Futureproofing #30: The Best Music Of 2025
My favorite records of the year.
As with last year’s list, this selection is more personal than definitive. There are tons of records I thought were good, or important, that aren’t on here. Instead, these are the records I cared the most about this year, the albums that burrowed the deepest into my mind. They are in no real order, except that the first one is definitively my Album Of The Year
Thanks for reading in 2025!
The music
Edited by Tom Gledhill
venturing - Ghostholding [DeadAir]
One moment I couldn’t get out of my head this year: when Jane Remover’s voice suddenly goes deep and guttural on “Believe.” It’s a Scott Stapp impression in the middle of a stream of consciousness so weighty it could have been sculpted from marble. That line, a deeply felt “believe in me,” comes as part of a dizzying series of melodies that spill out from a simple guitar riff, unspooling strange but evocative lyrics like “I saw god in your arms/I took him to sleep” and “Jesus don’t like bitches/I was floating downstream.” A friend of mine said that the song’s maze of hooks reminded him of The-Dream, which made me think: is this what it would sound like if The-Dream did buttrock?
That hypothetical is a jokey way of looking at a serious album. Ghostholding is the first LP under Jane Remover’s venturing alias, which is reserved for capital-R rock (the kind that first showed its face on the second JR LP, Census Designated). The American artist exploded into rage rap hysteria on this year’s Revengeseekerz album, but on Ghostholding, they look to Midwest emo and unravel that genre’s knotty songwriting into a more straightforward form of rock. Built on incredible melodies and lyrics about self-destruction, partying, and the twin identity crises that come from gender dysphoria and falling in and out of love, Ghostholding cuts through the impressionistic smear of shoegaze with the cutting honesty of emo for an album that stuck with me more than any other this year.
Introspekt - Moving The Center [Tempa]
Of all the younger DJs and producers mining the dubstep archives for inspiration in the 2020s, few are as studied (or as talented) as Introspekt. On her debut album for Tempa, she zeroes in on the genre’s fluid beginnings. It’s a snapshot of the days of Horsepower Productions records on that very same label—a time when dubstep was still being referred to as “dark garage.” Moving The Center is a faithful revival of this style, which emphasizes swung drums and syncopation over empty space and dark corners. But its real genius lies in the way that Introspekt adds her own touches. She scatters ballroom stabs, steamy moans and sharp intakes of breath all over teh record, leaving clammy imprints on the tough-as-nails drums. By the time the unbelievably funky low-end in “Afro Bass” kicks in, Moving The Center accomplishes what should be impossible: taking a legendary and sound and not only reproducing it perfectly, but somehow making it better.
Addison Rae - Addison [Columbia]
“When I was growing up, Mama always told me to save my money so I never had to rely on a man to take care of me. But money’s not coming with me to heaven, and I have a lot of it, so can’t a girl just have fun?” That’s the giggly intro monologue to “Money Is Everything,” a trifle generally regarded as the worst song on her otherwise towering debut album, which brought comparisons to everyone from Britney Spears to Mount Kimbie.
Addison was the musical center of 2025 because it aspired to be nothing but pure pop. Weird enough for the underground but sharp enough for the mainstream, this sincerity made goofy tracks like “Money Is Everything” and “New York” hit even harder. There’s no guilty pleasure here. There’s no guilty pleasure here. But Addison was also easy to root for, because it was aspirational, framing her success as a foregone conclusion, presenting Rae as the everywoman small-town pop star before she had even reached that status. She had nowhere to go up. It’s why, when she laughs through “Money loves me! I’m the richest girl in the world!” on “Money Is Everything,” even though you know it’s not really true, you believe it anyway.
Nick León - A Tropical Entropy [TraTraTrax]
Nick León is a hard character not to love, with a pureheartedness and enthusiasm that comes across immediately in pretty much any video of him talking. But more importantly, he’s a great producer, with a lean and incisive take on contemporary Latin club music that streamlines his natural excitability into syncopated club tools. His debut album was something of a bunt, looking inwards and backwards to his upbringing in Miami with short bursts of downcast reggaeton and bedroom pop. It’s unusually humble for a long-awaited debut album from one of the most hyped dance music producers in recent memory, and it has a way of burrowing into your brain and setting up shop there, waiting for just the right moment to fire your synapses. Take the instrumental on “Ocean Apart,” which briefly swells behind Casey MQ’s voice after two minutes of Oklou-style fluttering—it’s subtle by anyone’s measure, but in that moment, it feels explosive.
Eusebeia - The Wyrding Way [Livity Sound]
Jungle producer Eusebeia released the most un-Livity record in the entire Livity Sound catalogue. Here, label and artist look to a different sector of UK electronic music for an album of slow, strange IDM that harkens back to early Plaid and The Black Dog releases, with a little hauntology thrown in. The tracks are simple and slow, and sound like they were made with vintage hardware: haunting, microtonal melodies wobble like blobs in a lava lamp, while the occasional drum machine rhythm keeps time. The Wyrding Way sounds like it’s melting in real time—not quite melancholy but a more unearthly feeling, like sounds you might hear wandering through some deep forest that exists only in an old oil painting.
yingtuitive - Letters To Self 寫情書 [Third Place]
I was unfamiliar with yingtuitive until Tom Gledhill, the DJ, producer and writer who edits this newsletter, sent me her debut album. Then it became an obsession, with a blend of simple but soulful piano, Japanese environmental music and homespun field recordings merging into a warm and cozy watercolor painting of an album. Recorded between London and Singapore, Letters To Self 寫情書 is fraught with homesickness, yet it finds peace in moments of reflection and nostalgia, without without ever feeling too mopey. “On “Pandan,” you hear yingtuitive at the piano while an auntie slices pandan in the kitchen next door.” It’s an invitation into a private moment, and feels all the more universal for it.
Reeko - Cryptophony [Samurai Music]
Cryptophony inhabits the same techno-drum-and-bass border zone of Samurai Music’s once-groundbreaking Horo series, but where those releases sounded like hulking, juddering machines running on linear tracks, Cryptophony crackles with potential and unresolved tension. The feeling is both cybernetic and stone-age primitive. “Ecos de Suburbio” is built from taut, wiry textures uncommon with techno, and the way that the snares and hats push up against every bar captures the tension of late ‘90s drum & bass without devolving into pastiche. Cryptophony might sound monolithic if it weren’t so spacious and detailed, full of ledges to hold onto and tunnels to get lost in, even amidst the storm of rhythm swirling at its core.
Nazar - Demilitarize [Hyperdub]
Demilitarize was an unlikely followup to one of the crown jewels of the Hyperdub catalogue. 2020’s Guerilla contorted kuduro into a violent, jagged rhythm inspired by Angola’s civil war. This one was made during convalescence from a life-threatening illness—an internal battle instead of an external one—and comes off as insular as you’d expect, all muffled drums and murmured vocals. Demilitarize is world-weary but occasionally hopeful, and like so many other albums on this list, it’s an introspective take on dance music, with lilting rhythms that sound like someone putting their life back together.
Carrier - Rhythm Immortal [Modern Love]
Carrier, like so much great electronic music, is the direct result of blending what came before it. Think Detroit techno originators mixing Kraftwerk, YMO, and George Clinton, or dub techno mashing up reggae and Jeff Mills records. In this case, the base ingredients are Basic Channel’s Rhythm & Sound project (where the name Carrier comes from) and ’90s drum’n’bass artists like Source Direct and Photek, who took the timestretching style of jungle and made it sound like they could actually stop time, with drums that sliced the air in strange patterns. The result references the dancefloor more than it lives on it, an approach that feels futuristic and stone age at the same time. On Rhythm Immortal, Brewer’s debut album as Carrier, the drum sounds feel unusually physical, like they’re the product of humans striking rods against iron or rock. You can feel the air move with each thwack.
Ø - Sysivalo [Sähkö Recordings]
Sysivalo, an album that was near completion before Mika Vainio’s death in 2017, is the Finnish producer’s loveliest record, spotlighting a side of Vainio that only his most adventurous fans know about. Instead of crushing doom or ear-piercing frequencies, here Vainio channels his supreme talent for synthesis into classical-leaning, noir-ish pieces, underlined by the “Études” series, which frame his rumbles and bleeps as compositions rather than experiments. Sysivalo is certainly his most composed record, luxuriating in its own beauty and taking the time to flesh out melodies that linger long after the record stops. It’s a beautiful swan song, but likely an unintentional one, which makes it even more crushing.
Coatshek - Sound Bath [Dark Entries]
Sound Bath was one of the greatest surprises of the year: a vinyl reissue of what started as an online mix for a now-defunct poppers brand. That online mix was actually a live set of all-original material, music that dipped its toes into the more tranquil (and occasionally paranoid) end of ‘90s IDM and ambient techno without feeling overtly retro. Armed with a guitar, a drum machine, and some synths, the San Francisco producer masterfully channeled the experience of cruising in a bath house—seedy, blissful, occasionally unsettling, and, above all, sweaty—without intellectualizing it. There are furtive whispers, jittery heart palpitations and long, dreamy sighs, all written in the soft-focus, reverb-soaked language of vintage techno. It’s a reductive comparison, but if you liked Patrick Cowley’s gay porn soundtracks compiled by Dark Entries, this feels like the logical next step.
bambinodj - Silent Dispatch [OST]
The first thing that got me in Silent Dispatch was the log drum in “Auf Log,” earwormy and brisk, yet heavy with emotion. There was hope there, too, and the bright synths and chipper chord percussion of “Auf Log” sound like bambinodj clicked “invert” on the melancholy side of amapiano, so the dark tones became blindingly bright. Every track on this album is overstuffed with feelings, bordering on corny—like the cotton candy dancehall tune “Highest Praise”—but the sincerity sells them, as well as the production. Silent Dispatch was also one of the best sounding dance records of 2025, with mixdowns and production values to match the stylistic sleights of hand.
Time Cow - Scaring 1100 Chickens To Death [Kullijhan Records]
Scaring 1100 Chickens To Death almost merits inclusion on this list for track titles alone, like “Mind Controlled Alligators” and “Guns Drugs And 800 Parrots.” But it helps that the Jamaican producer’s album is genuinely unclassifiable, somewhere in the orbit of dub and dancehall but also way out of it—”Hardworking Brazilian Woman Can Clean Fish” sounds like Shackleton Meets Kode9 + Spaceape Uptown, if all three of those artists were drunk and lost inside a church. If that sounds inscrutable to you, well… welcome to Time Cow’s world.
Mammo - General Patterns [Short Span]
I love dub techno more than the average person, but whenever I talk about it, I find myself making excuses for its sameness, how it relies on the blueprint of its earliest records more nakedly than almost any other genre of dance music. Which is fine. But General Patterns blew me away because it takes the feel and atmosphere of dub techno and brings it somewhere else entirely. General Patterns sounds like an abandoned planet, a post-fallout world inhabited only by rusty machinery and inhospitable weather. Foreboding but funky, with lengthy tracks and deep rabbit holes, it makes no concession to anything that sounds human. The melodic lead on “Traction” sounds like metal contracting and expanding—the kind of thing robots might dance to in some old B-movie.
Vehicular - False 05 [False Aralia]
The fifth release in the excellent False Aralia series is enthralling because of the warmth glowing in its otherwise washed-out, silvery nothingness. The False Aralia records sound like they’re made up of some magical substance, liquid and solid at the same time, so it’s even more striking to hear lucas deleon’s voice reverberate through it, distant and phased, like an R2-D2 hologram. The twisty 15-minute B-side is worth the price of admission alone, but I keep coming back to the swampy, throbbing A2, which was named “cool bass patch” on the promotional version sent to me in the fall. And that basically says it all for me.
Ben Bondy - XO Salt Liif3 [3XL]
File under records that seem tailor-made for me: ambient trip-hop with slide guitar and a country twang (courtesy of collaborator more eaze). In a year built on earnest electronic music, XO Salt Liif3 appears to balance irony and emo in a perfect suspension, though the more I got to know the record the less ironic it seemed—later confirmed in my interview with Bondy, who discussed his earnest love for country pop artists like Morgan Wallen. The album swoons and soars behind Bondy, whose vocals come off like a mumblecore Liz Fraser. The shoegaze swirl is punctured by the occasional noise or texture that snaps you back to attention, like the scrape of a fretboard or the pinch of a nylon string or the terse, matter of fact voice of a friend muttering in your ear.
Space Ghost & Teddy Bryant - Majestic Fantasies [Peace World]
As I wrote here in June: “If it didn’t sound so pristine and three-dimensional, you could probably convince me this was a record from the early ‘90s. The drums are huge, the synths wiggle and bend like old G-funk records, and the basslines sound like they’re trying to dig a hole… in a funky way. (I’m obsessed with how the low-end trails behind the kick drum on “Some Things Last Forever.”) Some tracks sound like pure-hearted tributes to this era of R&B, like the sultry “Unconditional”, while others embrace the silliness. The synth sax and gently driving rhythm on the title track remind me of old Pender Street Steppers records, only fleshed-out into the kind of obscure soul gems they were inspired by. Whichever way you look at it—retro, winking, or heart-on-sleeve—this is excellent R&B.”
Car Culture - Rest Here [NAFF]
Physical Therapy’s first LP under his Car Culture alias feels like a glorious regression, looking at downtempo electronic music through the lens of emo, post rock and indie that feels very high school (or maybe I’m just projecting). On tracks like “Nothingburger,” he paints with a broad brush, with sweeping guitar riffs and syrupy melodies throwing any notion of cool out the window. Which, of course, makes it kind of cool, especially the faucet-drip breakbeat of “Coping Mechanism.”. “Coping Mechanism” could soundtrack an antidepressant commercial, or just a lazy afternoon staring out the window. It’s one of many moments of aesthetic honesty on Rest Here that makes the LP feel wonderfully twee and bravely personal.
rRoxymore - Juggling Dualities [!K7]
A record that looks back to the weirder corners of ‘90s IDM, rRoxymore’s Juggling Dualities highlights a quality I like to call ‘Good At Music.’ She can try any subgenre she wants, and always make it sound like she’s been making it all her life. While you can point to individual influences here and there, the best part of Juggling Dualities is how it speaks its own language at its own speed, with eerie, slow-fast tracks like “Embracing The Unknown,” which follows the groovy techno of “Moodified,” stopping the album in its tracks. It’s an old-school approach to an album of capital-E Electronica made with the post-everything dance music know-how of the 2020s.
Walt McClements - On A Painted Ocean [Western Vinyl]
As I wrote in the introduction to my interview with McClements earlier this year: “On a Painted Ocean is tagged “post-rock” and “neoclassical” on Bandcamp in addition to ambient, which are probably some key words to keep in mind, even if the album isn’t exactly those genres either. Walt McClements doesn’t make background music or music to chill to—he puts his whole body into the instruments, even if that instrument is a synthesizer. It can feel maudlin one moment and revelatory the next, intensely private and then gloriously communal, with a sense of dynamics absent from most of the music McClements is compared to.”
NZO - Come Alive [DDS]
People (me!) use the word “beat science” a lot, and I’m not even really sure what it means, but it should mean this record from Sheffield producer NZO on Demdike Stare’s label. I don’t know where to start: the drum patterns come together in strange woven patterns—think Hessle Audio’s Joe—for a patchwork quilt of styles and genres that are trendy but have never quite sounded like this. Leftfield techno, amapiano, Afro house, dubstep, it’s all here, though barely recognizable as more than traces.
Skrillex - F*CK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3 [OWSLA]
This is the album equivalent of a YouTube party where everyone plays their favorite tracks for 35 seconds at a time and screams over them and sniffs a lot. The voiceovers get tiresome, and sometimes you wish a track would last longer than a minute. But there are so many ideas, so much life packed into every second, that it’s hard not to be bowled over by the sheer force of will. You will listen to these next 15 seconds of dentist-drill dubstep, and you will enjoy it.
Binary Algorithms - Reminiscencias [Furatena]
Shifting between razor-sharp electro, leaden techno, dubby skanking and lighter, early Warp-style IDM, Reminiscencias reminds me of some of my most beloved techno full-lengths—the records that use the genre as a jumping off point for exploration without losing sight of the fact that this is still supposed to be dance music. There’s a sense of melody and structure that should appeal to non-techno heads, like the wistful and windswept “Sub-Periphery,” but there’s still enough clanking metal (”Resplendor Perdido”) to work the darkest of rooms.
The voiceovers are 30% of the charm of the Skrillex record! "Oh my God, is that JOKER?" I've never laughed that much on an electronic record.
Excellent tip on that venturing! Loving it