Steven Hyden’s Favorite Music Of March 2025

Every month, Uproxx cultural critic Steven Hyden makes an unranked list of his favorite music-related items released during this period — songs, albums, books, films, you name it.

1. Destroyer, Dan’s Boogie

This is the 14th album Dan Bejar has made as Destroyer. When you get to the 14th album in any discography, you’re hoping for something that sounds fresh and exciting while also delivering the unique qualities that kept you interested through the other 13 records. Dan’s Boogie does that. It feels like a new beginning after the previous three releases, which form a stylistically united trilogy. (Let’s call those dark, synth-infused LPs his ’80s Dylan period — which coming from me is a compliment.) Dan’s Boogie, meanwhile, retains some of the feel of that music while also reaching back to the live-band looseness of aughts-era albums like This Night and Rubies.

It’s a compact record (under 40 minutes), and yet Bejar’s song structures feel even less conventional than usual. Songs like “Hydroplaning Off The Edge Of The World” are dense to the point of inscrutability, but you also can’t get it out of your head. It is, in other words, precisely the record that Destroyer fans invested in the 14th Destroyer album will probably want.

2. Fust, Big Ugly

My favorite album of 2025’s first quarter. Given that Fust makes hearty alt-country and hails from North Carolina, it’s natural to think of it as a post-Manning Fireworks southern indie rock record. But Fust’s singer-songwriter Aaron Dowdy is no Lenderman-come-lately. He’s been working on music under the Fust banner for eight years, and part of that time he’s been a Ph.D candidate in literature at Duke University. Which means I am required by music-critic law to describe Big Ugly as “literary.” Which it is, though Fust truly satisfies by playing beautiful bar-band jams that convey warmth and coziness to academics and morons (my kind of people) alike.

3. Haim, “Relationships”

As you would expect from Haim, this is pretty much a perfect indie-pop single. If I were Ariel Rechtshaid, and someone wrote a breakup song inspired by my personal life, I would insist that it was as well-executed as this song.

4. Charley Crockett, Lonesome Drifter

I have enjoyed this Texas country singer’s albums over the years, though even if I didn’t, I would just have to wait a few months for another one to come along. Last year, he put out two records, and he’s already back in 2025 with another LP, Lonesome Drifter. By now, his formula is more or less set — a mix of originals and covers, all pitched in the retro honky-tonk zone. This time, one of the highlights is a rendition of “Amarillo By Morning,” a 1980s era hit for George Strait that Crockett delivers with his usual barrel-chested élan.

5. Dutch Interior, Moneyball

I wrote about this California band last month upon the release of the single “Fourth Street,” one of the better songs from Moneyball, out this month. If you missed them in February, don’t sleep on them now — Moneyball is a pleasurable collection of rustic indie tunes that occasionally slip into Allmans-style harmonized guitar leads.

6. The Waterboys Feat. Fiona Apple, “Letter From An Unknown Girlfriend”

I’m a big fan of The Waterboys’ work from the 1980s, when they mixed self-described “big music” in the mold of bands like Simple Minds and pre-Joshua Tree U2 with American and European folk influences. Singer-songwriter Mike Scott has kept the band going over the years, though his forthcoming record — a conceptual work about Dennis Hopper called Life, Death And Dennis Hopper — appears to be the strangest and most high profile in a while. It’s out on April 4, but one of the album’s standouts — featuring an impassioned (is there any other kind?) Fiona Apple lead vocal — has already been released.

7. Florry, “Hey Baby”

I loved this Philadelphia band’s previous album from 2023, The Holey Bible, and I’m pleased to hear that they haven’t much tamed their shambolic country-rock sound on the forthcoming Sounds Like…, due in May. “Hey Baby” has two hearty “woo’s!” during the sloppy guitar solo and it sounds like the rhythm section was recorded after bars closed on a Saturday night. Can’t wait to marinate in the entire album.

8. Alien Boy, “Changes”

It’s been four years since this Portland band’s breakthrough LP, Don’t Know What I Am, which made my year-end best of list in 2021. But judging by “Changes,” the first song released from their upcoming LP Do You Wanna Fade? (due in May), they are still making fuzz-pop gems that split the difference between ’90s lo-fi and classic dream pop.

9. Kyle M, The Real Me

Former SNL cast member Kyle Mooney is a master at replicating the minutia of awkward, poorly executed amateur media. On his anti-singer-songwriter album The Real Me, he applies the same careful eye to Bandcamp indie that he previously has to high school public access TV programs. Over rudimentary guitar picking and demo keyboard licks, Mooney talk-sings about about feeling like a cowboy instead of a cowman with a mix of detachment and genuine middle-aged dread. What initially scans as a comic lark reveals itself over time — not that much time, it’s only a 19-minute record — as a set of weirdly catchy and spiritually unsettling songs.