I saved the smallest artist on this list for the #1 spot on purpose. Kabuki Love has 2227 monthly listeners on Spotify. Not 22,000. Not 220,000. Two Thousand And Twenty Seven. I want that number to sit with you for a second because I think it says something important about where we are right now with music discovery.
Kabuki Love started as a duo in Brooklyn during the 2020 pandemic. Andrew Carlin and Rima Naufal started writing together when the world shut down and everyone was stuck inside trying to figure out what to do with all that fear and restlessness. Their first EP, Psychosomatic, came out in October 2020, and the title alone tells you what headspace they were in. The project pulls from goth, new wave, punk, post-punk, grunge, and psychedelic rock without ever sounding like a genre exercise. It sounds like two people processing chaos in real time and turning it into songs.
“Howling” is their September 2025 single and it’s the track that convinced me they deserve to close out this countdown. The guitar riffs collide into each other with this heavy, pitch black bass tone underneath, and Rima’s vocals sit right in the center with this gutsy, almost feral quality. There’s nothing polished or safe about it. It sounds like a band playing at 2am in a Brooklyn basement where the ceiling is too low and the monitors are too loud and nobody in the room is checking their phone. That kind of energy is almost impossible to fake, and Kabuki Love doesn’t even try.
What I keep thinking about with this band is the timeline. They’ve been doing this for five years now. Their Bandcamp discography runs from 2020 all the way through April 2026, steady releases the whole time. Singles, EPs, just constant output. And in five years of consistent work, they’ve built a listener base that could fit inside a mid-size lecture hall. That’s not a failure. That’s what making independent music actually looks like for the vast majority of people doing it. No viral TikTok moment. No playlist placement that changes everything overnight. Just two people writing songs and playing shows at spots like Lucky 13 Saloon and hoping that someone in the room tells someone who tells someone.
EARMILK recently named them an artist on the radar for 2026, which is honestly how I found them. The write-up called their music “a healing force that connects with listeners on a visceral level,” and I think that’s exactly right. Kabuki Love doesn’t make music that asks to be consumed. It asks to be felt. That’s a different thing entirely.
I’m putting them at #1 because I think this countdown needed to end with an artist who represents the actual reality of what it means to be under 100k. Not 43,000 listeners with a growing buzz. Not 20,000 with a debut album on a label. Two thousand and Twenty Seven. Five years of work. Still going. Still releasing. Still playing shows for rooms that don’t sell out. And still making music that sounds like it could tear a hole in the wall if you turned it up loud enough.
That’s the whole point of this site. Right there.