My recommended best records of the last month. This is what I listened to and loved the most.
Album of the month:
Winged Wheel – Desert So Green
This experimental rock band are ostensibility a Detroit outfit with members scattered across the American music landscape and including Whitney Johnson (Matchess, Circuit des Yeux), Cory Plump (Spray Paint, co-owner of the dream venue Tubby’s), Matthew J. Rolin (solo guitar wizard and half of the Powers/Rolin Duo), Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth), Lonnie Slack, and Fred Thomas (Idle Ray, Tyvek).
Desert So Green is the band’s third record, recorded in Chicago and draws on American midwest emo, shoegaze, post-rock and kosmische experimental improvisation – reminding me at various points of Godspeed, Slint, TAGABOW, Just Mustard, Mogwai with a restrained sound that continues to draw me back in.
Its songs are nebulous and inviting, vistas of landscapes passing, pensive and undulating yet slightly off mic and distant – an elusive daydream that slips from your grasp the moment it ends.
A$AP Rocky – DON’T BE DUMB
A$AP Rocky’s fourth album has been in the offing for a while and is the followup to 2018’s album Testing, making a significant eight year gap between albums.
Is DON’T BE DUMB worth that wait? It certainly comes out the gates swinging, with Rocky wisely frontloading the record with mostly rap cuts that demand replay like the trap-pop swerve of single ‘Helicopter’, the wavvy Ye-esque ‘Stole My Flow’ and the hypnotic pure rap of ‘No Tresspassing’.
The second half of the record gets genre loose and guest-heavy – Brent Faiyaz Thundercat and Jon Baptiste feature. and the punk rap of ‘STFU’, the fairly staid ‘Punk Rocky’ (trying to repeat the eminent ‘Sundress‘ vibe), the Doechii-featuring jazz-lounge of ‘Robbery’, Gorillaz and Westside Gunn share duties on low-end rider ‘Whiskey (Release Me)’ lead up to the Jessica Pratt-featuring ‘The End’, repeating her trick of featuring on Rocky’s 2024 single ‘Highjack’ ,with Tyler, The Creator’s ‘Fish N’ Steak’ as it sits on a second disc feels like an addendum rather than essential.
In the end, DON’T BE DUMB is a fine rap album that trails off as it goes, but has enough single song highlights to keep it in my rotation all month.
Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore – Tragic Magic
Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore have made an album together called Tragic Magic where the synthesizer-producer-singer and the harpist’s complementary ambient and electronic styles composition styles combine.
The album was made in nine days at the Philharmonie de Paris, co-produced by Trevor Spencer (Fleet Foxes, Beach House), with access to the Musée de la Musique’s instrument collection – harps and analogue synths, in partnership with the French label InFiné.
Cosmic transportive arrangements reveal themselves across this record with the pair pushing and pulling in the spaces between their instruments to uncover luminous sounds.
Oneohtrix Point Never – Marty Supreme Soundtrack
Continuing his run of superior soundtrack albums for the Safdie Brothers (Josh in this case) that excavate a parallel world of their own, Daniel Lopatin’s Marty Supreme score pushes hard on glistening synth vaporwave ’80s vibes with nods to Tangerine Dreams, Jean-Michel Jarre and Philip Glass.
I love the score and I haven’t even seen the film yet.
Ye Vagabonds – All Tied Together
Irish folk band Ye Vagabonds’ fourth album on Rough Trade’s River Lea label. Brothers Diarmuid and Brían Mac Gloinn finds the brothers expanding their recorded circle into a foursome with contributions from multi-instrumentalists Shahzad Ismaily, Alain Mc Fadden, Caimin Gilmore, Kate Ellis, Sam Amidon, Romain Bly and Louise Gaffney, recorded with producer Philip Weinrobe (Big Thief, Adrianne Lenker) in a house in Galway.
All Tied Together excavates a deeper well of modern trad songwriting from Ye Vagabonds, with their original songs speaking with colour of home places, locations and specific people, citing fiction writers George Saunders and Claire Keegan as inspiration.
Ye Vagabonds have quietly and steadily built their reputation with inviting and harmonic take on traditional folk, but All Tied Together demands the listener’s attention with its radiant melodies and tender arrangements.
Irish, UK, European and US tour dates for the coming months here.
Ailbhe Reddy – Kiss Big
Kiss Big is the followup to Irish singer-songwriter Ailbhe Reddy’s previous records Endless Affair (2023) and Personal History (2020) ,and is concerned with the end of a long-term relationship and the disorientation that comes in its aftermath.
There are songs about building a life around a person no longer present, how they moved on quickly while the author is stuck, and attempts to glue back feeling re-arranged.
Written between Dublin, London, New York and the American Midwest, KISS BIG finds Reddy at her most musically accomplished with a backdrop of electronic flourishes lifting the tracks alongside a sharp confidence in the songwriting that makes this record feel like a step up. Maykay provides backing vocals on ‘Graceful Swimmer’ and the closing track ‘Crave’ opens with a monologue from Sarah Kane’s Touching Love play.
Ailbhe Reddy’s top songs of 2025
Ailbhe plays Button Factory in May.
By Storm & Injury Reserve – My Ghosts Go Ghost
My Ghosts Go Ghost is the debut studio album by rap duo By Storm who formed after the death of their friend Stepa J. Groggs in 2020 from their band Injury Reserve, coming after a series of singles since 2023.
The album is utterly informed by Groggs’ passing and is a contemplative avant treatise on dealing with this grief and the aftermath, formed from lucid live improvisations around central ideas or thoughts that are sung, mumbled in passing, rapped out of range, or covered in effects. Billy Woods features on Best Interest’ among discombobulating and weighty alternative rap music.
SAULT – Chapter 1
The enigmatic band lead by producer Inflo and singer Cleo Soul released their first album since last April’s 10. Chapter 1 is the band’s thirteenth record since 2019, and features the band’s trademark stark black artwork with a candle on the cover, and ten tracks that stick to the band’s established and clearly fruitful soft-edged soul and R&B music – expect this time with more orchestral arrangements to the fore along with contributions from Jack Penate and the ’80s American production duo Jerry Jam and Terry Lewis (Janet Jackson). Highlights include ‘Love Does Not Equal Pain’, ‘Fulfil Your Spirit’ and the title track.
Bitchin Bajas – Isle Peaks
For now, an exclusive Qobuz release:
Bitchin Bajas are the Chicago psychedelic-indie trio of Cooper Crain, Rob Frye, and Dan Quinlivan with feet in the ambient and jazz worlds and this new EP on Drag City is 26 minutes of psychedelic playful productions painted with horns, synths, marimba, harp and ambience across two long songs of 16 minutes and 11 minutes in length.
Dry Cleaning – Secret Love
The third album from the English four-piece band who operate on the boundaries of traditional guitar and rock music with Florence Shaw’s magnetising spoken-word vocals and lyrics the centrifugal force for the band’s avant-rock sound.
Secret Love is produced by Cate Le Bon, the singular artist and producer of records from Horsegirl, Wilco and her own records. Secret Love has a lightness of atmosphere and an ’80s soft touch that could likely be attributed to Le Bon compared to 2022’s Stumpwork and 2021’s New Long Leg.
It doesn’t quite hit the heights of the previous two records, Secret Love is a bit more spacious, rubber-limbed and less urgent in its music arrangements which works well for Cate Le Bon’s carrying voice but less so for Shaw’s spoken style.
The decision is is an understandable switch up from what went before. I still enjoy my time with the record but it does mean some songs don’t leave much of an impression – operating in a liminal space that keep the album in more of a background appreciation mode.
Madra Salach – It’s A Hell Of An Age EP
The buzz justifiably continues to grow for the Irish alternative-folk six-piece with the release of their debut 12″ EP record.
After adding and selling out Dublin and Belfast shows, the EP features previous singles ‘Blue & Gold’, an original song inspired by singer Paul Banks habit of buying scratch cards, which I said had “clear Lankum influences in the arrangements, but a bit more on the raggle taggle alternative Pogues kick,” and ‘I Was Just A Boy’, an expansive seven minute plus tune that builds up with mandolin and drums into a swirling drone, and reflects on teenagedom.
The EP features a version of a song that is associated with the Wolfe Tones – ‘Spancil Hill’, ‘Murphy Can Never Go Home’ as popularised by Frank Harte and a song that basically convinced me of their huge potential seeing them live – the towering original song ‘The Man Who Seeks Pleasure’.
Maria Somerville – Luster Remixes EP
The Connemara musician whose Luster album drew from shoegaze, ambience and nu-gaze dreamy pop last year dropped this six-track remix collection of reworks from eminent names like Seefeel, YHWh Nailgun, Colle and Irish producer Asa Nisi Masa.
Caitlin Orla Eve – Space, Weight, Colour EP
The West Cork 24-year-old artist Caitlin Orla Eve releases a debut EP all made, mixed and produced by the musician, and it brandishes some really beautiful genre-varied work drawing from ambient, electronic, soul, dream pop and singer-songwriter styles.
The six tracks here feature breakbeats, dreamy gossamer pop, intimate reverbed vocals, slightly reminiscent of last year’s James K record but more grounded and direct.
Released through her independent label, Sonorous, the Objects, Space, Weight, Colour EP is impressively singular in what it’s doing from an Irish artist perspective, Caitlin is not afraid to lead into melody, while clearly pushing these songs into a liminal soft glow space. Don’t sleep on this.
Created entirely by Caitlin in a small off-grid studio hidden in the forests of West Cork, every aspect of the EP (from writing and recording to production, mixing and mastering) was carefully sculpted to form a self-contained world defined by atmosphere, texture, and tone. Guided by her creative mantra “space, weight, colour,” every layer and detail was imbued with its own presence and purpose, a philosophy that ultimately became its title. This approach extended beyond sound, informing the EP’s visual language, with the cover artwork (created in collaboration with fine art photographer Richard Lloyd Lewis) translating the music into image.
SX2 – POWDER! EP
Clive and Scott Sullivan are the Waterford brothers SX2 who have put out a fine line in electronic tracks on labels like Disco Halal over the last couple of years. They return to the label with their latest collection of four tracks – drawing on low tension-slung dance textures, ‘Swamp Thing’-esque ’90s electro stompers, exotic Chemical Brothers-esque title track with vocals from Def Nettle and electro-guitar psych wig outs. They remind me of Boot & Tax.
“The POWDER! EP really kicks open the door to the psychedelic club sound we’ve always loved. Some of these tracks are among our earliest work, tunes we never thought we’d release. We get bored easily by club music that follows all the rules, so this EP is our most hands-on project yet. We pushed into guitars, synths, live recording, anything to give the tracks that real human feel. It’s a sign of where SX2 is heading next: live performance.”
PVA – No More Like This
The London trio’s new album is more jagged and rhythmically warped than I recall their music being – featuring steel electro-pulsations, spoken word ambience, spindly indie, trip-hop 808 workouts. It’s got a woozy Smerz meets Dry Cleaning soul to it.
BXKS – Fear Of Eclipse
The debut mixtape from the Luton MC whose alternative grime-flecked rap delivery is in the slipstream of Lil Simz. BXKS recently collaborated with Gliders MC Travy on ‘Guestlist’ which doesn’t feature here.
Instead there are 11-tracks breezing across 20-minutes setting out an intriguing stall, and marking BXKS as one to keep an ear on.
Older Albums I’m enjoying this past month
- Gang Starr – Daily Operation / Step in the Arena
- Massive Attack – Mezzanine / Blue Lines / Protection
- Horace Andy – Good Vibes
- Pearl Jam – Yield
- Björk – Debut
- Kelela – Take Me Apart
- Beck – Odelay
- Tangerine Dream – Dream Sequence
- DJ Shadow – Preemptive Strike
- Cameron Winter – Heavy Metal
- The Chemical Brothers – Surrender
- JID – God Does Like Ugly
- Nick Drake – Bryter Layter
- AIR – Virgin Suicides Score
What albums are you enjoying? Join our Discord community with a Patreon membership and discuss albums with us.
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
