In this segment, we round up the best albums released each month. From Sudan Archives to Snocaps, here are, in alphabetical order, the best albums of October 2025.
Agriculture, The Spiritual Sound
The title of Agriculture’s astounding new album is lifted from the statement that’s printed onto their T-shirts: “I love the spiritual sound of ecstatic black metal by the band Agriculture.” On the follow-up to their 2023’s self-titled LP, the Los Angeles band toys with the technical boundaries of the genre and stretches its transcendent power, partly by digging through the muck of how it feels to love its intense extremes. Shifting between and blurring the visions (and vocals) of main songwriters Dan Meyer and Leah Levinson, its waves are unpredictable but frequently exultant in their chaotic spawl. The most fitting metaphor arrives on the closing track, which ends with the proclamation: “Sometimes I’m lifted and sometimes they crash down on me/ I’m totally out of control/ With a mouth full of water.” Rad the full review.
bloodsports, Anything Can Be a Hammer
From their first rehearsal together, it took less than a year for bloodsports to record their blistering debut LP, Anything Can Be a Hammer. Produced by Hayden Ticehurst, the album innervates the band’s slowcore foundations, its volatile songs often beginning with spare, somber guitar parts before bursting with noise, though never exactly in the direction you expect them to. Murphy’s lyrics teeter between sweet stream-of-consciousness and nightmarish dejection, blurring the line between fragility and confidence. “It forces an odd reaction/ Coarse and affirmed/ Cuts like a razor,” he sings almost self-consciously on the closing title track, which might leave you feeling the same way: no less alone, but strangely moved by the ever-evolving chaos. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with bloodsports.
Eliza McLamb, Good Story
Written after she relocated from Los Angeles to New York, Eliza McLamb‘s sophomore LP as wry and introspective as her Sarah Tudzin-produced debut while leaning into feelings of absurdity and chaos; not just taking stock of the changes in her early 20s, but unpacking the self-narrativizing patterns behind them. “Writing it down and making it real/ Skipping the step where I remember to feel,” she sings on the title track, reconciling by holding the stories lightly and reminding herself the present is all she has: boring and difficult, sacred and eternal. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Eliza McLamb.
feeo, Goodness
feeo frames her fragile, eerily intimate songs against the backdrop of infinity. Cosmic possibilities and absurd injustices shimmer at the edges of Goodness, making its vision feel as wide as it is singular; yet the more microscopic details and emotional nuances the London artist homes in on, the more her sonic poems scan as small epics, oozing through the connective tissue of a deeper world. At 39 minutes, Theodora Laird’s full-length debut is astonishingly rich; it swirls, brews, and burrows, rewarding you the further you stay along with it. Her voice is as beautiful as ever but at times almost vaporized by its surroundings, as if everything is always hanging by a very fine thread. But her discerning eye and sense of presence remains infrangible. “I’m only a witness,” she sings, bearing like few artists dare to.
Flock of Dimes, The Life You Save
Jenn Wasner’s radiant new album under the Flock of Dimes moniker creates a warmly inviting, deceptively straightforward environment to accommodate its complex ideas around addiction and co-dependency. Two decades into her career – with several solo records under her belt aside from her work in Wye Oak and collaborations with Bon Iver, Sylvan Esso, and many others – the simplicity of its songs can feel subversive, and, more importantly, the only way to really sit with and wrench the truth out of them, paradoxical as it may seem. As she reminds herself on ‘Defeat’, “I’m inside it, after all.” Read our inspirations interview with Flock of Dimes.
Florence + the Machine, Everybody Scream
“Let me put out a record and not have it ruin my life,” Florence Welch sings on ‘Music by Men’, a relatively unassuming song from her latest album that cuts to its very core. It’s not fame that comes close to destroying her life, Everybody Scream suggests, but the very human drive to push through the body’s limits, to satisfy her compulsion to perform. Welch may indulge in magical realism here and there, but the visceral origins of these songs are hard to overstate: in 2023, complications from a miscarried ectopic pregnancy forced her into emergency surgery mid-tour, which saved her life and prompted an exploration of witchcraft and pagan imagery. Still seeking cathartic release, she delivers a torrential and shadowy record that’s anything but lacking in big choruses and brutal confrontation. Read the full review.
Hannah Frances, Nested in Tangles
Following last year’s Keeper of the Shepherd, Hannah Frances‘ fifth LP is another dazzling invitation into the singer-songwriter’s deeply interconnected world. Continuing her collaboration co-producer Kevin Copeland, Frances expands the earthy intricacies of her last album by leaning into graceful, winding maximalism; if her previous album was a solemn excavation of grief, familial dysfunction, and a turbulent upbringing, Nested in Tangles spirals outward instead of burrowing further in, creating a lush environment through which past and present selves can move and change shape. Gnarled, playful, and ultimately therapeutic, it knows when to breathe fire and softly exhale, nestle and branch out. “Recollections move through in sudden shifting shapes,” she intones on the final track, “I release into the unburdening.” Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Hannah Frances.
Jay Som, Belong
When the time came to revisit her solo project, Melina Duterte felt the urge to open up her sound to outside collaborators, enlisting contributions from Joao Gonzalez (of Soft Glas), Mk.gee/illuminati hotties collaborator Mal Hauser, Steph Marziano, and Kyle Pulley, as well as guest vocals from some of her biggest heroes, including Paramore’s Hayley Williams, Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins, and Mini Trees’ Lexi Vega. Belong, her first new album in six years, is expansive and exciting at every turn, clearly energized as much by Duterte’s experimental impulses as her nostalgic love for classic alternative rock. Even when they lean into moodier, more subdued territory, these songs aren’t meant for sulking, but as Duterte puts it on ‘Past Lives’, spiraling up. It’s good company to feel a part of. Read our inspirations interview with Jay Som.
keiyaA, hooke’s law
keiyaA was feeling numb as the hype around her last album, 2020’s Forever, Ya Girl, began to die down, when she came across a post by writer Mandy Harris Williams: “a downward spiral is a loaded spring.” He was citing the concept in physics that became the title of, and poetic fuel for, the Chicago-born singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist’s latest album, hooke’s law. Building on the avant-R&B vision of her debut, it’s a dazzling portrait of jadedness unlike any in the genre while remaining absolute playful, both in its lush experimentation and silly one-liners. It’s not claustrophobic, exactly, so much as club music from the bottom of an emotional well. “I toast to lighten up the pain,” she offers on the closing track, “Until we meet again/ Start again.”
Rocket, R Is for Rocket
Named after a song by ‘90s post-hardcore outfit Radio Flyer, Rocket‘s debut album was recorded between 64 Sound and the Foo Fighters’ Studio 606, but rather than calling in a big-ticket indie producer, guitarist Desi Scaglione helmed the process himself. All but one of the record’s early singles were tracked at Studio 606, pushing forth its most thunderous and anthemic qualities; but what makes R Is for Rocket such a refreshing, fully-realized debut is its emotional range and earnest experimentation. “I wanna be the one to make it out of your dreams,” Alithea Tuttle repeats on ‘Another Second Chance’, as they all sound like they’re living their own. Read our Artist Spotlight interview.
Snocaps, Snocaps
If the words Waxahatchee, Swearin’, or P.S. Eliot mean anything to you, the surprise debut from Snocaps might be the best musical surprise of the year. It’s the return of the Crutchfield twins, whose first band, the Ackleys, made waves in Birmingham, Alabama when they were just 15. Allison sometimes plays as part of Waxahatchee, Katie’s biggest, now Grammy-nominated project, and they’ve promised to perform material from P.S. Eliot, their second band, when they tour together later this year. They split their self-titled album’s tracklist evenly, ricocheting between their diverging (but never discordant) songwriting instincts. Backed by two musicians Katie worked with on her latest album, Tigers Blood, MJ Lenderman and Brad Cook, Snocaps is as warm and spontaneous as it is thorny and subtly miraculous. Read the full review.
Sudan Archives, The BPM
Sudan Archives’ lavish, ambitious world keeps expanding on THE BPM, but not at the expense of vulnerability – quite the opposite. Broadly speaking, the virtuoso’s third LP is as inventive as her 2022 breakout Natural Brown Prom Queen, but it also at times feels like a totally different album: wilder and more confounding its musical swings, more existential in its post-breakup candor. Sudan and her collaborators’ production is hypnotic and breathless with ideas without ever falling out of sync with the singer’s emotional overflow. “Sometimes I can get real low but I am high right now,” she sings on ‘Los Cinci’, prizing every point on the spectrum equally.
The Antlers, Blight
The Antlers’ new album, Blight, widens the scope of Peter Silberman’s songwriting by reckoning with environmental catastrophe, taking cues from a range of science fiction media. But it begins in a homey place: the unsparing intimacy of Silberman’s voice, admitting to the ways he’s contributing to the destruction by simply going about his day, the way you might be when you first press play on the record: having a meal, ordering it. If you have mourned with the psychological devastation of 2009’s Hospice or 2011’s Burst Apart, it is disarming and powerful to hear his soulful whisper carrying the same weight in this conceptual framework. Though when Blight spirals toward a series of ambiguous apocalyptic events, it once again feels not conceptual but psychological, the sound of ecological anxiety – corrosive, wordless, outstretched – turning what could be a familiarly delicate (by the Antlers’ standards) listen into an eerily fragile one. Read our inspirations interview with The Antlers.
They Are Gutting a Body of Water, LOTTO
As the most pioneering band in modern shoegaze, TAGABOW could capitalize on a fantastical, watered-down version of a sound that’s only getting more popular, especially on their first LP for a bigger label in NYC’s ATO Records. They could shroud everything in glitchy layers of artifice and mutter poetic lyrics that mean nothing for the rest of their careers. Douglas Dulgarian’s way of avoiding that was making a record he’s deemed “too real” – confessional, euphoric, and achingly, nauseatingly beautiful. “I finally feel the comforting, familiar feeling of potential sleep rising up through the bile in my throat,” he says on the first song of a record filled with truths that are hard to stomach. But there’s hardly a feeling of finality to it – against all odds, it’s another fruitful beginning. Read the full review.
