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

I keep coming back to the last ten seconds of ‘ON FLEEK’, a cut from the 18-year-old Atlanta artist Che’s REST IN BASS. Under a staggered 8-bit mosh, the beat is cut up with what sounds like gravel blowing its nose. Che follows in the rage footsteps of fellow ATLien Playboi Carti in a chase for ever-escalating levels of extremity. He’s a self professed rockstar, a live wire hedonist, and on ‘DIE YOUNG’ he even prophesises: “I’ma die young, we ain’t ever growin’ up.” The music’s body is all raucous punk energy, but its head is off disassociating. Take closer ‘BA$$’, built around a Beach House sample that is then buried under stacks of charred compression. For the digital native, blissed out is a destination you need a whole lotta decibels to get to. Billowing layers of texture alone just don’t cut it.

One can identify a resemblance to Asoo Kohzadi and Otagh Band’s work in this approach of juxtaposing and disfiguring historical Iranian records with contemporary sounds and also a strong presence of minimalist ideas: repetitive motifs, played by a contemporary pianist, repeated to the point of annihilation (‘Stilla’). In one piece, there is something similar to a santur – the Iranian instrument – presented in bits and fragments, suddenly bombed by a deafening and shocking noise (‘Maculate’). The usually lyrical and melancholic melodies of Iranian music, too, are this time skewed and disfigured, brought to a grotesque end. This is perhaps what is meant by his ‘surgical’ procedure: not to recreate a cohesive, unified body, but to reinvent, to create a tapestry of disfigured sonic and musical elements – with its most obvious victim being the Iranian tones, struggling to rise out of the dust of the sonic bombs.

If $ilkMoney truly doesn’t give a fuck about this rap shit, then this is not how to prove it. “Never make it seem like you’re trying too hard,” has always been one the mantras of the former Divine Council member, but he almost contravened it by noticeably aiming to make his debut on Lex Records his best album yet. Emphasis on “almost”: the sentence-long, wacky song titles; the random references he doesn’t mind going over listeners’ heads (from Shinzō Abe to Doug Dimmadome); the minimalist song structure, dive-right-in opening verses and disdain for hooks… It still seems as if $ilk is rapping for himself rather than for the audience. MF Doom’s best disciples are the ones who grasped what made him so special: indifference, impudence, an almost pathological self-confidence. They understand that you don’t emulate Doom through imitation, but by being the brashest version of yourself.

Completing a trio of late period masterpiece pop albums along with 2020s Crazy Hearts and 2023s Jump Into Love, Adventure finds Half Japanese as ebullient as ever, with Jad Fair’s inspirational optimism perfectly framed by his long-standing backing band over the course of twelve tracks. The most musically diverse of the three releases, Adventure also comes across as more wistful and reflective than its predecessors, perhaps influenced in this respect by the passing of long-time member Mick Hobbs (also of The Work, Family Fodder and Officer!), who sadly passed away at the start of the year. This is far from being a melancholic work however, and its cumulative effect on listeners open to its charms is so elevating of mood that it should perhaps be available on prescription to those of us who might need the simultaneous hug and pep talk that it offers. Given that such a diagnosis likely applies to a very large percentage of us during these difficult times, it’s an irrefutable argument, as far as I’m concerned, that Half Japanese are deserving of a much bigger audience. 

If we take the album’s dissident, confrontational tone as its guiding spirit, then ‘Sahel’ featuring El Kontessa, lands right in the bloodstream. Its jungle breakbeats and needle-sharp scratches amplify the record’s restless energy, carrying the same sense of urgency and refusal that runs throughout Beside Myself. With this cutting-edge cohort of collaborators, DJ Haram has delivered a debut worthy of an artist intent on tearing through the clichés that cling to both sound and identity – confronting the systems that colonise, both outwardly and within. And she succeeds, sonically, in drawing lines not just against enemies, but also among allies – refusing easy solidarity, and forcing a reckoning with complicity, comfort, and performance.

From Sunik Kim’s dense noise monoliths to aya’s 4am horror stories, much of the best contemporary electronic music embodies the inherent chaos of life in 2025. This music is often intimidating, jarring, or straightforwardly unpleasant, born from circumstances that Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux snappily termed “a gaudy, unlivable present” – or, in other words, a Decadent Stress Chamber. But despite this ominous title, Keith Rankin’s fifth album as Giant Claw represents a heel turn from the nihilistic excess of the zeitgeist. Decadent Stress Chamber is maximalism of possibility: a commingling of worldly frenzy and human warmth that feels positively utopian. Across eight tracks, Rankin re-shapes elements of seemingly hundreds of genres – K-pop, yacht rock, industrial goth, prog – into big, earnest pop songs. The result is alchemic, like the noise from a fast-moving dial on a radio somehow producing a rock opera.

There are a few times through Gaudencia, Ugandan hip-hop artist Yallah Gaudencia Mbidde’s latest fiery collaboration with French producer Debmaster, where you might be hit with a thought: “Who else would sound as good rapping over this?” These are layered, unruly beats, caked in more dirt and detritus than anything we heard on their last project, 2023’s Yallah Beibe. There are strong grooves laced into them, but the rhythms are often skewed or slippery. MC Yallah speeds through them, finding new pockets to thrive in. Her delivery is addictive, at once smooth and acrobatic. It sounds as though she’s making space for herself on beats other rappers could well disappear within. But more than just thriving within technical complexity, it’s the fresh and surprising ways Yallah uses her voice that impresses most. 

For Gaza With Love Vol. 1 is a well-put-together new charity compilation featuring artists as diverse as Richard Dawson, Belle & Sebastian and Pefkin aka Gayle Brogan (whose slowly-unfolding hymnal ‘Premonitions’ is worthy of the cover charge alone). And that’s before we’ve got to the cause. Curated by the Yorkshire-based musician and composer Aby Vulliamy, who also contributes the moving, thought-provoking ‘Because of Us’, the collection aims to raise funds for the PalMed Academy in Gaza, an organisation which is trying to raise the standard of medical care for Palestinians through training and education. Clearly facing an existential crisis on a strip of land that has seen most of its hospitals either damaged or destroyed in the last twenty-one months, it needs all the help it can get.

A lot has happened to South East London-based Jim Legxacy since the 2023 release of his superb breakthrough mixtape homeless n***a pop music, as he outlines against a backdrop of buzzing synths and soaring guitar licks on ‘context’, the two-minute opener to his latest record. As he explains, the past two years have seen his mother suffer two strokes, his brother develop psychosis, and, most devastatingly of all, the death of his younger sister. These events clearly colour what follows on black british music (2025), his dizzyingly brilliant debut for XL Recordings. It can be heard in the vulnerable admissions of regret over acoustic guitar on ‘issues of trust’ and the open references to grief in the Dave collaboration ‘3x’.

Where black british music (2025) thrives is in Legxacy’s ability to effortlessly combine these intense moments of catharsis with both outright humour and nods to all manner of sounds from his childhood, including the titular Black British music of artists such as Wiley, J Hus and Dave. The aforementioned ‘issues of trust’ flows immediately into an automated voice (styled as the mixtape’s host who pops up throughout the record) exclaiming “black british music, we’ve been making asses shake since the Windrush” on the intro to lead single ‘father’. The brilliantly titled ‘i just banged a snus in canada water’ sees that same voice reel off lines about doing balloons and busting gunfingers to bangers before Legxacy swaps the crooning that he picks up for most of the mixtape for frenetic rapping. Elsewhere, standout cut ’06 wayne rooney’ is a thrilling nod to the kind of mid-00s indie tunes you might have heard on a FIFA game soundtrack during that era.

Though often hailed among the much-hyped new wave of shoegaze, They Are Gutting A Body Of Water prove themselves to be ahead of the pack on the latest taste of new album LOTTO, where that familiar rush of fuzz is paired with edgy, scrappy, moody moments of quiet.

Arriving off the back of one of the year’s standout singles to date in June’s ‘S.M.O.’, this latest preview of Amaarae’s forthcoming album, Black Star, is an addictive blend of acoustic guitar licks, bumping jersey club beats and nods to Brazilian funk, all topped off of course by the Ghanaian-American artist’s typically airy and alluring vocals.

The Venice, LA rapper Evidence teams up with acclaimed producer The Alchemist (Freddie Gibbs, Earl Sweatshirt) for a moreish slice of laidback hip hop centred around a sultry piano vamp that might almost have been sampled from a cult 70s sitcom. 

Marking cult figure YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s first full-length release since receiving a full pardon for various legal troubles from Donald Trump earlier this year, new album MASA is something of a sprawling, jumbled listen, but among it there are some delights. Take this collaboration with Playboi Carti, which finds both in fine, carefree form, even if Carti is barely trying to conceal the Future tribute act that also coloured much of latest album MUSIC at this point. The track’s breezy, laidback beat loaded with whirring synth melodies provides perfect foil for the duo’s autotune-aided boasts, nods to various fashion houses and trash-talk.

A centrepiece of British-Sierra Leonean artist Nadeem Din-Gabisi’s masterful new record Offshore, out next month, ‘B Happy’ uses a slick and inviting groove to invite the listener in, before immersing them in to the richly multi-faceted exploration of belonging and lack thereof that’s shot through the rest of the LP

The roots of Rian Treanor and Cara Tolmie’s new album for Planet Mu – of which this is the first preview –lie in a specially commissioned, joint live performance that they did for Glasgow’s Counterflows festival in 2023. It saw vocalist and performance artist Tolmie combine her vocal technique of Internal Singing — described in a press release as “an intimate practice using breath, movement and touch that explores the subtle binds between voice and body in an unsettling, engrossing sonic space” – with Treanor’s own rhythmically complex work.

Finally, after much speculation over Cardiacs’ almost mythical unfinished album, LSD, today (1 August) sees the first of three singles prior to the album’s release on 19 September. For those of us close to the band who have been listening to it throughout much of 2025, there’s an almost audible collective sigh of relief at being able to speak of the secrets we have withheld until now. The album features 17 tracks, mostly unreleased, with the exception of the three that were on the Ditzy Scene EP (and those three, particularly its title track, being rather transformed in the process), all written by Tim Smith with arrangements by Kavus Torabi and orchestrations by North Sea Radio Orchestra’s Craig Fortnam. Mike Vennart takes over as lead singer, although he’s far from being the only vocalist heard on the album, which also contains contributions from Rose-Ellen Kemp and the rest of the band. Kemp is stunning on the less punked-up tracks, and Vennart shines throughout.

For anyone who may have seen Vennart performing Cardiacs ‘Dirty Boy’ with Spratleys and Cardiacs musicians at the Garage in 2018, with Tim Smith in the audience, the notion of the Oceansize singer being the right man for the job should not come as a surprising idea. ‘Woodeneye’ is a classic Cardiacs banger, propulsive, punky guitars giving way to a symphonic choral effect and some serious guitar soloing from Torabi. It’s an enticing entrée for the main course soon to come, but one that only hints at the diversity of the delights to follow. Despite Cardiacs last releasing an album twenty-six years ago, their increased popularity online and critical reappraisal from many quarters makes it seem as though they are a band whose time is yet to come.