Music of the Month: The Best Albums and Tracks of May 2025

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.

The band’s indefinite hiatus has not been in vain, as they have clearly been spending this time carefully piecing together what feels like their strongest album in years. Instant Holograms on Metal Film also feels particularly emotionally resonant. While their previous release Not Music still had Stereolab’s wonderful melodic sensibilities, its production was considerably more claustrophobic, distracted and distant compared to the openness we find on their latest. Maybe this is something to do with Stereolab finding perfect collaborators (as they did with Nurse With Wound on Simple Headphone Mind). With Bitchin’ Bajas members too, it sounds like they’re relaxed and open to exploration, making for a suite of songs as bright as its yolk-yellow album art.

Turning sixty and heading to Nashville to record his third solo album – or eighth it you include his Torsten The Bareback Saint projects – allows Bell to exist outside the Erasure bubble. Working with producer and co-writer Dave Audé (with whom he has previous, although not quite so much previous as with Vince Clarke), he’s come up with ten numbers that linger plenty enough for earwormery to set in. Operating in the comfort zone of his pop/dance/gospel template, he’s always been the cheerleader for Erasure’s big pop side, and Ten Crowns, despite sounding like the name of a pub (it’s actually a reference to Tarot cards) allows him to romp freely and embrace his general Andy Bell-ness.

,,, 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.

There is no warning and no chance to prepare. The instant you press play on Ash Fure’s Animal, a mass of thundering sub-bass hits you like a predator pouncing on its prey. With consciousness too slow to react, some ancient, primal region of the brain lights up. Suddenly, you find yourself in fight or flight mode, pumped with adrenaline, heart racing and palms sweating. The US experimental musician and composer has dedicated a significant part of her career to exploring the physicality of music and our instinctual feedback to sound, with The Force Of Things: An Opera For Air (2014–2022) and Hive Rise (2020) tackling the human body’s relationship with fear and the palpable effect that sonic waves have on the psyche. However, none of her previous works are quite as immediate and visceral as Animal.

caroline 2 is a remarkable second album from one of Britain’s greatest bands. Throughout the album, the exquisite way in which this album is crafted adds so much to songs that are already awash with beauty and romance. There is an intimacy inherent in the way that caroline let the stitches, scraps and seams show across this record, and masterful playing and songwriting matches the presentation perfectly. The world is increasingly dictated by algorithms and artificial intelligence, increasingly hostile to the creative process, so it is so beautiful to hear an album so handmade, so lovingly-crafted, so visibly mended… A total love-letter to the labour of creating.

With a trap set up including instruments such as a win bottle, an automobile transmission housing and multiple sex toys, David Van Tieghem was the go to percussionist of the fertile New York downtown scene, playing on classic albums by everyone from Laurie Anderson and Talking Heads to John Giorno, Arthur Russell and Steve Reich. This new compilation from Phantom Limb collates tracks from his two solo albums for the Private Music label in the late 80s plus cuts from a score for a dance piece by Twyla Tharp. It’s a rubbery, propulsive set of electronic pop tunes full of odd little quirks and strange sounds, driven by a unique oddball sensibility. It sounds, at times, rather like the musical equivalent of drowning in a ball pond or pogoing down the fast lane of a vintage arcade racing game.

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 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, Conductor Williams, Preservation, Messiah Musik, Sadhugold, Ant, Shabaka Hutchings, Steel Tipped Dove, DJ Haram, Willie Green, Jeff Markey, Saint Abdullah, and Human Error Club. And yet, the sound holds together. Disorienting, yes. But deliberate. Woods is the constant: his voice measured, ghostly, sometimes smirking.

Their strain of high-definition UK techno is not catered to fist-pumping lads (also not your regular “bassface” material!), its sonic palette is way more nuanced and delicate, backed by a strong sense for lush melodies and swooshing pads. Downtempo closer ‘Just Can’t Live Without Ya’, whose vocal sample has that Jamie XX quality, gorgeously captures this specific sensibility with its soulful afterparty vibes. On the other hand, the alarm-like synthline and storming beats of ‘Betcha Wouldn’t Hurt Me’ are anxiety-inducing while also energising, like a friendly slap in the face. It is a fully-fleshed UK techno epic and an introspective club travelogue that maintains a tight grip on your fragmented attention despite its length, never getting boring. I reckon it could even inspire others to further explore lengthier formats.

Their latest entry, Instruments, with four ‘reels’ clocking around twenty minutes each, deepens the formula of patterned heaviosity (“maximal repetition, minimal deviation,” as the group are fond of repeating) with even more patience and the addition of two fellow travellers, Patrick Shiroishi on baritone saxophone and David Grubbs on guitar. The opening ‘Reel 28’ is sluggish krautrock, where Shiroishi’s saxophone doesn’t fly around in free jazz style but instead helps to stabilise the whole foundation of the song and support the motorik. Although you can observe slight changes in tempo, as if the beast were coming alive, you wish the repetition would never cease and continue ad infinitum. The patience and intensity of how Water Damage explores one droning note or just a single rhythm recalls especially the work of France, although the French motorik rock outfit scoured the more medieval and folk side of drone music.

Opener ‘The Voice I’ve Yet To Understand’ is the clearest exploration of the record’s central tenet – how the discomfort of the present finds tragic echoes through time. Here, traditional zajal poetry evokes the communal past, archival radio debates from the 1970s and 80s summons living memory, while Moughanni’s unsettling production places us firmly in the present. On a later interlude we hear the sounds of real bombs dropped during Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon in 1978, while ‘Of Colour And Significance’ elicits the region’s even older colonial scars via the use of a French cassette called Lebanon In Colour. That original tape had featured romanticised melodies played on the qanun (a Middle Eastern string instrument), which here Moughanni stretches and warps into something simmering with rage. It ends, however, in a place that is in a way even more heartbreaking – the 14-minute ambient sprawl ‘To Lose A Friend / A Separation From Habit’ evoking the detachment and suppression necessary to simply keep existing under such conditions.

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.

Riffing on Kelis’s classic ‘Milkshake’, Channel Islander Claudia Valentina delivers a sleepy-sultry-stuttery party banger with more bounce than a sack full of rabbits.

I am a sucker for a mangled title and originally pressed play on this purely because I thought it was called ‘For Whom The Fools Toil’. I was wrong, but that doesn’t stop this being a prangy banger that reminds me of early Liars via a drum machine not quite sure what it’s up to, maddened brass, yelling and “la las”. The best song about pushing buttons since the Sugababes one.

Bob, Pete and Sarah have announced that their next album will be their last and on the basis of the lead single, with its crashing rave stabs and soaringly melodramatic chorus, it looks like they’re intent on going out in grand style. A sad banger for the ages.

Where the first taste of Matmos’ forthcoming album composed entirely from metal objects, last month’s ‘Changing States’, extracted something beautiful and hypnotic, new single ‘The Rust Belt’ presents the scratchy, pounding flip-side – although the results are no less transfixing.