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

Over two sides of an LP, Ensamseglaren takes us along paths of genteel jazz, intriguing experimentation, thunderous doom, and brassy sighs capable of breaking your heart. With her 12-strong ensemble, reassembled after a five-year hiatus in order to help work through the grief of losing her father (the lonely sailor to whom the album title alludes), Anna Högberg has transcended any clichés about getting the old band back together. Their collective expression, their artistry, their simply being with one another, proves itself to be a viable method for processing the chest-hollowing feeling of parental loss.

Traveling Light pushes the jazz influence to the forefront. It’s essentially, in the most literal sense of the term, a standards album, though the sounds surrounding the chord progressions of each individual piece are so far-off from jazz that listening to the album through that lens feels almost impossible. Luminaries from the Portuguese improvised music scene contribute to four out of the six tracks on the album, colouring them in a way that provides an anchor of sorts in the jazz tradition. The instrumentation fits perfectly with the otherworldly, thoroughly non-jazz sounds of Toral’s guitar pedal wizardry, and the absence of an expected dissonance between the two feels strangely hypnotic.

The album opener ‘The Pressure’ crashes in without any hesitation with 80s coded, dark synth riffs coursing through the veins of the track. An undecipherable vocal adds more groove to an already rhythmic track before the vocal is seemingly transformed into screeches and hails similar to that of a seagull – marking the true start of a descent into absurdity. By ‘Cede’, the auditory journey is stripped back down to the simplicity of pounding techno drums, before industrial crunches and stabs of sub bass are lathered all over the song. The album’s title track similarly reflects Bourne’s ability to produce a club tune, as swelling synth pads rise through marching kick drums, as if soundtracking a drug-induced scene in a Gaspar Noé film.

If Melvin Gibbs wanted to live in the past, he would certainly have plenty to work with. As a member of Ronald Shannon Jackson & the Decoding Society, Power Tools, and Sonny Sharrock’s band, Gibbs’ electric bass work was often the glue holding together the heaviest jazz-rock groups of the era. His new album Amasia: Anamibia Sessions Vol. 2 owes its origins to a prompt from legendary video artist Arthur Jafa to have a group of musicians work off of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. However, in no way is this yet another electric Miles tribute project. On Amasia, Gibbs merely uses the insular creative framework that Miles and producer Teo Macero mastered in the 70s as a jumping-off point for an entirely different planet of strange.

As is often the case with instrumental music, the titles clue you in. One short and urgent, angular and roughly strummed piece is called ‘Rhythm Methodist’. Perfect. Elsewhere, a dramatic thing that lurches through whip-quick acts like a community theatre troupe on trucker speed is called ‘Head Bone In The ‘Tater Hole’, which can’t help but amplify the track’s madcap, almost slapstick energy. These titles act as something like emphatic punctuation on tunes already overflowing with character. They also belie the keen-yet-puckish intellect responsible for these rough-cut gems.

Like a bath drawn to slightly the wrong temperature, Unterhaltungen mit Larven und Überresten (“Conversations with Larvae and Remains”) requires slow, careful immersion. Sampled voices and found footage drift in and out like a radio dial operated by a Ouija board. Minute by minute, it is unsettling – and yet, in totality, the results are peculiarly comforting. By the end, you feel that you and Schoppik have been through something together – a not entirely reassuring undertaking, but one that has been worth the effort. 

Voices are mangled and obscured throughout SickElixir. Their messages teeter on the cusp of comprehension but rarely tip over. Shrouded utterances scrape across the battery of mutated and fuzz-strewn synths on ‘TCP Burn’, clashing forcefully with drums that rocket about like Ritalin tics. There is a glimmer of humanity amongst the rampaging machine music, however. The howls at the heart of ‘Sonkind, whilst evidently metallic, express a cathartic emotion rooted not only in straining sinews and pumping ventricles but also in a deep sense of loss. Fourth track ‘Rabbit Hole’ finds Monstera Black’s strangely soulful serenade adding a fresh and humane dynamic to Blawan’s off-kilter digital eruptions and strangely fleshy productions. Her cry of “I’m in a rabbit hole, just keep dancing” is one of the rare moments of vocal clarity.

The first minute of ‘My Garden’ opens The Spiritual Sound in dramatic and instructive style. A count-in of bass hits launches a storm of blast beats and noise, drops swiftly into a riff topped with squalling guitar before settling to a more familiar metal chug as the caustic vocals come in. When it hits the chorus, everything eases back, Dan Meyer singing softly over strummed chords and busy but muffled percussion. The great joy of Agriculture’s music is the way they make these abrupt shifts flow naturally. On their second album they broaden the scope of their sound while integrating its many aspects more fluidly.

The sound of Lotto offers little in the way of surprise for long-time followers of the band (though it may be a bit less hard-to-penetrate than previous recordings). This is immediately apparent on ‘violence iii’, a variation on a theme that first appeared in ‘violence i’ and ‘violence ii’ on previous albums Destiny XL and s, respectively. But I’m somewhat relieved that They Are Gutting a Body of Water haven’t simply given itself over to TikTok-gaze trends and glorified what forward-looking inventiveness in guitar music might be. From start to finish, as is clear on the closer, ‘herpim’ (one of my favorite tracks on the album), it’s evident that this is a band who are acutely aware of what their shoegazing sound should be. In a moment when “heavy shoegaze” is being reimagined by a new generation, Lotto shows how the genre can still evolve without dissolving into nostalgia, how weight and distortion can push it forward rather than backward. In that sense, They Are Gutting a Body of Water might just be its most blistering and luminous expression yet.

For anyone whose heard the trio’s previous albums, much here will be familiar – especially the insistent quality of its seven tracks. The longest of these, ‘The Hangman’s Shadow Fifteen Years On’, ominous and brooding, stretches out over close to nineteen minutes. As with much of the record, it incorporates elements of drone. But Širom aren’t playing drone music per se. The track gains coherence from an underlying pulse, akin to a pre-set element in a backing track. It’s further evidence of how experimental folk and electronic music have been backing into each other. There’s more of an emphasis on melody here than on The Liquified Throne Of Simplicity, the album that raised the band’s international profile in 2022. Listen, for instance, to the way ‘No One’s Footsteps Deep In The Beat Of A Butterfly’s Wings’ gently takes flight around a minute in. There’s a delicacy entirely appropriate to the track’s title. Less becomes more.

In the middle of the 1990s several leading lights from the so-called intelligent dance music scene in the UK, took an ostensibly weird detour into the worlds of lounge, easy listening, exotica, children’s tv theme music and so on. It might have been labelled ironic at the time but was anything but given Tom Jenkinson’s long standing love for fusion, Mike Paradinas’ deep investment in his Jake Slazenger project and Richard D. James’ often fantastic but ultimately abandoned Melodies From Mars album plus unusually sincere remixes for Mike Flowers Pops and The Gentle People, not to mention the short lived Mike and Rich project and other contemporary lounge outliers like Mo Wax’s Sukia. If anything this was a temporary escape tunnel leading out of the insanely over categorised and rigidly over policed dance music scene of the day into a less restrictive, and more fun, tipsy and torrid environment. It certainly should be seen as a more relaxed precursor to the way more self-conscious hauntology that was just around the corner. CV Vision is a Berlin based musician who makes music like an alien who has been tasked with back engineering lounge, exotica and late 60s style psychedelic pop music using only these mid-90s recordings for reference. So if you’d ever wondered what a mix of Jane Weaver, Hieroglyphic Being, Stock, Hausen & Walkman with David Axelrod producing would sound like, maybe it’s time to stop wondering. Ten out of ten for the cheeky Earl Brutus lift as well. 

You might feel like you have the people behind ‘Berghain’ pinned; but the truth is, you don’t. None of us do. Superb. 

The new single by the Jim Beam-endorsed K-pop quintet sounds kind of like a futuristic update on Azealia Banks’ classic 2012 hymn to cunnilingus, ‘The 212’ – only this one’s about eating pasta and how annoying it is when you get a bit stuck between your teeth. Relatable!

Seeing news of Lankum covering The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ for a standalone halloween release would naturally lead one to expect straight-up spookiness. Though it starts as such, a lurching instrumental and ghostly harmonies, it’s testament to the foursome’s drive for innovation that it gradually mutates into a bizarre, enthralling, pumping psychedelic dance epic – closer to the work of Radie Peat’s ØXN project than anything in the band’s discography thus far.

Prior to their forthcoming album, the mighty Hey Colossus return with an aptly horror-themed standalone single for All Hallows’ Eve. Sounding more like a flashback to old school Hey Colossus than anything from their last three albums, ‘Hey Zombie’ lurches along like the undead son of The Stooges to an incendiary climax worthy of late period Butthole Surfers, before devolving into what sounds like a broken fairground calliope organ. It’s great to have them back. “Hey Zombie, chew my brain” indeed.

Footage of Dennis Bovell manning a fishing boat alone is a treat, paired with the playful and whacked-out dub of Elijah Minnelli – a mysterious producer from the fictional town of Breadminster – it is irresistible.