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

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.

It’s not the many modes a Mei Semones song goes through that’s thrilling in itself, but how she delights in the exhilaration around every bend. Her songs are rooted in the brightness of bedroom pop and bossa nova, but she commands dynamics and arrangements with the confidence of a jazz bandleader, complete with Pat Metheny-inflected guitar runs. Animaru flits between these realms with such fluidity that it’s hard to pin down which even makes up the dominant style… but therein lies the joy, right? Semones does whatever she wants, but she lets you share in the contagious ecstasy of it too.

Throughout Hymnal, Lyra Pramuk’s approach to singing is downright mesmerising. I’d dare call it ASMR-ish, but compared to the anaesthetising effects of trigger sounds and sights, her delivery 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.

Bar italia (Double Virgo plus lead singer Nina Cristante) were the subject of a largely critical album review in this very publication. In my view the piece discounted the trio’s unmistakable penchant for melody and weird spidery chord progressions, discounting the supremely catchy output of best buds Sam Fenton and Jezmi Tarik Fehmi, which reaches its apex on Shakedown. As a duo, the result is more drunken Focusrite fuckery than it is polished model-pop – weaving Teenage Fanclub-y melodies with shit double vocals and shit anguished lyrics. Split between Fehmi’s sexy caterwauling and Fenton’s sleekit nasals, the duo have the guts to put out throwaway music – something that most modern guitar bands do badly or not at all. And it’s done ridiculously well.

A four-piece on this release, Traidora was previously the one-woman band of Eva Leblanc, resident in the UK for a decade after time spent in Venezuela, Chile and mainland Europe. Her songs are informed by this, and by her existence as a trans woman. Una mujer trans sin país’ closing song is called ‘Disgender’, a title I for one am pleased this specific group have used; it’s 17 seconds long and in something like an early grindcore style. In that respect, it’s an atypical example of this release, but the band are in certified speedfreak mode a sight more often than you might expect if you’ve heard 2023 record Un cuerpo trans lleno de odio or even caught a Traidora live show in recent months.

What Jennifer Reid recognises perhaps more than anyone else in her field is that there’s really no need to ‘breathe life’, that old songs are still brimming and bubbling with life of their own. The trick instead is to channel that energy, to allow it to possess you, to mingle with your own vitality and expel it into the present. And boy, does The Ballad Of The Gatekeeper feel alive. Reid has an intense charisma, and she uses accompaniment sparingly. It is occasionally theatrical, but at no point does it feel imitative or like a recreation. Thematic parallels between past and present are easy to locate. Consider the resonance of the titular characters on ‘Poor Little Factory Girls’ that draw parallels between 19th century Lancashire weavers and modern day South Asian garment workers (among whom Reid has spent time), for instance. Though steeped in the history and dialects of northern England, this is a record of universal resonance.

Classically trained pianist Kelly Moran follows up last year’s excellent Moves In The Field by revisiting some earlier compositions, reframed in the glittery light of a disco ball. Moran’s prepared piano shimmers alongside textured synths, with the melodic sense of a Sakamoto score.

Making a clean break from his old band Sprain, LA noise rock polymath Alexander Gregory Kent returns with a project that is more ambitious, visceral, and bloodthirsty than anything in his back catalogue. A heavy post rock grotesquery stitched together from hundreds of hours of rehearsals, this blasted opus channels Swans, Pere Ubu and Xiu Xiu as Kent delivers his most addictive work to date.

It appears Flesh Narc’s ambitions are to disorientate to the point of calvaria-fracturing migraine. To ensure such results, Yokers was recorded with a double-drummer lineup, like all the best bands have. The quintet’s other noises were made using guitars, bass, synthesizers, percussion and tape manipulation. Oh, and vocals in the key of nasally chanting and shouting through gargle effects. It makes for quite the cacophony and resembles, at different points, the following phenomena: Sonic Youth, in their bratty years, having a horrific accident on a stairwell; Liars, in between their first album and iconoclastic second one, trapped inside a haunted tumble dryer; Butthole Surfers scrapping with Ween; Destruction Unit throwing spanners at CCR Headcleaner with slurred retorts; Magik Markers pushed backwards into a factory-sized soup blender; a band you’d see lower down the bill in the glory days of All Tomorrow’s Parties whose entire discography existed only in the format of CD-R or, at best, cassette. Flesh Narc are from Texas, of course. 

The second album by The Tubs is accessible, in the sense of centering the inherent tunefulness of its folk rock/UK jangle/mid 80s Minneapolis punk combined approach, and in featuring lyrics that sound drawn from a life familiar. Conversely, on Cotton Crown this inspired Celtic brotherhood (three Welshmen to one Scot) give their dadrock tendencies an amphetamine jab, and vocalist Owen Williams sings of matters that are deeply personal, in the sense of applying to his experiences and no-one else’s on the planet.

Post rock was always a big blanket term which needed to be broken down further. In one of its corners, for instance, was the fun end of the scene. There frolicked the likes of Trans Am and Oneida. Over in the more SERIOUS ART section were Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Explosions In The Sky and Sigur Rós. Bouncing between were Mogwai, who sometimes gave silly song titles to sad-sounding music. Seattle’s Kinski were, and remain, in the light-hearted faction. Their tenth album opens with ‘Do You Like Long Hair?’, an instrumental that rocks in a warm and gentle fashion at first, a little like something from the Sonic Youth rarities collection The Destroyed Room. It then gets more crunchy and sparkly at the same time, suggesting J Mascis is guesting with Hawkwind. ‘Staircase Wit’ progresses along a similarly enjoyable art-rock-to-space-rock trajectory. ‘Slovenian Fighting Jacket’ brings things down a notch with its slower and moodier minimalism. Only briefly, however, as its second half rockets up again. The acoustic-based ‘Her Absence Feels Like a Presence’ stays calm and dreamy throughout. Of the few songs with vocals, the title track is slacker rock rendered in a phatter fashion, while ‘Experimental Hugs’ is a fast-paced and bouncy number with shades of Superchunk. File under “FUN MUSIC”. 

In the five years since their short and punchy LP Immersion, the world has given Primitive Man plenty to be horrified about. It’s little surprise that Observance, haunted by personal suffering, techno feudalism and fears of a collapsing American society, easily breaks the one-hour barrier. The rage-filled nihilistic tone is best captured in ‘Social Contract’: “Living the blues inside the body of a dead god fucking the void / With 450 million motherfucking guns, things do not have to be this way.” The time between albums has clearly enabled the band to refine every section, song and transition. The seven tracks are structured like a towering pyramid: a central harsh noise interlude buttressed by two fourteen-minute slabs of doom metal, and bookended by the ‘shorter’ tracks. The effect is that once you begin the journey through the album, there is no quick escape to shorter tracks. You are lashed to the bow for the duration.

CV Vision is a Berlin-based musician who makes music like an alien who has been tasked with back engineering lounge, exotica and late 60s style psychedelic pop music using only these mid-90s recordings for reference. So if you’d ever wondered what a mix of Jane Weaver, Hieroglyphic Being, Stock, Hausen & Walkman with David Axelrod producing would sound like, maybe it’s time to stop wondering. Ten out of ten for the cheeky Earl Brutus lift as well. 

Album opener ‘Canaan Land’ marries the laid-back but detailed reggae lilt of Minelli’s instrumental with sweet ear-worm vocals from Barbadian legend Dennis Bovell. The switch up from this piece to ‘Sumptuous Promise’, a spacious and trippy instrumental equipped with classic dub echoes and looping treated percussion, is a genius turn. Minelli’s attention to the flow of an album, is one of the many strengths of Clams As A Main Meal. Just when it feels like you have a measure of his sound palette, he throws in a sonic curveball to mix things up – be it the charming melody of the wordless vocals on ‘Watercraft Apologist’ or the ear-grabbing and spacey synth textures and rattling low key breakbeat of ‘Calopify Now!’.

Smerz are still working in the zone where club music, art-school minimalism and emotional confession overlap. Big City Life operates on a kind of low-battery logic: everything flickers, fades or folds back on itself with hypnotic intention. There are ideas introduced and strategically abandoned. Beats arrive late and leave early by design. Melodies make brief, tantalising appearances. It’s the feeling of living inside half-finished conversations, multiple tabs open, a hundred things happening at once, and nothing really landing.

Completing a trio of late period masterpiece pop albums along with 2020’s Crazy Hearts and 2023’s Jump Into Love, Adventure finds Half Japanese as ebullient as ever, with Jad Fair’s inspirational optimism perfectly framed by his long-standing backing band over the course of twelve tracks. The most musically diverse of the three releases, Adventure also comes across as more wistful and reflective than its predecessors, perhaps influenced in this respect by the death of long-time member Mick Hobbs at the start of the year. This is far from being a melancholic work, however, and its cumulative effect on listeners open to its charms is so elevating of mood that it should perhaps be available on prescription to those of us who might need the simultaneous hug and pep talk that it offers. Given that such a diagnosis likely applies to a very large percentage of us during these difficult times, it’s an irrefutable argument, as far as I’m concerned, that Half Japanese are deserving of a much bigger audience. 

Luster is (ironically) far more collaborative than 2019’s All My People, Maria Somerville’s self-released first album. She returned to her native Connemara from Dublin in 2020, landing among a community of musicians who helped to build the album’s world, including Lankum’s Ian Lynch and his uilleann pipes. This is a Connemara tugged closer towards the 21st century. Yet the rain still beats and the waves still break. Luster ends with a field recording of coastal surf, as well as an organ that stirs up some deeper, holier flavour of the land. “If you can’t say something new it’s alright,” Somerville sings on ‘Stonefly’, and in an era of genre-less music, it’s nice to hear an album that does one thing and does it well, capturing a landscape so old it never really gets old.

I keep coming back to the last ten seconds of ‘ON FLEEK’, a cut from the 18-year-old Atlanta artist Che’s REST IN BASS. Under a staggered 8-bit mosh, the beat is cut up with what sounds like gravel blowing its nose. Che follows in the rage footsteps of fellow ATLien Playboi Carti in a chase for ever-escalating levels of extremity. He’s a self-professed rockstar, a livewire hedonist, and on ‘DIE YOUNG’, he even prophesises, “I’ma die young, we ain’t ever growin’ up.” The music’s body is all raucous punk energy, but its head is off disassociating. Take closer ‘BA$$’, built around a Beach House sample that is then buried under stacks of charred compression. For the digital native, blissed out is a destination you need a whole lotta decibels to get to. Billowing layers of texture alone just don’t cut it. Che’s is a sound that would rattle old heads still wedded to the 90s, but he pays them no mind.

Previously, Clipping.’s Daveed Diggs claustrophobically spat bars onto nervous instrumentals made of samples of alarm clocks (as on their 2014 debut album CLPPNG), or the group closed their albums by performing contemporary classical pieces (like including Annea Lockwood’s ‘Piano Burning’ on 2019 record There Existed An Addiction To Blood), but Dead Channel Sky, conversely, is something you can safely blast on the car radio while on the highway. It blends sounds from the hardcore continuum, like jungle, breakbeat and acid, with West Coast hip hop and sounds of phreaking (hacking telephones) to show what it would approximately sound like if Ice T’s J Bone from Johnny Mnemonic had a musical project besides underground resistance.

The latest from Bath’s best-ever pop star is not quite as gossamer-light as previous hits ‘Boys A Liar’ and ‘Mosquito’. Lead-up singles like ‘Tonight’ and ‘Illegal’ immediately signalled a harder, faster, more dancefloor-friendly sound. Fancy That is still every bit as infectious as those aforementioned singles, though. Magpie-like, PinkPantheress is pinching bits from the likes of Underworld, Basement Jaxx and Sugababes, but it’s the skipping 2-step beats that situate these songs most firmly in the late 90s, some years before the singer was even born. There is a swirly rubberiness to the sound here, a post-K-pop effervescence that marks it as distinctly of the now. I have no idea how heavily PinkPantheress’s voice has been processed in the studio, but she sounds to me like someone who was born with an autotune filter built into her throat. There simply aren’t enough people around trying to make music sound this fun.