»Tether« – a jazz-infused, soul-drenched torch song folk record – feels like an album from a different era, but at the same so urgent and exciting unlike any other these days. At times, Annahstasia Enuke evokes the ecstatic calm of B. Glenn-Copeland’s earliest albums, and at her most dramatic sounds like Anohni after inhaling Norah Jones’ back catalogue. Hell, the last song here is best described as a reimagination of »Farewell Transmission« by Bryan Adams, and yet all of this – with the exception of a less-than lukewarm spoken word piece in between – is absolutely flawless, contemporary, and innovative in its own ways. It’s even got an Obongjayar feature that feels necessary, a first in music history. 

It’s the greatest, the most beautiful, the truly remarkable record you can play first thing in the morning, late at night, or any time in between, should the mood take you. It’s by Barker—and yes, you’re meant to add Berghain, though you could just as easily say Leisure System, that delightfully unruly label. But that doesn’t quite capture it. What does fit, thematically, is this: Stochastic Drift isn’t a record that shouts for your attention. It’s a gentleman’s sleeve for the cigar hour. Or something else entirely. Whatever it is, it’s so, so good.

Golliwog ist das musikalische Pendant des Films Reflecting Skin: Ein obskures, unter dem Radar laufendes Meisterwerk, das einen fix und fertig macht. Billy Woods klingt da »betäubt und wirkt betäubend, erscheint ebenso emotionslos wie wutgeladen, wirft dich nach vorn und doch auf den Boden«, erklärt Kollege Brauwers in seinem Porträt des New Yorker Rappers. Eine treffende Beschreibung, die unterstreicht, wie sehr einem die durchweg alptraumhafte Stimmung der LP in Mark und Bein fährt. Für die Sorgen neben Woods´ eindringlicher Delivery auch ein All-Star-Producer-Roster, dem Underground-Ikonen wie El-P, The Alchemist oder Ant angehören. Stark!

No other current song is likely to be accompanied by more Ottolenghi recipes in Ikea kitchens this year than »Chintamani« by Céline Dessberg. The French musician with Mongolian roots serves up a blissful blend of rare, groovy catchiness and exotic expansiveness. RIYL Khruangbin. The B-side is the real star – a purely instrumental track with the melancholic, timeless quality of an Ahmed Malek composition.

Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels (Versions) is an atmospheric reinterpretation of Mayssa Jallad’s 2023 concept album, which explored the »Battle of the Hotels« during the Lebanese Civil War (1975/76). Swedish producer Civilistjävel! carefully transforms the original into a contemplative soundscape shaped by dub and ambient elements. In contrast to the narrative depth and acoustic diversity of the original, Versions focuses on atmosphere and hypnosis. Jallad’s extraordinary voice takes centre stage – the Arabic lyrics are hauntingly transformed into ghostly, veiled echoes. A quiet masterpiece.

The Traces of the Swedish supergroup Cosmic Ear are those of Don Cherry. Bass clarinettist Christer Bothén played with Cherry himself, introduced his music to the donso n’goni – a four- to six-stringed harp lute covered with goatskin, traditionally reserved for hunters in West Africa – and became a key reference point during Cherry’s stay in Sweden. Now 83, Bothén and his fellow musicians Mats Gustafsson, Goran Kajfeš, Kansan Zetterberg and Juan Romero – all known from the free-flowing Fire! Orchestra – carry that spirit into the 21st century. No nostalgic note. Just timeless.

Take the wildest edges of Dizzee Rascal on Boy In Da Corner and mix them with the rhythms of Angolan kuduro, and you get Diferenciado. DJ Narciso isn’t here to apologise. It’s up to you to deal with it. The best way is to kick up into a half handstand against the wall and shake your hips to the choppy beat. If that’s not your style, stand firm, look it in the eye and say, »Thanks for the slap, I needed that.«

DJ Python has a way of landing on exactly the right notes, just when you need them. They tend to be soft and reflective, as heard on his latest EP. On I Was Put On This Earth, the New Yorker drifts through five tracks of viscous pop electronica, shaped by Caribbean and South American rhythms, that settle on the ears like sunlight on closed eyelids. Only »Besos Robados« breaks the spell, with Isabella Lovestory’s sharp-edged vocals pulling you to full attention.

In this case, proper preparation for the storm looks like this: Leave the hut, take off your fear with your shirt, look ahead, know only one goal: the eye of the thing looming on the horizon. It doesn't take long before it's there. On Children Of Darkness by Taipei's DOPE Purple, the electric and bass guitars maintain order for a long time while keeping the tension high: their mantra-like playing ensures that you can still anticipate the chaos, even though the saxophone has long since squealed and the synthesizer alarm sounds as if it were announcing a second leak in the reactor. And then it goes on. Further and further and deeper. The psych-rock of DOPE PURPLE shows no interest in finding the light at the end of the tunnel. Surrendering instead of rising is the name of the game.

The 7" single as the supreme discipline. With a few shyly recited and repeated sentences, British singer Elaine Howley tells an intimate story of longing. There is someone who should embrace her like never before. And this actually great message is supported by not much more than a small, throbbing beat, some bass and a keyboard. In this piece of dark pop music, which feels most at home in the shadows, less is not more. It's everything.

The opening track of Belgian producer Emily Jeanne’s quỳnh debut is a masterful exercise in rhythmically intricate sound-design with a psychedelic twist. But Call of the Sea has more to offer than deep dives into the Mariana Trench. »Count Me Out« sounds like a Steve Reich x Jlin x Barker collaboration released through Ilian Tape, mid-tempo chugger »Đồ Sơn At Night« combines Bristolian bass sentiment with a rawness à la Salon des Amateurs, and »Gone Water« closes shop with a polyrhythmic feast that makes DJ Plead look like Tiësto. Jeanne is parting the sea of mediocrity in contemporary dance music to get where she is going.

The best R&B album of the year comes from Denmark. Erika De Casier achieves on Lifetime what can only be done with a grown-up self-confidence: Spreading insanely erotic love vibes while staying completely calm, even cool! And maybe I'm crazy, but: isn't that a deliberate Hey-Ma reference on "Delusional"? The time would be ripe for that.

Gajek creates exactly these moments for Ziggy Devriendt's label STROOM, which stay in your head month after month, year after year, also in his NTS shows. In the service of the big picture, but always extra-weird, with repetitive voice messages, carrying melodies, drowned in minor keys. Cutting Together Apart was created in the East. A cliché; a beautiful one.

'Easy Lee', the 2003 hit by Ricardo Villalobos, is one of a kind. 'Prada' by Gombeen & Doygen comes close to capturing its magic. It's captivating dub minimal with ketamine-like spoken words, a rhythm and sound bass groove, and funky guitar chords. It sounds like Berlin, but it's from Ireland. The B-side is just as special with "Sequel". It's minimal house with hi-hat fever and a voice reminiscent of the best moments of acts like Soul Capsule. If this were the norm, a minimal renaissance could be on the horizon!

In a time in which the market is being flooded with lazy krautrock reissues, Gvoon: Brennung 1 feels all the more special. The late Holger Czukay had studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen before writing music history with CAN, and it showed on his solo releases. This long-lost 32-minute-long piece was recorded in 1997 and is accompanied by a version realised by the duo DIE ANGEL together with Faust’s Zappi W. Diermaier. It’s a murky, muffled collage of droning sounds, claustrophobic to the max and yet—it’s Czukay after all—oddly groovy. Put on this the next time someone tries to sell you the umpteenth reissue of »Cluster II«.

Watch out, Kraut! Berlin-based minimal sound artist Jan Jelinek takes samples from cosmic Kraut rockers of the 70s and sends them into a loop. If you want to find out where the samples came from, you should look for another hobby. It's not about source research, but about musical similarities at two different points in time. Jelinek processes the sound sources, which are based on repetition and rhythmic pulsation, into his own glitchy minimal hypno beat. Kosmischer Pitch is as important today as it was 20 years ago.

2025 confronted us with a plethora of things none of us had on our bingo cards, but a London rapper/singer walking the tightrope on beats that sound like they were cooked up by Clams Casino or Forest Swords and then got the Mica Levi treatment seems like one of the unlikelier things to happen in this godforsaken year. To be clear, Like A Ribbon: Three EPs is indeed little more than a collection of, er, the three EPs that John Glacier has released through Young since early 2024, but the whole shebang nevertheless sounds like a coherent album, the kind of unified, self-confident statement by an artist who still has a lot more to say. Looking forward to that.

Feeling drunk in the morning without having touched a drop. That's what happens with Turmoil (Boomslang) when Joss Turnbull hits, rubs, tickles, caresses, pinches and taps his percussion in a seemingly random sequence and sends the surprised reactions of the instruments through effects units. In addition, he moans, shouts and mumbles, and lets everything collide in a chaotic dervish dance. Heads are whirring, eyes are spinning, but the hips… the hips sense a beguiling groove.

One of the best discoveries of 2025: Own Affairs by Kalahari Surfers, recorded in 1984 on an 8-track recorder at Shifty Studios in Johannesburg - an abandoned caravan - and re-released this year on the French label Via Parigi. Musically, it is not far removed from the post-punk colorfulness of Family Fodder or the sample frenzy of Roger Doyle's Operating Theatre, but in terms of content it is clearly more political. Warrick Sony, founder and only permanent member, used the band name as a pseudonym to protect himself from state repression and wove dub, punk, African and Indian rhythms as well as samples from political speeches, police radio and religious chants into a satirical, aesthetically impressive statement against apartheid. Almost a little radio play.

Little Simz has a new producer. Even if the reason is rather sad (her past companion Inflo owes Little Simz £1.7 million), it's for the best for the rapper. Her lyrics are biting and full of pointed, calm anger, her delivery dares to cross several lines when she picks Inflo apart. And the music is raw and vital. In the past, producer Miles Clinton James had already contributed writing and individual instruments. On Lotus, he returns the energy space to Little Simz that Inflo's increasingly redundant, washed-up canned soul had rather confined in the past.

Forces from the Meridian Brothers, Frente Cumbiero, and Romperayo make common cause. Los Pirañas is a kind of Bogotá supergroup. Eblis Alvarez, Mario Galeano and Pedro Ojeda developed Una Oportunidad Mas De Triunfar En La Vida live in the studio from improvisation. Cumbia is the basis, other Latin American styles and their African roots are the material that is processed here with a punk spirit. Superficially good humored, but always ready for a stylistic adventure.

Macie Stewart describes her second solo album When The Distance Is Blue, released by International Anthem, as »a love letter to the moments we spend in-between«. It sounds a bit like a cliché about life help, but here it is meant primarily in musical terms. Because, the eight tracks, collaged from ambient pads, piano improvisations, string arrangements, and field recordings, emphasize the pauses. Who doesn't love them? With Lia Kohl, Whitney Johnson and Zach Moore, the Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist also has high-caliber collaborators at her side.

He took his time with his solo debut. Marshall Allen, leader of the Sun Ra Arkestra, is now 101 years old. His New Dawn is neither atonal madness nor space esoterica; Allen scratches at the door to free jazz, but does not go through it. Traces of calypso, big band and spiritual jazz, funk and strings run through the tracks, and there are cosmic effects when he swaps his alto sax for the electronic horn. It's as fresh and vibrant as if jazz had just been invented.

It looks a bit like an old vacuum cleaner with strings. Created by artist and designer Halldór Úlfarsson in 2008, the Halldorophone has been used by Icelandic cellist and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir for her soundtrack to the movie Joker. Her colleague Martina Bertoni now uses the electroacoustic instrument in a less bombastic way on her latest album Electroacoustic Works For Halldorophone, which elegantly asserts itself between folk and glitch.

When Maurice Louca makes music, he doesn't just open the box a little, he always lets the whole swarm out at once. His compositions are like organisms in themselves, growing bodies that swirl around you, pulling you into the vortex that a city like Cairo has traditionally been. Egyptian musicians have probably never composed as pointedly as they do on Bariiy (Fera): despite their characteristic teeming nature, the pieces have a strong inner cohesion and a catchy groove. Fera is the pulse you want to have - anything else would be half alive.

Today, Merzbow is mostly associated with memed-to-death albums such as »Venerology.« Not to disparage anyone from diving into Masami Akita’s 1990s discography, but as a card-carrying merznerd it is my duty to highlight this massive box-set. In 1981, Akita and Kiyoshi Mizutani cranked out ten cassette releases, now finally made available on wax through Urashima for the first time. On Collection 001-010, the duo still drew on surrealist techniques, live instrumentation, and tape fuckery to make music that felt like someone had locked Peter Brötzmann, Nurse With Wound, and Pierre Henry into a crashing elevator—not as quote-unquote funny as »Woodpecker,« and serious business instead.

It's like stumbling unknowingly into a forbidden rite you'd rather not see. That's the sound of ZERO, this leaden, slowed-down doom-pop in a dense fog on Modern Love, the label of experts in music that people dance to in concrete shoes. MOBBS & Susu Laroche put the melodies on the rack while everything around them falls to rubble. The five tracks by the British producer and the Egyptian-French singer drag themselves to the finish line with their last ounce of strength.

Mohammad Mostafa Heydarian plays one of the oldest instruments known to humankind, the long-necked lute called tanbur, but the Kurdish virtuoso is sparsely interested in the preservation of tradition. His sophomore album Noor-e-Vojood instead sees the Kermanshah-based 23-year-old pick up where his 2021 debut »Songs Of Horaman« together with dâf player Behzâd Varâshte left off. Recorded mostly alone—the two longest tracks feature Mortezâ Rezâei on percussion—Heydarian adds further nuance to his compositional style, which oscillates between introspective calm and frantic energy. It’s the wildest acoustic release besides the new Senayawa record, innovative through and through.

The first single from OHYUNG’s third album You Are Always on My Mind came as a surprise: »no good« had very little to do with the gentle ambient excursions of 2022’s »imagine naked!« and everything with the pop-on-a-beat style spearheaded by Mica Levi and Tirzah. OHYUNG does it differently, paying dues to both hip and trip-hop, weird electronic music, and occasionally the dancefloor—all topped off by the generous-yet-efficient use of string samples here and there. This album, described by the artist as »my trans self and my former self in conversation, from both perspectives« is full of musical and emotional contrasts, uplifting in one second and absolutely crushing in the next.

With their debut Signs two years ago, New York trio Purelink created one of the best albums of the decade so far. They set the bar pretty high for their sophomore effort, Faith. From the fine webs of crackling, ambient and dub they develop clearer sound structures this time. Even guests like Loraine James pop up now and then and contribute to real minimal songs. All in all, things are a bit more earthy, but the three remain true to their ideal of maximally reduced groove.

It is tragic that the mysterious Q Lazzarus never lived to see her small but impactful body of work being properly reappraised through a documentary movie, a compilation on Sacred Bones, and finally the first proper reissue of her eternal break-through single Goodbye Horses. Then again, it feels oddly fitting that an artist named after a biblical figure that came back from the dead would soar to new heights after her passing in 2022. While much of the previously unheard-of material that was presented to the public this year did not compare to Diane Luckey’s biggest hit, the single’s Dark Entries reissue alone serves as a beautiful homage to her legacy. Goodbye, Q Lazzarus.

There is indeed strength in numbers, but sheer force alone is nothing without structure. Lebanese polymath Raed Yassin, a member of the »A« Trio and Praed, pulled of a nigh-impossible stunt with his album Phantom Orchestra, arranging separate recordings of 42 (!) Berlin-based improvisers into a consistent, coherent seven-part suite. A stark reminder that even the most megalithic monuments are still the sum of their individual parts, this album makes even the most grandiose, genre-flexible bands of our time—whether that description makes you think of Sleep Token, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, or Neptunian Maximalism—look like half-assed amateur punks.

Slightly off-kilter bedroom pop that can be catchy, even if it takes the long way around. What Raisa K, whose friendship with Mica Levi is unmistakable, serves up is a little lyrical, a little overcast and very, very great. Sometimes there's just a bass playing along, but what she gets out of these little song experiments, which sound so intimate it's almost wrong to listen to them out loud, shouldn't be ignored. This kind of wonky art-pop is having a moment, thankfully, but rarely sounds as fascinating as it does here.

Dream In Dream is the second album by Japanese producer Saeko Killy and was released this year on the Bureau B label. Especially impressive is the combination of 80s New German Wave with Japanese influences. A symbiosis of minimal wave, psychedelic electronics and warm synthesizer sounds creates an atmospheric soundscape that is both nostalgic and original. Dream In Dream thematizes the connection between man and machine and shows in an impressive way how new technologies can connect cultural and temporal spaces. Killy's music is a bridge between eras and countries.

From Kraftwerk to D.A.F. to the Salon-des-Amateurs clique, Düsseldorf's musical heritage has grown to weigh a gigantic ton over the decades, but Sequence Of Events shoulder this burden with ease. On their debut album The Art Of Memory , Joshua Gottmanns and Deniz Ahmet Saridas, who are also Salon alumni, present themselves as sophisticated adepts of the post-industrial sound shaped by Kreidler and Co. with dub in the background and quite sharp edges, but they give the proven formulas a new spin. On eleven tracks, the two anarchic autodidacts combine chugging grooves with a punk attitude and sentimentality that occasionally drips into the gearbox.

Footwork is one of those genres that is either rumored to be dying out or undergoing a revival. But the truth is: footwork never went away and never will, and acts like Traxman have played a big part in that. The Chicagoan, sorry, veteran, shares what's going on in his head 15 times: a ridiculously inspired jumble of brute basslines, humorous dancefloor commands and creative yet precise sampling that's in no way inferior to the best Teklife times.

The compilation is so great and so important and so ENLIGHTENING simply because its title is reminiscent of a vibe in danger of extinction: No-One's Listening Anyway. Yay! Awesome! Just stay unheard, unseen, and accept and celebrate this with a light-hearted and, of course, beautiful arrogance. After all, who is the audience? There have been comparisons to post-punk from the glorious UK of the 1980s, of course, but it's been a long time since any were as good as this one.