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

This thinly veiled sequel to Cosey Fanni Tutti’s last solo outing six years ago continues in much the same fertile vein as her post-Throbbing Gristle output. At the same time, it also appears a little more guarded, as if the candid moments in her early days have left her more cautious. 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.

The eight songs contained within The Heart Is In The Body are not entirely without precedent. One might consider Lost Crowns to be akin to a wilder Gentle Giant, had they been inspired by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Conlon Nancarrow, instead of medieval and baroque chamber music. The work of the Henry Cow and Art Bears-inspired American Rock In Opposition groups Thinking Plague and 5uus are also obvious touchpoints, although Lost Crowns’ use of the darker kind of English folk exemplified by Comus, as well as a propensity for undeniably earworm-worthy riffs and vocal melodies, mark them apart from those bands. Undoubtedly, they will have crossover appeal for Cardiacs fans too, though it’s harder to draw any direct comparison there, with Tim Smith having always had an ear for a certain kind of psychedelic pop. This music will not be for everyone. Accusations of being wilfully difficult or overly composed are often fielded at such music (and are not entirely without foundation).

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 Jules 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. This approach is part of what makes the fraught compositions of Ghost/Spirit a massive push forward in experimentation for Reidy, especially taking into consideration their recent works, namely 2023’s Trances and 2024’s ‘Rave Angels’. Trances played as variations of extended, slow-moving meditations and embraced a singing-bowl rhythmic flow. For all its lines about breathing, Ghost/Spirit has a decidedly non-meditative musical and lyrical tension. Reidy’s guitar playing on Trances fit as part of the movement of songs. It’s now a statement of self, often at odds among cut-ups of electronic rhythms and patchwork samples of drums and cello.

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. 

Marie Davidson’s sixth album finds the Canadian artist with one eye on the dance floor, the other lingering suspiciously on her smartphone. Produced in collaboration with Soulwax and Pierre Guerineau (Davidson’s partner in minimal wave duo Essaie Pas), City Of Clowns re-embraces the precise, machine-tooled techno and strutting electroclash of 2018’s Working Class Woman, but there’s a stronger sense of both the personal and the political here – not to mention a clear distrust of big tech and the insidious way it has come to monetise and dominate our lives.

The Worm is a character created by Cornwall performance artist Amy Lawrence, one they imagine travelling into a parallel Celtic landscape. The project’s primary expression is onstage, where, in the artist’s words, they embrace “music, costume, clowning and spoken word recitals inspired by opera and dance from the early 20th century”. Presented purely on record as Pantilde, however, stripped of those multi-disciplinary bells and whistles, it’s no less engaging. After an enchanting opener, ‘Through Greenness’ – a recorder melody set to the sound of a babbling brook that’s akin to seeing a colourful alien flower bloom amidst green and brown undergrowth – comes ‘Portal’. “When you grow up, you will go through some kind of portal, made of birds,” relay eerie and detached vocals to an abstracted but organic backing of drones and twangs.

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, Preservation, Sadhugold, Shabaka Hutchings, DJ Haram, Saint Abdullah, and many others besides. And yet, the sound holds together. Disorienting, yes. But deliberate. Woods is the constant: his voice measured, ghostly, sometimes smirking.

Rosalía’s fourth album, LUX, stands in firm opposition to the dopamine rush of the modern instant gratification age defined by social media doom-scrolling and algorithm-based streaming playlists. Split into four movements, it’s a highly engrossing gift of avant-garde pop rooted in classical music that sees the lead artist and her collaborators sing in 13 different languages: her native Spanish and Catalan, as well as English, French, Italian, Arabic, Japanese, Ukrainian and more. Centred around sweeping orchestral arrangements and Rosalía’s jaw-dropping, sometimes operatic vocal chops, the record’s 15 songs touch on the intense give-and-take of romantic relationships, heartbreak and present-day femininity. Along the way, it folds in flashes of flamenco (‘La Rumba Del Perdon’); waltz (the playful ‘La Perla’); tango and dembow (Dios Es Un Stalker); and maximalist chamber pop (the Björk and Yves Tumor-featuring lead single ‘Berghain’), as Rosalía continues to toy with the limits of modern pop music and expand on her ever-absorbing sound.

On Crying The Neck, 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. The LP is 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.

Stardust is undoubtedly Danny Brown leaning into pop – specifically hyperpop – more than he ever has before. After the insular mood of previous LP Quaranta, with its themes of addiction and depression, it’s refreshing to hear a now-sober Brown having unabashed neon-lit fun. He’s brought in a bunch of hyperpop artists as guests: 8485 provides a sweet chorus for ‘Flowers’, sibling duo Frost Children turn ‘Green Light’ into an emo rave, and Issbrokie adds a bratty bubblegum verse to ‘Whatever The Case’. Digital hardcore artist femtanyl energises ‘1L0v3myL1f3!’ with synthetic breaks, easing from a heady, hectic rush to a blissful plateau – the audio equivalent of faking it ‘till you make it. Brown is earnest about his new-found lust for life post-addiction, winking to the audience on occasion (“We all love a comeback story”).

In recent years, Stereolab have become something of a household name, often quoted as an influence on bands like Vanishing Twin or The Orielles. But in a way that feels almost playfully in spite of this cosy familiarity, Instant Holograms On Metal Film explores textures and melodies inspired by disco, techno and lo-fi electronic music from the 1970s and 80s. Don’t get me wrong, Instant Holograms On Metal Film preserves much of the classic Stereolab sound, retaining that motorik, locked-in feel. Their palette is so much more rhythmically dense, adventurous and even cinematic, however. This is thanks to the band’s collaboration with Cooper Crain and Rob Frye of Bitchin’ Bajas, whose own sonic explorations feel like the perfect compliment.

Clear Vortex Chamber, Alexander Tucker’s latest as Microcorps, swirls samples of his own bass and cello performances into a beat-laden, sonic miasma. The straddling and blending of juxtaposed elements and ideas exemplifies the artist’s interest in merging the digital with the tangible, the futuristic with the ancient, ritual with freedom, collaboration with individual expression, and art with music. It’s an album forged from collaboration, with Elvin Brandhi, Phew, Justin K. Broadrick, Karl D’Silva, and Karl O’Connor all pitching in.

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.

Glitterbeat claims this is the first time that Los Pirañas’ live methodology – with Eblis Alvarez feeding his electric guitar through a laptop, layering circular loops to build dense arrangements knit together with Mario Galeano’s nurturing bass, and propelled by Pedro 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, 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.

Radio Libertadora ! is inseparable from its sociopolitical context. MCs are incendiary, with frothing fire vocals distinct from São Paulo sound ostentação, a far more aspirational form of funk. On ‘BEAT SUGA ALMA’, the kid MC sounds every bit as tough as the revved engine synths he’s surrounded by, while the call to prayer on ‘SUA FILHA QUER OS D’ marks the favela as righteous holy ground, as well as a site of insurrectionary potential. There’s a real focus on repetitious insistence, the sonic texture of every syllable. Unlike hip hop where the beat is often the bedding for an MC to flex, here they are enmeshed.

For anyone who has heard Sirom’s previous albums, much on In The Wind Of Night, Hard-Fallen Incantations Whisper will be familiar – especially the insistent quality of its seven tracks. The longest of these, ‘The Hangman’s Shadow Fifteen Years On’, ominous and brooding, stretches out over close to nineteen minutes. As with much of the record, it incorporates elements of drone. But Širom aren’t playing drone music per se. The track gains coherence from an underlying pulse, akin to a pre-set element in a backing track.

Sleep In The Shadow Of The Alternator is a dream: a deep immersion in another world that is like and unlike our own, described through abandoned landscape, wrecked machines and lost purpose. The dream is here and now, a post-industrial Britain inspired by Leo Chadburn’s East Midlands home town, marked by the closed power stations and coal mines, retreating back to the land and back to the future. Around his soft, insistent voice, layers of sound rise and fall. On ‘The Body Becomes A Viewfinder’, an electronic sea seems to take over as waves close in. ‘Magic Flora Of The East Midlands’ employs Gregorian chant, while ‘Move Like A Freight Train’ uses percussion to tap out a metallic, trundling, train track beat.

On Antigone, Eiko Ishibashi moves away from the loopy, odd time signature-driven pop of earlier albums such as Car And Freezer. The record focuses more on 70s-inflected chord progressions and builds, with 80s-esque ambiance and reverb, and plenty of stylistic twists and turns along the way. ‘Trial’ has dense layers of horns that give the track a foggy, mystifying air similar to Angelo Badalementi’s soundtrack work, but it’s embedded in a deep, post-punk-like rhythmic pulse, courtesy of bassist Marty Holoubek and percussionist Joe Talia. Listening to Antigone, one can hear everything Ishibashi has achieved in these fruitful past few years coming to a head. It’s a risk-taking, ambitious album-length statement that further cements Ishibashi’s place in a rare pantheon of artists – one including O’Rourke, Scott Walker and Autechre – making some of their best work thirty-plus years into their career.

Loaded with luridly colourful synth melodies, distorted 808s and enough bass to rapidly induce a migraine, OsamaSon’s third full-length project sees him push significantly past the Playboi Carti imitations of past records. Executive produced by North Carolina beatmaker wegonebeok (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 and plugg. Lit up throughout by OsamaSon’s care-free, autotune-aided warbles, the beats on tracks like ‘Mufasa’ and ‘Ref’ are pure granulated noise, while the Skrillex-sampling ‘The Whole World Is Free’ is jarringly addictive. For more like this, check out the rapper’s equally befuddling second album of 2025, psykotic.

Several songs on Antidepressants share a thematic link with the synthetic happiness of the medication. The title track is immediate, but also cleverly constructed: the melody of the chorus bounces between a limited range of notes like emotions streamlined by medication. The New Order-esque ‘Trance State’ is a more literal take on synthesis, an impressionistic song about dissociation driven by Codling’s prominent electronics and Mat Osman’s Peter Hook-esque bass. ‘June Rain’ is a magical realist dreampop lament. Brett Anderson describes “walking into the traffic flow”, but it’s unclear whether his protagonist is suicidal or a ghost.