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

James K wastes no time drawing us into her sonic jungle. On opener ‘Days Go By’, she wants to “close it all out and lay down” amid glitchy sound effects mimicking bird calls and reptilian croaks, coaxing us into a spiritual Garden of Eden where we can relax. Right from the start, Friend charms listeners with angelic soundscapes and dream-pop, embracing the listener in a warm, auditory hug. Beyond her velvety voice, the production shines. This is no surprise as her back catalogue of collaborations with producers and artists stretch between some of the most exciting musicians of late. Previous tracks with Moin, Yves Tumor, Fergus Jones, Parris and Priori, now feel like prototypes for the numbers on this album. And it’s the moments where’s she’s working with returning collaborators that the record’s tracks feel at their most complete and exciting.

On the cover of Suede’s tenth studio album, Antidepressants, singer and lyricist Brett Anderson assumes the position of Bacon in a 1962 photograph by John Deakin, shirtless and flanked by two cuts of meat in the position of perverse wings behind him. It’s a fitting choice for an album that deals in what Bacon termed the “exhilarated despair” of human (dis)connection, but also one which takes the raw energy of 2022’s Autofiction and skews it. If Autofiction dealt in the directness of photography, Antidepressants is – like Bacon’s portraits – a no less truthful recreation of emotion and experience through distortion and dramatisation.

It’s an album forged from collaboration, with Elvin Brandhi, Phew, Justin K Broadrick, Karl D’Silva, and Karl O’Connor all pitching in. The latter lending not just his voice but also his council to Tucker who, having worked on a year’s worth of material, tossed it all aside and regrouped. ‘ZONA’, the single that O’Connor guests on, is a ricochet of one-two bass thumps, bottomed-out growls, and silvery snaps over which he and Tucker trade vocal barbs so delay-heavy, they’re borderline unintelligible. Broadrick provides the titular static-encased frequencies on ‘FEDBCK’, slashing, veering, and fluctuating like a heart rate monitor in a hospice. The Phew-featuring ‘SANSU’, on the other hand, recalls Fuck Buttons’ ‘Olympians’. Uplifting sustain soars against mutant techno beats. The galvanising chords shift into digital bird song, as if Tucker has fed Merlin recordings into modular racking.

Raymond’s mastery of her instruments is unmatched. She can conjure detailed imagery with little more than carefully plucked strings and dexterous fretboard scurries. The title track, for example, starts with a rocking cadence – rocking as in your gran’s chair, not the riffs of AC/DC – that slowly develops into a pitching tumble of notes, relocating her Welsh Primitive to the Great Plains and evoking a stroll taken across the dusty landscape lit by the failing light of an aging sun. As if a twirling column of smoke has become visible, a shift occurs, and you’re hightailing it back to the ranch on your quickest steed. A middle section of melancholy and reflection follows before drifting back into that rocking cadence and then, once more, bolting for the door. It’s cinematic in both its structure and depiction of Western vistas.

There’s something phantom-like about NEW YORK’s presence, their un-Googleable name serving as both obstacle and invitation. In an era where young artists saturate every digital channel to fight algorithmic obscurity, the London-based duo of American Coumba Samba and Estonian Gretchen Lawrence have chosen deliberate elusiveness instead. It’s a radical stance that extends into their music: capturing digitally mediated existence without succumbing to its demands for constant visibility. 2024’s rapstar was a deadpan testament to the terminally online. The album occupied a strange middle ground between tedium and unease: grating yet oddly comforting, music so inert it became the perfect soundtrack to digital ennui. Their brand of anhedonic pop captures something essential about our current collective emotional state – the peculiar numbness of the present. Push allows for something approaching actual warmth while maintaining its core aesthetic of productive detachment.

There are those to whom Autechre seem a daunting prospect. The austere sleeves, the impenetrable track titles, the tales of intense two-hour sets played with the audience plunged into pitch darkness. Some of their recorded output might not help: 2016’s elseq 1–5 has a running time of nearly five hours, and its successor, NTS Sessions, clocks in at a neat eight. For those who have wavered, then, this reissue of 2008’s Quaristice should be a welcome opportunity. Quaristice shows the duo as miniaturists rather than maximalists. Each of its 20 (relatively) short tracks feels like a single tessera of a mosaic which, once completed, shows the full range of the Autechre soundworld. From the brief jewel of ‘SonDEremawe’ (one minute twenty-one seconds) to the comparatively epic ‘Outh9X’ (a whole seven minutes and fourteen seconds), this feels like Autechre’s collection of short stories, rather than one of their epic novels. 

Lyrically, the duo’s targets range from spoilt music industry brats to the smug benefactors-by-birthright of land long stolen. Their furious fingers cocked and pointed at those whose own greedy digits reside in amply stuffed upper crust pies. They ply a weirdly beautiful form of mayhem, throwing curveballs so often that you’ll start to think that straight lines ought to bend. And just when you think you’ve finally got them pegged, they lob in one final surprise in the shape of the post-outro acid-tronic remix of the pithily titled ‘Ain’t No Such Thing As Civilised, It’s Man So In Love With Greed, He Has Forgotten Himself And Found Only Appetites’, courtesy of Joe Garrick, complete with breakbeats and warping oscillators underpinning Amée’s cut-up pub rock yelps. Delivering all of this with glinting eyes and an infectious sense of humour, deserves plaudits a-plenty.

Marja Ahti’s music rarely commands attention. Depending on the context in which it’s played, whether listening on speakers or headphones, during a time of day bustling with activity or in the dead of night, the Turku, Finland-based Swedish sound artist’s pieces may easily slip into the background and disappear completely beneath the threshold of perception. At the same time, her subtle electroacoustic strokes contain an invitation to listen deeply, leaving behind a trail of found sound, field recordings, synthesizers, amplified objects, and inchoate effects to be assembled into a rewarding sonic narrative.

By the end of the album, you’re drifting into slumber, the discordant ‘covenstead blues’ laying your head softly in the ether. It’s a long way from the reserved drone sensibilities of No era solida and Anticlines, but still maintains the same free-spirited experimentalism established during Dalt’s earlier records. Not ruminating on climate change or geological formations this time around, Dalt instead dives deep into her own idiosyncratic world, in an attempt to make sense of the intangible human condition. To surrender to a lover is to risk danger, but she dissolves into it with grace.

LSD offers a broad spectrum of delights. From the classic full-throttle Cardiacs bangers of ‘The May’ and ‘Wooden Eye’, through the powerfully refurbished ‘Ditzy Scene’ with added strings and brass, the joyous Zappa meets Beatles off-kilter pop of ‘The Blue And Buff’, the frenetic but fun wild rides of ‘Skating’ and ‘Volob’, the symphonic delirium of ‘Busty Beez’ to the epic ‘Downup’, LSD is a trip, a technicolour experience for the inner eye that only reveals the full richness of its sound and imagery with repeated listening. Though largely euphoric in its emotional tone, if there is a touch more sadness inherent in this release than is usually the case with Cardiacs’ music, then that’s entirely apt, given that it’s essentially a goodbye to the band’s now departed frontman. Yet the feeling of jubilation that sadness comes wrapped up in, the wonder of finally getting it over the finish line, somehow transcends its melancholy shadow.

New album The Spiritual Sound broadens Agriculture’s sonic palette considerably. Chowenhill describes a “musical agnosticism” at the heart of the album. It’s there in the huge opening riff of single ‘Bodhidharma’.

Ghosts of early-80s Fall records come up the Thames estuary with the daily tides in the form of this new track from Southend’s The Plan. Where some jerking lo-fi can come with an air of nostalgic whimsy, this lot are tougher than most – more skronky than shonky, the vocals confident and cutting, the rhythm garrulous in groove. Alongside excellent recent single ‘Patterns’ this is an excellent taster for forthcoming album Mountain View.

Stephen Lee Bruner picks up Edwin Birdsong, Jaco Pastorius and Billy Cobham and shoves them into Flying Lotus’s psychedelic washing machine, somehow ending up with the best Japanese City Pop record since the days of Mari Iijima and Taeko Ohnuki.

LA-based artist Hirons appears with the first track from a new EP forthcoming on Western Vinyl this September. Light and airy, it floats and bounces all over the place, both in wordplay, harmony and melody reminiscent of something of Brian Eno’s Another Green World, while other moments hark back to great lost odd-pop band Clor, Stereos both Totale and ‘Lab.  

Coming along with news of new LP Stardust, which finds him working with a hyperpop-heavy host of collaborator, ‘Starburst’ is Danny Brown at his most restless, spitting frantically over a hard and frayed-at-the-edges beat (by Portuguese producer Holly) that keeps morphing into stranger forms of itself.