Kez Whelan picks out the 20 best records from 2025 in metal, year of heartening cross-pollination and pushed limits, as well as some heartbreaking departures 

Messa, photo by Nicola Pianalto

2025 will undoubtedly go down as an important year in metal history, if only for the heartbreaking number of generational voices and visionary musicians we lost over the last 12 months. As sad as it is to say goodbye to artists we’ve grown up listening to, there’s a distinct inevitability to it at this point; if we’re taking Black Sabbath’s 1970 debut as year zero, then heavy metal as a concept will be 56 years old next year, and we’ll likely lose even more of the genre’s old guard as the…

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Moor Mother, Wooden Elephant, Beethoven Orchestra Bonn, Dirk Kaftan

Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes

Moor Mother’s 2019 album gets an orchestral upgrade

For around a decade, Philadelphia’s Camae Ayewa has been constructing sonically experimental and thematically radical works of art. As Moor Mother, the musician and poet’s art often offers searing takedowns of structures of oppression and on the imperialism, colonialism and brutality that has resulted in generations of Black trauma. She delves deep into this on her 2019 album Analog Fluids Of Sonic Black Holes, the sense of widespread socio-political discontent illustrated by the record’s brutal, auditory chaos. Now, in her latest release, Moor Mother reissues that same album as a brand new orchestrated edition, featuring the string quintet Wooden Elephant…

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Home Front

Watch It Die

Canadian post-punks have all the right slogans, but the sound feels all too familiar, finds Hayley Scott

Watch It Die by Home Front

Home Front’s third album lands with the uneasy thud of a watered-down Protomartyr filtered through the pop-punk polish of Green Day and the more saccharine edge of Turnstile. The vocals, presumably meant to come off as rousing or anthemic, tilt almost instantly into cringe, a strained uplift that might read as “big” but feels gratingly hollow to anyone actually listening.

Some melodies gesture, faintly, toward a Replacements-esque sensibility, but the comparison falls apart as soon as you register how little this material risks. The record feels locked in a dated palette, an awkward collage of monochrome hardcore…

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Rian Treanor & Mun Sing, Proteus, Sarah Angliss, Bruise Blood and Helm also added to bill for next year’s Wiltshire weekender…

Acid Horse, the festival co-organised by tQ’s own John Doran (with Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor Press) has been announced for the Whitsun bank holiday weekend May 2026, with a wide ranging line up spread over three days and two stages.

Taking place at its regular home – the idyllic Barge Inn, Honeystreet, Wiltshire, under the wise eye of the Alton Barnes chalk horse that it is named for – next year’s edition, held on May 22 to 24, will see live sets from Mohammad Syfkhan, Lord Spikeheart, Hedgling, E The Artist, Bruise Blood, Loula Yorke and Sarah Angliss,…

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Various Artists

Metal Machine Music: Power to Consume, Vol. 1

Several salutes to Lou Reed’s most returned release, featuring Thurston Moore, Pharmakon, Drew MacDowall and others

It’s no wonder Lou Reed often got grumpy with those who interviewed him. Whether they were partial to his output or confounded by whatever he’d been up to, journalists constantly urged Reed to explain himself.

This was especially true in regard to 1975’s Metal Machine Music. It was by no means the first example of “noise music” in the history of the human eardrum but it was one of the most notorious and therefore influential. In the immediate aftermath of its release, and then for the rest of Reed’s life and long career, people were determined to figure…

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Darran Anderson relishes hearing Rupert Hines’ soundtrack to Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1978 psychological horror, The Shout and discovers a sonic gateway in the process. Contains mild spoilers for films The Shout, Berberian Sound Studio, Blow Out, and The Conversation

Rupert Hine in NYC, early 1980s courtesy of Buried Treasure

THE SHOUT by Rupert Hine

One of the theories around pareidolia – the tendency to see recognisable forms in otherwise nebulous materials such as faces in clouds, or animal outlines in rocks – is that it bestows an evolutionary head start on those who have it. It gives the body a split-second response before any thought takes place, rather than allowing time for confirmation that there is a ravenous sabre-toothed tiger, or the last…

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Leather.head

Mud Again

The debut album from London-based noiseniks shakes the habitual

mud again by leather.head

‘World Building’, the opening track from Leather.head’s debut album, starts with a big bang of a guitar riff which subsides shortly after. The lulling pace of the song’s verse, echoing Alen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, contrasts with the thunderous chorus.​Creation and destruction go hand in hand on Mud Again, an eight-piece work by the five-piece London-based collective. A juxtaposition that also defines the realm of political activism to which the band members have adhered. The founding core – brothers Toby, Josh and Aidan Evans-Jesra – have effectively voiced their ideas through music since 2016. The lack of racial diversity on the music scene in Brighton (their home at the time)…

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Kara-Lis Coverdale

Changes In Air

The Canadian composer’s third album of 2025 is all about material textures and subtle variations

Changes in Air by Kara-Lis Coverdale

For crafters of ethereal, drum-less music there’s a fine line between producing passive content for a Spotify playlist of calming music to train AI to and something more profound. It’s a balance that Kara-Lis Coverdale always gets right. Depth, detail and a sense of subtle drama give her music presence beyond inert background.

Changes in Air’s opening track, ‘Strait of Phase’, begins with slow striding organ, a steady pattern imbued with delicate harmonic variation. Intensity rises, as if you’re leaning on the volume button of your playback device, amplitude creeping up almost imperceptibly. Gradually the harmonic movement flattens out…

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Here are our favourite albums of the last 12 months, as voted for by tQ staff, columnists and core writers

One of the scant benefits bestowed by editing a countercultural magazine born in a time of great financial turmoil is that you eventually develop a state of permanent readiness for the next disaster. In the very early days of the Quietus, when my good friend Luke Turner and I were first unceremoniously shown out of the start up office door onto the street in 2008 – thanks Global Financial Crisis! – our magazine was just a matter of weeks old. We had barely established ourselves in a proper headquarters when we realised our existence was to be one of indefinite threat…

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De La Soul

Cabin in the Sky

The Long Island hip hop legends have always been a darker, edgier group than most give them credit, but their first new album in nearly a decade proves them more than capable of taking the 2020s rap sxcene head on, finds Liam Inscoe-Jones

For a while, you would have beeen forgiven for thinking that, as per the promise of their 1991 album, perhaps De La Soul were, finally, dead. It had been quiet for some time. Twenty-one years of label strife and copyright skirmishes, with only 2016’s And the Anonymous Nobody serving as a brief intermission. Then, tragedy struck. In March 2023, when Dave “Trugoy” – one of the groups’ two MCs; a soft spoken, Dadaist…

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