So here we are again, the end of the year, looking back at the almighty heights scaled by the most intrepid few. Here’s the first half of 2025’s Best Albums of the Year, an absolute showcase of fearless invention and remarkable beauty that demands and deserves your full, undivided attention.
20 | Toivo Tulev – Dawn, Almost Dawn
“The opener, And I Loved You Like a Branch Breaking Under the Snow … goes a long way to demonstrating two key aspects of Tulev’s music. The first is an emphasis on line, in this case a highly fluid melodic outpouring from the scordatura violin. A mixture of gestures, arpeggios and the beginnings of phrases, they quickly form an elaborate solo, like diving straight into a cadenza. … The scordatura violin is not just soloistic but literally alone for a long time, while the piano is absent throughout much of the piece, heard in only 33 of its 256 bars. It’s a highly unusual deployment of forces, one that compels us to consider more directly the music’s nature and narrative.
There’s a similar emphasis on melody in the title work … Intimacy becomes absolute here, progressing from just air noise to a breathy emergent melody. … Our world seems to be defined by the limits of this melody, Tulev bestowing on it a profound sense of intense expression, driven by a passion that, later, emerges in a wonderful momentary splutterance of staccatos. Fana … demonstrates precisely the same kind of melodic centredness. Composed for mezzo-soprano and viola, it features a single line of text, by Hazrat Inayat Khan, “Every tear in Thy love, Beloved, exalts my being.” Tulev fashions these words into a serpent-like contour, utmost tactile on the mouth and lips … as if in an act of worship.
… Black Mirror can’t fail to come as a shock. Gone is that sense of close intimacy, replaced by an oppressive atmosphere, with repeating wind clusters, lower strings brooding and upper strings suspended … as if the piece is beginning with an ending, draped in funereal garb. When the voice enters, it’s ostensibly not with song, but to articulate some hybrid of singing, keening, wailing, groaning and speaking. … The voice sounds catatonic, dazed and repetitive, circling around an inverted paean decrying what’s at one point almost absurdly mildly described as “a bad kind of bliss”. It’s not just his text, but his whole reality that reflects an outlook of nothing but erasure and an eternal “back to zero”. … there’s such a welter of beauty in Black Mirror – Tulev’s language has rarely been so ravishingly articulated – that the cumulative effect is not repulsive but engaging; we’re pulled in by the immense gravitational weight of the music and made to resonate with its vast emotional heft.” [reviewed in June]
19 | Abul Mogard – Quiet Pieces
Don’t be fooled by the title; the five pieces on Abul Mogard’s latest album are often overwhelming in their sheer dynamic weight. Yet, behaviourally speaking, they can definitely be described as ‘quiet’. Each track is in essence a meditation, contemplating a single sonic idea, one that, as we become more accustomed to it, and as it expands before our ears – both imaginatively and literally – reveals more and more of its inner nature.
‘Following a dream’ opens the album with arguably the most simple of them. A droning chord undergoes a series of swells, modulated by noise, in the process quickly establishing a basic tension between stasis and movement, pitch and noise, clarity and chaos. The flexing is delicately coloured a few minutes in, as softer high material becomes audible, introducing a slight harmonic tilt, and the piece feels relaxed and tense simultaneously. Similar swells occur in ‘Like a bird’, though here bass movement harmonically recolours drifting upper register material. This rotates round and round, all the while becoming more caked in noise, to the point that everything becomes lost in the fuzz.
‘Constantly slipping away’ takes a slightly different approach. A complex sound object pulsates, all the while seeming to reveal more of itself. From one perspective, we hear more of what it is; from another, it’s as if we were moving toward it, boring inside it. As such the focus continually shifts, and the relationship between pitch and noise, and assorted registral strata of both, is similarly fluid, even elusive. It’s an interesting paradox, one that aligns with the title: we go deeper, yet the nature and identity of the object is impossible to pin down. Adjacent to this is ‘Through whispers’, where what we hear appears to be muffled, details lost. Now the movement is reversed, it’s the object seemingly moving toward us, perhaps surrounding us, though – another nice paradox – clarity doesn’t ensue. Noise and bass emerge, the former a texture, like a granular patina, the latter a kind of harmonic oscillation, teetering on a cadence. There’s that tension again, moving yet static, relaxed yet unresolved.
The highlight of the album is ‘In a studded procession’, where a richly chromatic chorale – dense, intense, bass-heavy – cycles round in aeternam. It grows continually, pushing toward something momentous, becoming truly enormous, embracing the full sonic spectrum, noise and distortion licking the edges as if it were actually start to burn. The majesty with which it does this is quiet, but the blaze it projects is anything but. [LP / DL]
18 | Hekla – Turnar
To spend time in Hekla Magnúsdóttir’s soundworld is to occupy a space with seemingly no earth and no sky. There’s an irony there, since so much of her music – especially the eight tracks on Turnar – is heavily polarised, pushed outwards to extremes of register. Bass surges up to us from abyssal fathoms; high melodic fronds turn in air high above. Yet the more we spend time here, the more they appear impossibly proximate, the universe yawning away beyond them in both directions.
What plays out in the midst of such enormity is often, not surprisingly, small and intimate. ‘Kyrrð’ is an exercise in chamber-like meditation, soft organ chords and glitter in a smoke-like atmosphere, buzzing bass below, circling round. Radiance is found, Magnúsdóttir’s theremin rises, but what follows is no peroration, something more thoughtful. Likewise ‘Ókyrrð’, the theremin ruminating over blurry bass with the flavour of a chaconne, and ‘Í Ösku og Eldi’, where the instrument, despite multiple manifestations, seems threatened from below by buzzing depths, yet prevails by burning through the centre.
The album’s highpoints go beyond this basic paradigm of presentation, intensification and subsiding. In ‘Ólga’, three strata, low-medium-high, echo each other, drifting and reverberating in darkness, surrounded by noise detritus. ‘Flækjur’ makes its sound objects ambiguous, awash with buzz, shine, blur, impact and black radiance, culminating in an overdriven aftermath. Album opener ‘Inni’ exacerbates the polarisation, makes it hard to read, high distant ethereality in an exquisite, long distance choreography with deep rumbling subnotes.
17 | Alex Paxton – Delicious
“There are a couple of aspects that seem to be fundamentally important throughout Delicious, and perhaps Paxton’s music in general. The first is melody – it’s everywhere – both in the form of proliferations of diverse counterpoint as well as, more often and more significantly, as a kind of united folk music, a tune to be loudly performed to the skies by anyone and everyone. The second aspect, intimately connected to this, is the importance of the group, the ensemble, the combined forces of players who in their immediacy and lack of fucks given bring to mind the restless, unruly mob-like turba of Bach’s Passions. It’s they, after all, who articulate Paxton’s assorted melodies, often as an undercurrent or thread running through an absolute cavalcade of pantomimic shenanigans. … Paxton’s is a … subversive combination of glee, mania, grotesque, eccentricity, chaos and celebration, presented with an earthy, demotic, fantastical, child-like fascination with timbre, colour and, above all, line. Nothing is off limits; there are no limits.
The way Paxton’s group dynamics are articulated is genuinely breathtaking. Everyone gets involved, for much of the time, yet there’s a never a sense that things are getting out of control. On the contrary, there’s a mysterious, even uncanny sense of mutual understanding among the musicians. … Melodies overlap, one idea cuts in front of another, yet the whole time one feels this is performed within a context of sympathetic music-making. Thus, overlapping melodies become decoration, elaboration, reinforcement and counterpoint; while contrasting ideas turn out not to be so disjunct as they seem at first, not always interruptions as such but part of an urge – which everyone shares – to be as creatively florid and multifaceted as possible.
The more times i’ve listened to Delicious the more i’ve felt it to be a wonderful riposte to a world that seems so disfunctional, individualistic, insular, and downright polite and boring. … Perhaps if music can change the world, this is one of the ways it might do it. Not through a moral or political critique but a musical one: a delirious, delicious pushback against sterility, tradition, formality and inhibition, through unbounded ensemble joy.” [reviewed in July]
16 | Natasha Barrett – Toxic Colour
“[In The Other Side of the Lagoon, w]e’re immediately transported into a heightened world of water, clatter, people, activity, but also sustained tones and glittering metallic impacts, combining to form a fantastical, supervivid environment … caught between the slow stability of the tones and the rapid volatility of the field recordings, which seem more than usually energetically-charged. There’s also a beautiful liminality in the way some real-world sounds appear quasi-normal (albeit carefully arranged and sculpted) while others spiral out, revealing themselves to be utterly alien. On this “other side”, things get weird. …
There’s even greater intensity in Glass Eye, a work responding to the way surveillance is used to counteract resistance. Loud exclamations of protest are the locus of tangibility here, endlessly pitted against sonic obstacles that fragment, distort and filter them, or silence them completely. … This isn’t a piece where beauty is aspired to or should be admired, though, and Barrett marshals the vocal forces such that they form a dense growing chorus, becoming a massive torrent that slews over us. The cheers and applause that follow could hardly be more appropriate. …
At over 15 minutes, the title track is also the longest … “I decided it was time to make a statement in sound”, Barrett’s note says. And what a statement. We’re instantly overwhelmed; an apparent easing off, revealing sustained pitches and undulations, is a short repose before the grinding restarts, now with bursts of acidic squelch all over it, while sharp tones pierce our eardrums. Both the details and the cumulative effect (all the more so coming hot on the heels of The Swifts of Pesaro) are exhilarating and stunning. … The speakers shake, and we shake with them.
Yet this mordant, seemingly unstoppable display is answered by a second half that unexpectedly tilts into an apparently less toxic environment. Gentle rain resettles into soft pitches and a tapping texture. It’s curious to be here – is it to be trusted? Not even remotely: an aggressive surge is the trigger for a complete avalanche of effluvial noise that bespeaks absolute abrasion. Having obliterated all, something like massive wings flap and we end up amid vapour and water, with tinnitus-like drones the dazed aftermath. Even by Barrett’s standards, Toxic Colour – both this piece and the album as a whole – is genuinely incredible.” [reviewed in April]
15 | Chiyoko Szlavnics – Memory Spaces
“Memory Spaces (appearances) … is a mesmerising study in harmonic fluidity. There’s a paradox in the way the work sounds: from one perspective, so glacial, and from another, so full of inner motion. … As the instruments move, they freely allude to familiar harmonic states, chords, progressions, ever with the sense that they’re unplanned moments, chanced upon along the way, accidents of verticality from a mindset concerned more with the horizontal.
For Eva Hesse is an immersive electronic work that operates in a strikingly similar way … . Now it’s sine tones that move freely, ever in flux, though here there’s often a curious impression that the tones are attempting themselves to move from misalignment to unison. … There’s something distinctly balletic and … sculptural about the way the tones move. …
The album concludes with Oracles I-V (listening spaces) … structured in five movements. The first is initiated by deep tuba pedal tones, resounding like a foghorn. … it’s gorgeous, like a slow, somewhat solemn breathing in and out …. In Part II a strong single note acts as a focal point; other pitches join it, displacing it for a time, sliding across its surface, but it persists and ultimately prevails. … Part III replaces the opening foghorn with bass drum rumble, coming in slow, steady repetitions like soft aftershocks of an unsensed detonation. … Part IV continues seamlessly, introducing additional pitches, in the process only slightly elaborating the polarity into what are now three distant strata: low, medium, high. … The short final part acts as an epilogue, almost a continuation but transferred or transfigured to a higher plane, playing out in the stratosphere. A fuzzy fifth shines out, the pitches undulating as if wafted by some supernal zephyr. …
Memory Spaces is an album that reminds me what it was that i fell in love with, so many years ago, when i first discovered Chiyoko Szlavnics’ music. It’s that sense that nothing is as it seems, everything familiar has been reconfigured, reimagined, reconceived. Where so much music using non-standard tunings is just fussy, neurotic and joyless, Szlavnics’ work demonstrates a contrastingly genuine emancipation, one that feels effortless, and sounds timeless.” [reviewed in December]
14 | Christopher McFall – Late Night Fate Directory
“[The album] can be heard as a direct continuation from Disengaged Songs For Disenchanted Lovers …, with its first part, ‘Braids of the Wire’, beginning with looping drum strikes, continuing the sombre, somewhat ritualistic tone with which that album ends. … The same female voice …, singing the same melody, emerges overlapping with herself until lost within throbby, halting bass piano notes. It’s a jarring progression from fluidity and humanity to a lurching mechanical loop, which doesn’t resolve but dissipates via blank wind and curious squeaking sounds.
The second part, ‘Brazen Amulet’, picks up where part one ended, and also evokes where it began, caught in a weird, squeaky loop, like a slow, ritualistic drum beat, focused and regular. This becomes absorbed into a rich bass drone, and although the two are separate, they’re felt to meld. This is the first of many such meldings, one of the main traits of this album, which to a degree sets it apart from McFall’s more usual approach, favouring stratified textures and crossfading transformations. …
Considering the powerful closeness – penetration even – of the sound materials on Late Night Fate Directory, it seems appropriate that its third part should be titled ‘An Intimacy at Interchange’. Intimacy is entirely the right word for the slow, tactile, perhaps sensual way that discrete sound objects are brought together and interact. And it’s actively reinforced in the gentle strains of distorted piano that loop at the start of this part, here blending with abstract sounds … leading into the heart of the track, where, despite assorted pulsing and ticking sounds, a sustained pitch element within makes the whole feel fixed in place and, again, all melded together into a unified texture. …
The closing part, ‘Gentlemen’s Orate’, picks up with a more agile, clunky loop that’s immediately swamped by hectic noise, with a sustained high tone the only stable element. … Towards the end, barely audible, the female voice briefly and finally reprises her song, in harmony with the bass, before she too fades away.” [reviewed in April]
13 | Quinquis – Eor
“Eor means ‘anchor’, suggesting not just water and depths, but security and immovability. Yet its eight tracks are a dark sequence continually articulating wistfulness, uncertainty and loss. Its initial sounds, in opening track ‘Inkanuko’ (desire) hint at what’s to come: electronics and breath, cold and warmth; slow beats, somewhat heavy, yet accompanying lyrics that speak of stars and a blaze. …
Whereafter the album progresses through a series of reminiscences that bring ever greater clarity to just how un-anchored the narrator has become. ‘The tumbling point’ plunges into poignancy, recalling outdoor intimacy, walking cliffs together, described in a way that’s constantly precarious and paradoxical, where tumbling and falling are adjacent to “Leaning on the air” and flying. … The sea makes its presence felt more in ‘Blaz an holen’ …, the music pared back, now breathy and beatless, the pulse more about passively keeping time than actively propelling it. A happier song, with a lighter touch, it takes us into the album’s first half coda, ‘Distro’ (come back), where things start to unravel fast …: “Tell me, where were we going / When you were disappearing”. There’s a dual shock from second half opener ‘Dec’h’ …, which paints a stark portrait of then and now. First, there’s a power, confidence and above all drive in the music hitherto absent. Second, is the way the music thereby glories in the happy past tense before unexpectedly slamming into the final verse’s present day buffers: “Leave me in peace … Stay away from me / I won’t go dancing … Go away”. …
The final three tracks form their own continuity within the album’s overall interconnected narrative. In ‘Morwreg’ … the narrator feels herself to be doubly separated from the object of her desire – sea versus land, creature versus human – and her breathy delivery is riddled with uncertainties … . This aquatic allusion turns more literal in penultimate track ‘Peñseidi’ … getting stuck in an emotional and musical rut: arpeggios stronger than ever, breathy vocals, tilting harmony. It’s an almost literal treading water, climaxing in total breakdown … . In this way, ‘Peñseidi’ doesn’t just look back, but also ahead, foreshadowing the final loss that brings Eor to an end. … It’s a heartbreaking testament to the extent to which desire and memory can be maddening, destructive forces. Yet, just as Eor opened with a kind of fatalistic take on hope, so it also ends. But hope is still hope, impelled here by an indefatigable, immovable love.” [reviewed in December]
12 | Formuls – Disorder as a function of time (from Graz to Holycross)
“…the opener, ‘Welcome to paradise [2022-05-27] (from Graz to UK PLC)’, is an exercise in cycling, relatively gently but with palpable energy coursing through it. … It’s only in the closing 90 seconds or so that its sense of stability is slightly undermined, though everything remains familiar, held in check. As Disorder continues it considerably expands; where track 1 was under eight minutes, track 2 … is nearly 11. It exhibits a curious form of momentum that’s somehow fast, slow and non-existent, sometimes all at once. … It’s to Dooley’s credit that this track sounds so cohesive; at any given moment there are usually half a dozen (at least) elements in the texture all moving at different rates, and the fact that they somehow meld into a united whole is impressive. …
The expansion continues in the final two tracks, which last 13 and 34 minutes respectively. Track 3 … is intensely focused and highly energised, more than anywhere else, locked into a laser-sighted drone. … Here, the stasis is more overt, until the centre where everything is transformed and, passing through sequences of metallic surges, some data-like burbling … and a return of those high intensity whistles – even more catalytic here, like fireworks – the music evolves into an ever more pounding coda where beats and noise frenetically jostle.
This is arguably the album’s high point in terms of activity. The final track … fills its half-hour span through a process of defocused expansion. It brings to mind some of Autechre’s lengthier forays into beats-meet-ambient territory (such as ‘e0’, ‘shimripl casual’ and particularly ‘column thirteen’). Of course, Dooley’s default position isn’t similarly rooted in dance idioms, so we’re placed within an altogether less certain musical structure, one where that blurring of stasis and change reaches its zenith. … Compelling and fascinating throughout, it ends as it began; maybe, considering its title, it articulates something of the mixed feelings of homecoming after Dooley’s self-described “colourful period as a sojourner”. A tense form of peace.” [reviewed in June]
11 | Patricia Alessandrini & Marco Fusi – Proximity, Distance
From the start of opening track ‘Adjoining, Touched’, it’s often tough to say where acoustic and electronic begin and end. Quickly, therefore, we regard the two sources as one voice. … Tones pulse and waver, aloof for a time, more forceful later, and suddenly there’s a low, rather edgy pseudo-bassline that suggests almost a Baroque moment. And it’s gone, passed by into something more uncertain, something that shimmers, moving with smooth, balletic grace.
The title piece, the longest on the album, injects an ominous air into the performance. Like a cross between a stringed instrument and something more dangerous, low tones develop a razor sharp edge. … This is not remotely a delicate balance, it’s a bifurcated world, one where stability and uncertainty coexist, and somehow fit together. … Hard and soft, sharp and smooth, low and high, the polarised landscape of ‘Proximity, Distance’ makes it especially compelling. …
Another highlight is ‘Cracked, Fissured’, where animal-like growls and noises, half in shadow, pulse in the depths while something vague moves high above. … More so than in ‘Proximity, Distance’, there’s a genuine wildness to the musical behaviour … yet this is answered, eventually, by the abrupt appearance of a deep, throbbing stratum that in time quietly bubbles and simmers. It’s soft but potent, and while there’s more razor-edged danger to contend with, the duo arrives at an octave unison, and a few minutes after, an actual unison. Nothing about this is predetermined; there are no foregone conclusions here. …
In some ways final track ‘Removed, Lost’ is a synthesis of what’s gone before. Dry impacts – more striking (literally) than before – and friction play out, stroking and rubbing beside softly sustained tones like cloud formations. … [T]he piece develops into a textural collection of notes that buzz and fizz against each other. Breaking apart, releasing more strong, final suggestions at both high and medium altitude, the music seems to falter (fractured again?), not just sagging into lower levels, but seemingly now lopsided, tilted to the left, in a coda that’s as beguiling as it is quietly dramatic.
