The Quietus Albums of the Year So Far 2025 (In Association with Norman Records)

Californian rapper Maxo’s fourth studio album is perhaps his most liberated and tranquil release to date, a shift that is made all the more pronounced by the more markedly pensive and downbeat qualities of 2023 duel projects Even God Has A Sense Of Humor and Debbie’s Son. “This is the first time that I really didn’t care, I didn’t approach things so seriously,” Maxo said in the record’s press notes, and fortunately this lax approach to his craft produces dazzling results in the 10 vignette-like cuts that make up Mars is Electric. Expanding his sound further than ever before, tracks like ‘Saturday Love (Cherry)’ and ‘Idk’ draws on breakbeat and classic jungle rhythms, while ‘Donahoo’s Chicken’ pushes rap into the world of industrial music before a raft of prog synths give proceedings a more psychedelic edge. Between occasional bursts of conversational chatter in the outros of certain tracks that almost come off like a breaking down of the fourth wall, Maxo remains as philosophical as ever, but most vitally, there’s an overriding sense of having achieved an inner contentment with exactly who he is. 

Reminding me why I don’t go to the gym is an album of percussion and spoken word by the duo of Valentina Magaletti and Fanny Chiarello on their Permanent Draft Imprint. ‘Reverse Fly’ is an oddball banger, a voice sunk in effects intones over unruly drum machine claps that flutter away on wings of delay. ‘Curtsy Lounges’ opens with naive piano but takes a handbrake turn into the manic repetitions of ‘shiny hair swinging in the air’, an earworm you won’t rid yourself of easily. Alternative gym music for the experimental music scene. 

The first solo collaboration between Marlene Ribeiro (GNOD, Negra Branca) and questing producer Shackleton resembles a very deep, clear and languid pool of crystal clear water shot through with beams of sundappled Balearic synths, ripples of dub and shoals of tightly harmonised vocals. Not that distant from Ribeiro’s previous excellent solo album for Rocket Recordings, Toquei No Sol, this is simply a headphone-optimised progression with lysergic attention to textural definition.

Craig Clouse continues to exercise his God-given mandate to make Billy Childish look like a lazy musician, by knocking another blinder out for the quarter. This time he occupies an occult region inside a strange three-dimensional figure bounded by post punk, elektronische, digital dub, and minimal techno with attention paid to the idea of deep listening. These tracks appear to be named for railway stations in the far west of Germany (except the ones that clearly aren’t). The country I’m currently thinking of is Finland however; probably because Circle are the only other long-running cult group of note I can think of who continuously return to a group of well defined genres (in their case NWOBHM, psych and Krautrock) and yet still consistently amaze and break new ground in the same way the otherwise entirely different but just as brilliant Shit And Shine does. 

Opening with a raw rolling blues number called ‘Palmyra’, this Liam Grant album on long running label VHF is the first thing I’ve really dug in on by this relatively young guitarist. Everybody seems to mention his age in write-ups and features (he’s in his mid-twenties), perhaps because the ground he’s treading has more often been the fancy of older souls. His trajectory is through an obsession with the Joe Bussard / Fahey / 78rpm country and bluegrass zone, later filtered and infused with the broad influences of DIY and underground culture. Recording is rough and often distorted or in the red, and this grit sits well. On ‘Salmon Tails Up The River’ his fingers are fluid and glittering over the strings; ‘Insult To Injury’ drops into a gentle lyricism; ‘A Moment At The Door’ is sparse and pensive; and ‘Old Country Rock’ is of a moonshine-on-the-old-back-porch vintage. 

Aside from The Squirrely Years even existing in the first place, another of its surprising aspects is that these new versions are so faithful to the blueprints. They have not been fed through the blender of Psalm 69 and blasted back into the world as blisteringly busy Burroughsian metal. Thankfully, nor do they sound as cackhanded as all those 80s cover songs by nu-metal bands and Marilyn Manson that dominated rock club nights in the early 2000s (and still do, I’m told), like a sewage flood welcomed into an uninsured kitchen. Early Ministry’s poppiness, once part of Al Jourgensen’s shame regarding these pieces, has been retained unashamedly. They are heavier, yes, but in a fairly subtle fashion which in some cases will have you reaching for the originals to pinpoint the differences. Ministry have aimed for an “arena rock” vibe and something truer to Jourgensen’s vision prior to Arista’s alleged meddling. 

Smerz are still working in the zone where club music, art-school minimalism, and emotional confession overlap. Big City Life operates on a kind of low-battery logic: everything flickers, fades, or folds back on itself with hypnotic intention. These are ideas introduced and strategically abandoned. Beats arrive late and leave early by design. Melodies make brief, tantalising appearances. It’s the feeling of living inside half-finished conversations, multiple tabs open, a hundred things happening at once and nothing really landing.

Zosha Warpeha and Mariel Terán improvise with the hardanger d’amore – a bowed, fiddle-like instrument from Norway, and indigenous Andean flutes, respectively. Across Orbweaver, strings mew and croak as well as soar and sing. Flutes gasp and yelp as much as sound notes. On ‘Quesintuu & Umantuu’, something starts to wheeze. Voice occasionally enters through the album, whispering, hushed, vaguely supernatural. At its heart, Orbweaver is surreal, open-ended music communing with diverse folk traditions while taking an exploratory approach to traditional instruments. But like Ute Wassermann, Adrian Myhr and Michaela Antalová or Laura Cannell, Warpeha and Terán’s music suggests the partition between human and non-human soundings is porous. Instruments with folk origins are played in ways which acknowledge their histories while also stretching beyond their boundaries. It’s all propelled by an instinctive interaction between the two players, a shared new vocabulary crystallising before your ears across the tape’s six improvisations. Often, their music toys with whatever mechanism in your brain makes cats crying cut through even the noisiest of nights. But rather than unsettling us, Warpeha and Terán find wonder and euphoniousness while exploring where humans and non-humans share acoustic space. 

Affection is a conflicted emotion. The soft fondness of the word belies the daily reality of its harder core – the dark hazelnut truffle of the emotional lexicon. Raisa K’s debut album, Affectionately, offers up both sides of this conflict, combining visceral electronics with thoughtful melody, intoning “you won’t hold me”, then “you won’t hold me back”. Alongside her role with Good Sad Happy Bad, her solo work adds a welcome new layer to London’s classically trained artists with an oblique approach to pop

Marking a return to her independent roots following two albums for 4AD, the surprise-released, entirely self-produced Lifetime sees Erika de Casier further refine the thrillingly sensual downtempo trip hop and R&B sound that has previously put her in the lineage of widely adored artists such as Sade and 90s Janet Jackson. De Casier’s vocals are bewitchingly smokey and seductive throughout as she hones in on the intoxicating thrills and nerves that come with new love with charming sincerity. Above all, the artist’s active decision to take full control of the project and pare back the featured credits list yields potently cohesive results making for her best release since 2019’s breakout LP Essentials.

A supergroup of sorts, formed at the first Wrong Speed Records Fest in 2023 (via Lee Richardson’s address on Joe Thompson’s postie run), AAA Gripper feature members of Hey Colossus, Sweet Williams and Joeyfat. The result is a cascading, groove-based math-rock record with articulate talky vocal observations, a bit like an English answer to Enablers. We Invented Work For The Common Good is only nine songs long but it’s packed with ideas, musical and lyrical.

Despite how hypnotic Crucifixion Of Orchids can be, it’s a terrifyingly focused record, covering a lot of ground in just over half an hour. Just take crushing album centre-piece ‘Wither’ for example, a song that ties together frantic blasting and abrasive tremolo riffing with pounding crust punk rhythms, shimmering post-rock textures and crystal clear, emotive vocals in just over seven minutes without feeling forced or rushed at all. The two-and-a-half minute ‘Ark’ is even more impressive, feeling like a vast Wolves In The Throne Room-esque epic comfortably shrunk into a punky nugget of energy without losing any of its grandeur, whilst the 11-minute ‘Paradise’ allows the band to stretch out into even more trance-inducing territory. The moment the band’s yearning riffing breaks into a thick, black void around halfway through is vertigo-inducing, making its subsequent build from twinkly, wounded tremolo picking to its roaring climax feel even more rewarding. Whilst the record feels like a clear continuation of the Fatalist sound, Crucifixion Of Orchids is such a fresh, powerful statement of intent that the band’s name change to Acceptance makes total sense.

This is Clément Vercelletto’s first release under his own name; previously he has put out solo work as Sarah Terral or as half of duo Kaumwald with Ernest Bergez, AKA Sourdure. And he has produced it using only the engoulevent, playing the bird calls with a MIDI controller and recording in a few different locations including a hugely resonant wine silo. It’s virtually impossible to describe this music without resorting to avian imagery; on ‘La Tourmaline’, the engoulevent twitters and chirrups as Vercelletto makes drastic changes to the tempo (I’m doubtless not alone in having David Lynch on my mind at the moment, and the uncanny combination of the natural and the mechanical brings to mind the robin at the end of Blue Velvet). Elsewhere, ‘La Grande Berce’ features a reedy tone slicing through a thicket of scrabbling, scuffling, squealing noises but tranquil passages predominate. On ‘Le Serpent Testa L’Air’, there are clicking and clacking rhythms like the sounds of motorised wings and dawn-chorus trills, while on ‘Hoedic long’, (one of the wine silo pieces, I presume) seemingly distant clouds of ghostly reverberation gather and swirl. 

As a suite of songs, Hand To Mouth lacks the rigour of Kelley Forsyth’s full-length albums, but that may just be a recommendation in itself. At a time when so many modern classical-adjacent albums are austere and formal to the point of being daunting, Forsyth and Matthew Bourne are inviting us to listen in as they try a new approach. And while you certainly wouldn’t go so far as to describe the results as playful, this is music imbued with a sense of adventure and, despite its frosty veneer, compassion.

I’ve recently been listening to a lot of old private press loner synth stuff from that brief period when synths became affordable and portable enough to have in your spare room and people ran off their own cassettes from home – people like George Garside and Rick Crane (hat tip on this to Nate Young’s Baker’s Dozen). This is the second release on Buh for Venezuelan composer Oksana Linde and it fits right in that mould. Her previous release didn’t stick with me, and right now I’m not sure why – I wonder if I found it a touch light in a new age-y way – but this one has landed with me solidly and is on repeat. It has that same sense of world-building-for-one that I find in Garside and Crane, where the music feels less about the spiritual introspection or functional music that drives DIY new age synth work, and instead conjures imaginative spaces: science fiction narratives or cosmic dramas, unfolding in questing synthetic choruses. 

A sense of bewilderment works on More where it may not have been entirely successful in the past, because we all understand that time is elastic and our lives are ebbing away. Jarvis Cocker’s negative experiences with fame will inevitably be harder to tap into than someone reflecting and trying to make sense of their lives. There’s a universality to More which benefits from Cocker’s inimitable, offbeat perspective. Songs on the album then contain a series of wistful and not-so-wistful memories, such as a pratfall-strewn trek to Spike Island to see The Stone Roses – which actually is a second-hand memory, given that it all happened to co-songwriter and Jarv Is… collaborator Jason Buckle. ‘Tina’ returns like an apparition, being followed around by a soundtrack that sounds like Ennio Morricone at his warmest. Tina is a girl who Cocker remembers seeing around Sheffield whose appearances took on a significance even though they never spoke. ‘Grown Ups’, meanwhile, is perhaps an answer to ‘Help The Aged’, seen through the prism of experience rather than supposition. 

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 16th 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.

Sopraterra are the elegant, sometimes courtly electoacoustic music duo of Magda Drozd and Nicola Genovese, a Pole and an Italian who now live in Zurich. Seven Dances To Embrace The Hollow, their debut album, nods to baroque or even early music styles at times, though where recorders and violin feature they are subject to ample electronic modification, and elsewhere the sound design is more like something you might find in the PAN label catalogue. If you can imagine London-based composer and 3D-printed instrument maker Wojciech Rusin with more of a dungeon synth element, this album might be for you.

There’s a genuinely great and immensely fun album to be found within MUSIC’s somewhat excessive 30-song tracklist as Carti tries out various vocal stylings – from raspy goblin mode and drowsy chatter to shrill, pitch-shifted coos – to riveting effect. Appearing back-to-back in the second half of the record, ‘OLYMPIAN’ and ‘OPM BABI’ are a febrile one-two punch of bass-boosted Atlanta trap brilliance, the latter in particular a dizzying clash of gunshot samples, the rapper’s autotune-assisted falsetto and the maxed-out vocal tags of Swamp Izzo, the Atlanta DJ whose voice appears erratically across MUSIC having lit up various mixtapes coming out of the city in the 2010s. ‘COCAINE NOSE’, with its callback to the instantly recognisable guitar licks of Ashanti’s 2004 R&B hit ‘Only U’, is another highlight, with Carti dipping firmly back into the maximalist rage bag that he explored so brilliantly on 2020’s Whole Lotta Red.

A Separation From Habit’s opener, ‘The Voice I’ve Yet To Understand’, is the clearest exploration of the record’s central tenet: how the discomfort of the present finds tragic echoes through time. Here, traditional zajal poetry evokes the communal past, archival radio debates from the 1970s and 80s summons living memory, while Joy Moughanni’s unsettling production places us firmly in the present. On a later interlude, we hear the sounds of real bombs dropped during Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon in 1978, while ‘Of Colour And Significance’ elicits the region’s even older colonial scars via the use of a French cassette called Lebanon In Colour. That original tape had featured romanticised melodies played on the qanun (a Middle Eastern string instrument), which here Moughanni stretches and warps into something simmering with rage. It ends, however, in a place that is, in a way, even more heartbreaking – the 14-minute ambient sprawl ‘To Lose A Friend / A Separation From Habit’ evokes the detachment and suppression necessary to simply keep existing under such conditions.