An Alphabetical List of 2025’s Most Personally Significant Live Sets
At one point I was tempted to use this space to write about how 2025 has been a largely shitty year for me; both as a human in the world and on a very personal level. But the truth is, most everybody I know has been through some shit this year. Some people I know, some people I’ve loved, entered 2025 and didn’t make it to the doorstep of 2026. That also counts for scores of people I’ve never met. Crisis, corruption, and con men trying to control the world have been the year’s big themes.
Many people who read the results of my lifelong obsession with music also know I’m an astrology girlie at heart. A somewhat dark joke I’ve been using to help me cope since the pandemic started over five years ago is, “Earth is in retrograde.”
I’ve witnessed, at minimum, about 30 live sets a year over the past two decades. To say seeing live music has been a balm for me in hard times would be underselling its importance to the quality of my life. Many of the highlights of my 2025 have involved live music and the traveling I’ve done to see live music. I went to Minneapolis for the first time to attend the anniversary party of my friend Evan Minsker’s great punk and rock ‘n’ roll newsletter see/saw; I flew to Memphis for the third year in a row to attend Gonerfest (my favorite destination music event); my fianceé and I planned a trip to the Bay Area around Mosswood Meltdown. Seeing friends in other cities, making new ones there, and getting to travel to see music are all wild privileges that, even at my lowest, are hard to take for granted.
In one of the worst years of my adult life—and I’m sure the lives of lots of people reading this—how fucking fortunate we are to get to see live music! To get to dance and sing along and rap along and shout and lift other people overhead with all our might so they don’t land headfirst on the ground! To be in the vicinity of however many dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of people who are there for the same thing we’re there for; to share that moment with other humans.
billy woods & Quelle Chris // Madame Lou’s; Seattle, WA (June 2nd)
woods has in recent years gained rightful recognition as one of America’s great contemporary writers; Quelle Chris has been your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper for a while. woods proclaimed multiple times during his career-spanning set—on tour for what is being called a “horrorcore” masterpiece by people who now use “horrorcore” as a catch-all term for rap that’s even vaguely sinister—that he’s been writing horror stories in his raps for years (it’s true). Chris rocked the crowd from a stool, started a call-and response of “Fuck the police, Fuck ICE,” and led the crowd in primal scream therapy before finishing his set with his all-time great rap song “Popeye.” If you have a friend that tells you they don’t listen to hip-hop, it’s because they don’t know where the good shit is.
Shana Cleveland & Will Sprott // Sans Backup Plan Records; Nevada City, CA (July 22nd)
After flying down to Oakland to attend Mosswood Meltdown for the first time, my lady and I took the train (and then the bus) to Northern California, staying with a good friend of ours and her parents in Grass Valley. It just so happened that after playing with their respective bands at the festival—Cleveland’s band La Luz (my pick for America’s greatest rock band) and Shannon and the Clams, who Sprott plays keyboards for—Nevada County locals Cleveland and Sprott were billed to play solo sets at the grand opening party for their friend’s record store.
A small record store packed to the gills was a perfect setting for Cleveland and Sprott’s solo acoustic sets. The kids (including Cleveland and Sprott’s young son, with Cleveland’s mother watching/chasing after him) and dogs gave the event a nice, family friendly, mid-summer vibe.
DEVO // Mosswood Meltdown, Mosswood Park; Oakland, CA (July 19th)
Though Mosswood was fairly stacked with acts we wanted to see, the headliners were the reason we took an 8am flight on a Saturday from Seattle to Oakland. My partner was most looking forward to Bratmobile—who were awesome and ceded some time for indie pop icon Rose Melberg (who has been playing guitar for the band in the absence of founding guitarist Erin Smith) to sing lead on a Tiger Trap song(!!!)—and I traveled to Oakland to see DEVO for the first time when they were scheduled to play two nights at the zoo 10 minutes away from home.
The long and short of it is the Akron, OH art-rock heroes fucking ruled. They were as tight as some of the leather jackets we saw that weekend, as subversive as you’d expect, and playing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”—far and away the best version of the Rolling Stones tune, with all due respect to Otis Redding—back-to-back with “Secret Agent Man” was well worth the cost of waking up at 4:45 in the morning on a weekend.
Earl Sweatshirt // Showbox SODO; Seattle, WA (December 16th)
Sweatshirt has been my favorite rapper for pretty much the entire past decade, and his 2025 LP Live Laugh Love was definitively my favorite album of the year. After a full night of great opening acts (Cleatus Strap, Zeelooperz, and Liv.e), Earl took the stage on the final night of tour with a palpable sense of joy. In addition to LLL favorites like "exhaust" and “TOURMALINE”—the latter my favorite song of the year if I had the patience to make such a list—he performed brand new songs and beloved classics like “Grief,” “December 24,” and “E. Coli.”
An almost-sold-out, all-ages, notoriously frosty Seattle crowd passionately rapping along with him on a Tuesday night as a victory lap for a year where he dropped yet another perfect rap album? It’s tough for anybody to deny Earl Sweatshirt’s status as an underground rap icon now.
Iggy Pop // Marymoor Park; Redmond, WA (July 28th)
What I thought was going to be a boilerplate gesture of goodwill from the man who either influenced or outright inspired more than a third of the music I like, Iggy summoned a couple thousand middle-aged punks (present company included) and many of their kids to the Eastside suburbs of Seattle for a barnburner. He managed to get through half of the first song before taking his shirt off, led a band of killers through a setlist of bangers (they were up for the task), and created one of the highlights of my adult life by delivering a performance of “1970” worth writing home about.
Judy and the Jerks // Year 1: A see/saw Party, Eagles No. 34; Minneapolis, MN (April 5th)
This could essentially be an entry for the whole see/saw anniversary party lineup, which—along with its prefunk the night before—didn’t include a bad band in the bunch. This could have easily been a breathless appraisal of Abi Ooze or Artificial Go or 208 (whose set I already wrote about in my newsletter), but the band I’d been anticipating the most delivered the set I was hoping for. If you’re unfamiliar with the beloved Mississippi punks, they’re basically a hardcore band with goofy fun and good vibes standing in place of boring machismo. They blitzed through a set like elementary school recess, and much like recess, my only complaint was that it was too short.
Lifeguard // Baba Yaga; Seattle, WA (July 30) — Sharp Pins // Gonerfest 22, Wiseacre Brewing; Memphis, TN (September 27)
I’ve had a handful of people try to give me the hard sell on Cameron Winter (and, by proxy, his much ballyhooed band Geese) by highlighting his age, but I have a hard time believing Winter is anywhere near the level of another talented youth who really came into his own in 2025: Kai Slater, who has released multiple zines and nearly half a dozen great albums before reaching legal drinking age this year. I had the pleasure of seeing both his bands—Lifeguard and Sharp Pins—within two months of each other, and both performances were thrilling.
I saw the former’s ripcord art-punk in the basement performance space of a rock venue spitting distance from Downtown Seattle and the latter’s lightly psychedelic power-pop on an 85-degree day in a city where you can’t go 500 feet without smelling barbecue in the air. On both occasions, Slater was wearing full polyester, ripping through his immaculately written songs to a stunned (but still very much moving) crowd.
MIKE // The Crocodile; Seattle, WA (May 14)
MIKE, part of the new vanguard of indie rap superstars, has been touring about six months a year for the past couple trips around the sun. Having seen him the past three consecutive years, it’s no surprise that he continues to get better and better as a live performer. He’s more confident and in greater command of the stage, but brings his natural energy as an affable Libra stoner to his songs about emotional and spiritual weight and what it takes to carry them.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST ALERT: somesurprises // KEXP Gathering Space; Seattle, WA (April 26)
For about a year and a half between 2024 and 2025, I co-hosted a podcast series called The Cobain 50 alongside my friend Dusty Henry for KEXP. Alongside Albina Cabrera—host of its Spanish-language companion series El Cancionero de Kurt—we sent our podcasts off with a conversation in front of about 200 people about all the things we learned while making them. Our special musical guest was shoegaze-leaning art-pop band somesurprises, stripped down to a duo, playing a four-song set of covers inspired by the series.
The clear personal highlight of this brief performance was their cover of Marine Girls’ “Love to Know,” their introduction of which inspired a huge round of applause from me and my partner (and literally no one else in attendance). It was magical, and I hope they eventually put it on a seven-inch so I can listen to it all the time.
