2025 Year's Best New Albums

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Nilam

GANAVYA

Released 23 May 2025

LEITER

*****

A meditative journey through Tamil spiritual traditions and ambient minimalism.

Ganavya Doraiswamy is a New York-born, Tamil Nadu-raised vocalist and transdisciplinary artist whose work bridges South Indian classical traditions, spiritual jazz, and ambient minimalism. A Fulbright scholar and Berklee-trained musician, she has collaborated with artists like Shabaka Hutchings, Floating Points, and Sault. Her 2024 album Daughter of a Temple was named one of The Guardian’s Top 10 Global Albums, praised for its communal resonance and spiritual depth. Ganavya’s music often draws from Tamil devotional forms, such as abhangs and bhajans, reinterpreted through contemporary experimental frameworks. Her voice—described by The New York Times as “prayerful”—anchors her genre-defying explorations of identity, grief, and transcendence.
Nilam, meaning “land” in Tamil, is Ganavya’s most intimate and elemental work to date. Co-produced with Nils Frahm at Berlin’s Funkhaus, the album emerged serendipitously during a brief pause between tour dates. The result is a meditative suite that feels both grounded and otherworldly, a sonic space where stillness becomes a form of resistance.
The album opens with “Land,” a sparse invocation that sets the tone for what follows: songs that unfold like prayers, rooted in Tamil spiritual traditions yet filtered through ambient minimalism. “Pasayadan,” an abhang from the pilgrimage tradition, is reimagined as a hymn for collective healing, while “Nine Jeweled Prayer,” featuring her parents, stretches into a nearly ten-minute meditation on ancestral memory.

Ganavya’s voice is the album’s anchor—soft yet unyielding, intimate yet expansive. Tracks like “Sees Fire,” inspired by her social media ban for advocating a ceasefire in Gaza, channel political grief into quiet defiance. Throughout, harpist Charles Overton and bassist Max Ridley provide subtle textures that enhance the album’s contemplative mood.

Nilam doesn’t seek to dazzle; it invites listeners into a shared stillness, offering a space for reflection and grounding. It’s a powerful reminder that in a world of noise, silence can be a profound act of presence.

Read more ... Bandcamp | LEITER | Boomkat

Paradise Now

Paradise Now & Forever

OBONGJAYAR

Released 30 May / 20 November 2025

September Recordings / Obongjayar

*****

A confident, genre-expanding manifesto in which the reggae auteur embraces inner peace and self-acceptance through electro-pop and Afrobeat fire.

Steven Umoh, better known as Obongjayar, is a Nigerian-born, London-based multi-genre artist whose unique vocal delivery shifts effortlessly between spoken word, haunting falsetto and raspy growls. His music too, is a rich tapestry, fusing Afrobeat, soul, punk and electronic elements. With deeply personal and politically charged lyrics address identity, grief, and resilience, his profile rose sharply following his Ivor Novello-nominated album "Some Nights I Dream of Doors" (2022) and "adore you" a platinum-selling collaboration with Fred Again...

"Paradise Now", Obongjayar’s sophomore effort finds him achieving the mental and musical clarity hinted at in his earlier work, defining his own concept of "paradise" as a place of inner peace and total self-acceptance. Shedding the pressure to constantly innovate, the artist delivers a joyous, 15-track manifesto of "no rules, total freedom."

The album brilliantly navigates genre, setting intimate storytelling against elaborate but clean production - collaborative effort between various producers, including Kwes Darko (UK), Yeti Beats (US), and Beach Noise (US), taking place in both London and Los Angeles.

High points include"Holy Mountain", an infectious blend of Afrobeat and indie pop, the furious political indictment on the drum-and-bass-infused single "Jellyfish" and the sharp, spirited lyrical interplay with frequent collaborator Little Simz on "Talk Olympics." Whether riding the sultry guitars of "Sweet Danger" or delivering raw affirmations on "Born In This Body," Obongjayar crafts a focused, kaleidoscopic world that captures the anxiety of the present moment while wholeheartedly embracing the future.

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Devotion & The Black Divine

ANAIIS

Released 26 September 2025

Dream Sequence Recordings / 5dB

*****

Her richest work yet - an inspirational meditation on motherhood, uncertainty and self-respect, in which vulnerability and sonic exploration are held in exquisite, graceful tension.

anaiis (French-Senegalese, based in London) has steadily built a voice in alternative R&B / indie soul characterised by intimacy, nuance, and cultural multiplicity. Devotion & The Black Divine marks a new chapter in her artistry, deeply shaped by her journey into motherhood and by a willingness to relinquish perfection. Recorded live to tape at 5dB Studios with frequent collaborator Josh Grant, with additional songwriting contributions from Jay Prince, Jesse Singer, Alex Cosmo Blake and Sam Crowe, the album holds a wide emotional range without losing its centre. Anaiis writes from both internal and collective worlds, pushing to the edges of her comfort zone while embracing acceptance, change, and the unpredictable.

Devotion & The Black Divine begins with “Something Is Broken”, a raw, emotionally charged overture setting the tone of openness and unguarded vulnerability, which is extended by the astonishing "Deus Deus", it's smooth sway adding a prayer of thanks to the Divine.

The first of four short, spoken-word interludes, "freedom of dreaming" follows, and features a spoken word quotation from American poet Adrienne Maree Brown "That's the constant quest of the dreamer: to learn how to fly, yes, but more than that, to learn how to change, again, and again, and again".

Accordingly, in "Dreamer Too" anaiis confirms "I’m a dreamer, You’re a dreamer too, we make the mountains move".

With fluttering synths and heavy bassline, “Moonlight”, rounds out an inspirational opening quintet of songs, telling a story of the path to achieving life's ambitions and those who follow “you've got every reason / To wanna reach the stars / You need ask no permission / Be yourself from the start".

Judiciously, the album's inspirational narrative arc then pivots towards songs of relationships and affection with "In Real Time" "Call Me (a) (B)" "Here Comes The Sun", before a second interlude is heard from Adrienne Maree Brown who declares "Freedom is an act of togetherness".

From this point anaiis' gentle, inspirational songs alternate with affirmative poetic interludes - from American artist and filmmaker Jas'Tovia Gary and UK poet, writer, clinical psychologist and educator Sanah Ahsan.
The gorgeously melodic “My World (Beyond)” brings warmth, strength of character and quiet revelation in equal measure to lyrics in a love song to motherhood.

Breathy vocals, psychedelic bells and deep grooves dominate “Green Juice”, a lingering love song caught between memory and longing.

Appropriately, the album concludes with the optimistic lyrics of "Bright Lights" reaching toward healing and illumination: “Gotta believe that fate is on your side... loving unconditional / together we can grow”.

Warner Classics / Parlophone Records

anaiis

5dB

Hymns of Bantu

ABEL SELAOCOE

Released 21 February 2025

Parlophone Records

Warner Classics

*****

Bridging continents and centuries, weaving African traditions with classical mastery in a transcendent musical journey.

Abel Selaocoe is a South African cellist, vocalist, and composer adept at blending classical cello with traditional African music. His innovative style incorporates throat singing and improvisation - a unique fusion that transcends genres. Selaocoe's work celebrates cultural heritage while pushing the boundaries of classical music.
Hymns of Bantu is Abel Selaocoe's sophomore album, following his acclaimed debut Where Is Home (Hae Ke Kae) (2022). This album is a profound exploration of identity, ancestry, and musical fusion. Selaocoe masterfully intertwines South African traditional music with Western classical pieces, creating a tapestry that is both deeply personal and universally resonant.

Warner Records

Abel Selaocoe

"Four Spirits" (Live)

ABEL SELAOCOE

AURORA ORCHESTRA, NICHOLAS COLLON

BERNHARD SCHIMPELSBERGER

Released 15 August 2025

*****

In a career-defining synthesis of tradition, identity and performance, Salacoe has devised a concerto that sings and roars, stomps and soars beyond the boundaries of the classical form.

Four Spirits (Live) captures the premiere of Selaocoe’s 2024 concerto for cello and orchestra, performed with the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon, joined by percussionist Bernhard Schimpelsberger. The work’s architecture reflects Selaocoe’s deep-rooted duality: an instinctive grounding in African rhythms and vocalizations interwoven with the dynamic tension of Western orchestral forces.

The four movements, each representing a distinct “spirit,” move from meditative stillness to ecstatic release. The result is a work that challenges the European concerto tradition by reshaping it into a vessel for cultural meeting—part ritual, part celebration, wholly alive.

Warner Classics

Abel Selaocoe

After The Last Sky

ANOUAR BRAHEM

Released 28 March 2025

ECM

*****

Not just music to admire - this is music to keep close at hand, to play repeatedly and to live with.

Across three decades of transcendent recordings, Tunisian oud virtuoso Anouar Brahem has sculpted one of the most distinctive voices in global music. Seamlessly blending Arab classical tradition with jazz, chamber music, and folk motifs, Brahem's work resists categorization while honoring the spirit of each influence.

Like Rabih Abou-Khalil, Jan Garbarek, or Shakti, he has forged a luminous musical language that speaks across borders - not through bombast, but with quiet intensity and lyrical precision. His contributions to ECM’s catalog are among its most meditative and enduring, each album a self-contained world of restrained beauty.

After the Last Sky extends this legacy with grace and subtle innovation. Reuniting with cellist Anja Lechner and bassist Dave Holland - two of his most attuned collaborators - and joined by the elusive Django Bates on piano, Brahem crafts a sequence of ruminative, spacious compositions that shimmer with emotional depth.

The album's title suggests loss, aftermath, and imagination beyond boundaries; the music answers with reflection, melancholy, and moments of crystalline hope. Lechner’s cello entwines with the oud like vines on a wind-carved ruin, while Holland and Bates provide rhythmic architecture that never constrains, only uplifts.

What makes After the Last Sky special, even within Brahem’s consistently excellent body of work, is its balance of familiarity and risk. The interplay feels lived-in yet unafraid to explore. Each note is deliberate, unhurried, and emotionally charged. As always, silence is his greatest ally.

More ... ECM

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Lotus

LITTLE SIMZ

Released 6 June 2025

Little Simz, AWAL Recordings

*****

Delving deep into personal strife and raw emotion to craft a potent narrative of resilience and growth.

Born Simbiatu Ajikawo in North London, Little Simz has carved a distinctive path in UK hip-hop over the past decade. Her six critically acclaimed studio albums, including standouts Sometimes I Might Be Introvert (2021) and No Thank You (2022), feature her distinctive mix of introspective lyrics and genre-extending sound collages.

Lotus arises from a period of personal and professional upheaval for Simz, including a legal dispute with longtime collaborator Inflo. But in the face of challenges, Simz continues to evolve artistically, exploring new sonic landscapes and emotional depths. Beyond music, she is also building a reputation for acting and contributions to the arts.

Musically, Lotus showcases Simz's versatility, blending elements of rap, soul, contemporary jazz and experimental sounds. Opening track "Thief," delves into themes of betrayal, likely referencing her legal dispute with Inflo and throughout the record, Simz navigates a spectrum of emotions, from anger to acceptance, crafting a narrative that is both personal and universally relatable. "Blood," featuring Wretch 32, and "Lion," with its Afrobeat influences, highlight her ability to fuse genres seamlessly. The album's production, while echoing past collaborations, introduces fresh textures that complement Simz's lyrical depth. Collaborators this time out include a assembly of London jazz progressives - Moses Sumney, Michael Kiwanuka, Yussef Dayes and Sampha, among others.

While the album's consistent focus on personal grievances occasionally detracts from its musical strengths, Lotus is nevertheless a milestone in Simz's personal evolution and maintains her continued relevance in the contemporary music landscape.

Essex Honey

BLOOD ORANGE

Released 29 August 2025

RCA Records

*****

A quietly moving elegy shaped by grief, memory, and place, where subtle instrumentation, hushed voices and British melancholy converge in a deeply personal musical landscape.

Devonté Hynes, known to music lovers as Blood Orange, returns with Essex Honey, his first full-length album in six years. Born and raised in Essex, England, Hynes has built a reputation for genre-bending fusions of R&B, indie pop, jazz and experimental soul, collaborating with the likes of Lorde, Caroline Polachek, and Zadie Smith.

His works often balance refined pop sensibility with emotional depth and cultural commentary. With Essex Honey, he turns inward, channeling grief, memory, and place into a richly textured soundscape that both retains his sleek musical identity and bears his most autobiographical imprint yet.

A beautifully melancholic exploration of grief, geography, and the tactile power of memory, Essex Honey is crafted in the wake of his mother's passing and rooted in his Essex upbringing. Hynes translates this loss into resonant music through subtle shifts, sonic fragments, and tonal resonance.

The album navigates abrupt musical juxtapositions with striking emotional precision. The opening number, “Look at You,” offers soft synth clouds that dissolve into plucked guitar echoes and is followed by “Thinking Clean” which embeds a near-dance pulse, only to unravel into cello abstraction.
These textures maintain an elegant tension between cohesion and fragmentation. The piano, more central than in previous recordings, underscores the album’s intimacy—particularly on weighty tracks like “The Last of England,” where mournful vocals dissolve into cluttered breakbeats and strings.
Hynes reunites with a luminous roster of collaborators - Caroline Polachek, Lorde, Daniel Caesar, Mustafa, Zadie Smith, Brendan Yates - yet their presence is quiet, additive, never ostentatious. Lorde’s soaring line in “Mind Loaded”, or Zadie Smith’s poetic cameo in “Vivid Light”, feel like ghostly illuminations rather than flashy cameos.
The result is Essex Honey’s most focused and haunting statement, its late-summer melancholy and pastoral nostalgia elevated by emotional clarity.

This is Blood Orange at his most tender, poignant, and profoundly present.

Read more... Bandcamp

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Crooked Wing

THESE NEW PURITANS

Released 23 May 2025

Domino

*****

After five years, a reinvention: abandoning propulsion for poise, revealing Thee New Puritans at their most restrained, austere, and quietly radical.

Few bands of the past two decades have embraced reinvention as consistently and convincingly as Thee New Puritans. From the jittery post-punk of Beat Pyramid (2008), the ritualistic grandeur of Hidden (2009), the orchestral austerity of Field of Reeds (2013), and the exploratory Inside The Rose (2019), Jack and George Barnett have treated each album as a clean break rather than a continuation. After a five-year silence, Crooked Wing is arguably their most dramatic and significant shift yet, marking a decisive shift in These New Puritans’ compositional language and thinking.

This is not simply a stylistic pivot but a move toward fully articulated contemporary composition, where lyric, harmony, and spatial design function as a single expressive system. The lyrics unfold elliptically, with references to bells, wings, labour, devotion, and movement - waiting, return. less as songs than as recurring motifs, suggesting a ritualised narrative rather than linear storytelling.

Musically, the band draws heavily on contemporary choral, theatrical, and orchestral composition. Pipe organ, choir, double bass, and chamber-like ensembles replace beats and noise as the primary drivers. Bells are not decorative but structural, reflecting a narrative of movement and flight; voices function as both character and texture. The Caroline Polachek duet, “Industrial Love Song,” exemplifies this approach - two vocal lines inhabiting a constructed space, longing articulated through spatial and harmonic design rather than pop form.

Crooked Wing feels composed rather than produced - a work that unfolds in movements, where lyrical meaning is inseparable from its carefully chosen sonic architecture.

This is an album that deserves attention and the comfort of familiarity will reward the frequent return listener.

I Forgive You

I Forgive You (A Capella Edition)

CYNTHIA ERIVO

Released 6 June 2025

Verve / Republic

*****

As a debut, it's audaciously personal and vocally immaculate, an introspective rather than radio-driven record.

British-Nigerian singer, actor, and Broadway star, Cynthia Erivo rose to fame with her Tony-winning role in The Color Purple and has since earned various Golden Globes, British Academy Film Awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards and Academy Awards nominations for her title role in the 2019 motion picture, Harriet and in 2024, for her role as Elphaba in Wicked. Blessed with a powerful soprano, natural theatrical intensity and intense emotional commitment, Erivo now pivots into full-length solo music with a theatrical sound that is shaped by gospel, soul and contemporary pop.

I Forgive You is both a deeply personal reckoning and a bold artistic declaration. Across 12 tracks, she fuses gospel-rooted vocal phrasing with expansive, genre-spanning production.

The Original Edition leans into spiritual pop-soul, borrowing from Solange and Moses Sumney’s palettes - airy textures, reverb-drenched harmonies, and lyrical introspection dominate. Standout tracks “Alive,” “Glowing Up,” and “Tears” ride minimalist arrangements that showcase her dynamic control, but also suffer occasionally from overly abstract lyrics or ambiguous melodic focus Vocally, she is as commanding as ever, her sustained notes and melismatic runs are polished without ostentation.

The Capella Edition's stripped-down format underscores her vocal prowess, revealing impeccable pitch control and breath technique, but it also exposes some over-arranged vocal layering that can feel cluttered without instrumental grounding. While the album asserts her identity outside the stage and screen, it occasionally wavers in songwriting distinctiveness. The spiritual and emotional themes feel sincere but would benefit from more varied song structures and rhythmic risk-taking.
The album cover presents Erivo as an ethereal, elemental force, her naked form dwarfed by angels wings, draped in metallics, eyes alight, embodying divinity and rebirth. It a bold contrast to her theatrical roots (The Color Purple, Henry IV, A Midsummer Night's Dream) and gritty movie appearances (Harriet, Luther: The Fallen Sun). The supernatural imagery and song choices suggest her aiming to elevate the music’s spiritual themes. In context of her progressively more controversial recent casting (as Puck in Midsummer Night's, Jesus Christ in JC Superstar, Elphaba in Wicked) this visual and thematic rebranding seems intended to control the narrative, seeking to be considered now not just as a performer, but as a visionary artist in her own right.

Read more... Bandcamp

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I Remember I Forget بنسى وبتذكر”

YASMINE HAMDAN

Released 19 September 2025

Hamdanistan Records | Kwaidan Records

*****

After eight years away, Yasmine Hamdan returns with an album of resistance, intimacy, and timeless beauty. One of the year’s most vital and unforgettable works

Yasmine Hamdan is a pioneer of Lebanon’s indie and electronic scene, first known through Soapkills the group she co-founded in 1997 that defined a new Arab underground. Her solo debut Ya Nass (2013) and follow-ups Al Jamilat (2017), and Jamilat Reprise (2018) established her internationally, leading to appearances on NPR’s Tiny Desk and a haunting cameo in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).

Now based in Paris, her style fuses Arabic poetry, traditional forms, and experimental electronics, weaving the region’s histories into modern sound. Since her earliest albums, Hamden has collaborated with Marc Collin, (a French producer, arranger, and co-founder of Nouvelle Vague, an unlikely project, fusing post-punk songwriting and bossa-nova) who has been a central figure, framing her distinctive vocals and shaping her sound with cinematic arrangements with his deft balance of retro elegance and modern impulses.

Although I Remember I Forget emerges after an extended pause, its voice feels current and sharpened. Hamdan and Collin co-write most of the material, opening with “Hon”, where oud figures weave around Hamdan’s voice in a song written in the aftermath of the Beirut port explosion in 2020: “A tiny land / with a gaping wound", its words resound even louder in today’s context of genocidal violence and dispossession. From there, Hamdan braids personal reflection with cultural resistance. “Shmaali”, sung with her sister, reinterprets a Palestinian tarweeda - an encrypted women’s song used to outwit occupying guards - set against Collin’s electronic textures. The result is both archive and renewal, a solidarity carried in coded melody. “The Beautiful Losers”, written with Syrian composer Omar Harb, refracts exile with wit and tenderness, while “Shadia” channels the pulse of Nubian music from Sudan. The second half of the album subtly shifts gears. “Vows” and “Abyss” offer interior meditations, stripped-down and spectral. “Mor” deepens the palette with darker, more percussive textures below Hamdan's soaring, evocative vocals, while “DAYA3” pulses with disorientation. The closing “Reminiscence” provides a dusk-lit coda: restrained, melancholy, yet quietly luminous, it leaves the album suspended between grief and defiance.

Across I Remember I Forget, Hamdan reminds us of her singular ability to compress worlds into songs: each track a dialogue between past and present, exile and return, vulnerability and resilience. It’s a statement of survival and presence, one that carries as much weight in its silences as in its declarations. I Remember I Forget is one of the year’s essential albums: a brave, beautiful act of memory and resistance.

A Paradise In The Hold

YAZZ AHMED

Released 28 February 2025

Night Time Stories

*****

A showcase for Ahmed's technical prowess and her dedication to storytelling through music, offering listeners a rich tapestry of sound that bridges her British-Bahraini heritage with contemporary jazz innovation

Yazz Ahmed, hailed as one of the most influential trumpet players of her generation. An Ivor Novello award winning composer who makes sweeping epics that are rich with storytelling, depicting evocative ancient worlds and mythological muses. With her fourth studio album, A Paradise in the Hold, the British-Bahrani musician dives even deeper into her dual heritage and has come up with a treasure trove that draws on traditional music and stories from her childhood home. Ahmed writes for the voice for the first time, with lyrics inspired by Bahraini wedding poems and the yearning songs of the pearl divers. Deeply textural, expansive and full of potent performances, the album charts the heroic voyages of the jewel-hunters of yore, who sailed home through rough seas with precious cargo, and Ahmed’s own voyage of self-discovery over the past decade.

She moved to London with her mother and sisters in 1992 but says, “I felt like I didn’t quite belong and I didn’t know why that was. For a long time, I would lie about my heritage because of how Arab and Muslim people were represented in American films and British dramas. When I was at school, I never said that I was half Bahraini.” Music, however, helped to strengthen her sense of identity. She saw links between the jazz she studied at university and Arabian classical music, and started to learn Arabic. “I started to rediscover my mixed heritage,” she adds. “And that’s when I started to remember all this music that I grew up hearing but never fully engaged with.”

The collaborators on the album in particular, percussionist Corrina Silvester and the greatly missed giant of the jazz world and Yazz’s dear friend, drummer, Martin France, helped Ahmed to strengthen the connection between the two worlds; A Paradise In The Hold is a bold fusion that reveals its riches more with each rewarding listen. “It’s another step in my evolution of making music,” says Ahmed. “There’s so much beauty in Bahraini music. I hope this album gives people a flavour of how vibrant its culture is.”

Read more ... Bandcamp

Teal Dreams

YAZMIN LACEY

Released 24 October 2025

AMF Collective

*****

Soulful, unguarded and quietly radiant, Teal Dreams traces the afterglow of heartbreak and renewal through Yazmin Lacey’s most vivid storytelling and adventurous production to date.

Since her breakthrough with Voice Notes (2023), Yazmin Lacey has emerged as one of the UK’s most distinctive soul voices — intimate, conversational and steeped in the textures of jazz, R&B and lovers rock. Born in Nottingham to Jamaican heritage, Lacey channels both classic lineage and modern independence, her music valuing emotion over adornment. With collaborators Miles James, Barney Lister and Matt Maltese, Teal Dreams broadens her palette: looser, dreamier and more rhythmically fluid.

Teal Dreams unfolds like an interior film - dusky, unhurried, and suspended between melancholy and acceptance. Lacey trades the directness of her debut for atmosphere: dub basslines blur into Rhodes chords, percussion drifts like passing weather, and her voice sits half in shadow, shaping quiet epiphanies rather than choruses.

"Wallpaper" is the album's instantly-memorable, radio-friendly earworm and "Ain't I Good For You" it's most popular cut, but three other moments anchor the record. “Love Is Like the Ghetto” captures the tension between devotion and disillusion, its groove deceptively languid. “Rear View” turns reflection into rhythm, Lacey’s voice a soft post-Sade monologue of letting go. And “Water” (featuring TYSON) shimmers with mutual calm — an exchange between two women learning to float above the noise.

Rather than dramatic peaks, Teal Dreams moves in tides: intimacy becomes groove, heartbreak becomes motion. It’s the sound of self-possession, rendered in teal, a colour somewhere between sadness and serenity. A quietly stunning evolution from one of Britain’s most emotionally intelligent songwriters.

Read more... Yazmin Lacey, AMF Records, Bandcamp

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Off The Record

MAKAYA MCCRAVEN

Released 17 October 2025

International Anthem

*****

A magnificent, sprawling collage of live-improvised 'organic beat music' where jazz, hip-hop, and electronica are masterfully cut, pasted, and recontextualized.

Makaya McCraven is a pioneering American drummer, producer, and "beat scientist" renowned for his innovative approach to creating what he calls "organic beat music." Born in Paris to a musical family, McCraven was steeped in jazz, hip-hop, and global folk traditions. Based in Chicago, his signature method involves recording hours of live, improvised sessions with a rotating cast of musicians, earning him the nickname of "cultural synthesizer", which he then meticulously edits, overdubs, and re-arranges in the studio. This process transforms spontaneous moments into layered, cohesive, genre-fluid compositions, effectively blurring the line between live performance and production, a technique that has cemented his place at the forefront of modern jazz.

Off The Record is a compelling, double-disc compilation drawing from four EPs (Techno Logic, The People’s Mixtape, Hidden Out!, and PopUp Shop), showcasing the power of McCraven’s unique sonic architecture.

Built from live, communal improvisations with collaborators like Theon Cross, Ben LaMar Gay, and Jeff Parker, the album is then sculpted through McCraven's post-production wizardry.

The result is a vibrant, rhythmic tapestry that is both spontaneous and structurally dense. Tracks like the hypnotic "Technology" (featuring Cross's blistering tuba work) and the funky pulse of "Battleships" (with Parker's guitar) demonstrate a deep, infectious groove rooted in jazz but filtered through the aesthetics of hip-hop and dance music. This is an adventurous, highly rewarding listen that perfectly encapsulates McCraven’s gift for turning ephemeral live moments into timeless, beat-driven art.

سماع [Sama'a] (Audition))

أحمد [AHMED]

Released 21 October 2025

OTOROKU

*****

The Pat Thomas-led quartet delivers a euphoric, explosive masterclass of Sufi-inspired free jazz, re-imagining the foundational music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik.

أَحْمَد [AHMED] is a powerhouse quartet comprised of pianist Pat Thomas, saxophonist Seymour Wright, bassist Joel Grip, and drummer Antonin Gerbal. Since 2014, the group has been dedicated to excavating and re-imagining the music and spirit of the 1950s/70s pioneer, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, who blended jazz with Arabic modes. Their collective sound fuses abstract free improvisation with danceable, rhythmic intensity, drawing inspiration from disparate sources like Thelonious Monk, dub, and jungle, all delivered with an electrifying, collective heat.

سماع [Sama'a] (Audition) is a vital release, marking أَحْمَد [AHMED]'s first studio recording after years of acclaimed live work. The album is a full-suite re-imagining of Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s 1958 landmark Jazz Sahara, a work that fused late-Fifties jazz with North African modes. Crucially, the quartet tackles this piano-less original with Pat Thomas's percussive piano at its core, achieving a fusion that is both historically reverent and utterly contemporary.

The Arabic term Sama’a, meaning meditative listening, defines the spirit of this music. Tracks like "Ya Annas (Oh, People)" evolve from ghostly split-note sounds into pulsating dance rhythms, while "Farah 'Alaiyna" becomes rocketing jazz swing. This is dizzying, euphoric music—four interlocking pieces recorded in single takes that stretch the concept of jazz-as-dance, confirming the quartet as a force moving through music history like no other.

Wikipedia

YouTube - Ya Annas [Oh, People]

The Cosmic Tones Research Trio

THE COSMIC TONES RESEARCH TRIO

Released 24 October 2025

Time Longer Than Rope

Mississippi Records

*****

The band's second album channels spiritual jazz, cosmic improvisation and textural experimentation into a coherent, transfixing whole.

On their self-titled second album, The Cosmic Tones Research Trio deepen the exploratory aesthetic that defined their debut, pushing further into the borderlands between spiritual jazz, ambient and avant-garde. The trio, whose almost telepathic rapport has emerged as their greatest instrument, draw upon the lineage of influences that includes Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra. Yet, their sound feels individualistic and the music is anchored in the moment: rhythmically fluid, harmonically open-ended and richly attuned to space and texture.

The album is a study in balance: serenity and friction, structure and dissolution, earthly pulse and celestial drift. Although their tools are typical - reeds, keys, percussion, electronics - their collective imagination is expansive. Their music emerges as both searching and well grounded, meditative but full of movement, like a ritual unfolding in slow spirals.

Across the record, the players demonstrate a remarkable sensitivity to each other’s gestures. Saxophone lines stretch outward, keys shimmer, and percussion navigates the liminal zone between groove and texture. The music feels improvised, but remains focus; each piece evolves with an internal logic that rewards continued listening. Though subtle, the trio’s use of electronics adds atmospherics that elevate their acoustic interplay into something otherworldly.

There are passages of genuine beauty, moments of spirited dissonance, and long stretches where the music seems to be contemplating its next direction. It’s a record that invites patience and offers revelation, a quietly powerful statement from a group whose chemistry continues to deepen.

Mississippi Records

YouTube - The Sacred Garden

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ڪڏهن ملنداسين

Kadahin Milandaasin

TARUN BALANI

Released 16 May 2025

BERTHOLD Records

*****

Blending South Asian, Persian and Arab influences, Balani’s jazz elegy for Sindh is conceptually unified, emotionally layered, and musically sophisticated

Tarun Balani is an Indian drummer, composer, and producer whose work traverses modern jazz, electronica, and South Asian traditional forms. Based in New Delhi and trained at Berklee, he leads multiple projects including Dharma and Seasonal Affected Beats. Balani’s music is conceptually ambitious, rhythmically intricate, and emotionally resonant, often exploring identity and displacement.

On ڪڏهن ملنداسين (Kadahin Milandaasin), Tarun Balani offers his most personal statement to date - an album rooted in ancestral memory and shaped by present-day diasporic yearning. The title track, a brief yet aching invocation, sets the emotional compass: this is music of longing, imagined reunion, and cultural reassembly. Joined by his Dharma Quartet - Adam O’Farrill (trumpet), Sharik Hasan (piano/synth), and Olli Hirvonen (guitar) - Balani creates a meditative but restlessly alive soundscape where tradition and innovation speak in hushed tones.

“Lajpat Nagar Sometimes” opens the set with brushed grooves and cautious melodic searching, evoking urban transience. “The Laburnum Blooms” and “Locusts Are Descending” stretch out with patient, layered improvisations, their open-ended forms allowing for microtonal trumpet cries and glistening synth textures. “ٻوڏ Sailaab” (Flood) is densely rhythmic and impressionistic, while “Samadhi 02.11.2024” folds ambient minimalism into spiritual reflection. The album’s closer, “For Every Man Saved A Victim Will Be Found,” leaves no easy catharsis - its title alone suggests unresolved legacies and the moral weight of survival.

Balani’s use of Sindhi text and subtle vocal layering adds historical and emotional heft without falling into pastiche. This is music for memory work - not nostalgic, but vividly present, and quietly radical in its refusal to exoticize.

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Rammana

SALIN

Released 27 May 2025

DeepMatter Records

*****

A career-defining, globally significant and musically inspiring groove-powered ceremony that binds Isaan soul and Yoruba fire.

Salin, born Salin Cheewapansri, is a Thai-born drummer, producer, and composer who relocated to North America at the age of 19 to pursue her musical aspirations. She is currently based in Montréal, Québec, where she has become an integral part of the city's vibrant music scene. From this multicultural base, Salin is reimagining Thai musical heritage through a diasporic jazz-funk lens.

A rarity as a Southeast Asian, female bandleader, she combines vintage Thai percussion (notably the rammana hand drum), with Afrobeat grooves, spiritual jazz modalities, and the melodic lilt of Isaan folk (from Northern Thailand).

Her self-styled genre “Afro Isaan Soul” pushes against both geographic and gendered expectations in Thai music. With a background in ethnomusicology and stage collaborations across Asia and Africa, Salin positions herself as both a cultural preservationist and avant-garde innovator - anchoring deep roots while opening new portals of sound.

Salin’s Rammana is a rhythmically adventurous debut, folding Afrobeat drive, Thai folk cadence, and modern jazz ensemble interplay into a richly layered, pan-Asian spiritual tapestry. Though much praise has been lavished on the record’s Thai-Lao tonalities and Yoruba ceremonial echoes, it's the confident presence and carefully balanced presence of contemporary jazz-funk that gives Rammana its structural depth and emotional breadth.

Tracks like “Si Chomphu” swing with crisp snare work, slinky electric bass, and Fender Rhodes lines that recall the raw heat of Mizell Brothers productions. Elsewhere, “Painted Lady” floats through modal changes with flugelhorn and vibraphone lines more kin to Blue Note than Bangkok.

The album, largely instrumental, gains its narrative cohesion through Salin’s control of dynamics and phrasing; her drumming is articulate and patient, favouring grooves that build organically into invocation. Montreal’s jazz culture, where Salin is currently based, clearly plays a formative role—there’s an improvisational looseness here that opens traditional patterns to questioning and reinvention. The closing track, “Rammana,” exemplifies this synthesis: meditative gong washes, syncopated claps, and chromatic improvisation trace a map from West Africa through Isaan to North American avant-funk. voice listens deeply and speaks with purpose.

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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.

Juana Molina Official Site

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.

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

Clarice Jensen Home Page

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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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Pulse

QUR'AN SHAHEED

Released 11 July 2025

*****
A sensational debut full of daring and raw potential, that dazzles, disrupts and frequently disorients.

Qur’an Shaheed is a pianist, poet, and vocalist from Pasadena, now based in Inglewood, California. The daughter of two professional musicians (her mother a piano teacher, her father a musical director for Marvin Gaye), Shaheed received classical piano training from the age of four.

Over time, she has evolved into a fearless improviser and genre-defying composer. Her music, often composed through tactile experimentation with keyboards and samplers, fuses jazz, neo-soul, spoken word, and lo-fi abstraction into radiant, dreamlike compositions. Her fluid artistic philosophy embraces personal vulnerability, communal liberation, and a boundless sonic imagination.

Pulse is a daring and challenging debut, overflowing with invention, spirit and restless experimentation. Shaheed draws on classical training, poetic fragments, looping keyboards and glitchy studio effects to shape a personal sonic language. The result is emotionally communicative but structurally elusive, a work as much about process as product.

With production support from Spencer Hartling and vivid inclusion of harp, flute, modular synth and saxophone, the album flows like a dream collage, teeming with sonic and textural shifts whose apparent spontaneity is in fact deeply considered.

While Pulse is richly expressive, it’s narrative is opaque. Tracks often fragment into sketches or abruptly shift mood, making it hard to follow a sustained musical or emotional arc; and the sheer density of ideas can be exhausting over a full listen.

Opening track "Dreams" and moments like “Doo Doo Doo” and “Somber Eyes” hint at clarity and cohesion, but they’re surrounded by material that feels deliberately amorphous, namely the challenging ambience of "Fix It" Parts 1 & 2" and "Variations " Parts 1, 2 & 3".

However, sheer brilliance is to be found here, (such as the transmogrifying trajectory of "3am Wine Drunk"), but it arrives in flashes rather than through an identifiable unified vision. THis might be distracting uon first listen, but repeat plays will reward those with patience.

"Mixing Colors" offers five minutes of angelic calm mid-set and the moods of the many abstract pieces offer glimpses of imaginative inspiration; the album would have sustained further development of the sometimes sublime moodier passages, which offer glimpses of Shaheed's exceptional potential.

Shaheed describes her approach as a resolve for wide-ranging, innovative musical techniques that merge intuitive composition with methodical devotion. She describes Pulse as "a spirited, unflinching approach to a new sound, inviting listeners into a field of lucid vision and resonance, capturing her voice in its most liberated form".

Pulse may be less an album to absorb all at once, than a sound-diary to return to in pieces but there's enough here to alert anyone listening that Qur'an Shaheed is "One To Watch".

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Cuntry

CLEO REED

Released 17 July 2025

Cleo Reed

*****

Less an endpoint than an open-ended insistence: the South retold, unsettled and very much alive.

Cleo Reed is an experimental singer, songwriter, and producer from North Carolina who fuses Southern traditions with Afrofuturist textures and cutting-edge digital production. Rooted in gospel and soul but equally informed by electronic music, performance art, and queer aesthetics, Reed interrogates the politics of belonging, identity and land in her work. Her sound is simultaneously intimate and abrasive: gospel harmonies are bent through distortion, trap rhythms collide with ambient washes and her voice alternates between confessional clarity and digitally warped lament.

Cuntry, her most ambitious release to date, pushes the boundaries of narrative songwriting while remaining anchored in cultural memory. It is both a reclamation and a confrontation: a record that reshapes the sound of the American South through the eyes of a queer Black woman refusing erasure. Reed stitches together gospel cadences, electronic distortion and folk fragments, building a sonic language where inheritance is neither static nor unquestioned. The album opens in austerity - “Intro (Dirt)” - her voice grounded in elemental textures, soil and memory as foundation. “Bloodroot” expands into layered gospel harmonies warped by glitch, a metaphor for tradition under interrogation. With “No Home Training,” Reed pivots toward percussive insistence, voicing the defiance of refusing assimilation into Southern respectability.

The album's centrepiece, “Heaven, Maybe,” offers her most vulnerable register: a voice entwined with a synthetic choir and her faith suspended between yearning and doubt.

The second half grows sharper in its critique. “Landlord Song” satirises exploitation with sardonic trap-gospel fusion, while “Queer Folk” subverts a genre historically coded against her, reworking its language into a declaration of tenderness and belonging. The closing track, “Backyard Altar”, gathers the album’s fragments - field recordings, gospel harmonies, electronic smears - into a ritual of reclamation.

Rather than bringing the narrative to resolution, it fades into layered static, a purposeful and allegorical refusal of neat closure.

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Glory

PERFUME GENIUS

Released 28 March 2025

Matador Records

*****
Perfume Genius's 'Glory' is a masterful blend of introspection and grandeur, reaffirming Mike Hadreas's role as a pivotal voice in contemporary queer music.

Mike Hadreas, performing as Perfume Genius, has been a defining voice in queer art-pop since his 2010 debut Learning. Over seven albums, Hadreas has traversed themes of vulnerability, identity, and transformation, evolving from intimate piano ballads to expansive, genre-defying compositions.

Glory continues this trajectory, blending introspective lyricism with lush, intricate soundscapes. Collaborating with longtime partner Alan Wyffels, producer Blake Mills, and featuring artists like Aldous Harding, Hadreas crafts a work that is both deeply personal and universally resonant.
Hadreas's ability to channel personal narratives into evocative musical expressions allows the album to oscillate between moments of hushed intimacy and grand, orchestral arrangements, reflecting the complexities of the human experience. Tracks like "No Front Teeth," featuring Aldous Harding, showcase a delicate interplay of voices, while "Full On" juxtaposes traditional masculinity with tender imagery, challenging societal norms.

Glory for its emotional depth and sonic richness. Pitchfork notes that the album "evokes the haunted songcraft" of Hadreas's earlier work, yet introduces a "widescreen, expressive production" that lingers with the listener.

Far Out Magazine awarded it a perfect score, describing it as "a wondrous spectacle" that caps off another triumph for Perfume Genius.

The album's exploration of queer identity is both poignant and unflinching. In "Capezio," Hadreas delves into themes of anxiety and insecurity, using the metaphor of ballet shoes to convey vulnerability. Throughout Glory, Hadreas confronts the complexities of the queer experience, crafting narratives that are both specific and universally relatable.

Artist Website (Paul Kelly)

YouTube (Paul Kelly - Seventy playlist)

Label Website

Wikipedia

Te Whare Te Wekaweka

MARLON WILLIAMS

Released 4 April 2025

Marlon Williams / Secretly Distribution

*****

A heartfelt exploration of Māori identity, blending traditional language with contemporary sounds: spiritually resonant and culturally significant.

Marlon Williams, a celebrated singer-songwriter from Lyttelton, New Zealand, is renowned for his genre-blending artistry that traverses folk, country, and indie rock. Of Ngāi Tahu and Ngāi Tai descent, Williams has consistently infused his music with a deep sense of place and identity. His fourth studio album, Te Whare Tīwekaweka—translating to "The Messy House"—marks his first project entirely in te reo Māori, reflecting a profound reconnection with his ancestral roots. This endeavor is guided by the Māori proverb, "Ko te reo Māori, he matapihi ki te ao Māori" ("The Māori language is a window to the Māori world"), underscoring his commitment to cultural exploration through music.

Te Whare Tīwekaweka is a luminous and spiritually resonant work at the heart of which lies connection: the album’s five-year process reconnecting Marlon to family, friends and his home town of Lyttelton after a globe-trotting decade establishing his career.

Sung entirely in te reo Māori, the album delves into themes of love, identity, and cultural introspection. Collaborations with artists like Lorde on "Kāhore He Manu E" and KOMMI on "Huri Te Whenua" enrich the album's tapestry, blending traditional Māori motifs with contemporary musical sensibilities.

The album's emotive depth and genre-defying compositions. led Rolling Stone Australia to describe it as "a stunning ode to love, life, and connection," highlighting its role in celebrating Māori culture. Clash Magazine echoed this sentiment, noting the album's radiant and uplifting nature, portraying it as a spiritual homecoming for Williams.

As a cultural statement, Te Whare Tīwekaweka invites listeners into the rich linguistic and emotional landscapes of te reo Māori. It's a milestone in Williams' artistic evolution and his dedication to honoring and revitalizing his heritage through song.

In Limerence

JACOB ALON

Released 30 May 2025

Island Records

*****

Glowing with myth and memory, Alon's debut transforms grief, queerness and longing into poetic folk reveries.

From Fife, Scotland, Jacob Alon's debut is a milestone on the artist's remarkable path from medical school and physics studies to van-life songwriting and festival stages. With intricate guitar work, spectral vocals and storytelling steeped in folklore and intimacy, Alon joins a rich lineage of introspective UK folk artists, but effects course correction as through queer experience and poetic candor.

Alon’s formative influences - Nick Drake, Adrianne Lenker (Big Thief), Sufjan Stevens, Rufus Wainwright and mentor Kae Tempest - have shaped their emotional clarity and vision, while echoes of predecessors like John Martyn and Fairport Convention seem to hover.

In his debut album, Alon eschews a mixed-tempo portfolio to deliver a statement of subdued artistic intent, where folk hAS become a vessel for exploring myth, grief and unguarded tenderness in a world both ethereal and disarmingly direct. To sparse accompaniment and with little musical variety, Alon relies on his poetic lyricism to carry listeners through a heartfelt album that unfolds as a song-cycle of myths and memories.

The album's title refers to an involuntary mental and emotional state of intense, obsessive infatuation with another person, characterized by intrusive thoughts.

The set begins with “Glimmer” a wordless prelude that beckons the listener into this dream-lit world. “Of Amber” follows, casting love as something radiant and elusive, part fairytale, part relic. In “Don’t Fall Asleep”, grief speaks in dialogue with the dead while “Confession”, to this listener the most compelling songs here, opens a raw, coming-of-age diary, filled with shame and release "We were only fourteen / wild, wide eyes / pledging our virtues between holy crimes".

“Elijah” delivers the album's apocalyptic centre: here, violence and denial are scorched by prophetic fire, echoing the biblical story of the prophet who challenged idolatry and demonstrated God's power by calling fire from heaven. Relief arrives in the form of “Liquid Gold 25", which frames queer intimacy as awkward, funny and tender. The song provides lyrical re-grounding in the arc of the album, but the lack of variety in approach causes the songs to blur in Alon's fog of folkloric quietude - caught lyrically between dreamscape and autobiography and sonically grounded in minimalism.

The concluding song pair "Fairy in a Bottle" and "Seratine" (a medication used to manage and treat the major depressive disorder) mirror the opening tracks. In the former, Alon acknowledges both the enchantment (the fairy’s glow) and the harm (bottle as cage). It’s a song about learning to release idealised love, in order to face the deeper, unhealed wounds within. The latter, fragmentally brief, and a surreal tableau of what it feels like to live inside depression, presents intimacy not as a cure, but as a shared wound. Together, the songs condense the album’s central consideration - the reckoning of the space between fantasy and pain.

Read more... Bandcamp

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The Forgotten Path To Humanity

JOSEPH TAWADROS

Released 1 August 2025

Joseph Tawadros

*****
A minimalist trio in timeless meditation - oud, violin and handpan in close communion, like a journey through ancient landscapes, rich in emotion.

Egypt-born, Australia-raised oud virtuoso and composer Joseph Tawadros AM, an eight-time ARIA Award winner, has released an album every year since 2004, any one of which will draw new fans to his rich, oud-based creative spirit. His new release, The Forgotten Path to Humanity, is another transcendent album, this time featuring the trio of Tawadros with Layth Sidiq ( a Grammy-nominated violinist, composer and educator and current Artistic Director of New York Arabic Orchestra) and percussionist Elyar Pashang on handpan and doholla.

The recording is a meditative exploration of empathy, tradition and sonic universality that unfolds like a spiritual odyssey, weaving the three instruments into an intimate dialogue. Tawadros frames the oud not as a revivalist symbol but as a universal voice, a melodic wanderer and emotional conduit. The violin of Layth Sidiq complements it with lyrical phrasing rooted in Arabic tradition, while Elyar Pashang’s handpan offers minimalist pulses that feel both ancient and hypnotically modern. One needs only to close eyes to be transported, as if to any of the authentic venues where such music is played, across the Levant and the Maghreb.

From the opening tones, the album evokes a sense of communal memory and introspection. Tawadros’ compositions prioritize spaciousness over technical display, creating breathing room that invites listeners into the emotional core of each melody. As Tawadros describes it, "This music feels like a journey through ancient landscapes rich in emotion, blending improvisation and structure in a way that highlights each artist’s unique traditions. “The Forgotten Path to Humanity” evokes a sense of rediscovery and reflection, inviting listeners to reconnect with the essence of what makes us human. The album explores themes of unity, empathy and the timeless connections that transcend cultures and generations. The music is a reminder of the beauty of the shared human experience and the importance of looking inward to find our way forward, together".

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God's Window, Pt. 1

THAKZIN

Released 26 September 2025

Platoon / Thakzin Music

*****

A spiritually-underpinned celebration of ancestry, community and possibility, this debut album weaves drum, voice, and electronic textures into a panoramic journey that showcases 3-step - a hybrid of Afro House, Amapiano and qgom.

Thabang Mathebula, known as Thakzin, is a Johannesburg-born producer, vocalist, born of a South African & Mozambican family of musicians. Raised in Ivory Park, a densely populated residential suburb of Johannesburg, his musical identity has been shaped by township rhythms, sangoma rituals (of highly respected healers in Zulu culture), and a youthful openness to global musical vibrations. Prior to God’s Window Pt. 1, he earned attention through singles like The Magnificent Dance (2022) and restless genre-blending.

Having discovered djing in his early teenage years he is now the pioneer of the emerging sound he calls 3Step - a hybrid of Afro House, Amapiano (the South African musical subgenre of house music, blending deep house, lounge, jazz, and kwaito with distinct percussive basslines and repetitive piano melodies) and qgom ( a Zulu language word that means "drum" or "hitting drum," which describes its minimalist, hard-hitting, and percussive sound). The defining characteristic is a "three-kick-drum" pattern where three kicks occur in a 4/4 measure, creating a unique groove. It also blends elements from Afro-tech, and broken beat, incorporating deep basslines, log drums, and layers of percussion and is often described as having a hypnotic, trance-inducing, and "alive" feel, distinct from more rigid rhythms.

This album is his debut long-form statement: ambitious in scale, deeply collaborative, and spiritually grounded. It presents Thakzin not just as a beat-maker but as a curator of cultural legacy and sonic future Across its 18 tracks, God’s Window Pt. 1 showcases an artist of substance, comfortable across a broad musical swathe, expressive of deep soul and embracing an expansive collaborative spirit. The philosophy of 3Step is central: Thakzin approaches the music as a collective mindset: rhythmic tension and release, multiplicity of collaborators treated as co-creators, and spirituality infused in sound. “It's not just my sound anymore, it's our sound”, he is quoted as saying.

From the patter of drums that evoke sangoma healing rituals to vocals that pulse with longing, the album honours tradition without succumbing to homage. The album's title derives from the notion of "Mpumalanga", which means "The Place Where the Sun Rises" in the Swazi and Zulu languages. The name reflects the province's geographical location in the east of South Africa, from which the sun rises, and its beautiful natural scenery. This becomes a metaphor for perspective, humility, expansiveness.

The set extends to almost two hours of music, sufficient for tracks like "When We Play", "Ke Na Yo" and "The Road Is Long" to extend into long percussion-led grooves. "Start Anew", "Jabula' and "Gelela" combine traditional strings and percussion with modern production; "Botho Begins With Her" pulses with tribal dub weight; "The Calling", "Love and Pride" and "Chance (Come Back To Me)" fold in intimate R&B textures.

The flow from ancestral drums to synth washes keeps the listener grounded. Some pieces feel rich and necessary; others drift, (as they might in live performance), commensurate with the album’s length and ambition. Yet the sum is powerful - a declaration of identity, belonging, and possibility.

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STARSEED

BLESSED

Released 13 June 2025

Blessed, Playbook Distribution

*****

Arguably, one of the most culturally significant and sonically original voices to emerge from Australia in the past decade.

"Blessed Starseed" is a term associated with New Age beliefs, referring to individuals who believe they are extraterrestrial beings incarnated on Earth to help humanity. So it comes as something of a surprise to hear BLESSED (born Blessed Samuel Joe-Andahis) is a Western Sydney artist of Ghanaian heritage, a multi-instrumentalist, producer, rapper, singer, and iconoclast. Since first gaining traction in the 2010s, he has made a name for himself by dismantling the rigid categories that have long shaped Australia's music scene - racially, stylistically, and spiritually. With deep roots in DIY punk and emo, tempered by a hip-hop sensibility and with Afrofuturist vision, BLESSED is extending what Black artistry can look and sound like in Australia.

BLESSED was first known as Miracle and under that moniker, advanced an individualistic homegrown brand of electro-hip-hop. His 2014 album ‘Mainland’ was an entertaining high-concept album about his diasporic experience.

Subsequently, as BLESSED, further albums followed: "Music is the Medicine" (2020), "Lockdown Tapes Vol. 1" (2021) and "Aussie Blackstar" (2022)

Now, with STARSEED, BLESSED channels multiple genres: emo guitars, trap drums, gospel harmonies, cloud-rap textures and post-punk urgency intermingle freely in this vivid sonic collage. Part prayer, part protest, part self-actualisation, the record is restless and borderless, but never messy. Every track feels personal, intentional, filled with wounded hope and cosmic clarity.

Lyrically, BLESSED interrogates identity, trauma, belonging and power with raw openness. The production turns to massed synths, looping mantras and rough-hewn distortion, journeying through emotional landscapes.

Beyond BLESSED's fusion of styles, his mould-breaking includes his refusal to be boxed-in, despite the Australian mainstream hesitancy in embracing Black diasporic voices of complexity. However, STARSEED asserts itself as a global Black album, rooted in Western Sydney’s multiculturalism and tuned to a higher consciousness.

There’s no other Australian album right now quite like this - ambitious, genre-agnostic, and grounded in a vision that refuses compromise.

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Manifest Everything

BODDHI SATVA

Released 11 July 2025

BBE Music / Batakari

*****

This soul-framed double LP of Afro-house anthems and intimate interludes is a heartfelt cultural manifesto and tribute, uniting dancefloor power, ancestral roots and personal memory.

Boddhi Satva, born Sativa Tosin Aina in Côte d’Ivoire and raised in Angola, is a London-based pioneer of Ancestral Soul - a blend of Afro-house, deep house, and soulful global rhythms. His 2022 album Manifestation earned a Grammy nomination in the Best Alternative Music Album category, elevating Afro-electronic sound to wider acclaim.

Satva's music often carries spiritual and political resonance, anchored by rich percussion and collaborated vocals.

Manifest Everything, is a personal tribute to his late mother and a celebration of cultural roots, marked by deep lyricism, packaged within striking, Basquiat-inspired visuals.

It is a powerful double vinyl set that curates highlights from Satva’s Manifestation and In Spite of Everything (2024), placing intimate moments among pulsating club-ready tracks in an immersive narrative journey of resistance, memory, and healing .

The first of this two disc set is opened by “Nyè Sonni So (The Strength Within)”, a four-minute intro that features a delightful kora lead figure, backed with soft-keyboard chords. The album's Afro-house heartbeat grows into “I Won’t Say I’m Not Hurting,” in which Bodhi's high, soulful vocal soars over shimmering, layered synths. “In That Funk” and “Dancing in Circles (Main Mix)” pivot toward dancefloor euphoria with sticky bass and propulsive rhythm. The contemplative “In Spite of Everything” closes the sequence with gravitas.

Disc two pivots into collaboration with globally recognized artists, each adding distinctive flavor. Raheem DeVaughn on “Finesse Me” channels buttery soul; Davi Lorenzo & Mr Luu’s “Sácalo” delivers seductive Afro-Latin swing; J’Something guests on the gospel/house-jam “Slow Down”; Spilulu, Kaysha & H. Baraka on “Kilulu” offer silky Afro-pop fusion. Zaki Ibrahim’s “Vibrate High,” Jorge Bezerra’s “Xangô” and the raw percussion of “Kotto River” closes the set, with Freddy da Stupid offering deeper emotional textures. The sequencing sustains narrative momentum - no filler, each track purposeful.

Doubly significant, the double gatefold includes personal liner notes by Satva reflecting on his mother’s memory and features Basquiat-inspired artwork, underlining the spiritual and cultural importance of the project.

While not strictly new material, Manifest Everything serves as both retrospective and rebirth, elevating Satva’s Afro-electronic vision with emotional authenticity and dancefloor impact.

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Hiwar

ALEPH QUINTET

Released 18 April 2025

IGLOO Records

*****

Privileging mood, texture and collective sensitivity this exciting Quintet delivers authentic, cross-cultural music that feels deeply lived-in rather than conceptual.

Brussels-based, Aleph Quintet is a French-Tunisian ensemble rooted in modal jazz and Maghrebi (north African) traditions. Led by drummer and composer Sofian El Mabrouk, the band includes saxophonist Adam Mounir, pianist Clément Daldosso, bassist Nabil Boularès and oud player Nesrine Gherbi. Their name, Aleph, nods to both Arabic script and infinite possibility.

The Quintet's sophomore album, the follow-up to 2023's award-winning "Shapes of Silence"), Hiwar is a conceptually unified and emotionally layered set that finds its voice in contrast and convergence. “Hiwar” (meaning “dialogue”) invites listeners into a richly textured conversation between North African heritage and European modern jazz language.

Opener “Hair Dance” sets the tone with a shifting groove and sparse melodic material that unfolds slowly, making space for detailed instrumental interplay. “Monsters Are Everywhere” leans into abstraction, its minor modality and free pulse suggesting paranoia without melodrama. “Samaï,” the first of the album’s two centrepieces, builds on a classical Arabic form, but reframes it with a stretched harmonic palette and a jazz ensemble’s sense of dynamic evolution.

For many, I am sure, "Le Chat Noir" will transport listeners to after dark sessions in the jazz bars, music festivals and salons of the Maghreb.

The second major element, the four-part “Hiwar” suite (preludio, follia, aria, finale) reveals the group’s most ambitious writing. Here, the oud and piano entwine in delicate counterpoint, while saxophone threads through with lyrical restraint. The “follia” movement stands out for its intensity, pulsing with ritual energy, before the “finale” closes in hushed reconciliation.

Dhafer Youssef Home Page

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Aeris

ERKKI-SVEN TÜÜR

Released 20 June 2025

ECM

*****

'Music has to have everything: overwhelming power, illuminating light, endless gentleness and the deepest darkness. Fury, pain, remorse. Everything that makes us human. And the tender touch of redeeming love". Erkki-Sven Tüür

Aeris is the ninth ECM New Series album to feature the vibrant and highly expressive music of Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür. Olari Elts, a long-time champion of Tüür’s work, conducts the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra in compelling, intensely-focused performances of Phantasma, De Profundis and Tüür’s tenth symphony “ÆRIS”, which is scored for horn quartet and orchestra.

Phantasma (2008) is an indirect homage to Beethoven, with ghostly echoes from the Coriolan Overture, the otherworldly allure of Tüür’s piece also emphasized by microtonal glissandi.

De Profundis (2013) is dedicated to Olari Elts and is a free interpretation of the Old Testament psalm, its plea from out of the depths conveyed instrumentally, as vibraphone and harp lead the music upwards from despair and, eventually, toward transformation of the entire sonic field.

In Latin, Tüür notes, “æris” means brass while “aeris” means air, “and without this essential element, not a sound would come out of brass instruments. Thus, the title of my tenth symphony focuses mainly on the brass sound that carries the weight of this composition.” Written at the urging of the ensemble German Hornsound in 2022, the symphony is a vast drama of shifting energies and interactions, with the horns effectively “messengers from beyond the horizon, bringing prophecies of imminent irreversible changes.”

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El Viejo Caminante

DINO SALUZZI

JOSE MARIA SALUZZI, JACOB YOUNG

Released 11 July 2025

ECM

*****

At 90, Dino Saluzzi embarks as The Old Wanderer through memory and melody, in a trio where bandoneón, classical and steel guitars converge in elegiac dialogue and elegant reinvention.

Dino Saluzzi, now 90, remains a luminous figure in world jazz, his bandoneón (a type of concertina popular in Argentina and Uruguay, typically in tango ensembles) weaving memory, landscape and lyricism with unfaltering grace.

On El Viejo Caminante (The Old Wanderer), he’s joined by his son, José María Saluzzi (classical guitar) and Norwegian guitarist Jacob Young (steel-string and electric) creating an intimate trio marked by cross-generational dialogue and sonic empathy. Recorded in April 2023 in Buenos Aires, the album spans originals, jazz standards and reinterpretations, subtly blending tango, Argentine folk and jazz.

Saluzzi’s enduring quest for “artistic and human growth” continues to shape his work.

The album opens with José’s “La Ciudad de los Aires Buenos,” ("The City of Buenos Aires") an interlocking guitar motif that evokes place and memory. Young’s “Quiet March” carries subtle drama, while Saluzzi contributes pieces like “Buenos Aires 1950” and “Mi hijo y Yo” ("My Son and I") poignantly anchored in reflection and familial resonance. Notably, he delivers a solo rendition of the title track, rich with nostalgia and church-like cadences, emphasizing the instrument’s physicality.

The trio navigates standards “My One and Only Love” and “Someday My Prince Will Come” with a spare, lyrical openness that brings surprising intimacy and restraint.

Celeste Official Site

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Daybreak

SVEN WUNDER

Released 26 September 2025

Piano Piano

*****

A lush cinematic tone poem in which melody and orchestration combine, conveying warmth rather than nostalgia.

Since his two 2020 debut albums with Wabi Sabi and Eastern Flowers, Swedish composer-producer Sven Wunder has built an improbable career out of re-imagining the grandeur of 1970s library music, jazz-funk and global exotica through a modern, emotionally direct lens. Blurring the lines between arranger, beat-maker and conceptual composer, he’s created a self-contained world where analog strings, vibraphones, flutes and vintage drum tones coexist with cinematic sweep. Across five albums in as many years, Wunder has moved from the crate-digger aesthetic toward full orchestral writing, without losing the groove or curiosity that made him a cult favourite among both hip-hop samplers and audiophile traditionalists.

"At daybreak, as sunlight travels through the atmosphere and begins to reach Earth’s surface, daylight gradually emerges..."

Daybreak opens with gentle brass and rippling harps, suggesting a tranquil pastoral scene, but as the record unfolds, Wunder’s writing reveals harmonic daring and rhythmic elasticity that lift it far above “easy listening.” The palette recalls Burt Bacharach’s sophistication and Michel Legrand’s impressionism, yet Wunder’s phrasing and tempo shifts show a producer’s instinct for momentum and space. Strings swell like a tide; percussion flickers with funk undercurrents; woodwinds sketch sunlight and shadow.

Where earlier albums toyed with stylistic pastiche, Daybreak feels fully integrated, its transitions seamless, its orchestrations alive with modern tension. Pieces such as “Morning Star” and “Silver Horizon” balance melodic clarity with harmonic twists worthy of David Axelrod or Eumir Deodato. The result is neither retro nor ironic but a continuation of a lost art: lush, orchestrated instrumental music that breathes. Far from conservative, Daybreak reclaims sophistication itself as a radical gesture of beauty and craft.

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Strange Heavens

LINDA MAY HAN OH

Released 22 August 2025

Biophilia Records

****-

A contemporary Super-Trio assembles for a sometimes uncomfortable sonic journey through layers urgency, lyricism and emotion to forge a resonant, improvisational gem.

Linda May Han Oh is a Malaysia-born, Australia-raised bassist and composer based in New York, acclaimed for her virtuosic command of both electric and acoustic bass. A collaborator with giants like Vijay Iyer, Pat Metheny, Geri Allen and Terri Lyne Carrington, she balances jazz tradition with progressive ambition. Her recent solo works "The Glass Hours" (Biophilia Records, 2023) and collaborations such as "Compressions" with Iyer and Sorey (ECM, 2024) reveal a composer unafraid to confront complex social themes through intimate yet daring musical forms.

With Strange Heavens, she returns to the "chordless" trio format for the first time since her debut, reuniting with earlier collaborators, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and drummer Tyshawn Sorey and claiming opportunity for pure, unmediated expression.

Inspired by the adage that we often choose a familiar hell over a strange heaven, the super-trio probes the fragile boundaries between comfort and transformation in a sonic manifesto of quiet resistance.

From the opening track “Portal,” driven by a taut bass motif and the Miles-inspired urgency of Akinmusire's trumpet, the trio traverses tension and release with electrifying empathy. Whether for the meditative lyricism of “Paperbirds” or the expansive warmth of “Folk Song” (to name two of the twelve pieces here), Akinmusire’s trumpet alternates between tremulous, introspective tones and top-end bursts, while Sorey’s drumming ranges from rimshot hush to propulsive rhythmic gestures.

The centrepiece of the album is a suite of four tracks inspired by Australian artist, writer and filmmaker Shaun Tan’s wordless graphic novel The Arrival (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2007): “Home”, "Paperbirds", “Folk Song” and "Work Song". As wordless as the graphic novel itself, the suite provides a parallel "voice" to, supplementing the painters visionary narrative with a new layer of emotion and textural richness for the shared imagination of readers and listeners alike.

Covers of Geri Allen’s “Skin” and Melba Liston’s “Just Waiting” close the album, blending the tonal warmth of the album as a whole, with trio's engaging, free-jazz energy.

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The Resurrection Game

EMMA SWIFT

Released 11 September 2025

Tiny Ghost Records

*****

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.

The Wind Doesn't Blow This Far Right (EP)

LISA O'NEIL

Released 19 November 2025

Rough Trade Records

*****

The Irish folk auteur delivers a potent, stark EP of social protest and timeless poetry, underpinned by her singular, soul-shaking voice.

Born in County Cavan, Lisa O'Neill is one of the most distinctive and important voices in contemporary Irish folk music. Renowned for her stark, haunting vocalizations and sharp lyrical observations on modern Irish life, she expertly fuses traditional sounds with a fierce socio-political commentary. A self-taught musician on guitar and banjo, her visibility soared after her cover of Bob Dylan’s "All The Tired Horses" soundtracked the final episode of Peaky Blinders. Often compared to figures like Sinéad O’Connor for her uncompromising truth-telling, she is rightly celebrated as a cultural hero in her native Ireland.

This potent six-track EP is both a political broadside and showcase for O’Neill’s prowess as originator and interpreter. The title track, a stunning lament on divisive politics, establishes the EP’s uncompromising tone. This contemporary fury is expertly balanced by her moving adaptation of the Bob Dylan cover "All The Tired Horses" and the inclusion of her devastating original "Homeless in the Thousands (Dublin in the Digital Age)."

O'Neill frames her own songs within a timeless canon of social critique and stark poetry by with her own inimitable covers of works by 19th Century English writer of romantic, devotional and children's poems Christina Rossetti ("The Bleak Midwinter") and 20th Century Irish novelist and poet James Stevens ("Autumn 1915").

Delivered in her raw, indelible voice over minimal instrumentation, the EP is a vital, unforgettable listen that confirms her status as a folk force. It is especially welcome, since O'Neill's output has been sparing, with only five albums so far, the most recent of which "All Of This Is Chance" (2023) is a timeless masterpiece.

Lisa O'Neill Home Page

Lifetime

ERIKA DE CASIER

Released 8 May 2025

Independent Jeep Music

*****
A shimmering, subtly subversive R&B suite that refines de Casier’s signature minimalism for her most emotionally resonant and compositionally assured work so far.

Danish-Portuguese singer, songwriter, and producer Erika de Casier has carved out a quietly revolutionary niche in contemporary R&B. Drawing on late-’90s and early-2000s aesthetics, she deploys whisper-soft vocals, liquid bass lines and crystalline drum programming and crafts music that feels both nostalgic and futuristic. Somewhere between Sade’s cool elegance and Julee Cruise’s dreamlike softness, Erika de Casier has shaped a style entirely her own. Across Essentials (2019), Sensational (2021), and Still (2024), she perfected a feather-light, quietly playful form of R&B built on sly humor and meticulous production.

With Lifetime, de Casier expands that universe. The production remains minimalist and deeply textural, but the emotional palette has grown richer: warmer synth pads, more organic instrumentation, and a songwriting voice that leans into vulnerability without losing its wry self-awareness. It’s the sound of an artist deepening her vocabulary while keeping her signature cool intact.

Lifetiome is Erika de Casier at her most spacious and assured, a record where restraint becomes a kind of generosity. Opener “Forever’s Not That Long” sets the tone with its gliding two-step rhythm and brushed synths, framing de Casier’s voice as a confidante rather than a performer. Tracks like “Soft Target” and “Sweet Memory” showcase her uncanny ability to make quietness feel powerful — each drum hit perfectly placed, each melodic contour glowing with understated confidence.

The album’s emotional center arrives in “Grey Morning,” an unexpectedly tender ballad where fingerpicked guitar meets vaporous pads, revealing new shades of warmth in her delivery. Meanwhile, “Play Nice” brings back her trademark winking assertiveness, its rubbery bass and clipped percussion reminiscent of classic Timbaland but refracted through her minimalist lens.

What binds the album is coherence: a sonic world that feels lived-in, breathable, and effortlessly stylish. Lifetiome is soft, but never slight.
A luminous refinement of her artistry, Lifetime proves Erika de Casier is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary R&B. Elegant, intimate, and immaculately crafted, it is a quiet masterpiece.

Erika de Casier Home Page

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Sanctuary

LEVITATION ORCHESTRA

Released 14 November 2025

5dB Records

*****

The third album by this London 10-piece delivers a transcendent, cinematic exploration of spiritual jazz and collective improvisation - the fully realized statement of a group announcing itself as a major force in contemporary jazz.

Led by trumpeter Axel Kaner-Lidstrom, Levitation Orchestra is a celebrated 10-piece collective at the forefront of London's vibrant contemporary jazz scene. Formed in 2018, the group champions an egalitarian approach to composition. Their expansive, cinematic sound is deeply rooted in spiritual jazz, drawing philosophical and sonic inspiration from the cosmic explorations of Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane, alongside classical textures from Stravinsky and Ravel. They are recognized for their deeply emotive and uplifting live shows that transcend conventional genre boundaries.

Sanctuary, the Orchestra's third album, is a powerful exercise in improvisation. The collective successfully builds on the legacy of large-scale jazz ensembles, recalling Sun Ra's expansive, freewheeling freedom and the boundary-pushing experimentation of the Art Ensemble of Chicago's 'Great Black Music.' Yet, the collective's blend of spiritual themes and powerful instrumental narratives places them in the company of UK and International contemporaries including SAULT, Sons Of Kemet and Isaiah Collier & The Chosen Few.

The eight tracks that comprise "Sanctuary" constantly surprise: while vocalist Plumm and harpist Maria Osuchowska continue to add celestial, folk-infused layers that extend the exploratory textures of previous albums - 2018's Inexpressible Infinity and 2021's Illusions & Realities - it is the albums more robust ensemble work that now elevates the record's devotional intensity to the the highest levels. Sanctuary is the fully realized statement of a group announcing itself as a major force in contemporary jazz.

5DB

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Dream Manifest

THEO CROKER

Released 13 June 2025

*****

The culmination of his explorations into the intersections of jazz, hip-hop, R&B and electronic music, all woven together with a spiritual and introspective thread.

Theo Croker’s Dream Manifest is a luminous, genre-fluid odyssey that features a stellar lineup of collaborators, including Estelle, Kassa Overall, Tyreek McDole, MAAD, Gary Bartz, Natureboy Flako, Malaya, and D’LEAU. Each artist adds their unique voice to Croker’s intricate compositions, blending soulful melodies with complex rhythms and textures.

Croker’s approach to Dream Manifest is deeply rooted in the idea of manifestation and the power of imagination. He describes the album as a “sonic exploration of the power to manifest in our universe,” aiming to create a space where listeners can reflect and find inspiration.

Croker’s trumpet work is both expressive and restrained, often serving as a guiding voice through the album’s diverse sonic landscapes. The use of samples and electronic textures adds depth and modernity to the compositions, creating a sound that is both timeless and contemporary.

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Cavejaz

FABIANO DO NASCIMENTO

Released 21 November 2025

Leaving Records All Genre

*****

A mesmerizing, rhythmically intricate exploration of Brazilian musical lineage, in which the nylon string guitar seems transformed, becoming a vessel of discovery, imagination and immersion.

Los Angeles–based Brazilian guitarist and composer Fabiano do Nascimento has long been celebrated for his ability to braid tradition with experimentation, drawing on choro, samba, northeast Brazilian folk idioms, Afro-Brazilian spirituality and the exploratory impulses of late-’60s/’70s Brazilian vanguard. Cavejaz (“music from the cave”) channels those threads in one of his most conceptually unified works.

The album’s palette is deceptively simple: nylon-string guitar, percussion, breath and occasional electronics, yet the results feel expansive - and not always easy listening. Instead, we find a body of work that is elemental, echoing and rooted in rhythmic pattern and primal resonance. It entices and challenges and as a result is amply rewarding. Collaborating on the album are: Fabiano do Nascimento (7-string Guitar, 8-string Guitar, Electronics), Paulo Santos (Handmade Percussion), U-Zhaan (Tablas), Ricardo 'Tiki' Pasillas (Percussion) and Jennifer Souza (Vocals).

Do Nascimento’s playing is supple and searching as he shifts between meditative repetition and bursts of crystalline clarity. It’s a recording that encodes a conversation between tradition and invention, inviting the listener to share space that feels ritualistic, tactile and transporting. Some tracks, for example “Maracatú”, carry the quiet propulsion of northeastern Brazilian traditions, as hints of baião, coco, or maracatu surface in the cross-accents and circular phrasing gently pushes the music forward. Other pieces hover in a not-quite-ambient haze, guided less by melody than by texture and breath. "Velho Templo", “Olhos Luz” and “Tranquilo” drift into more atmospheric spaces, guided more by texture and pulse than melodic progression. Throughout the album, do Nascimento's touch is deft, ranging from gentle in “Aguas Serenas”, to fiercely articulate in the title track - always at the service of the emotional contour of the piece, rather than technique.

The album’s “cave” concept is encoded in its acoustics: everything feels close, resonant - as if played in stone chambers where each note returns transformed. Although the careful attention and deep listening between its five collaborators is central to its excellence, Cavejaz showcases a level of virtuosity that seems beyond the conventional limits of the nylon string guitar - a patient, immersive work from one of today’s most distinctive guitar voices.

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GODTET

+ The Sydney Symphony Orchestra

GODTET

NOVAK MANOJOVIC, NICHOLAS BUC

THE SYDNEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Released 14 November 2025

La Scape Records

*****

Dissolving musical hierarchies, GODTET’s ecstatic groove meets the SSO's symphonic weight in a fearless landmark convergence.

GODTET is an enigmatic Sydney-based electronic-jazz quintet led by guitarist Dave Rodriguez, who have developed global cult status in the underground scene for their spontaneous, groove-driven improvisation. In this remarkable recording they are joined by the world-renowned Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO), established in 1932 and resident at the Sydney Opera House. "It’s important to us to mention how monumental this new Sydney Symphony Orchestra record is for us. I don’t think any of us imagined such a thing would be possible in our lifetimes."

GODTED comprises Godriguez (guitar), Andrew Bruce (keyboards), Dominic Kirk (percussion), Jan Bangma (bass) and Tully Ryan (drums).

The collaboration is marshalled and composed by polymath Novak Manojlovic whose arrangements bridge GODTET's live-sampling artistry with the classical tradition, ensuring the SSO's structured score complements the band's fluid expression. However heroic it seems, this is not GODTET's first pass at working with orchestration: they also worked with Manojlovic on +Strings (2023). Recorded live at the Sydney Opera House, this album is nevertheless a monumental achievement in genre dissolution. Under the baton of conductor Nicholas Buc, the suite brilliantly explores the friction between the fixed structures of orchestral composition and instinctual, improvisation.

Manojlovic’s arrangements amplify GODTET's rhythmic language with the SSO’s rich sonic canvas. The orchestra and quintet each retain their identity and place throughout the performance, as the musical expression and intensity moves back and forth between them. This synergy is perfectly demonstrated by opening piece "New Sun" whose neoclassical strings are infused with jazz flavors and segue into the percussion-fed, bass-driven "Stepper". The early drum and bass simplicity of this piece is in turn replaced by beguiling keyboards and expressive orchestral textures - a cinematic transformation that is typical of many tracks on the album, perhaps reflecting the artists' bedroom-to-concert hall journey.

A mid-album highlight, "The Fall Line" follows, it's steady, musical narrative carrying out of silence to the verge of terror. Three tracks follow, that seem to work as a suite, although not listed as such, First, the angelic harp of "Dub Angels", which serves as a palette cleanser after the intensity of "The Fall Line". This too diverges, this time to the melancholy and precedes "Cantus", perhaps, the album highlight, which opens meditatively but develops a romantic groove that builds into a vast cathedral of sound before dissolving into the more experimental, ephemeral "Bliss Angels". Closing the set, "Always Bright - Live" is a cathartic finale, blending controlled orchestral chaos with brilliant soloing, achieving powerful, uplifting completion. The work is a demonstration of music born in bedrooms and warehouses moving to the concert hall.

It is expansive, fearless, and a definitive moment for Australian music, received with rapturous applause in this engaging live recording.

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Phylipe Nunes Araújo

PHYLIPE NUNES ARAÚJO

Released 24 October 2025

Far Out Recordings

*****

A stunning debut weaving stripped-back, folk-inspired Brazilian songwriting with sophisticated harmony and the rich, rugged spirit of the Northeast.

Phylipe Nunes Araújo is a Brazilian songwriter from Caruaru, Pernambuco, whose music is deeply rooted in the culture and diverse landscapes of Brazil's Northeast. Raised listening to local traditions like forrós and cantadores, his approach to lyricism draws heavily from regional folk poetry (Literatura de Cordel). Describing his sound simply as "Brazilian music from the Agreste of Pernambuco," Araújo expertly blends traditional rhythms (like coco and baião) with modern, sophisticated harmonies. This intimate folk-pop debut, created alongside collaborators Bruno Berle and Batata Boy, announces a pure and vital new voice.

This self-titled debut is a mesmerizing tapestry that beautifully threads together regional rhythm, folk poetry, and stunning ballads. Recorded primarily in São Paulo, the album is noted for its intimacy and authenticity, earning comparisons to the quiet, acoustic introspection of artists like Nick Drake. Araújo is quick to assert that while his nylon-string guitar evokes Bossa Nova, his foundation is strictly the Northeast, expertly recontextualizing rhythms like frevo and maracatu into a gentle, contemporary folk-pop sound. The ten songs, rich with extended chords, vividly evoke the diverse landscapes—from the hills of Pernambuco to the lagoons of Alagoas. Tracks like "Asa" and "Santa Cruz" are hypnotic, showcasing his mastery of melodic subtlety. This is an honest and pure statement, a luminous debut that demands and richly rewards repeat listening, cementing its place as an essential new voice in Brazilian popular music (MPB).

Far Out Recordings