Best New Ambient (October 2025)

These records will take you places

Summer has come to an end, and while that always makes me slightly melancholic, I am also looking forward to the autumn season ahead.

I’ve been enjoying slow life out here in the countryside, reading the new book by the ‘neo-luddite’ writer Paul Kingsnorth, Against The Machine. While the verdict on that one isn’t in yet, here are my usual tiny media diet recommendations outside of ambient music first:

• Hot Milk, Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s 2025 drama film based on the popular Deborah Levy novel. Beautiful imagery, haunting soundtrack by Matthew Herbert and brilliant lead actresses (Fiona Shaw, Emma Mackey). What’s not to love?

• The death of the corporate job – a great read from

  Alex McCann
  , inspired by the late David Graeber’s theory on Bullsh*t Jobs. “I think it's evolved beyond that”, McCann writes. “We've built entire ecosystems of mutual nonsense.”

• james K’s new album Friend. Some songs sound like Cocteau Twins remixed by William Orbit, others like Slowdive remixed by Tricky. The moody dreampop/shoegaze/trip hop record I didn’t know I needed so badly this fall.

• Autechre. I’ve unpaywalled the primer on my favorite electronic group of all time, which features a one-week deep listening course for beginners to get into their oeuvre. Current obsession: “column thirteen” off NTS Session 4.

• The Nighttime Ensemble. The experimental Chicago collective around guitarist Daniel Wyche released this stunning hour of improvised ‘doom jazz’ in 2024. It’s now available as a name-your-price download from Wyche’s Bandcamp.

So now let’s get into it, shall we? Find below my top ambient album picks from the last four weeks.

M. Sage

M. Sage – Tender / Wading (RVNG Intl., 2025)

Matthew Sage has released experimental music on various labels over the course of the last decade. Most of that time, he’s lived in Chicago, but recently he’s moved back to his native Colorado with his young family. Even though he grew up in the country, the city also turned him into “a wily academic who often thinks in memes and feels the tug of a cell phone in his pocket.” On his new album, he’s grappling with the contradictions that come naturally with these back-to-the-land movements.

On Tender / Wading, you will hear influences from folk, jazz and electroacoustic music. Ambient country? Maybe. “I’m just making the music that I would want to be playing in my headphones while weeding or whatever”, says Sage. He’s created this music from acoustic instruments, analog synthesizers and field recordings. Gorgeous melodies are woven into his dense tapestry of sound – a peaceful, pastoral life soundtrack with a rich variety of timbres and textures.

Slow Blink – Letters Home (Past Inside The Present, 2025)

The sound artist Amanda Haswell from Chattanooga, Tennessee, creates haunting loops of bowed guitar, piano, bells and toy synthesizers, and then processes them through effects pedals and tape machines. She calls these works ‘tape loop weather patterns’, and they have a grainy, nostalgic quality to them, hitting the sweet spot between William Basinski and The Caretaker.

Haswell’s discography contains dozens of DIY releases on limited-run tapes and handmade CD-Rs. Her first album on ambient powerhouse Past Inside The Present contains two hypnotic half-hour long pieces on cassette: “The Heart’s Docent” is daydream music based on the sound of a rare monophonic synth and field recordings, while “Laughter at Cascade Park” centers around piano loops and tape hiss, evoking faded childhood photographs that capture long forgotten moments of joy.

Raica

Raica – The Absence of Being (Quiet Details, 2025)

No ambient round-up without a new release from the reliable

quiet details

label, this time a long-awaited life sign from experienced U.S. electronic producer Chloe Harris. Her last material under the Raica moniker came out a decade ago – in the meantime, the eternal cycle of life and death continued. The Absence of Being is dedicated to two people close to Harris that she lost along the way.

It makes sense that this music, which she wrote in a period of mourning and finding her way back into life, sounds melancholic but uplifting at the same time. Sonically, it reminds me of these classic Berlin School records – spiraling, twinkling analog synth figures repeat with incremental changes, carried by gentle pads and chords. Where much ambient music lacks drive and energy, Raica’s tracks often feature climactic developments which make them less suited for passive background listening, but unfold a cathartic, empowering effect when played at a certain volume.

Visible Light, photo: Vincent Chadwick

Visible Light – Songs For Eventide (Permaculture Media, 2025)

Amy McNally (cello) and Matthew Hiram (synth) alias Visible Light have developed a collaborative practice creating what they call ‘nature-based music’, writing and recording sounds in their native Minnesota outdoors. These five slow-moving chamber ambient compositions are meant to evoke the change of the seasons and create “soundtracks for the edge of day”.

On Songs For Eventide, plucked cello and folk-inspired melody fragments float over sustained analog synth tones. The duo also makes use of flutes, quartz bowls and “sounds from the living world”, which I would assume to be field recordings. These sparse, mystical instrumental meditations require a patient listener, but they also feel suited for creating a calm environment – played at relatively low volume, they will quickly transform any space into an autumn meadow in the wilderness of the American Midwest.

Ida Urd & Ingri Høyland – Duvet (Balmat, 2025)

This Danish/Norwegian duo met at Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory – a music college that ML Buch, Astrid Sonne, Smerz and Erika de Casier have attended as well. But their music isn’t following in that art pop/neo-trip hop vein of the aforementioned artists. This collaborative suite was written and recorded during a winter week spent in a Danish cabin. “The two composers hope the album can be a similar space for others”, the label info says, “a temporary space of residence.”

Theirs is a mysteriously shimmering lowercase ambient, created with a mix of electronic devices and analog instruments, modules, pedals and electroacoustic treatments, and mixed on analog tape. It feels unassuming and slightly uncanny at times; it can pass you by almost unnoticed if you’re unattentive, but it will still change the mood in the room. While I wasn’t overwhelmed by this music at first listen, I’ve found myself going back to it quite regularly over time – I’m thinking this might become a bit of a sleeper hit.

Melted Form – dyschronometria (Melted Form, 2025)

New Jersey-based electronic music artist Spencer Cowley alias

Melted Form

has made himself a name around the ambient music community for his newsletter Hum, Buzz, & Hiss, dedicated to showcasing the music of other independent ambient musicians, as well as highlighting his own releases by providing valuable insights into the creative process behind his work.

dyschronometria, his debut album which was five years in the making, is a layered sound collage of noise and hiss, eerie synths and strongly processed acoustic sources. These ten movements take you on an unsettling, psychedelic journey and evoke Blade Runner-like images of a dystopian megacity’s foggy back alleys. Played over headphones in a darkened room, the music had the effect of a weighted blanket, sheltering me in a weirdly familiar feeling of alienation and estrangement from the world. If you vaguely know that state of mind, definitely give this album a spin – but make sure to wait until nightfall.