New Weird Britain: 2025 in Review by Noel Gardner

Technically a reissue of a 2023 CD, pressed to vinyl this time, this introduced me (and I’m sure many others) to the sultry sub-soul murmurs of London threesome Rest Symbol and their self-imposed 5mph speed limits.

Excitingly inscrutable gothic UKDIY post punk. If I said Leucotome’s tape is this year’s Tristwch Y Fenywod album, that’s me trying to prod you into hearing it, not saying they don’t have their own thing going on (they do).

Yorkshire-located guitar slinger Bridget Hayden switches to banjo to deliver a set of folk standards inspired by the domestic singing habits of her mum, who sadly died before Cold Blows came out.

There have been several different iterations of what gets called Ramleh, spanning more than 40 years. This one is the project at its most instrumentally developed, a seasoned power trio trading in spacious, psychedelic noise rock skyscraping.

Labake assembled this 17-song debut album at The Gate, a Shepherd’s Bush arts centre for learning disabled people. She has a bajillion ideas and a great team, and that comes through on this impulsive post punk and synth pop delight.

Last year’s NWB chart included a release by a project named Liquid DnB-Like Ambient Grime 2, which was not in fact ‘ambient grime’. This is, though! Weightless, housey and dubbed-out, Adventures… catches fire when the main 11:11’s duo pass the mic to MC Lucky I’m Luke.

Following a 2018 release which included a jaunty number titled ‘Reading The Track List For Napalm Death’s ‘Scum’ Into A Broken Tape Recorder’, Newcastle’s anti-music musician Joe ‘Posset’ Murray one-ups himself with this lovingly unfaithful tribute to the grindcore giants’ debut LP.

Ajay Saggar, Lancashire lad long settled in the Netherlands, popped back to the UK a few summers ago and found a disused Yorkshire church with a working organ, which he revisited to record this double LP of droning, trancelike instrumentals as Bhajan Bhoy.

Machine music undoubtedly influenced by the greats, but dragging them to some sort of black site. Nearly all of this 92-minute tape sounds fresh to me, even with the ghosts of 80s proto-techno, all-synth Krautrock and mythical Spiral Tribe or Unit Moebius live excursions orbiting my head hummingbird style.

My NWB album of 2025 is possibly the most ‘pop’ thing reviewed here all year – ‘pop’ in this case meaning richly-arranged folk-rock Whispering Bob Harris would have introduced with oleaginous pleasure in the mid-1970s – but Lavinia Blackwall, ex of Glasgow’s Trembling Bells, has weirdness in her DNA, as well as an amazing voice and melodic ear.

This seven-song LP by Sussex psych unit Black Arches with Kent poet Sexton Ming, has the undiluted NWB juice for sure, the product of a gang of outsiders in a smallish town (Hastings) hitting on something that slaps even if you’re not in their gang. The sexagenarian Sexton, inveterate collaborator including multiple times with Billy Childish, spouts tall tales and nonsense invective in his frazzled sage of a voice as the Arches trio cover every blade of astral grass with rare Faust-cubed abstraction. Guitarist Gareth E. Rees is better known as an author, indeed his recentish Terminal Zones collection is weird in much the same good way this album is.

Gossen’s debut tape came out so early in the year I’d not really woken up yet, but it ticks all kindsa boxes for me. They’re a duo from Cornwall who look to be tight with the broad Falmouth/Penryn scene there but who move to their own beat, which most often is no beat at all. The two side-long tracks here, both live recordings, total almost an hour. ‘Rust Echoes For Iron Baths In’ is bleak noise/psych, not unlike late-80s Ramleh at points though flowering into a partway melodic modular bloop sesh. ‘One Lamp Club’ is a burst of delay-damaged space drone that’s a bit scuzzy to be ‘blissful’ by design but gets there anyway.

The Greater London Banjo Trio, comprise Jacken Elswyth and Daniel Evans of Shovel Dance Collective plus the half of Milkweed known only as R. They are indeed all banjos and nothing but, and true to the historically-inclined form of all three, debut release Do Not Do Doing Not is packaged with a potted history of the instrument’s fluctuating popularity in Britain since the 1880s. Theoretically, players of that time could have jammed on something like this tape’s side A – drilled, monolithic repetition that’s like House & Land doing Boredoms – yet, regrettably, I struggle to imagine it.

Rangy, modish jazz trio delivering the goods on alto sax, trombone and electronics, with still more electronics applied to the acoustics. Ledley are London-based, though recorded this album in Bristol’s Cafe Kino, and also ply their trade in combos like Led Bib and Nostalgia 77. Ledley is a bit further leftfield than that, with tracks like ‘Seven Sisters Road’ and ‘Lordship Lane’ doubling down on the isolationism, but there’s usually melodic sunlight to offset the staccato needling: ‘One Knee’ is like a New Orleans remembered only through a haze of jetlag. If you’re detecting a theme via name and titles, you’re probably correct: Raph Clarkson, Riaan Vosloo and Chris Williams are all Tottenham Hotspur fans and this project is an unlikely tribute to the team’s talismanic ex-centre half Ledley King. If this means nothing to you it is of no detriment to the listening experience. 

Another Bristolian live recording, from 2024 during the city’s biannual New Music Fest, where Nicols, a Scot living in west Wales, and local drum cat Johnson made a point of keeping things as spontaneous as possible for their first performance together. Separated age-wise by the best part of 50 years, the pair turn out to be powerfully kindred musical spirits, with Nicols bringing her weighty reputation as a vocal improviser via some knotty notes and, about two-thirds in, excellently manic Kurt Schwitters-ish prattling which Johnson responds to with comparably quicksilver percussion. I saw the duo reprise this set in June just gone and it felt like a privilege, as has seeing Johnson hit things with ceaseless inventiveness throughout the year.

The extent of the lore associated with Josie Vallely’s third album as Quinie is way beyond what space allows for description here: this will happen when one’s bread and butter is the Scots folk tradition. It does though feel worth highlighting that Forefowk, Mind Me’s gestation owes much to Vallely’s week-long journey across west Scotland on horseback, handily filmed by Lizzie McKenzie, if only to counter the modern default mentality that a budding folk researcher can do all their work at home on the computer. Quinie can flourish unaccompanied, but Forefowk is greatly embellished by a team of musicians from around Glasgow, including Harry Górski-Brown on pipes and violin and Irish viola player Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh.

The pokey void left by London rock dismantlers Mosquitoes, following their cessation in 2021, continues to be partially filled by members’ other activities. Of note this year were the first two releases by Split Apex, a duo who feature Mosquitoes’ Peter Blundell reprising his bass-and-vocals duties alongside Jussi Palmusaari, a Finn in London on guitar and percussion. A cassette EP, self-titled and self-released in February, is rake-thin makeshift post punk that could have sprung from the Instant Automatons wing of UKDIY. Thoughts In 3D, issued via Mosquitoes’ sometime label Ever/Never, is marginally more ‘produced’ (all things being relative), with guitar and bass in unwieldly but compelling lockstep on, notably, ‘Crux Machine’ where before Blundell had largely dictated the rhythm unchallenged.

More Cornish soundsmithery, would you believe! This album offers geographical specificity, to boot, as it’s an interpretative study of the Carnon Valley, where the water has been coloured red by pollution from an abandoned mine. The album is packaged with a book of Red Lake / Black Mine’s graphic score: the scattered text and cut-up imagery ensure it also functions as a volume of concrete poetry. The music to which it corresponds is Will Parker’s first release, although he’s got a longer background in audiovisual work, and the earlier part of RL/BM is some diverting Autechre/Mark Fell type modulating. A less hermetic approach to the final two pieces is a winning about-turn, with the operatic vocal of Francesca Stevens swooping over electronically-altered minimal composition to stunning effect on ‘Until We Meet’.

Arrived at this one late, but any time of the year’s a good one to appreciate music that sounds like it’s getting beamed from a planet with decidedly unEarthly weather patterns. In reality, Yves lives in London, his real name is William Messenger and on this four-track EP he does icy, post-post-club computer music very nicely. Digital zithers, parallax-scrolling rainforest sounds and carpets of bitcrushed detritus combine, with Mr Mitch’s isolated grimescapes and Tim Hecker’s pricey noise sculpture equally valid reference points. Tributary was the debut tape on Weighted My Hand, founded by Dylan Mallett aka Silver Waves: curiously, both producers’ releases this year were their first proper ones since 2016, with Silver Waves’ Aninstar album also worth your time.

There are 24 tracks on this cassette comp by the Collapsing Drums label, which started five years ago in London and recently moved to Bristol, with no concrete common factor linking all the artists. Vibes-based assemblage is to be encouraged, though, when the vibes are good. A few of the participants hail from ‘elsewhere’ – Norway, Brazil, Iran, the Netherlands – and about a third of the tracks have been previously released, which leaves close to an hour of fully unheard sound. Collapsing Tape includes previously celebrated favourites of this column (Mariam Rezaei & Dali de Saint Paul – whose contribution alone is worth admission price – Dan Johnson, Graham Dunning & Sam Underwood, Han); some to-date-unreviewed favourites (Elaine Mitchener, Mr AKA Amazing, Robyn Rocket) and acts with no clear online footprint due to being called Mooooooooo and Aparapara but whose contributions I dig.