Ghold

Bludgeoning Simulations

Ghold’s latest is an expansive, trudging voyage through deep, dark reverie, with proceeds from Bandcamp sales going towards SkatePal, a charity supplying skateboarding equipment and training courses to underfunded communities in Palestine

Bludgeoning Simulations by GHOLD

Ghold’s first album in six years possesses a monstrous, viscous form.It’s a shape that makes its appearance through the album’s warping, dark atmospheres. Murky samples, eerie synth drones, tribal toms and shifting band dynamics radiate apprehension from within its core, a feeling which only intensifies across its runtime. Their previous tags of “doom metal” on albums like STOIC and PYR seem to have expanded into even darker realms on this new record. Tracks like ‘Leaves’ evoke epic and foreboding atmospheres, making for a brutal yet evocative…

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Noel Gardner caps off his 15th year as our punk and hardcore columnist with a roundup of the 10 best records of 2025, and reviews of 10 more that got away

Traidora, photo by @doomridermedia

“Not long now before I can review bands whose members are younger than this column,” I wrote back in summer, implicitly begging to be respected for a 15-year stint writing Noel’s Straight Hedge on this armour-plated music website. Technically I was actually doing so in that review, as one of the listed members of the band is a dog called Sophie, and although most of 2025’s other chosen punk and hardcore content has been less frivolous than this, I have enjoyed time spent with it immensely. 

I also…

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With AI on his mind and joyous sound in his ears, Daryl Worthington dives into his 20 favourite cassettes of 2025, finding the world’s tape conveyed eccentric undergrounds remain in brilliant form

Zosha Warpeha and Mariel Teran, photo by Alexia Webster

My fear when writing this column is that all I’m really doing is training AI so that soon it will deliver hotter takes about cassettes than I ever could. Maybe it’s web induced paranoia, but some blurbs on promoters’ websites and social media for artists I’ve covered here are uncannily close to uncited quotations of text I wrote. It has the fingerprints of ChatGPT, or perhaps humans cutting, pasting and collaging without considering the source, which is suspiciously close to what…

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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Live God

As Cave himself slides into his establishment artist era, a live set recorded in Europe in 2024 sounds best when you can still hear the old grime and the seediness, finds CJ Thorpe-Tracey

With last year’s Wild God, Nick Cave continued his remarkable run over the past decade of highly praised Top 10 hit records. Alongside the soundtrack work and other endeavours, as well as his public grace in deep grief, it’s a streak that has smoothed out and consolidated the older Cave’s reputation, positioning him as a vaulted mainstream-adjacent icon. Cave is now in what you might call his ‘establishment figure era’. A Cave who shows up at Royal events. In the early 1990s,…

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Tariq Goddard declares that in Jeremy Brett’s portrayal of Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective, the actor delivered one of the greatest TV performances of all time – one that was so total, it arguably destroyed him

I did not fully believe in Sherlock Holmes’ existence until I first set eyes on Jeremy Brett, the actor smirking mischievously at me from our small television screen in a manner his literary model would have rejected as unserious. As befitting a fictional detective, a fact not altogether obvious on my tour of his ‘house’ 221b Baker Street where he was referred to as a real person throughout, Holmes has been played by over 300 performers. The Sherlock Holmes Society hails Douglas Wilmer, the Grand…

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Wrens

Half What You See

Richmond, Virginia jazz heads blend gangsta rap with hermetic poetry

Half of What You See by WRENS

From its musical and linguistic phrases, even down its cover art, Half of What You See might be best defined as exquisite-corpse electro-jazz. Nothing is more easily contextualized by those with avant-garde proclivities than apparent cacophony. As such, launching a never-ending debate pitting structure against chaos is less interesting than trying to observe what Wrens, through free form and live instrumentation, actually attempt to birth out of their chaos. In this case, a sort of sci-fi spin on contemporary nihilism that would manage to be virtuosic, playful and relatable at the same time.

The first adjective is chased throughout the project by quirky…

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After a year in which the wider musical ecosystem is taking more and more notice of the French underground, David McKenna presents 20 of his favourite records that emerged in 2025

Rien Virgule

In another fine year for French releases, it’s been heartening to note that music heads in the UK and Ireland are becoming increasingly aware of how vital the French underground scene is, and just recently I’ve experienced the delights of Rockfort favourites Emmanuelle Parrenin, Société Étrange and Megabasse live on these shores. Earlier this year, it was also a joy to catch mighty, Marseille-based industrial punks GrRzZz at the Acid Horse festival in Wiltshire (and have a very pleasantly sozzled conversation with them afterwards) and chat with electronic power…

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Depeche Mode

Memento Mori: Mexico City

It’s the deep cuts and alternative versions that stand out on this live set from 2023 capturing the group at a time of transition

Depeche Mode have put out official releases covering the vast majority of their tours since the mid-1980s, whether via film, live album releases or more often than not both, so the release of Memento Mori: Mexico City, another dual film and album combination, is in simple terms a continuation of that approach. There’s no way that it can convey the giddy cresting energy and innovation of 101 or the drenched-in-darkness gothicisms of the combined Songs of Faith and Devotion Live and Devotional releases, but Memento Mori: Mexico City does capture the band at…

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Burnt Harbors

Blood High Star

Richard Skelton’s slow unpicking of American history draws to a close on an album which boils with righteous anger

Blood High Star by Burnt Harbors

Burnt Harbors is the latest entity used by Richard Skelton to make music about the times we now find ourselves living in. A composer and artist with an extensive, fascinating catalogue, Skelton’s music is generally instrumental and could be described as ambient, if associations with relaxation and reassurance could be stripped from the word. Alongside the music released under his own name, he has devised separate identities which he uses to record music about the USA. Burnt Harbors is an evolution of his Imperial Valley moniker, under which he made several albums about the Great…

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From all out weird to the ultra polished, club-ready to armchair gems, here are the finest electronic albums of 2025, as selected by our columnist Jaša Bužinel

DJ K, photo by @joca24k

2025 was an odd one. The electronic music scene, at least a considerable part of it, reaffirmed its position as one of the most politically vocal cultural spheres. Amid the genocide in Gaza, political discourse about boycotts, Israeli artists and institutions partnering with the rogue state largely overshadowed conversations about new music. Global macropolitics were mirrored in the culture war that splintered the scene. On a positive note, many artists did use their platform to voice their criticism, while some naysayers and piss-takers under the “politics and music don’t mix”…

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