What a start to 2025! Can you believe we're almost a quarter of the way through the 21st century already?
No one has had a better start to the new year than Welsh legend Bonnie Tyler, who's walked off with the trophy in our first Tracks Of The Week contest of 2025. So we're sending the heartiest of congratulations in her direction, as we are to the runner-up, Dixie Dragster, and to the runner-up to the runner-up, Thundermother.
Below you'll find our latest eight contenders. Aren't they lovely?
Amplifier - Invader
Amplifier have been down a few sonic rabbit holes over the years, embracing alt, prog, conceptual and psychedelic brainwaves in the process. Now, on this first taste of the Brit mavericks’ next album Gargantuan, they’re sounding decidedly…well, gargantuan, in the smartest, most brooding sense. Mixing minor-key intensity with a bright, catchy melody, Invader is a heavy, epic rocker ripe for considerably bigger stages than those they’ll actually be playing on their next tour. We can't wait to hear the rest.
Gyasi - Cheap High
We can think of worse ways to shake off the January blues than by plugging into this newbie from West Virginia’s platform-booted 21st century glamster-in-chief. Rough and ready blues’n’roll with glitter in its eyes, fire in its belly and no time to fuck around, Cheap High gets straight to the point in hooky, 70s-hued fashion and doesn’t let up for two and a half minutes. After that you’ll want more, and you can get it with his next album, Here Comes The Good Part, coming soon…
![GYASI – Cheap High [official] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/L_QdjO15o5c/maxresdefault.jpg)
Bob Mould - Here We Go Crazy
Here We Go Crazy is the title track of the former Hüsker Dü/Sugar mastermind’s new solo album, and it’s a beauty: heart-rending guitar pop with a sweet surface and layers of emotional complexity beneath. "I've been spending time in the Southern California desert over the past few years, and the video was shot there. Chilly wilderness atop a mountain, expansive vistas below the hills, distant places to escape life's routines. Going crazy can be many different things. The joy of reckless abandon, the uncertainty of the world's future, the silence of solitude."
The Cold Stares - Automobile
Dirty blues rock with an outlaw country kick, in which Indiana’s The Cold Stares do what rock’n’rollers have been doing since the dawn of time: sing about cars and girls, bringing forth all the loosely veiled innuendo that occurs when straight dudes with guitars put those two things together in song form (and yes there is a breath of the Beatles’ Drive My Car in that juicy, major-minor shift in the verses). A straight-ahead but effective appetiser for their next album, The Southern Part II. Vroom.
The Hellacopters - Do You Feel Normal
One of the chirpiest songs we’ve heard about alienation and solitude lately, but full of irresistible little twists, turns and tone changes, Do You Feel Normal is a cool yet warm-hearted banger that builds to a darkly spacey fade-out. As old-school as they come, but with a poppy kick that gives the sense of a band who still love doing this, commercial fortunes and mahoosive stages or not. Great bridge harmonies and twin-lead flourish too. It’s all in the details, innit.
Venamoris - Animal Magnetism
Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo and his singer wife Paula have teamed up with current Slayer-ite Gary Holt for this woozy, atmospheric cover of the Scorpions classic. If immersive, industrial-laced darkness and blackened grooves (spiced up with a nicely screamy guitar solo) feels about right for the post-holiday fog of January, you’d do well to check this out. Like what you hear? You’ll find new, original tuneage on their album, To Cross Or To Burn, which comes out next month.
Lady Beast - Inner Alchemist
From the none-more-metal Steel City of Pittsburgh, Lady Beast claim to be influenced by Motörhead, Dio, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Mercyful Fate, and you can hear it in every fibre of the resolutely old-school Inner Alchemist, which trundles along like Priest playing footsie with Maiden at some kind of debauched medieval gathering. It's the title track from the band's upcoming fifth album, which, it says here, "struts and gallops with equal aplomb, buttressed by instantly-hummable riffs and a palpable atmosphere of swords and sorcery."
Sons Of Silver - Running Out Of Words
After a couple of well-received EPs, Los Angeles rockers Sons Of Silver released their debut album Runaway Dreams on Friday. New single Running Out Of Words finds mainman Pete Argyropoulos conjuring up the spirit of Bruce Springsteen at his most mournful before the chorus arrives to lift the spirits skywards. Backed by members of bands like Candlebox and Skillet, it's fully-formed 'big' music, purpose-designed for large crowds and larger arenas. Nice.
