As the year draws to a close, different end of year lists have started to trickle in, and it’s unsurprising to see so many Rewire 2025 artists included amongst the year’s best releases. From the harmonious brilliance of Nala Sinephro and the emotive guitar tones of Moin to the bristling atmospherics of Arooj Aftab and the DIY experiments of Able Noise, 2024 was a wonderful year for boundary-pushing music.
Enjoy this recap of great albums from artists coming to Rewire 2025 selected by various great publications and platforms including The Quietus, Crack Magazine, Resident Advisor, and The Wire. Of course many previous Rewire performers also received high accolades this album-of-the-year season, but for today let's focus on 2025's artists.
The slow-paced High Tide (2024) by guitar and drum duo Able Noise is part of The Wire and The Quietus’s selection of albums of the year. The latter highlights how its “multi-track layering and diverse processing techniques create an exploration that is both intuitive and meticulously crafted.”
Touted as “one of the best things both acts involved in its making have filed away in their already impressive respective discographies,” the hallucinatory basslines and bubbling dub of The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now (2024) by Holy Tongue Meets Shackleton were given the nod on The Quietus’s end of year list.
The crepuscular tones of Arooj Aftab’s Night Reign (2024) left a mark on Crack Magazine, The Quietus, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone, making its way onto all of their end of year lists. The album weaves sonic intimacies and “refreshes her usual palette to produce an experimental and often startling collection of moody and mercurial soundscapes,” as Crack Magazine states.
Watch Arooj Aftab’s Aey Nehin videoclip
Watch "Arooj Aftab - Aey Nehin (Visualizer)" by "AroojAftabVEVO" on https://www.youtube.com/
Moin’s latest release You Never End (2024) was lauded by The Quietus and The Wire. The Quietus gave them the third position out of their 100 best albums of the last 12 months, observing that “from immensely satisfying Fugazi-like guitar licks, to powerhouse drumming that makes even the most abstract sections groove, You Never End is a liberating listen, and perhaps the most modern guitar album of the year.”
Sinephro’s spiritual jazz pearl Endlessness (2024) has received special mentions from Crack Magazine, Resident Advisor, Bandcamp, Pitchfork, NPR, and Vulture. On Bandcamp’s 2024 essential release picks, Endlessness is said to have “plotted the trajectories of jazz and ambient music and aimed for where they would intersect.”
De Schuurman’s Bubbling Forever (2024) continues the journey of bubbling, a genre which started in Dutch afro-diasporic clubs in the late 1980s and consists of accelerated dancehall variations. This treasure was noticed by Crack Magazine and Resident Advisor, who mentions how it “builds on the genre's Afro-diasporic legacy with a clutch of tracks designed to whip up hysteria.”
Watch De Schuurman's Boiler Room in Den Haag: Bubbling Forever
The monumental solo album The Love It Took To Leave You (2024), an emotive and intimate work by saxophonist Colin Stetson, landed in Crack Magazine’s end of the year list.
In this latest work he “towers mountains of sound through an arsenal of extended techniques that overwhelm through sheer scale,” Crack Magazine notes.
Kali Malone’s All Life Long (2024) – which she performs live at Rewire 2025 alongside vocal ensemble Macadam, a brass ensemble, and SUNN O)))’s Stephen O'Malley – made it onto Pitchfork and The Wire's lists of records of the year.
Crack Magazine and The Wire included among their top 50 albums Clarissa Connelly’s latest release. The ethereal World of Work (2024) is a “wintry prog-pop opus that pulls at the tension between her awe at life’s beauty and existential fear,” as Crack Magazine writes.
Watch Clarissa Connelly’s An Embroidery video
Topping The Quietus's list this year was Ex-Easter Island Head's Norther (2024). "Across the record, they show how single and simple patterns repeated ad infinitum offer the potential for highly developed suites," they write. "One idea is soaped up into infinite layers creating sonic forms; poignant pieces brilliantly played by eight hands."
Appearing on Pitchfork and Philip Sherburne's Futurism Reinstated end of year lists is Milan W.'s immaculate Leave Another Day (2024). Jeremy D. Larson writes: "Behind the rhythmic picks and strums, everything else is smeared in long streaks—saxophones, synths, solos, a black melancholy that so cellularly real you’ll wonder if our moods are indeed governed by the bodily humors. Such is this power of Milan W.’s spell and this occultish record that taps into an olde magick that looms as the fog rolls in."
As the year draws to a close and the final notes fade, immerse yourself in the melodies and rhythms that have defined these past months. Each and every one of the artists shared above venture into uncharted sonic realms with an unwavering pursuit of new musical horizons. Catch them all at Rewire 2025.