New Noise For A Restless Year: Garage, Punk And New Wave In 2025

If the great post-punk boom of the late 2010s felt like a wave, 2025 is the undertow. The fashion-cycle tourists have moved on; what is left are bands for whom distortion, repetition and awkward honesty are a way of living rather than a scene. Across Britain, France, Germany and Tokyo, a clutch of new records are quietly resetting what “garage”, “punk rock” and “new wave” can mean right now.

This is not about nostalgia cosplay or TikTok-friendly pastiche. It is about bands who still believe that a small room, a drum kit on the edge of falling apart and a sceptical crowd can change the temperature of a city night.

Why feels like a reset

Two things define this year’s crop. First, many of these albums come from bands who have already done the hard miles: years of small-room touring, stop-start careers, DIY EPs. Second, they arrive with an unusual amount of critical attention for such abrasive music. Shame’s Cutthroat and Maruja’s Pain to Power have both been reviewed by NME and other major outlets, not just niche blogs, a sign that the mainstream press has stopped pretending guitars went away.

At the same time you have French lifers like The Limiñanas delivering their most ambitious “garage cinema” record yet, duly dissected by Le Monde and Les Inrockuptibles. In Germany, smaller labels are backing records that splice no-wave weirdness into punk frameworks, while in Tokyo a long-running rock underground keeps feeding heavier and more chaotic bands into late-night live houses.

For listeners, that means a year where you can move from a Midlands spoken-word punk sermon to Catalan cinematic garage rock, then to Leipzig no-wave and Shinjuku hardcore, without ever leaving the broad church of “punk-adjacent”.

Four British records dragging the scene forward

Shame – Cutthroat (Dead Oceans)

Shame have long been one of the standard-bearers for British post-punk; Cutthroat, released in autumn 2025, is the record where their nervy energy finally locks into something leaner and more emotionally direct. The artwork – a blurred figure skidding around a velodrome in a smear of orange – is a useful metaphor: songs careen close to disaster but somehow stay upright.

The writing is less barbed than on Drunk Tank Pink, more preoccupied with ageing out of self-destruction than with sneering at others. Guitars still slash and clatter, but there is more space for melody and for frontman Charlie Steen’s baritone to sit in the mix rather than on top of it. Reviews have talked about “renewed focus” and “tightrope tension”; they are not wrong.

Maruja – Pain to Power (debut LP)

Manchester’s Maruja have been bubbling under for a while with their sax-scorched, jazz-inflected post-punk. Pain to Power, released in September, is their first full-length and already feels like a defining UK rock album of the year. NME praised its “feral” blend of noise rock, spiritual jazz and political fury, and it is hard to disagree.

Songs often build from spidery guitar lines and murmured vocals into full-blown squalls where saxophone, feedback and drums all push into the red. Yet there is structure under the chaos: recurring motifs, carefully paced crescendos, a sense of catharsis earned rather than faked. This is not background mood music; it demands attention and pays it back with genuine emotional release.

Sorry – Cosplay (Domino)

London’s Sorry have always sat somewhere between indie rock, trip-hop and art-damaged new wave. On Cosplay, due in November via Domino, they lean further into studio experimentation without losing their knack for hooks. Consequence’s announcement piece framed it as a “shape-shifting” album, and early singles back that up: brittle drum machines rub against live drums; sugary vocal lines float over queasy, detuned guitars. 

Lyrically the record plays with masks and performance – how we present versions of ourselves online, in relationships, on stage – without ever collapsing into theory. It is still, at heart, a guitar band writing pop songs, just ones twisted into odd shapes. In a year where more straightforward indie has struggled to cut through, Cosplay’s willingness to be both catchy and uncomfortable feels quietly radical.

Big Special – National Average

Midlands duo Big Special dropped National Average almost by surprise in July, but the record has spread quickly through word of mouth and glowing reviews on specialist sites. Built around Joe Hicklin’s half-sung, half-declaimed vocals and Callum Moloney’s thunderous drums, it channels industrial noise, street-punk and kitchen-sink monologue into something nastily compelling.

What could easily have turned into a gimmick – spoken-word rants over heavy backing – works because the writing is sharp and the arrangements keep mutating. One minute you are in a pub back room singalong, the next you are in a metallic churn closer to early Nine Inch Nails. The record’s portraits of anxiety, class frustration and small-town rage feel specific rather than generic; they are clearly written from lived experience.

French fire: from Toulon basements to widescreen garage

The Spitters – Fake Brutal

From Toulon, The Spitters have been a word-of-mouth favourite on the French garage-punk circuit for years. Fake Brutal, released in 2025 on Howlin’ Banana Records, is the moment their blown-out live sound finally lands on a record with the right balance of filth and clarity.

Across a brisk set of songs, the band throw together 90s noise rock, classic garage riffs and a distinctly Mediterranean sense of swagger. Tempos are high, vocals are spat rather than sung, and guitars have that harsh upper-mid crunch that feels like a rehearsal room with one too many cheap amps. Yet there is a surprising amount of structure in the songwriting, with melodic lines that continue looping in your head long after the record stops.

The Limiñanas – Faded (Because Music)

If The Spitters embody the basement, The Limiñanas now operate in CinemaScope. The long-running duo from Cabestany returned in February with Faded, a record that has been hailed in French press as a major new chapter in their discography.

Faded is nominally garage rock, but that barely covers it. The record folds in Morricone-style soundtrack drama, yé-yé pop, psych drones and a huge cast of guests: Bobby Gillespie, Jon Spencer, Bertrand Belin, Pascal Comelade and more all turn up across the tracklist. The thematic thread is “vanishing” – faded film stars, relationships, places – but the music is anything but ghostly. Loops grind and shimmer, drums stomp, and Lionel Limiñana’s production gives everything a saturated, widescreen quality.

Deutsch tension: Däächt and ONYON

Däächt – Crying Houses

From Regensburg, Däächt’s second album Crying Houses arrived in July after a five-year gap, immediately picked up by underground sites and album-of-the-year aggregators. Ten tracks in 29 minutes, it is a tightly wound mix of garage punk, post-punk, grunge and psych. Guitars slash in straight eighth-note patterns, drums tumble and lurch, while the vocals oscillate between melodic lines and strangled yells.

What prevents it from collapsing into genre soup is the sense of dynamics. Songs often pivot from sprinting verses to half-time codas, or from trebly riffing into thick, almost stoner-rock sections. The result is a record that feels volatile but never messy, with choruses that rise out of the noise just long enough to lodge in your head.

ONYON – Pale Horses

Leipzig’s ONYON have been quietly building a reputation on the European DIY circuit; Pale Horses, released in November through Berlin’s Mangel Records and Rennes-based Swish Swash, is their sharpest statement so far. The Bandcamp tags say it plainly: punk, garage, no wave, post-punk, “weird”. That weirdness is not art-school affectation; it is baked into the song structures, which favour short runtimes, skewed chords and vocal lines that feel one step away from falling apart.

The record’s charm lies in how catchy it all is despite that. Choruses arrive quickly, keyboard lines jab through the mix, and there is an almost surf-rock lightness to some of the guitar work. In a year of emotionally heavy punk albums, Pale Horses offers something wirier and more nimble, without sacrificing edge.

Tokyo’s underground signal: The Fuzz Act and Vision of Fatima

Not all the action in 2025 is tied to a specific new album cycle. In Tokyo, the health of the guitar underground is measured more in live schedules than in release-day hype, and two bands in particular keep cropping up on gig bills: THE FUZZ ACT and Vision of Fatima.

THE FUZZ ACT

THE FUZZ ACT have been at it for more than a decade, founded by vocalist-guitarist Shunsuke Tokunaga and drummer Shun Morizono back in their school days. A 2019 mini-album, Humans, showcased a raw blend of rock’n’roll and blues rock delivered with a stripped-back, almost stubborn simplicity. Since then they have become regulars on Tokyo bills mixing garage, punk, pop and classic rock, from Ryogoku SUNRIZE to WildSide Tokyo and other small venues.

In 2025 they remain very much a live band: sets that move from swaggering mid-tempo stompers to faster, punkier numbers, always anchored by overdriven guitar tone and Tokunaga’s unvarnished vocals. For listeners following this year’s new European records, THE FUZZ ACT are a reminder that the same spirit is thriving in parallel scenes where English-language press coverage is still thin.

Vision of Fatima

Vision of Fatima, formed in 2010, sit further towards the hardcore end of the spectrum. Japanese-language sources describe them as “chaotic hardcore” and “melodic hardcore”, with elements of post-hardcore and metal in the mix. They have released material through Garimpeiro Records and, more recently, Lastfort Records, building a reputation strong enough to see them sharing bills with international acts like Counterparts and Dying Wish on Japanese tours.

Their 2026 tour, titled 「愛の綴化」 (“The Transfiguration of Love”), has already been announced, with shows at Shinjuku Antiknock and other venues, suggesting a new release cycle is on the horizon. Musically, expect dense, emotionally charged songs where screamed vocals and intricate guitar work sit over rhythm sections that constantly shift tempo and feel – closer to the heavier fringes of post-hardcore than to classic three-chord punk, but animated by the same refusal to sit still.

Where this leaves guitar music in 2025

Taken together, these records make a persuasive case that garage, punk rock and new wave are not museum genres but living tools. Shame and Maruja prove that British bands can still rewire post-punk tropes into something emotionally urgent. The Spitters and The Limiñanas show French rock working at two very different scales – from basement-level fury to orchestral widescreen – without losing the grit that keeps it grounded. Däächt and ONYON demonstrate how German bands continue to push at the edges of structure and sound, while Tokyo’s THE FUZZ ACT and Vision of Fatima remind us that some of the most exciting scenes run on sweat and train timetables rather than playlist placements.

For fans and photographers alike, this is a year worth documenting properly. Smartphone clips of cramped gigs and spinning turntables are already circulating on social media; polishing those with an image quality enhancer before you post is a small act of respect for music that is doing far more than chasing the next viral moment.

What connects all these bands is not a common sound but a shared belief that small details matter: how a snare drum rattles in a tiny room, how a lyric lands when shouted from a few feet away, how an album cover looks when you spot it halfway across a record shop. In a streaming culture built on disposable playlists, that stubborn attention to craft might be the most punk thing about 2025.