A curated selection of editor Lloyd Bolton’s top releases of the year.

2025 has given us so much great music to look back on here at Hard of Hearing. As a site, we have grown a lot over the past twelve months, bringing you more interviews, festival coverage and reviews than ever before as well as introducing our weekly Tracks roundup to keep you up to date with our favourite new singles.

As far as the year in music goes, in many respects the tone was set last December by the release of Cameron Winter’s ‘Heavy Metal’, which affirmed Winter and his band Geese as two defining acts in alternative music right now. That album perfectly set up Geese’s ‘Getting Killed’, one of the most hotly anticipated albums of the year and one which justified the hype. Excitement around New York’s current music scene extends beyond the Winter-verse, however, with new releases from the likes of James K and Water From Your Eyes further evidence of the latest wave of vitality from the city.  Elsewhere, the year has been marked by other forms of highly anticipated albums, from sophomores by The Last Dinner Party and Wet Leg to comeback albums including Pulp’s ‘More’ and Stereolab’s ‘Instant Holograms on Metal Film’.

With more of an eye on the up-and-coming here at Hard of Hearing, we have been delighted this year by a number of exceptional debuts. Legss produced their first full-length album, ‘Unreal’, after years of tantalising experimental EPs, at last offering a whole and ultimately maturely developed collection. Jessica Winter’s debut LP was of similar interest on these terms, as acknowledged by its title, ‘My First Album’. Slightly more concise but no less impactful –oh, quite the opposite – YHWH Nailgun’s ’45 Pounds’ was a more immediate and instinctive debut record and an instant favourite of ours. Coming in a little more fresh, there were a number of great first collections (EP or album), including from Y, Most Things, Silver Gore, tall child, Blousey, black fondu, Kissing Gate, Sheepish and Louis O’Hara. Then, of course, there were The New Eves, a band we have been excited about since they first featured on ‘Slow Dance ’22’, and whose album delivered on all that excitement and more.

Alongside such exciting first samples of artists’ work, a number of my personal favourite records capture artists at the top of their game. ‘caroline 2’, in my top spot, is the sound of a band in full command of their abilities, ambitious and capable of delivering on what they set out to achieve. It has been hard work whittling down to just ten selections, but here are the top releases that have stayed with me all year.

caroline – ‘caroline 2’

This record is a perfect marriage of art music experimentation and relatively pop-oriented songwriting. caroline have long been recognised as one of London’s best ensembles, particularly for their instinctive group improvisation and formal ambition. That formalism is everywhere on this album without constantly being in your face. Moments drift in and out, between and within tracks, forming clearings that tie eclectic influences and individual performances together in an epic whole.

In spite of a certain loose quality to the finished product, the music is carefully and obsessively constructed. ‘Coldplay cover’ is based around a recording made on a microphone passed between two rooms in which two halves of the band performed two separate but related pieces of music, though as we found out interviewing the band, the effect was artificially magnified in post-production. Such blurring of the organic and the artificial is felt across the album, particularly emphasised by heavy use of autotune and the collaging of musical ideas; both components the band credit to the influence of Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA.

Alongside some outstanding new albums, ‘caroline 2’ is my album of the year for its originality and timeliness. The band’s mastery of an ecumenical breadth of influences pulls from the current British folk revival, the recent revitalisation of post-rock in alternative music, and the latest innovations in pop, the latter connection sealed by the perfectly conceived collaboration with Caroline Polacheck. All these elements are brought together with the vital urgency of eight musicians striving to make something grand and beautiful entirely on their own terms. This during one of the bleakest moments of the century so far makes ‘caroline 2’ a crucial release for 2025.

Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band – ‘New Threats from the Soul’

‘New Threats from the Soul’ is easily one of the best-written albums of the year and dares comparisons with the best songwriters of all time. Davis takes seemingly simple country music formats but stretches and remoulds them across six-to-twelve minutes. In this time, intricately detailed lyrics circle back on themselves picking up new meanings on each orbit. One-liners stretch for bars longer than is reasonable, pushing the musical format to beyond its expected limits. Offhand puns are called back minutes later and revealed as keys to the secret of the universe. Matching the complex subject matter, the instrumentation challenges the expectations of clean-cut country. Lo-fi drum machines and blooping synths assimilate with ease in their measured usage among more familiar strains of piano, pedal steel and winding guitar. Davis’ soundalike starting points are the likes of David Berman and Bill Calahan, who already set a high bar as songwriters. Yet even these are overshot as these expansive works intricately weave mysteries and revelations within the humble song format.

The New Eves – ‘The New Eve Is Rising’

The New Eves arrived as a refreshing and thoroughly conceived new act combining punk and folk with an eye for the countercultural canon and a romantic sensitivity for the wonders of nature. ‘The New Eve Is Rising’ bottles that magic, not compromising the rawness that makes this music so vital. Vocals trade places, each member’s lyrics adding new purpose to a given theme, ‘Circles’ and ‘Cow Song’ being particularly electric in this respect. The four members pool their talents with an exceptional sense for knotting their ideas together into a dazzling whole. At the heart of it all is a conviction of the necessity and power of these works, precocious in a new band but justified by the material, such that we are with them as they knowingly channel the likes of Patti Smith, Television, The Raincoats and The Rolling Stones.

Y – ‘Y’

The year’s best innovation on the dance-inflected punk form mutating among British alternative artists right now came from Y. With countless Windmill forming the proving ground for this band, building on experience pooled from Fat White Family, Meatraffle and Pregoblin, Y feel like the natural synthesis of these earlier projects with Fat Dog, PVA, Warmduscher and other innovators of modern dance punk. Sax wails and insistent beats are fused with genuine originality in a market crowded by frustrated attempts at self-differentiation. Y’s live shows make for ecstatic riots and this energy is dutifully translated to their debut EP.

Willi Carlisle – ‘Winged Victory’

Willi Carlisle is at the top of his game reworking American folk for the twenty-first century. Now achieving the level of recognition his songwriting talent and unforgettable live performances deserve, Carlisle has the capacity to match his prolific writing with an equivalent recorded output. ‘Winged Victory’ is his fourth album in as many years, an even split of originals and traditional adaptations. Lavender Country’s ‘Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears’ is embellished with a verse reflecting explicitly on the song’s relevance today, while Richard Thompson’s ‘Beeswing’ is rendered beautifully. Elsewhere, highlights include originals such as the revisionist rodeo history of ‘Old Bill Pickett’ and ‘Big Butt Billy’, which transcends country’s history of truck stop lechery with reflections on gender fluidity and the divine purpose. What might seem at first glance like something of an album between albums, ‘Winged Victory’ fights its corner as among Carlisle’s best work.

• Geese – ‘Getting Killed’ – The most talked-about indie release this year and rightfully so, on ‘Getting Killed’ Geese combine the harsher edges of their previous work with the relatively restrained majesty of Cameron Winter’s ‘Heavy Metal’, with which we are all still obsessed.
• Milkweed – Remscéla – An absorbing and intense collection from the collage folk pioneers, bringing together extensive research and innovative production.
• Speedial – ‘Light of the Late Night’ –An intimate epic, combining revisionist post-rock with the ensemble majesty of Black Country, New Road without overreliance on any of those reference points.
• Kissing Gate – ‘Funny Dream’ –The debut album from South London’s DIY supergroup Kissing Gate shows exactly why they are one of the most magnetic acts around, incredible lyricism supported by exceptional musical interplay.
• Water From Your Eyes – ‘It’s A Beautiful Place’ –A tremendous new collection from one of the most sonically imaginative bands active right now – brutal, vulnerable and constantly innovative.