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

Radio Anorak’s debut, Rememberer, is a free-flowing montage where flights of fantasy hit brick walls and flickers of pastoral magic sprout from pavements. The Brighton-based duo of musician Toma Sapir and visual artist-turned vocalist Hugo Winder-Lind recorded the groundwork for these tracks in a cabin in Lewes. They sat on a computer for a while before being eventually cut up and strung together into Rememberer. The tape’s core is a kaleidoscope of spoken word-meets-abraded space rock and a smattering of ragged acoustic folk. Winder-Lind’s words carry a whimsy shackled to humdrum reality: supermarket meal deals, housing shortages and dwindling green spaces cracking through pastoral recollections and corrupting their innocence. Sapir’s music matches the mood, guitars alternating between levitating and giving the impression of a psych rock troubadour buckling under the weight of their energy bills.

Coltsblood are, to my ears, one of the most distinctive, fresh and powerful doom acts to emerge from this rotten isle over the last decade, pulling strands of the most subterranean black metal and funeral doom into their sludgy morass. This long-awaited third album is their most focused and impactful yet – it’s significantly shorter than their first two but manages to feel even more immersive, thanks to the instantly enveloping atmosphere it creates and sustains throughout.

Trio Rien Virgule have followed up their hulking 2021 release La Consolation Des Violettes, their first following the tragic loss of fourth member Jean-Marc Reilla, with an album that sounds even more labyrinthine (in fact the superb closing track is called ‘Labyrinthes’). It’s also less like something that’s dragged itself out of a dank basement but the band’s uncanny power hasn’t been diminished; there’s a crisp, sci-fi sheen to the 12 tracks here but they still amalgamate Eastern European folk, goth or metal-like minor chords, naive synths, abstract noise, dramatic percussion, spring reverb pings and pops, and a sensibility that’s attuned to Lovecraftian cosmic terror and the mood of the darkest fairytales. Lumbering slow-burners like opener ‘Le Rythme Du Sang’ are still their speciality but the hair-raising ‘Ostinato Des Parades’ locks into a submerged techno pulse and ‘Chute Imaginaire D’Un Astre’ rides an almost-jaunty, fairground rhythm. Anna Careil’s heavily treated voice is the star of the show, a thing of blood-curdling beauty; she can sound like a terrified child or a malignant entity wailing as it’s banished to some hellish dimension.

80’z is like a joyously chaotic disco shift at the club, opening with ‘Tipz & Trickz’ which has bouncy, fast-flowing verses that sit atop jangly guitar lines reminiscent of the sounds of West African highlife. It flows into ‘Superchú!’, which features more of Bb Trickz’s characteristically drill vibe in its beats and rhythm. The track playfully mixes the artist’s Spanish lyricism with phrases in English to create a kind of Spanglish that both seems nonchalant and uniquely hers. We get this on ‘Not A Pretty Girl’ too, which sees Bb put her spin on Clairo’s 2017 breakout single ‘Pretty Girl’, coupling its laid-back instrumental with her brash delivery, confirming that she’s not one to be trifled with.

Гільдеґарда reinterprets the compositions of the 12th-century prioress, philosopher and visionary Hildegard of Bingen. Synthesized suites and Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko’s traditional Ukrainian singing intertwine in intense polyphonic music, full of spiritual tension. The album contains two extended pieces: ‘O Ignis Spiritus Paracliti’ and ‘O Tu Suavissima Virga’. The first is an energetic, impetuous, fiery prayer for life. The composition unfolds slowly, from gentle drones to a monumental wave of sound that overwhelms the finale. The second track – cooler, more contemplative, humming à la murmurando – pays tribute to St. Mary. Bass drones provide the foundation for Saienko’s vocals, which move with solemnity and focus.

Kinski’s tenth album opens with ‘Do You Like Long Hair?’, an instrumental that rocks in a warm and gentle fashion at first, a little like something from the Sonic Youth rarities collection The Destroyed Room. It then gets more crunchy and sparkly at the same time, suggesting J. Mascis is guesting with Hawkwind. ‘Staircase Wit’ progresses along a similarly enjoyable art-rock-to-space-rock trajectory. ‘Slovenian Fighting Jacket’ brings things down a notch with its slower and moodier minimalism. Only briefly, however, as its second half rockets up again. The acoustic-based ‘Her Absence Feels Like a Presence’ stays calm and dreamy throughout. Of the few songs with vocals, the title track is slacker rock rendered in a phatter fashion, while ‘Experimental Hugs’ is a fast-paced and bouncy number with shades of Superchunk. File under “FUN MUSIC”.

Without wanting to throw around any loosey-goosey notions of something being proto-techno, side B of this tape genuinely sounds like Mika Vainio’s Metri played entirely with the sounds of water droplets. It’s a macro lens but a minimal (techno) sound, made by Masaaki Takano, who began his career in sound effects, but lost faith in it and began recording natural sounds, later moving into making his own naturalistic instruments when he couldn’t capture the wind in the way he wanted. Shizukutachi is conceptually rooted in the suikinkutsu, the principles of which informed the creation of his own self-created ‘suikinchiku’ instrument (which means water harp bamboo). Side A is a little more meditative, but still rhythmic, and these rhythms lend a transient architecture to the work; imbue it with human teleology. 

The eight songs contained within The Heart Is In The Body are not entirely without precedent. One might consider Lost Crowns to be akin to a wilder Gentle Giant, had they been inspired by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Conlon Nancarrow, instead of medieval and baroque chamber music. The work of the Henry Cow and Art Bears-inspired American Rock In Opposition groups Thinking Plague and 5uus are also obvious touchpoints, although Lost Crowns’ use of the darker kind of English folk exemplified by Comus, as well as a propensity for undeniably earworm-worthy riffs and vocal melodies, mark them apart from those bands. Undoubtedly, they will have crossover appeal for Cardiacs fans too, though it’s harder to draw any direct comparison there, with Tim Smith having always had an ear for a certain kind of psychedelic pop. This music will not be for everyone. Accusations of being wilfully difficult or overly composed are often fielded at such music (and are not entirely without foundation).

Coming off like an undiluted celebration of Chicago rap in its various forms, this collaboration between Saba and producer No I.D. is a thrilling meeting of minds. Centred around Saba’s meditative, laid-back vocal delivery and No I.D.’s cheerfully soulful beats, a revolving cast of other artists – from Pivot Gang members such as daedaePIVOT and Daoud to well-known R&B vocalists such as Kelly Rowland and Raphael Saadiq – add further light to proceedings. Tracks like ‘Westside Bound Pt. 4’, with its various flow changes and beat jumps, and ‘Breakdown’, with Saba’s dizzying fluid bars, are triumphant. Most thrilling about From The Private Collection Of Saba & No I.D. is just how naturally two different generations of Chicago rap come together to make a record that sounds equally playful and thoughtfully arranged.

If the world in which Alamut arrives appears to be plumbing new depths, then it’s also a reminder that fanaticism is nothing new, whether now, during the 20th century or the 11th century. Great art in reaction to troubling events is nothing new in the Laibach canon either, though Alamut is almost certainly the most jaw-dropping work they’ve been involved in across a 45-year career and counting. The parodic Laibach and the arch Laibach are both eschewed for something more sincere, sober, solemn, expanding and pushing the boundaries of what they do. Indeed, the sonic flourishes and abstract digressions feel removed from the art pranksterism they’ve sometimes become associated with.

Marie Davidson’s sixth album finds the Canadian artist with one eye on the dance floor, the other lingering suspiciously on her smartphone. Produced in collaboration with Soulwax and Pierre Guerineau (Davidson’s partner in minimal wave duo Essaie Pas), City Of Clowns re-embraces the precise, machine-tooled techno and strutting electroclash of 2018’s Working Class Woman, but there’s a stronger sense of both the personal and the political here – not to mention a clear distrust of big tech and the insidious way it has come to monetize and dominate our lives.

Sami Galbi lives in Switzerland but claims Moroccan heritage, and recorded this debut album in both countries. The Swiss side of him accounts for his formative time living in Lausanne anarcho punk squats when he was younger, and for Ylh Bye Bye being released by the consistently open-eared Geneva label Bongo Joe. The Moroccan element dominates the sound of its ten songs, in the best way. Singing in Arabic and swamped in Autotune, Galbi marries folk melodies to hectic, modernist electronic dance – coming off, perhaps more than anything, a mid-2020s update on the electro chaâbi sound that was so thrilling in the mid-2010s.

Los Thuthanaka is the self-titled debut of Chuquimamani-Condori and brother Joshua ​​Chuquimia Crampton. Defiantly unmastered and deeply psychedelic, it’s a trance record in the true sense. Eternal time in the rhythms of cumbia, the steps of the Andean dance huayño. We’re left with a sense of slack-jawed euphoria. As the album progresses, the tracks get longer and the grooves get heavier, Joshua’s guitar veering toward quasi-metal crunch. It’s easy to view sound as impermanent, like a puff of smoke that dissipates in the air, hard to grasp and hard to trace. It’s better to view Los Thuthanaka as a kind of literal rock music.

More complex and multi-sectioned than your average hardcore arrangement, without threatening indulgence or finesse, Disorder In The Machinery features great cloudy hockles of deathrock lobbed into anarcho/pogopunk demolition derbies. Synth player Lula Hoffmann adds a whole extra dimension but of like-mind with her bandmates (guitarist Shereen Elizabeth, bassist Adrian Alfonso and drummer Camille Fry). Linsey McFadden, playing in her first band that I know of, is also a deadly vocalist, her high register as combative as any diaphragmatic cookie monster. 

With Belly Up, Moin return to their minimalist roots while pushing sonic boundaries to new, explorative heights. ​​The group’s soundscapes feel both deliberate and instinctive. ‘See’ kicks off the EP like clockwork. Drummer Valentina Magaletti is the glue of this track, playing a continual tom rhythm that pairs seamlessly with Qatari-American writer Sophia Al Maria’s slow-burn stream of consciousness (Al Maria began her collaboration with Moin on last year’s You Never End LP). Experimental loop musician and saxophonist Ben Vince also makes an appearance on ‘See’, meaning that it’s probably a saxophone we’re hearing, and not a set of detuned, discordant bagpipes. Released alongside ‘See’ as a double single, ‘X.U.Y’ elevates their post-everything sound, evoking the feeling of slowly returning to your body after a panic attack. It’s less like an assortment of unidentifiable noises and more like an actual, cohesive track that wouldn’t be out of place on You Never End.

The life and work of pioneering poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini casts a long shadow over this record from French artist Karen Jebane, also known as Golem Mecanique. The album’s title, which translates as “we are all in danger”, is derived from the final interview Pasolini gave before his still-unsolved murder in 1975, and a sense of threat pervades the record from start to finish. This is a dense, foreboding album, its scale and texture as unforgiving as a vast, broiling body of water. But there is beauty here.

It’s a yearning to be something more that characterises Cowards, Squid’s prickly third LP. Ollie 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 their 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.

Showbiz!’s opening cut, ‘Bear Trap’, lays the groundwork for MIKE’s characteristic 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 MIKE’s lo-fi delivery.

Across songs with ingredients such as optimism, embracing life and a general uplift against forces that – either interior or exterior – threaten to swallow you up, Ten Crowns takes the listener for a joyful ride – quite literally on the opener ‘Breaking Thru The interstellar’, where a vocodered Bell darts among the rave stabs with an ecstatic nod to ‘Nightflight To Venus’. There’s a clubbiness to the album that usually doesn’t quite get let in to the sealed perfection of Erasure. Bell has his tits out and is breathing the dry-iced air of nights out in places where Shazam is of no help on ‘Lies So Deep’.

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 long-standing 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.