Music of the Month: The Best Albums and Tracks of January 2025

Ethel Cain has always invoked the Southern Gothic. It’s in the ghostly figures in her artwork, the grotesquerie in her lyrics, and the aesthetics of her release titles – Inbred, Preacher’s Daughter, Perverts – not to mention the details of her storytelling. Along with that, she puts her own spin on the genre’s preoccupation with darkness – its role in the world, where it comes from (within? Or somewhere beyond?), and to what extent it outweighs the light. Trading the romantic castles and dreary moors of the European Gothic for antebellum mansions, fiery tent revival preachers, and ghosts of the lost Civil War, the Southern Gothic digs past the region’s pastoral beauty and pie-on-windowsill charm into its history of slavery, racism and abject poverty. Realities that are repressed manifest in forms that are irrational and abhorrent, transgressive and, at times, darkly comic. With Perverts, Ethel Cain takes shame and turns it inside out. Sexual impulses, masturbation, the desire to be “good” versus the reality of being human, and the lure of recognition all unfurl across this otherworldly sprawl that looks to her own uncompromising artistic vision, above all else, as its guiding force.

Splendour And Obedience is a more voluptuous effort than the scratchy edges of Decius’ previous record, Vol. I. It is party music for those frazzled by three consecutive nights consuming the hair, the tail, the whole of the dog. A magical thing seems to happen during the third night of non-stop revelry. Your mind and body submit, recalibrating to this new state of constant consumption. The new normal is accepted and, as long as you keep feeding that insatiable beast with liquids, pills and powders, the sharp claws of a comedown remain out of reach, seemingly forever.

Even The Horizon has some of the apocalyptic tinge that colours much of English’s drone albums, but it feels more like a meditation on the ephemeral nature of time, memory and space than any sort of sweeping gesture. The soundscapes on this record are dark and desolate, but also deeply immersive and vast. It makes sense that the record has its origins in something site-specific, as, even outside of that context, the record feels as though it was designed to occupy a space. It’s unclear how much of these soundscapes are sourced from field recordings, though, given the people involved, one would assume at least some of them are. More importantly, the record activates a deeper form of listening and sonic perspective in a way that many field recordings do, without containing any direct or concrete sonic references. This is at the heart of what makes Even The Horizon one of Lawrence English’s more compelling releases as of late. 

The flippant title of this record from Edvard Graham Lewis – a warm greeting from the North East – belies the considerable achievement here. Under that Scandified moniker of his full name (Edward becomes Edvard), Lewis has released three albums, two of which came out accompanying one another in 2014: the largely ambient noise-driven All Under and the more song-driven All Over, though both were prone to shoot off on unexpected tangents. Alreet? consolidates both and adds another decade of experience to the pot. At 71, Lewis’s voice has deepened into an authoritative but still vulnerable baritone, resonating like a latter-period Johnny Cash. The open lines of ‘Kinds Of Whether’ (“You’ll not pass this way again / I’ll never have the pleasure / You’ll not pass this way again / In search of sonic treasure”) certainly suggesting finality, though it’s valedictory too, with a pulsing undercurrent that implores us to keep moving, irrespective of this combative opening salvo.

The songs that make up Compter Les Dents come from the Vendée department on France’s Western seaboard – dramatic songs that reflect the area’s dramatic history. Vendée’s coastal location means that it was heavily affected by the wars of religion in the 16^th century, undergoing a period of religious tumult that eventually transformed it from a protestant area into a stronghold of staunch Catholicism, and fostered a rebellion against the French Revolution that descended into a grisly guerilla conflict. When Napoleon returned from his exile in Elba, the Vendée refused to recognise him. The vocal trio Tartine De Clous draw from the region’s song both for their intense beauty and, in the words of their press material, “to reclaim the people’s tradition from those who would seek to exploit it for nefarious political ends”. Their commanding three-part harmony doesn’t lose its grip throughout the record, but the deft inclusion of occasional instrumentals warrants a mention too – deliciously lopsided accordion on ‘La Veuve’, a gradual crescendo of drone and a peppering of roguish fiddle on ‘La Mignonne À L’ombrage’. This is folk music at its most ruggedly affecting.

Rather than falling into the comfortable flow and subsequent rut of a typical free improvisation session, this trio of Han-Earl Park, Lara Jones and Pat Thomas operate in visceral, full attack noise mode. Their instruments shape jagged figures, then let them clash and fuse with each other, resulting in a sound that is akin to a freer version of Ryoji Ikeda’s glitched-out minimalism or John Wiese’s electroacoustic drones. Recorded live during the group’s performance at London’s Cafe OTO for the EFG London Jazz Festival in November 2023, the album comes in two versions. The digital edition comprises two sets in six parts each, ‘Derealization’ and ‘Proxemics’, while the cassette release includes only an alternate mix of the second set sourced from the room microphone.

Montreal-based Moon Apple describes her new album as “a series of sonic séances” and it certainly sounds appropriately spooky. This diaphonous mix of shoegazey wooziness and skittery IDM beats gives me a similar feeling to mid-90s US lo-fi groups like Swirlies, All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors, but in truth this is a much more intimate and inward-looking record than anything those bands released. It’s a record that sounds like it was manifested from a dream rather than recorded per se. There is a restlessness, a wild omniphagous hunger here. On first listen, you could be forgiven for dismissing Four Pillars as another addition to the deluge of recent dream-pop records, but once it starts spinning, the sheer centrifugal force of its weirdness starts pulling in all sorts of things. The list of instruments alone is enough to send your head spinning: ajaeng, cajon, dizi, drums, erhu, felt piano, haegeum, hulusi, janggu, kendang, moktak, tatuk, reyong, saron, moktak, violin, viola, wind gong, yangqin – and that’s before we even get on to the array of synthesisers, samplers and digital workstations. It’s a strange and seductive listen, riddled with ghosts.

The album Eusexua most resembles – both spiritually and musically – is Madonna’s mid-career classic Ray Of Light, another major aesthetic shift that elevated the club to celestial heights. The most straightforward analogue for this comparison is ‘Girl Feels Good’, a breezy, sensual mix of electric guitars and synths, which even features William Orbit-esque electronic pulses. Co-produced by twigs and regular collaborator Koreless, along with duo Ojivolta, it’s a plea to those experiencing a crisis of masculinity to channel feminine energy for their own good and for that of the world (“Your mother’s lover’s sister’s heart is where there’s healing”). Here, twigs presents female pleasure as a tool for peace, with the shrewd bossiness of a true Capricorn (“A girl feels good / And the world goes round / So turn your love up loud / To keep the devil down”). 

Salt River might be under Sam Amidon’s name, and its material (traditional tunes, shanties, shape-note songs and hymns mixed in with songs originally penned by Yoko Ono, Lou Reed and Ornette Coleman) drawn from a repertoire he’s been building for a while, but his collaborator, Sam Gendel, is equally to thank for its brilliance. Amidon and Gendel, the latter a saxophonist and experimental producer, are longstanding friends and mutual admirers, and got together at the end of last year with drummer Philippe Melanson in Los Angeles where they decided to mine Amidon’s personal archive. Their approach, the record makes evident, had more in common with jazz than anything else; the music here is exploratory, playful and forward thinking, prone to sudden-but-gentle shifts in direction, sometimes drifting all the way out into extended ambient jams.

At only 26, American rapper-producer MIKE has created a body of work that would rival most artists twice his age. And yet, as he prepares to release his tenth full-length, Showbiz!, the quality has never diminished. As the new record demonstrates, the artist’s syrupy flow and introspective ruminations have only gathered steam with each project. The album’s opening, ‘Bear Trap’, lays the groundwork for his characteristically laid-back tone, a soulful vocal sample and shimmering piano floating unassumingly behind the track’s resonant bass. But at two minutes, the vibe shifts, picking up speed and rhythm, as if to introduce an entirely new point of view or to suggest a kind of levelling up. Instead though, we’re led into ‘Clown Of The Class (Work Harder)’, returning the timbre to the earlier serenity of MIKE’s nonchalant delivery. A similar effect occurs on ‘Artist Of The Century’, which switches up halfway, drifting away to nothing before the start of ‘What U Bouta Do? / A Star Was Born’. It has a hypnotic feel, as if you’re being teased in and then gently pushed out by the rapper’s lo-fi delivery.

It’s been eight long years since we heard from Valhalladale’s greatest pop maniacs, but at long last The Moonlandingz have returned – and with a banger in tow. ‘The Sign Of A Man’ pushes their trademark sleaze into ravier climes, with frontman Johnny Rocket striking a line somewhere between the magnetically sinister and the surreally banal – who else could deliver a line like, “I’ve been to Cardiff. That’s in WALES,” with such a seedy purr?

Having hit stratospheric heights with his last studio album proper, Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, rather than buckle under the pressure, on the strength of the gorgeous melancholy sweep of lead single ‘It’s A Mirror’, Perfume Genius is set to somehow one-up himself on the forthcoming Glory.

Curiouser and curiouser becomes this barely extant slice of Gabonese-Singaporean-American witch house the more you listen to it, constructed, as it is, with whacked-out field recordings of Italian churches and much black metal-adjacent vocalising. It bodes well for new album, Please Come To Me, which is out next month. 

Michelle Zauner’s self-directed video for ‘Orlando In Love’, glistening in a Wolfeian high camp, is apt accompaniment to the first single from new LP For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), a song that floats along on an impossibly lavish wave of strings.

Marie Davidson trains her sights on data-mining corporations on this shuffle-speed electro stormer, gifting us another very persuasive lead single from her excellent new album City Of Clowns, which is released next month. 

This is pretty laid-back – you might even say ‘smooth’ – but the more you stick with it, the weirder it gets, with all sorts of little angular offbeat timing things and swirly Fourth World-type sounds going on. It’s a promising first single from this new trio of LA musicians, more commonly found playing with the likes of Jeff Parker, Anna Butterss and Sam Gendel.

The first taste of aya’s forthcoming second album for Hyperdub, hexed!, is a delightfully bonkers and sugary dancefloor banger built around double-time, shuffling drums and the UK artist’s eccentric and engrossing vocal delivery. A reminder of just how simultaneously fun and weird club music can be.