scaryblog

Completing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2025 . #1 :  LUX - Rosalia With its lyrics in 13 languages and references to dozens of historical female saints, the fact that Lux manages to transcend scholarly chin-stroking and dry Wiki deep dives is near miraculous, and the credit is solely Rosalía’s. While this isn’t her first album to alchemise the past and present – see 2018’s second album El Mal Querer and its heady flamenco-R&B hybrid – the stakes are far higher on Lux, and the balancing act more pronounced. What elevates it, apart from its multi-layered melodies, rich compositions and engrained drama, is the playfulness at its heart. Like Björk during her effortless 90s peak, there’s a sense of wonderment to Rosalía’s voice that sweeps you up into its tornado. Even when she’s tearing your heart in two, as on La Yugular’s blossoming balladry, or the ascension to heaven on the closing Magnolias, you want to be right there with her. The 25th album I've previous...

Starting my trip up Empire's  top 20 TV shows of 2025 #20 :     Foundation It’s important to have at leat one show in your life that’s an undemanding, easy watch. A show that you can lie back and sink into while letting your brain switch off. Foundation is not that show. The third tranche of this ambitious adaptation of the Isaac Asimov series might have seen showrunner David S. Goyer take a step back from the helm, but its quality remains undimmed. The Cleonic triumvirate begins to crumble (Lee Pace’s Brother Day going full Lebowski), Harry Seldon’s (Jared Harris) plan shows signs of fraying at the edges, and all-powerful antagonist The Mule (a delightfully maniacal Pilou Asbæk) takes centre stage. There’s even a pair of space Influencers (Cody Fern and Synnøve Karlsen) thrown in for the Gen Z crowd. This is cerebral television at its most ambitious and a mind-bogglingly complex (and compelling) work of sci-fi that deserves to be seen by everyone. Come for talk about fou...

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2025 . #2 :  EURO-COUNTRY - CMAT Despite its fraught creation, CMAT’s third album sounds like the supremely assured work of a songwriter whose powers have reached a new peak. It is, by turns, poignant, moving, furiously angry, uproariously funny and packed with incredible tunes. It strides confidently away from the country-infused style she minted on her 2022 debut If My Wife New I’d Be Dead – into territory that variously touches on jazz (Janis Joplining), raging alt-rock (The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station), soul-kissed pop (Running/Planning; Take a Sexy Picture of Me) – without in any way losing the essence of what made her successful in the first place. The 24th album I've previously heard and when I met this as a new entry (in the same week I met Sabrina Carpenter and Blood Orange  which also made this list), I described it as "interestingly cryptic" so it will be intriguing to see what I make of it on a seco...

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2025 . #3 :  Essex Honey - Blood Orange Dev Hynes’ fifth album as Blood Orange felt uniquely keyed into the fragmented, distracted headspace that comes after someone passes, in his case, his mother. Essex Honey’s restive nature was summed up in its painful opening lines, which you could read as the dying’s acceptance of death starkly contrasting the living’s ability to meet them on those terms: “In your grace, I looked for some meaning,” Hynes sings on Look at You. “But I found none, and I still search for a truth.” That search is wide-reaching: The Field refashions the Durutti Column’s Sing to Me as a racing hymnal made for the stereo of a Ford Escort. There are tough little Robert Rental-style post-punk gems in The Train (Kings Cross) and Countryside that bristle with frustration. Vivid Light is a plainly soulful duet with Zadie Smith; Life, featuring Tirzah’s unmistakable vocals, basks in languid, flute-dappled funk. T...

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 26/12/25 : I Barely Know Her - Sombr Christmas week gives us some odd albums - last year we had Lana del Rey's album from '12, which hasn't left the chart all year. I'm pleased to say we're somewhat more up to date this year with an album that came out in August - I met it as a new entry  and was somewhat nonplussed by it, but I have mentioned it a couple of times since because it's just not gone away, which is somewhat unusual. So let's see what I make of it on a second listen (this trick totally failed to convince me of the virtues of Addison Rae earlier today). Well, well, well - Sombr at least intrigues on second listen. I'd struggle to describe it - it's kinda poppy indie with a woozy vibe to it, but it feels like it has depths to it and I reckon the more you listen to it, the more you pick up on. Intriguing indeed - I'd love to tell you more but that's all I got for the time ...

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2025 . #4 :  Addison - Addison Rae Once derided as a former TikTok dancer who made ill-fated attempts to break beyond the platform, Addison Rae’s fortunes changed last summer when Charli xcx invited her to collaborate on a remix, washing away the sticky juvenilia of her social media fame. Her debut album offered up dreamy synthpop that was weirder and more interesting than expected. Opener New York begins sounding floaty and fizzy, but ends in a pummelling explosion of chaos; High Fashion and Times Like These were an experimental hallucination of trip-hop and R&B. The fact that Arca remixed Aquamarine says it all. The pleasures Rae sang about, however, were far simpler. The gauzy, romantic Summer Forever distils the vibe: how fun it is, to be “young, dumb and cute / Nothing to lose”; the record’s mix of hedonism and nostalgia, its proud anti-lore depthlessness and hunger for sensation feel like extremely 2025 techniqu...