Our look at the essential collections out this month, also featuring Legss, Big Thief, James K, Mark William Lewis, Wednesday, Cate le Bon, Troutflies and Kansas City Playboys.

Geese – ‘Getting Killed’

It’s a dark time to be alive in America, and the apocalypse feels nigh on ‘Getting Killed’. Across eleven chapters of malaise, the record ripples with a timely dread as Cameron Winter and co. thread doomsday whispers through potent, isochronal refrains. From the discordant instrumentals and panicked cry of “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR” on opener ‘Trinidad’, these NYC experimentalists grab your attention and refuse to let go. What makes ‘Getting Killed’ so arresting is its unpredictability; this is music outside of trend or institution, driven instead by instinct and improvisation. ‘Au Pays du Cocaine’ spills melancholy, tenderness and desperation, while ‘Bow Down’ pivots into an upbeat, jazz-inflected rocker. Elsewhere, the title track radiates warmth and might be one of the most finely written and composed pieces of the year, while festival-ready anthem Taxes leaves an equally lasting impression. The imagery scattered across Getting Killed is often cryptic, at times indecipherable – and it’s not a stretch to imagine Winter himself wrestling with the meanings of his own surreal turns of phrase. This opacity only heightens the pull of the record, with Winter delivering like a faintly spiritual figure – half rambling preacher, half rock frontman, sermonising to a congregation that can’t look away. You’ll struggle to find another album this immersive, inventive and wondrously strange all year; Getting Killed is an instant classic, and a reminder that original ideas do still exist. (Donovan Livesey)

Wing! – ‘Missed It Just The Once’

In a 2007 interview, the enigmatic South London producer Burial speaks about this ineffable quality: ‘In London, there’s a kind of atmosphere that everyone knows about but if you talk about it, it just sort of disappears.’ Burial has made a career attempting to bottle this ethereal, elusive quality, producing music that weaves narratives of post-rave night buses, solitary meandering walks under groaning towers and the momentary glance of a stranger in a crowded thoroughfare. With the release of ‘Missed It Just The Once’, it is evident that wing! have been passed the loom to thread London’s aural tapestry. wing! is the moniker of Adam Swan, a producer from the further reaches of south east London. Accompanied live by Kai Charlton on bass and Joe Killick on drums, wing! form a ghostly tableau of trip-hop, post-rock and ambient electronica, but to rely on base signifiers is simply unfair and reductive when speaking of the project. Swan’s production embodies that mysterious loneliness that urban environments create, with distant vocal samples whispering in alleyways, groaning pads looming above and crisp drum breaks cruising down wide roads. ‘Missed It Just The Once’, the project’s debut EP, delivers this atmosphere in a murky, pensive, but ultimately uplifting package, standing out as one of the year’s finest releases. Swan has crafted a declarative mission statement for the future of crossover electronic and indie production. An undeniable triumph, with ‘Missed It Just The Once’, wing! stake their claim on the true future sound of London. (A. L. Noonan)

Read the full review here.

Legss – ‘Unreal’

At long last, Legss have released their debut album, ‘Unreal’. The resultant 13 tracks form an epic and immersive apprehension of contemporary experience, of overstimulation, overwork, the intensity of city life and underneath it all our enduring humanity. Guitar riffs bend with all the awkwardness of the transcription of such new experiences, making for an album that relies little on the history of guitar rock beyond its component instruments. Legss’ experimentation is less raw and frontloaded than on their ear-catching early EPs, the resultant album shedding this process and presenting what this all adds up to applied to the wholeness of the song form. As they told us in our recent interview, “there are a few final bosses” of forms of Legss song on ‘Unreal’, which ultimately indeed holds together as their most cohesive statement yet. (Lloyd Bolton)

Read the full Legss interview here.

Big Thief – ‘Double Infinity’

‘Double Infinity’ drifts between nostalgia and playfulness, its earthy textures and tape-warped haze evoking earlier forms of indie folk, while unpredictable song structures and whimsical lyrics lend it a raw, exploratory charm. Throughout, the body becomes the bridge between past and present. You don’t know where you’re going yet, but the light is soft, the air is familiar, and you follow. This album is the product of a deeply collaborative and improvisational process. Across its nine tracks, the band explore themes of nostalgia and existentialism with a sound that is warm, and vulnerable, infused throughout with the spirit of collective creation and discovery. Lyrics land with the gentleness of handwritten pages from a diary but linger with the permanence of ink scratched into skin. “How can beauty that is living be anything but true?”, Lenker asks on the opening track, ‘Incomprehensible’, a line that continues to echo long after the track has ended. Across the album, words and sounds trade off as primary messengers. At times, language falters, and it is the tone, the texture, the hum that carries the truth forward. The production process of simultaneous improvisation reveals itself not only in its layered instrumentation, but also in its willingness to sit with contradictions: between clarity and abstraction, form and dissolution, noise and silence. And maybe that is where its beauty lives, in the space between. (Isabel Kilevold)

Read the full review here.

Blousey – ‘The Precipice’

Blousey set up shop with their debut EP, ‘The Precipice’. Built from a model that suggests astute study of the recent post-punk revival, they burst beyond its conventions to elevate the music to almost glam proportions, in this sense particularly reminiscent of Gag Salon’s recent album. Opener ‘Chances’ has certain phototropic impulses that will resonate with any regular Steve Lamacq listener, but its chorus soars with rich melody, and a faintly cajun redolence from Jessica Porter-Langson’s fiddle adds further idiosyncrasy. ‘Canela Skin’ has more than a little Opus Kink about it, but its outlaw ragged quality feels more garage, its whining saxophone played off against exposed and clean electric guitar. ‘The Precipice’ shows Blousey’s creative ambition with a tantalisingly raw edge. (Lloyd Bolton)

James K – ‘Friend’

‘Friend’ is the intersection between two great trends of 2025: retrofuturistic nostalgia, and club music that would be totally unsuited to the club. Artists like Smerz, Oklou, and RIP Swirl have spent the year making music that seems an inevitable result of the post-COVID party boom. Headphoney, spaced-out, and relentlessly chill, this scene pontificates and celebrates night life, friendship, and making out, with only circumstantial musical influence from dance – the odd house beat, or electroclash synth. Despite its hauntological reference points, this is an album that feels like a vision of a utopian future broadcasted from heaven. James K characterised ‘Friend’ as “a definition of love at this moment in my life, equally euphoric and grounded, gentle and safe while processing certainty, uncertainty, pain, and joy.” All these things were achieved, except her desire to keep the music grounded. ‘Friend’ is an album that hovers above the peripheral, occupying the heat-warbled haze of the horizon, a synesthetic reimagining of emotion expressed through abstracted synth and gossamer guitar. Though the washed-out soundscapes of the mid-record lull pushes the listener closer to drowsiness than dreaminess, the final quarter is worth sticking around for. Grounded? Probably not. But when it sounds this good, who would want that anyway? (Magnus Crawshaw)

Read the full review here.

Wedensday – ‘Bleeds’

It would be so easy for ‘Bleeds’, the sixth studio album from North Carolina band Wednesday, to have fallen apart. It was written as lead singer Karly Hartzman and guitarist MJ Lenderman’s relationship broke down, it’s the first since ‘Manning Fireworks’ capitulated Lenderman’s own star perhaps beyond that of the band, and it’s just their second on Dead Oceans (Bright Eyes, Mitski, Phoebe Bridgers) — the band having put out most of their records through one-man operation Ordinal. Thankfully, a difficult set of circumstances has done little to deter Wednesday from solidifying their claim as one of the most interesting rock bands of their generation. Throughout the record, the band toy with the tension of country storytelling and pummelling guitar noise as if to prove just how tight a grip they have on them. The noisier stuff comes to the fore on the blistering ‘Wasp’ whilst ‘The Way Love Goes’ wouldn’t be out of place on a solo country album. The real highlights, however, come when the band crashes the two distinctions into one another with little restraint, as they do on opener ‘Reality TV Argument Bleeds’ and on the four singles that preceded the album’s release. “This is what Wednesday songs are supposed to sound like,” Hartzman said of ‘Bleeds’. “I feel like we’ve devoted a lot of our lives to figuring this out and we did it.”  She has good reason to believe that this is as close to perfect as they have come. (Marty Hill)

Read the full review here.

Mark William Lewis – ‘Mark William Lewis’

Mark William Lewis cemented his reputation as a minimalist, vibe-curating singer-songwriter on his Dean Blunt-adjacent 2022 debut EP, ‘Pleasure Is Everything’. He could have continued to ride the straightforward sound it established without complaints from anyone. But this self-titled record is something altogether more ambitious, never deviating from his characteristic sound, but expanding it with lush ambience, reverb-foregoing intimacy and mind-expanding guitar sounds. ‘Mark William Lewis’ is performed against a backdrop of a dark night sky. It is like the musical equivalent of those paintings where it’s just a canvas of ink, with slivers of white carved into the blackness: an examination of negative space. This album explores every part of the spectrum between light and dark, exposing the many shades of monochrome. In the process, Mark William Lewis projects silvery moonlight on the complexities of the city, illuminating greyscale concrete to reveal its nuance. (Magnus Crawshaw)

Read the full review here.

Cate le Bon – ‘Michaelangelo Dying’

‘Michelangelo Dying’ is a strange Cate Le Bon album, feeling, for the first time since 2012’s ‘Cyrk’, like something sketched out, grasped at, but not fully realised. The run of albums from ‘Mug Museum’ to ‘Pompeii’ is a better string than many could hope to achieve across an entire career, each its own bold sonic world, argued with precision. ‘Michelangelo Dying’ by comparison, feels a little more uncertain. It is evidently an exploration of heartache, but perhaps out of a mixture self-protection and the unfinished processing of its subject matter, the record feels ultimately vague, lacking in self-assurance and narrative pace. There are some great songs, opener ‘Jerome’ and recent single ‘About Time’ among them, and elsewhere Le Bon experiments with almost ambient soundscapes, submerging her voice in a tropical, flanging soup. Ultimately, though, she lacks the precise perceptiveness and ruthless single-mindedness that has defined her work to date as she gropes through grief and heartache. (Lloyd Bolton)

Read the full review here.

Troutflies – ‘The Dancing Years’

Keeping busy in the wake of the breakup of York’s premier junk punk group Needlework, Reuben Pugh and Guy Godivala launch their new project Troutflies with debut album ‘The Dancing Years’. Preserving the witty drawling lyrics, jarred rhythms and sharp edges of the former project, Troutflies in its early stages feels more personal, more homemade and enjoyably more weird. Inspired guitar riffs scratch and grate against drones of melodica as Pugh unfurls his strange poetic lyrics, more domestic in character as he remembers a childhood, “the size of a backpack” on his father’s shoulders, and stares at ‘Dancing Dust’ on one of the album’s highlights, a track that recalls especially the liberated Cate le Bon compositions between ‘Crab Day’ and her work in DRINKS. (Lloyd Bolton)

Kansas City Playboys – ‘The Devil’s Freeway’

London’s latest answer to the rockabilly country heyday of pre-Dolly Americana will insist that they are in fact from Kansas City, Missouri, but do not be deceived! They have emerged from South London’s own swamp of country punk whose tradition encompasses the likes of Goat Girl and Fat White Family on its course back to Country Teasers. On ‘The Devil’s Freeway’, twangy stomps and deranged lap steel sets the stage for biting lyrics that veer from poached American imagery to a lurid London-centric realism. (Lloyd Bolton)