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

Salt River might be under Sam Amidon’s name, and its material (traditional tunes, shanties, shape-note songs and hymns mixed in with songs originally penned by Yoko Ono, Lou Reed and Ornette Coleman) drawn from a repertoire he’s been building for a while, but his collaborator Sam Gendel is equally to thank for its brilliance. Amidon and Gendel, the latter a saxophonist and experimental producer, are long-standing friends and mutual admirers, and got together at the end of last year with drummer Philippe Melanson in Los Angeles where they decided to mine Amidon’s personal archive. Their approach, the record makes evident, had more in common with jazz than anything else; the music here is exploratory, playful and forward thinking, prone to sudden-but-gentle shifts in direction, sometimes drifting all the way out into extended ambient jams.

Split into two distinct halves, 2t2 combines a back half of exploratory electronics with the more rhythmic, Chris & Cosey-esque opening tracks. Formed of mournful cornet cutting through slippery drones and pearlescent pads, the subtle centrepiece, ‘Stolen Time’, perfectly bridges these two worlds. Not that the mood throughout the record is wallowing in despondency. It is heavy, weighed down with a dark something that dares not speak its name, but Cosey perseveres to find a light through it all.

Themes of light, space, breathing and the earth abound on Ghost/Spirit, but the album is far from New Age gentleness. Friction plays a central role within each song, matching the emotional unease of Reidy’s lyrics. There is always some concession to interruption or distortion that prevents the songs from being harmonious or cohesive. Where Reidy’s voice is smoothest, it’s set against a choppy sample or jockeying rhythms.

An album concerning the degradation of a place once held familiar, at times Wasteland brims and bubbles with anticipation of the end times, at others boiling over into a steaming flood. Jim Ghedi sings as if through clenched teeth, plays guitar with a skewering rawness, and often deploys strings – sometimes for a rush of overwhelming emotion as on opener ‘Old Stones’, sometimes for transfixing melodic flourishes (‘Just A Note’), sometimes for a dark, Satanic jig (‘Newtondale / John Blue’). Ghedi’s combination of intensity and sublimity recalls Lankum to some extent, and yet where that band’s doom seems to descend from above like a thick black cloud, there’s something more earthen to Ghedi’s work – the horrific, terrifying beauty of a collapsing planet, turned into sound.

The notes in Richard Skelton’s latest release, The Second Chamber, are prolonged, bleeding and weighted. Nothing drifts without intention. Each note extends with purpose and precision. The artist uses silence and emptiness as a painter uses negative space, treating it like a material instead of an absence. The lack of something is also an integral presence to the composition’s architecture. As each note subsides, the silence consumes it. When the next note emerges, it displaces the silence only to be reabsorbed. A constant dialogue of delicate tension between absence and presence, circulating and chasing, simultaneously interrupting and defining one another.

Even with its standout moments, GOLLIWOG resists dissection. This isn’t an album of singles, it’s a haunted house. Every beat feels like a creaking floorboard. Every verse, a door swinging open to memory. ‘Star 87’ evokes quiet paranoia. ‘All These Worlds Are Yours’ opens with Billy Woods delivering a stark, slum poetry-style recounting of watching a man die in the hall, his words distant and detached, as if this is just another image he’s grown numb to. There’s horror, detachment, and deep personal sorrow. The production credits read like a fever dream: The Alchemist, Kenny Segal, EL-P, Conductor Williams, Preservation, Messiah Musik, Sadhugold, Ant, Shabaka Hutchings, Steel Tipped Dove, DJ Haram, Willie Green, Jeff Markey, Saint Abdullah, and Human Error Club. And yet, the sound holds together. Disorienting, yes. But deliberate. Woods is the constant: his voice measured, ghostly, sometimes smirking.

Learning the provenance of this tough-sounding record alongside repeated plays reveals its dark beauty. You could, I suppose, apply Linnaean-style descriptions of the various “kinds” of noise you hear, such as doom, metal, minimalist or industrial, but that process is a purely cerebral one. Osmium works best when (to use an unlovely modern term), the music is embodied. Tuning in to its stentorian roar whilst out on a walk led to elevated states of mind: its pieces are ritualistic and impactful. The strange instruments and Rully Shabara’s unearthly vocals combine to make huge, pressing slabs of resonant noise.

Recorded in London’s church of St. John on Bethnal Green, Le Sacre Du Soleil Invaincu is centred around three Indian classical ragas, which serve as a launch pad for Neptunian Maximalism’s heady free-form jamming. The first of which, ‘Raag Marwa’ (or alternatively, ‘At Dusk’), really hammers home the group’s drone metal origins, as intoxicating Eastern licks gradually spiral out of thick, cavernous Sunn O)))-esque tones, before erupting into a grandiose horn-backed dirge that sounds a bit like Celtic Frost’s ‘Innocence & Wrath’ played at the wrong speed after a heroic dose of psychedelics. This segues smoothly into ‘Raag Todi’ (AKA ‘Arcana XX’), which begins with a lengthy surbahar (also known as a bass sitar) intro, before erupting into perhaps the album’s most hyper-kinetic passage, as jittering drumming and swirling bursts of searing psych rock guitar dance around an ominous vortex of deep, droning bass. ‘Raag Bairagi’ (or ‘At Dawn’) makes for a suitably climactic finale, as flowing licks straight out of the Mike Vest school of feedback drenched guitar freakouts gradually evolve into thunderous doom metal riffage, bringing the whole thing to a rapturous finish.

In recent years, Patrick Wolf deeply immersed himself in Kent’s landscape, histories and rituals. He took day-long peregrinations along the coastline. He devoured all the pamphlets from the local historical association. He consulted folklore experts to better understand rituals. It was almost like a ceremonial forgetting of London. And it’s from this absorption that his first album in 13 years, Crying The Neck, is born. On the record, a man on the edge and a land on the edge both fall into one another. And instead of making a greater abyss, they end-up supporting one another, creating something like the dolmens that populate the county. It’s a cathartic, erudite and complex work that serves as the beginning of a new chapter for Patrick Wolf – both in east Kent and in his music, the two now seemingly forever intertwined.

Listening to this record (Forefowk coming from the Scots for ‘the people who came before,’ or ‘ancestors’) is to hear Quinie’s tight knot of connections to her Scottish surroundings made palpable. It’s in the way her singing emerges with such easy power on unaccompanied numbers like ‘Bonnie Udny’ and ‘Generations Of Change’, and how it weaves so effortlessly into the enveloping drone of pipes on songs like the resonant ‘Col My Love’, the brooding ‘Sae Slight A Thing’ and the frayed ‘Cam A Ye Fair’. It’s in the way her vocals skitter and dance in tandem with fiddle on the delightful ‘Macaphee Turn The Cattle’, over a ramshackle rhythm played on whatever her instrumentalists had to hand – including a cheese grater and a woodburning stove.

On Gut, Baths bathes in the depths of emo, while luring you to the dancefloor with addictive, poppy beats and sometimes scratching, sometimes tender vocals. Full to the brim with queer joy, queer angst, and angst-in-general, Will Weisenfeld journeys through deeply personal reflections on loneliness to the ubiquitous disillusionment of being a “fucking American” in a nightmarish political climate. Pleasure peeks through the darkness, mostly in the form of every single track being really fucking danceable. Hooks like the desperately screamed “How does anybody do this?” egg you on with gripping bass that hits hard whether experienced through headphones or the full-body pulse of seeing it live. It’s a dance-away-the-pain type of vibe, a moreish listen that offers solidarity through the hard times and an electric soundtrack for the good ones too. 

On We Will Annihilate Our Enemies’ magical concluding track, ‘Finding Money’ (featuring actress Jess Barden), Real Lies cement exactly what they set out to do on the album: emerge from a ‘lost past’ by writing a powerful, atmospheric record about the here and now. Nevertheless, the LP’s not afraid to be occasionally pulled back into the warm embrace of nostalgic memories, however gritty and candid they might be, in true sentimental MGMT style. But this isn’t a bad thing; rather, it’s a reminder of the mystical glue that’s held together the world of Real Lies this whole time.

While the music on Skylarks is deft and undeniably beautiful, the album’s success is the result of something far more ineffable. Often bands exploring folk or folklore can tip into trite pastiche, leaning on either hey-nonny-nonny tweeness or try-hard Wicker Man weirdness. Haress, instead, are matter-of-fact when it comes to their connection with landscape, place and folklore. It seems woven into their day-to-day rather than something donned as part of a performance, the product of a life being lived in the here and now rather than a timid exercise in nostalgia. Skylarks feels old, yes, but also incredibly alive.

On their third album, Rattle continuously trace the circle’s edge, experimenting with the interplay of time and expectation utilising only doubled-drums, fluctuating tempos and chanting vocal cycles. Through wordless repetition, you don’t have to engage in conscious thought. Eventually, the lines between beginnings and endings blur; they become circular. Encircle could almost be a stripped-back version of The Raincoats’ percussion-heavy Odyshape album. Its four tracks resemble ritualistic meditations.

Halo On The Inside is an album that could only be made well into an established career, by an artist given the time to explore and the budget to pull off their lofty ambition. In that spirit, it’s a case study of what can be done when following your creative impulses without restriction. While there’s impressive heft to the arrangements and endless layers to unpick, the greatest treasures come from inside its creator. On ‘Skeleton Key’, supporting pieces melt away for a moment. Haley Fohr is left alone with a guitar working through her process. “I need a synonym for ‘skin’ / that naked feeling of giving in / of touching and looking,” she muses, elongating each vowel sound like she’s searching for that sensation. We’re there with her, as she grapples with creation for a moment. Then the record erupts again, and her thoughts spill out in front of us as fragments of guitar, voice and percussion. The internal is pushed outwards, to the benefit of all listening.

Spliced with iPhone voice notes that tell a highly personal story in fragments, the aggro Lancs drill that introduces Joseph, What Have You Done? is a red herring for a sensitive and tightly composed beginning-to-end journey. Take the spidery, mournful ‘Mary Magdalene, As A Home’ (at five years, the oldest track on the record) or the extraordinary lead single ‘The Fable/The Release’, whose haunted falsetto and rising percussion over smoky, burnt treacle textures unexpectedly recall late-era Radiohead, both making use of Rainy Miller’s new favourite toy: the guitar.

In 1939, among the treasures unearthed from the Sutton Hoo ship burial were fragments of a 7th century lyre, thought to have belonged to an Anglo-Saxon king. Now, albeit via a replica, that instrument has found its way into the hands of one of Britain’s foremost explorers of the intersection between early and experimental musics, Laura Cannell. On LYRELYRELYRE, the instrument’s chimes are interwoven with bass recorders and double reeded crumhorn, as well as with Cannell’s deep research into the lyre’s role in pre-Christian England, to form something totally mesmeric. As Cannell herself has noted, of all the artefacts unearthed in Sutton Hoo and beyond, it’s the lyre’s unique ability to stimulate our aural senses that makes it that much more visceral as a link back to the past.” Listening to the chasmic reverberations on LYRELYRELYRE, it’s easy to imagine them echoing all the way back to the seventh century and beyond.

Glitterbeat claims this is the first time that Los Pirañas’ live methodology, with Alvarez feeding his electric guitar through a laptop, layering circular loops to build dense arrangements knit together with Galeano’s nurturing bass and propelled by Ojeda’s incredibly kinetic drumming, has been adequately captured in a studio recording. Whilst in truth their previous releases have all been excellent, particularly 2021s Infame Golpazo En Keroxen (a ‘greatest hits’ selection with an added brass section recorded in a disused kerosene tank), Una Oportunidad… does feel like their most successful attempt in locating the sweet spots between the joy of the groove and such a broad sweep of other subtle musical inflections that at times it’s like gazing into a constantly evolving sonic kaleidoscope.

Lyra Pramuk’s approach to singing is downright mesmerising throughout Hymnal. I’d dare call it ASMR-ish, but compared to the anaesthetising effects of trigger sounds and sights, her approach is much more compelling and purposeful. As if tasting each syllable, she rolls words on her tongue, then stretches them across her palate and lips. “Licking the soil, licking the sun, affixed,” she sings on ‘Meridian’, the juicy delivery pressing against a melancholy arpeggio. “Simply,” she enunciates over a blue backdrop on ‘Incense’, turning the word into a hiss. With each repetition, she reorders the phrases, mutates her inflection, and considers each sound’s place carefully, as if caught in a fit of glossolalia, until the voice becomes not her own, shifting in pitch and breaking down.

Loaded with luridly colourful synth melodies, rolling 808s and enough bass to rapidly induce a migraine, OsamaSon’s third full-length project sees him push fully past the Playboi Carti imitations of past records. Executive produced with North Carolina producer ok (as those “ok is the hardest” intro jingles will keep reminding you throughout), the 18-track collection thrives on pure chaos and stands out as one of the most creative, head-spinning records to emerge from the ever-unpredictable world of recent years trap / rage / plugg. Lit up throughout by OsamaSon’s frequently mumbled, autotune-aided vocals, the beats on tracks like ‘Mufasa’ and ‘Ref’ are pure granulated noise, while the Skrillex-sampling ‘The Whole World Is Free’ is jarringly addictive. File Jump Out away under ‘sugar high trap’.