20 Essential Ambient Albums 2025
- Stack Records
- 7 days ago
- 10 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
This year’s essential ambient albums 2025 selections span a wide range of approaches, from subtle textures and slow-moving compositions to more expansive electronic explorations. The playlist presents a curated snapshot of these releases, though some albums are not currently available on TIDAL. Together, they represent a broad cross-section of contemporary ambient music, suitable for both focused listening and open-ended exploration.
mood: tuning in
label: kitchen. label
genre: electronic
style: ambient
listen on tidal | apple music
Where Meitei’s earlier works conveyed his personal impression of a fading Japan, Sen’nyū is grounded in tactile presence, music not imagined but encountered. Here, his practice moves closer to the spirit of kankyō ongaku, environmental music born from place, shaped by it, and inseparable from it.
mood: tuning in
label: akp recordings
genre: electronic
style: ambient, experimental, new age
listen on tidal | apple music
",,, as long as i long to memorise your sky ,,," is an audio journal comprised of the sounds & sentiments captured on that fortyfourth night inside of the canyon; an echo of the softness etched upon those muav stones; an aide-memoire on the long-lost creation story between the river, the desert floor, & all the elements in between that remain intertwined for as long as they decide, forming what we call the grand canyon.
mood: tuning in
label: smalltown supersound
genre: electronic
style: ambient, modern classical
listen on tidal | apple music
In May, composer, musician, and producer Kara-Lis Coverdale released her first new album in eight years, From Where You Came. It was followed by her second album of 2025, A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever, in September. Today, Coverdale details her third full-length release of the year, Changes In Air, out 21 November via Smalltown Supersound, and unveils its lead single ‘Curve Traces of Held Space’.
Changes In Air is a work for electric organ, modular synthesis, and piano in five sections. The album was adapted from a work originally written for installation at Skarven in Oslo, a floating sauna facing the expansive fjord which is heated by wood fire and solar radiation. Five “materials” influence the album's arrangements: wood, water, sun, glass, and metal. Coverdale composed, played, and recorded Changes In Air alone in Marquette (Montreal) in 2019 and completed it this year.
mood: tuning in
label: mystery circles
genre: electronic
style: ambient
listen on tidal | apple music
'Mita Koyama-cho' offers a fresh perspective on today’s ambient music scene, blending acoustic and electronic elements into a rich, evocative soundscape. Murakami, a multi-instrumentalist, weaves together acoustic and jazz guitar, saxophone, fretless bass, and an array of keyboards—including vintage synthesizers, Mellotron, and acoustic piano. The result is a fusion of jazz, new age, folk, Brazilian music, and even 1970s progressive rock.
With an intuitive sense of melody and arrangement, Murakami layers warm cassette textures, vintage amp tones, and intricate string and saxophone orchestrations. 'Mita Koyama-cho' is a deeply personal tribute to the musician’s family and the Tokyo neighborhood they once called home—demolished in 2024 due to corporate redevelopment.
mood: tuning in
label: northern spy records
genre: electronic
style: ambient
listen on tidal | apple music
Jamie Lidell and Luke Schneider have created a kind of sonic tool to navigate a liminal state of mind. Their new collaborative LP, A Companion For The Spaces Between Dreams, is out this fall on Brooklyn experimental imprint Northern Spy Records, designed as a reverent companion for psychedelic journeys born from Lidell’s own ketamine therapy sessions, which deepened his belief in art’s healing power.
“A mind is often found more exposed during psychedelic experiences,” Lidell explains. “Specifically in a therapeutic setting, where trust is key to approach issues and work through events in the way of growth. This is music to support and guide the listening with or without psychedelic sensory heightening.”
mood: winding down
label: blue note records
genre: electronic, jazz
style: avant-garde jazz, ambient
listen on tidal | apple music
Openness Trio is a title that could easily be the name of this group – “openness” is the ideal word and description for what is happening here. Listening, Immersive Emoting, Deep Communication, Discovery, Trust, Exploration, and arriving to the moment to witness and share where we are, where we are going, and where we’ve been – these are all things that allow our music to happen in the way that it does.
mood: tuning in
label: métron records
genre: electronic, classical
style: ambient, new age, modern classical
listen on tidal | apple music
Japanese artists Yumiko Morioka and Takashi Kokubo unite for Gaiaphilia, a journey through ambient soundscapes that seamlessly blends Morioka’s graceful piano compositions with Kokubo’s immersive field recordings and atmospheric synthesisers.
This collaboration brings together two of Japan’s most influential pioneers in ambient and new age music, each with decades of groundbreaking work. Morioka, celebrated for her 1987 album Resonance—reissued to critical acclaim by Métron Records—infuses her introspective playing with Kokubo’s vivid environmental textures, creating a dialogue between nature and melody.
mood: tuning in
label: stroom label
genre: electronic, jazz
style: ambient, new age
listen on tidal | apple music
A New Life is not an album. It does not belong to a ‘genre.’ Not aesthetic, not ironic, not for consumption. Not intellectual—it is felt. It speaks from coherence—structure beneath the noise. Grief, anger, stillness are not flaws here—they belong. Featuring harp and saxophone by Róisín and Cathal Berkeley. A return to truth. To be human without the mask. Integrated, not performed or bypassed.
mood: tuning in
label: mystery circles
genre: electronic
style: ambient
listen on tidal | apple music
Hiroshi Ebina's third solo album with Mystery Circles is dedicated to his grandparents, with whom Ebina had lived in the same house since he was a child. His grandmother passed away in 2021 and his grandfather in 2023. Ebina’s grandparents were a very ordinary family with nothing special to say. Nevertheless, they were invaluable to the artist, and the impact they both had on his life is significant. The title of the album refers to the fact that both grandparents passed away in the fall after a gap of two years. The album cover image was taken by Ebina himself on a vintage Contax film camera. The two structures on the horizon fading in the distance allude to his grandparents in the beyond.
mood: tuning in
label: holuzam
genre: electronic
style: ambient
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funcionário delights in the freedom of creating freeform music for the first time in his career. On “horizonte”, he loosens the reins, his sound follows a wavy, organic structure rather than a rigid, formal one. If it feels freer and more colourful, that’s because it truly is.
mood: tuning in
label: isc hi-fi selects
genre: electronic, classical
style: ambient, modern
listen on tidal | apple music
Joel Shearer’s 'Listening' Immerses Itself in Ambient Guitar, Restraint, and the Beauty of Repetition.
With guitarist and ambient composer Joel Shearer’s new album, Listening, he took the path of repetition, subtle movement, and pure sound rather than conventional songwriting. What began as a disciplined experiment — limiting himself to just electric guitar — soon expanded. At various points, he introduced piano, cello, and trumpet, allowing the record to evolve organically. “I didn’t know I was making another record,” Shearer says. “I was experimenting, wanting to do something beyond just the electric guitar. So, I started these other tracks, and that’s how Listening came about.”
Unlike albums built around hooks or dramatic shifts, Listening unfolds gradually, moving with patience and restraint. There are no choruses, no obvious climaxes — just sound evolving over time. “Instead of a traditional song structure with a verse, chorus, or B section, it’s one continuous movement that grows and dissolves,” Shearer explains. “It’s not about anticipating the next moment—it’s about sitting inside the sound, getting comfortable with patience.”
mood: tuning in
label: balmat records
genre: electronic
style: ambient, new age
listen on tidal | apple music
Hrafnamynd—Icelandic for “raven film”—is a new feature-length documentary by experimental filmmaker Edward Pack Davee. Shot on a mix of film and digital formats, and incorporating his father’s Ektachrome slides from the 1970s, the autobiographical film works on multiple levels at once: a reminiscence of his childhood in Iceland, an exploration of landscape and folklore, and a documentary study of the island nation’s ravens—including a talking raven named Krummi.
mood: tuning in
label: 28912 records
genre: electronic
style: ambient
listen on tidal | apple music
Hometown Girl is a 2025 ambient/electronic album by U.e. (Ulla E. Straus), released on the label 28912. The record blends intimate acoustic textures—guitars, woodwinds, piano, and subtle percussion—with ambient electronic touches, creating a quietly detailed sound world that feels both tactile and introspective. Combining warm, room-like recordings with delicate sonic exploration, Hometown Girl invites listeners into a nuanced listening experience that balances organic instrumentation and subtle electronic design.
mood: tuning in
label: silentes
genre: electronic, classical
style: ambient, drone, modern classical
"Implodendo in una accecante oscurità" - also included in the “a sad song for A.” 4CD Boxset - is released on two LPs, available separately or bundled together, both offered in black and clear vinyl. The first LP is augmented with two exclusive extra tracks.
mood: tuning in
label: moon glyph
genre: electronic
style: ambient, experimental
listen on tidal | apple music
Mythology has a recurring theme: creating ambiguity by rearranging worlds and creatures that normally don’t belong together. Centaurs, Minotaurs, Hydras and so on: mockery and mystery intertwine into entities that are in equal parts magnificent and ridiculous. Referencing this idea in the present, Loris S. Sarid conjures 12 compositions simultaneously showing traits of dreamlike trap, candy-flavoured New Age and Spoken Word. The lines between spiritual and mundane, drama and parody are bent and questioned, used as raw material and treated with the same importance. Binding the work together is the sense of feeling peacefully lost inside a shuffling iPod, buried in a quiet zen garden inside a noisy shopping mall or vice versa. What connects Ambient music, which often anonymously swims into endless sleeping playlists with monthly subscriptions to well-being, to the mainstream output of commercial music? "Ambient $" doesn’t explore the social aspect of this question, but rather celebrates the beauty of its paradoxes. This album is the morning choir of forgotten NFTs, brewing lyrics in their binary exile. The television homily of a wrestler turned priest, turned influencer chef, then hermit and then rapper. Randomness is reclaimed as a human quality, and the aesthetics of mass music consumption are repurposed into a rather inexpensive guide to streaming-service-enlightenment.
mood: tuning in
label: mystery circles
genre: electronic
style: ambient, soundtrack
listen on tidal | apple music
A cozy collection of botanical background sounds from Lullatone – an arrangement of atmospheric ambience that blossoms into a bouquet of meditative melodies.
What is the obsession with electronic musicians and houseplants? Is it because they are a captive crowd to watch composers create? Because photosynthesis kind of sounds like synthesizer? Because roots and vines like cables on a modular synth rig? Or is it just because ever since Erik Satie coined the term “Furniture Music” every person with a penchant for soundtracking can’t help but look for things in their immediate surroundings to turn into a muse?
From seedlings to sprouts, these melodies mature more like the life cycle of flowers than typical long-lasting houseplants. Living in Japan, Lullatone quickly learned that half of what makes a flower beautiful is knowing it won’t be around for long. Every spring, phrases about fleeting beauty flood conversations as cherry blossoms saturate the sky. Even the flitting run time of some of the songs evokes the haiku-ish poetry of plucked petals falling away too soon.
mood: tuning in
label: tonal union
genre: electronic, folk
style: ambient, experimental
listen on tidal | apple music
Through the interaction of dulcet textures and harmonious melodies, infused with Greek bouzouki string plucks, sporadic piano and violin, enigmatic musician Gabriel Brady laments the everyday with daring simplicity on his lustrous alt-ambient debut for the Tonal Union imprint. Across its seven vignettes, 'Day-blind' is life animated as Brady makes possible an everyday encounter with the transcendent.
mood: tuning in
label: laaps label
genre: electronic
style: ambient, minimal
listen on tidal | apple music
"This album is a delicate, meditative collection recorded between March and November 2024 in Aiko's former studio, a secluded spot near the River Isonzo, between Gorizia and Nova Gorica in Slovenia. The Grass Harp was made specifically for LAAPS, who asked Aiko to create a new complete piece of sounds. As always, it was largely recorded using dense layers of manipulated loops that weave in and out of the recordings, shaping them in a singular way through effects pedals, tape decks, and tape loops. The Grass Harp is a meditation on decay and silence, blending warm soundscapes with soft, playful melodies. That’s Aiko’s signature sound."
mood: tuning in
label: tonal union
genre: electronic, jazz
style: ambient, experimental
listen on tidal | apple music
On the spot piano improvs, experimental jazz and ambient coalesce on lo-fi, self-liberating debut. “Après coup, to me, signifies that moment of conscience in the aftermath, fundamentally an experience of time, the relationship between the before and after.” – Laurie Torres
Centering around piano, drums and synthesizer with interweaving field recordings, 'Après coup’ is a sprawling 11-track album. Translating directly from French - afterwards, after the event - its title subliminally points at something deeper between the lines. Recorded in 2023 between tours in a small window of time where ‘normal’ life hadn't quite recommenced, Torres meticulously crafted her debut solo material in view of surrounding nature, all providing the perfect nourishment for long streams of improvisation. Built right up to the edge of a lake, Studio Wild in St-Zénon, Québec offered an unparalleled location and set up for her freeform creativity.
mood: tuning in
label: glossy mistakes
genre: electronic
style: ambient, new age, abstract
Andalusian emerging-talent producer GAZZI, a young yet influential figure within the broader Spanish electronic scene, presents an LP that feels like a quiet turning point in his career. Rooted in ambient and new-age minimalism, the record drifts through piano-based textures, soft pauses, and spacious moments that invite deep introspection.
Across its delicate arrangements, GAZZI captures the sensation of slowing down in a world where everything feels fleeting. These tracks hold space for reflection-offering nostalgia, stillness, and the subtle suggestion that hope remains at the edges of even the most ephemeral moments. Each piece unfolds like a landscape suspended in time, shaped by restraint, emotional nuance, and a profound sense of presence.
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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