This is a fine release with great emotional depth, and its oft-haunted tone is given a perfect kiss-off with the final track, which can only be described as pure - a loving ode built upon classic country song imagery.

Little of the album ever actually dips in quality (“Don’t Call Tonight” is the only real leftover nacho), the confusing aesthetics of the album cover and the decision to tack “Die With a Smile” on here do go a long way to making this package feel a tad disjointed and lacking a bow. Still, the aesthetic failings are only a disappointment because the contents are so dang good.

There are minor exceptions here – the wondrous flourishes of opener "COLORATURA", the lilting inflections Aoba rides on "Luciférine", the aching nostalgia of the centrepiece "FLAG" (for my money, the one true Aoba classic here in every sense of the word) – but you'll be hard-pressed to find a record so full of subtle details that puts so little emphasis on the spectacle of individual moments, that drifts so freely within itself.

After nearly 15 years of middling releases, Parasomnia is a triumphant return to form – possibly their most creative, focused, and engaging work since Metropolis Pt. 2.

A Paradise In The Hold is one of the best albums you are going to listen to in 2025. It is focused and whole, while also being as breathtaking and wild as the land from which it derives its inspiration.

Saya Gray’s newfound streamlined approach comes at little cost to her oddball M.O.. She is remarkable for how she irons out what would once have been a lone idiosyncratic contour into the basis for a full track, stuffing verse/chorus structures with ideas so prickly that it’s a wonder to hear them sit so naturally in a conventional framework.

in spite of this record’s formlessness, i keep coming back to choke enough. there’s something intriguing about a pop album committed to never, ever popping, while presenting enough cute little bits that are just memorable enough to be able to describe oklou’s music.

While the ceiling is low and the majority of So Close To What is annoyingly undercooked, there is still a lot of promise to be found. Tate and her team clearly have an ear for sticky melodies and the lack of necessary lore is appreciated, but there still is a very pervasive sense of figuring things out here.

Blindness doesn’t necessarily come together in the way a record ideally would, despite the fact that the songs are largely high-quality. Nonetheless, I’m quite intrigued by the record’s final stretch, which notably improves the overall feeling of this release.

It fails on every level. It’s not fun. It’s not sexy. It’s not impressive. It’s not inventive.

Sure, The End of the Middle might not be as breathtakingly immersive as Ruby Cord or as transportive as Peasant, but it further cements Dawson's place as modern folk's most fascinating auteur, turning historical echoes into something eerily prophetic.

Where Magdalene found itself virtually overburdened by its own emotional weight, this album is almost ponderously short of it, yet malleable and playful in a way that vindicates its escapist bent.

The effects, walls of noise, sharp changes in tonality and song structure are engaging and well-executed. Despite stretches of atmospheric passages and droning instrumentals, Never Exhale doesn’t ever feel boring. It is deliberate without being robotic, and creates an introspectively bleak mood throughout the record.

Violet’s biggest victory is not only sounding like the sum of its lofty parts, but also having a personality that’s distinctly its own.

Although there are a handful of highlights, the group has settled into a comfort zone from which good tracks emerge effortlessly, but nothing outstanding.

I could go on for hours about the beauty within the story of You Are The Morning, but the record truly speaks for itself. From the luscious instrumentation to the heart-on-sleeve lyrics, jasmine.4.t’s first full-length shares a message that needs to be heard: a message of hope found within community. You Are The Morning is nothing short of raw and emotional, and that’s what makes it so powerful.

Those who take the time to unpack and absorb the content will almost certainly find aspects that crawl beneath the skin, but the collection is only as hard-hitting as the listener is receptive to the experience. It’s musically calming like a dusky sky pinpricked with stars, but unforgivingly immediate in its focus, like the underlying promise of thunder.

If I’d stuck to just a listen or two of Bad Apple or No Homo, I’d be tempted to think this was a good album. But underneath the fight-montage attack, the songwriting feels about as lazy as it can possibly get. I’m not looking for math-rock bridges or string sections in my garage band or anything, but there’s a difference between walking down a well-trod path and wallowing.

Ringo remains Ringo, for better and worse. And in keeping with the hangdog Ringo persona this isn’t even the best country-adjacent album by a Beatle. It’s an album for Ringo Starr, and if we can’t give it any sort of adulation, we can at least respect its intentions, and those of the artists who made it.

This thing is quiet. It’s cozy. It’s simple. It’s, to be blunt, a vibe. Horrible Occurrences is a warm blanket during this time of year where the days can stretch on forever and the nights can swallow me whole.

Perverts’ 90-minute runtime and average song length of ten minutes could be intended to alienate, and undoubtedly harmed the record’s replay value for me as I continued to dig deeper into it. Perhaps this is the point, or perhaps I’ve missed it entirely. Either way, my respect for these compositions never dwindled because of their bravery and clarity of artistic vision.

Fennesz' ear for striking textures takes the spotlight precisely once here: through the latter minutes of the opener "Heliconia", he plucks and rakes his guitar as though putting it on life support, the stark tone of the instrument a fragile contrast to the densely processed sound that otherwise dominates the album. It produces a genuinely compelling tension and sets the bar modestly high, this but proves to be an early peak: the remaining five tracks lay down one languorous chord pattern after another, their digital modulations and cavernous reverb settings spread too thin to patch the threadbare cast-offs.

It just finds this fantastic middle ground, not only in the way that its frantic smattering of ideas somehow presents not as overwhelming, but comforting - the exuberance infectious, the fuzz electric - but, also, in how Night Palace ties in with the broader Elverum catalogue.

The Last Will and Testament is slickly produced, conceptually sound and stronger in its first half. Unfortunately, it lacks an overall aesthetic that would see this record reach the accolades of Blackwater Park, Watershed or even Heritage while dabbling in those clear elements.

GNX is the sound of an artist stepping into their power and the newfound freedom that comes without have to prove a damn thing. It’s a several-victory lap long coronation that serves as the perfect capstone to what was already a legendary year that shifted the entire rap hierarchy with just a handful of songs.

Seed of a Seed doesn’t quite reach the heights of I Need to Start a Garden (and let’s be honest, that’s a HIGH bar to clear as it is), but it’s still quite an impressive offering. Instead of lazily rehashing what made her debut so special, Heynderickx decided to expand on it and give her songs a more panoramic space to roam in. Most importantly, the core characteristics of her style weren’t lost in the process.

The faults of Bouquet lie not in the genre lane-switch, but in the artist’s seeming disdain for her own talent, which by-and-large goes unutilised here in favour of an exceptionally flavourless, dirt-road bland, pop country excursion.

From Zero is a tale of two halves. The first half feels like pandering to what people miss from Linkin Park. .... However, by the time “Overflow” rolls around, a switch flips. Though it’s more of a Shinoda track, it sets the stage for a strong second half, with its dark and captivating atmosphere and simplistic instrumentation that makes it a powerful standout. From this point on, From Zero maintains momentum.