chaosincurate's 2025 Favourites (7/12) - Album Concept of the Year

This superlative is dedicated to the album that best executed on it's concept. Naturally it needs to be a concept album of some description, but crucially the overall quality of the music isn't being judged here. It isn't the best concept album, it is the best concept for an album.

Honourable mention: FKA twigs - Eusexua

For 2025, twigs turned her attention to club culture for inspiration, hoping to capture a very specific sense of belonging and euphoria she felt in raves and clubs. Crucially, she wasn't attempting to make music for those environments, just about those environments, and naturally when you are trying to evoke the imagery of those spaces you will end up adopting elements of the music of those places, but in general I think she succeeds in making an album about the club that isn't necessarily a club album. The production is imaginative and experimental here, which does a lot to help her thread that needle, making it an album that is equally at home as a backing track to dance to and as an album to sit down with and analyze.

Ninajirachi - I Love My Computer

Conceptual electronic albums are having one hell of a moment right now, and this is a shining example. Arguably pushing the definition of a "concept album" much like my honourable mention, but I think both clearly have a concept, with the concept here being the experience of growing up with technology and the internet so intertwined with our lives as they are now. With songs here about tech addiction, witnessing traumatic events online, and the slightly embarrassing and very absurd modern version of flirting via social media, and much more.

Mentioning this feels a little redundant, but I'd be remiss to not: the sound of the album does a lot to feed into this too. There are very few natural elements to the mixes of these songs. This isn't an underscores album where the natural and digital are blended into this hybrid monster sound. This album is almost entirely synth and vocals, which makes it a fitting love-ish letter to technology both in sound and sentiment