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

It’s not necessarily that Brown makes music that sounds maximalist or wholehearted, although the new album does inherit, in its own warped way, some of the 1980s’ most bombastic sonic traits. Lyrically, though, The Passionate Ones wears its heart on its sleeve, an earnest celebration of collective spirit over the introspective individualism that dominates much of modern pop. This championing of love, community, and a desire for more surely comes as a reaction to the pandemic, as well as the austerity and social inequality that’s overshadowed the years before and since. It’s hard to find a roof over your head that’s stable and affordable, hard to find a job that pays enough, hard to afford food. Hard to live in a war-torn world that skews ever farther right, the chasm between rich and poor threatening to swallow us all, especially the younger generations. Basic existence is tough – let alone basic existence as an artist.

This is a defiant working class sound primed against militarised facism. That liberatory impulse is there from the off. Over a foreboding Jigsaw melody, ‘ESTA NO AR A RADIO’ samples a 1969 speech by the Marxist-Leninist politician and writer Carlos Marighella, broadcast on a hijacked Rádio Nacional. Marighella was a founder of urban guerrilla group Ação Libertadora Nacional and author of the communist text Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. Assassinated in 1969, Marighella’s revolutionary agitations make him a kindred spirit with funk artists like DJ K, who face their own clashes with the police and authorities. As reported by Raphael Tsavkko Garcia in DJ Mag, funk has been and continues to be criminalised, with incidents like what occurred at Baile da D Z7 in December 2019, where party-goers were kettled then hit with tear gas and rubber bullets. “Nine people were killed,” writes Garcia, “Gustavo Cruz Xavier was the youngest to die. He was just 14. According to witnesses, the police occupied all possible exits from the street, making it difficult to escape and leading to the panic.”

On their fifth album, No Joy reach into the shoegaze landfill and stumble across fierce, cybernetic treasure. With IDM/maximalist/face-melting augur Fire-Toolz (aka Angel Marcloid) in tow, the two strike a medium between futuristic music and the shoegaze of the past. For an album with enough electronics to kill a horse, the coalition results in a sound that’s surprisingly natural – bristling, reactive and uncannily emotive. Bugland sputters into place on ‘Garbage Dream House’ with some Aphex-adjacent mania, before the emergence of a frostbitten synth and a tectonic drumbeat. Owing to the time White-Gluz spent in rural Quebec for the album’s writing and recording process, the track almost gives the image of a robotised Rite of Spring: synth pads waking from sublunary slumbers, lichen-cloaked vocals collecting firewood, menacing guitar lines bubbling under a lake.

Chadburn is an acclaimed composer who has released several solo albums, including as Simon Bookish. Sleep… is powered by his narration, words murmured into a microphone like the latest of late night radio: the spirit of Chris Morris’ Blue Jam and Delia Derbyshire’s Inventions for Radio. Around his soft, insistent voice, layers of sound rise and fall. On ‘The Body Becomes a Viewfinder’ an electronic sea seems to take over as waves close in. ‘Magic Flora of the East Midlands’ uses Gregorian chant, while ‘Move Like a Freight Train’ uses percussion to tap out a metallic, trundling, train track beat.

Altruism draws on a palette established in 2022’s Traditional Music Of South London, pulling on a history of listening and playing music that has spanned electroclash DJing and harsh electronic music, among various other bands, projects and cameos. His current palette fuses the snap and tickle of electroclash and the grit and grind of Pan Sonic; plastic synth stabs and brittle rattlings punctuate his swaggering South London invocations, which often sit front and centre. “I wanted to do something that combined a bit of everything I’ve done,” he explains. “So there’s these big pop songs, really short etudes, brief spoken word and sung bits.” 

Amaarae doesn’t whisper to seduce; she whispers because she can. Black Star, her third full-length, is an album built from soft command: airy, controlled, often strange, and quietly assured in its ambition. The Ghanaian-American artist has always dealt in intimacy and eclecticism, but here, she stretches her reach into something messier, more transnational, more interested in tension than resolution as she enlists Naomi Campbell, PinkPantheress, Charlie Wilson, Bree Runway and Starkillers to strengthen the track list and engross the fans.

Although David Grubbs has worked with all of the musicians who join him in Bitterviper, they’ve yet to all gather in a single place. Still, they all seem highly attuned to what one another does. The quartet’s eponymous debut was produced through file sharing, an accretive process set in motion by lush, often psychoacoustic solo cello lines and patterns played by the Athens-based Nikos Veliotis and subsequently layered with sounds by Grubbs, Japanese electronics master Taku Unami, and percussionist-composer Sarah Hennies. Across four gorgeously contemplative, deeply spacious pieces the ensemble achieves a stunning cohesion, even without considering that everything we hear was produced in four different locales at different times.

While post-production has always been a big part of how they make music, they’ve never used the studio with such rigour. Part of the credit goes to Dave Vettraino, the house engineer for International Anthem Records. He worked closely with Mazurek and Taylor in the studio à la Teo Macero, bringing a dazzling clarity to the layers of electronics and overdubbed percussion used to shape the collaborative tunes. On the surface, the album opener ‘Click Song’ conveys the essence of CUD: a joyful, indelible trumpet melody redolent of Don Cherry’s innate lyricism, dancing over propulsive, skipping percussion. Yet beneath the veneer is a deceptively complex collision of two electrifying drum patterns – derived, like so much of Taylor’s playing here, from his study of traditional African grooves – while undergirding the deliberately blown-out sound of Mazurek is an insistently snaking synthetic bassline.

In 2025, human existence on Earth is somewhat nonsensical – one look at the news headlines makes this clear. In their first album since their breakthrough release, Everything’s Crushed (2023), Brooklyn-based duo Water From Your Eyes respond to this state of affairs with cautious but optimistic existentialism, namechecking Ween as influences on their ironic, rather absurdist approach to music-making. In lead single ‘Life Signs’, vocalist Rachel Brown mumbles, subdued, “It’s so sad in this beautiful place” before reversing their view with “The world is a paradise” later on in ‘Born 2’ – and there are musical contradictions here too. One of these is that Brown’s laconic vocal style is understated compared to the accompanying music from producer and guitarist Nate Amos, whose blend of trippy electronic effects and subterranean guitar create a surreal, otherworldly soundscape.

There’s a delightful, refreshing contradiction at the heart of God’s World. Here’s this incredibly produced album. It slaps like some idealised, hypothetical pop banger without sacrificing its gristle or edge, while at the same time managing to be genuinely likeable. Sonically alluring. Manchester’s impact here cannot be overstated. To me, he’s an Adrian Sherwood or Conny Plank kind of figure – his presence, his creativity, is felt on every record he works on. And it’s always welcome, never intrusive. And the sound that he’s crafted here with Buford and Jones is something else. The drums alone. The biggest drums of the year. But the contradiction is this: This album also sounds like it should be distributed from the trunk of a car. It sounds like a copyright lawyer’s nightmare. A capitalistic non-starter.

In an era where genre and form are becoming increasingly fluid, Nadeem Din-Gabisi is one uniquely creative artist. As a British-Sierra Leonean musician, poet, visual artist, and filmmaker, Din-Gabisi crafts immersive worlds that converge themes of Black identity, cultural displacement, and spiritual resilience. His work bridges sound and vision, creating a synesthetic language that resonates both emotionally and politically. In his second album Offshore, Nadeem channels his creativity to our ears with an intriguing delivery. Kickstarting with ‘Intro’, Din-Gabisi crafts a brief yet compelling story, weaving cinematic strings and assertive rap flow into an interesting style. The track’s enigmatic allure leaves us yearning for more, beckoning a replay. Next up, ‘Enter Claim’ erupts with a nice fusion of saxophones, pulsating percussions, and stirring background vocals. Nadeem’s anthemic choruses amplify the track’s energy, but it’s the saxophone’s masterful dance with the vocals and percussion that truly steals the show, holding us in a rapturous grip.

A reissue of a little-known album from 2021, which intertwines wax cylinder recordings from 1917 of a blind kantele player called Teppana Jänis, with 21st century recordings by researcher and kantele player Arja Kastinen and the late Finnish folk musician Taito Hoffrén. It’s done so sympathetically, where some tunes are performed in double the new over the degraded wax cylinder recordings, it is as if Kastinen and Hoffrén are undergoing an explicit act of restoration through these overlaps. The impression left is music that is still alive not preserved on wax never to be touched, but something which might change or develop.

LA-based jazz bassist returns to the laidback indie rock mode of his 2023 album Driving for this lo-fi Fleetwood Mac cover on Psychic Hotline’s singles clubs.

Bendik Giske’s woozily manipulated saxophone pieces are among the most hypnotic sounds being produced anywhere on the planet. Remarkably, on her remix of ‘Slipping’, aya finds a way to push further still when it comes to beautiful disorientation 

Pet Shop Boys’ ‘So Hard’ was a wonderful song of mistrust and a relationship falling into nothingness. On his new cover, Hawk strips the original back to piano, voice and little flutters of guitar that rather wonderfully make the whole thing sound like a Suede song from the debut album or early B-sides. 

New Doja Cat channels Madonna and Vanity 6 for this sultry banger that feels very much like it should be playing in the back of a night club scene midway through a Paul Verhoeven movie

The second of three singles from the forthcoming album, LSD, finds new lead vocalist Mike Vennart in fine form and playing a seemingly more prominent role than on previous single, ‘Woodeneye’. Whilst most Cardiacs fans won’t be able to hear this, at least initially, without missing Smith in the role, Vennart’s soaring performance is so assured and so hugely uplifting that it’s hard to imagine a more apt performer taking over the unenviable task so successfully. Yet this is also, very obviously, a Tim Smith-penned piece, from his signature use of multiple chord changes, the shifts in vocal pitch, to the stirring use of brass underpinning its main melodic momentum that imbue it with a kind of English pastoral-tinged psychedelia that has long been a calling card of his work. In terms of its emotional vibe, ‘Downup’ is also intensely euphoric and a slow-release earworm that only gets better with repeated listening. In other words, a classic Cardiacs tune of the more poptastic variety.