Best Albums of 2025
41 Longfield Street Late ’80s - Kieran Hebden/William Tyler
The guitar is a shapeshifter. From Les Paul and Mary Ford’s elegant tape experiments to Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s fearless use of distortion to Hendrix’s Big Muff and the Fripp/Eno Frippertronic era, the great guitar innovators are always turning the instrument into something else. This other thing, however, is usually not an imitation of another instrument – it’s more of a “guitar-and.” A hybrid. Imagine any sound. Is it feasible that it could have been made by some combination of guitar and analogue or digital modulation? Everybody’s finally putting the electric in “electric guitar.”
William Tyler, the Nashville virtuoso who used to play with Lambchop and Silver Jews, released two albums this year that easily fit this tradition. The first, Time Indefinite, is excellent however, the guitar album of the year, the one that changed what I thought was possible to do with a guitar, was the album he made with Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, with the inscrutable title 41 Longfield Street Late ‘80s.
From Steve Reid to Thom Yorke to Burial to Madlib, it seems like there’s nobody Kieran Hebden can’t work with. He gets on the record with some of the greatest practitioners of their respective genres, and he makes it sound even better. Adding the acoustic guitar to his repertoire of laptop-chopped sounds feels like a natural and clean progression, and the opening track of 41 Longfield Street is a mellow bath of wood-and-steel tones turned ambient with the magic of Ableton. Tyler plays the guitar relatively straight most of the time, and it still sounds living and new.
41 Longfield Street opens with a twelve-minute “cover” of Lyle Lovett’s classic “If I Had a Boat,” and after a couple minutes of ambient noodling, Tyler basically just fingerpicks the twinkly lead line from the original for a while. It’s a pretty series of arpeggios, and it’s nice to be able to hear the song without the silly lyrics about seafaring ponies, but it’s also amazing to just hear straightforward acoustic fingerstyle guitar on one of the most experimental guitar albums of 2025. Hebden samples and loops segments of Tyler’s guitar part for about five more minutes, and that’s the song. It’s not fancy or complicated, but it still feels lively and fresh; it’s sunrise music.
Where Time Indefinite is an elaborate Kandinsky painting, 41 Longfield Street Late ‘80s looks at first like straightforward landscape wall art until you investigate it closely. Then you realize that, on second glance, you don’t actually recognize these trees and flowers; they painted in familiar colors, but the world they made is one that hasn’t been imagined before.
45 Pounds - YHWH Nailgun
Brian Eno used a pack of cards called “Oblique Strategies” to help his creative process. Each card would have a constraint or idea that the artist had to use in their next project or song. I imagine YHWH Nailgun’s deck is just 52 card pick up reading “DISTRUPT.”
The New York quartet makes visceral, punishing rock, thanks to their insatiable need to disrupt, destroy. They feed their influences through a woodchipper and fashion the pieces back together. Gore, viscera and all. Lead vocalist Zack Borzone sounds like he’s coughing up pyroclasts while screeching undiscernible threats, and the DBZ fusion-dance between synth wizard Jack Tobias and Saguiv Rosenstock’s unidentifiable guitar rips the sonic contours of each song into individual atoms. There are sudden, shocking moments of violence, scrapyards worth of metal clanging down from Sam Pickard’s skittering drum lines, songs shattered by failing computer systems, or the horrifying, cosmos-leveling drone on album highlight “Blackout.” I can’t wait to see what they break next.
All What Did the Blade Reveal - Lijkschouwer
I knew. When I saw the album art, and when I read the album name, I just knew. I knew that this album was going to be exactly what I look for in a metal release. Filthy, grimy, dark, heavy, oppressing, enveloping. The song structures themselves stand up tall on their own, but the sound textures of the instrumentation are what puts this one over the top. The drums sound massive, like rolling thunder combined with Death on his pale horse and Hades following behind him in an apocalyptic stampede. The guitar lines were crafted and dialed in with expert accuracy and precision, waxing and waning, cutting and stabbing, or beating and bludgeoning. It's a masterclass in world building and emotion stirring metal. That's what the Blade has Revealed to me.
Another Day Has Passed in a World Without You - Telepath
Imagine you are in a shopping mall that is just elevators. You walk inside, pick an elevator, go to a floor, and then find another elevator. While you are inside the elevator, you can see out of a glass window, all of the other elevators going up and down, forever. In the middle of all of those glass tubes is a human, dressed up as a robot, playing piano in a hypnotic loop that changes ever so slightly, making you wonder if it is real or a machine.
Ohio vaprowave pioneer Luke Laurila returned to his roots for three releases under his telepath alias this year and the second, Another Day Has Passed in a World Without You, invokes a feeling of constant slow motion for motion’s sake. The opening track, “Dreaming of the day I’ll return to you” is a 19 minute reverie that uses CD-Rom synth sounds over gently evolving repetitions of delicate vintage keyboard melodies. Its dedication to constant flux is a comforting reminder to sit still and observe small changes in our environment.
Beyond the Everest Crater III - Wisconsin Anger Team
Consistency is an interesting thing in music, because if you're too consistent you risk people overlooking you. But you might end up with a boil-the-frog situation if you get in front of the right ears enough times and, before you know it, you have a new favourite band.
Wisconsin Anger Team have been quietly releasing fantastic records since 2021, and they've been getting better and better with each one. 2024's Archie was a high water mark, and this year's Beyond the Everest Crater II is their best yet. They have wide appeal, but are happy toiling away every year on a new set of songs regardless. You could slot this on the shelf beside Liquid Mike, anything released by Dirtnap Records, or hand it to fans of The Figgs or Green Day and it's going to satisfy everyone.
Bleeds - Wednesday
Wednesday mastermind Karly Hartzman has always been a master of collage. On her website Prison Divorce Bombshell she has sold handmade Wednesday shirts sewn together from scraps and thrift store finds. Bleeds, the fourth Wednesday LP finds Hartzman’s mixed media muse taking center stage, where she and the band lay out all of the different ingredients of “bootgaze”, and then carefully cut and sew them into something new. These are songs that delight in pushing themselves to their breaking point, which comes in the form of sly hooks, brutal observations, ripping solos, halftime breakdowns, a literal hardcore song, and eventually a baseball bat to the face. If there is a clear throughline, it is somewhere in the cracks, tears and seams in life that cause relationships to fizzle out. Speaking of, it features the kindest, most withering diss I have ever heard on a breakup song, “Elderberry Wine”, when Karly tells the GQ Man of the Year “you cry at commercials.” It’s so savage that it is kind of sweet.
Blurrr - Joanne Robertson
Some say that music is our way of decorating time. Is it therefore possible for sound to convey a perfect stillness, the non-passage of time? As a fleeting moment becomes infinitely short, is it reduced to silence? I’m not convinced. I think that as the clock grinds to a halt and time freezes, we would hear something like Joanne Robertson’s Blurrr.
Robertson is a multitalented artist, having garnered attention for her music, painting, and poetry. To me, she began as a recurring character in the Dean Blunt Cinematic Universe. Her breathy lilts were an instrument in themselves, effortlessly slipping across Blunt’s enigmatic productions. After finding her name and solo work several years ago, I found I connected most with 2023’s Blue Car, due to its parallels to the material of one of my favorite artists of all time: Grouper. Comparisons made between Harris and Robertson are frequent, but with Blurrr, Robertson diverges from Grouper-land in ways which play to her strengths. Despite its name, Blurrr’s sonic palette is rarely smeared. One might even call the mixing stark or (god forbid) sterile. It doesn’t just work; it’s essential. Roberton lets her voice speak for itself, unfettered by tape noise and distortion. Thus, across the first half of this record, an unspeakable sense of emptiness develops. It’s like that fleeting feeling in your stomach as you realize you’re about to be told bad news, but here it’s sustained, refusing to let go. While Liz Harris thrives in her use of obfuscation, Joanne Robertson’s loneliness stares us right in the face. We are right there, lost with her. It feels undeniable, inescapable. Until the second half of Blurrr rolls around. Sighing string arrangements from Oliver Coates cast just enough light onto the pitch-black shadows of Robertson’s words.
We have allowed ourselves to be embraced by the nothingness. The ticking of the clock is a distant memory. We are home.
Caveman Wakes Up - Friendship
Philadelphia’s Friendship, a minor-league indie rock supergroup of sorts, have topped themselves with Caveman Wakes Up, a low-key and thought-provoking slowcore record filled to the brim with alt-country jams and funny pop culture references. Peter Gill (of the great power-pop revivalists 2nd Grade) once again teams up with vocalist/lyricist Dan Wriggins, bassist Jon Samuels, and percussionist Michael Cornier-O’Leary to prove that there is plenty of gas in the tank, especially when the tank in question is of the Sebadoh-Uncle Tupelo-Smog milieu. There’s even a hint of late-era Bad Seeds here, both in the way the additions of flute, clarinet, and violin downright elevate these songs to baroque pop and in the way Wriggins utilizes his Nick Cave-esque baritone. Sly, lovely, moving.
Cancionera - Natalia Lafourcade
Señora Lafourcade is on a roll. Though she’s been popular in her native Mexico and Latin America for nearly 25 years, she really only broke through to North American audiences about a decade ago with the release of Hasta la raíz. In 2022, she released her best album to date, De todos las flores. Her new album, Cancionera, draws from many of the same influences that De todos did (bolero, Latin jazz, Mexican folk music), but it is a decidedly slinkier, more cinematic record. It’s easy to imagine these songs soundtracking an Emilio Fernández movie like María Candelaria or Victimes del pecado, all the drama and passion swirling and twirling while Natalia’s voice soars. At the same time, Cancionera is a rather vulnerable and autobiographical collection, bursting with tender lines like, “Cómo quisiera quererte como te quiero querer / Cómo quisiera entregarte la noche, el amanecer / Cómo quisiera que vieras que no acabó mi sufrir / Es un incendio de llanto que no he dejado salir (How I wish I could love you the way I want to love you / How I wish I could give you the night, the dawn / How I wish you could see that my suffering isn’t over / It’s a fire of tears that I haven’t let out).” Gracias, Natalia.
Cloud Time - Emily A Sprague
Fresh off the excellent Jellywish, Florist leader Emily A Sprague released the new ambient collection Cloud Time, compiled from improvisational pieces recorded while on tour in Japan. Each song is named after the city it was made in, and finds Sprague’s unique and lively modular synth patches dancing with each other in time, through the magic of a good ol’ delay petal. The result is both a masterful example of kankyō ongaku, a Japanese term for “environmental music” and an intimate tour diary. It’s also insanely relaxing, and warm. I have always admired Sprague’s ability to make a synth feel alive, using fast cutoffs and clever filters to make each keystroke sound like an organism or sentient machine communicating in tones and frequency changes. In Cloud Time, she finds peace with the spirits of her host country, in the whirlwind of a DIY tour.