Time flies when you’re rebooting punk and blimey! Suddenly we find ourselves presenting the nominations for the TENTH annual LOUD WOMEN Hercury Music Award. Another year, another cornucopia of creativity, and after a prolonged struggle to pare the cavalcade of contenders (aka the longlist) through a process of negotiations so strained that at one point Anthony Blair threatened to arbitrate, Team LOUD WOMEN present for your perusal a democratically designated top-notch one dozen albums released between mid-July 2025 and mid-July 2026 by women/enby-led British/Irish bands. Sensible criteria for a better Britain(/Ireland).
Ignore all suspiciously similarly named corporate pay-to-play weird-distribution-gatekeeping so-called rival awards perpetually trying to gazump our turf by making their announcements first, because THIS is the only shortlist you need. It’s alphabeticised, and it goes like this:
Breakup Haircut – No Worries If Not! (INH CD/DL, Nov 2025)
Stars of this year’s LOUD WOMEN-curated Rebellion Introducing Stage (and LOUD WOMEN Volume 7, available NOW), Breakup Haircut moved to INH Records for this second album of thoughtful, tuneful, skilful indiepop/punk. The band have a wonderful way of setting interrogatory angst poetry to sprightly emo anthems, with, in particular, impressively furious drumming throughout. This is no genre-by-numbers record either, with tracks like ‘Don’t Get Eaten Up’, ‘Two Spaghetti Meals’ and dénouement ‘Remy’ showcasing the band’s range. Although, tbh, they had us with the way Ishani pronounces “heart” in the superlative opening track.
Chroma – 25 Forever (Alcopop! LP/DL, Apr 2026)
Two LPs in three years on Oxford’s Alcopop! Records for Rhondda’s finest, and our main dilemma is deciding whether the second is even better than the first: a nice problem to have.
“A thunderous, heart-on-sleeve triumph of an album that cements Chroma as a defining voice of a generation caught between the grit of the underground and the polish of the modern world,”
declared our review. Equally adept and anthemic on coruscating bombtracks like ‘What!’, ‘Riverhouse’ and ‘Straight Men’ as on more measured, evocative songs such as ‘Lifehack’, ‘Matching Tattoos’ and the titular ’25 Forever’, Chroma sound like they’re here to stay.
The Dead Zoo – Suspects (self-released CD/DL, Jul 2025)
Well, this is something special. Fronted by singer-songwriter/guitarist Kaoru Sato, formerly of UK queercore legends Six Inch Killaz among many others, the Dead Zoo’s debut LP features their excellent singles ‘Hoover Damned’, the not-nearly-long-enough ‘Bruise’ and a sax-gilded rerecording of ‘In The End’. Packed with all kinds of 70s/80s/90s influences without feeling tied to any particular time or place, the Zoo could be a slept-on Britpop-adjacent band on ‘Television Wears The Crown’ (ft. keyboardist Somrata on lead vox), or a long-lost North American protopunk outfit on ‘Warm Cube’ and ‘Cobalt’. The propulsive ‘The Grey Man and the Shadow of a Gun’ is at the punk end of new wave, while other tracks flirt with electropop, postpunk and coldwave-inflected artrock, all with lashings of Bowiesque lead guitar and engaging outsider energy throughout. Up with this sort of thing.
Gimic – New Traditions (Drunken Sailor LP/CD, Jun 2026)
Following two excellent EPs in 2023–24, here’s the debut longplayer from Bristol’s Gimic, on Stoke’s Drunken Sailor label. Twelve tracks of reflective rage which cross splenetic anarcho-style vocals with intricate post-hardcore dynamics, kicking off with ‘Read The Rune’, a punk Masters Of War for the age of livestreamed genocide. Their near-relentless assault is interspersed with more mid-paced tracks like ‘Dark, Darker’, which make me want to excavate my At The Drive In as much as my Rudimentary Peni albums (while updating my references). The blistering ‘In the Yoke’ and the devastating title track are particular highlights, and the poetic, dreamlike lyrics, alongside the creative guitarwork, maintain a healthy distance from genre cliché: “An invisible museum/May your nation lay sleeping/Like a portrait on rice paper.” (‘Disintegrate’.)
goo – Oh Wow, Oh Well (GM LP/CD/MC, May 2026)
A brand new set of fuzz-pop goodness from Keighley’s goo. Following without duplicating their recent-ish ‘Chomp’ EP, Oh Wow, Oh Well features “12 tracks of perfectly blended punk, grunge, and 90s alt-rock influences”, showcasing the band’s strategy: “trim the fat and make sure each section is hooky and immediate”. They’re a great live band too and were splendid on last year’s Rebellion LOUD WOMEN stage. Significantly, this is this year’s only Hercury shortlist contender to be available on actual cassette, and yes I do have a deck to play it on thanks.
Irked – The Grievance (Wrong Speed LP/CD, May 2026)
Part of what might just be a full-fledged female-fronted hardcore/punk resurgence (cf. Gimic, Tethered, Split Dogs), as well as a vital contingent of current north-east bands, Irked deliver a frenetic eruption of riffs across 14 mostly breakneck-paced tracks, interspersed with some mildly slower but equally furious grooves. The band call out class-tourist hipsters on ‘The ACP’, interrogate social media and Gaza with ‘Death Cult’, and come closest to pop on the infectious ‘Green Space’, as catchy as it is sarcastic. Our review of The Grievance found a band very much living up to their name. They even indulge fans of a certain vintage with a recession-friendly affordable CD featuring the first EP as a bonus. Heck, even their name is great. It’s time to get Irked.
Lime Garden – Maybe Not Tonight (So Young LP/CD/DL, Apr 2026)
What a transformation! Their 2024 debut was perfectly acceptable, but whatever Lime Garden might have been through in the last two years, the band have shapeshifted into a swaggering electro/alt-rock beast that bleeds seductive, sarky, three-minute anthems across their second album. New Order and the Strokes might be musical influences, while early-20s alienation is clearly the driving lyrical force, but there’s no denying the band’s unique blend of guitar and groove, particularly on album side one, roughly split as the record is between blowout and hangover. ‘Downtown Lover’s louchely catchy indie-sleaze (“I like the way we are/I like it most because we are always apart”) and the Psychedelic Furs-esque soundtracked angst of ‘Body’ (“I hate the way my body looks too/If that helps, but it won’t”) are brilliant standouts, and the chorus of ‘All Bad Parts’ will stick in your brain like a childhood TV jingle. Lime Garden are touring Maybe Not Tonight right now.
mary in the junkyard – Role Model Hermit (AMF LP/CD/DL, Jul 2026)
An intriguing mélange of pensive grooves and an aesthetically distinctive viola-inflected take on indie rock rewarded mary in the junkyard with a Top 30 album placing for this creative debut. The superb ‘New Muscles’ has a Cure-meets-Raincoats vibe, ‘Blood’ is charmingly wistful, ‘Myrtle’ is engagingly melodic, and ‘Thou Shalt Sprout’ is a whimsical, tuneful take on folk horror. We first featured the band back in 2023, and I caught them live in Stockwell at what must have been quite an early gig. It was already clear that the group were presenting their own world to the audience, and not necessarily one fully formed, as it seemed to be evolving before our eyes. In contrast to some of the critical attention they’ve received, I don’t feel we should take the Marys so seriously on every level: these playful experiments find them channelling modern anxieties when the mood takes, but having a laugh while doing it.
Nervous Twitch – The Day Job Gets In The Way (Spinout Nuggets LP/CD, Oct 2025)
A sixth LP from a band coming close to rivalling the Lovely Eggs with their prolificity, this isn’t the first time Nervous Twitch have featured on the Hercury shortlist, and may not be the last. The album sees a relocation to Spinout Nuggets but no move away from the band’s trademark garage-pop-meets-first-wave punk. Every album has its musical surprises too, and here the title track and ‘The Man With His Head In The Sand’ take a slightly darker, postpunk turn. Meanwhile, ‘My Mum’s An Anarchist’ – “she don’t know it!” – is as irresistible as it sounds, and the gone-in-50-seconds ‘Some People Have It All’ sounds a bit like very early Lurkers. And if I had a penny for every time the Lurkers got a mention on LOUD WOMEN, I’d have a penny.
The New Eves – The New Eve Is Rising (Transgressive LP/CD/DL, Aug 2025)
Not many bands can coax Everett True from his secret hideout, but the New Eves have done it, and with probably the first Hercury contender to make #1 on the UK folk charts. As his LOUD WOMEN review begins:
“The title is austere: THE NEW EVE IS RISING, the lettering states blankly. Is it? Good. About fucking time.”
An opening manifesto; religious/sacrilegious imagery; freeform tempo shifts; music somehow both post- and pre-everything; violin, flute and cello-adorned experimentation; a record not only out of leftfield, part of it was apparently recorded in a field (with a cow): the Eves are playing by their own rules, although fans of the Raincoats and Bas Jan should find plenty to relate to here. ‘Highway Man’ comes closest to regular post-punk, the label never feels fully adequate for bands pushing the boundaries, and ‘Rivers Run Red’ is the group at their most earworm-y, but this album rewards further immersion, offering snatches of poetic wordplay between surging and ebbing instrumentation: “Buzzing between a thousand lives/I am the first sunrise/I did silence in the cacophony/The first light in the morning skies.” (‘Circles’.)
Witch Fever – Fevereaten (Music For Nations/Sony LP/CD, Oct 2025)
Witch Fever deliver the heaviest-sounding and the singular industry-major entry on this shortlist, with their second record for Sony’s Music For Nations. Fevereaten might be on a metal label, but there’s more than one musical tributary feeding this “dark, furious soundscape”, with its gothic aesthetic, influences from the gnarlier end of postpunk, and song structures that often start like something from the Courtney Love back catalogue. Crucially, while lyrical melodrama is entirely befitting of their genre, they sound like they mean it. Standout tunes include ‘Northstar’ and ‘Safe’, but Amy’s vocals are formidable throughout, and ‘Final Girl’, in particular, is little short of astonishing: “You can’t bury me, you can’t bury me! I part the red sea, I got what I need!”
Yakkie – Kill The Cop Inside Your Head (self-rel LP/CD, Feb 2026)
We conclude as we began, with more stars of this year’s LOUD WOMEN-curated Rebellion Introducing Stage: a LOUD WOMEN Album Of The Month and tour-de-force from “riot metal” supergroup Yakkie. An assemblage of riffs, tunes, chants, theory and musicianship the like of which is rarely seen on these shores; according to our review this grunge-influenced debut “not only rehabilitates rock; its best songs may be among the greatest released in this country in the last 30 to 50 years.” The band play a double bill in London in November with Petrol Girls.
Stay tuned: the winner of the 2026 LOUD WOMEN Hercury Award will be announced very soon.