At a distance of 15 years, says Dan Franklin, it’s easier to sense the liberating power in CELESTE’s concoction of outlier forms of extreme metal and heavy music

Morte(s) Nee(s) by Celeste

CELESTE, Lyon’s avant-garde metallers, had an unexpected viral moment in November last year. Five women on a girl’s night out travelled from Liverpool to Birmingham for what they assumed was a gig by easygoing, Mercury-nominated singer Celeste. Instead they walked into The Asylum venue (surely a clue this wasn’t the gig they were looking for) after support band Grief Ritual (surely an even bigger clue) finished up, just before the headliners took to the stage and pummelled the sparsely attended audience into submission. 

Realising the group’s mistake, one sympathetic metalhead in…

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Kibrom Birhane

Lisané Bahir

Ethio-jazz meets modular synths on this thrilling record from the Ethiopia-born, LA-based musician

LISANÉ BAHIR ልሳነ ባሕር by Kibrom Birhane

The penultimate track on Kibrom Birhane’s Lisané Bahir, ‘AMEN’, has the voices of Ethiopian elders giving blessings over a slow swinging drum machine. A sequencer bubbles out a rubbery pattern beneath sparking keyboard flourishes, soaring pads arrive carrying a lofty vocal. The track’s origins came in a recent trip back home to Ethiopia by California-based Birhane, where he noticed he wasn’t hearing these blessings as much as he did when he was growing up there. He recorded them as a reminder for a younger generation.

Preservation is one of the motivations behind Birhane’s fourth album, continuation is another. Lisané…

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From avant folk to post-post-club computer music, via several doses of Cornish soundsmithery and a tribute to former Tottenham defender Ledley King, Noel Gardner presents his 10 favourite releases from New Weird Britain in 2025, and rounds up 10 more that got away

Lavinia Blackwall

Not content to merely look back at the last 12 months of New Weird Britain’s musical content, fine as it’s been, this evening I’ve looked back eight years to the first of these year-ending listicle burbles I wrote, and each one after from 2018 to 2024. You can imagine how evocative a set of time capsules these all were! That’s right, not very. The repeat appearance of certain themes, credos and rhetorical devices in the introductions, as…

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Charles Hayward x Dälek

HAYWARDxDÄLEK

New Jersey rapper and South London drummer team up and tear it up over nine tracks of deep beats and mangled melodies

Back in 2023, From The Other (the creative bods behind Fat Out Fest) invited Charles Hayward and Will Brooks (AKA MC Dälek) to collaborate as part of their artist development programme Samarbeta. What started off as an improvised work, combining synth, drums, and samples, grew over the course of a week into a live performance with Brooks then taking the recordings back to his New Jersey studio to mix and add lyrics.

Deadverse Studio is the Garden State-based headquarters for Brooks’ main creative outlet – Dälek – a heavy as fuck hip-hop outfit that utilises walls of…

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Jakub Knera rounds off the year in Central and Eastern European music with a reflection on how the region’s complex ecosystem is reflected in its cultural output, and a selection of 2025’s key albums and reissues

The Cyclist Conspiracy

Sailing down the middle of the Danube, our guide points out that the largest parliament building in Europe is on our left. He says Hungary opened the first metro in Europe. Since the UK left the EU, he adds, we can now say that without hesitation.

We are at the Budapest Music Hub River Party. The event showcases music from Central and Eastern Europe, serving as an opportunity to meet and discuss perspectives on the music industry in the region. Earlier in the…

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JR Moores finds some comfort in his favourite psych and avant-rock albums of the year 

Orcutt Shelley Miller, photo by Rachel Lipsitz

Guy Williams is a righteously angry comedian from New Zealand. He punctuates his sets simply by highlighting something dreadful that has occurred recently. Then he will buckle his lanky frame and scream into the microphone. Those bits, regularly used as an unsubtle segue into Williams’ next topic, aren’t particularly side-splitting. They can, nevertheless, be very cathartic. “White supremacy is back. AAARGH!” That’s one example. Another: “The world is ending. AAARGH!” Couldn’t have put it better myself.

2025 has indeed been another period when it’s felt easy to get onboard with Williams’ pessimistic desperation.

Black Sabbath played their ever final concert and then…

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In the final pod of the year, tQ’s founders tremble in the face of the coming cheese apocalypse as they dive into their musical highlights from the past 12 months

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a clump of earthworms in a musician’s mouth. John and Luke, as has become part of tQ’s annual tradition, try and stifle their beleaguered coughing fits long enough to praise the the length… the depth… the breadth… the sheer freaky might of this year’s Albums of the Year chart. As well as Aya’s Hexed – which contains one of the weirdest sleeve photos in recent memory – the pair summon vast reserves of praise…

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Siriusmo

Buletten & Blumen

The fourth LP from the Berlin-based electronic music producer hums with retro-futuristic warmth served with a plentiful side of shits and gigles

The opening track of Buletten & Blumen, Siriusmo’s fourth album, is multi-faceted. ‘That Could Funktion As A Song’ begins with the sound of a computer logging on. A metronome starts. Then a stranger mutters “Hmmm… cool. So that could function as a song… I guess.” The uncanny voice has all the emotional detachment of a scripted call centre helpline or, more chillingly, an AI. “Ok, ok,” says that voice again “I like instruments,” but the intonation is off. It builds symphonically before fading out into the clatter of computer keys being punched. Herbie Hancock meets The Muppets’…

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Japanese Television’s Al Brown eagerly licks the toxins of the back of a Sonoran desert toad and sinks into a bottomless funk of motorik rhythms, twisting basslines and Balearic guitars resulting in an album of slithery bedroom electro-psych well-suited to the late, winter months

Golden Toad is the solo project of Al Brown, former co-creator of indie-psychers Japanese Television. He’s also made music videos for the likes of UNKLE, Lambrini Girls, Idles, and Deap Vally. His solo debut Unite The Worms happens to be released twenty years after the extinction declaration of the Costa Rican Golden Toad, the last confirmed sighting of which occurred all the way back in 1989. This Golden Toad, however, decided to hole himself up in a…

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Listen to a track via The Quietus

Composer Rafael Anton Irisarri, who recently released a remix collection featuring the likes of The Bug, Penelope Trappes, William Basinski and Abul Mogard, has unveiled details of a new album. Called Points Of Inaccessibility, the album was recorded in New York after development in improvised sessions of bowed guitar drones in former psychiatric institution the Pieter Baan Centre in Utrecht. Here, Irisarri collaborated with Dutch visual artist Jaco Schlip as he created projections for joint A/V performances. “Points Of Inaccessibility came from thinking about how disconnection feels in an age obsessed with connection,” says Irisarri, “We are constantly online, constantly visible, yet we drift further apart. The real distance isn’t geographic anymore, it’s…

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