September 2025 Line Rider Roundup
Finally, we’re out of August!!! As stated in the intro of the August 2025 roundup, I’ve now broken into September’s humble abode to release the September 2025 roundup. Don’t worry, I won’t steal anything! I’ll even leave a plate of cookies and some almond milk before I leave!
Anyway, after having plenty of notable tracks being released in August 2025, September 2025 has slowed down significantly in terms of Line Rider releases, leaving us with only seven tracks to review. With that said, thanks to Jade for reviewing calidaer’s PALI and to Bevibel for reviewing Ray’s Mayonaise, and a huge shoutout to Bevibel for copyediting my reviews and staying on the Monthly Roundup train as editor for the roundup since I’ve started hosting! Hope you enjoy, and I’ll see you in October 2025!
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order), excluding PALI where the song is blocked from YouTube. Titles also link to videos individually.
PALI - calidaer
Review by Jade:
I get this feeling that, a lot of the time, Line Rider artists kinda resent the place where they grew up. Or at least, detachment is a predominant feeling. That’s most likely a consequence of Line Rider having a largely American community, and if you prompt a queer neurodivergent American artist to make a track about the place they were raised, you end up getting something like Hide And Seek, basically a track about how much it sucks growing up in Florida, and how your most formative memories took place outside a 7-11 or Sam’s Club. So, for just this once, it’s nice to see a track about someone who genuinely loves the place they grew up in.
The thing about calidaer/vsbl’s style is that its strength seems to be poking the perfectionist adult-poisoned brain that says, “that looks sloppy, that looks unfinished! that looks like it was made by a 4-year-old!” and while that sloppiness can hold some tracks back from speaking fully, it works well in PALI’s favour, because it’s a track about the place where calidaer lived during their childhood, and who is any outsider to say or evaluate what your sense of culture/personal connection to the place you grew up in like?
If I can just talk about the domino community for a second, domino builders are generally much less imaginative when it comes to making art about our relationships to places, immediately jumping to re-creations of famous landmarks or historical figures – but PALI isn’t compelling because calidaer drew the Parthenon in Line Rider – it’s because they made a track about this personal and unplacable joy of being Greek, and I’m just like so here for that!!!
The way calidaer uses visual motifs is the star of the show in PALI, it feels fresh but also classic for a Line Rider track… the flowers, the same word repeated over and over, the scribbled colours that feel like toddlers playing with crayons, and how calidaer moves through these simple motifs in a very organized, hypnotic flow is what makes PALI a track I could not stop watching when it came out. Pali– “again”, indeed.
Mayonaise - Ray
[cw: body horror, gentrification, genocide]
Review by Bevibel:
Set to a Smashing Pumpkins song chosen by Goose for the latest Secret Songsta (an event where creators create tracks set to randomly-selected songs chosen by others), Mayonaise is probably my favorite Secret Songsta track that doesn’t have an outright antagonistic relationship with its music. It’s a somewhat abstract affair, but Ray is clearly interested in depicting the collapse of a civilization in a way that has a lot of respect for the earth it was built on in the first place. The sledder’s chaotic meandering pace is a little on the slow side, so it can feel a little like a chore to sit through, but there are a number of powerful visual moments, like a mass of bloody flesh rising up from below to destroy buildings, a felled tree that is leaking not sap but blood, a gorgeously vivid sunset, and new shoots growing from the ruins of a forest. In case the themes of this imagery were in doubt, the video opens with a land acknowledgement and a call to support each other in antifascist action. It’s nothing that blew me away, but I think the ecocidal imagery will stick with me.
when the party’s over - MoonXplorer
[cw: abuse, blood]
Review by Autumn:
In my opinion, when the party’s over is MoonXplorer’s most mature Line Rider track yet. Before this release, pretty much all of their Line Rider tracks have some sort of a childlike touch to them, and when MoonXplorer attempts to get serious on a track—Switchblade, for example—it falls flat on trying to convey the mature themes. With when the party’s over however, MoonXplorer conveys the mature themes pretty well. This time, the themes are more about their personal life—trying to leave a toxic, abusive friendship and all the stress and trauma that comes from that.
Like many earlier MoonXplorer releases, some of the track still relies on the lyrics of the song to convey emotion, but there are many other ways MoonXplorer convey emotion too. One of the most prominent is the movement of the rider. Movements such as the shivers that Bosh does at the beginning and the many times Bosh leaves the visible lines to ride on invisible lines really show how trauma from abuse takes a toll on a person and leave them disoriented. I also really like the layer automation, such as the sudden “CALL ME BACK” and the way the friend’s lashing out is literally cut off. All of this ends with the drawing of crying eyes, showing how people aren’t just instantly happy once they cut off a toxic and abusive friendship, and it takes time to heal from it. Overall, this is a sad and somewhat surprisingly mature track from MoonXplorer, but the way it conveys the subject matter is also kinda beautiful.
Soda Stain - Alt-Key Here
Review by Autumn:
Soda Stain is Alt-Key Here’s most creative release yet! Alt-Key has taken the rotating and skewed camera ideas from Tonalia and The Well Tempered Malizmual and expanded upon them with gravity triggers and layer automation to create an experience that’s quite trippy. One of the things that works well in Soda Stain is the progression of ideas, where it starts off with some camera rotations, then adds some gravity triggers, then finally some layer automation on top of all that, along with a skewed camera effect that makes it look like the camera itself is circling around Bosh. The track itself is nothing too meaningful, but it’s not trying to be. Alt-Key Here is just experimenting with post-production camera tricks, and most of them work quite well! I think my only complaint is that I wish it was movement-only; there are some drawings that go by that don’t really add much to the experience, and I think removing them could let people have a bit more fun with the neat camera ideas the track has. Overall, it’s a fun, little experimental romp that I enjoyed, even if it didn’t have a lasting impact on me.
street address - avery
Review by Autumn:
street address is the type of Line Rider track where it doesn’t leave much of an impression until we reach the end, where it suddenly turns into something quite beautiful. The start doesn’t have much going on. We have some movement lines that Bosh rides on with a gradient surrounding them, along with a grown tree, a tree that has been chopped down by an axe, and a barn with a small metal tower next to it. If it ended at the one-and-a-half minute mark with Bosh dismounting, the track wouldn’t be very memorable. But it is memorable! And that’s because avery decides to zoom out after the dismount where we get to see past this little landscape and see that this whole time, everything we’ve seen is within what looks like a tear in the fabric of space! There’s also a blue sun and some scribbles surrounding the tear, and the entire thing is a beautiful piece of art. It might’ve taken a bit to see the full picture, but what it showed at the end was really pretty!
Scream - Leonis
Review by Autumn:
Ever since Witch back in late 2024, Leonis has released several gigaquirk tracks that I could only describe with one word: feminized. It’s like Leonis is looking at the historic toxicity of gigaquirk’s hyper-masculinity and decided to put a feminine filter on the same style. And honestly, I’ve really enjoyed a few of these feminized gigaquirk tracks, such as Complementary, blUwU, and the aforementioned Witch. However, there are other recent Leonis tracks that feel like your painfully average gigaquirk tracks but with dramatic zooms and a purple-ish color palette, such as Bitter Sweet Boogie and now Scream. Bitter Sweet Boogie at least has a hopeful message of pride at the end of its track; Scream doesn’t really have anything that stands out to me, at least not in a positive way. The track is set to a lo-fi hip hop song that I could see myself studying to, but Leonis hits us with no-holds-barred gigaquirk right out of the gate, and when the song picks up near the end, Leonis doesn’t change anything up, leaving me bored. Despite there being a lot going on technically, the track feels very static and it feels like nothing notable happens.
I think the reason why Scream doesn’t work for me is because the songs Leonis chose for the tracks I like gave her the opportunity to be all silly and fun with gigaquirk and/or push the aesthetic boundaries of the average gigaquirk track. I really liked Witch because the song she chose for her old gigaquirk track breathed new life into it by transfeminizing it, I really liked Complementary because the dynamic between the high and low vocals gave Leonis the opportunity to switch between her usual gigaquirk style and a cutesy scenery style that pushed the boundaries of her typical style, and I really liked blUwU because the over-the-top cutesy song lets her be all cutesy in the track by adding :3 emoticons and doing silly kramual motifs in the chorus. I also feel like the songs used in the tracks I like are a better fit for gigaquirk overall, while the song used in Scream just doesn’t fit with gigaquirk. I hope to see Leonis hone what makes Witch, Complementary, and blUwU great and expand upon that, because there is a lot of potential there, even within the gigaquirk itself.
The Entertainer - Qo3s
Review by Autumn:
Qo3s’s second release is notable because they attempt to have every little section of lines that Bosh rides have its own scenery. Most of them are random shapes, especially in the second half, but there are also some fun ideas such as the piano keys in the first half of the track and a metronome in one part. It’s a little fun, but it gets stale pretty quickly, especially since the movement itself doesn’t have much to offer.
Thanks for reading!