In this segment, we round up the best albums released each month. From Bon Iver to Maria Somerville, here are, in alphabetical order, the 10 best albums of April 2025.
Black Country, New Road, Forever Howlong
Building on 2023’s Live at Bush Hall, Forever Howlong leverages Black Country, New Road’s fluidity as a band with a heightened level of precision and strikes a subtler balance between sonic lightness and emotional intensity. With vocals, and largely songwriting, now split between Tyler Hyde, Georgia Ellery, and May Kershaw, the album serendipitously, yet potently, coalesces around a female perspective, yet the experiences they relay reach far beyond these three women. It’s in the loneliest moments that you hear them band together, all playing out time. Read the full review.
Bon Iver, SABLE, fABLE
First, Bon Iver reframe the entirety of last year’s SABLE, EP by repurposing it as the prologue to their fifth studio album. Throughout it, Justin Vernon puts a lot of stock in that prefix: things are perpetually jumbled, but they can be remade, maybe even replaced. Each new path buzzes with possibilities, but fABLE does away with the fear and paranoia these can stir up, attaching itself, miraculously, to an abundance of joy. It’s clear-headed and radiant, drawing upon elements of soul and R&B that Vernon has harnessed before, but never with such refreshing immediacy and purpose. “Seek the light,” he urged all those years ago, and damn it if he won’t keep looking. He’s in such good company, after all, and it’s showing more than ever. Read the full review.
Colin Miller, Losin’
While he continues to build an impressive resume as an engineer, Asheville musician Colin Miller found time to release Losin’, the heart-wrenching follow-up to 2023’s Haw Creek. Featuring MJ Lenderman on drums and guitar, as well as his Wednesday/The Wind bandmates Ethan Baechtold (bass, keys, aux percussion) and Xandy Chelmis (pedal steel), the album was recorded at Drop of Sun with producer Alex Farrar. There are a couple of layers to the its title: the record untangles a period of intense grief following the death of Gary King, who owned the Haw Creek property and served as a father figure to Miller; it’s also a literal reference to trying to win the lottery in hopes of buying the home, which he rented for 13 years. Even when the pain swells, echoing in every note his friends play, Miller keeps up the effort – if not for the unattainable, then simply to keep the engine running. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Colin Miller.
Florist, Jellywish
Emily Sprague has no trouble baring her soul out in her lyrics. Intimacy, like tenderness, has and never will be a difficult thing for the Florist enterprise, or “friendship project,” as they call it, which includes Rick Spataro, Jonnie Baker, and Felix Walworth. The challenge, bigger than ever on their first album since their resplendent 2022 self-titled effort, is sounding at peace with a world hurtling towards catastrophe; staying soft, friendly, and curious when grief continues to bear its mark on you. But the music can also only be as delicate as the line between the threads of consciousness Sprague bounces between – waking, altered, existential – thin enough to let light slip through yet expansive enough to get lost in. For all its quiet optimism and awe, Jellywish is never quite restful or easygoing; much in the same way that, for all its introspection, it never truly stands alone. Read the full review.
Jane Remover, Revengeseekerz
Jane Remover could have spent several albums coasting on, even softening, the blend of shoegaze and bedroom pop that made 2023’s Census Designated a success. Instead, the experimental artist cemented their status by pushing everything – including the limits of those genres, but also rap, pop, and club music at large – to the red. Revengeseekerz puts its money on the feverish excess and self-referentiality that could deter fans who came on board with the last album, but the unbounded rawness that rises to the fore makes this record an absolute blast. It’s explosive and dexterous in ways that put the self above everything: “Might close up shop,” Jane sings ‘Fadeoutz’, “if it means I can live my life.”
Lily Seabird, Trash Mountain
Trash Mountain is named after a pink house sitting on a decommissioned landfill site at the back of Burlington, Vermont’s Old North End, which Lily Seabird has called home for several years now. But the singer-songwriter has also spent much of that time on the road, touring her own music and as a bassist with Greg Freeman, Lutalo, and Liz Cooper. Freeman, along with Robber Robber’s Nina Cates and drummer Zack James, accompany her on just a few songs on the new album, which is intentionally sparser than previous efforts like 2024’s Alas, (which was accompanied by an acoustic EP in its Lame-O Records reissue) and 2021’s Beside Myself. Rough-hewn yet warmly realized, the album centers on Seabird’s captivating voice as it lingers on a moment, trembles in grief, or sighs around a melody for just that bit more relief. “Where the wind blows everything I try to remember and forget/ On the edge of town/ Where when I’m home I rest my head” is how she describes Trash Mountain, recording to bask in its comfort a little longer. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Lily Seabird.
Maria Somerville, Luster
On Maria Somerville’s 4AD debut, Luster, there’s hardly a line between pristine songs and spacious atmospherics. The Irish musician is an expert at diffusing it, just like her curiosity towards the natural world wafts into her internal one. The follow-up to 2019’s All My People is lush, liminal, and luminous, all those “l” words that earn the record its title. Even at its most reserved, it expands beyond the sense of solitude it seems to be inspired by, rendering it one of the most inviting – and best – dream pop albums you’ll likely hear all year.
Samia, Bloodless
Samia introduced her third album by tracing a line between the inexplicable phenomenon of bloodless cattle mutilation – ‘Bovine Excision’ – and her own experience of womanhood. Though there are pockets of Bloodless that remain a mystery no matter how many times you listen or scrutinize the lyrics – too many poetic turns of phrase, contexts erased, men blurring together – the bigger draw is Samia’s unique ability to turn the inexplicable into the phenomenal; to make beauty out of a void, not necessarily by filling it. It may leave you with more questions than it answers, yet it astounds and surprises you at every turn. The songs rip straight through the heart – even if you have no idea how they even got there.
Thanya Iyer, TIDE/TIED
Thanya Iyer‘s immersive collage of spiritual jazz, experimental pop, and ambient folk grew more fully-realized on 2020’s Polaris long-listed KIND, and the multi-instrumentalist and her band continue to home in on it on their latest LP, TIDE/TIED. Though they released an EP, rest, in 2022, the five-year gap between albums lends the new collection a different kind of gravity, and the group – including co-producers Pompey and Daniel Gélinas – deftly bear the weight. It is a stirring, swirling antidote to numbness, but it is also the rare kind of therapeutic, jazz-inflected, spiritually-minded music that doesn’t skip to mantras so much as circle the journey around them, paddling through uncertainty and pain. “What do we do when we can’t breathe?/ I forget how to be, how to feel like I’m free,” she sings on ‘Low Tides’. Riding with the feeling, with this group of people, brings her closer to a future far beyond our immediate line of vision. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Thanya Iyer.
The Ophelias, Spring Grove
It’s been five years since the Ophelias’ last album, Crocus, but its follow-up, Spring Grove, is by no means a post-pandemic document. Spencer Peppet’s lyrics burrow much deeper into past wounds, burdened by dreams that recur without end or explanation, blurring the line between the present moment and what’s clearly come to pass. When the titular Spring Grove cemetery comes up, it is in reference to the summer of 2014, yet as if neither person would now be the first to speak. “The feeling of you haunts me and I/ Know that I can recognize that,” she confesses on new single ‘Cicada’, and the whole record gives it shape even when the ghosts cease to follow. Read our interview with the Ophelias.
