When I get bored of looking inside myself I always open windows at night

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

#32 : Glory - Perfume Genius

With typical grace and humour Mike Hadreas sends up his self-defeating tendencies on his seventh album, and wonders how old you have to be to escape those lifelong patterns: like the contradiction of struggling to face the world while also fantasising about violence and romanticising “all the poems I’ll get out” of it. It feels apt that Glory starts with the western twang of It’s a Mirror, suggesting a fixed, brawny masculine archetype – then breaks it down over the course of the record, a gothic, celestial voyage into the interior, and the latest addition to a uniquely beautiful American songbook.

Our second visit with Perfume Genius and last time I described him as a "slightly less beepy Hot Chip" - so who knows what we're going to get here!

Yeah, I liked this - it's somehow delicate and lush at the same time. I was reminded of Bright Eyes and early Paul Simon - it's also not a million miles away from Bon Iver's earlier offering, but delivering even more warmth than that did. It definitely feels like a grower which I should give more listens to - it's also got quite the album cover.

It managed some very minor chart activity, with one week at #17 in the Downloads chart being its high point. Its Wikipedia entry tells us that it's more of a collaborative effort than he usually goes for, with him having pulled a band together to make it. The critics loved it, with Beats Per Minute winning the award for most pretentious comment, saying he "continues to hone juxtapositions of heaviness and buoyancy, yoking the spacious and the claustrophobic. More specifically, he explores the dynamics of entanglement and removal". I can't believe they stole what I was going to say, so I'll just have to settle for "yeah, I liked this".

#31 : Phonetics On and On - Horsegirl

Spindly rock à la the Velvets and the Raincoats is as spartan in its constituent parts as it is high on reward, and Chicago trio Horsegirl demonstrated the inexhaustible pleasures of this 60-year-old form on their second album. With production from Cate Le Bon, they wove magic from just a few thrumming guitar and bass notes and Nora Cheng’s nonchalant, near-spoken vocals, as well as a knack for melodic hooks as finely turned as intricate woodwork: the bittersweet, skipping chorus of Information Content is an all-timer.

I still shudder at the memory of when Rolling Stone made me listen to an album by The Raincoats, so the description above has not filled me with joy.

Well, the good news is that Horsegirl are no Raincoats - and some of this is indeed melodically hooky. And you know what, when they get round to tuning their guitars and finishing the songs, I reckon this could be a pretty decent album. Oh - I'm told this is all I'm getting. This album is only 37 minutes long, but it felt like a very long 37 minutes.

The album has featured some minor chart action, with one week at #24 on the Downloads chart being the lofty peak it experienced. It doesn't have a Wikipedia entry - their entry tells us their from Chicago and have been going since '21. And that's your lot!

#30 : choke enough - Oklou

Trance, medieval polyphony and Y2K pop may seem like odd bedfellows, but French singer-producer Oklou cast them all in a dawn-like haze on her gorgeous debut album, flowing these distinct disciplines together until they swooped and soared like a flock of starlings. Choke Enough was no academic exercise, either, with standout pop moments including Take Me By the Hand with Bladee – a winsome conjuring of how Alice Deejay might sound in collaboration with a piping minstrel.

Ah yes - trance, medieval polyphony and Y2K pop. The Guardian are really making this sound special, aren't they? But - this is not only an album I've met as a new entry in the charts, it's also one I've revisited several times because there are some very lovely sounds on it.

One slight criticism is that she makes the mistake of putting the best tracks at the beginning - "thank you for recording" and "family and friends" are both somehow simple and complex at the same and very hooky (particularly the former). Yes, some people will find it a bit few and wishy-washy but I really like it - I was reminded of Caroline Polachek, but with more medieval polyphony obviously.

As previously stated, this properly charted with one week at the dizzy heights of #83 and it's got a proper Wikipedia entry as well. It's her debut album, it explores "the quest of meaning" and it took her over two years to pull it together with Casey MQ, Bladee and Underscores also being involved (whoever they are!). It was very well received by the critics at the time and has done best on the year-end lists of all the albums we've seen so far - #6 in NME, #4 in Pitchfork, #3 in Stereogum, #2 in Dazed and #1 in Time Out. You gotta laugh at the track called "(;´༎ຶٹ༎ຶ`)" though - apparently it's pronounced "snif".

So this one's an easy one to order - Horsegirl are a distant third, Perfume Genius a pleasing second and Oklou a very decent gold medal position - I really liked her effort.

#35-33 - Three interesting albums