Best New Ambient (December 2025)

These records will take you places

Dec 02, 2025

Imagine you're spending a few days in a mountain valley cabin. One night, your hosts leave for a nearby village to have dinner at some local place. The next morning, you wake up all alone. It’s completely silent. They haven’t returned yet.

During your morning walk, you notice an invisible circular wall which prevents you from leaving the valley. Outside of the wall, time seems to be standing still; people appear lifeless and frozen. You begin to ask yourself: Am I the last living human on earth? Will I ever get out of here? How am I going to survive?

Due to a recommendation from

Lia Kohl

, whose new album I’m recommending below, I’m reading Marlen Haushofer’s hauntingly dystopian 1963 novel The Wall. Haushofer was an Austrian writer whose work was forgotten after her death in 1970, but reappraised after The Wall was turned into an arthouse movie in 2012.

Let’s get into the monthly roundup of my favorite (aka ‘the best’) ambient albums that came out during the last four weeks.

Ambient Album Of The Month

Rob Winstone – Butterflies (Warm Winters Ltd.)

Enigmatic UK composer and producer Rob Winstone has been quietly releasing a bunch of gorgeous post-ambient albums since the beginning of the decade. One of his last albums was dubbed “an expression of a deep yearning to overcome the alienating byproducts of capitalism and the subsequent dislocation of the human soul.”

Butterflies might be his opus magnum yet – a two-hour album released on double cassette tape on Slovakian label Warm Winters Ltd., this collection features works of very different formats such as longform minimalist pieces, decaying neoclassical vignettes and dark ambient tracks. It creates a musical world that I’ve been frequently returning to over the last months, ever since

Adam Badí Donoval

sent an early advance copy to me. Now that it’s out there publicly and everyone can potentially enter this world, I’m almost inclined to keep it a secret, but that’s nonsense of course. It’s there for you to discover. Don’t miss out.

Lia Kohl – Various Small Whistles And A Song (Dauw)

Lia tells the story of this new project in her newsletter:

“I came across [Ed Ruscha’s 1964 photographic artist book, Various Small Fires and Milk] while waiting for the bathroom at the Art Institute of Chicago — it’s tucked away in the basement photography section (near Potato, which I also love). Fifteen photographs of small fires and one glass of milk: something about it captured me right away. It’s unserious and a little funny, but also kind of tender. I immediately thought, can I make something like that?”

Various Small Whistles and a Song consists of sixteen pieces of music and field recordings. All of them are exactly one minute long. The ‘fires’ and ‘milk’ from Ruscha’s book are substituted by whistles and singing; Lia used recordings of whistles that were sent to her by friends and collaborators, and some of the field recordings were taken across the world, in Guangzhou, China, or Barcelona, Spain.

The resulting quarter of an hour is surprisingly fun to listen to – it’s not exactly of that calm, slow-moving, drumless strain of ambient, more a lively, wondrous soundtrack for exploring your everyday surroundings. I’ve been repeatedly listening to it while joyriding my bike around my neighborhood during daytime.

Natasha Pirard – Fernande, Cecile (Deewee)

An experimental musician based in Ghent, Belgium, Natasha Pirard dedicates her sophomore album to her late grandmother Fernande and her mother Cécile. “Side one traces her grandmother’s warmth and the fading of memory through Alzheimer’s, while side two follows her mother’s care and resilience”, the press release states. “The album weaves her voice, field recordings, synthesizer, and violin into an ode to the lasting influence of her matrilineal line.”

On the opening track, bird chirps appear over a warm synth bed; we’re transported into a more carefree time, before life unfolds through gradual growth and progression, as well as some immediate changes and unexpected cuts. Pirard leads the listener through these meditations with great care for detail. Her tender music evokes grainy childhood polaroids. It’s deeply emotional, but never overwhelming – the perfect soundtrack for autumnal mornings, wondering about life’s strange pathways, as well as memories cherished and lost.

Saapato – In Alaska (AKP)

I’ve previously recommended the nature-inspired work of Upstate New York-based synthesist Saapato. His newest piece was written at Alaska State Park in the summer of 2023, and weaves hydrophone recordings with synth melodies, textures and effects to create seven site-specific compositions. Inspired by 1980s new age records by Steven Halpern and Steve Roach, Saapato would capture field recordings by day and compose by night, improvising playfully, surrounded by this vast, silent landscape.

Listening to In Alaska, I’m thinking of an idealized, imaginary country, maybe that of Chris McCandless from Into The Wild. Saapato is quoted in the press release: “The Alaskan soundscapes revealed extremes; a celebration of abundance and a warning of its fragility. Holding these simultaneously I’ve never felt more in awe of nature and disgusted with humanity’s impact.” His calm compositions function both as a catalyst and a regulator of these emotional states.

Brian Weza – Fizzles (We Be Friends)

I’ve been getting into tape loops again lately, mostly because of Slow Blink’s beautiful recent album Letters Home, which is still on heavy rotation. Therefore I was delighted to find this little gem from Chicago in my email inbox. Over seven years, the artist Brian Weza has built a bank of custom loops that served as the foundation for his debut album. The press release says they “were created as a part of a meditative and holistic approach to maintaining presence, escaping the blue glow of our electronic devices, and discovering the different ways music can soothe the anxieties we face.”

Originally inspired by new age cassettes from his mother’s collection, Weza has been creating his music during late-night sessions on his four-track tape recorders. For some of the compositions on Fizzles, he’s improvised on various acoustic instruments over these spliced loops. The result has a relaxing quality without being overly predictable – it’s interesting enough to follow the ebb and flow of these meandering, ambiguous soundscapes. This is slow-moving lowercase ambient suited for extra-mindful listening as well as background consumption, right in that sweet spot between Steve Roden and William Basinski.

From Overseas – Thinking Like a Mountain (Past Inside The Present)

Kévin Séry is an ambient guitarist and a graduate student of Environmental Philosophy originally hailing from Réunion island. Explaining the title of his sophomore album, he’s quoted in the press blurb: “Thinking like a mountain is a concept from [environmentalist writer] Aldo Leopold, where one sees everything as an ecosystem, a vast interconnection in which all actions affect the ecological balance… I think this philosophy can and should be applied to everything we do.”

Composed over a period of five years that brought a pandemic, fatherhood and a transcontinental relocation, the record is framed as Séry’s “undaunted statement of soft power amid the noise, haste, and myopia.” The music does convey a strong sense of rootedness and groundedness. Like much of the Past Inside The Present label catalogue, the album feels inspired by post-rock aesthetics with its epic, droning guitar and synth textures than seem to come and go in waves. Within the storms of individual life and global politics, among societal and environmental change, Séry has created resonant compositions that can function as emotional anchors.

Zander Raymond – No One Notices The Fly (Love All Day)

By the opening sounds of an out-of-tune but emotionally gripping violin, this album had my attention. Raymond is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Chicago who occupies himself not with virtuosity or perfection, but with layering mundane sounds, synthesizers and acoustic instruments to an almost sculptural effect. In that approach he follows fellow Chicago experimental musician Lia Kohl, who’s featured as a guest on the record (as is former Chicagoan Matthew Sage).

An unassuming album that sets out to capture fleeting moments of beauty in ordinary everyday life, No One Notices The Fly reminds me of those scenes in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days when our hero Hirayama is interrupted at work and decides to shift his attention to the remarkable details of a shadow on the wall, or a weird dancing man on the street, turning a short period of latency into a valuable sensory experience. This music can do the same for you.

Eric Angelo Bessel – Mirror At Night (Lore City Music)

This artist from Portland, Oregon, previously unknown to me, shares a collection of 12 instrumental vignettes, “an ambient landscape of dispersed artificial clouds and bioluminescent waters.”

There’s a pervading element of nostalgia at their core, supported by the throwback sounds of the Mellotron and Alesis synths. Because of these reference points, Bessel’s work feels indebted to 2000s electronic music, an obvious hauntological precursor being Leyland Kirby’s work as The Caretaker. I can’t say much about these ghostly pieces except that I’ve found myself deeply captivated by them in these dark and rainy evening hours between autumn and winter.