MAVI, Pink Siifu, Treaty Oak Revival & more

Good morning, hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving! It’s a shorter week in the music world, not too many albums are out this week, and not too many more albums are coming out for the rest of 2025 in general. Next week marks the start of December and that probably means we’ll start seeing an influx of major year-end lists next week too.

That said, there are a handful of new records out this week and I highlight seven of them below. First, a few honorable mentions: Josh Freese, Hit-Boy x Spank Nitti James, Equipment Pointed Ankh (mem Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band), Ikonika, Ronnie D’Addario (The Lemon Twigs’ dad), Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter’s Forever, the Nine Inch Nails tribute comp from Magnetic Eye Records, the Dream Theater live album, the 40th anniversary edition of The Pogues’ The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy & The Lash, the 50th anniversary edition of Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night, and Madonna’s EP of bonus material from 1994’s Bedtime Stories.

And, as you’re gearing up to make your own ‘best of 2025’ lists, Dave and I made a list of 10 albums from this year to make sure you’ve heard and we go through that on the new episode of BV Weekly. It’s not necessarily a list of “overlooked” albums, but it is a list of albums that flew a little under the radar compared to the Geeses and Wednesdays and Turnstiles of the world, so we thought it’d be worth giving them all one more push before year-end list season fully begins. Look up ‘BV Weekly’ wherever you listen to podcasts to stream that.

Read on for this week’s Notable Releases. What’s your favorite release of the week?

MAVI – The Pilot (Loma Vista)

North Carolina indie-rapper MAVI transcended the “abstract rap” label on his devastating 2024 album Shadowbox, and now he’s back with a 10-song mixtape that finds him with an even greater sense of clarity. Shadowbox was partially informed by MAVI’s struggles with alcohol, and as he raps on track 1 of The Pilot, he made this new project after getting sober. The Pilot is short but sweet, with 10 songs and only one track that reaches the three-minute mark. It’s got four perfectly-matched guests (Earl Sweatshirt, MIKE, Smino, Kenny Mason), and some nice variety in the production, which ranges from chilled-out jazz to orchestral swells to the delightfully dancey outlier “Silent Film.” The short runtime and the Thanksgiving week release date makes it feel more like a stop-gap release than a proper new album, but regardless, MAVI’s on such a roll right now that everything he touches is worth hearing.

PLOSIVS – Yell At Cloud (Swami)

PLOSIVS emerged in 2022 as the new songwriting partnership of Rob Crow (of Pinback, Goblin Cock, etc) and John Reis (of Drive Like Jehu, Rocket From The Crypt, Hot Snakes, etc), in which that dynamic duo is backed by John’s former RFTC bandmate Atom Willard (also of Against Me!, Alkaline Trio, Angels & Airwaves, The Offspring, etc) on drums and Jordan Clark (of Mrs. Magician) on bass. We said their self-titled debut LP basically sounds like the exact middle ground between early Pinback and Hot Snakes, and LP2 picks up where the debut left off: strong, timeless ’90s indie rock/post-hardcore vibes from some of the people who helped invent those vibes in the first place.

Pink Siifu – ONYX’! (Dynamite Hill)

Pink Siifu already released one of this year’s most creative and overwhelming rap albums with the 77-minute sensory overload BLACK’!ANTIQUE, and now he’s back with a 13-song, 45-minute companion piece called ONYX’!. Like BLACK’!ANTIQUE, it’s a genre-defying affair with an ensemble cast. It’s got appearances by Armand Hammer (whose new album Siifu appears on), HiTech, Kal Banx, Turich Benjy, Valee, Woo Da Savage, and others; and production from Hudson Mohawke, evilgiane, Jason Wool, iiye, Roper Williams, Apollo Rome, and others.

Treaty Oak Revival – West Texas Degenerate (Interscope)

Treaty Oak Revival are a Texas country rock band who are at least a little bit emo-adjacent–they played Warped Tour this year, their singer Sam Canty appears on the new Ben Quad album, and you can hear a little Midwest emo in TOR’s gritty Texas twang. If you like anything from Lucero to the Home Is Where album, you should check this out; it’s real-deal country rock from people who sound like they know their way around a DIY emo basement show. It’s the band’s third proper album and major label debut, but even with a powerhouse label behind them (and a whopping 6+ million Spotify listeners), Treaty Oak Revival sound like a band of the people.

The Saints – Long March Through the Jazz Age (Fire)

The Saints leader Chris Bailey died in 2022 but he left behind one last album he had been working on, and that album is now here. As one of the original punk bands, The Saints’ later years were more jangly and melancholic and that’s the mode that this album is in. And even with the revved-up, peppy pace of classic Saints entirely absent, Chris’ voice is as magnetic and unmistakable as ever, and this is a genuinely great batch of songs. Chris really did go out with a bang.

Excide – Bastard Hymns (SharpTone)

Excide aren’t afraid to wear their ’90s and early 2000s post-hardcore influences on their sleeves (Quicksand, Cave In, Snapcase, Failure, etc), and fans of those bands would probably have to agree that Excide bring a lot of justice to those 20-to-30-year-old vibes in the present day. Bastard Hymns is their second album, following 2022’s Deliberate Revolver, and it finds them pushing themselves further in all directions: the poppy parts are poppier, the heavy parts are heavier.

Your Old Droog – Anything Is Possible EP

We thought we were getting the Droogie Otis (aka Your Old Droog and Madlib) album this October but the wait continues. Meanwhile, Droog is tiding us over with the five-song Anything Is Possible EP, his first project since his expansive June 2024 album Movie. It has production from Statik Selektah, Kenny Segal, Roper Williams, Khrysis, and the legendary Count Bass D, and it’s a nice reminder that Droog is a boom bap devotee with bars for days.

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Looking for more recent releases? Browse the Notable Releases and Indie Basement archives.

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