Ishmael’s Top 5 Albums of 2025!
I am a simple man. I like lots of notes played in lots of time signatures. Put a high-pitched dude warbling on top of that (or a woman screaming, or a saxophone wailing) and we’re well on the way to a record that will find its way into my personal library, at least in part.1 To get the entire album into my library, it must have breadth of instrumentation and a compositional throughline: give me melodies repeated across tracks, but played on different instruments for different texture; give me complex rhythms repeated enough times that I’m tapping on my knee in 13/8 by the end of the song; give me fast tempos; give me hooks, or give me death.
So when it came time to write this post outlining my favourite albums of 2025, there was a high bar. I joined The Progressive Subway in January and I’ve listened to more new music this year than probably any year of my adult life, but there are only a few albums from 2025 that I’ve returned to again and again, and that I’ve recommended to friends outside The Subway. As such, my list is a bit shorter than others here, but I wholeheartedly stand behind these picks. I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I do.
Before we get to the main attraction, though, here are a few albums which very nearly made the cut. I found all of these to be relatively compelling, but they missed the mark just slightly in one or more areas.
Point Mort – Le Point de Non-Retour: Point Mort describe themselves as “Popcore / Postcore”, which are two of my favourite -cores. Le Point alternates between intense, harsh hardcore sections and slow, clean, emotional ones. There’s a bit more blackgaze influence here than I prefer, though, and the tracks tend to linger on ideas a bit longer than my internet-addled brain has patience for. I’ll keep listening to this one going forward, but I’ll have to be in the right headspace to absorb it.
Steven Wilson – The Overview: Jethro Tull‘s Thick as a Brick is one of my favourite classic prog rock albums, and “Objects Outlive Us”, the twenty-three-minute A-side of The Overview feels like listening to that album for the first time again. I’m a sucker for a suite (looking at you “Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres” and “The Willing Well”), and “Objects Outlive Us” is a Pink Floyd-esque holistic compositional masterpiece, with just the right amount of mass and energy, separated by just the right amount of space. The Overview is let down by its B-side, though—I don’t need to listen to an expressionless voice reading off astronomical bodies for minutes on end, like an audiobook of a Wikipedia article. I will listen to “Objects Outlive Us” over and over, but I can’t see myself listening to this album as a whole.
Dessiderium – Keys to the Palace: When Dessiderium‘s latest album, Keys to the Palace, dropped, we had a bit of a field day here at The ‘Way; it seemed like everyone had it on repeat and was singing its praises. Nine months on, the hype seems to have died down and it’s possible to make a more level-headed assessment of this album: it’s good. Really good. But, like Point Mort, this one relies a bit too much on flat black metal-style harsh vocals for my taste, the clean vocals are a bit weak and timid at times, and the machine-gun preprogrammed drums quickly wear out their welcome. This is a beautiful, well-composed, complex album, with just a handful of flaws. I’m looking forward to what’s next from Dessiderium.
Chercán – Chercán: The Mars Volta had a huge role in forming my musical taste in my teens. So much so that whenever I hear Latin influence in prog rock, I instinctively compare it to TMV. Chercán‘s debut self-titled album almost scratches that itch for me, but all of the frantic energy of early TMV has been replaced by Tool-style twitchy rhythmic trudges. In theory, this album ticks most of my boxes. In practice, there’s some je ne sais quoi missing, which I think boils down mostly to production.
5. Cocojoey – STARS
Style: Bitpop, Cybergrind, Hyperpop, Electropop-Metal Fusion, Avant Garde (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: KNOWER, Fire-Toolz, Poppy, Sophie, Trust Fund Ozu
Modern life is a hellscape of algorithms, prejudice, disease, anxiety, and war. To question what it means to be human and how we navigate the world as individuals is one of the fundamental impetuses for the creation of art. On their latest album, STARS, Cocojoey lets us see the world through their eyes, sometimes in an almost stream-of-consciousness style, reminding us that it’s possible to see beauty in the mundane (like traffic), and that cats are warm and fuzzy and good. Like a TikTok feed being flicked up a screen, shifting from heartwarming to enraging to stupefying in an instant, STARS turns on a dime, sometimes multiple times in a single track. If you are a fan of black metal and electropop and want to shove both of them into your ear holes at the same time, STARS is the album for you. If society were to compile a sonic time capsule which captures what it’s like to live as an anxious, disabled, depressed queer person in a modern, western country (but in a fun way!) chances are it would sound just like STARS.
Recommended tracks: TRUST IN EVENTS, TIME TO GO!, COCOJOEY’S LACK OF REGRETS
Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | original review
4. Moron Police – Pachinko
Style: Progressive Rock, Neo Prog, Progressive Pop (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Mr. Bungle, The Dear Hunter, Dream Theater, Thank You Scientist
Ever since their “Who’s That Chicken?” days, Norway’s Moron Police have had a penchant for writing progressive rock that’s infectious, frenetic, and irreverent. Over time they’ve honed their songwriting abilities, matured their lyrics, and refined their production process—and the grandiose Pachinko is the well-deserved fruit of that labour. Compositionally, Pachinko is a masterpiece: individual tracks are chock full of hooks while still featuring impressive vocal and instrumental performances, melodic and lyrical themes carry through the album, and the two-part, nearly sixteen-minute title track is a flawless epic of progressive rock. If you want catchy, singable progressive rock, look no further than Pachinko.
Recommended tracks: Pachinko, Alfredo and the Afterlife, Nothing Breaks (A Port of Call)
Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | original review
3. Calva Louise – Edge of the Abyss
Style: Metalcore, Progressive Metal, Alternative Metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Poppy, Ithaca, Rolo Tomassi
Calva Louise was a late entry onto my AOTY list. Although The Sub’ covered their latest, Edge of the Abyss, back in August, it flew under my radar until I began reviewing our back catalog in preparation. And I feel like an idiot for not listening sooner. Jess Allanic is the main creative force of the band, singing while playing guitar and piano, conceiving the universe in which the band’s albums are set, and writing and directing all of the cinematic music videos which accompany most tracks on the album. While the band make clean, quick transitions between smooth tango-inspired sections and brutal metalcore ones, Allanic’s vocals seamlessly transition from Spanish to English, and from clean to harsh. Like my colleague Claire, I apparently also like having members of the opposite sex scream at me. I just wish I’d discovered Edge of the Abyss sooner so I could have spent more time enjoying that in 2025. Oh, well, here’s to 2026.
Recommended tracks: El Umbral, Impeccable, Tunnel Vision, Lo Que Vale, La Corriente
Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | original review
2. Between the Buried and Me – The Blue Nowhere
Style: Metalcore, Progressive Metal, Jazz Fusion (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Haken, Protest the Hero, Intronaut, The Dillinger Escape Plan
Between the Buried and Me are a band with an impeccable track record: Colors, The Parallax II: Future Sequence, and Coma Ecliptic are all masterpieces in their own right. So the big question with The Blue Nowhere wasn’t “will it be good?”—we all knew it would be—it was “will it be great?” Although lacking the explicit narrative throughline of albums like Future Sequence, The Blue Nowhere shows that BTBAM somehow still have stylistic ground to cover. “Things We Tell Ourselves in the Dark” leans much more into jazz fusion than any past work by the band; “God Terror” skews industrial; and “The Blue Nowhere” and “Beautifully Human” end us in an alternative metal context. As a band evolves and grows, striking a balance between delivering more of the kind of material that your existing fans know and love—while at the same time exploring new ideas—can be hard, but pushing yourself into uncomfortable territory is part of the journey every artist must experience in order to grow. Between the Buried and Me have pushed and have grown: The Blue Nowhere is another exceptional work to add to their already impressive pile of material.
Recommended tracks: Things We Tell Ourselves in the Dark, Absent Thereafter, The Blue Nowhere
Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | original review
1. Cardiacs – LSD
Style: Psychedelic Rock, Progressive Punk, Art Rock (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Captain Beefheart, Oingo Boingo, Ad Nauseam, black midi
Few groups have taken as many artistic risks as Cardiacs (namely, brothers Jim and Tim Smith) have throughout their careers. Their unorthodox works seem purposefully designed to bend or break just about every rule of western popular music: syllables have the wrong emphasis, words are split across bars and musical phrases, recurring melodies are mutated, twisted, and reshaped like a Frankenstein’s monster broken and re-articulated into a galloping spider with a neck like a giraffe. It’s music purposefully designed to make you uncomfortable.
“Some people think it’s dead funny, others hate it. It’s strange when people hate us
—they really do hate us, it brings out something odd in people.”
– Tim Smith
It’s unfortunate, but not unusual, for opening bands to get an icy reception onstage when they are poorly matched to their main acts. Cardiacs were harassed off stage so often, they ducked out early on their first-ever tour. Their album Sing to God received a 0/10 rating from Vox on its release. But critical reception underwent a sea change when Tim Smith, the band’s lead creative force, became incapacitated in the mid 2000s before passing away in 2020. The impact of the band’s previous works was reevaluated in the context of contemporary music: swathes of artists professed to be influenced by the group, and their works were posthumously re-reviewed, this time positively.
Regardless of popular opinion, which ebbs and flows like the tide, LSD deserves all of the praise it is getting, now nearly two decades after the process of creating it began. From the airy, glorious “Men in Bed” to the disorienting, punky “Downup”, to the heartfelt goodbye of “Pet Fezant”, LSD is a psychedelic masterpiece and a fitting magnum opus for Mr. Smith.
Requiescat in pace.
Recommended tracks: Men in Bed, The May, Gen, The Blue and Buff, Volob, Lovely Eyes
Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | original review
- Yes, I’m someone who saves individual songs to my personal library, rather than entire albums. ↩︎
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