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

Tullgren’s voice and steadily-plucked guitar are the only real constants in Decide Which Way The Eyes Are Looking. Tullgren “took the quiet isolation of a shoreline cabin” to first write this album, with many of the lyrics relating to the simple ability to notice – see “it walks by my window”, or “I have beautiful hands and I’m a singer”, or “I hear a car horn” – that is heightened in isolation. These songs have been written and played by Tullgren, for Tullgren. The disparity between the rich session instrumentation and Tullgren’s soft, lilting voice is never an issue, with the former seeming only to foreground the intimacy of the latter. Tullgren is known for the sparseness of their music – telling BOMB magazine in 2020 that, on dates during a recent European tour, they “addressed the crowd about their talking.” With the occasional artful bum note or intake of breath, it’s as if we’re sitting near them on a squashy armchair in Jonny’s Kosmo’s backhouse.

Times of personal upheaval can drive us to look to something greater than ourselves. For some, it’s community or religion. For others, it’s the universe. For Berlin-based artist and composer Jules Reidy, the drama of experiencing the end of a relationship and finding a more expansive understanding of their identity manifests in the rich seam of mysticism running through new album Ghost/Spirit. The album has clearly been conceived as a whole composition rather than a collection of songs. It has a strong narrative arc, following a point/counterpoint structure with the ‘Ghost’ A-side and ‘Spirit’ B-side from the initial impact of heartache, ambling towards what might be found on the other side of it. The respective opening tracks, ‘Every Day There’s a Sunset’ and ‘Every Day There’s a Sunrise’, are direct counterparts with interconnected lyrics that set the pace for each side of the album. There are many through-lines on Ghost/Spirit, from the obvious title references to the more subtle repeated, dissonant, plodding musical phrase that first appears on ‘Interlude I’ and follows throughout the album. There are consistent reminders to the listener that they are accompanying Reidy on a journey.

The band came out of a megalithic roadtrip through the Irish Midlands to see Nurse With Wound, via the many stone circles, pillars, and passage tombs that mark transition points between one world and the next. Goat Skull Table is a trance album, but not as we know it. The opening chant is followed by two shorter tracks, like squeezing through the tight entrance to a tomb, before it spreads out into an inner space with two ten-minute dream-state tracks. ‘Brave New World’ and ‘Am I Not’ are summoning songs, played on acoustic guitar, blurring the distinction between life and death. ‘Blood On My Blanket’ and ‘Wagon’ go full fugue, spinning layer upon layer of repetition and shift. They are ecstatic pieces. If any album can succeed in breaking through the veil, this is surely it.

Jojo Orme, the solo face behind Heartworms, made quite an entrance with her 2023 EP, A Comforting Notion and she’s now here with her debut album, Glutton For Punishment. Despite toned-down military regalia, which she’s swapped to vaguely resemble a goth cardinal of sorts, she’s just as effusive about war history on her debut. The album builds on what we were starting to glean from Orme’s message as an artist – that when confronted with martial themes, we might recognise the inherent discord present in our own lives. That maybe war (with a capital ‘W’) is an amplification of all the tiny wars that play out across someone’s life, whether internal or external. And if you’ve had many of them, it might be difficult to detach from becoming what the title suggests – a glutton for punishment, which Orme delves into here. 

Richard Dawson (or “just Rich,” as he suggests on the cover of his new album) is a wildly inventive musician. His work with Hen Ogledd made pop songs stranger and more exciting than almost anyone had done before. His record with Finnish metal band, Circle, was awesomely unclassifiable. Bulbils, his duo with Sally Pilkington, born in lockdown confinement, released endless mini-albums of pure expression. His solo work has created a new form of folk music, filled with inimitable storytelling and triumphant tunes. His new album, End of the Middle, is his most stripped back to date, featuring mostly Dawson’s voice, guitar and percussion, so that when a saxophone appears it drops like a bomb. It is also his most direct and haunting work, and a confident, sophisticated achievement that is surely his best work so far.

Although Davidson has been making music for almost twenty years now (since 2007, initially as half of experimental duo Les Momies de Palerme), she has only relatively recently taken up DJing professionally, something she credits with changing the way that she produces tracks. Certainly this is a more direct, club-focused album than her previous records. ‘Fun Times’, after its rigid and starkly percussive first minute, reveals itself as a pure pop throwback to 2020’s Renegade Breakdown, with a vocal melody a little reminiscent of Madonna’s ‘Hung Up’. ‘Contrarian’ goes harder. It’s a straightforward acid-techno face-melter that shrugs off any of the record’s weightier concerns in favour of the sheer physical pleasure of dance music played loud.

It’s this yearning to be something more that characterises Cowards, the group’s prickly third LP. Ollile Judge and the rest of the band set out to veer the songwriting away from the abstraction of O Monolith (an album title they chose, without deciding a meaning for), but the music has become ever more surreal, vivid and painterly as the group’s sonic palette broadens. Squid’s most experimental tendencies take hold, with their tetchy krautrock id only peaking occasionally through the miasma of the band’s dense impressionist soundscapes. Modular synths, discordant strings, and wilting brass melodies often overpower the twin guitars of the core group, whilst rumbling basslines are often sidelined for more delicate touches, either from Laurie Nankivell’s cornet or a litany of collaborators.

An album concerning the degradation of a place once held familiar – “the process of watching someone’s surroundings and environment collapse,” as Ghedi puts it, as well as “death, personal loss, grief, mental health” to which the natural world is an ever-weakening remedy – at times the record brims and bubbles with anticipation of the end times, at others boiling over into a steaming flood. Ghedi sings as if through clenched teeth, plays guitar with a skewering rawness, and often deploys strings – sometimes for a rush of overwhelming emotion as on opener ‘Old Stones’, sometimes for transfixing melodic flourishes (‘Just A Note’), sometimes for a dark, Satanic jig (‘Newtondale / John Blue’). Ghedi’s combination of intensity and sublimity recalls Lankum to some extent, and yet where that band’s doom seems to descend from above like a thick black cloud, there’s something more earthen to Ghedi’s work – the horrific, terrifying beauty of a collapsing planet, turned into sound.

Like A Ribbon is a stylish hybrid of UK drill, future garage, grime and atmospheric art pop that counters the frantic bustle of city life as a working musician with nature’s tranquil repose. Produced by Kwes Darko, Flume and Evilgiane, the production translates to something akin to Wu-Tang Klan’s 36 Chambers via DJ Shadow. John Glacier sits firmly at the helm, shifting the mood around her with each note and nuance, yielding a quiet magnetism throughout. There are moments when you might hope she wakes up from this reverie; her cool composure feels very familiar in the context of recent rap trends. But the magic resides in Glacier’s allegorical flow, occasionally sliding into focus but never threatening to break into song.

Mysterious ‘slacker-trad’ twosome Milkweed – who feed found folkloric texts through the mangler of experimental lo-fi production – have taken the pre-tales of the Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge as the basis for an utterly transfixing new LP, with the bubbling gloom of ‘Exile Of The Sons Of Uisliu’ serving as the first cut.

Atlanta-via-Austin freakbeat musos get funky, fuzzy and free-spirited on this extremely fun single from forthcoming third album.

Following up the trilogy of albums that established that established her among the most important voices in experimental hip hop was always going to be a tall order, but Backxwash’s latest cut from forthcoming LP Only Dust Remains – rapturous, melancholy and intense all at once – proves that momentum’s not slowing any time soon.

When we first listened to it a gentle breeze wafted across our desk, not from the heavy bass insanity that you might expect from Martin in The Bug guise, but something more subtle, though no less deep.

Extremely 2009 though this may be, it’s also clearly a banger, like the long lost Santigold / Adele collaboration you never knew you needed. 

Five years on from Fountain – an under-the-rader masterpiece from Berlin ‘futurist folk’ musician Lyra Pramuk – comes ‘Vega’, a headspinning cut of avant-garde production, warped and looping voices, that somehow tops what’s come before.

“I have had a love and hate relationship with vocals and I almost gave up on doing them entirely […] when recording ‘Between You’, I decided to give vocals another shot. It feels like a fresh start.”