The Grammy Award for Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album was first given out in 1987 but has contained precious few ambient records among its rank of nominees. There have been ambient-adjacent artists, but the Recording Academy’s view of the genre has always skewed towards either the safe pastures of Windam Hill-styled meditations or the more cryptic realm of neo-classical. There’s a reason why the band Paul Winter Consort has won in the category four times.
So imagine the shock on everyone’s face when the nominations for 2025’s ceremony were announced. Among them was New Blue Sun by rapper-turned-flutist André 3000. Long lost in the musical wilderness as he followed his own muse, André surprised many by collaborating with the many varied voices of the Los Angeles instrumental/experimental scene, including figures like Surya Botofasina, Nate Mercereau, and guru Carlos Niño (all of whom put out excellent records that were contenders for slots on this list). While many felt André was leaning into the public persona many viewed him through, those who sat through the album proper were surprised by its earnest intent, structured spaces, and distinct point of view.
The real kicker was that this record didn’t score a mention for Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album, but instead Album of the Year, competing next to the likes of Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, and Taylor Swift. As easy (and fun) as it is to mock the Grammys, this shock nomination was a boon for ambient-instrumental albums worldwide, giving a glint of mainstream acceptance to a genre that so often gets tossed to the fringes.
Yet ambient records can take many forms, and while many may not snag the headlines and attention that André 3000 can garner, 2024 showed the genre as varied, wild, diverse, and daring as ever. That may not be a televised broadcast anointed with golden gramophones, but rest assured, these albums still went double-platinum in our hearts.
15. Akira Kosemura & Lawrence English – Selene (Temporary Residence)
Selene is the first time the Japan-based keyboardist Akira Kosemura and self-proclaimed sound artist Lawrence English have worked together, and it’s incredible how naturally their worldviews fit together. As if soundtracking a quiet flyover of celestial bodies, Selene‘s strength is in how well the duo holds space for each other. “Twilight Wave” is the epitome of this, as Kosemura’s keyboards start lightly plodding, giving ample negative space between each reverberated keystroke, as English’s synths come in and softly dance through the in-between. It’s casually cinematic but lovingly rendered. While only clocking in at 37 minutes, the album radiates a lifetime of wisdom, inviting listeners into its warm, safe embrace. While it might be the most “stereotypically ambient” record listed here, we argue there is nothing wrong when genre veterans find a unique kinship and combine their strengths. Selene is a rare ambient album that refuses to grow old even after multiple playthroughs.
14. World of White Ice – Who Can Pave the Ocean for Me? (Independent)
The rate at which Angel Marcloid can release music can only be described as “Robert Pollard-esque”. While the Chicago deity primarily trades under their Fire-Toolz moniker, where death metal caterwauls collide with New Age jazz chords from the late 1990s, World of White Ice is an ambient side-project that Angel revived in 2024 with a flurry of releases, ranging from Teething (the project’s first full-length in a decade) to the 24-minute track “Electron Results”. Yet key among this sudden revival was Who Can Pave the Ocean For Me?, a pillar of sound sculpture that uses its 66-minute runtime to its advantage. Angel deconstructs their ideas of what ambient music can do throughout eight songs – four of which clock over nine minutes.
Case in point is “The Spirits Are Lifting”, wherein a simple ghostly tone seems to be enough for us to lounge in before rubbery tom hits start circling your headphones, at which point a streaking, dissonant guitar wail can be heard circling the mix and, at times, even threatening it. There is a slight sense of unease that creeps up through these songs, but only in moments, at times barely visible (“Angels of Light, Phases Repeating”) and at times the revealing the darkness that has been lurking underneath (the aptly-named “Evil Seems to Dwell in Every Corner”).
In the write-up accompanying the release, Angel notes that they are trying to capture the emotional journeys they underwent in their 20s but still are having a hard time understanding. In truth, there is an unknowable quality to the diary-like Who Can Pave the Ocean for Me? However, deciphering that meaning for yourself is part of its charm.
13. Surya Botofasina, Nate Mercereau, Carlos Niño – Subtle Movements (Leaving)
When not becoming surprise Album of the Year nominees for their work with André 3000’s New Blue Sun, Surya Botofasina, Nate Mercereau, and Carlos Niño – all proud warriors of Los Angeles’ experimental ambient-jazz scene – are pursuing their own creative outlets, and all of them put out fascinating and wildly different records this year alone. Yet between all three of them, few records moved listeners quite like their collaborative full-length Subtle Movements.
With dreamy laced keyboards from Botofasina, waves of expertly-woven percussion by Niño, and Mercereau’s trademark “synth-guitar” lines, Subtle Movements at times feels less like an album and more like another chapter in the journey of a collective who have created their own musical language. While “So Much Love” dabbles in a collective hippie group singing, the rest of these Movements carry a range of tones and temperaments, oscillating from Mercereau’s bending-sample experiments in “A Band That Swims Together” to the lush textural journey that “Exploration (Sincerely)” takes the listener on. Vaguely psychedelic but with its feet firmly planted in the soil, Subtle Movements is a symphony, a love-in, an experience, and a movement all wrapped into one.
12. Arushi Jain – Delight (Leaving)
The songs of Arushi Jain take journeys. Her albums are not designed to feature one vibe, her songs not committing to one set of changing chords, no. The music of her sophomore album Delight, which improves on her debut Under the Lilac Sky in nearly every metric, seems to sway gently towards its destination, every track a leaf in a breeze. Look at “I Surrender”, which has a bright descending chord line that only kind of repeats until the bass and washed-out saxophone samples interrupt and guide the melody to new places.
In “Play in the Void”, her voice enters the fray as an instrument, reciting washed-out lyrics that are at times barely distinguishable but always evocative, as Jain knows that the ear picks up on human emotive elements than synthesized ones, no matter how much life and love she pumps into her modular synth setups. Delight is a quiet epic, unafraid to give you backbeats and the occasional upbeat tempo, as there is nothing in the rulebook that says the end effect of any ambient album must be free of propulsion. Sometimes “ambient” feels too broad a term for what Jain is accomplishing with her records, but as she stretches her sound past the breaking point of the genre, we’ll still gladly count Delightamong our instrumental-experimental ranks for now.
11. Nick Schofield – Ambient Ensemble (Backward Music)
Last year, I received emails regarding a new group called the Nashville Ambient Ensemble. While they put out a lovingly composed record, they defied the “ambient” part of their name by having a singer give us singer-songwriter vocals and lyrics right in the middle of their lush instrumental atmospheres. It seemed somewhat contradictory, or at least non-adjacent, to most ambient-instrumental records, and the contrast was jarring. Leave it to Canadian composer Nick Schofield to reclaim the proper Ambient Ensemble mantra by releasing what is effectively the cross between a traditional piano-driven ambient record and a small chamber orchestra piece.
With a small group of string players and Schofield’s layers of sped-up and sped-down piano takes Ambient Ensemble is a lovely work that floats through clear melodic pathways while still giving the listener a sense of bliss and relief. While clarinetist Yolande Laroche provides the occasional wordless vocal accents to specific musical phrases, the world of Ambient Ensemble feels properly self-contained, with gentle waterfalls of piano chords falling into the airy abyss of reverberated violins. With most of Schofield’s songs clocking in under four minutes, Ambient Ensemble doesn’t waste your time. Instead, it uses it wisely, giving you just enough space to digest his mix of the contemporary and the classical before quietly exiting. It’s a rare record that leaves you wanting more.
10. Michael A. Muller – Mirror Music (Deutsche Grammophon)
Mirror Music is the first solo album Michael A. Muller has released outside of his group Balmorhea, but he continues to bring a band-like sensibility to Mirror Music, his ambient opus. Collaborating with a different musician on every track, his largely organ-driven compositions soon run up against the dusty desert guitar of Tortoise’s Douglas McCombs, the evocative pedal steel work of Chuck Johnson, and the lush cello stylings of Clarice Jensen.
Muller doesn’t shy away from cinematic themes throughout Mirror Music. Still, in these ten songs, he displays the depth of his knowledge and his love of the genre, moving from landscape-hewn tunes that evoke the warm embrace of the morning sun to rain-soaked dirges that wallow in darker emotive tones. While knowledge of how film scores manipulate our emotions can be easily weaponized for quick melodrama, the songs of Mirror Music are smarter and more mature than that, luxuriating in their grooves before switching up styles. Despite the disparate set of collaborators, Mirror Music makes sense as a whole and is evocative enough to hope that this isn’t Muller’s only solo ploy.
9. SUSS – Birds & Beasts (Northern Spy)
SUSS‘ 2022 self-titled album, a culmination of a series of thematic EPs, was planned out by members Jonathan Gregg, Bob Holmes, and Pat Irwin following the sudden 2021 passing of founding member Gary Leib. While deciding to move on as a trio after working their entire existence as a quartet was difficult, the EPs were unique, exciting experiments in different textural spaces. Birds & Beasts, however, truly feels like the first album where the reigning kings of “ambient country” have found time to mourn properly.
The expansive ten-minute closer “Migration” features Leib’s last-recorded contribution, which the band didn’t feel had a proper place to fit into until now. That track’s moody vibe permeates much of Birds & Beastsoverall worldview, alternating from brisk to downtrodden, from being backed by acoustic plucks to finding the sadness in a harmonica solo. It’s the group’s fifth full-length proper. While most groups would find difficulty in living up to a discography already littered with classic recordings, Birds & Beasts showed that even in sadness, there are still new hills to travel over, new sonic territories yet unexplored.
8. Aja – Ajasphère Vol. II (Grand Musique Management)
There is nothing wrong with being a traditionalist. French composer Aja had years of tutelage under the great Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and dropped her first EP in 2019 before unleashing Ajasphère Vol. Ionto the world in 2021. The long-awaited Ajasphère Vol. II finally showed up this year, and its commitment to what can affectionately be described as “ambient traditionalism” is worthy of praise. This record would easily fall into Brian Eno/GAS stereotypes had the compositions been unable to flow together so expertly, each track a sound bath in an infinity pool.
Clarinets and ocarinas float in and out of the mix, but the overall effect here is tranquil, blissful, and very much at ease. Aya’s lyric-less vocal cooing slots well with the other elements, but the overall effect is more reverent, flirting with an undefined sense of divinity. As much as this list highlights the daring, the new, and the experimental sides of ambient music, an ambient record in the “classic” style done right is a rarity. With such emotional precision to her work, we hope it’s not another multi-year wait until Vol. III.
7. Brothertiger – Fundamentals, Vol. V (Independent)
John Jagos’ Fundamentals series was born out of livestream sessions he hosted during the pandemic, and across four volumes released between 2020 and 2022, he created the instrumental effect of a day-night cycle, starting with dusk, heading deep into the night, and reaching the vibrant morning air by its third installment. We had documented the brilliance of these recordings prior, and while the fourth volume was considered “final,” it was much to our surprise that in 2024, he announced a fifth iteration.
Fundamentals, Vol. V is a joy to listen to because it feels like the “greatest hits” of the series, not aiming for a particular feeling but instead cherry-picking vibes from the records that preceded it. “Train to Altona” could have very easily fit on the masterful first edition, just as how the ponderous synths of “Mika” could have slotted right into Vol. II. What made the I-1V run so compelling was that whether intentional or not, there was very much an arc to his sonic, and Vol. V does nothing to disturb the formula but instead feels like a well-earned victory lap. Just like the four LPs that preceded it, we can’t wait to listen to this a few hundred more times.
6. Coral Morphologic & Nick León – Projections of a Coral City (Balmat)
If you call your album Projections of a Coral City, it doesn’t hurt to count a marine biologist among your ranks. Coral Morphologic is a duo based out of Miami consisting of musician J.D. McKay and actual underwater scientist Colin Foord. In collaboration with Nick León (who composes the music with McKay), Projections of a Coral City is the rare album that genuinely sounds like its title: a vibrant, cinematic pan toward deep sea treasures. There are warm synth pads aplenty, quiet crescendos of cinematic proportions, and the clangs and murmurs of soundtrack-worthy sound design. Yet the trio in charge of this operation doesn’t rely on cheap stunts like the sounds of bubbles or waves to get an aqua-immersive feeling. Instead, they use reverb, cacophonous riffage, and simple but beautiful chord progressions to map out an area for your ears to safely submerge under, letting the day’s worries simply wash right over you. It’s a quiet and curious gem.
5. Fabiano do Nascimento & Sam Gendel – The Room (Real World)
Sam Gendel doesn’t know when to stop. The Los Angeles-based saxophonist has run his horn through so many pedals, synths, modulators, and effects that he’s developed a signature tone all his own, one that has shown up on overstuffed albums that are often filled to the brim with a decade’s worth of musical ideas (his 2022 clearinghouse Superstore clocked in at 34-tracks). In 2024, he released three different collaborative full-lengths, the best of which was the kinship he developed with Brazilian seven-string guitarist Fabiano do Nascimento.
The Room features the two trading licks, both staccato and relaxed, with hints of a classical music repertoire mixing with Spanish flavors and American jazz themes interlaced throughout. “Até de Manhã” borders on the romantic, while “Poeira” draws its stylized melodies straight from the contemporary. What’s even better is how crisp Gendel sounds here, proving that for all of the waning tones he’s conjured up over the years, he’s still a formalist, happily following Nascimento’s guitar note-for-note overruns that look complicated on the staff sheet but go down easy on the ears. The Room doesn’t feel like a clash of cultures because it’s a blending of styles, achieved only through the duo’s innate chemistry and ear for a tight melody. It’s one of the year’s most dynamic surprises.
4. Kane Pour – The Last Wave (sound as language)
You have to give credit to Kane Pour for showing patience. While The Last Wave is the first album he’s recorded under his own name, having previously released music under the moniker Pospulenn, this new offering was recorded during the pandemic, when themes of loneliness and isolation came to the fore of his reflective guitar experiments. What’s most impressive is that the year is 2024, and instead of having his record come out amidst a glut of other similarly-themed releases in 2021 or 2022, he waited for the songs to settle and marinate.
The Last Wave is built on simple but timeless-sounding melodies, where one crisp guitar line is soon accented by another, the notes weaving together before disappearing down a canyon of reverb. What’s different about Pour’s songwriting is that he isn’t afraid to push the vibe in unexpected directions, which is why a track like “Circles in the Air” can flirt with yacht rock affectations while still sounding fully contained within his basement universe. Seemingly straightforward on the first listen but revealing layers of death with each subsequent playthrough, it’s clear that Pour wasn’t alone during the creation of The Last Wave: his creativity and pathos were present in the room with him.
3. Lapsed Pacifist – Hypatia (A Strangely Isolated Place)
Hypatia, the debut album from Colin Dunkerley’s Lapsed Pacifist moniker, is a labor of love, mainly because it was rendered slowly over time. Dunkerley’s day job has him working as a professional sound engineer, getting other performers perfectly pitched and mic’d while daydreaming about the day some other sound engineer would do the same for him. With Hypatia, Dunkerley has found kinship in the A Strangely Isolated Place roster, as his rolling waves of lavender synths, often gliding over the muted-but-present dull hum of harsh sawtooth synth tones, get wrapped in melodies that dissolve into pixels right before your ears.
Tracks like “Almost Remembered” ride ghostly glass tones to an ethereal horizon. Meanwhile, the closer “Garden” doesn’t provide so much cathartic release as it soundtrack one’s sense of discovery, unsure if this new sonic world is friendly or harsh. As with all outstanding ASIP records, tension is present here, as the vibe is primarily lush and calm, even with a sense of unease lingering underneath each composition. That may be a deal-breaker for some, but Lapsed Pacifict’s opening salvo finds beauty in uncertainty, asking the listener to face an unknowable future head-on because what other choice is there?
2. Saapato – On Fire Island (sound as language)
While Fire Island has garnered a reputation as a go-to hedonistic party destination, Brendan Principato found it tranquil. Recording on location via a residency set up via the National Park Service, On Fire Island is the ambient record equivalent of walking alone through nature during the daytime, of feeling the air between your fingers but articulated as whooshing keypads. The track titles accurately describe the compositions inside, as “Midday Storm Dissolving” starts with the field recording of a downpour over lush overstory before those raindrops evolve into skittering synth plinks.
“Ebbing (Shoreline, Dunes, Butterflies, Silence)” incorporates mic’d-up crashing waves into its moving digital landscape. Yet the 17-minute closing title track is where Principato finds his stride, his melodies having time to stretch out and luxuriate in a calming groove properly. It’s very easy for any album to overstay its welcome, but even without a ferry pass, we can see ourselves On Fire Island several times in the near future.
1. Sam Wilkes, Craig Weinrib, and Dylan Day – Sam Wilkes, Craig Weinrib, and Dylan Day (Leaving)
Bassist Sam Wilkes likes repeating himself a lot. In 2024, he released not one but two albums in collaboration with guitarist Dylan Day and drummer Craig Weinrib. The latter of which, the recorded-live-in-Tokyo ensemble piece iiyo iiyo iiyo, features Wilkes leading a quintet to craft intimate new works while also playing covers both traditional and self-penned (his classic “Descending” is presented in two different iterations). Yet his other collaboration with Day and Weinrib, a self-titled album featuring just their names, taped in a single evening while outdoors and only later glossed over with a few additional studio days, is somehow even more magical.
Sam Wilkes, Craig Weinrib, and Dylan Day has the intimacy of a few friends just jamming out together, perhaps with no intention of the songs ever seeing the light of day, but there is joy to be found in that. They are locked in aesthetically, tossing out a few jazz chords here and there while letting the empty space between notes do much of the talking. When “Rain” migrates from its liquid guitar jam session to a downtrodden bass number at the five-minute mark, it’s clear how connected the trio is with each other, deftly switching moods while keeping that Wilkes-ian brand of emotional throughline present in the melody.
This record is so unassuming that you often fail to realize how deep it has its empathic tenterhooks inside you, drawing out tears without you fully understanding why. Even when the group is playing around with a Jobim riff on “How Insensitive”, their crystal-clear style makes you feel like the boys rendered this melody live and on the spot. The fact that you can still hear their sharp intakes of breath on some of the tracks only adds to the intimacy.
We mentioned that Sam Wilkes likes repeating himself, and it’s true: his solo record WILKES topped the PopMatters Ambient Albums of 2018 list, and even with several outstanding records dropped in between, this quiet little trio record that has not a single note out of place finds himself here again.