The List 2025
At the end of each year I make a list of the twenty albums I enjoyed the most. To be eligible, a record has to be of album length (at least ~30 mins), and contain entirely—or almost entirely—new material; live albums, cover records, and compilations are ineligible.
20. Jadu Heart — POST HEAVEN
Jadu Heart were new to me a couple of years ago, when they appeared at twentieth on the 2023 list. I praised that record—Derealised—for ‘a production style that layers hazy tones into the mix to arresting effect’. Here, on POST HEAVEN, the dream-pop aesthetic is dialled down in favour of some sharper electronic elements, joined by trip-hop percussion on a couple of tracks (including stand-out ‘AUX’). It’s as though a half-turn of the lens has pulled the band’s sound into clearer focus. Despite the tonal shift, Jadu Heart manage to keep a coherent feel to the gestalt. Coupled with considered sequencing, the record ebbs and flows smoothly, with even its more abrasive moments (eg the rhythmically unsettled post-Kid A percussion on ‘Lambs.exe’) feeling intentional. Taken as a whole, it’s a difficult album to draw comparison against, save for the band’s own prior work. Different as they are—and it’s tempting to read into that difference a reflection of the dissolution of the primary band members’ romantic relationship—Derealised and POST HEAVEN make for a fascinating diptych.
19. Hayley Williams — Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party
Alongside several list inclusions with Paramore (most recently, fourth spot in 2023 for This is Why), Hayley Williams also scored a top 5 spot with her solo debut in 2020, Petals for Armor. As befits a front person unsupported by their usual coterie of musicians, Williams’ solo output tends to be somewhat of a more understated affair than that of Paramore. That’s not to say that Ego Death… is a muted affair—quite the contrary: it’s kaleidoscopic, and the breadth of genres from which it pulls is worthy of applause.
Even the relatively straightforward pop-rock numbers—like lead single ‘Glum’—find Hayley playing with vocal distortion effects. Elsewhere there’s trip-hop percussion on ’Negative Self Talk’, forays into electropop (‘Parachute’); post-shoegaze / post-grunge ‘Mirtazapine’, and a Bloodhound Gang interpolation (that I could frankly have done without) on ‘Discovery Channel’.
The direct influences are also apparent—Alanis (‘Disappearing Man’); Fiona Apple (‘Brotherly Love’)—which, again, isn’t to diminish Williams’ artistry. Much like Halsey on last year’s The Great Impersonator, this is partially an exercise in painting with other artists’ brushes. That Williams is able to carry it off in almost all cases is a testament to her talent.
That said, the album’s diversity is also its only real weakness. Across 18 tracks and a full hour, the patchwork of styles falls somewhat short of making a coherent statement. On reflection, it’s interesting that Williams originally released each track separately, as if to hand off the tricky (and possibly fruitless) task of sequencing this particular set of songs into a whole.
18. Miley Cyrus — Something Beautiful
I often think about Miley Cyrus around this time of year, because of how she sucker punched me at the finale of Sophia Coppola’s Netflix special A Very Murray Christmas, with a rendition of ‘Silent Night’ that absolutely reduced me to a puddle with its beauty. To one extent or another I’ve enjoyed each of her albums since 2013’s Bangerz, with both Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz (2015) and Plastic Hearts (2020) having made bids for list inclusion. Until now however, whilst she’s frequently hit for me on the level of individual songs, she hasn’t quite made an album-length statement that met the bar.
Something Beautiful changed that equation on first listen. In interviews, Cyrus has spoken about how, having finally won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2024, she felt liberated to let go of concerns over critical consensus, and instead make an album guided only by her own taste. The title track is a soul cut until it’s suddenly invaded by discordant prog synths: fair warning to the listener that things may not go the way they expect from the artist behind ‘Party in the USA’. Next up, ‘End of the World’ is a joyous slice of pop (that I’m dying to hear Arcade Fire cover), and ‘More to Lose’ is sad and somewhat haunted. Then, lost funk classic ‘Easy Lover’ (originally written for Beyoncé) erupts between two mood-altering interludes.
In summary, Miley has finally made a complete record. Every track is good or great, and each has something interesting to offer on repeat listens. Factor in the breadth of pop sub-genres she’s playing with here, and this is an album worth celebrating.
17. Biffy Clyro — Futique
What’s left to say about Biffy Clyro? Ninth in 2007 with Puzzle; 2009 list-toppers with the still-spectacular Only Revolutions; third in 2013 with Opposites, their most recent list entry was fourteenth spot in 2020, though (on reflection) follow-up—The Myth of the Happily Ever After—should have probably snuck onto 2021’s list.
Futique represents another set of angular, colossal-sounding rock inflected with just enough pop tinges to ensure it slips easily into the brain. The band’s talent nonpareil is in finding new and interesting ways to take simple constructions and unfailingly add twists here and there to keep things compelling. Unexpectedly pretty synth trills mixed in with punky guitar stabs (‘It’s Chemical!’), folk-inflected intros to songs that later explode (‘Woe is Me, Wow is You’), weird chanted bridges (‘Hunting Season’)… and it’s all sat on a solid base of tuneful rock that it’s hard to dislike.
Perhaps some of the band’s extremes are absent here—there is nothing as playful as ‘Cop Syrup’, as odd as ‘There’s no Such Thing as a Jaggy Snake’, or as beautiful as ‘Many of Horror’—and the somewhat restricted palate will irk some who don’t find what they’d hoped for. Personally, I would consider Futique in the conversation for Biffy’s fifth-best album, but that’s a high bar after more than two decades of releasing relentlessly inventive rock.
16. Wet Leg — moisturizer
It’s not that I didn’t understand the hubbub around Wet Leg back in 2021 when ‘Chaise Longue’ was one of the buzz tracks of the summer. I just thought it was a little overblown, and the arrival of the self-titled debut album the following April didn’t change my mind. That record was enjoyable enough, but its best song was somewhat played out before the album even arrived. Fast-forward a couple of years however, and the follow-up came as a delightful surprise. It only took a couple of listens to affirm that moisturizer was a marked step forward. I’d been a little perplexed to see the debut feature so prominently on several 2023 year-end lists, but it turns out this was indeed a band that had something, it just took a moment for them to tap into it more successfully.
There are hints in Wet Leg’s sound of some early 2000s influences: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Strokes, Pretty Girls Make Graves and Franz Ferdinand are all in the mix, contributing to a punchy flavour of pop-rock that remains pretty even at its most confrontational. Many of the lyrics are delivered with tongue firmly in cheek, and they’re matched to a playful sense of melody that keeps things light throughout. Songs like ‘catch these fists’, ‘davina mccall’ and ‘mangetout’ each took their turn colonising my brain for days at a time, which is the sign of a well-shaped pop hook. And, what’s more, their sets from both Glastonbury and NPR’s Tiny Desk were superb. If you can command both of those spaces, it proves you have great songs and the showpersonship to match.
I’ll lay a gauntlet down now and say I expect a genuinely great album from this lot in the future.
15. Deradoorian — Ready for Heaven
This record was one of the year’s nicest surprises. Arriving in May as a new name to me, Angel Deradoorian dropped a neatly-wrapped bundle of art pop at my doorstep and said ‘make of that what you will’. Actually… it turns out that’s not entirely accurate: not only was I aware of some of her previous work, but she’d scored a seventh place finish as part of Dirty Projectors on their finest work: Bitte Orca (2009).
That’s a helpful starting point, because some of that album’s penchant for avant-garde time signatures and sharp turns of direction are also present on Ready for Heaven. Deradoorian’s record, however, is leaner and more focussed where it counts. This is an album of finely-honed musical statements that rely upon the foundational musical elements underpinning them: the strong bass line that guides ‘Digital Gravestone’; the percussive pattern, borrowed from disco, that underpins ‘No No Yes Yes’; melancholy organ on ‘Set Me Free’… and so on. Deradoorian employs each musical tool for which she reaches with great assurance, and towards results as well balanced as they are sometimes unexpected.
Antepenultimate track ‘Purgatory of Consciousness’ reminds the listener they’re engaged with an art-pop record, but it’s an effective palate-cleanser before the synths take over on (one of many highlights) ‘Reigning Down’, Deradoorian’s lightly-treated vocal returning to float, as it does throughout the album, ethereal above a compellingly mercurial sound.
14. Samia — Bloodless
I played Samia’s second record—Honey (2023)—quite a bit, and her Nov ’23 appearance on NPR’s Tiny Desk series then sent me back to her debut: The Baby (2020). Nevertheless, I was immediately impressed by the step forward that this record represents. Bloodless is characterised by a looseness of form, with an air of effortlessness that it’s easy to forget is actually the result of a thousand tasteful decisions.
‘Lizard’ comes in on a detuned radio, drops one of the year’s prettiest vocal melodies, and is cut short by the abrupt start of the laid-back ‘Dare’. A couple of tracks later, ‘Fair Game’ rides finger-picked guitar until it dissolves into another channel change on that radio. What emerges is ‘Spine Oil’ a plaintive pean to inner strength. The transition from one piece to the next has the effect of being just out of control, as though the listener is at the mercy of a capricious dial-turner who decides when a song ends and what happens next.
There are through-lines however: Samia’s impressive vocal range, and her talent with lyrics being two. The first words on Bloodless are ‘Diet Dr Pepper; Raymond Carver / Sitting in the bathtub whilst they’re knocking / I wanna be untouchable / You took the door off its hinges’. It’s a microcosm of the album’s emotional vulnerability cut with Samia’s knack for imagery and wry metaphor, which called to mind for me Rosie Tucker (sixth last year).
This was a record that surprised and delighted, and which took some getting used to. Meeting it on its own terms has proven hugely worthwhile.
13. Anthony Naples — Scanners
Though it didn’t make that year’s list, I played Anthony Naples’ debut LP Body Pill a whole bunch back in 2015. Alongside artists who did make that list—Squarepusher, Fort Romeau, Rival Consoles, Nosaj Thing etc—Naples was part of quite a bumper year for electronica releases that have withstood the test of time. Each subsequent record the New Yorker has put out has got a couple of spins from me, but none have quite stuck like that first one, until now.
At a decade’s remove, Anthony Naples has evolved his former lo-fi house sound into something more seductively melodic. Several of the tracks on Scanners are built more for headphones than for the dance floor: take, for instance, the oscillating tidal white noise in the background of ‘Compact’, or the skittering down-tempo ‘Ampere’. But, when he turns his hand to it, Naples still foregrounds a beat to powerful effect: eg on album highlight ‘Night’, which maps an almost verse-bridge-chorus-verse structure to a six-minute techno track.
Listened to back-to-back with Body Pill, there’s quite a contrast. It seems quite likely, however, that I’ll be playing both for some time to come.
12. Mogwai — The Bad Fire
I feel as though I’ve consistently underestimated Mogwai. I recall having some fun with both Rave Tapes (2014) and Happy Songs for Happy People (2003), but I’ll admit to having spent too little time with their catalogue as a whole, and if I reach for a Mogwai record, it’s most likely to be their 1997 debut LP Young Team. If I’m in the mood for post-rock however, I’ve historically been more likely still to play something from godspeed you! black emperor, Explosions in the Sky, This Will Destroy You et al. Each of those bands has placed on one of these lists over the last 25 years, and yet this is Mogwai’s first inclusion.
The Bad Fire is the sound of a band who have been at this for a while, finding new ways to keep things fresh, whilst displaying mastery over a core sound that they’ve developed (perhaps pioneered) over a thirty year career. If they want to use their powers to morph a power-pop melody beyond recognition (‘Fanzine Made of Flesh’), venture into Low-esque stark fuzz territory (’18 Volcanoes’), or support the year’s weirdest guitar solo (‘Lion Rumpus’), all the better for us.
At a running time of almost an hour, built as it is from dense layers that subsume the listener, The Bad Fire can be quite a draining experience. But that’s a post-rock hallmark: this isn’t background music, it’s smother-you-in-a-blanket-of-noise music. This may be the record that brought me around to finally paying Mogwai their due attention.
11. Deftones — private music
Deftones have featured on this list either seven or nine times, depending on how you’re counting. (You can find a full rundown of placements as part of the entry for twelfth-placed Ohms in 2020.) After five years then—the longest gap yet between releases—here’s a tenth studio album of thick-set, sidewinding, muscularly romantic rock from Sacramento’s finest.
There are a few surprises, but in truth the departures are less notable than the fidelity with which the band once again brings forth more three and four-minute cuts of prime melodic, riff-driven tunes, characterised throughout by one of rock music’s enduring wonders: Chino Moreno’s rich, soaring vocal, which remains undimmed by the passing of decades. Once again, there’s not a single skip on the record, and ‘milk of the madonna’ (shivers every time) instantly finds a place amongst their very best.
A couple of times in recent years I’ve heaped praise on acts like Metallica and Pearl Jam, for producing a great record after extended stretches of either nothing or mediocre work. Conversely, it’s all too easy to take for granted Deftones’ consistent output of quality material. You could spin as a negative the fact that there are multiple tracks on private music that would have sat perfectly comfortably amongst those on 2000’s White Pony. I’d find that criticism more palatable if there was anyone else making this particular divine noise. After thirty years of doing so, however, Deftones have proven once again that one of my favourite musical rivers springs from only one source.
10. Smut — Tomorrow Comes Crashing
I hit play on this record back in June not expecting to make it more than a track or two. The fact that I even gave it a try is owed to having learned over the years that album covers can be deceptive. Luckily for me Smut aren’t a black metal outfit, as the art for Tomorrow Comes Crashing may suggest, but rather an indie rock five-piece based out of Chicago.
As seems to have been the case the last couple of years, there’s a foundation of dream pop here, with a distinct ‘90s bent (think Belly / that dog.). Things get nicely chunky at some points (eg the final minute crescendo of ‘Syd Sweeney’), elsewhere it’s a fine balance of pretty melodies and substantial chords behind Tay Roebuck’s vocal, which itself ranges from delicate to scream as appropriate.
There’s not a weak track amongst the ten here, from celebratory opening number ‘Godhead’ to the closing chords of ‘Sunset Hymnal’ (the guitars showing a little more edge towards the end). My favourite is probably ‘Touch & Go’, which would have felt right at home in heavy rotation on turn-of-the-millennium MTV.
9. Djrum — Under Tangled Silence
Oxford’s own Djrum (aka Felix Manuel) very nearly did himself out of a place on this list by virtue of making a record spilling over with ideas. After my first play of Under Tangled Silence my impression was that it was too disjointed an offering to hang together coherently as an album. Something about it, however, drew me back, and whilst I clung to the opinion that it might better have been offered as a set of three EPs, there was nevertheless something compelling about the hour of electronica Djrum has put together.
Things begin in a straightforward fashion, with ‘A Tune for Us’; stitched together from delicate percussion it’s admirably pretty. ‘Waxcap’ foregrounds tuneful piano trills, before the arrival of a low-key techno beat. ‘Unweaving’ follows up by pulling back to solo piano alone. If you’ve been lulled into thinking you’re listening to a minimalist piano jazz record, however, ‘L’Ancienne’ is here to remind you (a minute in) that discordant spikes of jarring synth are a very real possibility at any moment. That’s the opening 20 minutes of an LP that also embraces drum n bass, jungle and house rhythms, whilst showcasing Manuel’s talents as a pianist and harpist. By the time epic closer ‘Sycamore’ arrives, to traverse most of this landscape in a single track, you’ve either fallen for the record’s many charms, or you’ve dismissed it as incoherent. I’m certainly glad that I overcame my initial flinch, because Djrum has made something unique here.
8. Turnstile — NEVER ENOUGH
Having not crossed my radar with either of their first two releases, Turnstile placed second on the 2021 list with (mandatory all caps) GLOW ON. That record upset some longtime fans of the band’s previous straightforward hardcore sound, by embracing a broader range of genre influences, and layering up its sonic world with slickly-produced nods to soul, R&B and pop. But… spend a little time with the back catalogue and that story isn’t exactly accurate. Yes, GLOW ON was the biggest swing yet from the Baltimore lot, but as early as the debut there are experiments with rap and metal thrown into the hardcore mix.
In some respects, NEVER ENOUGH is the band’s least adventurous record, in that it primarily picks up where GLOW ON left off. Festival-sized riffs (the band’s set from Glastonbury was a blast), percussion with real kick, and warm synth cords providing a backdrop to Brendan Yates’ vocal, lightly treated with a reverb effect. Yates is also on production duties here, and in collaboration with the same mixing and mastering duo from GLOW ON, he’s kept the colossal soundscape that defined that record. Applied to songs that capture elements of punk, post-punk, jangle-pop, new wave etc, it’s a powerful recipe.
Despite its similarities to its immediate predecessor, the album is certainly not without ambition. Take as one example ‘LOOK OUT FOR ME’: at almost seven minutes it is by some distance the longest track in the band’s catalogue, and belies a bewildering set of influences, starting with The Smiths and ending up on a ‘90s house drum loop. On paper that shouldn’t work, and a ‘hardcore’ band certainly shouldn’t be the ones to attempt it. Turnstile are very obviously not concerned about the labels though—they’re just making their own unique racket, and I am very much here for all of it.
7. Rival Consoles — Landscape from Memory
Ryan Lee West has been releasing his unique blend of ambient-inflected electronica via Erased Tapes for almost two decades at this point. Starting with 2015’s Howl (seventh for me that year) onwards, he’s also been a staple of my EDM diet: Night Melody (2016), Persona (2018), Overflow (2021) and Now Is (2022) all saw major play, even if none of them quite made an annual top twenty.
Landscape from Memory is a different story. My most-played record of 2025, it reads to me as a distinct milestone in West’s career: one on which he’s perfected the balance of his earlier work’s sparse lo-fi with the richer, fuller palate that he’s employed on more recent releases. (It’s an evolution very similar to that of Anthony Naples.) West has found ways to embed elements of live instrumentation amongst the dense beds of rich bass and lively beats, and to pin washes of sonic colour to fluid nets of percussion. The seamless results belie the difficulty of making organic-feeling music out of these hybridised parts.
West remains unafraid of going avant-garde—such as when penultimate track ‘Tape Loop’ foregrounds a mask of bright noise—but for the most part Landscape from Memory represents both his most approachable and his most accomplished work to date.
6. KAYTRANADA — AIN’T NO DAMN WAY!
KAYTRANADA last made an appearance on my list almost a decade ago with his debut LP… is a sentence I just wrote, convinced of its veracity. And yet, I just scrolled the 2016 list up and down, and 99.9% is nowhere to be seen. As is the way with these things, there are at least half a dozen records on that list that I’ve played less frequently in the years since than KAYTRA’s debut. Its concoction of house, soul and hip-hop, layered with deep bass and rich synths, has continued to work for me, even if I found the albums that followed to be less seductive.
AIN’T NO DAMN WAY! hit me on first play as something fresh. The soul and hip-hop influences have been dialled down in the mix, and the guest vocalists have not been invited to the studio this time out. Instead KAYTRA has built a 34 minute trip through hypnotic house loops and beats that move like no other record I spent time with this year. Big bass and funky synths continue to be a big part of the toolbox, and KAYTRA is an absolute wizard with a drum machine. This is an album that goes down super smoothly, ideally for the listener locked in on headphones, enjoying its easygoing dynamism, lost in a party for one.
5. Saya Gray — SAYA
Depending upon how you measure these things, Saya Gray is either two, three or four albums into a solo career. I’ve not knowingly heard any her previous work— though, without knowing it, I had actually seen her before: playing bass for Daniel Caesar when he appeared on NPR’s Tiny Desk series in 2018—and hence I’m not in a great position to say whether SAYA marks a sound into which she’s grown, or whether she arrived into her solo work fully-formed. So meticulously layered is the sound of this record, that I have to believe it’s the former, but either way, SAYA is something quite special.
Here are some names I don’t drop lightly: Fiona Apple, Björk, St Vincent. As with Halsey (second in 2020; eighth in 2021) there’s a sense of Gray having inherited from these artists and others not so much the specifics of a particular sound but permission to find her own. Intricate, poetic lyricism is matched to melodies and beats masterfully constructed piece-by-piece from the widest-possible range of influence. Throughout, there’s an idea that anything might happen to a track at any given time. Take, as one example, ‘LINE BACK 22’, which begins delicately enough with an R&B-adjacent vocal piece, before the guitar and harp show up; click-track percussion supports a build that adds backing vocals. Then the drums evolve into something fuller, which quickly comes off the rails to produce something almost free-jazz behind the sampled vocal and a synth that sounds like a tractor beam.
The album’s most straightforward track is one of my favourite songs of 2025: ’10 WAYS (TO LOSE A CROWN)’. It emphasises Gray’s sincere vocal against a relatively uncomplicated folk structure. Naturally it gives way to ‘H.B.W.’ a gloomy trip-hop adjacent piece. One of the most eyebrow-raising moments of the musical year comes in the last 45 seconds of penultimate track ‘EXHAUST THE TOPIC’, a plaintive indie piece with a pretty-yet-sad vocal, which suddenly bursts into a Cave In riff because… well, because it sounds good.
That’s the real magic of SAYA: its composition is unmistakably the work of someone not just with flawless taste but with the talent to build something mesmerising that sounds unlike any of its myriad parts. Finding it was one of the year’s most enjoyable surprises.
4. Ninajirachi — I Love My Computer
Fully aware that this makes me sound as old as I am: much of what is considered ‘hyperpop’ leaves me cold, coming off as a largely incoherent exercise in maximalism for the sake of maximalism. I’ve had some limited success with acts like 100 Gecs and Rina Sawayama, but Jockstrap’s I Love You Jennifer B (2022) is the only record affiliated with that sub-genre that has truly got its hooks into me. If you stretch the bounds a little more towards glitch pop however, you start to get my attention. And really, to be quite specific, I’ve been waiting a decade for someone to produce a worthy successor to Grimes’ Visions (third in 2012) and Art Angels (third in 2015).
Thank heavens then for Australian DJ / producer Nina Wilson, who followed a string of EPs with a debut album that kicked me directly in my smiling face upon release in August. It’s music that embraces the ultra-online aesthetic of pop culture reference, creepypasta, kawaii winks at Pokémon etc, but whilst its many restless chop-and-change rhythmic switches seem to speak to fractured attention spans and ADHD diagnoses, the whole thing is imbued with a glowing warmth that I’ve found lacking in other records of its ilk.
There are a lot of distinct moments throughout that hit (eg the bass pulse of ‘CSIRAC’, the clean arpeggios of ‘Infohazard’, the glitched-out vocals of (album highlight) ‘Fuck My Computer’) but the whole thing is an admirably smooth ride given the kaleidoscope of components from which it’s composed. And, what’s more, it’s—for the most part—giddily passionate music that had me dancing and smiling time and again.
3. Arcade Fire — Pink Elephant
Shall we do the rundown? Top in 2005 for Funeral; top in 2007 for Neon Bible; top in 2010 for The Suburbs; top in 2013 for Reflektor; ninth in 2017 for Everything Now. It’s no overstatement to say that Arcade Fire are one of the cornerstone bands of the last twenty years for me. And yet, their last album (2022’s WE) was the first not to place on my list. It remains their weakest, but if we re-ran the 2017 and 2022 races now, both of the AF records would feature with greater prominence.
Undeniably, one of the factors that undermined my enjoyment of WE was the advent of several accusations of sexual misconduct that were made about frontman Win Butler in 2022. Pink Elephant then, came freighted with the expectation that it would have to address that situation—Butler having admitted to no criminality, but to inappropriate behaviour outside of his marriage to bandmate Régine Chassagne. It would perhaps have been difficult to sensitively reflect upon these topics within the sonic blueprint for which Arcade Fire are best known: panorama, bombast and grandeur. Somehow though, I had not expected an album quite as stripped down to basics as Pink Elephant is (for the most part). To listen to several of the tracks here you would not necessarily know that this was a five-piece band (who regularly have eight players on stage for live shows). Instrumentation and production alike are pulled back to basic elements, fitting the personal, confessional nature of many of the lyrics.
Arcade Fire have always been a band who draw upon raw emotionality. Indeed, one of the weaknesses of WE is the extent to which the subjects of many songs had become abstract, diffuse or otherwise difficult to relate to (the ‘age of anxiety’, the end of American empire). On Pink Elephant the band are returned to very personal themes, and with the narrowed focus comes a palpable increase in just how honestly the feeling is conveyed. For several months after release I was unable to listen to (album highlight) ‘Year of the Snake’ without welling up. Something about the duet vocals and the sad, resigned optimism of the lyric is deeply affecting. Things get a bit bigger on ‘Alien Nation’, and a bit looser on ‘Stuck in my Head’, but for the most part the record is a tonally distinct entry in the catalogue of a remarkable band.
Now that Chassagne and Butler have announced their separation, I’m not sure what a possible future Arcade Fire record sounds like. For now, I’m just grateful that we got this one.
2. The Last Dinner Party — From the Pyre
I remember reading a review of The Last Dinner Party’s debut record, Prelude to Ecstasy (2024), in which the author noted how smart the band had been to avoid the pressure of delivering on the promise of lead single ’Nothing Matters’, by simply recording the whole album before the song was released. When that record took top spot on last year’s list, I ended my review thusly: ‘Prelude to Ecstasy is in the conversation for my favourite album of the last decade. I wish The Last Dinner Party good luck following up a debut like this’.
No sleight of hand was available to TLDP this time around of course. After all the kudos and awards that Prelude to Ecstasy rightly reaped, there was no hiding from the task facing them. It shows enormous bravery to bite the bullet and deliver a sophomore LP a mere 20 months on from release of the debut. And what a set of songs they’ve put together for a second collection! Once again, there’s nothing here that can be dismissed as anything less than artfully constructed and passionately delivered.
There are too many standout elements to list (the deep groove of the bassline on ‘Count the Ways’; the stunning a cappella moments on ‘Rifle’; Emily Roberts making the most of the solo on ‘The Scythe’ etc etc), and the album is replete with the band’s customary flair for theatricality—delivered with endearing sincerity, it’s one of the elements that make them so special. But, Abigail Morris’s impeccable, virtuosic voice warrants special mention. It’s compelling enough when following (or leading) a melody, but there are dozens of instances on From the Pyre—from the staccato trill of “the pigeons were witches, they whispered…” on opener ‘Agnus Dei’, to the sequence of ohs that climb the scales on closer ‘Inferno’—where she adds flair to a line, elevating it into something truly magical. There’s not another vocalist on this list who could handle the thirty second passage on (best song of the year) ‘This is the Killer Speaking’ from 3:21–3:51, in which Morris is first hauntingly pretty, then strident, then momentarily unhinged, then all-of-a-sudden back in command of the melody. It’s not the only thing about her performances which recalls Freddie Mercury, and that is absolutely the highest compliment it’s possible for me to pay a vocalist.
So then. Bonne chance for album number three ladies. I double dare you to make another record this wonderful.
1. Deep Sea Diver — Billboard Heart
Mark 2025 down as the year I fell in love with Deep Sea Diver. They were a new name to me upon release of this fourth album in February. They finish 2025 as my most-played artist of the year. Some of that is down to a back catalogue comprising two very good albums (History Speaks (2012) and Secrets (2016)) and one spectacular one: 2020’s Impossible Weight. But it’s Billboard Heart that did the big numbers, including six of my ten most-played songs of the year. Add in not one but two incredible gigs, and I end 2025 with moderately serious intentions of getting one of the band’s lyrics tattooed on my wrist.
Peter Mansen’s drums are often playful and inventive where most rock acts would have been content with something safer, and Elliot Jackson’s synth is a powerful force in adding colour and dynamism to the band’s sonic palette. But the heart and soul of DSD is two-fold. Firstly, there’s Jessica Dobson’s vocal: by turns soulful, vulnerable and forceful whilst remaining flawlessly tuneful, it allows the band to run the spectrum from tender (‘Happiness is not a Given’) to romantic (‘Tiny Threads’) to anthemic (‘Shovel’). Secondly, there’s Jessica Dobson’s guitar. Honestly, something about the guitar sound on this record—produced by Dobson in collaboration with Andy D Park—is magical to me. The album features the year’s best driving, melodic riff (‘Emergency’), its best fuzzed-out solo (‘Always Waving Goodbye’), and its most compelling clean jam (‘Billboard Heart’). Having stood within feet of Dobson as she played these, and hammered out the closing bars of ‘See in the Dark’ (not to mention ‘Lights Out’ from 2020’s Impossible Weight 🥵), I can attest to the fact that she’s a world class guitarist, and one whose voice also happens to be note-perfect at the same time.
Nothing else this year hit quite like the crescendo of ‘Loose Change’ or the push-pull groove of ‘What Do I Know’. It’s the mark of a truly great record when increased familiarity deepens one’s affection. I’ve played Billboard Heart a lot in the ten months since its release, and it absolutely delights me every time. Those opening warbles of the opening / title track are the defining sound of my 2025.
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