FEATURE:
Marking a Phenomenal Year for Music
IN THIS PHOTO: Beyoncé
The Best Albums of 2025
_________
EVEN though…
IN THIS PHOTO: Charli xcx
there are a few more weeks of potentially exceptional albums and ones that could be among the best of the year, I think we have seen the absolute best. Like so many people, I wanted to highlight the standout albums from a brilliant year. Even though my rundown and spotlight is a little restrictive – with ten albums included – I do think that it has plenty of variety. Albums I would recommend people investigate. From a year-defining album from Charli xcx to some terrific albums by established and newer artists alike, it has been another stunning year for music. Below are ten albums that I feel are…
THE best of 2025.
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Charli xcx – BRAT
Release Date: 7th June
Label: Atlantic
Producers: A. G. Cook/Cirkut/George Daniel/Charli XCX/Gesaffelstein/Finn Keane/Hudson Mohawke/El Guincho/Jon Shave/Linus Wiklund/Omer Fedi
Review:
“The out all night in last night’s makeup, glorifies Lana Del Rey, a little bit messed up, and “you hate the fact she’s New York City’s darling” ones. If her latest album – a set of rave-y dance songs digging deep into the artist’s insecurities and looking good while doing it – is an attempt to court that crowd, it’s so good that it might as well be pandering.
Whereas Charli’s previous full-length effort Crash was her most garden-variety-pop release in years, recreating the synthpop of the late 20th century with a modern flair, Brat is a diametrically different kind of dance record: she “came from the clubs,” as she said in a post on X, and to the clubs she shall return. Brat is chock-full of grimy, booming synths, driving drum-machine beats, and repetitive hooks; these tracks would be best experienced by a headbanging, borderline-violent crowd surrounded by smoke machines and illicit hallucinogens. At fifteen tracks, the album’s club-friendly repetitiveness can make it a bit of a stretch to get through, especially because a few tracks feel less essential than the rest. But overall, it’s still surprisingly exceptional as a front-to-back listen.
That power and cohesion is due in no small part to the album’s producers. Electronic music visionary A.G. Cook, who has led Charli’s production work since the mid-2010s but largely took a backseat on Crash, has his fingerprints all over Brat; he even gets a shoutout on each of the album’s first two tracks. It’s all the little A.G. touches – the cutesy piano melody in “Mean girls,” the choice of synth on the outro of “Rewind” – that make this album feel a little closer to Charli’s comfort zone, if one can even call it that. Her PC Music-inspired, pioneering, avant-garde, abrasive comfort zone.
Even if Brat is Charli’s most bouncy, propulsive album, though, it’s also her most vulnerable.
It’s a common trope for pop artists to write introspective lyrics a couple times per album, in an attempt to show that the pop star, too, is a human being. Maybe the ambitious will write a whole album talking about their feelings. But Brat isn’t just inward-looking – it’s a full-on self-character dissection, delivered with all the rawness of a self-hating Notes app rant. Some tracks appear to be about other pop stars explicitly, and most delve into Charli’s most difficult feelings, from generational trauma to body image issues to an obsession with the Billboard charts. She describes herself as inhabiting the “background” at clubs, wonders aloud whether or not her contemporaries actually like her, expresses her fear of actually meeting someone for the first time in real life, asks if she “deserves commercial success,” laments how much she over-analyzes her face shape. She sings about how her jealousy of other pop stars can drive her to suicidal ideation; she writes about her fears that her parents’ generational trauma might have reached her. Even when paired with bombastic dance beats, this is easily the most insecure, dark album Charli has ever released. And in context, the few songs where Charli sounds fully and unreservedly secure in herself – “360,” “Von dutch” – start to sound less like re-affirmations of her greatness and more like attempts to convince herself of it.
Brat isn’t entirely mournful, though: on occasion, moments of hope filter through the misery of celebrity that pervades Charli’s lyricism. On “Everything is romantic,” she pens a list of small joys – “Bad tattoos on leather tanned skin / Jesus Christ on a plastic sign / Fall in love again and again / Winding roads doing manual drive” – and repeats it again and again, clinging to the beauty in those otherwise-insignificant moments. And at the end of the album on the penultimate “I think about it all the time,” she writes about meeting a friend and her new baby: “standing there, same old clothes she wore before, holding a child”. It’s these moments of vitality that cut through the insecurity and suffering throughout most of Brat, reminding Charli and her audience simultaneously that life can be – and is – beautiful, despite everything. “My career feels so small in the existential steam of it all,” she writes on “I think about it all the time”. Maybe it is.
By the end of the album, Charli seems to have no memory of her vulnerabilities. Instead, on album finale “365,” she raps over a sped-up mix of opener “360” about looking hot, calling an ambulance, and generally having what sounds like the craziest house party of all time. It’s superficial, unpoetic, unimportant – and absolutely deserved. She sounds more alive than she has in years. After over a dozen tender, depressive, beautiful club tracks, by the end of Brat, Charli is ready to actually be at the club. And you know she’s going to shine at its centre” – The Line of Best Fit
Key Cuts: Club classics/Von dutch/I think about it all the time
Standout Track: 360
Nadine Shah – Filthy Underneath
Release Date: 23rd February
Label: EMI North
Producer: Ben Hillier
Review:
“Nadine Shah is lingering backstage after a “blinding” show at the dawn of the track ‘Sad Lads Anonymous’ from her tour de force fifth album ‘Filthy Underneath’. Her gloriously expressive Wearside accent runs free in a spoken word monologue: “The band left hours ago, according to the work experience kid that I’m currently telling all my deepest darkest secrets to in a toilet cubicle”.
If that kid was privy to the first draft, then we are all now treated to the fully-realised final product. Those secrets, sadly, carry a profound weight: since Shah’s last album, 2020’s ‘Kitchen Sink’, she lost her mother at the height of lockdown, her marriage came to an end and she attempted to take her own life. Through a period of recovery has emerged a career-best statement of Shah’s songwriting prowess, where inner struggles are rendered with maturity and relatability, supercharged by a fearless, expansive sonic palette.
Twitches and chirrups of static fuzz adorn ‘Even Light’, a track ridden by a sense of foreboding, gothic paranoia, but at a rollicking, devil-may-care pace. ‘Food For Fuel’ shows off the qawwali devotional influence of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, while ‘You Drive, I Shoot’ and ‘Keeping Score’ find Shah and longtime producer Ben Hillier [Blur, Depeche Mode] creating soundscapes that can send a shiver through the listener without ever alienating them. If the arrangements occasionally seem sparse and uncertain, then with Shah’s deeply felt vocals, we are always firmly rooted in a human place, where a warm embrace is never far away.
‘Greatest Dancer’ details nights watching Strictly with her ailing mother while illicitly slipping down some of her medicated morphine. What results is a glorious moment of escapism, a hallucinogenic fantasia with galloping drums and a glitterball swirl of dreamy synths.
But on ‘Topless Mother’, the mood changes as she sings, “When you were born you broke the mould / Another lie to you your mother told”. A glimpse into Shah’s recovery period, the song collapses into a non-sequitur chorus of random word exclamations (“Samosa!”, “Iguana!”), and we ponder whether Shah is shirking at us trying to listen in too closely, or surrendering to the jumble of her own internal monologue.
‘French Exit’ is a disarmingly frank contemplation of the day of her attempted suicide. “Blue polka dot and matching trousers / Reapplied lipstick, a clown who counts the downers / Just a French exit, sliding off the dancefloor / But how close is it, the now until the no more,” she sings, the poignant, matter of fact specificity averting any danger of glamourisation. Shah is writing about the darkest places a person can reach in a devastatingly human manner that demonstrates a rare level of repose and reflection” – NME
Key Cuts: Even Light/Greatest Dancer/Twenty Things
Standout Track: Topless Mother
Beyoncé – COWBOY CARTER
Release Date: 29th March
Labels: Parkswood/Columbia
Producers: Various
Review:
“Ever since Beyoncé – to quote the lady herself – “changed the game with that digital drop” via her self-titled fifth album, released without warning in 2013, she’s become the fixed point around which popular culture oscillates. Bandwidth-swallowing think pieces, detailed decoding of every lyric, plus an increasingly vexed right-wing America have kept her name on everyone’s lips. She wasn’t exactly a cult concern before, but the last decade has seen her move beyond mere superstar status, aided by 2016’s internet sleuth-facilitating infidelity opus Lemonade and 2022’s liberated, post-lockdown dance party, Renaissance.
That last album was billed teasingly as Act I, and now arrives the second part of a mooted trilogy. While Renaissance, with its celebration of the oft-ignored influence of Black queer dance pioneers, facilitated a healthy amount of debate, you could cobble together a hefty book on the discourse that’s already swirling around Cowboy Carter. Inspired by a less than welcome reaction to the Texan’s performance of her country single Daddy Lessons at the 2016 Country Music Awards – where she was dismissed as a “pop artist”, seemingly code for “Black woman” – it’s an album that takes country music by its plaid shirt collar, holds up its (mainly) male, pale and stale status to the light and sets it on fire.
A deliciously camp revenge fantasy suddenly breaks into a snatch of 18th-century aria – one of many vocal flexes
Thrilling opener Ameriican Requiem – a slow-burn, country-rock opera – references that CMA controversy directly (“Used to say I spoke too country / And the rejection came, said I wasn’t country ’nough”), before making broader statements on who gets to call themselves a “true American” (“A pretty house that we never settled in”). It is followed by a cover of the Beatles’ folk-y Blackbird (here retitled Blackbiird, a consistent motif used throughout the album to denote it being Act II), a song that was inspired by the experiences of nine teenage Black girls attending an all-white school in post-segregation 1957, featuring vocals from upcoming Black country singers Brittney Spencer, Reyna Roberts, Tanner Adell and Tiera Kennedy. It’s an opening salvo ripe for music scholars to unpick.
But Cowboy Carter is never just one thing. Nor does its scholarly detail weigh it down. Just as it uses country music as a backdrop to explore other genres, it also utilises anger and injustice as shades of a bigger picture. There’s fun to be had via the playful, thigh-slapping single Texas Hold ’Em, which makes more sense preceded by an introduction from a stoned Willie Nelson. The unhinged Ya Ya is a freewheelin’ sprint through social and economic disparity that channels the electifying spirit of Tina Turner, and samples Nancy Sinatra and the Beach Boys.
While Beyoncé’s take on Jolene by Dolly Parton (or Dolly P as she’s recast here) loses some of the original’s desperation by morphing into a glint-eyed warning, it’s still a hoot to hear her spit lines like “Jolene, I know I’m a queen, Jolene / I’m still a Creole banjee bitch from Louisiane.” Daughter is a deliciously camp revenge fantasy that suddenly breaks into – and this is one of Beyoncé’s many vocal flexes on the album – a snatch of the 18th-century aria Caro Mio Ben, sung in Italian.
By swapping the tightly packed synth and drum programming of Renaissance for live instrumentation (including percussion made from the click-clack of Beyoncé’s nails), Cowboy Carter has a looser, baggier feel than its predecessor. The excellent, loved-up Bodyguard unspools like a lost Fleetwood Mac classic, all rippling 70s soft-rock melodies, while the sweet Protector, dedicated to her daughter Rumi Carter, sounds like it was knocked out around a campfire. II Most Wanted, meanwhile, finds Beyoncé and pop-country maven Miley Cyrus trading odes to their ride or dies as if sharing the same mic.
If this all sounds decidedly mid-paced, Cowboy Carter isn’t solely about rustic shuffles. Spaghettii, which features Linda Martell, the first Black country star to perform on the Grand Ole Opry stage, is a trap-infused head knocker; II Hands II Heaven rides a soft electronic pulse and samples Underworld; while the finger-pointing Tyrant fuses fiddle filigrees with rib-rattling bass, perfect for a sweat-soaked dosey doe at Club Renaissance.
Cowboy Carter’s scope and scale can be overwhelming, as can its 27-track runtime – the shorter interludes-as-songs cause a dip in excitement midway through – but there’s something about its construction that pleads with you to consume it as a whole; a journey not just through, and beyond, American roots music, but through various moods, shades and emotions that coalesce as a celebration. It feels like a feast at a time when pop is offering up scraps. As she mentioned herself when announcing the album to a mix of anger, intrigue and confusion: “This ain’t a country album. This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album.” It’s also her fourth classic in a row” – The Guardian
Key Cuts: BLACKBIRD/TEXAS HOLD ‘EM/ALLIIGATOR TEARS
Standout Track: SPAGHETTII
Jack White – No Name
Release Date: 19th July
Label: Third Man
Producer: Jack White
Review:
“Jack White didn't get where he is without a keen sense of theater and self-promotion, and not many artists could build a buzz around a new album the way he did with 2024's No Name. On July 19, 2024, anyone who made a purchase at one of White's Third Man stores in Detroit, Nashville, and London would find in their bags a mysterious LP, in a plain white sleeve and with the white labels simply stamped "No Name." Of course, the sort of folks shopping at his stores are the sort of music nerds who would be intrigued and delighted by getting a mystery disc, and before long the music media was abuzz with stories about White releasing a new album in a manner that was at once secretive and bound to call attention to itself. It didn't take long for needle-drop bootlegs of the album to circulate online, and within a week, No Name had been given an official wide release. So what sort of album did White make to hype in this manner? No Name happens to be the most straightforward rock & roll album he has delivered in some time, a set of 13 tough guitar-based tunes with an abundance of swagger and a kick that melds the punky minimalism of the White Stripes with his well-documented obsession with Led Zeppelin. (You could make an effective drinking game out of making listeners take a shot when they hear a clear Zep lift in the melodies or White's guitar.) If White's two albums of 2022, Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive, found him introspectively exploring the outer margins of his music as he struggled with the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, No Name is an enthusiastic return to the familiar, though it doesn't play like a regression so much as an artist embracing their strengths and having a good time doing so. The lyrics are full of braggadocio, declaring "If God's too busy then I'll bless myself" in "Bless Yourself" and "I'll make you miss me again" in "Missionary," and they're matched to guitar work that rhymes. White's leads constantly swing from elemental chunkiness to bluesy flash without losing his footing, and the clean, unobtrusive production flatters his tone and lets the other musicians strut their stuff without taking the spotlight off the star (as if he would permit such a thing). Even without its publicity stunt release, No Name would doubtless click with an awful lot of Jack White's fans, and it's the sort of idiosyncratic but lean and mean rock album he's needed to make for a while” – AllMusic
Key Cuts: Bless Yourself/Bombing Out/Terminal Archenemy Endling
Standout Track: Archbishop Harold Holmes
St. Vincent - All Born Screaming
Release Date: 26th April
Labels: Total Pleasure/Virgin
Producer: St. Vincent
Review:
“While hardly the most original observation, St. Vincent’s constant use of reinvention and high concepts shares a few similarities with our dear departed Starman. Both Clark and Bowie stand as ferocious creative forces spurned on by the next big idea, hungrily eager to change their musical makeup with every project. There’s also a shared sense of the alien that both artists inhabit. There’s a distance, the feeling of them being an observer of our world, not an earthy participant. Such elements make their songs exciting, otherly, and, of course, unique to most others. Why the preamble? To highlight why Clark’s previous album, 2021’s ‘Daddy’s Home’, didn’t quite linger in people’s hearts as well as her other work.
Inhabiting the sleazy funk and soul of 70s New York sounded exhilarating when announced, but when all was said and done, Clark embracing nostalgic sounds and aesthetics of yore didn’t come across as 100% convincing. Her dominant aura and forward-thinking spirit just didn’t fit the warm tones of the past – which takes us to ‘All Born Screaming,’ ten tracks of off-kilter rock and pop that sees Annie strap on her angular guitar and set coordinates straight for the sun. In other words, she’s back.
While ‘Daddy’s Home’ wasn’t without its merits, this latest release had an immediacy that it could only dream of. Despite opener ‘Hell Is Near’ acting as the album’s moodiest cut, there’s a lurking sense of propulsion and menace from the off. There’s a dash of Led Zep folk rock by way of the moody textures of trip-hop. Bold, arresting, and Clark at her finest. The following ‘Reckless’ sees her harness her love of Nine Inch Nails, embracing the cinematic darkness one Trent Reznor perfected. Groovy and dangerously carnal, she absolutely nails the sense of isolation and intimacy that NIN made their name with.
Continuing her teenage love of alt-rock is the lead single ‘Broken Man,’ an industrial-flavoured stomper with Mr. Dave Grohl adding his powerhouse drumming to proceedings. It’s three and a half minutes and gritty swagger, and it will undoubtedly become a live favorite for years to come. With Clark literally covered in flames on its cover and the title being, well, what is, you’d be excused for thinking that her seventh album may be her most somber, but at the midpoint, things take a welcome turn.
‘Big Time Nothing’ marries some of the funk and soul elements of the previous album but filters them through a kaleidoscopic prism of electronica and dance. It’s a far more exciting prospect. Not happy with subverting expectations there, Clark then goes full Bond theme tune on the brilliant ‘Violent Times.’ John Barry-esque guitar licks and horn blasts are married to lyrics focused on eyes and immortality. It’s a treat and makes you wonder why on earth St. Vincent has yet to be tapped to do a theme – after all, Garbage did a bang-up job.
Ever imagined what Annie Clark doing Blondie would sound like? Dream no more, ‘So Many Planets,’ breezy nu-wave is your answer. Light ska elements add a summery sheen to the number before Clark lets loose a mischievous guitar solo that shows off her chops without overpowering the song’s upbeat vibe. As for the mental-as-hell-sounding title track? An 80s-flavored foot-tapper slowly morphs into a trippy disco outro, like a more unhinged cousin to the beloved ‘Fast Slow Disco.’ Until its last moment, nothing is as it seems on ‘All Born Screaming’.
While it’s not a controversial take to say St. Vincent doesn’t have a bad album, this latest set sees Clark back in domineering form. There’s not a second wasted on the album’s taut track list, the songwriter managing to balance her teenage inspirations simultaneously, go back to basics, and break new ground all at once. Bowie soared highest when being his freaky little self. The same can be said of Clark, whose songs come alight when icy beauty and danger go for a dance—a staggering return” – CLASH
Key Cuts: Reckless/Big Time Nothing/Violent Times
Standout Track: Broken Man
Laura Marling - Patterns in Repeat
Release Date: 25th October
Labels: Chrysalis/Partisan
Producers: Laura Marling/Dom Monks
Review:
“I want you to know that I gave it up willingly/ Nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me,” sings Laura Marling to her baby daughter on Patterns in Repeat. Recorded mostly at the 34-year-old musician’s north London home, the album features infant gurgles and dog collar jangles interspersed with her decisively plucked acoustic guitar. It’s a record that celebrates motherhood as an expansion of creativity, rather than the stifling of it that she had expected.
It’s unsurprising that Marling feared the pram in the hall. Ever since the release of her 2008 debut album, Alas I Cannot Swim, released when she was just 18, critics have compared her precocious talent to that of Joni Mitchell – who put her only child up for adoption in 1965 and spent much of her subsequent songwriting career comparing the lonely exhilarations of her fearless artistry with the cosy prison of domesticity that she contemptuously/covetously cast as “the lady’s choice”.
Like Mitchell, Marling finds her truth in angular melodies that often elbow aside space for her blunt, questing confessions. She left home young, read fiercely, and sang of loving with wild unsentimentality. Often toying with the idea of walking away from the music industry, she took a break in America where she befriended vagabonds, cult members and people who lived off grid. She went electric (like Mitchell) on her 2015 album Short Movie, and in her podcast Reversing the Muse, challenged cultural constructs around women and art. On 2017’s Semper Femina she sang of yearning “to be the kind of free/women still can’t be alone”.
But it has been almost 60 years since Mitchell (then 20) felt forced to choose between music and motherhood. She was alone, with no support from her child’s father or her parents – and had not yet established herself as an artist. By contrast, Marling is a well-established talent, with financial security and a loving partner (a songwriter-turned-charcutier). Under these fortuitous conditions, she’s found parenthood to be an adventure and she stretches out thoughtfully into many of its corners on this album, like a baby in its first cot. Opener “Child of Mine” rises from a terrycloth-soft strum, casually picking up a heavenly choir as it journeys from intimate scenes of father-daughter kitchen dancing to the more abstract mysteries of the unreachable infant mind. Strings and accompanying male vocals curl around Marling’s voice like tiny fingers.
Marling recently earned a masters in psychoanalysis and attended “family constellation therapy” – a therapeutic approach in which she looked for patterns in gene pools. The skippily picked “Patterns” sees her relaxing into the repetition of generations that turn like seasons. She rakes leaves on “Your Girl” – the melody is slinky and her voice drops to a drawl as she tells a lover that he “let me down sometimes” as she “tried to play a boy’s game”. A piano pops in on “No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can” and the guitar takes on a moody, melodramatic Spanish flare on “The Shadows”. You can hear the narrative turning on a flamenco dancer’s heel as Marling laments: “She knows, of course she knows… and one day she’ll tear me apart.” There’s a little flick of the skirt to Led Zep’s “Stairway To Heaven” in there, too.
There’s a bittersweet nod back to Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice” on “Caroline” – a song written from the perspective of an older man getting a call from the old flame who left him, asking her not to call again because: “I got married and I love my wife/I have kids, they’re good and grown now/All in all I’ve been happy with my life.” Marling’s voice – once again, like Mitchell’s – is often most soul-grazing when it drops low and cold. She contrasts those moments with the sweetness of a forgotten tune that goes: “Laaa, la, la, laaa – something something, Caroline.”
Marling has often credited her dad for teaching her his “birdlike” guitar technique. Here she goes one further and covers a song he wrote as a young man called “Looking Back”. Here his daughter projects herself into the future where she remembers the joy of early motherhood – she knows she’ll ache for it one day. The latin-flavoured “Lullaby” does what it says on the bottle, promising her child that she is “safe in my arms”.
The album closes neatly with its title song – jazzy chords lifting to hammock-swung refrains. “A smile or two/a gap between your tooth,” wisecracks the singer, always with an edge of sharpness. Never sappy. Strings saw their way between semitones like teethers. It should be enough that Marling has expressed this version of motherhood for herself and her family alone. But I can’t help hoping it opens hopeful doors for other creative women – and shows the music industry how to value and support mothers without expecting them to crack on like nothing game-changing has happened to their minds, bodies and souls” – The Independent
Key Cuts: No One's Gonna Love You Like I Can/Caroline/Lullaby
Standout Track: Child of Mine
English Teacher - This Could Be Texas
Release Date: 12th April
Label: Island
Producer: Marta Salogni
Review:
“Not everybody gets a time to shine,” muses English Teacher’s Lily Fontaine on the suitably star-gazing ‘Not Everyone Gets To Go Space’ from their long-awaited debut ‘This Could Be Texas’. It’s a tongue-in-cheek line that also pragmatically lays out the logistical nightmare and societal issues that a free-at-the-point-of-delivery intergalactic travel system would create for us normies. A pretty perfect encapsulation of the band’s marriage of the fantastic and the everyday, and a pithy reminder of where we’re at.
There have been a lot of headlines of late about how totally impossible it’s becoming for musicians, artists and creatives to exist – let alone thrive. Venues closing, streaming services not paying out, shareholders laughing at us, and opportunities disappearing: see some sad-but-true points made by James Blake, Another Sky, BRITs champion RAYE and The Last Dinner Party in their correction of those out-of-context “cost of living” comments.
Yes, doom surrounds us, but so does talent. If you’re mourning a drought of decent new bands, please find the nearest bin. The year is still young and you’ve already been spoiled with stellar first albums from NewDad, Sprints, Whitelands and Lime Garden, for starters. The odds are stacked against these bands, and yet they deliver. Leading the charge are Leeds’ own English Teacher.
Another set of dry and talky post-punkers, they are not. Heavenly album opener ‘Albatross’ lays the table nicely with some gorgeous indie-prog string and piano work with a smack of ‘90s peak Radiohead. Buzz-generating single ‘The World’s Biggest Paving Slab’ delivers a rollocking ode to the little guys with big ideas – namely fellow Northern legends the Pendle Witches, John Simm, Lee Ingleby and The Bank Of Dave – vowing that “no one can walk over me”.
That defiance carries through to the lilting ‘fuck the Tories’ vibe of ‘Broken Biscuits’ as Fontaine demands someone take responsibility: “Can a river stop its banks from bursting? Blame the council, not the rain”. ‘R&B’ is a jagged fiery revenge song that sees the singer spit back at misplaced presumptions about her race and place in music: “despite appearances, I haven’t got the voice for R&B”.
The utterly gorgeous ‘Albert Road’ will speak to anyone who remembers bittersweet moments of boredom and frustration, and teenage daydreaming themselves out of the wire in working class neighbourhoods. As Fontaine offers: “So don’t take our prejudice to heart, we hate everyone” and refreshingly concludes without irony or patronisation: “That’s why we are how we are, and that’s why we don’t get very far” – NME
Key Cuts: The World's Biggest Paving Slab/Broken Biscuits/Nearly Daffodils
Standout Track: Albert Road
Fontaines D.C. - Romance
Release Date: 23rd August
Label: XL
Producer: James Ford
Review:
“When Fontaines D.C. dropped their debut album Dogrel in 2019, the Irish post-punkers were heralded in some quarters as generational voices, a band that was able to dissect their Irish identity in a way so acute that it evoked the spirit of that nation’s great poets — whether that was classic voices like James Joyce or modern hellraisers such as Shane McGowan.
“Dublin in the rain is mine,” the group’s singer Grian Chatten famously affirmed on the spiky punk of ‘Big’.
This thread continued all the way to their third album, 2022’s Skinty Fia, in which they offered the perspective of a band wracked with a degree of guilt when they moved away to London after hitting the big time.
But two years later, their return feels like a hard reset. This time around, it seems that this record is defined by something less rooted in reality and a search for something far more fantastical. To paraphrase a very famous quote from Dorothy Gale: “We’re not in Dublin anymore, Toto.”
The first sign of this came when they released the swaggering lead single ‘Starburster’, which saw the group decked out in oversized sports tops, hair clips and wraparound sunglasses.
It seemed like a sign that the band were searching for something bigger, and that’s only too clear on the sound of this latest record.
On the titular opening track, the group display an unsettling, Kubrickian edge as Chatten croons “Maybe romance is a place” over imposing, piercing instrumentals.
At times, it feels like this bigger sound is that of a band triumphantly gunning for the big leagues too, cementing their place as generational greats. It’s shown on that aforementioned rock-star verve of ‘Starburster’, but the searing ‘Death Kink’ — an examination of toxic relationships — feels like one of the best songs that Chatten has ever written.
As the album closes too, ‘Favourite’ feels like the closest thing they’ve ever managed to a driving song. We mean this entirely in the positive sense; it’s the kind of softly melodic, hook-laden number that could be paired nicely with a sun-soaked trip through the country, windows fully down, of course.
All of which is to say this: Fontaines D.C. have abandoned the serious for the fantastical, the tangible for the surreal. This new identity and successful quest for something, ahem, BIG, suits them down to the ground. They’re in a brilliant world, and indeed a league of their own” – Rolling Stone UK
Key Cuts: Romance/In the Modern World/Favourite
Standout Track: Starbuster
Beth Gibbons – Lives Outgrown
Release Date: 17th May
Label: Domino
Producers: Beth Gibbons/James Ford
Review:
“Stylistically, Lives Outgrown approaches folk music, thanks to its acoustic guitars and strings; but it feels denser, louder, and more exploratory, like stumbling across a junkyard deep in the forest. Unusual textures abound: In “Tell Me Who You Are Today,” producer James Ford (of Simian Mobile Disco) strikes piano strings with metal spoons; for another track, he and Gibbons spin whirly tubes over their heads, in search of the perfect creepy tone.
Melodies of endless melancholy and lyrics of pointed depth, reminiscent of Gibbons’ work with Portishead and (briefly) Rustin Man, her duo with Talk Talk’s Paul Webb, reflect the singer’s period of self-reflection. Lives Outgrown has moments of crushing relatability, as she tackles subjects like motherhood, anxiety, and menopause, her unvarnished humanity a world away from the otherworldly rage she inhabited on Third. “Without control/I’m heading toward a boundary/That divides us/Reminds us,” she sings on “Floating on a Moment,” striking a beautifully sparse rhythm and tone, while the opening couplet of “Ocean” (“I fake in the morning, a stake to relieve/I never noticed the pain I proceed”) distills years of dull suffering into two elegant lines. Her melodies are strong as iron: The elegantly inevitable “Floating on a Moment” and cathartic album closer “Whispering Love” are among the best songs that Gibbons has put her name to.
Gibbons’ voice makes comparisons to Portishead inevitable—and there is, perhaps, a tang of Adrian Utley’s spaghetti western guitar in the opening bars of “Floating on a Moment.” Occasionally, she makes veiled references to her past, with phrases that seem to mirror lines from elsewhere in her catalog. On the whole, though, the singer makes a concerted effort to outrun her musical history. Gibbons said that she wanted to get away from snare drums and breakbeats—both key elements of the Portishead sound—while recording Lives Outgrown, with the drum lines of collaborator Lee Harris (formerly of Talk Talk and a contributor to Gibbons and Rustin Man’s Out of Season) instead hammered out on toms and bass.
This percussive roll is complemented by an inconspicuously cosmopolitan mixture of sounds. Unusual groupings of instruments are packed into devious musical layers, like the viscid concoction of bass clarinet, bass, cello, Farfisa, harmonium, recorders, “fuzz flute,” violin, singing tubes, and bowed saw that is daubed over “Beyond the Sun”. This darkly sylvan stew has little of Portishead's cinematic high drama; its abstruse angles and woodland heavy metal are closer to Tom Waits’ discordant masterpiece Swordfishtrombones than the clean guitar lines of Out of Season. Gibbons also employs backing vocals for the first time, their sparing use bolstering, rather than radically altering, the album’s makeup, although the children’s choir and wobbly recorder on “Floating on a Moment” and “Beyond the Sun” give the two songs an unsettling air of innocence lost.
The arrangements, largely by Gibbons and Ford, luxuriate in the slightly unreal edge of music once removed. Much of the instrumentation (for example, the sweeping, almost Middle Eastern string lines on “For Sale”) could have been written at any point in the last century, although the rejection of the snare drum’s rebellious crack nudges Lives Outgrown into a parallel universe where rock’n’roll never really took root. Verses are punctuated by wild brass skronk (“Beyond the Sun”) and violins scrape across the percussive surface like nails on a blackboard (“Burden of Life”). These leftfield choices underscore the courageous and subtly unusual nature of Gibbons’ album” – Pitchfork
Key Cuts: Floating on a Moment/Lost Changes/Oceans
Standout Track: Reaching Out
The Last Dinner Party – Prelude to Ecstasy
Release Date: 2nd February
Label: Island
Producer: James Ford
Review:
“Unapologetically flaunting an MO of gleeful maximalism at every turn, The Last Dinner Party’s hotly-anticipated debut album was never going to be a meek thing, but it’s hard to recall an opening gambit that greedily embraces every possible ounce of opportunity quite like ‘Prelude To Ecstasy’. If the primary spoils of major label backing are that the barriers to things like lavish string sections and world class producers (in their case, Arctic Monkeys’ go-to guy James Ford) are removed, then the London quintet have used their deal with Island to facilitate an album that dreams not just big but huge. It begins with a literal orchestral overture - 96 seconds of world-building that removes you from boring old reality and plants you into their version of Fantasia. Then, 11 tracks of similarly sky-high, grandiose ambition, that tie together lofty literary sentiment, cinematic sweeping theatricality and killer melodic indie hooks with an equal affinity for each.
It’s this unlikely balance that is The Last Dinner Party’s greatest trick. A band composed of both classical and alternative musicians, they knit the two sensibilities together in ways that sound like little else. Recent single ‘Caesar on a TV Screen’ might be the only modern pop song to reference Leningrad and the Red Scare, but it’s also all sorts of fun, switching up time signatures and styles from bombastic chest-puffing to a cheeky ‘60s shuffle. Early highlight ‘Burn Alive’ begins with tense, ‘80s gothic drama before exploding into a rousingly defiant chorus; ‘Beautiful Boy’ makes use of woodwind and an Oscar Wilde-like sense of romanticism; ‘Gjuha’ sees keyboard player Aurora Nishveci singing in Albanian, while it’s frontwoman Abigail Morris’ natural sense of vocal melodrama that’s likely earned them a fair whack of Kate Bush comparisons.
Dangling the carrot right through to the record’s closing moments, they leave breakout debut ‘Nothing Matters’ until the penultimate track. But it’s a holy trinity of brilliance in that single, the roaring rock opera of ‘My Lady of Mercy’, and ‘Portrait of a Dead Girl’ that sees out ‘Prelude…’s final third in truly ecstatic fashion. The latter track in particular serves up crescendo after crescendo; nestled between the band’s two finest singles, it’s even better than either of them.
If Wet Leg’s globe-conquering debut showed that it was still possible for an indie band to reach the dizzying heights of yore, then the success of The Last Dinner Party feels like one step further; proof in an age of algorithms that a completely singular band can beat them all and come out on top without diminishing a shred of their vision. If their debut is only the ‘Prelude To Ecstasy’, then it’s truly thrilling to imagine what they could dream up when they reach the real meat of their career” – DIY
Key Cuts: Caesar on a TV Screen/Sinner/Nothing Matters
Standout Track: The Feminine Urge