The Quietus Albums of the Year 2025 (In Association with Norman Records)
Here are our favourite albums of the last 12 months, as voted for by tQ staff, columnists and core writers
Reviews
Home Front
Watch It Die
Canadian post-punks have all the right slogans, but the sound feels all too familiar, finds Hayley Scott
News
Lord Spikeheart, Decius, Mohammad Syfkhan & more for Acid Horse 26!
Rian Treanor & Mun Sing, Proteus, Sarah Angliss, Bruise Blood and Helm also added to bill for next year's Wiltshire weekender...
Reviews
Various Artists
Metal Machine Music: Power to Consume, Vol. 1
Several salutes to Lou Reed’s most returned release, featuring Thurston Moore, Pharmakon, Drew MacDowall and others
Black Sky Thinking
From The Shout to Bait: Listening to the Sound of Movies about Sound
Darran Anderson relishes hearing Rupert Hine's soundtrack to Jerzy Skolimowski's 1978 psychological horror, The Shout and discovers a sonic gateway in the process. Contains mild spoilers for films The Shout, Berberian Sound Studio, Blow Out, and The Conversation
Reviews
Review Columns
Cassettes
Spool’s Out: Cassette Reviews for November by Daryl Worthington
From radical dance music to triumphant, intricately layered synth pop and a levitating collaboration between a Ugandan embaire ensemble and a Japanese dub producer, Daryl Worthington finds rays of joy on cassette to blast away the impending winter entropy this November
Baker’s Dozen
Artists discuss the 13 records that shaped their lives
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News
Anniversary
Been Around The World: The Magical Odyssey Of The Avalanches’ Since I Left You
A concept album that transcended its concept, a stealth mix-CD, global disco, sampledelic exotica, yacht rock by other means: the Australian group’s debut was many things, writes David Bennun - and above all it was, and remains, a joy. This article was first published in 2020
The Portal
Explore 15 Years Of Cultural Wayfinding
Each week we conjure up a miscellany of tQ writing from the mists of time for you. Most often random. Sometimes themed. Always enthralling.
Explore The Portal
A Quietus Interview
Praying in Fire with Hildegard Von Bingen: Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko Interviewed
Ahead of their appearance at this year's Le Guess Who festival, Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko speak to Jennifer Lucy Allan about interpreting the music of Hildegard Von Bingen via Ukrainian folk song in the context of the Russian invasion of their homeland
Culture
Books
The Lodger In Me: Bid from The Monochrome Set on the Aneurysm that Changed His Life
In an exclusive extract from his new book, Strange Young Alien, the founder member and principal songwriter of the Monochrome Set discusses the ruptured cerebral aneurysm that changed the way he thought about music and the creative process
Books
Stroppy, Optimistic, Overdressed Young Men: Robert Elms Remembers the Blitz Club
Blitz: The Club That Created the Eighties, a new book by Robert Elms, returns the reader to a bygone London of squats full of future popstars and cans of Red Stripe to recall the nightclub that birthed Spandau Ballet and Visage and might just have invented the future
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