The question of what constitutes an EP did not go away in 2025. A certain artist who topped our EPs list several years ago and has managed to do so again – with a very different project – stirred up the conversation early in the year, which also included promising debuts, esoteric experiments, and cathartic farewells utilizing the format. Familiar faces in the indie world tested out new projects, while others expanded the world of an earlier record. Everyone threw a bit, or a whole lot, of shoegaze in there. Here are the 25 best EPs of 2025.

25. Parts Work, Parts Work

Hop Along’s Frances Quinlan has stayed relatively quiet since their debut album, Likewise, came out over five years ago, so it’s striking to hear the lines “Even though I’m the one coming back here again/ You could also say I am, in fact, departing” on Parts Work’s first single. A collaboration with Hop Along contributor Kyle Pulley, his Thin Lips bandmate Chrissy Tashjian, and former Hop Along member Dominic Angelella, Quinlan’s new project offers a return that’s slightly daring, slightly bitter, yet altogether satisfying. In that way, the fiddle absorbs an electric guitar’s grittiness on ‘Trenton’, zany riffs diffuse into the sweetest constellation of instruments as Quinlan pleads for help on ‘Clowd’, and no amount of electronic manipulation can overshadow the sheer power of their voice. There’s quite a lot of it on Parts Work, which is just four tracks long, including the playfully indecipherable ‘Max Wrench’. But it underlines how Quinlan’s strange grip on language mirrors their grasp on existence. “There was always room for my way to being alive,” they sing on the closer, “The method is mine/ The method is alright.” 

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24. she’s green, Chrysalis

she’s green make the kind of shoegaze that tends to melt into the atmosphere, not quite as noisy or hooky as their recent tourmates in Glixen and Softcult. But on their latest EP Chrysalis, they prove there’s real muscle and heart to their Slowdive-coded aesthetic. Zofia Smith’s iridescent voice reaches too many high notes to fade into the background, giving weight to familiar tropes in the genre: ghosts taking on the shape of distorted guitars (‘Graze’), love as a delicate daydream (‘Silhouette’). The visceral drumming and pummeling during some of the softer moments suggest it’s often the beautiful dreams that land a punch to the gut. Rather than shrouding them in layers of gauze, she’s green remind us they can’t be buried for too long. 

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23. Nilüfer Yanya, Dancing Shoes

Dancing Shoes is knowingly not Nilüfer Yanya’s most spirited work. A sense of weariness creeps in on the opener ‘Kneel’, and it never fully dissipates. The EP’s title strikes you as somewhat ironic, not least considering the industrial beats that kick in at some of its most pensive moments, like the lines “Heaven knows the way you hold me/ Let ‘em know I feel this lonely” on ‘Cold Heart’. But these holdovers from last year’s My Method Actor are far from undercooked. Yanya and songwriting partner Wilma Archer flesh them out in ways that twist them out of their icy shapes: the searing guitars on ‘Kneel’, the swelling distortion on ‘Where to Look’. They remain lonely songs for all their embellishments, but they deserved the light of day.

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22. Porridge Radio, The Machine Starts to Sing

We lost a lot of bands in 2025, but none offered a means to grieve as cathartic as Porridge Radio. If one word could summarize the band’s music, “catharsis” would be the one – but The Machine Starts to Sing, an EP comprising songs recorded during the sessions for last year’s Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me, is more subdued in its delivery. Apart from the six-minute opening title track, the rest of the songs tend to downplay their climactic buildups by relying mostly on acoustic instrumentation. Even the closer ‘I’ve Got a Feeling (Stay Lucky)’, which swells with organic intensity, avoids blown-out distortion. “No need to talk about/ No need to cry about it/ Like dust, it all just blows away,” Dana Margolin sings on ‘Don’t Want to Dance’. Porridge Radio, of course, are the gale-force wind – and the best we can do is keep listening.

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21. Dean Blunt and Elias Rønnenfelt, lucre

lucre emerged, sort of ethereally and exclusively on YouTube, as a New Year’s present, a small window into the seemingly vast collaborative world of Dean Blunt, Elias Rønnenfelt, and Vegyn. The 16-minute EP was subsequently released on streaming services, but its sequencing did little to detract from its transient, timeless mood. Rønnenfelt does an astounding job sinking into Rønnenfelt’s slithery, shapeshifting guitar work, which seems precisely made to both accommodate and throw off his dissociative balladeering. It helps when Vegyn locks in a groove, as in ‘3’, while the almost straightforward post-punk of ‘4’ belies a world of disappointments in fragmented poetry: “Unified in slumber/ Wrecking sudden fame.” lucre sleeps it off in the hopes of a luscious dream.

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20. gyrofield, Suspension of Belief

The EP format is a great vessel for left-field electronic music; last year, releases by Djrum and Verraco earned a spot on our list for their intricate, unpredictable grooves. Aside from Djrum’s full-length follow-up to Meaning’s Edge, gyrofield’s Suspension of Belief contains some of the year’s most mind-bendingly layered percussion: misty and enigmatic but always attractive. It seems to seep out of the subconscious until Bristol’s Flo State guests on ‘Rorschach’ to give it language, reflecting on “this radical wholeness.” But gyrofield – the 22-year-old producer aka Kiana Li – really honours the format by closing with the most off-kilter track, ‘Brinjal’, which lurches so eerily you could imagine billy woods rapping over it. It’s enough to affirm Li will already have ventured into new territory by the next release.

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19. Wishy, Planet Popstar

Though these six songs are technically B-sides that didn’t make Wishy’s debut LP Triple Seven, a couple more and they’d have a compelling full-length follow-up in their hands. Yet this is a band that excels at and experiments with the EP format, as evidenced by 2023’s Paradise, which made our list that year and was compiled with the new one as Paradise on Planet Popstar on sky blue vinyl. As the title suggests, Wishy are on top of the world here – or maybe somewhere on the outskirts of it. Spellbound and starry-eyed, the record approaches euphoria with the shakiness of living in the real world, soaring and shimmering but willing to undercut its own sweetness. It’s elevated, most of all, by Nina Pitchkites and Kevin Krauter’s dynamic interplay, which often frames the songs in conversation with each other. “Book a flight to the sun/ ‘Cause I’d rather be burned alive/ If I thought it would catch your eye,” Krauter sings on the title track, while Pitchkites laments, on the bubbly ‘Chaser’, “I’m just another one of your trips around the sun.” For the listener, at least, the ride’s worthwhile.

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18. Florence Road, Fall Back

For now, Florence Road wear their influences on their sleeves, but few rising acts did so as proudly and confidently as the Irish quartet on their debut release, Fall Back. The EP opens with their poppiest song, ‘Break the Girl’, which is straight out of the Olivia Rodrigo playbook – and the band opened for Rodrigo this year. Rodrigo’s producer, Dan Nigro, is one of a few big-ticket producers who contributed to the EP, co-producing the wistfully lush ‘Caterpillar’. That one remind you of Phoebe Bridgers? That’s her collaborator Marshall Vore in the credits of the theatrical closer ‘Heavy’. But none of those facts are as remarkable as Florence Road’s fine-tuned emotionality, which makes them sound like they’ve been doing it for as long as any of their inspirations. But at their most spiteful, on the breakup anthem ‘Goodnight’, Lily Aron lets the goofiness slip, and you hope this kind of youthful charm never eludes them.

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17. Moin, Belly Up

It’s hard to believe that Moin’s debut LP Moot!, given the band’s evolution over the past four years, now almost seems like a conventional post-rock record. Three albums in and the London trio continues disassembling its rhythm-focused experiments, leaning further into jazz and mutating their approach as they bring in new collaborators. Or rather, on the gripping Belly Up EP, bring past collaborators deeper into their world: Qatari-American writer Sophia Al-Maria, who contributed to their previous album You Never End, appears on ‘See’, a killer of an opening track that also features the frantic saxophone of Ben Vince. “To obliterate the edge of my understanding in the way that things oughta be,” as Al-Maria puts it, seems to encapsulate Moin’s M.O.: interweaving the furious with the languid, the way impending doom masquerades as routine. Even when they create a mood of obvious disorientation on ‘I Don’t Know Where to Look’, they’re quick to supplant it with another one. Look at it a few years from now, they seem to suggest, and it’ll sound completely different.

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16. Witch Post, Beast

Even if you’re not familiar with the solo music of the two people behind Witch Post – Alaska Reid from Livingston, Montana, and Dylan Fraser from Livingston, Scotland – you can hear them discovering a certain kind of freedom on Beast. Reid, who could have leaned further into pop after two records with production from A.G. Cook – one of which made our EPs list back in 2020 – lets loose with a range of grunge, dance-punk, and ‘90s alt-rock influences, still very dreamlike but less steeped in her diaristic lyrics. And her voice enchants just as much when it intersects with Fraser’s, especially on the stripped-back ‘Spell’, where she responds to his plea for magic by cooing into her verse. “There’s beauty in the rust/ There’s a song in the rust,” they sing on the next song, and polished as its darkness may seem, their raw dynamic has yielded at least a few memorable tunes.

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15. xaviersobased, once more

You’d be forgiven for mistaking once more as the work of an unsigned artist. xaviersobased’s dizzying, off-kilter effort is in fact his first as an Atlantic signee, even though there are at least a few moments where you can imagine the New York rapper-producer shrugging off the influence of any major label exec. Who knows about the album on the way, but once more doesn’t dilute so much barrage the listener with his nonconformist attitude, reaching its apex on the OsamaSon collab ‘uncomfy’, which suggests that Deafheaven’s euphoric fusion of shoegaze and black metal wasn’t inventive enough. xaviersobased’s gleeful abandon elicits a smile at the most nonsensical juxtapositions, like the gunshot beats threaded over relatively wholesome rapping on ‘red snapper’. You’re advised not to overanalyze this idiosyncratic flurry; just hope it’s retained in whatever comes next.

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14. Grumpy, Piebald

Grumpy make sure we remember their unnerving idiosyncrasies first. Their new EP Piebald, which doubles down on the contradictions of last year’s Wolfed, is bookended by its most eerie, glitchy songs, affirming the grotesque aesthetic of the band’s visuals. Make no mistake, though: these songs are about love, though the kind that’s warped in unconventional, often uncomfortable shapes. Sandwiched between them, though, are tracks like the infectious and uncomplicated ‘Crush’, which delights at the thought of complete lack of supervision, and ‘Proud of You’, which soars like a surefire hit. But it still doesn’t get better than Grumpy at their absolute rawest, a vulnerability rooted in their dynamic as a band: Like a darker spin on a Katy Kirby song, ‘Knot’ finds Heaven Schmitt singing “Holding you last night was worse than holding no one” as if inside the belly of a beast. That’s where the horror spawns.

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13. Glixen, Quiet Pleasures

Glixen’s take on shoegaze is crushing, ethereal, lustful – and it’s the delicate sensuality of their music, especially on Quiet Pleasures, that separates them from many of their contemporaries and connects them intimately to their forebears. With production from Sonny Diperri (My Bloody Valentine, DIIV, M83), the follow-up to 2023’s She Only Said finds the Phoenix band moving in a more abrasive direction, but in “chasing subdued feelings,” as Aislinn Ritchie sings on ‘avoid’, you can also hear the subtle nuances they introduce to their sound, which is subsumed by the eponymous quiet on the closing track, ‘lick the star’. “She wants a taste of the noise,” it goes, “forever drowning for more.” Let’s hope we get more Glixen sooner rather than later.

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12. Tems, Love Is a Kingdom

Love Is a Kingdom, asserts Tems on her latest EP, and it can be a lonely one. A year after coming through with her official debut Born in the Wild, the Nigerian star surprised fans with a seven-track effort produced almost entirely by herself, and inward-looking as it may be, its production is as multi-dimensional as her singing – not to mention her depictions of love. The tempo may not vary much, but you can hear the quiet determination of ‘First’ blossom into the steeliness of ‘Big Daddy’, the tender uncertainty of ‘I’m Not Sure’ breeding the bemused desperation of ‘What You Need’. Even when coasting on sumptuous, uncomplicated romance, there’s a palpable temperature rise between the neighboring ‘Lagos Love’ and ‘Mine’, and it’s not long before she gets existential about it on the acoustic closer. When she sings about all the emotion at her disposal, you know she’d travel great lengths not just to protect it, but keep its borders fluid and soft.

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11. Scarlet Rae, No Heavy Goodbyes

Scarlet Rae’s debut EP gets heavy pretty fast, both musically and emotionally; the opener, ‘A World Where She Left Me Out’, was the first song Rae wrote after her sister died. The collection finds bliss in radiant, ethereal hooks while avoiding the cloudy lyricism that often pervades them, bluntly enticed, depressed, and disoriented by the range of emotions that accompany grief. “Hope and doom, they tend to balance, right?” she sings on ‘The Reason I Could Sleep Forever’. That balance hardly ever checks out, but what’s striking about No Heavy Goodbyes is how total depletion can act like a light switch, teasing the words and melodies out of the darkness. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Scarlet Rae.

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10. Jane Remover, ♡

Jane Remover’s Revengeseekerz has been cemented as one of the best albums of the year, with the artist’s Venturing record Ghostholding earning at least an honourable mention. But they couldn’t help but close out the year by unleashing the project with such pop potential that they were hesitant to flesh it out into a full-length. Still, ♡ (pronounced 🫶, per the artist) arrived to the delight of fans holding Jane Remover’s 2024 singles in high regard, giving them a home by slightly working them and adding two new songs to the mix. “I build a home from every vision,” they sing on the fantastic ‘Magic I Want U’, meaning they’re free to tweak and explode it at any moment. But more than anything, ♡ benefits from the blissful marriage of these songs, which are high on infatuation and playful irreverence: frying laughter and fireworks, pasting blink-and-you;ll-miss-it samples, splicing a reggaeton beat to a shoegaze song for the hell of it. Even reduced to an EP, it boasts hooks for days. “Said, ‘I wanna make it to Christmas’/ But I fall off the bone,” Jane sings of a relationship on ‘Dream Sequence’. At least when it comes to her music, emotional preservation appears effortless.

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9. Helado Negro, The Last Sound on Earth

Helado Negro’s latest project is generally uptempo and beat-forward, but those qualities dissipate right when Roberto Carlos Lange seems to be answering its titular prompt. The last sound you hear before you die may resemble ‘Zenith’, the EP’s ambient, celestial highlight, which could also be the sound of the world dawning in. “When I wake up in the morning, I can listen to my ears tuning in to the world around me,” the musician said in press materials. “It feels like a blanket being pulled off my eardrums.” The first three songs on The Last Sound on Earth may be jittery and spaced-out, but they exude a blanketless kind of comfort, the way a day in shambles can still inspire hope. It doesn’t end with the last sound, after all. Lange smoothly picks up the groove again on ‘Don’t Give It Up Now’, holding the listener by the hand: “Let’s go.”

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8. ira glass, joy is no knocking nation

A lot of Lise Ivanova’s erratic non-sequiturs may be too esoteric to decode even with a lyric sheet in your hands, but it doesn’t take long for her to wield the word that could sum up joy is no knocking nation: relentless. (It’s how “john the conqueror” is described on the opening ‘it’s a whole “who shot john” story’.) The Chicago post-hardcore outfit’s nervy, pummeling follow-up to their debut EP compound turbulence flexing for the heat is bound to stop you in your tracks, even if you’re very well-versed in the hardcore tradtionsit trades in. Its radical spirit isn’t so straightforward, its jazziness freer than that of contemporaries like Maruja. Jill Roth’s saxophone can be groovy or merely percussive, expressive or eruptive; Ivanova’s delivery isn’t just incendiary, but capable of making the music’s abrasive feel physical. No song on joy is more astounding of an exercise in the band’s extreme dynamics than ‘new guy (big softie)’, the EP’s centerpiece: relentless, yet thrillingly exacting.

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7. DJ Python, i was put on this earth

Instead of a traditional press statement, DJ Python announced i was put on this earth with a philosophical conversation between two unnamed people – yearners, if you will – one of which says, “I wish we could all just lay around, do nothing, talk about ideas that lead to nothing, not bothered by conclusion, not driven by production.” The languid beauty of the EP feels like a direct expression of that desire, putting it more in conversation with the vaporous electronic pop of the producer’s Natural Wonder Beauty Concept project than the reggaeton and dembow experiments that put him on the map. On his first release for XL Recordings, he tries out singing with the same hazy intentionality, swooping so low on ‘Coquine’ that his voice nearly rubs against the bass. Even when he collaborates with reggaeton star Isabella Lovestory on ‘Besos Robados’, he sticks to the barren yet beautiful mood. And when his vocals are nowhere to be heard on the closer ‘Elio’s Lived Behind My House Forever’, his synth tapestry sounds like a dozen shades of the letter z. You could never call it sleepy, though – just hypnotic.

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6. forty winks, Love Is a Dog From Hell

Love Is a Dog From Hell is as wickedly strange as its title suggests, no less cutesy than its cover art, and way catchier than you’d expect from indie rock this spiked with hardcore and metal influences. From the breathy heaviness of ‘Liadfh’ to the irresistibly cacophonous banger ‘commie bf’, forty winks own their aimlessness by snapping it into easily digestible songs that are collectively more endearing than the mess that’s inspired them. It’s effective thanks in part to its short runtime, but the mathy catharsis of the closing Noise’, complete with frantic guitar soloing, hints at the band’s grand ambitions. If you can’t change hell, you might as well broadcast it.

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5. fantasy of a broken heart, Chaos Practitioner

Everyone heaping praise on this year’s releases from Water From Your Eyes and This Is Lorelei should show some love to fantasy of a broken heart, whose latest EP is even better than their frenetic 2024 debut Feats of Engineering. Mixed by Nate Amos (Water From Your Eyes and This is Lorelei), of the aforementioned bands with which the duo have spent months on the road, Chaos Practicioner refines the rhythmic and melodic puzzles of their songwriting – solving more than it leaves in pieces – without compromising on its oddball humour; the bossa nova-inflected ‘Victory Path’ begins interpolating ‘La Vie En Rose’ to court the opening line “Swish me around like Listerine.” As densely colourful as the collection is, vocalists Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz earnestly embrace not just the dynamic interplay of their voices but a pervasive darkness; the final track and standout is called ‘We Confront the Demon in Mysterious Ways’, but their music has never been more transparent in its exorcism of toxic human forces. “I don’t know what I want from the moment/ I say softly as I trace your eyelids,” Wollowitz sings, in striking vulnerability that contrasts a boisterous moment like the Brutus VIII’s guest spot. But it’s true, what the Slow Hollows member joins in to say: You’ll want just a little more.

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4. MSPAINT, No Separation

If MSPAINT’s debut album, Post-American, was synth-punk with an emphasis on punk, the No Separation EP leans harder on synth – which doesn’t say much coming from the proudly guitarless band from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The bass is distorted, the drums electrifying, Dedee’s vociferous delivery and self-reflective lyrics turning every song into an anthem – but they all started as demos from synth player Nick Panella, and you can tell. As brief as this record is, Panella’s wide-reaching experimentation stretches the boundaries of MSPAINT’s sound in ways that should energize their sophomore full-length, especially as it’s amplified by production from Julian Cashwan Pratt and Harlan Steed of Show Me the Body. It swirls and screeches around the acceptance, on ‘Surveillance’, that we’re “living on a scorched earth,” perhaps the most hair-raising moment in the band’s discography. Emphasis on living.

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3. The Orchestra (For Now), Plan 75

2025 was almost as big a year for seven-piece bands that invited comparisons to Black Country, New Road as it was for that band itself. At least for two of them: one, a Michigan-based outfit that put out its self-titled debut album, and the other – the one that actually sprung from the same Windmill scene as BC,NR – which released two great EPs. While their name may allude to the often volatile nature of such explosive, emotionally intense post-rock acts, there is certainly a sense of continuity between Plan 75 and Plan 76, whose ambition never masks their framing as scene-setters for an even bigger project. Here, dramatically baroque instrumentation meets modern references to Jubilee YouTube series, Zadie Smith books, Skins, and potentially the now-Windmill-adjacent Caroline Polachek and scenemates deathcrash. From the theatrical flair of a murder ballad like ‘The Strip’ to the 8-minute epic ‘Wake Robin’, both the nerve and craft behind Plan 75 feels deep-seated; even if the music sometimes evokes a sinking ship, you hope they’ll bear out the storm.

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2. Tracey, Tracey

Tracey – “two friends making music,” according to their Bandcamp bio, looking like “ヽ(•‿•)ノヽ(•‿•)ノ” – waste no time delivering the rush. ‘Sex life’ slides in all harsh and playful, an obvious banger of an opener that knows it’s got your attention, even if you know little to nothing about the people who made it. But then the track augments its hyperpop cheekiness with a dreamy sensuality, its crystalline keys broadcasting its signal off into the ether, where the rest of the EP coasts. Lush, cloudy, and intoxicating, these four songs cover more ground than most of the year’s albums but present a unique sensibility, painting with the sky as its canvas. In just over five minutes, they’ve ventured so far that when one voice sings “look down,” the distance seems incalculable. But every song here warms itself up to you like it could be your next favorite, never appearing too alien or enigmatic. Even as a massive synth yearns over chugging guitars, which erupt into fireworks, closer ‘Take Care’ feels palpably human. Coming from Pitchfork’s label of the year, AD93, we can expect way more from Tracey, ヽ(•‿•)ノ or not.

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1. Ethel Cain, Perverts

It would be natural to view Perverts, the daring follow-up to Ethel Cain’s 2022 breakout Preacher’s Daughter, as a response to, and rejection of, everything about success that might register as noise, not least because it was accompanied by a Tumblr post entitled ‘The Consequence of Audience’. Preacher’s Daughter amassed a fervent following, and Perverts no doubt poses a challenge to the segment of Cain’s audience that has trouble engaging with the artist’s persona in the absence of unambiguous lore and soaring melodies. Yet the 90-minute project – released at the start of the year but hardly overshadowed by the proper album that succeeded it – doesn’t feel like a departure so much as an opportunity for Hayden Anhedönia to home in on the esoteric darkness she holds a deep reverence for, the eerie dissonance and muffled silences that were seen tangential rather than core to her songwriting. Read the full review.

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