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.

Marc Ribot – Unstrung. Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist (Akashic Books, 2021)

If you don’t wanna to use Amazon to grab copies of books and records for your own – ideological and practical – reasons, it is harsh to find out what you’re looking for at the right time. In Milano, the town most near to the place where I’m currently living, you have to pay extra fees for import books and records once you’re ordering them. Things goes that way. So I put my hands on a copy of this book by Marc Ribot only after it was translated, unexpectedly, in my own native language one month ago.

Divided in four parts, and with only the first one devoted to music, the other three being dedicated to small novels in a style that reminded me the one that belonged to Bukowski – “bloody funny”, as Elvis Costello said – in a way, I was just reading a small novel about a Jewish girl that lived the first part of her life as a hippie and the other part as an attempt to become, after the harshness of life hit her, acceptable to her social milieu again before going to cinema to see the last movie by Arnaud Desplechin, the one titled Brother and Sister featuring two great actors such as Melvil Poupaud and Marion Cotillard.

Curiously enough, the story in the movie was at the opposite of the story narrated by Marc Ribot, that of a liberation from their social milieu, but in order to do so the main characters, both Jew interestingly enough, needed to get outside of the society that gave life to them. One writing more about himself, the other leaving France for Africa. What both the book and the movie have in common is the fact that they try to cope with what remains of our cultural heritage and roots as part of the Western civilization. Nothing less, nothing more.

One can think, superficially, that the best part of Unstrung is in its first part: the hommage to Henry Grimes, the narration of the life of guitarist Frantz Casseus, some notes on people like Robert Quine, Derek Bailey and Hal Willner, some liner notes for Ribot albums or the text for Ceramic Dog’s rap The Activist. Nothing more wrong than that. The entire book, even the most funny parts, is interesting because it is an attempt by a navigated musician to fight body against body with his culture and even his own life.

Obviously the book can seem at a first reading as not pretentius or even superficial – even if there’s a line by James Chance quoted by the guitarist himself here, “I only live on the surface – I don’t think people is very pretty inside”, that can explain the aesthetic of Ribot style as a writer. Not that Ribot is a “nihilist”, he is in fact more as someone very gifted with (sometimes black) humour, but this tinge is more a testimony of an ancient culture that survived the Holocaust and still ask itself how to believe in a God whatever, talking about a people or a culture and not necessarily about a single human being.

Interesting as it is reading this book, as a critic I’ll bring back that note about musicians laughing hard at the attempts by people like me to understand and making comprehensible to the masses – two different types of translations at the place of a single one, that means two different possible types of mistake – the work of a musician, complex as it can be. You can take as an example the beautiful passages of the book where Ribot try to explain the difficulties in playing non-Western music like the one created by Susana Baca and others, thansk to cultural and existential – I mean, experiential – difficulties.

In the end, Unstrung. Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist is a book worth reading, full of notes about the music we all love and full of fantasy and fantastic stories to pass some good time with. Like those discussions with a friend who traveled the world around a table and a beer, full of strange facts but also full of new, interesting things to learn and to store in order to enrich your own personal luggage. Curiously enough, the Italian version of the book, the one I own, was published by the same publishing house that issued the last edition of Mingus’ Beneath the Underdog. 

 

 

Marc Ribot “Songs of Resistance (1942-2018)” Anti, 2018

Marc Ribot is one of the most eclectic post-modern musicians you'll ever hear on guitar. He toured exstensively with Chuck Berry and recorded guitars in many of Tom Waits' albums since 1984, but in his discography you'll also find not one, but two Cds dedicated to the music of Albert Ayler. Between the artist he worked with, there are David Sylvian, John Zorn, Elvis Costello and Mike Patton.

In 2018, Marc has become more political than ever. First with his last Ceramic Dog Trio album “YRU Still Here”, then with this new “Songs of Resistance (1942-2018)” issued by alt-rock label Anti. Politics and the resistance to fascism have a noble tradition in avant-garde jazz at least since 1970's album “Charlie Haden Liberation Music Orchestra”, where Ornette Coleman's bassist gave life to some free jazz versions of the anti-fascist and anarchist songs of the Spain of the 1920s.

Now that Trump has won the elections in the Us and the alt-right is spreading their wings all over the world, is time to embrace again the weapons of creativity against the Black Wave. And, who better than Marc Ribot? Helped by a bunch of brave singers like Tom Waits, Steve Earle, and Meshell Ndegeocello, Mr Ribot gives new life to old political songs for our harsh times.

Only the initial We are Soldiers in the Army has open references to jazz, with his textures of saxophones. The rest of the album is divided between folk songs (Bella Ciao, The Militant Ecologist), rock (The Big Fool), ethnic music (Rata de Los Patas), funk (John Brown) taking me back at the good old days in which I was listening to Ani Di Franco and Bruce Springsteen.

Obviously this is a post-modern record, in which you can touch all the time passed between the original songs and the present tense, but the original drive is still here. It's all a matter of our present tense. Fascism is coming back, and so many artists are lost in the supermarket of a sterile experimentation – now that everything has been experimented – but it's not the case of Ribot and his friends, whose idea and practice of music is still rooted in real life and their beings.

Allen Lowe - Blues and the Empirical Truth [Music and Arts, 2011]

Words: Gian Paolo Galasi

Allen Lowe, Marc Ribot, Lewis Porter, Ray Shury, Jake Millet

Did you ever felt a deep struggle, listening to some records, to be aware that you are listening to amazing music but that the project is maybe at risk of being lost in the big sea of today's huge amount of releases? 

If so, you can deeply understand  what I'm feeling everytime I give a spin to Allen Lowe's last year effort, the three CD + 12 page booklet set - have you ever complained for a 3 cd set nowadays? now's the time to change yer mind - that under the title of The Blues and the Empirical Truth collects 52 compositions in which the now Portland-based multi-reedist and guitarist shows to the world what does it means to take blues, gospel, cakewalk, Albert Ayler, hollers, The Carter Family, and Cripple Clarence Lofton, and to use creatively that kind of DNA and tracks giving life to a music, as Lowe himself observes, born of 'things lacking in the music world, or at least I perceive to be lacking'. 

Born in Massapequa Park, NY, in the 1950s, Allen Lowe started playing saxophone in jazz groups aged 15, at the Slugs Saloon - Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman played there - finalizing his education with Super Sessions (Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield), Grateful Dead, Louis Armstrong and The Mothers of Invention. 

Roswell Rudd

Right in the middle of the Seventies, he befriended Al Haigh, Curly Russell, Bill Triglia, Dick Katz, Tommy Potter, and met Lenny Tristano, Jaki Byrd and Art Pepper. Finally relocated in New Haven, Connecticut in the '80s, Lowe started playing with David Murray, Julius Hemphill, Don Byron, Roswell Rudd in clubs as the Knitting Factory and for Enja - for which he recorded the first reenactment of Blind Willie Johnson's Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground - and Music and Arts labels. 

Director of Jazz in New Haven in the 90s - a free outdoor summer festival that featured Tony Williams, Max Roach, Freddie Hubbard under Lowe's artistic direction, once moved to South Portland, Maine, after a period of inactivity the musician took again guitar and composing, learning sound restoration while working on books as American Pop from Minstrel to Mojo (issued by Cadence with a 9CD set), The Devilin' Tune: A Jazz History 1900-1950 (issued by Music and arts with a 36CD set), and Really the Blues? A Blues History 1893-1959, the last two published without any institutional financial support. 

Mattew Shipp

While Allen Lowe's modernistic approach to music is widely recognized as enriching the matter he's digging, and highly praised by the likes of the composer Anthony Braxton and journalist and author Greil Marcus, the 3CD set of The Blues and the Empirical Truth is not only structured around Lowe's deep knowledge through his 'restructural' skills on the blues and folk tradition, and by his almost harmolodic-flavored alto saxophone - as in the Mingus-inspired, cubist boppish moans of Blues and Transfiguration, C-melody sax, tenor sax and guitar, but also embellished by Matt Shipp's piano and farfisa, Marc Ribot deconstructive attitude, Roswell Rudd and his trombone - particularly brilliant as on Manhattan Moan, and a well-trained assembly of lesser known - but highly expressive - players as guitarist Ray Suhy - listen to his duo with Lowe on The Children of Ella Mae Wiggis, altoist Spike Sikes, bassists Jessie Hautala, Derek Reynolds and Chris Day, pianist Lewis Porter, singer Todd Hutchinsen and drummer Jake Millet.

Marc Ribot

There aren't collective renditions on the album, but small groups - from duets to quintets - and a multi-layered attempt to give life to new music welcoming the most diverse and brilliant approaches to the music matter itself. Take for instance No 5 No Flats No Sharps Blues, inspired by both the attitude of the classic Delta singers to stay on the chord changes while keeping themselves instrumentally on the 1st chord with the non-synch typical of Ornette and Don Cherry, or the field hollers inspired Mama, Mercy Comes in Spurt duet between Lowe's Richard Hell-flavored guitar and the almost metaphysic Shipp's interpretation of a ragtime; or again, the cross pollination between the White Folks and The Primitive Baptists, reminiscent of John Zwed's essays on the creolization of American music and embellished by a brassy Sikes' alto solo, whose alternation with Suhy's guitar statement is the kind that fully explains their value even outside a record like this one.

This set is one that really make you understand how music can be fully enjoyable, while rich and complex at the same time, as on the 11 minutes of Reconstruction Dreams (The Ballad of Blind Tom), dedicated to Blind Tom Bethune, one of the many nuggets Lowe's attitude to dig out of the history of music put newly the lights on. Blind Tom was a possibly autistic slave, born in 1849, that from early childhood started touring as a pianist due to his brilliant technique and his ability to replicate any music he heard, while writing on his own spiritual and expressionistic pieces that are almost philosophycal reflections on the human condition through music; the long suite Lowe, Ribot, Porter, Huatala and Millet dedicate to his memory is, as the other compositions herein, an attempt to give back to present life the richness and the deep charm, beyond mythologies and narrations, the music in his forming is able to communicate to who listen, as the quote - better said: the invitation - by Miles Davis reported on the back cover can testify.