Annahstasia – Tether

Towards the end of Tether, there is a song called Silk and Velvet; its sound is characteristic of Annahstasia’s debut album. Fingerpicked acoustic guitar and her extraordinary vocals – husky, expressive, elegant – are front and centre. The arrangement is subtle but not drearily tasteful: arching noise that could be feedback or a distorted pedal steel guitar, which gradually swells into something climactic before dying away. The lyrics, meanwhile, concern themselves with selling out: “Maybe I’m an analyst, an antisocial bitch,” she sings. “Who sells her dreams for money.”

It’s a topic that speaks to Annahstasia’s turbulent music industry history: signed at 17 to a label that tried to mould her into a mainstream pop star, she quit and pursued a more singular vision. Tether acts as vindication, announcing the arrival of a strikingly unique voice. It slips from Slow’s seductive take on soul to the raging alt-rock of Believer, but every track has its author’s unique character stamped through it. These are superbly written, remarkably moving songs, delivered by a singer who knows exactly how to use her vocals to cut the listener deep: when to exercise restraint, when to express halting uncertainty, when to let fly with impassioned vibrato. The result is an album that feels intimate and revealing: the kind you don’t so much listen to as enter into a relationship with. Alexis Petridis

Valentina Magaletti and YPY – Kansai Bruises

There’s a tendency to single out prolific musicians as “hard-working”, though one of the joys of following Italian drummer Valentina Magaletti through the underground is how effortlessly and innately she races through different gears. This year she released a remix album of her excellent 2024 album Estradas with Afro-Portuguese producer Nídia, put out a mighty new EP with her abrasive trio Moin and collaborated with the writer Fanny Chiarello. Then there’s this wildly exhilarating record with YPY, AKA Japanese musician Koshiro Hino, also of Goat (jp), which highlights the delirious musicality of her playing as his synths and her filigreed attack become inextricable.

You might very well think: “Thirty-seven minutes of pure percussion? No, thank you.” But even if you don’t know your Chris Corsano from your Kahil El’Zabar, Kansai Bruises is immediately arresting in its virtuosity, high-wire thrills and textural delight. The hyper detail of One Hour Visa feels like synaptic overload, Magaletti and Hino’s mind-meld swerving like an out-of-control sled down a slalom. You hear Magaletti yelping “yeah!” in the title track, and wonder how great and gruelling it must feel to flit from tuneful patter to drone-line rumble then hand-style patterned percussion in a matter of seconds, an electric run aptly characterised by Hino’s shooting sparks. Lantern Lit Run has a dazed swirl to its gait that feels like drunkenly blinking at a city’s bright lights; then it dissipates to the steamy hiss of hot springs. More of a showcase for Hino, Her Own Reflection makes his synths blossom through the rubble Magaletti strews with abandon. The gleeful aggression of Kansai Bruises is so overwhelming that it becomes oddly relaxing: another indication of Magaletti’s preternatural talent. Laura Snapes

Madison Cunningham – Ace

Marriage as a grape plucked and crushed, a plane downed in an open field, a town patrolled by wolves: for her gripping third album, Californian folk musician Madison Cunningham calls on a host of haunting metaphors to describe falling in love at 17 and divorcing by 27.

A record about rebirth, or “dying in reverse”, Ace shifts the focus from Cunningham’s celebrated, dextrous guitar work. Instead, she and her touring band harness elemental power from vast woodwind arrangements and slicing strings – all the better to capture the terrifying, breathless possibilities of starting over. “You say you know every mole and skin tag, like it makes you wiser to the person I am,” she sings, steely with new self-knowledge, on piano ballad Take Two.

Cunningham’s previous LPs (including the Grammy-winning Revealer) used songwriting to search for clarity. But Ace, named after “the strongest and the weakest card in the pack”, finds the truth to be slippery, contradictory, two-sided. Grief and desire are circular on single My Full Name, while the album’s slow-burn finale Best of Us tackles the slippery slope that is faking it, just a little, until you’re faking it more than you’re not. What happens when the facade finally cracks? This stormy, career-best record holds the answer. Katie Hawthorne

Sarz – Protect Sarz at All Costs

Anyone with any interest in Afrobeats knows that the Nigerian producer Sarz has been an architect and alchemist of some of its best sounds, from Wizkid’s Come Closer to Lojay’s Monalisa. I’ve also seen him DJ at some of the best African music nights in London: not a realm he originally planned on venturing into, but one that naturally emerged from his production work as he wanted to learn how to influence the psychology of a crowd and get them moving. With his momentous, Black diaspora-surfing debut album Protect Sarz at All Costs, he lays a solid claim to the title of Nigeria’s most deft curator and enchanter of swinging hips.

There are some of his usual collaborators here in Asake and Lojay, but there is also the Ndlovu Youth Choir from South Africa, French-Congolese singer Theodora and Cameroonian-American artist Libianca. They help him helm an incredible span of sounds: orchestral flourishes, traditional African percussion and futuristic afro-pop textured EDM. Like many ambitious projects by Afrobeats artists, Protect Sarz at All Costs is genre-fluid, encompassing amapiano, hip-hop, afroswing, 90s R&B and alté. The result is a potpourri of different moods: one of my favourite tracks, African Barbie, is sensual and fierce, while Getting Paid takes its cues from luxury rap about the spoils that a business in music and entertainment confers. With Sarz’s presence stretching beyond the African continent to fill dancefloors across the world, his debut doesn’t mark an arrival, but an assertion of his prodigious talent. Jason Okundaye

Daniel Avery – Tremor

Daniel Avery’s Tremor is an album I feel like a fine film of grease on my skin, or the thin, constricting sensation of nylons pulled tight over my face while I do crimes. It’s an album that sounds like furtive behaviour, full of dark, industrial sounds and brooding, lurking musical alleyways. The first time I listened to it, I was walking home after dark with my hood up against the drizzle. It made me feel as if I was up to absolutely no good (but was actually on my way home from book club).

Avery gathered a community of interesting, understated voices around him to make Tremor and the result is a far cry from the accessible techno he produced in his youth: though it occasionally feints in that direction as it roils through genres, Tremor’s droning guitars and clipped live drums slink beneath breathily delivered lyrics; the only way you could call it techno is if you said it was something like deconstructed post-techno industrial noisecore, which, let’s not. If Nine Inch Nails hung out in Dalston for a bit, they might come up with something approaching this record. If Deftones played a show underwater, you might get something a bit like Tremor; a seething, serpentine album that seeps into being and lingers, goading you into mischief like the devil on your shoulder. Kate Solomon

Anthony Naples – Scanners

Naples emerged in the mid-2010s amid a wave of dance producers making lo-fi house music (such as Delroy Edwards, Actress, DJ Boring and most of the LIES roster). Consciously or not, that loose scene seemed to be a bulwark against the shine of EDM. Since then, Naples’ work has only matured: 2023’s Orbs was spellbinding ambient techno, and the follow-up is richer still.

It’s a more populist album than Orbs, with vocal samples, higher tempos and playful detailing such as the discordant jazz piano chords of Somebody, or the neo-acid squiggle running through Bounce that undulates the grid around it. Hi Lo is classic Basic Channel-style dub techno, as if swooping through mists on to a city-planet at dawn, while the title track still has that Germanic bearing but with a more golden-hour, late-afternoon light. Mushy, meanwhile, sounds like the kind of early 90s track that ex-ravers get misty-eyed about in YouTube comment sections. The highlight is Night: cantering along at 134bpm, it’s as if shards of digital light are hurtling past your field of vision.

In a dance scene that lauds old-school legends and the latest hype-cyclists but can forget about those in between, it’s great to see Naples still steadily moving forward, iterating and improving his craft with every release. Ben Beaumont-Thomas

Radu Lupu: The Unreleased Recordings

Lupu was a pianist whose beguiling sound world was allied to a mind of such penetrating musical intelligence that it sometimes seemed miraculous. He died in 2022; Decca, for whom he recorded exclusively for over two decades, released his complete recordings in 2015, but to mark what would have been the pianist’s 80th birthday, the company produced this wonderful surprise: six discs made up of unreleased studio sessions and BBC, Dutch and SWR radio tapes, dating between 1970 and 2002, of works that the Romanian pianist otherwise did not record.

While there is more familiar Lupu territory (Mozart and Schubert) in some of the discs, much of the set is less expected. Lupu recorded little Chopin, but here is a thrillingly vivid performance of the B minor Scherzo, more uncharacteristic still is Copland’s Sonata, fierce and majestic, from the Aldeburgh festival in 1971, while Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition sees him making a rare venture into the Russian repertory; it comes from a 1984 Dutch broadcast, his tone noticeably rawer, almost strident at times. In general, though, the recording quality serves the exemplary playing well enough; every track is a treat.