The Quietus Albums of the Year So Far 2025 (In Association with Norman Records)

Campanelli means bell ringer, which Valentina Gonchorova uses in the sense of a soundmark, that might peal upon our entry into, route through, and departure from this earthly life. I interviewed her around the release of this album and was surprised to find a definite spirituality at the heart of her music, which she says she doesn’t shout about because it would put people off. She’s often referenced as having some New Age vibes, but actually she encountered Buddhism in Mongolia in her twenties when the Soviet Union still stood, and considers herself a Catholic of sorts, with an interest in the Old Testament. This album is her first new material since her 2022 magnum opus Ocean, and you might be asking why you should listen to this over that. I say this is beautiful, graceful, Tibetan bowls framing her violin melodies, which are always so resonant and distinctive. This comes partly from custom electrification and partly from her tunings. I love ‘Hut In The Mountains’, an a capella folk ballad for electrified strings, sung out over a forested panorama. 

Throughout the course of Goldstar, colossal columns of sound rapidly manoeuvre between sections, rarely allowing space or time for listeners to get their hooks in. The result of this is a rewarding repeated listening experience, catching fresh licks and pummelling fills with each dip back in. Just when you think you’ve got it sussed, the ptwaang of the bass guitar heralds the arrival of jazz’s blue smoke. ‘Gomorrah Nouveaux’, for example, is constantly seeking new angles and new approaches as it bounds forward amidst riffs that grind with their heads down, popping up only to dish out sharp jabs. The violent guitar of ‘Rot Moderne’ squeals into your ears in a manner reminiscent of ‘When Good Dogs Do Bad Things’ by The Dillinger Escape Plan and Mike Patton. It’s all howl and thunder.

Acoustic guitars are layered up “to the point where they’re almost unrecognisable as guitars” on Moonlight Concessions, and the wonderfully atmospheric cello of Pete Harvey, and focus on concise and gritty storytelling, make for a powerfully emotive and cinematic experience. This is an invigorating reinvention of Throwing Muses’ sound when compared with the fuzzed electric guitars of the album’s also excellent predecessor, Sun Racket. It is also a testament to the power of creativity in transmuting difficult experiences into honest and empathic art, since these songs derive from a time Kristin Hersh spent living amongst the homeless and displaced of Moonlight Beach, Encinitas, California. That Hersh can continue to transform her music yet retain its power in those different guises throughout a career lasting over four decades, just goes to show how truly essential and unique her art remains.

Returning to billy woods’ essential Backwoodz Studioz label four years on from 2021’s ruminative Load Bearing Crow’s Feet LP, PremRock, otherwise known as one-half of razor-sharp rap duo ShrapKnel, is on typically scintillating form on Did You Enjoy Your Time Here…? Pulling together production from an extensive cast of collaborators that includes Child Actor, ELUCID and YUNGMORPHEUS, as well as lyrical contributions from billy woods, Pink Siifu, Cavalier and ShrapKnel bandmate Curly Castro, it’s testament to PremRock and executive producer Willie Green just how focused and fluid the 16-track project sounds. Weaving together laidback, jazzy beats (‘Void Laquer’, ‘Doubt Mountain’) and more expansive moments in cuts like ‘Steal Wool’ and ‘Love Is A Battlefield Simulation’, it’s all brought together masterfully by its protagonist’s astute wordplay that explores love, loss and grief in its various forms. Did you enjoy your time here? I certainly did.

The first Sheer Hellish Miasma was intense, and the sequel ratchets it up further. Beginning with a torrent, the two tracks on the double CD barely lift for a second. As your ears adjust, what seems like a wall of static comes into focus. Details emerge, glimpses of form encourage your ears to scan for more. A mode of listening akin to having your eyes move across a vast canvass equal parts Rothko and Pollock to take in every detail. If you listen close enough, you might even hear a slither of Greg Kelley’s trumpet, which appears on this record (as it did the first Sheer Hellish Miasma) but has been pulverised out of recognition.

Dali de Saint Paul is a member of Harrga, Viridian Ensemble and Ondata Rossa. Endless Summer marks the debut of her producer/solo alias Content Provider. It’s a tape completely at one with its artwork lifted from a postcard of Avonmouth and Severn Beach dated 1979. The tracks, built on sweat stained drum machines and heatsick electronics, are a little romantic and a little industrial, painted in vibrant hues but with a sense that everything might be burning. The title cut is a frenzied love song for a summer where temperatures have surged well above pre-industrial thresholds. ‘E-System’, featuring Manonmars, has quicksand electronics trickle through a bouncing guitar loop, ‘Close Ur Eyes’, featuring Birthmark, crawls around a sinkhole bassline. Closer ‘Sunday Morning’ is a song for the morning after the apocalyptic party, its ring tone like electronics equal parts luminous and ominous call back to reality. It’s a new direction for De Saint Paul, but Endless Summer still channels the wonder of her other projects. A blast of joyful solidarity against an overheating world.

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. 

Gamelan Salukat is a gamelan project formed by composer Dewa Alit in 2007, which has a unique set of instruments designed by Alit specifically so that the group could perform his boundary-pushing compositions. It’s what sits at the root of this fresh, future-sounding album by Jan Kadereit and co.. There are crisp rushes of sound; bells in impossibly high definition; tumbling waterfalls that ring in slow motion, the patterns of falling water revealed as if by slow-mo camera. The opener is a stunner, crisp twittering repetitions of high pitches that give way to crashing percussion. It’s like no other gamelan album I’ve heard. Alit’s work is the closest comparison, for obvious reasons, but there is a totally different sensibility powering each composer’s sound on this instrument.   

Penelope Trappes is very clear that her fifth album, A Requiem, is about grief. Though not a traditional dirge, the opening notes of the album are an open-hearted declaration of loss and mourning, sitting with the different facets of that experience. Trappes has a strong sense of dichotomy, that every aural high has a low, the smooth always has the rough, the light is brought down by the heavy. It is an embodiment of grief, which subdues us with shock and makes us lash out with anger. The dark, heavy feelings of the early songs give way later in the album, but never fully leave – the harsh buzzing in the final moments of album closer ‘Thou Art Mortal’ is a reminder of a pain that never goes away even if the edges get smoothed down.