Fuzzy Frontiers Albums of 2025 (Part I)

Read Time: 6 mins

It’s been a complicated year, hasn’t it? I’m growing tired of saying that, to be honest. It feels as if the walls are forever closing in: more war, more financial insecurity, more tyrants, more tech barons and and and. It’s like standing knee-deep in someone else’s excrement. It can be really tough to keep it together, especially when faced with multiple crises, both at home and abroad.

But just like J.M. Silk said, “Music is the key for you and me to unlock the mind.” And this year, it truly has been that — a lifeline, an off-switch. And so here’s part one of my favourite albums of 2025: the records that soundtracked this year, offered solace, and carried me through. Onward…

Cerys Hafana – Angel

After swapping the battleship-grey streets of Berlin for the verdant mountains of northern Portugal, this album of melancholic, harp-driven Cymraeg folk quickly became my daily soundtrack. Not since Peter Auty belted out Walking in the Air in The Snowman has anything made me cry this much.

Carol Mynyddog, in particular, is agonisingly beautiful. I still can’t listen to it all the way through without sobbing uncontrollably. It’s a portal to Ceredigion, with the saudade dialled up to 11. I close my eyes, and I’m transported to the west coast of Cymru: watching birds of prey with my granddad, playing in the River Leri with my brother, traversing the peaks of Talybont as a bored, spotty goth. It’s pure magic.

Elijah Minnelli – Clams as a Main Meal

I’ve been a fan of Elijah Minnelli’s home-brew distillation of cumbia, psyche, folk, and dub for years now, and Clams as a Main Meal has only ossified my fandom. Barbadian-British dub innovator Dennis Bovell guests on the opening track, Canaan Land, a journeying Nyabinghi-esque incantation that sets the tone beautifully.

The Cymru-core thread continues with a touch of Dwb Cymraeg in the form of Donna Donna (Chwerthin), featuring Welsh music legend Carwyn Ellis of Colorama. It’s tough to pick a favourite from Clams as a Main Meal, but at gunpoint I’d have to choose Watercraft Apologist: a world of long accordion refrains and mutated vocals looming darkly over the percussion and jaw harp, like a tawny owl locking onto its prey.

Pulp – More

Back in the mid-90s, when my friends and I were shoplifting ladies’ pinstripe trousers from the Aberystwyth branch of N** L*** (I was skinnier back then), it was widely accepted that guitar music was split into two binary camps: Blur or Oasis. A ridiculous choice, especially when we had Super Furry Animals and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci at home. But even within the supposed battle for English music, the obvious winner was Pulp.

No one else embodied the mainstream strangeness of British culture quite like they did: the doggers, the reprobates, the boy racers, the pukka pie munchers, and the out-and-out perverts.

In a year that has functioned like some awful millennial fever dream, with all the worst bands returning for one final, bill-paying hoorah, having a new Pulp record has been comforting in the extreme. They are, as they always were, the perfect antidote to Britpop.

Perhaps it’s just that I’m knocking on a bit, but More doesn’t feel like something retro beamed in for the beer boys — at least not to me. It continues the Pulp canon rather than embalming it. Spike Island, however, is classic Pulp: deftly merging disco elements with self-effacing pop and a big chorus, a Pulp refresher, maybe.

The standouts, for me, are the Scott Walker-infected Tina; Jarvis declaring his unrequited love for a girl he’s only seen in passing, dreaming of “screwing in a charity shop, on top of black bin bags, full of donations that smell of digestive biscuits in the air”; and the final track, A Sunset — a lovely, stripped-back, country-esque rumination on digital life, social media, and late-stage capitalism. It also contains my favourite line on the album: “So now I’m learning about money, And I’m learning about law, The first rule of economics: Unhappy people, they spend more”

Various Artists – A Love from Outer Space

I suppose it’s normal that, as you age, your life becomes a laundry list of regrets — mine does, anyway. One of those regrets (among many) is that somewhere in 2016, I lost a battle against my crippling anxiety and didn’t go as planned to see ALFOS play in Berlin, while Andrew Weatherall still walked this dimensional plane. It’s safe to say I am a fan. I have a folder full of ripped versions of every set I’ve found online; I’ve even gone so far as to record some to tape — you know, for that vintage feel.

Sean Johnston and Andrew Weatherall pioneered a kind of dance music that was funky, dark, spiritual, and entrancing — a sound that was distinctly theirs, and at my favourite tempo too. And although Weatherall is sadly no longer with us, Sean Johnston has done a lovely job of honouring and carrying forward the sound the two embraced, from the pulsing, dubbed-out acid of Johnny Sender’s Zhivago Zhivago and the tribalist chug of Feon’s Round Earther, to the sleazy indie disco of Popular Tyre & Fats McCourt’s Feel Like a Lazer Beam, and the spaced-out funk of Das Komplex’s remix of Jazxing’s Neu Nostalgia.

Panda Bear – Sinister Grift

To be honest, I largely shunned all guitar music for the decade that Animal Collective were mostly active, and so missed the Panda Bear boat entirely — until he collaborated with Sonic Boom a couple of years back (another great album). As a lifelong Beach Boys fan, I am awed by Panda Bear’s sweeping vocal harmonies and the way he meshes acoustic and synthetic instruments in his work.

What was initially a terrible start to the year (like every year in Berlin) was soon lifted with the release of Sinister Grift, which opens with the obviously Brian Wilson-inspired Praise. Its multitracked melodies spiral around a simple drumbeat and acoustic guitar vamps with joyous surf-pop abandon. During February and March this was a genuine lifesaver during my cold and solitary dog walks across a below-freezing Tempelhofer Feld.

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