Albums of the year

I’m still coming down from seeing Cameron Winter on Monday night at the Roundhouse. It was one of the most brilliantly enigmatic performances I’ve ever seen I think. Heavy Metal would be my album of the year, but let’s face facts, it came out in December 2024. I wrote about it back in June, if you have a spare couple of hours :/

Here are another ten albums (in no particular order) that I’ve loved in 2025. A great year for music – and Cameron Winter makes an appearance with Geese, of course. Deftones making my top ten was not on my 2025 bingo card, 16-year-old me would be thrilled.

Gift Songs – Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
The Making – Lavinia Blackwall
Interior Live Oak – Cass McCombs
Blurr – Joanne Robertson
Like a Ribbon – John Glacier
Night Fishing on a Calm Lake – Jerkcurb
Big city life – Smerz
Salt River – Sam Amidon
Getting Killed – Geese
private music – Deftones

Run yourself a deep bath and listen to this:

I really enjoyed Lucy Harbron’s Far Out review of the Cameron Winter show. An interesting take, for sure, although I wonder if the central argument is a bit of a straw man:

He’s been granted that lofty and mythical status in which Cameron Winter is a good musician, positioned specifically as a clever artist who is doing structurally advanced and interesting things, pushing the limits of genre and pushing his own poetry. So to say you don’t like it is kind of like saying you don’t like jazz – some people will look at you like you’re dumb.

Is this true? I know a number of music fans for whom Heavy Metal hasn’t clicked at all. I wonder if, to adopt a modern term that someone in their mid-40s really shouldn’t be using, it’s not that deep. Isn’t it just that we’ve been starved of a charismatic Dylan-esque figure whose songs are puzzles that can’t be solved? These kinds of artists don’t come along very often, so, when they do, people naturally become very invested in them. Is there a cult of Cameron Winter, or do people just really like his music? If there’s a cult around him, then there’s also a cult around Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Kate Bush, the Beatles, Miles Davis – any musician whose every utterance is pored over in an attempt to parse its genius. Isn’t that just what happens with very good artists?

I didn’t spot anyone at the Roundhouse having a variety of religious experience. A few people fainted, but that was due to the heat. Winter’s youthful fans certainly seemed devoted (not least in their attempts at copying his hairstyle). But I didn’t get a sense that their devotion was anything beyond fandom and delight at seeing a very special artist turn in a beautiful and inscrutable performance, full of drama and comedy. But then again I was up in the gods, among the 6 Music Dads (some of whom, bizarrely, left after a few songs). Perhaps it would have been different if I’d have been in the front row, losing myself in the congregation’s shared rapture.

I’m also not sure if the Roundhouse performance saw Cameron Winter break free from what Habron calls the ‘rigid structure’ of his recorded music. For me, Heavy Metal is an album that is so captivating because it feels so loose and free-flowing. I agree though that it was brilliant to see him reinvent the songs live (shades of Dylan again), effortlessly improvising new Randy Newman-esque chord progressions and Jarretty interpolations; a whole world of song at his fingertips.

I realise that writing a hefty response to a review of a concert that was published yesterday is pretty much what someone in a Cameron Winter cult would do. Oh well. Guilty as charged. Throw away the key. God is real!

More music I’ve enjoy this year:

I wrote about Cass McCombs’s brilliantly self-deceiving song ‘I Never Dream About Trains’ earlier this year. In the same post I also talk about this heartbreaking tune from Poor Creature’s excellent album All Smiles Tonight:

One of the many Beatley highlights from 2025 was the superb One to One film, centred around John and Yoko’s 1972 benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden, which captured Lennon at an inspired and inspiring creative and political high. The barnstorming evening performance of ‘Come Together’ is on the Power to the People boxset:

Danny Brown’s Stardust is a great record, particularly the first track – a brilliant meditation on the rapper’s new-found sobriety.

I loved In the Earth Again, an unexpected collaboration between sludge rockers Chat Pile and American primitive guitarist Hayden Pedigo.

One of my favourite gigs of the year was the thrillingly unhinged YHWH Nailgun at the Scala. Their album 45 Pounds is a visceral twenty-minute treat.

I wrote about Joanne Robertson’s beautiful album Blurr back in October. ‘Gown’, with string arrangements by Oliver Coates, is a highlight:

Finally, a record that only came out last week but has been on repeat ever since: Jerkcurb’s dreamlike Lynchian Night Fishing on a Calm Lake.

And, why not, here are the books I read this year. I was lucky enough to interview a number of these authors, so if you fancy listening to me chatting to Josie Long, Evie King, Rose Ruane, Rebecca Watson and David Collard, check out The Allender Calendar wherever you get your pods.

Because I Don’t Know What You Mean and What You Don’t – Josie Long
Lost in the Garden – Adam S. Leslie (eerie folk horror, recommended)
Orbital – Samantha Harvey
Rejection – Tony Tulathimutte (outrageously funny)
The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2 1974–80 – Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair
Ashes to Admin: Tales from the Caseload of a Council Funeral Officer – Evie King
Birding – Rose Ruane
This is Yesterday – Rose Ruane
Little Scratch – Rebecca Watson
I Will Crash – Rebecca Watson
Multiple Joyce: 100 Short Essays About James Joyce’s Cultural Legacy – David Collard
Off the Ground: Paul McCartney in the 1990s – J. R. Moores
Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing – Matthew Perry
Perfection – Vincenzo Latronico (the narcissism of small differences novel of our times)
John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs – Ian Leslie
Why Can’t I Just Enjoy Things? A Comedian’s Guide to Autism – Pierre Novellie (podcast forthcoming!)
The Bookshop – Penelope Fitzgerald
The Benefactors – Wendy Erskine (podcast forthcoming!)
Homework: A Memoir – Geoff Dyer
Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure – Lias Saoudi
Thirst: Twelve Drinks that Changed My Life – John Robins (read an early draft of this, it’s brilliant – I think it will help a lot of people)
Every One Still Here – Liadan Ní Chuinn
Chasing the Dark: Encounters with the Supernatural – Ben Machell (fantastic if you’re a fan of Uncanny)
Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood – Lucy Jones
Cold Hand in Mine – Robert Aickman
The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading – Sam Leith
Will There Ever Be Another You – Patricia Lockwood (I loved this but found it quite hard going)
The Expansion Project – Ben Pester (podcast forthcoming!)
Am I in the Right Place? – Ben Pester
A Whole Life – Robert Seethaler

2025 was the year when I finally had the courage to give up on a book I wasn’t enjoying. I thought I would really love Little, Big by John Crowley after listening to an excellent Weird Studies podcast about it, but I couldn’t find a way into it. Maybe next year!

I’m also currently in the middle of Ian McEwan’s brilliant but thoroughly depressing What We Can Know. And this is the year that I finally got stuck into Tune In, the first volume of All These Years, Mark Lewisohn’s unparalleled biography of the Beatles. That should keep me going over Christmas.

Have a good festive season and I’ll see you on the other side.

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