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Ramleh’s Hyper Vigilance is an important addition to 2025’s musical landscape. In a year marked by genocidal waves, fierce nationalism, and ever-swelling antipathy toward immigrants, Ramleh create hypnotic soundscapes – blends of post-rock, drone, sludgy metal, and industrial elements – pointing to apocalypse, the living nightmare, anxiety paired with a distinct counterphobia.
“Nothing Here but Fire” is built around wiry guitars and mid-tempo but formidable drums. The band move from spacious yet dense forays to passages that are noisy and agitative. Mundy’s chanty vocal borders on spoken-word à la Michael Gira. “Forage” is darkly ambient and riffy, crossing hard-edged electronics and a throbby bass. A murky and sinister groove conjures images of totalitarian regimes, soldiers marching, people hauled away in vans, a wannabe dictator delivering incendiary comments to a bug-eyed crowd.
The 19-minute “New National Anthem” further elaborates on the themes of apocalypse and human-caused horror. Electronic swirls and roils evoke power outages, bombs, fire, the destruction of art, conflagration of books. An au courant drone recalls a behemoth lurching through cities, razing farmlands. As the track progresses, sounds grow briefly minimal, eerily beautiful – illustrating the reprieves experienced even during a period of extended suffering – then turning noisy again, serrated, cacophonous. The ever-changing attributes of reality and zeitgeist.
Closer “Nityapralaya” similarly juxtaposes semi-paradisal and dystopian gestalts. The band embrace a bright, even celestial sound, as if to suggest the possibility of personal and cultural redemption. At the same time, distorted flourishes come and go, as does a droney, buzzy sound reminiscent of warplanes. Is the promised land an illusion? Is the end of the world finally here or can we – faced with annihilation, extinction – avert disaster? Can human consciousness undergo a radical transformation or is the matrix of our fundamental nature inescapable?
Hyper Vigilance ushers us through an existential gauntlet. Via precise arrangements and performances – chemistry honed over decades – Ramleh reflect humanity’s; i.e., our, proclivity for oppression, power-hoarding, stealing, exiling. We’re learning, again, that homo sapiens are the most savage of species, though we also contain within us the empathetic impulse. How will we – you and I – contribute to this ongoing story? Ramleh prompt us to ask: will we tilt toward our higher or lower selves? JOHN AMEN
Back in 2023 I saw what I thought was a great gig by an exciting new band from Manchester: Nightbus. After the show, when I shared my enthusiasm uninvited with one of the band, I was told, “No, we weren’t very good tonight.” Maybe that was an early hint of a perfectionist streak, who knows? Two years have passed since, during which Nightbus have become a duo – Olive Rees and Jake Cottier – signed to Melodic Records and, more importantly, made a seriously impressive and addictive debut album in Passenger.
Coming from Manchester could be intimidating if you’re working anywhere near the
increasingly amorphous and open-bordered world of post-punk, but Nightbus avoid the
weight of history and instead bring something fresh enough to justify their existence in the
here and now.
They weave dancefloor textures into a sound that sits somewhere between second- and
third-album Cure, synth-pop, moody new wave and, yes, a nod to the best of Factory
Records. The result is a dark, disorienting vein of existence-probing music that crawls under
your skin and stays there.
You know you’re in for something special the moment the skittery, dubstep-adjacent
instrumental “Somewhere, Nowhere” hits. From there it’s all seductive twists and turns
through varied soundscapes, with lyrics that tantalise like scraps of overheard conversation.
Since Passenger arrived, Nightbus have played a run of euphoric gigs with a real live and
seriously fantastic drummer, and already seem to be moving on to the next stage. Promise
delivered and a sign of very good things to come. My soundtrack to the tail-end of 2025. SIMON HEAVISIDES
Lael Neal’s 2015 debut album I’ll Be Your Man – a conventional, acoustic opening statement – immediately illuminated her to me as one to watch. However, never in my wildest dreams would I envision the transformative journey that has led Neale to 2025’s Altogether Stranger. Warm, evocative acoustic led tracks have shapeshifted into the technicolour dream that Lael paints on album number four.
Altogether Stranger operates at a street level, portraying the inner city chaos of Los Angeles, Lael Neale weaves the narrative around stories of consumer driven excess, observing the “Super 8 Motel where suits come and go out” found on "Tell Me How To Be Here". One of the projects defining moments can be found on "All Good Things Will Come To Pass", which takes an alternative look at ‘The Story of Genesis' where in this society, the garden of Eden has been replaced by “Amusement parks and prison yards, salad bars and shiny, shiny cars”, the songs memorability long secured in my year is also wonderful due to its surf-rock guitar solo and twee sounding xylophone melody.
Writing for an end of year list or even choosing an album of the year is always a difficult tossup, I can only decide after I go away and think “what did this album imprint in me?” and my everlasting love for Altogether Stranger comes from its deep rooted portrayal of big city anxieties vs the green pastures and rivers Neal deeply misses. She is “Torn between the town and country” to quote 2021’s "Every Star Shivers in the Dark".
It is on the last song, the mystical "There From Here", where Neal finds herself of all places, at an airport. She is determined to “Lift above the traffic, the engines of time,” in a desperate plea to leave the suffocation of the city behind.
Altogether Stranger may have fallen under the radar, in lieu of a monster year full of excellent albums. But, the emotion and the sincerity that radiate from this project are destined to reward the seekers, the ones looking below the surface, opening this toy box full of lofi melodies and omnichord flourishes will be rewarded with a project designed for endless relistens. TOBY FURLONG
Black metal is notorious for going against the grain, but this year, Agriculture truly embraced the opposite extreme. Rather than define the subculture based on what it's not, the homegrown Los Angelenos remained open to any and all outside interpretations. As is tradition in our indie-leaning circles, their sophomore album pushed them even further afield, pulling from Zen Buddhism as much as queer and trans AIDS-era literature. Both demanding and worthy of devotion, The Spiritual Sound reaped endless rewards for all to hear.
Agriculture made waves three years ago with their unsurprisingly divisive debut. Though admittedly tongue-in-cheek, labeling your band "ecstatic black metal" is asking for a slap on the wrist from the comment section, but those pesky gatekeepers couldn't stop their spirited new album from climbing onto the UK charts. Like a lightning rod, The Spiritual Sound channeled blast beats, chugging riffs, free jazz, the governing chaos of grindcore and alt-metal's grooviness all within its sprawling opening track. By sharing lyric duties between two vocalists, the record was figuratively – and literally – chopped in half. With equal parts purpose and abandon, side A burned for liberation from the weight of injustice while, like incense, the flip side drifted into a meditative chill, where shoegaze, post-rock and Eddie Van Halen peacefully coexist.
Faced with so much genre agnosticism and algorithmic suppression, what was miraculous is that this album never sounded forced or even scattered. Amidst a field overrun by lone wolves, The Spiritual Sound separated Agriculture from the pack by sticking to their collective pursuit. Whether screaming or singing, strumming or tremolo picking, together, the band were still in search of life's inescapable, innumerable pains and pleasures.
The Spiritual Sound ends with a scene that's familiar to anyone who's nostalgic for Norway's frostbitten shores. A presumably bearded young man, staring upon the vast indifference of the ocean, contemplates humanity's cursed existence. He's fucking freezing, and the water is cold, but "The Reply" doesn't echo black metal's long-held nihilistic outlook. Instead, the album's coda wades into the deep end, battling crashing cymbals, carried by a melody that falls like great sheets of rain (and the helping hand of Emma Ruth Rundle), until the band, with their heads on fire, reach a place where they can no longer stand. "I'm totally out of control / With a mouth full of water," in these trying times, how else can we live? WILL YARBROUGH
The great blender that is the future seeks to take the far reaches of the culturally specific and build them into a monolith. Live with that and let that breathe, now ask yourself; would you dare categorize Isabella Lovestory’s Vanity as Latin pop of all things? By the nomenclature rules of the past, it excels in pointing out how comically silly large umbrella terms in music can be. Vanity is a vast body of work surveilling a winding canon of pop music from around the world; it can be in Spanish, it can be in English, it can follow reggaeton rhythms and it can play 80s and coked up. This year is one of horrific, terrifying new territories past category and truth; flex your artistic muscles and fuck up the established order of things. It’s not like they got us anywhere productive.
For a record as blazingly confident as this one, I return most to its more anxious title track, glimpsing the self-objectification and cruelty involved in adopting the brat persona. It’s one of the only moments here where she’s abstained from sassy self-harmonizing, which is an immediate lock-in for the attuned listener. You’ll ask, “How much of myself do I forfeit in commodifying features and traits better kept like secrets to myself?” Then you’ll say, “I must be burning myself to ash trying to be a shooting star.” Then the beat comes back in and you’re off, for betterment and fear, to somewhere new. NOAH BARKER
Before his latest effort, Once Upon a Time… In Shropshire, it had been five years since Jerskin Fendrix unleashed his debut, Winterreise, into the world. And while that gap in time felt quiet, it wasn't because he was. In the half-decade since, the progressive pop experimentalist shifted the focus of his musical endeavors to scoring films for auteur and kindred weirdo Yorgos Lanthimos, translating his odd pop instincts into worlds far more improvised, expansive, and emotional. Now Jerskin, a singular talent in his own right, brings that sharpened vocabulary back home on Once Upon a Time… In Shropshire, a record that holds onto the strangeness that made him beloved, and yet tempers it with considerable grace. These songs carry sadness, longing, and the complicated warmth and guilt of returning to the place that shaped you. It's an album formed by life, death, desire, and distance – all sifted through his unmistakable sense of tone and his willingness to be boldly himself. KYLE KOHNER
"Some have money plenty, but still they crave for more / They will not lend a hand to help the starving poor," hisses Jim Ghedi during “What Will Become of England”, a drone-fuelled, relentlessly heavy (literally and figuratively) reimaging of a traditional folk song originally recorded in the 1950s, which provides one of the many highlights on Wasteland.
The powerfully indignant rendition’s seamless symbiosis of ancient folk traditions and unmistakably contemporary musical reference points (the tone is arguably nearer to doom metal than a song-swapping session at a pub function room) and enduring themes of injustice, inequality and lack of opportunity that derive from bygone eras but seem all too sadly topical today characterises what made Ghedi’s fourth solo album one of the genuine masterpiece to emerge from the ongoing folk revival.
2021’s In The Furrows of the Common Place could occasionally strike an uneasy truce between the South Yorkshire-based guitarist’s roots in bucolic, fingerpicked instrumentals (check out 2018’s A Hymn For Ancient Land, a real hidden gem) and his increasing ambition as a politically and socially informed songwriter. Wasteland, however, proved totally and thrillingly committed to Ghedi’s uncompromisingly bold and epic agenda that mashed folk-inspired song structures and settings (you can imagine these tunes rising off the pages of Ben Myers’s inequality-ridden historical fable of the Calder Valley, Gallows Pole, a definite kindred spirit in tone and theme) into electric instrumentation, explosive rock band lift-offs (the adrenalized “Sheaf & Feld” resembles knotty Post-Rock played with hardcore dynamics) and doom-laden, droning strings, capped by Ghedi’s increasing range and confidence as a falsetto-frequenting singer.
Their primary inspirations may be in the past, but the apocalyptic scenery evoked by the elegiac majesty of Ghedi’s startlingly assured songs felt all too easy to connect to the here and now. The title track’s desolate windswept roar, centred on a man returning home to find very little in terms of hope or opportunity, feels all too topical at the end of a year when the kind of brutal large-scale destruction that turns cities into, well, a wasteland has been livestreamed into our homes. The haves versus have-nots themes of “What Will Become of England” also resonate powerfully at a time when indecently privileged individuals have funnelled mass hysteria against those with the least.
Fierce and bruised, intense but also brutally beautiful, Wasteland was a startling creative breakthrough, and one of 2025’s most noteworthy (and underappreciated) albums. JANNE OINONEN
Chinese multi-hyphenate – writer, performer, producer, multi-instrumentalist – Xinwenyue Shi has travelled a notable artistic distance between 2023’s 巴蜀文艺复兴:第二章 (Bashu Renaissance: Chapter Two) and this February’s 灰太阳 (Gray Gray Sun). More than a stylistic shift, it marks a change of perspective in Shi’s ongoing conversation with ‘home’ as a concept. Bashu Renaissance played as a vivid dispatch from his hometown, a record where Shi served as cultural documentarian, blending Sichuan-dialect Mandarin with English across relaxed hip-hop structures and traditional guoyue instrumentation – a sonic nod both to his Bashu upbringing and the years he spent studying in Boston. It was a warm, communal excavation: part rap, part alt-pop ritual, rooted in the culture he calls his ‘baptism.’
灰太阳 , by contrast, softens the pulse and blurs the edges. The visual world around the album – the monochromatic cover image photographed by the artist of his own grandfather, its weather-bound track list – creates an atmosphere of static calm, as if the entire project unfolds beneath a low, unbroken ceiling of cloud. “Clouds” embodies this shift, trading the narrative bustle of Shi’s earlier work for quiet meditation: "I want to carry my hulusi and play in the park / Lightning flashes and thunder strikes all at once / When will I be able to meet my people again?"
灰太阳 feels prescient. It crystallises a broader movement among young Chinese artists who are turning regional identity inward; an emotional language rather than a purely cultural one (see: Hiperson, Shu Ying). Shi’s East-meets-West approach embodies this duality. His earlier work celebrated community, where 灰太阳 creates nuance out of that very same cultural resource. Through its exploration of solitude and interiority, its desire for transition, it gives depth to Shi’s artistic outlook; creating a counterpoint to its predecessor’s sonic brightness.
“Rainmaking” exemplifies this sense of climatological identity as emotional lens: a 6pm Jianghao Weather Station broadcast announces that Chengdu remains "shrouded in a grey sun." Shi’s keys offer delicate word-painting before crisp percussion and the reappearance of the hulusi carry the track forward, cresting into a crescendo begging for the breaking of overcast stagnation, for the onslaught of a downpour and the heralding of Spring.
What made Bashu Renaissance so compelling, its portraiture of communal life, its warm rootedness, resurfaces here transformed. On 灰太阳, that intimacy becomes interiority. The focus shifts from people and place to mood and emotional memory.灰太阳 stands as the private counterpart to Bashu Renaissance’s public chronicle. For listeners drawn to its predecessor’s lively glow, 灰太阳 offers a melancholic but deeply compelling and quietly ambitious light. RHYS MORGAN
In English, Deseo, Carne Y Voluntad translates to Desire, Flesh and Will. A simple, direct statement befitting of the heart-on-your-sleeve music this Chilean seven-piece are making. Half way through “Liebre”, after a few minutes of gothic guitar lines, a voice starts ruminating to itself. A few minutes later and he’s pouring his soul out above building drums, shouting about biting, chewing, and breaking through depressive episodes. Candelabro are making noisy, earnest prog-rock that speaks to the yearning of a dejected youth: in choruses of harmonised wails, the album feels like one big urge.
And at 73 minutes, they make you stick around. It entices through its unpredictability — at times, the band sounds like they’re shooting from the hip. Take “Pecado”: it opens with frantic screams and staccato horns, teases a steady lounge melody, then almost instantly, as if at random, spins into high-tempo klezmer. Meanwhile, “Prisión de carna” is a smooth alt-rock number that climaxes at the 3 and a half minute mark, and then spends the next 3 minutes tumbling through a lyricless, at times sinister jazz breakdown.
But the length doesn’t just make room for tangents – it encourages the necessary emotional buy-in. By the end of the sweeping “Cáliz”, the catharsis feels tangible, as rousing sax lines gradually climb over a big, post-rock finale. Within all of the roomy, grand production, and the lyrics’ cryptic, religious existentialism, Candelabro’s music feels truly sincere.
This is heard best on “Domingo de ramos”, which – although only the second track – feels like the album’s high point. A short, joyous romp, driven by the addictive hook: ‘Tear down the fences/Feel the voices’. Sang in a loud chorus of harmonies, it not only sounds euphoric, but it feels like you can hear each band member. It’s become one of the year’s most charming tracks, because underneath its impressive instrumentation, structure, and melody, you can hear seven musicians having fun.
Young, jazzy, prog-rock music like this often ends up drawing comparisons to London’s Windmill scene, but Chile has its own vibrant prog-rock history, and with Deseo, Carne y Voluntad, Candelabro are writing themselves into it. BEN FAULKNER
Signed to the female-centred ‘creative nucleus’ marvaða – aka the most exciting new label in Iceland right now – Ida Schuften Juhl’s new project knackered was one of the standouts at this year's Airwaves. Moving to Iceland in Denmark in 2015, Juhl’s been active in the Reykjavík music scene for close to a decade (notably under the name IDK IDA, releasing as part of the Post-Dreifing arts collective) but her sound as knackered levels up a singular, expansive take on electronic music.
Stuttering and popping across a painterly canvas, knackered’s first release fyi draws from UK rave as much as the superlative sonic textures of Aphex Twin and the result is some of the most intelligent sounds you’ll hear this year. Post-Dreifing’s ethos of “Do It Together” (D.I.T. rather than D.I.Y.) is no more evident than in her live performance – she’s a firework: commanding, explosive and utterly joyful, welcoming the audience to join her in a celebration . She’s got a fan in Björk, playing as part of her Full Moon series, and rejects Spotify or Amazon Music – the fyi EP is only on Bandcamp. PAUL BRIDGEWATER
In an exceptional year for music coming out of the Beirut underground (see also Sanam’s Sametou Sawan and Yara Asmar’s everyone i love is sleeping & i love them so so much), the return of Yasmine Hamdan, a true pioneer of the Lebanese alternative and electronic scene, made the deepest impression on me.
Although she’s long been based in Paris, Hamdan’s connection with her homeland is absolutely central to I remember I forget, with its potent annotations of memory and mourning rooted in the country’s multilayered crises. Breaking an eight-year silence, she sings of scorched luck and beautiful losers, of gaping wounds and crippled hopes, and, on the standout title track, the normalisation of leadership as incompetent as it is criminal. If that sounds painfully familiar, its relevance to the world beyond Beirut is not lost on Hamdan, who says the record became “a symbol, a metaphor, a catharsis” for humanity in turmoil all around the world.
Reuniting with French producer Marc Collin (most famously of Nouvelle Vague), Hamdan draws on tarab and tarweeda folk traditions from Lebanon and Palestine, reconfiguring them within her own vocabulary of artful, often bold experiments in trip-hop, anxious chanson, and fractured electronics. “The path is bittersweet, habibi,” she sings, muddling through rememberings on the atypically loose-sounding “Shadia شادية” , ultimately finding solace from the fog in “Reminiscence غروب”, I remember I forget’s transformative conclusion. ALAN PEDDER
The tornado on the cover of Syndey Sprague’s third album – and first released indepdently – Peak Experience perfectly depicts the whirlwind of life bottled inside. The Phoenix, Arizona songwriter has made this determined return her most personal offering yet, and with it comes an escape from a maddeningly chaotic world.
On opener "As Scared As Can Be", Sprague's knack for lyric writing comes in full effect. "I’m so small and as scared as can be / I taste salt pretty sure you fucking hate me" is an excellent way to portray crying in the face of the consequences of your actions. And it's throughout that the personal tidbits and geographical locations piece together her experiences. The albums real moment is "Flat Circle", a cut that reckons with the idea of time and existentialism through romantics, as the eye of the tornado whips us out the other side of delicate precursor “Long Island” into the stormy distortion that feels apt to cry into.
With that, Peak Experience, if anything else, is a perfect album to get lost in for a brief time – clocking in at only 20 mins – the offering is an encapsulation of keeping things simple, while laying everything out on the table. Fully authentic to her experiences, those that feel as unknown as they do relatable, as vivid as they do abstract, Sydney Sprague has proven she remains a formidable songwriting talent with a penchant for the heavenly melodies that befit the beautiful crushing realities of growing and living. STEVEN LOFTIN
Amsterdam-based DJ and producer Himera’s Now I Know What Dreams Are Made Of is a high-powered playground of hyperpop spells and ambient sorcery, childlike things with “sappy” and “sentimental” overtones. Demand for Himera’s supersaw brand of maximalist magic has mushroomed significantly in recent years. Well-versed and well-connected, collaborators include Namasenda, Hannah Diamond, umru, and f5ve. Their trance-tinged third record sees them continue to reject the rules of perfect pop, far removed from some of the more palatable sounds of formative PC Music pioneers, instead conjuring an absurdist fantasy realm that defies belief on a first listen.
Educational opener “Aeiou” plus choppy cuts “Pop Song” and “Dizzy” are shiny whistling kettles full to the brim with bubbling, squeaky toy synths and competing kid laughs, wacky Willy Wonka worlds that entice and propel – as if the Great Glass Elevator attempted atmospheric escape. “I Still See You” is as close as it gets to the spectrum of radio-friendly invitation, a mangling melody maker conducting rave euphoria in Robert Miles’ stead. Nora Korra’s illusory narration feels almost tangible: “I just wanna be in your field of vision / Because I can be the thing you long for”, sings Himera's sleep paralysis angel over unrelenting “I”’s.
A gathering of thoughts, feelings, and a whole life of lived experiences, each track of Himera’s intricate dreamscape tells a bedtime story, even in the absence of structure or spoken word. “Sweet Dreams” is exactly that: starry-eyed, twinkling percussion leaving room for a digital lullaby of sorts. Fairytale finale “Oh How You Look When You’re Asleep", a woodwind birdsong basking in the glow of a breaking dawn. Himera’s discipline escapes delirious definition, clever and deceptive, Now I Know What Dreams Are Made Of is CoComelon for the club, leaving its listeners lucid and wanting more. DOUGLAS JARDIM
The best kind of album that dwells within the bedroom produced indie rock mould is how it treats its tone and sound differently. So much of it for the past few years has been played around within a straightforward edge, for better and for worse, that it becomes a curiosity how one artist can play around with the genre despite the limitations thrust upon them. Djuno’s debut album, Moonrats, fortunately resolves that thought with a level of wit and raw nerve that’s a cut above.
Despite the restraints that Djuno has to manoeuvre, there’s a lot to simmer in the craft that he worked so hard to create. All things lo-fi and programmed become smeared amidst his tendency to lean into the ambiguous roughness of the scenery. He modifies his vocals on cuts like “Oktah”, simulating a conversation with himself and somebody else. He also shifts into an intimate singer-songwriter on “Maura Crushed” with intricate strumming, but breaks out into this alternative rock blast on “Drenched In Amber”. He has worked with little, but clearly, he brings in a lot for everyone to chew on.
All that only highlights his attention to detail and atmosphere. Utilising his adoration for the ’90s singer-songwriter and connecting it with the facets of bedroom pop, indietronica, and alternative rock that he stitches together and ruffles them in a way that works in his favour, resulting in Moonrats as a record that might not pull you in at first glance, but definitely invites you to listen very closely to the finer details. “Beak” best represents all of this. The mixing muffles inwards and clears outwards as he mutters: “I slam the door shut / and I open the windows”. A simple note between sound and lyric that seemingly came out of nowhere, but really, it’s one of those details that signifies Djuno as a musician worth looking into. LOUIS PELINGEN
“My favourite colour is gold.” That’s how Kellen Baker opened his debut full-length. Written over the past five years, these 19 songs don’t form a typical album: Talulah’s Tape – an homage to Oxford’s janglers Talulah Gosh – was first released back in January. On tape. It took ten months for the Carpark and Smoking Room labels to team up and drag the Indianapolis songwriter into 2025 with vinyl and streaming releases. But Baker only came halfway in: “My favourite colour is gold” is cut from a vintage interview with The Jesus and Mary Chain. Taken with the album’s other interstitial skits, you might think it’s throwaway. But this is The JAMC’s subversively nonsensical answer to a petty question, and their refusal to be dragged into reductive, hot-or-not discourse thus becomes a mission statement for anyone making or enjoying such a happily antiquated, melody-forward guitar racket.
Having established its M.O., Talulah’s Tape plays like your channel-changer is stuck flicking from college radio stations circa late-80s to random Instagram reels: SpongeBob clips, the infamous “what the hell is even that?!” meme. It’s great for an ADHD brain. It’s even greater for fans of goofy but accomplished DIY pop. These are guitar parts that you need to sing at the top of your voice: buzzy, wiggly leads and chonky strum-o-ramas. It can be ramshackle like the intro to “Fall Away” or “Wallace”. There are also relaxed midtempo grooves like the opener, “Down on Me”, which is absurdly replayable, and wistful bossa-pop in “Everyday is Another”. The production sounds like the amps have been shrink-rayed down to dollhouse size. But because everyone’s playing like the price of fun depends on it, there’s this brilliant effect where it feels like Talulah’s Tape cannot contain its bursting personality, its avalanche of ideas, and – we’ll eventually see – its own longevity. HAYDEN MERRICK
There’s one record that’s been absent from most end of year lists I’ve seen, and that’s Leith Ross’s I Can See The Future. Ross has been a mainstay of internet-era folk since the pandemic, though their discography has largely remained in the hands of a select few who know. I find this a real shame, though I’m not sure Ross themselves would necessarily change that state of affairs. Rather, they create simply for the enjoyment and purity of creation, believing in the process more than the dissemination of a product. Maybe that pride in the craft is why everything they touch is so good. Though I’ve been a longtime admirer, I Can See The Future was a cut above the rest. The record, produced by Rostam Batmanglij, features songs that are bigger and more ambitious than any of Ross’s past work. Where their last records have mostly stuck to soft, acoustic whispers, suped-up cuts like “Terrified”, “Point of View”, and “(I Can See) The Future” show a new Ross willing to take risks and push their own envelope. There are influences from jazz and electronica, major instrumental innovations, and even a feature from Dijon. These songs drift between grief, joy, the state of the world, and the state of the self with ease, tackling complex terrain like it’s a simple after dinner musing from a friend. From its production to its melodies to its words, this album was one I spent much time marveling over. And yet, it somehow seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. I hope this blurb somewhat rights that wrong and convinces you to give it a try. LAURA DAVID
English (US) · 