What a year
My favortite albums of 2025
I know, I know, it’s been quiet here for months. But what better way to revive this blog than to talk about my favorite albums and eps that were released in 2025.
A few things before we get into it:
The following list is in no particular order and is definitely missing a few entries.
I recommend you listen to all of these albums in their entirety, they were intended as complete pieces of art and should be experienced that way at least once!
I didn’t forget about Lotus, LUX, EUSEXUA and DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, but pretty much everybody already has an opinion on them, so I’ll spare you mine.
I won’t get into lyricism. Not my field, don’t care. I’d rather talk about what makes the music itself special.
Please consider the following a threshold text, my writing isn’t meant to substitute a listening experience but give you a starting point from which you can embrace the albums’ quirks fully.
and finally: I also have no idea why so many of these picks have strangely capitalized titles.
otta - WITH LOVE FROM EVERYWHERE
When I first thought about writing this article, I immediately knew which release I wanted to feature first: otta’s fantastic WITH LOVE FROM EVERYWHERE ep.
I’m fascinated by this record. There’s pretty much zero information about it online, aside from a few cryptic social media posts announcing its release. otta’s ep defies genre classification (even more than most music that’s been featured on this blog), makes it its singular goal to disorientate the listener, all while exploding into some of the most colorful soundscapes and grooves, I’ve been privileged enough to witness.
WITH LOVE FROM EVERYWHERE isn’t just a title, it’s the album’s literal mission statement. otta’s music hits the listener from all angles, the ep feels like lying on the floor out of breath during the final battle between jazz, ambient and electronica.
PAIN, the opener, immediately hits you with a wall of sound, somehow completely capturing a deep, generational pain, without falling into any form of programmaticism. This intro into otta’s world is followed by the ep’s “poppiest” track, FULL OF YOU, which then dissolves into the violent textures of PLOP. otta manages to create an algorithm age appropriate next step in the lineage of masters like Pharoah Sanders, a deep exploration of musical form and texture with passionate disdain for listeners that just want to nod their head along.
I know this sounds like a challenging listen and it is, but please please please give WITH LOVE FROM EVERYWHERE a shot, it’s impeccable.
Saya Gray - SAYA
My very first blogpost was about PUDDLE ( OF ME ), the third track on Saya Gray’s third release (or fourth, depending on how you count, but I’d argue that the QWERTY eps function as one). In it, I described SAYA as “a whimsical 10 track masterpiece, manically concerned with creating a unique sonic atmosphere over its runtime”.
There is a reason, why Saya Gray is the favorite musician of all of your favorite musicians. Her grasp on musical worldbuilding might be unchallenged in the current market and SAYA is her most focused, controlled work yet. On it, she leaves behind some of the DIY-ish grit of her older productions and embraces a folkier, less electronic aesthetic that even dares to flirt with country music.
I can’t recommend this album enough! Even if you’ve heard it a thousand times, go listen to it again. I guarantee, you’ll find new details you haven’t heard yet.
KOOB - Off Head
I stumbled across Valeryia Dele’s KOOB project when we were booking SWAP jazz festival 2024. We didn’t know what she was gonna do on stage until the moment her show started, but trusted our guts and placed her in the headline slot, Saturday, 10pm. And thank whatever entity you believe in we did. That night I got to witness the best concert I’ve seen in my life, a truly wild experiment between almost Monk-ish jazz, ambient interludes, spoken word and pure imagination.
KOOB’s 2025 release Off Head is her first studio album that manages to capture the same manic fragility I felt, when I watched her perform. The album’s 8 songs all comment on the current state of jazz in an interesting way, but I’m honestly not interested in discussing Off Head as a jazz album, it’s so much more than that. It’s punk, it’s hip hop, feels like anger, hunger, dust and gritted teeth, put simply: It’s amazing and you should definitely listen to it!
Kitty Florentine - Balance
You might have noticed, that all the artists on this list are more than musicians, they frame themselves as larger than live statues, snapshots into different visions of 21st century humanity. This is especially true for Kitty Florentine. For a first glance into her world building I recommend checking out the music video for her song Reprise, one of her more accessible songs. If her aesthetic speaks to you, definitely listen to Balance.
The 2025 album is a thrilling take on experimental hyperpop. On it, Kitty leans into granular sound design techniques, using her voice more as texture than as an actual focal point and constantly breaking with conventional wisdom in pop production.
Do you know the cerulean monologue in The Devil Wears Prada? I think it’s very helpful in trying to figure out, what exactly Kitty Florentine is doing on her newest album. In it, Meryl Streep’s character Miranda Priestly explains, how decisions made in the high fashion/ designer bubble eventually influence the consumer market. Balance wants to be understood as a designer piece, an essay in what pop music could evolve into. It wants to show a possibility of the future, all the while never losing Kitty’s entrancing performance of an aestheticized self, that anchors all her music.
If very experimental pop adjacent music sounds like something you’d be interested in, definitely listen to Balance, there are few records out there that can unsettle and move you in such a unique way.
BODUR - MAQAM
Another, even clubbier Hyperpop entry, cunty, I know. BODUR’s MAQAM has a special place in my heart though. Every song title carries the name of its respective maqam. Think of these maqamat as specific combinations of notes that are supposed to convey a specific emotional space. This is a fairly old way of understanding music theory prevalent in the Arabic and Persian world.
BODUR matches every emotion she wants to convey in her lyrics with a respective maqam, creating a beautifully dense, clubby underground atmosphere. Sometimes you can practically taste the club fog she wants you to inhale while listening to her music, sometimes she makes you feel scorching hot sun on your skin, sometimes she let’s you hang in complete uncertainty.
If you want to dive deeper into the connection between the album’s theory and its lyricism, i highly recommend this interview. BODUR’s understanding of this interplay and her conscious reclaiming of these concepts feel like an act of resistance, not only against AI-generated slop music but also against the omnipresent western occupation and exoticization of “foreign” grooves and melodies. I adore this album, please check it out!
Nilüfer Yanya - Dancing Shoes
Nilüfer Yanya’s Dancing Shoes is the shortest entry on this list, spanning only 16 minutes over 4 tracks. The ep is just a fantastic example of unique, genre bending, sometimes electronic, sometimes romantic indie rock.
All the tracks are united by this very bittersweet feeling between nostalgia and limerence. Nilüfer immediately pulls you into her own head, surrounding you with distorted guitaresque sound sculptures, her hypnotizing voice and her oh so crunchy drums.
If some of my other recommendations were too far out there for you, give this one a spin. This ep is like a magic trick, it hides its many complexities behind complete emotional transparency. Love it.
XINA - IRON X
Singer/songwriter, dancer, choreographer, producer, director, designer and entertainer XINA is based in Minneapolis, which makes her the only US artist on this list. Her music is distinctly non-American though. Her dark texturalism moves continental electronica aesthetics into the wildest spaces, at times citing classical minimalism, at others dissolving into maximalist, stressful soundscapes, flirting with R&B influences or collapsing into industrial electro punk-ish territories.
This is clearly music for an age of short attention spans, IRON X bombards you with its ideas, keeping you on your toes throughout its 22 minute runtime. The self-produced ep is an exciting showcase in artistry, pulling from a world suffocated in new, post-algorithmic influence networks.
If you enjoy artists like Woodkid that play around with textural percussion and orchestral scapes a lot, XINA’s new album might be for you. It tries the same things but dares to push more boundaries. This is such a fierce proposal for dark dance pop and I’m so here for it!
Ragnhild Og - Might as Well Just Cause a Scene
Might as Well Just Cause a Scene is Ragnhild Og’s second studio album, an enigmatic indie pop production, that has consistently managed to captivate me for its expansive 40 minute runtime throughout all my listens.
The album does something I’ve not seen any other pop production do. It manages to capture the repetitive melancholy and emptiness of nordic jazz and its adjacent subcultures in a completely new context.
The amount of restraint and discipline in this music makes it feel terrifyingly immediate, hitting your subconscious way before you even have the chance to rationalize its deep vulnerability.
This is the perfect album for your next solo train ride.
INJI - SUPERLAME
brat summer is over. But fear not, children. INJI has provided the perfect unofficial sequel with her October release SUPERLAME. The 12 tracks are party girl anthem after party girl anthem, interspersed with interludes where INJI references the jazz heavy subcultures she frequents, when she isn’t throwing herself into the nightlife she constructed this album around.
SUPERLAME is a celebration of self-determined youthfulness as a defiant stance. It completely embraces, almost occupies, post-capitalist consumer logic and obsessively watches its own reflection on the highly polished surfaces of its surroundings.
The whole project and all the communication and marketing around it oozes personality. INJI opens the door into her sugar rushed mind as wide as possible, making this not only an extremely fun dance pop record, but a shard of time, a perfect encapsulation of what it feels like, to be (like) her right now.
This is just such a fun record, it’s wild, unapologetic and restless. A must listen!
There were so many more great releases this year, but I’ll end my list here. Send me your faves please!
See you around,
Malik <3