The Gremmy Awards 2025: Best "Mad" Instro Record

The point of having so many Gremmy Awards categories to something that most people just think of as "surf" is to best compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. And so what we have here is the wildberries at the bottom of the basket. Unidentifiable, unique, possibly poisonous. Some of them play with our idea of surf music, some of them ultimately are just recommendations to surf fans. It's funny how things have changed over the course of doing the Gremmys. I once had a small band called Khruangbin win this category, now I feel like bands that sound like Khruangbin are kind of their own genre, and I'm hesitant to include them here. Bands like Chicha Libre and Sonido Gallo Negro that pushed cumbia and chicha felt like cousins to surf music, and while sometimes that still feels like the case, cumbia has experienced such a vibrant revival in a manner that often feels very separate from surf. And I think that's amazing. Even if it doesn't seem to have paid dividends for surf music, I love that we're living in a world that seems more open to instrumentals in general. Maybe this will mean fewer people yelling "SING SOMETHING" at shows. But the most important thing that I'm saying here is that if you took any of my Gremmy categories seriously, please take this one less seriously. Think of this only as things that I, a fan of surf music, might think other fans of surf music would find enjoyable.