i've taken a subset of the year-end analysis as the records i'm considering worth noting, for some reason.

the full list is a few posts down, or you could check out the np: list on the side.

green means go, B+, A-, A, A+. these are releases i truly recommend checking out.
yellow means proceed carefully, C+, B-, B. these are not quite there, but almost.
orange means proceed only with extreme caution, X, E. sometimes, a lot of effort is put into something and it still sucks anyways, especially if it's made by millennials, who have a reputation for trying as hard as they can and still miserably failing. i am isolating these into their own category. i admit that some people may find something worthwhile in these records, despite the reality that they objectively suck.

otherwise, my suggestion is don't bother with it (F, D-, D, D+, C-, C).

however, note that only new releases from 2025 receive a colour code. notable re-releases may appear in this list withot a colour.

mifu	i love music	2025	warsaw, poland	B+	this record combines electric and classical guitar work with fairly freeform laptop generated noise collages. it is at times fairly sparse and unwritten and at times more dense and written up. i've listened to it enough to let it sort itself out a little and while i like the general sound and idea and approach, i have to point out that it requires a little more work, too. it's only the length of an ep and feels like one song rather than a record. i'm going to recommend this, but with the clarification that it's a tease rather than an lp.
julek ploski	nullcycle (reawoken)	2025	warsaw, poland	B	this is apparently a remix album with remixes by other artists of julek ploski originals from 2024, which i haven't heard. it's glitchier and less constructed than the previously reviewed record, which is not in it's benefit.
julek ploski	give up channel	2025	warsaw, poland	A-	i prefer my electronic music to be both melodic and abstract in order to be interesting. this record doesn't accomplish anything in terms of production or composition, but it's extremely well put together and a more enjoyable listen than the generic pop i've been trudging through. there's a playfulness underlying the more difficult presentation that is key to having it succeed as music and not just being a pretentious exercise in difficult sound art. i have to spend the time sorting through the shit to find the interesting records or i won't find them. this could be filed under experimental/electronic or under 20th century classical, which i suppose ought to be the definiton for 21st century classical. there are some goofy samples, but they don't drag the record down the way the cheese does in the previously reviewed album. this is well done and recommended.
death's dynamic shroud	the lunar curtain II	2025	los angeles, usa	E	an overly pretentious attempt at some of the worst elevator music i've ever heard. the vocal tracks suck. however, the record improves slightly if you just completely delete the first five insufferably pretentious tracks and start it at track 6, which is the most interesting track on the record. this hatchet work still results in a failing attempt at art music, and the vocal tracks are still loaded with cheese, but it cuts out the worst of the stench. the hesitation i'm having with just throwing this in the dung heap is that, despite the fact that it's repeatedly objectively terrible in it's repeated use of tired genre cliches and it's cringing application of the worst kind of cheese in the vocal work, there are a handful of interesting moments that largely come up in the sequencing structures. they just constantly ruin the sporadically novel sequencer work by burying it in these layers of cliches and cheese and these awful vocals. this is a characteristic of gen y music more generally - even when they are trying as hard as they can, it still sucks. i guess that's a characteristic of gen y more generally, though; even when they try their hardest, they still fail. life's tough, kids.
gumdrop	gumdrop	2025	los angeles, usa	X	this is a curious combination, and i prioritize novelty and creativity above almost everything else in music....except composition. you still gotta write the songs. sometimes, something like this is necessary to get to something else, and sometimes it just rots in obscurity. i don't know how seriously to take this, and i don't know if it intends to be taken seriously, but i can point out that i heard this this year and took note of it. i'm reminded a little bit of an album from 2019 called 1000 gecs that i liked a little bit in terms of being novel but likewise wasn't certain if i should take seriously. that record did very well, over time. this particular combination of chiptune production and screamo-rap vocals may hit me as beyond goofy and difficult to interpret as art, but the kids really like it, and i guess that reflects their decision not to take life seriously. when life gives you lemons, throw them at the cops. yet, it's not vacuous pop music, either; there is some thought put into making this impossible to take seriously and i have to take note of that as performance art, even if i wonder about the songs, themselves. that's the question, here: this is fun and silly, sure, but can you listen to this? i don't know. however, if you've succeeded in perplexing and confusing me, you're doing something right, even if i'm not sure whether you've succeeded in making substantive art, yet. i'm going to grade this as X, for now.
sierra veins	in the name of blood	2025	paris, france	B-	stripped down modern techno update on a 90s industrial sound. it's enjoyable, but a little primitive.
agriculture	the spiritual sound	2025	los angeles, usa	E	rock music has slowly become more and more retarded over time; you always had to be a little bit daft to do this well, but by the time corporate emo was taking over, i was done with it, and just listening to jazz. it had become utterly stupid. then, corporate emo inverted on itself in a way nobody predicted, and became the era's progressive rock, and i realized i was going to have to find a way to deal with my disdain for the incredibly stupid cliches in the genre if i wanted to listen to anything calling itself rock at any time in the near future, because the fuckers had taken over the genre, and that was how it was, whether i liked it or not. i never really came around to it, but just as i was finding ways to stomach it, it evolved into something even worse. somebody will yell at me for deriving black metal from screamo, and i know that skips a few steps, but i'm talking about the mainstream rock culture, not the development of the style. if i thought corporate screamo was stupid, black metal was a massive step into full retard, but the same thing was beginning to happen, and there just wasn't a way around dealing with the ubiquity of this new style of rock music if you wanted to find things that were new, as anything at all was going to go through both the screamo bottleneck and then the black metal bottleneck. art rock wasn't going to sound like it used to anymore and you'd have to deal with this, no matter how much you hated it, or you'd have to give up and stick to jazz. one very weird thing that happened is that this genre that was about killing fags (is that guy still in jail?) got taken over by women, gays and transgendered people, but that didn't make me more interested in it, it just took away a good way to make fun of it. now, in 2025, it's usurped the core structural norms in progressive rock music, so there's no way around dealing with it, but i'm not convinced that i can. when they just shut up and play, it's not that bad, but i haven't found a way to process this screeching and yelling, yet. i was able to solve this problem during the ubiquitous period of screamo by finding more hardcore or punk sounding vocalists, and waiting until the genre matured to the point where the lyricism was more developed. i haven't really found that path with black metal, yet, and it doesn't make as much sense to look for punk singers in black metal bands, as the history is oppositional. i have only been able to enjoy it when it's instrumental, when it's essentially loud shoegaze or when it features virtuoso guitar playing, like indricothere. i have no interest in the genre cliches: satan is stupid, heavy metal guitar solos are boring and these lyrics are never going to be intelligible in the genre because the point is that they aren't, which makes me disinterested in them. i'm not going to find a small group of evolved, progressive black metal bands that i'm able to appreciate as new art rock, i'm going to continue to cringe at this until the next thing replaces it. the form is fundamentally less redeemable than screamo was, and that makes it pretty awful, as everybody thought screamo must be the absolute bottoming out of western culture. we were wrong. i have listened to this a few times, and i'll give them an E for effort in terms of trying to be a little bit unpredictable regarding form, but it sucks, as art, and i'm not going to ease up on this the way i eventually forced myself to ease up on screamo. i'm going to have to wait this out. but, i fear the next thing is even worse, like using thoughts to generate pink noise with diodes, and running it through a high gain feedback loop, forcing the listener to decode it with a special fourier transform algorithm that you have to download with the album.
chat pile	in the earth again	2025	okc, usa	C+	i've found this band to be overrated for years. this is also overrated.
jo passed	weekend	2025	toronto, canada	C+	pop musicians need to shift with the pop form. bit of a weezer vibe.
north sea radio orchestra	special powers	2025	salisbury, uk	B-	this has several of the same people as lost crowns but is a far more listenable record. however, the middle part of the record drags it down a little. it's built like an early 70s pink floyd record in that sense.
lost crowns	the heart is in the body	2025	london, uk	E	being a trained musician in 2025 is extremely frustrating, as your choices are total obscurity or doing covers of bloated cliches, if you're lucky enough to get a job in the local orchestra. opportunities for creative music production are very meagre. so, you get projects like this. it's not enough to call this pretentious or even to say it has no commercial potential. this really doesn't go anywhere or do anything. it's complex on it's face (it's less complex than it sounds), but it isn't abstract or creative, it's just purposefully obtuse. it's difficult without being rewarding, as you don't gain anything by being patient with it, or suffering through it. there are reasons that medieval music is so ugly sounding - they had the mathematics of tonality all wrong and were always out of tune - and mimicking that in the era of supercomputers doesn't sound sophisticated, it just sounds out of tune. you want the record to develop at some point, but it doesn't. the drumming is the best part of the record. there's a subset of people that will think they're smart for "understanding" this and call you stupid for rejecting it, but you should not listen to them and take their self-righteousness as irony. when the primary selling point of your record is that somebody could write a phd thesis about it, it's not compelling, by definition. so, you could spend a lot of time with this, but you won't get much out of it in the end - it's awkward, ugly, empty and rotting in it's own filth. like the dark ages.
adebisi shank	this is the second ep of a band called adebisi shank	2025	ireland	B+	this is the skipped review of a band called adebisi shank, which is possibly the most hyperactive and cracked out band the math rock era produced. they don't change much from release to release, which i appreciate, as it means you can just fill up the 5 disc changer, or set up a five hour playlist at this point. if you like the other releases, you'll like this too.
foetus	succulence	2025	nyc (usa), australia	A+	jim. the legendary jim. jim is checking out, he says. i'll wait. this track is a gabrielesque epic, which is something jim did more of in the latter part of his career, with an idiosyncratic big band bombast. because if this is the apocalyse, you should dance down your death march.
jessica moss	unfolding	2025	montreal, canada	B	jessica moss is one of a number of musicians that i have followed for a length of time and that has recently made the issue in gaza central to her messaging in a way that i don't agree with, but i wouldn't consider it to be catastrophic. i don't consider jessica moss to be a supporter of hamas or an advocate of genocide against israel, but i recognize that she's uncomfortable with not criticizing an israeli government that she sees as acting in her name in what she thinks is a drastic overreaction. she would appear to be reacting out of embarrassment. she may accuse israel of overreacting to hamas, but i may rather suggest she's underreacting to the threat. i think a lot of people had difficulty grasping the immense level of hatred unleashed on oct 7th and don't want to engage in the difficult discourse attached to weighing realistic policy options available to the state of israel today in confronting 30 years of failed containment policies and consequently getting your head around the fundamental nature of what the existing population of gaza is. it's easier to adopt a humanitarian posture, without acknowledging or accepting that these are people that would cut your arm off for trying to feed them; you would hand them bread, and they would eat your arm. the state of israel bears responsibility in generating the situation, but that doesn't make the set of options available to it any easier. if you leave a dog alone in a cage for months at a time and it grows mean and attacks you when you enter the room, what choice do you have but to euthanize it? but these are not themes that would play out well in jessica moss' group of friends, or help her market her art to the audience she wants to market it to, which wants to talk about resisting state power and is in the process identifying itself as a collection of useful idiots to foreign fascist groups that would gleefully slaughter them for show, she would be the first to go, and in the most gruesome manner imaginable, where it was once a soundtrack for internalizing defiance of the here and now that directly confronts us. but she composes instrumental classical music. she generates a lot of sound, and some if it has more thought put into it than some of it that doesn't. this would be more on the jam/improvised side, and you can hear that she's working a lot with reverb and loop pedals to create drone-based soundscapes without doing much with them when she does. it's like building a foundation without constructing a house. it's passively enjoyable for what it is, but it doesnt command much attention; it's missing a lead, melodic instrument, which coud be anything she wants it to be, but which is currently absent. that is not always true of her solo work, but it is frequently true.
lingouf	cintamini	2025	normandy, france	B+	lingouf, who has been a well known (in certain circles) underground dj for decades, released this brilliant lp in 2008 that is very different than what he's known for, and i've kept checking back periodically to see if he's tried to expand his sound a little from the very harsh and guttural, distorted beats he is mostly known for, generally without positive results. this record is actually a little more mainstream and contemporary techno, which is neither going to appeal to his core fanbase (who are no doubt too old for that shit now anyways) or the art-techno audience that identified doeme as what it is. this is by no means bad, but it isn't brilliant, either. it's a little generic.
squarepusher	stereotype	1994/ 2025	uk	B+	i can't say i'd heard this before. squarepusher has developed a reputation as the brainiest of the 90s braindance artists, which is just a way to get around the embarrassing term idm, while nonetheless continuing to try to point out that this isn't ebm. the kids came up with this idea of edm which looks like a cross between the two and sort of is, but there was a time when people felt it was worthwhile to say "look, this is music. it's not just boom boom boom.", and it led to people calling it jazz as a way out, but to an extent you'd might as well just give up and call it progressive rock because it's so fucking british anyways, which nobody dares to do. what i'm getting at is that you hope an early squarepusher record is abstract, even if you expect it to be more rave and acid house than his later work, and that's actually more or less what this is. it's dated; it's from 1994, and you can tell. it's not helpful to analyze it as new music. but if you want some more very early squarepusher, well, here it is, and it's really everything you'd hope it is, too.
swans	birthing	2025	nyc, usa	A+	i still remember when swans were dead. the last few swans releases have really taken gira to a different level and, after having listened to this a few times, i think his sanity is an open question. this record is bizarre. there are certain crutches in his contributors that he relies upon, and he has a tendency to exaggerate bad cliches, but, for what it is, this might be the best record released so far this century. the problem is that it's almost impossible to listen to, and that's before you try to understand it, which i don't suggest doing.
geese	getting killed	2025	nyc, usa	E	i didn't make it through this one. the singer's not my thing. seems really phony and plastic and fake. the first song would be better if it was a reaction to finding a bum (that is, a homeless person) in his car than a bomb in his car.
guerilla toss	you're weird now	2025	nyc, usa	B+	guerilla toss wants you to think they're punk, and there was something punk about them in 2015ish, but this record draws from mainstream pop, nu metal and progressive rock, with little to no discernible punk influence. that's not a criticism, it's a description. i wouldn't normally listen to vocals of this type, and citing paramore nowadays would not be current, but it is the last thing i heard with this type of vocals, which is a good distance from the barking of yester year. it's still popular. i think. i dunno. the odd time signatures, prominent synth work and capable guitar narratives keep it flowing in a manner that seems intended for mtv, but they don't have mtv anymore. i'm not that old, i was a kid in the 90s, but i don't think this has that much in common with pavement or phish. rather, the very popular band (at it's peak) that this record reminds me of is late 70s or early 80s genesis, albeit not in exact style but in aesthetic and approach. these are relatively short, musically interesting, anthemic, arena-ready synth-rock pieces that would make phil and tony smile. that gives the record a pretty broad level of appeal. contemporary pop music of this sort is generally intentionally extremely facile, and while this isn't particularly complex either, it's developed enough to be interesting. at my age, i feel like i'm looking in on something, although i know i'm not; that said, if the intent here is to market a polished pop record to young people, and you know a few, maybe help these big kids out.
cardiacs	lsd	2025	salisbury, uk	B+	this is not really cardiacs. the key composer had been functionally dead for years before he died and it's clear enough that he didn't leave enough for a record, so some of his friends and proteges took over and the result is passable but not very impressive. they do the same pop song something like ten times. i initially described it as a parody and i think that's correct. i never thought i'd suggest they should cut a cardiacs record in half, but this multitide of identical pop songs is redundant and gets tiresome and if jim thought he was going to fool everybody, i think i'm on to him. his brother hated him for a reason; he's a sonofabitch. the lengthier and more disparate pieces hold their interest (it's ok if some of the instrumental interludes sound like they were written by somebody with mild brain damage, because it's true, and it adds to their quirky charm), but we only needed one of these interchangeable pop songs over an hour, and it's hard to imagine going back to the record when you realize it's the same song over and over again. maybe your average cardiacs fan in 2025 can't remember ten minutes ago, anyway.