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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 and shorter tracks with a motorik krautrock-style driven coloured by strange sounds, intense emotions and sharply angled, dark, droll social commentary
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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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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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Deki Alem: Forget In Mass
New album: Stockholm’s Swedish-Ghanian twin duo Sammy and Johnny Boakye Bennett bring a superbly stylish blend of sharp hip-hop, punk, dark, seething industrial, electronica and dance music with just a dash of the Prodigy, Alabama 3 and 90s trip-hop
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Courting: Lust For Life …
New album: A lengthy title for a short, snappy, cleverly interwoven eclectic indie-dancefloor-postpunk experimental third LP by the Liverpool band with a theme of duality, a cyclical intro and outro, and each song paired with a balanced counterpart, sharing specific sonic elements.
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Circuit des Yeux: Halo On The Inside
New album: Dark, vivid, pagan, hedonistic, carnal goth-dancefloor experimental electronica and more by the Chicago-based multi-disciplinary superbly alternative artist Haley Fohr and her otherworldly, mesmerically rich, four-octave voice
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HONESTY: U R HERE
New album: Moody, dark, atmospheric, cross-genre inventiveness comes aplenty in this debut LP for Partisan Records by the Leeds-based collective who bring a hard-to-define fusion of ambient, restless electronica, shoegaze, goth, abstract industrial, krautrocky momentum, soulful trip-hop and alt-pop
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Ethel Cain
New album: Dark, challenging, otherworldly, experimental, ethereally oddball but at times alluring electronica and ghostly vocalisations? It’s the Tallahassee artist Hayden Anhedönia, who after the successful 2022 LP Preacher’s Daughter, pushes the musical envelope into most unusual territory
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The second part of our favourite albums of 2024
Favourite albums of 2024: Welcome to The Song Bar’s favourite albums of 2024 Part 2. Part 1 can be found here. There’s no such thing as ‘best of’ and everything is subjective, but please dig into this rich seam of originality and quality, and even suggest more of your own
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Fat Dog: WOOF.
New album: Having gathered a lively cult following on tour, the canine-themed London-based band’s LP is an eclectic, theatrical techno, industrial-pop post-punk fusion, with klezmer strains, synth- and horn-parping, panache-filled dancey debut of wit, energy, noise and sheer shouty fun
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Lip Critic: Hex Dealer
New album: A dazzlingly high-octane, white-knuckle ride of a debut album by the New York-based electronica-punk-hip-hop-hardcore-noise-rock band, who push the musical boundaries with express vocal delivery and double drummers
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Africatown, AL: Ancestor Sounds
New album: A beautifully evocative, documentary compilation of anonymous spontaneous performances and field recordings from descendants of slaves in a northern section of the city of Mobile, Alabama, one of the last places in the US to receive slave ships
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Moor Mother: The Great Bailout
New album: The American poet and musician Camae Ayewa returns with with a pointed, powerful release aimed at Britain’s murky, slavery-profiting colonial past, with a vivid, profound, visceral, declamatory narrative and soundscape that charts many injustices about wealth and compensation
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Kim Gordon: The Collective
New album: Dark, crashing, whispering, abstract, deadpan internal monologues, dreamlike off-beat poetry, trip beats, crunchy electronica and industrial grunge-guitar noise, the ex-Sonic Youth frontwoman, bassist and visual artist’s new LP is a challenging, truly innovative release
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Chelsea Wolfe: She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To
New album: Dark, simmering, sensual, ghostly, goth-noir rock with restrained thundery rumblings by the California artist, in a powerfully effective, slow, atmospheric release that sounds like tears in a downpour, an echoey, innovative potion of metal melancholy
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Bound by Endogamy
New album: Released last month, dark, oddball and original, this electronica, industrial, post-punk LP is full of fantastic visceral sounds and droll, vocal delivery by the Geneva-based duo Shlomo Balexert and Kleio Thomaïdes
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