The Gremmy Awards are bloated and complicated, and the stupidest part is that they don't even work. What I want is to sum up the year as best as I remember by focusing on the highlights, but there's always things that feel missing if we're really taking stock of the year. So this category is here to attempt to pick up all the scraps. There are sub-cateories within this category that come and go. For instance, I couldn't think of a Worst Album Art winner this year, but feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments. It's free-form. It's whatever.

I don't really care when people say stuff like "Dick Dale was the godfather of Heavy Metal". Surf music, as far I can tell, is when rock & roll musicians really started to embrace loudness and aggression. It's not a stepping stone to other loud forms of music, it's the dawn, and whatever came afterwards simply came later. And part of why I say this is because just as metal, etc can take influence from surf, surf can grab back too. This is the category for bands that focus on that aggressive sound.