2025 :: Q1
Hey guys…
So here we are, the year 2025, a year where everything could not possibly get any worse after the previous one, right?
With civilian lives either endangered and erased by reckless reforms, financial cataclysms and good old fashioned genocide from higher powers that were elected (mostly) to make sure shit like this shouldn’t happen, I have thought about whether or not to carry on my foolhardy endeavour to try and listen, re-listen, rate and compile every audio offering to see release in this most doomed of years for fear of coming across as disconnected from the present excoriation that is human existence.
To which, point.
In terms of justifying my florid keyboard-tapping though, I will argue that there are more destructive coping mechanisms to which I could have dedicated my penchant for distraction, though admittedly finding the right balance between healthy detachment and increasing isolation is proving trickier and trickier to navigate most days.
And with news cycles and social media feeds hellbent on making us feel that much more removed from one another despite our increasing interaction with said torrents of (mis)information, getting some time away from it by talking about good stuff feels like the only thing I can offer to myself and anyone else who would care to give this lonely speck of the Internet a gander.
Granted, it is concerning of all things The Music Industry, a notoriously monolithic enterprise that was full of enough evil abuses and underhanded dealings to begin with before streaming and algorithms decided to swindle all but 1% of artists out of a living, and my unhealthy consumption of the (sometimes) earnest work these people have put together is endemic of how it currently operates.
Until such time that I am professionally and personally impervious to any harm the world and its bad actors can throw at me and my friends though, taking time away to collect thoughts and focus on good work forged in this darkest of timelines to help others wile away their days with that much less trauma is all I have, especially with how totally shitty these past three-and-a-bit months have been.
So, despite the world, good still exists somewhere, however minute or fragile it may seem, so keep fighting even if it is simply taking notes and never forgetting, ideally with a handy playlist to help you along your way potentially featuring the following works…
What We Missed In 2024…
Yeah, I would bet that when it was happening at the time you did not think you would miss 2024 as much as you do right now?
Still, as I have written previously, there was much to like about 2024 in terms of music, which now includes a handful of releases in the fraught month of December during which my personal listening schedule brings down the shutters for the sake of giving my music-loving brain a breather from new things and reconciling with familiar fancies.
As such, most of my January was spent catching up with what I missed in that so-called most festive of months, of which one album in particular stood out.
Everything Changes, Nothing Ends by Mark Barrott
DJ and producer Mark Barrott’s is a career that has taken rather less conventional routes than most of his peers, with particular watershed moments including being the first drum-and-bass artist to perform live on BBC Radio 1 here in the United Kingdom and becoming a music consultant for the Hyatt hotel empire, providing ambient playlists to their establishments the world over.
Moving to Ibiza in 2012 with his wife Sara after enjoying stints in Germany, Italy and Uruguay, Barrott had until recently been enjoying a renewed prominence as a connoisseur of blissed-out Balearic downtempo, releasing albums under his given name after a raft of stage monikers until tragedy struck with the Sara’s untimely death in 2023.
Responding in both honour of his spouse and for his own mental necessity, Everything Changes, Nothing Ends is a neoclassical tribute that feels like ascending to whatever after awaits via the warmth of the most inviting Mediterranean sun you have ever felt, Barrott managing to combine heavenly choirs and orchestral bombast with his customary downtempo jazz and soothing ambience with deftly poignant assurance.
Special Not-Album Mentions For Q1
Apologies for teasing further, but before I can reveal my ten favourite albums from 2025 Q1, I’d be remiss to not mention two releases that ignored the traditional new-music-longform format and still warrant praise for how entertaining they are.
i was put on this earth by DJ Python
For his debut release on the prolific XL Recordings label, DJ and producer Brian Piñeyro delivers a five-track trinket that mixes ambient dream-pop with his fabled post-reggaeton blend of IDM and trip-hop that trims his songs into more cohesively tight productions than his more amiably drifting earlier works and offers a tantalising glimpse of what might yet be on this musician’s horizon.
In The Blue Light by Kelela
After carving a particularly lush niche for herself in the realms of electronic R&B over the past decade, singer-songwriter Kelela Mizanekristos released her first live album in February derived from recordings made at her two concerts at the prestigious Blue Note Jazz Club in New York last summer.
Aided by a four-piece band including harpist Ahya Simone, Kelela’s tremulous voice is absolutely clandestine in its clarity, never hitting a single false note as she relishes the chance given to her with performing in such an intimate and iconic space that allows her slow-jam stunners to breathe beyond the beats and programming of their studio incarnations.
Be it material from her first mixtape or venue-appropriate covers that pay tribute to her musical influences, the whole event is presented with a cohesive guile as effortless as it is arresting, with the artist at its centre on point throughout delivering what should become a definitive showcase in the pantheon of live performance recordings.
10 Great Albums from Q1
And here we go, from 272 albums, these 10 were the absolute best… in my opinion, obvs.
And not including at least 40 others that were listened to after the end of March, because who honestly has time for all of this anyway!?
All Living Things by Park Jiha
First up is the fourth album from noted post-classical composer Park Jiha, whose blend of contemporary production techniques and traditional instrumentation from her native Korea offers a truly transportive paean to life in all of its hues, be it revelatory or mysterious.
Written, produced, recorded and played entirely by herself, each piece of All Living Things advances Jiha’s trajectory further into the higher echelons of contemporary classical music, utilising subtle electronics and percussion to underpin her dreamy woodwind and string arrangements with an emotional directness that prevents them from becoming too weightless.
Constant Noise by Benefits
As appropriate opening lines for a 2025 album go, I feel like nothing is going to quite top “I’m looking up in awe at a mountain of shit” from the title track of post-punk electronic duo Benefits’ second album.
The rest of the longform release follows that sentiment’s rancorous route with unwavering appeal, as vocalist Kingsley Hall intones incisive polemics concerning class, poverty, race and fascism over warmly percolative beats and industrial ambience that are hard to hear for the images and feelings they elicit but propulsive enough to cheer the listener on to dance through them.
It’s an album not for those who dance as the world burns, but for those who dance because they want to stop it doing so.
EUSEXUA by FKA twigs
Given her prominence over music in particular over both the previous decade and this one, you would be forgiven for being surprised to read that Tahliah Barnett’s latest campaign is focused on what is only her third album, arriving amidst a maelstrom of publicity involving legalities concerning her relationship with violent Hollywood brat Shia LaBeouf.
It’s especially revelatory then that for all of the tabloid context surrounding it, this album actually represents an assured grab for dance-pop supremacy and is easily Barnett’s most positive-sounding and unadulteratedly fun LP in her career so far.
Whilst it is still infused with all kinds of dark leftfield flourishes and distortions courtesy of collaborations with similarly edge-of-the-mainstream noiseniks as Eartheater and Koreless, Barnett herself has never sounded so willing to dance her troubles away as she has here.
Even The Horizon Knows Its Bounds by Lawrence English
We step back into the cold of ambient artistic endeavour now with Australian composer Lawrence English’s latest sound design tour-de-force, borne from an assignment to essay the improvised sound of space in relation to the recently opened Naala Badu building in Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Bringing onboard a raft of musicians to help cultivate improvisations using their specific instruments of choice and essentially mixing them together to create a protean morass of ambient waves, English delivers a collection of epic soundscapes full of awe and majesty.
Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams by Patterson Hood
Piano-led alternative country is the name of the game for journeyman Patterson Hood’s fourth solo album, calling in favours from the likes of Kevin Morby, Waxahatchee and folk-rock’s current poster-boy MJ Lenderman among others to help bring to life a collection of musical ideas that have been as gestating as far as back the 1970s in some cases.
It’s an intensely introspective set from the Drive-By Truckers frontman that brings in myriad influences and stylistic motifs to create a vastly involving experience, full of mercurial nuance and feeling that proves to be a welcome antidote to the swaggering rage-baiting that has sadly become endemic with present-day mainstream country artists.
Gut by Baths
Though he has kept plenty busy with more ambient assignments both under his Geotic namesake and scoring one of the most lovely-sad serial animes in recent memory, Netflix’s Bee & Puppycat, fourth album Gut comes a full eight years after Will Wiesenfeld’s most recent album under his indietronica identity and his first to be released independently under his own label.
Presenting a more direct sound both in his embracing of more live instrumentation and punk-style song structures as well as a newfound unvarnished lyricism, Wiesenfeld dives deep into the melancholy, joy and horniness of being queer with a vigour that does well to make such travails sound enriching and empowering, regardless of the inevitable mistakes made along the way.
Lonely People With Power by Deafheaven
For those who were a little put out the Californian black metal outfit’s previous album leaning a little too much into the softer shoegaze aspects of their sound, album number six for the most part finds them back at the kinds of screaming pinnacles that made the alternative metal scene swoon in the first place.
Not much else to say really other than its the finest rabble of noise to see release in 2025 so far, probably…
LOWER by Benjamin Booker
The “Welcome Back” bunting continues to fly in the pre-spring wind thanks to one Benjamin Booker delivering a new set some eight years after 2017’s Witness, and quite the ribald comeback of alternative rock it certainly is too.
Each song a disconcerting missive detailing sorry sagas of sordidness and violence whispered with a lascivious lilt by Booker throughout, the singer/songwriter’s third album is a trippy descent into the kind of smalltown debauchery filled with gritty beauty that would make the dearly departed David Lynch proud.
Luminescent Creatures by Ichiko Aoba
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, Japanese folk artist Ichiko Aoba has brought to bear a new album that appears to have transcended the Western world’s language barrier and broken through via sheer, uncompromising loveliness.
Coming across to us uncultured Westerners like Kate Bush composing the soundtrack to the best vintage Studio Ghibli film that never came to be, this album is actually a direct continuation of her previous one, 2020’s Windswept Adan, though thankfully such context can be laid to rest at whatever door you need to take to enter Aoba’s beautifully rendered world of meditative fantasy.
Tonky by Lonnie Holley
And we finish up with another sonically illuminating contribution from The Sandman himself, multimedia artist Lonnie Holley, and his second longform collaboration with producer Jacknife Lee after their 2023 effort Oh Me Oh My found understandably considerable favour on its release.
Revisiting key incidents in his formative years spent in foster care, Holley tells tales of abuse, degradation and redemption that offer a view of the American experience that is often-always ignored, creating with Lee a worthy companion piece to his most previous work that ultimately offers more hope and resolve than this world probably deserves.
And that’s your lot for now.
Apologies for getting this out of the way a whole two weeks later than when it was probably useful (if you can’t be the first to declare stuff on the Internet regardless of its validity, what’s the point eh?); but hey, at least 2025 has given us a good place to start in terms of music.
Provided we can still afford to log online and get shit done, see you next time, and until then, take care.
xxxo
