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Welcome to /Countdown/2025 – this year’s wrap-up of the best new music that I’ve heard across the year, and the 22nd year of me starting to do such annual roundups (which began on LiveJournal before moving to this site). I begin as usual, with the best compilations and reissues in no particular order, although it should be noted that as is the norm these days, there are a whole lot of reissues coming through.

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/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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Other things to note: to allow me a Christmas break from writing, my “year” covers 01-Dec of the previous year to 30-Nov of this one, and I try my best to stick to that.

I run /amodelofcontrol.com as what might be called a “labour of love”. I’ve written about music for twenty-nine years, over twenty of those years under this website banner, and I continue to want to celebrate all that is great about this corner of the musical realm. So this site continues to exist – with no external funding (aside from the small number of Patreon funders) and no paid-for advertising – and I will continue to do so as long as I want to do it, and as long as people want to read it.

So thanks for reading, contributing, offering comments, or being one of those people that makes the music I want to write about.

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/Suede
/Sci-Fi Lullabies (Expanded)
/Edsel Music
/Buy: Official Band Store

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To fully understand the deep love many hold for Suede, Sci-Fi Lullabies is the place to go. Originally released in late 1997, it collected 27 B-sides from the singles released up to the end of the Coming Up cycle, and while a handful of songs were omitted, the first half at least has a good case for being seen as the greatest Suede album. A number of these songs have been live staples since the nineties, too (particularly the thundering stomp of Killing of a Flashboy), and over the last thirty years I’ve heard the majority of that first CD live at some point or another, but more than anything, it proves that Suede had so many great songs that trying to sequence albums became difficult, and what other bands might have seen as surefire hits were relegated to B-sides. To whit: the dank, drug addiction nightmares of High Rising, the greatest ballad the band ever wrote (and the following, related The Living Dead). The seething, glowering disdain of To The Birds. The sleek synth-led modernism of Europe Is Our Playground. The chiming, stark guitars and harmonies of Whipsnade (a song we were privileged to see played at the Royal Albert Hall, one of the only times it was ever played live). The anthemic power of Together. Seriously, how were all of these B-sides?!?

The second half doesn’t quite live up to that, but it still has some fantastic moments, particularly the rousing Every Monday Morning Comes and the rippling power of Money (another that should have been a single, frankly), while hidden among this mass of tracks is one of the most fascinating experiments Suede explored: the cavernous, dubby-basslines and squelching synths of W.S.D.

The big draw of the re-issue this year, though, was the addition of Vol. 2, covering the rest of the band’s time up to the present – and perhaps understandably, there’s comparatively little of the late-90s/early-2000s era, instead concentrating on material released since their reformation. Unlike the original version, though, the tracks are not in chronological order, which perhaps makes it a little more disjointed, but there are still some gems here, and reminding that Suede are a band rejuvenated in more recent times.”

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/Collide
/Signals (Vol. 1) & Signals (Vol. 2)
/Noiseplus Music
/Buy: Official Band Store

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Collide are now veterans in the scene – their first album Beneath the Skin originally released in 1996 – and they have remained a fiercely independent duo, having released on their own Noiseplus Music label for the past twenty-five years. Unusually, too, aside from a short period, they’ve remained a studio-only project, and the time has come for a career retrospective. But as always, they’ve done it their own way: rather than just cobbling together a CD of old songs, they spent a few years remastering and making minor changes to old favourites (following on from the excellent remasters of Chasing the Ghost and Some Kind of Strange, and a few of those tracks appear here, of course), and the result is a pair of releases that roughly cover half of their career each.

Vol. 1 covers the early darkwave-oriented material and the period where they felt like they could be on the cusp of breaking through to bigger things (at least in part thanks to use in TV shows like NCIS), while Vol. 2 is the more recent material. Collide have nothing to prove these days, and this collection of songs works in two ways. One as a great introduction to the band: I’m sure all fans of the band will quibble about the song choices, but I personally think it’s a damned strong selection, and some of them are genuine surprises (Wings of Steel in particular sounds astonishing, the sheer depth of the new mix revealing entirely new things I’d never heard before). The other, though, is a way of longer-term fans to rediscover and reflect on a band that sometimes go under the radar, and this is a new way to celebrate a group who’ve always done things their own way, and to this day sound utterly unique.

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/The Sabres of Paradise
/Sabresonic / Haunted Dancehall
/Warp
/Buy: Bleep Online Store

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There was always this feeling that the Sabres of Paradise never got the respect that their music deserved. Which is surprising, when you consider who was in the group: Andrew Weatherall (DJ, producer, remixer, songwriter, you name it, he did it), Jagz Kooner (producer and remixer to almost everyone else) and Gary Burns (producer). But maybe because their shadowy electronic music didn’t really fit in with the trends of the time, they remained a cult act. Both of their main two albums, Sabresonic and Haunted Dancehall, were remastered and reissued this year, alongside the surviving members Kooner and Burns taking the act back out on tour. The passage of time has perhaps made the albums all the more strange. Ghostly, strange samples weave through reverb-heavy beats and swirling, unsettling synths, as if they decided to try for the most terrifying electronic music they could. Albums to listen to on dark nights, on headphones, just don’t let anyone sneak up behind you while you’re listening. You might never recover.

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/Klangstabil
/chronik
/Ant-Zen
/Buy: Bandcamp

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German duo Klangstabil remain an outlier on ant-zen, their long-time label: less noisy and abrasive than their peers, not to mention their distinctive use of vocals. After a period of inactivity, this compilation picks up many of their best-known tracks – even if some, such as the classic Shadowboy, are in remixed form – and it actually turns out to be an excellent introduction to an act that have shown remarkable staying power, and have stuck to a distinctive sound that immediately sets them apart. Their electronic pieces are intricate and rarely too dense, the intensity left instead to the vocal delivery. For some this might be an unnecessary release – particularly if you already have the sprawling one step back, two steps forward – but this is rather more concise at just eleven tracks…

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/Red Snapper
/Reeled and Skinned (30th Anniversary Edition)
/Warp
/Stream: Bleep Online Store

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I’m hardly alone in my love of jazz among my friends, but back in the mid-90s, when this came out originally, I absolutely felt alone. Having been introduced to the greats of jazz by my dad, not to mention bands like dEUS and Morphine inspiring me to explore the alt-adjacent jazz too, this collection of Red Snapper’s early EPs was a fascinating oddball. A mix of moody, dark jazz, dub, electronics and blues, a couple of the songs were the springboard for Beth Orton’s wider fame with her debut album proper Trailer Park in 1996, another was an astonishing Sabres of Paradise/Andrew Weatherall remix, and a couple of other tracks defied categorisation due to the fierce intensity that left jazz for a dancefloor that was like no club I’d ever encountered.

The album was fully remastered for the 30th anniversary, with an additional track added (the rolling gloom of Area 51) and a different track order, which puts a number of the best tracks stacked at the end, but after a number of listens, perhaps the new order flows better than originally. All the songs are still fantastic, too, with a new clarity to the mix that really does reward listening on headphones in particular. Wesley Don’t Surf explodes into life like a raging storm, while the snare rolls of Snapper quite literally snap into your ears.

Thirty years on, Red Snapper still sound like no-one else, and it all started here, and is well worth exploring.

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/Deviant UK
/Speak of the Devil
/Armalyte Industries
/Buy: Bandcamp

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After illness set back Jay Smith and his Deviant project, a return to live performance recently has been accompanied by an EP that collates new versions of a number of the best-known (and probably best) songs by them, as well as a few new remixes. And having had some time since I last listened to them, I have to admit that my previously somewhat lukewarm views on their music has changed: the songs are smarter, sharper than I recall, with a distinctive anti-religious leaning that somehow, I’d never noticed as quite so prominent before. Two of the most notable songs, though, are a live track and a remix. The former is a ripping, tongue-in-cheek take on Let Me Entertain You (yes, the Robbie Williams song) that worrks because Jay Smith fully commits, while the latter, where Tasertanz tear apart Raptured Saints and reassemble it into a Rammstein-esque, industrial metal destroyer.

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/Icon of Coil
/Serenity Is The Devil (25th Anniversary Remaster)
/Metropolis Records
/Buy: Bandcamp

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The world, and our smaller scene of electro-industrial music, has changed an awful lot since 2000, but one thing that remains constant is that if you’re a DJ in the scene, you’re going to be playing some Futurepop at some point or another in your set (or someone will request it). For those that weren’t there, it’s difficult to explain just how big a thing it was for a short time. The albums dominated the sales charts in the scene, the bands played increasingly large venues (and headlined festival after festival), and songs from them filled dancefloors. Like most sub-scenes, the bands mostly resented the name the scene was given, but it seemed to work. Broadly it was a mix of electro-industrial and trance hooks, but also with a concentration on actual songs, with hooks and choruses: and while all of the bands lumped in did have a very different approach to the sound, it was perhaps the first Icon of Coil album that was the one that embodied the purest form of the term “futurepop”.

Serenity Is The Devil is an album best described as “sleek”. The uptempo songs flash past in a whirlwind of four-to-the-floor beats, synthesised cymbal crashes, and trance synths that signpost the upcoming choruses in neon lights (best example? The glorious rush of Former Self, a reworking of their second single), while the slower, brooding tracks often betray little emotion (Down on Me is cold and distant, the electronics as sparse as they can be). At points it also feels like a work-in-progress: swooning ballad Situations Like These features now long-forgotten Norwegian vocalist Computorgirl (whose own, long deleted EP is well worth checking out, now available on Bandcamp at last), but something else was clearly seen in the track, as it reappeared as the lead track on the Seren EP, but as a monstrous, dancefloor-destroying take instead (and frankly, is all the better for it).

There are a couple of points where interesting deviations are made, though. Fiction is a throwback to nineties electro-industrial, the busy rhythms nothing like anything else on the album, while Floorkiller is a stomping trance epic that jettisons most of the industrial elements to go full force (before trailing off into weird electronic wibbling in the latter part of a nine minute epic – us DJs long since learned the point where we could mix it out. About 05:30 in, if you’re asking).

Despite the wealth of remixes that were made from tracks on this release, though, just one additional track has been added to this otherwise sparkling remaster: a track called SEC FOUR, that seems to rise from the outro of Floorkiller, and it is perhaps understandable, though, why it wasn’t on the original album.

Icon of Coil didn’t last particularly long – their third and last album Machines Are Us was released in 2004, and Andy LaPlegua moved onto Combichrist and quickly hit a far bigger audience – even if bogged down in controversial imagery and unpleasant lyrical themes. But the lure of reforming IoC meant that by the 2010s, they were an occasional touring band again, but aside from one single have been happy to roll out the old hits time and again instead.

Perhaps that’s for the best: the short discography of IoC is not perfect, but this album isn’t far off being so, and it was a pleasure to return to it this autumn for the first time in quite some time.

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/The Young Gods
/Only Heaven (30th Anniversary)
/Play It Again Sam
/Stream: Official Band Store

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It will perhaps not be a particular spoiler to note that The Young Gods will feature in all four /Countdown posts this month, such has been the quality of their activity in their fortieth year. The announcement of a remaster/reissue of Only Heaven took me by surprise a bit: announced and released, it seems, without a great deal of fanfare during October. This reissue perhaps deserved a bit more than that, particularly as for me at least, this album is the near equal of their breakthrough album T.V. Sky, released three years before it., and this one was the first one I bought myself.

This album was at the time seen as quite the departure, as the band drifted away from the overt industrial rock of T.V. Sky to explore more ambient textures, with entire sections of the album beatless and slight – but the next explosion of sound is never too far away. The pick of the album – and longtime live favourite – remains the still-astounding Kissing the Sun, that takes the quiet-LOUD dynamic to glorious industrial-rock extremes, but elsewhere the futurist rush of Speed of Night, and the seventeen minute centrepiece of Moon Revolutions takes in industrial prog, elegant ambience and a pulsating, thundering five-minute coda freakout. There’s even an acoustic track here, which makes more sense in hindsight if you’ve ever listened to the astounding acoustic version of Gasoline Man recorded on the streets of Paris: while their songs rarely used guitars, they were clearly constructed as if they did.

For once, too, this is a remaster that deserves the title. Everything sounds that bit crisper, that bit clearer, and the drums have the requisite punch – this is one of those albums recorded in such a way that you can hear the air move from the kickdrum, such as on the swirling, ghostly Donnez Les Esprits, while the intro to Moon Revolutions now feels like it might swallow you whole. Kissing the Sun, of course, sounds perfect, while The Dreamhouse, often a forgotten song, is all the weirder for how much more prominent the water samples in the song are.

I’d not listened to this album in a while when I bought the reissue, and it was a joy to hear it rejuvenated like this.

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/Various Artists
/Electronic Saviors Vol. 7: ReUnion
/Distortion Productions
/Stream: Official Label Store

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It’s now fifteen years since Jim Semonik released the first edition of Electronic Saviors, and the seventh edition of the long-running series came out this year. The numbers involved are crazy: he’s raised well beyond $110,000 for cancer charities in the US, and over 350 artists have provided mostly exclusive and previously unreleased songs for compilations that take months to arrange and produce.

Jim has rightly been lauded for his work creating these and pulling everything together, and the seventh edition sees every single one of the ninety-eight tracks here created anew for it. As has become the case over the years, it’s a pretty good indicator of the industrial scene generally, with long-standing names rubbing shoulders with newer artists, side-projects and guest appearances too, and a overriding feeling that artists have brought their A-game, determined to ensure that their place on these compilations will be memorable.

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/Various Artists
/Going Out Of My Head – Adventures On The Indie Dancefloor 1995-1999
/Cherry Red Records
/Buy: Official Label Store

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One of the joys of London clubbing in particular in the latter half of the nineties was the sheer eclecticism. Indie bands got remixed, or took in electronic elements, and there was far more going on than the meat-and-potatoes rock of the likes of Oasis would have you believe. In my student days at the time, I was a regular at a number of clubs (The Heavenly Jukebox, Trash at Metro, Popstarz, Popscene, Collide-a-scope, Looney Tunes, Feet First, Full Tilt, and likely quite a few more lost to time – hmm, perhaps I can begin to see why I dropped out!), and the wild, whiplash inducing changes in some of the DJ sets were actually great fun. Part of this was perhaps helped by the Big Beat scene that ran in parallel, which crossed over to indie heads quickly (maybe helped by the sheer number of remixes by the likes of the Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy and Fatboy Slim…).

Evidence of this is rife across this sprawling 4CD box set, another from the Cherry Red stable that does an excellent job in getting across just how cross-pollinating everything was at the time. It is opened by one of the best remixes the Chemical Brothers ever did, their rebuild and explosion that became Nine Acre Dust, taking the joyous Charlatans instrumental and turning it into a hyperactive dancefloor destroyer. Elsewhere there are thrills aplenty, the four discs broadly split into the stuff to get you going, the cast-iron floor-fillers, and the post-club chillout (remember that?), with old favourites and forgotten remixes alike. If you were there at the time, this is an amazing time capsule. If you weren’t, this might just give you an idea of something of a golden age of indie/dance clubbing.