THE WORLD'S BEST NEW MUSIC: UPDATED DAILY
2025 December Best New Albums
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Getting Killed
GEESE
Released 26 September 2024
Partisan Records / Play It Again Sam
*****
A ferocious, irreverent and fiercely alive record from one of the most exhilarating rock bands of their generation.
With Getting Killed, Geese arrive at a moment of full creative ignition. Now on their fourth album, the New York band have sharpened their volatility into something deliberate and dangerous. At the center is Cameron Miller — a frontman whose vocal presence seems to ricochet through rock history without ever settling into imitation. His singing slips between falsetto fragility and sneering bravado, theatrical yet controlled, elastic enough to carry both melody and menace.
Geese’s lineage is unmistakable yet unsettled: the wiry abrasion of The Fall, the nervous propulsion of Television, the jagged cool of early Strokes, and the dance-punk urgency of LCD Soundsystem all flicker through the record. More recent touchstones — Arctic Monkeys’ swagger, black midi’s controlled chaos — help situate Getting Killed in the present tense. Backing Miller is a fiercely disciplined four-piece: Emily Green’s guitar cuts and coils, Dominic DiGesu’s bass locks the center of gravity, and Max Bassin’s drumming drives with ruthless economy.
Getting Killed hits with an immediacy that feels almost confrontational. The album thrives on tension — between groove and collapse, discipline and abandon. On “Cobra,” Miller channels a Jagger-like strut, riding the band’s taut pulse with reckless charm. “Half Real” shifts the energy inward, his delivery taking on a Lucinda Williams–like drawl that grounds the song’s emotional grit.
Throughout, the band’s playing is lean and relentless. Riffs snap rather than swell; rhythms push forward without indulgence. There’s a punk instinct at work, but filtered through sharp arrangement and a deep understanding of dynamics. Falsetto passages recall Thom Yorke, yet they’re deployed as weapons, not ornaments — destabilizing the songs just as they threaten to settle.
This is music that demands attention, thrives on friction, and rewards repeated listens.
Getting Killed is not for the faint-hearted — and that’s precisely the point. Bracing, volatile, and alive with intent, it confirms Geese as a band.
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Syncretic
BHAIRAVI RAMAN, NANTHESH SIVARAJAH
Released 26 November 2025
Efficient Space
*****
A luminous, contemporary fusion masterpiece and a continuation of Melbourne/Naarm’s four-decade legacy of pan-Asian artistic dialogue.
Melbourne/Naarm has long been a vital site for cross-cultural experimentation within Asian and South Asian communities. Since the 1980s, artists have challenged inherited boundaries, blending classical forms with contemporary practice in music, dance, and theatre. Landmark initiatives such as the Bharatam Dance Company, founded by the visionary pan-Asian choreographer Dr. Chandrabanu in collaboration with artist Geoffrey Goldie, helped establish a uniquely antipodean approach to syncretism: one grounded in deep respect for tradition yet unafraid of transformation.
Syncretic, by Australian duo Bhairavi Raman, a Western and Carnatic violinist from South India, and Nanthesh Sivarajah, a mridangam (a double-headed barrel drum) player and versatile percussionist from Sri Lanka, emerges from this lineage. Both artists are steeped in South Indian classical traditions, yet fully engaged with jazz, contemporary classical, and global improvisatory languages. Rather than treating fusion as surface-level hybridity, they approach it as an ethical and musical practice, a conversation between systems of rhythm, melody, and spiritual intent.
Syncretic unfolds with rare balance and assurance. Raman’s violin is agile, luminous, and emotionally grounded as she navigates Carnatic melodic frameworks while opening outward toward jazz phrasing and contemporary harmonic space. Sivarajah’s rhythmic architecture is equally expansive, drawing on South Indian tala while incorporating timbres and structures that feel globally conversant rather than stylistically “mixed.”
What distinguishes the album is its compositional integrity. Each piece feels carefully shaped, allowing raga-based exploration, improvisation, and ensemble interaction to coexist without hierarchy. Resisting spectacle, the music breathes with a sense of shared purpose as it moves between meditative stillness and kinetic momentum. This fusion represents traditions evolving in dialogue, rather than for effect: tradition absorbed, expanded and reframed.
The production favors clarity and intimacy, ensuring that the nuance of microtonal inflections, rhythmic detail, and dynamic shifts remains central.
Syncretic is both a milestone and a reminder that Melbourne’s long-standing culture of cross-disciplinary experimentation remains fertile, rigorous, and forward-looking. Elegant, grounded, and deeply communicative, it belongs among the finest fusion recordings to emerge from this lineage.
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Shiraz
DHAFER YOUSEFF
Released 14 November 2025
ACT Music + Vision
*****
A transcendent masterwork from an artist at the height of his powers, turning voice, oud (and silence) into pure revelation.
Dhafer Youssef has long occupied a singular place in contemporary music. Born in Tunisia and shaped by jazz, Sufi spirituality and global improvisation, he has redefined what the oud can be, not merely an instrument of tradition, but a vessel for ecstatic expression and radical openness.
"Shiraz”, his debut album for the German ACT label, is also his most personal. In thirteen vibrant songs, it tells the story of the most important encounter of his life: meeting his wife, Shiraz Fradi. These are songs about love and gratitude, but also about overcoming life’s hardships together. At the same time, “Shiraz” marks the premiere of a young, multinational band featuring pianist and fellow ACT artist Daniel García, trumpeter Mario Rom, bassist Swaéli MBappé, and drummer Tao Ehrlich. Together, they open a new chapter in the global success story of this musical trailblazer, moving between jazz and the music of the world.
Shiraz unfolds with considered poise. From the first notes, Youssef creates a world where the melody floats effortlessly and the rhythm emerges organically, like breathing. His oud playing is supple and precise, each phrase shaped with care, while his high, ecstatic voice cuts through with precision. There is a sense of ritual throughout, but the music remains alive, responsive and is constantly evolving. Even at its most impassioned, the album resists excess and maintains a balance of intensity and restraint. Silence is a collaborator here as the stillness frequently engages as a dynamic force. Jazz harmony, Middle Eastern modes and contemporary improvisation mix and dissolve into a unified musical language, neither historical or contemporary, in which each note contributes to the legibility.
As surely as this album finds a place in the pantheon of "Eastern" background music, so will it demand close attention, which it will repay completely. Shiraz is a towering achievement: spiritually charged, emotionally enticing and exquisitely crafted, this is an album of rare beauty and depth and without question, one of the year’s finest recordings.
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Some Kinda Way
CONNOR D'NETTO
Released 5 December 2025
Room40
*****
This contemplative, finely wrought cycle —reveals a young Australian composer of uncommon poise, transforming his personal transition into luminous, textural chamber music.
Australian composer Connor D’Netto has emerged as one of the most intriguing young voices in contemporary chamber music. His work sits at an intersection of post-minimalism, ambient resonance and timbral curiosity, shaped by training that embraces both classical rigor and a broader openness to cross-genre collaboration.
Though still early in his career, D’Netto has developed a distinctive approach to form and texture: patient, spacious, and emotionally grounded. He describes his composition Feeling More Like (2019), which is included here, as a turning point, written just after he decided to come out upon returning to Australia after time overseas - a period he describes as an internal unburdening.
The piece explores the quirky, tactile sonorities of the viola da gamba through loops and delays. The 3-part suite, Some Kinda Way, composed later in collaboration with clarinettist Jason Noble, extends that impulse. Built from musical ideas once set aside or abandoned, it becomes a reclamation project, weaving together materials to reveal unexpected coherence. The suite, the centre-point of this release, unfolds as a gentle arc, framed by brief interludes (intro/tattoo, interlude/nails, outro/piercing) that feel like quiet gestures of self-marking. It's layered clarinet figures echo the lineage of Reich’s New York Counterpoint yet move with a softer, more introspective energy. Rather than a driving pulse, D’Netto favors subtle phase shifts and melodic tendrils that drift, settle, and re-emerge, creating an atmosphere of tentative assembling, like ideas gathering themselves into shape.
Nevertheless, “Feeling More Like,” , remains the album’s emotional heart: thick with resonance, saturated with loops, and beautifully attuned to the instrument’s woody irregularities. Its slow accretion mirrors the experience that prompted it - the relief and quiet expansion that accompany accepting one’s own identity.
The album is compact, but its emotional and textural depth is striking. Each piece feels necessary, nothing overstated.
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DOGA
JUANA MOLINA
Released 5 November 2025
Sonamos
*****
An eerie, hypnotic blend of improvisation, folk roots and spectral psychedelia that produces something hauntingly alive.
Juana Molina has spent decades refining a voice that defies conventional genre boundaries: part folk, part experimental pop, part ambient hallucination. After an eight-year hiatus since her previous studio album Halo (2017), DOGA arrives as her eighth full-length, a deeply personal, improvisation-rooted album that was itself crafted over six years.
The record draws on long-form improvisations originally developed with keyboardist Odín Schwartz and later shaped with the help of producer Emilio Haro.
The result is a collection of songs where acoustic instrumentation, analogue synths, looping and subtle post-production create dense, ghostly soundscapes that feel both intimate and other-worldly.
DOGA unfolds like a dream half-remembered, with echoing guitar loops, ethereal synth drones, and Juana Molina’s voice drifting through layers of repetition and subtle dissonance. The album often avoids traditional melodies and hooks in favor of atmosphere and texture, an approach established in the opening track “uno es árbol”, that wrap you in looping basslines and enigmatic lyrics.
Elsewhere, “desinhumano” evokes folkloric mythologies and surreal narratives, pairing haunting guitar twangs with vaguely organic synth textures, mimicking animal cries or distant insects - all of which adds an uncanny, almost paranormal, edge to the record.
Even the lighter moments, such as the single “Siestas ahí”, carry a dreamlike quality, with a buoyant rhythm, warped vocals, and whimsical melodies that suggest nostalgia, longing, and gentle disorientation.
Less about immediate gratification and more about immersion: repeated listens, DOGA feels like a nocturnal journey through memory, nature, and subconscious reverie.
With this release, Juana Molina delivers a mature, daring, and deeply personal statement - a record that defies easy classification but offers a rich, atmospheric labyrinth for listeners willing to lose themselves in its waves.
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In holiday clothing, out of the great darkness
CLARICE JENSEN
Released 17 October 2025
Fat Cat Records
*****
A calm, immersive listening experience that feels both contemporary and timeless and reveals its depth to the patient .
New York based cellist and composer, Clarice Jensen occupies a distinctive space in contemporary music, aligned with a post-Glassian generation of composers who value process, atmosphere, and emotional resonance over formal complexity. Trained as a cellist but fluent in electronic and experimental practices, she works in the lineage of artists who use repetition to establish presence, rather than to propel, an approach that is closer to ambient music than to concert-hall minimalism. In this way, her music blurs the boundary between formal composition and sound environment, combining acoustic instruments with subtle electronic embellishment. There are few dramatic gestures, as Jensen favors accumulation and gradual change to create textures, so that listeners are invited into a state of focus that is intimate, reflective and unforced - though at times, ponderous
In Holiday Clothing, Out of the Great Darkness moves at its own unhurried pace, built from layered cello lines and gentle electronic resonance. The album creates a sense of suspended time, where small shifts in harmony and texture carry the emotional weight of its narrative. Jensen’s playing is tactile and expressive: you hear bow on string, the bloom of notes and the way sound lingers in the air. Repetition is used soothingly as the soundscape gradual opens to higher registers, brighter tones, ethereal vocals and the creation of sonic space. There’s nothing remotely dramatic here, but there is warmth, clarity, and careful attentiveness. This is understated music that suits solitary listening: headphones, dusk, stillness
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Sanctuary
ALAM KHAN, VIJAY IYER & NITIN MITTA
Released 5 December 2025
AMMP
****-
An intimate, improvisational meeting of musical diversity, Sanctuary distills three masters into a luminous small form, where tradition, virtuosity and curiosity meet in real time.
Sanctuary brings together three musicians rooted in deep and distinct musical lineages. Alam Khan, sarodist and son of the legendary Ali Akbar Khan, carries the classical Maihar Gharana tradition with both reverence and adventurous spirit. Vijay Iyer, one of the most influential pianists/composers of his generation, has spent decades probing the intersections of jazz, classical, and global musics. Nitin Mitta, a tabla virtuoso with long collaborative history with both, enriches the dialogue with rhythmic dexterity and openness.
Rather than a meticulously planned project, Sanctuary was born from a spontaneous, two-day session in California, an improvised dialogue rooted in mutual respect and curiosity. The result is not an exercise in fusion for its own sake, but a real-time conversation between sonic worlds, where tradition guides, but does not confine.
Sanctuary unfolds with the spaciousness of shared listening rather than compositional declaration. The title track sets a contemplative tone: Alam Khan’s sarod lines arc with modal grace, Iyer’s piano and Fender Rhodes punctuate with rhythmic subtlety, and Mitta’s tabla articulates time with quiet logic. What feels remarkable is the EP’s absence of grand statement — instead, a sense of unfolding, of musical ideas gently co-alescing.
“Crossing” opens with a sense of inquiry: phrases stretch out, overlapping like waves, with all three players responding more than asserting. “New Day” closes the set with a subtly rising optimism — motifs weave in and out, sometimes near silence, sometimes more insistent, always attentive to each other’s impulses.
Throughout, the trio avoids showcasing technique for effect; instead, they carve space for breath, nuance, and dialogue. The improvisations are neither dense nor lean: they are engaged, patient, and grounded.
Sanctuary is a delicate gem — modest in length but rich in implication. It affirms the power of improvisation as listening, and offers a glimpse of what can emerge when equal voices meet in openness. Highly recommended for listeners drawn to contemporary intersections of South Asian classical and jazz-informed thought.
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Panorama
JULIÁN MEKLER, JUAN SAIDÓN, BAPTISTE STANEK
Released 12 December 2025
Isla Desierta Discos
****-
A dynamic trio in collaboration, bringing innovative synergy and true excellence to complex instrumental terrain.
This project unites three formidable instrumentalists who operate at the forefront of contemporary improvised jazz. Argentinians Julián Mekler (keyboard/piano) and Juan Saidón (bass) and Frenchman Baptiste Stanek (drums) share an international pedigree. Their collective identity is built upon virtuosic musicianship and a shared commitment to exploratory composition. They fuse the harmonic languages of South American jazz, New York post-bop and European rhythmic complexity, all the while eschewing traditional structures. Instead, they build narrative through interplay, prioritizing intense, near-telepathic communication. Their music is highly literate, demanding focus, yet deeply rewarding in its technical ambition and emotional sophistication.
Panorama is less a collection of songs and more a document of three musicians achieving true excellence in instrumental synergy. The album's strength lies in its innovation of composition through collective improvisation. Rather than relying on pre-written charts, the trio constructs vast, detailed soundscapes in real-time, succeeding where many improvisational albums falter: maintaining structural tension and cohesion.
Saidón’s bass provides a constant foundation, simultaneously anchoring and propelling the rhythmic framework. Stanek’s drumming is less concerned with timekeeping and more about textural invention. Mekler’s piano work is fluid, moving effortlessly from delicate, classical motifs to percussive, abstract bursts.
The originality here is found in the group’s unified voice; the absence of a dominant soloist means the arrangement is constantly shifting, This rewards the genuine democratic exchange between members with rapid response. Panorama offers a challenging but breathtaking view of modern jazz at its highest level.
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Women In Jazz
VARIOUS ARTISTS - WOMEN IN JAZZ
FEAT: ROSA BRUNELLO, MA.MOYO, AMY GADIAGA, LILY CARASSIK, EMMA JOHNSON'S GRAVY BOAT, MADELEINE, POPPY DANIELS, AROWAH, JELLY CLEAVER, YAZZ AHMED, DEE BYRNE, MOONMOT, ALINA BZHINSKI, COLECTIVA
Released 5 December 2025
Women In Jazz x New Soil
****-
A diverse UK compilation that showcases the hidden depth of instrumental and compositional talent, seeking to shift representation of women from the margins of Jazz to the mainstream.
Founded by Louise Paley and Nina Fine, Women In Jazz exists to celebrate and showcase the music and stories of women, to inspire the next generation of talent.
Made up of 10,500 people, from singer-songwriters to producers, instrumentalists and composers, the team of highly experienced creatives direct, produce and execute projects focusing on music, storytelling and real-life experiences.
This compilation functions as an essential aural manifesto, demonstrating the incredible breadth and depth of women's talent currently shaping the UK jazz scene. The collection's strength lies in its commitment to featuring a wide array of roles including instrumentalists, composers and producers and ensuring a sound that is rich in stylistic diversity.
The journey begins with the funky, flute-fueled opener "Uno Punto Uno" by Rosa Brunello, setting a high bar for groove and invention. The album later plunges into the profound emotional depth of Yazz Ahmed's "My Heart Will Not Forget You," where her haunting trumpet sound creates an expansive, cinematic mood. Balancing this intensity is the evocative vocal quietude of Jelly Cleaver's "Ocean of Peace," and the other-worldly "Dreamer" by MADELAINE, each showcasing the power of delicate, soul-infused arrangements.
The compilation captures the vibrant energy of a statistically under-represented section of the wider UK jazz community, providing a rare opportunity for emerging or under-represented artists to showcase technical brilliance and expressiveness. Like similar initiatives by jazz re:freshed ,jazznewblood, Gilles Peterson's Brownswood Recordings and Worldwide FM, this project is a valuable community building initiative and indispensable for anyone seeking insight to the definitive, future-facing sound of British jazz.
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The Resurrection Game
EMMA SWIFT
Released 11 September 2025
*****
Effectively her debut, this album finds the songwriter stepping confidently into her own voice, delivering literate, dark country-pop with emotional complexity.
Emma Swift is an Australian singer-songwriter based in Nashville, initially gaining critical acclaim for her 2020 album, Blonde on the Tracks, a collection of expertly interpreted Bob Dylan covers. Her sound is deeply rooted in Americana, country-folk, and melancholic indie-rock, drawing comparisons to artists like Lucinda Williams and Neko Case. Swift possesses a clear, controlled voice that conveys deep emotional complexity without resorting to melodrama or affectation. The Resurrection Game is both a long-anticipated return, and her first major opportunity to showcase her full talent as an original lyricist and composer - moving beyond her influential covers, to define her own unique artistic space.
in this context, The Resurrection Game is a bold and brilliantly executed pivot and an impressive debut on which Swift now delivers a masterclass in original, dark country-pop underpinned by lyrical bite and deep sincerity.
The songwriting dissects themes of survival, recovery, and rebirth with poetic weight. Tracks are often sparse, allowing her sharp lyrical imagery and nuanced vocal delivery to command attention.
The musicianship too, is exemplary;: arrangements are tastefully executed, featuring subtly placed pedal steel and twangy, atmospheric guitar lines that evoke the desolate beauty of the American South. This is an album of true excellence, confirming Emma Swift as a new and compelling voice in contemporary roots music.
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Lance Ferguson's
Rare Groove Spectrum, Vol. 3
LANCE FERGUSON
Released 21 November 2025
Tru Thoughts
****-
The Bamboo's founder brings a crate-digger's savvy to his antipodean vision of Funk and Soul with an irresistible selection of tracks that honour the originals, but find a new way in.
Few musicians have shaped the sound of modern antipodean funk and soul as decisively as Melbourne / Naarm’s Lance Ferguson. Best known as the creative force behind the legendary The Bamboos, Ferguson has spent more than two decades bridging vintage grooves and contemporary sensibility, through band-leading, production, DJ culture, or soundtrack work.
His Rare Groove Spectrum series is perhaps the purest distillation of his musical DNA: instrumental, beat-driven compositions that nod reverently to 1970s funk, soul-jazz, library music, and disco, without ever lapsing into pastiche. Now on its third volume, the project feels fully lived-in. Vol. 3 is an album that understands groove as a conversation rather than a statement.
Vol. 3 spans his interpretations of ‘70s Australian jazz-funk, Big Band soul breaks, Latin-fusion classics, golden-era funk reworks and a few contemporary Pop classics, with each track filtered through Lance’s deep musical vocabulary and intuitive ear. The rhythms are supple and patient, built on tight drums, elastic basslines, and guitar figures that know exactly when to step forward and when to disappear. Fender Rhodes, clavinet, wah-wah guitar, and subtle horn accents drift in and out, evoking the golden era of crate-digger classics while maintaining a clean, modern punch.
The tracks bear the hallmarks of time-tested compositions, pulled from long-held sources and worked up in locked-away sessions, feel outweighs flash and the primary focus is the groove. Ferguson’s arrangements are economical and richly textured, allowing small details - a rhythmic shift here, a harmonic turn there - to carry the momentum. There’s an understated cinematic quality too, invoking late-night dance floors and soundtracks to long lost films. And throughout respect for the origins of each selection " You’ve got to be reverent, but inventive too” Lance explains.
Confident, deeply informed and irresistibly playable, it’s another essential chapter in Lance Ferguson’s quietly exemplary body of work - and the Melbourne / Naarm funk and soul songbook.
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Blizzard
DOVE ELLIS
Released 5 December 2025
Black Butter / AMF Records
****-
A striking debut defined less by arrival than by the anticipation attached to a young artist of rare vocal and lyrical gravity, standing at the edge of something larger.
Dove Ellis arrives with a level of attention most debut artists can only imagine. UK and Irish press (The Guardian, NME, and others) have been quick to frame him as a singular new voice, praising his emotional intelligence, literary instincts, and commanding vocal presence. Yet Blizzard is not a debut built for instant, crowd-sized catharsis. There are no Hozier-style “Take Me To Church” crescendos, engineered for mass singalongs. Instead, Ellis works inward, favoring intimacy, phrasing and carefully weighted words over declarative hooks.
Vocally, he draws from a deep and eclectic lineage: the theatrical poise of Rufus Wainwright, the exposed ache of Jeff Buckley, the operatic reach of Freddie Mercury, the elastic vulnerability of Thom Yorke, and the conversational earnestness of Glen Hansard. Ellis uses the voice as a dramatic instrument, capable of fragility, force, and confession in equal measure.
Blizzard unfolds like a private performance. Ellis’s elastic, searching and emotionally precise voice is the album’s axis. On “To The Sandals,” his Buckley-like phrasing stretches syllables to their breaking point, conveying yearning without indulgence. “Heaven Has No Wings” leans into theatricality, where flashes of Mercury's grandeur emerge, not bombastically but as controlled release. “Left Little Hope,” by contrast, retreats into Yorke-like unease, its tension carried by breath and hesitation as much as melody.
The writing is consistently thoughtful, often striking, though not always fully resolved and that incompleteness is consistent with the 23-year-old's debut album. Like Buckley's "Live at Sin-é" (1993) - the work of a emerging artist on the cusp of the generational album "Grace" the following year - Blizzard documents the progress of an artist paying due respect to influences, still discovering the full dimensions of his instrument and identity.
Blizzard is not a masterpiece, but that’s its power. It is a debut rich with potential and emotional intelligence, suggesting an artist capable of far greater scope and surprise, once his vision fully coheres.
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Live God
NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS
Released 5 December 2025
PIAS / Bad Seed
****-
A transcendent document of a legendary band's ongoing pilgrimage, this album captures 45 years of fury, faith and hard-earned grace in communal concert.
Nick Cave’s artistic persona is shaped by his Wangaratta childhood, boarding school adolescence and nearly five decades of high-intensity expression, beginning in late 1970s venues like The Crystal Ballroom in St. Kilda (Melbourne) with post-punk firebrands The Boys Next Door (1973-1978) and The Birthday Party (1978-1983), along the way moving to London and Berlin, before braking up. This initial fury transitioned into the gothic, literary thunder of The Bad Seeds, debuting with From Her To Eternity in 1984. Shaped by his passion for influential writers and performers, and profoundly refined by the intense personal experience following the death of his two sons, Cave has latterly evolved from a growling, nihilistic showman into a gospel-tinged, conservative homilist, using performance as a space for shared catharsis and reflection. Through his innovative website The Red Hand Files, he maintains a close and personal conversation with his legions of followers - indeed, devotees - like a parish priest for the digital age.
Live God captures the communal energy of The Bad Seeds’ Wild God Tour, presenting the band at the height of its maturity and emotional command. Unlike a simple souvenir, this double-album is an encapsulation of Cave’s current evolution, like a medicine-show, transforming arenas into houses of worship where "an antidote to despair" is offered.
The track-list is expertly sequenced, threading thunderous early-catalogue favourites like "From Her To Eternity" and "Tupelo" through newer material like "Wild God", all leaning toward uplift and ecstatic release.
The production preserves the raw, immediate feeling of the shows, allowing the band’s dynamics to shift between the feral scrape of Warren Ellis’s violin and the tender, piano-led core of tracks like "Bright Horses" and "I Need You." Cave’s voice oscillates between preacher-like fervor and striking vulnerability. The album’s narrative arc, from confrontation to the consoling grace of the closer "As the Waters Cover the Sea", is a powerful, cohesive story that balances drama with poise, making it both a triumphant affirmation for long-time fans and an incredibly accessible initiation for newcomers.
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The Mumbai Exchange
EX GENERATION
Released 20 November 2024
Energy Exchange Records
****-
A joyful act of cultural time-travel that reanimates vintage Indian pop through contemporary grooves, global beats and deep musical curiosity.
Ex Generation is a fluid, borderless collective shaped by migration, collaboration, and crate-digging imagination. At its core sits drummer and producer Ziggy Zeitgeist, a peripatetic presence across Melbourne, Berlin, and London, whose work consistently bridges scenes rather than genres. For the project he works with Lewis Moody (keys, programming, arranging) and after an extensive digging period through rare and eclectic Bollywood Disco records from the 70s and 80s, the pair set about putting together an A-team of studio musicians versed in both Indian Classical and Bollywood, including award winning vocalists Vinay Sugatha Ramadasan and Anuja Zokarkar.
Known for blending jazz, funk, hip-hop, and global dance forms, Zeitgeist approaches music as an exchange rather than a fusion. On The Mumbai Exchange, that philosophy comes sharply into focus: decades-old Mumbai pop becomes a living source (revived as a collaborator, more than a sample) that is reframed through application of contemporary production, improvisation, beats and affects.
The result is an affectionate pastiche that seeks to wrangle the competing interests of retro kitsch and cultural appropriation against the fertile artistic ground for reinvention.
Drawing from film songs and popular styles of the ’60s through ’80s, Ex Generation lifts melodic motifs, harmonic gestures, and vocal inflections into a modern groove-based context.
Beats are central: crisp, danceable, but never overbearing. Funk basslines, jazz-informed drumming, electronic textures, and live instrumentation coexist fluidly, allowing the original melodies to breathe while giving them renewed momentum. The production resists polish-for-polish’s-sake, retaining the grain and pulse of communal energy.
In this way, a balance is found and the low-gloss tone feels consistent with the original sounds, like a conversation across time and geography.
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Songbook
KENNY BARRON
Released 14 November 2025
Artwork Records
****-
A joyful, generous celebration of a living legend, placing Barron’s writing in vibrant conversation with today’s finest jazz vocalists.
Few pianists have shaped modern jazz as quietly and enduringly as Kenny Barron. Across six decades, his touch has graced countless classic recordings, his influence felt as much in harmony as in feel. Central to his language are the famed “Kenny Barron voicings”: warm, mid-register chords that sound full without heaviness, subtly shifting beneath melodies to create lift, tenderness and forward motion.
Songbook brings Barron and his long-standing trio - Kiyoshi Kitagawa (bass) and Johnathan Blake (drums) - in contact with an exceptional cast of contemporary vocalists, offering a living, breathing portrait of his compositional world.
Each vocalist brings a distinct lens to Barron’s writing and the album’s pleasure lies in hearing how naturally his music adapts.
Cécile McLorin Salvant is a commanding presence. Her performances on “Thoughts and Dreams,” “Sunshower,” and “Song for Abdullah” are steeped in poise and emotional depth. Jean Baylor lends warmth and directness to “Beyond This Place” and “Until Then,” while Ann Hampton Callaway’s “Cook’s Bay” sparkles with classic elegance.
Elsewhere, Kurt Elling swings conversationally on “In the Slow Lane,” Catherine Russell gives “Minor Blues Redux” earthy bite and Tyreek McDole brings theatrical flair to “Calypso” and “Marie Laveau.”
Throughout, Barron’s piano is the quiet constant, his voicings cushioning the singers, nudging harmony and never crowding the line. The trio keeps everything buoyant and alive.
Songbook is legacy work done right: generous, contemporary and full of joy; inviting the present in and it responds beautifully.
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There Is Beauty, There Already
SARATHY KORWAR
Released 7 November 2025
Otherland Records
****-
This searching, humane, and quietly radical work finds Korwar refining his cross-cultural vision into something tender, spacious, and deeply present.
Sarathy Korwar has emerged as one of the most thoughtful voices at the intersection of jazz, South Asian classical music, and contemporary experimental practice. Trained in both tabla and jazz percussion, and shaped by years in London’s boundary-pushing scene, Korwar has consistently resisted easy notions of “fusion.” His previous work, from Day to Day (2016) through More Arriving (2019), KALAK (202) and KAL (Real World) (2023), treats rhythm as a social and philosophical force, as much about listening and coexistence as propulsion.
There Is Beauty, There Already is a recalibration. “The album is me finding my voice as a composer again and going back to the thing I know best, which is the drums,” Korwar says.
Less overtly political than some earlier releases, it turns inward without retreating from the world, exploring stillness, patience, and collective resonance. It reflects an artist comfortable with ambiguity, allowing ideas to unfold rather than assert themselves.
Korwar’s rhythmic approach is subtle and elastic, often implied rather than stated, allowing melodic fragments, drones, and harmonic textures to float freely. The music draws gently on Indian classical modalities, jazz harmony, and ambient pacing, yet never foregrounds its sources; instead, it inhabits the space between them.
The standout feature is the album’s emotional temperature. Rather than striving for drama or virtuosity, it privileges presence. Repetition becomes meditative rather than insistent; improvisation feels conversational, even communal. Moments of quiet beauty accumulate slowly, almost imperceptibly, until their weight becomes undeniable.
The production enhances this intimacy, preserving breath, decay, and micro-detail. Nothing feels crowded, nothing rushed. It is music that rewards sustained attention rather than immediate impact.
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Pequena Vertigem de Amor
SESSA
Released 7 November 2025
Mexican Summer
****-
A warm, heartfelt and gently funky meditation on love, fatherhood and the vertigo of life. This is the most universal and emotionally alive record of Sessa's emerging career.
Sessa (São Paulo–based stylist Sérgio Sayeg) has steadily expanded his musical vision across three albums, moving from earthy, intimate desire on Grandeza (2019) through personal romantic longing Estrela Acesa (2022) to something broader and deeply human with this new release, which translates to something like "Love’s Gentle Vertigo".
Sayeq's experience becoming a father has reshaped his songwriting - themes of love, responsibility, awe and the sublime smallness of being alive inform every track. Musically, he blends Brazilian soul / samba-jazz heritage with laid-back funk, soft psychedelia and nocturnal grooves, crafting a sound both rooted and exploratory. Pequena Vertigem de Amor flows like a breeze: it is warm and slightly hazy, gently swaying between melancholy and hope. The arrangements are lush but never heavy: wah-wah guitars, electric piano, soft percussion, subtle strings and brushed bass combine with Sessa’s hushed, contemplative vocals. This new instrumentation broadens his palette beyond previous guitar-centric works, allowing for richer textures and deeper emotional nuance.
Highlights include “Vale a Pena”, which shimmers with intimate joy, as a rare Suette electric piano underpins Sessa’s soft croon and a chorus of female backing vocals adds warmth and communal resonance. “Dodói” swings with gentle funk and soulful rhythm, mixing playful bass and percussion with understated strings, capturing the mix of vulnerability and resilience that often defines parenthood and maturity. Meanwhile “Nome de Deus” and “Bicho Lento” weave samba-jazz, soul and pan-American influences to explore existential and spiritual longing with elegance and restraint. Lyrically and emotionally, the album feels grounded: there’s humility in the melodies, acceptance in the harmonies, and a sense of wonder in the spaces between. Although this music doesn’t demand attention, it nonetheless invites immersion.
Pequena Vertigem de Amor is Sessa’s most fully realized album to date: tender, soulful, and resonant. It’s a record about love, transformation, and the vertigo of growing up, not just as an artist, but as a human.
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Time Passes
JONES, ROBERTSON, GOULD
Released 14 November 2025
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
****-
A masterclass in lyricism and restraint — Time Passes finds three Australian jazz elders speaking softly, deeply, and with profound mutual trust.
Pianist Tony Gould, bassist Ben Robertson, and guitarist David Jones are among Australia’s most respected jazz musicians, each with decades of experience across performance, composition, and education. Individually, their careers span modern jazz, chamber-inflected improvisation, and collaborative work with leading local and international artists. Together, they form a trio defined not only by virtuosity but by attentiveness, patience, and shared musical values. Time Passes captures this collective maturity; an album shaped by long friendships, deep stylistic understanding and a preference for nuance over showiness.
From the opening moments if Time Passes, it’s clear that this trio operates on a finely tuned internal logic, every note considered, nothing overstated. Tempos tend toward the reflective, allowing melody and harmony to breathe. The absence of drums creates open space for musical exchanges.
Gould’s piano anchors the set: his trademark clarity and harmonic poise, offers gentle provocations. Robertson’s bass is supple, melodic, and deeply grounded. Jones’ guitar adds warmth and elegance, walking the line between lead voice and harmonic support.
The album unfolds as a series of thoughtful exchanges - unhurried, reflective and richly musical. A quietly outstanding contribution to contemporary Australian jazz.
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By All Means
AARON PARKS
BEN SOLOMAN, BEN STREET, BILLY HART
Released 7 November 2025
Blue Note
****-
A warm, confident return to straight-ahead jazz by a master of melodic clarity, with an expanded four piece ensemble.
Since his breakout with Invisible Cinema (2008), pianist Aaron Parks has charted one of the most distinct trajectories in 21st-century jazz. Equally at home in intricate post-bop, atmospheric chamber-jazz, folk-inflected impressionism and the patient lyricism of his ECM-era work, Parks has long demonstrated a rare gift for melodic clarity and a capacity to make even the most harmonically complex writing feel welcoming.
For this release Parks has expanded his acclaimed trio with bassist Ben Street and drummer Billy Hart into a quartet with the addition of tenor saxophonist Ben Solomon, allowing them to explore a new color palette.
By All Means opens with relaxed assurance: concise themes, clean lines, and a quartet sound that privileges clarity over abstraction. "By All Means" and “Parks Lope” swing with easy propulsion, Parks offering elegant, economical phrasing while Hart and Street create a supple rhythmic bed. Throughout the album, Solomon’s tenor provides a warm, centered counterweight to Parks’s lyricism. “For María José,” a dedication to Parks’s wife, is the record’s emotional centerpiece, a ballad rendered with remarkable poise and patience. “Little River,” written for Parks’s son, unfolds as a gentle 3/4 lullaby - tender without sentimentality, its melody shaped with the same deliberate restraint that marks his best acoustic work. Even the more assertive pieces avoid flash. What stands out is the quartet’s trust, the sense of musicians listening deeply and shaping the music together.
This is Parks at his most direct - unadorned and confident enough to let the writing and playing speak plainly. The result is graceful, mature, and quietly radiant album that reminds us why his acoustic voice remains one of the most expressive in contemporary jazz.
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The Arboretum (EP)
ALEX ALBRECHT
Released 7 November 2025
Butter Sessions
***--
A smooth, tasteful, and impeccably refined palette of late-night grooves, ultimately undone by its own insistence.
Alex Albrecht has built a reputation for polished, cosmopolitan electronic music that draws equally from deep house, downtempo, jazz-funk, and modern beat culture. His work often favors atmosphere over narrative, placing sonic texture and rhythmic momentum at the center. The Arboretum, a five-track EP, continues this trajectory, presenting a suite of mellow, sophisticated grooves designed for after-hours listening as much as for the dance floor.
There is clear craft at play: harmonic choices are elegant, synth tones are warm and tastefully restrained, and the overall mix is clean and confident. Albrecht understands how to create a mood and sustain it. The question The Arboretum raises is not whether he can do this, but how long that mood can hold without variation.
From its opening moments, The Arboretum establishes a sleek, nocturnal atmosphere. Lush pads, jazzy chord voicings, and gently looping motifs glide with ease, suggesting a producer deeply fluent in modern groove aesthetics. On individual tracks, this works well: the melodies are inviting, the sound design thoughtful, and the harmonic movement subtly satisfying.
The issue lies in the drums. Each track is driven by a relentless, synthesized beat mixed front and center, leaving little room for dynamic contrast or release. In a club setting, this insistence might be energizing, even necessary, but across five tracks it becomes fatiguing. The grooves never quite loosen, never step back, never allow the surrounding textures to breathe fully.
As a result, what could have been a varied and immersive EP feels overly uniform, its sophistication dulled by rhythmic over-commitment.
The Arboretum is stylish and assured, with moments of real beauty, but its insistence on constant, inescapable beats limits its emotional range. A promising release that hints at greater depth should Albrecht allow space, silence, and contrast to play a larger role next time.
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Keys To The City
Volume One
ROBERT GLASPER
Released 10 October 2025
Loma Vista Recordings
****-
A reflective homecoming that reconnects a modern Master with jazz’s core values, while keeping the door open to the streets beyond.
Few musicians have reshaped modern jazz as decisively as Robert Glasper. Equally fluent in straight-ahead piano trio language, hip-hop, R&B, neo-soul, and experimental collaboration, he has spent the past two decades dissolving boundaries between jazz and contemporary Black music. From the acoustic elegance of Canvas to the genre-defining impact of Black Radio, Glasper has consistently treated jazz as a living, social art form.
Keys To The City, Volume One signals a recalibration rather than a retreat, a return to the piano-led intimacy that first established his voice, reframed through the perspective of an artist who has already expanded the field.
Keys To The City, Volume One feels like Glasper taking stock. The album is rooted in acoustic jazz language, where piano, bass, drums carry the rhythmic elasticity and harmonic sensibility he’s developed through years of cross-genre exploration. There’s space here, and patience: grooves settle rather than snap, melodies unfold conversationally, and improvisation favours flow over flash.
What stands out is Glasper’s touch. His voicings remain plush and harmonically adventurous, but they’re deployed with restraint, often allowing rhythm and silence to shape the music as much as notes. Even when the pulse leans toward hip-hop-inflected swing, the emphasis is on feel rather than fusion.
This is also an album of partnerships, in which the stellar array of talent - Thundercat, Meshell Ndegeocello, Norah Jones, Black Thought among others - offer sublime, collaborative performances, seamlessly bridging Jazz, Funk, R&B, and Hip-Hop.
This is not a manifesto album, celebrity star-turn or nostalgia exercise. Instead, it reads as the first chapter in a longer reflection, a grounded, quietly confident statement that reconnects Glasper with the piano trio as a site of ongoing discovery.
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Shy Girl
HOLLIE COOK
Released 10 October 2025
Mr Bongo
****-
Sunlit and self-assured — Shy Girl refines Hollie Cook’s lovers rock vision into her warmest, most confident album yet.
Hollie Cook has long been one of the most distinctive voices in modern reggae and lovers rock. First emerging from London’s punk and ska-adjacent circles, she quickly carved out her own space by drawing deeply on Jamaican vocal traditions while filtering them through a contemporary, pop-aware lens. Across successive albums, Cook has balanced sweetness with steel, a voice that floats lightly while carrying emotional weight. Shy Girl arrives as a moment of consolidation: an artist fully at ease with her sound, her collaborators, and the understated power of restraint.
Shy Girl glows with ease and intention. Built on classic lovers rock foundations, supple basslines, gently skanking guitars, and unhurried tempos. the album never feels retrograde. Instead, it radiates a relaxed modernity, where space, tone, and feel matter more than ornament.
Cook’s voice is the centre of attention: soft but assured, intimate without fragility. She sings of love, independence, vulnerability, and self-possession with a calm confidence that gives the album its emotional coherence. The arrangements are immaculately judged, allowing melodies to breathe and grooves to settle deep into the pocket.
What’s most striking is the album’s balance. It’s romantic without sentimentality, breezy without being lightweight. Each track feels considered, yet nothing sounds laboured. Shy Girl doesn’t chase attention, it earns it through warmth, consistency, and quiet charm.
Shy Girl is a beautifully poised release, understated, soulful, and deeply listenable. Hollie Cook continues to prove that lovers rock, in the right hands, remains a living, evolving form.
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Exile
CHRONIXX
Released 10 October 2025
Forever Living Originals
****-
Rooted yet restless; expanding modern reggae’s emotional and political horizons without losing its spiritual centre.
Chronixx has been one of the defining voices of reggae’s 21st-century survival (“revival” just seems too strong a word for it) while consistently pushing beyond it's traditional limits. Deeply grounded in Rastafarian philosophy, classic roots, and from the Jamaican musical lineage, he has embraced hip-hop, soul, Afrobeat and global pop influences with apparent ease. Rather than modernising reggae through the technological gloss of production, Exile, his most expansive and reflective work to date, reshapes it from within, by preserving its moral gravity and inviting new rhythmic, melodic, and thematic possibilities.
Exile is an album about displacement - cultural, spiritual, emotional - and the search for grounding in a fragmented world. Musically, one-drop rhythms sit alongside looser, hybrid grooves; warm analog textures coexist with contemporary production sheen. The result is fluid rather than fused.
Lyrically, Chronixx is introspective and searching, more witness than preacher as he addresses alienation, responsibility, and resilience with calm conviction. His remains a quietly compelling voice is always measured, melodic in protest, praise or prayer.
Exile confirms Chronixx as more than a revivalist for reggae, but as one of its most thoughtful contemporary architects.
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The Sirens
SHOLTO
Released 21 November 2025
DeepMatter Records
****-
A luminous, shape-shifting debut that drifts between folk intimacy and art-pop curiosity, guided by mood, melody, and quiet invention.
Sholto emerges as a distinctive new voice in the increasingly porous space between folk, indie-pop, and experimental songcraft. Rooted in acoustic tradition but drawn to texture and atmosphere, his music feels less concerned with genre than with emotional temperature. There’s a clear lineage here - echoes of British folk revivalism, chamber-pop delicacy, and contemporary ambient-pop but Sholto’s defining trait is restraint. He builds songs patiently, allowing timbre, space, and subtle harmonic shifts to do the expressive work.
The Sirens introduces an artist interested in nuance and confident enough to let songs unfold at their own pace. It is an album that invites close listening. Its songs feel gently suspended, shaped by soft acoustic figures, understated electronics, and vocals that favour intimacy over projection. Sholto’s voice sits lightly in the mix, almost confessional, often functioning as another texture rather than a dominating presence.
The record’s emotional pull lies in its ambiguity. Lyrics suggest longing, warning, and attraction, which is only fitting for an album named after mythic figures of seduction and danger, but they’re never over-explained. Instead, meaning accumulates through repetition, atmosphere, and carefully judged arrangement choices. Folk guitar lines blur into ambient washes; pop melodies surface briefly before dissolving again.
Sholto announces himself not with noise, but with poise, suggesting an artist attuned to the long game rather than quick impact.
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soft shakes
GO KUROKAWA
Released 5 September 2025
Guruguru Brain
****-
A playful debut of psych-folk, krautrock rhythms and intimate, transitional grooves.
Go Kurosawa is best known as the drummer and vocalist for the revered Japanese psychedelic group Kikagaku Moyo, a band he co-founded and whose decade-long tenure shaped the global psych underground. Beyond his percussive work, Kurosawa is also the head of the essential independent label Guruguru Brain, dedicated to showcasing experimental music from Asia.
Following Kikagaku Moyo's 2022 disbandment, Kurosawa turned inward, producing soft shakes entirely by himself. Recorded in Rotterdam, this self-produced debut serves as a sonic farewell to Europe before his move back to Fukuoka, Japan, capturing a moment of personal and geographical transition.
For Ko, the record feels like the closing of one chapter and the beginning of another: “Now I’m excited to build a studio in Japan and start again. I don’t know what will come next, but I want it to be shaped and influenced by new surroundings.” Hence, soft shakes is less of a grand statement and more of a spontaneous, multi-instrumental sketchbook that shifts seamlessly between genres, combining psych-rock meanderings, folk-edged strumming and motorik beats. Highlights include the off-kilter Brazilian "Soredesho?", the driving Krautrock loop of "Autowalk", the buoyant horn and vocal swagger of "Jungle Cooking," and the fuzz-heavy electric guitar climax on closer "Cloud Rock", a reminder of Kurosawa's heavy psych roots.
The music is layered, rhythmic, and delightfully destressed, as Ko trades the collective improvisation of his former band for the intimate freedom of solitude. The sparse, textural vocals and acoustic foundations lend the album a deep sense of longing and softness, echoing the artist's feeling of "moving towards a far away home."
It is a beautiful, personal first step into a new chapter.
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LA NOCHE
RADIO TARIFA
Released 26 September 2025
Buda Musique / Radio Tarifa
****-
A magnificent return and reimagining of the Spanish trio's visionary sound, from this intersection of global cultures, histories and geographies.
Hailing from the tiny coastal town in Southern Spain, in sight of (and just a short ferry ride across the Straights of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco, Radio Tarifa draws upon the rich and colourful heritage of one of the world's most interesting geographical, historical and cultural junctions.
The region's musical inheritance spans Spanish, Arabic, Sephardic, medieval and Afro-Mediterranean traditions. Rather than fusing genres as they exist today, the group’s founding trio, comprising multi-instrumentalists Sánchez Dueñas, Vincent Molino and the late Benjamín Escoriza, sought to recover a shared Iberian-Mediterranean past: an imagined continuum of traditions that might have evolved together, had history taken a different turn.
Now, as a duo, Radio Tarifa returns with a late-career gem to add to their portfolio of five previous albums: Rumba Argelina (1993), Temporal (1998), Cruzando el Río (2000), Fiebre (2003) and !Alevanta! (2006).
Working independently, without a label, Dueñas shaped the album from his small home studio in Hamburg, integrating wind parts recorded remotely by Molino in Madrid and building arrangements with extraordinary care.
La Noche, completed between 2022 and 2024 honors the memory of the departed Benjamin Escoriza. And at its heart lies a remarkable gift: an unreleased 2003 recording of Escoriza singing the title track. Around this nucleus, Dueñas and Molino invited a constellation of singers and musicians from Spain, Greece, Japan, North Africa to contribute to what emerges as a border-crossing songbook of the possible Iberias that live in memory, imagination, and migration.
The recovered voice of Benjamín Escoriza on the title track is breathtaking: urgent, cracked, incandescent. Dueñas surrounds him with electric guitar, Casio VL-Tone, hand percussion, and violin lines that flicker between Andalusia and the Maghreb, anchoring the album’s emotional core. From there, the record blossoms outward. Javi Castrillón’s flamenco grit on “Me Preguntas,” “Tarantos,” and “Soleá del desamor” brings muscular immediacy; José González’s Greek traditional songs (“Sabah,” “Ay ojos negros”) form a bridge to the Eastern Mediterranean; Blanca Paloma’s crystalline voice illuminates “La niña del almendro viejo” and Landini’s medieval “Quel sol che raggia,” revealing the early-music lineage that underpins the band’s identity.
Drawing variously from Japanese folk (“Sakura”), Moroccan and Levantine timbres, banjo, ud, nay, guimbri, oboe, the album is eclectic yet coherent, unified by Dueñas’s deeply felt arrangements and Molino’s unmistakable wind writing. Every track feels like an invitation to another time and another shore.
La Noche is a triumph: emotionally rich, historically imaginative, and musically daring. An essential, radiant masterpiece.
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Real Warmth
JOAN SHELLEY
Released 19 September 2025
No Quarter Records
****-
A quiet masterclass that delivers profound emotional resonance through hushed arrangements and restrained, yet intensely personal, songwriting.
Joan Shelley is a critically acclaimed singer-songwriter from Kentucky, known for a unique, modern interpretation of American folk tradition. Her music is defined by striking intimacy and a commitment to elegant restraint, where her dusky, often whispered vocals and intricate acoustic guitar work take precedence over instrumental flourish. She has been praised for the literary quality of her lyrics, which often draw on themes of nature, domestic life and hard-won optimism. Shelley’s ability to communicate profound emotion through subtlety: a style most resembles Sandy Denny, but touches on aspects of Joni Mitchell, Bill Callahan, Gillian Welch and Laura Marling and has earned her collaborations with figures like Bonnie "Prince" Billy and appearances on major platforms like Fresh Air.
Real Warmth is Joan Shelley's seventh album and a perfect distillation of her celebrated style. Recorded in the snowy quiet of Toronto with producer Ben Whiteley (The Weather Station), the atmosphere of gentle isolation permeates the 13 tracks. The title is fitting; this is an album that radiates intimacy, built on delicate fingerpicking and sparse, communal arrangements featuring members of the Toronto music scene. Tracks like "Everybody" and the expansive "Here in the High and Low" showcase her mastery of building immense emotional weight from simple, repetitive phrases.
While many contemporary vocalists prioritize dynamic power, Shelley finds her strength in vulnerability, urging the listener to lean in and absorb the hard-won wisdom contained within her lyrics. The result is a collection that feels deeply personal, offering a comforting, necessary antidote to the frantic pace of the modern world. This album is a triumph of folk minimalism.
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Armageddon In A Summer Dress
SUNNY WAR
Released 21 February 2025
C&P, New West Records
****-
A collection of fearless, beguiling & engaging songs that turn episodes of personal and political chaos into defiant, soulful clarity.
Sunny War has quietly become one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American roots music. Emerging from Los Angeles’ DIY punk and folk circuits, she blends fingerstyle blues, old-time folk, gospel, and protest song with an unflinching lyrical gaze. Her music has always balanced toughness and tenderness, shaped by lived experience rather than nostalgia. What sets War apart is her refusal to aestheticise struggle: she sings plainly, plays economically, and trusts songs to carry hard truths without adornment. Over successive albums, her writing has grown sharper and more expansive, positioning her as a vital bridge between traditional folk idioms and modern social realism.
Armageddon In A Sunny Dress is Sunny War’s most assured and expansive statement yet, an album that stares down chaos with grace. Musically, it widens her palette without diluting her core: acoustic blues remains the foundation, but it’s enriched with gospel harmonies, subtle rhythm section work and flashes of soul and roots-rock warmth.
Lyrically, War balances the intimate and the apocalyptic. Songs wrestle with addiction, injustice, spiritual exhaustion, and survival, yet they’re delivered with a lightness of touch that makes them inviting rather than oppressive. Her voice - conversational, slightly raspy, quietly resolute - carries extraordinary emotional authority. Even when addressing systemic collapse or personal demons, she sounds grounded, present, and humane.
The title captures the album’s power perfectly: beauty and catastrophe coexist, neither cancelling the other out. These songs don’t promise redemption, but they insist on dignity, connection, and the possibility of joy amid ruin.
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Teeth of Time
JOSHUA BURNSIDE
Released 29 February 2025
Nettwerk Music
*****
An expansive and emotionally precise collection that pushes folk music's boundaries of permission with music that is restless, intimate, and quietly unsettling.
Belfast-based songwriter Joshua Burnside has steadily carved out a singular lane in contemporary folk, one where tradition, electronics, and introspective songwriting coexist without hierarchy. Like Wilco and Americana, Burnside treats folk not as a preservation project but as raw material: something to be stretched, destabilised, and reassembled without losing its emotional centre.
Rooted in fingerpicked guitar and regional storytelling, Burnside's work has increasingly absorbed ambient textures, subtle beats, and a modern sense of space. It sits comfortably alongside international alt-folk standouts like Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens, but retains a brogue-like authentic Irish-ness. His songs are often personal without being confessional, shaped by place, memory, and emotional drift rather than narrative resolution.
With Teeth of Time, he deepens this hybrid approach, sounding more assured in his ability to let songs breathe while still retaining a strong melodic core. It’s a record that reflects maturity without smoothing away uncertainty.
Teeth of Time unfolds with a gentle but persistent pull. Bizarrely - and humorously - the title track opens proceedings with a sampled vintage waterbed advertisement, before settling into a trademark, rambling rumination on the passing of time: "The truth is I’ve only been, concerned with my own wee life / With making a quid or two, or three on a good night / The truth is we fucked it up, and every inch of it / We sold for cheap so you’ll have to fight / To get it back". Acoustic guitar remains Burnside's musical anchor, but it’s surrounded by understated electronic elements - soft pulses, blurred loops, atmospheric shading - that subtly alter the emotional temperature of each track. Burnside’s voice, intimate and unforced, sits close in the mix, lending the songs a confiding quality. Lyrically, the album circles around impermanence, distance, and quiet reckoning. Rather than dramatic climaxes, Burnside favors gradual accumulation: melodies repeat, phrases return, meanings deepen through familiarity. There’s a mild unease running beneath the surface, as if the songs are always slightly unsettled - fitting for an album preoccupied with time’s erosion. The production is clean but not glossy, preserving texture and breath.
Once again with this release, folk tradition is present, but refracted through a contemporary lens that feels thoughtful rather than fashionable. Burnside isn’t modernising Irish folk so much as expanding its expressive range - proving it can accommodate doubt, darkness, and experimentation without losing its soul.
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Black Thunder
BRITTANY DAVIS
Released 13 June 2025
Loosegroove Records
****-
Raw, spiritual jazz that transforms grief, identity and cultural memory that is fierce, cathartic and deeply human,
In this June 2025 release, Brittany Davis, a Seattle-based pianist and vocalist who has been blind since birth, steped into bolder terrain. Rather than relying on programmed beats and studio polish (as in her previous work), she joined with bassist Evan Flory‑Barnes and drummer/percussionist D’Vonne Lewis for a fully live, free-form session, improvised over just two days and forged in vulnerability.
The result is a deeply Afrocentric, spiritually charged album that draws on jazz, soul, spoken word and ancestral memory, as Davis’s courageously confronts personal and collective pain in celebration of resilience and identity.
Black Thunder is as much a ritual as an album. It opens with “All You Get,” a piano-led groove that settles into hypnotic pulses and invites Davis’s voice - alternatively mournful and fierce - as she confronts social inequities and self-worth. That tension surfaces throughout: “Amid the Blackout of the Night” offers a plaintive meditation on blindness and longing, using soft piano and bass to reach for cosmic clarity.
Moments of rawness, in the form of spoken-word fragments, claps and chants, punctuate the music, especially on the title track “Black Thunder,”, as ancestral memory and natural elements (rain, soil, thunder) merge into an urgent, earthy invocation.
Meanwhile, on “Mirrors” and “Sarah’s Song,” Davis grapples with body image, identity, and generational trauma, often with heartbreaking honesty.
Yet the album never abandons hope. The closing piece, “Sun and Moon,” feels like a gentle exhale, finding a path between light and darkness, acceptance and transcendence.
Black Thunder is a bold, emotionally unflinching statement. More than jazz or soul, it embraces ancestral confession, protest, healing, and rebirth. For listeners ready for honesty, depth, and spiritual resonance, this is essential listening.
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