2025 is coming to an end, so here are the records that caught my attention:
- Alison's Halo - Skywide (BandCamp)
Alison's Halo formed in Phoenix, Arizona in the early 90s, and made a number of records, foremost among them their highly rated 1996 album Eyedazzler, in a somewhat Slowdive-adjacent vein, before breaking up, with Adam Cooper continuing his career making more abstract instrumental records. Now, almost three decades later, they return with a 5-track EP, continuing where they left off, with layers of shimmering processed guitars, atmospheric rivers of fuzz, and Catherine's voice floating above them, as ethereal and crystalline as ever.
Of course, no band crosses the same river twice, and so a 2025 album by a veteran shoegaze band is going to be different from the record they made in the white heat of their youth: where the first round had, in its ecstatic bliss, a shadow of dark ambiguity, Skywide has more a euphoric glow of nostalgia, like a San Junipero of chorus pedals and imported NME issues, a siren calling to the careworn GenXer across the oceans of time. (The opening track makes this particularly literal.)
The passing of time being what it is, Skywide is a great return from one of the more underrated bands of the genre, and is, if anything, too brief. Check it out, and if you like it, check out Eyedazzler as well.
- Blueboy - A Life In Numbers (BandCamp)
Speaking of improbable comebacks, Blueboy. Yes, the Sarah band, not the German Eurodance project of a similar name that always keeps getting mixed up with them. Almost three decades after their last record (the underrated, understated The Bank of England), and two after the death of frontman and chief songwriter Keith Girdler, whose voice (literally and figuratively) was synonymous with the project, the surviving members, Tim and Gemma, have reunited, and written an album of new material, largely inspired (they say) by their and others' lives, with thirteen songs, each thematically assigned to its number.
Musically, A Life In Numbers is towards the harder-edged end of Blueboy's sound, mostly away from the fey chamber pop they were known for, though is also more polished than the skronkier tracks they did towards the end of their Sarah period. In places, it comes within a pedal of shoegaze, driving basslines and guitars forming–and occasionally chiming resplendently over–walls of fuzz, Gemma's high vocals floating over everything, never too high in the mix. (It must be remembered that Blueboy emerged from the same late-1980s Thames Valley milieu that produced The Scene That Celebrates Itself.)
The opening track, One, is a case in point, kicking off in a howl of jangling guitars and driving bass, Gemma's vocals bobbing above the maelstrom like a paper boat, and we're a long way from Unisex. The second track, Deux, starts almost like a lost Slowdive, before cutting back to something sparser in the verse. 4am sounds like Bobby Wratten at his most Cure-inspired, and Five Minutes, with its vital urgency, wouldn't be amiss in a DJ set next to The Field Mice's Sensitive. Meanwhile, Seven Wonders sounds like a lost early My Favorite song (Gemma can sound so much like Andrea Vaughn that it's positively uncanny). The standout, though, would be My Three; this is chamber Blueboy at its peak, alongside Joined-Up Writing and Always There, only with a few more decades of bittersweet experience, all fingerpicked guitar and subtle string arrangements.
The elephant in the room, of course, is the void where Keith was, which is too large to ignore. The band largely do not attempt to channel him or imitate his unique perspective, but fill the space from their side. Perhaps this makes it a different band, in the way that New Order is not* Joy Division, though they have kept the name, and there is a palpable continuity. Whether Blueboy can exist under that name without Keith is a personal question for the fans, though in my opinion, Gemma and Tim make a decent case for their legacy. I for one am happy to see that they're back.
- Just Mustard - We Were Just Here (BandCamp)
One of the current wave of noteworthy Irish bands, Just Mustard hail geographically from Dundalk, just south of the border on the way between Dublin and Belfast, and stylistically from somewhere in the triangle between shoegaze, trip-hop and 90s goth. Expect a maelstrom of drum machine loops, keening guitar feedback and undefined electronic noise, with fey, ethereal vocals floating above, in a slightly otherworldly falsetto. People will compare them to their compatriots My Bloody Valentine, though Cranes would also be a reference point.
- Ninajirachi - I Love My Computer (BandCamp)
Nina Wilson started making dance-pop tracks in Garageband aged 16 in between school, long bus commutes on the NSW Central Coast and growing up online; a decade later, she is the year's big breakthrough story, winning a stack of ARIA awards. Her debut full-length album is stylistically one part trance to two parts hard-edged EDM/“techno” for dancing the drugs through your system, with some hyperpop elements (digital glitches, melodic lines with preternaturally clean processed vocals). Thematically, meanwhile, it is very much an artefact of growing up online, in the social-media era, with songs touching on online creepypasta lore (Infohazard), starting out in making electronic music (Sing Good), the personally affirming properties of a music collection (iPod Touch) and the intimate place digital technology occupies in our lives, exaggerated to parasexual levels (Fuck My Computer). The production is impeccably crisp and clean. Ninajirachi cleaves closely to dance-music conventions, with sounds and elements being immediately familiar to connoisseurs of the genre, though arranges them with enough variety to keep things interesting (in a way that a lot of Australian doof has historically been weak at).
I first heard of Ninajirachi a year or two ago, when she released an Ableton Live rack for vocal processing (including very online element names like “smolrus”), but only heard her actual music earlier this year, managing to see her play (i.e., mix her tracks live from four decks) in London. Since then, she has become absolutely huge. Chances are the major labels are climbing over themselves to bid for her, and next year she'll be based in LA or somewhere, so her next record may well be streaming-only.
- Oklou - Choke Enough (BandCamp)
The latest album from the Parisian songwriter/producer has 10 short songs built of a palette built on dance-music, and specifically the PC Music-adjacent school of hyperpop; layers of synth pads, arpeggios, subtle beats and Oklou's vocals, autotuned to within an inch of their life, all woven into intricate melodic arrangements verging on the classical in places.
One would probably call Oklou post-hyperpop rather than hyperpop, in the sense that while she comes from this milieu and draws on its palette, she doesn't really lean into the artifice in the way that, say, GFOTY does. You probably won't find any mainroom anthems on this record; though one can imagine Harvest Sky as a Eurovision entry, and Take Me By The Hand could be the big pop single. Other highlights include Plague Dogs, a dysphoric soundscape of bitcrushed arpeggios which could almost have fit on the Purity Ring album, Thank You For Recording, a languid pop song buttressed by intricate layers of synth arpeggios and textured noise, and the whimsical pop of the closer Blade Bird.
- Pickle Darling - Bots (BandCamp)
Originally titled Battlebots before trademark owners' lawyers intervened, Bots continues on from Pickle Darling's 2023 album Laundromat, upping the intricacy whilst staying aesthetically, for want of a better word, endearingly smol. Bots is a collection of tracks layered with lo-fi elements (acoustic guitar, sometimes chopped up into stuttering loops, cheap keyboards, 8-bit drum machine loops sandpapered with a bitcrusher and the odd use of digital glitch effects and vocal processing), and falls somewhere the twee end of IDM (think The Books) and Casio-and-glockenspiel indie, arranged in intricate progressions, though largely eschewing traditional pop verse/chorus structures. Lukas Mayo's close-miked vocals ride over these soundscapes, their lyrics remain introspective, focussing more on thoughts and internal mental state and the contemporary human condition.
Highlights include the lo-fi glitchpop of Violence Voyager with the almost Rampsian surrealism under its twinkling melodies, the 6½-minute, bipartite Human Bean Instruction Manual, and the lo-fi synthpop Massive Everything, which one can imagine filling floors at indiepop discos.
File alongside We Show Up On Radar, Julian Nation or The Love Letter Band before they turned into The Decemberists. (One could be tempted to compare this to this year's other antipodean album taking on the digital human condition through glitchy electronic pop, though the two aesthetically stand some way apart. If Ninajirachi's album is an AAA game running on a PS5, Pickle Darling is a PICO-8 metroidvania from itch.io.)
You can probably find Mayo at Camp A Low Hum with their guitar and Casio keyboard; if Aotearoa is too far away, perhaps someone can get them to make a Mastodon account.
- Popular Music - Against Men (BandCamp)
We last heard of Popular Music, Zac Pennington and Prudence Rees-Lee's art-pop project, two years ago, with their grandly theatrical Minor Works. Their follow-up EP is somewhat more slender and leans more in a literary direction. (It technically came out last year, but only on a cassette; it was made more generally available this year, which is why I'm counting it.)
Against Men weighs in at seven songs and reads like an anthology of short stories, dealing with the recurring motifs of the Penningtonian demimonde: the hermetic hermeneutics of desire, innocence, corruption and compromise, and increasingly the weight of time, a sense of loss and the spectre of death; one pictures him somewhere between Dorian Gray and Michael Grace Jr.
The record opens with the glam-rock stomp of Passover; Pennington's narrator recounting tales of body-counting debauch like an Ivy League Jarvis Cocker; the milieu is a millennial indie-sleaze demimonde, the American-Apparel-porno-polaroid aesthetic upfront and centre, unleavened by the romanticising shoegazey gauze of, say, Cigarettes After Sex, and presented with the ambiguity familiar to fans of Parenthetical Girls.
"Crying" (note the quotes) takes the pace down, Omnichord and synths laying the path for the narrator in full tender-pervert mode, recounting his own Charm Of Innocence. The song is not so much about crying as “crying”, performatively, if perhaps only to oneself (“now we're vacant inside… those waterworks still flow, but this is just for show”). Emily Says, with its wry third-person detachment and 606 beats, is a tragicomedy of manners of modern dating and sexual morés, from a point of view of jaded, scarred experience. Desert Motel #1 playfully détourns a Leonard Cohen song, turning it into pulsing OMD-esque synthpop, all gated drums and throbbing analogue synths, Zac's voice soaring over the choruses, recounting the delicious memory of some kind of torrid situationship one can, alas, never return to. Black Shroud speaks of pathological obsession, over a bed of unsettling electronic noises that only unfold into a coherent melody towards its end, and Providence Street brings a lush string arrangement to a ballad of long-severed friendship; it reminded me of mid-period Paradise Motel.
The highlight in my opinion would be the closing track, The Last Night Of Our Lives, where the narrator takes his mask off and gives his view from somewhat more than halfway down. Over almost eight minutes unfolds a slow-burning song of the alchemy of redemption amidst the desperation of the human condition; a procession of spectres, then the scene zooming out to a sense of closure; a salvation perhaps too late, though better than nothing.
Whilst smaller in scope than its predecessor, Against Men shows the maturing of Popular Music's voice. Rees-Lee's pellucid production subtly accenting the arched ironies and grey shades of Pennington's writing, which only gets sharper, with some of the most nuanced writing about the complexities of human intimacy since 20th-century Momus. (This slender record is, as you may expect, laden with exquisite turns of phrase, like “the tenuous touch of feminist men”, “the nights you died inside the hospice of his heart”, “the phases of love are like faces of death”, and more.) And his actual voice also gets more splendid, growing into a magnificent vintage matinée-idol croon; one imagines it soaring from a gramophone in a room redolent with bittersweet regrets.
As Against Men was completed in 2024, it's not clear what Popular Music are up to now. They toured Europe this year; Pennington mentioned plans to write a novel, and Rees-Lee has her own instrumental projects (she played an ambient set in sound-bath format in Naarm in 2024, which was excellent). Anyway, here's to the next record.
- Saint Etienne - International (BandCamp)
After three decades, numerous albums and recent experimental digressions towards vaporwave-adjacent haunto, Saint Et call it a day; this record is their farewell party. There is little experimentalism here, and not many meditations on pastoral England or the nature of nostalgia; this is a celebration, back in the swingin' London of the mind that will forever be their golden heyday, drawn in a palette of 90s romplers, Roland gear with a zero in the middle, euro-house, 60s soul, poptimism and the endless possibilities of being young in the big city.
The opening tracks set the scene, letting you know where you are: Glad opens with some sampled brass hits and synth keyboard chords, and soon Sarah comes in, singing about the sadness of being lonely and the joy of happiness, but we're not here for a philosophical discussion. Dancing Heart ups the Eurodance. Save It For A Rainy Day leans into italo-disco so much that it could almost be Swedish. There's a reflective breakup song with elegiac synth strings and breakbeats (Fade) and a confection of Italo-house pianos and 909 snare rolls (He's Gone). Brand New Me, meanwhile, takes it back to Swinging London with soul brass/break samples, organ licks, a groovy bassline and a spoken vocal that will be catnip to indie anglophiles; it's a burst of vintage sunshine, that also serves to show Lily Allen that you don't need to do a dodgy fauxmaican accent. And needless to say, The Go Betweens is not about the Meanjin indie duo, but a bouncy electropop song about being young in London or something.
I will miss Saint Etienne. They weren't one of my most listened to bands recently, though they were always enjoyable to talk or write about. I won't miss having to correct the tags on my Bandcamp downloads of their albums after their label, Heavenly Recordings, cheekily lists itself as the "Artist", though. And presumably Bob Stanley will keep writing about pop music and compiling mixes of interesting deep cuts from micro-milieux few others would be aware of, and Sarah will occasionally contribute a guest vocal to something.
- Stereolab - Instant Holograms On Metal Film (BandCamp)
When this album was announced, only weeks in advance, I was slightly sceptical: the notorious creative rifts between Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier, and assertions by other parties that the groop's reunion was as their own cover band for purely financial reasons. On the other hand, their live shows were charged with energy, and their mini-festival in Dalston showed a band cognizant of their significant legacy. So I held my breath. Then it came out and exceeded all expectations.
Instant Holograms follows on from late-period Stereolab, though adds some more electronics to the mix and then pushes it up a notch. It opens with a burst of synth arpeggios and vintage organ chords, just under a minute long (the characteristically titled Mystical Plosives), before dropping the listener into Aerial Troubles, a classic Laetitia song, with organ/harpsichord-like keys, a motorik beat, guitar fuzz and a technical-failure/capitalism/human-condition metaphor. And then it keeps going from there, with propulsive grooves, key changes, paradoxically upbeat social critiques and a surfeit of vintage electronics judiciously applied. Other highlights include the unrelenting motorik workout of Electrified Teenybop and the bipartite If You Remember I Forgot How To Dream (whose second part closes the record out with tape-delayed organ boombox, transistor chords, various kinds of analogue fuzz and a paradoxically optimistic message),
There is no filler in this record–it is remarkably consistent–though if there was a peak, I'd say it's Melodie Is A Wound; the third track clocks in at 7½ minutes, starting off as a track that wouldn't be amiss from the groop's Dots/Cobra-era oeuvre, all upbeat, retro-styled grooves paired with vaguely paranoid lyrics about oligarchy and social control; then, shortly after the three-minute mark, it abruptly fades into a slow-moving low-rider of fuzzed out grooves, fat beats and stacked chord changes, and motors on like that, breaking down and building back up on white-noise drums and warbling synths, as if to give the old-time 'lab rats exactly what they have been craving.
I'll call it: Stereolab have done a Slowdive and exceeded their fabled first act in their return. And they show no sign of stopping: they followed this album up with a two-track single in much the same vein. Here's to whatever they do next.
And some other releases: Automatic — Is It Now? (driving drum machines, warm analogue synths and melodic DIY grrrl-gang vocals riding on angular bass grooves; think Electrelane/Chicks On Speed meets early DFA with perhaps a touch of Numan) ¶ Blood Orange — Essex Honey (wintery chamber-folk meets indie meets soul, somewhere between Nick Drake and Prince) ¶ Civil Polis — En Man Utan Referenser (Swedish rave-punk; social commentary in Swedish over collages of WipeOut-soundtrack breakbeats, choppy guitars, synth warbles and guests from the Stockholm underground including breakbeat mentalists Cockhouse; a sort of Scandi breakcore Campesinos) ¶ The Cords — The Cords (rambunctiously melodious indiejangle like it’s 1986; slip this into a mix between The Primitives and The Shop Assistants and nobody will notice) ¶ CV Vision — Release The Beast (a mixed bag from this Berlin studio outfit on the krautrock-adjacent Bureau B album, combining fuzzed- and flanged-out sixeventies psychedelic rock, breakbeats, squippling 303s, TV-library-music-adjacent instrumentals and a varispeed collage aesthetic with distressed layers and breakneck tempo changes, giving the sonic impression of a graffiti-layered laneway in Mitte) ¶ Essendon Airport — MOR (the most meditative of the Little Band post-punks, who more or less invented post-rock some 20 years early, and now they return with another record of sinuously hypnotic instrumentals for guitar, slide guitar and various vintage beatboxes, evoking a mood of sunbleached wistfulness; one of the tracks is titled Wallpaper Music, which is a fitting description, though not a pejorative one) ¶ GFOTY — INFLUENZER (if the hyperpop-adjacent music elsewhere isn't hyper enough for you, take some GFOTY; the PC Music mainstay is essentially a cypher of maximalist artifice and dancefloor euphoria, at the expense of subtlety) ¶ Jens Lekman — Songs For Other People's Weddings (Gothenburg's greatest romantic (at least in English) returns, this time with a concept album around his wedding-singer persona (and a novel by David Levitan attached); this album is somewhat meta, with the sort of unabashedly glossy American MOR sounds everybody knows from 80s FM radio (or, presumably, “oldies” playlists these days), with Lekman's guitar joined in places by Vivaldian string quartets and Diane Warren-esque FM-piano gloop) ¶ Jerskin Fendrix — Once Upon A Time… In Shropshire (piano-driven ballads, occasionally veering towards hyperpop territory, with references to dubstep and pastoral life, from a skinny, beardy Hackney hipster with a vocal range from resonant baritone to caterwaul, who's like a PC Music adjacent Tom Waits; the piano has been drinking a cloudy fruit göse) ¶ Kuunatic — Wheels of Ömon (dubby psychedelia rooted in Japanese folklore, played on Japanese instruments, guitar and synth; like Om meets Kikagaku Moyo) ¶ Lala Salama — Miltähän me näytettäis yhdessä (anthemic, riff-charged indie rock and dreampop/shoegaze from Helsinki; the opening track recalls For A Minor Reflection, before kicking up the pace. In their live sets, they also do an absolutely rocking Finnish-language cover of Electric Six's Gay Bar, which unfortunately isn't on the album ) ¶ Lullatone — Music For My Friend's Flower Shop (the bedtime beat returns, with pretty much what the title promises) ¶ Briana Marela — My Inner Rest (recorded at Mills College, consisting of vocals, processing and electronics, going further away from the bedroom electropop of her earlier works, consisting of no standard pop-song structures, whilst remaining listenable and engaging (even if in places it reads like an affirmation one might see going rhizomal on Mastodon)) ¶ Tony Molina — On This Day (21 very short, exquisitely melodic songs, very much in a 60s sunshine-pop tradition; Alicia from The Aislers Set (who is also Molina's partner) is involved as well ) ¶ Monnone Alone — Here Comes The Afternoon (Marky delivers an album of mildly psychedelic sunshine pop somewhat busier/groovier/less foggy than its lockdown-era predecessor, and in places veering into Stone Roses/Happy Mondays territory, only without the electronics (Brain Stone)) ¶ Lael Neale — Altogether Stranger (a combination of lo-fi drum machines, Omnichords and sun-dappled gently psychedelic folk, following on from Star Eater's Delight; meditations on the traffic jams and airport queues of modern America, set to music that's somewhere between Broadcast and The Velvet Underground) ¶ Geoffrey O'Connor — I Love What We Do (mellow sophistipop with a 80s-European feel, with O'Connor's familiar blend of heart-on-sleeve romanticism and almost paralysing introspection, leavened with a lot of flute; easy music for uneasy lovers and the lobbies of baroque spaces) ¶ The Parker Posies — who cares? (possibly the indiepop debut of the year from a group one could call the Canadian Cords; a group of teenage gurls from Oak Bay (the southwestern bit of Canada, across from Seattle). Stylistically slightly rough around the edges in a DIY way, not dissimilar to The Beths and Rose Melberg's various projects (they don't mention Melberg but it's unlikely that she, a linchpin of the scene in that part of the world, wasn't an influence). Also, the cover is top-notch, and underground-comics illustration slightly reminiscent of Adrian Tomine's cover for The Softies ) ¶ Phoebe Rings — Aseurai (a New Zealand band combining city-pop, 60s chamber pop and touches of bossa nova and disco-funk ) ¶ Pulp — More (another surprise return, with Jarvis & Co. picking up sort of where they left off; Spike Island breaks the fourth wall and writes from the point of view of Jarvis the public performer, Grown Ups reprises the age dysphoria of Countdown from the other end, Got To Have Love is more agapē than the eros of the FEELINGCALLEDLOVE it recalls, and there's a loungey number and a song titled Farmer's Market; the standout would be the epic Hymn Of The North, which starts with piano and builds) ¶ Purity Ring — Purity Ring (the self-titled return from the dark-electropop duo who brought us Shrines, this time influenced by Japanese role-playing video games, and intended as a soundtrack to a hypothetical one, all symphonic synths, rapidfire breakbeats, rave riffs and denatured vocals; the closing track is a lovely tribute to the late Ryuichi Sakamoto ) ¶ Rosalía — LUX (you've probably heard Berghain, the maximalist excess of Orffian opera, mainroom bombast, sex, violence and religion, with added Björk, that sounds like a less American Baz Luhrmann film in musical form. The rest of the album is in a similar vein, if somewhat more subtle, combining grand opera, rave techno and Iberian classical traditions in a hypersaturated palette. A bold experiment, which only time will reveal whether it succeeded) ¶ Sacred Paws — Jump Into Life (vibrant, upbeat indiepop with propulsive drums, euphoric vocals and chiming Congolese high-life guitars, not too unlike Tigercats; good luck not moving to this ) ¶ Maria Somerville — Luster (feather-light yet textured post-Cocteauvian dreampop; file alongside Juliana Barwick and early yeule ) ¶ Thala — Avalanche (tasteful indie from Berlin, from the moment when "tasteful indie" sounded more like M83 or Phoenix than Tame Impala; alt-rock with propulsive beats electronica production and vaguely Apple keynote vibes, though Thala's vocal delivery does bring to mind a particular Tom Ellard blog post; file alongside Yumi Zouma ) ¶ These New Puritans — Crooked Wing (a vast, subtle record, with an aura of twilight and solemnity, crafted from metronomic repetition in a Cage/Reich sense; file alongside Amiina and iLiKETRAiNS ) ¶ Sharon Van Etten — …& The Attachment Theory (synthpop meets stadium-adjacent indie rock in a catchily anthemic record) ¶ Dean Wareham — That's The Price Of Loving Me (Wareham returns to working with long-time Galaxie 500 producer Kramer, for the first time in 34 years, in a mellow, gently reflective and quietly rich album, driven mostly by his guitar, Britta Phillips' bass and some subtly lush string arrangements; a slow-burner) ¶ yeule — Evangelic Girl Is A Gun (the latest from yeule, sticking in the 90s-retro vein with distressed textures; it's grunge, but in the graphic-design sense) ¶
There were a lot of bands I didn't get around to listening to properly enough to write about here: there's a surfeit of indiepop, notably from the US West Coast (Lightheaded, The Telephone Numbers) though also some from the UK (Autocamper), which I didn't quite find the time to check out properly.
If I were to pick a record of the year, it would be Popular Music or Stereolab, though Blueboy's pretty close.
PS: this year, in lieu of a Spotify playlist, I decided to try the new Bandcamp playlist feature. I managed to get most of the tracks I wanted up; the playlist is here.