The downside of assigning strange categories for your end-of-year review process is there's all these other things you want to recognize. So that's what this is for. These categories are completely unstructured. Some categories didn't exist last year, some categories disappeared from last year, and they might come back next year.

For the sake of layout I'm not posting individual Gremmy Awards images for winners, but if you won and you'd like me to send one, let me know.

Brazil truly seems like its own little world, a nation known for its cultural output, yet it always feels like it's not exactly put out there as much as the rest of the world peeks in. For Brazilian surf music, they have a champion advocating on their behalf: Reverb Brasil, headed by Leopoldo "Mocotó" Furtado. Reverb Brasil is to some extent a label, but mostly a platform to spread the word about Brazilian surf music. Reverb Tsunami is their most strident statement yet.

When I do this deep dive into the past year of surf there are inevitably other things of note that simply listing the top albums can't really cover. That's what this is for.

While I love doing the Gremmy Awards, I hate that so much weighs on my own quirky opinions. Every year there are some great records that don't make the lists but that I genuinely enjoyed, and that feels like a snub. So I started asking a few other people to help out, spread out to different point of views. People that I know are very involved in surf, are following new releases closely, but don't have a platform of their own to espouse their opinions. Three surf nuts from all over the globe have stepped forward. I've given them full reign on how they want to do it.

There are some things that deserve recognition other than just the albums themselves. This is the category where I get to spill out the rest of those observations. These categories change year to year.

Robotron is a project by Bjørn Hovland featuring 7 tracks of monstrous fuzzed out tough surf. While a lot of these projects where one member writes and plays many parts tend to sound stripped down, this gives no indication based on the music itself. Partially because this was hardly a bedroom recording: Bjorn hails from Norway, the album was mixed in Brazil and mastered in Seattle!

The last Gasolines LP was in 2008, but they're still as genre-twisting as they were when they left off. Plenty of bands have had jungle-themed surf albums, but this one sticks to it closely, even if they do it in a broad and multi-faceted way. The title track is the pure Martin Denny sound the cover aludes to, but you'll also hear Peruvian chicha on "La Danza de los Mirlos" and "Catamarã", reggae on "Rockers Rock", and interesting latin/South American percussion throughout. It's this sort of diverse world-surf stuff that makes a musical diet with tons of surf rock digestable.