Genius 26.5 - Scrap Heap
Screap Heap triumphant return! A youtube classic! A bunch of records of emo, rock, ambient, electronic, "weird" varieties. Longmont Potion Castle all over this joint.
We are so back. This is a mix of albums I had checked out from Nov 2025 to Jan 2026. Some really great ones here! I highly recommend going down the list and seeing what's been scrap heaped in the past 3 months, there are some real bangers.
YouTube Classic - Longmont Potion Castle vs Alex Trebek
Do you have 50min to listen to a series of escalating prank calls aimed at Alex Trebek by Colorado's anonymous Longmont Potion Castle? At minute 13:43, he successfully 3-way calls Jeremy Piven & Alex Trebek and pranking them into believing they each called the other about performing on a show together. It's absolutely fucking crazy. Every other person who gets roped in, Trebek tries and fails to explain that he has been pranked repeatedly by LPC.
Scrap Heap
Big Feelings
PIDGE
Haley Heynderickx & Max Garcia Conover - What of Our Nature (Fat Possum, 2025)
Touching anticolonialist folk songs that are a little rough around the edges, which I think is a nice change from Heyndrickx's typical perfectionism.
SUDS - Tell me about your day again. (Big Scary Monsters, 2025)
I spent a long time in an anti-emo mode – playing in an emo band made me feel pent in by the tropes of the genre. Songs all needed to have big hooky choruses, start-stop moments; I could go to a basement show and know exactly what to expect from all of the bands. I loved this SUDS record: the big chunky guitars, the harmonized vocals with simple pleas & overlapping lines, the noodly licks, the stutter-step drumming. Just made me remember what drew me to the genre as a teen. Helps when the band is just absolutely locked in. "Hook me out" is just the ultimate nostalgia trip for me.
Star Card - Trash World (self, Nov '25)
I try to be impartial about the works for bands where I chat with the members, but really enjoyed this LP and wanted to share. Great powerpop hooks, what sets Star Card apart from their peers is a 1-2 combo of songwriting/playing & a complete vision of how to use studio techniques to transcend typical DIY vibes. Heartfelt stuff, it really comes thru in Calley Nelson's voice. "Lena" is song of the summer??
Joyce Manor - I Used To Go To This Bar (Epitaph, Jan '26)
Probably their best since Never Hungover Again – 9 short songs and 5 of them are legit. Not a bad hit rate for the JMs!
Cross My Heart - Temporary Contemporary (Deep Elm, 2000)
I'll be real that I def had Cross My Heart and My Winter Nerve mixed up for a long time – both are MD bands from the early 2000s, tho CMH is more Braid & The Promise Ring while MWN is more Mineral/Appleseed Cast. Anyways: good record, good stuff, big feelings.
Rock music
mika9150
The Sundays - Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic (Geffen, 1990)
Had never listened to this jangly sunny pop album from the husband-and-wife duo of David Gavurin and Harriet Wheeler. None of the songs really jumped out at me, but each one had a great vibe. Reminded me of if Young Marble Giants had a more filled out band.
Sweeping Promises - Good Living Is Coming For You (Feel It/Sub Pop, 2023)
I've been listening to this record for years, but my partner's obsession with it came back for me & now I'm re-obsessed as well. Remarkably authentic 60s garage rock sound with self-recorded in their Kansas house. When I say that Lira Mondal is one of the best vocalists I've heard on tape, I mean it – she howls and self-harmonizes in ways that are absolutely transfixing. Great message in the songwriting, too – the personal & the political all wrapped up in each of us.
Good Flying Birds - Talulah's Tape (Carpark, Oct '25)
Cool jangle pop record! Got kind of an REM/Camper Van Beethoven sound, but as recorded by Guided By Voices (complete with one song ending and you hear the start of a different song start playing on the tape before the mp3 ends). There's an element of parochialism to that kind of lofi adherence, but if you can let go of that and just accept the songs as they are, this is a good one.
Plosivs - Yell At Cloud (Swami, 2025)
Way better than the awful album art. Knotted up mathy & melodic driving rock stuff. San Diego supergroup with Rob Crow from Pinback, & John Reis from Drive Like Jehu and Rocket From The Crypt, Atom Willard who has played in a zillion huge bands like The Offspring etc, and also a bassist who has also played in other bands probably.
Electronic
Yasmine Hamdan
Kavari - Plague Music EP (XL, Feb '26)
Extremely hard-hitting dark techno with a glitchy IDM bent to it, this goes so hard
Yasmine Hamdam - I remember I forget (Crammed Discs, 2025)
This is a really special one, probably should have gotten a bigger write-up in a GDC. Dusky electronic with deep bass, sampled percussion, and Hamdam's rich voice. Quite bouncy at times with big rhythm and dubby change-ups. Her written memories and worries and regrets of her home country of Lebanon are painful to read, especially just 6 months after the record was released. Some of the most pointed lyrics I've seen about what it's like to live on this earth as it crumbles in the hands of violent losers. "What’s left to say? A tiny land with a gaping wound. Some people linger and some go absent"
Craig Taborn (with Tomeka Reid, Ches Smith) - Dream Archives (ECM, Jan '26)
Cool trio of piano/keyboard, violoncello (new instrument for me!), and drums/vibes/electronics. Taborn's compositions sit really nicely against a Geri Allen piece and a Paul Motian piece, kinda somewhere between jazz and ambient, sometimes exploding in one direction or the other.
Tyler Pursel - Aftryk (self-released, 2024)
Blippy little synth EP recommended by Sean – nice stuff! I think the sound of 2026 will be resampled acoustic guitars, I recommend getting in on the ground floor.
Ambient
Tashi Dorji - Low Clouds Hang, This Land Is On Fire (Jan, '26)
Interesting tonal electric guitar album. Slow moving compositions of harmonics, resonant repeats, extended technique/prepared guitar sounds. Love the sound of Dorji's behind-the-bridge picking.
Loscil - Ash (self-released, 2025)
Not quite boiling hot magma ambient, but what the air feels like during a forest fire. Thick smoke, hot in the lungs. Oppressive, but intriguing.
The Bug & Ghost Dub - Implosion (PRESSURE, 2025)
Spooky ambient dub, everything has a great wash over it – to be totally honest, I thought this was a collab album and realizing that each song was only either The Bug OR Ghost Dub is fucking me up since the whole thing is so cohesive.
Chris Watson - Planet Ocean (Touch, Feb '26)
Water sounds. No joke, just field recordings of water in different places. You might think I'm a sick freak, but I don't care, I'll sit and listen to an hour of water lapping on shores across this planet.
Space
juan2009diego
King Tubby - Dub From The Roots (Gorgon Records, 1975)
GOd damn you ever just get really into dub reggae?? This is all I want to listen to these days.
Longmont Potion Castle - Online Potion Package 2 (Kung Fu, 2009)
Love this fucking freak! Great compilation of his earlier work between 1988 and 1995. Bizarre recordings that straddle the line between prank call and free improv sound design with 1 audience member (the person trapped on the phone with the artist). I could listen to him call people repeatedly as a UPS guy trying to drop off an aquarium tank filled with squid all day.
Charmaine Lee - Tulpa
ASMR noise record made up of a thousand resampled voices. Totally wild and athletic – reminds of Ka Baird's Bardo works, but less evil.