Mukqs – Anaglyph
Anaglyph
Mukqs
EP
Electronic
Liam Murphy
March 20, 2020
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Just before we get into some of the best releases from this year, we wanted to ask – if you haven't before – to check out our magazines and cassettes and consider getting one. We produce original writing and musical analysis and plan to continue and build on this in the new year, so purchase something and help us continue to analyse and celebrate incredible music:
mousetrapping – I’VE ALWAYS HATED THE INTERNET
"Snapshots of an internet that’s falling apart are being smashed together like in one of those hydraulic presses you see on TikTok. Reminds me of some of my earlier work which is probably why it scratches an itch in the back of my head. Sample-dense, hard-hitting percussion, and never takes itself too seriously, definitely a good one to blast in a car on a highway I’d assume. I don’t have a car."
Bleeds – Wednesday
"2025 has been a truly incredible year for music, with such unbelievable amounts of incredible stuff coming from close friends & family. Truthfully, I listen to a pretty small amount of new music, often I’m following threads of 50’s and 60’s stuff, BUT in the last couple of years I’ve been pretty smitten with everything coming out of Asheville NC. It’s no surprise to anyone who’s stood within 5ft of me that Bleeds By Wednesday is my favourite album of the year by a large margin. I think I’ve evangelised it to everyone I’ve met. Karly’s lyrics are hilarious and cutting and add to it feeling like their most direct outing yet. I feel like I’ll be listening to it for a long time to come."
Read our review of Jennifer Walton live, supporting Kara-Lis Coverdale
自 然 | 恋 | 絶 望 – ｙｏｕ ｓｔｉｌｌ ｆｅｅｌ ｔｈｅｍ ｏｕｔ ｔｈｅｒｅ， ｄｏｎ＇ｔ ｙｏｕ
"y o u s t i l l f e e l t h e m is an artist that I have always been thoroughly impressed with. With only three lovely albums in his discography, he has created incredibly lush soundscapes in a unique way for slushwave as a whole. This album is no different. Each track is long, but it never overstays its welcome. All have a purpose in guiding the listener through moments of tranquillity; it is as if we are wading through the soundtracks of mother nature herself. It is an album that is best experienced rather than described in meticulous detail. Might I also add that it is sample-free?"
Self-titled – TDJ
"If the indie sleaze revival peaked in 2024, then 2025 had prepared 2026 to possibly be the year that festival EDM makes its big comeback. Modern dance artists like Ninajirachi and Frost Children grew up listening to electro house and are now making it themselves. What makes theirs innovative is that they’re taking it seriously with emotive songwriting – a genre once often belittled is now being embraced with love. Having grown up with it too, I’m so eager for the trend to continue because this nostalgic, headbanging dance music truly brings me back to when the world felt brighter.
While much of this new music overlaps with hyperpop, a more faithful and overlooked excursion is TDJ’s self-titled – the Montreal DJ’s latest set of uplifting trance geared up for Ibiza dancefloors. The stellar guest cast of Real Lies, Danny L Harle, Hannah Diamond, and many more, add their unique touches to TDJ’s transcendent tracks. Where Is My Angel and Shoreline are key standouts, both sounding like a cross between deadmau5 and Paul van Dyk in their primes. jamesjamesjames’ remix of the latter is a must-listen – it’s a festival progressive house banger taken straight out of the 2010s. The entire record is just so euphoric. I ❤️ EDM!"
Languid Haunt the Trees – Lol K
"Imagine putting an album that came out in December on your AOTY list. A scandal. Amazing things are happening in the Mica Levi camp lately (check out the Lol K album from last year too): found sound medieval midi grime with footwork tendencies / post-coil Emo, minimal/maximal musicianship; James Blake if his favourite album was The Flowers of Romance by PiL. The term “weightless” if it meant business. Definitely the most interesting guitar album of the decade. Extremely fragile, delicate balancing act of dissonance & consonance and “totalist” use of purely rhythmic, atonal material stacked to create more nuanced tonalities.
Clouds is probably my favorite hat trick of the year – two minutes are spent screwing with the pitchwheel to make the song sicksteady and unsteady and suspend it in perpetual key-change (something to be said the conversation this as a songwriting move creates about last minute modulations in songs to induce euphoria/end things on a literal high, a rising above the prior-established musical context – kind of a genius metaphor for emotional instability, frankly) before death dropping it into a guitar wall crescendo, one of the sparse few times the album doesn’t shy away from “proper” resolution. Studio technology is in good hands, I would think."
Never Going Back – RADD
"In all honesty, Never Going Back by RADD is a heavy contender for the best release of 2025 in my book. It makes me even happier knowing that we got the privilege of having her perform in our URL charity event that I co-hosted with my friends at Doki Doki Beats and Hushtones. The album gives off a fresh new feel on what electronic music will sound like and it really does show that the folks at OMEAC Records have a keen eye for hidden gems that deserve to get more eyes on them. Highly recommend checking out RADD’s work – it’s all amazing!"
Self-titled – Purity Ring
'"I’ve been blacking out but I will come back changed, you recall the soul, and I’ll recall the body,' Megan James, of Purity Ring calls out through a swirling crescendo of cataclysmic bells and swiping post-club synths. The duo, having been a mainstay of the electro-pop boom of the early 2010s have set their sights somewhere more daring and, for me, crystallised the hyperemotional beauty of JRPG’s like Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts.
These kinds of games achieve such a heightened sense of euphoria and emotion, through their melding of the personal with the apocalyptic. The world is ending… and the answer lies within the hearts of you and your friends. These kinds of themes sprang to mind as flute melodies dance elegantly on tracks like red the sunrise and mistral. They also feel embedded in Megan James’s lyrics: 'Just leave me bleeding out, I’m flowing toward the sea, Toward the place I’ve embodied.' 'Call me invisible, A wraith of your future self', 'The kind of place you go to when you’re gone, Where the sky is coming down.'
In a time where many artists invoke the visual styles and themes of video games, the overwhelming emotion that these tracks shine with helps this album stand apart. And the tribute to Ryuichi Sakamoto at the very end, touching and beautiful. 'Everything changes in the end.'"
Honourable mentions (as I was compiling this list, I was reminded of so many more releases that I know I’ll be listening to forever. I thought I wouldn’t add them, but then remembered I’m the editor and can do whatever I want):
Life – PeoplePC (Mom and Dad’s Computer):
"The sort of release that makes it very clear that there is still a lot of incredible things to be done in the realms of vaporwave methodologies. The second track has to be one of my favourites of all time."
choke enough – Oklou:
"Has to be album of the year when all is said and done, incredible."
Caroline – Caroline 2
"I loved this album and what they were able to do with such a large eight-piece group. The way different fidelities and spatial environments are used speaks to me, like when a part of a song that feels like it’s coming from another room merges with something very close and almost clashing, or when the clear vocals mix with a very digital pitch-shifted low timbre. To me, those spatial experiments feel like a great niche for rock music to occupy in a DAW-heavy world."
Moon Apple – Four Pillars
"The first quarter of the year is blessed with great music, and Moon Apple’s newest album, Four Pillars, is one of them. I always appreciate instrumental music with a concept to follow through, and discovering the album and its concept back in the early weeks of January intrigued me. An album questioning our unshackled grip on divinity and how we can shape our paths in life without them.
I’m always a sucker for concepts surrounding the human condition, and Moon Apple certainly pulls you into that wandering journey, where ethereal vocals, adventurous melodies, and tactile textures come to the forefront. Spiritual animals and the four pillars that make up one of the Chinese astrology systems are being put to examination. A thrilling concept, with sonorous melodies, making up a fantastic album. Definitely a record I’d recommend!"
Read Louis’ review of Four Pillars here
data.cluster – Coalescence LP
"On June 30th, I got a text from Machinedrum: “Yo a friend passed along this demo... im loving it so far (about 5 tracks in). He’s looking for a label.” I hit play on Coalescence, and within two tracks, I knew it had found a home on Tabula Rasa. I often criticise modular-sounding IDM for skewing coherent musical ideas in favour of pure texture, randomness or math. But Coalescence is different in that it achieves a kind of mechanical sublime – one that’s sharp and crystalline, but with a warm machine glow. It moves with the rhythmic finesse of a live performance, glitching and stuttering with soul. Learning that data.cluster built this entire album in Ableton, without a single piece of hardware, remains mind-boggling to me.
Personal favourite songs: mindspace, synaptic bloom, ExoMind, wire and bones."
Tim Six – Places to Be Vol. 1
"Ambient tapes have a special place in my life as every morning I’m listening to one, having my breakfast, watching the trees from my window and getting my mood settled for another day.
So far, one of the tapes I played the most often this year is Tim Six’s Places to be – Vol.1.
It’s a recording of two 30-minutes track, one on each side, originally composed in 2023 but released in June 2025 on the label Aural Canyon.
I’ve chosen this tape because it has everything I love when it comes to ambient. It’s drony, warm and bright, featuring nature field recordings, beautiful layers of synth, textures and frequency spinning. I could describe the sound but here it’s more about the feels, it’s an immersive, subjective and time-stretching music that brings so much calmness.
It also carries all the minimalism, immaculate beauty and modesty I love in this type of ambient.
The way this music is composed to offer soothing soundscapes to whoever would listen makes it very humble to me because the musician is providing a path to calmness, to nature wide, infinite spaces but also to inner dimensions. In a sense, these drones are referring to concepts that are far above us all, standing on a scale that is way bigger than the ego.
I’m recommending this tape as a companion to relax, breathe, think... and just “be” – as it says in its title – either by diving in and focusing on the sound evolution or by doing other activities in the meantime and letting it define your environment in the background."
Read out interview with Tim Six about his release Bedtime for Ravers
kot homewrecker – Marcy the Baptist
"I could talk forever about the way distortion functions on marcythebaptist’s new album, kot homewrecker. There are shades of Times New Viking’s fuzz-wall-power-pop, similarities to no age’s lo-fi-sample-punk, connections to pre-hot-topic-tape-saturated-folk-punk like on avery island or eternally taxonomy averse plunderphonic-noise-pop like disco inferno. More excitingly, there’s the dense-lobit-distortion of Ken Carson and the master-smashing-over-compressed-artefacts of Playboi Carti’s maximalist collages.
At the core of kot homewrecker is a desperate need to bridge the songwriting tropes of lo-fi guitar forms and the texture and attitude of blown out-soundcloud-hiphop. marcythebaptist understands these worlds aren’t so far apart and she works to bridge them in her own way. But maybe most importantly, there are massive powerpop hooks and twee singalongs. The choruses of blondes and russian dykes, standing on the sink, I wanna be a credit card and a pencil song all seered their way into my brain this year.
The lyrics also present a tension between marcy’s love of classic indie-rock forms and her post-internet brainrot. The multiple references to burnt trees and transformation motifs evoke timeless queer poetic imagery, while the sexually-charged-bezos-fanfic and global-conflict-shitposts feel more like pisspiggranddad tweets. At times she manages to blend these two modes by writing about yearning to become AI or a credit card, the way gays historically wrote about becoming their lovers. The catharsis of the lyrics emerge from how these disparate tones and subjects brush up against each other to depict a completely contemporary angst. She even interpolates Radiohead’s Creep twice.
On kot homewrecker, there is a deep appreciation for great rock music but also a winking awareness of great rock’s impotence in the face of 2020s cultural enshittifcation. At a time when guitar music often feels regressive under the weight of its own history, this album demonstrates a path forward for songwriters in this style. Rock must diversify its influences and draw on the present to stay relevant."
Read our interview with jc for the anniversary of Shadowdog
Elevator Music – Chairmaine Lee and Ikue Mori
"It has been a long time since something has caught my attention as totally as Elevator Music did this year. Snarls, gulps, and growls from Lee fuse with the disorienting electronic squeals of Mori leaving a listener completely off balance. Expect to be jumbled up, shaken about, and crushed by the total foley frenzy on display here."
(2025 logo by Samira Mammadova)
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