Top 20 electronic music albums of 2025: Bruise Blood is dirtier than a ketchup-splashed pop shirt

This is part of a series, posting between 30th December 2025 and 3rd January 2026

Bruise Blood: You Run Through the World Like an Open Razor (Rocket Recordings)

Welcome to more highlights of 2025. I banged on about dozens of best-of-2025 albums, and now we’re into the Top 20 Bangers. The very best electronic music releases of 2025. With Bandcamp embeds and everything.

If you like your EBM, you may well adore this album from Teeth Of The Sea’s Mike Bourne. It’s industrial, crunchy synthwave noisecore kind of thing, splattered with acid and shoegaze and ‘orrible grubbiness.

I’m behind schedule with writing these blog posts, so forgive me for a moment of laziness. Here is an extract of me talking about the album when I interviewed Bruise Blood for Electronic Sound magazine. This was published a couple of months ago:

“This is a dirty album. Not the sanitised kind of dirty you get in detergent commercials in which a child splats ketchup onto their impossibly white polo shirt. This EBM-inspired workout is the filth of electronic aeons, riven with analogue grime and the leaking pneumatics of old studio hardware.

“For example, Cede leads with an impossibly dented bass rhythm while a rusty sawtooth yowl cuts through a splatter of vinegary ambience. And the scuzz of the title piece is so mesmerizingly broken, your inner cave-dweller will be bashing rocks to its 85bpm stomp.”

That pretty much sums it up. Thanks, past me. A doff of the cap should go to music magazine The Quietus for giving 'Blood the impetus to create this album, and to make our world a whole lot grubbier. I love it.

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025

Bruise Blood cuts deep in Electronic Sound magazine

In the current edition of Electronic Sound magazine, I have a good old waffle blab with Bruise Blood, the solo project name of Mike Bourne from psychedelic rockers Teeth Of The Sea.

In the interview, we chat about the sonic dirtiness of his debut solo album, having the confidence to go solo, buying old gear from Cash Converters, and his love of Autechre.

His album, called You Run Through the World Like An Open Razor, came out a few days ago on Rocket Recordings. My notes for the album contain phrases like "so very very dirty" and "the scuzz is mesmerising", and "gaaaawjeous" which may or may not be a word.

This edition also contains my 130th column, this month themed on brains. "What's inside a brain?" I ask. "What are brains made of? Do they taste of cauliflower?" I pontificate, before going on to answer precisely none of those questions. I do, incidentally, briefly talk about my stroke (see blog posts passim).

The cover star of this edition is Gary Numan and his guitar-drenched 1980 album Telekon. The album contains humdingers of track titles, such as Remember I Was Vapour and I Dream of Wires. However, none of them can hold a candle to Bruise Blood's And They Burned a Hole Through the Earth All the Way to Hell and Oh But You Can, Oh But You Will. Absolutely sublime.

Read my Bruise Blood feature here. Read my column here. Both of those links need a subscription.

Further Fats: My own personal braindance (2023)

Further Fats: The dark destroyers – my interview with Black Sites (2025)