2025 was a terrible year in many ways, but at least it was a good one for recordings. Indeed, the embarrassment of riches is not easily confined to lists like these. They are just a starting point, an invitation to reflect. In that spirit and in no particular order, here are 25 favorite recordings from 2025:
Aux Meadows — Draw Near (self-released)
Lea Bertucci + Olivia Block — I Know the Number of the Sand and the Measure of the Sea (Room40)
A first meeting, hopefully not the last, between avant musicians Lea Bertucci and Olivia Block, this recording is at turns exploratory and emphatic in compositions that use just the basics, reel-to-reel tape recorders, a few field recordings, and Bertucci’s voice. The outcomes are anything but basic, rather seeming like an essential example of both artists’ work.
Sir Richard Bishop — Hillbilly Ragas (Drag City)
Circuit des Yeux — Halo on the Inside (Matador)
Flock of Dimes — The Life You Save (Sub Pop)
Rebecca Foon and Aliayta Foon-Dancoes — Reverie (Constellation)
Violinist and cellist siblings join for an album of what might best be called contemporary classical. Rebecca Foon has post-rock bona fides and Aliayta Foon-Dancoes is both an accomplished composer and a Ph.D. candidate in Composition at Princeton. Their respective practices come together in music that befits the album’s title, meditative, at its best transportive.
Jürg Frey / Reinier van Houdt — Composer, alone (Elsewhere)
Liza Lim — String Creatures (NMC)
Composer Liza Lim’s writing for string instruments has become ever more pliable, with effects not used as decoration, but serving as fundamental components on both local and formal levels. String Creatures has been recorded by JACK Quartet, who are some of the best exponents one could hope for in this repertoire. Moving strings away from idiomatic playing techniques into a fluid environment in which noise inhabits the music alongside pitch and rhythm as an equal partner, the recording is both challenging and inspiring.
Alberto Ginastera/ Miró Quartet — String Quartets (Pentatone)
Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) was an Argentinian composer who used a broad palette of musical styles, incorporating folk music as well as clusters and microtones. His three string quartets include all the various musical elements that defined his work, and they are varied yet distilled concoctions that make a strong case for his profile to be raised. The Miró Quartet give these pieces attention and care, and it will prove difficult for another group to top them.
Jessica Moss — Unfolding (Constellation)
The Necks — Disquiet (Northern Spy)
Pierre Boulez / Quatuor Diotima — Livre pour Quatuor (Pentatone)
Pierre Boulez / Ralph van Raat — Piano Works (Naxos)
This year was the centennial of composer/conductor Pierre Boulez’s birth and among the various tributes in the form of concerts, books, and recordings, pianist Ralph van Raat’s traversal of rare and underserved pieces is a real find, one that will contribute to the discourse surrounding Boulez’s watershed year of 1945, as well as the transition he made to different techniques in his late style.
Alan Sparhawk — With Trampled by Turtles (Sub Pop)
After the loss of his wife and creative partner, Mimi Sparhawk, Alan Sparhawk disbanded their group Low and did a solo album (White Roses My God) which gave voice to the sometimes voicelessness of grief, the vocals distorted by the use of a vocoder. On With Trampled by Turtles, Sparhawk joins fellow Minnesotan artists for a recording that is a return to singing sans effects. While one misses Mimi’s voice being in the mix — probably always will — this successful new collaboration affords Alan the space to express a wide emotional range. One part of the mix of styles is the slowcore of Sparhawk and another is the alt-folk of TbT, which combines well. The music making is top notch too.
Joan Shelley — Real Warmth (No Quarter)
Squanderers — If a Body Meets a Body (Shimmy-Disc)
Teethe — Magic of the Sale (Winspear)
Apparently, Denton, Texas has become a vital outpost for post-rock, as is evidenced by Teethe’s second album. The group’s members are members of several groups active in the scene, and The Magic of the Sale seems like a beginning of something, that there is a lot more music from Denton in the offing, which is a good thing.
Rafael Toral — Traveling Light (Drag City)
Tortoise — Touch (International Anthem/Nonesuch)
A new Tortoise album so compelling that it makes their long hiatus seem like it was but just a brief absence. Welcome back to the greatest post-rock group.
Jeff Tweedy — Twilight Override (dBpm)
Gérard Grisey / Ukho Ensemble — VORTEX TEMPORUM (Kyiv Dispatch)
I’m pretty sure that this is the first time I have received a recording from a war zone, but this made its way to me from Kyiv. It is an extraordinary document, a scintillating rendition of a late work by the spectral composer Gérard Grisey.
Philip Glass / Vanessa Wagner — The Complete Piano Etudes (Infiné)
Philip Glass is a good pianist, but he wrote these etudes for virtuosi to play, and Vanessa Wagner does a fantastic job, having mastered the pieces’ technical demands, playing even the most challenging of passages with aplomb. Moreover, she allows the music to breathe in a way that other pianists don’t always do. Glass’s piano music may have lots of repetition, but it also embodies the phrasing and melodic heft of etudes from the great pianist-composers in the repertoire.
Squanderers — If a Body Meets a Body (Shimmy-Disc)
Guitarists David Grubbs and Wendy Eisenberg are both eclectic musicians well known for their prodigious skills as improvisers. It seems a natural fit to have them meet in a free music recording, If a Body Meets a Body. Squanderers also includes a third member, multi-instrumentalist Kramer. He allows the others a lot of room to bounce ideas back and forth, but his bass-playing and electronics are important parts of the proceedings.
Each track name starts, “Theme for,” ending with an unusual set of nouns. “A Theme for Squanderers” begins on simmer with a feeling out process of chords between the guitarists. Kramer adds florid bass guitar lines. Eventually, a rapid fire guitar solo moves to the foreground, and the piece wraps up. “Theme for Contrails” (the vapor trails of jets) follows with a bellicose change in demeanor, rife with distorted downward slashes and howling held notes. “Theme for Silent Cowboys” channels flamenco, with an imitative guitar duet and a chromatic bass line.
“Theme for Viewers At Home” layers melodic fragments in guitars, dissonant harmonies, repeated notes, and multi-stop playing on the bass. It is an atmospheric ramble of a piece. “Theme for Pattern Recognition” has a bit of sci-fi about it (perhaps a William Gibson reference?), with a dyadic ostinato and single note trade-offs that create a discordant web. In “Theme for a Quiet Car,” the guitars adding loping lines to make a mysterious ambience, one that is the closest on the recording to address centric pitches and harmonies. The concluding track is a reprise of “Theme for Squanderers,” with subtle variations and several tempo shifts that distinguish it from the first time through and give things more of a post-rock vibe.
If a Body Meets a Body is the kind of simpatico free play that suggests the existence of ESP. One off groups are the stock in trade of many improvising musicians. Dare we hope Squanderers is a more abiding concern?
