2025 Cultural Highlights: Music

As the year draws to a close, rs21 members review their music highlights of 2025.

Euro-Country – CMAT by Clara H (North London branch)

One of the best reasons for living in 2025 was CMAT’s third album Euro-Country. Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson has the knack for writing funny odes to women who love being the centre of attention, the sesh, followed by self-loathing. Nominated for the Mercury Prize, she managed to encapsulate petty hatreds of middle-class TV chefs (Jamie Oliver), the existential threat of getting older as a woman and a yearning for a homeland, Ireland, ruined by greed on the album’s titular track. One of my favourite songs ‘Lord, Let That Tesla Crash’ is a haunting reflection on losing a friend and one she has heartbreakingly vowed never to play live. 

Never Enough – Turnstile by Sam O (East London branch)

Charlie XCX crowned 2024 ‘Brat Summer’. This year she called for ‘Turnstile Summer’. The Baltimore hardcore band’s 2025 release, Never Enough, arrived less as an album and more as a cultural flashpoint. Predictably, gatekeepers cried ‘pop, not hardcore’, yet that tension is the point. Turnstile have always thrived on blurred boundaries. 

The band launched the record with a free Baltimore park show, drawing thousands of working class kids into stage diving and hardcore dancing without hesitation. For many, it was their first encounter with hardcore’s communal chaos. It’s a great album, but more importantly it reignited hardcores point of unity, DIY ethics and space for those shut out elsewhere. Watch the album launch show here. 

Off the Record – Roméo Poirier by Allan S (North London branch)

Pulls the very rare trick of being both conceptual and relaxing. It’s music composed around accidentally or unintentionally recorded snippets of sound, pulled out from the beginnings and ends (the not-music parts) of other artists’ recording studio takes, integrated into fizzing little ambient sound-pieces. It’s found-sound, musically arranged to reveal the conditions of its own production, mediating a movement from the particular – itself – through to the general case – music as historically contingent type of product recorded in a certain type of system, to be played in the bath on a sunny day. 

End of the Middle – Richard Dawson by John S (East London branch)

Richard Dawson’s latest album is a beautiful work occupying the space between folk and experimental music. Dawson never draws an easy distinction between everyday and existential moments. One song covers alcoholism, going on holiday with grandchildren, watching Deal or No Deal, and thwarted dreams of further education. The result across songs is something richly textured. The characters’ voices are unmistakably working class – or at least popular – without either romanticisation or kitchen-sink dreariness. In fact, the album is heart-rending and extremely funny, full of bathos as registers shift from the grand to the absurdly quotidian.

Anthony Joseph by Neil R (North London branch)

I had not heard of Anthony Joseph until a couple of years ago when I read a review of his album The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running For Their Lives. How could I resist an album whose title comes from the writings of the great CLR James, the Trinidadian Marxist, who I heard speak back in the early seventies. The album itself was a beautifully integrated mix of poetry and contemporary jazz. A few months ago Joseph released a new record Rowing Up River To Get Our Names Back, and with it a promise of a live performance during the London Jazz Festival. I persuaded some friends to come along, though I had little sense of what to expect. 

The band were fantastic – a heady mix of jazz, soul and funk. Then there was Anthony Joseph setting the evening aflame with his tales of the Black experience of colonialism, racism and life in Britain. His poetry was delivered in a warm embracing Trinidadian-British accent, blended brilliantly with the band. The highlight for me at least was his extended performance of Calling England Home, a wonderful poem about his time in Britain: 

I’ve lived here longer than home, since 1989
Remember Harlesden in the spring time
I used to walk from Cricklewood to Marylebone High Street to cut up meat to punch out dough
I was never asked to wait tables or serve scones and coffee
I worked in the basement but I learned to tie my apron in a way that retained some dignity
And in the first summer above the corner shop I listened to rare groove on pirate radio.
I was flung so far from any notion of nation
How long do you have to live in a place before you can call it ‘Home’?

A Paean to Wilson – The Durutti Column by Tom C (East London branch)

This year has been marked by personal change and loss and I have inevitably turned to music for refuge, seeking glimpses of life beyond the rubble of a long-term relationship. In solitude, I’ve found myself drawn again to music, most of all to The Durutti Column. Their album A Paean to Wilson opens with the voice of Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records, who died in 2007. ‘Is this an art form, or are you just a technician?’, he asks a question lifted from an interview with the band’s lead member, Vini Reilly, whose guitar playing marries the virtuosic skill with overt, tender expressiveness. As the track progresses, Wilson’s question is looped and phased, evoking the maddening solipsism of grief, the torturous impossibility of any dialogue with the dead. Eventually it recedes, leaving Reilly’s crystalline guitar strokes to fill the space that remains, as if grappling with that question, and the myriad others that linger in times of loss.

Notably, Reilly’s own raspy and fragile voice is curiously absent from the album. In the liner notes, he explains, ‘My only objective was to create some music that Tony would thoroughly approve of. I think I’ve done that and, if his spirit lives on – which I like to think that it does – I want him to know that this is for him.’ Wilson signed Reilly to Factory Records in 1978, opening up the possibility of a life beyond the Manchester street gangs of his youth. Taking on a paternal role in naming the band and shaping its musical direction, Wilson was forever at odds with Reilly’s insistence on singing over his instrumentals. In deciding to speak only through the sound of his guitar this time, Reilly accedes to the call of the father – a seeming plea for approval beyond the grave.

While rooted in personal loss, the album widens its scope. On ‘Brother’, Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’, a lament for the decaying social fabric and intensifying state violence of the early 70s, is sampled. Chopped and layered with Reilly’s elegiac, radiant guitar, Gaye’s voice evokes grief that is at once interpersonal and political. This tension is rendered most starkly on the album’s final track: as Reilly’s guitar fades, Wilson’s voice emerged again with an indictment of the New Labour government, closing on an incredulous, despairing note of a larger scale. Often overshadowed by the band’s celebrated 1980s work, A Paean to Wilson stands as a flash of beauty, speaking to the searingly generative potentials of loss, as much its capacity to break us. As I’ve tentatively felt my way into a new phase of life this year, it is this duality within Reilly’s music that I’ve found a home in.

Tranquilizer – Oneohtrix Point Never by Liam J (Edinburgh branch)

Ambient music has long sat low on the aesthetic hierarchy, more furniture than art, as Erik Satie described one of his own compositions. Yet surely all art has now achieved the condition of ‘elevator muzak’: endlessly portable, anything can be background noise to soundtrack our lives. We are surrounded by acoustic debris in the form of digital data, any specificities of genre or technique reduced to the fact that they can be played anywhere, anytime. In this flattened landscape, how can one truly create anymore?

For Oneohtrix Point Never, the answer can only be: through plunder. Picking up where Eccojams and Replica left off, the records which launched the vaporwave pseudo-genre, Tranquilizer is spliced together from a web archive of 2000s stock music. The album sighs, whirrs, throbs and twinkles with sounds that exist on the threshold of familiarity – they could be rushing water, laboured breathing or the ringtone of a flip-phone. Detritus, recomposed and collaged together, is redeemed from triviality into a sonic expanse both melancholy and opaque, like half-remembered dreams lingering in the mind. Is this what our civilisation will sound like, decayed and forgotten, to lifeforms millennia from now who don’t even know what music is?

Blair Babies – Ceebo by Tobi O (West London branch)

This year has been a very exciting one for fans of the underground rap scene from Jim Legxacy’s Black British Music to afrosurrealists BuyBritish, but the mixtape I want to talk about is Ceebo’s Blair Babies. It opens by portraying the experiences many Black British people face and the consequences of the Blair government. Ceebo blends his personal story – his childhood, mental health and everyday struggles – with political realities. From the grimy ‘captain roscoe with a crossbow’, sampling Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Brand New Day’ to show how little has changed in two decades, to the breezy ‘buzzball summer’, where a younger Ceebo raps euphorically about worsening circumstances with a shrug: ‘fuck it, I’m young’.

My favourite track, ‘The Gospel (as According to Tony Blair)’, tells two lives: a wealthy young woman masking her pain with money, and a man in prison for murder, reflecting on how he ended up there. Both cry out to God but in his final verse, Ceebo confronts God’s indifference too, arguing about survival in a world that strips away the agency of Blair’s babies. Blair Babies shines musically too: Ceebo’s vocal shifts on ‘buzzball summer’ signal growing up without saying it outright, while production from Jim Legaxcy and afrosurrealist proves the new generation can match established producers.

And for the people at the back, once more with feeling!…

Euro-Country – CMAT by Kelly D (East London branch)

Ireland’s CMAT delivered one of the year’s most vital albums with Euro-Country, using infectious melodies and her camp persona to interrogate the insidious effects of neoliberalism on Irish life. The album showcases her blend of pop culture savvy, irony, and millennial rawness to create work that’s simultaneously anthemic and deeply affecting.

CMAT veers between hooky observations on femininity and parasociality to reckonings with Ireland’s post-Celtic Tiger economic collapse of 2008 and the mundane triggers of personal grief. She illuminates experiences often overlooked in contemporary Irish cultural discourse: skyrocketing male suicide rates, community spaces lost to commerce, and a generation caught between reverence and resentment for their homeland.

Rather than trafficking in the glib cultural ephemera (‘splitting the G’, every Irish object consumed or worn in East London) that’s emerged as a sellable flattening of Irish culture, Euro-Country gives voice to a generation haunted by what could have been if successive Irish governments hadn’t emerged from British rule to embrace an equally corrosive capitalism. Delightful pop music with a bitter aftertaste.

The first part of the cultural highlights of 2025 can be read here. Happy holidays from the rs21 website team!