Highly subjective and therefore entirely accurate.
Most euphoric song of 2025 because it sounds like 1982 and the year 3000 at the same time
Unspecified Enemies - "Romance in the Age of Adaptive Feedback"
Numbers, February 2025 | Bandcamp
I first heard this while running along the Tansui River where distant mountains and temple-tops poked through the shadows of Taipei’s skyscrapers and apartment blocks. Dig those crashing drums and widescreen synthesizers—this is pure electro sleaze like a beautiful machine top-rocking in a Blade Runner alley, and the perfectly placed robo-growl that makes it a classic. I left this song on repeat for days, and it’s looping now as I write these words at the library, nodding and grinning like an idiot while people do Zoom calls and study for exams. And because synchronicities abound these days, I just noticed the title of this track harmonizes beautifully with my robo-spouse scenario.
The album that challenged me until I learned how to love it
Sa Pa - Ambeesh
Short Span, July 2025 | Bandcamp
My first listen felt like visiting a construction site where men yelled at me to get out of the way while rusty machines pounded the earth. For some reason, I kept returning. Gradually it became the throb of a hostile dance party in a distant warehouse. Then one afternoon, it clicked: this is the earthbound answer to Porter Ricks’s “Nautical Dub”: the sound of soil and muck dredged by an alien machine with so many beautiful gears that I could stare at it forever.
The album that delivered the most transcendent experience while running
Nakibemebe Embaire Group & Naoyuki Uchida - Phantom Keys
Nyegenyege Tapes, November 2025 | Bandcamp
Maybe it was a surplus of dopamine or the lack of oxygen in my muscles and brain, but the world started to burn extra-bright at the four-mile mark of a wintry run. Then came the giddy sense of sliding out of time and I realized everything about this fallen world was just fine because the animal heat and precision-drilled logic of the drums in my head reminded me that we are wild and inventive creatures. I was taken back to the column of fire and taiko boom of a Goma ceremony and embodying the ancient rites I’d seen in documentaries and by the time a voice yelped in my left earphone, I was nearly in tears. Also: plenty of reverb.
The album I played six times in a row to soundtrack my view of the North Atlantic at 36,000 feet
In Transit - In Transit
Felt, October 2025 | Bandcamp
When a fog horn blares exactly five minutes into the first song, it’s a burst of pure audio excitement and disorientation. Until then, everything had been burbling along pleasantly: a plush low end beneath a micro-clickety haze like a tranquilized Jan Jelinek doing his best impersonation of Pole. But the fog horn ruptured my understanding of what I’d been hearing and how many layers and organs this music might possess. I squinted my ears and inspected each song until I began to doze with distant white caps roiling far below me and my forehead left a smudge against the cold polycarbonate window.
Most rewarding exercise in patience while dealing with an Old Testament bass drum that sounds like creation itself
Sixsixsevenfortyseven - "I Stood There"
Wounded Dogs | Youth, June 2025 | Bandcamp
A cloud of static rolls across the stereofield, mumbling with a French accent. Then comes a bottomless drum, a seasick lurch, and a skitter of laughter that dead-ends into negative space. It’s hard to understand what’s happening until the 4:50 mark when the situation coheres into a deadly cool machine and I can’t wait to play it again so I can wait.
A delightfully complex situation that destroyed my reliance upon language and genre
Minor Hexachords - Brinkmanship
May 2025 | Bandcamp
I kept hunting for three or four words to mentally classify this album. Dub techno as psychedelica. An interstellar pastoral. But whenever I thought I had a grip on the thing, the music skittered off to do something else. Tracks like “Inflection” somehow rock out and remain tight-looped while pulsars orbit smeared guitars. “Radians” sounds like somebody strangling a Chain Reaction record in a bathtub. These songs are alive and heaving, the messy stuff of fingerprints and breath, but also injected with silicon, aerogel, and any other strange material the future holds.
The music played at least five hours per day
Variant / Intrusion / cv313 / Echospace
Bandcamp
The patron saint of reverb, the godhead of majestic slabs of endless drift and groove. Likewise, once you enter the Echospace, the journey is infinite. Beneath the mist of aliases—Intrusion, Soultek, cv313, Phase90, Radius, etc—there’s a man named Stephen Hitchell who seems possessed by a manic yet fascinating compulsion to relitigate his catalogue. Every other day he’s in my inbox with a new remaster or extended analogue version or live set—and somehow I still want more because the hiss is kaleidoscopic, the reverb is boundless, and I think he's approaching dub techno as a 21st-century religious technology.
I have no idea where to begin. Give this short one a go:
The song that got stuck in my head the most
Biosphere - "Time of Man"
Way of Time | AD 93, June 2025 | Bandcamp
Pairing futuristic synthesizers with a vintage Southern accent performing a 1951 radio adaptation of a novel from 1926 sounds like a terrible idea yet the result edges toward the holy. Tracks like "Way of Time" and "All Stars Have Names" threaten to leap from the speakers, they're so vivid and saturated. But the title track lodged itself into my head for the better part of 2025: a woman's voice saying time of man time of man time of maaan until I wanted to scream. But Biosphere's ability to transform his synthesizers into glorious sculpture more than makes up for it.
