This year was an especially difficult Gremmy Awards with so many great surf releases to sift through. I start to feel guilty, I'm subject to my own tastes and biases as much as anybody else, but most of those anybodies don't have a series of awards. So the Guest Gremmys help mitigate that guilt by bringing in other prominent surf ears to either agree with me or mention all the things that I felt guilty about not mentioning. Guilt aside, it's eye opening to see how albums land on other listeners. Despite all this social media, I still don't have a feel for whether my peers have similar feelings about these releases as I do, and The Guest Gremmys are a great way to lay it all on the table.

Odds and ends, things that I feel need to be recognized to sum up the year. Some categories return year-on-year, some don't.

This is a category for hybrid organisms with surf in their DNA but plenty of other things too. That can be plenty of things of course, so the definition is pretty subject to my own whims. That said, I really like this batch this year. These were all great releases and though their share very little with each other, I hope you can appreciate them all.

The Gremmys are a stupidly complicated thing, slicing up surf music into imaginary categories just so that I can make sense of things in my head. It's messy -- there are things in this category that could be in another category and vice versa. But the judging criteria of this one is delightfully simple:

Does it rip? How much?

This is a category for surf/instrumentals that aim to get your adrenaline spiking, maybe inspire some headbanging or fistpumping. I call it "rad" because it needs a name and it rhymes with trad. Let's go.

It's been, oh, 60 years since the surfquake and music has changed significantly. Everybody reading this website recognizes that there was something special in surf music, but it can also be crossbred to make new amazing sounds. You don't have to be trying to forge something new, sometimes you're just making the music that makes sense to you. No matter the case, here are the standouts in modernized surf music this year.

This is the category highlighting bands that are most mostly influenced directly by bands from the 1960s and would delight in hearing themselves compared in such a way. There are years where there aren't as many bands in this category as I'd hope, and I get a little more forgiving about what "traditional" sounds like. This year there were so many great trad surf records that I went in the opposite direction, dumping great records into other categories at the slightest hint of modernity and cutting records I like because the bar was simply too high. Certainly not the worst problem to have, but often tough in its own way. Ideally the Honorable Mentions are good enough that somebody else will think they should be the winner. I expect to see a lot of that this year, as there are some true heavyweights below.

Bookmark this. When somebody asks you "is anybody even making new surf music?" show them this and laugh.

OK surf nuts. Every year around this time I roll out the Gremmy Awards: my way overthought list of what I think are the best surf records of the year. I haven't listened to everything, I certainly haven't listened to them all enough, but I've listened to a lot, and hopefully this can draw some attention to the most deserving releases of the year.