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Dry Cleaning: Secret Love
New album: This third LP by the London experimental post-punk quartet with the distinctive, spoken, droll delivery of Florence Shaw, is packed with striking, vivid, often non seqitur lyrics capturing life’s surreal mundanities and neuroses with a sound coloured and polished by Cate Le Bon as producer
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Match album artwork to the titles below from favourites of 2025 Part Three (in no particular order)
Cate Le Bon: Michelangelo Dying
New album: The acclaimed Welsh artist returns with her distinctive vocal and highly influential, rich, warm, strange, otherworldly, experimental sound - woozy, dreamy, pedal-effect saxophones, guitars and more on bittersweet, superb album that evolved this way to to an all-consuming private heartbreak
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Gruff Rhys: Dim Probs
New album: After last year’s acclaimed Sadness Sets Me Free, the ex-Super Furry Animals frontman’s ninth solo LP (meaning ‘no problem’) is a fully Welsh language release, his first since 2019’s Pang!, filled with charming, soothing, catchy folk-rock tunes, but with some darker subjects for current times, the title is an ironic twist
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Gwenno: Utopia
New album: After three LPs looking back at her childhood upbringing, now 44, the Welsh singer-songwriter Gwenno Saunders’ polished, candid experimental fourth pop album recalls a period of young adulthood, from dancer in Las Vegas to a pub cleaner and also singer in The Pipettes in London, having adventures, experimenting and struggling with self-determination
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Horsegirl: Phonetics On and On
New album: Minimalistic, pithy, nostalgically twangy, wistful, undersyated indie-folk-pop by the Chicago/New York trio of Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein, and Gigi Reece in this second LP with a refreshing sound produced by Cate Le Bon
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All aflame: St. Vincent - All Born Screaming
New album: Annie Clark’s follow-up to 2021’s 70s-inspired Daddy’s Home is a striking, stylish self-produced LP, with a rawer, starker edge, fierce guitars, a theme of characters pushed between their true selves and how they’re perceived, an includes guests Dave Grohl and Cate Le Bon
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Wilco: Cousin
New album: A 13th LP by Jeff Tweedy and co of the veteran Chicago band, this time with the innovative Welsh artist Cate Le Bon as producer, bringing a more experimental sound than last year’s alt-country double LP Cruel Country, and something more reminiscent of 2001’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
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H. Hawkline: Milk For Flowers
New album: Cardiff’s Huw Evans releases his fifth LP, a charming, tender, wistful, sensitive, intelligent, and beautiful collection of alternative pop with a folk/country hue, co-produced with Cate Le Bon, and players including Stephen Black (Sweet Baboo)
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Sweet Baboo: The Wreckage
New album: A very welcome return after five years from Wales’s Stephen Black, who having worked with Gruff Rhys, Cate Le Bon and others, releases a selection of beautiful, gentle folk rock songs of delicious melody, creativity and sensitivity
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A selection of favourite LPs for 2022. See the lists below to go from top row left to right onwards
Favourite albums of 2022: Welcome to the first part of a selection for this year, many of which continue to come to terms with pandemic, climate change and other current issues but also show how music can continue to innovate, surprise and entertain
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Cate Le Bon’s sixth album, Pompeii
New album: The brilliant Welsh musician’s follow-up to 2019’s Reward is a low-key, slower paced affair, simmering with lockdown’s solitudinous lyrics, sparse keyboards, spongy bass, sax and little brass blasts, with echoes of Bowie and Talk Talk
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John Grant: Boy From Michigan
New album: The American’s newest LP is his most autobiographical to date, filled with trademark electronica sounds, but an overall mellower sound than previous, smoothly produced by Cate Le Bon, coloured by childhood recollections
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FKA twigs
The second part of this year’s LP favourites again includes several superb female artists. Also check out the first part published yesterday
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Which way? Her way. Cate Le Bon
A huge selection and range this week includes the unique and original sound of Welsh artist Cate Le Bon, Australian punk rockers Amyl and the Sniffers, soul, funk and hip from The Internet’s Steve Lacy and cinematic rap from Flying Lotus
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Dystopia depicted: Gruff Rhys’s album Babelsberg
The first part of our annual roundup of notable albums includes several great debuts by young bands, plus work that reflects dystopian political turmoil, gender issues and growing human relationship with technology
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A unique and beautiful voice: Geoffrey Gurrumul
This week’s selection includes a farewell from great blind Aboriginal singer, plus Kate Le Bon’s new collaboration, the Hot Chip singer, East Berliner Perel, a Jeffrey Lewis tribute to counterculture, and a strange joint album between Sting and Shaggy
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The Cribs
Our latest selection of recent releases includes cutting satire with the return of Randy Newman, The Cribs going back to their roots, plus a hardcore punk supergroup, plus melancholy pop and psychedelia
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Farewell, Mr Bowie. And thank you.
Bowie? Beyonce? There's no such thing as the best album of the year. But instead we round up favourites, apt and lesser known new albums as suggested by readers in part 1 from a profound 2016
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Picture this: Spinal Tap's Break Like the Wind
The Song Bar has a new section – after suggesting songs, slip over to Vinyl Tap and join in with the discussion on new weekly releases. Not just on big black discs but in any format, analogue or digital
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