The Quietus Albums of the Year 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.

On Offshore, Nadeem Din-Gabisi takes his relationship with football as a foundation to explore broader complexities of identity, both English and diasporic. In order to not be too constrained only by his direct experience (though it is highly autobiographical), he developed an alias for the project, ‘Jack Surname George in the Land of Hope and Glory’ in order to do so, a figure who garbs himself in sporting paraphernalia: red and white beanies, caps and tracksuits, adorned with the St. George’s cross. Offshore is an album that provides no easy answers or final decisions. Reminders of colonial trauma are peppered throughout the record, in the face of which Jack presents a conflicted figure, embodying the mixed emotions that his creator shares as he wrestles with the question of whether England can be his.

On The Passionate Ones, Marcus Brown inhabits a space somewhere between 1980s pop and 1990s R&B, a site he excavates with thoroughly modern tools. The production is layered, dense with samples and wonky earworms, all carried along on the lazy river of his muddied Barry White baritone. The album sounds rich, even if the people Brown sings about (and for) are not. The songs themselves are brain-swirls of half-remembered fragments, dreams, bits of song, ephemera that repeats in your mind against the everyday wash of thought. You’re captured in its sticky, squelchy synth web from start to finish. Opener ‘Automatic Love’ builds to a satisfying bass wobble, ‘Crazy People’ arrives at an even more satisfying, juddering synth breakdown, while lead single ‘Max Potential’ operates like a self-help mantra delivered via thick, twisting guitar and distorted melody. The aforementioned glittering piano and lovably zany production on ‘9 2 5’ beams through like a break in the clouds, like a rare moment of unbridled joy in a life dominated by work.

Like a bath drawn to slightly the wrong temperature, Unterhaltungen mit Larven und Überresten (“Conversations with Larvae and Remains”) requires slow, careful immersion. Sampled voices and found footage drift in and out like a radio dial operated by a Ouija board. Minute by minute, it is unsettling – and yet, in totality, the results are peculiarly comforting. By the end, you feel that you and Schoppik have been through something together – a not entirely reassuring undertaking, but one that has been worth the effort. A great deal of this record is rooted in dissonance and the hint of a melody – a fragment of a fragment, a portrait drawn with smoke. But there are relatively conventional tunes, too, under the topsoil of static. With its suggestion of a cooed vocal, ‘Das Alles Dass’ carries echoes of Sigur Rós in their “Soundtracking David Attenborough” Takk period. The true curveball is ‘Letzte Lichter’ (“Last Lights”), which jump scares the unsuspecting listener by taking the form of a more or less conventional song, with Jota Solo, of the band Nový Svěstark, delivering an earnest vocal reminiscent of David Bowie on side two of Low or Heroes. 

Milkweed make 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.

Arnold Dreyblatt, the veteran New York minimalist composer, instrument designer and advocate for just intonation/non-standard tuning has lived in Berlin since the mid-80s, and in more recent years, he has come to count three members of Baltimore’s Horse Lords as expatriate friends in the city. With veteran Italian drummer Andrea Belfi standing in for Sam Haberman who had remained behind in the States, the ensemble have produced an album which is as ecstatic and pupil-dilating as it is rigorous in its pursuit of specific harmonic overtones and shimmering electroacoustic effects. 

Altruism draws from a palette established on Dale Cornish’s 2022 record Traditional Music Of South London, pulling on a history of listening to and playing sounds that have spanned electroclash and harsh electronic music, among being involved in various other bands and projects over the years. His current sound fuses the snap and tickle of electroclash, and the grit and grind of Pan Sonic; plastic synth stabs and brittle rattlings punctuate his swaggering South London invocations, which often sit front and centre.

Гільдеґарда reinterprets the compositions of the 12th-century prioress, philosopher and visionary Hildegard of Bingen. Synthesised suites and Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko’s traditional Ukrainian singing intertwine in intense polyphonic music, full of spiritual tension. The album contains two extended pieces: ‘O Ignis Spiritus Paracliti’ and ‘O Tu Suavissima Virga’. The first is an energetic, impetuous, fiery prayer for life. The composition unfolds slowly, from gentle drones to a monumental wave of sound that overwhelms the finale. The second track – cooler, more contemplative, humming à la murmurando – pays tribute to St. Mary. Bass drones provide the foundation for Saienko’s vocals, which move with solemnity and focus.

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.

,,, 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.

Composed largely between Jerskin Fendrix’s film score work, Once Upon A Time… In Shropshire is an attempt to soundtrack the artist’s own life story. Having been raised in the West Midlands, the songs are infused with references from his formative years, restoring the memories in detailed lyrics on the opening ‘Beth’s Farm’: “We kiss beneath the apple tree / And I’ve never felt so in love until now / Daisy-chain the night sat on the farm / Play Kanye, play rosey, play Mulan”. Despite the American hip hop musician mentioned, the rustic idyll is conveyed through an anthemic melody and vocal line, somewhat reminiscent of Coldplay from their Viva La Vida period.​

Naturally, the film work infiltrates the texture of the album – some tracks have distinct strains of his score for Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things. Similar, droll and at times dramatic effects are achieved through a combination of strings and electronic sounds, seemingly extracted from a Buchla synthesiser. While drawing from childhood memories of family gatherings, for example, this album is a sonic fantasy world, whose colourful and dense arrangements underscore the nostalgic element. Still, it’s not escapist. Certain tracks, like the pensive ‘Mum & Dad’ are written as a response to the passing of dear ones (Jerskin Fendrix lost a few friends and family members, including his father, while working on the album). It starts as a ballad featuring impressionistic piano and the artist’s velvety baritone vocals and elevates with a sudden crescendo halfway. The choir here doesn’t sound very far from Poor Things, so the real and cinematic worlds merge even further. Nevertheless, the effect is striking.

Despite being recorded live, like all of France’s previous releases, this is the group’s most ‘produced’ album to date. Unlike, for example, the classic France Do Den Haag Church which was a ‘hit record and hope’ job (a Zoom recorder placed on the floor), Destino Scifosi was deliberately set-up, with Mim from the a1000p label bringing his studio set-up to record the band at the Rituale festival in 2022, close-mic’ing the amps and setting up other microphones hundreds of metres away.

With everything then being mixed by Mim, the resulting recording is the thickest, most hard-driving sound the trio have achieved on a record, with a weirdly pleasing, almost rubbery snare sound and the white heat of the hurdy-gurdy scalding your ears. It’s also fun at times to try to figure out whether you’re hearing whoops and whistles from the crowd, squeals from the hurdy-gurdy or a combination of both.

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’.

The first minute of ‘My Garden’ opens The Spiritual Sound in dramatic and instructive style. A count-in of bass hits launches a storm of blast beats and noise, dropping swiftly into a riff topped with squalling guitar, before settling to a more familiar metal chug as the caustic vocals come in. When it hits the chorus, everything eases back, frontman Dan Meyer singing softly over strummed chords and busy but muffled percussion. The great joy of Agriculture’s music is the way they make these abrupt shifts flow naturally. On their second album, they broaden the scope of their sound while integrating its many aspects more fluidly.

The album’s title derives from the band’s T-shirt slogan / mission statement / mantra: “I love the spiritual sound of ecstatic black metal by the band Agriculture.” An assertion that appears simultaneously absurd, annoying, self-mocking, and completely sincere. The title track is only a thirty-second guitar drone, an atmospheric intro to ‘Dan’s Love Song’, a dreamy cloud of warm, shoegazey distortion and soft vocals. It’s beautiful. And if, sonically, it’s the most unusual track on the record, it also strangely feels like the closest to its heart.

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.

With SickElixir, Jamie Roberts has shifted gears again, seemingly predicting the next sonic iteration – and accompanying societal collapse. It warns of an impending future, of the age of automation gone horribly wrong. Where uncontrollable robotics lash out. A time when the feeding frenzies of large language models have finally been sated. When humans are deemed superfluous, tossed aside, and our new mechanical overlords party all night long to artificially intelligent dance music.

Voices are mangled and obscured throughout SickElixir. Their messages teeter on the cusp of comprehension but rarely tip over. Shrouded utterances scrape across the battery of mutated and fuzz-strewn synths on ‘TCP Burn’, clashing forcefully with drums that rocket about like Ritalin tics. There is a glimmer of humanity amongst the rampaging machine music, however. The howls at the heart of ‘Sonkind, whilst evidently metallic, express a cathartic emotion rooted not only in straining sinews and pumping ventricles, but also in a deep sense of loss. Fourth track ‘Rabbit Hole’ finds Monstera Black’s strangely soulful serenade adding a fresh and humane dynamic to Blawan’s off-kilter digital eruptions and strangely fleshy productions. Her cry of “I’m in a rabbit hole, just keep dancing” is one of the rare moments of vocal clarity.

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 voice of a treble voice 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.

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.

Outside Over There opens with a sample of Stewart Lee threading a joke about Magners Pear Cider into his diverticulitis diagnosis. Considering EarthBall’s penchant for free-roaming instrumentals that don’t so much expand upon the main theme as plunder its village and torch all the domiciles, it’s fitting to kick things off with a comedian who has claimed that he brings elements of free jazz into his comedy. The untethered brass squawks that make up ‘100%’ provide a brain-scudding platform from which EarthBall then launch the raggedy blend of propulsive rhythms, hysterical skronk, and fearful outsider psych that forms second track ‘Helsinki’. It’s a song that comes lurching out of the woods like it’s either being stalked or doing the stalking.

Beginning with a saxophone freak-out and getting only madder from there, the twelve-minute finale, ‘And Music Shall Untune The Sky’ is where all hell truly shrieks loose. It’s a whirling dervish trapped in a plate glass window shop. Thunderous bass and drums race for the nearest exit whilst the group’s Jeremy Van Wych hollers and wails in a fashion that makes exploded doors seem less unhinged. The band sound as if they’re tunnelling against time, tearing through walls of ancient stone, chased by the fiery liquid of the planet’s collapsing core. They have become the pressurised sphere holding the earth together. Their heavy blend of burning low-end, panicked beats, and sparking guitars provide the requisite mass and gravitational pull to stop this EarthBall from breaking apart, continents from cracking and tipping into parting oceans, mountains from piercing through lakes, the belt of the equator from expanding and entire countries splitting off and spiralling away into the great, cold chasm of space.

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.