2nd record of 2026 - ‘Secret Love’ by Dry Cleaning. More excellent artwork on display and an expanded, more direct sound for Florence Shaw’s surreal poetry. Some Fall vibes in there too. Out now on @4ad
First record purchase of 2026 (I did well it’s the 10th!) - Weapons OST by Ryan Holladay, Hays Holladay, & Zach Creggar. The music is brilliantly spooky and unnerving as it should be - and the album design is fantastic. Lenticular cover, gatefold sleeve and cheeky insert. Top marks all round @waxworkrecords #vinylrecords #horrorfilms #soundtracks #weapons
‘Beaming Backwards’ by ddwy
I cannot lie. There were more important albums released this year, more experimental, more topical, more profound; but ‘Beaming Backwards’ by ddwy has been on near constant repeat since it came out on Test Pressing Recordings back in July.
Even the reason for this is uncomplicated; the four tracks by Ronan MT, aka Inner Totality, and Naomi Pieris, aka nangi, the duo behind the project - ddwy (pronounced d-why) is the Welsh word for “two” - are small slices of unadulterated joy. With trancey beats, ethereal vocals, and Balearic vibes, this perfectly formed EP is hazy, trippy, pop perfection. Good for dancing, good for chilling, good for navel-gazing, good for happiness; and that is not as easy to make as it sounds. I’m beaming every time I listen to it.
‘Beaming Backwards’ by ddwy is Number One on the More Than Human best of 2025 countdown.
Thanks for listening - see you back here in 2026.
#Bestof2025
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#ddwy
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#TestPressingRecordings
‘Bite Down’ - Ribbon Skirt
Ribbon Skirt (Tashiina Buswa & Billy Rileyand and co-produced by MTH friend Marlaena Moore) have released an astonishing debut album that is complex and mysterious yet direct and emotionally satisfying. The lyrics (‘They want 2000’s Buffy Marie/They want my status but they’re getting my teeth’), turning on themes of colonialism, identity and loss, are both sarcastically pithy and despairingly angry, filtered through a seemingly raw and immediate production that belies the skill involved to make it sound so inexorable; snippets of conversations and other sounds bleed through in places suggesting the songs are slightly porous. Buswa’s voice manages to sound both ironic and deadpan yet painfully exposed, as if accessing her truth has cost her dear. It’s all these messy contradictions that give the album such vitality and power. I’ve been proselytizing hard for this primal scream of a record since its release because it pretty close to perfect.
(Plus it has the best sleeve art of 2025 too)
Ribbon Skirt’s ‘Bite Down’ is is Number Two on the More Than Human best of 2025 countdown.
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#ribbonskirt
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#mintrecords
‘The Overview’ - Steven Wilson (Fiction)
It was a bold move in 2025 to make a progressive rock concept album contrasting our cosmically trivial lives and the mind-melting enormity of the universe in which we live but the resulting epic by Steven Wilson is completely convincing. Aided by spot-on lyrics by XTC’s Andy Partridge and a constantly changing sweep of Floydian guitars & 90’s IDM keyboards, it’s an unexpectedly melodic and soothing voyage rather than one of avant-garde despair; and after multiple listens over the past year it still gives me chills when the spectral voice says ‘Virgo Super Cluster. Eridanus Supervoid. Super Cluster Complex.’ A comfort blanket for the overwhelming.
Steve Wilson’s ‘The Overview’ is Number Three on the More Than Human best of 2025 countdown
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#stevenwilson
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‘The New Eve Is Rising’ - The New Eves
You may not know this but I’m quite partial to the Fall, folk-horror, the occult, the pagan, and outsider art. So it should come as no surprise that the debut album from The New Eves was never far from my turntable or headphones since its release on Transgressive Records back in August of this year. It soundtracked summer psilocybin and winter walks, always invigorating and sounding gloriously elemental in all its burn-it-all-down directness. The four-piece from Brighton have antecedents of course - I can hear the aforementioned Fall, Stooges, Pentangle, Incredible String Band, bits of folk and new-age mysticism (not a pejorative in my book) but the music seems to banish these comparisons because it sounds new-born, forming for the first time every time it’s played. Can’t wait for what’s next.
(…and the back cover is like a weird re-staging of the famous photograph taken during the Enfield haunting)
‘The New Eve Is Rising’ - The New Eves is Number Four on the More Than Human best of 2025 countdown
(‘when the Eve-bitten apple returns to destroy the tree’)
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#theneweves
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