Not your usual records from the first half of 2025
It is, as anyone who has to fill in a quarterly mini tax return will know, the second half of 2025, exactly the right moment in history to take a look back at what has happened musically in the first half of this curséd year.
Below, you will find my not-ranked-in-any-kind-of-order list of the 31 best records of the year, which seems surprisingly indie heavy. (And only set to get more so as the year advances: the new albums from Water From Your Eyes and Wet Leg are both fabulous.)
I’m sure things are missing. Maybe I missed them entirely; maybe I just didn’t get around to listening; maybe when the year-end review comes they will be right at the top. Who knows?
Beyond that, though, I wanted to go into a bit more detail about 11 albums that I have wanted to write about for Pitchfork and beyond over the first six months of the year, but haven’t been able to. I don’t want to call them “overlooked” because they haven’t been. So let me instead label them as “Not your usual records from the first half of 2025”.
I am also looking forward to awarding a record my Line Noise album of the year award and there are a couple here that have a very strong chance.
Have a read; have a listen. I am sure you will find something to enjoy. And, as ever, let me know your thoughts in the comments.
PS Thanks to everyone who signed up to Line Noise this week. I did hit my target - just - and I will now probably drop back below it when I get the inevitable post-newsletter-sending unsubs. C’est la vie.
Not your usual records from the first half of 2025
Helen Ganya - Share Your Care (Released February 7)
Helen Ganya’s album Share Your Care makes an inspiring union of indie rock and Thai music, with the Scottish-Thai artist being inspired to do so after her grandmother died in 2021. It’s one of the most subtly unusual records I have heard in a long while, one that invites you into a comfortably bizarre groove that is both 100% cardigan indie and definitely wears the distinctive influence of Southeast Asia. I can also hear distinct traces of Kate Bush and Sparks thrown into the mix, which should be like throwing pepper and cumin on a fruit salad but somehow only makes things even more delicious.
Chaiyo, one of many highlights, comes from memories of Ganya watching her granddad enjoying Thai boxing on the TV, and is simultaneously soft and strong, with a beautiful chorus straight out of the 90s indie toy box. If you’ve heard anything like it before, you’ve probably been listening to Helen Ganya in your sub conscience.
Marshall Allen - New Dawn (Released February 14)
Given that this is the debut solo album from the centenarian Marshall Allen, current leader of The Sun Ra Arkestra, you want New Dawn to come racing out of the traps with some of the most radically weird shit that your ears have ever encountered. It doesn’t. Far more than Sun Ra’s much-loved far-out-and-lost adventures in 1970s space jazz, New Dawn resembles the Arkestra’s early recordings when they were, to all extents and purposes, a fairly standard big-band jazz troupe (EG 1959’s Jazz in Silhouette). Once you get over this, New Dawn, is actually rather lovely, a throwback that goes as far back as the 1940s - on the charming swing ballad New Dawn, with Neneh Cherry, or Are You Ready - that worms its ways into your affection. That said, the 10-minute long Boma, when the band do finally cut loose, is probably the best song.
Andy Bell - pinball wanderer (Released February 28)
The Ride reunion albums have only been periodically satisfying and Andy Bell’s solo work (including his electronic records as GLOK) hasn’t done much for me. So my hopes really weren’t high for pinball wanderer, Bell’s third solo album (depending on how you count them.) Which makes it all the more satisfying to report that he has cooked up something special, a mixture of Stone Roses’ grooves (apple green ufo), Krautrock-ish roll (panic attack), Cocteau Twins whimsy (madder lake deep) and - best of all - a ravishing and perfectly poised cover of The Passions’ I’m In Love With A German Film Star (a song that producer Erol Alkan claims is “proto shoegaze”) with Dot Allison and Neu!’s Michael Rother on guitar. You suspect that Andy bell has a great record collection. But pinball wanderer is the first time in a long while that it looks like he knows what to do with it.
Ichiko Aoba - Luminescent Creatures (Released February 28)
Luminescent Creatures is one of the most aqueous albums I have heard since Drexicya. In some ways, it’s not that different to Windswept Adan, which was Aoba’s breakthrough outside Japan, in terms of its sonic palette. But it sounds like that record if it had been recorded underwater, the gentle currents easing the music to and fro. Luciférine, the album stand out, is like a giant octopus of a song: elegant and strong but at the same time innately formless, able to adapt and change form at the blowing of the wind. The song’s key changes, the time signature changes, as if on a whim, but it all somehow works, creating one of the most beautiful songs I have heard in a while.
TOKiMONSTA - Eternal Reverie (Released March 7)
TOKiMONSTA has, to put it mildly, had a very difficult decade, undergoing brain surgery, temporarily losing all language skills and then postponing Eternal Reverie, her seventh studio album, to care for a friend who eventually passed away. What comes through on the album, however, is the absolute joy of music - and in particular house music. Eternal Reverie isn’t a complicated album, really: a mixture of house beats, jubilant samples and the odd guest (including Cakes da Killa and Anderson. Paak). But what TOKiMONSTA shows - and in particular on stand-out track Corazón / Death by Disco, a French House filter killer that Cassius would be proud to call their own - is how incredibly effective these ingredients can be when put together in the right way. It’s magic; it’s life…. (And, yes, there are also hip hop / funk songs. But, for me, it’s the house that counts.)
Raisa K - Affectionately (Released March 7)
While lots of bands are influenced by Broadcast these days - including Raisa K’s day job in Good Sad Happy Bad - this tends to be the more spy film and psychedelia side of Birmingham’s finest, rather than the crude and slightly brutal synths of Broadcast’s third album Tender Buttons. Affectionately, Raisa K’s debut album, is the exception. It’s no Tender Buttons rip off, of course, but Affectionately does share that album’s stark drum machine patterns, slightly jarring synth riffs and wind-born melodies (see: Dreaming and the title track especially). And god does it sound good: bracing, emotional, simultaneously strong and vulnerable.
Spiral Deluxe - The Love Pretender (Released March 14)
The last album from Spiral Deluxe - aka Detroit techno titan Jeff Mills, UR’s Gerald Mitchell, Yumiko Ohno (Buffalo Daughter/Cornelius) and Kenji “Jino” Hino - was hamstrung by an excess of noodling, with the four original tracks laid down in one-take recordings in an attempt to “capture the moment.” The Love Pretender is another collection of “tracks” extracted from a long improv session. But it feels a lot more focused, as the band perhaps gets to know each other’s musical idiosyncrasies. On The Power of Miracles, for example, Mills’ basic drum pattern provides a rock solid base for Mitchell’s jazzy, ecstatic and every so slightly house-y keyboard, while Jino’s bass rides right at the very edges of ostentation, the song culminating in a beautiful entwinement of bass and piano. It’s easy to forget how innovative a lot of Jeff Mills’ work is, so often does he push the boat out. But an improvisational jazz / house / techno quartet is not usual at all - and Spiral Deluxe make it sound absolutely effortless.
Annie and the Caldwells - Can’t Lose My (Soul) (Released March 21)
The story of Annie and the Caldwells is so irresistible - grand soul matriarch saves daughters from Satan by joining their band - that it is tempting to wave this album through on reputation alone. But that would be a serious mistake, given the record's fabulously satisfying mixture of gospel emotion - Annie sings like she is clearing raw fire from her throat - and deep disco grooves, the production lightly roughed up from the band's previous album, We Made It, in a way that will appeal to secular listeners. It’s not all disco - the song’s title track is like a gospel take on The Doors - but that’s what I enjoyed most. There’s no reason why people shouldn’t still be making records like this. And yet, still, Can't Lose My (Soul) feels brilliantly time capsule-y.
Jadu Heart - Post Heaven (Released April 11)
If there’s one thing I love more than rock and electronic crossing over, it is rock and electronics crossing over in new ways. British duo Jadu Heart - who, from the looks of things, are one of those groups who are subtly popular on Spotify without attracting much mainstream attention - manage this consistently on Post Heaven, their fifth album. You’re Dead, for example, initially mixes shoegaze fuzz, skittish drum machine beat and nervous synth textures, before slouching off into a classic grunge chorus, like Autechre crashing into Mudhoney. U, which follows, has the moody vocal / disdainful guitar klang of Radiohead’s Creep, which it mixes with a trance-ish synth arpeggio and reggae beat. And so on. Post Heaven is covertly strange throughout, as if such bizarre mixing comes entirely natural to Jadu Heart. And utterly brilliant too.
Gazella - Vías (Released May 5)
I’ve written a lot about Valencian nu-gazers Gazella and their epic second album Vías here. So suffice to say that the group’s mixture of shoegaze guitars, electronics and flamenco influences has twirled its way into my being like roses around a gable, only getting classier and more beloved over time. Vías is probably my favourite Spanish album of the year and Volver one of my top 10 songs.
Goldie Presents Rufige Kru - Alpha Omega (Released May 16)
Goldie is unquestionably one of the most important figures in contemporary British music for his role in simultaneously pushing the limits of and popularising jungle. (How many other jungle producers got a role in a James Bond film?) But it is well known that he is more an ideas man than hands-on producer so his music often depends on the strength of his collaborators.
For Alpha Omega, his first album as Rufige Kru in 16 years, Goldie worked with James Davidson, his fairly long-term partner in Subjective (and a great producer in his own right), which means a very safe pair of hands. It’s not always entirely clear but Rufige Kru tunes tend to be harder and slightly more technical than the music Goldie releases under his own name.
And Alpha Omega certainly doesn’t disappoint here: the album is dark as an owl’s hoot; twice as hard as the Times crossword puzzle on a come down; and as technically advanced as quantum computing. (The album is very tech step, if tech step got over its all-consuming obsession with the nastiest possible bass noise.) Goldie has billed Alpha Omega as a return to his roots and you can kind of see that on a track like Sandcastles, with its Let No Man Put Asunder vocal sample and drifty chords. But the drums sound so incredibly sharp throughout, the production so brain-bendingly tight, that nothing here really sounds retro at all.
Maybe these specifics are due to Davidson. But you should never overlook the creative drive of Goldie. Getting CASISDEAD to lend his voice to a track, for example, feels like a classic Goldie mover, bringing together unlikely collaborators and forcing them to gel. And this is an album with ideas all over the place that really deserves to be heard.
Best albums of the first half of 2025 (in no particular order)
Stereolab - Instant Holograms on Metal Film
Herbert and Momoko - Clay
Nick Léon - A Tropical Entropy
Nadah El Shazly - Laini Tani
Holden and Zimpel - The Universe Will take Care of You
Footshooter - The Oasis
US Girls - Scratch it
Jenny Hval - iris Silver Mist
Raisa K - Affectionately
Throwing Muses - Moonlight Confessions
Gazella - Vias
Jadu Heart - Post Heaven
Emma Jean Thackray - Weirdo
Beirut - A Study of Losses
Rebecca Karijord - Bell Tower
Alabaster DePlume - A Blade because a Blade is Whole
Barker - Stochastic Drift
Sharon van Etten & the Attachment Theory - Sharon van Etten & the Attachment Theory
Tokimonsta - Eternal Reverie
Marshall Allen - New Dawn
Andy Bell - Pinball Wanderer
Darkside - Nothing
DjRUM - Under Tangled Silence
Ichiko Aoba - Luminescent Creatures
Ale Hop and Titi Bakorta - Mapambazuko
Lady Gaga - Mayhem
Panda Bear - Sinister Grift
Momma - Welcome to My Blue Sky
Pulp - More
Annie and the Caldwells – Can’t Lose My (Soul)
Circuit des Yeux - Halo on the Inside
Soundit Festival
On July 18 to 19 Barcelona’s Soundit event is stretching its wings, taking over the Parc Nou in El Prat de Lobregat (which actually looks more like a forest for me, always a good thing) for the Soundit Festival, a two-day knees up of electronic music, which aims for “the essence of the club in a natural setting”. Viva los trees! And especially viva los trees with a metro stop very close by.
Anyway, the line up is very Line Noise friendly. It features previous Line Noise guests Goldie and Special Request (going back to back, conveniently), Jeff Mills, Luke Slater and Moritz von Oswald (who is doing what promises to be a very special set indeed with Tikiman), as well as a few people I definitely want to bring to your eyes and ears, including Avalon Emerson, Polygonia, Surgeon, Chez Damier, DjRUM and more.
My tips for the festival are - well, them, basically, as well as Octo Octa live, the ever-brilliant Phran, Shackleton live, Objekt back to back with Quelza, Hunee, Josey Rebelle, Verraco and more. I will be there (all being well). Come and say hello.
Some Listening
Blurry breakbeats, off-colour synths, horror-filled samples, intense feelings and - I reckon - just a touch of humour combine on fragile, the debut album from Korean producer Yu, about whom I know next to nothing. rainy christmas is a masterpiece of drum programming and sound design that seems to continually pull new intensity from unexpected folds and corners. The song feels eminently cinematic, like a whole world is unfolding beyond its titanic grooves, ending with - why not? - a single sleigh bell hit.
Animal Collective - Love on the Big Screen
Grunge Animal Collective? Where do I sign up? OK that’s not quite what Love on the Big Screen is, despite its gritty guitar sound, thumping drums and welcome brevity, with Animal Collective seemingly unable to retain their rainbow harmonies and clever melodic shifts. But this is, to some extent, the AC song you can most imagine Mudhoney hammering out to celebrate an early evening slot at Belgium’s second greatest rock gathering. And while that may sound a little snarky, it shouldn’t: Love on the Big Screen is fantastically inspired.
Jeff Mills - i9 (2025 Version)
Jeff Mills’ Live at the Liquid Room is unquestionably one of the most important records in techno history, a swaggering, if slightly unstable, titan that swept all before it, making all your favourite techno records suddenly feel a little old. It’s getting a reissue for its 30th (ish) birthday, which makes me feel incredibly ancient, bringing me back to summer 1996 when I packed into Manchester’s snooty-if-essential Eastern Bloc store alongside friends and trainspotter-y types to watch Mills play an electric in-store set to celebrate the album’s launch.
i9 is one of the most important tunes Mills manhandled into life on Live at the Liquid Room, an as-yet-unreleased dystopian monster that he played off reel-to-reel, all nervous energy, bitten fingernails and rave-gone-bad rush, the sound of an evil wind blowing across your free party as the seventh hour rush kicked in. Mills himself calls the track - which is getting a re-release this summer - “something that marked the end and the beginning of something else. A new way to think about dance music”, as well as making a not-entirely-cerebral reference to “nose-bleeding jack-hammers”. Well quite.
Mabe Fratti’s Sentir Que No Sabes was one of the best experimental rock (ish?) records of last year and she returns to the fray as Titanic, a collaboration with Héctor Tosta (aka I. la Católica), who also worked on that album. If Sentir Que No Sabes was hard to capture in words, Gotera feels like the Rosetta Stone of music journalism, a brilliantly unsettling work that unites industrial throb, free jazz skronk, death metal stomp, sumptuous string glide and a rather gorgeous vocal line, like a face off between Nine Inch Nails, Ornette Coleman and Jenny Hval. (Oh - and when the album comes out, look out for a song called Libra, which is the absolute best.)
Desire: The Carl Craig Story, the soundtrack album to the documentary film of the same name, makes a strong case for being one of the best dance music compilations of all time - no but seriously - by rounding up some of the greatest works of Carl Craig, Detroit’s favourite son and a producer of quite extraordinary depth and quality.
Who else could rustle up a collection of tracks that includes proto jungle (Bug in the Bass Bin), breakbeat chill out (Desire), gritty techno funk (Urban Tribe’s Program 12), the sweetest electro ambience (A Wonderful Life) and classic Detroit techno (Galaxy) and still leave room for a towering indie dance remix (his remix of Junior Boys’ Like A Child) and classical mope (the Versus Beatless version of Desire, which, to be honest, I don’t really like but probably works brilliantly in the documentary)? There are also a couple of digital rarities, including 1991 single No More Words, which I’ve written about before, and Designer Music’s The Truth.
Craig, more than anything, is a producer of epic sonic constructions, with tracks like Attenuator, the C2 remix of Slam’s Azure and Like a Child absolutely towering over the mix, as they unfold in their own sweet, unhurried time. Playing out over the film’s credits and closing the album is another example of this musical architecture: Meditation Four, a little-known ambient gem previously only available on Craig’s 2013 Masterpiece compilation that shows all of the producer’s incredibly malleable powers, his stately production slowly expanding all over your ears like velveteen brownian motion.
Am I Human? Are any of us human in this confounding heat? It speaks a lot of rRoxymore’s latest - and distinctly Carl Craig-ish - single that it is one of the few things to have brought a semblance of calm to my overheated cranium in times of bad news concentrate and racing temperatures. Am I Human? is like a dose of cool galactic water, spiralling synth melodies born aloft on soft, dubby bass springs and just the slightest snap of a vocal melody, the result being incredibly more-ish, like snacking on ice cubes and frozen strawberries.
Tortoise - Oganesson (Makaya McCraven remix)
It’s a mark of how subtly widespread and low-key influential Tortoise have been that they can get artists as diverse as Saul Williams and Broken Social Scene to remix them on a new EP and no one bats an eyelid. US drummer and bandleader Makaya McCraven takes home the honours, though, for his subtly effective remake of Oganesson, which ramps up the original’s borderline dark tendencies and straps on extra percussive ruffle, with the result a crucial 20% improvement on the already excellent original.
After the incredible Gazella (see above), could it be that Spanish / Catalan / Valencian bands are leading the nu-shoegaze revelation? Barcelona’s Salvana aren’t quite as innovative as their Valencian amics in Gazella, pursuing instead a very classic-Slowdive route of sun-sparkling guitars against cool vocal breeze. But you can never really have too much of this kind of thing, particularly when it is done with the effortless and almost weary swagger of Salvana.
Dance music producers getting all serious at album time and dropping a beat-less opus has become an utter cliché. Miami producer Nick Leon’s A Tropical Entropy isn’t that, exactly: the Latin-ish house beats with which Léon made his name are still present and Bikini, his Erika de Casier collaboration which close the album, is a straight-up banger. (Albeit quite a melancholy one.) Beyond that, though, A Tropical Entropy is a hazy, decaying beast that seems to shimmer and degrade before your ears. (The album is very well named.) Ghost Orchid, with Ela Minus, is probably the best song beyond Bikini; but it is nigh-on impossible to imagine its elegant drift and inconclusive air lighting up big club spaces like Bikini once did.
Some watching
The idea of protagonists trapped in a time loop might seem a little long in the tooth, post Groundhog Day et al. And by limiting this loop to just two minutes - as is the case in the 2023 Japanese film リバー、流れないでよ or River - it feels like writer Makoto Ueda and director Junta Yamaguchi might have painted themselves into an impossible corner. And yet, incredibly, the duo (and fantastic cast) manage to ring a huge amount of emotional depth, bittersweet comedy and philosophical meditation out of this predicament, turning the premise’s limitations to their considerable advantage.
Possibly the thing I love most about River is that it seems perfectly adapted to its form: it wouldn’t work as a seven-part series, a play or a novel but elegantly fills every one of its 86 televisual minutes, the kind of thing that film was made for.
(And I also now desperately want to see ドロステのはてで僕ら/ Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, Ueda and Yamaguchi’s original two-minute time-loop film, to which River is the sequel.)
Things I’ve Done
Line Noise podcast - Simo Cell live at Primavera Sound 2025
I spoke to French electronic wunderkind Simo Cell at the 2025 Primavera Sound festival about the French Touch, classic puppetry, FL Louis, Daft Punk, Paris clubbing and more. I really could have gone on for hours - no surprise maybe, given the subject matter - but I hope you enjoy this brief but fascinating interview.
‘Someone compared it to Bohemian Rhapsody’: Wookie on making UK garage classic Battle
I love love LOVE Battle, one of the all-time great UK Garage tunes and a total anthem for me both at the time and today. Genuinely inspiring. Anyway, it was great to speak to Wookie and Lain about making the tune for The Guardian, they are both excellent people and you can feel the enduring friendship after all these years. There was so much I didn’t have room for too - like loads of drum talk.
The playlists
Summer heat is definitely here in Barcelona and my head is melting into a molten orange stew. And yet I have still managed, nonetheless, to update my two playlists: The newest and bestest 2025; and The newest and the bestest. Do follow them before my brain melts and it is all Cyndi Lauper hereon in.