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

On paper, this project reads like nostalgia-tinged musique concrète. But this is Matmos, and while Metallic Life Review is both intricate and sentimental, it also sparks, bounces and refracts as all that is metallic melts into cascading rays of sound. The second two words of the album’s name refer to the psychological effect triggered by a near death experience: “life flashing before your eyes”. Matmos evoke that flood of sensation in shimmers and twinkles.

Somewhere in each track is a memory: a recording of a door in Norway, cannons drummed in Germany, a crypt gate in Rome. Over this, Matmos play other metals – percussion, scissors, gongs and nitrous oxide canisters – alongside more conventional instrumentation from a small cast of collaborators: Thor Harris, the late Susan Alcorn, Horse Lords’ guitarist Owen Gardner (here on glockenspiel), and Half Japanese guitarist Jason Willett. Metallic Life Review is the sounds of metal. But the qualities of metal captured in the music feel photic as much as sonic. An evocation of the glints, iridescence and wild reflections caused when light hits shiny surfaces. 

Throughout caroline 2, delicate songs are presented in a series of different ways that reveal the process of creating – for instance, ‘When I Get Home’ integrates scratchy demos of embryonic versions of the song into the intricate end product, in a bid to capture the spontaneous magic of its composition. Meanwhile, ‘U R ONLY ACHING’ oscillates between a maximal post-rock recording of the song by the whole eight-piece, complete with glitching autotuned vocals, and a minimal folk version that just features the vocals of Casper Hughes and Magdalena McLean, singing the song on a blustery day in Nunhead Cemetery.

The sections that make up sugar-sweet single ‘Tell me I never knew that’ deliberately sound glued together, whilst ‘Coldplay cover’ takes this to an extreme. A novel recording, it features half of the octet playing a fragment of a jagged folk song in one room, and the other half of the group playing a pastoral chamber pop piece a few rooms away. About halfway through, you hear the recording engineer Syd Kemp stand up with his microphone, amble between the rooms in a bid to connect the two disparate parts as one cohesive whole. Fractious harmonies, somehow beautifully entwined.

,,, as long as i long to memorise your sky ,,,, the latest recording patchwork from Elijah Jamal Asani, begins with the sound of an inquisitive bee. It’s a collection of nature recordings, with birdsong, rainfall, the gentle buzzing of crickets, and swished streams elegantly dovetailing with more human interferences: zither, wind chimes, wooden blocks, small bursts of padded synth, and softly fingered piano. These sounds were captured by Asani during one of the sixty nights that he recently spent in the Grand Canyon. This pastoral approach brings the landscape drifting into our ears as if floating in upon a spring morning’s breeze.

The third track, snappily titled ‘thirtyonecircles /// soft shoulder(s) confluence near second mesa’, calls to mind the ambience of David Toop and Brian Eno. A kick drum’s addition shifts this into Clams Casino’s Rainforest EP territory, albeit deconstructed and reimagined. The sounds are stretched, separated, isolated. They are soporific in the best way. It cleanses like a deep and untroubled sleep with percussive sounds on wood and soft fabric materials intertwining with light three-note synth pulses. It’s the new age airiness of Kankyō Ongaku relocated to Northwest Arizona’s ancient depths.

Remscéla could be considered a case of Milkweed circling back to their 2022 debut album, in that its ten songs are based on the opening segment of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the great canonical work of medieval Irish literature. The duo aren’t Irish, or at least don’t sound it when they speak. If your relationship with music requires you to view the performers’ interior emotions through their words, Milkweed – who said, in a tQ interview last year, that they don’t really think of themselves as songwriters – are going to dissatisfy you until further notice.

Personally, I think theirs is a fine gambit, and the music they pair it with is increasingly interesting and distinct. It’s recognisably folk music of the type you might hear played at a folk club, but dragged through all sorts of post-production mangles so the vocalist’s Appalachian-sounding lilt – tackling lyrics which don’t really use meters as such, leading to occurrences of extreme syllable crammage – and her bandmate’s acoustic accompaniment is forced to reckon with wow, flutter, flotsam and jetsam. On ‘Imbas Foresnai, The Light Of Foresight’, it sounds like it’s been recorded onto a cassette subsequently ran over by a lorry: given that one does not arrive at a fidelity like this by accident in 2025, you could consider the results slumming of a sort, but on the basest level this schtick satisfies this listener greatly.

One of the strengths of These New Puritans is how the expressive vulnerability of Jack Barnett’s vocals sit within the battering of twin brother George’s drumming. In this relationship, I’ve always heard a dance of the aggression and softness of masculinity, something that’s reinforced on their fifth album, Crooked Wing, by how it begins and ends with the full yet delicate vocal from Southend Boys Choir. As the years have passed since I first saw what was then a four-piece rattling away in tiny London venues, this dynamic has only become more pronounced. This is a band who can make music of the heart (as stunning duet with Caroline Polachek ‘Industrial Love Song’ proves), as well as the head and the body. As the mainstream has retreated from the sort of music that These New Puritans make, Jack and George Barnett seem to have responded by becoming ever more focused. With all facets of the corpus working in harmony, their music has an intimacy that isn’t inward-looking, but instead gives their art its intensity, in both execution and emotion.

Where 2019’s Inside The Rose at times recalled the 80s pop grandeur of Talk Talk and Tears For Fears, Crooked Wing is a gathering up of the Puritans’ sound into themselves. Romantics in every sense of the word, they sound so of this time, but entirely out it. In the drudging predictability of our algorithm and trend-driven age, this is a bold place for artists working to manipulate and conjure with the traditional rock and pop paradigms to be. Another masterpiece from this most singular of groups, Crooked Wing deserves to soar.

East London rapper and producer John Glacier confronts the duality of human existence on her debut studio album, Like A Ribbon. Split into three sections, each representing the fluid, evolving nature of a ribbon unfurling, the album comprises tracks drawn from a series of EPs, revealing a deeper impact in the context of a larger project, while carving out a distinctive niche at the intersection of pop and avant-garde sounds. 

The manipulation of glitchy pastoralism and new-age samples realise the constant tension of paradoxical living in the digital age: like a feedback loop between opposing forces – the respite of nature and the chaos of urban life; the natural, tangible world with the digital. The pairing of elemental imagery with contemporary themes interprets the wonder of nature disrupted by the stream of digital overwhelm: “This is my space, why they wanna friend me? In the garden, full of snakes and envy,” she laments, with equanimity, on ‘Emotions’.

Richard Dawson is a master at creating and becoming characters. As the narrator on End Of The Middle, each song finds him immersed in complex, yet instantly familiar stories, which he unwinds layer by layer. The opening track, ‘Bolt’, drops us in at the deep end. “I’m in the hall on the floor / Jen’s in her room watching Neighbours”. A family setting, ordinary in every way, suddenly becomes the scene of an extra-terrestrial event: “an empty page of heaven landed on our roof / leaped from room to room”. Something incredibly strange occurs, described with a precision that makes it both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. Then its meaning becomes ambiguous, and we are left to interpret events for ourselves. Dawson explains that, while he “thinks he knows what happens in each song,” we may have different ideas. The sophistication of this track, a haunting, melodic piece, takes the breath away.

Ambiguity is at the heart of the album. Everyday events are both what they seem and something else, depending on the listener. Our individual experiences give each of us a different reaction to what we are told, but drawn from common experience. The album is peppered with references to Blossom Hill, Good Morning Britain, allotments, exchanging house contracts, B&Q – but also with alien visitations, severed heads and the afterlife. Dawson is incapable of writing easy or expected songs, and his work is easier to understand in relation to writers in other forms than to musicians. Specifically, End Of The Middle has much in common with the work of playwright Annie Baker, perhaps the greatest stage writer working today. Baker creates situations, characters and dialogue which are ordinary in every way, to the extent that they feel unfamiliar on stage – and she reveals the deep strangeness inherent in normality. Supernatural events occur in suburban living rooms, B&Bs and spas. Dawson has a similar deep insight into the things we actually spend our time doing, and the weight they carry.

Splendour & Obedience is a more voluptuous effort than the scratchy edges of Decius’ Vol. I. It is party music for those frazzled by three consecutive nights consuming the hair, the tail, the whole of the dog. A magical thing seems to happen during the third night of non-stop revelry. Your mind and body submit, recalibrating to this new state of constant consumption. The new normal is accepted and, as long as you keep feeding that insatiable beast with liquids, pills, and powders, the sharp claws of a comedown remain out of reach, seemingly forever.

Whether it’s the lurching swing of blue-eyed soul on ‘Walking In The Heat’ with its strangely cool anxiety-tapped synth arpeggiator juxtaposing the lyrical temperature, or the building sunrise of chords and contorted digital glockenspiel tones that make up the finale of ‘Arctic Spring’, this quartet will be found swaddling a libidinal piston with a dirty electronic veneer. So, if you’re welcoming another wired morning, indulging in orgiastic dance floor exploits, or simply want to lose your head, Decius have got you more than covered.

Hexed! reveals Aya as a master of sound design, functioning as both a storytelling tool and as a descriptor of emotion. The last minute of ‘heat death’ sees the final electronic pulse go out, leaving the sounds of car wheels whooshing through rain-soaked asphalt. The track drops underwater at the very end, like a soul sinking to the ground, then soaking into a puddle as life continues without them, a dark joke. Aya’s voice is absent for the title track, on which she builds a sculptural altar of drone and feedback, her pain and dread physically palpable. The more minimalist ‘peach’ approximates the hard-soft of BDSM using whips as percussion, contrasted with gentle electronic pools in which aya’s quieted voice floats, tentatively. Her processed screams are layered with too-perfect harmonies, in avant-garde mimicry of nu-metal vocal dynamics.

As is often the case, the confrontation of recent trauma turns into an examination of earlier manifestations. On ‘droplets’, Aya remembers an instance of teenage vice “down dogshit alley”: “You followed me down a guinnel / Swaddled in my dank habit… I quench my thirst with poison”. Her whispered vocal tone and the beats vibrating underneath are confessional but seductive – again, she’s showing us the slippery relationship between pleasure and pain, past and present. The ASMR-adjacent soft industrial of the track is reminiscent of mid-90s Nine Inch Nails or ‘Inertia Creeps’ by Massive Attack. As the album progresses, Aya continues to play with references from her years as a teenage nu-metal and emo fan, as an act of de/reconstruction rather than regression – something she has in common with other experimental artists of her generation like Moin, Claire Rousay and Klein.