Left you in Catford 'Spoons and you were all alone

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's 50 best albums of 2025.

#47 : Dead Channel Sky - clipping.

Clipping frontman Daveed Diggs is best known for being in the original cast of Hamilton, and for all that this album is filled with noisy industrial rap, you can easily imagine it being successfully adapted for the Broadway stage. Dead Channel Sky is set in a cyberpunk dystopia not dissimilar to the scorched-sun “real world” of the Matrix, humming with janky tech and populated with fascists and freaky hedonists. Producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes render it in acid squiggles and revving breakbeats, while Diggs delivers his mutoid poetry like a prophet jacked up on some amphetamine he’s synthesised in a backstreet lab. 

Somewhat surprisingly, this is our second visit with the pretentiously named clipping. - last time I described it as "unremittingly grim", so obviously I'm super glad to be back with them.

Well, that was "interesting". The first track ("Intro") features rapping over the sound of a dial-up modem and it pretty much continues in that challenging vein. However, there's a load of skill gone into making these unpleasant noises and Daveed Diggs really can spit those words out at a rate - I may not have enjoyed it but I certainly wasn't bored by it, as I am with a lot of rap these days. And I really don't want to know what that creature on the album cover is...

This album comes the closest yet to proper chart action on this list - it got to #23 in the Album Sales chart (ie excluding streaming) and #2 in the Hip Hop & R&B chart, so it was relatively successful commercially. It also has a Wikipedia entry which tells us they've moved on from horrorcore to fusing hip-hop with cyberpunk and the album features guest appearances by Bitpanic, Nels Cline, Tia Nomore, Cartel Madras and Aesop Rock - and obviously I've never heard of any of them. It was also, obviously, very well received by the critics - they love this kinda shit. 

#46 : Cotton Crown - The Tubs

In different hands, the Tubs’ second album might be a crushing listen, and understandably so. In 2014, frontman Owen Williams’ mother, the songwriter and author Charlotte Greig, died by suicide. Grief, as these songs detail, made him a rubbish boyfriend. But Cotton Crown is often funny and ardent, and especially self-aware about how new love might feel like a life raft to a depressed mind ill-equipped to reciprocate: “Know it’s all in my brain / Caught in the middle of loving you and being insane,” Williams sings on Fair Enough. His striking voice, somewhere between Richard Thompson and Bob Mould, bolts through the band’s joyful jangle-pop. Clear students of the form, they’re virtuosos with zero patience for perfection, their riffs hurtling and plundering like seagulls going at a spilled catch as they vigorously rough you up with profundity.

And we're back to artists I've never heard of, but the mention of Richard Thompson and Bob Mould gives me some hope.

Woo-hoo - an album I actually like! I can see the Bob Mould thing (although I'm not so convinced by Richard Thompson), but it's the jangly guitars that drew me to this - I'd also say it wasn't as rough as The Guardian hints above. I was actually reminded of Big Star, who I met a couple of times on Rolling Stone's list and liked, but have never visited since - I actually think there's a chance I'd listen to this album again. Amazing!

This is another album that came close to proper chart action, getting to #42 in the Album Sales chart. It's got quite a sizeable Wikipedia entry for an album that probably not that many people have heard - and it tells us that the album cover art is a picture of the band's lead singer being breast-fed by his mum (in a graveyard, obviously) whose suicide (and his reaction to it) is a strong theme of the album. And her entry tells us she was quite a talent, having released multiple albums, books and plays. Back to the album, it was very well received - one critic mentioned it was very similar to the first one but didn't have a problem with it because that one was great as well.

#45 : Big City Life - Smerz

Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt feel like the pop girlies of the incredibly prolific and off-kilter Copenhagen Rhythmic Music Conservatory scene, making music that’s more outward-facing and arch than some of their insular and traditional (and equally great) classmates. Their second album lurches between throwing yourself at life – “you’re a girl in the city and you shouldn’t think twice”, they chant in deadpan harmony on Roll the Dice – and actually thinking twice quite a lot in existential spirals about purpose and desire. The dissonance between confidence and anxiety comes through in the album’s stilted beauty: one minute, their whorls of prepared piano carry you along like clouds amid perfectly turned pop-R&B and balladry; then they stab and stutter, like cracks in the pavement destined to trap your heels. In 2023, K-pop’s brightest hopes NewJeans hired them as co-writers: more pop bearing their imprint can only be a good thing.

We continue to wait for an album I've heard of, let alone heard - but the description above gives me some hope I might like it.

And there's a lot to like about it, without there being an awful lot to it. The lyrics are very minimal, often being about something very focussed like a state of mind or the pleasure in not really doing anything - these are not Viking sagas relating epic tales of battles and relationships. And the music isn't a lot more there either with ethereally minimalist tunes over simple or non-existent beats. You do get the impression that a lot of effort and skill has gone into making something so sparse, but I couldn't help but wonder whether too much minimalism maybe just results in a whole load of not very much? I was left thinking I maybe liked the ingredients more than the end result - but I also wonder if repeat listens would draw me in further.

Unlike our previous two entries, Smerz have never had a sniff of even the most niche chart success but the album does have a Wikipedia entry, even if it doesn't actually tell us very much - although it does alert me to the fact that there's a remix album available which might provide me with the content I'm looking for.

So three albums with plenty of admire, if not necessarily loads to love - but it's an easy win for The Tubs for me, given they produced an album I actually enjoyed and would be tempted to revisit (and also check out their debut). 

#50-48 - Not the best start