A relativistic Queen song, sacred Byrd, and Hosono at 79

At 79, Hosono is still making music that resists the usual Western categories: psych-folk, electronics, Japanese pop history, and exotica in the same bloodstream.

Cowen put DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS on his first-cut list of 2025 records that impressed him. Its proudly local frame is part of the record’s reach, not a limitation on it.

Norwegian-Mexican ambient dub with a Pauline Oliveros-like attention to space. Sounds keep changing status as memory, texture, and event.

Young New York rock that remains disreputable, funny, and structurally unstable instead of settling for merely good guitar music.

Three composers rather than leader plus rhythm section. Alto, piano, and Cuban rhythmic intelligence continually rearrange the hierarchy.

British music-hall nostalgia becomes a science-fiction song about relativistic time dilation. The misreading and the revelation both improve it.

Saxophone, global woodwinds, percussion, and electronics. The retreat from sax into flute now sounds like the detour needed to make the return interesting.

Orchestral pop, sacred-music gestures, and multilingual vocals made without reducing the whole thing to a sensible proposition.

Murky, southern, faintly medieval R.E.M. before the band learned to explain itself.

Guatemalan cello and voice meet American free-guitar abrasion. Unexpectedly warm, but with enough friction to avoid beautiful-experimental-record syndrome.

Catholic sacred music written inside Protestant England makes national music considerably more interesting than flags and anthems.

A Chinese rap phenomenon worth keeping in the sequence because eclectic should mean more than jazz, classical, and indie.

French electronic pop in which the production does at least as much compositional work as the melody.

An unusually low-rubato Chopin performance: familiar music made strange enough that the listener has to recalibrate.

Musically cheerful, lyrically vicious, and attacking national solidarity from inside its own vernacular.

A British experimental ensemble connecting free improvisation, homemade live electronics, Stockhausen, and tape manipulation.

The rhythmic feel remains difficult to imitate without merely sounding like someone imitating D’Angelo.