Here are some experimental highlights of 2025, and you can tell these albums are experimental because their titles contain words like "vortex" and "tranquilizer". This next bit will only make sense after you've read the text below. Altogether now: Bring our your dead! Bring out your dead!...
Aleksi Perälä – Vortex 1–4 + Cycles 0 (AP Musik)
If you ask Google how many albums Aleksi Perälä released in 2025, Google will explode. Fact. On New Year's Day, he released the understated Cycles 0. Then in the second half of the year, he released 15 albums all called Grace. The series mapped an electronic geography, from simple saw waves to Indian percussion. The whole thing was enchanting and you need Perälä in your life.
Dale Cornish – Altruism (The Death of Rave)
"Bring our yer dead! BRING OUT YER DEAD!" This disconcerting drawl is an uncomfortable start, which is good, because this is not a comfortable listen. Cornish gives us an album that is DIY in production and intention. The nihilism of its broken and rusty half-rave music is bravely undercut by his lysergic vocals full of truth about queer life.
Hieroglyphic Being – The Sound Of Something Ending (Mathematics)
In anyone else's hands, this would have been a deep house album. The Chigaco producer quickly sends things sideways with electro-jazz, horn-laden microhouse and psychedelic EBM. It feels like he's commandeered a studio, planked over the doors and windows, then poured boiling oil on anyone else who dare approach its boundary. Entertaingly original.
Holden & Zimpel – The Universe Will Take Care Of You (Border Community)
Border Community's James Holden is always up to something, like a disobedient child or a naughty poodle. He goes all kosmiche on this partnership with folk musician Waclaw Zimpel. This builds on their Long Weekend EP from a few years ago, and it's jazzy, loose, carnivalistic and earthy. What will he get up to next? Someone keep an eye on him.
Los Thuthanaka – Los Thuthanaka (self-released)
What did I just listen to? Bolivian-American brothers reimagine music of the Andes. The result is uncategorisable: it's scratchy and shuffling, but also epic and hysterical. Someone called it a trance album, but that's true only in so far as its exuberant clattering and deceptively subtle dynamism will induce a kind of psychosis.
Oneohtrix Point Never – Tranquilizer (Warp Records)
Mr Never is back doing his thing, this time plumbing sounds pulled from ancient sample CDs and CD-ROMs featured on the Internet Archive. Tranquilizer drags us into a steamy greenhouse of organic sounds, bursting with heady colours and with frequencies sprouting all over the place. It's all so precise, though, and intoxicating throughout.
rRoxymore – Juggling Dualities (!K7 Recordings)
This latest selection of 2025 albums have defied categorisation, and rRoxymore's third album is no exception. Opener Am I Human? could have been lifted from Global Communication's 76:14, while elsewhere it feels like motorik Detroit techno, library music, or jazzy coffee table electronica. She never takes an eye of melody.
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