The Predatory Wasp
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Nothing I write here about the backstory to bvdub’s new album Replicant Memories is going to do justice to the incredible write up on Bandcamp, so if you want all the details, go there. Briefly, it reminds me of both the long form, genre-flipping sketches of recent Burial and the emotional gut-wrench of 36’s ambient trance masterpiece Cold Ecstasy. So a fairly high bar.
Keeping this short as it’s my first day back in the office and I am struggling, but here’s a deeply atmospheric house cut from the extremely reliable Martinou to warm your souls. Taken from his new EP Always There. Welcome to 2026! It’s going to be good?
Lb Honne’s new EP Brücke comes on Smallville, a label with which I was mildly obsessed in the early 2010s thanks to sleepy, melancholy deep house from artists like Moomin and Christopher Rau: a musical theme which continues to this day. The pick of the bunch here is Deeper, which picks up the beautiful, reflective threads of his 2024 album Present Future / Here There, which is a must-listen if you missed it last year.
https://smallville-records.bandcamp.com/album/smallville-71-lb-honne-br-cke
Molly Nilsson managed to sneak out an album without me realising back in October, which is pretty astonishing given how much I like her music and how much time I spent looking for new albums from artists I like. Amateur is described as both a “jubilee for losers” and “maybe her greatest yet” and while the latter honour still firmly resides with her 2018 masterpiece 2020, Amateur is awash with enough beautiful, hazy melodies and low-key hooks that, even on the first listen, it’s definitely up there.
Voices From The Lake’s eponymous album came out way back in 2o12, and I’ve probably returned to it on a nearly weekly basis every since. Donato Dozzy and Neal’s collaborative project started as a one-off live performance in the Japanese Alps before birthing an album that, according to the press notes, “become a touchstone in ambient techno, reshaping the global landscape of hypnotic and atmospheric electronic music.” I heartily agree. I cannot express how much I’ve loved this album over the last decade and more. The follow up, Voices From The Lake II, arrived today, and is already in my top 10 of the year.
The Predatory Wasp 