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Imarhan – Tamiditin

Imarhan started out around 2008, a loose collection of friends who began to play together and whose style reflects their cultural and generational background; dry guitar riffs, pop melodies and pan-African rhythms which draw on traditional Tuareg music, African ballads and the modern pop and rock the band heard growing up.This is taken from ESSAM, their fourth album, recorded with the same core lineup, but with a significant shift in their sound and approach, moving toward something more open, modern, and exploratory.

https://imarhan.bandcamp.com/album/essam

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Pefkin – Green Bound In Ice and Snow

The opening track on Pefkin’s new album Unfurling is a stunning, 11-minute blend of haunting folk and icy ambient, inspired by the artist’s dreams of the coming spring. Nature has always been a central part in Pefkin’s music, and on Unfurling she captures all the elements as the record follows the transformations of the land from winter into spring – air, light, temperature, soil.

https://pefkin.bandcamp.com/album/unfurling

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Durand Jones & The Indications – Let’s Take Our Time 

A fresh A-side from Durand Jones & The Indications finds drummer and falsetto king Aaron Frazer taking the lead on Let’s Take Our Time, a song that has been billed as a Mayfield-era Impressions’-adjacent track, but to my (admittedly untrained ears) sound more like a Smokey Robinson tribute. Either way, it’s likely you’ll know the kind of area in which they’re operating.

https://durandjonesandtheindications.bandcamp.com/album/lets-take-our-time-flower-moon

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OHYUNG – all dolls go to heaven

Fresh from delivering one of the best albums of last year, OHYUNG returns to the ambient textures they explored so affectingly on 2022’s imagine naked!; my favourite LP of that year. all dolls go to heaven is the lead single from the forthcoming album IOWA, described by the artist as “a memento to my time living in Iowa between 2023 and 2024” and “my ambient transexual version of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.”

https://ohyung.bandcamp.com/album/iowa

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SAULT – Protector

SAULT start the year with a typically low-key release, their new album Chapter 1 emerging out of the January mists with barely a whisper of hype. Predictably it’s great, perhaps even a career highlight. Time will tell; but if you can’t find something to enjoy with Protector I’m really not sure what’s wrong with you.

https://saultglobal.bandcamp.com/album/chapter-1

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Julianna Barwick, Mary Lattimore – The Four Sleeping Princesses

It’s very encouraging to have an album this good released so early in the year. Tragic Magic pairs Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore in a collaboration recorded at the Philharmonie de Paris, made with rare access to instruments from the Musée de la Musique collection through InFiné. Co-produced with Trevor Spencer, the album was created in nine days, building from improvisation and the emotional carry-on of the moment.

Lattimore chose a run of historic harps that map the instrument’s evolution from the early 18th to late 19th century. Barwick worked with classic synthesisers including a Roland Jupiter and a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, bringing soft-edged harmonic colour and air around the notes. The Four Sleeping Princesses may be a highlight, but its far from the only reason to immerse yourself in this forest of lushness.

https://marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com/track/the-four-sleeping-princesses

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Isabel Pine – A Flickering Light

Isabel Pine is a classically trained violist, composer and producer whose work draws deeply on nature, shaping vivid soundscapes through string textures, electronics and field recordings. After a series of self released EP’s and singles her debut LP Fables releases next month comprising a number pieces that were recorded in the fall of 2024, in a small, remote cabin and outside, primarily using stringed instruments. A Flickering Light is the second single, and it is absolutely beautiful.

https://isabelpine.bandcamp.com/album/fables

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Mikel Rev – LM 8182

More good stuff I missed from last year here courtesy of Mikel Rev. Rev is a mysterious figure from the depths of the Oslo underground, who primarily operates as part of the Ute Collective – a group of producers and DJs pushing a unique electronic and trance-forward sound, through various sublabels and live events often set amongst the lush forests of Norway. Following his debut album The Art Of Levitation on A Strangely Isolated Place back in 2023, last year’s Journey Beyond presents a selection of tracks demonstrating his obsession with the porous boundaries between ambient and trance.

https://mikkelrevute.bandcamp.com/album/journey-beyond

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Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – Thoughts On The Future

Kaitlyn’s Aurelia Smith’s last album GUSH was one of the best albums of the year, and didn’t get nearly enough love in the end of year list, except mine of course. There’s a risk new EP Thoughts On The Future will also get a bit lost as it came out just before Christmas when no-one’s really paying attention, but it shouldn’t. Entirely instrumental, and echoing artists like Kelly Moran in its use of slowly evolving rhythmic repetition, Smith described it as “a contemplative body of work that examines what grief does to the body and the mind – the necessary disembodiment & cocooning — how it suspends us, how it empties us, and how it quietly begins to rebuild us in its own time.”

https://kaitlynaureliasmith.bandcamp.com/album/thoughts-on-the-future

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Hannah Cohen – Earthstar

Here’s something else lovely I missed from last year; file this in the Natalie Bergman folder of 2025 albums that belong to an entirely different era. It also strongly reminds me Tim Heidecker and Weyes Blood’s majestic Oh How We Drift Away: arguably the greatest 60s single made this decade.

https://hannahcohen.bandcamp.com/album/earthstar-mountain