The Ten Most Outstanding International Records of 2025
As the year draws to a close, we reflect on the worldwide sounds that expanded horizons. We explore ten notable albums that shaped the year in music.
10. Sarathy Korwar – There Is Beauty, There Already
The concept of a 40-minute, uninterrupted piece built on insistent drumming might not seem the most approachable listening experience. However, south Asian drummer and composer Sarathy Korwar converts this insistent rhythm into a strangely alluring album. Directing an trio of three drummers, Korwar develops a dense percussive language across the record's ten sections. His composition references the phasing techniques of Steve Reich combined with traditional Indian musical phrasing, everything tethered in the repetition of a ongoing, thrumming motif. The longer one listens, this refrain starts to mirror the trance-inducing cycles of devotional music, luring the listener deeper into Korwar's distinctive percussive realm.
9. The Lebanese Artist Yasmine Hamdan – I Forget, I Remember
After an eight-year break, Lebanese vocalist and composer Yasmine Hamdan makes a comeback with a contemplative collection of songs. It continues exploring the Arabic-language, dub-tinged sound that established her as a fixture in the Middle Eastern independent music landscape since the 1990s. Hamdan's vocal delivery is quiet and ruminative, delivering delicate melodies over the bowing strings of a track like Hon and the deep trip-hop groove of Vows. On livelier tracks such as Shadia and Abyss, she employs a trembling, longing vibrato against Maghrebi-inspired synth melodies and skittering electronic percussion. The album's sound is lean and subtle, yet this minimalism provides the perfect setting for Hamdan's expressive songwriting to shine through. This is a record well worth the long anticipation.
8. Debit – Desaceleradas
From Mexico producer Debit has a knack for eerie reinterpretations of archival audio. On her most recent project, Desaceleradas, she focuses on the 90s style of cumbia rebajada – a slowed, dubby take of the shuffling Latin American dance music genre. Debit drags this sound even further, processing its characteristic synths and syncopated rhythm via sheets of sludge and hiss to produce a novel, menacing groove. Periodically atmospheric and unsettling, Debit transforms the celebratory dancefloor sound of cumbia into a enduring, ghostly afterimage.
Number Seven: The São Paulo Producer DJ K – Liberator Radio!
Sheer intensity is the operative word for the records of Brazilian producer Kaique Vieira, also known as DJ K. Inventing his own genre of "bruxaria" (witchcraft), Vieira piles a tumult of alarms, explosive bass tones and screamed lyrics on top of the enduring Brazilian genre of baile funk. This captures the propulsive sound of neighborhood block parties. On his new record, Radio Libertadora!, Vieira escalates the energy, adding everything from four-on-the-floor techno beats to the sound of the Islamic call to prayer into his chaotic bruxaria mix. The result is a notably manic and overwhelmingly noisy 40-minute listening experience. Surrender to the assault and Vieira's unapologetic productions become strangely liberating.
Number Six: Mohinder Kaur Bhamra – Disco Punjabi
Religious vocalist Mohinder Kaur Bhamra's record from 1982 of disco music and Punjabi folk melodies is a reissued masterpiece. Recorded by her son, music producer Kuljit Bhamra, Punjabi Disco's ten tracks deliver an unusually compelling combination of the sharp sound of 1980s synthesisers and drum machines with her melismatic classical Indian singing style. Drum machine patterns echoes the rolling tones of the tabla, while synth lines parallels the classic sound of the reed organ on tracks such as Pyar Mainu Kar. At other times, Latin-inflected grooves takes center stage on Soniya Mukh Tera, and Nainan Da Pyar De Gaya channels a driving funky bass rhythm. It's a club-ready hybrid delivered more than ten years before the rise of Asian Underground music.
Number Five: Enji – Resonance
Mongolian singer Enji's soft latest record, Sonor, develops her jazz-inflected sound to deliver some of her broadest music so far. Stepping outside her training in traditional Mongolian "long song" singing, the record's selection of pieces range from the gentle jazz-pop melodics of slow-burning number Ulbar to the German-language narration lyrics and twanging guitar lines of Unadag Dugui. The album also includes a lively, funk-inflected cover of the 80s Mongolian pop hit Eejiinhee Hairaar. Featuring a live band rather than her typical setup of guitar and bass, Sonor's sound is still close, drawing the listener into the tender acoustics of her singular voice.
Number Four: Derya Yıldırım and Her Band – Yarın Yoksa
Drawing on the 60s heritage of Anatolian rock pioneered by groups such as Moğollar, German-Turkish singer Derya Yıldırım's latest work alongside her group fuses the metallic twang of the electrified saz with dreamy keyboard and R&B-inflected lines. It's a retro-70s aesthetic anchored in Yıldırım's powerful falsetto and influenced by producer Leon Michels' analogue tape aesthetic. But, on Turkish standards such as the nursery rhyme Hop Bico and 60s classic Ceylan, the group finds vibrant new territory. They create smooth, slow-burning grooves and lifting vocals that lend a novel, off-kilter twist to the Anatolian psychedelic style.
Number Three: Lido Pimienta – The Beauty
Catholic requiem mass music, Eastern European folk melodies and symphonic arrangements converge on Colombian-born singer Lido Pimienta's remarkable fourth album. Arranging music for the 60-piece Medellín Philharmonic Orchestra, Pimienta and producer Owen Pallett journey through everything from the Gregorian chants of opener Overturn (Obertura de la Luz Eterna) to the theatrical interweaving lines of Aún Te Quiero and the syncopated dembow rhythms of the woodwind-heavy El Dembow del Tiempo. Yet, it is Pim
