CDs/DVDs
Katie Colombus
Some albums announce themselves with a roar. Others arrive quietly, kind of casually strolling into your life when you weren’t looking. Returning to Myself did the latter. Brandi Carlile’s most recent record just appeared, like an old friend in the doorway with a bottle of wine and an understanding nod. It is my album of the year not because it is loud or revolutionary, but because it is steady, wise and exactly what I needed.The title track began life as a poem, scribbled alone in Aaron Dessner's studio after years of Carlile supporting other musical legends: Joni Mitchell, Elton John, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Fantômas was the creation of French pulp novelists Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, whose titular criminal genius made his first print appearance in 1911. An amoral sadist with a talent for disguise, Fantômas made his first film appearance two years later in a five-episode crime serial directed by Louis Feuillade. Feuillade’s sober, stripped-back adaptation was hugely influential and the template for subsequent attempts to put Fantômas on screen. Until the mid-1960s, that is, when André Hunebelle helmed three brightly coloured Fantômas romps which so enraged co-creator Allain that he Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The wonderful Mirra exists in its own space.” Back in August, that was the conclusion of my review of Benedicte Maurseth’s then-new album. Living with this “stunningly intense,” “haunting, intense evocation of Norway’s uplands and its wildlife” hasn’t changed this impression. Moreover, over the ensuing months, the impact of this exceptional collection of eight interrelated compositions has increased. Benedicte Maurseth is Norwegian. Her main instrument is the Hardanger fiddle – with its second set of sympathetic, drone-generating, strings. This, together with Mirra’s concern with Read more ...
Mark Kidel
My musical year isn’t primarily made up of albums – there are so many other ways of enjoying “New Music” – not to mention the classical which I follow too. Bon Iver’s SABLE fABLE, offered delightful acoustic-driven sounds, that trod familiar ground, but the best of a wonderful album demonstrated how open he is to collaborations, in this case with artists such as vocalist Dijon, and producer Jim-E Stack, both of whom discoveries for me, and whose own work led me down so extraordinary sonic rabbit-holes. I have returned to this album a great deal, and the inventiveness and emotional power Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Mark Rothko’s colour field paintings invite contemplation, reflection, quietude, association, and in British, Irish and Scottish folk this year, that feeling of an open field, a depth of focus and an appetite to enter arrestingly abstract areas marks out a disparate range of albums of the year.It’s part of the magic and ambience of fiddle-guitar duo Spafford Campbell’s compelling second set, Tomorrow Held. They explore the quiet end of the open field, the title track a haunting 14-minute centrepiece, expanding that sense of space in their music to cosmic dimensions. On opening track “ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Yes, I know. Maybe everything bitched about them is true; an eye-watering marketing push, cynically calculated, monied, etc. Maybe it is not. I’ve no real idea.But, but, but, the second album by this London five-piece is my most listened-to of 2025 – and it only came out in October. In the end, all that will be left is the music, the rest history. Just think of The Monkees. The cool kids loathed this manufactured TV group in the 1960s, but who listens to “Daydream Believer” today and froths with the same indignation?From the Pyre is a gem, start-to-finish, a perfect balance of Sparks-like pop Read more ...
graham.rickson
Family crises and relationship breakdowns are familiar subjects for films to tackle. Both are central to Aribam Syam Sharma’s 1990 feature Ishanou (The Chosen One), where divine intervention wreaks havoc on a middle-class family living in India’s remote north-eastern Manipur province. Husband and wife Dhanabir and Tampha (Kangabam Tomba and Anoubam Kiranmala) are celebrating their young daughter’s transition to adulthood by having her ears pierced as part of a Meitei religious ceremony. Tension between the pair is signalled early on when Tampha rebuff’s Dhanabir’s attempts to embrace her. The Read more ...
joe.muggs
One of this year’s best music books, Songs in the Key of MP3 by Liam Inscoe-Jones, paints a picture of musicians of the “streaming era” having a different relationship to the past, compared to those of… well, the past. He shows how artists like Dev “Blood Orange” Hynes have adapted to mass availability of culture by indulging not in nostalgia for something vague, but using the endless micro detail at their fingertips for reconstructing, picking up unfinished business, creating “alternative presents” from which new lineages might branch off.So it is with a lot of this year’s best records. Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In all honestly, 2025 has not been a vintage year for new recorded music and there certainly seems to have been a significant paucity of high-profile album releases that are likely to be viewed as stone-cold classics in years to come. Nevertheless, there has been gold for those prepared to look hard enough.Swiss electro-rock veterans, the Young Gods unleashed a techno-metal monster, Appear Disappear, that dug deep into an intoxicating malevolence with their muscular, sample-heavy electronics and live percussion. Soulwax brought us the gritty electro-pop flavoured All Systems Are Lying. While Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Among millennials, Taylor Momsen is likely to be primarily remembered as an actor of things relatively sweet and family friendly. She appeared in Spy Kids 2 and TV’s Gossip Girl, but most notably as Cindy Lou Who with Jim Carrey in How the Grinch Stole Christmas at the turn of the century.Since then, of course, she’s reinvented herself as the post-grunge front woman of the very successful Pretty Reckless. As a rock’n’roller, she may like people to believe that she’s something of a replacement Courtney Love but actually she really inhabits Avril Lavigne-like territory. Still, she’s not Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
According to the fifth song on their first Christmas album, seasonal shenanigans in Old Crow Medicine Show’s family are boozy and raucous. Step aside Santa because “Grandpappy's been a-brewing since before the war” and is “the best bootlegger for a Georgia mile”. The result is the riotous barndance fiddlin’ of “Corn Whiskey Christmas” (which brings “good cheer to all the gals and the fellas). I’m in!The song is a highlight of OCMS XMAS, a 13-track set which showcases the light-hearted side of a Nashville outfit who’ve been at the forefront of the US bluegrass revival for over two decades. Read more ...
joe.muggs
Well, this is a surprise. Not so much that the Sunderland band should do a Christmas album, mind. Despite their raw and spiky hardcore framework, which channelled heavyweights like Gang Of Four and Fugazi, they were always capable of being gentle, dreamlike, flirting with but never tipping over into the whimsical, as on their huge breakthrough cover of Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love”. And maybe even more relevantly, their harmony singing bordered on the choral from the start, something made explicit on their a capella reworking folk songs and their own work on their 2012 Rant album.No, it’s not Read more ...