It’s time to reflect on the year in music! This month, we’ll be highlighting Jam of Today’s favourite albums of 2025. Working our way up to the #1 album, which will be revealed on the 31st of December, we’ll go one by one past this year’s favourites. Today, our #27: ‘NIIS WORLD‘ by Niis.

I vividly remember marking this one as one of my favourite hidden gems of 2025, back in September of this year. When I first found out about Niis’ debut album ‘NIIS WORLD’ (and especially single ‘Spite’) I thought this was going to be one of my favourite discoveries of this year. A few months and a few listens later and it didn’t exactly meet my expectations but luckily that doesn’t take anything away from the fact that Niis has released one of the most unapologetically punk albums we’ll stumble upon in this year’s endlist.

Niis (pronounced as ‘nice’) is an LA-based punk outfit who – according to themselves – “synthesise the sounds of punk, hardcore, lo-fi garage, and early grunge to create an undefinable noise” by taking influence off of some of the most iconic anarcho-punk bands out there in Crass, Subhumans, and Rudimentary Peni. Yeah, that touch of anarchy certainly comes across strong on this debut album, whether it being through Mimi SanDoe’s merciless screams or perhaps those exceptional fills and rolls by drummer Monte Najaro. This, amongst the overall punk energy creates an album full of songs all having the proper hardcore sound incorporated in some way or another.

All sounds good so far, right? Yes. Now, on to something I like a little less about this album which would be its lack in consistent impressiveness. There’s some fine tunes on here in the aforementioned ‘Spite’ transitioning into ‘STK’, and ‘New Pig’ near the end is solid too, but I leave ‘NIIS WORLD’ with a sense of having just listened to a hardcore version of Best Coast. That 2015 indie sound on steroids: twice as fast, twice as bold, but similarly interchangeable. A bit that ‘This was the best thing I’ve ever seen at a festival’ kind of vibe only to find out that you ‘really had to be there’ when you play it at home. A shame, since this prevents Niis from catapulting straight to the top of this year’s end list but, hey. Who cares anyways. It’s an album with a couple of highly decent songs that will certainly have this band leaving their mark on this year’s punk releases. And I’m sure there will be much more to come.