Quick-fire Roundup - October 2025
Short reviews for some of our favorite releases of the past month.
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. These releases nevertheless deserve a gold star and a spot on the podium.
Alfa Mist – Roulette
53:12 // October 3rd, 2025 // Sekito
If nothing else, Roulette flexes Alfa Mist’s command over a well-established and highly appealing comfort zone: the man has spent a good decade curating a lounge-friendly three-way of jazz fusion, nu-jazz and neo-soul that has proved catnip for those happy taking such things as sophisticated mood music (results may vary for the concerted-listening, chin-stroking crowd). As with his 2023 smoulderer Variables, Roulette cruises along effortlessly with its hazy interplay between longer fusion jams and delicate miniatures. Channelling a zany concept about reincarnation, Alfa Mist adds colour with the occasional noirish flourish (“Found You”), a questionably-placed foray into suburbanite rap (“Reincarnation”) and a newfound emphasis on chamber accompaniment, but these find themselves diffused across oil-smooth sequencing and performances far too loyal to the mood to call excessive attention to themselves.
There are enough standouts to warrant as much interest from playlist-scalping day-trippers as from returning fans — the nervy mystique of “Avoid the Drones” and the intricate harmonies of closer “Black Snow” in particular — but the prevailing line here is that which links par for the course with a reliable good time. Hit up the new Makaya McCraven EPs if you want something more ‘exciting’ from hip hop-inspired jazz fusion (I personally will need more time with these!), and otherwise seek out a locale classy enough to play this album on loop. (7/10)
- Hugh Puddle
夢遊病者 [Sleepwalker] - РЛБ30011922
37:00 // October 28th, 2025 // self-released
A nomadic project split between Osaka, Tver and NYC, Sleepwalker ooze like dark matter from the margins of the internet and coalesce into an unlikely cult treasure. The trio uses black metal as a foundation to explore all manner of obtuse ends in psychedelia and folk — their approach is unpredictable and entirely singular, but it boasts deceptive out-of-genre appeal. You’d hawk them alongside Oranssi Pazuzu and Sigh if you were selling to happy eaters, but their sound is far too mercurial to be pinned down so easily. What this entails varies considerably from release to release, but on РЛБ30011922, we’re in for a single-track psychedelic marathon backed by riffage that covers everything from chasmal churning to harmonised grandeur, but the album-song’s best stretches emerge from its willingness to go off-piste. At around the one-third mark, the band veer into a folk-infused break (less the crusty neofolk long overplayed within the black metal universe, more David Sylvian at his most shamanic), and from thereon their knack playing with space and atmosphere gives way to one breathtaking twist after another. While neither as succinct nor as palatably partitioned as, say, 2023’s excellent Skopofoboexoskelett, РЛБ30011922 may just be the most ambitious showcase of Sleepwalker’s vision to date. (8/10)
- Hugh Puddle
Massa Nera - The Emptiness of All Things
46:37 // October 31st, 2025 // Persistent Vision
I haven’t been starved for choice when in the mood for heavy, staunchly leftist “everything sucks and has sucked a long time and will keep sucking” music this year, but New Jersey punks Massa Nera’s latest LP takes its Halloween release date and doubles down on the morbid machinations fueling unchecked capitalism. Climate crisis is the supposed topic of interest here, and the quartet’s exhilarating screamo tunes range a dateless, literary spectrum of blood trails and dried tears as a result, conveying the insidious nature of engineered global catastrophe through the nightmarish mathcore of cuts like “Pèlerin,” the disembodied moans drifting through “Avalon Cove,” the crusty, crescendoing chaos peaking on “City of Mines,” the barren wasteland of “New Animism” and more. Downtuned dissonance lines every track, examining the trillion-ton elephant in the room through a sobering, bleak, and impeccably sequenced barrage of outbursts and undertows. The Emptiness of All Things is a real contender for the most acerbic and expansive screamo of 2025—and with ample reason to shout in scorn this year, that’s no small feat. (8/10)
- Zack Lorenzen
FiFi Zhang – Fleeting Hearts
26:27 // October 3rd, 2025 // self-released
Shanghai-born dance-pop singer Fifi Zhang has gifted us with a delightfully dreamy and wistful album in Fleeting Hearts. Its concise and sharp tracklisting makes it a smooth and easily repeatable listen, especially when the last traces of daylight are hitting your bedroom wall. The closing songs “To the Moon and Back” and “All the Lights Are Coming Back” are a perfect distillation of what makes this album so fun; the former’s roller rink synths and deceitfully complex vocal lines glide across a hi-hat driven four-on-the-floor beat that would get most shoulders moving, and the latter’s more atmospheric soundscape and airy vocal sampling bring home a sense of love being both momentary and atemporal.
You have two options while listening to this: you can put on some comfy shoes and go for a walk at night when it’s nice and cool, strutting to the beat; or you can lay in your bed, move your head from side-to-side on the pillow, and tap your feet. Either way, have fun getting swept away in this album’s whimsy. (8/10)
- Adam Amanse
Sudan Archives – The BPM
52:46 // October 17th, 2025 // Stones Throw
“The violin is very Black, and I think that we’re not really taught that. […] It’s not just highbrow, white, classical music. It’s a very Black instrument. People danced to the fiddle long before house or techno existed. I’m reclaiming it as dance music.”
- Sudan Archives, in conversation with the NME.Turns out that the violin is just one of many, many elements that R&B force-of-life Sudan Archives reclaims or repurposes as dance music! The BPM is a delirious rush of all things haptic, sensuous and effortlessly commotive, its dancefloor pulse flitting flitting from texture to texture as it sustains the entire record — and when Sudan Archives’ trademark violin does steal the show (get a load of the line that breaks in just before the chorus of standout track “A Bug’s Life”), well, then you are dancing to a violin. Although results may vary and senses of humour may be playfully tested, this thing’s hedonistic vim justifies any number of thrills and spills. It helps that she saves the best til (almost) last — the stunned silence one imagines settling over any dancefloor that has “Noire” on it! — but you could just as easily play lucky dip with this record and be guaranteed a good time however things pan out. (7.5/10)
- Hugh Puddle
John Zorn – Nocturnes
39:49 // October 17th, 2025 // Tzadik
Far from the Ornette Coleman-inspired squawk or infamous genre mutilations that put him on the map in the ‘80s and ‘90s, John Zorn’s late-career output has been going from strength to strength at its most mellow. Nocturnes’ piano-bass-percussion trio of Marsella/Roeder/Smith has been at the heart of Zorn’s recent arc (including 2023’s excellent Full Fathom Five, where they are joined by another of his mainstays, Julian Lage on guitar), and on this outing they serve up an appropriately intimate take on chamber jazz with classical nods aplenty. Turn to “Nocturne Nr. 4” for your Chopin, “Nr. 6” for your Debussy, “Nr. 7” for your Messaien and “Nrs. 1 and 5” if you’d rather focus on Zorn’s own brand of dissonant hijnx (the phrasings he inflicts on Marsella in “Nr. 5” specifically are oddly evocative of the to-ing and fro-ing of a restless mind in the deepest stillness of night).
There’s a lot to love in Zorn’s oneriric compositions and the luminous tones of Marsella’s keys, but the star attraction here is the sheer weightless ease with which the record moves from foot to foot — and by extension, the phenomenal chemistry between the trio. Check out “Nocturne Nr. 2” for the most transportive cut, and consider this album one of the healthiest places to leave all preconceptions or intimidations at the door, and (re)discover a legendary maverick at his most demure.(7.5/10)
- Hugh Puddle
Lugubrious Garment – Demo MMXXV
14:01 // October 31st, 2025 // Nuclear Winter
Sometimes music aims to boost your mood and assuage your err’day tribulations; sometimes a demo is hastily cobbled together just to get the pestiferous, Coco-Jamboo-up-the-wazoo chorus you thought of when the matcha latte overdose kicked in out right this second; and sometimes calling a piece of musical art ‘cosmic’ serves as a catch-all descriptor for supposedly matured writers to fall back on when they have nothing meaningful to offer beyond the nth ever-so-slight revision of their puny repertoire of platitudes. This is not one of those times.
A demo merely by name, Demo MMXXV, the premiere entry to what will hopefully become Lugubrious Garment’s full-fledged discography in the proximal future, is as studied as any officially labeled EP (or, if you want to equate this to a grind record, any full-length) and constitutes an earthly counterpoise to attore principale GG’s primary solo outlet, Cosmic Putrefaction, and all the anticipatory baggage of the straitened operational framework construed from its principally progressive methodology. With the exploration of more insistent varieties of death metal as its professed goal, this new project feels entrenched in its audibly less ethereal hotbed even at its incipient stage, as if this weren’t so much a recently developed urge to give in to barbaric cravings as an atavism coming to light in this youngest offspring. Listen to any of these three tracks and it will quickly become evident that Papa Gramaglia (aided by a ruthlessly whirling Claudio Invidia) has always been an autochthonous inhabitant of the boundary layer surrounding the genre’s miasmic core, just barely holding its intangible shape under all the distorting stress.
Blackened motifs pass into grind-adjacent furor with ease before morphing into reflections of the most noxious set pieces of early- to mid-’90s DM mastery. It’s iterative to a point, hard-edged to a fault, and achieves exactly what it set out to do. To call this a demo feels almost cynical considering how much it comes into its own — not only with regard to the emulsification of stylistic components, but also when evaluating the production, which is on par with many works lauded for sounding genuinely old-school by modern standards. All this adds up to a well-rounded package; the only question that remains is whether there’s enough gas in the tank to make this work on a full-length. With any luck, we’ll get our answer soon. (7.5/10)
- Nex
Currents – All That Follows - EP
20:01 // October 31st, 2025 // SHARPTONE
Currents are nothing if not incredibly consistent in their quality. Ever since they exploded in 2017 with The Place I Feel Safest, they’ve been pumping out solid-quality albums and EPs at a pretty regular pace. 2023’s The Death We Seek was lesser only in the sense that it played things incredibly safe when it came to its djenty riff-work, not helped by a mix that seemed to bury the vocals a bit deeper in the background (a shame when you consider what a beast Brian Wille is on vocals). In many ways, surprise release All That Follows doesn’t do much differently. The riffs are slightly more intricate, but the mix is super similar, and the band’s focus on atmospheric connective tissue still is just as present here as it was on The Death We Seek.
So why did I enjoy my listen of this EP so much more?
Don’t get me wrong, Death is a wonderful modern metalcore album, but I think that the shorter tracklist here allows Currents to go all-out without worrying about overstaying their welcome and sliding into repetitiveness. And dear lord, do they ever go all-out. This EP is a nonstop barrage of jagged djent-style riffs, with some of Wille’s best vocal performances yet (“Can’t Turn Back” specifically features all of the above, and is probably my favorite track on the EP). In many ways, it’s a pseudo-sequel to the band’s fourth LP, but far tighter, a breezy listen that beautifully blasts your face off with modern metalcore goodness. Great stuff, but what less would you expect from one of the most consistent bands in the scene? (8/10)
- Ben Rosenberg
Flock of Dimes - The Life You Save
50:17 // October 10th, 2025 // Sub Pop
The Life You Save feels remarkable to me for one reason only - it delivers the most entrancing vocal performance of this year. Jenn Wasner, best known as the singer for indie band Wye Oak (Flock of Dimes is her solo project), has always been a great vocalist, but she really outdid herself this time around. It helps that the mellow arrangements, sleepily operating in the mid-space between folk, dream pop, and soft rock, seem primarily designed to let Wasner’s voice deliver maximum impact, and deliver she does, emotively dissecting mental and interpersonal struggles in heartbreaking fashion. The Life You Save has been one of my go-to evening listens since it dropped, and I don’t expect that to change for a while. (8/10)
- Sunnyvale
After - After EP 2
20:39 // October 17th, 2025 // Mom + Pop
This writeup comes straight after another classically dull round of p4k discourse, making it difficult to separate extremely wayward (and extremely terminally online) accusations of ‘late capitalism’ with any substantive criticism on ‘nostalgia bait’ as a concept, rather ruining the discussion. So, in lieu of acknowledging this rampant hyperbole over what is a pretty straightforward pop rock duo, here’s the bottom line. Did you grow up watching live-action Disney Channel and Nickelodeon shows as a kid and elevate this experience to rose-tinted romanticism? You will probably like this. Are you especially fond of Frou Frou and other early Imogen Heap projects and have been longing for something in that realm, even if it’s not quite as developed and boundary-pushing? You will probably like this. Is there a large gap in your heart for the impassioned and homely songwriting of early-mid 2000s indie pop stars like Michelle Branch and Vanessa Carlton that needs filling? You will probably like this. Do you over-analyse everything you consume to the point you struggle to enjoy pop music that just wants to be pop music, and not a grand societal statement or complete reinvention of the formula? Your mileage may vary. Personally, I’m gonna stare out the window on my bus to work with Outbound blazing like I’m 12 again and pretending I’m in some super-deep music video. Hope this helps. (8.5/10)
- Tom Read
DEATHFUCKINGWOUND – Void MMXXV
14:14 // October 7th, 2025 // Iron Corpse
MMXXV (the year) is the conspicuous yellow stain on your Airbnb bed sheet, the sad frozen pizza you get when you’ve lost the jalapeño-dispenser lottery, the unerring bird dropping that nails your sleeve on your way to this month’s third corporate meeting about synergies and how AI is the future. I wish we could just void it.
Void MMXXV (the EP) is a deathgrind romp with the mindset of a war metal bedroom producer who prefers a classic HM-2 tone to an octuple screamer-pedal chain. I wish it would never end.
This has been a miserable, piss-poor year on so many levels, and if it were up to me, sonic anarchism like this would follow us everywhere: as muzak in the grocery aisle, as hold music grounding us while we wait for confirmation that, yes, there’s still some poor soul in an oxygen-deficient bullpen whom we can talk to after ten minutes of insufferable robot questionnaires, or as an airport-terminal loop. This is how we reset. (7/10)
- Nex
 | A guest post by
|