Quick-fire Roundup - November/December 2025

Short reviews for some releases that slipped by us these past two months.

Quick-fire Roundup is our chance to highlight a few of the albums we’ve been digging from the past month that we may not have had the time or energy to pump out full essays for. This time, it’s actually a two-for-one: if you’re not quite ready to say goodbye to 2025 yet (and with this doozy of a January, none of us would blame you), here are a few more releases that caught our ears.

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36 - A Warm Static Sphere

60:06 // November 3rd, 2025 // quiet details

Ambient synth stalwart 36 (that’s three-six to you, nerdios) has long since proved his mastery of a billowy space-gazing palette that will sustain all manner of background dreamscapes if you want it to, but which also chimes perfectly with his keen sense for a linear progression over any number of cinematic ascents. These are perhaps best known from his Stasis Sounds for Long-Distance Space Travel series with zakè, the final installment of which dropped last June, but his latest solo effort A Warm Static Sphere is less concerned with panoramic maximalism than gauzy, introspective wash-outs. It’s light on memorable motifs but delivers a stirring sense of harmony (“Part 2” is exactly the kind of emotive stew to have no need to break into anything more ear-catching) and expansive progressions where they count (get a load of “Part 6”!); this music is deeply sheltering to the point that you could do anything from falling in love to staving off a panic attack with it on without (I imagine) making a significant dent in the listening experience, and it’s remarkable how much strength and presence it derives from what, at the end of the day, are just a handful of choice textural intricacies stretched over glacial bpms. Sometimes all you need is the right pillow.(7.5/10)

- Hugh Puddle

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Jehovah Lashing – Eternal Pyre Beneath the Wings of Night
23:19 // November 3rd, 2025 // Self-released

Is it birds’ twittering? Is it 70s laser gun samples? No, it’s Jehovah Lashing’s signature deformed scrapes! This one just barely missed making it onto my list of 2025 favorites, but not for lack of replayability (or replays). Unarguably last year’s most melodic war metal record, if that identifier even applies to this mixture of black, death, grind, and hints of more traditional heavy tropes anymore at this point, Eternal Pyre Beneath the Wings of Night will drill deep into your synaptic vesicles with its treble-to-eleven guitars and thumping drums. And boy, does that bass drum thump!

On top of sounding distinctive production-wise, the Pennsylvania duo’s third full-length is also surprisingly vibrant for a work of its ilk. The aforementioned trad-HM overtones, which at points stick out from the predominantly meloblack-informed structures prominently, make this a, dare I say, grotesquely feel-good spin. What keeps the album out of the higher echelons is its grassroots nature, or more specifically, its entrenchment in tradition on all levels. You’ll have heard all these riffs before from the respective source genres’ specialists. The peculiar blend of styles is every bit as engaging as intended, the production on fucking point, the idea ripe for the picking. Should they develop some wanderlust and dare to push toward more swashbuckling progressions – a more quixotic take on what they’ve got brewing here, if you will – their next album could see them break through. (6.5/10)

- Nex

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The Devil Wears Prada – Flowers

42:26 // November 14th, 2025 // Solid State

Prepare for a take so searingly molten it’s advisable to read through welder’s goggles: Flowers is… actually alright. Oh, I don’t doubt teenage me would be absolutely distraught at the audacity of its sonic handbrake turn — not to mention my opinion of it — but it’s hard to deny that there’s real heart on display here, perhaps moreso than anything TDWP have released in years.

From silly mid-2000s MySpace-metalcore-band-with-ridiculous-song-titles to the more mature stylistic shifts of their later era, TDWP have consistently demonstrated a desire to add depth to their sound. The issue with late-career albums like Transit Blues, Color Decay, and to a lesser extent, The Act, is that they attempted to diversify while maintaining the same framework. As with most half-assed evolutions, something had to give — and that something was the most important element: the emotional immediacy. True, formerly this was mostly down to the eye-watering pipes of frontman Mike Hranica rather than the content itself, but in building upon the musical foundations, this element —mostly unchanged — also began to feel vestigial.

In rebuilding the template, Flowers retains the emotional, angsty ethos of the band’s early work but daubs it onto a new canvas: a blend of solid, if not hugely inspiring, alternative riffs and light post-hardcore vocals. The result of reducing the intensity down to a light simmer, it’s difficult not to call the experience diluted, but there’s still a likeable, accessible aesthetic at play that was previously absent. The simplified songwriting gives the clearer vocal performance space to sell the lyrics themselves, rather than relying solely on the abrasive power of their delivery.

Ah, okay, so the lyrics are good right?

Uhhh…

Okay, if you were to take any single aspect of this bloated LP and analyse it in isolation, you’ll almost certainly be disappointed. Its streamlined, mostly linear songwriting nestles a little too snugly in the indents of established tyre tracks, its lyricism has more in common with Swiss cheese than actual emotional depth, and the production occupies the shrugging no-man’s land dead centre between terrible and outstanding. And yet and yet and yet, the collision of all these moving parts forms a surprisingly well-oiled, efficient machine that double-barrels the emotive intent of Plagues and Dear Love better than anything they’ve done since. Look no further than the chorus of ‘‘Ritual’’ or the harmonies/ driving melody of ‘‘The Silence’’ for illustration of this.

Musically, its closest analogue is the Space EP, only stripped down to the point it doesn’t truly feel like a TDWP release at all, yet remains tangentially related just enough to haunt the margins of their discography. A third cousin twice-removed every wing of the family is reluctant to claim, if you will. It never feels offensively bland, nor does it excel in any meaningful way, but it’s a bold shift that feels both listenable and curiously deft in its application of well-worn tropes. TDWP have made the decision to sacrifice force in favour of clarity, and while that choice weakens them technically, it finally humanises them emotionally. (6.0/10)

- Benjamin Jack

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Dove Ellis - Blizzard
34:28 // December 5th, 2025 // Black Butter

Opening for Geese put Dove Ellis on many peoples’ radar, but evidently not quite enough of us to make the Irish-born, Manchester-based singer-songwriter a must-hear entity as last year closed in on the holiday crunch. Blizzard deserves to be one of your foremost considerations for December 2025 snubbery, though: this folk rock record is understated yet unrestrained, primarily guided by Ellis’ dynamic vocal chops, resting somewhere between the quivering croons of Thom Yorke and the passionate elasticity of Jeff Buckley. In comparison to his immediately impressive, commanding presence, Blizzard’s musical arrangements often lie low, making their occasional climaxes (key tracks “Love Is” and When You Tie Your Hair Up” especially) dazzle. It’s short, sweet, and lyrically impressionistic—just how I like my debut LPs brimming with potential. Keep an eye on this guy. (7.5/10)

- Zack Lorenzen

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Nic TVG – Shout Into the Dirt
54:31 // December 12th, 2025 // Pinecone Moonshine

All the fun of manualizing your drum VST’s humanizing feature and then some. Mingling painstakingly placed kicks’n’toms’n’snares and cymbs with anything from deep-house tasters to jazzmic swirls of hazy noir-brass samples, Pinecone Moonshine’s top dog Nic tightens the reins of his drumfunk empire on this absolute unit of a chemicalia-catalyzed red-eye jam. It’s equal parts zippy impetus and ruminative samples to unwind to, cross-pollinated under controlled conditions in the DnB auteur’s greenhouse and elaborated to a degree that would make a lesser person develop an obsessive-compulsive neurosis.

Across the twelve self-contained tracks, each main motif is given enough time to impart a clarion theme, yet nothing is ever mindlessly reiterated. While there are pieces deliberately driven by meditative repetition (“Change Is Unknown”, “Voice Like a Whisper”), more often than not, seemingly forming patterns are broken up by subtle changes in texture, a fleeting sample cameo, and, indeed, breaks – both literally and figuratively. I’ll be frank and say that this isn’t remotely close to the intuitive food-photography vibes of an I Love My Computer (though I love listening to Shout Into the Dirt while working on my computer), but there is a market for this kind of pensive yet pulsing electronic work – music that respects your attention without ever begging for it. (7.0/10)

- Nex

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$uicideboy$ – THY WILL BE DONE

29:46 // December 25th, 2025 // G59

Colour me every possible shade of uh, what? that $uicideboy$’ sixth full-length ended up being the most-streamed hip hop album of 2025 globally. After dropping in December. Six days before the end of the year. It’s a testament to their underground following and quiet influence in the cloud rap sphere that they were able to achieve such an impressive feat, and while best rap record of the year is a stretch so strenuous it had me folding like a deck chair, it’s still an atmospheric, brazen project that evolves the duo’s established sound while still feeling staunchly familiar.

The candle-lit cloud rap/ horrorcore/ emo/ trap stylings (engineered to wrinkle your nose both conceptually and sonically) do their usual unholy work with vicious aplomb, raw and violent, but texturally foggy in the best way. The perhaps overfamiliar themes of existential struggle, nihilism and self-destruction don’t hit with quite the amount of earnest, diaristic severity they once did, but the bassy weight and sinister hooks elevate the lyrical triteness in a way that still convinces, even when it’s the usual slew of miserly verbal rumination.

Tracks like ‘‘Leviticus’’, ‘‘BLOODSWEAT’’ and ‘‘MSY’’ feel more in-step with the outfit’s cloud rap origins, with well-integrated flows and production that leans just vintage enough to give the record that signature cobwebby, spacey menace. ‘Business as usual’ is perhaps the most appropriate bottom line here — it’s had a lick of paint and actioned a few blueprints to make the experience feel a little fresher, but mostly it’s the same familiar, haunted layout and atmosphere. And on those terms, it works. (7.0/10)

- Benjamin Jack

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