{"id":2184105,"date":"2025-12-02T14:03:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T14:03:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2184105"},"modified":"2025-12-02T14:03:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T14:03:13","slug":"the-year-in-new-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/the-year-in-new-music\/","title":{"rendered":"The Year in New Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In spite of a shattered monoculture and dividing attention spans, the studio album still held power as a cultural event in 2025. <\/strong>Everyone from rappers who\u2019d <\/strong>just as soon persist <\/strong>as a hail of singles, like Playboi Carti and Cardi B, to pop overlords like Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter <\/strong>came to the plate. Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, and Doja Cat used their albums to broadcast tastes that span decades. Morgan Wallen, Justin Bieber, Arcade Fire, and Drake sought to turn the page on negative press by refocusing attention on their talents. An album is a megaphone and podium, or an intricate sculpture, or a temporary press whirlwind. The best of this year took the opportunity to nudge us toward a deeper love for our fellow humans, or a greater appreciation of an outstanding auteur\u2019s craft, <\/strong>or a fresh outlook on an existing musical tradition \u2014 without losing sight of the hunger for big hooks and cool riffs that brought us around in the first place.<\/p>\n

The Brooklyn arts collective joined a growing number of artists this year who pulled albums from Spotify as disdain mounts for the company\u2019s payouts and practices. They sent listeners on a quest to obtain their third album: For a few hours on September 11, you could meet someone in a Mickey Mouse costume in Times Square to pay cash for a DVD that turned out to contain the new music. (They\u2019d eventually livestream it and sell copies on their website.) If you found it, you heard a zany patchwork of anachronistic threads. It\u2019s a slippery, ambitious album that investigates past innovation through a lens of modern ennui. It buzzes around history, reverent toward the insular studio funk of Sly Stone, the guitar tones of the Isley Brothers and the Beatles, the memory of late Latin-jazz titan Eddie Palmieri, and beat-based psychedelia and mixtape culture. The ominous \u201cSecrets\u201d advises against keeping things from a lover just after a false-start New Orleans funeral march yields to a folk-blues chant. The woozy \u201cMr. Postman, Wait!\u201d melds doo-wop vocals, drum machine clatter, and wailing blues-rock guitar. It\u2019s almost like stumbling on an old record warped by the elements. The album <\/strong>shares a shambling music-nerd awe with the work of greats like Madlib.<\/p>\n

A few of the bubbly originals from the singer-songwriter and producer\u2019s second mixtape carry the potential to be her calling card, like the meet-cute-as-job-interview narrative \u201cIllegal.\u201d After reinforcing her skills as a curt, potent writer with an uncannily keen handle on late-\u201990s and early-aughts pop culture, the 24-year-old puts her peers and influences on the remixes. U.K. music titans sampled on the mixtape (Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada, Sugababes) return the favor in zesty reworks. Assists from an international cast of admirers \u2014 Swedish cloud rapper Bladee, Britpop revivalist Rachel Chinouriri, Brazilian singer Anitta, K-pop group Seventeen \u2014 make for one of the most alluring maps of an artist\u2019s taste since Drake flipped Missy and Kanye on So Far Gone<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In his growing spate of work in Safdie films and Weeknd albums, producer Daniel Lopatin has developed an aptitude for all sorts of heady interstitial and incidental music. His latest album as Oneohtrix Point Never journeys over gauzy clouds of sound. The sample-based method of his earlier work returns, this time sourced by a trove of sample compilations from the \u201890s and early aughts, when rap and video game music producers had synth presets and eerie noise CDs in common. OPN records often ponder the past through examinations of his predecessors\u2019 tools. But Tranquilizer <\/em>teems with intent that feels gleaned from years of crafting songs that jostle the listener in service to advancing the plot of a scene or a pop song. Here, he co-opts some of the suspenseful sounds of luminaries like Silent Hill <\/em>composer Akira Yamaoka to ruminate on thoughts he had at the dentist\u2019s office.<\/p>\n

A decade after pairing up for the collaborative album Autoimaginary<\/em>, Chicago instrumental trios Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas reunited for a second outing. Unlike the more beat-based pleasantries of Bajas\u2019 new album Inland See <\/em>and the stomping, ominous jazz of Natural Info\u2019s recent Perseverance Flow <\/em>EP, Totality <\/em>centers breezy ambience. Four drifting expeditions into elegant quietude find the half dozen players gravitating to an alluring tenderness and weightlessness. The drums, synths, and woodwinds of the patient \u201cAlways 9 Seconds Away\u201d tiptoe around each other, never insisting upon themselves the way those instruments can. This is an album to trip into and pass time exquisitely with.<\/p>\n

The multi-disciplinary artist explores themes of love, justice, and self-worth in songs that braid jazz, rap, drum n bass, and soul. Her sophomore album follows her acclaimed 2020 debut, catching us up on the philosophical quandaries and personal initiatives of keiyaA\u2019s last half-decade. She\u2019s a more ambitious and capable composer now; she\u2019s distraught about the murder of her brother. Throughout hooke\u2019s law<\/em>, the psychedelic bliss of the former development crashes into the agony of the latter experience. <\/strong>As it bandies from tryst to testimony to tragedy, hanging on the words of literary forebears like Pat Parker and Amiri Baraka, the album sketches an arresting image of modern Black femme brilliance and resilience.<\/p>\n

On his seventh album, the Kentucky country singer-songwriter connected with veteran producer Rick Rubin to negotiate a careful expansion of his traditional Appalachian sound. Tapping the engineer behind Johnny Cash renditions of Soundgarden and Glenn Danzig <\/strong>tunes casts Childers\u2019s stories of downtrodden Americans in a new light. His stripped-down folk and reverent electric country tunes meet more cinematic dressing, shifting song structures, and plentiful distortion. It may itch at first to hear someone whose music typically avoids such producer-ly theatrics and radio format restlessness dive so committedly into it. But the message apparent in Snipe Hunter<\/em>, whose trip across the planet ends back in the hollers, is that sometimes you need to get outside your realms for a spell to tease out what you really love (and also what you no longer care for) in the first place.<\/p>\n

Adopting the dead-horse motivational saying \u201cLive, Laugh, Love\u201d as the title of his latest album is both a truth and a self-effacing wink. The crank who once named another one I Don\u2019t Like Shit, I Don\u2019t Go Outside <\/em>has found genuine happiness and fulfillment in love and family. <\/strong>On Live Laugh Love<\/em>\u2019s cover, the rapper and producer peers out at the listener over glasses, a smoke of some sort dangling from his mouth. Yeah, this will be your textbook \u201cI\u2019m a dad now\u201d album,<\/em> it all seems to smirkingly say. Earl\u2019s music is as bright as it\u2019s ever been, proving that he doesn\u2019t need a proclamation of impending doom to get animated, which is not to suggest that he\u2019s above it. He has come out of nihilism and loss having found a center, loving with purpose where sometimes his music hungered most for nothingness. \u201cI remember when I ain\u2019t want it,\u201d he muses in \u201cLive,\u201d creating distance between a devil-may-care past and a better adjusted present. He\u2019s back from the edge \u2014 with a toe \u201cstill in the void.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Puerto Rican star\u2019s sixth album is a love letter to his home that all but begs you to learn anything about the place and people. His initial forte of bittersweet breakup songs and street anthems is represented in bangers like \u201cKLOuFRENS\u201d but buttressed by journeys into the musical parents and grandparents of Latin trap and reggaeton. This album is musicology as advocacy, but it doesn\u2019t preach, nor soften its message and delivery to reach more ears. To see Bad Bunny live in 2025, fans had to leave the contiguous States; to understand his feelings, you must reckon with his language. The prize for this steadfastness is playing the next Super Bowl halftime show. Haters swear they\u2019ll watch some other counterprogramming debacle, taking nothing from Fotos<\/em>\u2019s thesis that the people our demagogues conspire to purge from this country have long been essential to its operation and art.<\/p>\n

\u27bc Read Craig Jenkins\u2019s full <\/em>review o<\/em>f DeB\u00cd TiRAR M\u00e1S FOToS<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The hooks on the Sacramento metal vets\u2019 10th album are bigger and sweeter than the last batch, at no cost to the intensity. In the punishing \u201clocked club,\u201d singer Chino Moreno juggles carnival barker and Bjork-but-goth vocal routines while the band marches in a bass-heavy chug to a synth-laced clearing at the chorus. Their last five years of touring and finding new demographics through social media have produced a somehow more self-assured version of the band that effortlessly mixed rap, metal, and synth-pop in its first five years. The acerbic tones and pretty chords of catalog classics like \u201cBe Quiet and Drive (Far Away)\u201d or \u201cMy Own Summer (Shove It)\u201d resurface in the new album\u2019s \u201cinfinite source\u201d and \u201c~metal dream.\u201d<\/p>\n

Studio utility player and singer-songwriter Dijon Duenas had a breakout year thanks to his work on the latest Bon Iver and Justin Bieber releases. His sophomore album is a wonder, the kind of record that used to trickle out more in the past when legends like Marcus Miller, Prince, and Raphael Saadiq would manage simultaneous solo and supporting roles. Dijon pulls signatures from across music history into a sound that feels increasingly his own. Jittery drum programming and shrouding reverb screams Minneapolis in the \u201880s, but the wonky thump and the multiplicity of vocal tracks are just as suggestive of D\u2019Angelo or the raw pain of a Frank Ocean. This is all in service to a batch of songs about the joy and obligation of family. The giddy <\/strong>\u201cAnother Baby!\u201d seeks to \u201cexpand the collection\u201d just after the title track and opener sweetly walks the artist\u2019s son through the courtship and pregnancy that brought him here. Baby! <\/em>ponders love in all its rejuvenating and off-putting shapes, sweating with a husband and father\u2019s devotion but sometimes with a son\u2019s pining for a closer connection with an oaklike and unreadable elder. Cycles of musical and parental influence inform an album teeming with guests \u2014 D\u2019Angelo regular Pino Palladino, folk-rockers <\/strong>Mk.gee and <\/strong>Bon Iver, pop and indie-rock producer BJ Burton \u2014 who never distract from Dijon\u2019s vision.<\/p>\n

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There are few immovable rules in popular music, but one of them is that you probably shouldn\u2019t fuck with Lily Allen, author of songs like \u201cSmile\u201d and \u201cFuck You\u201d where some poor, unsuspecting detractor is nearly defenestrated in song. Her fifth album, West End Girl<\/em> \u2014 recorded in ten days last December, when her split from Stranger Things <\/em>actor David Harbour after five years of marriage was revealed \u2014 suggests that rule has been broken. West End Girl<\/em> dramatizes a woman\u2019s inability to read her successful husband, whose jealousy and hunger for extramarital sex weigh on the protagonist in devastating and narrative-intensive pop tunes. Cruising confidently through disparate song forms as she comes to the conclusion she\u2019s being lied to, the singer lashes out in elegantly crushing yarns like \u201cPussy Palace,\u201d a snarling ode to discovering a trove of sex toys and letters and realizing your marriage was more open than you thought. \u201cRuminating\u201d twists in bed at night while a man is stepping out; \u201cRelapse\u201d takes its feelings of betrayal and fragility out on the dance floor. It\u2019s very fully formed and versatile for a work the songwriter describes as \u201cautofiction.\u201d Cooking this grenade for most of a year to drop on the doorstep of the final season of the ex\u2019s television series says as much as the pith of \u201cMadeline\u201d and \u201cTennis\u201d that Lily Allen is back in her vengeful element.<\/p>\n

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Touch<\/em>, the first full-length by venerable Chicago post-rock outfit Tortoise since 2016\u2019s The Catastrophist<\/em>, catches the quintet pushing past the most bucolic stretches of the previous release. The group has often gotten its kicks from bowling listeners over with the vastness and strangeness of its requisite parts; this wily two-drummer situation can take the shape of a majestic rock band or a coterie of techno-organic aliens. But Touch<\/em>, the eighth album, settles on sweetness, its grooves not far removed from what the Francophiles in Stereolab have been up to lately. These are some of the more tunefully serene passages in a 35-year journey. But the old abrasiveness lives, quietly stalking the edges of the mixes. \u201cWorks and Days\u201d foregrounds trebly, churning squeals that offer an unsettling edge to an otherwise sedate song. The clattering \u201cElka\u201d wants to remind us that our chill indie-rock dads can still make combatively loud noise.<\/p>\n

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Regrouping after front man Cameron Winter\u2019s acclaimed 2024 solo debut Heavy Metal<\/em>, Brooklyn country-rock alchemists Geese delivers their most potent batch of lackadaisical country rockers and Tom Waitsian grit to date in Getting Killed<\/em>, their fourth album. Winter\u2019s vocal presence imagines a fearless indie oddball like Pavement\u2019s Stephen Malkmus going for the full prattling gusto of the Rolling Stones\u2019 Mick Jagger; the band tussles and sways exhilaratingly underfoot. \u201cYou can\u2019t keep running away from what is real and what is fake,\u201d he howls in mid-album gem \u201cIslands of Men,\u201d as a punchy groove threatens to shake the headphones off a listener\u2019s face. Elsewhere, the percussion-heavy title track complicates a choir-adorned fuzz rocker, the raucous production slowly untangling into a sedate coda. Produced by Seattle beat-maker Kenny Beats, Getting Killed <\/em>pulses with the mutinous volatility of the year into which it has crash-landed.<\/p>\n

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Bleeds<\/em>, the by turns acrid and rustic sixth album from Nashville quintet Wednesday, is here to remind you never to typecast southern rock as implicitly, exclusively country-tinged. The twang and strut of the pithy \u201cPhish Pepsi\u201d \u2014 \u201cWe watched a Phish concert and Human Centipede<\/em>,\u201d singer-guitarist Karly Hartzman intones, \u201cTwo things I now wish I had never seen\u201d \u2014 are Music City catnip. But the band, featuring North Carolina riff whiz MJ Lenderman, is just as affecting, drenched in distortion. Wednesday takes the shape the often darkly terse and occasionally impressionistic storytelling demands, buzzing through folk, grunge, and alt-country as Hartzman sings of breaking hearts and ambling around America\u2019s forgotten places.<\/p>\n

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The early 2020s were a tight spot, not just globally but also personally for Dev Hynes. The producer and singer-songwriter\u2019s flagship Blood Orange project slowed its release output, dealing not just with a pandemic but the illness and death of his mother. Essex Honey<\/em>, the full-length follow-up to 2019\u2019s Angel\u2019s Pulse <\/em>mixtape, is shaped by grief but just as much so by meditations on a place of origin, on family and provincial neighborhood character. A twee folk edge augments the artist\u2019s signature smudging of R&B\u2019s boundaries; in moments where it leans decidedly British, Essex Honey <\/em>is a reminder that Hynes was once the Lightspeed Champion guy. The vastness of the sample set and guest list \u2014 bits of Elliott Smith and Durutti Column songs meeting vocals from Lorde, Caroline Polachek, and Mustafa to bridge \u201cindie\u201d and \u201cpop\u201d worlds \u2014 is owed to Hynes\u2019s unfussed versatility. They wander in and out of the frame like visitors to the bereaved, sweetly supporting downcast acoustic numbers and slowly unfolding drum \u2019n\u2019 bass heaters.<\/p>\n

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Tyler, the Creator has taken time out of the world tour for last year\u2019s Chromakopia <\/em>to spin the block and urge you to live in the moment. Don\u2019t Tap the Glass<\/em>, a quick-hit follow-up for that sprawling opus, doesn\u2019t float too many lofty ideas beyond the notion that you should be dancing. Kick-starting the initiative is an arsenal of snappy, hooky nods to early B-boy culture and post-disco, aughts club bangers, and anarchic Odd Future anthems. The compositional slipperiness on display in the towering \u201cDon\u2019t You Worry Baby\u201d and \u201cI\u2019ll Take Care of You\u201d \u2014 odes to Atlanta crunk, Miami bass, U.K. jungle, and \u201990s R&B \u2014 undercuts the West Coast rapper, producer, and arranger\u2019s noisy assurance that Glass <\/em>is low-stakes sonic expedition.<\/p>\n

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The blearing and hissing riffs of Wisconsin\u2013to\u2013New York transplant Will Anderson often get him flagged as shoegaze, a sound profile the My Bloody Valentine fan is admittedly aware of but not necessarily in thrall to. Raspberry Moon<\/em>, his expanding former solo project Hotline TNT\u2019s third full-length, expresses evolving interests and ambitions. The latent J. Mascis-ness of the early work is foregrounded in rippers like \u201cThe Scene,\u201d and the softer songs in the back end like \u201cDance the Night Away\u201d \u2014 no Van Halen \u2014 benefit greatly from extra hands of the full band on frets and kits. Raspberry Moon <\/em>is not beating the shoegaze allegations; fuzz still sits at center stage, giving listeners the feeling of spending a gig stationed in front of the guitarist\u2019s amp. But a dollop of \u201995 alt-rock sweetness almost <\/em>overpowers it.<\/p>\n

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Annahstasia Enuke\u2019s voice \u2014 by turns a breathily bassy and sweetly soaring instrument \u2014 snatches you sideways across time. Draping or else scraping over sparse folk tunes on her debut album, Tether<\/em>, it\u2019s enjoying enthusiastic comparisons to Tracy Chapman and just as often conjuring earlier predecessors \u2014 Odetta, Rosetta \u2014 who could make beautifully quiet music but weren\u2019t confined to it. Tether <\/em>aims to be just as untethered: It sets up a spectrum spanning hushed intimacy (\u201cTake Care of Me\u201d) and rustic plushness (\u201cWaiting\u201d), but louder production in \u201cBeliever\u201d and \u201cSilk and Velvet\u201d increases guttural, soulful sharpness. A stunning versatility renders moot the latter\u2019s wondering if it matters when Annahstasia makes a sound.<\/p>\n

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Crushing, tuneful and proggy, but never exactly long-winded, Xenotaph<\/em>, the sixth full-length from San Francisco death-metal outfit Fallujah, is a wonder of balance and precision. The second outing with singer Kyle Schaefer at the helm after 2022\u2019s Empyrean <\/em>finally gives the newest member space to worm his way into the unit\u2019s compositions, and the textural breadth benefits massively. The mission to try and squeeze more dynamic tension into compact spaces yields gorgeous atmospherics that never feel like tacked-on synth sweetener across highlights like the mournful \u201cLabyrinth of Stone\u201d and the raggedly triumphant title track. The melodies are subtly beefier, and the whirlwind flights of technical death-metal wizardry get breathers. It feels like much more ground is being covered without taking much more time to get there<\/p>\n

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The first new album since 2010 from British French indie-rock institution Stereolab is a treat, a reunion effort with both a keen understanding of a band\u2019s deal and the chops to honor the classics <\/em>without falling prey to self-parody. Stereolab\u2019s signatures \u2014 tricky grooves coated in effects, \u201960s and \u201970 French pop and German rock influences filtered through modern tech, disaffected invective colliding into psychedelic optimism \u2014 remain potent. Halfway into the floaty, almost eight-minute epic \u201cMelodie Is a Wound,\u201d co-founder L\u00e6titia Sadier sighs that \u201cTruthfulness has fallen into desuetude\u201d before a long, uplifting jam blows stormy thoughts away. \u201cColour Television\u201d worries sweetly that the titular medium is \u201ckilling the possibilities of there being other stories, conceptualizations of progress and development\u201d while splashing chords and propulsive drums imply enduring faith in human connection. If you pay close attention, Holograms <\/em>sells respite for worried minds; if you don\u2019t, it\u2019s all swanky Saturday-afternoon slaps.<\/p>\n

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While pondering the history of Italian choral music, from early Christian hymn recitals to medieval castrati, Toronto-based singer-songwriter Lido Pimienta began to wonder how her Colombian Wayuu ancestors might\u2019ve expressed themselves musically as contemporaries. La Belleza<\/em>, Pimienta\u2019s third studio album, is a celebration of Indigenous life and rhythm also laying claim to the majestic orchestration of centuries of art music. The booming \u201cEl Dembow del Tiempo\u201d dresses the titular Afro-Latin rhythm in suspensefully chilly woodwind and string arrangements; Belleza <\/em>sings of dripping mango juice with jaw-dropping power and dynamism. The half-hour is a transportive barnstorm tour of an alternate universe where the voices of the exploited dominated, and \u201cclassical\u201d and \u201cchamber\u201d music never signified a European upper crust.<\/p>\n

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The artwork for billy woods\u2019s GOLLIWOG<\/em>, which situates its namesake post-antebellum minstrel doll in a rustic Christian-Girl Summer backdrop, prepares intrepid listeners for a reflection on the glaring persistence of America\u2019s oldest horrors. The fruits of cycles of inequality are perhaps most potently pondered in the rapper\u2019s breathtaking pairing of \u201cBLK XMAS\u201d and \u201cWaterproof Mascara.\u201d The former depicts the eviction of a family hovering at the poverty line and a trickle of neighbors who come out to pick over a pile of their abandoned belongings, heating the excruciating scenario until it boils over: \u201cEverywhere, it\u2019s hungry mouths \/ It\u2019s gnawing doubt \/ Dreams where teeth keep falling out.\u201d \u201cMascara\u201d peers into hard, sometimes grisly choices made by parents in a bind and the childhood trauma and adult malaise in its wake as woods slips from what seems to be a recount of his own family\u2019s exit from Africa following the death of his father to a grim ideation about going out like Sylvia Plath. His often uncompromisingly somber and occasionally very funny narratives weave several threads of American independent music \u2014 via assists from the Alchemist, El-P, Conductor Williams, Shabaka Hutchings, and more \u2014 into a unified, intricate, and imposing rap tapestry.<\/p>\n

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Send a Prayer My Way<\/em>, a collaborative album uniting Tennessee troubadours Julien Baker and TORRES, could\u2019ve taken literally any shape, arriving after the latter\u2019s boisterous boygenius Record<\/em> and the former\u2019s strutting, chugging What an Enormous Room<\/em>. Toying with the idea of working together in 2020, the pair, who met at a show a decade ago, agreed on a country album on a lark. But Prayer <\/em>is not your humdrum, surreptitious post\u2013Cowboy Carter <\/em>cash-out. The duo\u2019s catalogues tussle with a southern conservative Christian upbringing; embracing country is examining the culture their early work resisted. The gutting \u201cOff the Wagon\u201d and \u201cTape Runs Out\u201d reveal two naturals whose excoriating writing is not far removed from the yearning heart of a country weeper.<\/p>\n

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The spark for the gossamer compositions on Tripla<\/em>, the breezy and fully formed debut by London\u2019s Miki Berenyi Trio, ignited when Berenyi was asked to perform a set of songs from her former flagship outfit Lush in a string of appearances promoting her 2022 memoir, Fingers Crossed<\/em>. Alongside partner Kevin McKillop, the titular Moose in early \u201990s shoegaze progenitor group of the same name, Berenyi sketched out dream-pop reductions aided by drum machine. Songs came with demand for more performances; the format is both creatively freeing and quietly nostalgic. It helps the couple and bassist\u2013slash\u2013utility player Oliver Cherer chart a course through dance music and hip-hop while hinting at what it might\u2019ve sounded like if the guitars-and-programmed-drums mindset of early Cocteau Twins met the grooves of the aughts.<\/p>\n

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A winking and very online sensibility crashes into hearty and self-effacing writing throughout the catalogue of 21-year-old Jane Remover \u2014 a.k.a. Leroy, a.k.a. Venturing \u2014 whose disparate projects scratch unique itches. A few years ago, Jane coined Dariacore, melding breakbeat nostalgia and manic hyperpop, but they more recently tilted toward shoegaze. Revengeseekerz <\/em>takes their talents to twitchy EDM-rap. The taste profile might seem jarring, but it\u2019s true to the modern drip of n\u00fc-metal sonics into hip-hop, and video-game sound signatures into a plethora of exploding and imploding microgenres. The best Revengeseekerz <\/em>songs arm the arresting singing voice centered throughout the February Venturing album Ghostholding<\/em> with a toned-down version of the Dariacore chaos. \u201cFadeoutz\u201d and \u201cDreamflasher\u201d suppose that the listener can handle all of the artist\u2019s bursting interests at once, thundering through grooves that imagine a candy-flipping Yeat.<\/p>\n

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Scowl is a Cali punk outfit guilty of the hardcore-community capital crimes of accessible melodicism and participation in a 2023 Taco Bell commercial. Merging alt-rock\u2019s gritty tunefulness with the speed and ferocity of skate punk and hardcore, their sophomore album, Are We All Angels<\/em>, <\/em>wears the reputation for tunefulness and the Cheesy Gordita Crunch connection proudly. Disparate ingredients \u2014 screams, clarion vocal harmonies, tense breakdowns \u2014 melt into appealing combinations draped in a haze of guitar noise gracing the frenetic, menacing \u201cFleshed Out\u201d and \u201cSpecial\u201d and the slower, sweeter \u201cSuffer the Fool (How High Are You?)\u201d alike. However you choose to file Angels<\/em>, every drum hit lands like a slap over the head.<\/p>\n

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Skrillex spent the last two albums proving that he was still good for an engrossing body of work following the collapse of the mainstream American dubstep wave he washed in on years ago. The two-hit combo of Quest for Fire <\/em>and Don\u2019t Get Too Close <\/em>flexed expansive tastes and connections well beyond the confines of the old signature sound. So it was a shock to hear this year\u2019s surprise April Fool\u2019s Day mixtape Fuck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol But Ur Not!! <\/em>carry him back to dubstep and to discover there\u2019s still gas in the tank. Warhol <\/em>is a career retrospective disguised as the artist\u2019s memorial-tribute mixtape to himself. Alluring remixes of recent tunes rub elbows with sought-after B-sides and song fragments that are trickier to place chronologically. Flow and sound design are as breathtaking as the presentation is unabashedly silly. Less Eras tour, more cannonball run, Warhol <\/em>condenses decades of change into a zany 45 minutes.<\/p>\n

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It feels reductive to describe Aya Sinclair as a \u201csinger-songwriter and producer.\u201d The vocal performances on the 31-year-old U.K. artist\u2019s sophomore album hexed! <\/em>range from carnival barker to lingering apparition, and the sound design bends, morphs, and corrodes unpredictably underfoot. Like the real, live earthworms in her mouth on the cover art, the songs writhe and slide like invertebrates. Hexed! <\/em>pokes discomfitingly at questions of identity and dependency while building bridges between punk, noise, dance music, and shoegaze, sonics adjusting to the flavor of bravado or anomie coursing through the lyrics. \u201cHeat death\u201d burbles darkly toward an explosive hook that lands like an answer to the wish for the end of the world intoned in the verses. \u201cI am the pipe I hit myself with\u201d howls as buzzing synths ascend. Hexed! <\/em>mirrors the jolting luminescence of an epiphany setting in.<\/p>\n

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Death is ever present in the work of Montreal rapper and producer Backxwash, from face-paint gesturing to Zambian communal ceremonies to tense riffs summoning extreme metal signifiers. Only Dust Remains<\/em>, her fifth album, follows the resolution of a trilogy initiated in 2020\u2019s Polaris Prize\u2013wining God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It<\/em>. Soaring and elaborately arranged compositions brush against lyrics haunted by blood and violence. This show of sweetness fighting back against a sense of hopelessness builds an apprehensively brighter perspective than earlier work. Can <\/em>the artist pouring shoegaze ooze into \u201cDisassociation\u201d and playing the pain of \u201cStairway to Heaven\u201d off luxe psych-rock want the world to end?<\/p>\n

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A seemingly endless succession of exquisite Neil Young archival releases suggests the Canadian Crazy Horse and CSNY vet shelving almost as much heat<\/a> as he ever put out in the \u201970s, when he dropped the devastating Harvest<\/em>, On the Beach<\/em>, and Tonight\u2019s the Night<\/em> but stashed away Homegrown<\/em> and Chrome Dreams<\/em>. This year, the 79-year-old guitar giant shared Oceanside Countryside<\/em>, a 1977 gem whose threading of folk and country dovetails with the mood of the late-decade roots-centric offerings American Stars \u2019n Bars<\/em>, Comes a Time<\/em>, and Hawks & Doves<\/em>. The lonesome alternate takes of familiar songs from the era imply a slightly more stripped though no less gorgeous Bars <\/em>coming out in some parallel universe.<\/p>\n

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Darkside \u2014 an on-again, off-again collaboration between singer-songwriter and electronic producer Nicol\u00e1s Jaar and guitarist\/multi-instrumentalist Dave Harrington \u2014\u00a0expanded into a trio in the 2020s. Listeners noticed the gains on 2023\u2019s Live at Spiral House<\/em>, a rehearsal space recording bringing drummer\/programmer Tlacael Esparza into the fold. February\u2019s Nothing<\/em>, their third studio album, filters the bubbly, groove-oriented psychedelia of earlier works through more conventional songwriting structures. The result is summery repose interspersed by alluring surprises: The pulsating, oceanic \u201cAre You Tired? (Keep on Singing)\u201d drifts toward an unexpected cosmic-rock interlude you\u2019d sooner expect to encounter deep in a Grateful Dead tape. The soulful, bipartite centerpiece \u201cHell Suite\u201d plays by the book everywhere except Jaar\u2019s vocal, equal parts lounge lizard and absurdist Dusty in Memphis <\/em>reimagining.<\/p>\n

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The longtime Sun Ra sideman and Sun Ra Arkestra bandleader Marshall Allen set intimidating Guinness World Records this year; at 100, he\u2019s the oldest human ever to drop a debut studio album. The work in question, winter\u2019s New Dawn<\/em>, <\/em>is a stately tour of a woodwind lifer\u2019s gifts. Allen basks in the sweet repose of \u201cAfrican Sunset\u201d and the title track, the latter of which houses a smoky vocal from jazz scion and pop royalty Neneh Cherry, and plays a more commanding role in the playfully squawking \u201cSonny\u2019s Dance\u201d and the huffing big-band jam \u201cAre You Ready.\u201d At ease everywhere from flitting free jazz to looser, funkier textures, Allen abides, insistent but never overbearing on a session well worth the wait.<\/p>\n

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Breaking early on in a scintillating performance at Manhattan\u2019s famed Blue Note to stress that it was a dream-come-true engagement to play the jazz club where she once studied neo-soul pioneer Amel Larrieux, Washington, D.C., singer-songwriter Kelela hints at a deeper splash into those roots. The show, documented with the live album In the Blue Light<\/em>, jettisons the skittering, moonlit electronics of the star\u2019s back catalogue, softening stark arrangements formerly designed to hug the vocalist like a wintry chill. The already-breezy \u201cAll the Way Down\u201d is delivered with an even subtler touch than on the studio recording; pulled away from the propulsive drum programming, the decade-old mixtape heaters \u201cEnemy\u201d and \u201cBank Head\u201d foreground the soulful songwriting underfoot. It\u2019s an achievement getting those sparse originals to feel more stripped.<\/p>\n

\u27bc Read Tirhakah Love\u2019s <\/em>2023 interview with Kelela<\/em><\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n

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The divergent journeys binding the bicoastal rap brotherhood of Larry June, 2 Chainz, and the Alchemist meet at one key point: the exquisite retro airs animating June\u2019s Doing It for Me <\/em>and Al\u2019s deluge of independent releases jut out in Chainz tracks like \u201cThreat 2 Society.\u201d Life Is Beautiful <\/em>pulls the Atlanta vet into the mind-meld that yielded the formidable 2023 Al and June full length The Great Escape<\/em>, and the trio disappears into a spirited boom-bap backslide together. The wordplay is as colorful as the sonics are sedate, tag-team player parables sailing over production seeking a slippery middle ground between East and West Coast throwback jams. It\u2019s a reminder of the pliability of Al\u2019s minimalism, catnip not just for your Mobb Deeps and Griseldas but also your Kendrick Lamars and Lil Waynes. Life Is Beautiful <\/em>is another gem in a growing trove of left-field collaborative outings, offering more sample-crazed analog daydreams.<\/p>\n

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The first thing you notice pressing play on Showbiz!<\/em>, the latest full length in a nonstop stream pouring out of Bronx rapper-producer MIKE, is the bass. It\u2019s a commanding, center-stage presence, the ruddy root the ideas sprout from. Even the high end feels woozy and drowned, like foliage piercing a melting frost. Hefty low end hugs tastily pitched-down loops the artist uses to wax exhausted. \u201cYou gotta be, I mean, probably above me,\u201d the boisterous \u201cArtist of the Century\u201d begins. \u201cProud of me, working against the odds and the ugly.\u201d You don\u2019t expect the bustling flute-funk jam to float in on a note of familial grief and questioned faith delivered via hazy internal rhyme, but entwining joy and grief is a constant in MIKE\u2019s catalog. The song and album aren\u2019t always as piercing as the couplet, but brevity allows Showbiz! <\/em>to hit a listener with alternating sweets and hots, its shifting moods anchored by the subterranean frequencies in the beat.<\/p>\n

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FKA Twigs\u2019s Eusexua <\/em>recalls another time neither distinctly past nor future. The sexual politics are very now but the sonic predilections spread out over key points in dance music\u2019s past. All the while, the artist\u2019s overarching dream of a utopian bond between the techno- and organic ponders philosophical tenets that will bind the rest of the century. Eusexua<\/em> balances Boiler Room banger material and heady atmospherics. Production is conversant in the sleek, metallic otherworldliness couching manicured hooks in Eurodance classics. But unlike those points of reference, lyrics here don\u2019t merely gesture toward sensuality. They hash out boundaries and dismantle hangups. Eusexua<\/em> offers a soundtrack for bedrooms and basements fit for balling and bawling sessions.<\/p>\n

\u27bc Read Craig Jenkins\u2019s full <\/em>review of <\/em>Eusexua<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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A tugboat chugging across an ocean of Playboi Carti clones, 21-year-old Ohio rapper OsamaSon makes coarse rap that appears to pilfer the Atlanta goblin\u2019s utensils. But the tunefulness and, well, enunciation showcased on his third album, Jump Out<\/em>, <\/em>are equally related to Chicago drill melodicists like Sicko Mobb, and closer in content and delivery to emo-rap crooners and the hazy absurdism of the Pack than rage. Bite-sized highlights like \u201cRound of Applause\u201d and \u201cInsta\u201d float on their deceptively chipper hooks as the rapper tries to kick a sour mood: The former\u2019s video-game fanfare is a set piece for beef, and the latter\u2019s soulfulness arrives shackled to anesthetized sighs. As with his Midwest predecessors, mixing smooth hooks and abrasive storytelling complicates alluring simplicity.<\/p>\n

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Mac Miller\u2019s unreleased work explains and presages the stylistic shifts his successive studio albums yielded, revealing a never-ending question of what kind of artist he could or should be. Proving his mettle by easing into the burgeoning indie and mainstream Cali rap movements in the early 2010s, he went back and forth between delivering a tight commercial argument for radio airplay and a more totalizing dive into his bursting gifts as a multi-instrumentalist. Balloonerism<\/em>, recorded in 2014 seemingly in the overflow of the darkly impressive Faces<\/em>, <\/em>catches Miller working through the prior mixtape\u2019s still-pervasive darkness with a widening creative palette. It took a back seat to the emotionally and musically slippery GOOD:AM<\/em>, a winning (and called) shot at a big-league push. But the bad feelings tucked away in jarringly candid cuts like \u201cRick\u2019s Piano\u201d are just as potent as singles of the era. You wish the late rapper, singer, and studio Swiss army knife didn\u2019t second-guess his work but see why an artist having brushes with public scrutiny and disapproval might think again about sharing too many thoughts about drugs and death at one time.<\/p>\n

\u27bc Read Craig Jenkins\u2019s <\/em>review of <\/em>Balloonerism<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n

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Who Let the Dogs Out?<\/em>, the debut from Brighton duo Lambrini Girls, marries timeless, machine-gun licks and modern problems. Their breakneck pacing and crunchy low end fuse aspects of noise-rock, grunge, and post-punk exuberantly: \u201cYou\u2019re Not From Around Here\u201d leans into the grit of early Sub Pop classics, \u201cCompany Culture\u201d mirrors the sinewy precision of Gang of Four, and \u201cNo Homo\u201d queers garage rock. It\u2019s all in service to the rip-roaring screeds of lead singer Phoebe Lunny, who chats whip-smart shit about the miserable state of xenophobia, workplace sexual harassment, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, and hypermasculinity. She\u2019s a riot from the commanding, emasculating, \u201cHow big is that dick in reality?\u201d in \u201cBig Dick Energy\u201d to the enthusiastic self-help checklist served in album closer \u201cCuntology 101\u201d: \u201cSetting boundaries is cunty.\u201d<\/p>\n

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By turns a budding chart sensation, a political firebrand, and an enthusiastic cataloguer of cryptids, Ethel Cain interrupts a stream of gossamer pop, folk, and rock records with Perverts<\/em>, <\/em>a droning rejection of the accessibility of her 2022 Billboard<\/em> top-ten debut Preacher\u2019s Daughter<\/em>. Beyond the breathy \u201cVacillator\u201d \u2014 a drifting love song conjuring early Cowboy Junkies \u2014 and the mournful \u201cPunish,\u201d the agenda is largely the eerie juxtaposition of beautiful and terrifying noise. Feedback carries the anguished wail of \u201cThatorchia\u201d out to sea, and distortion and reverb drown out pop hooks in \u201cOnanist.\u201d Perverts <\/em>eases into the maelstrom of 2025: Moments of sweetness are beset by mounting discomfort, and time seems to creep by at half the anticipated speed. The sound is no less southern in spirit than Daughter<\/em>\u2019s gothic tales of generational ills and church trauma \u2014 it\u2019s just more interested in luxuriating in the ambiance. The heat check is delightful.<\/p>\n