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Yazz Ahmed – A Paradise in the Hold
Yazz Ahmed’s Bahraini heritage has always been key to her take on jazz: from the start, the London-based trumpeter/flugelhornist has deployed Arabic quarter-tone scales (she has a specially made flugelhorn to play them) and Middle Eastern percussion. But on her fourth album, it’s more pronounced than ever: the tracks are rooted in Bahraini wedding poems and in fijiri, the songs sung by pearl fishers around the Persian Gulf. The results are enthralling: soloing that feels alternately yearning and exuberant, rich and emotive melodies, the sound – big on vibraphone and electric piano – regularly strafed with fizzing electronics. It’s an album to lose yourself in. Alexis Petridis
Annie and the Caldwells – Can’t Lose My (Soul)
A family band who have spent the best part of 40 years honing their God-fearing blend of gospel, funk, disco, southern soul and R&B, Annie and the Caldwells were once Mississippi’s best-kept secret. They break cover with an album recorded live (although without an audience) in a church in their home town of West Point. You don’t have to share the Caldwells’ faith to find the songs on Can’t Lose My (Soul) life-affirming, their message of hope both infectious and timely. This music is tough, powerful and tightly played, but still raw, blessed with incredible vocals and almost telepathic interplay between the musicians. Read the full review. AP
Architects – The Sky, the Earth & All Between
The British metalcore band made their masterpiece with their 11th album, a triumph of production and pop melody as well as cathartic lyric writing. Each song is its own burning exoplanet of sound, heaving with multitracked detail from granite-shearing drums to floating layers of ambience above, as frontman Sam Carter casts a nihilist’s eye over ravaged psyches and social discord – while getting in a couple of jabs at Architects’ own fanbase. Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Aya – Hexed!
As she explained to us in March, Aya Sinclair’s second album of hardcore electronics is an interrogation of her youth in the north-west, grappling with her queerness, gender identity, panic attacks and substance use. As her voice goes from manic to calm, and breakcore or donk beats collapse into noise, reality seems to get right up in your face then slip from your grip. These tracks bounce and fall like an old tyre down a hillside, and Aya moves with them, chattering one of the best British lyric sheets in years – full of tight rhyme schemes, double meanings, northern slang and joy in the plasticity of language. BBT
Bad Bunny – Debí Tirar Más Fotos
There are worried discussions on social media that there are no good contenders for a 2025 song of the summer – but there’s an hour-long album of them here from Bad Bunny. Latin America’s biggest music star leans even harder into his Puerto Rican heritage: as well as making plenty of reggaeton, he samples classic salsa and creates entirely new songs in that style; adds the scrape of a güiro here or a guitar-led bolero there; and turns DtMF, a song in Puerto Rico’s plena genre, into a mega-streaming smash. Spanish speakers may spot a series of semi-veiled political lyrics – but in his vocal tone alone, he still expresses hurt and disappointment better than arguably anyone in pop today. BBT
Bon Iver – Sable, Fable
Justin Vernon has been many things over the course of his career – the rustic singer-songwriter of For Emma, Forever Ago; the Auto-Tune-drenched electronic experimentalist of 22, a Million; a collaborator who provides the unlikely link between Taylor Swift and Swamp Dogg. But, as much as it’s presented as a companion to his stark indie-folk EP Sable (included as a prelude-like first disc), Fable is ultimately an R&B album, brightly hued and poppy even during its most out-there moments: the backing of Day One is lurching and disruptive, but the melody is a killer. Read the full review. AP
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – Gift Songs
No record this year will have a more apposite title: the five pieces of the Zen priest and hospice worker’s latest record are soothing balms born of the sensitive interplay between Cantu-Ledesma and his new ensemble. The 20-minute opener The Milky Sea sounds like moonlight hitting water, a dappled conjuring of brightness and depth between pianist Omer Shemesh, drummer Booker Stardrum and cellist Clarice Jensen. The three-part eponymous suite comprises patient, open-hearted sketches and a sense of the players in the room together. But pretty much any sense of delineation between instrument and person dissolves on River That Flows Two Ways, a softly ecstatic meditation of pump organ and droning cello that overflows one’s field of perception to drown out life’s hurts for nine minutes. Laura Snapes
Erika de Casier – Lifetime
To immerse in Erika De Casier’s surprise-released fourth album feels like slipping into an infinity pool: her down tempo seductions brim with boundless, limpid luxury and possibility. Writing and producing everything for the first time, the Danish-Portuguese musician’s touchstones here are Sade, William Orbit-era Madonna and Janet Jackson. While the sultry beats and period-specific dial tones are on point, Lifetime transcends homage thanks to De Casier’s innovative vision: the celestial rave synths that glimmer through Seasons; how Two Thieves disintegrates from chilly Y2K futurism to dank, time-warped dub; contrasting the immaculate melody of Delusional with a whinnying horn sampled from Insane in the Brain. Almost every song, in fact, has a spellbinding melody: highlight You Can’t Always Get What You Want has a little of Pure Shores in its tender conciliation. LS
Destroyer – Dan’s Boogie
“I’m into it / If you’re into it,” Dan Bejar sings on Sun Meet Snow, the wink heavy with indeterminate intimation. Dyed-in-the-wool Destroyer fans may take it as an acknowledgment of Bejar’s commitment to the literary absurdism and sybaritic production that the Canadian songwriter knows we love so well. Dan’s Boogie is another masterclass in it, paring back the dancefloor precision of 2022’s Labyrinthitis for the haunted opulence of Bologna, which seems to reverberate across the empty marble floors of a deserted hotel; the title track’s decadently spiralling arpeggios knocking his rakish lounge act off their piano stool; the darkly manic power pop of Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World. By “into it”, Bejar may also mean the infinite beauty and ugliness in the world, which he can’t ever look away from and can’t stop showing us: “The sun mostly rises,” he sings on The Ignoramus of Love. “A great golden spike through the heart of the world.” Read the full review. LS
Djrum – Under Tangled Silence
Producer Felix Manuel’s crazily ambitious third album is a masterclass of detail and vision, an insatiable swarm of classical piano into tabla and breakcore, all presented as a seamless mix. It warrants the full-hour, headphones-on listening experience, but the many textural highlights along the way include the intent tabla, booming drums and bassy slurps of L’Ancienne, the hyper-kinetic kalimba and blown-out breaks of Three Foxes Chasing Each Other and Sycamore’s torrid rotor blade whirl. LS
Edward Skeletrix – Museum Music
Some listeners interpreted the US rapper’s 30-track double album as a satire on hollow trap music, while others found it just plain empty. The lyrics are often dumb, even wilfully horrible at times – but they’re hardly presented as aspirational, and with a slurred melodic flow over corroded-motherboard beats, Skeletrix conjures some terrifically bleak moods. The result is like an album from the “rage rap” generation of Playboi Carti and Ken Carson that’s been burned out and left to drift. BBT
John Glacier – Like a Ribbon
One track on the pseudonymous London rapper’s debut album opens with the words “Since I came to Earth …” It fits: there’s something very otherworldly about the sound of Like a Ribbon. It inhabits a strange and fascinating territory somewhere between UK rap, grime, lo-fi alt-rock, abstract electronica and bass music. Its author floats through it, her voice a deadpan mumble, her lyrics a stream of consciousness: you occasionally feel less like you’re listening to her than eavesdropping. It’s remarkably original and completely enrapturing. Read the full review. AP
Horsegirl – Phonetics On and On
The cover of the Chicago indie trio’s second album echoes a classic quilting patch, the eight-point star. Produced by Cate Le Bon, the pared back Phonetics On and On creates a similar kind of simple piecework to beautiful effect, turning gorgeous miniatures from rumbling bass, splayed guitar and discordant violin that owes much to the Raincoats and the Velvets. Their spindly, rickety sound has its edges sanded by their casual tunefulness and gentle melancholy, with fragmentary lyrics that seem to trace a surreptitious search for comfort and fulfilment: “Shepherd wants to drive a flower truck / ‘Cause it smells nice and everyone’s happy,” as they sing, with gnomic loveliness (and no trace of twee), on Rock City. Read the full review. LS
Eiko Ishibashi – Antigone
After a couple of soundtracks with Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car, Evil Does Not Exist) and some avant garde releases, the Japanese composer-songwriter returns to relatively straightforward songwriting and reaches a new peak of sophistication. Over pattering jazz drums, her decadently rich and symphonic arrangements are never leaden or predictable; digital and analogue sound sources flow together like freshwater meeting the sparkling sea. Even if you don’t understand Japanese, Ishibashi’s lounge-bar singing evokes so much: there’s profound melancholy, tempered with a touch of happy resignation, as well as awed wonder. BBT
Japanese Breakfast – For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women)
Michelle Zauner’s fourth album represents a distinct shift: it’s her first recorded in a professional studio, with indie super-producer Blake Mills – of Fiona Apple and John Legend fame – at the controls. The results are romantic and lush – orchestrations that lean towards baroque pop on single Orlando in Love and 60s easy listening (Little Girl); adding a Cure-like swirl to the sound of her band on Honey Water. The songs, meanwhile, are great: pensive and questioning, at one remove from the pop-facing sound of 2021’s Jubilee, but no less effective. Read the full review. AP
Jasmine.4.T – You Are the Morning
Jasmine Cruikshank’s debut album attracted attention for being produced by all three members of Boygenius and released on Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory label, but it doesn’t really need the celebrity endorsement: You Are the Morning stands entirely on its own merits, revealing Cruikshank to be a fantastic songwriter. Her brand of alt-rock touches on Elliott Smith, Adrianne Lenker and Daniel Johnston, as well as 90s slacker grunge on Elephant and the standout (and Bridgers duet) Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation. The lyrics deal with her experience of coming out as a trans woman with unflinching candour, its mood shifting from heartbreaking to utterly joyful. AP
Kin’Gongolo Kiniata – Kiniata
Like the legendary Konono No 1 before them, Kin’Gongolo Kiniata are testament to the sheer resourcefulness of Kinshasa’s musicians. Its members variously play a homemade one-string guitar, two-string bass and a xylophone fashioned out of discarded plastic bottles (played with a pair of flip-flops); their drummer’s kit features a broken television instead of a bass drum. And, like Konono No 1, the noise they make is visceral and utterly electrifying: a kind of fuzzed-out, wah pedal-heavy punk-funk Afropop, frequently delivered at warp speed, with call-and-response lyrics (in Lingala). It sounds thrillingly evocative of teeming, bustling city life. AP
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DJ Koze – Music Can Hear Us
“In the kingdom of my ends / The maxim is clear / Pure love loves purely,” Damon Albarn sings on the Afrobeats-dappled Pure Love. It’s as good a mission statement for DJ Koze’s sprawling vision as any. As the Hamburg producer floats from Japanese folk song to Teutonic balladry and ecstatic psychedelia – all rendered with Koze’s typically iridescent detail and cheekiness – the self-styled Talented Mr Tripley’s guiding ethos for the journey seems to be nothing but radiant appreciation for beauty in whatever form it may take. And if that feels a little woo-woo for your tastes, the pedal-to-the-metal breakbeat of Brushcutter and rainforest rave of Buschtaxi find their own kind of purity in the transcendence of obliteration. Read the full review. LS
Nao – Jupiter
The “sister album” to 2018’s Grammy and Mercury prize-nominated Saturn has been a long time coming – partly because Nao diverted into making her guitar-heavy response to Covid and its accompanying privations, 2021’s And Then Life Was Beautiful, partly because she has been struggling with chronic fatigue syndrome. But the concise 33 minutes of Jupiter are entirely worth the wait: warm, sensual optimistic, densely packed with great songs that variously touch on R&B, disco, Afrobeats and even a touch of the “wonky funk” style with which she first attracted attention. AP
Perfume Genius – Glory
There’s a sense in which Mike Hadreas’s seventh album as Perfume Genius feels like a culmination, a collection on which you can hear aspects of all the musical personae he’s inhabited over the years – from the stark confessional singer-songwriter mode of his debut Learning, to the synth-pop of 2014’s Too Bright to the left-field Americana of 2020’s acclaimed Set My Heart on Fire Immediately. He remains an impressively unique songwriting voice throughout, whether fantasising about being kidnapped on In a Row, or musing about what it is to be an ageing gay man on the title track. Glory is experimental and deep yet immediate with it – the Aldous Harding collaboration No Front Teeth really hits. It may well be Hadreas’s best album to date. Read the full review. AP
PinkPantheress – Fancy That
For all the gags about her slender track lengths, good luck keeping up with UK producer PinkPantheress on all 20 minutes and nine tracks of her garage-addled new mix tape. She lassos jungle, emo and samples spanning Basement Jaxx to Sugababes and Panic! at the Disco into a hungry, playful hyperlapse trip through a night out. High on an unruly strain of weed and heady flirtation, she spins the ecstasy into a stupid amount of addictive, sugary choruses. Although Pink broke out as a bedroom producer on TikTok, she – as Smerz do below – makes an unarguable case for going out out and letting life happen to you. Read the full review. LS
Ploy – It’s Later Than You Think
That title carries with it a whiff of Anthropocene-era doom – but mostly the cheery sense that you’ve been lost in dancefloor reverie for hours. Ploy, AKA UK producer Sam Smith, has been putting out releases across UK underground labels such as Hessle Audio and Timedance for a decade now, and the joyous Afro-Latin house on his second album (released by Dekmantel) should be rinsed over the festival season. When in Room rides a rolling groove but frequently rears up in alarm with a digital whinny; Stringz has a weird melody that spelunks its way through a series of K-holes; the title track’s marimba line will rightly be bellowed by topless lads in cross-body bags. BBT
Addison Rae – Addison
The year’s best new pop superstar worships at the altar of Britney and Madonna, has drawn adoration – and collaborations – from Charli xcx and Arca and channels the most evanescent end of Lana Del Rey’s catalogue (plus the non-stop blue jeans/short skirts references) into transcendent dance-pop that’s perfect for this downtempo moment. Her long-awaited debut feels just as sumptuous and luxe as the spoils the 24-year-old Louisianan sings about: while she’s often dissolving into a sort of ecstasy at the prospect of pleasure, the production twists her reveries into unexpected shapes, with incredibly effective key changes and mutant bass lines. LS
Sherelle – With a Vengeance
In a world that feels relentless, even galloping out of control, British dance star Sherelle seems determined to find a positive in all that brutal forward motion. Her 160bpm style encompasses Chicago footwork, British jungle and transatlantic techno, and her skill is in maintaining the sci-fi strangeness of those genres while making them as broadly appealing as a dance-chart banger. Read the full review. BBT
Smerz – Big City Life
The Norwegian duo’s second album feels like both an insider’s guide to a killer night out – they’ve got the skinny on the gossip, fashion, swagger, the “art-school gang” who won’t join the fun – and a dare to keep up with Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt. They deliver their dry observations in side-eye mutters and conspiratorial singsong, loaded enough to make you worry about what they really think about your outfit and drink of choice; just the way they sing “feisty!” on a song of the same name is unsettling. The instrumentation is similarly uneasy, all captivatingly weird, insular bops that jolt with stabs of treated piano. The tongue-in-cheek vibe might get a bit hollow were it not for how deeply they’re yearning to make a real connection out on the tiles: “I want something huge to hit me / Something out of time,” they sing on Street Style. In You Got Time and I Got Money – a gorgeous devotional drunk on the strings of Bitter Sweet Symphony – they’ve got it. LS
Los Thuthanaka – Los Thuthanaka
Anyone invested in the potential of the electric guitar needs to hear this overwhelming album by the Bolivian-American sibling duo of Chuquimamani-Condori (FKA Elysia Crampton) and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton. The latter’s riffs are thick smears of raunchy distortion or clearly chirrupping bird calls, played over his sister’s shuffling rhythms and a dense thicket of samples. The final half-hour, across three mind-blowing tracks, pushes you into the heavens and leaves you there, gasping blissfully on a cloud. (Note that it’s only available on Bandcamp here.) BBT
William Tyler – Time Indefinite
Tyler’s music was once expansive, pushing Americana and krautrock towards transcendence. The Nashville guitarist’s fifth solo album embodies the inverse of that impulse, existing in a staticky, spiralling state of collapse as tape loops and small guitar refrains melt together. It’s largely personal: Tyler made the album while seeking treatment for alcoholism and confronting the limiting personal myths that he had constructed around himself. But it’s hard not to hear this charred, beautiful record – made by a great buff of American history – as a eulogy for his country. LS
Venturing – Ghostholding
The US musician Jane Remover released a stunning album in April under her main name, entitled Revengeseekerz: ultra-compressed glitchcore-trap that felt like being hosed down with jagged pixels. Even better is this album from a month prior under her Venturing alias, which is a total stylistic shift: alt-rock lit up by a soulfully overdriven guitar tone, and somewhat evocative of midwest emo. On Recoil, though, she claims to “hate every emo song”, and fair enough – these vignettes of love and youth are sung with breezy confidence and sly amusement, so different from emo’s earnestness. BBT
Wolfacejoeyy – Cupid
R&B vocals and spartan rap production have dovetailed in the “sexy drill” sound of recent years, and this is the subgenre’s finest full-length alongside last year’s Cash Cobain album Play Cash Cobain. Wolfacejoeyy’s lower register is a bit reminiscent of Drake in hurt-boyfriend mode, but in his higher range he knocks out a series of perfect pop-R&B melodies that flutter like pink-penned butterflies on a teenage diary. It’s quotable – “I’m sexy and alone in this club, what the fuck?” he croons on Late to the Party, amusingly crestfallen – and the production is excellent, including baile funk touches on Ronaldinho. BBT
Billy Woods – Golliwog
You wouldn’t necessarily have expected one of the best hip-hop albums of the year so far to be an abstract take on the rap subgenre of horrorcore, but Billy Woods’s Golliwog – a dramatic about-turn from 2023’s approachable Maps – is just that. Daunting, difficult, strafed with noise and queasy jazz and soundtrack samples, it’s occasionally harrowing listening (as on Waterproof Mascara, where Woods’s vocals are backed by the sound of a woman sobbing). But it’s also very compelling in the way it blends gothic horror with current events, touching on illegal immigration and financial turmoil. Extreme music for extreme times. Read the full review. AP
YHWH Nailgun – 45 Pounds
Talking of extremes: this New York-via-Philly band’s 21-minute debut sounds sickly, full of slurry and clatter that stretches and contracts; skittish and nimble thanks to drummer Sam Pickard’s rototom-heavy kit, which keeps their deranged punk-funk perpetually airborne rather than grounded. Singer Zack Borzone – if you can label him so conventionally – sounds as if he’s wrenching himself apart, singing through electric shocks, crying out hoarsely. There are no choruses, just the ceaseless lurch of incessant mutation. Their closest comparison might be Ireland’s Gilla Band and their incredible 2022 album Most Normal: both dissect rock with the grimly visceral lens of David Cronenberg and offer up an ooze it’s hard not to want to roll about in. Read the full review. LS
