The Best Records of 2025 So Far

From Yazz Ahmed to The Residents

From fiery political statements laced with 90s techno, to one of the most gorgeous jazz odysseys I’ve heard in a long time, our year of 2025 has been nothing short of brilliant so far.

As we enter a new, regular era for deep cuts (note the italics), it felt like the perfect time to sit back and recap the absolute best of the best served up this year by the musical gods.

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Benefits - Constant Noise

It happens maybe once a year - I put on a record for that cursory first listen and have to stop what I’m doing. It’s too confronting or surprising to be doing the dishes or putting out the washing, it demands complete attention.

The last time this happened for me was with Vida Blue, my album of the year 2024, by Bay Area experimental group Mamaleek.

This time it’s Middlesbrough duo Benefits with a heady concoction of 90s-flavoured techno and gorgeous beat-less interludes, colliding with a furious voice unlike anything else you’re likely to hear this year.

Not wanting to slip into hyperbole, I’ll refrain from hailing frontman Kingsley Hall as the voice of a generation. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a better example of someone hardwired into the political and social anxieties coursing through Britain and – more broadly – the wider Western world.

“A man on the TV says missiles are firing

And interrupts my social thread”

Hall is a man whose fury knows no bounds. Outwardly disgusted by the ills of society, the contempt for hypocrisy rising like bile in his throat on every track of Constant Noise.

Those familiar with the first Benefits record, Nails, will recall the post punk noise, instruments and vocals all splintering into digital noise. Constant Noise is different – a track like ‘The Victory Lap’ locks into the kind of thumping groove that drives the best Underworld tracks. Elsewhere, ‘Missiles’ abandons the percussion altogether for a haunting melody and grumbling bass, fixing all attention on Hall’s reminder of how online culture and society sanitises the destabilising mess happening all around us.

One of the highlights of the record, ‘Divide’, sports a metallic tripping beat and features a brilliant guest turn from Shakk, a collaboration I’d gladly hear more from in the future.

No doubt I’ll have more to say about this record at the end of the year, but right now it’s one of the best things I’ve listened to in 2025.

aya - hexed!

The artwork of hexed! accurately manifests the tone of the music – as alarming an experience as a mass of earthworms squirming in your mouth.

London-based aya (real name Aya Sinclair) is the one gobbling the twisting wrigglers in the cover art, but insists in an interview with The Wire magazine that it wasn’t ‘a big deal’. No, aya, but it is a bit grim, no?

Imagine the flesh and organs of PC Music bundled into a hessian sack with razor wire and whacked with an iron bar, and we’re someway towards an approximation of this volley of clattering beats and synths.

It appears aya left no tool in her electronic arsenal unused, borrowing from UK bass, techno and noise collage to impose herself across a tight 34 minutes.

As a little taste test, ‘off to the Esso’ has it all – throbbing bass, startling revving roars, and a chorus brushing the shout-along style of 2000s indie noiseniks like Test Icicles.

The shaking bass on ‘heath death’ matures to a face melter of a beat, swarming with squeals and skittering swoops. It’s an electrifying moment on a record already bursting at the seams with intensity.

Even when aya pulls the plug for a bit, the quality of her songwriting shines through – on ‘The Petard is my Hoister’, anxious strings introduce a solitary instrumental interlude, a beautiful penultimate track.

Side note – for the Peep Show fans out there, aya’s northern accent reminded me very slightly of Dobby, Mark’s long-suffering crush and eventual ex.

Which is unfortunate, as now every time I listen to this brilliant record I can only imagine the Dobster screaming the words to ‘I am the pipe I hit myself with’ whilst Mark goes a bit ‘rainbow rhythms’.

Sharon Van Etten – Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory

A gorgeous sepia-tinted love letter to the 80s, the latest project from Sharon Van Etten is well worth your time. It’s a record that invokes the fabled studio of days gone by – analogue tape spooling through racks of dusty equipment, cigarette smoke wafting through the control room.

Van Etten has changed things up this time around by nailing the Attachment Theory suffix onto the release, a conscious attempt to remind listeners of the inherent ‘collective’ nature of this record.

It’s not just her anymore, it’s a band.

I’m pretty sure that if you played third track ‘Idiot Box’ in a bar, those in their 60s would be racking their brains to work out where they’d first heard this song – was it at their local in the mid-1980s, goths hunched in the corner, Thatcher photo on the dartboard, pints less than a quid?

Everything about this track is an anachronism, slightly out of its time – the light, almost-motorik drum beat, the punch of the post-punk bass carving out its own lane, Sharon shouting ‘let’s go’ sounding remarkably like Arcade Fire’s Regine Chassange on ‘No Cars Go’.

~ OK that one might not be quite so old … but two decades have actually passed since Neon Bible came out. Let that sink in. ~

‘Trouble’ continues the strong bass backline as floating synths envelope the space around the band, at times recalling the tender mood of those 80s Glaswegians The Blue Nile.

And even though you could bill this as the debut record of Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, Sharon is still very much the star of the show. That commanding voice retains the warm glow that’s an unwavering presence in all of her music to date.

Yazz Ahmed – A Paradise in the Hold

British-Bahraini trumpeter Yazz Ahmed crafts a suite based around the folklore and music of her ancestral home on A Paradise in the Hold, resulting in one of the most captivating jazz records I’ve heard in a long time.

My knowledge of Bahraini folk music couldn’t fill the back of a Post-it note, but that hasn’t stopped me from connecting deeply with what Ahmed does here with full band jazz improv, electronic loops and first-class vocalists.

The Ivor Novello-winning composer does something so expansive with the ten pieces that make up this release, frequently borrowing from the Bahraini folklore of weather-beaten fishermen, pearl divers, and the scales of mermaids glittering in the sunshine of the Persian Gulf.

Marking the first time Ahmed has incorporated vocals into her compositions, she took inspiration from those folk tales, wrote lyrics in English and then translated some of them back into Arabic, using different vocalists across the breadth of the record.

The brooding drama of track ‘Mermaids’ Tears’ has this brilliant duet between vocalists Randolph Matthews and Brigitte Beraha – as the track extends to its conclusion, both singers are producing these breathy textures that seem to evoke the unpredictable swirl of the ocean, a theme which plays such a key role in Bahraini folklore.

‘Dancing Barefoot’ is a flighty piece with sparing dramatic flourishes, the full band accompanied by the vibraphonist swapping out traditional instruments for milk bottle tops and cello bows constructed from coat hangers. Because why not, right?

And a track like ‘Though My Eyes Go To Sleep, My Heart Does Not Forget You’ kicks things off with a synth loop which quickly finds its place amongst chants, hand percussion and a deep bass groove.

On Bandcamp, Ahmed is described as ‘the high priestess of psychedelic Arabic jazz’, and on the basis of this excellent LP I think you’d be hard pressed to argue with that.

billy woods – GOLLIWOG

At this point we have to acknowledge that billy woods is an all-timer, deserving of a place in the pantheon of the greatest hip hop wordsmiths to put pen to paper.

From his own solo releases, to the Armand Hammer project with ELUCID, he’s the kind of poet likely to namedrop Sylvia Plath and an allusion to the Zimbabwean war of independence in the same breath – in fact, both of those things appear on GOLLIWOG, the 9th solo record the Backwoodz Studioz founder has put out since 2003.

The project has been rightly identified as horrorcore by listeners and critics, but don’t go in expecting John Carpenter-esque string stabs and stories about grim masked murderers stalking around suburbia.

Horror is undeniably the glue holding the record together, but it doesn’t convey this using the tropes of slasher films in the same way a group like clipping did on their 2019 and 2020 releases. This is the horror of being evicted and thrown out onto the street, the horror of ethnic violence and civil wars forcing innocent people to flee into the sea from their homes.

On the track ‘Counterclockwise’ woods deploys a sample of real-life government officials detailing CIA torture methods. The mentions of waterboarding and confined spaces create a palpable sense of unease, following a plodding bass ostinato and dusty cymbal taps courtesy of frequent collaborator The Alchemist.

Musically, GOLLIWOG is collage forever in flux, rarely comfortably locking into a groove. Instead, woods prefers to disorient with discordant samples and stop-start beats. Even on track ‘Pitchforks & Halos’, the snare is used so sparingly that the beat sags under the weight of the flat saxophone bleats and rumbling bass.

The depth of woods’ themes is frankly staggering, and deserves your undivided attention. Though you might want to go and listen to something less intense as a palette cleanser afterwards.

Barker – Stochastic Drift

It’s a special thing when a piece of electronic music has sound design so rich and immersive it feels like you’re being submerged in crystal clear, chilly water.

Now I have to admit that my impression of Stochastic Drift – British-born musician Sam Barker’s second LP – may have been coloured by my recent reading material. Roger Deakin’s Waterlog is a kind of nature travelogue where the author aims to swim his way across the UK, and it’s proven to be the perfect companion to this gorgeously-crafted electronic record.

The textures blended across these eight tracks swell across damp shorelines, pads plopping like raindrops hitting the surface of a coursing river cutting through verdant landscapes.

Alright, it’s fair to say this book definitely influenced my impressions.

But water really does serve as a useful element to discuss this music, regardless of my recent choice of literature – Barker’s use of percussion purposefully never weighs the tracks down, contributing to a weightless, flowing quality. Take opener ‘Force of Habit’, the snare is a pleasing woody snap, and the bass drum hits seem to float somewhere close to the surface rather than down in the murky depths.

For something that feels so organic, it’s not a surprise to learn that Barker used more acoustic instruments in this work than previous releases. The tracks on Stochastic Drift came together by experimenting with acoustic-MIDI instruments, by micing cymbals and testing the different resonances that could be discovered.

These experiments pay off tremendously, pulling together tracks that can operate twofold depending on the type of listener you are – you can either float on the surface and enjoy the textures and meandering melodies, or you can dive below and discover new sounds with every fresh listen.

The Residents – Doctor Dark

Did I think that one of the best records of 2025 so far would be a three-act ‘opera’ from an art rock group that’s been around since the 70s?

No, obviously I did not.

But Doctor Dark, the 35th (!!) studio record from American oddballs The Residents, is an audacious and strange record that dashes from punky thrash metal, to sweeping orchestral passages, to shouts of ‘life is just a jizzy pisshole, full of farts and empty manholes.’

The narrative follows two teenagers, Maggot and Mark, and a physician based on the real-life euthanasia advocate Jack Kevorkian. That garish artwork alludes to another of the real-life influences pulled into this weird piece of work: two teenagers who tried to kill themselves after listening to a Judas Priest record.

The band were taken to court in 1990 on the grounds that there were subliminal messages in their cover of the song ‘Better By You, Better Than Me’, but the lawsuit was dismissed.

Priest are replaced in the narrative of Doctor Dark by The Greasy Weasels, as noted in a faux radio broadcast played out towards the end of track ‘Tension’, amidst dramatic strings and horn parts.

What I found most arresting about this project is how deftly arranged the music is – for all the strangeness of what’s here, there are entire songs that disarm you with how alluring they are. Fourth track ‘She Was Never Lovelier’ is forlorn with its classical strings, joined by a haunting pitch-shifted vocal performance.

At an hour and 16 minutes this is one to take your time with, but if you’re willing it’s a beguiling and intense record.

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Here are some other great releases from this year so far:

Bon Iver - SABLE, fABLE – A beautifully warm way to round off the Bon Iver project, with some of the best moments in their entire discography (even if it is the cheesiest Vernon has ever been).

Swans - Birthing – Still processing this near-two-hour behemoth, but after a handful of full listens it feels like a spiritual successor to The Glowing Man.

Sumac & Moor Mother - The Film – What do you get when you cross post metal with a genre-bending poet? An excellent and challenging piece of work.

Knats - Knats – This Geordie jazz quintet has been getting some attention following their support stint on Geordie Greep’s recent tour, and it’s well deserved – this is a brilliant modern jazz record with heart and raw energy.

Deafheaven - Lonely People With Power – Following the disappointing Infinite Granite, this is a triumphant return to form for the SF black metal group. Their best since New Bermuda.

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Thanks for reading, and let me know in the comments section what you think I’ve missed.

Keep an eye out for the next deep cuts video, ‘A Guide to NINE INCH NAILS’, on Monday, followed by my written interview with Fugazi bassist Joe Lally on Tuesday!