Blue Cactus: “Bite My Tongue”
Believer, Steph Stewart and Mario Arnez’s assured third full-length album as Blue Cactus, is not short on year-end-list song contenders. In the titular track, “Believer,” lead singer Stewart’s croon waxes and wanes against crunchy guitar; on “This Kind of Rain,” the album’s most-streamed song on Spotify, Stewart’s vocals twine sweetly with singer Kate Rhudy’s in a ballad about just getting by. But it’s the third track, “Bite My Tongue,” that I’ve had on repeat all year. It has classic pop-country, Dolly and Reba vibes, as Stewart’s twang weaves in and out of a harmony with bluegrass singer Brit Taylor, two guitar solos undergirding the harmony, as Stewart raises the demand, in an effective refrain: “When you gonna hear me? When you gonna really hear me?” —Sarah Edwards
Joe Westerlund: “Persurverance”
Durham musician Joe Westerlund has given us three terrific albums since 2020, and what’s been especially rewarding is hearing him build his sound in stages. After all, it’s not that obvious how to make a solo album when you play percussion. On Reveries in the Rift, he laid out the materials—expressively pitched hand drums, metallophones, and shakers from all over the world delicately braided and shampooed with mild electronics. On Elegies for the Drift, he broadened his palette and sharpened his focus, centering his studies in the thumb piano.
And in 2025, with Curiosities from the Shift, he plumped it all up in his most dynamic and complex album yet. It’s infused with the clave, the syncopated rhythm at the heart of Afro-Cuban music that listeners all over the world know by feel. And his melodicism, already deep, is enhanced by many worthy collaborators who play trumpets and flutes and violins and guitars. Every track is marvelously unique and full of personality, but “Persurverance” has to be the jam, where a lithe swarm of plucks and string stabs gradually settles into a kind of lush, sauntering dub. The cinematic theme wailing through the horns and strings underlines how far from a simple percussion album we are. —Brian Howe
Jooselord: “Mowgli”
It can sometimes feel like everyone in North Carolina knows Jooselord, and at this point, maybe even more people know his 4-year-old, Onyx, who was diagnosed with cancer late last year. We’ve seen the father-son duo everywhere: at sporting events, on TV evening news, riding in tricked-out Jeeps. It’s one thing to witness such devotion; it’s another to hear and viscerally feel it for yourself.
That was the effect of “Mowgli,” the stark, stripped-down final song of Joose’s midyear Mentally I’m Here EP, on which he lays bare the confusion, sadness, and unyielding determination swirling around in his heart and mind. It’s more than should fit into a single song, but Joose’s gift for gut-punching brevity (“Hate life? N**** life hate me”; “Tryna raise a man, but he gotta make it there first”) forces it to do so anyhow, slowly building, line by line, into a sobering, unforgettable portrait of one man—frankly, one of the Triangle’s best—going through an ordeal that no parent ever, ever should. –Ryan Cocca
Joseph Decosimo: “Glory in the Meetinghouse”
In an interview with the INDY earlier this year, Durham musician Joseph Decosimo described the traditional music he plays as “exploratory”: “There is a form that you’re working with, but you’re exploring, taking different turns and seeing where it takes you.” That exploratory sensibility is felt across his whole album, Fiery Gizzard, which was released in August and featured on NPR’s All Songs Considered program, but “Glory in the Meetinghouse” is one standout track that exemplifies the thrilling sense of momentum that old-time jams can build. The tune has deep roots; Alan Lomax famously made a 1937 recording of southeastern Kentucky fiddler Luther Strong playing it for the Library of Congress. Accompanied by a handful of talented old-time musicians, Decosimo does the tune justice; it’s hard not to feel pulled into the middle of it and experience a spiritual tug, a sweeping sense of ascension, while listening. —SE
Reese McHenry: “Mississippi Blue”
When Reese McHenry died from a rare soft tissue cancer on November 14, 2024, there was an outpouring of grief for McHenry as both a musician and community pillar—a “force of nature,” as David Menconi wrote in a memorial last year. There was also an outpouring during McHenry’s illness, with numerous fundraisers and concerts. And a little over a year after McHenry’s death, that outpouring continues with the announcement of a forthcoming release, Reese McHenry Forever, compiled tenderly by McHenry’s friends and collaborators, featuring 12 tracks pulled from recordings she made over the past 20 years, including with other local musicians like Jon Wurster and the band Spider Bags. Timed to the announcement, last week, was the release of album opener “Mississippi Blue.”
It takes a bold songwriter to pen a song with a title invoking “Mississippi,” a state with many storied musical references. There’s Nina Simone’s protest anthem “Mississippi Goddam,” said to have been penned in less than an hour in a rush of anger, grief, and defiance. There’s Bob Dylan’s country classic “Mississippi,” a pretty good song of that name by Train, and many more. But McHenry was one such bold musician; her beautifully felt song takes listeners from California and Texas to Mississippi with poetic lyricism (“Now I return to your edge of the earth / Steep cliff before me and behind me the world”), infusing the word with rich new meaning. “Mississippi Blue” is more stripped down than much of McHenry’s other music—it isn’t garage rock—allowing the warm, resonant power of her voice to serve as a haunting primary instrument. It’s a powerful new classic. Reese McHenry Forever will release on vinyl and digital from Suah Sounds on March 6, 2026. —SE
Tab-One: “The Shake Off”
Don’t take the following as a suggestion that it’s time for Tab-One to decamp to the shuffleboard courts and 4 p.m. blue plate specials of a hip-hop old folks home—the longtime Kooley High emcee is still fully capable of unleashing a blistering 16 when the moment calls for it. But few artistic evolutions have been more satisfying over recent years than his embrace of a meditative, semisung rap style that seems distinctly and unselfconsciously inspired by his real (read: no longer a twenty- or thirtysomething) life rather than the youthful posturing that hip-hop sometimes demands.
Devoid of pretense, his newest album has a title that’s as simple as a statement of suburban morning routine: I’m Going for a Run. And for all the analogous connections that the album explicitly and implicitly seeks to draw between Tab’s new favorite hobby and life itself, the shared motif is never better than on “The Shake Off,” on which putting one foot in front of the other evokes not only literal running, nor just getting out of a rut, but also the unrelenting (and deeply edifying) passage of time itself. —RC
Tre. Charles: “WNDWS.”
In truth, I should probably be writing about “GRWTH.” It’s the other standout from the Durham musician Tre. Charles’s Here We Are. EP, and it continues the story of growing, healing, and slowing down in the music-industry fast lane that he tells in song—the very story we picked up on when we first profiled him in 2023. Since then, I’ve been telling anyone who asks (and some who don’t) that Tre is my favorite local musician, while he’s been busy racking up appearances at the Newport Jazz Festival and NPR, gigging tirelessly with the likes of Tune-Yards and Digable Planets, and gestating a long-awaited LP.
In the meantime, this EP gives us not only the great gyroscopic production and daring vulnerability of “GRWTH.,” but also the entrancing shoegaze of “WNDWS.,” which I think of as pure uncut Tre, when he doesn’t so much play a song as hold a séance. The drum is the heartbeat of the world, the bass thick as wet ink, the guitar spun in fine silver thread, with vocals stacked like hazy cliffs above. The contrast between these two songs shows why Tre remains one to watch, but above all one to listen to, again and again. He may sing about weariness, but these songs don’t tire out. —BH
Tift Merritt: “Last Day I Knew What to Do”
In August, Raleigh musician Tift Merritt marked the 20th anniversary of Tambourine, her Grammy-nominated sophomore album, with a special collection: a reissue of Tambourine accompanied by Time and Patience, a compilation of acoustic demos and unreleased songs. Merritt led the release with “Last Day I Knew What to Do,” a song originally recorded for Tambourine in the early 2000s, but left off the album. It’s a bright, brassy, toe-tapping track, a reflection on the passage of time that has only gained more meaning with two decades between its recording and now. Merritt’s music often deals in missed calls and old lovers and hard-won wisdom and twisty turns of phrase, as in this song, where the resolve of a young woman trying to stand her ground in a tough industry shine keenly through: “Everybody’s got a vodka drink / Nobody says what they mean / They’ll chase you out of your own life.” —SE
Watchhouse: “Rituals”
Watchouse, FKA Mandolin Orange, makes music for cooking and chopping and dicing; for running errands and meditative stretches of driving and making the bed and kissing your sweetheart and winter evenings reading books on a couch. Meaning, it is music that is not afraid to contend with the dailiness of daily life, finding beauty in meditations on home, rituals, patterns, and the joys and difficulties in putting down roots; of making and re-making meaning. Over the past decade, since early days playing at coffee shops and across small stages in Chapel Hill, married duo Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz have fine-tuned an artistic partnership that leans into harmony and slow, studied folk.
These days, Watchhouse is playing on much bigger stages (see: Red Rocks Amphitheatre), producing songs that manage to surprise, with skilled crystalline picking and the occasional pop flourish, even as they offer a reliable acoustic cadence. Title track “Rituals” embodies these qualities, as Marlin and Frantz contend with the pace of modern life, sounding like elders advising the young: “Now the world will try to shape you / Till you’re nothing but a tool” before settling into the refrain that feels like a sigh of relief: “Home, home, home, home / Can’t you feel it / Right behind you / Ain’t it always just ahead and all around you too.” —SE
Weirs: “Lord Randall”
“In the slow, centerless world of Weirs, folk music is a memory that leaps from skull to skull, riding our dreams through time.” This is how I was moved (and surprisingly, allowed) to begin my Pitchfork review of Diamond Grove, the second album by the North Carolina collective whose malleable lineup includes INDY favorites like Magic Tuber Stringband and Libby Rodenbough. It’s the sort of thought you have time to entertain in the winding course of a Weirs song.
They make experimental traditional music, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron, inching through old standards so they become fathomless epics. It’s tempting to elect the 20-minute “Lord Bateman” as the showstopper, but “Lord Randall” gives a sense of the album’s engulfing scale in half the time and still feels like a beautiful eternity. The source is an Anglo-Scottish ballad that’s been around at least since the 17th century, a dialogue between a young lord, who feels ill after visiting his true love, and his mother, who realizes he’s been poisoned. Weirs blow it out into a radiant pastoral dirge, with plucks and strums slowly blossoming from a rich, loamy drone. Just as patiently, singer Oliver Child-Lanning evolves the melody from subdued to soaring, re-feeling and interpreting each refrain. —Brian Howe
Anjimile: “Auld Lang Syne II”
After compiling this list, I had the stray compulsion to check and see if Durham folk musician Anjimile, whose last album was 2023’s The King, had released anything recently. Sure enough, there it was: “Auld Lang Syne II” released just weeks ago. According to press materials, the song began as “something of a wedding present” for their best friend—a bittersweet paean to changes, goodbyes, and growth—but resonates as an end-of-year track; a gorgeous, gossamer interlude between eras. Anjimile’s music has drawn frequent comparisons to that of Sufjan Stevens, and never have those comparisons felt more apt than on “Auld Lange Syne II,” produced by Brad Cook, in which Anjimile’s low voice carries a delicate, controlled quiver that seems to capture a hundred emotions at once. Farewell, 2025, and on to new beginnings. —SE
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