Bad Bunny – Debí Tirar Más Fotos (Rimas Entertainment) / 5 January 2025 / STREAM
Bad Bunny’s sixth solo album puts plena, bomba, jíbaro song and salsa at the center, using reggaeton and house as supporting structure rather than the other way around. He writes about Act 60 tax breaks, blackouts, migration and daily life under U.S. rule, linking block parties and kitchen-table scenes to colonial pressure without falling into slogans.
Los Pleneros de la Cresta, Dei V, RaiNao and Omar Courtz anchor the record in current Puerto Rican circles while streaming carries it worldwide. Few global pop releases this size offer such a direct, self-authored portrait of one place’s sound and politics.
Moonchild Sanelly – Full Moon (Transgressive Records) / 10 January 2025 / STREAM
Moonchid Sanelly’s career continues to wax with her 3rd long player outing, blending gqom, amapiano, and electronic music in equal parts fierce and vulnerable. With production by Johan Hugo, Full Moon sees Sanelisiwe Twisha better known as Moonchild eclipse herself and leave us excited for another lunar event. (picked by Lucas Keen)
BaianaSystem – O Mundo Dá Voltas (Máquina de Louco) / 16 January 2025 – STREAM
BaianaSystem run guitarra baiana riffs, ijexá and other Afro-Bahian rhythms through sound-system bass and MC vocals that keep the call-and-response of Salvador’s streets. Candomblé references, carnival chants and distorted samples tie the album to blocos Afro and trio elétrico processions even as the production moves into heavier rock and electronic territory.
The songs shift between daily struggle, faith and community pride, condensing an entire city’s Black street culture into one intense record shaped for Salvador’s sound systems and global stages.
Hilda Länsman & Tuomas Norvio – Dajan (Fierran Records) / 24 January 2025 / STREAM
The joint debut album by musician Hilda Länsman and sound designer Tuomas Norvio, in which they combine the Sámi singing tradition, joik, with electronic music – the album features intimate songs, vast landscapes and dance bangers. (picked by Miia Lane)
Aita Mon Amour – Abda (Shouka) / 29 January 2025 / STREAM
Moroccan duo Aita Mon Amour work with songs from the Abda aita repertoire, where rural, working-class women have long voiced desire, complaint and defiance in public. Lead vocals cut across electric guitar, percussion and discreet electronics that circle gnawa and chaabi without smoothing away the grain. The project reclaims a style that state and urban elites often treated as shameful, tying feminist intent and regional tradition into a present-tense sound that’s loud, specific and rooted in one corner of Morocco.
Black Flower – Kinetic (Sdban Ultra) / 31 January 2025 / STREAM
Brussels ensemble Black Flower stretch their Ethio-jazz fascination into heavier dub and psych territory on their fifth album. A decade into this project, they treat Ethiopian scales as one part of a wider Brussels vocabulary where North African, Caribbean and European influences all sit side by side.
Anthony Joseph – Rowing Up River To Get Our Names Back (Heavenly Sweetness) / 7 February 2025 / STREAM
The Trinidad-born poet and novelist uses this album to trace family lines and recover stories pushed aside by colonial history. Jazz band arrangements, spoken word and Caribbean rhythms share the same space, linking his writing and music so that each song becomes a place where ancestry can be named, reimagined and brought back into view.
Park Jiha – All Living Things (Tak:til / Glitterbeat) / 14 February 2025 / STREAM
On All Living Things, Park Jiha keeps the piri, saenghwang and yanggeum almost naked in the mix. The pieces move slowly, closer to studies than songs, so small shifts in breath, tuning and resonance carry the weight. Instead of chasing scale, she stays close to the instruments and lets that closeness do the work.
Dowdelin – Tchenbé (Underdog Records) / 14 February 2025 / STREAM
Guadeloupe is legally part of France, a département not a colony, but that status feels very different from the island. On Tchenbé (“hold on”), Dowdelin build songs from gwo ka drumming, born in resistance among enslaved Africans, under synths and Creole vocals that connect Guadeloupe’s rhythms to French club culture. They are part of a wider Guadeloupean wave electrifying gwo ka while holding on to land, language and culture that do not neatly fit French citizenship. (picked by Germa Adan)
Abel Selaocoe – Hymns of Bantu (Warner Classics) / 21 February 2025 / STREAM
Cellist and singer Abel Selaocoe continues his journey into the shared world of European classical music and his native South African music. The album features traditional Bantu songs, Bach, South African vocal harmonies, Selaocoe’s delicate and powerful vocals together with the Manchester Collective chamber ensemble. (picked by Miia Lane)
Celia Wa – Fasadé (Heavenly Sweetness) / 28 February 2025 / STREAM
Fasadé means façade, or surface, in Creole. The Guadeloupean artist uses gwo ka drumming and Creole lyrics to talk about what gets hidden behind that: colonial trauma, ancestral memory, the weight that Caribbean bodies carry. While the title points straight at the front people show to the world, the music digs into what sits underneath, using drum and voice as tools for healing as much as performance. Electronics deepen the spiritual dimension rather than electrify it for dancefloors, with production that is more ritualistic than performative and songs that sound as if they are addressing something beyond the listener.
Trio da Kali & Kronos Quartet – Bagola (One World Records) / 28 February 2025 / STREAM
Bagola reunites Mali’s Trio da Kali with Kronos Quartet for a second collaboration that feels fully internalised. Where their 2017 album Ladilikan had the air of a careful first conversation, Bagola moves with the assurance of shared vocabulary. Kora and balafon carrying the song lines, and Kronos’ strings threading through and around them as a responsive fourth voice in the griot ensemble, answering the trio phrase for phrase and listening as intently as they play.
Florence Adooni – A.O.E.I.U (An Ordinary Exercise in Unity) (Philophon) / 28 February 2025 / STREAM
A.O.E.I.U. (An Ordinary Exercise In Unity) is a highlife album led by Ghanaian singer Florence Adooni, built from Frafra gospel choirs and Kumasi dance-band language. Across seven tracks she reshapes a church hymn for highlife band, sets Frafra and English against each other in call and response, writes brass parts in the vein of 1970s Ghanaian dance orchestras, slips into a piece that leans toward Ethiopian scales and stretches the ten minute title track into a full band workout where she finally calls music “an ordinary exercise in unity”.
Outside Ghana a lot of people still meet highlife through old compilations. A.O.E.I.U. shows what the music sounds like now in Kumasi, written and played by a band who live with it every day.
Various Artists – Tsapiky! Modern Music from Southwest Madagascar (Sublime Frequencies) / 7 March 2025 / STREAM
Sublime Frequencies document tsapiky, the guitar-driven music from southwestern Madagascar that evolved in the 1970s and ’80s when traditional beko rhythms met electric guitars played at impossible speed. The result is virtuosic, hypnotic and specific to that part of the island. Malagasy music scenes barely get international coverage despite the island’s unique musical traditions: centuries of cultural exchange between Africa, Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean have produced something that doesn’t sound like anywhere else.
Anoushka Shankar – Chapter III: We Return To Light (Leiter) / 14 March 2025 / STREAM
The sitar virtuoso completes her trilogy. Indian classical ragas work with orchestral arrangements and electronic elements. Carrying Ravi Shankar’s legacy, this trilogy demonstrates movement beyond inheritance management into contemporary mastery, honouring raga tradition while creating present-tense work. (picked by Germa Adan)
Derya Yildirim & Grup Şimşek – Yarın Yoksa (Big Crown Records) / 14 March 2025 / STREAM
Raul Monsalve y los Forajidos – SOL (Olindo Records) / 18 March 2025 / STREAM
Venezuelan Afro-descendant musical traditions – tambor, fulía, parranda – remain severely under-documented internationally despite being central to the country’s cultural identity. Raul Monsalve has spent years championing these traditions whilst refusing to keep them in museum cases. SOL takes tambor drumming and runs it through funk, Latin jazz and horn-driven arrangements that owe as much to Fela Kuti as to Venezuelan folklore. The result is a sounds like a working band that knows its history and isn’t interested in repeating it.
Briela Ojeda – ANDARIEGA (Briela Ojeda / Altafonte) / 2 April 2025 / STREAM
Titled ANDARIEGA (“wanderer”), Colombian songwriter Briela Ojeda turns that idea into a 13-track route through Andean and Latin American folk, writing for close-miked voice, guitar and charango with occasional surges into rock and noise. Her lyrics stay on care, anger and everyday survival from a feminist angle, from the short, explosive “Jijuep*ta Ignorancia” to “Quién va Cuidar?”, whose psych-rock, grunge-leaning breakdown focuses on who actually carries responsibility for others. Protest and private reflection share the same folk setting, which is what gives the record its force.
Νέγρος Του Μοριά & Bloody Hawk – MAVRI ELLADA (307 Records) / 3 April 2025 / STREAM
Black Greece exists and this album proves it. Greek rapper Negros tou Moria — whose name references a Black Greek revolutionary from the 1821 independence war — teams with producer Bloody Hawk for MAVRI ELLADA, which translates as Black Greece.
Hip-hop meets rebetiko and Mediterranean bass, all of it in Greek, all of it about Black Greek experience in a country where anti-Black racism runs deep and the African diaspora remains nearly invisible in international coverage. The album doesn’t ask for recognition. It takes it.
Marlon Williams – Te Whare Tīwekaweka (Universal Music New Zealand) / 4 April 2025 / STREAM
Marlon Williams, of Ngāi Tahu, Ngāi Tai and Pākehā heritage, steps away from his English-language baroque pop and country songbook for a full album in Te Reo Māori. He spent years working on the language with teachers and recorded these songs alongside translators and Māori language experts, framing the record as part of ongoing reo revitalisation.
The arrangements stay orchestral and emotionally clear in a way that will be familiar to his listeners, but the weight now sits with reo, whakapapa and the communities keeping the language alive.
Zar Electrik – Koyo (Jarring Effects / Kuroneko) / 11 April 2025 / STREAM
French collective Zar Electrik build Koyo around zar possession rituals, using horns, percussion and dense electronics to mirror the cyclical patterns of ceremonies from the Horn of Africa and parts of the Middle East. The tracks push towards trance states and collective release, keeping zar’s ceremonial logic intact even as the setting shifts to European stages and clubs.
Kwashibu Area Band – Love Warrior’s Anthem (Soundway Records) / 11 April 2025 / STREAM
Rhiannon Giddens & Justin Robinson – What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow (Nonesuch) / 18 April 2025 / STREAM
Carolina Chocolate Drops founders Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson reunite for a focused return to Black American string band music, with banjo and fiddle right at the centre. The record underlines what Giddens has been spelling out for years: the banjo’s roots lie in West Africa and Appalachian string bands were once mixed Black and white before segregation and racist storytelling pushed Black players out of the frame. (picked by Germa Adan)
ESINAM & Sibusile Xaba– Healing Voices (W.E.R.F. Records) / 25 April 2025 / STREAM
Ghanaian-Belgian multi-instrumentalist ESINAM and South African guitarist-singer Sibusile Xaba co-lead Healing Voices, built from hand percussion, fingerpicked guitar, flute and live electronic loops. West and Southern African rhythmic ideas cycle under chant-like vocals and open syllables, with Xaba’s rough-edged lines and ESINAM’s clearer phrases turning the record into a shared ritual between two practitioners rather than a standard studio session.
It sounds like two musicians who already work in workshops and community spaces taking that practice into the studio, testing how rhythm, breath and repetition can carry care without losing the edge of live playing.
Nazar – Demilitarize (Hyperdub) / 25 April 2025 / STREAM
Demilitarize picks up after Guerrilla and turns Nazar’s “rough kuduro” inward. Angolan drum programming underpins cold synths, clipped vocals and radio-like fragments shaped by a period of serious illness, recovery and new love, with Ghost in the Shell sitting in the background as a loose frame. It matters because it shows kuduro used not just for shock or dancefloor impact, but to work through what long violence and its after-effects do to bodies, memory and relationships.
Sami Galbi – Ylh Byebye (Bongo Joe) / 2 May 2025 / STREAM
Ylh Byebye is the first full-length from Swiss-Moroccan producer Sami Galbi, recorded between Lausanne and Casablanca. Electro, trap, chaabi and medahate collide in short, rough-edged tracks where hand percussion, auto-tuned voices and cheap-sounding synths feel deliberate rather than accidental. It plays like North African street styles squeezed through a small European flat, restless and mobile rather than locked to one side of the Mediterranean.
Bejuco – Machete (Discos Pacífico) / 15 May 2025 / STREAM
Bejuco come out of Tumaco on Colombia’s Pacific coast, and Machete makes that geography impossible to ignore. Marimba de chonta, hand drums and call-and-response vocals carry currulao and related Pacific rhythms, then run into modular synths and studio effects without losing the impact of wood and skin.
Released by Cali label Discos Pacífico, the album shows a regional scene building its own infrastructure and modernising its sound from the inside.
Yugen Blakrok – The Illusion of Being (IOT Records) / 21 May 2025 / STREAM
The Illusion of Being is Yugen Blakrok’s first album since Anima Mysterium, and she uses it to tighten her world rather than open it up. Raps packed with occult symbolism, science-fiction references and political side-swipes ride over boom-bap drums, sub-heavy bass and industrial noise, the mix closer to a paranoid soundtrack than a straightforward hip-hop record. It underlines again how South Africa’s most interesting rap often lives far from radio and streaming playlists.
AMMAR 808 – Club Tounsi (Glitterbeat) / 23 May 2025 / STREAM
On Club Tounsi, Sofyann Ben Youssef focuses hard on mezoued, the Tunisian folk style built around goatskin bagpipes, ney and hand drums. Those lines wind through 808 kicks, heavy low end and thick synth textures, with auto-tuned vocals giving the whole thing a street-party edge. The album imagines a Tunisian club space where local sounds call the shots and global electronic language works around them.
Maurice Louca – Barĩy (Fera) (Simsara Records) / 30 May 2025 / STREAM
Egyptian composer and bandleader Maurice Louca gathers musicians from Cairo’s experimental and jazz circles for Barĩy (Fera), a 2025 release on Simsara Records. The album sits close to the restless ensemble sound of his Elephantine and Lekhfa projects, with dense writing for reeds, guitar, percussion and electronics. In a landscape where independent culture often operates under constraint, Louca’s international presence keeps Cairo’s experimental communities clearly in earshot. The title borrows a Latin root related to “feral”, a neat indicator of the record’s untamed streak.
Nadah El Shazly – Laini Tani (One Little Independent Records) / 6 June 2025 / STREAM
Egyptian-born, Montreal-based vocalist and producer Nadah El Shazly follows her breakthrough Ahwar with Laini Tani, released by One Little Independent in partnership with Backward Music. The record keeps the voice as the main focus, setting Arabic melodies, spoken fragments and extended techniques against synths, live ensemble parts and field recordings. Pieces move between song form, free improvisation and sound art, placing El Shazly firmly inside a global experimental network and far outside any easy “Arabic fusion” label.
Duo Ruut – Ilmateade (Duo Ruut Music) / 12 June 2025 / STREAM
Two voices and a shared kannel remain the centre of Duo Ruut’s sound, even as their palette widens. Ilmateade (“Weather Report”) adds discreet electronics and guests to regilaul-inspired melodies and rhythms, keeping a strong line back to Estonian folk practice. The title translates as “Weather Report”, and the record traces emotional and seasonal shifts while preserving the directness of two voices around one instrument.
Ekathé – Baba (Ekathe) / 9 July 2025 / STREAM
Buenos Aires group Ekathé build nine instrumentals from riff-based writing for guitar, keys, bass, drums and guests, using sharp stops and metric shifts to keep the band moving as one unit. Baba leans on jazz harmony and 1970s funk language but keeps the tracks compact, showing how an Argentine small group can treat street-facing funk and hip hop references as material for serious composition. (Picked by Sam Fletcher)
Adrian Sherwood – The Collapse of Everything (On-U Sound) / 8 August 2025 / STREAM
On-U Sound has long been a laboratory for dub as technology, not just style. With The Collapse of Everything, Adrian Sherwood pushes that idea further, scattering drums, bass and voice through reverb, delay and more modern digital treatments. The album extends the King Tubby and Lee Perry tradition into an era of granular sound design and post-industrial unease.
Guedra Guedra – MUTANT (Smugglers Way) / 29 August 2025 / STREAM
Moroccan producer Guedra Guedra pushes his club vocabulary further on MUTANT for Smugglers Way, twisting gnawa and Amazigh rhythmic patterns into high-BPM electronic tracks. Handclap cycles, chant samples and percussion figures sit alongside synth bass and drum programming shaped for large systems.
The title signals a commitment to mutation, as young artists from North Africa and the wider Global South assert that heritage instruments and scales can sit inside fully future-facing dance music.
Lucrecia Dalt – A Danger to Ourselves (RVNG Intl.) / 5 September 2025 / STREAM
Few electronic artists fold science, philosophy and voice together as precisely as Lucrecia Dalt. A Danger to Ourselves, released by RVNG Intl., turns spoken phrases, sung lines and muttered fragments into raw material for modular synths, tuned percussion and low drones. Her Colombian background and Berlin base sit quietly in the frame while the focus stays on concepts of risk, collectivity and responsibility.
Meral Polat – MEYDAN (W.E.R.F. Records) / 19 September 2025 / STREAM
The Turkish-Belgian composer releases MEYDAN — the public square. Qanun strings work through jazz arrangements and Middle Eastern modes. Turkish and Kurdish artists in European diaspora face pressure to be either “authentically traditional” or “successfully integrated.” Polat’s jazz-informed qanun playing refuses that binary.
SANAM – Sametou Sawtan (Constellation) / 19 September 2025 / STREAM
Beirut noise practice, Arabic folk materials and rock band dynamics all collide in SANAM. Vocalist Sandy Chamoun works with poetry and folk texts while buzuq, bass, drums, guitar and electronics push songs into heavy, sometimes chaotic territory.
Sametou Sawtan, written in Lebanon and completed in Paris, refuses to file traditional material on one shelf and experimental sound on another. It also captures something of Beirut’s music community spread across cities but still working as a loose network.
Yasmine Hamdan – I remember I forget بنسى وبتذكر (Crammed Discs) / 19 September 2025 / STREAM
Living between Beirut, Europe and the wider Lebanese diaspora has always shaped Yasmine Hamdan’s songs. Here she sings about memory, distance and daily survival over electronics, guitar, brass and string arrangements built with long-time collaborator Marc Collin.
The bilingual title I remember I forget بنسى وبتذكر nails the sense of being stuck between languages and places. It feels like a natural next step from Soapkills and Al Jamilat, but the production now sits even closer to carefully crafted art-pop.
Cerys Hafana – Angel (Tak:til) / 26 September 2025 / STREAM
Welsh triple harp can easily be treated as a museum object; Cerys Hafana treats it as a live wire. On this Tak:til release she folds older Welsh songs and fragments into new pieces, keeping the lyrics in Welsh and sometimes adding bass, drums or saxophone. Angel sounds firmly of the present even when it touches deep archival material. It is a sharp example of how minority-language music can move forward without dropping its roots.
Langendorf United – Undercover Beast (Black Sweat Records + Sing A Song Fighter) / 26 September 2025 / STREAM
The Swedish collective delivers Undercover Beast, bringing afrobeat and Ethio-jazz influences into conversation with krautrock and psychedelic funk. Based in Stockholm, the eleven-piece ensemble has been refining their approach for years, with tight horn arrangements, motorik grooves and extended instrumental passages. Langendorf United isn’t claiming authenticity; they’re claiming influence and inspiration.
Nala Sinephro – The Smashing Machine (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (Warp Records / A24 Music) / 3 October 2025 / STREAM
Nala Sinephro continues to astonish with her first film score. Composed, arranged and produced by harpist and synth soother Sinephro for the titular biopic of cult UFC fighter Mark Kerr, The Smashing Machine is a score that stands alone. Recorded at Abbey Road Studios with the vanguard of the London jazz scene in attendance, press play for a spiritual reset. (picked by Lucas Keen)
Širom – In the Wind of Night, Hard-Fallen Incantations Whisper (Tak:til) / 3 October 2025 / STREAM
Homemade instruments, altered banjos, found percussion and strange bowed contraptions form Širom’s toolbox. They use them to build pieces that move from near-silence to thick, rolling sections that sound carefully plotted rather than chaotic.
Under the title In the Wind of Night, Hard-Fallen Incantations Whisper they keep folk, free improvisation and contemporary composition in constant negotiation. It is the kind of album that rewards close, repeated listening rather than quick skims.
Silvana Estrada – Vendrán Suaves Lluvias (Glassnote Records) / 17 October 2025 / STREAM
The Mexican singer-songwriter follows her breakthrough Marchita with Vendrán Suaves Lluvias (“soft rains will come”). The title borrows from Ray Bradbury’s post-apocalyptic short story, itself named after a Sara Teasdale poem. Estrada writes mainly for voice and cuatro, sometimes jarana, with arrangements that stay close and quiet so small changes in tone and phrasing are easy to hear.
Antibalas – Hourglass (Daptone Recording Co.) / 24 October 2025 / STREAM
Brooklyn streets and Lagos legacies meet in Antibalas’s version of afrobeat. Long forms, interlocking guitars, busy percussion and hard-driving horns are all present, but the feel is shaped by New York funk and jazz histories. With Hourglass they mark more than twenty-five years of using afrobeat as both dance music and political commentary. It shows how a once-local style has become a shared global language without losing its urgency.
Noura Mint Seymali – Yenbett (Glitterbeat) / 7 November 2025 / STREAM
Mauritanian singer and ardin player Noura Mint Seymali fronts a loud electric band with guitar, bass and drums on Yenbett (“she will grow”). She sings in Hassaniya Arabic and Pulaar, reshaping wedding and praise songs from her Moorish griot background for amplified stage arrangements.
Recorded with her long-running group and co-produced by drummer Matthew Tinari and Mdou Moctar bassist Mikey Coltun, the album is her first full-length release since Arbina (2016) and came out on Glitterbeat in 2025. It gives a straight studio account of how this Mauritanian griot band sound when they play their own repertoire at full volume.
Wiz The MC – Yebo (NHMS Records) / 7 November 2025 / STREAM
The isiZulu word “Yebo” is an affirmation, a greeting, and an agreement in one, and an appropriate title for this road trip ready album by Berlin based artist Wiz The MC. Alongside massive lead single “Show me Love” tunes such as “Left will go right” and “Call out my name” blend amapiano and afro house with strong hooks and polished production by Bees & Honey. (picked by Lucas Keen)
Sarathy Korwar – There Is Beauty, There Already (Otherland) / 7 November 2025 / STREAM
Sarathy Korwar continues to think with drums as much as about them. Tabla, drum kit and hand percussion sit next to electronics and spoken word, sketching out links between Indian classical rhythm systems, jazz practice and club-informed production. He gathers these ideas into There Is Beauty, There Already on his Otherland imprint, a title that rejects deficit narratives around South Asian diasporic life. The record is as interested in everyday detail as it is in big political themes.
Nusantara Beat – Nusantara Beat (Glitterbeat / Demajors) / 14 November 2025 / STREAM
Nusantara Beat work out of Amsterdam but think in terms of the Indonesian archipelago. Their songs draw on Sundanese scales, dangdut swing, gamelan resonances and regional folk elements, then route everything through a psych-leaning band format with guitar, bass and drums. This approach powers their self-titled debut Nusantara Beat, jointly released by Glitterbeat in Europe and Demajors in Indonesia. It is a rare case of an “identity” project that sounds relaxed, fun and ready for festivals.
Meryem Aboulouafa – Family (Zerhoun Records) / 3 December 2025 / STREAM
Meryem Aboulouafa moves easily between Arabic, French and English, often singing as if she is confiding directly to the listener. Her arrangements link North African classical and Andalusian traces with careful electronic and chamber-pop production. All of this is threaded through Family on her Zerhoun label, an album that treats kinship and lineage as both subject matter and organising principle. It should connect with listeners who follow everything from Arabic pop to European art song.
