Tis the season for year-end best-of lists, and The Record Exchange is pleased to bring you our 2025 Staff Picks!

Today’s 2025 Top 10 is from Rem, and he shares his reviews for each pick. Read Rem’s archive of reviews here.

Visit our staff picks display across from the main counter or the staff picks page in our online shop to preview and purchase titles!

LOS THUTHANAKA
Los Thuthanaka

Phrases like “inventive” nowadays get thrown around at musical projects like chum during a feeding frenzy, with modern music listeners/critics jumping to stamp “unique” upon anything with a pulse in the direction of intentionality, but where the Crampton siblings – Elysia (Chuquimamani-Condori) Crampton and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton – take their debut collaborative studio album I’ll declare transcends these buzzwords in the direction of indescribable ingenuity that leaves me stunned over and over again.

Though the combination of such genre definitions as post-rock or epic collage are definitive of Joshua’s psychedelic guitar-based walls-of-noise and Elysia’s tenure dating back to the early ‘10s work of their E+E pseudonym, this self-titled Los Thuthanaka record goes beyond simply blending the two; it grinds them together into a biblically accurate patchwork of the genres’ bombastic high points and terminally intertwines them under the backbone of the record’s Indigenous Andean rhythms and tropes that are anything but false to the duo’s heritages. 

In utilizing the dance-heavy folk movements of Caporales and Huayño, the entire record screams digital cumbia gone noise-rock, as tracks like “Ipi saxra” or “Awila” spiral about in their Bolivian-style of blown-out tribal pulsations that suggest to me an image of a sinister carnival unfurling its tent as cavalcades of masked performers circle and co-mingle in kicked-up dust clouds that wisp away in ghostly figures of angry skeletons and the specters of animal faces contorting under a blood moon; creepy, but also playful and ceremonious. 

As I continue to delve deeper into this record and unearth its influences – particularly the work of Markasata – it’s a no-brainer that the gigantic stampeding rhythms of these Andean folk styles mesh so well with the post-rock methods of building large, cascading soundscapes, and the epic collage maximalist digitality adds such a noisy flourish upon the canvas that Los Thuthanaka painted here that it’s been hard for me to return to any other music after being inextricably swayed by this marvelous fusion. 

It’s not all these gargantuan Branca-esque dance circles on the record, however; more somber and pretty cuts such as “Phuju” or fan favorite “Sariri Tunupa” utilize glistening, almost jubilant crystalline synths and what I could only describe as smile-crying totalism in the form of big, brash drum instrumentation either slyly tucked away behind the folds of wavering foreground Casio keyboard vocal samples or act as the driving forefront of tracks that sway the listener into sweet lulls from its lullabying waltzes, always pushed into the next bar from Joshua’s tight guitar repetitions. 

No matter the designations of genre tags or references to the duo’s sleeve-worn Latin influences, Los Thuthanaka needs little in the way to be overwroughtly analyzed as it speaks for itself as a monumental touchstone in contemporary experimental music, and certainly the greatest, if not most mind-warping album I’ve heard from the 2020s, because whatever way you split it, the balancing of noise, fun and imagination exhibited from the duo on this here record is masterful beyond a blurb or review; it’s enigmatic and oh-so-much to marvel at.

JANE REMOVER
Revengeseekerz

Taking the cake for my most listened to record of 2025 is the senior record of chronically online pop star turned hip-hop supernova Jane Remover. 

Straying away from their established sensitive, shoegazey glitch-pop repertoire, Revengeseekerz is primarily a digicore/rage record, with 808s and sub bass lining the walls of the tracklist while EDM moments pepper the eclectic soundstage with elements of hardstyle, drum and bass and bass house, among others.

Aside from the sole Danny Brown feature on “Psychoboost” – a very complementary instrumental to Danny’s unique cartoony vocal inflection – Jane’s the center focus on the album, not only with their voice but with the narrative threaded throughout the record, touching on many complicated issues of gender, fame, mental fortitude and hopeless romanticism in the digital age. Whether it’s on the lead single “JRJRJR” that speaks on the difficulty in blowing up under their deadname and the numbness to the human condition that comes with the overwhelming nature of her frenzied fandom, or her weary candor of mistrust with her surrounding crowds and the revenge-seeking attitude she has towards the fake and exploitative “friends” in her circle on “angels in camo,” I find such a significant amount of commentary on the subject of maneuvering internet-plagued social environments while the crux of popularity rages on, regaled with such earnestly progressive vulnerability that I’d be hard pressed to name another contemporary album that comes close to Revengeseekerz’s heart-on-sleeve transparency.

This isn’t even to gloss over the music itself, which is stupefyingly dense, layered, well thought out and diverse, pummeling her attention-span-shot audience with a litany of genres to chew on until their rotted-by-ultra-processed-microplasticized-molars are ground to a sedimentary nub. “TURN UP OR DIE” is an excellent example of such stylistic voracity, where within a sub-five-minute runtime we leapfrog around genres like rage, drum and bass, hardstyle and fidget house, all accentuated by synthesizers shattering with high-end distortion and thick kick drums that rattle cochleas like rusty wind chimes in the eye of a wedge tornado. 

Aside from the captivating instrumentals and well-articulated lyrical themes are the vocal styles of Jane themselves, which are a mix of the tremolo-heavy mid-00s pop vox reminiscent of T-Pain, Akon or Usher and the overloaded with autotune, deadpan Atlantaean trap triplet flows like current wavy heavyweights Playboi Carti or Ken Carson. 

Capturing lightning in a bottle never looked so easy as Jane makes it seem on Revengeseekerz, and via a menagerie of overstimulating instrumental densities, captivating vocals that ruminate somewhere between distraught and accepting in their lyrical contexts and exciting twists and turns of generical influences applied like a unmedicated maximalist painter, I’ve become well-attached to this record and its impressive balancing act of entertaining, sans-kitchen-sink production and addicting gravity of exceptional intensity; it’s loud, far from vapid and meticulously crafted and I’m all for it and ultimately hope the mainstream hip-hop scene takes dutiful notes on its advantageousness with ardent immediacy.

ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF
Iconoclasts

Wow, there’s going to be a lot of post-rock on this list, but I digress. Adding to the pile is the sixth studio record from Sweden-hailing experimental aficionado Anna von Hausswolff, titled Iconoclasts. 

While she’s been on a stint of depressive melancholy records (see: Dead Magic and All Thoughts Fly, both quite droning and lonesome projects), Iconoclasts stands as a graceful while jarring detour into a more triumphant foray, opting to trade bittersweet drones with angel-winged solar flares. I get hints of Fiona Apple or Joanna Newsom vibes from this record; art-pop with expressive female vocals that do not dare to straddle the line of unoriginality, particularly in the wide array of styles that contrast one another from stark darks to bright lights sown together by the twine of exaggerated singing theatrics. 

Some brighter cuts include “Stardust,” with its blaring corny 80s pop saxophone solos in front of krautrock grooves, as well as “Struggle with the Beast,” which is a jazzy, maximalist jam with Hausswolff’s vocal performance coming across as both brittle and resilient, like a eupeptic version of late-career Lingua Ignota. 

Iconoclasts is truly all over the place for a modern post-rock record; from shyly sinister, chamber-y Talk Talk-adjacent ballads (“The Mouth”) to shimmering spacious climaxes (“Unconditional Love”) and even wide-open acoustic, near-techno heartbreak anthems (“Facing Atlas”), you can’t help but appreciate an artist over 15 years into their career still demanding focus from their listeners as they wring the rag of attention spans dry over long track times that waste no time but give ample room to formulate to their full potentials. 

The overall encapsulation of the album – and why it ended up here – is that those forlorn moments of Hausswolff’s last few despondent projects are not all lost, they’re just covertly tucked away, like the endlessly desolate drones on the Abul Mogard-collaborating sprawl of “An Ocean of Time” or the uncanny ending to “The Mouth” that spirals and splinters away into a sea of delay and reverb, only to be balanced with the aforementioned energy of the following “Stardust.” 

The only real critique I have here is of the quizzical addition of a somehow-still-breathing Iggy Pop wearily crooning away in his baritone on “The Whole Woman,” yet still it reminds me of the ghostly hums found in the ultimate projects of Bowie or Cohen, so even a sole flaw ends up being a positive, which on a 72-minute album is saying a lot. 

Iconoclasts shows Hausswolff continuing to extend her outstretched hand into the land of the palatable avant-garde, grasping themes and ideas up in bushels of baroque bouquets while gallivanting through ripe, bright fields of foliage, with the light of the sun peeking through an overcast sky, refracting antithetical color gradients of grey, maudlin tones off of a neoclassical garb emblazoned with sequins of depressive, well-tailored post-rock-influenced craftsmanship. 

SWANS
Birthing

Being billed as the final album in the “big sound” Swans discography comes 2025’s Birthing, an extension of the songs jammed about on last year’s tour for their previous record, The Beggar. 

You’d expect nearly 45 years into their career that the band’s sound would now be neutered of its grit and far from original, with an ever-aging architect in the abstract composite that is frontman Michael Gira at the helm. However, Birthing brings irrefutably interesting ideas to the table that aren’t too far gone from the realm of their compositional creative tenure in the post-rock genre, not to mention their declaration of the “big sound” still coming through to implode eardrums, regularly emerging from their slow, brooding song structures. 

Opener “The Healers” has one of my favorite quirks of the record, with Gira on the first half occasionally fluttering his voice in a sort of Phrygian, eastern drawl between semitones and strong tremolo as the instrumental builds with soft cymbals, quiet guitar waltzes and reverberous background choirs. This doesn’t last long, as the big band sound comes in before the halfway mark with screeching guitar drones and smashing drum tones, but as the track progresses, its tempo speeds up gradually, eventually veering away from a tottering slowcore-esque hobble into a post-punk upbeat jog before exploding into a classic Swans free-improv wall of sound hodgepodge of multi-instrumentational firepower. The track comes to an end with a death-march of sorts driven by thwacked snare rhythms, no-wave guitar ambiance and haunting vocal textures that wouldn’t be out of place on a sinister classical piece like Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna. 

This, being the longest track on the record, sets the mood and is a good indicator of the rest of the sound on Birthing, as in the remaining tracklist we get lots of choirs, drones, bursts of frenetic energy, cryptically glum lyrics from Gira, somber instrumentals and on-brand post-rock crescendos following towering edifices of tension and instability. 

While it may feel like a cop-out for a purportedly “final” Swans record to do many of the established Swans tropes, the recordings are very accurate studio renditions of these songs that I heard last year live on the Beggar tour, bestowed to me in a low-capacity, second-rate musical sweatbox down in Salt Lake City, so the album has a bit of a nostalgia factor to me, but just as much remains an album whose compositions tap into the cultural absence of atonality in music, all from an act whose sound has only evolved over a timeline that’s nearing its golden anniversary. 

Birthing is cacophonous, chaotic and bursting with creative intent and stands again as a demonstration in grandiosity that only Swans could deliver with such familiarity without kowtowing to a more approachable, redundant sound; I’d be happy if this truly were the last “big sound” record from the New York monument of post-rock, because all you need to listen to is the closer “Rope (Away)” to know they too understand the significance of their craft, and can end whenever they want on whatever dissonant climax they choose as their seismically titular curtain call.

BRUIT ≤
The Age of Ephemerality

These French post-rockers have stood out among the last 10 years of the genre’s semi-resurgence as an act positively plagued by strings and electronics, features of the genre’s highest points – in my opinion, with examples being Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Disco Inferno, respectfully – but where their latest record contrasts to 2021’s The Machine is Burning… is with an attitude now exhibiting a dejected lean into the atonal or angrier side of their established sound.

On this sophomore LP, The Age of Ephemerality, we get raw glitches alongside electronic arps and classical flourishes, as well as technocratic commentary by way of field recordings which establishes an underlining thread of angst throughout the tracklist; how they achieve this on a predominantly instrumental record is quite a feat, but the air of frustration exudes from its symphonies of wailing guitars, animalistic cymbal-heavy drum punishment and occasionally seismic explosions of full-band brutalist noise.

The second track “Data” is a great example for the bulk of variance you’ll find on the record. It’s oddball but evidently direct, consisting of vocal samples of a dystopia-deluded Mark Zuckerberg‘s depressive ramblings about the importance of online engagement underneath swathing ruminations of chamber jazz atop krautrock grooves and fuzzy crescendos of guitars wading alongside all these elements.

The genre gets much flak around its half-baked counter-protests and a handicap in the formulaic rise/fall action that has rubbed listeners the wrong way since the Explosions in the Sky era of oversaturation; if this distaste sounds familiar on your pallet, then I may recommend BRUIT to wash said taste from your mouth. Its narrative themes are current and seem to only become more relatable, but combined with the grandiose emotion found on “The Intoxication of Power” or tender Skinny Fistean classical swells on “Technoslavery / Vandalism,” the contextualization of the dichotomy between pitiful and furious reaches one white-knuckled breaking point after another, always being cyclically countered with begrudged exasperations that read so tired, so fatigued, so powerless. 

Not only does the barely-40-minute runtime complement the brevity of these societally poignant recordings, but The Age of Ephemerality’s variety and seemingly ever-brooding creativity in its sounds resounds in a contemporary echelon of post-rock expertise, all buttressed in an understandable, relevant and tangible anti-hyper-consumerism malaise enrobed through countless building and destructive moments that give way to cataclysmic eruptions of tension, beckoning the question: “Will things ever change?” They may well not, but at least this vein of cathartically dramatic guitar music still feels like a well worth tapping, if not for its emblematic display of vexatious dispositions in sonic form, then for its clear proficiency in knowing what works in the genre’s favor and how to convey such human experiences in a primarily instrumental fashion.

LUCY BEDROQUE
Unmusique

Joining the ranks with Jane Remover is another bedroom-inspired pop-rap gambit in the form of Lucy Bedroque’s debut mixtape, Unmusique. While they put out a cult classic in 2023’s Sisterhood under the lostrushi pseudonym, this new record – I’d argue it’s more a record than a mixtape because of its length, but its short track times raise a good riposte – sets a warpath of dismantlement as another welcome deviation in the contemporary hip-hop scene. 

The opening track “Speakers Never Learn” is a learning moment within itself, as it sets the tone for the record pummeling listeners’ cones and drivers with blown-out digitized fuzz and rich, trappy 808s that shred woofers into shrapnel. In the zeitgeist of the rage scene, this addition to the digicore phalanx spearheaded by the Drain Gang pioneers of Bladee and Ecco2k, along with Jane Remover – who Lucy shared a cut with on the Revengeseekerz B-side “Audiostalker” – sees the sound progressing here under the wings of Lucy and co. instead of flaming out in Icarus fashion. We get a ton of styles on the record too: the obvious Opium influence on the heater “I Am Impossible,” the nightcore synths on “G6 Anthem” and the undeniably tongue-in-cheek Roland drum machine-infected overproduction “Finish Him.” 

I can’t help but be sufficiently surprised by most of the record, as my bias in hip-hop nowadays feels jaded towards the drumless movement which opts for a more minimal, serious attitude, but when you hear a track like “Fenty Face” that’s blown out as all get out and flush with skittering percussion as Lucy braggadociously raps their chest off, it’s a sight I admit to marveling at. 

The EDM influence on this album too isn’t anything to write off, even if it’s used primarily as an accent; whether it’s the upbeat raving at the end of “One Of Us Is Lying,” the phonk grooves at the beginning of “Fenty Face” or the middle section of “Ultraviolet” that again makes a nod to the nightcore tropes in tandem with its short but striking four-to-the-floor rising action, Lucy’s implementation of these styles keeps the tracklist fresh and reputably in-the-know of the current meta in the underground electronic movements. 

Above all, the exceptionally dense and crunchy production carries a record that was already playing to its strengths. With its bitcrushed distortion and brick-walled loudness, Unmusique cements its place as a titular highpoint among its contemporaries and stands out as a galaxy purple sore-thumb that encourages repeat listens which’ll surely churn your car speakers down to a writhing pulp by way of its complicated cybernetic entanglements; a Frankenstein of popular genres coursing with threads, wafers and semiconductors, all out to lunch and all on the fritz.

ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER
Tranquilizer

Agreeing with the critics and the general populace aware of Daniel Lopatin’s music, the newest Oneohtrix Point Never record is a formidable victory lap, making progressive strides in his career following the decent Again from 2023 and 2020’s middling Magic Oneohtrix Point Never. 

This album, Tranquilizer, is on the softer side, straying away from Garden of Delete’s post-industrial firepower or Age Of’s depth charge of conceptualism, having more in common with – and arguably a combination of – his soothing opuses, Replica and R Plus Seven. Chock with minimalist fugues and synthetic low-end, Lopatin holds no punches regarding intent, as songs all over Tranquilizer are mistakably restrained, yet utilize their space effortlessly to give way for an endless stream of evocative moments to breathe and stew in its near hour-long runtime. 

“Cherry Blue” genuinely reads like a B-side to Replica, with its distant piano refrains bouncing around simple chimes, ambiance and emotional inflections in the form of tape-wavering guitars and processed bells, synthesizing a touching trajectory most albums would blush to conjure all within a single track. Another favorite, “Modern Lust,” also calls back to the minimal days of Replica or even his Eccojams of yesteryear, as the song limps along with sloppy bloopy loops for the entirety of its runtime, not without being jettisoned along via unflinching, varietal choir bursts and keyed chords and stabs that scream Max/MSP and the gorgeous unison layers of the Juno 60.

It’s been hard to pin down moments to talk about on Tranquilizer because of the expertise in its structure, working especially well as a front-to-back full-length, appropriately complemented by its mesmerizing whole-album visualizer concocted by the UK GFX partnership between Elliott Elder and George Muncey, UNCANNY (who have worked with Warp Records, Clipse, Sampha and Nike, to name a few). 

Truly, the little moments make up the direct impact of Tranquilizer’s stopping power; that burst of industrial techno bounce on the middle section of “Rodl Glide,” the warm nature recordings behind Steve Reich or Susumu Yokota-adjacent bell repetitions on “Storm Show,” the somehow comforting baby cries compressed inside crystalline pads on the opener “For Residue” or “Vestigel” with its dub techno atmospheres a la the German minimal electronic masterminds Basic Channel, Pole or Jan Jelinek. 

No matter where you jump around in this album you’re bound to land headfirst into an impressive gallery of sound design, aloof upon expert utilizations of contemporary electronic knowledge that only surface when a now-seasoned veteran of the genre like Lopatin cracks his knuckles and battens down the hatches for a satisfying and provocative return to form like on Tranquilizer.

THE NECKS
Disquiet

Australian trio the Necks’ sparse approach to modern jazz has long excelled at evolving throughout a career spanning nearly 40 years, wandering through a handful of different routes from their homebase of ECM avant-garde jazz with a catalog that’s remained focused and tight while faithful to the cool archetypes built from the scant, detailed roots of the ECM legacies formulated by Eberhard Weber and Keith Jarrett. 

2025’s Disquiet towers at a three-hour runtime, gestating and ebbing along at a lurching pace that comes across as their most focused and realized effort to date. Despite its intimidating length, Disquiet is extremely approachable, a trait that I’d argue acts as a strong suit for its appearance as a titan among the all-time post-minimalism avant-garde multihyphenate achievements. 

The center focus of the album, the 74-minute “Ghost Net,” waltzes about in a field of organs, pianos and dry cymbal syncopation with monsoons of cool polyrhythms steeping and bubbling over its gargantuan runtime like a foreboding cloud that casts slow-burning rainstorms onto a murky terrain of caves, moss and stretched-out canopies. 

The Necks describe themselves as “not entirely avant-garde, nor minimalist, nor ambient, nor jazz,” and Disquiet’s length allows the act to mold such a vagueness into a reality; the patience on opener “Rapid Eye Movement” never quite settles in a pocket or melody that becomes familiar, opting to swirl about in a limbo of pretty piano improvisations and stand-up bass flourishes of quickly plucked scales stitched under a comfy quilt of obstinate percussion, which nudges the song’s grandiosity along ever so finely, making an hour go by without hesitation. 

The two final tracks, “Causeway” and “Warm Running Sunlight,” are the most straightforward, with a combined runtime that doesn’t even touch the individual lengths of the previous two songs, the latter being a sprawling exercise of space whose simplistic textures remind me of that Pharoah Sanders record Promises from a few years back if it had less third-stream influences and more of an underpinned post-rock allure, and the former a Reichean foray that hangs about within the confines of a post-bop crescendo, never halting but never breaching; like a hummingbird’s lightweight stasis fluttering ceiling-bound smoke in a late 50s jazz club. 

Disquiet’s monolithic nature stands out as a capstone exhibition of a never-wasted, persistently engaging exploration of the strongest aspects of the minimalist jazz architecture, towering in presentation but ultimately comforting in a squared-away execution of a style that the Necks have effortlessly proven to have down pat.

HAYDEN PEDIGO
I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away

While having more in common with the John Fahey-style twangy heartland American primitivism than the fuzzy ambiance of Roy Montgomery or Loren Mazzacane Connors, Northwest Texan Hayden Pedigo’s style of ambient Americana strikes a balance between the acoustic and the electrified dry signal of solo guitar, painting visions of effervescent dust clouds and wriggling horizons cooking off hot desert sands. 

His newest LP I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away is a succinct, sub-half-hour addition to his catalog, companioned by the striking acrylic painting from fellow Amarilloan Jonathan Phillips – the third collaboration between the two, following the cover art on Pedigo’s previous two records. 

Accentuated by slides, hammer-ons and nimble fingerpicking, Waving ambles among landscapes of cold cacti and still valleys over its short runtime, where minimal hand strums and light guitar effects are cast about like magic, as if some cowboy wizard wove his sleeve across a wide-open space and conjured an elegant slice of life from hot, desolate sagebrush-laden plains. 

Hidden amongst the album’s foreground of Pedigo’s plucks are imponderous complements of atmosphere, primarily supplied by synths and EBow played from Scott Hirsch (Hiss Golden Messenger, the Court and Spark) with small features of pedal steel by Nicole Lawrence (Devendra Banhart, Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten) and piano from Boise resident Jens Kuross. 

When all the elements are combined and taken away as Pedigo sees fit in controlling his expansive playground of minimal Americana, the hypnotic crop circles of looping phrases and varietal time signatures keep the pace of the record engaging when it’s at its most languid and meditative and when it’s at its most busy.

More than anything on this year’s record – sharing the same calendar as Hayden’s droning slowcore-adjacent collaboration with Oklahoman sludge metal act Chat Pile, In the Earth Again – is the simple ability to jaunt and meander among easily cogitable terrains of the desert qualities of sun and expansiveness without really feeling as if the record is wasting anyone’s time when imagining the arid settings they concoct; always a respectable compliment towards any ambient-adjacent music – particularly on Waving – is the presence of scarcity that doesn’t bore, and actively invites a listener’s attention to settle down in the lack of busyness. 

I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away is an open book of fun southern ditties that capture a certain condition of loneliness by virtue of soft, intimate panoramas scaled upon the fretboard of American highways, whose repetitive circuits of western lullabies gallivant off the fingertips of an ever-impressive Pedigo, who I hope continues down his own lonesome roads and bestows us more tunes tucked within the pockets of his weathered musical saddlebag.

CANDELABRO
Deseo, Carne y Voluntad

The final inclusion on this list comes from a young seven-piece twee-y post-rock act from Chile, Candelabro, and their sophomore record Deseo, carne y voluntad. 

While the record’s lyrics are completely in Spanish via cathartic religious motifs sung in a holy, choral fashion, the overall indie-ish style of soft theatric vocals are more Black Country, New Road praise than anything, but not in a derivative fashion. Complete with a mix of male and female vocals, we get these big anthemic songs lush with jazzy saxophones and pianos that gyrate between time signatures all afloat upon the charismatic post-adolescent vocals of the group, which bleed with youthful emotion. 

I’d say it’s quite a synthesis of many elements or inspirations that don’t all become taxing by their influence; there’s the noise-pop sweetness of Swirlies and the spacious baroque post-rock of an act like the aforementioned BC, NR but equally tapped are their Chilean art-rock contemporaries like Hesse Kassel or Asia Menor, who all circle like buzzards around a palpable South American earnestness upon anxious wings of sentimentality. 

Programmed against the delicate ballads of a horn-heavy “Ángel” or the saccharine, mathy “3 Flores Blancas” are Deseo’s brash moments of energy and tension, like on “Tierra Maldita,” which has Midwest emo licks bouncing off the Klezmer-ish saxophone waltzes with scratchy distorted guitars adding to the textures, all shoulder-to-shoulder with quite peaceful and atmospheric post-rock simplicity. Likewise, “Pecado” is a strange cut that’s part chamber dance-punk and Latin ska and part swirling progressive jazz rock entangled beneath the clutch of radio-fidelity spoken word, feeling a bit at times like the zolo symphonic grandiosity penned in a John Zorn composition.

In many ways this does feel like a spiritual successor to Ants From Up There, as its intimacy weeps from the divots and rips bleeding off of the vocal performances, leaving the listener – no matter if they understand the Spanish lyrics – aware and alert of the pungent malady of sadness and desperation that Candelabro flourishes throughout the tracklist with no regard to embarrassment, only the elicitation of familiar youthful heartbreak.

On the penultimate track “Cáliz” we get our last climactic moment, one of the most memorable on the record, with a triumphant combination of guitar distortion, piano arpeggios, energetic drums and bleating saxophones resolving the somberly romantic rising action that reads like a tear-damp soliloquy of bittersweet resignation, only to be crumpled down into a insignificant ball and thrown out the window into winds strewn from a firestorm that burns down the city outside. Here, the listener sits as the imaginary protagonist does, staring at the urban destruction from inside their windowed haven, watching buildings topple and families run towards futile salvation while “José (Créditos)” rolls in the background.

With so much at stake as a young band making their own with a swiftly revived sound that’s already become oversaturated in our current time, Candelabro slugs an original dinger right out of the park, casting a flaming baseball that never drops, only soars, over burning, dried trees and cracked, ill-maintained asphalt, with a glistening comet tail of young talent ejecting from its cosmic stern across a navy sky, spelling out in neon cursive the words Deseo, carne y voluntad that glitter amongst the broken glass stockpiled in the storm gutters and makes even an old world in peril seem like a prism of puerile potential, if just for a moment or two.

Tags: 2025 staff picksrem jensenstaff picks