Dance Policy’s favourite albums, 2025.
1. Los Thuthanka - Los Thuthanaka
The debut record from seasoned musical siblings Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton. Mesmerising and bewildering, Los Thuthanaka buries you under layered vocals, chanting, as well as an ever-present blown-out bass and guitar so fuzzy it's practically hairy. The duo have been able to create not just sonic landscapes but an entire vista. Anchored in traditional Aymara music but filtered through the ephemera of modern life. The various modern inflexions introduced through Chiquimamani-Condori’s sampler can propel you to dizzying, chaotic crescendo or land you softly in an ambient, LED-lit meadow building and taking away continuously. The record brims with fun and vitality, but it is not an easy record; it requires you to submerge yourself in a disorientating world which sits both at the foothills of the Andes and the audio equivalent of Habbo Hotel. The most original and invigorating record I’ve heard all year.
Eusexua has potentially some of Twigs’ best work; the title track and Room of Fools are fantastically balanced between pop and full-throated techno. Her sound has been refreshed through the club-focused production, which nicely threads the gap between the extremely current and paying homage to the classics. Twigs’ keening vocals fill the often stark and moody sound design full to the brim with emotion but instead of the insular quiet moments that have often been her bread and butter on Eusexua, she lets herself explode and celebrate these feelings. It’s a record that completely took me by surprise with how much I liked it, and it's a true high point in an already impressive career.
3. Nourished By Time - The Passionate Ones
Sardonic and self-deprecating, NBT’s distinctive slurred vocal style spills all over this disco-inflected album. NBT is the loser we deep-down worry we all are, failed in romance, in life, a man staring at the world from the bottom of a well. But from that well springs knowledge: observations on working life, ambition, mental illness and the social dislocation of 21st-century Western society. Who wouldn’t be crazy when the world is like this? But, ironically, if you do just want to tune in and drop out, you can. Despite the tragicomic social critique in the lyrics, this album is extremely fun. Injecting more house and disco flavours into his work on numbers like ‘925’, ‘Baby Baby’, and ‘Crazy People’ has taken NBT from his shoegaze-y origins into more fertile, experimental fields. Perhaps it’s because so much of the album is dripping in 80s sounds, but I couldn’t escape the feeling I was listening to Prince drunk at a Karaoke bar at 3 AM. I am in love with this album.
4. Aya - Hexed!
Aya’s last album, the haunting and brooding im hole was a triumph of harsh feedback loops and chopped up percussion. Hexed! takes the same sonic environment and tools but explodes it. Aya herself is front and centre, angrily confessing and accusing over the disjointed and aggressive bass and percussion. Touching on depression, alcoholism, sex, and Manchester’s public transport. The album is a deeply cathartic experience, with the intense, unrelenting start of ‘I am the pipe I hit myself with’ and the fantastic Future-Donk of ‘off to the ESSO’. This ferocity gives way to spacier, more reflective moments on ‘heat death’ and the album’s title track or ‘droplets’. As with im hole, the quiet moments feel like a coiled spring, the massiveness of the album’s sound is always threatening to be unleashed, but whereas her previous record’s restraint was what defined it, Hexed! Is not afraid to make a scene. A beautiful, spiky, slippery record that, as soon as you think you’ve got a handle on what it is, it switches it up. Funny and heartbreaking, soothing and headbanging, with genuinely excellent writing. One day, Aya will be a star. Watch this space.
It’s been a while since someone in UK rap arrived with as much scorching-hot hype as Esdeekid. Possessing the punchy old-school vocal delivery often favoured by Scouse MCs, his bars are snarlingly witty. Delivered with a confidence and quality that sets the artist out from the already extremely promising crop of underground UK talent currently emerging. Rebel is an album that is far more internationalist than the often parochial UK scene. As much as Grime and Drill are clearly foundational for Esdeekid, you can also hear Drain Gang in his beat selection and adlibs, as well as the more esoteric side of Rage rap. Rebel sounds as if it were recorded from the outside of a blacked-out BMW with its 808’s reverbed so heavily they sound as if they’re vibrating. On top of this weight sit DG-like ghostly, glittering synth stabs and Wraith9’s ever-present ‘OK!’ producer tag, giving the album an other-worldly transcendence. It’s a dark, pessimistic album that paints Esdeekid not so much a rapper on top of his game, but a loner, roaming the streets at 5 AM, interested in nothing else but ‘money, music and fashion’. If you own a debadged VW Golf and want something a bit different to show the lads while you’re making your drops, this is the album for you.
Selected by Joe Hurdman