My 40 Favorite Albums of 2025, part 2
Second installment of the list, randomly ordered
Here’s the second half of the rundown of my forty favorite albums of 2025, at as it was the day I finished the list. You can see the first part here. Monday’s newsletter will follow the usual format with recommended show listings, but I’ll share another installment with further selections from last year, next week .
40 Reasons to be Grateful, Part 2
David Grubbs, Whistle From Above (Drag City)
A post-pandemic stunner from David Grubbs, who took advantage of the grim situation by playing what he called “a shit-ton of guitar.” Whistle From Above offers a series of bracing, disparate duets with musicians from his ever-expanding circle including Nate Wooley, Cleek Schrey, Andrea Belfi, and Nikos Veliotis, and while his esteemed collaborators all leave their own indelible marks the music always feels like a product of Grubbs, even when he moves to piano on “Hung in the Sky of the Mind,” against the cascading harp of Rhodri Davies. As I wrote of the recording back in March, “Across the album Grubbs elides any single approach or idea, blending concerns for texture, scale, melody, and harmony in countless iterations, collating years of listening and collaborating into an album that arguably presents the most complete portrait of his playing.”
Apartment House & James Weeks, Gombert (Another Timbre)
There’s been a fascinating connection between musicians in certain circles of contemporary music with a love for early music in recent years, particularly in terms of current figures interested in different tuning systems. Before the embrace of equal temperament as the default tuning of western music, composers employed all kinds of different systems, which explains why a composer like Marc Sabat recast the music of Bach on one of my favorite 2025 albums Bach Tunings. Tuning isn’t the connective tissue on this sublime album for which Another Timbre capo asked composer James Weeks to create new arrangements of the music of Franco-Flemish composer Nicolas Gombert for contemporary music stalwarts Apartment House—it was just a great idea. The concept was strengthened by a series of pieces Weeks composed based on pitch materials from the Gombert repertoire, drawing out revealing correspondences.
Patricia Brennan, Of the Near and Far (Pyroclastic)
Just as Patricia Brennan was beginning to introduce her agile septet to the world through galvanic performances in the wake of its 2024 album Breaking Stretch, the Mexican percussionist unveiled this new transmission. Leading a top-notch 10-piece ensemble, she pivoted toward a more rigorously composition-driven sound world. She mapped geographic configurations of seven different constellations atop a circle of fifths, using the resultant pitch sets to create corresponding pieces. But those generative procedures wouldn’t matter much if the results weren’t so stunning. The electronics of Arktureye are something like a binding agent for a string quartet and a horn-free quintet of piano, bass, drums, guitar, and vibraphone, toggling between elegant, multi-partite arrangements and carefully plotted improvisation for a sound that casually elides any given tradition.
Putu Septa, Piwal (Other Minds)
I can’t say if we’re entering a new world of avant-garde gamelan music or not, as various geographic, technological, and language barriers make it tough to get a good read on contemporary Indonesian music from another continent. I’d also refrain from making such a judgement on the strength of some remarkable modern gamelan music written by non-locals such as American Brian Baumbusch or Dane Jan Kadereit. But it is heartening to see the broader attention given to the great Dewa Alit spreading to other young Indonesian composers like Putu Septa, a founding member of Alit’s Gamelan Salukat. The music on Piwal blazes its own path, with a more austere sound world that plays up the crucial role of the lowest tones in a gamelan, a bass-like liquidity that seems to guide and activate so much of the higher pitched action. Like Alit, Septa’s work is deeply rooted in and respectful of the music’s traditions. It’s exhilarating, surprising, and beautiful, and I surely hope it’s a harbinger for other invigorating experiments for contemporary gamelan.
Zeynep Toraman, a lifetime of annotations (Sawyer Editions)
After writing about this album when it was released in June I kept it on my portable digital music player, and each time it popped up I was taken aback by its elusive beauty. It was a welcome reminder of Zeynep Toraman’s ability to simultaneously mine astonishing harmonic splendor and glacial compositional grandeur. The grain of strings played by Clara Levy, Biliana Voutchkova, and Judith Hamann on the title piece is breathtaking, hinting at the infinite possibilities of those instruments in the right hands. There are some rough transitions here and there, but I find those imperfections an essential part of this music’s magic, as the musicians focus on rare connections—the same goes for the second piece, “Slow Poem (v.2),” tackled with expected finesse by andPlay.
Horsegirl, Phonetics On and On (Matador)
Every generation makes their own discoveries, coming across artifacts of the past which sound fresh and exciting. A lot of music induces yawns from me because I feel like I’ve heard something much better years ago, but when songs and execution are good the criticism falls away, and that’s certainly the case for me with Horsegirl. On this breezy second album—produced by Cate Le Bon—they tap into all sorts of pre- and post-punk touchstones (especially the Raincoats), but the attack is so lean, crisp, and punchy, the melodies so pleasing, and the appropriations so broad that it feels like something new in a way, a kind of curatorial accomplishment that manages to blend a whole lot of shit that’s never quite assembled in such an intoxicating way.
Sarah Hennies, SOVT (elsewhere)
Over the last few years Sarah Hennies has achieved a new peak, digging further into durational works, three of which I got to hear over a few days at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in November. But this older piece—one of several she’s composed that draws upon exercises and experiences in her gender transition—feels like an essential precursor to her current practice. It was riginally written for R. Andrew Lee in 2017, was finally recorded by Richard Valitutto. The title is short for “Semi-Occluded Vocal Tract,” a vocal exercise Hennies used in the process of voice feminization, singing through a straw to control air pressure and lower strain on the vocal folds. The instrument’s strings are prepared with poster putty to create a percussive quality whose rapid decay and resonance across the entire piano reminded her of that exercise. There’s a gripping collision of mechanical repetition and breakdown that’s central to a lot of her earlier material, and while Hennies seems to have moved beyond this methodology, Valitutto captures its undiminished vitality.
Catherine Lamb x Ghost Ensemble, interius/exterius (Greyfade)
As the music of Catherine Lamb gains listeners and admirers so too does the level of commitment of musicians interpreting it. The composer visited the members of New York’s Ghost Ensemble a couple of years before they recorded interius/exterius, and it allowed them to get closer to her ideal than if they were simply reading the score. Of course, it’s more than translating the notes, as the musicians also acquired a rigorous ability to tune into one another, adjusting and articulating sounds in real-time, with somber long tones written in rational intonation tattooed by the mixture of brittle, quickly decaying notes from Lucia Stavros’ harp and Chris Nappi’s hammer dulcimer.
Ensemble Nist-Nah, Spilla (Black Truffle)
Drummer Will Guthrie has long been a musical omnivore, a musician rooted in jazz but with a curiosity that has led him to collaborate broadly and to bring in various far-flung traditions into his practice. In lesser, and less respectful hands that could lead to bald cultural appropriation, but with his Ensemble Nist-Nah he’s managed to embrace gamelan music in his own way. While the group’s first album displayed some awkwardness in its adaptation of a gamelan, Spilla advances the music in a major way, using the instrument to serve Guthrie’s agenda without cheapening the tradition. He invited some of the ensemble’s members to contribute compositions alongside his own pieces and there’s also a thoroughly transformed take on “Uncle,” a Roscoe Mitchell tune that appeared on the Art Ensemble of Chicago album Urban Bushmen. This is music that balks at genre as it forges its own captivating path.
Natural Information Society, Perseverance Flow (Eremite)
I don’t think there was an album I listened to more in 2025 than Perseverance Flow—particularly notable since it only came out in October!—at once a powerful distillation of the Natural Information Society sound and psychedelic expansion of it. I heard the core quartet play this piece in Chicago in 2023, where I got to witness how Joshua Abrams, Mikel Patick Avery, Jason Stein, and Lisa Alvarado had unequivocally developed the long-running ensemble’s aesthetic principles into a fat-free concentrate of slow-build hypnosis. When I heard the piece live I could trace its incremental drive, with Avery building up the groove on element at a time, but after recording the muisic Abrams went into the studio and treated the performance with dub-like dislocations, adding an endless strand of variations from each instrumentalist to accentuate the steady ascension with thrilling fillips, distortions, displacements, and accents. This album might be pleasant enough as a casual listen, but what a waste to engage on a superficial level. Digging into the details has proven endlessly rewarding, and it’s opened up a seemingly infinite range of possibilities in the future. A masterpiece.
Quinie, Forefow, Mind Me (Upset! The Rhythm)
In the press materials for this knockout the Scottish singer known as Quinie (aka Josie Valley) explained her musical world by writing, ““We learn from each other and build community, and we are not afraid to make a shonky-looking tape or CD. The difference is perhaps in intent and method—I take the ‘do what you like’ attitude of DIY and combine it with the ‘cherish what has come before’ values of the folk tradition. I see them as complementary rather than contradictory.” That seems like a pretty ideal ethos, that actually honors folk tradition more than purism does. Quinie is no pretender and this album is just the tip of the iceberg of an evolving global movement that largely rejects the anti-social practice of holing up in a room with a computer. Hear! Hear!
Richard Dawson, End of the Middle (Weird World)
No one observes the decline of Britain with greater sharpness, wit, and humanity than Richard Dawson, a bard for our fucked times. These tunes are larded with vivid details at once quotidian and lacerating, with narratives that touch upon domestic conflict and local struggles, whether it’s the grandmother long planted in front of a television who realizes her “dreams died like dolphins in a net” throwing caution to the wind and planning a Venetian holiday with her granddaughter in “Gondola,” or the narrator observing his father ‘s deterioration “when Nissan made my Dad redundant.” Surprisingly out clarinet solos by Faye MacCalman occasionally pepper his lean arrangements of guitar and the drumming of Andrew Cheetham—and sometimes Dawson evokes his free improv roots as in “The Question” —but the focal point is his voice: declamatory, lived-in, scuffed, and weirdly soulful.
Mats Gustaffson/Ken Vandermark/Tomeka Reid/Chad Taylor, Pivot (Silkheart)
Reedists Mats Gustafsson and Ken Vandermark share a history stretching back almost three decades, and there are plenty of other connections within this stellar quartet with cellist Tomeka Reid and drummer Chad Taylor, which thus far has gathered only once, for this recording session in Chicago in late 2024. But I really hope they eventually reconvene because the various intersections within the ensemble produced an impressively diverse album, with both fully improvised material and tunes by the reedists. The rhythm section toggles between plush grooves, with Reid characteristically moving between tough vamps and extroverted improvisations and Taylor bringing imperturbable swing to the thorniest, most fiery passages. Gustafsson is a master of pure sound and extended techniques, but along with his work on the Cosmic Ear album, he delivers some of his most narrative blowing in recent years and it’s a huge treat, especially when he jousts with Vandermark. I’m often skeptical of such one-off sessions, but Pivot is a wonderful exception, with everyone locked-in and firing on all cylinders.
Carson McHone, Pentimento (Merge)
I’ve been following the steady growth of singer-songwriter Carson McHone since she signed with Merge in 2021, with every new recording signaling her maturing artistry. Pentimento captures the biggest forward leap yet, a collection of flinty country-rock songs that aren’t afraid to embrace bits of pop and soul within her poetic ruminations. All of the tunes began as words—poems, captions, thoughts, marginalia—that eventually indicated what the musical material should be as the texts solidified. The album is littered with field recordings, brief readings, and melodic fragments, but the full songs contain multitudes. The tunes were written during the pandemic, after McHone relocated from Austin, Texas to Ontario, Canada, with a good bit of inspiration coming from a journal her mother had maintained with missives written to her daughter from birth, but only half had been fully worked into finished arrangements, with the rest forged with her band in the studio, and that hothouse creativity bleeds through everything.
Joan Shelley, Real Warmth (No Quarter)
There are few singer-songwriters more thoughtful than Joan Shelley, who seems to ruminate long and hard about her artistic choices, which includes deciding who to work with and how that will play out every time she makes a new album. For this record she enlisted the Toronto producer and bassist Ben Whiteley—a key member of Tamara Lindeman’s Weather Station—who helped assemble the excellent group of musicians bringign the crisp yet multi-layered arrangements to life. I don’t know if I’d call it her best record, as every new transmission carves out some new sound world, but by cutting Shelley’s vocals live along with the rhythm section there’s a more immediate quality to Real Warmth lacking on previous efforts. Of course, Shelley’s care and intelligence are manifest in her poetic, humanistic lyrics and her lovely voice, but the band here truly elevates her artistry.
Jeong Lim Yang, Synchronicity (Sunnyside)
The Brooklyn-based Korean bassist Jeong Lim Yang seems like one of the boldest younger figures on the New York jazz and improvised music scene by trusting her instincts rather than shooting for something splashy or cool. Plenty of young players enlist elders to complement their vision, but her choice of collaborators for this remarkable album—pianist Jacob Sacks, violist Mat Maneri, and drummer Randy Peterson—feels more like a gathering of kindred spirits than an assortment of ringers. For one thing, those seasoned players have all worked together often, whether pioneering a microtonal take on jazz pioneered by the late Joe Maneri or advancing the draggy turbulence of Paul Motian. Yang centers the music in a way that can’t be faked, celebrating a luxurious kind of rubato feel and harmonic fuzziness that requires serious trust and heightened listening. Most of the music moves slowly, but even at its most off-kilter it swings, tilting towards a chaos that never arrives. It’s a glorious sonic balancing act.
Maurice Louca, Barĩy (Fera) برٌِي (Simsara)
Egyptian guitarist and composer Maurice Louca is a model of artistic mobility, both in terms of style and global communities. I’ve heard him play hyper-reduced sounds alongside percussionist Burkhard Beins and bassist Tony Elieh in Marmalsana and tap into jazz adjacent works with a slew of Swedish improvers, to say nothing of his work in Arabic traditions. But I’ve never heard anything from has as elegant, sleek, and mature as Barĩy (Fera) برٌِي, a series of tuneful, rhythmically seductive instrumentals that elide any given tradition or genre. Leading an agile quartet with violinist Ayman Asfour (of the Handover), drummer Khaled Yassine, and double bassist Rosa Brunello, Louca casually avers a hybrid sound where Arabic strings are reduced to a single violin and slide guitar, marked by gorgeous melodies, percolating rhythms, and lush harmonies. The music feels built for cinema without the treacly, cliché-ridden sweep of most film music, merging Louca’s broad sensibilities with rigor and elan.
Evan Parker & Bill Nace, Branches (Otoroku/Open Mouth)
As I was reminded this past December at a concert in Berlin, few things in life are as remarkable as hearing Evan Parker engage in circular breathing on soprano saxophone, and Philadelphia guitarist Bill Nace seems to feel the same way. In a first-time performance at Café Oto in 2024 he hoped that the veteran reedist would bring that horn to the gig, and the visitor was ready to form a sonic double helix with cycling patterns produced on his amped-up taishōgoto. Hearing these two masters slalom around one another for 40 white-knuckle, uninterrupted minutes is as trippy and memorable as any experience of 2025.
Andrew McIntosh, Fixations (Kairos)
One of the great things about the music written by violinist Andrew McIntosh is how different it can be from project to project. His frequent collaborations with Yarn/Wire, for example, take advantage of the ensemble’s versatility, which allows them to tackle disparate programmatic concerns. Knowing McIntosh’ interest in early music and different tuning systems I’m not at all surprised that Fixations, which contains three stunning works for strings, pushes in yet another direction. For me it’s the most gripping and satisfying collection of his music yet. The liner notes consist of a wide-ranging dialogue between him and Cassandra Miller—they are clearly kindred spirits even if their music rarely sounds similar. I adore the opening piece “424.6,” performed by Aperture Duo—violinist Adrianne Pope and violist Linnea Powell, his ensemble mates in Wild Up—which is discussed in the composer discussion as music that feels still and in motion at once through the layered arrangements, awash in gorgeous harmony and marked by a gritty tactility. The other two pieces are for larger ensembles, but convey a similar intimacy through stately melodies that draw openly from centuries-old traditions.
Michael Hurley, Broken Homes and Gardens (No Quarter)
Although he had a full life, pursuing his varied interests right up to his death at 83, it’s still hard to imagine a world without Michael Hurley, a bona fide artist and dyed-in-the-wool musicker who never had time for playing the game or staying in his lane. His broad sensibility was about homemade music, and, like few before him or since, he personified all that was good about American music. He was the real folk music. His final album reinforces how timeless and out-of-time he remained until the end, and the opening track “Junebug” ranks among his best tunes in my book, revealing his undiminished wit and spark. What a parting gift.