The Subcity Team's favourite releases of 2025 so far!
As the summer ends and things whir into motion for Subcity again, the team have decided to share their favourite releases of the year so far!
Tobi - Programmes
Cities Aviv's Electric Chair. This album's potency is administered through Aviv's ripping soundscapes, which steer beautifully close to noise music, and his sparse, abstract lyrics, which are as ghostly as they are distorted. When listening, I am thoroughly saturated by the vibe of this album and the enveloping, intimate sonic world it builds. It's chilling and gripping and I can't get enough of it. The chaotic use of samples and loops mixed with dense, ambient production and field recordings creates a disorienting atmosphere, where there's a real risk of submerging into Aviv's carefully crafted non-spaces. And, if you're into the sonic texture and experimental production of this album, check out his side project African-American Sound Recordings, which is sublime.
https://boomkat.com/products/electric-chair-861c4fdb-fca0-4c6b-893f-d899a3ee43a9
Finn - Programmes
SSTROM'S Avvik. I've heard the term post-techno being thrown around a little bit in the past few months, specifically in reference to Rrose and Polygonia's excellent album Dermatology; a constantly collapsing and reforming piece of genreless dance music, or even Glasgow's very own Wodawater with it releasing a few strange, ambient, rhythmic noise lps which still embody an ineffable aspect of dance music. Whilst I am cynical about adding the prefix post to a genre and attempting to sell it as something new, Swedish producer SSTROM fulfils the concept of post-techno with an ep of absurdist, ever changing "dance" music that truly sounds like the future, in the same way that The Final Frontier did all the way back in 92'. Its a bubbling, shifting collage of industrial sawing and uneasy pounding built to set smokey dancefloors alight. If this is the direction dance music is headed, we're in safe hands x
https://sstrom.bandcamp.com/album/avvik
Frank - Archives & Programmes
Son of Chi and Omar Ka’s We Carry Eden. Recommended by a friend earlier this year, this is a fluid and murky rendezvous of dub, ambient and spoken word. I love when a record puts me in a place that I can’t quite place visually, but can certainly feel myself there, and this record does that. It moves with grace but has a kind of murk that is completely grounding. The albums structure is really interesting too, being comprised of these movements where each sound sort of collides and cascades with others in a hypnotic sequence while the bass drags everything down. Constantly seeking and sometimes finding, a fantastic album.
https://chifactory.bandcamp.com/album/we-carry-eden-feat-omar-ka
Ada - Web & Tech
Aya's Hexed! is an album built from two great concrete blocks.
first, the lyrics. raw, bleeding poetry, as much wordplay as playing with the sounds of the words. you can feel the shapes of the syllables rolling around on your tongue like a boiled sweet, as aya tells stories that ring true with the same metallic clang as the instruments in the background. sentences that in isolation could be read as absurdist one-liner gags dutifully record the absurdity of aya's (and I imagine many of her listeners') circumstances.
second, the instrumentals, which display a dominant next step in this decade's digital production arms race. not just drums and synths, but sounds with physicality. bullet impacts from some futuristic weapon, swipes through the air with a thin steel rod. hallucinated hammered strings, or kilovolts of shock therapy for an unknown illness. all of the weight of something "club ready" yet inappropriate for anything but attentive active listening. this album demands a listener who is ready to pick out jagged little shapes from the larger collage to hold tightly in their palm.
this album is the present moment distilled down to a one-disc LP. a friend of mine called it "too much"- he's absolutely right, but in my opinion that's this album's greatest strength.
https://aya-yco.bandcamp.com/album/hexed
Heather - Teamcurious
1tbsp's Hotel Living. It’s a blend of experimental house and dance that’s stacked with synths and laced with punchy drum beats that have been jenga’d into a rhythm you can only dance to.
House can become overplayed and simplistic when done wrong, which 1tbsp is the opposite of. It’s close to a mix of ambient and techno, the pitched up vocals allow an erratic but controlled sort of excitement to bleed out of the entire EP.
Almost fantastical and cartoon, this new record was the soundtrack to a summer of extreme weather polarities and excessively busy schedules; the beats of this EP are ones to live chaotically beside, his ability to weave a technological sound with passionate vocals and glitchy interludes, punctuated by a clever level of tension building really makes this my favourite release of 2025.
https://1tbsp.bandcamp.com/album/hotel-living
Daphne - Archives
Thredd's It's Lovely, Come On In. I went in completely blind to Thredd's gig at the Hug n Pint last month. Very original yet familiar sounding, definitely pop whilst' deconstructed, super sexy but with lines that make me wanna cry, liquid-smooth bassline & drum machine combos; just 8 perfect songs. I'm not sure if the album can capture how good they were live, but I don't mean that in a bad way. Like it's a secret. V obsessed.
https://scenicroute.bandcamp.com/album/its-lovely-come-on-in-2
Tilly - Support
Karen Ng's Backwards Blue. It's been a big year for contemporary jazz, and I'm struggling to pick a favourite, but composer / saxophonist Karen Ng's debut stands out to me as an album deserving more attention (honourable mentions to Mary Halvorson & Sylvie Courvoisier's 'Bone Bells', sophie agnel's 'Learning', and Phantom Wizard's 'Wholesome').
The album is sparse, it's slow, it's warm, it's weird and on each listen, I find a new favourite part. Primarily a mix of saxophone and electronics, but with splashes of clarinet, upright bass, and acoustic guitar, the album flows from gentle, melodic washes of sound to improvised saxophone stabs to electronic fuzz - it's got it all! An unafraid, sometimes tense melding of acoustic and electronic, improvised and programmed, and silence and noise, Backwards Blue is a sonic gem.
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