Some albums that I've enjoyed listening to for the first time in 2025
Because it's what you do at the end of the year, here are the highlights of my year listening to music, new and old.
Hi, me again. When I wrote my first piece here back in March, I had romantic ideas of starting to blog again after 15-odd years away from the form. Alas, a combination of actual paid work and already writing a load about music for Loud And Quiet this year meant that never transpired. Indeed, slightly abashed by that false start back in the spring, I’d recently assumed this account would just lurk forever. Instead, nine months on and with a bit of unexpected free time, here’s an attempted winter reanimation.
Now, it being December, a rundown of one’s favourite albums of the year is the obvious dish du jour. Then again, there’s a lot of AOTY lists kicking about at the moment, so I’m going to mix things up: as well as picking some 2025 albums I’ve enjoyed, I’ve also selected a handful that I’ve heard for the first time this year, regardless of how old they are. Hopefully the effect will be the same, namely suggesting something to listen to that might’ve been previously unencountered.
Caveats:
(1) I don’t listen to hundreds of new albums, as I don’t have the mental bandwidth and sometimes just get hooked on one and absolutely mainline that for a fortnight, so a list of 12 here feels about right to me. (How do people come up with lists of their 100 favourite albums of 2025?!). All of which is to say if I’ve missed something you think I’d love, I’m all ears in the comments.
(2) While a lot of the writing below is fresh musings, some of it has already appeared in abridged/extended/altered form on the Loud And Quiet Substack (nothing is just copy-pasted!), so if it feels familiar, I can only thank you for having already read a different edit of it over there. That cannibalisation is not meant as lazy, more just that once I’ve had my say about a record I love, I find it difficult to conjure different words for the same feelings.
Anyway, 12 album recommendations follow, and I’ll start things off with my Official Favourite Record of 2025:
Editrix — The Big E (2025)
The ceaseless gush of new music that comes down the Spotify pipe every Friday like that skit from the Stewart Lee Comedy Vehicle became so overwhelming midway through 2025 that I felt utterly drained and would rather go back to classics than address the pile of unlistened-to albums stacking up in my library. But when the Norman Records weekly mailout listed The Big E as “a gleefully chaotic set of experimental rock”, it was, happily, just what I was in the mood for that afternoon, so I listened to the singles and ten minutes later I’d ordered the LP. A week later it hadn’t left my turntable, and six months on it’s my favourite album of the year and the one I can’t stop telling my friends about as the cure for jaded ears.
It’s not that the album is entirely new-sounding — indeed, it’s easy to draw the through-line from Sonic Youth, Horse Lords, Nirvana and even a touch of Battles — but more that the vim, vitality and virtuosity across its 40 minutes are just so refreshing and addictive. There are hooks and riffs that draw you in, and playful polyrhythms and great big splangs that make it infectiously fun all the way through.
It also helps that lead singer Wendy Eisenberg makes these brilliant tutorial videos about her songs, and appears to have that rare quality of being completely at ease with her own talent — not falsely humble, but not show-offy either. But more than that, The Big E made me excited to discover new bands once again after what felt like years of diminishing returns.
Anna B Savage — You and I Are Earth (2025)
“Parasocial” was the Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year, presumably prompted by the relationships developed by Swifties and Allen stans in October, when the year’s two most discussed albums came out. Both The Life of a Showgirl and West End Girl made me feel pretty uncomfortable, less because of the content and more because of the seemingly wilful attempt to put daylight between star and fan and amplify that one-way power imbalance, which coimes across as borderline abusive. Parasocial relationships seem unhealthy; to then cultivate them feels exploitative.
But where those two big-hitting albums glamorised the drama unfolding in their love-lives with little care for the listener, Anna B Savage’s latest tell-all record about her romantic encounters went beautifully in the opposite direction: welcoming and warm, genuine and unassuming, You & I Are Earth must be one of the great love albums of this century, drawing you into relatable conversations about relationships with little butterfly melodies that offer you a rush-of-love contact-high from just existing in their aura.
I don’t know Savage, but after three albums of brutally honest songs about heartache, recovery, and now the simple act of falling in love, I feel I do. And in contrast to the parasocial relationships cultivated by attention-hungry megastars, Savage offers one here that’s actively enriching on the part of the fan, telling stories that feel gladdening, hopeful, and even a little inspirational.
Water From Your Eyes — It’s A Beautiful Place (2025)
This and the Editrix LP are the two albums that I can’t put down this year — just when I think I’ve wrung every last drop from each of them, they go back out and give me a little more. With It’s A Beautiful Place, what I like best is how it manages to do so much in such a short time but also never feels rushed or cramped. While you’re listening, it doesn’t feel like every second counts, or that the band are trying to cram all their ideas in like Tetris blocks, but at the same time there are about 20 things happening in each track, which is obviously a lot of fun. That’s a real skill, too: there’s space and artistry, as well as a very contemporary feeling of sensory overload.
But for all the stylistic breadth, it still hangs together with weirdness, edge, melody, drama, wit, brevity and, perhaps most crucially, a real sense of personality, the likes of which I can’t remember encountering before. Indeed, I was trying to think of the forebears for It’s A Beautiful Place, and the nearest I got was something like mid-90s/turn-of-the-century Beck. Not because Water From Your Eyes sound much like Beck, but because both acts appear to be so comfortable making records in lots of different idioms, but never in a novelty way, and remain super-melodic while they’re at it.
(A companion album to this that I’m not going to go into too much depth about here is the almost-as-good Cosplay by Sorry — Spotify / Bandcamp — which operates on a lot of the same levels of genre-collision and rich personality, of indie eccentricity and a sort of magpie quirkiness. If “hyperpop” has come to characterise the mashing together of lots of disperate pop styles and tropes, are we seeing, with these two records and others recents like them, the emergence in parallel of a sort of hyperindie?)
Caroline — Caroline 2 (2025)
If Caroline’s first album sought to stretch small ideas over long timeframes, their second crams complexity into the tightest spaces to the point of bursting, and the fallout from that is a joy. But although Caroline 2 is nominally “difficult” — there aren’t as many traditional pop structures as, say, WFYE or Editrix, and unorthodox recordings of voices and instruments abound — there’s still a naturalism to how Caroline sound, with an almost disarming familiarity in terms of the arrangements and melodies, right up until the point when that familiarity is wilfully — and expertly — severed.
The songs here often give the impression of multiple ideas happening alongside one another, or with one component becoming caught in a decaying loop while another continues on above it in a parallel but still audible universe. The effect makes it difficult to recall the beginnings of songs or predict where they should end, generating a hypnotic, time-dilating experience akin to intense daydreaming or staring out of the window of a high-speed train.
Or perhaps, more viscerally, this is what the inside of my brain can feel like a lot of the time — where thoughts appear, unprompted, then either vanish or stick steadfast for what seems like hours, undulating but never repeating, or where phrases of internal monologue iterate and echo, and competing thoughts bump up against each other. In the moment, and internally, it all feels fairly reasonable (it’s just in there, why wouldn’t it be?) but it’s only when I have cause to describe the contents to someone outside my own skull that I realise quite how nutty and knotty it might be.
In contrast, too, to plenty of bands who talk with superficially convincing intellectualism about the influences of complicated modern composers but whose records actually sound like Oasis, Caroline 2 actually pushes at the frontiers of what a band can do with an arsenal of voices, instruments, computers and microphones. The fact that they can be so boundary-breaking and strange while remaining this emotionally approachable is what keeps me coming back.
Horsegirl — Phonetics On And On (2025)
I’m not usually one for records where the overriding aesthetic is a sort of shambling cutesiness, so to my shame I dismissed Horsegirl pretty much on sight when they first came on my radar a few years ago. I can’t remember why I decided to give them a second look for this one, but I’m so glad I did: what I’d initially misread as hipster lo-fi posturing was actually really pleasingly laser-focused simplicity, where every action is in service to the track.
With that realisation, the unvarnished approach becomes Horsegirl’s greatest asset, amplifying the impact of their melodies and vocal harmonies, boosting the expressivity of their playing and giving the whole album a brilliant sense of coherence. The lack of intrusive production also gives Phonetics On And On a real sense of confidence: with a total absence of distractions or sonic trickery, this is proper nowhere-to-hide music, with each player having essentially one sound for the whole album. I find that radical honesty really compelling: it makes me want to listen to the record again and again, almost just to revel in its purity.
Kieran Hebden & William Tyler — 41 Longfield Street Late 80s (2025)
There’s been a shift in focus for Loud And Quiet this year, away from the quick-read album reviews that used to run in its printed incarnation into something more substantial on Substack that delves into the context of a record over a couple thousand words and hopefully provides the sort of framing that helps the reader enjoy the music even more. I’ve written a few of these now, and it’s certainly helped me get more from the music: the process of putting each review together has forced me to commune with the album I’m listening to on a more foundational level, and that’s led to some very satisfying revelations.
Perhaps most enjoyable to dive into, in September, was 41 Longfield Street Late 80s, which on the surface is a gorgeous, twinkling album of electronics and guitars loosely inspired by instrumental country music. It abstracts its source material into long ribbons of sound, and can be really quite ethereal at times, but it’s never alienating: maybe because of its country music roots, there’s always a hook or a melody waiting over the next hill.
But once you know the album’s background, it’s also about childhood, remembrance, and maybe even a little about grief, and about a fan’s relationship with music, and how age and place affect how you listen, respond, and reminisce. In that way, then, it becomes a sort of Rorschach blot in musical form, as revealing and emotionally rich as you want it to be, from tasteful twinkle to heavy eulogies for people, places, and music that are no longer here; an album that shows that instrumental music can sometimes actually enhance narrative heft by showing rather than telling, while still remaining a blank canvas in isolation and in the present.
PinkPanthress — Fancy That (2025)
There really aren’t enough albums that you can bang through three times in an hour in the sort of fizzy, sugar-rush ALL THE HARIBO gorging way that you can with Fancy That. The classic 20-minute hardcore punk album might offer you this opportunity in terms of pure duration, but those flavours are normally too acidic, the noise too scabrous, to not demand at least a small pause between playings.
Instead, Fancy That is primarily just a complete bop, but stays listenable after that novelty’s worn off because of how PinkPantheress engages with her source material, which to my ears (and to my surprise, too) has quite a lot in common with a Yo La Tengo record.
Woah woah, come back, hear me out. See, Yo La Tengo are quite often disparaged as “record-collector rock”, just showing you their record collection through their music, all exquisitely tasteful but lacking sincerity. As a fan, though, I’ve always found that to be a cheap shot, because what YLT do so well is merge their influences to make a new cocktail from the classic ingredients, and I think that’s what PinkPanthress is doing here, too: it’s impossible to describe Fancy That without referencing all the songs she’s sampled — there goes Underworld, that one sounds like Daft Punk, there’s the Basement Jaxx lift, there’s even Just Jack and Sex on Fire references (which may be a bridge too far for you; it was for me) — but because she’s interacting with the original material with such glee, that joy becomes infectious.
Perhaps this should be a given for a 20-minute-long album, too, but Fancy That is also completely fat-free, which becomes rather dazzling: when PinkPanthress has an idea, that’s the first thing you hear — there’s no prelude or establishing shot — and because the album’s so densely packed, its entirety feels incredibly robust and nourishing, even when it’s this short. It goes hard and fast and perhaps runs out of steam slightly, which maybe reveals PinkPanthress’ young age, but this really isn’t “young people’s music” as some places have framed it. Despite the TikTok origins and all the virality, I feel like Fancy That’s actually got real staying power.
Listen: Spotify / Not on Bandcamp
Sam Amidon — Salt River (2025)
After 12 albums and 25 years of a recording career, it’s fairly easy to guess what a Sam Amidon record is going to do, and to an extent, his latest went with form: Salt River has gently circling acoustic guitars and serene singing, plaintively scraped fiddle and a world-building combo of traditional tunes and Amidon originals. But it also has flurries of electronica and improvised jazz, and even within its folkiest moments lie experiments in song structure and rhythm that offer the kind of aural detail that encourages closer listening.
It also benefited from its 2025 surroundings: as the world of post-folk — music made with a folk approach but reaching beyond traditional folk execution — emerges with the continued rise of bands like Lankum and the careful curation of labels like River Lea (I’m not going to write about the Poor Creature album here — Spotify / Bandcamp here because of space and attention spans, but it’s worth your time), Amidon has taken on a sort of grandfatherly quality: this is the sound of a man who’s been there and done that several times over, who’s still progressing, still experimenting, still panning the ageless, depthless world of an old tradition for unorthodox gold.
Staraya Derevnya — Garden Window Escape (2025)
This is probably the weirdest record I’ve heard all year, and certainly the best weird one. It was another Norman Records tip (this time described in the mailout as “dancing between motorik groove, chaotic freak-out, and meditative drift” — whoever writes these should be on commission), and another where I just felt thoroughly orally reset, in the best possible way, after I’d finished listening to it.
It’s essentially a slow funk album, in that each track has a foundational groove and swagger over which ornaments are sprinkled, but the stuff that comprises the sprinkles is completely up for grabs: there’s some kazoo, cut-up vocals, droning reeds, what sounds like ping-pong balls rustling around in a shopping bag, maybe a fly trapped in a lampshade? It’s fairly abstruse, for sure, and the effect of that is obviously strange. But because everything is so rhythmically propulsive and locked in, your brain starts to make sense of this weird timbral soundworld that’s floating past you almost involuntarily, and before you know it you’re strutting around the kitchen to ambient field recordings and you’re suddenly a very long way from home.
Radiohead — Hail To The Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009) (2025)
Wild opinion here, but Radiohead have a fair few good albums. We can argue about which ones they are in the comments, but I’ll say above the line that I never really got on with Hail To The Thief: I found it a bit square and predictable after the sonic adventures of Kid A, and slightly shapeless too (I think it’s their longest album, and it certainly feels like that).
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that I’ve really fallen for these live recordings — they’ve breathed life and dynamism into songs that I’d filed in my head under “meh”, and that surprise is really welcome. In this incarnation, the songs from Hail To The Thief have a cartwheeling energy, confidence and menace, and put together it all sounds like a band just really enjoying themselves. Top marks in particular for the glow-up of Myxomatosis: I always found the studio version quite anaemic and try-hard, but on this album, that bass riff is absolutely monstrous.
Maybe Hail To The Thief should’ve been a Get Back-style no-frills/no-overdubs quasi-live album all along? Perhaps that would have been the perfect aesthetic response to the layers upon layers of Kid A? Based on seeing Radiohead last month at the O2, I certainly would love it their next album took that approach — and it would be a great way for them to sign off as a band.
Laughing — Because It’s True (2024)
Back in September, I stopped over in Montreal for a few days on my way to visit my in-laws on the other side of Canada, and spotted the striking graphic sleeve of Because It’s True in a record shop’s “local bands” rack. I knew nothing about them except that they had a bold sense of record-cover design and were from Montreal, a combo that was enough for me to ask the guy behind the desk if I could have a listen. I was about 40 seconds into the first song when I decided to part with my twenty bucks: this is gloriously crunchy power-pop in the grand tradition of Teenage Fanclub, The Lemonheads, Dinosaur Jr etc., concise and melodic and unpretentious and the sort of tunes you can imagine cropping up on some charming indie coming-of-age movie set somewhere in eastern North America in the autumn in the early noughties.
I admit I bought this record half as just a souvenir from my trip, but in the months since getting home, I’ve had it on again and again: there’s a comfort in its familiar soundworld, an ease in its modesty and its charm, and those qualities only seem to amplify with each passing play.
Chet Atkins — From Nashville With Love (1965)
Another Canadian record-shop punt here, this time from the two-dollar rack at Fascinating Rhythm in Nanaimo (incidentally, one of the maddest, most overflowing and chaotic-in-a-good-way record shops I’ve ever encountered), way over on the other side of the country. I knew Atkins’ name only from his reputation as one of the great country instrumentalists — I couldn’t’ve hummed you a tune of his — but having spent much of the previous month getting really inside the Kieran Hebden and William Tyler album for my write-up in Loud And Quiet, I was very much up for diving into the lush country sound that that record drew inspiration from, and which this album’s cover promises.
And how perfectly that promise is kept, too: this record has not a care in the world, and is completely seductive as a result. Zero-gravity string sections and Atkins’ precise but really expressive playing all add up to the musical equivalent of the “quiet luxury” trend that’s emerged in recent years, all understated elegance, premium but unshowy craftsmanship and a sort timeless quality, where it’s clearly not from the present but it’s also difficult to place.
There’s definitely a melancholy to this too, though — a sense of a bygone, even forgotten era preserved on vinyl — that would also make it ripe for the right kind of contemporary sampling (if snippets of Atkins is buried in The Avalanches’ Since I Left You, for example, I woundn’t be surprised). But in its entirety, From Nashville With Love is just completely enchanting. I challenge you to find a more escapist half-hour.
Listen: Spotify / Not on Bandcamp
Sun Ra — Sleeping Beauty (1979)
One of the nice things about liking Sun Ra is that he has about a million albums, so there’s always another to discover if the mood takes you. Such a mood did for me earlier this year (thanks to a re-issue/re-mastering job) and so this gem became new to me 46 years after its release.
What I love most about it is that, on top of all the lovely noisy joyful chaos and crunchy clustered chords that comes as standard with most Sun Ra records, this one is also super-romantic, as if the band were channelling Curtis Mayfield and Memphis soul as much as they were Jupiter moon beams and free radicals and whatnot. And that combo really works: the heady, lovestruck quality meshes perfectly with the loose groove, and the whole thing seems to float along, unmoored from anything remotely Earthly, making it a strangely good companion piece to that Chet Atkins record, too. Perhaps that challenge to find a more escapist half-hour should be extended to this one too.
And there you have it, a dozen records for a slow advent. Some you may have heard, and there’ll definitely be ones I’ve missed, too, so if you have any tips, please do let me know. I might try and post more in 2026 if the mood takes me, or I might end up seeing you again in a year’s time. Either way, thanks for reading this far!
Don't know that Editrix album, sounds right up my alley.
Haven’t heard most of these!