These are our picks for the best albums of the last three months.
Ichiko Aoba
Luminescent Creatures
Vinyl LP
To an unyielding world, Japanese chamber folk artist Ichiko Aoba delivers a work of gentleness. The tranquil Luminescent Creatures, Aoba’s eighth album, is inspired by the harsh beauty of the ocean and the resilience of the tiny glowing creatures who survive therein, but Aoba’s impressions of this indifferent world take the shape of blissful soundscapes and abstract melodies evoking the drifting tendrils and wavy corals of the underwater life she observed while diving off a chain of remote islands in the East China Sea. This is composed music at its most intuitive, fantastical, and compassionate, the artist’s deep sense of awe at the mysteries of creation captured in a rippling melange of pianos, flutes, bells, and swooping vocals.
Read our Album of the Day on Luminescent Creatures.
–Mariana Timony
Yazz Ahmed
A Paradise In The Hold
2 x Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
The fourth album from prolific British-Bahraini trumpeter Yazz Ahmed started out as a research project over a decade ago; supported by Birmingham Town Hall and Symphony, the British Council, and Bahrain’s Ministry of Culture, Ahmed spent a week in her home country conducting research and engaging with local musicians before unveiling the completed piece before a live audience on her return trip two years later. The studio recording, which she assembled post-pandemic in fits and starts, is by no means intended as a easily digestible history lesson, but “a modern take on Bahraini music” that abides by a more abstract timeline inflected through jazz, tape recordings, and more. The final result is a stunning tapestry of cultural folkways tied together by the elegant brass and hazy digital effects for which she’s renowned.
–Zoe Camp
Ambrose Akinmusire
Honey From A Winter Stone
Compact Disc (CD)
Theseus navigated the labyrinth on Crete and killed the Minotaur by unspooling a ball of thread Ariadne gave him. So before playing this stunning album, think of Ambrose Akinmusire as Theseus. Rather than a sword, he has a trumpet and an ensemble that includes vocalist Kokayi and the Mivos String Quartet. The thread is a set of compositions that wind into unexpected places; fiery, haunting, dazzling, beautiful, and ultimately wrenching. Akinmusire calls the album a “self-portrait” and mentions “the complexities I navigate daily.” Does he slay those? He sure fights them.
–George Grella
Read our Album of the Day on Honey From A Winter Stone.
bdrmm
Microtonic
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
It took bdrmm approximately seven years, one album, and a dozen-plus EPs to land a crucial endorsement (and sizable career bump) from post-rock’s holiest of holies: the almighty Mogwai signed the Hull, UK outfit to their independent label Rock Action in 2023, releasing the band’s sophomore effort I Don’t Know later that year. From a career standpoint, the lads made damn good time heading into Microtonic—and yet, bdrmm’s primary objective on this album is not to grow, let alone preserve, this hard-earned momentum, but to leverage it as aesthetic collateral, cashing in some of the guitar music’s hulking mass for elements of rave music, bedroom pop, ambient, and more. A little risk goes a long way.
–Zoe Camp
Circuits des Yeux
Halo On the Inside
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Any conversation I have about Halo On The Inside inevitably ends up being a discussion about its final third, already one of the finest three-song runs and closing acts of the year: The hypnotic post-punk throb of “Truth” sets up the piercing panoramic crescendo of “Organ Bed” (featuring some of Haley Fohr’s best vocal work possibly ever), then dismounts into the disquieting ambient of “It Takes My Pain Away.” It’s industrial, brutally percussive, pitch-dark even when Fohr’s voice soars—a remarkable outing from an artist who feels increasingly, thrillingly peerless.
–Elle Carroll
Confucius MC & Bastien Keb
Songs for Lost Travellers
Vinyl LP
As much a mind meld as a musical collaboration, on Songs for Lost Travellers, South London rapper Confucius MC and producer Bastien Keb bring their styles together in a new shared voice. Keb’s production is almost totally drum-less, a recent trend in underground rap that Songs for Lost Travellers pushes to its extreme; when the percussion finally kicks in on penultimate track “Toulouse,” it hits like a gale-force wind on a still day. While drum-less beats might be little more than sampled loops, Keb’s compositions feel more freeform and organic, textured with harp strums and gentle horns. Over these lived-in and lo-fi beats, Confucius MC reflects on everyday reality with wisdom and empathy; while the mood is sometimes mournful, he radiates a lovingly paternal warmth on tracks like “Little Man.”
–Nadine Smith
Marie Davidson
City of Clowns
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
City of Clowns—the sixth album from Marie Davidson—offers a canny takedown of big tech and the algorithm, co-produced by Soulwax and filtered through the sleazy haze of bloghouse that’s about as à la mode as you can get. The Québecois musician wears her sarcasm like a superpower throughout, deadpanning “You troubleshoot until you die” on electroclash 2.0 livewire “Push Me Fuckhead,” and throwing side-eye over barreling warehouse techno (“Contrarian”), muscular electro (“Statistical Modelling”), and even a smidgen of nu-disco (“Fun Times”). But more than anything, City of Clowns gets to the crux of Marie Davidson’s M.O.: “sticking with the weirdos,” even as the world around us crumbles into pixel dust.
–April Clare Welsh
Read our Album of the Day on City of Clowns.
FACS
Wish Defense
Compact Disc (CD), Cassette, Vinyl LP
As exemplary a work of underground music as you’ll find in 2025, Chicago band FACS’ sixth album (and the last engineered by Steve Albini at Electrical Audio before his death in 2024) Wish Defense fairly pulses with unresolved frustration, the songs propelled forward by sudden bursts of energy emphasizing the baked-in dynamic tension between the players. A sense of groove is achieved nevertheless, albeit it is one built out of abrasiveness: rough washes of metallic guitars, serrated bass lines, and drums that thrum and thunder. But Wish Defense is defined by the push-and-pull between slinkier post-punk passages and stretched out swells of feedback and noise that roil, rumble, and escalate, sometimes becoming melodic and sometimes remaining cacophonous, but always a dimly lit reflection of a familiar reality crumbling before our eyes.
–Mariana Timony
Fusilier
Ambush
Vinyl LP
Being a Black, queer Southerner in the Boston rock scene and now a Brooklyn club kid with a solo project to his name, Fusilier has many lives to live and does so all at once with rebellious abandon on Ambush. True to its name, the Atlanta native’s debut is a bracing amalgamation of ‘90s alternative, industrial electronics, and pop-punk songwriting with elements of Prince-ly funk and a Moses Sumney-type falsetto. With lyrics like “Don’t ever let a f— run a peep show/ I can tell you where to look you might not like it tho” from the pop-punk anthem “Nightmare Muscle” and “All the things we dream of so insane…/ Faster so the masters know our name” from “Birds,” Fusilier interrogates his own and others complicity in our hypercapitalist society, wrestling with feelings of hopelessness and frustration whilst reaffirming his sense of self. It’s an urgent offering executed with intuition and a brash punk attitude.
–Stephanie Barclay
Saya Gray
SAYA
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Cassette
The guitar—steel-stringed, finger-picked, and lap-steel, et. al.—plays an unexpected first fiddle on this album of non-denominational alt-pop from Toronto’s Saya Gray. Couched within an omnivorous palette of modular synthesizers, alt-rock riffage, and experimental production, SAYA makes for an eccentrically off-kilter, yet hooky, collection of post-break up vignettes. A seething reproach of a soon-to be-ex on the plucky “SHELL ( OF A MAN )” makes way for self-loathing devotion on “PUDDLE ( OF ME )” and hardened bitterness on the coolly morose “H.B.W.” By the album’s end, Gray exorcises her most pent-up emotional truths: Where am I going and what’s it all for? For such an eclectic creative, SAYA is as surprisingly cohesive and focused a project as it is a confessional one.
–Stephanie Barclay
Oksana Linde
Travesías
Vinyl LP
The second record of previously unreleased music from pioneering Venezuelan experimental electronic composer Oksana Linde on Buh Records is as revelatory as the first, if not more so. Here, celestial moments of sweeping drama (the dark swaths of synths coursing through album centerpiece “Mundos flotantes”) are balanced by a series of lighter, gentler melodies typical of New Age compositions (the twinkly “Estrellas I” and “II” were both commissioned to accompany a meditation practice.) The result is a beautiful record that is also quite forward-thinking in its melding of musicalness and the avant-garde; many approaches favored by modern ambient and electronic musicians can be heard reverberating in Travesías’s watery depths.
Read our Album of the Day on Travesías.
–Mariana Timony
Olga Anna Markowska
ISKRA
Vinyl LP
Pitting experimental drone’s numbing, mechanical oblivion against classical music’s organic beauty, Olga Anna Markowska’s stunning debut establishes the Polish composer and multi-instrumentalist as one of the most formidable experimentalists in her field. She commands graceful cello figures, fragile zither lines, crackling tape loops, stark electronic effects, and manipulated voice samples with the steeled resolve and impressive acumen of an old master; at the same time, the featherlight touch with which she executes such contrasts, combined with the arrangements’ indeterminate contours and melancholic signifiers, betray a reverence for William Basinski’s post-modern M.O. In the end, she bows to neither tradition on ISKRA, but rather curtails the divide altogether by way of an unsettled peace all her own.
–Zoe Camp
Motorbike
Kick It Over
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
This may be their second record, but Kick It Over from Cincinnati, Ohio band Motorbike plays like a proto greatest hits, all rough and tumble power pop with an edgy charisma; tight, jagged riffs; speak-sing vocals; and sweaty energy so intensely confident, it’s hard not to get onboard, especially if you enjoy things like drinking beer and having fun, maybe while wearing a leather jacket? The unruly punk approach of Motorbike’s 2023 self-titled record has been tightened up and given some structure, but it plays to the band’s strengths and their defiant commitment to rawness is only enhanced by the hints of a brash pop metal sound lurking in hooks that already seem too big for the basement they were born in.
–Mariana Timony
N NAO
Nouveau Langage
Vinyl LP
Inspired by the philosophy of musica universalis, or the belief that the movements of celestial bodies—the Sun, Moon, and planets—is in itself a form of music, Naomie de Lorimier, aka N NAO, strikes a metaphysical balance between acoustic instrumentation and glitchy electronics on her third studio album, with French-language lyrics that invoke the Earth and the cosmos in equal measure. Characterized by slick production and minimalist configurations, Nouveau Langage is a harmonious constellation of New Age ambience, musique concrète, synth ragas, and club influences that toe the line between grounded naturalism and the techno tessellations of a sacred geometry.
–Stephanie Barclay
Selvans
Saturnalia
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP, Cassette
The accusations of idolatry levied against heavy bands by pearl-clutches and pundits across the ’70s and ’80s rank among the most overblown takes in music history, but assuming good faith, we will grant them this: blasphemy and spectacle are two of extreme metal’s most crucial ingredients. Italian metal auteur Selvans’ final work, the last in a three-album, seven-year cycle exploring “Dark Italian Art” by way of blackened folk, prog, and more, probably won’t prompt any kneejerk reactions from fundamentalists on account of the Italian lyrics and neoclassical aura—60-person opera choirs and orchestral tunings aren’t exactly virgin sacrifices—but heshers, horror nerds, prog patrons, and theatre kids will probably lose their shit. When The Phantom of the Opera meets the Wall of Death, an original sin is born. You’d be wise to bear witness.
–Zoe Camp
Sharp Pins
Radio DDR
Vinyl LP
Sharp Pins is Kai Slater, whom you may know from his “serious” band, Matador-signed noise rock trio Lifeguard; here he is doing the low stakes indie pop side project thing (Radio DDR was originally a cassette-only release) and in the process casually outshining everything the “serious” band has ever put out. Featuring the beloved combination of melody-forward, ’60s sunshine pop and scratchy, gummy, ’80s home-taper aesthetics, Radio DDR takes the bright and breathless guitar pop we all know and love and gives it the vogue-ish ghost radio treatment with extra crunchy textures and warbly tones. The result is an admirably creative transcendence of the usual “chiming” descriptors associated with jangly shit, even as Slater’s songs remain typical of the genre: self-aware in a mostly sweet way, earnest, and a touch lovelorn.
–Mariana Timony
Snapped Ankles
Hard Times Furious Dancing
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP
The first album by the masked London electro-punks since 2021, road-tested across a run of “Forest Rayve” DJ nights in the UK last year (now that’s an on-brand focus group!) Hard Times Furious Dancing is Snapped Ankles’s most bracing, club-ready offering to date, with punchy polyrhythms, propulsive rock hooks, earthy percussion, and colorful, carnivalesque class commentary galore. “Pay The Rent” dedicates two stanzas to an app-loving gourmand reduced to “dismal foraging” at the over-priced grocery store because “deliveries seem grotesque,” while “Smart World” is sung from the perspectives of two friends trading cartoonishly animated hot takes regarding the coming singularity (“The amphetamine that keeps me fresh and relevant / I really really need it!”, says one brain-rotted philosopher to the other). Recession pop comes and goes, but Snapped Ankles’s austerity electronica is a sure thing: a primal, infectious show of solidarity.
–Zoe Camp
Vulture Feather
It Will Be Like Now
Vinyl LP
The cover of It Will Be Like Now depicts an upside down technology-obsessed society in the midst of being subsumed by the encroaching inevitability of the organic world. From their home in Northern California’s elevated forests, Vulture Feather want to turn away from cynicism yet these underground rock lifers (members hail from Wilderness and Don Martin Three) can’t help but acknowledge the fragile state of things. Is that a mushroom cloud blooming out the window? Tracks like “Flesh and Electronics” conjure Lungfish’s tantric vibe while others recall the stately post-punk of For Against. Fully engaged with the present moment, Vulture Feather chooses to sing songs of rejuvenation.
–Erick Bradshaw
Yetsuby
4EVA
Vinyl LP
If there are in fact pearly gates to walk through, this is what I would hope soundtracks the journey to the other side. Otherworldly, transcendent, gurgling vistas of bubblegum lava: These are some of the words that come to mind when listening to Seoul-based producer and DJ Yetsuby’s 4EVA. Gliding effortlessly between breakbeat, jungle, ambient, contemporary club and, if you can believe it, more, Yetsuby answers the question, “What if Mario Kart’s ‘Rainbow Road’ theme got an AI K-idol hyperpop remix?” on “Aestheti-Q” and sends us heavenward in sweet, sweet rapture on the luxuriating “Fly.” Truly, no one sounds like her.
