Music of the Month: The Best Albums and Tracks of June 2025

Throughout, Pramuk’s approach to singing is downright mesmerising. I’d dare call it ASMR-ish, but compared to the anaesthetising effects of trigger sounds and sights, her approach is much more compelling and purposeful. As if tasting each syllable, she rolls words on her tongue, then stretches them across her palate and lips. “Licking the soil, licking the sun, affixed,” she sings on ‘Meridian’, the juicy delivery pressing against a melancholy arpeggio. “Simply,” she enunciates over a blue backdrop on ‘Incense’, turning the word into a hiss. With each repetition, she reorders the phrases, mutates her inflection, and considers each sound’s place carefully, as if caught in a fit of glossolalia, until the voice becomes not her own, shifting in pitch and breaking down.

More high-octane minyo and chanting from Kasai, a Japanese care worker, binman, father and hobbyist farmer on Chinabot. It’s that chanting that brings it. The lyrics are on banal but brilliant subjects, such as the final song, which translates to ‘Piling-up Garbage Song’ and is about taking care with the bins. There’s a sense of randomness to the way sounds occur in these productions. Often a clap, shuffle or bong comes out of nowhere and settles into its own groove that’s just about out of whack with most of the rest of the tune. Either that or they’re all just totally off the beat. Whatever the tactic, we are definitely off the grid here. It means the productions have this curious idiosyncratic sort of animism, where each ping, ding or shuffle seem to be coming from sentient players trying to keep up and failing. It’s wonderfully naive, a tiny bit daft and incredibly likeable. Hands down the friendliest record in this edition of Rum Music.  

Wolf deeply immersed himself in Kent’s landscape, histories, and rituals. He took day-long peregrinations along the coastline. He devoured all the pamphlets from the local historical association. He consulted folklore experts to better understand rituals. It was almost like a ceremonial forgetting of London. And it’s from this absorption that his first album in thirteen years Crying The Neck is born. Monumental opener ‘Reculver’ sets the tone, played out across a complicated but melodious set of three time-signatures. The track, whose rough form was conceived when Wolf was 16 and completed over two decades later, unifies his years of pain, when he was “bankrupt and borderline / orphaned and obsolete” with his later salvation where he was able “to find all the words”. In a duality that mirrors Reculver’s twin towers near Herne Bay, it feels like a cleansing of Wolf’s decade of silence – the bridging of a supposed ‘lost’ period.

About Ghosts is a storming addition to Halvorson’s catalogue. Compositionally, it builds on her past work, expanding her oeuvre and balancing beauty with imagination and experimentation. The addition of two world-class saxophonists bolsters the range, depth and impact of the compositions on offer. Ultimately, she succeeds in perfectly balancing beauty and melodic implication with her restless experimentation. The result is deeply compelling and will have listeners coming back time and again to uncover more in these thrilling pieces.

Framed against her rise to the public consciousness via TikTok in 2019 – her viral dance routines earned her millions of followers on the social media platform – Addison Rae’s ensuing attempts at a pop star breakout, first with somewhat generic 2021 single ‘Obsessed’, have never felt all that surprising. More unexpected though is just how fully-formed she sounds four years on, on Addison. A debut album truly befitting her breakthrough, it was crafted collectively between Rae and songwriter-producer duo Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd. Benefiting greatly from the decision to lock in on a close nexus of writers and producers, this is pop music that is equal parts experimental and traditionalist. Bouncy Jersey club rhythms (‘New York’) and Ray Of Light-esque trip hop (‘Times Like These’) rub shoulders with snappy choruses and giddy key changes (the Born To Die-era Lana Del Rey-baiting ‘Diet Pepsi’), as well as ecstatically camp, nu-disco synths (‘Fame Is A Gun’). In an era of over-conceptualised, earnest pop music, Addison is a breath of fresh air. 

On paper the project reads like nostalgia-tinged musique concrète. But this is Matmos, and while Metallic Life Review is both intricate and sentimental, it also sparks, bounces and refracts as all that is metallic melts into cascading rays of sound. The second two words of the album’s name refer to the psychological effect triggered by a near death experience: “life flashing before your eyes”. Matmos evoke that flood of sensation in shimmers and twinkles. Somewhere in each track is a memory: a recording of a door in Norway, cannons drummed in Germany, a crypt gate in Rome. Over this Matmos play other metals – percussion, scissors, gongs and nitrous oxide canisters – alongside more conventional instrumentation from a small cast of collaborators: Thor Harris, the late Susan Alcorn, Horse Lords’ guitarist Owen Gardner (here on glockenspiel), and Half Japanese guitarist Jason Willett.

It has been six years since Cosey Fanni Tutti’s last solo outing (and 42 since her first). This thinly veiled sequel, 2t2, continues in much the same fertile vein as her post-Throbbing Gristle output. At the same time, it also appears a little more guarded, as if the candid moments in her early days have left her more cautious. Split into two distinct halves, 2t2 combines a back half of exploratory electronics with the more rhythmic, Chris & Cosey-esque opening tracks. Formed of mournful cornet cutting through slippery drones and pearlescent pads, the subtle centrepiece, ‘Stolen Time’, perfectly bridges these two worlds. Not that the mood throughout the record is wallowing in despondency. It is heavy, weighed down with a dark something that dares not speak its name, but Cosey perseveres to find a light through it all.

Like an electroclash party inside a kids TV studio, Gelli Haha’s debut album Switcheroo is characterised by playfulness with a hedonistic, sometimes sinister bent. Gelli Haha is the pseudonym of LA-based artist Angel Abaya, who released a decent indie rock album, The Bubble, under her own name in 2023. She’s since eschewed this more conventional aesthetic to establish ‘the Gelliverse’ – a high-concept theatrical world of play from which the character of Gelli Haha emerged, an amalgamation of Pee Wee Herman, Marina Diamandis’ Electra Heart and a 00s electroclash party girl. 

Fields Become Sky is about language, which the pair describe as “a sonic artefact”. The historical geography of the East coast is brought to life by reimagining the strange-yet-familiar words of our ancestors. The album is in Old English, a remarkable thing in itself. Opening track ‘Wundrian’ – Anglo-Saxon for ‘wonder’ – has a cello stalking at a stately pace through a watery-sounding landscape of bubbly synths and shimmering bells. It sets the scene for repeated eruptions of the past, as voices lurch from the grave and sing, using words not heard in Suffolk for a millennium. Counter-intuitively, vocals are treated through autotune, which gives them both a contemporary and an ancient quality at the same time. On ‘Cnidae’ Lara and Louis’ singing is like aon overheard, muttered conversation in the ether. On ‘Changeling’, growls and cackles burst from the speakers like a séance in full flow.

Recent years have seen a number of artists in the electronic music world – especially those associated with the 3XL axis of labels – revisit the fuzzy, downtempo delights of 90s trip hop and shoegaze. Few are doing it quite as well as james K though, whose latest single, ‘Play’, marks the third preview to forthcoming album Friend. Centred around her addictively saccharine vocals, velvety guitars and a driving, almost D&B-esque drum loop, I can probably best summarise it as teenage angst music for grown adults.

North London alt-pop vocalist Delilah Holliday and effervescent Tampa hip hop duo They Hate Change were mutual admirers before they teamed up for this double single. In broad strokes, the dazzlingly uptempo ‘Eyes On You’, exists more in the world of They Hate Change, while the dreamy ‘Life’s So Strange’ feels like Holliday’s, but there’s a transfixing push and pull between their two energies throughout.

Returning from a 16-year hiatus with the soon-to-be-released album Let God Sort Em Out, the second preview cut to be shared from the record suggests Pusha T and Malice have lost none of their deliciously wicked edge. Over a bass-rattling, Eastern-influenced beat, the coke rap pioneers  are in typically menacing form, with Pusha even finding the time to aim some razor-sharp jibes at Travis Scott in the track’s outro.

MPTL Microplastics’ riot-encouraging mandolin player Amelia Blackwell is in relatively reflective mode here on debut solo single, a spiderweb construction of guitar and piano as well as mandola, plus support from James Moss on autoharp and kalimba. Seems almost custom made for the weather right now. 

The lead track for Amaarae’s upcoming album, Black Star, is an absorbing blend of Ghanaian highlife, kpanlogo, zouk and bass music. Boldly embracing sexual liberation (S.M.O. stands for ‘Slut Me Out’) while taking pride in her Ghanaian heritage, it’s a tantalising precursor to what lies ahead on her third LP.

This lead single to Jerskin Fendrix’s second album, Once Upon A Time… In Shropshire, reveals that some of the five-year wait hasn’t just been down to Covid and the call of Yorgos Lanthimos but reflects the rough intrusion of mortality into his personal life; the heaviness suggested lyrically and by the astute use of post rock. But also it encourages a readjusted look at earlier lead singles, which now seem much less glib than perhaps they did on first contact.  

The Passionate Ones, Nourished By Time’s follow-up to 2022’s suprise-smash Erotic Probiotic 2 is set to be one of the defining albums of 2025. This shimmering, off-kilter-club track, a paen to the power of dreaming your way out of everyday drudgery, is its centrepiece.