20 Essential Alternative / Experimental Albums 2025
- Feb 6
- 14 min read
This is our selection of 20 essential alternative and experimental albums 2025 we’ve been spending time with this year so far. There’s no order to the list, just records that linger, unfold slowly, and reward repeat listening. Moving across ambient, folk, electronic, jazz, and art-rock, these albums sit outside easy categories and follow feeling over form. Music for drifting, thinking, and staying with a little longer.
mood: winding down
label: drink sum wtr.
genre: rock, funk/soul, folk, world & country
style: art rock, avantgarde, contemporary jazz
listen on tidal | apple music
"My career has been a lesson in patience," says Annahstasia, having cultivated her musical language between blazes of intimacy and independence across different lives, locations, and iterations, loves lost and gained, expectations evaded and recreated. The rising troubadour's proximity to love — for and from others, in society at large, and deeply within herself — guides the spirit of her soulful, poetic folk songcraft. Love is the elemental constant, alongside her distinctly resonant voice, shading the singer-songwriter's music since her earliest self-taught recordings, back when a 17-year-old Annahstasia Enuke was discovered and propelled into the pressures of an industry that nearly stifled her greatest strengths. Artistic resilience, gratitude, and dedication to process have yielded Tether, Annahstasia's full-length debut on art-forward indie label drink sum wtr, a collection of beaming torch songs, orchestral hymns, and astral anthems that feel lived-in, drawn from the human experience and the spectrum of love.
Annahstasia assembled the pieces of Tether slowly and with deep intention; she's carried these songs with her on the road, sang them for friends and strangers, and evolved them over time alongside her personal revelations. "The song is written, and then I have to live with it and see if I really believe what I'm saying," she explains. She brought material to sessions at the storied Valentine Studios in Los Angeles, joined by producers Jason Lader (ANOHNI and the Johnsons, Frank Ocean, Lana Del Rey), Andrew Lappin (Cassandra Jenkins, L'Rain, Luna Li), Aaron Liao (Liv.e, Moses Sumney, Raveena) and a range of accomplished musicians, including featured guests aja monet and Obongjayar. The recording became instinctual, done only in live takes to capture the feeling of the room, the community of the music. The sequencing was just as essential; she arrived at a flow with shifting energies and poignant arcs. The instrumentation swells, at times understated and others supremely lush, and through each arrangement, Annahstasia's voice rings true, open-hearted, and free. "I've come into the power of my voice as a medium," she says. "As a tool of expression, I am able to shape the emotional space around me."
mood: winding down
label: xl recordings
genre: electronic, funk/soul
style: downtempo, contemporary r&b
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Everything Is Recorded, the collaborative music project centred around producer Richard Russell, today announces news of their third studio album. Temporary will be released on 28th February 2025 via XL Recordings and features an incredible roll call of collaborators including Sampha, Bill Callahan, Noah Cyrus, Florence Welch, Maddy Prior, Berwyn, Alabaster Deplume, Jah Wobble, Yazz Ahmed, Laura Groves, Kamasi Washington, Rickey Washington, Roses Gabor, Jack Peňate, Samantha Morton, Clari Freeman-Taylor and Nourished By Time.
Created over four years from 2020 to 2024, Temporary was recorded in the main at Russell’s own west London Copper House studio, alongside sessions in Tottenham, Cumbria, Dorset, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and is setto build on previous acclaimed releases including 2018’s eponymous, Mercury Prize-nominated debut album. On Temporary, Russell reboots his musical DNA: while his music had previously been about rhythm, words and melody in that order, on Temporary he swaps rhythm and melody, the rhythm taking up less space and the melody coming to the fore. Musically some songs are inspired by the sonic thought experiment “what if folk music had ‘gone digital’ in the 80s, just as reggae had?”, while spiritually and lyrically the themes encompass grief and loss. The results –
elevated by an intriguing and diverse set of collaborators who sound like the best and freshest versions of themselves – are the most luminous and relaxed compositions of Russell’s career. Every song sounds washed in sunshine and graced by tenderness. More fragile and quieter than previous Everything Is Recorded output, it might be one of the gentlest records ever made about death. In Russell’s own words “making the album was joyous, a way of hallowing life.”
mood: day thinking
label: sonamos
genre: electronic, rock, folk, world & country
style: art rock
listen on tidal | apple music
The album concentrates all the qualities that define Juana Molina’s music and goes a step further in the constant pursuit of the singular, where influences are hard to detect—genuinely original, literally unlike anything else. Unexpected melodies, ethereal, organic sounds, minimalist and subtle gestures, repetition as an aesthetic, austere, seemingly static harmony, lyrics as concentric layers: a familiar but always surprising landscape for the artist’s regular audience and an excellent doorway for newcomers to the world of Juana Molina.
mood: day thinking
label: guruguru brain
genre: folk, world & country
style: ambient, home recording, psychedelic
listen on tidal | apple music
Go Kurosawa is a multi-instrumentalist, producer, and co-founder of the independent label Guruguru Brain. Best known as the drummer and vocalist of Kikagaku Moyo, he has spent the past decade building bridges between East and West, sound and silence, rock and ritual.
soft shakes is something different. A personal chapter in Go’s journey, it marks his first solo album, created entirely by himself and made, for the first time, purely for himself. After Kikagaku Moyo disbanded, Go spent some time producing records for other artists, but with soft shakes, there was no plan. Just the instinct to pick up an instrument, play, and see what might unfold.
As he puts it, “The whole framework is new. When I made music for the band, I always knew who would play what. This time, it was just me. No plan, no expectation. And weirdly, that became the concept: doing it all myself, for the first time.”
mood: day thinking
label: true panther sounds
genre: electronic, pop
style: ambient, experimental, indie pop
listen on tidal | apple music
Mark Williams Lewis
mood: winding down
label: A24 music
genre: alternative/indie rock, folk, art-pop
style: atmospheric
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Mark William Lewis self-titled album, pressed on black vinyl. Featuring photography by Steve Gullick.
mood: day thinking
label: felbm sounds, objects & sounds
genre: electronic, classical, non-music
style: ambient, experimental, field recording, modern
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Perhaps his most luminous work to date, multi-instrumentalist Eelco Topper, also known as Felbm, presents a resounding and timeless suite in winterspring/summerfall. The work is a natural progression of his two latest solo feats, Elements of Nature and cycli infini, as it taps into nature and cyclical patterns while expanding upon these themes through the lens of Nijūshi-sekki, the Japanese 24-point seasonal system.
Whilst reading a book about the Japanese tea ceremony, Felbm first came in touch with Nijūshi-sekki, a calendar used in Ancient China and Japan that, rather than dividing time into four seasons, uses 24 points, with six periods per season, to mark what is happening in nature at precise moments. The poetics of these markers intrigued Felbm. Beginning in November 2022, he decided to follow the Nijūshi-sekki for a year, tracking and recording his observations of nature in a journal—from cloud formations to weather patterns, animal life to plants sprouting—while collecting musical ideas inspired by the changes and reflections experienced per period. These musings slowly took shape over the course of the year and became winterspring/summerfall.
mood: day thinking
label: hermine
genre: rock, pop, folk, world & country
style: indie pop
listen on tidal | apple music
Produced by Ichiko Aoba & Taro Umebayashi
All Lyrics by Ichiko Aoba (except M2, a traditional folk song of Hateruma Island)
Composed by Ichiko Aoba (M3, M4, M5, M6, M7, M10)
Taro Umebayashi (M1, M4, M7, M8, M9, M11)
Orchestration by Taro Umebayashi
Additional vocal arrangement by Ichiko Aoba (M1, M9)
Ichiko Aoba performs
All Vocals, Classical Guitar, Steiner Chime, Shell, Field Recordings, Electric Piano
Taro Umebayashi performs
Acoustic Piano, Celesta, Synthesizer, Electric Guitar
Strings performed by phonolite strings (M1, M2, M4, M8)
1st Violin: Yuko Kajitani
2nd Violin: Asano Mekaru
Viola: Anzu Suhara
Cello: Orie Hirayama
Contrabass: Hiroaki Mizutani
Flute: Jun-ichiro Taku (M1, M8)
Harp: Tomoyuki Asakawa (M1, M2, M8)
Percussion: Manami Kakudo (M1, M7, M8)
Recorded & Mixed by Toshihiko Kasai at Place Kaki, VICTOR STUDIO, Aobadai studio, Ichiko’s house
With additional editing by Takuma Kase
Assistant Engineers: Arou Yamauchi & Ryota Koshimitsu (VICTOR STUDIO), Minori Ishikawa (Aobadai studio)
Mastered by Seigen Ono at SDLab (div. Saidera Mastering & Recording)
mood: day thinking
label: other people
genre: electronic, rock, folk, world & country
style: experimental, noise, drone, abstract
listen on tidal | apple music
Following a string of acclaimed collaborations, including Agua Dulce with percussionist Laura Robles and Mapambazuko alongside Congolese guitarist Titi Bakorta, Peruvian artist Alejandra Cárdenas (aka Ale Hop) returns with her most personal work to date yet, A Body Like a Home. Marking her first album under her birth name, the project is a sonic memoir exploring the tangled realms of trauma, recovery, and love through autobiographical soundscapes.
A Body Like a Home is the artist at her most exposed. Comprising 13 songs and 15 poems, the album sees her set aside collaborative fusions for solo catharsis, channeling years of turbulence - intergenerational scars left by colonialism, racism, domestic violence, and alcoholism - into a work that oscillates between brutality and tenderness. Cárdenas states:
“I grew up under Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship, when a veil of hopelessness seemed to settle over everything. This is the backdrop of the album. The songs and poems trace the inevitable loop between private wounds - addiction, domestic violence, fractured intimacy - and Peru’s national scars, carved by colonialism. It’s not a straight story or a resolution. Writing and composing became a ritual of digging for meaning, into what’s buried, disguised, or renamed, until the body itself became a living archive.”
At the heart of the album is Cárdenas’s own voice - part witness, part confessor - reciting over layers of electric guitars, electronic textures, the haunting violin of Mexican musician Gibrana Cervantes, and a collage of field recordings, from rainfall, muffled whispers, broken glass, to archival protest footage from Peru. The result is a work that resonates like a diary written in sound.
mood: day thinking
label: jagjaguwar
genre: rock
style: indie rock
listen on tidal | apple music
From the off, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory is sonically different from Van Etten’s previous work. Writing and recording in total collaboration with her band for the first time, Van Etten finds the freedom that comes by letting go – letting go of her normal modus operandi or the need for control or attachment to the outcome. No safety net. It’s somewhat terrifying, but also liberating. The result of that liberation is an exhilarating new dimension of sound and songwriting. The themes are timeless, classic Sharon – life and living, love and being loved – but the sounds are new, wholly realized and sharp as glass.
mood: day thinking
label: poison city records
genre: folk, world & country
style: folk
listen on tidal | apple music
Palm Springs is the outsider folk identity of Erica Dunn and an evolving cast of essential collaborators. Born out of a compulsion to write sparse, intimate verse and named for her nervous affliction -sweaty hands - Palm Springs has been a cornerstone of Dunn’s songwriting that sits in a seperate interior back room from her other creative outputs (Tropical Fuck Storm, MOD CON, Fiancée, Harmony et al.)
'Turning Yr Back On The Dolphin' pulls together a tangle of threads that represent seven years of reflection and rumination; an Alice-through-the-looking-glass journey which catalogues existential crisis under the arch of Hadrian (Infinity 69), nihilism vs. wonderment (No Contest), the torture and reward of unshackling from a toxic relationship (Your Ashes, My Tree) and the weight of wading through the waters of modernity as we know it (Lay Your Eric Burden Down). The titular track sees Dunn enlist the piano for the first time to document an aching and introspective stream of consciousness poem which dances along the knife edge crux of this record- the beauty and the pain of existence.
mood: day thinking
label: psychic hotline.
genre: electronic, folk, world & country
style: ambient, acoustic, experimental
listen on tidal | apple music
No other solo American guitarist this century has impacted that fecund scene quite like William Tyler. After crucial stints in Silver Jews and Lambchop, this adopted son of Nashville emerged at the dawn of the last decade with a string of inquisitive albums that paired the measure of his country rearing and classical enthusiasm with his ardor for post-modern experimentation, field recordings and static drifts folded beneath exquisite melodies. Tyler dug Chet Atkins and Gavin Bryars, electroacoustic abstraction and endless boogie. His productive little enclave of instrumental music has increasingly followed such catholic tastes, not only ushering new sounds and textures into the form but also critical new voices and perspectives.
And on the brilliant, bracing, and inexorably beautiful Time Indefinite, Tyler’s first solo album in five years, he steps at last into the widening gyre he helped create. The guitar serves as a starting point for an album that will make you reconsider not only Tyler but also the possibilities and reach of an entire field. A vortex of noise and harmony, ghosts and dreams, anguish and hope, Time Indefinite is not a great guitar record. It is a stunning record—a masterpiece of our collectively anxious time, really—by a great guitarist.
mood: day thinking
label: third man records
genre: funk/soul, pop. folk, world & country
style: soul, folk
listen on tidal | apple music
The much-anticipated follow-up to LA-based singer-songwriter Natalie Bergman’s critically acclaimed 2021 solo debut album ‘Mercy’. If you re-envisioned and rebuilt Motown somewhere in the California desert, it might sound something like 'My Home Is Not In This World'. Recorded analog-to-tape and produced by her brother and longtime collaborator Elliot Bergman, the 12-track record shimmers with gospel soul, country-western heartache, and rock 'n' roll grit, all filtered through Natalie’s unmistakable voice.
Where her critically acclaimed 2021 debut solo album Mercy was steeped in grief and spiritual reckoning, written in the wake of the sudden loss of her father and stepmother, My Home Is Not In This World emerges from new life and rebirth. Natalie gave birth to her son, Arthur, in 2024, and the experience of motherhood has transformed her music into something equally tender and transcendent.
mood: day thinking
label: balmat
genre: electronic, rock
style: ambient, experimental
listen on tidal | apple music
When you’re running a label, a demo occasionally comes across your desk that makes you reconsider everything you thought your label was all about. For Balmat, such was the case with this stunning album from Stephen Vitiello, Brendan Canty, and Hahn Rowe. It sounds like nothing we’ve released so far—and that very otherness opened up a whole new world of possibilities for us.
Fans of ambient, experimental electronic music, and sound art will be familiar with Vitiello, a New York native, long based in Virginia, who has collaborated with a cross-generational list of greats: Taylor Deupree, Steve Roden, Lawrence English, Tetsu Inoue, Nam June Paik, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Pauline Oliveros, and many more. On labels like 12k, Room40, and Sub Rosa, he has explored a wide range of minimalism, microsound, lowercase, ambient, improv, and other styles. But this album is something different. It may begin in ambient-adjacent territory, but it quickly veers off, and it just keeps zigzagging, taking on elements of krautrock, post-punk, dub, and the groove-heavy interplay of groups like Natural Information Society and 75 Dollar Bill.
mood: day thinking
label: jagjaguwar
genre: rock, pop, folk, world & country
style: folk, alternative, rock, pop rock
listen on tidal | apple music
Bon Iver’s three-song collection SABLE, was an act of vulnerability and unburdening. Written and recorded at a breaking point, they were songs of reflection, fear, depression, solitude, and atonement. The word “sable” implies darkness, and in that triptych, Justin Vernon sought to unpack some long-compounded pain. Then, at the tail end of its final track “AWARDS SEASON,” there’s the barest thread of a lighter melody—a drone, a glimmer, an ember, hope for something more. SABLE, was the prologue, a controlled burn clearing the way for new possibilities. fABLE is the book. Stories of introduction and celebration. The fresh growth that blankets the charred ground. Where SABLE, was a work of solitude, fABLE is an outstretched hand.
Compared to the sparse minimalism of its three-song table setter, fABLE is all lush vibrance. Radiant, ornate pop music gleams around Vernon’s voice as he focuses on a new and beautiful era. On every song, his eyes are locked with one specific person. It’s love, which means there’s an intense clarity, focus, and honesty within fABLE. It’s a portrait of a man flooded and overwhelmed by that first meeting (“Everything Is Peaceful Love”). There’s a tableau defined by sex and irrepressible desire (“Walk Home”). This is someone filled with light and purpose seeing an entire future right in front of him: a partner, new memories, maybe a family.
mood: day thinking
label: drag city
genre: electronic, jazz, non-music, world 7 country
style: abstract, experimental
listen on tidal | apple music
Ambarchi, Berthling and Werliin are back, a little looser and wilder than before. Their ability to lock in and focus on the smallest of details is enhanced here by a sense of increased immediacy. Great news for fans of stimulating variations of tone and mood within a potentially infinite universe of rhythm and sound! The more you listen to Ghosted III, the better your hearing becomes. Or maybe it’s just that you hear more every time you play it.
mood: day thinking
label: unsound
genre: electronic
style: ambient
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There’s no direct English translation for the word “hiraeth”. In the Welsh language, it describes a form of longing for an intangible something, somewhere or someone that no longer exists. Sofie Birch and Antonina Nowacka draw on the concept to guide their second collaborative album, a suite of vulnerable, open-hearted improvisations and reflections that attempt to grasp an image of the past that’s chimeric, dissolving almost as soon as it materializes. The duo’s process follows the same distant beacon; unlike Languoria, their critically acclaimed debut, Hiraeth is, at heart, an acoustic record, informed by in-person improvisations with voices and string instruments that gesture to an era before computers, AI and DAWs. It’s just as lush, but Hiraeth is warmer and more muted than its predecessor.
Nowacka and Birch conceived the album in the wake of a slew of collaborative live concerts, spurred on by serendipitous improvisations and an interest in paring down their setup. Unsound arranged a retreat in Sokołowsko, an idyllic village nestled in the verdant hills of Southern Poland, close to the Czech border. Sokołowsko surrounds a large ruined sanatorium that’s rumored to have inspired Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, and has long been a magnet for artists. The two took the opportunity to rethink their approach completely, arriving with just a guitar, a zither and a portable Nagra reel-to-reel machine. Recording directly to tape, they sketched out ideas with just their voices and instruments, reflecting their surroundings without being distracted or mediated by modern technology.
mood: day thinking
label: brainfeeder
genre: jazz, funk/soul, pop
style: experimental
listen on tidal | apple music
Lindsay Olsen aka Salami Rose Joe Louis is a genre traveller multi-instrumentalist female producer and a signee to Flying Lotus's Brainfeeder label. She returns with her most personal album to date on April 25th, 2025.
Delightfully raw and heartfelt, ‘Lorings’ is a collection of songs that find SRJL displaying her vulnerability through a playful and sonically explorative lens. “I was hoping to bypass the distillation process of overthinking outside perception,” she says. “Each song feels like a significant section of my personality has been carved out and put on a platter for public consumption, which is a devastating thought [haha].”
mood: day thinking
label: 4AD
genre: rock
style: folk, rock
listen on tidal | apple music
Big Thief announce their sixth studio album, Double Infinity, out September 5th via 4AD, and share lead single and album opener, “Incomprehensible.” Double Infinity is the follow-up to 2022’s Grammy-nominated album, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, and was recorded last winter at the Power Station, New York City. For three solid weeks, the trio would ride bicycles on frozen streets between Brooklyn and Manhattan, meeting in Power Station’s warm wood-panelled room.
Together with a community of musicians (Alena Spanger, Caleb Michel, Hannah Cohen, Jon Nellen, Joshua Crumbly, June McDoom, Laraaji, Mikel Patrick Avery, Mikey Buishas), they would play for nine hours a day, tracking together - simultaneously - improvising arrangements and making collective discoveries. The album was recorded live with minimal overdubs. Double Infinity was produced, engineered and mixed by longtime Big Thief collaborator Dom Monks.
mood: day thinking
label: modern love
genre: electronic
style: ambient, experimental
listen on tidal | apple music
All tracks written, arranged, performed, mixed & produced by Rat Heart
with appearances from:
Adam Sinclaire - Flute
Cansu Kandemir - Vocals
Juan Camilo - Vocals
Ruby Conner - Vocals
Mastered By Rashad Becker
Released on Modern Love 2025
Distributed by Boomkat
music for your mood — www.stackrecords.co.nz. If any titles go out of stock, flick us a message and we’ll see if we can hunt down more copies.
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