Without wasting any time, let’s plunge into the second half of 2025’s Best Albums of the Year, every one of them a staggering achievement of ingenuity and brilliance that defies any and all expectations. Individually, they’re vital and essential; together, they define the very best of the best of this remarkable year.
10 | Sander Saarmets – Bleu Précieux
“The album brings together the delicious sounds of analogue and modular synths, using meantone temperament, with organic stimuli (specifically plants) to help shape and generate the material. … Opening track ‘Unfold’ has a clanging melody, diatonic but fuzzy at the edges, dancing arpeggio shapes within a soft dronescape. It’s lovely the way this subsequently eases off, the fuzz taking over, and occasional notes continuing to sing out but not connecting. … ‘In Waves’ … has a fascinating chiaroscuro: becoming dense, even overwhelming, it seems to radiate brightness, yet one can’t help feeling this is something nocturnal, illuminated in darkness. … There’s a whiff of melancholy to it, and in the title track that becomes a palpable sense of struggle, moving in fits and starts (similar bursts to before). The biological connection to the music – plant feedback used to generate voltages – is clear here, leading to the most fascinating inner activity that’s unequivocally organic. …
One of the high points is ‘Rosée’, where long sustained notes are the foundation for the gentlest form of burbleplink, all very dronal and ostensibly static. Saarmets is a master of innocuous, slow burn music, and here as elsewhere the track takes several minutes before revealing that that’s what it’s been doing. … Each time i listen to ‘Signaux’ i’m struck by the ambiguity of its motion; i said how a sense of forward motion is unclear but here it’s practically unfathomable, things constantly move, twist, squirm, squelch, drift and collide but the whole sonic organism has infinite lightness, floating on air, suggesting what we’re hearing is highly magnified movement taking place at quantum levels.
Bleu Précieux is a tour de force of ambient electronica, displaying a sublime combination of lightness and weight, energy and stillness, abstraction and expression. Its soundworld is deeply immersive … and if you’re anything like me, you’ll find its 38-minute runtime to be over in no time at all, prompting an immediate relisten. It’s a world not just to lose yourself in, but to be safely lost in, roaming its viscous, vaporous soundspaces and in the process encountering ever new sonic fronds and formations. It’s like music in a microscope; we become small, surrounded on all sides by the infinitesimal made immense.” [reviewed in November]
9 | Oklou – Choke Enough
The year’s most inventive and infectious pop album is a whole lot more than it seems on a first listen. Marylou Mayniel plays fast and loose with structure, charts playfully angular melodic lines, fills her songs with playful burbling arpeggios. Play, play, play – and yet these are deeply conflicted songs, riddled with anxieties.
Take ‘Thank You For Recording’, where the music’s gentle lilt sits uncomfortably beside lyrics that speak of natural and human-inflicted forms of destruction. This leads into one of the album’s highlights, ‘Family and Friends’, a delicious song that for all its lightness, even effervescence, is fundamentally ambivalent. “I’ll be singing pleasure and pain”, and while there are hints of retreat (“Let me lie forever in bed”) aligned with comfort (“Blessed by family and friends”) the veracity of it all is challenged: “Are you even human? … Is it even real?” There’s a circularity here – “Dancing in a round” – that typifies much of the album. It’s extended in the title track, upbeat, acrobatic shapes paired with a narrative exploring recklessness, danger, even erasure. In the face of such existential anxiety, “in a round” feels perilously close to a downward spiral.
There are two related micro-interludes that seem bafflingly remote, yet the first of them, ‘(;´༎ຶٹ༎ຶ`)’ seems a paradigm of this sharp emotional bifurcation. We hear a field recording, an alarm, far-off and ignored, while gentle chords play out indifferently in the foreground. This theme of inner conflict reaches its furthest point in ‘Plague Dogs’, where from the outset a sense of awe is conveyed, bordering on transcendence. Yet it’s qualified by suggestions of infection, fear of capture, fear of dying. Held taut between notions of elation and dread.
‘Ict’ is an example of unalloyed uplift, an immersive slice of joy recounting chasing an ice cream van. “Tomorrow’s never, so I go faster” – all about the moment, now or never, Mayniel caught up in vocal scat delirium while subbass throbs and the whole attains rapture. The album’s high point comes in ‘Harvest Sky’, a duet with Underscores that’s an absolute floor stomper, turning up the intensity to levels of pure euphoria. Melody and chorus are all radiance, the bass pounds, yet again the song’s measured, articulating a tension between desire for communal interaction (“with no one to watch me, I felt kinda silly”) while finding true liberation in private (“And with no one around me, I come alive”). Pop at its most breathlessly and exquisitely bittersweet. [CD / LP / DL]
8 | Enno Poppe – Körper
“Gold is a choral work … in three contrasting movements that each explore some aspect of group behaviour and dynamics. … The opening movement, ‘Moderne Walpurgisnacht’, … [is] something like the ultimate stream of consciousness. … perpetually liminal: a gushing torrent yet one laden with a myriad motes of information … . [T]he tiny central interlude ‘Silber’ … a new sequence of calls and responses, swoops and slides flying back and forth as this particular species sings its own genetically programmed song. … [In] ‘Notturno’ … there’s the continual sense of everyone in it together, a context, system, situation affecting everyone the same, working and responding together without internal friction … all are united by small motivic movement that gives rise to and underpins almost everything they sing. …
Körper … is in some respects a paradigmatic example of this group behaviour and dynamic. A strict drum kit pulse holds all the numerous melodic strands together … signalling order like a steady heartbeat in an otherwise chaotic lifeform. … The gentler second part takes shape from a solo sax, its line slowly acquiring doublings and spin-offs. … The sax restarts, and as others join once again they attain a strong, blurry unity. They rise, they sink, and in so doing tap into an almost David Lynchian level of dark, brooding lyricism. …
Part 3 turns everything on its side, a weird, bleepy game of call and response. Chatty solos emerge above, an amusing little bassline chirps below, and again the music grows into a messy near-unison with a slow sense of processional. Things move out of step, the brass riff, the group somehow gains weight and manages to just about fit together. … The piece concludes with its strangest sequence so far. A texture of tiny staccato notes acts akin to a steady state, its behaviour consistent yet always changing and involving. … this ostensibly strange end of Körper doesn’t really sound like an absolute end at all, but simply the latest pause before something else begins. Endless variation and evolution, as necessary and fundamental to Poppe’s musical bodies as to organic ones.” [reviewed in December]
7 | Tantric Bile – Vampire Boudoir
It’s been an impressive year for Matt Stephens’ Tantric Bile nom de guerre. Both A Medusa in Your House and Babalon indicated the extent of his ambition, melding extremities of noise, metal and grindcore with avant-garde classical thinking. The results are fittingly alchemical, and are heard to best effect on Vampire Boudoir. The album is deeply infused with inspiration and imagery drawn from the playful imaginings of Greek and occult myths, fused with a strong inclination toward potent forms of pseudo-ritual.
From a tentative but energised introduction entrance, we enter its complete opposite, a ferocious sequence (‘Kültovampen’) where something akin to an ancient reed instrument blares while chaos becomes aligned and turns rhythmic. Having established these extremes, ‘Invoking Nemesis’ calibrates its call with light repetitions that culminate – or collapse – in a stunning series of surges. Werewolves are referenced in ‘Lukánthrōpoi’, where chimes, a curling flute chorus and animal noises develop into the most lovely mix of sounds with a real sense of group activity, earnest, focused, united. The heat they generate is channelled via croaks and twangs into the most wonderfully orgiastic tutti, followed by a refractory period of burps, whistles and friction.
The latter half synthesises these possibilities further. ‘Dawning the Aegides/Hecatomb to Mataiodoxía Soteira’ returns to repetitions, setting up an almost minimalistic underscore for an increasingly pounding, unstoppable dance. Radiance touches its edges, laughter is heard from the periphery, while calls, shouts, ululations and death growls resound from within, leading to a climactic united chanting. Penultimate track ‘Ekrízosi’ shifts from merriment into violence, becoming caustic and abrasive. A myriad details, impacts, cries and screams suggest an enormous destructive conflict captured in HD (a surround mix would be amazing), pull the ear in a host of depths and directions. Over time, though, everything we’re hearing seems to emanate from voices, suggesting everything has turned into a dithyrambic rampage. Exiting through rich, dissonant chords, and eye-watering punchy percussion, we’re left breathless, dazed and incredulous. [CD / DL (free)]
6 | FRUM – Whirlpool
“That title, Whirlpool, suggests swirling around … The first song, ‘Orbit With You’, invokes it in both its title and its sentiments, “They say that we are here again, back here again once more”. ‘Sun Aura’ speaks of how “the seasons go around” and stepping “into the circle to see the other side”, while the title track makes it the vehicle for emotional focus: “All of my heart centers round you from now”. The penultimate track is even named ‘Cycle’, relishing the prospect of a more collaborative journey, “I will ride the circle with you”.
This sense of something going round … is a clear feature of the music too. ‘Sun Aura’ establishes the paradigm: relaxed, flowing verses … passing into the main refrain where beats immediately appear, driving the track on in a total contrast to the more spare, chugging restraint heard elsewhere. … ‘Wave’ follows, even more polarised, with vocoded verses over a strange pulse … There’s a pronounced sense of alternating states, either ruminating in a place of float, words hard to make out, or brought into sharper focus, moving at speed. …
In ‘Ride’ the verses … occupy a place where tempo seems irrelevant, snapping into a metric grid in the choruses. Here, though, one feels it’s a lack of beats that’s more fertile, with the final chorus jettisoning them and entering an elated reverie. That’s also true in ‘Whirlpool’, with verses laden with so much bliss they become dense, aligning with cheerful trip-hop beats from time to time, in another example of oscillating states. …
The highlights of Whirlpool are the songs ‘Rise’ and ‘Cycle’. ‘Rise’ at first turns Kragesteen’s voice into weird, squiggly tendrils, placed above pounding beat repetitions … . Yet the verses immediately override and reduce the power and speed of those beats; until, that is, the choruses, when they surge forward as the foundation for huge, glorious bursts of euphoria.… ‘Cycle’ is more emphatically pop-infused … making the verses all about upbeat momentum while the first chorus moves away, returning to that euphoria. … Whereupon the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ‘Intro’ is answered by a much more expansive ‘Outro’, which ‘Cycle’ dovetails into; another chorus of assorted drifting vocal strands, as if each of the preceding tracks was encapsulated within its shining, whirling eddies.” [reviewed in July]
5 | Electro Funeral – Requiem
“Strange, strained clusters and key clicks were joined by a deep pulse. The clusters prevailed, only to be replaced by soft, high tones and whistles, mysterious and distant. Crackling from somewhere, fast rising electronic tones like a kind of incense, and a voice ([Darja] Goldberg’s) could be heard, before everything expanded into a dense, juddering wall with the accordions protruding out from it, while the pulse beat irregularly within.
These opening few minutes promised a lot, and they were entirely lived up to in the rest of the trio’s nearly 25-minute performance. Density continually evolved, and with it elements materialised and were reabsorbed. Squelches swelled over floating clusters, becoming a vibrating, flexing entity, large and looming. It was like a pure ball of energy; the clusters shimmered, both on its surface and within its core, electrified ripples ran across, as if we were zooming in on parts of its detail. Ghostly echoes of something playful, jaunty but half lost in reverberance; strange chords caught in an almost stasis; glimpses of uncanny wavering notes and a low buzzy presence. That wavering semi-solidified into something chant-like, while the chords became a drone, producing an atmosphere of ritual charged by an underlying rapidity in the synths, seemingly set to burst.
By now, the accordions seemed like disciples either side of a central priestess, Goldberg’s voice veering between unidentifiable and words suggesting something ominous and terrible toward the end. It was as disquieting as it was arresting, culminating in a return to the softer elements from earlier, incense tones, ripples, soft percussive tappings and ebbing clusters. Dissolving and crossfading into birdsong was a delicious closing gesture, suggesting a final withdrawing from the mysterious power of an all-enveloping inner sanctum, out into a world where birds improbably sang in total darkness. Breathtaking.” [reviewed in November]
4 | Dieter Ammann – Glut: Music for Orchestra
“glut is restless. Yet there’s a grandness to it and, more than anywhere else in the music on this album, a pervading sense that something tangibly harmonic lurks deep below, quietly guiding at least some of what’s playing out on the surface. A great deal of the work indicates uncertainty: sounds are tremulous, points of focus smeared, continuity disrupted by shock accents. Yet its narrative is one continually oscillating between driving on and holding back. … The work’s middle sequence … is more erratic, though even here Ammann moderates its repetitions and rapidity with the opposite. … Distant bells and returning smeared pitches suggest a recapitulation of sorts … and just two minutes before the end, the orchestra lets rip a jaw-dropping cry …; those harmonic traces continue through an exquisite coda discreetly underpinned by pivoting tritones, shivering but radiant above.
There’s a visceral quality to Ammann’s often unusual timbres, heard from the outset in [Core’s] weird opening gesture and a kind of noise-melody that here sounds like it’s made out of focused air. More importantly … they bring out a pronounced brightness, even before the first minute has passed, with triadic hints that point ahead but also back to glut. … Something akin to this brightness also comes through strongly in Turn, reinforcing the continuity across the works. OSR bring a nice sense of opulence to the opening section, like it’s sounding from within, caught in a large amount of densely compacted stuff. … What i love about this performance is its attitude of all or nothing, Nott making Ammann’s pauses into a truly halting sense of progress, rendering it more contemplative. …
The harmonic / triadic hints continue in OSR’s performance of Boost … Nott strikes an excellent balance between momentum and reflection; the power level is by now undeniable, but the emphasis – continuing on from everything that’s gone before – is on the lyrical ideas. … All the same, Boost has that name for a very good reason, and its latter stages assume nothing less than dithyrambic levels of caprice. … Nott and OSR launch into the most uproariously gleeful party atmosphere, rhythms and accents spilling and slapping all over the place, in a brief but potent display of utter abandon.” [reviewed in November]
3 | Galina Ustvolskaya – Symphonies Nos. 1–5 [LPO / Karlsen]
“In the instrumental part 1 [of Symphony No. 1], Karlsen gets a wonderful balance of warmth … that’s immediately undermined, capturing in this introduction something essential about the work’s unique form of austere lyricism. We feel both touched and pushed away, an ambivalence that perhaps characterises Ustvolskaya’s entire output … The unwavering focus Karlsen brings to the piece almost feels too much in ‘Saturday night’, where its strong neutrality almost becomes a kind of blankness, made rather eerie in the close-micing of the voices. … while in ‘When factory chimneys die’ the boys themselves embody the harshness, their cries reinforced by the orchestra, a spellbinding sequence that, again, splits later in a schizoid mix of robotic staccatos and lyricism, the latter featuring a gorgeous deep tuba. …
The LPO’s performance of Symphony No. 2 “True and Eternal Bliss!” … may well be the highlight of the album as a whole, as Karlsen fearlessly leans into its abject, apocalyptic tone. The drum accents are wince-inducingly impactful, like literal blows to the chest, answered by looming swells in wind and brass. But the voice! … the wild, stentorian tones of Sergej Merkusjev, whose desperation is unequivocal, and literally amazing to behold. … There’s a comparable sense of shock in Symphony No. 3 “Jesus Messiah, Save Us!” (a work i explored in 2016), its polarised opening sounding both extremely close and starkly panned: low left, high right. Both here and elsewhere the LPO wind players … add a heartbreaking subtlety to the music, jarring against a palpable anger in the ensuing chords, as if they were compressed in a tight container. … Though it seems impossible, Karlsen ramps things up in Symphony No. 4 “Prayer”, eliciting such terrifying opening crescendos and tam-tam crashes … that it’s as if we’ve plunged into a climax in medias res. …
Symphony No. 5 “Amen” … is a blasted, ruined soundscape, post-apocalyptic, and Karlsen quite rightly keeps everything marshalled. … The work’s final bangs on the wooden cube are somewhere between gunshots and hammer blows, which only makes Merkusjev’s final outburst, where he practically loses it in emotional overload … seem utterly inevitable.
This is an incredible album. The commitment and execution shown here are formidable, and the effect is not merely powerful and immediate but utterly cataclysmic. … Ustvolskaya’s symphonies have never sounded so vibrant, so challenging, so necessary. Аы! Господи!” [reviewed in October]
2 | Aya – Hexed!
“It starts with an opening gambit filled with … self-aimed, self-inflicted violence, stubborn and humiliated, frustrated and pent-up, coloured by dark, bitter humour. … ‘off to the ESSO’, a fever dream-nightmare, breathless and unstoppable, shape-shifting taken to an extreme here as beats are seemingly made out of liquid turned into semi-solid forms. There’s not a melody in sight but instead something between sprechstimme, rap and a rant, pitch materialising only as acidic bursts and stings, while bass is seemingly only present in order to surge and pummel. …
[A]ll that torrential flow crashes into the devastating internal reflection that is ‘the names of Faggot Chav boys’. Agonising wounds inflicted from within and without, looking back to childhood, friends and enemies, persecution from elders and authority figures. … the album then encroaches on total stasis in ‘Heat Death’. By now, the euphoria of ‘off to the ESSO’ feels both a long way away and exposed as being little more than a brief respite … Having turned away from ephemeral narrative, Aya returns to it in ‘Peach’, where there’s a similar, stark leap between worlds in the move from verse to chorus. … The choruses aren’t so much memories as wistful possibilities of what might have been, but wasn’t… They’re all the more poignant as, for the first time, Aya really sings …
The title track starts the second half of Hexed! with its first instrumental. … Like a buzzsaw the music is ripped through its centre, pained, elegiac, somehow still singing through excruciating discomfort, those pings now like water torture, drops of acid. For a time, words have broken down, yet the music says it all. We’re then thrown back, shockingly directly, to autobiography in ‘droplets’, that benign title belying how drenched the track is: rain, gutters, blood, body fluids, drugs, poison. Later on, the vocals will literally be drowned. …
‘The Petard is my Hoister’ … unfolds as a series of chords trying to gain focus, timbral hints of organ mingling with a more caustic, dangerous razor edge … and in the final 30 seconds birdsong and ambient sound unexpectedly materialises. ‘Time at the Bar’ abruptly wipes out that world beyond, overwhelming it with intense juddering, pitched and percussive, followed by superfast beats. … It’s a tough ending. … Yet that instance of the natural world … comes late in the album, and stays in the memory; it connects back to the references to landscape heard earlier … and suggests the possibility, one day, perhaps, of the beginnings of something redemptive.” [reviewed in December]
1 | Gerald Eckert – night, falling
134 minutes; seven pieces; one soundworld – this is just epic.
The fact that the works included on night, falling all seem to be large windows into different parts of the same world establishes a strong sense of familiarity. Yet various facets of the music actively work against that sense, leading to a prolonged, even permanent feeling of tension.
To a large extent this derives from the fact that Eckert’s musical language is profoundly elusive. Yet it’s not remotely distant – on the contrary, often it’s incredibly close; it feels tangible, its sounds distinct, discrete points of tactile solidity. No, this is music not so much at the periphery of perception as resolution: we hear, but we’re rarely sure what we are hearing, in terms of what specific sounds are, where they emanate from and how they relate.
The work that opens the album, späte Gegend for orchestra, demonstrates this uncertainty from the start, with rustling noise that could either be the product of one large or many small sources of movement. The ensuing texture of streaked pitches suggests friction, things rubbing hard together, while rumble leads to various impacts, more streaks and noise, lingering pitches, some of them ostensibly overtones, all very shadowy and skittery, made ominous by low growls. Even within these first couple of minutes we have to adapt our listening away from identity in favour of ambiguity. This is a landscape that’s not so much truly alien as just very foreign, though laden with traces that suggest, allude to and evoke sounds and gestures that are very familiar.
This tense listening state is also a kind of instinctive, sympathetic response to the fundamental character of Eckert’s soundworld, which is itself a paradigm of tension. In conjunction with its elusiveness, it’s also highly volatile. In general, this is a world where sounds move slowly (the seven compositions range from 11 to over 26 minutes in length, and they both need and earn those durations) and as such, it’s easy to be lulled into a sense that everything is under control – indeed, that control is perhaps the defining feature of this music. Nothing could be further from the truth. Returning to späte Gegend, barely a few minutes on from that mysterious introduction we’re confronted by a sequence of increasingly solid swells. They fall away into vague, muffled aftermaths, but finally there’s a huge eruption as some instrument from abyssal depths – akin to an unfathomable horn – heralds something unutterably momentous. Whereupon it’s all gone, leaving just a high, tinnitus tone and deep resonance from drums and gongs. It may not be a place where chaos reigns, yet unclarity and uncertainty are endemic.
An additional aspect of this derives from the fact that many of these pieces incorporate electronic elements (both fixed media and live electronics), but at almost no point is it even remotely clear what those elements are contributing. That, in turn, makes one question almost everything – both electronic and instrumental – acting to undermine and distance even more the nature and details of what we hear. Furthermore, three of these pieces are presented as concertante works, yet here too the precise nature, contribution and, at times, even sonic identity of their respective soloists is similarly difficult to parse. The clearest is Schemen – Feld 30, where a contrabass clarinet moves within an electronic environment, though even here what constitutes the actual clarinet and possible extensions of its sounds and timbral palette is hard to tell. Eckert’s electronics conjure up monochromatic gothic splendour, impossibly vast, which the clarinet (mesmerisingly performed by Joachim Striepens) seems to meld with: sometimes vaporous, as if part of the grey open space; sometimes intimidatingly present, projecting impossibly deep tones that resound like primordial roars, even while everything dissipates to almost nothing. The dynamic range here and everywhere else is enormous, encompassing the most massive and the most microscopic, and everything in between.
Likewise the title work, Nacht, die fallende, where solo cello, orchestra and live electronics combine to form a homogeneous electroacoustic mixture. More streaks, more rumbles, now as the extreme poles of a vague but unmistakably heightened music, no longer merely tense, now taut. A weird major third materialises, is pulled apart, and the poles exert an immense force causing a dizzying swell. Beyond it, still polarised, things continue unfocused, a slow melange of cello squall and remote, suggestive atmospherics. Here, the balance – if that’s the right word – is in the nature of that wide polarity, between tectonic movement below and more rapid activity above. Again the volatility, instances of inner expansion that never stop sounding overwhelming and massive, despite never being full-blown outbursts; again the inscrutable, inseparable solo instrument, one element fused with all the others.
ferne Tiefe for contrabass flute, orchestra, live electronics and tape seemingly picks up where that piece leaves off. Nothing identifiable emerges for several minutes, instead forming an ominous, pulsing, singular sonic entity; maybe a trace of brass here, a string there, but everything is once again melded into the whole. Over four minutes pass before the flute makes its presence felt – although, high and overtone-riddled, it’s impossible to extricate it from adjacent sounds. Instead, we’re pulled by the huge gravitational pull of the sound mass, looming and colossal, until – the other end of this music’s instability – Eckert tilts everything into erasure, a blank texture of granular noise and almost palimpsestical traces of pitch (but from where? of what??).
By integrating diverse musical elements in this way, the organic nature of the music is significantly increased. Indeed, these pieces are like true, large-scale sonic organisms, undergoing gradual processes of activity, evolution and transformation that have an unassailable internal logic. This is all the more remarkable when one considers the mind-boggling range of sounds that appear in Eckert’s music, perhaps even more so when, just once or twice, they’re actually identifiable (such as an incredible moment around nine minutes into späte Gegend, when a singing bowl makes a brief appearance).
Kisalpah for ensemble and electronics continues this ongoing exploration, again making acoustic and electronic inextricable, in a tantalising way that’s more enigmatic. The volatility is different here; no eruptions but instead recurring bursts of clatter that are consistently troubling, as if they had a tone of authority to them. It seems as if it might clarify into something tangible, via pitches and whistles, but it ultimately remains strange and defocused, in perhaps the most aloof and remote of these pieces. If they are, as i’ve suggested, all windows into the same soundworld, Kisalpah is located far in its interior, a place that’s enclosed, the most exotic, furthest from familiar reference or focal points.
im Endlichen, dehnbar for solo accordion is a rare example on the album of greatly increased focus, due to the use of just a single instrument. It’s like a distillation of what we’ve encountered so far writ small. The accordion (played by Eva Zöllner) is unstable, seemingly trying with increasing violence to free itself from recurring sustained notes. Frustration becomes incandescent, but the strongest connection to the other works comes as it descends, almost ‘singing’ in the form of a deep cluster, as if a single voice had been refracted into a tightly bunched-up chorus. (One can’t help wondering if somehow this is what lies at the core of all this music, perhaps giving rise to it all.)
The album concludes with instead of (empty rooms II) for ensemble and tape, and while it might seem as if, by now, after nearly two hours exploring this soundworld, there’d be nowhere left to go, the piece proves decidedly otherwise. Here, the sonic unclarity that typifies this place is seemingly turned inside out. While there’s a primary emphasis on pitch, it’s blurred and hazy, to the extent that the music sounds like an imagined presence – or, even more apt, a kind of ‘amplified absence’. Ghost music. The ensemble seems to be trying to articulate something beyond utterance, their erratic nature akin to that of the accordion previously, a form of frustration arising from the necessity of the urge clashing with the impossibility of the action.
This is, very simply, among the most dazzling and exciting music – acoustic, electronic, electroacoustic, whatever – you’re ever likely to encounter. Nothing is as it seems; indeed, everything seems to transcend the very notion of ‘seeming’. All of it is just wondrously new. Prepare to be arrested and bewildered, overwhelmed and stunned, and when its 134 minutes have elapsed, to be itching to experience it all over again. This is what makes night, falling, by far, the Best Album of 2025.
