In this segment, we round up the best albums released each month. From La Dispute to Geese, here are, in alphabetical order, the best albums of September 2025.
Asher White, 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living
More than continuously toeing the line between styles, between coherence and abstraction, Asher White’s music has evolved to prioritize confessional transparency over purity, complexity over wilful obfuscation. That may seem counterintuitive when talking about her latest album, 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living – her 16th overall and first for Joyful Noise – itself an unconventional and anxious reaction to a potential breakout moment, pushing her approach to its eruptive, feastful limits. More than just revealing, its recklessness opens the door to a fascinating place that’s bound to change shape with each subsequent release. If you’re dedicated enough to follow its twists and turns, you’ll want to come back for another look. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Asher White.
Big Thief, Double Infinity
Big Thief find themselves at a creative crossroads. Or, as Adrianne Lenker more poetically puts it on the title track of their new album, Double Infinity: “At the bridge of two infinities/ What’s been lost and what lies waiting.” Recorded at New York’s Power Station Studios, the LP accordingly doesn’t sound like moving on so much as between those vast emotional points, with many of Lenker’s meditations on love reflecting the band’s own disorientation following the departure bassist Max Oleartchik. It is their first album as a trio, but Lenker, guitarist Buck Meek, drummer James Krivchenia’s attempts at recording as one were initially fruitless, so they enlisted a small circle of collaborators that translate the undercurrent of confusion into a sweet, gauzy veil of textures, marrying Lenker’s increasingly mantra-like lyrics with loops, samples, and wordless backing vocals, as well as zither contributions from ambient luminary Laraaji. Read the full review.
Geese, Getting Killed
In the 1965 documentary Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen, which follows the singer-songwriter around the age of 30, a TV interviewer asks what Cohen means when he says he tries to wake up in a state of grace. He describes it as “that kind of balance with which you ride the chaos that you find around you,” adding, “It’s not a matter of resolving the chaos, because there’s something arrogant and warlike about putting the world in order.” I kept thinking about his use of the word warlike as I spun Geese’s revelatory new album, Getting Killed, which wastes no time pointing to the carnage all around while spending most of it in a fervid, ludicrous freefall that fills the gaps between the bizarre chaos of 2023’s 3D Country and Cameron Winter’s solo album Heavy Metal. Read the full review.
Guerilla Toss, You’re Weird Now
“I’m so sorry,” Kassie Carlson proclaims on the opening track of Guerilla Toss‘ new album, emphatic enough to instantly register as irony, “I came to party.” She gets lost as her head throbs on the way to another party on ‘Red Flag to Angry Bull’, where her friend is “Telling me he’s gonna eat the sunshine/ Though he isn’t walking in a straight line.” The burst of positivity is hallucinatory, intoxicating, and downright maddening, yet it also makes complete sense considering how and where the experimental rock band made You’re Weird Now. The album keeps twitching and triumphing in its communal cacophony, precise-engineered to convince you that even if today feels a lot more like a hellhole than a party, you are certainly not alone in it. Read our inspirations interview with Guerilla Toss.
Joan Shelley, Real Warmth
Joan Shelley has been making albums for a decade and a half, yet she always makes each one feel like a new, easy embrace. “I want the anthem that feels like first love/ I want the chorus that warms like fire/ I want the tune that swells like a full moon/ Knows your deepest desire,” she sings about halfway through her easygoing, endlessly hummable 10th LP, Real Warmth, which was recorded in Toronto with producer Ben Whiteley and features contributions from her partner, Nathan Salsburg, as well as The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman and a tight-knit community of Toronto-based musicians, including Philippe Melanson, Karen Ng, Doug Paisley, Tamara Lindeman, Matt Kelley, and Ken Whiteley. Singing with quietly blazing conviction, Shelley often writes through a fantastical lens, but the language they gather in is musical, conversational, nature-loving and totally human. Read the full review.
Joanne Robertson, Blurr
A selfie utilized as an album cover might be the first thing that strikes you about Blurr, making it no surprise the album carries the intimacy of a voice memo – and often sounds like it was recorded directly onto a cell phone. More than staring at yourself in the mirror or inside the screen of a tiny computer, however, Joanne Robertson’s latest release feels like shutting it off and catching your reflection in the blackness. Without any percussive accompaniment, it is full of rhythm, the coiling between her voice and guitar invoking the soul humming through the body: tender and tactile despite its fuzziness, temporal while stretching toward infinity. Oliver Coates’ string contributions, astonishing and meticulously placed, fill out the canvas as if in absolute certainty that endless place is not just reachable, but colours out the solitude.
La Dispute, No One Was Driving the Car
On ‘Saturation Driver’, a highlight from La Dispute’s new album No One Was Driving the Car, disaster flicks play on a muted TV while nobody’s watching – except, that is, Jordan Dreyer’s camera-wielding narrator. Disaster – whether exploited for entertainment, untangling through time, or lost to history – is a fact of life; earlier on the record, Dreyer goes as far as to sing, “Every moment we’re alive a disaster/ A tragedy to be and breathe.” It is also a miracle, he later exalts; the follow-up to 2019’s Panorama is revelatory and windingly rapturous in that way, knotting the vicious truths and transcendent joys its characters are driven towards around the veil of memory, progress, and Christian fundamentalism. Read our inspirations interview with La Dispute.
Total Wife, Come Back Down
After more than a couple of influential records in the increasingly saturated shoegaze genre – 2021’s self-titled LP, 2022’s a blip, and 2023’s in/out – Total Wife did the opposite of fading into obscurity, signing to Philadelphia label Julia’s War and cementing their status with their latest, come back down. It’s a breathlessly inventive and unconventionally dreamy record whose tides are difficult to predict or even identify – mind-melting guitars that get blown out and repurposed as synths, vocals whispered right beside your ear then chopped to oblivion, and a fluid rhythmic backbone evoking, to quote their song ‘rest’, “the beat in between my restlessness.” Pitched between jittery alertness and the edge of sleep, come back down is also a riveting expression of the duo’s dynamic compositional and lyrical instincts, a force that grounds the record in its malleable, blurry transcendence. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Total Wife.
Wednesday, Bleeds
If it sounds like the road is its own fateful character on Bleeds, it might have something to do with when and where it took shape. Entering the studio just a month after vocalist Karly Hartzman and guitarist MJ Lenderman broke up, the North Carolina band were recording off the back of an exhaustive touring schedule in support of 2023’s masterful Rat Saw God. With a couple of stylistic diversions, Wednesday‘s new album no doubt feeds off the gnarly, blazing energy of its predecessor, collaging another tangle of funny, tragic, beautiful stories. But reaching what sounds like a breaking point on the ferocious highlight ‘Wasp’ leads vocalist Karly Hartzman to be just as unsparing on the album’s more intimate moments. The band is about to embark on another tour, but Bleeds sounds like the equivalent of pulling over to let out a good scream. Read the full review.
