This is a list of 10 terrific albums from 2025.

I make lists like this every year, and I finally understand why: It gives me the impetus to seek out new music throughout the year, rather than to just listen to stuff from decades ago. Because that’s the sort of thing I’d do, otherwise. This year’s Spotify Wrapped thing told me that my musical age is 70. The cheek!

But also, this year I found a good reason to write about music. To quote Ted Gioia:

“Music writers have a greater responsibility to write positive music reviews about outstanding works than negative hit pieces on bad music. The bad music will go away on its own. But good (and even great) artists often need a helping hand if their work is to survive.”

This is why, as per, I’ll be focusing on stuff that’s unlikely to get featured in many other end-of-year roundups. Because if I don’t who will?

Starlight Temple – Mystic Moon Palace

One long track, subtitled This Shining Star Will Continue to Shine Bright for You, Even if I’m the Only One Left in the Sky. That might sound like a line from Kingdom Hearts, and that’s fine: For this sounds like Kingdom Hearts music. Picture Sora and his friends visiting that Mystic Moon Palace, and imagine the sort of music that would play as they learn important lessons about heart and light. I hope you like panpipes.

The piece moves through a few sections, each of which may evoke a different part of the starlight ritual: The anointments and other preparations; the procession and the dance; the devotion, and the final ascent to the Moon and the stars. It gets particularly beautiful from the 27 minute mark, and almost reaches the celestial heights that Vangelis attained on his final Juno to Jupiter album.

There’s lore if you want it. Explore the Nightmare Disciples portal to access all the sigils and diagrams you’ll need for safer virtual mysticism. But whatever you do, do not listen to the second track on this album. It’s a version of the first track, simply subtitled “version”, and it sounds like the music you’d hear if you called purgatory and they put you on hold. For 40 minutes.

Fish Basket – Fish Basket and His Second Album

Fish Basket, that giant fish who just wants to hang out at high school like a real boy, has stepped away from the basketball court to blast out his second album, for his friends.

This is a basket of mellow psych jams which frequently burst into flame. Some of the riffs RAWK, and you get some gruff ritualistic chanting during the opening number. But beyond that, these pieces are happy to just drift, rather like Fish Basket himself used to glide through the water before he decided to take to the land to live as a boy.

It’s nice to imagine that all subsequent releases will document Fish Basket’s various achievements, like Scientist albums. Fish Basket rids the world of the curse of the evil vampires? Fish Basket wins the World Cup? Anything is possible, when you’re Fish Basket.

Bhajan Bhoy – Bhoy on the Wire

Bhajan Bhoy is Ajay Saggar, who’s been doing this whole DIY music thing in one way or another for decades now. Bhoy on the Wire is a selection of largely improvised compositions that were originally broadcast live on a Radio Lancashire show: Steve Barker’s On The Wire. Ajay has been listening to this show since 1984, and Steve has supported his endeavours for decades. These performances were given as a thank you for years of service. They’re a celebration of underground and visionary music, and those who seek it out and let it sing.

Each session nods to a different North West location (Blackpool, Blackburn, Burnley, Preston etc.). The mood is often murky, and you might picture a foggy evening on the outskirts of such a town. But this isn’t some tired meditation on how it’s “grim up north”. No, this is for a different kind of meditation. These are sounds for your inner world, specifically crafted to induce a state of bliss. “Music like shower”, is how Ajay puts it. One track appears to sample a Buddha machine!

Cyanide Sisters – S/T

A fuzzy incandescent wall of Spectoral sound buries the sort of melodies that feel like they’ve been part of your world forever. Some of this reminds me of the Magnetic Fields’ Distortion album. It sometimes sounds like The Raveonettes jamming across time and space with The Japandroids.

Yes, if you’ve heard Psychocandy you know exactly what to expect. But who cares? Guitar, drums, voice, crunch, and heartbreak: Sometimes this is all you need. And this is also one of those rare albums where, each time I hear it, a different song tends to stand out as my favourite.

Iain Bellamy – Riversphere

I first heard British saxophonist Iain Bellamy, who is apparently known on the continent as “the fantastic Englishman”, via the soundtrack to Dave McKean’s 2005 film MirrorMask. Iain went for a sort of steampunk circus jazz sound for that film, unstuck from any particular time or place. For me, the music was the most outstanding aspect of the whole film, so I couldn’t tell you why it’s taken me this long to seek out more of Iain’s work.

There’s less of the circus in Riverspehere, but this too feels timeless. Ten light and airy compositions, each of which feels like a wide open space full of intriguing pockets of sound to explore. This is apparently but volume 1 of Riversphere, so hopefully Iain is just beginning to explore these waters. But even if he takes things no further, there are still plenty of glittering treasures to be found in this vibrant stretch of river. I particularly dig the guitar, which sparkles over the surface of these pieces like sunlight dancing on rippling water.

Miffle – Goodbye, World!

This one’s just as precious as it looks. The titles are all in lowercase, which is something I usually cannot abide. But I’ll make an exception here. Because just look at that elephant’s face.

These are gentle lo-fi lullabies for zither and tape loop. It mostly sounds like Fennesz, but you might also think of the ambient interludes you used to get on a Múm album. The song titles hint at a nocturnal urban existence, but also at anhedonia induced by too much screentime and too little sleep.

It all ends with the title track, which of course could be read as one final, desperate act. But I don’t know. The whole album feels too warm for this to be the case. I prefer to think of it as a bittersweet farewell to the waking world, in the hopes that one will dream something wonderful before morning comes.

DoorHead – Compendium

Early this year, an untitled video appeared in my YouTube recommendations. The thumbnail was baffling: A dark brick-lined tunnel; a bank of computer monitors; experiments in motion capture; and a friendly smiling face in the middle of a diagram that appeared to illustrate the connections between Being, Non-Being, and Becoming; along with the links between the physical and mental worlds, and the platonic mathematical world.

The video turned out to be an audio recording. The thumbnail remained unchanged throughout. Reading the comments, it soon became clear that I wasn’t the only one who’d found this thing in my feed. “This video finds you,” said Super Awesome Weird Guy. There were also references to an “incident” which is due to take place on 17 September 2026. “They will never be the same again,” warned Quintessential I2I.

All of this was the work of an entity called Doorhead. The baffling thumbnail was in fact the cover of an album called Compendium. This album is freely available to all from a Neocities site. You get over two hours of melting glitchy noise and eerie digital mindscapes. It’s always 2:00 am somewhere, and after the incident, it will always be 2:00 am everywhere.

Celestaphone & Dealers of God – Cult Subterranea

Don’t worry too much about that Mudokonny creature on the cover. He might look like he bears ill will, and he probably does. But mostly he’s just happy that his mouth’s finally been unstitched.

This is a concept album about an MC who learns the secrets of the universe from a bunch of aliens, who may actually be holograms. But at the same time, it’s a tribute to the author Harry Horse, who died in circumstances that were simultaneously tragic, gruesome, and mysterious.

In 1996 Harry worked on a video game called Drowned God: Conspiracy of the Ages, which was itself based on a manuscript Harry had forged that he claimed to have been written by the poet Richard Henry Horne. Cult Subterranea could be the soundtrack to a sequel that was never to be.

With all this in mind, you might expect mystical new age crystal music drenched in synthetic strings. That would have floated my boat, but instead you get a blizzard of paranoid rapping over anxious art rock, with occasional transmissions from another place, as if extradimensional beings are taking control of the narrative by force. Pay attention: This will all be important later.

Nate Mercereau, Josh Johnson, Carlos Niño – Openness Trio

Guitarist Nate Mercereau, saxophonist Josh Johnsn, and percussionist Carlos Niño are the Openness Trio. And these pieces are so open they feel a thousand miles wide.

Each piece was improvised live in a different Californian setting, most of which were outdoors. You can feel the Sun warming the back of your neck, and you can almost taste the hint of sage and pepper on the wind.

These are small worlds to inhabit, and I could happily immerse myself in any one of these bright, breezy, sunlit lands for hours, or days. People like to describe this sort of music as “mind expanding”. I’m tempted to go even further: This is life-expanding music.

Martin Grech – Dragon’s Blood

Ta-dah! With no fanfare whatsoever, Martin Grech put a new album out. I only discovered it myself by chance, when I happened to revisit Unholy while listening to a collection of albums from 2005. And there it was, sitting there quite the thing at the forefront of his discography: Dragon’s Blood, 2025. Strewth.

I seem to recall his last album came out quite unexpectedly too. And while Hush Mortal Core was a maximalist vampire opera for extroverted djentleman, Dragon’s Blood is even more understated than his previous high watermark, 2007’s March of the Lonely. Most of the songs here feature little more than piano and voice, and his voice sounds more spectral than ever. There are strings, and sometimes some distant horns. But these too are ghostly. They haunt the songs from the shadows, only occasionally surging and filling these desolate spaces with light.

So this is what Martin Grech does, now. He disappears for years at a time, only to quietly emerge from his chrysalis with new sounds that, for me at least, immediately trivialise most everything that anyone else is currently doing that year. There was a point when I was playing this one first thing in the morning, every single day. I almost never do that. Already it’s become of those albums that I may as well keep behind glass, which I’ll break in case of emergency. It’s really special.

Yes, there’s a playlist.

It features many more artists besides these 10. And not all of these 10 made it. Some of them aren’t on Spotify, bless ’em.

Doesn’t that Stereolab song sound exactly like the credits music from Sonic 3?

Here it is: