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Match album artwork to the titles below from favourites of 2025 Part Three (in no particular order)
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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Haley Heynderickx and Max García Conover: What of Our Nature
New album: Beautiful, precise, poignant and poetic new folk numbers inspired by the life and music style of Woody Guthrie as the Portland, Oregon and New Yorker, now Portland, Maine-based singer-songwriters bring a delicious duet album, alternating and sharing songs covering a variety of forever topical social issues
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Hand Habits: Blue Reminder
New album: Passionate yet controlled, powerful yet quiet, introspective yet expressive, walking a tightrope between hope and a kind of quiet anxiety, New York-born, LA-based Meg Duffy returns with their distinctive, intimate experimental folk-rock-indie, with 12 circumspect, insecure yet intense love songs
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Youth Lagoon: Rarely Do I Dream
New album: The idiosyncratic Idaho songwriter and producer Trevor Powers’s latest LP is a vividly cinematic, darkly humorous, dream-like release inspired by a 2023 discovery of VHS home movies documenting his childhood, and lying boxed in the basement of his parents’ house
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The Weather Station: Humanhood
New album: Beautifully balanced, nuanced, delicate, intimate new experimental folk by Toronto’s Tamara Lindeman on a gorgeous seventh LP that goes to the individual and collective core of being alive, with a free-flowing semi-acoustic songs partly created by improvisation with her six-piece band, decorated with flurries of woodwind
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Fievel Is Glauque: Rong Weicknes
New album: A beautifully quirky, unique cross-genre, melodic, meandering experimental release of surreal lyricism of jazz-folk-pop by the Belgian-US duo of Zach Phillips and Ma Clément joined by an ensemble of six other musicians
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Honeyglaze: Real Deal
New album: A wonderfully innovative, sharp, agile, pace-changing, dynamic postpunk and indie rock debut LP by the London trio of singer-songwriter, and guitarist Anouska Sokolow, bassist Tim Curtis and drummer Yuri Shibuichi
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Nailah Hunter: Lovegaze
New album: Slow, sensual, simmering, lingeringly beautiful numbers in this debut LP of experimental, ambient, will-o'-the-wisp, dream-like quality by the Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist, composer, singer and harpist with Belize ancestry
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Joanna Sternberg: I've Got Me
New album: Another retrieved treasure from earlier this year, released in June, of gentle, witty, melancholy intimate self-deprecatory folk numbers by the New York singer-songwriter who exudes a old-school charm
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Armand Hammer: We Buy Diabetic Test Trips
New album: A mesmerically smart, articulate, experimental hip-hop LP packed with ideas, samples and slick delivery by the New York rapper aka Billy Woods and guests, interweaving endlessly inventive, dreamlike hazy maze of voices, stories and sounds
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Tamara Lindeman
New album: Nothing can compare to last year’s superbly crafted LP Ignorance, but Toronto’s Tamara Lindeman returns with a still powerful, if more pared-back LP of delicacy and intimacy of voice, piano and minimal orchestration
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Sam Evian’s third album, Time To Melt
New album: Warm, woozy and fluid, an appropriate title for this super smooth third album by Sam Griffin Owens, the Brooklyn based artist, decorated with light funk, 70s psychedelic soul and lush, orchestral instrumentation
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Tamara Lindeman of The Weather Station
Album review: This majestic LP of superb musical maturity.by the Canadian singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman has an undercurrent climate change theme, with deft piano, drums, strings, sax, guitar and a sound sometimes reminiscent of mid-80s Talk Talk
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Another celebrity square of nine new albums, in now particular order
Albums reviews roundup: Our latest selection includes a couple of comebacks from Bright Eyes and US punk legends X, plus Sheffield’s wonderful International Teachers of Pop, a mainstream Killers and the talented Lemon Twigs brothers
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Angel Olsen
This latest roundup includes a seismic album of emotion turmoil from Angel Olsen, a stripped-back release from Wilco, snappy hip hop from Danny Brown and gritty Brooklyn postpunk from Wives
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Dave. Articulate, analytical, angry, honest.
A selection of great contrasts and innovations includes a debut from the British rapper, experimental work from Solange, rare and unreleased material from folk legend Townes Van Zandt, and the return of industrial artists Test Dept
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Snapped Ankles
This week’s selection roundup includes a raucous return for Royal Trux after 19 years and Robert Forster’s second in a decade, plus a chorus of of beautiful vocalists from Self Esteem to Alice Phoebe Lou and a whole lot more
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Riding high: Mattiel
A selection of new releases from the past fortnight, including the Atlanta singer, the prolific Californian guitarists, a return to form for the Brooklyn band, and two bright debuts from Australia
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