Best of 2025 in music

Many months have passed since I wrote my last review. Many albums have seen my desk and my CD reader, or have been transferred to my laptop. The fact is, I’ve started writing for an Italian magazine online, in my native language, but after some months the articles were not published, nor rejected. They were simply frozen on the virtual desk. Then there was the theatre laboratory, and the arts academia. And my daily job.

But since many musicians have sent to me their beautiful works, and since I have bought some other records that to me were worth listening to, now I want to give my reader a small “best of 2025”. So, I’ll start in no particular order. There won’t be a podium, and the albums will not be displayed from worst to best or vice versa. The reader is free to skim through the lines and read the reviews of the albums he had listened to or maybe he’ll want to discover the music he was not aware of.

As in the past, you will find albums coming from Italy as much as from the rest of the world, experimental records and noise rock, metal influenced by jazz and industrial music. Obviously my (non-)ranking is subjective, so don’t mind if I miss LPs or CDs you liked: it is impossible to be conscious of everything that sorts out of the music business, and every time I read magazines, on line or on paper, I see a beautiful anarchy coming out of them, more than a dreadful or mortal order. That’s life!

 

Wadada Leo Smith/Vijay Iyer “Defiant Life” (ECM)

Partially deluded as I was by last year collaboration between the A.A.C.M. trumpet player and Amina Claudine Myers (see my review here), I was really happy to hear him and Vijay Iyer in this ECM release. Space and time are suspended, but you won’t enter into another dimension as while listening to Chet Baker or Chopin’s preludes: better, you’ll enter in touch with yourself. If post-punk is the right music to deep dive into yourself from 1979 onwards, this 2025 album is beautiful and courageous in a similar way.

Leo Smith’s trumpet is interspersed with layers and layers of piano, Fender Rhodes and electronics, but the music is always essential and the compositions are created by subtraction. The dedications to Patrice Lumumba and Refaat Alareer (poet, activist and co-founder of the project ‘We Are Not Numbers’ in Gaza) say it all.

And so, even if sometimes the (abstract) ‘muezzin call’ we are accustomed to listen while hearing Wadada Leo Smith trumpet here is more elliptical than in his usual concerts or records, the meditative atmosphere can bring consciousness about the nature of activism – it doesn’t sort out of the will to affirm oneself, but from a deep connection with the inner self and with reality: this is at least what the music suggested to me.

 

Nine Inch Nails “Tron: Ares” (The Null Corporation / Walt Disney / Interscope)

It’s incredible how much Reznor’s music under the monicker Nine Inch Nails is able to speak out loud to me even when it is a partial compromise with the music business as this soundtrack for the movie starring Jared Leto is. But let’s go with order: last year Reznor himself told the press that he was imagining with difficulties a future for his major creature. But after a small amount of time he was helped by Walt Disney’s CEO who wanted the new soundtrack for the movie “Tron: Ares” to be released as a proper NIN album.

And even if Reznor is assuring in 2026 we’ll see other new NIN material, this album in the end, thanks to pieces like ‘As Alive as You Need Me to Be’, the duet with the Spanish singer Judeline ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’, the meditative ‘I Know You Can Feel It’,  and a bunch of instrumental tracks like the ecstatic ‘Echoes’ or the threatening ‘Infiltrator’ are raising high the flag of the band name. Obviously, we will be grateful to Reznor and Atticus Ross for the new  material we’ll hear this year, with great curiosity.

 

Swans “Birthing” (Young God)

The two CDs (or vinyls) set published by Gira and friends this year is possibly the most focused of these last years. More than the beautiful “The Beggar”, more than the previous “Leaving/Meaning”. From ‘I Am A Tower’, with the guitars echoing memories of Robert Fripp’s work with Eno and Bowie on ‘Heroes’, to the dramatic crescendo of ‘Red Yellow’, Swans are creating a music full of tensions that are not exploding, but that are accumulated until an abyss comes to your senses.

The perfection of tracks like ‘The Merge’, with his noisy introduction and his circular, even if a little limping, rhythms, make us forget about Gira pretending “The Beggar” to be the testament of The Swans (do you remember ‘Michael Is Done’?) and the following tour as the last of his career. It is not the first time this happens with him, but the beauty of the music makes me curious about the announced new phase of Gira’s creature as I was curious about his pupil Devendra Banhart when his first albums came to light.

 

Model/Actriz “Pirouette” (True Panther Sounds)

This is possibly the album of 2025 I have listened to the most. I have read many reviews in which the album was negatively judged because of his mixing post-punk guitars and 4/4 beats as they happen in disco or dance music, but to me this is definitely a ‘plus’. The single ‘Cinderella’ with his ‘queer’ video is what we had missed for many years – Cole Haden, M/A lead singer, as the hero we needed along with Anohni and Terre Thaemlitz as the only people able to bring some diversity to some genres created mostly by and for cisgender hetero males.

But also ‘Diva’, with his static tension, the second single from the album, has some intriguing quality – as the rest of the album – as if the music were able to bring the listener on the edge of the chasm leaving him here to dance. “I won’t leave as I came” sings Haden, and this is exactly the destiny of the listener of this album: the music and its meaning will remain glued to your conscience, and it will be a beautiful experience.

 

KnCurrent “self titled” (Deep Dish)

Jason Kao Hwang (electric violin), Cooper-Moore (diddley-bo), On Ka’a Davis (guitar) and Patrick Brennan (alto saxophone) have created one of the most adventurous LPs you will listen from what is emerging from 2025. Some years ago I crowned Hwang album “Uncharted Faith” as one of the most intriguing and avant albums of that period, and even if basically everything Hwang is involved bears traces of pure genius in music, this album is so full of textures and nuances that I couldn’t help but insert in this ‘best of 2025’.

Each track has its own peculiarities and particular sound/vision in it, and the instruments involved and the techniques they speak are so different from one  piece of music to the other, but taken as a whole the album is showing how much the old masters of improvised music are far from been merely legends of the past and can leave tracks into the present. Another album I wrote a review early this year, musically different but genuinely beautiful, is the album “Parallel Aesthetics” by Ivo Perelman and Tyshan Sorey: my advice is to enjoy it in its full length if you still miss it.

 

Robertson/Dell/Ramond/Klugel “Blue Transient” (Nemu)

Trumpeter Herb Robertson, vibraphonist Christopher Dell, bassist Christian Ramond and drummer Klaus Kugel have released in 2025 this double album full of remembrances from the Art Ensemble of Chicago (the ‘small instruments’ at the beginning) and from the Blue Note era of the great Sam Rivers and others who tried to give free jazz to the masses.

An intimate and intriguing journey through the depths of sounds and the visions of these musicians. Sometimes when I listen to them I ask myself why they’re not put on the flag by every blog/website/magazine related to experimental music. This is not nostalgia or carbon copy; this is devotion to an idea of music full of personal nuances and will to create.

 

Duck Baker “There’s No Time Like The Past” (Fulica)

Released in December of 2024, this album has entered my radar only last year so I really wanted to put lights on it since Duck Baker, a musician fond in fingerpicking, jazz, country and other U.S. contaminated music like the blues, goes well beyond my usual taste in experimental sounds. Melodic and enjoyable from the first listen, “There’s No Time Like The Past” will be for many of you like a Pandora’s box: Baker discography is full of treasures (he released at least other three albums under its own name in 2025).

Far from the deconstructions of musicians like Marc Ribot and Derek Bailey, Baker is one of the many, too many good underappreciated artisans that silently but with great love and devotion are leaving us an opus of beauty and truth. This album is a testimony of how a someone able to create a music rooted into tradition can be taken as example for other musicians or simple listeners as far as breadth of intention and clarity of vision.

 

Tropical Fuck Storm “Fairyland Codex” (Fire)

The nice and usual habit of seeking influences to describe this or that post-punk band are useless with this line-up coming from Australia. Obviously, there is the hoarse voice of Gareth Liddiard to remind me a little of David Thomas, but is a too obvious reference and Liddiard is a valid and original singer per se.

If you find difficult to think of this genre as self-renovating again after last year “Romance” by Fontaines D.C., this album will definitely change your mind. Drums, drum machines, synths, pedal steel guitars are creating for the listener a wider landscape, full of the irony and the abrasiveness that is typical of this style of music. But the creative spark is here to stay, and I think many of you will get back to this album also in 2026 …

 

Messa “The Spin” (Metal Blade)

Heavy Metal was the first genre of music to grab my attention as a teenager. Sonic violence, in-yer-face attitude and tell-it-like-it-is vibes were accompanying my angst in a way my parents were not completely approving, and this was enough to me. But many years passed since my last look at this genre in the first part of the 2000s, with bands like Neurosis and few others.

Messa are an Italian band (from the suburbs of Treviso if I remember well) who loves to mix doom metal with jazz guitar licks and harmonies. But the result is different from a pure melting pot of different styles: in a way only at an attentive listening you’ll find the single elements melting together. Because the effect is that of a perfect blend. A small miracle from my country, Messa are a band worth seeing in live concerts and spanning through its career in order to enjoy its evolution.

 

Marc Ribot “Map Of A Blue City” (New West)

A little bit disappointed as I was by Ribot’s recent outputs as a leader (Ceramic Dog were satisfying to me only partially), I enjoyed this album the was released after decades from its conception, thanks to many record companies who didn’t know how to label the music contained in it.

Ribot and his pals give life to a music that can be put aside of the beautiful folk of people like Nick Drake, but with a tinge of contemporary electric experimentations and some Latin nuances (see ‘Daddy’s Trip To Brazil’). There’s also space to put into music a poem by Allen Ginsberg (‘Sometime Jailhouse Blues’). One of the major works of Ribot to me, along with Spiritual Unity (with Ribot recreating with his guitar the music of Albert Ayler) and the famous (for the wrong reasons) ‘fake-cuban’ albums.

 

Suede “Antidepressants” (BMG)

Famous during the mid-Nineties for their almost-glam rock revival in an era in which everyone was looking for an alternative from the Oasis-Blur battle, Brett Anderson’s Suede are coming back with a concept album that is deep and full of nuances to appreciate through different listenings.

Symmetrical to last year’s The Cure comeback, and different from the poorly written (in my opinion) Lebanon Hanover’s “Asylum Lullabies”, this record, released by a major label, has new obscure nuances the old Suede were completely missing. And if the album’s cover is inspired by a famous Francis Bacon (the painter) photograph, the music is more essential and plainer than in the past.

 

So, these are the album I enjoyed this year – along with older stuff – and these are my advices after almost a year of silence with this blog. I don’t know honestly how much I will write this year 2026. But obviously I’ll keep on listening new music, and so get ready for new releases like the new album by Wadada Leo Smith and Ivo Perelman. I still need to listen to this unprecedented collaboration, but I hope it will be a good sign for all the new alternative and experimental music that will be released this year.