20. 36 & zake – Stasis Sounds for Long-Distance Space Travel III (Past Inside the Present)
For the last five years, 36 & zake have been crafting epic longform meditations on life in deep space with the Stasis Sounds for Long-Distance Space Travel series. The prolific pair end the triptych on a high note, as Stasis Sounds for Long-Distance Space Travel III manages to capture both the sublime awe and existential terror of space travel with all the attention to space and detail of a room full of Rothkos. Although they’d never say so themselves, being far too soft-spoken and understated, 36 and zake continue to be some of the most striking, imaginative ambient artists currently working. – J Simpson
19. Jessica Shand – Transmutations (Independent)
Providence-based Jessica Shand is a flutist, producer, composer, and researcher whose diverse influences include contemporary jazz, electronic music, and creative improvisation. As one of nine young creators selected for the Steve Jobs Archive’s inaugural fellowship, Shand recorded Transmutations in 2024 with Grammy award-winning engineer Joseph Branciforte. Each of the album’s tracks begins with a short sample, which is then transformed using a constrained set of digital signal processing techniques.
The result is 12 tracks that vary from lush, intergalactic soundscapes to brief, staccato bursts of flute, employing a compositional framework Shand developed alongside her research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Transmutations is one of those experimental recordings that sounds, upon initial description, like a lot of process-based art that could leave some listeners cold and unmoved, but the result is the opposite. It’s an album filled with sonic possibilities, stretching the limits of what someone can do with an instrument and accompanying digital techniques. It’s the sound of technology, imbued with a distinct, deep warmth. – Chris Ingalls
18. caroline – caroline 2 (Rough Trade)
Warm, intimate, intricate, expansive, detailed, caroline 2 is a detailed snapshot of post-rock in 2025. It has the knotty, gnarled progressive structures that made Black Country New Road such an immediate sensation, but it’s more personal. Caroline 2 invites you into the room to tell you all their most cherished secrets and buried nightmares. Most importantly, caroline 2 doesn’t sound defeatist in any way. The nihilistic resignation of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “East Hastings” is swapped out in favor of warm, arty Talk Talk naturalism. Many battles have been lost in the last 25 years, but the war is far from over. – J Simpson
17. Matthew Ryals with effe effe – Exalge (Infrequent Seams)
The new album from synthesist, composer, and improviser Matthew Ryals is a fascinating and uncomplicated way to dive into the artist’s works. A totally improvisational live recording at a venue of the same name in Milan, Exalge is a direct, unvarnished sonic landscape, a real-time performance of the modular synthesizer, divided into five tracks.
Collaborating with Ryals on three of those five tracks – on viola and effects – is Italian musician Federica Furlani, also known as effe effe. The songs range from “Ancient Crimes”, a magnificent beast of a track, sparse noise tumbling into cavernous echoes, to the somewhat tentative and vulnerable “Limb-Loosener”, with Ryals’ synths and effe effe’s viola going head-to-head in a sort of cosmic duel. By collaborating with a fellow improviser and performing it on stage for an audience, Ryals has once again expanded the possibilities of experimentation and improvisation. –Chris Ingalls
16. Kevin Drumm – Sheer Hellish Miasma II (Erstwhile)
Age is supposed to mellow us, help us find nuance in complicated subjects, while enjoying whatever everyday quotidian comforts we can grab. It says a lot that the sequel to Kevin Drumm’s masterful, influential noise opus, Sheer Hellish Miasma, is five times as brutal and relentless as the first installment nearly 25 years later. Instead of the meditative sound sculptures and tone poems of the original,
Sheer Hellish Miasma II is an hour and 45 minutes of raw, relentless white noise, piercing feedback, and gut-shredding shrieks. It’s the sonic equivalent of a pleasure stroll through Centralia, Pennsylvania, a soundtrack for choking on noxious fumes. It’s pure catharsis in a world that seems like it could topple into the void at any given second. – J Simpson
15. Jorge Espinal – Bombos y Cencerros (Buh)
Born in Peru but currently based in Buenos Aires, Jorge Espinal has spent more than a decade developing a musical approach in which body and instrument function as a single unit. After participating in various collaborations, Espinal released his debut solo album this year, using prepared electric guitar, bass drum, cowbell, pedals, and a laptop to trigger samples, build loops, and freeze sounds. As his official bio states, “the guitar becomes a source of rhythm rather than harmony”.
The record was recorded in a single session in December 2023, simultaneously played using hands and feet, but comprised a series of pieces that condensed years of practice. Espinal explores the intersection of noise, repetition, and accident. The result is noisy, chaotic, and fascinating, and is a wild, unbounded combination of sound that is exciting, revolutionary, and never dull. – Chris Ingalls
14. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – Gift Songs (Mexican Summer)
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma is a generous man. For almost 20 years, he’s released multiple thoughtful, imaginative, and unique ambient albums exploring everything from identity to philosophy to modernist literature, with an expansive mind and an empathetic heart. No matter what he’s writing about or what genre he’s working in, be it mind-pulverizing shoegaze or meditative drone, you get the sense that everything’s going to be okay.
While always a much-appreciated balm, that reassurance feels almost revolutionary in 2025, where we face fresh hells and new apocalypses every week. Nevertheless, Gift Songs’ tender, ruminative piano sketches, airy beats, and cryogenic drones help us persist even when the odds seem insurmountable. – J Simpson
13. Cyrus Pireh – Thank You, Guitar (Palilalia)
On his fourth album of what he describes as “transcendental shred electric guitar music”, musician and composer Cyrus Pireh continues to do what he does best: Craft unique, oddly melodic, cathartic music using the raw power of the electric guitar and little else. It’s no surprise that Thank You, Guitar is on Palilalia Records, the label formed by fellow trailblazing guitar weirdo Bill Orcutt. There are certainly parallels between Pireh’s approach and Orcutt’s (not to mention kindred spirits like Wendy Eisenberg, Jessica Ackerley, Henry Kaiser, and Ava Mendoza).
Pireh’s circular, often minimalist style is countered by the noise, distortion, and repetition of his execution. Anyone who finds inspiration in the unique playing of current greats like Orcutt or legends like Gary Lucas (particularly his work with Captain Beefheart) will find plenty to enjoy on Cyrus Pireh’s Thank You, Guitar, from a guitarist whose combined skill set and original ideas make for a completely new and welcome type of guitar hero. – Chris Ingalls
12. Abul Mogard – Quiet Pieces (Soft Echoes)
On Quiet Pieces, Abul Mogard continues to blend the personal and the conceptual, combining the emotional landscapes of Biosphere or Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas project; the immersive sonic worldbuilding of Loscil and Murcof, and the intimate memoir of the Caretaker to stunning effect. This time, the Italian musician draws inspiration from a crate of battered classical records rescued from his uncle, which he then proceeds to slather with a thick glaze of almost impenetrable reverb, like some haunting, mournful melody drifting through a brutalist structure cloaked in fog. – J Simpson
11. Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet – HausLive4 (Hausu Mountain)
Miami-born, San Francisco-based experimental guitarist Bill Orcutt gained notoriety in the 1990s with the influential noise band Harry Pussy, and has been releasing odd (and oddly moving) instrumental guitar albums for the past several years. His 2022 record, Music for Four Guitars, featured Orcutt multitracking himself through a series of rigidly structured musical phrases, all with a distinctly sharp tone and bits of distortion-fueled riffs.
HausLive 4 brings that project to an audience with spectacular results. Recorded at the experimental-tilted Chicago venue Constellation, HausLive 4 is the latest in a series of audience-recorded live albums from the Hausu Mountain label. This particular release includes Orcutt and fellow guitarists Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parish, taking the basic tenets of those earlier compositions and often adding bits of improvisation, occasionally lengthening the tracks.
It’s an acquired taste, and anyone not particularly interested in hearing four electric guitars simultaneously pounding out inspired, amplified noise should probably stay away. Still, noise rock fans who yearn for the sound of a quartet at the absolute peak of their powers will gain a great deal by scooping this one up. – Chris Ingalls
10. Rafael Toral – Traveling Light (Drag City)
Traveling Light picks up where last year’s revelatory Spectral Evolution left off, weaving together ambient music, jazz, homemade electronics, and field recordings to create something earthy and pastoral yet also otherworldly and abstract. This time, Rafael Toral leans even more heavily into jazz, drawing upon the Great American Songbook for raw materials to be spun into gossamer spiderwebs of anti-gravity pedal steel guitar, woozy, harmonious, and hypnotic drones.
Warm and inviting yet still unsettling at times, Traveling Light draws out the shadows and the light of standards like “Body and Soul”, “Solitude”, “My Funny Valentine”, and “God Bless the Child”, creating an ambient record with a warm, beating human heart. – J Simpson
9. Asa Horvitz / Carmen Quill / Ariadne Randall / Wayne Horvitz – GHOST (Celestial Excursions / Het HEM)
A highly conceptual, process-based album that combines themes of grief and loss with artificial intelligence, GHOST is the result of Asa Horvitz, grieving the 2017 loss of his father, looking for a musical language “to evoke our metaphysical and tangible experiences with loss and the weight of history that surrounds those who have passed on,” according to the press notes. Assembling a dataset of more than 150 pre-existing texts from throughout history that deal with grief, Asa Horvitz fed them through a custom Natural Language Processing AI system.
Compositions resulted from vocal improvisations featuring bassist and vocalist Carmen Quill, as well as Ariadne Randall and Bryan West on processing, synthesizers, and viola da gamba, and Horvitz’s uncle, pianist Wayne Horvitz. You’ll probably never hear anything like GHOST, and while it is undoubtedly an acquired taste, the honesty and fearlessness with which this project is approached is palpable, infectious, and appreciated and loved more with every listen. – Chris Ingalls
8. Kelly Moran – Don’t Trust Mirrors (Warp)
Last year’s exquisite Moves of the Field found Kelly Moran employing her impressive range of extended piano techniques to the realm of dance music, transforming her prepared piano into uncanny automata of perpetual motion and mechanical longing. This year’s Don’t Trust Mirrors inverts that principle, using the same tools and techniques to go inward. Sentimental, thoughtful, plaintive, longing, Moran’s piano becomes a music box, a time capsule, or a drifting fogbank, displaying a remarkable fusion of imagination and craft. – J Simpson
7. Mondo Lava – Utero Dei (Hausu Mountain)
Following Parrot Head Cartridge and Ogre Heights, James Ketchum and Leon Hu are back with Utero Dei, another journey into the world of loops, distortion, and wild stylistic jumps. Releasing music once again on the Chicago-based experimental imprint Hausu Mountain, the heads of that label describe James and Leon’s music much better than any mere music journalist can, referring to the new album as “beautifully fried excursions” and “humid rainforests of sound”.
There’s no shortage of cluttered, gleefully overstuffed collages to work with. “Golem Boogie” is a noisy funk workout, while the gurgling, rapid-fire bass line of “Decalcified Pineal Gland” seems to reach into the inner depths of hell. Part of the pleasure of Utero Dei is seeing where Mondo Lava will go next. It’s experimental, often abrasive stuff, but the journey includes many curious detours.
The fretless bass of “Venus of Willendorf” uses New Age as its sonic template. Meanwhile, “Brass Fields” revels in rainy field recordings under a simple, deliberately paced guitar/synth melody, only to fall apart and end up unfettered and cacophonous. Utero Dei is wild, often puzzling, but a whole lot of fun to get lost in. – Chris Ingalls
6. Anna von Hausswolff – ICONOCLASTS (Year 0001)
It feels unfair that critics and haters are often so quick to dismiss love songs, as if love, romance, relationships, and all the things that go with them aren’t among the most intense and impactful experiences we can have in life. That goes for the end of love, as well. Breakups aren’t just the end of a relationship. They’re a sort of death, a dissolution, an end to our lives as we know them up until that point.
In ICONOCLASTS, Swedish composer/singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Anna von Hausswolf gives love the respect it deserves. Employing her signature pipe organ sublimity along with 10 ton-beats and stratospheric vocals to truly bottle the wild conflagration that follows the end of a relationship and the rebirth that follows. – J Simpson
5. Dustin Wong – Gloria (Hausu Mountain)
For Los Angeles-based composer, producer, and guitarist Dustin Wong, recent albums such as Fluid World Building 101 With Shaman Bambu (2018) and Perpetual Morphosis (2023) saw him moving away from guitar loops to incorporate more synths and samples into the mix. In Gloria, Wong continues along that path, but the album’s contextual theme brings a more emotional pull to the music.
The record’s title refers to Gloria Violet Lee Wong, Dustin’s grandmother, who died last year, just shy of her 96th birthday, and is inspired specifically by a road trip Dustin took with Gloria down the American West Coast in 2023. Gloria is presented as a memorial to her storied life and a celebration of the warmth and kindness that characterized their close relationship.
Tracks range from the bouncy, jittery “Memories of Cordelia”, incorporating deft fingerpicking and woozy, tropical flights of fancy mixed in with the samples and percussive stomping, to the sparse, airy “Glass Beach”, and mini-vignettes like “Gloria & Backman on the Phone” and the rigid, robotic “Malcolm, Carey, Darrel, Andrea, Janice”. Gloria is adventurous, sonically unique, and a uniquely emotional tribute. – Chris Ingalls
4. The Necks – Disquiet (Northern Spy)
Disquiet is a misnomer. The 21st album from the Australian is very quiet indeed if we’re using the word to mean unassuming and unobtrusive. Unengaging it is not, though, even if it consists of four monolithic hour-long tracks. Lean in a little closer, and you’ll find an absolute riot of details: hypnotic motorik rhythms cruising frictionlessly beneath a cloudbank of Fender Rhodes and airy double bass.
Judging solely by the instrumentation, you’d think Disquiet is jazz, which it is, sort of… just don’t expect any chord changes, heads, tails, bodies, bridges, or otherwise. Instead, it sounds like Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis summoning some vast cosmic mechanoid to deliver us from evil. It’s one of the most spellbinding four-hour records ever laid to tape. – J Simpson
3. Pulse Emitter – Tide Pools (Hausu Mountain)
Pulse Emitter is the musical moniker of Daryl Groetsch, whose work with the synthesizer has embraced melodic synth music, organic ambient, relaxation, microtonal, and noise/drone, and while the most recent Pulse Emitter album, Dusk (2022), encompassed most of these subgenres, his new one, Tide Pools, is more of the same. Which is good news, because Groetsch absolutely excels at creating synth soundscapes that sound mind-bendingly wild, are massively melodic, and demand repeated listens.
In the opening track, the frantic, jittery “Energy Flying”, Groetsch immediately creates an atmosphere of futuristic hope. Things slow down on the more ruminative “So Many Leaves”, but none of the sleek sophistication or generally upbeat vibes are compromised. Despite the songs all seeming to embrace the same positive headspace, there’s plenty of variety and individuality.
“Chip Stacking” is positively playful: crystal clear melody lines that are rich and irresistible, often coming off as a soundtrack to the world’s most advanced video game. As Pulse Emitter, Daryl Groetsch excels at creating musical worlds that are always filled with optimism alongside a bold artistic spirit. – Chris Ingalls
2. Jamie Lidell & Luke Schneider – A Companion for the Spaces Between Dreams (Northern Spy)
“A mind is often found more exposed during psychedelic experiences,” Jamie Lidell explains on the Bandcamp page of A Companion for the Spaces Between Dreams. “Specifically, in a therapeutic setting, where trust is key to approaching issues and working through events in the way of growth. This is music to support and guide the listening with or without psychedelic sensory heightening.”
Lidell uses modular synths, Fender Rhodes, tape effects, and percussion, and Luke Schneider employs interplanetary swaths of pedal steel to create a listening experience that can bolster a psychedelic trip or provide a pure, adventurous, and ambient sonic ride. These lush instrumental soundscapes can be easily described as “dreamlike”, as there’s always a sense of ethereal, semi-conscious bliss. By creating music with a specific, therapeutic purpose, the collective talents of Lidell and Schneider have delivered an otherworldly soundtrack to dreams—and the spaces between them. – Chris Ingalls
1. Swans – Birthing (Young God)
Has there ever been a band with a stranger trajectory than Swans? From the anarchic, post-metal noise terrorist roots in the 1980s to the sublime Gothic sound architects in the 1990s to out-and-out critical darlings in the 2010s. The fact that Michael Gira’s dense, relentless, existentialist noise symphonies would ever catch on outside of black box Goth clubs is strange enough. That they also enjoyed a moment as a viral phenomenon is either proof that the simulacrum is finally shutting down for good or that we’ve collectively lost our damn minds.
Either way, Birthing would deserve recognition for being the final installment of Swans’ legendary Big Band era alone. The fact that it’s as challenging, punishing, relentless, intoxicating, frightening, and exciting as any of their most challenging works earns it a place at the top of the list. – J Simpson