The 20 Best Albums of the First Half of 2025

A mid-year roundup of my favorite records released in the last six months

#20: Quade – The Foel Tower (AD 93)

This Bristol four-piece describes their music – half-jokingly but quite aptly – as “doomer sad boy, ambient-dub, folk, experimental post-rock”. Their sophomore album was recorded over ten days in rural Wales. The Foel Tower is a dark, brooding, introspective song cycle that makes Bark Psychosis or Laughing Stock-era Talk Talk seem light and fun in comparison.

#19: Brighde Chaimbeul – Sunwise (Glitterbeat)

Hailing from the Isle of Skye, this Scottish musician recontextualizes the bagpipes – the smallpipes, to be exact – as a drone instrument. On her third album, long-form overtone explorations take turns with interpretations of traditional songs, some with vocals in Gaelic. Truly magickal sounds, steeped in the UK’s esoteric folk underground.

#18: Aesop Rock – Black Hole Superette (Rhymesayers)

Almost 30 years into his recording career, Aesop Rock is still rhyming circles around imaginary opps. The b-boy poet has also turned into a decent producer, firing off Moroder-style synth melodies over fierce drum machine beats. Referencing that classic mid-2000s Def Jux sound, the seasoned indie rap auteur is also pushing it forward into the mid-2020s.

#17: Satomimagae – Taba (RVNG Intl.)

Satomi’s lowercase ambient folk songs based on acoustic guitar and field recordings seem to celebrate dissolving into the collective instead of desperately wanting to stand out; the record’s melancholic mood caters to listeners who find wonder and awe in a quiet lifestyle instead of incessantly seeking fame and fortune. Due to some of the lyrics being in her native Japanese, I might be totally on the wrong path here, but one thing I’m sure of is that the music is absolutely gorgeous.

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#16: Stephen Vitiello with Brendan Canty & Hahn Rowe – Second (Balmat)

What happens when a minimalist composer (Vitiello), a post-hardcore drummer (Canty) and an avant-garde violinist (Rowe) start working on a trio project? In this case, their mutual sweet spot seems to be an instrumental, dubby version of post-rock with an ambient jazz sensibility, almost like Tortoise in their TNT phase, or the early 1990s incarnation of Bill Laswell’s Material. A very special record with high replay value.

#15: Black Milk & Fat Ray – Food From The Gods (Fat Beats)

Fat Ray is one of those gifted but elusive MCs that appear out of the blue every couple of years to drop a brilliant album, then disappear back into the underground. Reuniting with hometown hero Black Milk, this is not more but decidedly not less than a half hour of hardcore Detroit street rap in the spirit of Madlib and Guilty Simpson’s late-2000s winning streak – think albums like Ode to the Ghetto and O.J. Simpson – or even Phat Kat’s underrated magnum opus, Carte Blanche.

#14: Poppy H – Treadwater Fury (Fort Evil Fruit)

A UK bedroom producer of dark and experimental soundscapes, Poppy H has released a steady flurry of projects on various labels and their Bandcamp page over the last two years. On one of their most cohesive recent efforts, they’re making a leap into solo electroacoustic improv. This suite of vignettes perfectly captures our collective mindstate in the face of late stage capitalism and live-streamed genocide, as we’re torn between deep feelings of helplessness and slight glimmers of hope.

#13: Penelope Trappes – A Requiem (One Little Independent)

An Australian-born singer, composer and performing artist who now divides her time between Brighton and Scotland, Penelope Trappes channels her inner witch on this new solo album, her debut for Björk’s long-term label. Themes of death, grief and trauma are deeply engrained into these dark electronic folk songs; the true show-stopper is her bone-chilling vocal performance though. RIYL Grouper, Sara Parkman, Kate Bush.

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#12: Resavoir & Matt Gold – Horizon (International Anthem)

Discovering their mutual love for Latin-infused jazz and bossa nova, these two prolific musicians from Chicago’s progressive jazz scene decided to make a record in the style of Wayne Shorter and Milton Nascimento’s 1975 fusion album Native Dancer. Horizon has indeed turned out a hazy, meticulously crafted post-tropicália daydream that soundtracked my late spring and early summer.

#11: Roomer – Leaving It All To Chance (Squama)

As Roomer, these three musicians from Berlin’s experimental and improvised music scenes have created an homage to yesteryear’s shoegaze and dreampop. Listeners of my generation will find more than just a hint of bands like Low, The Cranes, Slowdive, or even Gish-era Smashing Pumpkins in their layered phasing guitars, loose drumming, and the vulnerable-but-detached vocals of singer-songwriter Ronja Schößler. I’ve not been as into an indie rock record in years.

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#10: billy woods – GOLLIWOG (backwoodz)

On his newest entry in what’s easily becoming the most consistent discography in the history of indie rap, the New York MC explores horror and slasher movie themes as a metaphor for Black life in MAGA times. Musically, woods keeps proving he’s not just an outstanding technician and a potent poet with a knack for striking imagery, but also one of the most courageous beat-pickers in hip-hop. If you grew up on a diet of 90s/00s leftfield rap (like I did), and if label names like Def Jux, Big Dada or Anticon still ring some kind of bell with you, then I assume you might absolutely love this (like I do).

#09: Macie Stewart – When The Distance Is Blue (International Anthem)

The second solo album by this prolific violinist, keyboardist and composer from Chicago’s improvised music scene is framed as a “love-letter to the moments we spend in-between”. Genre-wise, it’s similarly hard to pin down – somewhere between electroacoustic composition, classic minimalism and the spirit of improv, these instrumentals recall the melodic, organic and deeply emotional ambient works of Brian Eno and Harold Budd, and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s film soundtracks. There could be worse references.

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#08: Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – Gift Songs (Mexican Summer)

This veteran of the U.S. experimental music scene, hailing from Texas and based on the west coast for a long time, has settled in the rural Hudson Valley in recent years; there he found a new community of improvising musicians while also working as a hospice chaplain and Zen Buddhist priest. His compassionate worldview is mirrored in this gorgeous new record, especially the longform ambient piece “The Milky Sea” which takes up the whole A-side of the vinyl record with its meandering soundscape of gentle drums and layered organic textures. This hasn’t left my rotation since it came out.

#07: Lippard Arkbro Lindwall – How do I know if my cat likes me? (Blank Editions)

For this trio album, Swedish organist/composer Ellen Arkbro teamed up with performance artist Hanne Lippard and fellow organist Hampus Lindwall. They’re channeling the classic minimalist avant-garde (think Robert Ashley or “Blue” Gene Tyranny) but with a decidedly contemporary, humorous edge. Lippard’s spoken word vocals – which recall the robotic sound of text-to-speech programs – prove weirdly addictive, especially when asserting that the keyboardists should change chords (“Timing”) or impersonating two AI chatbots trying to break up a conversation (“The Long Goodbye”).

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#06: Duval Timothy – wishful thinking (Carrying Colour)

As you all know by now, some of my listening diet leans towards the challenging, the noisy and the avant-garde; on the other end of the spectrum, there’s South London-born and raised pianist Duval Timothy. On this collection of summery, easy-listening instrumental sketches, he’s combining his idiosyncratic chord progressions with sparse highlife guitars and field recordings from his second home in Freetown, Sierra Leone. This uplifting album never fails to spread an atmosphere of calm serenity and peace.

#05: PremRock – Did You Enjoy Your Time Here? (backwoodz)

To be honest, I wouldn’t have expected the more chilled-out half of Philly hip-hop duo ShrapKnel to produce the best indie rap album of the year so far. But that’s exactly what happened. PremRock drops intelligent, introspective bars over atmospheric, psychedelic production from elite underground producers such as Child Actor, Blockhead and the incredible Sebb Bash. Easily my most played rap record of the year so far, and an ambitious statement from an MC that might have been overlooked – at least by myself – for the longest time, but clearly not anymore. Will need to dive into his back catalogue too.

#04: Whatever The Weather – Whatever The Weather II (Ghostly)

Setting out to make non-boring ambient that can work as foreground listening music, Loraine James resorted to a glitchy, clicks’n’cuts-inspired sound for the second album under her downtempo moniker. Leaving the amen breaks at the door, she’s assembled dreamy textures and pads, careless girl-next-door vocals, buzzing field recordings and sparse percussion, often not more than crackles and pops. I can hear early Mount Kimbie, Fennesz, Oval and the Mille Plateaux catalogue as influences on these detailed soundscapes. It’s my go-to album for city public transport – I love getting lost in the music while real life is bleeding through the headphones.

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#03: Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force – Khadim (Ndagga)

Mark Ernestus, I probably don’t need to tell you, is true Berlin dub techno royalty. His long-running Ndagga project is where analogue studio wizardry meets Senegalese mbalax polyrhythms and mystical Sufi chants. Ten years after the first album comes this minimal four-track stunner centered around this 13-and-a-half minute masterpiece. All four riddims recall the classic Rhythm & Sound aesthetic, rooted in soundsystem culture but infused with an Afrofuturist vision of traditional West African music. I can’t stop listening to this right now – extremely hypnotizing.

#02: Bad Bunny – Debí Tirar Más Fotos (Rimas)

Granted, I wouldn’t have expected to love this as much as I do. Like Rosalía on her instant classic Motomami, the Puerto Rican superstar presents an experimental while still hugely accessible take on reggaeton. But while Rosalía is looking towards dance and bass music for inspiration, Bad Bunny steeps his infectious tunes in salsa and other classic styles of Latin music. Conjuring an inclusive form of pan-Latin-American, cross-generational pride in this climate of adversity and discrimination, the Caribbean chanteur has created his most important body of work to date. It surely helps that the level of songwriting and production is outstanding too.

#01: Eliana Glass – E (Shelter Press)

This 27-year old New York-based jazz singer and pianist has completely and lastingly enchanted me. It started like a slow burn though; I’m normally not one to fall for vocal jazz easily, though I do love Nina Simone and Billie Holiday just like the next man, and just like Eliana Glass does.

But she also happens to love Karin Krog and Annette Peacock and Carla Bley and Asha Puthli and Elizabeth Fraser, and still she’s not sounding even remotely like any of them. I’ve listened to E so much I would recognize her voice by the first syllable at this point; there’s so much depth and vulnerability in it and such gorgeous melancholy running through the mostly self-penned compositions; the covers, on the other hand, perfectly outline her musical universe through references.

This is music for the closure of a calm summer day, when you’re slowly walking back to the car through the sand dunes, turning around to take a last look at the glowing red sun lingering low over the still sea, feeling a cool breeze on your skin and that ambiguous mix of quiet happiness and an indefinite longing deep in your heart; knowing that all things must end but somehow desperately hoping they also may not.