2025 Spring Rewind
Introducing: Season Rewind.
The best of the best of the season that just passed us by.
Albums, Tracks, Live Reviews, and Whatever Else moved the needle in the past three months. Maybe you missed it. Maybe we missed it. Maybe neither of us missed it but we want an excuse to celebrate it again, and make a note of it – ahem, cough, sniffle – for Year In Review nominations and awards.
That’s good, right? Share music for the next Rewind here.
This season’s Whatever Else is the train (that continues to pick up steam) of anti-Trump protests sweeping the nation as the Administration tries to defraud democracy. The “Hands Off” rally on April 5. May Day on May 1. Pride Parade x “No Kings” on June 14 brings us just about into summer. Huge crowds.
With Zohran Mamdani taking out Cuomo in NYC, maybe Willie Burnley, Jr. has a fighting chance against Katjana Ballantyne in the Somerville mayoral race?
Stranger things have happened. Hop on the train!
When The Distance Is Blue
by Macie Stewart
From out of the bubbling cauldron of Chicago’s experimental music scene comes Macie Stewart with a new solo album, When The Distance Is Blue. Call her a “multi-instrumentalist” and “composer.” It’s the easiest thing to call her, because it’s true, and it puts off the more difficult task of trying to figure out where and how an artist like this – who collaborates with SZA one day, and composes a prepared piano piece à la John Cage the next – fits into the contemporary (popular?) music scene.
Beautiful Extension Cord
by (T-T)b
(T-T)b, a chiprock outfit whose moniker possibly, maybe, potentially stands for “tiny toy bicycles,” returns to the airwaves with their latest LP Beautiful Extension Cord (via Disposable America). The album combines shaggy indie rock riffs and electro hooks into pleasant pop confections that never make you wait too long for the good bits, whether those bits are 8-bit or not.
Downpour
by Charmer
Michigan’s Charmer makes it rain on their latest full-length Downpour. A confident new entry into their growing discography that inches further into the conundrums of maturity even as the ghosts of youthful outcry still haunt the verses and choruses of their discontent. You might not find answers to life’s mysteries in these songs, but you’ll luxuriate in the shared commiseration like a warm bath after a bad day.
24 tracks. Covers link to streams.
Boston Calling
Boston Calling takes the place of pride at the start of the LIVE REWIND in virtue of its status as the preeminent “major league” music festival in the area. You might not like all the acts, but the fest is drawing talent from all around the country (sometimes the world), the lot of which you’d never get to see in one place otherwise. Enjoy it while you can because the event is taking 2026 off (and promises to return in 2027). This year’s billing skewed toward nostalgia, and the days were a bit rainy, and who cares – right? – because we got to see Chuck D come onstage for an unannounced cameo during Tom Morello’s set. Beautiful moments aplenty. And we wrote a few of them up in three days of coverage with fantastic additional photos provided by Julia Levine.
Festival Roundup
You think of summer when you think of music fests, but there was plenty of action in the spring. Hump Day News returned to NYC for New Colossus Fest, an early March landing spot for acts on their way to SXSW. A whopping six days of music, featuring nearly two hundred local, national, and international artists descending on the Lower East Side. This one is fast becoming an out-of-town, yet still nearby, fest favorite.
A new festival debuted around the same time in March, Boston Bitdown, an arts & music jamboree that leaned heavily into the chiptune scene. But the “genre” is more an intersection of multiple roads that lead multiple places, rather than a destination itself, so the event effortlessly housed an impressive variety of visual artists and musicians within its walls. The inaugural edition was fearlessly covered by writer Sam Haber.
Add Somerville Porchfest to the list of best Porchfests around. Maybe THE best? The new post-Guster rules made traffic worse for pedestrians but it didn’t impact the mood. Good times, full of music, dancing in the streets, and more Porta-Potties than the previous year.
Istanbul: Land Of Tyranny
A five day trip to Istanbul served as a reminder that authoritarian government is a worldwide trend. The day before I arrived, the tyrant president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan jailed the mayor of Istanbul Ekrem İmamoğlu on phony charges, in order to prevent the mayor from bringing his considerable political popularity to the next presidential election. That’s how a tyrant holds on to power for 20 years – jailing his opposition. The people of Istanbul reacted with righteous anger, taking to the streets with rallies and protests of enormous scale. Thousands were jailed, detained, and deported. I made a short film of the events as I saw them, a story of music, protest, and the menacing shadow of authoritarian rule. Shot on a smartphone.
One-Offs
The spring packed in a bevvy of memorable one-off shows. Chief on the list – how could it not be? – was the fourstack punk bill at Cambridge Community Center at the end of the Cambridge Day Records Store Walk. Not sure how many walked the walk, especially on a rainy day, but the stores were full and the music divine. Out-of-towners Jade Dust featured, along with locals Homeworld, P.V., and Push Back.
Other highlights include a Heartbreak Records Showcase at The Jungle; Ireland’s Orla Gartland returning to Boston for a show at the Paradise; the opportunity to finally see FACS live, at Deep Cuts, after having written them up relentlessly; plus, a real nostalgia moment for a 90s kid with a Lou Barlow gig in the bottom of The Rockwell.
Also at the Rockwell? The Boston Fringe Festival, more or less the first of its kind. Hump Day News reviewed one of the performances, a rock opera titled “Wrath of the Selkie,” which went on to win the People’s Choice and Best Full Length Ensemble awards at the festival. “It’s an honor just to be nominated…”
Fuck that! You gotta take home the hardware!
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The best coverage of the season that just passed us by.