Full steam ahead, this category is for groups that prioritze noise, speed, and power in their instrumental music. They often take influence from punk groups, they're often simple and lo-fi, and in spirit sometimes I think they're closer to what teens in the 60's wanted to do.

This category is for surf groups that don't feel like they need to closely imitate the sounds of yesteryear, who carve out their own sound and identity. I don't know if I've ever crammed this category with so many records as this year -- and this is after several difficult cuts. Maybe I need to be more ruthless, or maybe there was just so much to love. I like to think it's the latter. Here are what I consider to be the cream of the crop for 2020.

These days garage bands with a little bit of reverb on their vocals are called surf bands. Thankfully, there are still plenty of excellent groups out there that know what surf really sounds like. The following bands aren't aiming to reinvent anything, they're all about making great instrumentals with that irresistable sound cooked up in the 1960s.

This was a good year for trad surf groups and an interesting one. Most of the groups below are sort of rising stars of the scene who made their initial appearance only in recent years, without much presence from the more legendary 90's era groups. Here are what I believe to be the standouts.

Welcome to the first, most irrelevant round of the Gremmy Awards. Album Art matters. Without listening it gives you an idea of what an album might sound like, the effort put in, and even though it shouldn't, it usually does have some say in whether or not you end up listening to it. Even when listening to the final product, it can guide the mindset that you listen in.

Here are several picks from this year that really stood out.

2020 is over. Maybe not in terms of global panic, but we did technically make a trip around the sun. During that trip festivals were cancelled, bands couldn't play shows.... but music certainly didn't grind to a halt. There were a LOT of great surf releases in 2020 -- in fact I counted more releases overall than in 2019.

Yeah yeah, 2020 was a bad year for the world. And of course, surf bands couldn't play shows, festivals were cancelled. However, it was hardly a dormant year for the surf listener! While many bands suffered from inability to meet and collaborate, plenty of others thrived from the extra time. As a result, this list is actually bigger than last year's!

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!

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.

I can't imagine you stumbled upon surf music because it was popular. Wesweek out the obscure and different, and I think it's important to recognize those that are really trying to do try something new. This category is to recognize groups that have a loose foothold from surf but jump into more challenging directions.

This category used to be called Best Way-Out Instro, but I was never comfortable with that name and realized that "Mad" rhymes with trad and rad and works well enough. Mad as in crazy, not angry.

This category is for surf groups that represent the state of the music today. They're not focused on sounding authentic, they're about making a good surf record while accepting and incorporating the roughly 60 years of music history that happened since the birth of surf music. This description covers most surf bands releasing music today, and it's always really difficult to choose a winner. I cut a lot of great records from this list just to bring it down to this many -- easily the largest category this year! I feel that all of these albums are at the same level as each other, and I'll happily recommend any of them to anybody.