The Top 50 Albums of 2025

2025. Where do we start?

Last year’s Christmas decorations were barely down when Ethel Cain released her dread-laden opus Perverts in the first week of January – an energy-sapping, daylight-depleted period at the best of times. The album’s nightmarish ambience held a mirror up to a collective foreboding mood, compounded soon after by the death of visionary director David Lynch.

Is it a coincidence that the death of Lynch, who did so much to push the outer limits of imagination, came at the start of a year when mass-produced AI slop swelled even higher? Probably. But when a third of daily music uploads are AI-generated and 97 percent of people can’t tell the difference, the idea that art should challenge and unsettle and strive to say something new or difficult feels more pertinent than ever.

In a landscape shaped by palette-shrinking algorithms and the predictability of being dished up what we already like, we believe the albums in this list stand quite apart, affirming that true exploration arises from pockets of culture shaped by real people with their own collage of eclectic references, experiences and tastes.

Here, familiar faces sit alongside new ones: seven former Crack Magazine cover stars, 13 artists we met in print over the last 12 months, legends like Cosey Fanni Tutti and Blood Orange sharing space with breakthrough debut albums by DJ Haram, Annahstasia and YHWH Nailgun. But there’s more – so, so much more – to dig into. Crucially, we’re pretty certain that no algorithm, however fine-tuned, could produce a list quite like this; and that is, of course, what we reckon makes these lists – or any act of human cataloguing and curation – worth something. It’s also a lot of fun.

These are the 50 best albums of the year, with 25 short takes and 25 fuller breakdowns, according to Crack Magazine.

Where to start with 2025? Start here.

Pink Siifu

Black’!Antique

Dynamite Hill

Avant-garde, freeform and caked in industrial runoff, Black’!Antique is another long-distance transmission from the brain of one of rap’s greatest outliers.

Masma Dream World

Please Come to Me

Valley of Search

Devi Mambouka’s heady, pan-spiritual brew blurs the lines between ancient and modern, sacred and profane.

Water from Your Eyes

It’s a Beautiful Place

Matador

Chaotic post-punk, zonked country-pop, proggy shredding, bubblegum grunge – it’s all here in the art-rock duo’s guitar-forward second album.

John Glacier

Like a Ribbon

Young

Glacier offers more questions than answers on this gloriously offhand and inscrutable debut of deadpan streams of consciousness and addictive glitchscapes.

Maxo

Mars Is Electric

Smileforme

The Los Angeles rapper swaps introspection for a captivating brand of dreamy existentialism on this collection of lush, hypnagogic hip-hop.

Quinie

Forefowk, Mind Me

Upset the Rhythm

Collected across Argyll on horseback, these traditional Gaelic songs take on a bewitching power in Quinie’s hands.

Maria Somerville

Luster

4AD

The wild, rugged landscapes and mythical history of Ireland’s Connemara permeate Luster’s otherworldly dreampop like sea fog blowing over the shore.

coatshek

Sound Bath

Dark Entries

Emerging first as a mix designed to soundtrack an imaginary gay sauna, this set of humid, cruisy ambient techno is music to play in the dank.

Mark William Lewis

Mark William Lewis

A24

Lewis flips the singer-songwriter script with his spooky baritone and spectral soundscapes, redolent of the Durutti Column, Dean Blunt and Talk Talk.

Smerz

Big City Life

Escho

Anti-pop, but not as you know it. The Norwegian duo have coined their own brand of dystopian R&B with a suite of slinky, lo-fi dread.

DJ Haram

Beside Myself

Hyperdub

The New York producer changes course once again with a furious, electrifying album of claustrophobic noise, nascent MCing and darbuka breakbeats.

Carrier

Rhythm Immortal

Modern Love

Guy Brewer breaks free from 4/4 club music and conventional genres in this essential, impressionistic study of sound and rhythm.

France

Destino Scifosi

Standard In-Fi

The ultimate document of the French-Belgian psych-droners’ earth-scorching power, propelled by the white-hot squeal of Yann Gourdon’s electrified hurdy-gurdy.

DJ K

Rádio Libertadora

Nyege Nyege Tapes

The bruxaria-funk pioneer doubles down on his blown-out sonic barrage and ups the revolutionary fervour. The result is incendiary.

Lucrecia Dalt

A Danger to Ourselves

RVNG Intl.

The Colombian musician is at her most free and unguarded, both sonically and lyrically, as she embraces a period of stillness and the electric intimacy of newfound love.

Ganavya

Nilam

Leiter

Named after the Tamil word for “land”, Nilam is an antidote to the rootlessness that followed endless touring – a prayer-like ode to stillness, grounded in tradition.

FKA twigs

Eusexua

Young

Inspired by a transformative period in Prague’s techno scene, Twigs’ transcendental third album channels the rush of a night out that’s as healing as it is hedonistic.

Blawan

SickElixir

XL

Blawan channels inner turmoil into an increasingly feral sound on this fearsome second album, cementing him as one of our most uniquely thrilling voices.

Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force

Khadim

Ndagga

Berlin’s dub-techno don Mark Ernestus reconvenes his Senegalese project for four unmissable, heavyweight, spiritually charged steppers.

Men I Trust

Equus Asinus

Self-released

On the first of two equine-inspired albums by the Canadians this year, the trio blend guitar, warm syncopated bass and lo-fi synths into a hazy, dreamlike sound.

Milkweed

Remscéla

Broadside Hacks

The hauntological odd-folk duo get weirder still, conjuring warped Appalachian soundscapes from the bones of Irish mythology’s Táin Bó Cúailnge.

Horsegirl

Phonetics On and On

Matador

A quantum leap for the Chicago trio, who trade the high-school, sugar-rush energy of their debut for a masterclass in tender indie-pop minimalism.

Rainy Miller

Joseph, What Have You Done?

Fixed Abode / Supernature

Preston’s Rainy assumes the mantle of a northern gothic preacher, solemnly taking the pulse of his home region while dialling up the industrial melodrama.

Caroline

Caroline 2

Rough Trade

More mesmerising symphonic post-rock from the London eight-piece, who are hitting an increasingly emo stride.

Titanic

HAGEN

Unheard of Hope

Mexico City power couple Mabe Fratti and Héctor Tosta deliver a second album of contrasts – stark tension, pop hooks and theatrical peaks – anchored by Fratti’s cello and voice.

Nick León

A Tropical Entropy

TraTraTrax

The Miami producer du jour’s debut album is as sensitively comforting as it is built to make you dance. Although it features Bikini – the Erika de Casier-assisted 2024 song-of-the-summer contender – this is Nick León’s official arrival, and it doesn’t disappoint. It sparkles with breaks, deconstructed dembow and occasional flashes of romantic, yearning electronic production that glisten like the water one might see in the bay off the PAMM from the Downtown Metromover. In many ways, A Tropical Entropy distils a very specific type of Miami. It’s music for crying in the Club Space bathroom – or maybe its smaller sister venue, Floyd, in keeping with the album’s intimate mood – before dancing the feelings out, shutting the party down and rushing to catch a slightly hungover sunrise on Mid-Beach.

E.R. Pulgar

Yeat

Dangerous Summer

Lyfestyle / Field Trip / Capitol

On Dangerous Summer, Yeat’s chameleonic approach to making music feels fully realised. There are residual traces of the sweaty rage rap he built his rep on, but for the most part, Yeat treats his voice like a lump of neon Play-Doh, manipulating it over psychedelic beats that feel like they were cooked up on board a tesseract. Take opener Put It Ong: 25 seconds of sweet choral harmonies give way to intergalactic synth blasts before Yeat enters the fray with a breathy growl. At times, his tongue-in-cheek nursery rhymes are downright hilarious – “I fucked my money up, and now it’s pregnant with triplets,” he flexes on Loco. Elsewhere, there’s a refreshing soulfulness to his unselfconscious crooning, like on Fly Nitë, a sensual collaboration with FKA twigs which blooms from woozy purple trap into liquid drum ’n’ bass.

Robert Kazandjian

Tyler, the Creator

Don’t Tap the Glass

Columbia

Tyler, the Creator was forged in the blog era, the MP3 era – the era that was supposed to kill off the album as the primary vehicle for artistic expression. Instead, something strange happened: the kid who screamed “Kill people, burn shit, fuck school” became one of the preeminent album-makers of his generation. His records will stand as monuments in rap culture – and there have been more hits than misses. You can call Don’t Tap the Glass Tyler’s dancefloor album. It’s a grandiose synth drama that swerves from candy-sweet rushes to disorienting bass-heavy blasts, from chic disco-funk to, as the album artwork suggests, the fizzing Casio electronics of 1980s hip-hop. But Tyler never resists leaving his calling card. You get jazzy chords, some grinding callbacks to his horrorcore days and a general feeling of N*E*R*D being a key text. “I’m never sloppy,” declares Tyler on Sucka Free. With Don’t Tap the Glass, he’s added another classic to his stack.

Dean Van Nguyen

Joanne Robertson

Blurrr

AD 93

Joanne Robertson’s music, like her work as a visual artist, offers no fixed points. It drifts gently between colour and feeling. On Blurrr, her sixth album and second for experimental pacesetters AD 93, she conjures so much in these in-between spaces, inviting listeners into the vast desolation. Made on the fault line between improvisation and intentionality, these tracks feel as though they’re unspooling as they go, circling an idea without quite naming it. Yes, Robertson’s voice still sometimes seems to come from the end of a tiled corridor or float in on a warm current, but the emotional proximity is now touch-tight. On the opening Ghost, the buzz of guitar strings and the scrapes and breaths add a sense of human tactility amid the gloom, while the addition of Oliver Coates’ cello on three tracks is subtle but grounding, providing a gravitational centre to these uncontainable worlds.

Louise Brailey

Time Cow

Scaring 1100 Chickens to Death

Kullijhan

Like a master horror director, Equiknoxx’s Time Cow manages to conjure creeping moods using only shadows. Scaring 1100 Chickens to Death is functionally a beat tape, yet sonically it can be rhythmically splintered dancehall with evasive electronic details drifting through the claustrophobic air of an infested jungle, or brooding trap beats that seem to come from the other side of a wall. You can never quite make out coherent shapes, and the frantic, handmade clicks and clacks, often set to Dilla time and reverberating to the tip of your spine, only extend the sluggish eeriness. Far from Time Cow’s first rodeo in pushing dancehall’s boundaries, the album nevertheless becomes one of the genre’s most inventive records in years, as distinctive as it is disconcerting.

Nathan Evans

Blood Orange

Essex Honey

RCA / Domino

Returning to his hometown of Ilford in 2023 to be at his dying mother’s bedside, Dev Hynes found the familiar streets sharpening his feelings of grief and nostalgia. He channels this quiet devastation into Essex Honey’s rich soundworld: a melancholy wash of orchestral strings, sultry saxophone and skittering hi-hats, punctuated with snippets of conversation, the crackle of a vinyl record, the scrape of a plectrum on guitar strings. Clear influences hover throughout, from 80s college rock to the ethereal guitar of the Durutti Column (sampled directly on The Field) via the intimate introspection of Elliott Smith, whose track Everything Means Nothing to Me is interpolated by Lorde on Mind Loaded. Despite a list of heavyweight collaborators – Caroline Polachek, Turnstile’s Brendan Yates and novelist Zadie Smith, to name a few – the record never loses the personal, beating heart at its core. On Essex Honey, Hynes captures that last hazy summer before leaving your hometown, and the marks it leaves behind.

Sophie Lou Wilson

Turnstile

Never Enough

Roadrunner

The first time I cranked Never Enough, the latest release by the staggeringly popular hardcore quintet Turnstile, I thought I’d mistakenly hit play on another band’s album. Roughly halfway through the kicky barnburner Sunshower, the song drifts into a meditative trance carried by the lilting flute of composer Shabaka Hutchings. While the Baltimore-bred musicians have wandered into experimental waters before, with brief sojourns into Auto-Tune vocals and MIDI, the group are leaning heavily into their penchant for expanding hardcore’s sonic consciousness with Never Enough. On the multi-Grammy-nominated album, the band sound loose and curious, singing about shattered relationships while tinkering with brassy horns (Dreaming), a rhythm section time-warped directly from the 1980s (Seeing Stars) and ratcheted-up reverb (Light Design). While bending the dimensions of their songwriting, this is still Turnstile to their core: in other words, optimal music for slam-dance mayhem.

Paula Mejía

aya

hexed!

Hyperdub

Many months before the golden blonde halo had been singed onto the hairs of Rosalía’s head, aya had her own epiphany with hexed!. Previously living in Huddersfield, aya was made to choose between her Pentecostal church and her sexuality. She left for Manchester, where she made dance music and later transitioned. Now based in London, hexed! is about another kind of relationship: a realignment with herself. Made in the early stages of recovery, the album – fleshy and alive, raging against external authority – revs off with a splintering yelp on I Am the Pipe I Hit Myself With before descending into the thrashing chaos of Off to the Esso. aya fires off lyrics on fast-forward, blurting out surreal, dissociative lines to a flailing, paranoid mix of gabber, clattering, clanging glitches, screeching noise-punk and industrial loops. There is no ode to saints here, but rather something more sincere and thrilling: a revelation of self.

Zee Raza-Sheikh

YHWH Nailgun

45 Pounds

AD 93

There’s a fringe theory that the four-letter name of the Hebrew god, YHWH, can, in symbol form, be read to hold the meaning: “behold the hand, behold the nail” – a prophecy of Christ’s crucifixion. Whether this wonkish interpretation actually inspired the Brooklyn band’s moniker is unknown, but the brutal imagery aligns just so with 45 Pounds. Pain Fountain condenses the band’s glorious din to its purest form: Zack Borzone’s pained howls going toe to toe with queasy guitars that sound like synths and rapid-fire, cluster-headache drums. Elsewhere, Castrato Raw (Fullback) ups the torque, constraining the band’s incandescent rage within jazzy polyrhythms and gasped phrases (“I got the fear in me!”), while the fanfare that lights up Tear Pusher like a hail of tracer bullets is close to revelatory. In a year when the slop waterline encroached ever higher, 45 Pounds is a reminder that friction in art is essential.

Louise Brailey

Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko

Гільдеґарда (Hildegard)

Unsound

Twenty-minute renditions of 12th-century Latin plainchant might not sound like the most accessible repertoire, but in the hands of Ukrainian singer Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko and producer Heinali, it is a beguiling and deeply moving blend. On Hildegard, the duo interpret the devotional music of German mystic Hildegard von Bingen, faithfully reproducing the Latin melodies and lyrics of her compositions O Ignis Spiritus Paracliti (O Fire of the Spirit and Defender) and O Tu Suavissima Virga (O Sweetest Branch) in languorous arrangements. Heinali employs undulating modular synth programming to create cacophonous peaks and deep, dark troughs, but it’s Saienko’s miraculous vocals that make the album. Ranging from the soft, intimate quietude of O Tu Suavissima Virga’s yearning opening to the full-throated, piercing call of O Ignis Spiritus, her voice is a remarkable spiritual experience in its own right, enhancing the emotions of this music, centuries on from its creation.  

Ammar Kalia

Annahstasia

Tether

drink sum wtr

Tether finds Nigerian-American singer-songwriter Annahstasia settling into her own sound at last. After years of city-hopping and industry detours, she returned to Los Angeles with her guitar to make a record that captures her moody brilliance. The result is intimate, lived-in, a record that glows quietly from within. Her warm, dusky vocals curl around open tunings like incense, unfurling into slow-burning revelations and explorations of her womanhood. The Nigerian-born, London-based artist Obongjayar’s appearance on Slow is a standout moment that deepens the album’s emotional pull; his delicate falsetto the perfect complement to Annahstasia’s careworn ruminations on time and place. Tether is a gentle record, a balm for these times, best savoured on a slow Sunday with herbal tea, candlelight and nothing to pull you from its warmth.

Amelia Fearon

Purelink

Faith

Peak Oil

Sterility – a term often wielded by those looking to diminish the creative value of ambient music – isn’t something that can be applied to Purelink. In an electronic music scene saturated by ‘personalities’, the (perhaps accidentally) self-styled ambient boy band from Brooklyn continued their trajectory of putting a smiling, accessible face on one of music’s most misunderstood genres. This brightness runs throughout Faith, with foreboding tones and glitchy flits and starts eschewed in favour of bright contemplation and light-touch samples. Standout vocal track Rookie, with Loraine James, possesses a simplicity in its deployment so drenched in melancholia it’s hard not to be totally drawn into its liminal, dreamy world. This level of engrossment is repeated across an album whose short running time keeps the focus razor-sharp and the quality exceptional. 

Thomas Frost

Saya Gray

Saya

Dirty Hit

Saya is Gray’s most straightforward album, but that’s not to say it’s boring or normal or lacking the off-the-wall, kinetic energy that has emanated from her glitchy art-pop thus far. It just sounds like she’s experimenting in new ways, toning down her everything-but-the-kitchen-sink production and challenging herself to make a rock-pop album in the grand tradition of lovesick singer-songwriters who came before her. Don’t get us wrong: the drums are still deliciously cut-and-paste, the influences still range from folk to trap, and her songs still zig when you expect them to zag. But there’s something about the way her voice wraps itself around gently plucked guitar strings while singing things like, “I’ve lasted this long as a rubber ball/ You pick me up and throw me up against the wall,” that raises her music to new heights. Throughout her short career, Gray has shown she can do just about anything she sets her mind to, and this album is no different. 

Cameron Cook

Dijon

Baby

R&R / Warner

Baby is a fractured love letter to alt-R&B from an artist who, via his collaborations with Mk.gee and Justin Bieber, has played a vital role in shaping its sound in recent years. Dijon’s second album explores themes of fatherhood, sex and the all-consuming insecurity of love in offbeat songs so intimate they feel like fogged-over windows into his life. He leans into jagged production here: generous reverb pools around his vocals, delay shadows every drumbeat and rhythms seem to trip over themselves in the pursuit of some deeper truth. The result is an album that can be abrasive in texture but always tender in feeling, with echoes of D’Angelo’s sensuality and Frank Ocean’s elliptical storytelling. Dijon stretches familiar sounds until they become abstracted versions of themselves, capturing the beauty and volatility of loving someone so deeply it rearranges your sense of self. 

Hollie Hilton

james K

Friend

AD 93

If james K were the type of artist to follow trends, one could say that her potent blend of ambient club beats and fuzzy, blissed-out indie rock fits nicely into the current wave of Y2K nostalgia culture, which has only grown more omnipresent this year. In actuality, Friend is much more than that – though its influences draw from an era when trip-hop and electronica pierced through the rockist, turn-of-the-millennium mainstream, her razor-sharp production skills (and collaborations with like-minded sonic tinkerers like Special Guest DJ and Ben Bondy) ground these songs firmly in the present. From tracks like Doom Bikini and Hypersoft Lovejinx Junkdream (which borrow liberally from Cocteau Twins in both dreampop melodies and cryptic lyricism) to Play (which sounds like US indie-pop band Velocity Girl doing shots of absinthe with Björk in Tokyo in 1998), Friend feels like a mixtape that never existed, mashing together genres, moods and sounds directly downloaded from the artist’s ever-expanding psyche. 

Cameron Cook

Brìghde Chaimbeul

Sunwise

tak:til / Glitterbeat

From teenage piping champion to drone star is an unlikely narrative, but that’s the journey taken by Isle of Skye-born Brìghde Chaimbeul (Breetch-er Hime-bowl). She first put the smallpipes on the radar of experimental music fans with 2022’s Carry Them With Us, recorded with kindred wall-of-sound sculptor Colin Stetson. That record taught Chaimbeul the techniques she needed to articulate her “yearning to make sounds I haven’t heard before”, a vision she’s fully realised on the expansive, trance-like Sunwise. Haunted by the long shadow cast by winter in the far north – its isolation, big weather and ravaged landscape, the rituals and folkloric stories that sustain and entertain – Chaimbeul transforms three of her own compositions and five traditional songs into a spellbinding study in tone and drone created almost exclusively with smallpipes and voice. Elemental and experimental all at once, Sunwise dissolves past and present into a widescreen, hypnotic soundworld.

Chris Parkin

Los Thuthanaka

Los Thuthanaka

Self-released

In which Bolivian-American Aymara experimental producer Chuquimamani-Condori teams up with their brother Joshua Chuquimia Crampton on their surprise debut as a duo. Los Thuthanaka vibrates with Indigenous ancestral knowledge, channelled through a glitchy synthesiser. In the same spirit as the music that first put Chuquimamani-Condori (formerly known as Elysia Crampton) on the map, this quietly raging storm of Andean cosmology can at times feel like an 8-bit video game soundtrack colliding with roiling cumbia, sweaty with earth kicked up in a ceremony. The secrets of this album are well worth sitting with, hidden in explosions of ronroco and guitar, chugging keys and an infinite, propulsive rhythm that chips away at the structure of the songs until only their bare bones remain. More than an invitation to dance, Los Thuthanaka extends its hand to those willing to grind themselves down and truly get right with the cosmos.

E.R. Pulgar

Geese

Getting Killed

Partisan / Play It Again Sam

Arriving nine months after frontman Cameron Winter’s comparatively subdued solo debut, Geese’s fourth album feels thrillingly loose-limbed. It helps that it was recorded in just ten days, with Kenneth ‘Kenny Beats’ Blume brought in to capture the interplay between the Brooklyn band’s players and the surreal nature of their songcraft. Opener Trinidad is a case in point, inflicting its feral dynamics with all the delicacy of blunt-force trauma, finding Winter yowling, “There’s a bomb in my car!” over strangulated brass blasts and – what sounds like – a guitar being kicked. The title track chops and loops a Ukrainian choir sample over cacophonous blues rock, while the tumbledown groove of 100 Horses threatens to collapse in on itself before ultimately emerging triumphant, if bloody and bruised. But there’s tenderness here too, with the dainty, mandolin-flecked piano balladry of Au Pays du Cocaine and Cobra’s misty-eyed melodicism almost taming Winter’s ragged vibrato. It all adds up to one of the year’s wildest rides. 

Gemma Samways

Paul St Hilaire

w/ The Producers

Kynant Records

Those with even the remotest affiliation to subterranean dub techno will be familiar with the vocal tones of Paul St Hilaire, who lends his voice to compositions by nine different contemporary producers here, each forging their own path through the dub spectrum. Far from a confused rollout of individual tracks, each piece pushes and pulls St Hilaire’s vocals into very distinct territory. In the vocoded warping on Shinichi Atobe’s highlight, Time to Wake Up, or the echo effects on the Batu-produced Free Your Mind, Hilaire’s voice becomes a plaything for innovation. The exemplary choice of producers prevents the record from feeling like a rehash of the Rhythm & Sound dub palette – though fans of that sound will find plenty to mine here. Beyond its immediate weight and dub textures, the album reveals hidden intricacies long after the first play, with St Hilaire always at its centre. 

Thomas Frost

Cosey Fanni Tutti

2t2

Conspiracy International

Since the publication of her memoir Art Sex Music in 2017, Cosey Fanni Tutti has, much like her inspiration Delia Derbyshire, undergone a prosecutably belated reassessment. The book’s writing process also ignited a period of self-reflection for Cosey, which, adhering to her maxim “my art is my life”, she explored on only her second solo album, 2019’s Tutti. Cosey picks up those sonic and emotional threads on 2t2, recorded while negotiating yet more loss along with the world’s fragmenting madness. Its first half is cathartic, classic Cosey: a hypnotic tumult of propulsive martial rhythms, aggressive synths and visceral throat-singing from the void. The second is a meditative expanse of elegiac beauty, streaked with Cosey’s mournful cornet playing and pad sounds coaxed from her SOMA Terra synth – made from a slice of tree trunk. Just when you think a sort of inner peace has been reached, the closing Limbic erupts into a tempest of noise that suggests the fire still rages.

Chris Parkin

Rosalía

Lux

Columbia

On the cover of her belated album-of-the-year contender, Lux, the Spanish provocateur Rosalía kitted herself out in an all-white habit. The star appears as though she’s embracing herself, or perhaps desperately tearing herself out of her garment. But that’s the thing: the line between religious ecstasy and a crisis of faith is often razor-thin, which also happens to be an apt ethos for this sumptuous avant-garde pop album. Enlisting a remarkable range of collaborators – from Björk and Portuguese fado star Carminho to the London Symphony Orchestra, and even drum programming from Venetian Snares – Rosalía has created an album as thrilling as it is intimately visceral. On it, she delves into losing parts of herself, the emotional terror of an ex, flowers on her gravestone and her own excavations into theological texts. She sings in 13 distinct languages and includes a few operatic turns, especially in the rapturous single Berghain. The result is a collection of songs that get as close as possible to touching the divine. 

Paula Meija

Jim Legxacy

Black British Music

XL

Father, the lead single that announced Jim Legxacy’s latest album, paved the way for the deconstruction of Black Britishness and meditation on grief that would emerge: “Black British music, we’ve been making arses shake since the Windrush.” From the album’s name, confessional lyrics and flag-waving cover, it’s a response to those who insist we live in a monoculture. The 2000-born singer-rapper-producer stops short of making the comparison implied in the title of New David Bowie, but it wouldn’t be a leap; his genre-fluid instincts are warped through a hyperlocal, hyper-British lens. His XL debut jumps timelines: FIFA-era mischief and indie nostalgia on ’06 Wayne Rooney, Afrobeat shuffle on Big Time Forward and even a streak of British folk on Issues of Trust. Yet through all the stylistic heel-turns, his foundational love of emo shines through – his yearning singing voice serving as the anchor point. A deceptively heavy record, delivered with a striking lightness of touch.

Amelia Fearon

Ethel cain

Perverts

Daughters of Cain

In an era when clips dredged from the dankest corners of horror cinema are gleefully plastered across TikTok, it’s rare for a piece of art to drive a shard of ice through your heart. Yet the opening track of Perverts – its pregnant silences, ambient room tone, synth death-knells and stark rendition of Nearer, My God, to Thee – manages exactly that within its first 12 minutes. Landing in the grey wastes of January, Ethel Cain’s third album tuned to a collective moment already leaden with dread, although flashes of fractured beauty frequently break through: the yearning Vacillator or the dreamlike Onanist, with its distorted piano and voices drifting like wind through the eaves. Make no mistake, spirits roam Perverts’ corridors, from Coil’s magickal incantations to Nurse With Wound’s found-footage nightmares, via Low’s slo-mo sublime and David Lynch – so, so much Lynch. To immerse yourself in Perverts is to cross the threshold into another world, and even after the spell lifts, the chill lingers, bone-deep.

Louise Brailey

EsDeeKid

Rebel

XV / Lizzy

The cover of Rebel features a poetic ode to British tower blocks printed on a face mask – an essential garment for rapper EsDeeKid’s earnestly simple idea of rebellion: stay buzzed on substances, send lewd text messages, get in the occasional car chase with cops. This is urban noir mixed with comical menace; a gripping, over-the-top depiction of youthful degeneracy. The diamond-cut electronic riffs, clattering hi-hats and industrial wails conjure visions of late-night, rain-streaked pavements and drug-fuelled stupors. Over the beats, there is, of course, a scouse accent – the feature of EsDeeKid’s music that tends to dominate coverage. It is no novelty. How the rising star weaves local vocal tics into his wicked flows is crucial to a performance that’s always audacious.

Dean Van Nguyen

Oklou

Choke Enough

True Panther

A stark, irregular click skitters in, like mechanical crickets chirping through an open window, before a foreboding ambient wash rolls in, almost drowning it. Eerie, swelling synths follow, layering intrigue upon mystery to form the foundation of the lush, synthetic soundworld of Oklou’s Choke Enough – all within the first few moments of album opener, Endless. The classically trained French musician’s diaphanous vocals float over a jittery beat, questioning and uncertain, asking cryptically, “Is the endless still inbound?” Born from a daydream recounted to her by a four-year-old relative, the hazy track carries a sense of searching and infinite possibility, underpinning themes of nostalgia, innocence and isolation that drift through the record like bonfire embers in the breeze. 

For Marylou Mayniel, growing up online in the 2010s, the internet felt like an infinite playground of childhood daydreams made tangible – a goldmine for creative inspiration, collaboration and self-discovery. Like many of her contemporaries, she formed early connections on SoundCloud, eventually linking up with an eclectic roster of hyperpop trailblazers, including A. G. Cook, Sega Bodega and Casey MQ, all of whom she worked with on Choke Enough. 

While completing the album, Mayniel was in pursuit of true loneliness, seeking to disconnect from the constant connectivity and over-stimulation that defines a life lived terminally online. In her February Crack cover story, she succinctly summed up this prevailing sentiment, lamenting, “I’ve gotten tired of the internet.” On Choke Enough, she captures the desire to slow down and feel something real, conjuring disillusion and detachment through fleeting, dreamlike synths and gossamer vocals whispered from afar. It all feels a little out of focus, like reaching for connection only to skim surface-level interactions that magnify the emptiness. 

Mayniel’s sense of digital alienation doesn’t manifest as a rejection of technology, but instead hints at the symbiotic relationship between our online inspirations and our offline lives and memories. Childhood nostalgia is evoked through Zelda-like flutes, flickering synths and medieval melodies. 

Disconnecting completely from this plugged-in, hyperconnected age remains a fantasy, captured vividly throughout the album in memories of bright bonfire lights, folkloric traditions and endless summer afternoons when daydreams felt real enough to reach out and touch – as easily as tapping on a screen. “Obsessed with living in the present/ And with no one around me, I come alive,” Mayniel sings on the Underscores-featuring Harvest Sky – the closest the album gets to a big-room club anthem – recalling the childhood freedom and festivities of La Fête de la Saint-Jean, when she was left to roam and dance around the bonfire with other children from her town. The sweet innocence of ICT (Ice Cream Truck) crystallises in the song’s childlike la-la-las and enchanting trumpet line, inspired by the 1977 Disney animation The Rescuers. Elsewhere, synth flutes on Obvious evoke a Renaissance dance amid the cyborg swell of electronic textures beneath them. 

While Mayniel’s music has been associated with the hyperpop label, the warm, whimsical textures of Choke Enough would feel more at home in a strangely surreal children’s film – such as 1982’s Plague Dogs, which inspired Oklou’s track of the same name – than in a dimly lit club. When Ethel Cain co-signed the album via an Instagram story earlier this year, she dubbed it “pop music for bugs”. Its uncanny, insect-like twitches and hushed, Auto-Tuned vocals emerge like mechanical fireflies, flickering somewhere between the organic and the artificial, searching for a soft place to land. 

If, in 2024, pop accelerated towards Brat-green maximalism at breakneck speed, this year Mayniel offered something gentler, more questioning, more elusive. When so many pop records feel like a collection of singles optimised for virality, Choke Enough is an album that rewards careful listening in full, serving as a balm for our obliterated attention spans and a call to embrace the soft, twilit corners of imagination – where there is still time to dream, both online and off. 

Sophie Lou Wilson