Moundabout

Esker Hippy Bastard Blues

Moundabout may be lurking in the gutter, but their eyes are firmly trained on the stars

Moundabout – Esker Hippy Bastard Blues by Tesla Tapes

Moundabout’s music feels more like it’s been summoned from the depths of the Earth than composed in any traditional fashion. Esker Hippy Bastard Blues is Paddy Shine and Phil Langero’s second album of 2025. Initially it seems warmer and more approachable than the eldritch Goat Skull Table (which opened, let’s not forget, with an atonal incantation lasting for ten terrifying minutes), but it soon reveals its own strange nooks and crannies.

First track ‘Changeling’ is the closest thing to a traditional song here, all loosely-strummed guitar and Langero alternately “searching all night” and “running…

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An interview with the book’s author Michael Lentz and its translator, Max Lawton, about the German cult novel Schattenfroh, a bizarre and troubling novel for our bizarre and troubling times, and its timely appearance in an English-language edition

There is a peculiarly modern horror at the centre of Schattenfroh, Michael Lentz’ gargantuan, experimental novel, newly translated into English. The horror of the last century preyed on the blind spots of the imagination. This was the horror of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories. A horror borne from knowing too little, intensified by the mystery of an indifferent cosmos. Schattenfroh is the inverse. Across its 1,001 pages, Schattenfroh is a twenty-first century horror borne from knowing way too much. An overwhelming deluge of terror that…

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AICHER

Defensive Acoustics

Liam from My Disco’s solo project proves both a hostile environment – and a fertile playground

Defensive Acoustics by AICHER

Having been a fan of My Disco since my 16-year-old self plucked their 2006 release from the shelf almost purely on the basis it was called Cancer, I’ve had the joy of watching their brutal brand of disco grow ever lonelier to the point the party lived on only as some Proustian reverie from three-day old tinnitus in the grips of the mother of all comedowns. There were a lot of picks over this era in service to my mostly hormonal angst that don’t stand the test of time, but this one continues to pay dividends. From their origins in more recognizable…

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Jennifer Lucy Allan picks out 10 of the best from another Rum year, from lucid bedroom pop made in 1980s Hungary, to wild new sounds out of Lancashire produced on self-built wooden instruments, via accordions, kanteles, lap steel guitars, modular synths and much much more

Dale Cornish, photo by David Keen

My favourite festival this year was LUFF in Lausanne. I will open with a recommendation for my two favourite films I saw there: Fucktoys and Anything That Moves. The music programme had the best sound I heard all year. Mariam Rezaei flexed it properly – a set that was all muscle and bone, hard edges and bass that could lift a two-ton truck. @xcrsw were amazing there too, as were France,…

The post Rum Music: The Best of 2025 Reviewed by Jennifer Lucy Allan appeared first on The Quietus.

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DJ Narciso

DENTRO DE MIM

The Angolan-Portuguese producer’s first foray on an international label provides a perfect entrypoint – not to just to one artist’s sound, but to the thrilling, pulsating, grinding world of batida

DENTRO DE MIM by DJ Narciso

In countries with a bloody history, built on empire, it has long been the case that migrants, and the children of migrants, from formerly colonised countries are responsible for a disproportionate amount of cutting edge culture. In Britain, the examples are too numerous to recall; from lover’s rock and dancehall in the 80s, through to drill, grime, and … pretty much everything else.

Batida music is perhaps the most pertinent example of this in modern Portugal. The modern batida, practiced by the likes of DJ…

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Toby Manning gets to grips with the Beggars Arkive reissue of Gary Numan’s often overlooked second solo album Telekon, and its smart man/machine reversal

Gary Numan was treated by both the press and his synth pop peers as an upstart, a non-art school normie parodying the genre’s pioneers in craven pursuit of commercial success. Yet not only did Numan’s music sound distinct from early Ultravox, Human League or David Bowie, he was odder than all of them – putting the ‘alien’ in ‘alienated’ – and, given these artists’ popwards turn in the 80s, the least artistically compromising. Whether Numan’s cyborg ‘mach-man’ through-branding derived from artistry, autism or conscious capture of a cold conjuncture, it resonated with its recessionary times. Rather than neutralising him,…

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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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