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Pushing new boundaries with Kim Gordon’s Play Me
New album: Following 2024’s The Collective, the former Sonic Youth frontwoman’s fourth solo LP continues her extraordinary experimental, innovative journey, moving to more melodic beats shorter tracks, and motorik krautrock-style driven coloured by strange sounds, intense emotions and sharply angled and abstract social commentary
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War Child: HELP(2) follows 1995’s first compilation with another impressive range of music and artists
New album: Not only a timely and topical milestone charity record following the first in 1995 to help bring aid and wide variety of support to children in war zones around he world, but an impressive double-LP array of stellar British and international talent and powerful, poignant 23 songs from Arctic Monkeys to Young Fathers
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Lala Lala: Heaven 2
New album: Moving from Chicago to New Mexico, Reykjavík, then London and now Los Angeles, the UK-born artist Lillie West’s experimental indie dream pop is a fascinating release about restless escapism while trying to stay where she is
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Gorillaz: The Mountain
New album: Released with an art book, new games, and extended videos, a multicultural, multifarious and multilingual return for the collective cartoon pop-hip-hop project led by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, with many intercontinental guest appearances, and a particular Indian musical and visual flavour centred on fictional Himalayan peak as metaphor for life’s journey and illusionary truths
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Peaches: No Lube So Rude
New album: Unapologetically brash, overtly sexual, crazily catchy and entertaining, the charismatic, colourful Canadian electroclash and musician and performance artist Merrill Beth Nisker returns with her seventh LP and first for 11 years, a striking mix of sex, gender identity, freedom of expression, and an antidote to miserable times
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Apparat: A Hum of Maybe
New album: The sixth LP and the first for six years by the German experimental electronic artist Sascha Ring (Grammy nominated for 2019’s LP5), on the theme of flux and uncertainty, balancing family and work life, and built on the back of stressful three years of writer’s block but filled with unusual sonic textures, sonic and acoustic and vulnerable emotions
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Hemlocke Springs: The Apple Tree Under the Sea
New album: Lauded by the likes of Chappell Roan and Doja Cat, and now with a big Tiktok fanbase for her oddball videos, a quirkily original, humorous, melodious DayGlo DIY-ethic 80s-influenced synth pop debut LP by North Carolina’s Isimeme Udu
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Daphni: Butterfly
New album: Following his 2024 release as Caribou with Honey, Canadian composer and musician Dan Snaith returns as his other moniker, the dance/electronica and instrumental side with a selection of fun experimental sounds loosely evocative of the gently fluttering insect
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Puma Blue: Croak Dream
New album: A mesmeric, experimental, otherworldly, hypnotic fusion of trip-hop, dub, electronica of nocturnal ambience, haunting, intimate vocals and sensual grooves by the south London/Atlanta multi-instrumentalist and producer Jacob Allen, centred around the existential theme of strangely knowing when and how were going to die
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Ulrika Spacek: EXPO
New album: Arresting, intelligent art rock and electronica, krautrock and psychedelia and a marriage of the analogue and electronic, all intermingle wonderfully different and intelligent new LP by the London band fronted by Rhys Edwards
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Mandy, Indiana: URGH
New album: An extraordinary second album by the Manchester experimental noise and electronica quartet of the visceral and playful, protest and cartharsis, in a fierce, throbbing, shape-shifting, genre-bursting tour de force that’s responds to very challenging times
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Geologist: Can I Get A Pack Of Camel Lights?
New album: The hurdy-gurdy never quite sounded like this before. Animal Collective multi-instrumentalist Brian Weitz is the final member of that experimental collective to release a solo album, and it’s a bizarre journey of oddball sounds and instruments looped through guitar pedal effects krautrock repetitive, meditational exploratory spirit, inhaled through the titular reference to his past as a smoker
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Delaney Bailey: Concave
New album: A highly absorbing, potent, intense yet understated, ethereally sound-sculptured debut by the Indiana-raised Chicago artist who crafts intimate noir-goth dream pop across themes of vulnerability and mental health
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Toni Geitani: Wahj
New album: A truly magical, highly original, otherworldly landscape of experimental Arabic, electronica, avant-pop, dark ambient and industrial forms by the Beirut-born, Amsterdam-based musician, sound designer, producer, film-maker singer and composer
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PVA: No More Like This
New album: Inventive, alluring, sensual, mysterious, minimalistic electronica, trip-hop and experimental pop by the London trio of Ella Harris, Joshua Baxter and Louis Satchell, in this second album following 2022’s Blush, boosted by the creativity of producer and instrumentalist Kwake Bass
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Various Artists: ICELOCK CONTINUUM
New album: An inspiring, evocative, sensual and sonically tactile experimental compilation from the fabulously named underground French label Camembert Électrique, with range of international electronic artists capturing cold winter weather’s many textures - cracking, delicate crunchy ice, snow, electric fog, and frost in many fierce and fragile forms across 98 adventurous tracks
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Part Two favourite albums of 2025 collage
Welcome to the second part of Song Bar favourite albums of 2025. There is also a first part and a third part this week. There is no countdown nor describing these necessarily as “best” albums of the year, but they are chosen by their quality, originality and reader popularity
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First selection of 25 favourite albums in no particular order …
Welcome to the first part of Song Bar favourite albums of 2025. There will also be a second and third part this week. There is no countdown nor describing these necessarily as “best” albums of the year, but they are chosen by their quality, originality and reader popularity
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The Mountain Goats: Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan
New album: An evocative musical journey of a concept album by the indie-folk band from Claremont, California, fronted by singer-songwriter John Darnielle, based on a dream of his in 2023 about a voyage to a fictional island by the titular captain, charting adventure, wonder and tragedy
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Allie X - Happiness Is Going To Get You
New album: A hugely entertaining, witty, droll, inventive, chamber and synth-pop fourth LP with a goth twist by the charismatic and theatrical Canadian artist Alexandra Hughes, who brings paradox and dark themes through sounds that include string quartet, harpsichord, classical and pure pop piano with killer lyrics
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