The Portal

The Portal: 18 November 2025

Welcome to the new edition of The Quietus’ weekly archive dive. This time around, we’re celebrating two collaborations that, if we were betting people, we’d put money on being towards the top of our tracks of the year poll that comes out in a few weeks. Lifelong Velvets fan Charli XCX got John Cale on board for ‘House’, a filthy and doomy number from the forthcoming cinematic adaptation of Wuthering Heights – we’ve therefore brought up Cale’s Baker’s Dozen from the vaults. Yves Tumor and Björk joined Rosalía for utterly grandiose new track ‘Berghain’, so we’ve got an archival interview with Björk on the intersection of her work with environmentalism, and a piece exploring the “sublime distortion” of Tutor’s recorded output. With the news that there’s a ‘final’ Foetus album coming in December (we’ve got it on now and are being blasted by operatic and ornamental discord and drama) we revisit an old interview with JG Thirwell on his many projects. With My Bloody Valentine on the road, there’s an essay on the power of their rhythmic invention. As the government are poised to announce regulation on ticket touting, or ‘reselling’, as it is more politely know, our Black Sky Thinking by an academic expert on what measures should have been put in place long ago. From our subscriber archive, Wrongtom delves into a tale of two Normans via ‘Dub Be Good To Me’, and we’ve an Organic Intelligence on women in South Asian hip hop. And finally, with our albums of the year coming very soon, your reminder of what was in our round-up of 2024.