2025 felt like a century—yet it slipped away in a heartbeat. And when I try to retrace it month by month, it doesn’t play back like a neat timeline so much as a trail of vignettes, an oasis of music experiences amongst the desolation of each surreal news cycle. If you compare year-end lists across different sites, the overlap is thinner than usual—and I don’t think that’s a sign of fragmentation so much as abundance. There were simply too many releases worth defending, too many albums that demanded a second pass, then a third, then the kind of listening where you stop “reviewing” and start living inside them. In so many ways, it still feels like we’re in a golden age for the music we champion here.
Amidst all of that, I did have one certainty: my album of the year came from a place I never expected. If you had asked me five years ago whether AFI would land at the very top of my list—let alone that we’d be featuring them here—I would’ve said no without hesitation. Yes, there were tells: the post-punk pull of 2021’s Bodies, the darker contouring going back to 2013’s Burial. But Silver Bleeds the Black Sun isn’t a flirtation with the lineage—it’s a full-bodied commitment. It sounds like a band who spent their lives alone in the same darkened room as Bauhaus, Killing Joke, The Cure, and The Sisters of Mercy, absorbing the grammar, the tension, the romance, the bite—and then writing something with a spirit that shares a greenroom with its Goth forebears.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’ve stood next to Davey Havok at more than a few shows over the years—watching stalwarts like The Mission and The Chameleons, and then catching newer artists too, the same kind of names he’s been calling out lately in interviews. That context makes Silver Bleeds the Black Sun hit even harder: it feels like a record made by lifelong fans—who understand exactly where this music came from and who still have the nerve to make it feel dark, dangerous, and danceable.
I had another moment like that halfway across the world. I was in a record store in Tokyo when Suede’s Antidepressants stopped me in my tracks—one of those “rewind it, play it again” encounters where the room briefly disappears. Suede have been on a consistently strong run since 2013’s Bloodsports (with 2016’s Night Thoughts still towering for me), and Antidepressants felt like that rare thing: a band with nothing to prove still finding new angles to sound urgent.
Besides the many phenomenal releases on my list—including Bootblacks, Lebanon Hanover, Lathe of Heaven, and Silver Tears—I also want to take a moment to spotlight a few newer artists I’d strongly recommend, projects that feel genuinely forward-moving rather than content to circle familiar ground. Tiffadelic immediately stood out to me for their soulful vocals—often ghostly in tone—layered over icy synth sounds that feel unearthed rather than assembled, echoing coldwave and darkwave currents from France and Germany in the ’80s through the 2000s. It’s as goth as it gets, but without affectation: the real thing, rooted in atmosphere and emotional gravity. Moon 17—who were first introduced to me by Spike Hellis—create old-school industrial music that is complex and operates in a space that actively defies standard EBM tropes. Their music carries the same sense of experimentation and risk that defined the Wax Trax era, but without the camo-and-crew-cut baggage that calcified the genre through the ’90s and 2000s. Some tracks unfold with strikingly beautiful vocals, others erupt into screams, and the tension between those extremes is exactly what makes the project so compelling. And finally, a mea culpa: we missed the mark this year by overlooking The Sick Man of Europe. Their self-titled album—particularly the track and single “Obsolete”—lands with sharp, nervy precision that recalls peak Colin Newman–era Wire: taut, intelligent, and mesmerizing.
There were plenty of other releases I wanted to squeeze in, and a few that deserve their flowers even if they didn’t make it into my top list. The Chameleons’ Arctic Moon earns an honourable mention, as well as Pink Turns Blue’s Black Swan, and Corpus Delicti’s Liminal, also stayed in heavy rotation for me, each in their own way reminding me why this strain of music keeps surviving every trend cycle. And Jim E. Brown’s I Urinated on a Butterfly was one of the year’s strangest pleasures— hilarious, satirical, self-effacing, and impossible to forget once it gets its hooks in. I also want to nod to Frank’s picks—especially The Horrors and Martin Dupont, and a few more that were just shy of being in my top 25,
My favorite EP this year was, by far, the bold early ’90s dance-pop diversion, the Trouble EP by Nuovo Testamento, followed by Automelodi’s Chanson-synth gem, the Cavallo EP. And the Australian duo Sacred Hearts released my favorite single of the year with “Possession”. But as far as synth-pop goes, Madeline Goldstein and Ronnie Stone released, hands down, two of the best tracks of the year, with “My Own Design” and “BOUND 2 THE RHYTHM”.
Honorable mentions on the singles front: Death Bells had two great ones, including “Shiver.” And the new tracks featured on Ductape’s Echo Drama Deluxe were fantastic, as well as the latest singles released in advance of their next album, Faded Flowers. And while David Byrne’s Who Is This Sky? Wasn’t my favourite of his solo work, but “T-Shirt”—with long-time collaborator Brian Eno—hit with all the kind of sly, minimalist synth brilliance that could hope for.
One last housekeeping note: there’s no Andi Harriman list this year, as she’s been buried in authoring a book that’s due out soon. We’ll be shouting about it properly when the time comes. For now, here’s my list—one attempt to pin down a year full of great music that flourished while society collapsed.
Alex’s List:
1. AFI – Silver Bleeds the Black Sun
2. Suede – Antidepressants
3. Lathe of Heaven – Aurora
4. Silver Tears – Silver Tears
5. Bootblacks – Paradise
6. Lebanon Hanover – Asylum Lullabies
7. Odonis Odonis – Odonis Odonis
8. Ash Code – Synthome
9. Korine – A Flame In The Dark
10. Ritual Howls – Ruin
11. Soft Vein – Through Blinds
12. Rosa Anschütz – Sabbatical
13. Home Front – Watch It Die
14. Mareux – Nonstop Romance
15. Ultra Sunn – The Beast In You
16. Safe Mind – Cutting the Stone
17. The Discussion – All the Pretty Flowers
18. Moon 17 – TX_1320
19. Nyx Division – Midnight Lights
20. Body Maintenance – Far From Here
21. Tiffadelic – Retrosynthesis Vol. I
22. Pixel Grip – Percepticide: The Death of Reality
23. The Sick Man of Europe – The Sick Man of Europe
24. Automatic – Is It Now?
25. Sextile – yes, please
EPs
1. Nuovo Testamento – Trouble EP
2. Automelodi – Cavallo EP
3. Claudia Kane & Metallic Lover – A New Way To Hurt EP
4. The Names – Procrastination EP
5. Closed Mouth – You Don’t Need a God EP
Singles
1. Sacred Hearts – Possession
2. Madeline Goldstein – My Own Design
3. Ronnie Stone – B0UND 2 THE RHYTHM
4. Traitrs – Burn In Heaven
5. House of Harm – Away Above
Or via: