I usually open a digest preview by talking about its geographical and stylistic diversity. Not this time. The genres are as varied as ever, but geographically the whole field has collapsed into an absolute UK/US duopoly. Every other country was knocked out of this fourth installment of the 2025 album digest, leaving only two survivors in the top 15: the Netherlands - and if you follow symphonic metal, you probably already know which album I mean - and Brazil, represented by a spectacular progressive record from a no-name band that has barely had time to make its presence felt.
15. Wolf Alice - The Clearing
🇬🇧 UK, England / August 22 / 0,728 / 🌟
Spotify / Apple Music
soft rock / indie rock / baroque pop / art rock
Opening the top 15 is one of the most controversial albums ever to appear in the digest. The situation is made worse not only by the album’s actual quality, but also by the audience’s almost complete lack of critical thinking and reflection, which, with rare exceptions, accepted the album exactly as it was and then ran off to spread the good news of the best album of 2025. What exactly is the contradiction? Over ten years, Wolf Alice have travelled an incredible stylistic distance: from a pleasant but, overall, ordinary alternative rock band to high-class music experimenting with retro-futuristic art rock... and yet the very way this music is delivered to the listener cancels out all of their achievements. The album is overloaded with clipping; the aggressive mastering has managed to brickwall even the reverb; on half the songs, the drums produce unpleasant clicks and crackles; and on a third of the songs, Ellie Rowsell’s dry vocal runs directly into 0 dB and becomes distorted by clipping.
When your goal is a vintage ’70s sound, but the execution is at the level of bass-boosted rap, it creates a performative contradiction and aesthetic dissonance. Can we say that Wolf Alice made any of the guitar or piano tones on the album interesting? Again, no: such heavy limiting turns them into a pretentiously loud and boomy mass. It is comparable to ordering wonderful crystal wine glasses from an online marketplace, only to have them broken not during delivery, but while they are still being packed - and then the seller, seeing a box full of shattered glass, simply shrugs and says, “Good enough”.
One could say that I am nitpicking and exaggerating, but the album contains a strong argument in my favor: the song “Midnight Song”, which pushes the situation to absurdity. It is a sentimental ballad, and, you will not believe it, at the level of the score, one of the most complex and refined songs on the album. Yet Wolf Alice fans ignored the track and rarely named it among their favorite songs. In other words, even within the framework of complacent deafness, for some ‘unknown’ reason, the overwhelming majority of fans were unable to push through the school-level sound engineering and actually hear the song itself. The answer is very simple: aggressive mastering destroys the fragile world of ballads, which need space, an interplay with silence, and a large amount of dynamic range. It is no coincidence that in the last century, before the Loudness War, ballads were always present in the charts. In our century, however, a popular ballad is a rare event.
14. Gwenno - Utopia
🇬🇧 UK, Wales / July 11 / 0,733 / 🌑
Spotify / Apple Music
psychedelic pop / indie folk / baroque pop / art pop / dream pop
Serving a cause often comes at a price. For Gwenno, that price was obscurity: years spent making music in Celtic languages and advocating the idea of Welsh independence, working in both of her native languages, Welsh and Cornish. A little local recognition and the occasional commendation from organizations devoted to preserving Cornish proved too modest a reward for the work she was doing. And so Utopia, her fourth studio album, became the first of her records in which English is the dominant language. That is not, however, a repudiation of everything that came before. Celtic still has its place on the album, and some of those songs are among its most beautiful moments. Take the closing track, “Hireth”. Ordinary translation websites simply give up on it: Cornish is not even among the languages they support. This is one of those cases where a capable neural network is actually useful: ask it to translate the lyrics, but also to explain the ambiguities and the meanings that resist being carried neatly from one language into another.
13. Wet Leg - moisturizer
🇬🇧 UK, England / July 11 / 0,746 / 🌟
Spotify / Apple Music / Yandex Music
indie rock / post-punk revival / new wave / garage rock
Wet Leg’s second album feels like a genuine step forward - not so much a reinvention as a change in scale. They have moved from provocative, mischievous indie rock, with songs about a provincial innocent going off and getting her Big D (an academic degree, in case your mind went somewhere else), to moisturizer: still ironic, still sarcastic, but more pointed, more deliberate, and more provocative in the way it trolls its audience. They have also evolved from a band that was almost an accident - two female friends plus whatever guys happened to be around, enough to put together a couple of experimental tours before everyone went back to their separate lives - into a properly formed lineup with its own internal chemistry. The musicians no longer feel interchangeable. There is a sense that the band has acquired a structure of its own.
The songwriting has undergone the same transformation. On the debut, Rhian and Hester were responsible for almost the entire body of material between them. On moisturizer, the whole band is part of the creative process, with bassist Ellis Durand emerging as a crucial link and one of the record’s principal songwriting engines. And then there is Rhian Teasdale herself. Her evolution may be the most striking of all: from a shy, awkward girl who looked like the archetypal flannel-shirted frontwoman of some interchangeable indie band, into a performer with an almost animal physicality - a vortex of charisma and magnetism that makes it genuinely difficult to look anywhere else.
12. Jack The Joker - The Devil To Pay In The Backlands
🇧🇷 Brazil / August 22 / 0,761 / 🌌
Spotify / Apple Music
progressive metal / post-hardcore / matcore / djent / metalcore
The main unknown-name album of this edition is the Brazilians Jack The Joker from Fortaleza, in the state of Ceará, right on the equator. The quintet are by no means newcomers: their debut album was released in 2014, their second album in 2016 (under the title Mors Volta, hell yeah!), followed by a long break and a return in 2025 with their third full-length, The Devil To Pay In The Backlands. They may release records rarely, but they make up for it in sheer scale. Every album runs for about an hour, and every minute is crammed with ideas and groove. Their real talent lies in the way they can take the fundamental language of heavy music, veer off into long, elaborate jazz “improvisations” built around modal substitutions, and then somehow land, without fail, on bright, irresistibly catchy clean-vocal choruses. It is an almost shamelessly eclectic strategy: Jack The Joker are trying to win you over by playing every board on the chessboard simultaneously.
11. Laufey - A Matter of Time
🇺🇸 US, California / 🇮🇸 Iceland / August 22 / 0,771 / 🌟
Spotify / Apple Music
chamber pop / jazz pop / swing / bossa nova / folk-pop
Jazz left the mainstream roughly 75 years ago. Rock ’n’ roll displaced it from one side, while from the other came something more profound: jazz musicians returning from the battlefields and oceans of World War II could no longer quite understand how, after everything they had seen, they were supposed to go back to making pre-war dance music and swing. They turned instead toward bebop, hard bop, and modal jazz - for reasons not entirely unlike those behind Theodor Adorno’s famous claim that “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”.
From that point on, the more accessible, pop-facing strain of jazz survived only in fits and starts. The old stars were allowed to finish their careers in a haze of prestige, celebrated as relics of a vanished era. Yet every generation produced an unexpected figure who found some way of smuggling jazz’s old vocabulary back into the charts. Not a revival movement, exactly, but an exception embodied in a single person: Nina Simone became a superstar; Sinatra ushered his daughter Nancy into show business; Kenny G put the saxophone back into an astonishing share of ’80s and ’90s pop; and in the 2000s, Norah Jones brought a pop-jazz/indie-rock hybrid into the charts. This is, of course, a deliberately incomplete list - several important names have been omitted.
But over all those 75 years, perhaps nobody has succeeded more spectacularly at returning pop jazz to the mainstream than Laufey. I suspect the key was not simply the music, but the collision of two aesthetics: easy-listening jazz and the world of Lofi Girl. Lounge music as a comforting background. A sense of coziness. Soft melancholy. Jazz as an aesthetic rather than an intellectual proposition. It is music that asks very little of the listener while still carrying the unmistakable visual and sonic language of jazz. The result is arguably the most successful return of easy-listening jazz to the mainstream in decades: tens of millions of regular listeners, many of them from the youngest generation imaginable - an audience that, until very recently, hardly seemed like the sort of audience jazz could reach at all.
10. Calva Louise - Edge of the Abyss
🇬🇧 UK, England / 🇻🇪 Venezuela / 🇫🇷 France / 🇳🇿 New Zealand / July 11 / 0,783 / 🌙
Spotify / Apple Music
metalcore / alternative metal / progressive metal / industrial rock / space rock / electronica / art rock
Calva Louise are one of the most gloriously insane DIY bands around. Like Muse a quarter of a century ago, they have imposed an unusually strict constraint on themselves: remain a three-piece, yet sound as though there are twice as many people onstage. And this is not the usual studio illusion, where an enormous production is later reduced to something the band could never actually reproduce live. Quite the opposite. The whole concept depends on being brutally honest about what they can do: they enter the studio with a live set already figured out, and they go onstage knowing exactly how to reproduce what was recorded. To make that possible, the trio have built two enormous custom pedalboards, for guitar and bass respectively, with independent multilayered signal chains and parallel routing that can turn a single instrument into an entire guitar wall of sound. There is even a sliding piano rail, allowing Jess Allanic to bring the piano into play and then immediately shove it out of the way without ever having to abandon her guitar riff or step away from the mic.
Their approach to frequency allocation is just as ingenious - and happens to be the inverse of Muse’s. Chris uses a +12-octave pitch shifter to occupy part of the guitar’s spectral territory, leaving Matthew free to sing without a guitar before the instrument comes crashing back in for the chorus. Calva Louise solve the same problem in reverse: one of Jess’s guitar chains drops an octave, freeing up that chunk of the spectrum for Alizon on bass to bring in samplers and Korg and Novation MIDI keyboards. The multitasking goes even further. At live shows, you can actually watch Jess play electronic arpeggios by hand - something most bands would simply program and fire off from a launcher, or add as a backing layer.
For the first three albums, this uncompromisingly live philosophy held together remarkably well. Then Edge of the Abyss introduces the first crack in the system: the band’s eclecticism has finally grown beyond what three people can physically execute. “Aimless”, for instance, contains a rapid-fire piano tirata for which Jess does not have even a fraction of a second to take her hands off the fretboard, never mind find somewhere to put the pick. Perhaps the question now is whether the three-piece principle has reached its natural limit - and whether Calva Louise are ready to let a fourth (session) musician onto the stage.
09. Hayley Williams - Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party
🇺🇸 US, Tennessee / August 28 / 0,791 / 🌟
Spotify / Apple Music
alternative rock / indie rock / pop rock
Hayley Williams has done something remarkably clean with the division between Paramore and her solo work. Her three solo records are not extensions of the band, not fan service, not Paramore reduced to a one-woman operation. They feel more like a personal diary, filled with the minutiae of an individual life: breakups and loneliness, the smells of her own home, and countless mundane stories from the strange everyday existence of a working musician. Her third solo album Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party leans especially hard into that last category. “Ice In My OJ” captures the almost hysterical exhilaration of being accepted into your very first teenage band - the kind of happiness that can only end in a squeal. “Hard” is about the persona Hayley has had to grow into in order to survive the entertainment business, a version of herself that feels increasingly alien and yet has become difficult to shed. And finally, in the title track “Ego Death”, there is the desperate feeling of a young artist performing at rock bottom, in lousy venues out in the suburbs - and whatever happens in such a life, everything will be for the better, because from this place it is simply impossible to fall any lower.
08. Blackbriar - A Thousand Little Deaths
🇳🇱 Netherlands / August 22 / 0,798 / ☄️
Spotify / Apple Music / Yandex Music
symphonic metal / gothic metal
The Blackbriar phenomenon is more complicated than it first appears. They sound like something genuinely new, yet it is quite difficult to formulate exactly what is new about them. My modest theory is that Blackbriar represent a genuine return to the classic gothic rock and symphonic metal of the 1990s. Early symphonic metal was preoccupied with the mythical and the metaphysical: stories in which the protagonist comes face to face with something supernatural. Early gothic rock, meanwhile, was concerned with mortality, corporeality, and obsession. Over the decades, most symphonic metal bands have retained the genre’s musical and visual vocabulary while moving their lyrical focus elsewhere - toward social justice, environmental activism, popular science, women’s rights. Gothic rock fared less well as a living tradition, but in the wake of Evanescence’s enormous success, much of what remained underwent a kind of psychological turn. The cemetery was replaced by the psychoanalyst’s office. Blackbriar seem to reverse that evolution. They bring back the old preoccupations: the afterlife, ontology, the body experienced as something closed-in and inescapable. In doing so, they return the listener to something resembling the original way gothic rock was heard in the last century - before it became a mainstream genre, before its supernatural darkness was translated into the language of therapy and self-analysis.
07. Ethel Cain - Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You
🇺🇸 US, Florida / August 8 / 0,805 / 🌟
Spotify / Apple Music
slowcore / dream pop / post-rock
At a time when the music industry is overflowing with advice on how to write short, TikTok-friendly songs: music designed like a box of Lego, deliberately built to be broken apart into bite-sized pieces and scattered across random videos as disposable background audio - there is also a counter-trend. Atmospheric, viscous slowcore, music that resists being chopped into convenient fragments, has found an audience far beyond the underground. In fact, it is drawing millions of listeners. Ethel Cain’s new album is framed as a prequel to Preacher’s Daughter. (Perverts, meanwhile, was billed as an ambient EP, an almost comically long 90-minute “mini-album”.) This time, the story centers on teenage infatuation and the tendency of adolescence to turn ordinary events into dramas of enormous emotional significance, all unfolding against the backdrop of a troubled life in the American South. Like all Ethel Cain’s records, this is fiction. And yet the sheer density of detail: the metaphors, the tiny mundane observations, the texture of everyday life - suggests that Hayden is drawing freely on her own memories to give the story a Zola-like naturalism. The result is fiction that feels less invented than imprinted.
06. Ihlo - Legacy
🇬🇧 UK, Scotland / England / August 29 / 0,809 / 🌙
Spotify / Apple Music
progressive metal / djent
Only the British can get away with putting out music under titles as disarmingly plain as Union or Legacy, with lyrics that use the most basic English to describe the most basic feelings in the most straightforward possible language. It reminds me of that meme where a girl cramming for an exam solemnly lists, “the milk is curdled, the bread is stale, the cheese is moldy, the oil is rancid”, while an elderly native Briton beside her listens, chuckles, and reduces the whole thing to: “it’s bad”.
Kscope’s press release claims that, during the five years they spent making their second album, Ihlo stopped sounding like a bundle of influences from other progressive bands and finally started sounding like Ihlo. That is, to put it mildly, an overstatement. The trio are still plainly enamored with Tesseract and Haken, although Legacy does give them a little more of their own identity. But that is hardly a criticism in itself: imitation can be executed with remarkable skill, and Ihlo certainly do it well here. Legacy is an enjoyable record, even if its 68-minute runtime stretches the material considerably.
I also want to return, once again, to the problem of crushed dynamics, because “Storm” provides an almost textbook example. The entire song is built around a gradual accumulation of tension, leading toward the moment when it should finally come crashing down with a properly monstrous djent impact. But dramatic contrast needs headroom. If everything is already loud, there is nowhere left for the climax to go - and when that moment arrives, there is simply no wow. Aggressive mastering kills not only the aesthetic perception of music, but even the artistic intention behind it.
05. Yvonne Ambrée - Elusive
🇺🇸 US, New York / 🇩🇪 Germany / July 11 / 0,825 / 🌌
Spotify / Apple Music / Yandex Music
indie pop / trip-hop / electronic / ambient / alternative rock / avant-garde / art pop
Don't let Yvonne Ambrée's 70K monthly Spotify listeners fool you. She is, for all practical purposes, an unknown artist, and those numbers say almost nothing about the demand for her own music. Most of them come from the German-language version of “We Don't Talk About Bruno” from Encanto, which Yvonne was invited to sing. The streaming figures for her two original albums are virtually nonexistent. Her first release, “Open Fire”, appeared in 2021 under the Panteon project. Once her own name had acquired at least a little visibility, she began releasing music as a solo artist. The result was “Elusive”, a considerably more coherent and assured record than that first attempt.
Her musical vocabulary rests on three foundations: the Phrygian mode, trip-hop production, and a distinctly hip-hop sensibility toward looping and shaped volume envelopes. From there, she keeps taking the music in different directions. One track may quietly wander through the remaining minor modes, bringing in Aeolian and Dorian colors, while toward the very end the record conceals its real treasure: “Favor”. You can have spent a lifetime listening to music and still fail to anticipate where this song is going. Its harmonic turns and arrangement decisions refuse to settle into anything familiar. And that is precisely the kind of music that can restore the childhood thrill of listening: the feeling that everything is still new, untouched, waiting to be discovered, and that an enormous unexplored world stretches out ahead of you. Yvonne's 33-minute record is a small window into that world.
04. Anna Tivel - Animal Poem
🇺🇸 US, Oregon / August 29 / 0,829 / 🌑
Spotify / Apple Music
contemporary folk / indie
Animal Poem is a borderline work: an album that belongs, in many ways, more to literature than to music. At times, it feels less like a conventional record than like an author reading her own poetry in a manner entirely her own: absorbed in the interior world of the words, almost forgetting that there is an audience on the other side of them. It is precisely the quality that tends to disappear when professional actors enter the picture with their flawless, spectacular command of recitation. The song form, of course, is not destroyed. There are recurring refrains, and delicate instrumental interludes suspended almost like a light haze, all executed with effortless professionalism. But the real center of gravity is elsewhere: ten remarkable poems, following the restless, wandering movement of Anna's thought.
There is “Holy Equation”, an ode to city life and to sonder, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of private hopes and ambitions, and carrying within it a quiet, unsettling observation: the mathematics still refuses to work out. The closer a dream appears to be, the more energy and resources its pursuit seems to demand. Elsewhere, Tivel turns toward the machinery of violence that perpetuates itself, invoking the Hough riots in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1966. And then there are the memories of childhood: Anna recalls shooting a wild white goose while hunting, a creature that had simply been flying wherever its life was taking it. Its existence ended not for hunger, necessity, or survival, but for something far more trivial - the boredom of another creature, and its appetite for a moment of excitement.
03. Bitter Ruin - Arches & Enemies
🇬🇧 UK, England / May 15 / 0,833 / 🌑
Spotify / Apple Music / Yandex Music
dark cabaret / progressive rock / southern gothic / alternative rock / folk pop
Fifteen years ago, Bitter Ruin seemed to have everything in place. The aura of a rising act. The electricity of their live performances. An unusually expressive vocal partnership built on contrast and collision. Support from Ed Sheeran and The Dresden Dolls - the latter even saw Bitter Ruin as a distinctly British continuation of their own dramatic and stylistic lineage. And yet none of it proved solid. After “Waves” in 2014, arguably their defining work, Bitter Ruin failed to find their place in an industry being rapidly reshaped by streaming. The ground shifted beneath them, and they were left outside the new economy of music. Eventually, the band fell apart. Benjamin went to Vietnam, looking both for himself and for new possibilities, and found work producing albums for artists on the local Vietnamese scene. Georgia remained in Britain, where she began teaching singing.
When they reunited years after that first collapse, they did so carefully. Once burned, twice cautious. Georgia was the first to test the waters, returning to songwriting with her solo album “Needles & Pinches”. It brought Ben back into the picture. Together, they assembled “Chronology”, a compilation that functioned almost as a retrospective - a way of taking stock of Bitter Ruin's first life. And then they discovered something unexpected: people were still listening. That realization led to the new “Arches & Enemies” sessions - and ultimately to an album released in almost deliberate opposition to the machinery of the modern music industry. No label campaign. No videos. No social-media strategy. No TikTok. No promotional rollout at all. Just the music. In that sense, it is an anti-industry album, made not to chase an audience but for the people who had never entirely left: the old fans who still remembered Bitter Ruin and kept returning to the records long after the industry itself had moved on.
02. Racing Mount Pleasant - Racing Mount Pleasant
🇺🇸 US, Michigan / August 15 / 0,870 / ☄️
Spotify / Apple Music / Yandex Music
alternative rock / post-rock / baroque pop / art rock / chamber folk / indie rock / slowcore / midwest emo / progressive folk / post-bop / third stream jazz / orchestral fusion
One of the year's most accomplished albums. Calling a work like this “conceptual” almost feels inadequate, because a concept is far too small a container for a story so complete and inseparable from itself. Every composition functions as an essential chapter; remove one, and something fundamental is missing. There are no stray tracks here, no filler added simply to increase the running time or bulk out the record. The band even changed its name for this album, having released their first record under the name Kingfisher. Their sound has led some listeners to call them an American Black Country, New Road, which carries a strange comic symmetry of its own: both bands, at different points in their development, lost someone named Wood.
Great art tends to leave doors open. It withholds as much as it explains. A crucial event may be removed from the narrative altogether, leaving the reader or listener to reconstruct it - or to place something of themselves inside the empty space. In doing so, they may connect the story to an entirely different meaning and arrive at a reading that did not exist before their own encounter with the work. After reading through other reviews, I began to suspect that the album's central idea had escaped many columnists. Most describe it as a record about a romantic relationship that has recently fallen apart. My interpretation is different, so I will offer it here - not as the truth, because works like this rarely possess a single authoritative truth, but simply as one possible way of seeing the picture, you should build your own.
The missing piece of the story, as I hear it, is this: the protagonist (the narrator) arrives at the home of the woman he loves, Emily, and finds that she passed away, tragically lost her battle with mental health. The shock breaks his grip on reality. Unable to accept what has happened, he lies down beside her and slips into a hallucinatory landscape of memory, reliving every moment of their relationship that he can still summon. Like an ellipse with two focal points, the album seems to revolve around two centers: “Emily” and “Call It Easy”. Both are extraordinary compositions, immaculate in their smallest details and almost impossible to shake once they have taken hold. Their brass motifs are especially memorable, continuing to circle through the mind for days afterwards.
The album's first and last songs are bound together thematically while standing at opposite ends of its timeline. “Your New Place” tells us that Emily had always dreamed of having a home of her own. Shortly before her death, she buys an apartment on the thirty-fourth floor of a Chicago skyscraper. But by the time the album's fifty-seven minutes have run their course, neither she nor the protagonist will ever live there. And so, by the end, what was once “Your New Place” has become “Your Old Place”.
01. Deftones - private music
🇺🇸 US, California / August 22 / 0,881 / 🌟
Spotify / Apple Music / Yandex Music
alternative metal / shoegaze / experimental rock
Listening to this album without the wider context of what Deftones are now living through was, frankly, an unnerving experience. Is this really it? Is this the end? Is private music a farewell record? The symbolism is difficult to miss. “infinite source” can be heard as a gesture of love toward the audiences who have filled their concerts and received the band with such enduring warmth (yes, hardcore fans will remember the booing during the Kiss tour in 1996, but so many years later that has become more of a humorous story). Then there is the closing track, “departing the body”, whose ambiguity is impossible to ignore: it moves between the idea of some vast cosmic passage and a more earthly awareness of the body's fragility. And perhaps most tellingly, private music does not feel like the beginning of a new sound era at all. Quite the opposite: nearly every song seems to echo a particular album from the band's past, as though the record were moving through their own history and acknowledging each of its previous incarnations. And if that is not the language of a farewell album, what is? Thankfully, the band's interviews tell a different story. There is no sense of a group winding itself down. The members still sound energized by songwriting, still curious about where to go next, and genuinely delighted by the arrival of a new generation of young fans.
There is another theme on private music that is impossible to look past: after all these years, Deftones are still writing songs for Chi Cheng. “i think about you all the time” is the album's emotional center in that respect, and its sonic character places it unmistakably in the orbit of Saturday Night Wrist. Five albums after the coma, three albums after his death - this has come to mean more than any dictionary definition of friendship could possibly contain. Chi's absence has become part of Deftones' identity itself, a permanent fracture in something that can never again be made whole. And so the wound remains. Not because they are incapable of moving on, but because moving on is not always the same thing as healing. Some wounds become part of the life built around them; all one can do is find the strength to live beside them without pretending they were ever closed.
It is tempting to imagine an alternative timeline in which Chi Cheng survived. Deftones would probably have broken up by 2010. The tensions inside the band were escalating, and Moreno and Carpenter had reached the point where they barely wanted to be in the same room, sometimes arriving at the studio at different times simply to reduce the chances of running into one another. They might have managed, with considerable difficulty, to finish Eros - and then disappeared into an indefinite hiatus, reconvening from time to time for the occasional concert but never again for a proper studio album. But in our branch of reality, the tragedy suddenly discharged all of those contradictions. Old resentments suddenly looked small, even childish, beside what had happened. Deftones chose to continue for Chi, and he remains an invisible presence within this newer, more philosophical and more self-aware incarnation of the band. Since then, transformation itself - the passage from one state of being into another - has become one of Deftones' defining themes. On private music, it surfaces openly in songs such as “ecdysis” and “departing the body”.
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