My albums of 2025

Hello. I’m actually getting my albums of the year written the correct year for once. Woohoo.

For the first time in ages, there’s no straight-up ambient, drone, or modern classical in this list. That’s despite some very strong releases. Claire M Singer’s latest was astonishingly good and would absolutely have made it if she hadn’t done so before. There were welcome returns from Clarice Jensen, Jasmine Guffond, and Deaf Center. There were old friends in new guises in the shape of OSMIUM (Hildur Guðnadóttir, emptyset, and others), Annie A (which included Félicia Atkinson), and William Basinski’s collab with Richard Chartier. And my most striking new find was Amosphère. Straying a little further from the brief, the VÍZ record gave me the warm fuzzies.

The shortlist on the bosh front was, well, much shorter, but very strong: the retro vibes of Unspecified Enemies could easily have made the cut, and the delightfully catchy Loco Dice LP very very nearly did — instead, I’m giving a bonus track-of-the-year to Ice Cold Dealer.

But my final list is:

• Anna von Hausswolff’s Iconoclasts. This collection of pipe organ power ballads is huge in every sense.
• Charlotte de Witte’s self-titled album. Absolute banger after absolute banger.
• Djrum’s Under Tangled Silence. The technical bravado, the layers of complexity, and yet the lightness and fluidity of this record, which I tentatively filed under “jazzy post-footwork”, continues to blow me away.
• Heinali and Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko’s Гільдеґарда (Hildegard). Combining some top-notch modular synth with the “white voice” style of Ukrainian folk singing, this is awesomely powerful stuff.
• Loradeniz’s SUN SHONE. Half woozy synth and sighing, half IDM-ish ambient techno, this is a pure delight.

(P.S. Yes, I know I said that Singer missed out because she’s been here before, and I know that Hausswolf has been here before, but I never said that was a hard rule, and this is so good that I have to make an exception anyway.)

That’s it! I highly recommend that you now go and wrap your lugs around one of these.