Blimey, 2025 is flashing by. I’m now just two months out from /Countdown /2025 beginning (the best music of the year on /amodelofcontrol.com), and so I’m now seriously considering what the best of the year actually is.
/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.
/Subject /Tracks of the Month
/Playlists 
/Spotify / 
/YouTube
/Related /Tuesday Ten/Index
/Details /Tracks this week/10 /Tracks on Spotify Playlist/9 /Duration/38:17
There’s been a few notable releases just recently that are clearly contenders, and there are likely a few to come before the beginning of December, too. In the meantime, though, here’s the best music of the past month.
A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.
Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).
/Track of the Month
/HEALTH
/VIBE COP
/CONFLICT DLC
HEALTH have come a long way since their early, experimental electronic days, as the first singles have proven from upcoming album CONFLICT DLC. The swinging industrial rock hit of ORDINARY LOSS has been followed up by the brutal, Ministry-meets-melody of VIBE COP, which absolutely slams (that guitar-led beatdown that opens the track is something else – guitars here are partially supplied by Willie Adler of Lamb of God, which perhaps helps explain it) but also has moments of blissed-out beauty. HEALTH have an uncanny ability to balance the two sides of their sound, in a way that none of their peers have ever managed, and they have become in recent years the most enthralling, surprising band of their time.
/THE KINGS OF BLACK MAGIC
/BURN YOU THE FUCK ALIVE
/THE KINGS OF BLACK MAGIC
Brant Showers, of ∆AIMON and SØLVE, has another new project, continuing his fascination with ritual music and heavy, slow-paced electronics. Putting this release under a new name seems to make sense, though, as it is something of a halfway house between the two projects in sound and scope. The track that really grabbed my attention on this release, though, is BURN YOU THE FUCK ALIVE, where dramatic piano chords dominate the track before a bleak verse of self-loathing threatens to immolate everything. Unusually minimalist for Showers, it shows how he make magic with so little (and despite this, it remains a very loud track). Also of note here is a take on a DJ Shadow classic, where Building Steam With a Grain of Salt is subtly changed into something that lurks in the deep shadow.
/Sleek Teeth
/The River
LA electronic duo Sleek Teeth have been impressing for a while now (their self-titled EP was fantastic), but this track might well be their best yet. EBM hooks bolster an energetic darkwave song that is angry and wants to call out. A song full of metaphor that could be taken a few ways, I suspect, it seems to be aiming the ire at uncaring, selfish people that care little about how their actions might influence and affect others. It is also an outright banger, too, and those looking for dancefloor thrills will find it here: even if they aren’t caring about the nuance.
/Null Device
/The Worst Men In America
Aside from the note that all proceeds from this single go to the Center for Constitutional Justice, the only thing that Null Device have to say about this single is “We’re angry these days. Can you blame us?“. And it’s a fair point: watching my friends in the US begin to suffer under the most authoritarian, corrupt Government the US has ever seen has been terrible, particularly as it feels like my own country is unfathomably heading in the same direction. This song bubbles with rage: a harder-edged synthpop base (not a million miles from Eric’s work in KLACK, actually…) allows Eric Oehler to direct his fury into his vocal delivery, and the result is an impressive protest song.
/Delilah Bon
/Bush
/Princeless Princess EP
Delilah Bon has come roaring back with their new EP, four tracks of rage and noise that have an awful lot to say in fifteen minutes about the state of the world, of the state of men and how women can do better. The closing track Bush turns the volume up to eleven, with booming bass and roared vocals, as Delilah comes up with as many garden metaphors as possible as she implores women not to shave for their man, and stop “looking like a woman from the waist up”. It’s funny, catchy-as-fuck and not for the first time this year, a track that you probably don’t want to be singing along to at work…
/Assemblage 23
/Tolerate
/Null
The first taste of the tenth album from Tom Shear – and the first in five years – reminds me just how consistent Shear is with his music, but also that how much I’ve missed this project. Tolerate kinda picks up where Mourn left off – with a prickly disgust at the wider world and a willingness to say out loud that they won’t deal with it any more. Here, amid a club-bound, soaring song, Shear sets the stall out to refuse to tolerate bigotry and hate, refusing to step aside to let them steamroller other’s rights. Funny how many US artists are beginning to write songs saying this, and I applaud them for standing up for what is right.
/Cold in Berlin
/Hangman’s Daughter
/Wounds
The first album from Cold In Berlin in six years – although they have released an EP and a live album in the meantime – sees the band moving away a bit from the grinding doom that has dominated their sound over the past few releases. Lead single Hangman’s Daughter is a murder ballad of sorts, and is immediately notable by the electronic pulse that rumbles away under tumbling drums, but as usual with Cold in Berlin, Maya’s dramatic and ferocious vocal delivery quickly takes centre stage, and here, it is a performance that caps off the best song from the band in aeons.
/Omen Code
/Brutal + Pure
/Alpha State
A new duo with a deep industrial pedigree (Kevin Gould’s work goes back to the 80s), Omen Code appear to be leaning into the classic, cyberpunk-esque electro-industrial that was very much a thing in the eighties and nineties. First single Brutal + Pure is a complex beast, full of intricate synth work, a stately rhythm pattern and vocals that are very much part of the mix rather than dominating it. Yes, the spectre of Front Line Assembly is very much there, but Omen Code appear to have found a way to forge their own path, and the result is a promising sound that I can’t wait to hear more of.
/Public Circuit
/No Faith
/Modern Church
Thanks to my friend Marc for pointing me on to this new(ish) group, the latest to pick up the threads of synth-punk from the likes of High-Functioning Flesh and continue on their own work. Like HFF, there’s also more than a bit of a nod to mid-80s Cabaret Voltaire (i.e. their glorious electro-funk period), and a grimy, aggressive atmosphere pulses through their songs. No Faith is one of a number of standouts from their recent EP, with a barked vocal the appropriate delivery to a song that sounds threatening from the off. They play in London a week Friday, and I’m fascinated to see how they are live.
/Ladytron
/I Believe In You
The best Ladytron track in years and years, which perhaps is appropriate seeing as the band are currently marking the 20th (!) anniversary of their career peak Witching Hour, and this new song also has something of the echo of that albums chilly, detached nature. But the shoegaze elements of that album are absent here, instead going for hypnotic, gradually building electro that steadily adds elements to the mix, the result being an exceptional song that never overwhelms because of the band having complete control over the sound. A great return.