Thomas Blake

Many Hands’ There are Moss Balls in Paradise is a decidedly earthy take on ambient music, rough at the edges and hauntingly human. Triggered by a child’s grief over a dead fish, Henderson’s restless, freewheeling vision treads the line between tranquillity and uncanny depth. It is a watery ode to humanity and our fragile relationship with the natural world.

New York/Berlin duo Church Car—Big Daddy Mugglestone and Ian Douglas-Moore—debut with Church Of, a remarkably coherent album that feels like traversing a surreal role-playing game. Blending analogue synth, zither, and field recordings, the pair shuttles between grainy psych minimalism and structured melodicism. It’s a puzzling, adventurous journey where improvisational noise and avant-rock sparring constantly evolve into something new and exciting.

Expertly curated by Nyahh Records, An Irish Almanac is a sprawling 32-track survey of Ireland’s avant-garde. Spanning two discs, it treats “noise” as a broad umbrella for everything from dark drones and “occult freak-folk” to playful vocal experiments. While no compilation of this kind could ever claim to be complete, this detailed panorama offers a transformative map of a shifting underground scene, bursting with grit, mystery, and playfulness.

It’s that tough time of the year again, when music writers feel like they’re throwing some of their favourite artists under the bus by not including them in their annual Top 10. But here are the ten albums that made it. From Shabason, Krgovich, Tenniscoats’ feather-light pop to Milkweed’s eerie folk and Ben Lamar Gay’s thrilling jazz, 2025 delivered essential, fearless, and deeply distinctive records.

Erlend Apneseth Trio and writer Erlend O. Nødtvedt collaborate on Black Hauge, an album that expertly fuses experimental Norwegian folk with the poetry of Olav H. Hauge. Using samples of the poet reciting his own work, the music employs techniques from plunderphonics and musique concrète to create stunningly original and often uncanny tracks. It’s an exploratory, free-folk journey. A stunningly original album that combines elements rarely seen together.

Honed by high-profile support slots, Glaswegian songwriter Iona Zajac delivers a fiercely feminist and dynamically shifting debut. Bang traverses dream-pop, folk minimalism, and moody alt-rock, channelling the raw intensity of upsetters like PJ Harvey. Zajac is a songwriter with important things to say and a willingness to say them loudly and with a laser-like focus. Bang is a remarkably accomplished, statement-making achievement.

The final volume of Jacken Elswyth’s essential Betwixt & Between series features singer and multi-instrumentalist Elspeth Anne and the historic Welsh male choir Côr Meibion Gwalia. Anne offers a bleak, beautiful midwinter landscape of drones and dark carols, while the choir provides lo-fi, spirited wassails full of strange magic. It is a fitting conclusion to a project documenting British folk at its most raw and boundary-pushing.

Mysterious UK producer U maps the rural history of Archenfield in this ambitious new album. Blending ambient textures, field recordings, and plunderphonics, U moves beyond simple folk music into a complex sonic collage. From the hauntological piano of “Urchins” to the chilling folklore of “Black Vaughan,” the album is a labyrinthine exploration of time, memory, and landscape that is constantly changing and profoundly engaging.

Matthew Broadley’s debut as Greet, I Know How To Die, is a genre-defying journey, a link between the uncanny and the everyday, a bridge between two worlds. Anchored by an eerie harmonium drone and folk-horror aesthetics, this is a hugely impressive debut that doesn’t shy away from difficult musical and lyrical subjects.

Broadsides is Weston Olencki’s sound diary of a grand tour through the southern United States. Drawing on the long history of the broadside as social commentary, Olencki blends traditional folk forms with experimental sound art. From the timeless prelude of a railway station to an epic, transformative, post-minimalist take on “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” this album is a bracing crystallisation of that journey.

One of the most wonderfully warped Ceremonial Counties tapes yet: The Clare Voyants explore the mystical and musical elements of John Clare’s life via a collage of free folk, found sounds, traditional melodies and spoken word, while The Universal Veil take inspiration from Horace Harman’s Sketches of the Bucks Countryside and produce something that sits between Wicker Man psychedelia and Ghost Box hauntology (and is arguably more mind-bending than either).

JJJJJerome Ellis is an enviably talented musician who has developed an entirely singular musical identity. Vesper Sparrow, Ellis’ second album, communicates in a way that makes us stop and think about our own modes of expression, emerging with a new understanding of how beauty and truth can be conveyed in unprecedented forms, and how form itself can be manipulated to become art rather than simply structure.