Here we are again! Another year, another album round-up.
This year, we have been busy behind the scenes preparing a re-launch of Wax Music. So, don’t worry – we are back and here to bring you the best the Bristol music scene has to offer.
Stay tuned for gig reviews, interviews with artists, and any news from the local music world.
But first things first: what have our music writers enjoyed this year? It’s our pleasure to bring you the Wax writers’ favourite albums of 2025. Hopefully you can find some new music to listen to, or you enjoy reading about your own faves – there should be something for everyone. And maybe it’s a chance for you to get to know our writers a little better, too!
Clara’s Top 5
Clara is a journalist and poet based in Bristol. She has written for WAX since 2022 and has been in love with the scene ever since. Her favourite Bristol bands are Getdown Services and Scaler.
1. FKA twigs – EUSEXUA
I started the year with this album. Through the dark and cold winter months, while trying to stick to my New Year’s resolutions (worry less, be more present), twigs sang to me about loneliness, the promise of the night ahead of you and womanhood (girlhood).
In an interview, twigs described “eusexua” as the moment just before she has a really good idea. It’s great to have a word for the feeling before the feeling, to give meaning to the potential for happiness, which is always better than the thing itself. Like in girl feels young, when twigs sings: “When the night feels young, you know she feels pretty”.
I think of nights in my 20s, a drink next to me as I do my makeup, the promise of fun, the drugs not yet kicked in. It’s never about the comedown, the greasy men and being sick in grubby toilets, it’s about that moment before, when everything is still possible. EUSEXUA is full of that pure goodness, captures the moment before the orgasm. Safe knowing it will come
2. Big Thief – Double Infinity
There’s something about Big Thief that sounds distinctly American to me. There’s a vastness to her sound – similar to the vastness of the American mid-west. When you stand in the middle of the desert, or the mountains, and the horizon stretches out in front of you uninterrupted, you are made small. When you listen to Big Thief, a similar phenomenon occurs, you are reminded of your loneliness, of how you are just a speck on earth waving to other specks, saying: I am here. Can you hear me?
Singer Adrianne Lenke draws comparisons to nature on the album and it adds to the sound of American vast-ness. In the title track, trees are on fire, rivers flood. “Beauty speak to me/Let me know you, let me see,” Lenke sings.
The whole album starts with lines that tumble the listener into a state of being lost. “Incrompehensible,” Lenke repeatedly sings, drawing out the word until it, too, becomes incomprehensible. “All across Ontario, static on the stereo / Went swimming in the lake, Old Woman Bay,” a later line goes in the song. North America is vivid in front of our eyes and we are lost within it.
3. Kokoroko – Tuff Times Never Last
When I first heard Kokoroko, I did not know what to expect. A date took me to see them live at Marble Factory. We’d had a drink beforehand at a brewery down the road and I remember that he did not impress me. Kokoroko did, though. As soon as they came out and I saw they were carrying saxophones, trumpets and trombones, I got excited. And I wasn’t disappointed. Their music carried me away from an awkward date and into a world of sound and movement. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them. That summer, I listened to their first self-titled EP on repeat and was desperate for them to release more, more!
That hunger is still alive in me and so I was elated to see they were releasing another album this year. Tuff Times Never Last is warm and joyful. It’s comfort food. It’s the soundtrack to a summer dinner party, where wine is free-flowing and all your friends are happy and full.
4. Deafheaven – Lonely People With Power
We might not agree on this one, depending on where you fall in the Deafheaven debate. Too shoegazey for black metal, too fast for post rock. Deafheaven like to walk the line and Lonely People With Power is no exception. From the genius title, to the dragged out interludes, this album holds many gems. On Lonely People With Power, Deafheaven do what they do best: slow crescendos that build and build and build, so that you barely remember how you got to the screams and torture and volume when you’re there.
It’s easy to forget while listening that Deafheaven’s lyrics are basically poems. Yes, they scream them and distort them until you barely know what’s being said, but the lyrics are about tender moments, being lost, loneliness, grief. In The Garden Route, they sing: “Every door peeled/Open on an autumn afternoon/We traversed warm boredom/Fled disappointment/And loved under the wide rose sky”. There’s melodrama there but also something surprisingly soft.
5) Adult Leisure – The Things You Don’t Know Yet
Adult Leisure are my guilty pleasure. This is in no way meant in a degrading way, quite the opposite. Adult Leisure scratch an itch in my brain that has been left unscratched since Kings of Leon’s Only By The Night. It’s something about nostalgia, something about electric guitars, something about dancing to a sad song. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Adult Leisure play their hometown in Bristol – an energetic show that brought their songs to life and gave them a new context.
I believe their music is meant to be experienced live, in combination with the band’s excellent showmanship. They will get stuck in your head for ages, and they will make you want to dance, even as the lyrics long for a time long gone, or maybe never real. This is a band just at the edge of making it big.
Rosie’s Top 5
Rosie is a freelance music journalist currently based in Bristol. Since studying at BIMM Bristol, she has spent her time writing and presenting for music publications in the city. Her passion for music came from her parents’ extensive record collection and only developed further when she was bought her own iPod Shuffle in neon pink. She is currently studying MA Journalism at UWE.
1. The Art of Loving – Olivia Dean
The Art of Loving was one of those albums that properly got under my skin this year. Olivia Dean has a knack for writing songs that feel warm and familiar but still hit you with something honest each time you listen. The whole album sits in this smooth blend of soul, pop, and a pinch of jazz, all wrapped in warm, easy-going production. The track list moves like a conversation – soft, sometimes a bit cheeky, sometimes a bit blunt – but always real.
“Baby Steps” is the one I keep coming back to. There’s something so gentle about it, like it gives you permission to be messy and slow and still move forward. And then “So Easy (To Fall in Love)” melts you. It’s soft but catchy, and it captures that feeling of falling for someone almost by accident.
Seeing her live at Forwards Festival only made me love the album more. She sounded exactly like the record, and there was a serene confidence about her that made the whole crowd feel connected.
The Art of Loving is a gorgeous, soulful album that I’ve kept coming back to all year. It’s comforting, clever, and honestly just feels good to have on.
2. Dog Eared – Billie Marten
Dog Eared by Billie Marten has quietly become one of my favourite albums of the year. The whole record has this calm, folky warmth to it, with a gorgeous softness running through the track list. Nothing rushes and the songs sort of drift at their own pace, but in a way that keeps pulling you back in.
“Feeling” was the track that hooked me first. It’s got a steady, glowing energy that feels simple on the surface but hits properly once you sit with it. It has a mix of vulnerability and clarity, which paints a picture of trying to understand your own inner self. The track sets the tone for the rest of the album in that mellow-but-honest way she does so well. “Planets” might be the prettiest track on the album, it feels small and intimate but still manages to sound big in its own dreamy, floaty way.
Overall, Dog Eared is one of those albums that just stays with you. It is gentle, thoughtful, and weirdly grounding in the best way.
3. Willoughby Tucker, I will always love you – Ethel Cain
If there’s one album that I’ve had on repeat as the days got shorter and colder this autumn, it’s this one. There’s a beautiful gloom to the whole project that leans into melancholy without ever feeling stagnant, crafting songs that feel windswept and quietly devastating. The production is rich and full of distant echoes, soft distortion, and stormy synths that make every track feel like it’s unfolding in an abandoned house. The record serves as a prequel to her 2022 debut Preacher’s Daughter and delves deeper into the fictional Southern Gothic world of Ethel Cain.
Among the album’s highlights, “Janie”, stands out for its painful honesty, pairing gentle vocals with a slow-burn arrangement. The track perfectly illustrates universal feelings of girlhood, friendship and loneliness. “Nettles” is darker and more atmospheric, with beautiful lyricism that beautifully captures the desperation of loving someone so intensely you want to vanish from the real world. “The Tempest” feels appropriately sweeping, its emotional intensity rising and crashing like waves. And “Radio Towers” might be the most haunting of them all. The song’s imagery, paired with its ethereal vocal arrangements, lingers long after the song ends.
Willoughby Tucker, I will always love you blends a perfect mix of comfort and desolation into a tender depiction of aching adolescence and the desperate need to feel.
4. Euro-Country – CMAT
CMAT’s Euro-Country is an album that is sharp, funny, self-aware, and emotionally bruising without ever collapsing under its own weight. Since its release I have found myself constantly circling back to this record – there’s always a song that matches my mood, which is probably why it’s stayed in such constant rotation for me.
A huge part of what makes Euro-Country so compelling is how deeply it’s rooted in the experience of growing up in Ireland. The album consistently draws on a sense of small-town claustrophobia, Catholic guilt, emotional repression, and the complicated relationship with ambition and escape.
“Lord Let That Tesla Crash” and “Running / Planning” are standouts, capturing the album’s anxious, spiralling heart perfectly. They feel restless and searching, full of longing and self-interrogation. They’re the kinds of songs that get better the more you sit with them.
And while “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” might be the fan favourite, it absolutely earns it. It’s one of those deceptively upbeat, feel-good songs that sneaks in something deeper. The track is funny, addictive, and quietly heartbreaking and it’s easy to see why it’s been on repeat all year.
Euro-Country is an album that balances humour and sadness with incredible confidence. It’s bigger than its country-pop edge, smarter than it lets on, and proof that CMAT is doing something genuinely special right now.
5. The Clearing – Wolf Alice
Wolf Alice’s The Clearing was one of my favourite albums of the year, an album that feels both immediate and quietly ambitious. It has an infectious, luminous sound that pulls you in instantly, while carrying a sense of confidence that feels earned rather than overstated.
The lead singles were among the strongest songs released this year, setting the tone for an album that understands its own impact. There’s a clarity to them that makes them feel uplifting without ever tipping into naivety. At its core, The Clearing carries a message of perseverance and self-belief, leaving you feeling motivated rather than weighed down, something that’s surprisingly rare and deeply welcome.
“Bloom Baby Bloom” became a point of contention for some listeners, criticised for being too disjointed or pulled in too many directions. But that messiness is precisely what makes it so compelling. The song feels restless, intriguing, and irresistibly catchy. It mirrors the album’s broader refusal to settle into something predictable.
Sonically, The Clearing marks a clear departure from Wolf Alice’s previous releases. The album leans into a warmer, 70s-inspired soft rock sound, but never at the expense of edge or intensity. The arrangements are rich and detailed, the guitar work is subtle yet striking, and the sheer power of the vocals cuts through everything. Even in its softer moments, the band sounds assured, expansive, and completely in control.
The Clearing doesn’t rely on nostalgia alone but it reworks familiar influences into something fresh and alive. It’s an album that feels restorative without being passive, bold without being overwhelming, and confident in its willingness to evolve.
Jon’s Top 5
Jonathan Morris is a Bristol-based writer and journalist covering culture, music and new writing – both locally and across the UK. He enjoys punk of all varieties and liked Americana before it was trendy. When he’s not listening to music, he’s usually thinking about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
1. Hotline TNT – Raspberry Moon
In their Bandcamp bio, Hotline TNT sardonically refer to themselves as “music to listen to after redownloading Hinge”, positioning their sound as a glum backdrop to repetitive self-destruction. The irony being that the New York band’s fourth album Raspberry Moon sees fervently optimistic lyrics swirl and swell within a wall of their trademark fuzzy emo-shoegaze sound.
From the punk-rock shotgun-blast-turned-singalong that is Julia’s War (complete with na na na’s) to Candle’s resilient devotion to the importance of vulnerability in burgeoning romance (“I’m not scared/We’ll find new things to share”), there’s endless sweetness and celebration to be found within each of Raspberry Moon’s many layered guitar tracks. This density never threatens to overcome a rapid, assertive rhythm section, as you find yourself immediately memorising every inch of this album within the first listen – from finger-pointing hooks to thumping drum lines. Anthemic, attention-grabbing and some of the best guitar-led music you’ll hear this year.
2. Black County, New Road – Forever Howlong
The undisputed winner of 2025’s “Album That Most Closely Resembles Its Cover” award, Forever Howlong is an inspired ode to how friendships, for all their complications, shape our lives. Marking the band’s first studio album since their major reinvention in the wake of singer-songwriter Isaac Wood’s departure in 2022, Black Country, New Road find themselves trading anxious post-punk tension for a warm, communal and richly textured neo-folk palette.
Forever Howlong captures the oscillating complexity of friendship and the joy and confusion that’s born through leaning into them. The dynamic shared vocal responsibilities of Tyler Hyde, Georgia Ellery and May Kershaw gorgeously guide us through narratives of unrequited yearning (pulsing through the nursery rhyme-esque Besties) and a Chaucer-reflective pilgrimage woven through the album’s standout centrepiece For the Cold Country.
Perhaps the most impressive achievement of this album is its steadfast dismissal of despair. Where moments of indecision and self-interrogation threaten to bleed through, Forever Howlong remains defiantly communal, something like a backdrop to a Sunday lunch on a friends holiday. If you were to step outside and climb a hill on a late spring evening, Forever Howling would be standing on the other side waiting for you, beckoning you to join the party.
3. Wednesday – Bleeds
On Bleeds, Karly Hartzman is looking back. She’s re-considering hometown rumours, reflecting on the events that led to a breakup with real-life ex-boyfriend and bandmate MJ Lenderman – noticing the grime around the edges for the first time. Bleeds is a powerful, murky collection of songs concerning high school losers and serial killers, their freaky intricacies playing out before a vivid backdrop of distorted guitars, weirdo-country slide guitars and cutting melodies that constantly threaten to explode into jagged bursts of pure aggression.
Bleeds doesn’t shy away from the dark, the tragic and the unsettling, both lyrically and musically. Songs such as Townies invoke Mike Cooley-inspired character analysis, while Wasp is a reflection on lost companionship at its most hostile. Yet amid the grit, there’s an alluring, unpretentious energy of America’s new best bar band.
4. Divorce – Drive to Goldenhammer
It’s hard to pin Divorce down. Rooted in soft, understated indie rock, there’s a theatrical pulse running through their debut album Drive to Goldenhammer that matches the intimate with the unhinged. This is largely the influence of co-vocalists Tiger Cohen-Towell and Felix Mackenzie-Barrow, who trade storytelling duties throughout the album, their contrasting but raw styles carrying tales of uncertain love, self-doubt and unexpected awe.
Divorce’s songs are playful but honest – pub-corner soliloquies and half-muttered confessions that feel rooted in real-world experiences, places and people, all of which colour this luscious soundtrack to late-night drives and festival singalongs. Musically, Drive to Goldenhammer swings between a folksy calm and twirling guitar solos dressed in local theatre pageantry. But what truly elevates the album is the tiny moments sprinkled throughout – little missives tucked in the corner of each song. These details work to flesh out not just the band’s sound, but its world, rewarding listeners who welcome these desperate, wry and humorous tales.
5. Water From Your Eyes – It’s a Beautiful Place
We’ve all arrived late to the Water From Your Eyes party. Even if you’d been in the know about this Chicago two-piece’s project for a while now, taking in It’s a Beautiful Place offers a sense of not fully understanding what’s going on. You’re stumbling into a room full of friends deep in conversation, trying to decipher an art project that’s half finished, wondering why everyone is wearing sunglasses indoors when they’re just going to stare at the floor anyway.
Like 100 Gecs prescribed the right medication, the frantic, glitchy nature of Water From Your Eyes’s new album represents a form of anti-brainrot, an articulation of an ever-online, chaotic modern culture that sits in opposition to the ceaseless noise of a rapidly-swiped Instagram feed. Songs such as Playing Classics channel overstimulation into something conscious and funny, grounded despite its constant swaying towards liftoff.
It’s a Beautiful Place is an album eager to explore every half-hummed thought, blessed by a diverse and stacked vision. Each track arrives with the thrill of turbulent unpredictability. Hopeful, silly and utterly unhinged – it’s a rare head-scrambling record that manages to be as fun as it is poignant and self-respecting.
Maik’s Top 5
Maik is a Bristol-based writer and musician who’s been involved in the city’s music scene since 2011. Pass times include making derivative electronic music and listening to ambient for the lyrics.
1. Hammock – Nevertheless
Hammock’s Nevertheless is a record that hits visually before it hits sonically. The stark photograph of Niyoko Ikuta’s Ku-157 is probably the best-looking cover of the year, sharp enough to make anyone curious even if they’ve never heard the band. Luckily, the music inside matches the expectation – the green tint of the glass hints at an organic sound contained within a carefully considered structure, surrounded by clean, airy space.
Tracks on the album drift with gentle tension – Hammock are on their way somewhere, but don’t seem to mind how long it takes to arrive – and this marks them out from other ambient music which so often seems to simply create a sonic room you can sit in with no need for meaningful progression. In Distance Pavilion and Through Nameless Air are a couple of obvious highlights, but this whole project makes a case for the album as a format. The pacing throughout is thoughtful, and gives each individual idea room to breathe, even when relying on repeated motifs which stick around just long enough to take root before being lost to the open, reverberating chordscapes that are the album’s defining feature.
2. Cole Pulice – Land’s End Eternal
When looking for innovative instrumentalists in 2025, you could do a lot worse than Cole Pulice and their saxophone, with a catalogue of boundary-pushing work including collaborations with Lynne Avery and a release on the now-defunct Longform Editions. Land’s End Eternal takes that experience, channeling it into a lush sonic world, with the saxophone central but treated and processed in otherworldly, ethereal sounding ways. Guitar appears for the first time in Pulice’s work and immediately becomes integral to the compositions, shaping atmospheres without ever dominating.
There are shades of Pink Floyd’s final LP The Endless River in the musical conversation between instruments Pulice creates on the three-part suite forming the album’s backbone. Guitar, sax, and subtle electronics interact in ways sometimes gentle, sometimes brighter with a little more thrust to them.
This push and pull between ambient sensibilities and jazz composition lies at the heart of this album, and indeed the majority of Pulice’s work. The album builds towards the final and longest track, After the Rain, where varied instrumentation places it firmly in the conversation alongside the work of Nala Sinephro and The Cosmic Tones Research Trio about just what the emerging ambient jazz sound can encompass.
3. Lucy Gooch – Desert Window
There is always a risk of live ambient falling flat. Too reliant on pre-programmed stuff and the set will feel lifeless, but too much of an insistence on doing everything live and there’s a risk of losing some sonic richness that soaks the genre’s warmer moments. As if I wasn’t already convinced, a perplexingly early set from Bristol’s Lucy Gooch at the recent Simple Things festival cemented Desert Window’s place on this list.
On the record as was the case in Strange Brew’s back room, Gooch’s soprano voice sits naturally in the mix, which is warm with rich synthesized tones and elegiac orchestral instrumentation. There’s a subtle psychedelia to be found here, too, with layered vocals disorienting in the same breath as the wrap you up in a sonic blanket as in the swell of swirling voices in the back half of Jack Hare. In an ever more popular but often sterile genre, Desert Window is ambient music that feels inhabited, personal, and quietly engrossing, a rare balance in a genre that can all too often drift toward cold perfection.
4. Francesca Marongiu – Still Forms In Air
It’s a risky business openly declaring your influences, one can easily fall to accusations of derivative imitation or mimicry. Francesca Marongiu’s decision, then, to lead with the influence of mid-1980’s Japanese ambient music on Still Forms In Air is almost certainly made safe in the knowledge that this record could sit comfortably alongside classics such as Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Surround, or The Body Is a Message of the Universe by Shiho Yabuki.
Fortunately, Still Forms In Air is absolutely comparable to its chosen peers.
If there is one clear line between this album and its Japanese precursors, it’s a sense of space. The Japanese term ‘environmental music’ refers to music created for a certain location, and this record gives such an impression of place that, coupled with the name-checks in its release information, one can’t help but assume this was intentional.
In opener Spiral, and the sprawling 15-minute Città Metafisica, we get to hear from collaborator Antonio Gallucci’s wind arrangements, further solidifying the record’s connections to space and air. Indeed, even the sounds on this record created entirely within synthspace feel physical, contributing to the image of each piece as an object – the still forms to which the title refers.
5. Scaler – Endlessly
Scaler have been a constant presence on the Bristol scene for a few years now, bringing their signature blend of metal and techno to audiences across Europe with a string of great releases behind them. With a trademark sound as distinctive as theirs, the issue of how to keep a new full length album interesting could, in less capable hands, have proved a difficult one.
Fortunately, Scaler are more than up to the task, with a refreshing take on their established sound featuring more collaboration, experimental sound design, and a new live-sounding approach to mixing that lets you really hear that the drums are being played rather than sequenced.
The vocals are front and centre here, a first for a Scaler release with the only other vocal feature they’ve released being Remain In Stasis with Grove in 2022’s, but the deft way these collaborations are handled would make you think they’ve been doing this for years. These, combined with the live mix and the manipulated bodies on the cover, have Scaler sounding more human than ever. As an acknowledgement of where they’ve been it’s as good as a greatest hits, and as an indication of where they’re going it makes for very exciting listening.
Contributors
Clara Bullock // Rosie Burgess // Jon Morris // Maik Keefe