Best New Ambient (April 2025)

These records will take you places

As much as I love ambient music, the so-called ambient boom wasn’t just a net positive trend.

In its wake, we’ve been experiencing an avalanche of generic wallpaper music without any artistic ambition, produced for seemingly no other reason than a shot at monetization through lean-back playlists.

I’m happy to report we’re past peak ambient boom though, as the economic opportunities around that type of ‘content’ seem to be drying out. At least that’s what I’ve been hearing.

That said, I’m still getting sent dozens of new releases each week which roughly classify as ambient. Some of them sound really bland. Most of them seem fine, even if they don’t move me. Every now and then, I am discovering an actual gem in the digital promo pile.

Done right, ambient remains some of my favorite music. Ignoring the constraints of the traditional song format built around familiarity and functionality, great ambient composers create musical landscapes that express a wide range of moods and emotions. They take you places.

Here are my recommendations for the best new ambient albums, all released within the last couple of weeks.

Walt McClements, photo: Rachael Pony Cassells

Walt McClements – On a Painted Ocean (Western Vinyl, 2025)

I’m not sure if this technically even qualifies as ambient.

It’s instrumental, atmospheric music though, and it does absolutely work for both background and deep listening, which mostly comes down to its distinctive, acoustic sound palette.

This is the second album by the Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Walt McClements, who’s been a member of indie folk singer Weyes Blood’s live band for some years.

McClements wrote this record on the road, without access to his key instrument, the accordion, recreating it on the computer. In the final stages, he was inspired by a visit of his hometown New Orleans in the carnival time, finding solace in a community of befriended musicians.

At the center of the record remains the accordion. You might associate it with certain clichéd sounds, but put a different context it is just an acoustic instrument producing a beautifully ambiguous tone.

Here it is combined with organs and reeds, synth and melodica, all run through various pedals and other applications.

These impressionistic tunes fill me with a calming sense of slightly melancholic joy, evoking an idealized rural simplicity – just the right record in time for spring’s full bloom.

The record does carry some darker undertones as well. The second half of the center piece “Parade” features a recording of a woman talking a man through first-aid advice in case of a drug overdose. Despite that heavy subject matter, the overall mood remains hopeful and optimistic.

Saapato – Decomposition: Fox on a Highway (Constellation Tatsu, 2025)

Though Saapato is formally a one-person project, this album also channels the spirit of artistic community.

Brendan Principato, a sound artist and field recordist based in Upstate New York, built the skeletons of the tracks and then reached out to other musicians and producers, asking them to build on top of them, shape and mould them, before adding the finishing touches himself.

Some of his collaborators are staples on the global ambient scene – people like Loris S. Sarid, KMRU, Green-House, James Bernard, Marine Eyes, Patricia Wolf and former Eno collaborator slash ambient veteran Laraaji.

Their input turned this body of work into a shimmering kaleidoscope of styles and sonic languages, a sprawling 80-minute collection of vivid soundscapes, ecological noises and slowly unfolding melodies.

Though each collaborator brings their unique style and technique to the table, Decomposition: Fox on a Highway doesn’t end up sounding like a compilation. Principato’s biggest accomplishment is to unify all these ideas and approaches under a coherent conceptual arch – the idea of turning the processes of natural decomposition and decay into appealing sculptures of sound.

I love how this totally changes pace and mood after the first couple of songs. Starting with the KMRU collaboration “Fading Form”, the base layer of the music shifts from blissful synths to menacing drones.

This is music designed for deep listening that can work as a home-office background soundtrack without losing its emotional core.

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – Gift Songs (Mexican Summer, 2025)

Going to art school in San Francisco in the mid-1990s, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma started out making music in post-rock band Tarantel. The founder the influential indie label/blog Root Strata, he appeared on dozens of albums and collaborated with Liz Harris (Grouper) and Félicia Atkinson, among many others.

The experimental artist’s newest album, Gift Songs, features a group of improvising musicians from the Hudson Valley in Upstate New York, where he’s been residing with his family for the last few years.

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, photo: Brandon Schulman

This is music derived from process-based experiments, designed for being listened to on a vinyl record. The A-side contains “The Milky Sea”, a hypnotizing long-form piece around a gentle, slow drum beat and some dense acoustic textures, while the B-side includes a couple of shorter, more minimalist compositions (the actual “Gift Songs”) for guitar, piano, bass, cello, drums and modular synthesizer.

In addition to being a musician, Cantu-Ledesma is leading a rich life as a family father, an ordained Zen Buddhist priest and a full-time hospice worker; these songs are indeed offerings, his artistry being another expression of his compassionate, community-oriented worldview.

If these three outstanding albums aren’t yet enough to satisfy your appetite for new ambient music, here are some further reading and listening recommendations:

Women of Ambient

Los Angeles-based musician Cynthia Bernard, alias

marine eyes

, does not just produce some gorgeous ambient herself. She’s also constantly highlighting other musicians through her Women of Ambient mix series and her short interviews in the

cloud collecting

newsletter. What a beautiful soul.

Chinese Ambient

Jake

’s brilliant newsletter on Chinese music,

Concrete Avalanche

, has lately been zooming in on the local ambient scene, which is producing some genuinely exciting, distinctive sounds.

From his mind-boggling five-hour playlist, I’d like to single out three long-form highlights that I’ve been returning to repeatedly:

• xuán yīn – Cranes Appeared In The Forest (2025)

  (“ecological ambient from rural Zhejiang”)

• Dou Wei - Shuangxi (2023)

  (“a long, atmospheric piece that leans on traditional Chinese instrumentation”)

• Wang Fan – Five Primary Elements (2001/re-released 2024)

  (“so slow, like the never-ending Tai Chi master, who has unknowingly taken people across thousands of mountains in a light boat”)