chaosincurate's 2025 Favourites (5/12) - Most Underloved Album of the Year

The album that I feel has gone most undeservedly under the radar

Honourable mention: $ilkMoney - WHO WATERS THE WILTING GIVING TREE ONCE THE LEAVES DRY UP AND FRUITS NO LONGER BEAR?

Sometimes you will just see a title and decide you have to listen to the work just because that title is too compelling. This album is full of those types of titles, and the music backs it up.

This album is about as insane as it's art. It's extremely overwhelming, and I definitely haven't listened enough to fully understand this monster, but the aspects I've been able to pick out are incredible. The maximalist production, the unhinged rapping, the titles... It's a lot to unpack and feels actively hostile to it's listeners, but if it appeals to you that will just make it all the more compelling.

Mei Semones - Animaru

As soon as I saw this album on Album of the Year and saw those genre tags, I knew I'd fall in love with it and try to get everyone I could to listen to it. And I was right. Indie pop, jazz pop, bossa nova, sprinkles of chamber pop, I was so in before I heard a note played, and everything I heard afterwards was just validation.

It's difficult to explain what it is that I like about this album other than just describing those genres, because it feels like it was made for me. Indie pop is my favourite genre, and I love music that borrows heavily from jazz, adding vocals and lyrics, but keeping the complexity of the instrumentation, which also happens to be rare in my experience, furthering the feeling that Mei Semones made this just for me.

Typically music having lyrics from a language I don't understand gets in the way of my love for it, but the bilingual lyrics here strike a great balance, allowing me to understand the song broadly without translations, but also the bilingualism is used really intelligently at points. One example that comes to mind is in Zarigani where the line "Trust は無理" is repeated (which translates to "trust is impossible"). Maybe that line was only made that way because it sounds good, but when I saw that translation my immediate thought was that the language switch was used to obscure the meaning and keep you at arms length, as you would if you were distrusting of someone.

The lyrics aren't really what I appreciate most about this album, although I do think it heightens my favourite part of it. That being the natural and tender sounding instrumentals. A lot of the lyrics allude to nature, or if not, a perspective of the modern world that is stripped of it's unnecessary complexity. It's similar to how I felt about Regina Spektor's music before I found out how much she loves genocide: that there was a power behind it's childish simplicity. That feels like a musical version of when a child does something simple, but made profound by the over-complicated thinking surrounding it.

Spektor, though, didn't tie that feeling into nature like Semones does here. Where Regina Spektor simplified things to help people overthink the world less, it often feels like Mei Semones simplifies things to reconnect us with nature in a small way. To remind us that we are just animals at our core, and the rest is cool, but exists on the periphery of that simple existence.