The Quietus Tracks of the Year 2025

As well as releasing albums of smart and increasingly libidinous chamber pop music, Hamish Hawk is a dab hand at reinterpreting the work of his heroes. Only a couple of weeks ago he wrote for tQ about his love of Ivor Cutler, and earlier this year, he released an EP of covers of songs by Eurythmics (‘Sweet Dreams’), Madonna (‘Burning Up’), Sheryl Crow (‘If It Makes You Happy’) and, best of the bunch, Pet Shop Boys’ cheating anthem, ‘So Hard’. Hawk’s wonderful take on the track makes that most cutting of lines, “We’ve both given up smoking ‘cos it’s fatal / So whose matches are those” even more poignant.

Coming off like a lost cut from a mid-00s FIFA game soundtrack, the standout cut from Jim Legxacy’s brilliant black british music (2025) mixtape sees the UK artist take his sound to stadium rock levels – in a very good way. Set amidst the backdrop of the making of the tape – in the wake of his little sister’s death and other family trauma – the track’s lyrics are a painful and refreshingly open insight into the effects of the chaos that life throws at us, and the ways in which we deal with it (“Mum, I just came from a war / There was a party in my head, I’m breathing all of the cold”). The song, along with the mixtape from which it is lifted, is evidence that Jim Legxacy is one of the most exciting young and upcoming artists working within British music today.

The Hidden Cameras returned this year with excellent album Bronto, which came with a fanfare of  remixes by two of Joel Gibbs’ synth pop heroes, Pet Shop Boys and Vince Clarke. The latter’s reworking of ‘Undertow’ is one of the best “Remixed By Vince Clarkes” he’s done in years, glowing with a bright insouciance reminiscent of his earliest days on Depeche Mode’s Speak & Spell. 

The lead track to Amaarae’s excellent 2025 album, Black Star, is an absorbing blend of Ghanaian highlife, kpanlogo, zouk, R&B and bass music. Boldly embracing sexual liberation (S.M.O. stands for ‘Slut Me Out’) while taking pride in the artist’s Ghanaian heritage, it’s littered with unapologetically upfront pick-up lines (“Won’t you come blow on my fire?,” “I wanna meet the God that made you.”). Perhaps the horniest that pop music sounded in 2025, ‘S.M.O.’ oozes lust and desire, with Amaarae delivering it all with just the right amount of playfulness.

Much has been made of the growing resurgence of shoegaze within the contemporary indie palette, but few are making quite such interesting use of it as No Joy does on her latest record Bugland. ‘Garbage Dream House’, the album’s opener, uses those familiar rushes of feedback to create something bucolic in its prettiness, before upending entirely into a thunderous plunge.

After their return for the 2024 MUTEK festival, Factory Floor have kept it slow and steady with occasional gigs and releases on Erol Alkan’s Phantasy label. Their set at Corsica Studios was a live highlight of the year, with the venue’s always thunderous PA and the addition of a second drummer, alongside Gabe Gurnsey and Nik Void, turning the crowd into a sweating mess. It was all well and good hearing the likes of ‘Two Different Ways’ and ‘Fall Back’, but it was the throb of ‘Tell Me’, with its weirdly catchy stab of a melody line, that was the highlight.  

An ode to the necessity of keeping the dream alive, even when the drudgery of everyday life makes fantasy all but futile, ‘9 2 5’ stands as the glistening centrepiece to Nourished By Time’s superb second album The Passionate Ones. It’s at once a warped banger, and a moment of tender yearning.

Lana Del Rey had long been promising to go full country mode for some time before unleashing ‘Henry, Come On’ earlier this year, having teased covers of various classics of the genre in live shows in recent years, and announced early in 2024 that she would be exploring the sound further for her next LP. That album, having now undergone two title changes and various release date changes, remains unreleased but ‘Henry, Come On’ is a fine introduction to it. Awash with her usual engrossing Americana touches, it’s a sweeping, heart-rending piece of pop music that tells the parting tale of the titular Henry and his protagonist cowgirl.

One can understand William Bevan’s reticence in putting out a third album; his legacy as one of the most important musicians of the 21st century is already assured, so why even risk it? And for the rest of us who can’t get enough of his scintillating murk and ecstatic grime, there is his ever growing library of EPs and singles. ‘Comafields’ is a particularly beautiful exercise in imagining Susumu Yokota producing trancey post-garage for some imagined utopian rural festival that I, for one, would love to visit. 

‘Build The Habit’ is an unnerving, clattery four minutes of music, full of pounding beats, pitch-shifted voices and crispy-fried synth textures. Carmel Smickersgill is a composer based in Manchester who is just as comfortable writing chamber operas, symphonic music or theatrical sound design as she is creating bewitching albums of electronic music for PRAH Recordings (her last record, 2022’s We Get What We Get And We Don’t Get Upset was a tQ Album of the Week). This single, the opening track on her May EP Unsolicited Advice, whips all that compositional talent and arty sonic wizardry into a nightmarish banger liable to send you spiralling direct from the dancefloor to the nearest k-hole.

On caroline 2, the London post-rock collective doubled down on the fractured sound of debut album highlight ‘Natural Death’ with a collection of asymmetrical, higgledy rock songs that incorporated uneven rhythms and unusual recording techniques. ‘Total euphoria’ is this in microcosm; choppy guitars, disembodied harmonising duets, and thwacking drum rhythms that oscillate in and out of time; the perfect introduction to the handmade world of caroline’s second album.

On her first full band album in seven years, Anna Von Hausswolff assembles a crack team to turn her foreboding darkwave compositions into maximalist gothic power ballads. ‘The Iconoclast’ is perhaps the high water mark, as sprawling icy soundscapes are propelled by AVH’s earth-shaking organ and Otis Sandsjö’s dazzling, dusty saxophone solos. 

Doja Cat channels Madonna and Vanity 6 for this sultry banger that feels very much like it should be playing in the back of a nightclub scene midway through a Paul Verhoeven movie. The snare sounds like a slap in the face, the synths twinkle like stardust, and Doja Cat’s voice has never sounded more pneumatic and crystalline, as if she were auditioning to become a preset on a Yamaha DX7. ‘Jealous Type’ is the sort of song Prince used to write in his sleep, but there just isn’t really anyone else doing stuff like this right now and absolutely owning it. Frankly, it’s thrilling. A song that will make you want to wear spandex.

The narrative of Blawan breaks down (handily) into two halves. Early nutty filth techno ragers give way to more considered tunes made on analogue gear in more recent years. On superb album SickElixir this year, he seemed to want the best of both worlds, however. Nowhere is this joie d’vivre more readily apparent than on lead single ‘NOS’, with its hard swung Prefuse 73 vocal cutups, juddering serotonin burst drum trills, pelvis-shattering bass and Trocadero computer game noise. Blawan is putting the fun back in remorseless machine funk.

I have to admit that I haven’t fully been pulled in by PinkPantheress’ sound in recent years, with its barrage of in-your-face Y2K references frequently veering a little too close to pastiche for my liking, but it’s impossible not to be swept up by the intoxicating sugar rush of ‘Illegal’, with its dazzling Underworld-sampling synth melodies and shuffling 2-step UK garage rhythms. Throw in some double entendre lyrics about getting stoned and the awkwardness of new love, and you have one of the year’s most addictive pop singles.

The enigmatic producer Elijah Minnelli comes wrapped in self-penned mystique – he hails from a mythical borough of Breadminster, a “pseudo-archipelago” with its own rich mythology and lore. It’s daft and mischievous, but would count for little were it not twinned with such remarkable music. ‘Canaan Land’ employs all-time great Dennis Bovell to ride an irresistible cut of smooth and slinky dub.

Modern American black metal band Agriculture have, among many other things, almost supernaturally exquisite balance; so by the time the listener arrives at ‘Bodhidarma’ when listening to their superb second album The Spiritual Sound, they feel journeyed in a Homeric sense. But even as a standalone single, you can simply relish in the dynamic wax and wane of its Slint-style hush, Khanate-style repressed aggression, and Godspeed-strength riffage; and that’s before we get to the sky-blistering guitar solo of Richard Chowenhill. Just glorious. 

When you’re an artist as big as Charl xcx is right now, you can sit on your giant pile of cash and phone in “collabs” with your peers, or, like Charli, take the smarter approach by writing thoughtful essays about music and art on Substack, and asking your musical heroes to work with you on more esoteric projects. And that is how ‘House’, taken from the soundtrack for the forthcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation, came to pass. It opens with John Cale’s two note violin and voiceover suggesting a soul stuck between worlds, before the track is swallowed by infernal goth noise lunges and a distorted Charli sing/screaming “I think I’m gonna die in this house.” Magnificent.

Why aya, this is hell; nor am I out of it. An exquisite psychic noise cancellation scenario where nerve-jangling sound design, delirium tremens percussion skitter, serotonin-ravaged reportage from the fifth night spent hunched over a baggie in a stranger’s kitchen with a door key, and sick comedown bass actually combine to produce one of the most life-affirming bangers of recent years. 

There are big creative swings, and then there’s Rosalía’s decision to follow-up 2022’s world-conquering pop smash MOTOMAMI with an all-cylinders blast of booming orchestral baroque and operatic vocals. Guest spots from Björk and Yves Tumour only add to the considerable power of ‘Berghain’, the lead single from latest album LUX, contrasting not only that classical elegance but juxtaposing with one another – the former offering a desperate plea for divine intervention, the latter repeating the starkly violent proclamation of Mike Tyson before his fight with Lennox Lewis, “I’ll fuck you ‘til you love me.” An intricate, rapturous triumph of a comeback, it’s one that redraws the boundaries of what’s possible in modern pop music.