Music of the Month(s): The Best Albums and Tracks of November and December 2025

Rack Records, the boutique label set up recently by Steve Davis and Gaz Williams to showcase live improvised electronic music made by duelling synthesists, has just pressed up its first slab of vinyl, a live album called Shipwreck. The two honchos were invited to perform at the 40th anniversary of the Brecon Jazz Festival last year, so they developed a joint modular system in order to take advantage of the fine acoustics of their venue – Brecon Cathedral – and a temporarily installed quadraphonic rig. They had a rehearsal in a church in Abedare before the show and that is what is presented here with no edits or overdubs, as per the Rack Records modular manifesto, sailing the listener out into suitably deep waters. 

Unlike some of Armand Hammer’s other collaborators – the likes of DJ Haram, Preservation and Kenny Segal, who make mind-warping, time-twisting beats which challenge both the duo’s verbal dexterity and their perception as boom-bap throwbacks – The Alchemist makes for an inconspicuous partner, creating eerie soundscapes upon which Woods and ELUCID make things a whole lot eerier. And make no mistake, there are some hair-raising cuts here, filled with allusions to exploding pagers, a bloody massacre on ‘u know my body’ and, on the aforementioned ‘Calypso Jean’, two startling verses in which ELUCID draws a line between baptismal water and someone swimming among the cascading torrent of a river-border crossing, sniper rifles aimed at their skull. But while it would be easy to portray Mercy as all warfare and bloodshed, Armand Hammer are equally adept at turning the world suddenly inward, punctuating political madness with moments of real poignance. 

The album opens with a sample of Stewart Lee threading a joke about Magners Pear Cider into his diverticulitis diagnosis. Considering Earth Ball’s penchant for free-roaming instrumentals that don’t so much expand upon the main theme as plunder its village and torch all the domiciles, it’s fitting to kick things off with a comedian who has claimed that he brings elements of free jazz into his comedy. The untethered brass squawks that make up ‘100%’ provide a brain-scudding platform from which Earth Ball then launch the raggedy blend of propulsive rhythms, hysterical skronk, and fearful outsider psych that forms second track ‘Helsinki’. A song that comes lurching out of the woods like it’s either being stalked or doing the stalking.

Extended Field, the eighteenth volume in the RVNG label’s FRKWYS series of collaborative releases, finds Horse Lords completely locked into Dreyblatt’s compositional method, and vice-versa. There are plenty of moments in which one can hear elements of the sweaty math rock-inflected side of the band, but they’re always subtle, never in any danger of overwhelming the deep focus and tension of Dreyblatt’s string textures. But when things do kick into full gear, Dreyblatt is right there with them, matching them in focus and vigor. Whereas Dreyblatt came up as a composer studying with legendary figures such as Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Lucier and made a name for himself in the legendary Downtown NYC scene in the 80s, Horse Lords’ origins are in the equally fruitful but much more off-the-beaten-path Baltimore freak music scene. Yet Extended Field is as simpatico as an intergenerational collab can get, with Dreyblatt’s compositional method lending a sense of shape and form to the music that Horse Lords color in ever gracefully.

One of the finest new musical entities in recent years has seen Dan Bean and Anthony Child (AKA Surgeon) donning robes and lighting candles as ever-evolving drone duo The Transcendence Orchestra. The ingredients that go into the bubbling Pyrex to create that trippy alchemy can be heard in two recent releases from the duo on the Old Technology label: Dan Bean’s Bassduets and Child’s of the Beginning, his first record under his own name in quite some time. Bean’s album is made entirely on the bass and 303, yet despite the restrictions that imposes, has made a record that flickers and murmurs, like military flares on Salisbury Plain haloing ancient stones. In his track ‘Chevalier’, a circulating motif is challenged with background squelching stabs, like being in a noise bleed between the joyous peak of a rave and a gig by Ex-Easter Island Head.

Anthony Child’s of the Beginning was written as a response to a difficult 2025 of “loss, breakdown, heartbreak, reflection and discovery”, and throughout its seven tracks is the strong sensation of music being collapsed and built back up again. It’s as if you can imagine the sturdy power of his music as Surgeon detonated, and its soot and steel used to build the structures and feed the plants of a future garden, sunlight through leaves onto rust. ‘Shipwrecked’ and ‘Gloaming’ are thoughtful pastoral wonders, ‘Lodestar’ a watery shimmer.

Both Bean and Child’s albums are psychedelic, testing at the boundaries of that notion as a form of escapism, or rooted in a deeply humanistic introspection. There’s never any sense that this is expensive static with a complicated academic justification here – this is more music made to wander town and city, in a state of deep listening but as much to the self as what’s in your ears. As such, whether in The Transcendence Orchestra or through these excellent records, Bean and Child continue to be the artists operating today who can justifiably claim to have picked up the mantle of Coil (albeit in what feels like a refreshingly wholesome way). It’s something that’s also nodded at in the humour within the magic – track titles like ‘Are You Being Served?’ (Child) and ‘Keine Bin’ and ‘Face Lix’ (Bean) mining a similar English sense of the absurd, as well as the sublime.

Ghold’s first album in six years possesses a monstrous, viscous form.It’s a shape that makes its appearance through the album’s warping, dark atmospheres. Murky samples, eerie synth drones, tribal toms and shifting band dynamics radiate apprehension from within its core, a feeling which only intensifies across its runtime. Their previous tags of “doom metal” on albums like STOIC and PYR seem to have expanded into even darker realms on this new record. Tracks like ‘Leaves’ evoke epic and foreboding atmospheres, making for a brutal yet evocative listen.

Golden Toad is the solo project of Al Brown, former co-creator of indie-psychers Japanese Television. He’s also made music videos for the likes of UNKLE, Lambrini Girls, Idles, and Deap Vally. His solo debut Unite The Worms happens to be released twenty years after the extinction declaration of the Costa Rican Golden Toad, the last confirmed sighting of which occurred all the way back in 1989. This Golden Toad, however, decided to hole himself up in a garage in the Garden of England last summer and set about concocting a psychedelic passage through shifting time, riding kosmische grooves and electronic festoonery along the way.

‘Many Versions Of Me’ closes not only the album but the Foetus project itself. Not in a hail of bullets, but with an elegiac, aching ballad reflecting on 45 years of work. It’s a real heartbreaker from a (former) ballbreaker, and as Asher’s violin carries the ending aloft, Thirlwell quotes old Foetus lyrics, completing the circle. What makes Halt such a potent farewell is its sense of completeness. It gathers the strands of Thirlwell’s past into something both summative and forward-looking, even as it announces its own finality. Halt is controlled, deliberate, uncompromising. With the full arc now visible, Foetus stands as a living diary of obsessions musical, philosophical, and personal.

I’ve been thinking about a precise point at a Goblin Band gig at Hackney’s MOTH Club for over a year now. It was when they performed ‘Willie’s Lady’, specifically a point about two thirds through where, having gradually raised in tempo and intensity over ebbs and flows of concertina, the song reached a point at which something seemed to snap, the band careening into a flurry of violin, a jangling stomp of percussion and hurried recorders, vocalist Sonny Brazil almost breathless as they tried to keep up. In a packed and sweaty crowd, there was something about the energy that made me feel euphoric to the point of transcendence, floating up towards the venue’s glittery arched ceiling. It was only at the song’s close that the scale of the cheers from a packed crowd broke the spell – and indicated that I wasn’t the only one who’d experienced the same thing.

Album opener ‘Canaan Land’ marries the laid-back but detailed reggae lilt of Minnelli’s instrumental with sweet ear-worm vocals from Barbadian legend Dennis Bovell. The switch up from this piece to ‘Sumptuous Promise’, a spacious and trippy instrumental equipped with classic dub echoes and looping treated percussion, is a genius turn. Minnelli’s attention to the flow of an album, is one of the many strengths of Clams As A Main Meal. Just when it feels like you have a measure of his sound palette, he throws in a sonic curveball to mix things up – be it the charming melody of the wordless vocals on ‘Watercraft Apologist’ or the ear-grabbing and spacey synth textures and rattling low key breakbeat of ‘Calopify Now!’.

Stardust is undoubtedly Brown as his most pop – specifically hyperpop, which he describes as “some of the most creative shit I ever heard”. After the insular mood of Quaranta, with its themes of addiction and depression, it’s refreshing to hear Brown having unabashed neon-lit fun. He’s brought in a bunch of hyperpop artists as guests: 8485 provides a sweet chorus for ‘Flowers’, sibling duo Frost Children turn ‘Green Light’ into an emo rave, and Issbrokie adds a bratty bubblegum verse to ‘Whatever The Case’. Digital hardcore artist femtanyl energises ‘1L0v3myL1f3!’ with synthetic breaks, easing from a heady, hectic rush to a blissful plateau – the audio equivalent of faking it ‘till you make it. Brown is earnest about his new-found lust for life post-addiction, winking to the audience on occasion (“We all love a comeback story”).

Rosalía’s fourth album, LUX, stands in firm opposition to the dopamine rush of the modern instant gratification age defined by social media doom-scrolling and algorithm-based streaming playlists. Split into four movements, it’s a highly engrossing gift of avant-garde pop rooted in classical music that sees the lead artist and her collaborators sing in 13 different languages: her native Spanish and Catalan, as well as English, French, Italian, Arabic, Japanese, Ukrainian and more. Centred around sweeping orchestral arrangements and Rosalía’s jaw-dropping, sometimes operatic vocal chops, the record’s 15 songs touch on the intense give-and-take of romantic relationships, heartbreak and present-day femininity. Along the way, it folds in flashes of flamenco (‘La Rumba Del Perdon’); waltz (the playful ‘La Perla’); tango and dembow (Dios Es Un Stalker); and maximalist chamber pop (the Björk and Yves Tumor-featuring lead single ‘Berghain’), as Rosalía continues to toy with the limits of modern pop music and expand on her ever-absorbing sound.

Williamson has a keen ear for evocation of passing time and landscapes, both real and imagined. This is a warm and charming record of eddying folk made up of picked guitar, chanting and drones, with each track devoted to a different member of the Time Team – Mick Aston (who when he wasn’t a practitioner of naturism loved to wear lurid knitwear) and Carenza Lewis turned into ‘The Thinker’, ‘The Medievalist’ and so on. If you’re a fan of Moundabout, say, or Tristwch Y Fenywod, that should give you a bit of an idea of what Williamson has unearthed from the oomska here. Best of all is the haunting melodica of ‘The Artist’, which conjures up woodsmoke over ancient palisades, danger lurking in the nearby woodland, as effectively as the illustrations of the late Victor Ambrus, to whom it is devoted. ‘The Everyman’, meanwhile, sounds like ‘Who By Fire’ if Leonard Cohen had nicked it off a lonesome charcoal burner, years before he was born.

Jo Bevan, who fronts Desperate Journalist, has self-released a solo EP, which is embedded here for you to enjoy. It’s worth listening to the whole of the Everybody On My DAW Like They Supposed To Be, as there is a wealth of future potential ringing out. ‘A Rose’ reimagines Madonna’s ‘Frozen’ or Björk’s ‘All Is Full Of Love’ as made on a cluttered kitchen table’s worth of careworn analogue gear, then reassembled on a shonky laptop. And ‘TheBellsTheBellsTheBellsTheBells’ might not be a Christmas single but it does imagine an unholy alliance of Kate Bush and White Town for Rephlex. But it is ‘Nadia’, with its sample from Frances Ha, its hissing, loose drum machine envelopes and breezy psych folk tune, that hits home first. 

Xiu Mutha Fuckin’ Xiu: Vol. 1 sees the long-time experimental outliers delivering covers of everyone from Soft Cell to GloRilla, Talking Heads to Robyn, and it is a manic delight from start to finish. The whole thing’s out in January, but for now content yourselves with their takes on Daniel Johnston and The Runaways.

Dry Cleaning’s forthcoming third LP Secret Love is a considerable step forwards, as demonstrated by the strength of all three singles released so far this year. The latest, the hypnotic, swirling, strangely tender ‘Let Me Grow And You’ll See The Fruit’ is the best of the bunch.

Is there a more consistent singer-songwriter operating today than Bill Callahan? ‘Lonely City’ is yet another melancholy masterpiece.

As Hen Ogledd, Dawn Bothwell, Rhodri Davies, Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington make music that is quite literally beyond compare. Who else could deliver an eight-and-a-half minute lo-fi synth pop pastoral political anthemic rap track like ‘Scales Will Fall’?

Daemönik Fonce were a bonkers highlight of the 2025 incarnation of Sea Power’s Krankenhaus Festival, a swaggering and slightly daft (in a good way) powerhouse of rock & roll. ‘O Corita’ is a homage to Corita Kent, a nun, artist, activist and teacher, with nods to Crass in the artwork, and the late, great Earl Brutus in the glam-tinged racket. Whether the Fonce’s cry of “Oh Corita be my girl!” would have much sway with one already betrothed to Christ himself is another matter.