10 Iona Zajac – “Bowls”
“Bowls” kicks off Iona Zajac’s new album Bang with stark, painstaking deliberateness, ensuring the listener that she’s doing nothing to try to cater to conventional musical standards, rather letting things crawl along at the spooky pace of her own dark, enchanting muse. Zajac hails from Glasgow and sounds very much akin to Sharon Van Etten both in vocal tone and in songwriting style and structure.
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9 Von Pea & The Other Guys – “Roadblock” feat. Che Noir
Typically an instance of an artist coming out with a new album and being referred to as a “legend” is hazardous territory, like an attempt at establishing his credibility which should, given the term, already be obvious. In the case of New York’s long-heralded Von Pea, anyway, the style is deadpan like Ras Kass, but the sense of humor and energetic youthfulness seem a little more plentiful than the average, and Che Noir helps cement this banger as steady and street-worn.
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8 Park Shadow – “Veiled Fathoms”
A leader in Finnish techno here, Park Shadow has pared the art form down here to something crisp, rhythmic and haunting, a bold step forward for the dance EP, in this case materialized as Altitudez. “Veiled Fathoms” is the haunting but disciplined opener.
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7 Tortoise – “Layered Presence”
I don’t think I’ve ever said this about any other artist, but it just seemed really potently, in the case of this new Tortoise album, that they had to come out with something that sounded absolutely nothing like their former work, in order to execute anything meaningful. All over this new LP, Touch, things seem foreign and almost strange, in a refreshing way, lunging halfway into Don Caballero territory in some moments, and offering truth in advertising in “Layered Presence”; a dynamic, multifarious masterpiece in methodical, half-malfunctioning techno.
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6 Sarathy Korwar – “We Take Things for Granted”
This new project from London’s Sarathy Korwar was interesting in that every track seemed to take on the exact same percussion-heavy, laconically ambient mood. Ultimately, this selfsame malady prevented it from making my albums list, but I felt the originality and quiet effervescence rampant in “We Take Things for Granted” deserved some accolade.
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5 Hilary Woods – “Faults”
Slow, spooky girl pop seems to be a pretty prevalent motif on this list, like some strange anthropological beacon back into a world of melancholy and hopeless mood we’ve been ignoring in all our otherwise ambitions. Things are gorgeous and textural here, anyway, calling somewhat to mind Julia Holter’s masterpiece Ekstasis, with trippy, half-siren-like vocals and deliberate, patient synthesizer chord progressions.
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4 Iona Zajac – “Bang”
Sorry to beat a dead horse, but the Sharon Van Etten comparisons are pretty inevitable here, especially as on this track-two title track, Zajac ups the tempo a bit and takes things in more of a “rock” direction, exactly as Van Etten does on “No One’s Easy to Love”; the result sounding amusingly more like an approach to an axis of objective musical perfection, than mimicry.
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3 Added Dimensions – “What’s Gonna Happen”
Added Dimensions is the musical project of pop-punk duo Sarah Everton and Rob Garcia, based in the precociously musical Richmond, Virginia, and blending classic punk and Nirvana stylishly with forward-thinking, expedited songwriting. On “What’s Gonna Happen”; Everton’s spoken-word vocals bandy about a light sort of sarcasm, to blend with the verbose commentary, giving the song an incisive and distinct tone.
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2 Park Shadow – “Take U Higher”
“Take U Higher” harks back to classic techno with some celestial, trippy vocal samples, weaving in a frenetic, jungle-y drum pattern early on, and in general coming across as more rapid, focused and hip than anything else we’ve heard in techno up to this point.
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1 Tortoise – “Vexations”
New album Touch ended up being a very complete, cohesive and distinct masterpiece, but somehow the opener “Vexations” continues to seem like the nucleus of it all, with opening drums that sound like even Mogwai on a bad trip, and grunge guitar that seems also quite anathema of the band, in a good way, given their output of work up to this point. This is Tortoise updated brilliantly for 2025, all expressionist, ominous and anatomically robust.
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