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Ethel Cain – Punish

And so begins the inevitable march of posting all the music from 2025 that I missed, starting with this beautiful, devastating track from Ethel Cain’s album Perverts. It doesn’t really do justice to listen to it in isolation from the rest of the album, but it is an undoubted highlight – if a ‘highlight’ can make you want to curl into a mournful little ball and never go outside again. Perverts is one of the bleakest, most sorrowful albums of the year, and I can’t stop listening to it.

https://ethelcain.ffm.to/perverts

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Music

µ-Ziq – Majadahonda at Dawn

Mike Paradinas returns to Balmat with his new album 1979, the spiritual successor to his 2023 label debut 1977. 1979 explores a synth-heavy landscape of ethereal soundscapes, ominous crevasses, and strange, psychedelic fugues, and leans more readily into ambient-adjacent moods and textures than most of Paradinas’s more lively recordings as µ-Ziq on Planet Mu.

https://mikeparadinas.bandcamp.com/album/1979

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Music

Betty Hammerschlag – Circlesss

Betty Hammerschlag arrives on blush with a beautiful set of abstracted folk diversions on her new LP fake girl. Sits somewhere between Grouper and ML Buch; with heartwrenching melodies submerged beneath layers of reverb, dust and melancholy.

https://blushtbc.bandcamp.com/album/fake-girl

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Music

Prurient – Poison Apple

As Halloween approaches, I’d like to recommend this terrifying album from Prurient, Noise For Halloween Night. Lock the doors, turn the lights off, listen loud and have a panic attack. Happy Friday! 🖤

https://prurient.bandcamp.com/album/noise-for-halloween-night

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Music

Klein – it is what is is in d minor

Klein’s sleep with a cane isn’t so much a “mixtape” in the conventional sense as it is a sprawling ambient dossier. She frames it as such herself – “an epic ambient tape” – but over nearly 90 minutes, the record travels through murmurs, ruptures, and confessional loops. It’s experimental, deeply personal, intimately bound to her London roots and a strong contender for ambient album of the year.

https://klein1997.bandcamp.com/album/sleep-with-a-cane

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Features Interviews Music

One Track Mind: Arvin Dola

The Spanish composer and sound artist on the fragile solemnity of a late-period Low masterpiece.

The premise of One Track Mind is pretty simple: I ask artists to pick one track that means a lot to them – either something they’ve discovered recently, something that’s been with them for years, or one that reminds them of a specific time in their life or career – and tell me what makes it so special to them. I get to talk to the artists I love, and they get to talk about the artists they love. Love all round!

Spanish composer and sound artist Arvin Dola works at the intersection of music, cinema, and performance. His background in scoring for film and theatre informs a deeply textural approach, where sound becomes a vehicle for memory, emotion, and unresolved narratives.

His new LP O GHOST is his debut album release and is inspired by absence, memory, and the weight of unresolved time. Written in the wake of personal loss, it folds grief into a subtle kind of presence. Drawing on hauntology and shaped by Dola’s work in film and performance, the record blends ambient, drone, and disintegrating motifs that never quite land or leave.

For his One Track Mind selection, Arvin has chosen to highlight a track from an incredible album which also happens to be one of my all-time favourites.

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Music

Marta Forsberg – Dreamers feat. Rupert Enticknap

Marta Forsberg returns to Warm Winters Ltd. with her new meticulously woven album Archaeology of Intimacy. Soothing, gentle, yet uncompromising and strikingly beautiful, the album sees the Swedish-Polish composer move away from more long-form compositions into what the press notes describe as “pop”, but I definitely wouldn’t. Closing track closing Dreamers is an almost operatic piece which combines clipped and heavily auto-tuned vocals, a string section and beautiful synth melodies to impressively hypnotic effect.

https://martaforsberg.bandcamp.com/album/archaeology-of-intimacy

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Music

Her Blur – People Of The Red Blur

I don’t even know what this is really and I can’t find anything about it online other than that’s it a project of Luke Wyatt and Jessi Long, but it’s incredible.

https://valcrondvideo.bandcamp.com/album/first-blur

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Music

Joanne Robertson & Oliver Coates – Always Were

The accompanying PR text for Joanne Roberson’s new album simply reads: “Blurrr was written in between painting sessions and also whilst raising a child”, which is appropriate for an album of such understated brilliance. Mainly comprised of Robertson’s mournful guitar and heartbreaking, spectral vocal, there are several collaborations with Oliver Coates – perhaps best know for his devastating score for the film Aftersun – including Always Were, which is just ludicrously good.

https://joannerobertson.bandcamp.com/album/blurrr

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Music

René Najera – The Seasons feat. Leech

Minnesota-born, L.A.-based musician, mastering engineer, and co-founder of the Jungle Gym label Jared Carrigan records solo and in collaboration under a web of guises: V. Kristoff, Congo River Club House, Freaks of Nature, Easy Rider plus plenty more, including, most relevantly to this post, René Najera – his longest-running alias. His new LP Painted Life took shape from the seeds of a 2023 set prepared for a string of shows in Japan. Elements were later remixed, finessed, and expanded by a cast of inner circle collaborators, including Leech who contributed to this album standout.

https://renenajera.bandcamp.com/album/painted-life