chaosincurate's 2025 Favourites (10/12) - Album Find of the Year

I really want to stress here that this isn't dedicated to "finds" in the sense that these are super niche projects no one knows about. It's anything that I listened to for the first time this year. I just wanted to clarify that before I share my main pick. First though...

Honourable mention: Magdalena Bay - Mercurial World

In all honesty, this might be my favourite find of the year, but it felt jammy enough picking You Lose! as my song pick, so I opted to leave it as an honourable mention instead. On Mercurial World, Magdalena Bay really started to take shape as something exceptional. Sure, they executed their more straightforward pop style on A Little Rhythm And A Wicked Feeling pretty incredibly, and I love some of the songs off that album, but they weren't doing anything entirely new there. On Mercurial World, that is not the case at all, as they started to introduce some of their prog-rock influences into their catchy pop sound and, more often than not, blending those styles incredibly to make the best of both. The earworms will still find their way to your brain, but they do so alongside production that knows exactly when and how to be strange and innovative.

Danny Brown - Atrocity Exhibition

Danny Brown has been on my radar since SCARING THE HOES, but I never thought to revisit his back catalogue until I was impressed by Stardust this year, and I'm glad I was more impressed with it than many seemed to be, because I never would have heard this album if not for Danny Brown reminding me of his incredible talent.

I had heard that, in his prime, he was an unhinged rapper, and I assumed that meant that it was like God Loves You on steroids, but it seems as though I was wrong. There are definitely a few bars on here that are similar to that, but to my surprise I got that impression more from the way the album sounds than from the lyrics. The off-kilter beats, clever use of brass instruments and flows that don't really flow consistently make the album sound like a haunted insane asylum, and that was the most unhinged thing about it for me.

That vibe isn't just a cool idea either. It ties into the theme of the album. It is broadly an album about drug addiction, and while there will always be people who misunderstand artistic intent and use a cautionary tale as a call to arms, it's hard to imagine how someone with any amount of media literacy could interpret this album as glorifying drug abuse. It presents the experience as a pretty horrid and terrifying thing to go through, even if it is exciting. Much like a haunted house, it presents drug abuse as something that may be fun in some adrenaline-fueled, masochistic burst, but acknowledges that you can't leave as easily as you can leave a haunted house, and the actors here don't have the capacity to recognize when it's gone too far. You're locked in there with the psychos and ghouls and the fun quickly dissipates.