The Gremmys put a lot of weight on my fickle tastes, so I like to spread out and get input from others who have listened to a lot of new surf music to add some balance. It's always fun seeing what releases clicked with other people, and which ones people happen to agree with me about.

I gave everybody full reign over how they wanted to format it -- after all the format of the Gremmys is pretty awkward on its own. Italics are my own little intros.

Thanks to everybody that contributed this year!

Storm Surge of Reverb is currently just one person and I have my own fickle tastes. There are lots of albums that I know others enjoy but didn't click with me, and there are albums I enjoyed but not quite enough to find their way into the Gremmys. So I call on my friends to spread it out a bit! The following people are very well-versed in today's instro music and I want to thank them for letting me put that to use.

If not here then where? This is for the bands that are close enough to surf but hard to consider amongst the rest. The weirdos. The criteria here is especially loose, basically up to my own whims, but I think they all have value to surf music as a whole.

Rad is a dumb term I use to describe more loud, aggro, punk influenced surf. I chose it because it rhymes with trad.

These lists are never definitive, I always miss a few but there's a lot! More than last year!

If something is bolded it means it was reviewed on this site. I'm only including releases that are over 50% instrumental. Big thanks to Kevin Kamphaus and Nestor Burma for helping me fill in some gaps.

EPs

My definition of EP is between 2 and 7 songs. Some 7-song records might be classified as an LP if there are longer tracks. I did not track singles (as in one track releases) because it starts getting out of control.

Instro is imaginative and open-ended, and the album art can absolutely affect the way we listen to and interpret an album. Here are some of my favorites from this year.

Honorable Mentions

Hypnotzar - Cold Streams of Taiga

Surf is no longer the same music that the kids in California were making. It's drawn in influences from all over the place to make its own more open sound. Some of these bands seek to establish new boundaries in what instrumental rock & roll can be, some just make the sound that makes sense to them. Here are the ones that stood out most to me, in no particular order.

These are groups that have surf somewhere in their DNA but have reshaped it into something much different. What falls in and out of this category is pretty subjective to my own whims, as most of it is going to fall into "not really surf". Some of them are familiar cousins to surf, some are somethin' else altogether. Let's just get rolling with it.

Honorable Mentions

These guys may trace their roots to a surf sound, might even call themselves surf sometimes, but their sound is undeniably modern and often unto themselves. Surf isn't a code to live by, and Instro is a genre of possibilities meant to be explroed and tinkered with.

There were no shortage of good records for this category, and it was extremely difficult for me to choose between them. I'm looking forward to publishing this so I can stop agonizing and be done with it!

This is my own terminology here, but the rad category is for the instro bands that thrive on adrenaline. Moreso than the other categories, a lot of these show punk and metal influences. It also rhymes with trad, and I like it more than "aggro".

Honorable Mentions