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

Moundabout came out of a megalithic roadtrip through the Irish Midlands to see Nurse With Wound, via the many stone circles, pillars and passage tombs that mark transition points between one world and the next. Goat Skull Table is a trance album, but not as we know it. The opening chant is followed by two shorter tracks, like squeezing through the tight entrance to a tomb, before it spreads out into an inner space with two ten-minute dream-state tracks. ‘Brave New World’ and ‘Am I Not’ are summoning songs, played on acoustic guitar, blurring the distinction between life and death. ‘Blood On My Blanket’ and ‘Wagon’ go full fugue, spinning layer upon layer of repetition and shift. They are ecstatic pieces. If any album can succeed in breaking through the veil, this is surely it.

Listened to this three times on a long train journey, I couldn’t get enough of the tooth and drone of the strings on ‘Melopea’. It turns out these came out of an instance when Amelia Cuni and her partner Werner Durand superimposed the former’s dhrupad singing onto a performance of Éliane Radigue’s Occam River II (for violinist Silvia Tarozzi and cellist Deborah Walker). It worked so well that they asked Tarozzi and Walker to collaborate properly, and the string players went off and made a new recording for Cuni. The result is a stunner, a hybrid of deep traditional vocal technique and the precision of strings players used to microtones and partials. ‘Bhoop-Murchana’ is a richer and more lyrical affair, expansive and fluid in its movements, with Anthea Caddy on cello and Durand on soprano saxophone, and Cuni’s tanpura occasionally breaking the surface.  

From benders in Seven Sisters and the smell of petrol stations off the North Circular, to mourning drifting friendships and ‘what could have been’, Real Lies’ critically acclaimed 2015 debut saw the electronic duo oscillate between the existential and the quintessential at whim. Similarly, 2022’s Lad Ash featured a delicate balance between nostalgia-laden reflections (queues outside the fish shop and post-rave disorientation) with musings on self-expression. With We Will Annihilate Our Enemies, Kev Kharas and Pat King continue to carry the torch for modern angst, and learning to love it in the process – pulling from an even broader palette of influences to create their most mature, refined work yet.

Here’s a perfect record to complement the winter gloom, if you’re willing to lean into it. Trio Rien Virgule have followed up their hulking 2021 release La Consolation Des Violettes, their first following the tragic loss of fourth member Jean-Marc Reilla, with an album that sounds even more labyrinthine (in fact the superb closing track is called ‘Labyrinthes’). It’s also less like something that’s dragged itself out of a dank basement but the band’s uncanny power hasn’t been diminished; there’s a crisp, sci-fi sheen to the twelve tracks here but they still amalgamate Eastern European folk, goth or metal-like minor chords, naïve synths, abstract noise, dramatic percussion, spring reverb pings and pops and a sensibility that’s attuned to Lovecraftian cosmic terror and the mood of the darkest fairytales. 

The debut full length from long-time sonic adventurers James Holden and Wacław Zimpel is a set of focused improvisations striking out for the cosmic zone, for inner space, the weightlessness of trance. Holden & Zimpel are explorers, chasing the ego death, when the music starts to make itself, melting time. This transcendental impulse reaches beyond language, making it tricky to write about. Consider how the word trance feels worn down and sticky. The Universe Will Take Care Of You is a helpful signpost of a title. Its music calls for colours and nature metaphors, animal spirits and the movement of the heavens.

Songs on Pulp’s first album in over two decades contain a series of wistful and not-so-wistful memories, such as a pratfall-strewn trek to Spike Island to see The Stone Roses – which actually is a second-hand memory, given that it all happened to co-songwriter and Jarv Is… collaborator Jason Buckle. ‘Tina’ returns like an apparition, being followed around by a soundtrack that sounds like Ennio Morricone at his warmest. Tina is a girl who Jarvis Cocker remembers seeing around Sheffield whose appearances took on a significance even though they never spoke. ‘Grown Ups’, meanwhile, is perhaps an answer to 1998’s ‘Help The Aged’, seen through the prism of experience rather than supposition. 

Facta’s sophomore album includes some of the most intricately produced music in the Wisdom Teeth catalogue. That in itself says a lot. Comprising only seven tracks, diverse in atmosphere, tone and energy, it grows on you instantly. Its eclectic tracklist provides a surprisingly cohesive listening experience with a clear sense of direction. The patina of Facta’s productions is reminiscent of an orchid – fragile, graceful and complex, as illustrated in the dawn song ‘Terminal’, bristling with shimmering pads and cicadas’ rhythmical ticks. ‘Laguna’, a dubby micro-tech nod to his companion K-LONE’s Cape Cira era, and Balearic ballad ‘settle’ similarly pull at your heartstrings. Everything in-between is pure class, a bonanza of crystalline hi-hats and snares, hefty kicks, beautiful modulated synths, fragmented voices and pads as gentle as an evening breeze. 

Speaking to The Wire this year, Bill Orcutt seemed to be almost as surprised as anyone that he’s recorded something quite so “conventional” with Orcutt Shelley Miller. The ex-member of Harry Pussy is known for his improv-prone guitar work and regular cacophonous duo sets with drummer Chris Corsano. Recently, Orcutt found himself hankering for another way of making a rumpus. “I wanted a band where they’re the backing track and you’re on top of it,” he explained. Talk about a rhythm section with pedigree: Ethan Miller of Howlin Rain, Comets On Fire etc. is on bass. At the drum stool is Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley. Those two cats provide the bouncy basis over which Orcutt shreds like a man possessed. Captured at a concert in Los Angeles, the set opens with the fast and fiery ‘A Star Is Born’. Next up is ‘An LA Funeral’. It’s mellower and soulful, in the tradition of Eddie Hazel when he was laying back and staring at the ceiling. ‘Unsafe At Any Speed’ has a twang to it, as if the trio are aspiring for Delta Blues at a punkier pace. Listening to ‘Four-Door Charger’ and ‘A Long Island Wedding’ any sensibly minded person will be hoping Neil Young hires these three righteous goons as his next festival backing band.

At what point does absence become its own memory? Liyou’s latest probes the uncertainty of this question, via a stunning inversion of her past work. Where she once juxtaposed knife-sharp scenes of familial tension and closeted transness against ambient landscapes, Every Video is achingly direct yet spare in its vocal/piano-forward explorations of love and distance, contrasting its emotive sharpness with a pronounced negative space—sonically and contextually. Like the breathtaking closing track—an evocative exercise in radical elision—it’s a record that implores you to dig alongside Liyou in making meaning out of what is left unresolved, unspoken, undocumented.

Italian doom quartet Messa are looking beyond the organic 70s vibes of their stunning 2022 opus Close on latest record The Spin, which self-consciously harks back to the glitzy synthesisers and heavily gated snares of the 80s instead – and if that admission just filled you with the same dread I got upon initially reading it, then fear not, as not only do the band wear this sound well, it’s resulted in perhaps their most focused, punchy album yet. There’s a strong goth influence throughout, readily apparent from both the spidery guitar twangs, crepuscular keys and pulsating bass lines that kick off both opener ‘Void Meridian’ and the stomping Siouxsie-fronted Killing Joke-isms of ‘At Races’. 

With her sixth studio album, the first with full band arrangements since 2018’s beloved drone opus ‘Dead Magic, Swedish organist Anna von Hausswolff reinvents herself as a purveyor of tilted, autre pop music. Touches of macabre jazz and splinters of almighty drone, as well as features from Iggy Pop and Ethel Cain, punctuate this gothic art-pop opus, but the real star is Von Hausswolff herself – her voice a visceral, operatic force of nature, and her organ an Earth-shaking wayback machine.

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.

The ex-Little Mix star turns out a genuinely eccentric solo debut with witty, maximalist takes on classic 00s pop. She’s frank about pop stardom but this is no woe-is-me post-girlband confessional.

Recording music on a regular basis for 36 years, as Chris Abrahams, Tony Buck and Lloyd Swanton have done as The Necks, is not in itself exceptional. It is however deeply uncommon for a group’s release this far down the line to stand as the ultimate expression of their craft. And yet there is a strong case for Disquiet, the 19th studio album by these tenacious Australians, being just that. Running to over three hours, with the longest of four pieces weighing in at 74 minutes alone, find here shimmering vistas of elegantly stuttering drums/bass/keys jazz minimalism recorded in exquisite detail.

Little known, but extremely good, Worldpeace DMT are a “shapeshifting acoustic project” – whatever the fuck that means – sprung from London’s largely annoying underground scene. Their shows involve cocaine use, cowboy chords and cunty (bad cunty) looking men in shirts emblazoned with “2007”. If you’re lucky, you might even catch Bobby Gillespie’s talentless children at one of them. But Worldpeace don’t really deserve to be defined by London, because they’re just miles better than lots of its bands. On The Velvet Underground & Rowan (which should be number one for album name alone), Leo Fincham and Rowan Miles (of fellow Londoners The Femcels) splice together brass, 8-bit ploinks and burp samples for an album of endless whimsy and genius facility for melody. Start with the Sugarcubes/ Cohen-esque duo ‘Love Yourself’. End with this live recording of the unreleased ‘Year of the Dragon’ at the scene’s renowned Old Street flat venue. London’s music scene has a lot of problems right now but, thankfully, Worldpeace DMT aren’t one of them.  

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.

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. 

A frequent criticism I have for contemporary ambient music is that much of it feels like soundtrack-bait, utilising big, dramatic crescendos to force a sense of catharsis into the music that doesn’t feel genuine, and rather feels designed to manipulate the emotions of the listener. The six pieces on Travelling Light are, in fact, unabashedly cinematic, but in the same sense that Robby Müller’s film work is cinematic. Both works occupy a medium between the everyday and some unknown force, one which can perceive an overwhelming beauty and strangeness in, say, a long walk home. In this sense, Rafael Toral evokes such sweeping visions not by bashing his listeners over the head with his pathos, but through a sense of comprehensive listening that identifies the full cosmic scope of these standards.

If Melvin Gibbs wanted to live in the past, he would certainly have plenty to work with. As a member of Ronald Shannon Jackson & the Decoding Society, Power Tools, and Sonny Sharrock’s band, Gibbs’ electric bass work was often the glue holding together the heaviest jazz-rock groups of the era. His latest album, Amasia: Anamibia Sessions Vol. 2, owes its origins to a prompt from legendary video artist Arthur Jafa to have a group of musicians work off of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. However, in no way is this yet another electric Miles tribute project. On Amasia, Gibbs merely uses the insular creative framework that Miles and producer Teo Macero mastered in the 70s as a jumping-off point for an entirely different planet of strange.

Showbiz! opener ‘Bear Trap’ lays the groundwork for MIKE’s characteristically laid-back tone, a soulful vocal sample and shimmering piano floating unassumingly behind the track’s resonant bass. But at two minutes, the vibe shifts, picking up speed and rhythm, as if to introduce an entirely new point of view or to suggest a kind of levelling up. Instead though, we’re led into ‘Clown Of The Class (Work Harder)’, returning the timbre to the earlier serenity of MIKE’s nonchalant delivery. A similar effect occurs on ‘Artist Of The Century’, which switches up halfway, drifting away to nothing before the start of ‘What U Bouta Do? / A Star Was Born’. It has a hypnotic feel, as if you’re being teased in and then gently pushed out by MIKE’s lo-fi delivery.