Two-Zero-Two-Five C.E. — Counting Down The Year In Sound Worship
Record Room: Monday 12/29…
To whom it may interest,
It’s almost 6PM EST, high winds are carrying debris from one suburban yard to another and spinning an orchestra of discordant wind chimes into action, each front porch an improv concert. I’m nestled in the record room, hunched over this keyboard while attempting to pull together my favorite albums list of 2025, which I’ve admittedly been pushing off. Truthfully, 2025 has been yet another shit year and now that we’re more than halfway through this decade, it seems certain that variations of that theme are what we’re to expect till New Year’s Day, 2030.
But, as we wade through current economic ruin and continuing unrest, we have music to enrich us. Generative AI hasn’t squeezed human music out of the equation yet, so we’ll celebrate what we have while we still have it.
Author’s note:
Please buy physical music, and please see your favorite bands when they tour. Human-written, recorded, and performed music will eventually be removed from streaming services for the sake of promoting inexpensive (free) tech-bro-prompted plagiarized trash, all spoon-fed via algorithm to trick you into believing that you’re receiving the full value of your subscription(s). This transition is already happening, and the importance of physical media libraries, which include books and movies as well, is becoming more and more evident as the unrelenting deluge of half-assed content hits us with every app we open or channel we land on.
(Soapbox pushed aside.)
Keeping up was tough this year. I mean, as the means of music creation, curation, and dissemination continue to evolve, it becomes more and more difficult to acknowledge EVERYTHING, and this has been the case for some time. It’s good that so much music is out there and that artists are able to platform their work, but it’s daunting for those of us on the listener side who want to hear it all and spread the word. There was quite a bit I missed.
For what I didn’t miss, coming up with a top 10 list of favorite albums was tough. And, like most years, I’m still not completely sure that my placements are sound. But, it’s here: my list of 50 albums out of 65-70 that I listened to this year and how they’re rated. Enjoy and feel free to argue my taste and logic with me.
10. Ciśnienie
[angry noises]
(self-released)
Released: 9/19/25
I was late discovering Ciśnienie, a Poland-based jazz-metal quintet whose self-released [angry noises] LP is a four-track live recording that features some densely performed sonic mayhem and lush melodic passages. For the 18+ minutes of the album’s intro, the perfectly titled “my childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell,” Ciśnienie pulls excerpts from Igor Stravinsky and Gustav Holst, layering metallic (with no guitars) volume and John Zorn-level saxophone skronk into a mix of unrelenting and persistently ascending tension. The payoff is gratifying, and those 18-something minutes go by very quickly.
I’ll admit that the album sort of blows its wad with track 1, the following instrumentals reaching for the same level of intensity as the album’s harsh opener without quite getting there. This, however, is a minor complaint. “Gilotyna” is soaring and cyclical, its groove infectious and hypnotic. “Gówno (gown0)” carries a sinister theatricality to it, evocative of Scott Walker’s Bisch Bosch or In Glorious Times by Sleepytime Gorilla Museum; an uptempo surge hits, which breaks the song into a new act.
Album closer “Carthago Delenda Est” is more of a patient installment, mostly slow as the track incrementally builds into its targeted crescendo, a hammering mire of discordant instrumentation, Brillo’d strings, and sonorous brass. The crowd’s response is pleasant and I, the listener, was impressed.
I attempted to purchase the CD through Bandcamp multiplet times, but international postal restrictions wouldn’t allow the transaction to process. I’m hoping to acquire a physical copy at some point.
9. Automatic
Is It Now?
Stones Throw
Released: 9/26/25
As groove heads gravitate (justifiably) to Khruangbin, the ghostly-voiced rhythmic and synth-laden jams of Automatic resonated with me a tad more.
Automatic’s third album, Is It Now?, is a modernized nod to new wave dance music and oddball pop, combining the funk-laden groove of ESG (“mq9”) with 90s-evocative trip-hop breaks (“Mercury”) and post-punk minimalism (“Country Song”). There’s even a dash of Phil Spector-ized Shangri-Las that’s worked into the mix (“Don’t Wanna Dance”).
Exhibiting precision, eccentricity without pretense, and fun, Automatic’s pop lens proves colorful in an age of homogenous stream-pandering “content.” To my ear, Is It Now? is a breakthrough album.
8.
Tortoise
Touch
International Anthem
Released: 10/24/25
9 years after the band’s last LP, The Catastrophist, post-rock mainstays Tortoise broke their silence in 2025 with Touch, the band’s first release with International Anthem.
An impressive return exhibiting an unsurprising level of musical variation and array of genre-characteristic touchstones, Touch was pieced together over the course of four years with members holding sessions in different geographical locations. While the band faced challenges as members were pondering, composing, and developing the music, there isn’t a second of Touch that sounds hurried or half-assed.
Combining psychedelia, kosmische musik, electronics, and jazz, Tortoise articulates moods that benefit from a set of headphones and distraction-free engagement. As the determined stride of “Vexations” opens the LP, the layers of electronic embellishments add ambiguity, seeming to shift the tone or attitude of the piece. Synthesizer-dominant tracks like “Layered Presence,” “Elka,” and “Rated OG” bring to mind robotics and fantastical sci-fi scenarios, while the starkness of “Works And Days” and the gentle notes that drape over the busy percussion driving “Oganesson” sound pensive and lush.
Touch has been on rotation since it released in late October.
7. Agriculture
The Spiritual Sound
Flenser
Released: 10/3/25
From the track review entry In The Headphones: Agriculture, Water Damage, which was posted on 8/11/25:
There is no Zen here.
“Bodhidharma” is the lead single from the upcoming new album from Agriculture, The Spiritual Sound, scheduled to release 10/3 via The Flenser. Arguably in line with the quiet nature of the meditation and mindfulness which sits at the core of Zen Buddhism, “Bodhidharma,” named for the founder of this spiritual practice, initially uses the absence of sound as an unsettling feature. A thematic series of aggressive and layered melodic lines introduces the track and then abruptly stops, leaving only single snare and kick beats to disrupt the silence along with one agonizing shriek:
“You look like… you’re dying!”
From there, barely audible whimpers carry out the stanzas until the next instrumental break, the track’s structural adherence retained throughout its runtime, albeit with slight textural add ons and percussive variation. For its late bridge, a cathartic guitar solo is worked in, some rampant fret work pushing through the third act.
Not for spiritual renewal.
6. Lifeguard
Ripped and Torn
Matador
Released: 6/6/25
Ripped And Torn is the debut LP from Chicago’s Lifeguard, a trio of young punksters whose impressive output proudly exhibits the band’s influences without producing noise rock pastiche. Heavy on dub rhythms (“France And”), post-hardcore harmonizing (“Under Your Reach”), and abrasive guitar tone (“How To Say Deisar”), Lifeguard’s efforts have composed one of the most necessary albums of 2025, and it doesn’t hurt that the scouring pad dragged across the final product was handled by producer No Age’s Randy Randall.
5.
Makaya McCraven
Off The Record International Anthem/Nonesuch
Released: 10/17/25
In early 2025, jazz drummer Makaya McCraven released four EPs—PopUp Shop, Techno Logic, Hidden Out!, and The People’s Mixtape—all of which were combined into a 2-LP collection, Off The Record. With a revolving line-up and chronological distance in terms of the recording dates (the tracks recorded for the PopUp Shop EP were recorded in 2015; tracks recorded for the Hidden Out! EP were recorded in 2017), Off The Record wraps up a 10-year recording and production process, some of the additional studio work and overdubs having been completed in 2025.
While technically not a 2025 release in the traditional sense, this compilation of career-spanning material documents the progression of a significant presence in current-day jazz, one whose rhythmic sensibilities and skill for arrangement will likely leave some room for his name in the annals of jazz music.
And it’s a stunning listen.
4.
Tropical
Fuck Storm
Fairyland Codex
Fire Records
Released: 6/20/25
“It’s the golden age of assholes and the triumph of disgrace…”
While I’m sure Tropical Fuck Storm’s Gareth Liddiard is not the only individual to succinctly describe the current social climate and the lowest-common-denominator types that inexplicably and undeservingly receive our daily attention in this day and age, we’ll say that his observation stood out.
Fairyland Codex, the fourth LP from the aforementioned Tropical Fuck Storm, carries on the band’s idiosyncratic flair for expression of society’s inevitable ruin over screwy carnival-ish bounces (“Goon Show”), shrapnel-redolent guitar wheeze (“Dunning Kruger’s Loser Cruiser”), or serpentining dance pop bass work (“Teeth Marché”).
Aberrant, bold, and wildly acidic (“Yeah, the whole world's at death's door now… And they're picking at the lock”), TFS remain a distinct and off-kilter presence in punk-adjacent rock music.
3.
Guerilla Toss
You’re Weird Now
Sub Pop
Released: 9/12/25
From the track review entry Notes From The Record Room: The Necks, Guerilla Toss, Dag och Natt, IRK, Anna von Hausswolff, SQUANDERERS, which was posted on 8/22/25:
Awash in the colorful and fully-synthesized myriad of triumphant melodies and descending, busy swarms of staccato chirps, Guerilla Toss’s “CEO of Personal & Pleasure” is the latest single from their upcoming album, You’re Weird Now. Since around 2017’s GT Ultra, Guerilla Toss has shifted away from the eccentric art punk of Eraser Stargazer or Gay Disco, opting instead for more pop-leaning hooks and sugary textures.
Per GT vocalist, Kassie Carlson:
“Instead of marinating in the void, I’ve chosen to gaslight myself into greatness by firing my inner critic and reinstating myself as the slightly unhinged CEO of my own emotional start-up. The CEO of Personal & Pleasure doesn't have a 5-year delusion, but I do have dogs, vicious optimism, and a vague idea that being alive should occasionally feel good. Late-stage capitalism meets self-care nihilism ... and blooming from it, the CEO of Personal and Pleasure.”
There is a general sense of cheer-dressed-as-self-awareness (“Jaded by my own sense of meaningless identity”) that I quite enjoy about this track, its personal application seeming to comment slightly on the futility and / or myth of work-life balance.
You’re Weird Now is set to indoctrinate the normies on 9/12/25 via Sub Pop.
2.
Kilynn Lunsford
Promiscuous Genes
Feel It Records
Released: 5/16/25
From the entry In The Headphones: loscil, Coffin Prick, Grails, Kilynn Lunsford, which was posted on 7/1/25:
Promiscuous Genes is the latest solo album from Kilynn Lunsford (Taiwan Housing Project, Little Claw), a warped pop oddity fused with iconoclasm, crude electronics, and free-range experimentalism. A follow up to her equally cool and twisted 2022 solo debut, Custodians Of Human Succession, Promiscuous Genes is a full-body embrace of No New York and Vinegar Syndrome, equal parts Lydia Lunch and Daniel Johnston along with Roger Corman and Richard Kern informing instances of circuit-propelled minimalism (“Nice Quiet Horror Show”), noisier uptempo rawk (“Gates Of Hell”), and the delightful corruption of long-venerated material (probably the most fucked-with version of a Beatles song I’ve heard with Lunsford’s rendition of “You Never Give Me Your Money”).
The aberrant nature of Lunsford’s POV is the album’s common thread, a disposition and knack for arresting word choice conveyed via “Lillibilly”’s jovial hootenanny-level whimsy, the drooling, inebriated and bass-entangled sway of the album’s title track, or via the multi-tracked, beat-propelled spoken word of “Some Mothers Do.”
And, the covers: Aside from the aforementioned Beatles deep cut, Lunsford removed the otherwise sentimental tone of The Beach Boys’ “Disney Girls,” kicked up the tempo, added some funk and whistle embellishments, and blessed her voice with ethereal reverb. Lunsford’s take on “Disney Girls” might be the most accessible song on the album, (although the Juliana Hatfield-level sweetness of the “Saddest Of Dreams” probably takes that crown). Sharpening knives over an unsettling loop of heavily pitched voices, Lunsford reinterpreted Syd Barrett’s “Maisie” as hyper-stylized and unsettling dance music.
With Promiscuous Genes, Lunsford tries a lot here: an evident proclivity for genre-bending force-fed through houses both art and grind respectively and respectfully. And, it all sticks.
1.
Anna von Hausswolff
ICONOCLASTS
YEAR0001
Released: 10/31/25
From the track review entry Notes From The Record Room: The Necks, Guerilla Toss, Dag och Natt, IRK, Anna von Hausswolff, SQUANDERERS, which was posted on 8/22/25:
Admittedly painting broad strokes as I generalize about the state of pop music in 2025, Anna von Hausswolff’s latest two singles, “Stardust” and “The Whole Woman, (which features vocal accompaniment from Iggy Pop), have her venturing away from pipe organ instrumentals and darker musings, instead composing a brand of pop interpreted through her own lens. “Stardust,” specifically, is aiming for lightness and movement, albeit through thoughtful arrangement and an overt melodic focus. “The Whole Woman” is more of a ballad, Pop’s deep and distinct croon contrasting well with von Hausswolff’s breathy falsetto. Pop being no stranger to the duet, (his performances with Kate Pierson for “Candy”, Debbie Harry for “Well, Did You Evah!”, and Le Butcherettes for “La Uva” come to mind), his presence here sounds fitting and comfortable.
ICONOCLASTS is due out this Halloween and will be Anna von Hausswolff’s first release from YEAR0001.
Following:
11. FACS — Wish Defense (Trouble In Mind, 2/7/25)
12. Chime Oblivion — s/t (DEATHGOD, 4/18/25)
13. Die Spitz — Something To Consume (Third Man Records, 9/12/25)
14. Queens of the Stone Age — Alive In The Catacombs EP (Matador, 9/25/25)
15. SUMAC & Moor Mother — The Film (Thrill Jockey, 4/25/25)
16. Snõõper — Worldwide (Third Man, 10/3/25)
17. James Brandon Lewis Trio — Apple Cores (ANTI-, 2/7/25)
18. billy woods — Golliwog (Backwoodz Studioz, 5/9/25)
19. -(16)- — Guides For The Misguided (Relapse, 2/7/25)
20. clipping. — Dead Channel Sky (Sub Pop, 3/14/25)
21. Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs — Death Hilarious (Missing Piece Records, 4/4/25)
22. Deerhoof — Noble And Godlike In Ruin (Joyful Noise Recordings, 4/25/25)
23. Armand Hammer & The Alchemist — Mercy (Backwoodz Studioz, 11/7/25)
24. Osees — Abomination Revealed At Last (Deathgod, 8/8/25)
25. Water Damage — Instruments (12XU, 5/16/25)
26. Open Head — What Is Success (Wharf Cat, 1/25/25)
27. pôt-pot — Warsaw 480k (Felte, 9/19/25)
28. Black Eyes — Hostile Design (Dischord, 10/10/25)
29. Bacon Wagon — Trauma Cake (Reptilian Records, 6/6/25)
30. Coffin Prick — Loose Enchantment (Temporal Drift, 5/16/25)
31. Swans — Birthing (Young God, 5/30/25)
32. The Necks — Disquiet (Northern Spy Records, 10/10/25)
33. gushes — Delicious Collision (PTP, 10/16/25)
34. Alyse Dreamhouse — Body Mess (no label, 8/20/25)
35. Aesop Rock — I Heard It’s A Mess There Too (Rhymesayers Entertainment, 10/27/25)
36. loscil — Lake Fire (kranky, 5/2/25)
37. Sensor Ghost — Irritation On Demand (Dischord, 3/21/25)
38. Aesop Rock — Black Hole Superette (Rhymesayers Entertainment, 5/30/25)
39. Lana Del Rabies — Omnipotent Fuck (Feral Crone, 11/7/25)
40. Gus Baldwin & The Sketch — The Sketch (Permanent Teeth, 1/31/25)
41. Black Flower — Kinetic (Sdban Records, 1/31/25)
42. Clipse — Let God Sort Em Out (Roc Nation, 7/11/25)
43. Gabe 'Nandez & Preservation — Sortilège (Backwoodz Studioz, 8/19/25)
44. Grails — Miracle Music (Temporary Residence Ltd., 5/16/25)
45. Sprints — All That Is Over (Sub Pop, 9/26/25)
46. Horsegirl — Phonetics On and On (Matador, 2/14/25)
47. VACUOUS — In His Blood (Relapse, 2/28/24)
48. Brueder Selke & Midori Hirano — Split Scale (Thrill Jockey, 2/5/25)
49. Kali Malone & Drew McDowell — Magnetism (Ideologic Organ, 11/9/25)
50. Anika — Abyss (Sacred Bones, 4/4/25)
Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead
