Ranking junk: we love it. And yes, folks, usually I’d love to whip up some fanciful theory for you about how the human propensity to rank things is evolutionarily adaptive instead of decadent, but there sure is an awful lot of music to rank and I’m just not sure I can spare the time.
Sure, there’s a part of me that gets cynical every year when I do this exercise, because there’s a decent argument to be made that making a ranked list of one’s favorite [whatever]s of the year is disrespectful not only to the creators of the [whatever], but also disrespectful to our own experience. Instead of honoring an authentic encounter with music in as unmediated a way as possible, at every moment we already find ourselves inching towards comparison, analysis, quantification.
But the thing about music is, it’s impossible to wrap your arms around it or wall it off. It cannot be encompassed. This means, above all else, that there is no such thing as an unmediated encounter. Whenever we listen to music, we listen as a set of ears with serious history and baggage. Whatever we listen to, we hear through the long-faded reverberations of other things. Whatever we have been, we bring at every moment to what we are.
I think about Stevie Wonder’s song “Isn’t She Lovely” a lot, for example. Wonder wrote the song about the birth of his first child, so as a father, I can relate to the song’s awe and gratitude. But I can’t ever know his experience as a blind man, coming to know this miraculous new creature through his unique sensory world. I can’t ever know exactly what he means by “lovely,” but the song moves me tremendously because of that lacuna. So in a roundabout way, when I tell you these were my favorite 20 metal albums of the year, mostly what I am trying to do is to honor my own experience as a person hearing them, sifting these sounds through the crenellated mush of my interiority. You, of course, will bring a wholly different set of histories to how you hear these sounds.
I sometimes get a little down when I think about how so much of what I write casts me as someone who thinks his taste in music is the most – or only – interesting thing about him, but you know what? It’s all actually love. Ranking junk, the yammering on, the clattering sound of my mind’s teeth against the inflexible bit of its compulsions: all of these things are intended to be in service of love. Love of the world, love of each other, love of you – yes, exactly you. How could we ever keep from singing?
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE SCORIN’ EM (AKA HERE ARE SOME FRIGGIN’ GREAT METAL RECORDS)
As an imperturbable nuisance, I can’t help but also direct to your attention to these fine albums before sailing into the safe harbor of my top 20: Glorious Depravity – Death Never Sleeps; Abhorrent Expanse – Enter the Misanthropocene; Havukruunu – Tavastland; Flummox – Southern Progress; Mortual – Altar of Brutality; Coroner – Dissonance Theory; Gloombound – Dreaming Delusion; Tenebrae in Perpetuum – Vacuum Coeli; Kalaveraztekah – Nikan Axkan; Neptunian Maximalism – Le Sacre du Soleil Invainçu.
20. Tentacult – Synaptic Perfidy
Depending on how you calibrate your personal death metal poles, Tentacult might be either the most normal weird death metal band, or the weirdest normal death metal band. Synaptic Perfidy maintains that wobbly kind-of-weirdness, but adds to it a slow, sad vibe that makes it significantly more compelling to this particular knucklehead than Tentacult’s other LP from earlier in the year. This is death metal that’s pleasantly untethered from orthodoxy but never so outré as to be willfully antagonistic. “The Crater” sports a riff that might make trad-Fenriz blush, the closer goes for a chewy thing that’s like Tangerine Dream going late-period Voivod, and in between lie manifold goodies and delights. I want to hug this album, and y’know what, if that’s gauche to say, I don’t particularly want to be adroit. (That’s French for, “please shut up and listen to this good album.”)
• Bandcamp
19. 夢遊病者 (Sleepwalker) – РЛБ30011922
Sleepwalker’s music – especially on the dreamlike haze of their latest album – manages to be both inscrutable and approachable. A seamless, 37-minute long instrumental, РЛБ30011922 is remarkable also for how its sprawl remains manageable, even economical. There’s little in the way of extraneous instrumentation, so the listener is drawn in closely, following the shifting moods and digressions that, if you were so inclined to be a terrible killjoy, you might rightly point out have little to do with heavy metal as typically codified. From what little I’ve been able to glean from reading Bandcamp copy and Google-translating the album’s section titles, I think that РЛБ30011922 is an album that serves as both travelogue and tribute to the life and recent death of someone in the band’s grandmother, born January 30th, 1922. (The last two section titles, for example, translate to something like “Your grandmother is old…” and “Even when I’m gone, I’ll still be with you…and I’ll pray for you to be wonderful.”) The music here incorporates post-rock, psychedelia, light-touch atmospheric black metal swells, a notably stomping trad metal riff, ambient, and even dub, but for all that it is and isn’t, what it really sounds like is the small, unconquerable bravery of living a life.
• Bandcamp
18. Weeping Sores – The Convalescence Agonies
There’s a meticulousness to the riff-craft and songwriting across The Convalescence Agonies that either belies or underscores its fraught, painful genesis. The basic thrust of the music is death/doom, but that description is far too pat for an album that dips liberally into the tautness of noise rock and the messy squall of sludge. Annie Blythe’s cello is a crucial voice throughout the album, but it’s not played in service of gothic melodrama. Instead, the album sometimes feels a little bit like the ragged sprawl of My Dying Bride’s As the Flower Withers by way of Japan’s Corrupted. Doug Moore’s guitar lines are long, patient, looping things that stretch across exactly as many measures as they must to get the job done, which – on an album that is like the following in literally no other way – makes me think a bit about Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth. Friends, music is a hell of a thing.
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
17. Effluence – Pianistic Dismemberment
I would like to say a thing about Effluence’s Pianistic Dismemberment that you may be tempted to disagree with, which is that it is intensely musical. Granted, yes, it is equally valid to say that the absolute hellacious racket of this gibbering mongrel of an album is pretty goddamn close to what most people would consider anti-music. The gist, if you’ve not yet blessed thine ear canal with yonder blasted barge, is a skittering, free jazz assault on noise-clotted toilet slamming brutal death metal where the role of guitar is played instead by some kind of dementedly chopped and screwed keyboard. It’s kind of like Cecil Taylor and John Zorn’s Naked City wrestling with Deeds of Flesh in a vat of radioactive sludge. If that doesn’t sound like just a great ol’ time, then move it along, clown.
• Last Rites Review (via Missing Pieces vol. 1)
• Bandcamp
16. Phantom Spell – Heather & Hearth
Phantom Spell plays what you might, somewhat paradoxically, call “grounded escapism.” On second album Heather & Hearth, this brainchild of the UK’s Kyle McNeill continues to flit and flirt in that besotted realm wherein analog progressive rock and proto-metal collide, with the galloping hints of NWOBHM that are, at this point, nearly a legal requirement for any similar such new old sound. This means that Phantom Spell orbits with fellow travelers like Hällas and Tanith (and even a flash of Hammers of Misfortune on “Evil Hand”) while evoking past giants like Wishbone Ash and Uriah Heep, but when you sit with the album, all of these clear signposts and precursors fade swiftly to a low hum in the brain, because the majestic, sorrowful, triumphant, keening thrust and arc of these songs overpowers the desperate grasping of the analytical mind. Think about it like this: Heather & Hearth is a little like if the tone of Tolkien’s writing in The Hobbit had begun to sense the portent of The Lord of the Rings’ looming darkness, but decided to stride onward anyway.
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
15. Sanhedrin – Heat Lightning
Some ham-fisted harmonica wrote this about Sanhedrin’s Heat Lightning back in March: “On album number four, New York City’s Sanhedrin does exactly what they did on albums one, two, and three, which is to spin out a world-class set of no-frills, power-trio heavy metal. This is metal without prefix, qualifier, or adornment: riff and hook, thump and wallop, chapter and verse. Sanhedrin exudes a wonderful grit throughout the album, a winning combination of world-weariness and absolute determination that comes through in Erica Stoltz’s powerfully rough voice, in Jeremy Sosville’s fluid, memorable riffs, and in Nathan Honor’s unhurried shuffle on the drums.”
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
14. Kakothanasy – Metagonism
Here’s what I wrote about Kakothanasy earlier this year (although I probably could have been more concise and told you that I like this album because it is utterly slambient):
“I will grudgingly admit that most listeners are unlikely to find Metagonism, the second album from Switzerland’s Kakothanasy, an obviously soothing experience. Although the band is only a trio, the viscous torrent of sound they rattle off across these 30 rigorously tight minutes sounds like the work of a full army of seriously aggrieved machines. So, it’s not like I’m recommending you replace the chimes and pan flutes at your local spa with the jackhammering lurch of “Ephemeral Demise Macro-Episodes Merging in Successive Epiphenomenal Conglomerates.” And yet, here’s the pitch: Metagonism works on my brain in the same way that Bach works on my brain… Listening to Metagonism is like watching a beautiful mathematical proof unfold in real time, its abstraction and impenetrability suddenly resolving into an order that feels inevitable. Kakothanasy’s music is a gleaming chrome sorting machine, programmed with laser-cut precision to put everything in the right place.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
13. Panthalassan – From the Shallows of the Mantle
For the genre-junked of you out there, Panthalassan’s debut might beg the questions: Is this just particularly powerful prog? Or notably progressive power metal? Since you are journeying here at this website with us, chances are your big dumb brain also has plenty of big dumb thoughts about this utterly inconsequential topic. Jake Wright’s (mostly) solo excursion as Panthalassan probably doesn’t mind if you entertain those dumb thoughts, but it also might just prefer if you stuff it and let the wild upswell of guitar pyrotechnics and emotive, inescapably memorable songwriting take you away. To this particular idiot’s ears, From the Shallows of the Mantle has a fair amount of sonic similarity to Tanagra or Walpyrgus, but in the unselfconscious earnestness of the vocals and occasional melancholy of the lyrics, I also hear some echoes of Woods of Ypres. Whether or not your ears pin a different lineage on Wright’s lapel, From the Shallows of the Mantle delivers an hour of some of the most stirring, propulsive, and rewarding heavy metal of the year.
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
12. Grayceon – Then the Darkness
Some grubby, busted grab-bag wrote this about Grayecon earlier this year: “[Then the Darkness] is an album that speaks – sometimes directly in its lyrics, at other times obliquely in its moods and instrumental gestures – of betrayals, disappointments, deep roiling wells of anger and pain. It is dark, wrathful, venomous – it’s also, at 79 minutes, exhausting. The band sounds tired – not in their performances, but marrow-deep tired in their affect, the kind of tired where you’ve taken just about as much shit as you think you can handle, only to find life backing up an armada of shit-filled shipping containers to your doorstep. What can we do other than keep shoveling? Then the Darkness is the paradoxically comforting sound of old friends figuring out just what the hell three people can do in this world, and if it turns out all we can do is bring a little somber beauty and righteous fury into our own corner? Then by god, that’s what we do.”
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
11. Unbirth – Asomatous Besmirchment
Here’s what I wrote for the full-team Top LPs list: “Death metal can sound like all sorts of intended bodily harm. Some death metal plans to hit you with rocks. Some death metal endeavors to crush you beneath tank treads. Some death metal aims to slosh you around the inside of a cement mixer filled with acid. But on Asomatous Besmirchment, Italy’s Unbirth just wants to cut you with knives. If you’re the kind of sicko who loves to hear electric guitars doing awesome things, Unbirth has written you a prescription for insanely great riffs played in and out and all around the corners of insanely great songs. Unbirth shares with Suffocation (surely one of the most key influences here) a knack for dazzling the listener with technicality and pummeling them with brutality while never fully committing to one pole or another of the tech/brutal death metal palette. What we’re left with, then, is riffs that scythe and stutter and leap and shuck and jive and hammer and slice, slice, slice. It’s a red-lined, razor-sharp, unrelenting album that can work on the level of letting it obliterate and overwhelm your senses, and that can work on the level of dissecting and appreciating just how smart and – yes – sophisticated it is, even as it plucks a serrated blade from your freshly-aerated abdomen. Surprise! Now your organs live on the outside.”
• Bandcamp
FIDDLIN’ WITH THE TRUTH (AKA HERE ARE SOME MORE FRIGGIN’ GREAT METAL RECORDS)
10. MESSA – THE SPIN
Messa appears to be primarily in the business of alchemy, turning seemingly straightforward elements and familiar tones into a cathedral of astonishment. Yes, the advertised turn to more gothic/death rock tones on The Spin is present and accounted for, with sonic nods in particular to the likes of Sisters of Mercy, early Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Christian Death. But focusing on those new (or, really, newly more prominent) elements obscures what has not changed for Messa, which is the plangent unity of their sound, some elemental radiance that shines through their songs no matter what skin it’s wearing at any given moment. The Spin is an album with some explosive highs and deep, contemplative lows, but it’s actually all the in-betweenness of it that fascinates me, how they get from a quiet start to a deftly devastating crescendo without ever fully tipping their hand. This magical album continues one hell of a four-album winning streak.
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
9. MORBIFIC – BLOOM OF THE ABNORMAL FLESH
Hey, so… do you like Autopsy? Morbific likes Autopsy. And I mean, sure, they definitely also like Obituary and Cianide and Incantation and seminal fellow Finns like Abhorrence and Rippikoulu, but the gristly, twanging, caveman finesse they splatter across album number three feels – in all the best ways – like a cuddly love letter to cuddly ol’ Autopsy. Regardless of influence, though, Bloom of the Abnormal Flesh is a surprisingly diverse set of songs from this still-young band, and frankly, Morbific might simply be making some of the squishiest death metal out there. If you’re looking for a band whose music puts on a tie and tails and makes nice for Grandma, you must be looking for Lessbific, because Morbific sounds like they’d be happier clubbing Grandma with the steering wheel of a 1981 Chrysler LeBaron and selling her teeth to the forest elves in exchange for sahti money. This is a sticky, gooey, dedicatedly rude album that smashes and chunks just as much as it swings and swerves. But don’t mistake the crudity for banality, because these lads know how to squeeze in a jaw-dropper of an acrobatic riff as well as how to flatten you all the way from your eyebrows down to your wobbly bits with an obliterating sloooooooooooooow part. You want to get smart? Get Morbific and get stupid.
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
8. HOODED MENACE – LACHRYMOSE MONUMENTS OF OBSCURATION
Finland’s Hooded Menace have been curiously chameleonic across their career, albeit within the relatively circumscribed parameters of death/doom. When we last pulled back the hood on The Tritonus Bell, the Menace was rife with excellent Candlemassisms, and Lachrymose Monuments of Obscuration kicks the ball even further down the field with the melodic and classicist smearings that festoon the brute force crud of their more primitive origins. To put a finer point on it, the musical tones on this album match the lurid color scheme of Wes Benscoter’s cover art perfectly, landing at a sound that is serious, but not at all serious. Kitsch that might still kill you. Gold-tinged guitar leads gloop all over the place, melting and shearing and sloughing off precocious prettiness. “Daughters of Lingering Pain” somehow made me think about Dissection’s “Thorns of Crimson Death,” while “Lugubrious Dance” pulls in some sassy swagger to its riffing in a way that makes me wonder if some of what Hooded Menace is angling for here is doom/death for the Sunset Strip. Anyway, shut up. Go listen to it and yes, that’s a Duran Duran cover.
• Bandcamp
7. FEANOR – HELLHAMMER
As I scan through the other albums on this top 20 list, nearly all of them fall into the basic buckets of Sad, Angry, or Weird. These are, of course, important bricks in the mighty edifice of metal. But whoever you are out there, I hope we can agree that we could all use a little more triumph in our lives. Please, if you will, imagine an impressively majestic smoke bomb being thrown as Argentina’s Feanor (featuring an international lineup) enters from stage left with the utterly magnificent Hellhammer. Across nearly 70 minutes, Feanor pummels and gallops and soars with thoroughly modern-sounding trad metal that dips extravagantly into (mostly) Germanic power metal and hints of epic doom. So, if you’re currently cradling your FFO Bingo card at home, kindly rest contented that you can toss a handful of chips at the likes of Grave Digger, Manowar, Primal Fear, Blind Guardian, Angra, and Running Wild (the latter of whom are directly celebrated in the storming but inexplicably-titled “H.M.J.”). Hell, if you were to Sneap things up a bit and toss Halford on the mic, the title track here could easily have landed on either of Judas Priest’s last two albums, whereas “The Flight of the Valkyries” is the most devoutly Into Glory Ride of the bunch. If you love heavy metal, I really think you should love this album, but hey, maybe you’d prefer being a fatuous sorehead instead of a hero of legend and renown.
• Bandcamp
6. PARADISE LOST – ASCENSION
Friends, I aspire to be as quick as the next dummy out there to fess up when I have been – yet again – a no-account doofus. To that end, with Paradise Lost, I thought I was at the point where I reacted to news of a new album with a churlishly dismissive “yeah, it’ll be good but who needs it?” And in truth, the mind still boggles at the fact that Ascension is the seventeenth album from these veteran miserablists. But you know what? Hold tight for just a second while I go put on my hat so that I can take it off and eat it, because Ascension basically stands toe-to-toe with anything from the band’s classic first five-album run. The heft of this album is immense, and it ripples through everything, such that even the saddest laments are backed with serious steel. And in this, Paradise Lost retains their identity as the most quintessentially British of the Peaceville Three: sharp, sardonic, morose, and potentially happiest when stumbling down the pub in pissing rain.
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
5. CRADLE OF FILTH – THE SCREAMING OF THE VALKYRIES
When I reviewed The Screaming of the Valkyries earlier this year, I wrote that “perhaps more so than ANY other Cradle of Filth album to date, this one is absolutely stacked – from root cellar to rafters – with guitar pyrotechnics. Like, not to put too fine a point on it, but we’re talking fucking incredible guitarwork all across this bad bitch. Tightly coiled, thrashy blackened riffing, plaintively beautiful leads, clean, spiralling solos, and tandem guitar licks explode everywhere… Better yet, all those flashes and runs are deployed smartly in service of a batch of nine intricate yet memorable songs.” It’s still true! It’s a shame that over the course of the year the band’s story devolved into accusations and recrimination, and with both guitarist Ashok and Zoë Federoff now having left the band, it certainly casts a pall on yet another late-career stunner from this veteran band that, yes, I’m sure you have all sorts of extremely interesting opinions about. Why don’t you cross-stitch them on a pillow for me, and then you can smother me with it. I’ll be chilling over here, all smiles and Filthing it up with – shhh – this secretly-just-a-killer-heavy-metal-now band.
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
4. SULFURIC CAUTERY – KILLING SPREE
Subtlety, sophistication, and restraint can all be wonderful things, but sometimes you just want to throw it all away and dive headfirst into a meat grinder. This might be shocking for an album that sports the genteel, understated title of Killing Spree, but Sulfuric Cautery’s latest outburst has, as they say, no chill. Killing Spree is an utterly demented, fastidiously corrosive assault on ears, eyes, decency, and snare drums, with 21 songs in 22 minutes of blasting, swerving, coruscating brutal noise goregrind. Thing is, it’s also sneakily musical as balls, just… y’know, not quite in the way that people tend to recognize music. The red-lined intensity and absolutely punishing speed of the drums is the real MVP here, but once you acclimate to the jackhammer ping of the snare, you’ll start to notice just how diverse (and sometimes downright funky) the rhythms are. Still, whether you play this quiet or loud, for your pets or your parole officer, it can be hard to grasp that this is music made for or even by humans. My goodness, it’s just SPLENDID.
(P.S., doesn’t it just go figure that in the time between drafting this list and then publishing it, the maniacs in Sulfuric Cautery would go on ahead and release another insanely great album? Consummate Extirpation leans hard into the brutal DM side of the gutter, slithering through positively epic-length compositions [for manic grind, at least] with nine songs in twenty-seven minutes of glottal, grinding, gurgle-stomping goodness for fans of Brodequin, Deeds of Flesh, Disgorge [Mex or US, take yer pick, sicko], and the basic premise of running a jackhammer into a sewer line. Another triumph of grimy, greasy, songwriting-y stuff from this consistently killer band. Don’t miss it.)
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
3. SIGH – I SAW THE WORLD’S END (HANGMAN’S HYMN MMXXV)
Some chowder-brained ragamuffin had this to say about I Saw the World’s End earlier this year: “The sound of this re-recording is almost surgically precise, and yet rather than turn the album into a bloodless academic exercise, it actually helps to highlight just how powerfully anthemic the songs are. I feel like I now hear things that, in the original, were too blurred to appreciate… If the 2007 Hangman’s Hymn felt a little bit like sticking a butter knife into an electric outlet while being thrown out by ushers in the lobby of Symphony Hall, the 2025 I Saw the World’s End feels like soaring over a sea of liquid gold while Danny Elfman conducts Mozart’s Requiem mass for a “scream for me, Long Beach”-rabid audience. If I have beaten around the bush here, I Saw the World’s End is an improvement on the original in every possible respect, and it elevates an already excellent album to a near-perfect 10 experience. Further, this re-recording makes it easier to see what has been obvious all along: that Mirai Kawashima is one of the best composers in all of heavy metal.”
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
2. SPECIES – CHANGELINGS
The thing about thrash is, I don’t really like it. (Kindly direct your letters to P.O. Box Get a Life, please and thank you.) I’m being shitty, mostly, but what I mean is, I don’t care much about thrash as A Thing. I love plenty of thrash albums but have little to no default affection for the style in its trope-ishness. Speaking of tropes, the three gentlemen of Species are from Poland and I don’t think they need to hear anything from you about lightbulbs or submarines. On their second album, Changelings, Species simply tears through a tight, ebullient 40-minute set of proggy tech-thrash that ought to be white hi-topped catnip for esteemed enjoyers of such fare as Voivod, Coroner, Anacrusis, Atheist, Mekong Delta, and basically anything similar that lives right at the bleeding, rickety edge where ambition and skill coexist in just the right proportion. Each player is beautifully locked in here, with Piotr Drobina’s Cirith Ungol-esque vocals providing exactly the right kind of idiosyncrasy. As always, though, the album lives or dies by its songs, and the seven tunes here are, to be honest, basically perfect, little feral automatons that form a self-contained universe. I’m not sure I had more fun with any 2025 album than I did with Changelings, and you can put me down on record as Team “Fun Is A Good Thing.”
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
1. DISSONA – RECEPTOR
There’s a moment towards the end of the title track that opens Dissona’s third album, Receptor, that pulled me in close and then sucker-punched my brain’s musical sweet-spot: coming out of a fantastically busy, dexterous bridge, the band slips back into an orchestration-heavy verse that culminates in vocalist David Dubenic landing a HUGE mark with “No matter the cost / it must be known.” Plenty of bands, they’d end the song right on that punch-out, but Dissona follows it up with a brilliant leveling from a line that Dubenic sings and the whole band plays in unison (bass, guitar, drums, and a programmed version of upright chimes): “Come ignite this world.” It is, if we’re being frank, an insane flex of an opening salvo on this tremendous album, but across the remaining 50+ minutes of Receptor, Dissona delivers on the strength of that promise and more.
Weirdly, though, the thing that I really love about Receptor is that I don’t quite understand it. It’s the kind of album that throws you straight into a dense, heady landscape that can be as disorienting as it is welcoming, and even though the album has a thoughtful narrative arc, there still seems to be some magic that’s irreducible to its parts, some outstretched hand that stays tantalizingly ungraspable. This Chicago(ish) band plays, reductively, progressive metal, but I’ll bet when I say that you’ve already formed a bunch of assumptions (some right, some wrong) about the trappings that come with that tag. Dissona is alternately cinematic, symphonic, polyrhythmic, powerful, vulnerable, restrained, and maximalist. Across Receptor’s vast breadth, you might find things that remind you of Symphony X, Devin Townsend, Leprous, Madder Mortem, Anathema, Katatonia, or Meshuggah, but Dissona paints with a broader palette than most of those bands. Hell, “Suffuse” has a sweet Tool section early on, and guitarist Matt Motto’s programming occasionally adds electronic elements that push the metallic framework in excellent sideways directions (particularly on “Incisor,” which is probably the 2025 song that I have had stuck in my head more frequently than any other).
If you count yourself a fan of intricate, inventive, emotionally rich, powerful heavy music, you owe it to yourself to sink into the resplendent depths of Receptor. If not, I might just have to Disownya. Thank you, yes, we’ll be here all night.
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
THE FATTENIN’ OF THE EP-ERA (AKA HERE ARE SOME FRIGGIN’ GREAT METAL EPS AND SHORTIES)
10. Rotted Tower – Blessed Ruin
“[Ryan Lipynsky] is joined by Hudson Barth from Reeking Aura for a delectably greasy run through four bruising death metal chunkers. The guitar tone is a crushing bulldozer of a thing, while Barth’s drums slap the tympanic membrane with a wet snap. “Lore of the Cursed” is not, as far as I can tell, about Data’s evil brother, but fuck you anyway because it IS about kicking ass with a defiantly limited palette of crushing riffs, dyspeptic vocals, and crumbling masonry drumming.”
• Last Rites Review (via Frig You Friday)
• Bandcamp
9. Decrepit Altar – Egregious Defilement
The debut EP from this Croatian quartet is death/doom that foregrounds death metal tones but tips the scales waaaaaaay hard on the doom, sounding like the earliest Hooded Menace stranded in a Forest of Equilibrium. Three songs in twenty minutes is a perfect taster for stuff like this, so it remains to be seen if a future full-length can pull out the songwriting stops and mix things up enough to stand out. For now, Egregious Defilement is about as perfectly egregious a palate-cleanser as you might want during your defiled afternoon teatime.
• Bandcamp
8. Exorbitant Prices Must Diminish – Split with Shitbrains
Hot off last year’s excellent For a Limited Time LP, the Swiss grinders in Exorbitant Prices Must Diminish return with 11 minutes of “no thanks, I’m going to skip the starter salad and swan-dive straight into the blender you’re using for tonight’s lobster bisque” grindcore on their half of this split with L.A. powerviolence grinders Shitbrains. EPMD’s grind is razor-sharp and, well, Swiss clock-precise, though I would like to offer a special shout-out to the tremendous bass work on “Caution Please” and the absolutely filthy way it crashes into the pit-destroying slow churn of “Just Cause.” Elite-level grind for elite-level morons: come get some.
• Bandcamp
7. Spume – Xenomold Morphologies
In the spirit of transparency, I originally wrote this about Spume’s Spider Birth Reingurgitation long-player rather than the Xenomold Morphologies EP featured today, but for my money, the Spume that hurls together, twirls together […what?]. Anyway, sidle up to the sickbed, suckers: “…what we’re looking at here is a glistening gob of solo slamming goregrind depravity. The snare pops like a soda in the American Midwest. The blasts, they make with the gravity. The guitars scratch and chunk and bellyflop all over the place. Is it entirely possible that the vocals are just the sound of Winston Churchill’s “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds” speech fed through a pitch shifter and a backhoe? Friend, I demand that it be so.”
• Last Rites Review (via, hey, Frig You Friday)
• Bandcamp
6. Suffering Hour – Impelling Rebirth
I wrote the following for our full-team Top EPs list: “There’s a whole hell of a lot of reasons to recommend Suffering Hour’s latest EP, the economically destructive 15-minute Impelling Rebirth, but what tops the list for me is just how brilliantly spidery the whole thing feels. The black/death trio certainly has a lot of Deathspell Omega in its DNA, but they chop up the needling dissonance and spidery guitar runs with tasting portions of death metal scoot and beautifully intricate drums. And, friend, if I told you that Impelling Rebirth also sounds a little bit like Gorguts’s The Erosion of Sanity, you would be well within your right to tell me I’m wrong, but… you’d have to really think about it, right? Anyway, if you don’t have time in your day for five songs / fifteen minutes of black/death metal that wants to move your body just as much as it wants to ensorcel your soul, you may as well just sock yourself in the giblets with the side-edge of a tennis racket, because things can hardly get worse.”
• Bandcamp
5. Falsus Evangelium – Veneficvs, Barratry, et Magnvm Peccatvm
“If you had ’16-minute EP from Indonesian solo band that plays like Ved Buens Ende decided to rip harder into second-wave blastiness’ on your 2025 Bingo card, what the fuck kind of nursing home do you live at, gramps? Falsus Evangelium really nails the sort of bleary, woozy attitude of VBE with guitar bends, frequent shifts in mood and tone, and some deliciously inventive drumming.”
• Last Rites Review (again via Frig You Friday)
• Bandcamp
4. Coffin Mulch x Mick Harris – In Dub
“It’s two songs, it’s eleven minutes, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s… slow, diseased death-dub. If you’ve heard any of Mick Harris’s work under the dark electronic moniker Scorn, you’ll be mostly on the right track. A smarter person than me could probably tell you if these two songs are remixes of particular tracks from the excellent Scottish death metal band Coffin Mulch or if they feature newly recorded metal-y and grumbly voice bits, but when you have these corrosive beats and absurdly rubbery waves of guitar distortion pouring into your ears like Moses drowning the pursuing Egyptians, it’s hard to imagine you’ll care about such details.”
• Last Rites Review (via, Yes, We Really Frigged Ourselves Good That Friday)
• Bandcamp
3. Auriferous Flame – The Duel
Auriferous Flame is another solo project from Greece’s Ayloss (of Spectral Lore, Divine Element, Mystras, and more), and on The Duel his raw, melodic black metal (which is neither “melodic black metal” nor “raw black metal,” exactly) sneaks in like an eensy switchblade and wallops like the flat side of yonder broadsword. “Nest of Serpents,” even in its wooziness, is a bit of a respite, because the two 10-minute tunes that surround it are a more or less nonstop flurry of blasting drums and hypnotic, flesh-carving guitars that sound a little like early Krallice raised on a diet of early Rotting Christ. Delicious and nutritious!
• Bandcamp
2. Lucerne Hammer – Vermillion Pyre
Thee way to listen to Lucerne Hammer’s Vermillion Pyre, if’n you were wondering, is to spin the 24-minute single track version of it available on Bandcamp. The Ontario-based project’s métier is the kind of aggressively sad atmospheric black metal that is pretty much equal parts Wolves in the Throne Room and screamo (neither of which is a slight from this particular chucklehead’s pen), but the buzzing, hypnotic feedback interludes are a crucial part of the album’s flow, tapping into a slightly different (but still raw) vein that’s a little bit Urfaust, a little bit Dead to a Dying World. Stirring stuff on this auspicious debut.
• Bandcamp
1. Rigorous Institution – Tormentor
Ooooooh, buddy boys and good ol’ gals and kindred kin, this is just the business! The rough, rude, and rural apocalyptic crust of Portland’s Rigorous Institution sounds like it might have more naturally sprouted from the environs of Birmingham, England or Flint, Michigan or Gary, Indiana or, hell, Novaya Zemlya, Russia. But who cares from whence the sounds flirt when they hurt so good? At their riffiest (like “Twilight of the Authorities” and especially “Passion Play”), the songs on Tormentor sometimes remind me of the proto-doom black metal oddness of Furze, and sure, there’s plenty of Amebix to be found, but the EP also closes on the 8-minute “Laika’s Lament,” a spooky synth and industrial/noise sampling cut-up piece that might have wandered punch-drunk out of Current 93’s Nature Unveiled. I guess what I’m saying is to PLEASE RIGOROUSLY CRAM THIS INTO YOUR EARS AT YOUR EARLIEST POSSIBLE CONVENIENCE AND I’M SORRY FOR YELLING.
• Last Rites Review (via In Crust We Trust)
• Bandcamp
SCATS (AKA HERE IS SOME FRIGGIN’ GREAT JAZZ MUSIC)
Earlier this year I started writing a Substack (it’s called Spinal Tapdance; it’s over here; it happens infrequently), because I wanted a place to put my scribblings about other types of music. Over the course of the year, I gravitated mostly towards writing about jazz, so you’ll see many of the blurbs here are excerpts from longer pieces (linked below where relevant). In writing so much about jazz this year, I discovered a fairly shocking truth: jazz is just…music! I mean, one thing that probably plenty of jazz lovers and jazz haters agree on is that jazz can kind of be whatever the hell it wants. That openness certainly gives musicians a lot of freedom, but it can also make the stuff pretty intimidating for curious listeners. So, the only real advice I’d offer here is: if something catches your ear, follow that thread; if something isn’t your vibe, keep on moving. Life is short and jazz is great, but life is also long and plenty of jazz is shit. These fifteen jazz records, though? Devoutly, whole-heartedly not shit!
(As an unerringly foolish ding-dong, I can’t help but also recommend to your ears these delightful morsels: Matthew Shipp – The Cosmic Piano; David Murray Quartet – Birdly Serenade; Sasha Berliner – Fantôme; Chad Taylor Quintet – Smoke Shifter; Mary Halvorson – About Ghosts.)
15. GTO Trio – Within
“Within, the Israeli GTO Trio’s second album, is pure lightness and joy, like dazzling sunlight bouncing and refracting off of fresh snow. Gadi Lehavi often favors tinkling high-octave runs and easy melodicism, but the playful way that Tal Mashiach’s bass and Ofri Nehemya’s drums offset Lehavi’s limpid, unpretentious prettiness keeps things from ever dipping into easy listening. But maaaaaaan, the listening here sure is easy. Lehavi’s unrushed melody on “One for G” feels akin to some of the Bad Plus’s early material, while the wonderful “No Vowels Allowed” is a stuttering blues tune that rejoices in sprinting off through unexpected meters and tempos.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
14. Tomas Fujiwara – Dream Up
Goodness, what a tactile treat this album is. Dream Up is a percussion quartet led by Tomas Fujiwara, who also composed each song. Patricia Brennan’s vibraphones provide the album’s primary melodic movement, but that rarely seems to be the point of the compositions, given the way in which Kaoru Watanabe’s array of Japanese percussion and Tim Keiper’s kitchen sink of strings and drums (including West African ngonis, the djembe, and Afro-Caribbean timbale) turn these striking compositions into mysterious landscapes, each one like opening a cabinet and finding all the items on a shelf rearranging themselves in front of your eyes. Fujiwara’s drums sometimes stomp and thump (like on “Mobilize”), but often they stalk just outside the edges of the firelight like a curious animal tending to the shadows.
• Bandcamp
13. Charles Lloyd – Figure in Blue
At 87 years old, the saxophonist Charles Lloyd seems indefatigable. It was just last year that he released the double album The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow, and Figure in Blue is yet another double, this time in a new trio configuration with Jason Moran on piano and Marvin Sewall on guitar. Though now homed on Blue Note Records, Lloyd’s style rings with the intimate placidity of his long association with ECM Records. Lloyd is certainly in contemplative, commemorative mood, with lots of supple ballad playing and compositions paying tribute to Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and the tabla player Zakir Hussain (with whom Lloyd recorded several times), but when the tunes let Sewall really stretch out into the dirty blues on his guitar (like “Blues for Langston,” where Lloyd sits in on flute, and the gnarly twang of “Chulahoma”), the vibe feels closer to Lloyd’s (tremendous) sometimes band The Marvels.
• YouTube
12. Tom Casale’s No Bad Parts – Earth and Sky
“The Boston-based Tom Casale’s No Bad Parts ensemble forgoes piano but feels (somewhat paradoxically) all the richer for it on Earth and Sky. Casale is joined by drums, clarinet, sax, guitar, and didgeridoo on this sprawling double album that is almost certainly too long to appreciate in one sitting, but which works beautifully however you approach it – dipping into a couple songs here, playing one side or the other there, replaying a single lengthy piece to pick apart all its elements. Casale’s arrangements and the fluid approach to instrumentation is sometimes reminiscent of the guitarist Joel Harrison’s large ensemble work, although on the beautiful “Sun and Moon,” the group lays out a long, slow exhalation more similar to the Brian Blade Fellowship. For an album whose credits include field recordings, bird calls, sound sculptures, and Eurorack modular synths (not to mention that didgeridoo), there’s very little that’s avant-garde or dissonant; instead, all those elements are used to carve out a broader sonic palette within which the more traditional sounds can play.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
11. Linda May Han Oh – Strange Heavens
At various times throughout Strange Heavens, Linda May Han Oh’s bass work makes me think about a seasoned boxer in a friendly sparring match – there’s nothing to prove and no pressure to land a clutch KO, so she’s dancing and smiling, but still firing off darting jabs and forcing the pace. This wonderful trio session with Tyshawn Sorey on drums and Ambrose Akinmusire on trumpet is an embarrassment of talent, and while each player brings dexterity and big ears, the vibe is casual, conversational, even playful. And despite the intentionally limited (and chordless) tonal palette, the album flies through a range of moods, from the funk of “The Sweetest Water” to the explosive restraint of “Work Song,” and from the almost broken beat “Living Proof” to the gorgeous, plaintive bowed bass of “Folk Song.”
• Bandcamp
10. Dan Weiss – Unclassified Affections
“Drummer and composer Dan Weiss’s latest album, Unclassified Affections, is a wonderful excursion into mystery, spaciousness, and tones so immaculate and pointillistic you can reach through the speakers to trace their lines. Weiss wrote all eight pieces for this quartet (rounded out by Miles Okazaki on guitar, Peter Evans on trumpet, and Patricia Brennan on vibes), and his compositions are long, arcing melodies often written for two or three of the voices in twitchy lockstep or close harmony. Brennan’s vibes suffuse the songs with their glassy bloom of reverb, and even when Okazaki’s guitar or Evans’s trumpet run off into rougher explorations, there’s a softness and restraint that can turn the songs into something equally ghostly and comforting… [T]he key to this disarming and inviting album is that every pause, every spun-out lick that trades hands before you realize it, every cross-meter digression… it all just makes your ear follow the sound further in.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
9. Brandee Younger – Gadabout Season
“[Younger’s] third Impulse! album, Gadabout Season, is a classicist jazz trio recording, with Younger’s harp joined by Rashaan Carter on bass and Allan Mednard on drums. Her multi-hyphenate genre splicing is still baked into her compositions, but Gadabout Season is a slight return towards what first captivated me. For example, consider how much of a feast for close listening the title track is: Younger plays her harp with tight-focus, pizzicato plucks that she deadens almost immediately, while guest Joel Ross’s vibraphone becomes so fully of a piece with the rolling cant of the song’s underbelly that you might miss it. Shabaka Hutchings provides a brief grounding swell of clarinet to the tune (he also provides low, breathy flute meditation on “End Means”), while Makaya McCraven’s guest percussion adds another level of tactile movement. If that description makes the album sound as overflowing with ideas as the prior two, the impressive thing is how holistic Gadabout Season feels, like the out-breath of a like-minded congregation.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
8. Ivo Perelman & Matthew Shipp String Trio – Armageddon Flower
“On Armageddon Flower, [Matthew] Shipp’s String Trio (with [William] Parker on bass and Mat Maneri on viola) has joined with the indefatigably prolific tenor sax player Ivo Perelman on four lengthy explorations that bristle with a passionate restlessness that animates – rather than contradicts – their devotional nature. These four players have a long, dense tangle of history with each other, and their collective improvisations sometimes have the flavor of an intuitive choreography. Although this line-up has no drums, Shipp’s playing – his dense, incantatory shading so deliberate in its structure and harmonic progression – often propels the quartet’s rhythmic underpinning. And although the name of Shipp’s ‘string’ trio refers to the strings of the piano, bass, and viola, the fascinating thing throughout Armageddon Flower is how often Perelman’s tenor blends in tone with Maneri and Parker, whether offering lilting melody or anguished chamber shrieks like something out of Penderecki.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
7. Trio Of Bloom – Trio Of Bloom
“Across its 70-minute sprawl, Trio of Bloom can feel like watching a time-lapse video of a wild garden stretching and grasping its way from root to stem to sky… Trio of Bloom is the first recorded meeting of a trio of avant-jazz luminaries: Craig Taborn (on keyboards of all sorts), Nels Cline (on guitars of all sorts), and Marcus Gilmore (on percussion of all sorts). On this invitingly dense album, they dig into everything from jazz, blues, dub, ambient, fusion, and beyond, honing a sound that is never about any one particular thing so much as it seems to be about the process of cultivating each thing as it grows. Trio of Bloom is an album containing such intricate, gregarious spaces that it invites questions larger than itself… The questing, open-minded richness of the album continues to feel, the more I visit it, like a once-tended garden in the process of wilding itself. Even as the shape of the album settles in for the listener, it’s not easy work to trace the loping tendrils and shrill, surprising fragments back to their root.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
6. Ancient Infinity Orchestra – It’s Always About Love
“For anyone familiar with Matthew Halsall’s Gondwana Records, Ancient Infinity Orchestra’s music is perfectly of a piece with Halsall’s own music, as well as that of other notable labelmates like Phi Psonics, Mammal Hands, and Jasmine Myra. This means, broadly speaking, a lush, contemplative-leaning form of spiritual jazz that skews toward ambient restraint. The ensemble on It’s Always About Love is large – something like 15 or 16 musicians – but their playing is close and joyful like a rushing stream, even as the tonal center sometimes becomes a little more like chamber music than jazz… ‘Community’ really does feel like the operative word for the entire album, because even though these eight pieces make space for improvisation around their clear melodic nuclei, no voice or instrument ever dominates. So the flute solo on “Nilgoon,” the mournful ululation of the oboe on “All I Can Say of the Blossoms,” the solo piano on album closer “At Yoshino Mountain” (which itself reprises the theme of the stirringly “Auld Lang Syne”-inspired valediction of “Old Friends”)… in the context of the colorful and radically focused It’s Always About Love, these single voices are always an invitation to join the broader conversation that is always already all around you.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
5. Kaisa’s Machine – Moving Parts
“The New York-based Finnish bassist and composer Kaisa Mäensivu returns with the same core band as on her acclaimed 2023 album Taking Shape, minus Tivon Pennicott’s tenor sax. As a result of this hornless configuration (with the brief exception of a Melissa Aldana tenor guest spot on “Origin Story”), Moving Parts travels with a playful lightness that foregrounds Mäensivu’s long, unspooling melodic themes. Her bass often introduces and sketches the chords but leaves the recitation of themes to other instruments, like on the snakily understated opener “Tykytys” or on the aching balladry of stand-out tune “Moon Waves”… Moving Parts’ seven tunes (all penned by Mäensivu) unfold with an easy poise that, despite lingering in mostly light-touch brightness, never drag into stereotypical Nordic placidity. This is a great album for those days when you can finally feel winter’s gunmetal skies melting to spring.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
4. Patricia Brennan – Of the Near and the Far
The vibraphonist Patricia Brennan is one of the most exciting voices working in jazz right now. Her own vocabulary on the instrument is striking enough – with her liberal use of pedals and electronics – but she excels particularly as a leader and composer. Last year’s Breaking Stretch was a deft, powerful statement, but on Of the Near and Far she extends her sound further outwards on a seven-tune set with string quartet, inspired by astronomy and astrophysics. Some of the most thrilling interplay of the album is between Brennan and Miles Okazaki on guitar (both of whom played on Dan Weiss’s Unclassified Affections above), but everyone shines across a spacious, diverse 44 minutes that feel much bigger than its tidy runtime suggests. This is beautiful music, dense and textured but also playful, imaginative, and dancelike.
• Bandcamp
3. James Brandon Lewis Quartet – Abstraction is Deliverance
“The James Brandon Lewis Quartet – with Lewis on tenor sax, Aruán Ortiz on piano, Brad Jones on bass, and Chad Taylor on drums – is my favorite working band in jazz right now. On the heels of last year’s Transfiguration, which was a deliriously rich, undulating tapestry, Abstraction is Deliverance offers a slightly gentler, more pensive approach. Rather than simply embracing calm or quiet for its own sake, though, the album is all about the hush of anticipation, or the coiled slackness of muscles at rest… Lewis’s compositions are again in full flower, but the most entrancing part of watching him on this album might be the pure joy of his tone. Although the album leans heavier on ballad-like pacing, his saxophone is alternately brassy, rounded, and almost vanishingly understated. In his boldest expressions here, you can almost hear him taking big, Stanley Turrentine-full bites, but with the curiosity and verve of early Charles Lloyd. The achingly lyrical melody of “Polaris” might almost be cloying except for the focus and density of tone that each player brings to it. That’s the real draw of Abstraction is Deliverance: it offers immediacy and depth in equal measure.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
2. Myra Melford Splash – Splash
“Although jazz is a nearly endlessly mutable artform, the classic trio format of piano / bass / drums feels like one of the great spaces for fractiousness and contention, experimentation and idiosyncratic expression. Plus, sometimes you just want some motherfuckers to rain down everything they’ve got. Pianist Myra Melford’s new Splash trio with Michael Formanek on bass and Ches Smith on drums (and occasional vibraphone) brings exactly that kind of motherfucker energy across ten of Melford’s sprawling, argumentative compositions… Each player is on fire throughout the album, whether digging into their own furrow or traipsing into each other’s fields… It’s frankly outrageous how good this album is. If I was a jazz musician, it might actually make me angry. Melford’s piano playing is furiously intricate and sometimes almost punishingly abstract, but the compositions hang together with an irrefutable (if unpredictable) internal logic.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
1. Anouar Brahem – After the Last Sky
“After the Last Sky, the eleventh outing on ECM Records by the Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem, is entirely gorgeous, full of rich texture and deep emotional resonance… Brahem’s albums have often blended the worlds of jazz, classical, and Arabic music, and this one certainly leans much closer to languid, luxurious chamber music. There’s a pensive, melancholic flavor to many of these compositions, but also a certain restlessness. That restlessness comes through not just in the winding tendrils of melody favored by Brahem, but also in the fact that four of these eleven tunes feature duet pairings of the four musicians in different configuration…The reflective, fleet performances on this album are like watching the scattering exodus of a flock of birds not directly but through their shadowplay on the ground as they spiral out of sight. The album’s closing track “Vague” bears an uncanny resemblance to Philip Glass’s “Opening” (from Glassworks), not only as if to say that all true music of the spirit is the same music, but also to remind us all that every closing can also be an opening.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• YouTube
MY FAIR DEEJAY (AKA HERE IS SOME FRIGGIN’ GREAT ELECTRONIC MUSIC)
As I find myself at (annoyingly repetitive) pains to point out each year, I don’t listen to dance music for the purpose of dancing. Turns out, I mostly don’t listen to any particular kind of music in the pursuit of any specific purpose other than exploration, but it does still feel awkwarder than with most other styles to be like, “Hey, friends, check out these tantalizingly booty-grooving tunes from talented producers that I have absolutely no intention of ever moving my body to.” Nevertheless, the beat goes on.
(As a guilt-wracked fussbudget, I can’t in good conscience avoid bending your ear about these tasty treats: Mor Elian – Solid Space; Andrea – Living Room; Kloke – Lucidity; Rolando Simmons – Animatronics; Re:fraction – Xanadu Terrain.)
15. Yagya – Vor
“Aðalsteinn Guðmundsson’s music as Yagya… travel[s] the pristine corridors of dub techno, particularly on landmark early albums like Rigning and Rhythm of Snow. His last few albums haven’t particularly landed for me, but Vor is a hugely satisfying return to some of that earlier sound. The album is ostensibly split into a “Spring” side and a “Fall” side, but the atmosphere is remarkably consistent throughout: a strong thumping pulse, dub reverb, and such hazily warm synths that the endless 4/4 becomes like slow motion disco for cloud people.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
14. DJ Indifference – Aestivate
The Armenian producer DJ Indifference made one of the best summer chill albums of the year with Aestivate. These eight tunes (plus a choice remix) are a straightforwardly lovely display of clean, crisp, deep-leaning house with some judicious dips into drum and bass, particularly on the fantastic “August 30” (which also bursts into a radiant, classic rave piano break about halfway through). I bet you could figure out a way to be unhappy while listening to Aestivate, but you’d really have to put your back into it.
• Bandcamp
13. Akasha System – Heliocene / Sun Archive
If I’m being honest, I’m a total sucker for the vibe that Akasha System’s Hunter P. Thompson cultivates. Heliocene sports lush, hedonistic New Age atmospherics, hypnotic downtempo beats, and tones that occasionally border on the early, acid-heavy IDM approach of Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series. Its companion album Sun Archive is equally sumptuous and perhaps a bit spritelier, but the punchline here for both sets is that they are top-shelf zone-out music, rarely fiery enough for the club but also never quite weightless enough for the chillout room. Listening to each song crane for the sun is like watching an android watering virtual plants.
• Bandcamp
12. Sephirot – Fargazing
“Talk about something that goes deeeeeeeeeep into the aquatic paradise of ambient dub techno. Sephirot’s debut Fargazing is a pure sensory trip of thump and wash, tape hiss and blissed-out synth. ‘Midnight, Our’ sounds like Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works ‘85-’92 by way of Deepchord, while ‘Midsummer’ has some tricky shuffling step percussion more akin to early Burial. For those days when you just need a head bath, Fargazing is the real deal.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
11. Lhinen – Cusp
“In the near-absence of any information about the debut album from Lhinen, I have found it helpful to take the album title at its word. Cusp is a beautiful album of intentionally low-key electronic music that feels like it’s always on the verge of something, poised on the brink of transformation. If this sounds like a recipe for infinitely-delayed gratification, it’s really quite the opposite. Each song is like a miniature printing press, an intricate mechanism of micro-tactile tones in constant motion. Lhinen’s music adheres to no single electronic music style, though there are elements of deep house, IDM, dub, ambient, and post-rock (as on the wonderful, Four Tet-esque “Lumos”). “Soil” uses wordless vocal snippets as synth pads, but they hover atop a persistent bass line and a pattering thrum of tabla-like hand drum sounds, and “Lone” sounds a little bit like a particularly lush entry from Kompakt’s Total series by way of Skee Mask.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
10. Claudio PRC – Self Surrender
Self Surrender is a devilishly engrossing album, brimming with a reserved menace that seems always just about to leap into open hostility. The Italian producer Claudio PRC’s sound is a deep, dark, drivingly hypnotic techno that can be heard as either unsettling or soothing, depending on one’s mood. “Ebony Feathers” is riven with sparse, clattering house nods, while album centerpiece “Covered in Sin” makes excellent use of some buried, Burial-esque ghostly voices to both lighten and starken the mood. The hand claps and stuttering syncopation of closer “The Suspended Child” eventually bloom open into synth arpeggios and a mellow vocal snippet, but even this relatively beatific ending feels more like a close than closure.
• Bandcamp
9. Indopan – In Opulence
“In Opulence is Andrew Morrison’s second album as Indopan for Los Angeles’s 100% Silk, a label whose fetishization of neon, lo-fi, and cassette art screams “vaporwave” at me. However, I will readily admit to you that I do not know what vaporwave is. I am not proud of this, but like anyone still using the word “hipster” to mean “young white person doing something I dislike,” I will use “vaporwave” to mean “aggressively chintzy electronic music that I dislike.” This does not apply to Indopan! I am terribly sorry if I have taken you down a wholly unproductive rhetorical alleyway. In Opulence is, well, aggressively chintzy electronic music that I quite like. Give “Marshman” a whirl and let the sounds do the explaining that these words refuse to.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
8. Roel Funcken & exm – Flyphel
Flyphel is a collaborative album that uses skittering, intricate IDM to craft lush, bass-heavy downtempo worlds. For example, if you really squint at it, “Clieh” could almost be Autechre making G-funk, while elsewhere the album treads on vaguely complementary terrain to Venetian Snares’s Huge Chrome Cylinder Box Unfolding. I have no idea if these words mean the same thing to you when it comes to music, but Flyphel flattens out the vertical and fully maxes out the horizontal, which means for me it’s a full-immersion, fully reclined experience of following every tantalizing nuance as it skitters and pans across the inner eye.
• Bandcamp
7. Caldera – Music from the Fourth Swamp / Last Transmissions from Jevvers
The UK producer Caldera released these two excellent albums/12”s this year, and although the sounds are slightly different based on the recording dates, the vibe is so consistently heady that I’m counting them together here. The basic watchword for Caldera is hypnotic, psychedelic deep techno, laced through with all sorts of murmuring echoes, nature sound field recordings, hand percussion, and unplaceable organic textures. Listening to these gloriously tactile sets back to back just might find you pining for the swamps and fens and bogs, yearning to dance with the humid pulse of entropy.
• Bandcamp
6. Guedra Guedra – Mutant
Here’s a pretty facile statement to attach to a dance record, but Guedra Guedra’s Mutant is particularly great for any and all of you sickos out there who love percussion. Under the name Guedra Guedra, Moroccan producer Abdellah M. Hassak crafts fleet, funky, bass-heavy tunes that ripple and ping with the echo of drums, beats, and percussion of all sorts – drum machines, hand claps, feet stomping in dirt, sticks clacking off rims – such that every surface and every gesture in the world becomes an invitation to dance. Mutant reminds me, at various turns, of Matias Aguayo, of Slow Machete, of Fela Kuti, but mostly it’s a joyous, dense, occasionally ominous brew that should move even the staunchest of arms-crossers out there.
• Bandcamp
5. Fluxion – Haze
“Konstantinos Soublis has been producing music as Fluxion since the late ‘90s, with his earliest material released on the Chain Reaction label founded by the production duo Basic Channel. This means, for anyone playing at home, that Fluxion’s dub techno bona fides are unimpeachable. Haze provides plenty of space for that classic ping and reverb, but it’s also notable for how diverse it is. “Magenta” is perhaps the most notable dubby highlight, with a pipe organ undercurrent that becomes more prominent and strikingly beautiful as the track unfolds. “Nexus” has a bit of the strings and muted thud of Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas, while “Reflections” rewards close listening with its subtle backdrop of insect drone and flute.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
4. Efdemin – Poly
You might be able to get a decent handle on the likely sound of Efdemin’s Poly if I tell you that A) it’s deep ambient techno and B) it sounds German as hell. But another option is to stare at the cover art (a 1980 photograph by the German artist Isa Genzken) and wait for your eyes to drift out of focus. Put on the sounds and look a little more. The image is, obviously, a human ear, but the more you let your eyes see without looking, the more it bleeds into pure shape and curve, light and shadow. The music is like this, too. It’s like skimming low over coarse topography, striding over low hills and rippled creek bends with the gait of a titan. When I listen to Poly, I don’t want to dance; I want to dissolve into the dance.
• Bandcamp
3. Sleepdial – RV Lights
Sleepdial’s RV Lights is, to my goof-ass ears at least, one of the year’s slipperiest albums. What I mean by that is not just that it has sounded different to me throughout the year based on high volume versus low, passive listening versus active, and even whatever else I’ve been listening to proximately, but also that it feels like it’s composed of slippery things: riverbed stones, graphite-slabbed ice, a shaft sheared deep in aquifer rock. RV Lights feels like a nocturnal echo of each of its constituent styles: dub, ambient, drone, IDM, found sounds. Frankly, the album is as difficult to describe as it is to quit playing once you’ve started, because it drills a cozy space of otherness directly into the brainstem.
• Bandcamp
2. Yosi Horikawa – Impulse
“To my ears, Yosi Horikawa is basically a wizard of sound. (Soundalf? Humbledore? Please cut me in on any royalties.) Impulse is Horikawa’s third full-length album, and it continues his tremendous winning streak of immaculate, wistful world-building. The Japanese producer’s music is a typically bright, melodic, and toe-tappable (if not quite danceable) mélange of downtempo, IDM, and synth-entranced ambient house, but every song is anchored around and animated by a set of precise, incredibly tactile field-recorded samples… The eleven songs on Impulse are, at times, so beautiful and powerful to me that it’s almost painful. Their elegance – their quiet insistence on their own sufficiency – lands with an unexpected sharpness because of the chasm it reveals between how things are and how much better they might be. Am I trying to make the pollyanna-ish argument that such harmonious music as Yosi Horikawa makes can lead us to live harmoniously? I don’t think so – not really – and yet… Impulse feels in its way like an envoy from one possible future, a future where we find the world as it is – in its brokenness, its incompleteness, its raw and furious beauty – and dedicate ourselves, with however small or feeble a gesture, to the work of its healing.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
1. Djrum – Under Tangled Silence
I’m reasonably confident that Under Tangled Silence is my favorite album of any genre from this year, but I’m still at a loss how to tell you about it. It’s an eclectic, far-reaching album that never settles into a single, definable style, but it also never comes across as particularly showy. Djrum’s Felix Manuel is a terrifically gifted piano player, and his gorgeous piano improvisations – often Keith Jarrett-esque – form the backbone of several of these songs, yet of course this is primarily an electronic music album. Or… is it? From moment to moment, Under Tangled Silence might be jazz, contemporary classical, ambient, jungle, or abstract techno, but it actually never quite settles into any one of those modes long enough for me to really claim that one such face of the music is the “real” core, with the other styles representing inventive digressions from that center. “L’Ancienne” features harp and cello but also a deep, purling bass funk that might be the soundtrack to a metallic bellydance. “Three Foxes Chasing Each Other” opens with mbira, gentle piano vamping, sampled voices, and an insectoid hiss, but eventually grinds out a rutted groove of drilling footwork. That might be the true magic here: the way that Under Tangled Silence retains a singular thingness despite how often it feels like it’s on the way to becoming something else.
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WEST SIDE SNORING (AKA HERE IS SOME GREAT FRIGGIN’ AMBIENT MUSIC)
Friends and pals, for as much as I love ambient music, when it comes time to write about it, I get stuck. The lousy-minded among you might rudely assume it’s because all ambient music sounds the same, which… well, plenty of it actually does, more or less. Even when the sounds travel farther afield than the genre signifier suggests, though, I struggle because so much of what I seek in ambient music is the same: calm, depth, suspension, submersion, abstraction, time-distortion. For each of my fifteen favorites of the year, therefore, I’ve decided to force myself into a three-part template: 1) a color that the music suggests to me; 2) an image that comes to mind when listening; and 3) a RIYL. I make no claims to synesthesia, but music is a profoundly visual practice of the imagination for me, so maybe I’ll see-hear you out here, out there.
(As an occasionally loud-talking quiet person, I am compelled to whisper stridently in your direction about these crackerjacks: Martina Bertoni – Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone; Innesti – Fragility & Circumstance; Warmth – Revenant; Kompakt/Various Artists – Pop Ambient 2026; Pallette – Oasis of Peace.)
15. Kaito – The Ground Quietly Illuminated
Color: The electric jungle green of a rainforest hit by cloud-breaking sun after a long storm
Image: A long drive through flat country, the hum of the road an approximation of infinity
RIYL: Kompakt’s Total series in a pillow-soft knife fight with Kompakt’s Pop Ambient series
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14. Maps and Diagrams – Clearwater
Color: Ochre
Image: A storm runoff drain burbling and heaving
RIYL: Intensely tactile, close-listening sounds that are music but also might not always aspire to be music
• Bandcamp
13. Pan American & Michael Grigoni – New World, Lonely Ride
Color: A studious billow of dust scrounging the edges of a sepia photograph
Image: Sunrise over the Grand Canyon
RIYL: Country music, but very slow, and extra sad, and without words
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12. Loscil – Lake Fire
Color: Aircraft carrier grey
Image: The scorch marks on a lightning-felled tree after three days of rain
RIYL: Loscil, but starker and grimmer than usual
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11. Jason Calhoun – Monarch
Color: Dead TV channel static
Image: A cassette with its tape ribbon splayed out like disemboweled viscera of the Pixar lamp
RIYL: Early Tim Hecker and the Conet Project
• Bandcamp
10. Voyage Futur – Inverted Land
Color: Windows 95 boot screen
Image: The darkness of a cave suddenly silenced and bejeweled by a light shone at iridescent formations
RIYL: Twinkling, chiming tones in no particular hurry to get anywhere other than where they are
• Bandcamp
9. Pavel Milyakov & Lukas Dupuy – Heal
Color: The red dart of a cardinal scalpeling the still winter air
Image: An abandoned Winter Olympics village overrun by birds, moss, scurrying mammals
RIYL: Non-treacly spa music
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8. From Overseas – Thinking Like a Mountain
Color: Cobalt blue smeared against the shark steel of a ship
Image: Everest, impassive
RIYL: Guitars on reverb and downers
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7. Tyresta & Simon McCorry – Azimuth
Color: “The shores of Lake Superior… waves, distance, and the vanishing horizon”
Image: “Waves breaking against an irregular shape, with the crests spilling back onto themselves in blurry discord that every so often resolves into synchrony”
RIYL: Stars of the Lid, cello, drifting towards a forever-vanishing horizon
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
6. zakè ft. Various Artists – Silentium
Color: Sunlight refracted through a prism
Image: A volume dial to soften the edges of the world and all its mess and noise
RIYL: Friendship and found sounds
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5. Purelink – Faith
Color: Metallic eggplant
Image: A submarine lodged in Arctic ice, just near enough the surface for pale turquoise clots to show deep shadows beneath
RIYL: Weightless dub
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4. Walt McClements – On a Painted Ocean
Color: The perfect avocado-flesh green of a sun-warmed hillside
Image: The hovering leisure chairs from WALL-E, but for listening to music
RIYL: Yann Tiersen, Philip Glass, Colin Stetson
• Bandcamp
3. Abraço de Vapor – Vanishing Moment
Color: Cathedraled towers of sunset pink
Image: A warm seabreeze rippling a canvas shade on an empty beach
RIYL: Ambient with buried drums, slow jungle, heartbeat-regulating deep techno
• Bandcamp
2. Patricia Wolf – Hrafnamynd
Color: Thatched-roof straw
Image: A theremin played by wood-elves
RIYL: Glåsbird, a chilly and stern sort of whimsy
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1. 36 & zakè – Stasis Sounds for Long-Distance Space Travel III
Color: Inky black
Image: Nostromo sailing the void; the silent ballet of docking at Space Station V in 2001: A Space Odyssey; the Voyager 2 satellite chirruping its lonely report through the interstellar plasma
RIYL: Deep, elemental peace
• Bandcamp
LES MISÉTCETERAS (AKA HERE IS SOME GREAT FRIGGIN’ MUSIC NOT OTHERWISE HERETOFORE GENRE-CAPTURED)
You know how when you cook something in a big, heavy-bottomed pan – especially if you’re searing meat or roasting vegetables – the recipe will often make sure you come in at the end and scrape up all the drippings, the burnt-on ends, the caramelized bits? That’s not just to tidy up your pan, because those charred outcroppings and caramelized archipelagos are precisely where your culinary atlas gets its richest, most intensified flavors. But what do you call it, all those bits that didn’t fit neatly in any of the other steps? Do you hem and haw trying to come up with a cutesy name? Or do you dive headfirst into flavor country and stir ‘em up all cozy-like? If you’re like me and love all great sounds no matter where they’re found, then baby, you got a stew(pendous amount of music) goin’.
(As a pixel-pushing dweeb, I must needs convey the excellence of these additional albums: The Elven – Solstice; Rebecca Foon & Aliayta Foon-Dancoes – Reverie; Naxatras – V; Natural Information Society & Bitchin Bajas – Totality; Gwenifer Raymond – Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark.)
15. The Westerlies – Paradise
“The Westerlies are a New York-based brass quartet featuring two trumpets and two trombones… Paradise is certainly not a jazz album, but it also flexes its stylistic chops in broader directions than classical brass chamber music. Plenty of elements here feel indebted to the sort of music played by English coal mining brass bands, but there’s also an element of American folk melody, both in a ‘high’ sort of Aaron Copland vein and a rougher-hewn Appalachian twang. The compositions across the album are lovely, clockwork-intricate overlays of rhythm and close harmony, but my favorite thing about Paradise is that listening to it feels like an encounter with absolute roundness. The way the instruments swoon and smear into each other makes the experience one of all sustain, no attack.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
14. Skullcap – Snakes of Albuquerque
Do you ever just sit back and marvel at, I guess, how we as humans just can’t seem to stop making music? Thankfully, the three fine folks in Skullcap seem to spend very little of their time marveling at such foolishness, and instead spend it clocking in on some great goddamned explorations of the fecund deserts of the psyche. Snakes of Albuquerque is the debut album from this trio, featuring longtime collaborators (in music and life) Janel Lappin on cello and Anthony Pirog on guitar, plus Mike Kuhl on drums. The vibe of the day here is, hey, whatever the hell they feel like, which means that these instrumental (mostly) rock and (sometimes kinda) jazz pieces stroll across acres of different pasturage – fences be damned. The title track is basically doom, “Journey to the Sunset” opens with Pirog’s guitar imitating laser blasters, “Orange Sky” and “Pine Trees of Tennessee” are drifting, big sky-smeared Americana, and “Bear Out There” feels like a lost Radiohead instrumental. Man, I just love it when humans get like this.
• Bandcamp
13. Hannah Frances – Nested in Tangles
In my 2024 year-end wrap list, I wrote of Hannah Frances’ Keeper of the Shepherd that “[she] is probably tired of hearing it, but her voice is older than her years. That’s no knock on her rich, golden midrange singing, but meant to underscore the yearning but careworn ache with which she floats above her own subtly snaky guitar work. She often reminds me of Laura Marling, which is to say she often reminds me of Joni Mitchell…” Buddy boy, all this and more is true of the excellent Nested in Tangles, which follows the same mushrooming trails through twisty, progressive folk rock buttressed by field recordings, spoken word, and an understated force of lush supporting instrumentation. One listen to “Life’s Work” will lodge it in your head for a week, but the album is shot through with subtle, bewitching corners, like the Broken Social Scene-esque closing instrumental “Heavy Light” or the palpable, gut-punch beauty of album centerpiece “Steady in the Hand” which offers simple, impossible wisdom: “It takes living and losing to know what matters, / the loving shatters the edges and softens me again.”
• Bandcamp
12. Editrix – The Big E
The Big E is the third album from Editrix, which is the trio of Wendy Eisenberg on guitar/vocals, Steve Cameron on bass, and Josh Daniel on drums. These ten songs are twitchy, nervous things, jittering from snaking melodies to punchy stop-start rhythmic intricacy, and although the production (courtesy of Colin Marston’s now-shuttered Menegroth studio) is tight and clear, there’s a rough and deeply appealing ramshackle DIY vibe to the purée of styles Editrix whips through. The tautly coiled “Another World” stalks and builds like Bikini Kill playing Slint, but then “No” opens the second half with a straight-up noise/doom riff. The nearest thing to a unified impression I’ve made of this shapeshifting record is that it’s a bit like Unsane by way of Sleater-Kinney and tUnE-yArDs, which means indie cut with math rock, noise rock, and off-kilter guitar heroics. Awesome stuff.
• Bandcamp
11. Julia Úlehla and Dálava – Understories
“Dálava is a musical ensemble based in the folk music of Czechia, but they spin these old, simple songs out into skeins of alternately droning, ethereal, contemporary classical, ambient, noise, and churning psychedelic fragments. The anchor of Understories is Dálava’s vocalist, Julia Úlehla, whose great-grandfather apparently dabbled as some sort of Moravian Alan Lomax, collecting and documenting folk musics from his village a century ago. The ensemble’s musical shape is guided by Aram Bajakian, who builds these pieces primarily from guitar (but also adds piano, percussion, synths, and bass), and then it is given greater texture and depth by Peggy Lee on cello and Josh Zubot on violin… The album is both haunting and haunted. Úlehla shapes and narrates each song with such a ghostly intensity that you may find yourself remembering a history you never learned. In its tactile groundedness and purity of tone, Understories feels related to the worldly darkwave of Dead Can Dance or the ethnomusicological phenomenon of Marcel Cellier’s Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares project, but while Úlehla does sometimes evoke Lisa Gerrard’s vocal tone, she uses such a range of timbre and intensity that the album absolutely must be heard by fans of Diamanda Galás and Jarboe. Truly, Understories is a compelling reminder that the voice is an instrument, capable of just as much metamorphosis and mimicry as anything crafted by hands.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
10. Ches Smith – Clone Row
“You ever think about, like, weirdness? Why? Oh, no reason. Hey, by the way, check out this album. The drummer/percussionist and vibraphone player Ches Smith has a CV so absurdly overstuffed I need to take a nap after reading it, and on Clone Row, he has brought together a quartet (Liberty Ellman and Mary Halvorson on guitars, Nick Dunston on bass) to play in the liminal space between electric and acoustic sound, between jazz and rock and noise. But if you’re expecting to hear a bunch of conservatory dweebs soft-shoeing their way around dead theory, I hope you enjoy the sensation of your brain dripping out your ears. The great thing about Clone Row is that while it might appeal to post-rock fans or Krautrock fans or noise rock fans or punk fans or free jazz fans, there’s an almost equal chance that it will alienate every single one of those groups at the same time. That’s excellent!”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
9. Ava Mendoza / gabby fluke-mogul / Carolina Perez – Mama Killa
“[N]o, it’s not jazz. It’s also not metal, nor yet again is it noise or drone or punk or post-rock. The only thing you can truly say is that this album is a coming together of three voices to make a thrilling new chorus. Ava Mendoza is an avant-garde composer and guitarist who has played across all manner of musical sandboxes and whose chosen instrument is as likely to churn into gutbucket caveperson blues as it is to scrape and squeal and shred like Joe Satriani tossed in a cement mixer. gabby fluke-mogul has a similarly heterodox approach to the violin, playing it clean or electric, wailing or whispering, in wild, scything solo improvisations or in deep conversations with others. Carolina Pérez has the heavy metal bona fides of the group, as the drummer for the bands Hypoxia and Castrator… yet her approach on the album, while certainly summoning up death metal’s righteous clatter, is altogether more nuanced and diverse than one might expect based on her prior pummelings.”
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
8. Neko Case – Neon Grey Midnight Green
Neko Case’s 2009 album Middle Cyclone closes with a 30-minute recording of frogs, crickets, and other critters called “Marais La Nuit” (“the swamp at night”). At some point this summer I was out on an evening bike ride listening to the album, and by the time I got home dusk had fallen and the night sounds from my Bluetooth speaker melted entirely into the night sounds of the world around me. The only real connection this memory has to Case’s excellent new album, Neon Grey Midnight Green, is to say that her music has always had a wildness to it, a disinclination to separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. Neon Grey is likely Case’s most diverse album, lush with strings and texture and spellbinding throughout all its lyrical twists and stylistic turns, from the Tom Waits carnival barker “Tomboy Gold” to the hard-driving twang dervish of the title track to the late-night bar 6/8 two-step of “Little Gears,” the latter of which might just be the best song of the year. Hell, she says it all for me: “We all crave some wildness… To glimpse the side-eyed blurry hide / And thrill at the marks it leaves behind.”
• Bandcamp
7. Hedvig Mollestad Trio – Bees in the Bonnet
The Norwegian guitarist Hedvig Mollestad came up through jazz, but her gnarly, scenery-chewing style in the fiery power trio bearing her name has nothing whatsoever to do with the pristine stereotype of Nordic jazz. Instead, on her eighth album under the Hedvig Mollestad Trio name, she leads bassist Ellen Brekken and drummer Ivar Loe Bjørnstad through gutbucket squall, nimble, proggy fusion, and dense, psychedelic fuzz. The guitar/bass unison that Breken and Mollestad lock into throughout “Golden Griffin,” for example, is just straight-up nasty. The band is a mass of heaving elasticity across these six pieces, including the quiet spooky crawl and build of “Bob’s Your Giddy Aunt” and especially the cripplingly heavy closer “Apocalypse Slow,” which works its way up into a flailing whine of a solo from Mollestad while Brekken whips up an antagonistic whip-gallop on the bass that calls to mind the blackened Krautrock explorers in France’s Aluk Todolo. Simply put, Bees in the Bonnet is one hell of a great racket.
• Bandcamp
6. Menace Ruine – The Color of the Grave is Green
Whatever else Menace Ruine’s music might be – darkwave, goth, martial industrial, black metal, noise – to me it always feels like folk music. On “Once a Ghost,” for example, S. de la Moth’s beats might have wandered out of an album by Austria’s Summoning, but Geneviève Beaulieu’s beautifully sharp guitar, keys, and voice are like sandpaper whittling down the rush and bustle of life to leave behind nothing but the truth. “Let It Flow” has a stark, liturgical feel with its organ and flute tones and Beaulieu’s vocal polyphony, while “Mingled and One” foregrounds the needling guitar as it shifts through a tangled forest of dread and reverb. Menace Ruine’s music is harrowing, haunted, and painfully beautiful, delivering missives from a ruined future and touching raw nerves with bracing straightforwardness. I’m not sure I heard a more heartbreaking song this year than album closer “Broken by Fate,” whose plainspoken poetry is an anguished cry over the plight of migrants in a world of chasms and fences:
“As we toughen our borders / We toughen our hearts as well…
The death toll will continue to rise /
In the meantime, kings visit shipwrecks and die /
In the meantime, kings travel into space /
Meanwhile, stars are fading and will never shine again.”
• Bandcamp
5. Stephen Vitiello, Brendan Canty, Hahn Rowe – Second
“[C]alling this an album of ‘guitar, drums, and violin’ is absurd false advertising. Stephen Vitiello’s guitar improvisations and jam sessions formed the bedrock for each song, but then Brendan Canty (formerly of both Fugazi and Rites of Spring, and now also of the Messthetics) added not only drums but also bass and piano, with the finishing touches and overdubs courtesy of Hahn Rowe on violin, viola, 12-string guitar, and more. This makes Second sound like an academic exercise in sheer studio fuckery, but instead it’s volatile, impatient, and alive at every turn… Although Second gets noisy at times, the effect is still of a paradoxically undisciplined focus. It’s as if each player is so intensely focused on the moment at all times that they just can’t be bothered. Play now, think later. The album moves through ambient, dub, post-rock, punk noise, Krautrock, and probably a dozen other things, yet it still feels like the unruly product of shared intention.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
4. Brendon Randall-Myers & Annie Blythe – Only in the Dark
Only in the Dark is astonishing, transfixing, soul-piercing music. It is primarily a recital from Annie Blythe on cello, though Brendon Randall-Myers’ electronics bolster the sound in ways that can be as understated as they are titanic (see “On Fire, Quietly” for a stunning demonstration of the latter). These compositions feel just as inspired by early minimalists like Arvo Pärt and Philip Glass (see “The Way They Wept” for the most striking Glass resonance) as by more contemporary composers like Max Richter and Jóhann Jóhannsson, but it’s also possible to hear echoes of Bach’s cello suites in some of Blythe’s more formalist gestures. (Blythe also recorded Bach’s cello suite no. 3 in 2023; her gentle, yearning treatment of the “Sarabande” is instructive for the approach on this album.) But to be honest, none of these words can properly render the immense emotional impact of Only in the Dark. It’s an album that knows this truth: sorrow is a blanket and grief is a knife. It is truly heartbreaking music – the sort of thing that reaches into your chest and makes whatever you might be trying to focus on drop away – but sitting with this frankly miraculous experience is the sort of heartbreak that clarifies, purifies, unifies: if sorrow is universal, maybe we can use it, even in solitude, to imagine ourselves a little bit closer to each other.
• Bandcamp
3. The Necks – Disquiet
Hapless dummy alert: 2025 is the year that I finally got into The Necks. For whatever reason, despite many attempts throughout the years, the indefinable Australian trio – Chris Abrahams on piano (and more), Tony Buck on drums (and more), and Lloyd Swanton on bass (and more) – proved somehow too slippery for me. The fact that you can describe them with almost equivalent accuracy as a genre-less band or as an omni-genre band might be partly to blame, but I think when I first approached the band years ago it was with the thought that it was something I had to get, as if their music was a puzzle that had to be solved – quantified, specified – before it could be enjoyed. Friends, I had tried to put the word before the sound. But on Disquiet (the band’s longest album statement to date), as on all the rest of the Necks’ music, the sound is all. On these extremely longform improvisations – Disquiet is four songs and more than three hours – the band hints at jazz, post-rock, ambient, and plenty of spaces in between, but their primary interest seems to be finding pockets of sound to bring to a simmer, and then to push, stretch, tumble, and sit in the openings they create. “Ghost Net” is a 75-minute excursion into a woozy, off-kilter funk-drone – seriously, just spend a few minutes listening to the glacial polyrhythms from drummer Tony Buck – while “Rapid Eye Movement” is all languid, rippling echoes from Abrahams’ organ, with Swanton’s bass churning through like a rough-hewn oar chopping the waves. Plus, in a nice little bit of serendipity, Disquiet’s “Warm Running Sunlight” is perhaps most similar to “Black” from 1996’s Silent Night, which is the album that finally hooked me early this year. Oh chums of mine out there, be better than me: don’t sleep on dis quiet.
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2. Ensemble Nist-Nah – Spilla
“On Spilla, the Australian percussionist Will Guthrie, now based in France, leads the Ensemble Nist-Nah through nearly fifty minutes of some of the most otherworldly yet fiercely tactile music you can hope to hear all year. The ensemble – usually consisting of close to ten people – uses the instrumentation of traditional Indonesian Gamelan music alongside multiple drumkits to induce a trance state through tuned, percussive repetition that sometimes feel like one’s brain being massaged by a fluttering swarm of metallic crickets. (That’s a really good thing, I promise.) Whatever you hear in these sounds depends entirely on your own musical history, but I hear things as disparate as the industrial music of Test Dept. and Einstürzende Neubauten, the beatific ambient techno of Pantha du Prince and the Bell Laboratory, the abstract IDM of Autechre, and Tim Hecker’s spiritually parallel album Konoyo (made with a Japanese gagaku ensemble). But this music works best if you can approach it without predicate or expectation, and just hum inside the vibrations it creates. The rustling clamor and din sounds, at times, like ships at dock sloshing and knocking into each other with the foggy lurch of waves that lap the shore.”
• Review (via Spinal Tapdance)
• Bandcamp
1. Home Front – Watch It Die
“The basic frame on Home Front’s debut Games of Power was post-punk, but there were aspects of goth, punk, new wave, and synthpop… Two years on, album number two delivers pretty much the same exact blend of styles, but Watch It Die is, at least to these busted old ears, even better than its predecessor. The Home Front duo of Graeme Mackinnon (vocals / guitar / bass) and Clint Frazier (drums, drum machines, synths, programming, etc.) accomplish this feat of surpassing the already-brilliant Games of Power through perhaps the oldest trick in the book: phenomenal songwriting. The twelve tunes on Watch It Die are each a seemingly perfect crystallization of their own core idea – overflowing with indelible hooks, brimming with urgency, and powered by (as the album-opening title track puts it) ‘spray-painted slogans / for a future that’s out of reach’…
How is it that some music can reach into the quivering pulp of our flesh, cut through our armor and excuses, and simply see us, wholly and without flinching? Watch It Die feels to this particular knucklehead listener like every one of its songs is cut from this same aspirational cloth. Maybe Home Front has just tapped into a frequency that vibrates my ribcage like a fingertip circling the lip of a wineglass, like their melodies are just exactly the ones I expected to hear, or that their lyrics – fragmentary, pugilistic, prosaic, bruised – are what I thought I have been saying all along, but it all coalesces beautifully into an album that I truly can’t stop playing.”
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
Whoever you are out there: I love you. Be well, be kind, lean into love.
