The last /Tracks of the Month of the year has come around quickly – from the beginning of December, of course, I’ll be posting /Countdown /2025 over four weeks as I look at the best music of the year.

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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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There is, of course, still new music coming – at a rate I can barely keep up with, frankly, and I’ll cover some more of those new songs at the very beginning of January, with the usual break over Christmas itself.

Anyway, here’s ten songs I’ve liked and listened to over the past month or so.

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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).

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/Track of the Month

/HAYWARDxDÄLEK
/Breathe Slow
/HAYWARDxDÄLEK

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A project born of collaboration and improvisation sees drummer Charles Hayward (This Heat) team up with Will Brooks (DÄLEK) for an album that was conceived and recorded within a week. That might suggest a rushed concept, but both artists are more than familiar with the art of collaboration, and at least from the first song released, the results are going to be fascinating. Breathe Slow has the familiar bark of MC DÄLEK’s rapping, and where things feel different is the music. The stuttering beats are hip-hop but not quite, while the droning synths and samples feel weird to these ears (some of them might be backmasked?). I genuinely have no idea what to expect from the rest of this album, but I’m damned sure that I’m going to be tuning in.

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/Rob Zombie
/Punks and Demons
/The Great Satan

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It’ll have been almost exactly five years since The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy when The Great Satan arrives – but then Rob Zombie does have his film directing career too. The lead single from the new album comes in hard – an industrial thrash track that doesn’t half hark back to La Sexorcisto-era White Zombie (and no complaints from me about that) – and while the lyrics superficially are grumbling about some horror movie bad-guy version of Satan, looking a little closer at the lyrics suggests, perhaps, a veiled swipe at a certain US president? Anyway, the best Zombie track in absolutely ages.

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/genCAB
/Open Grave
/Open Grave EP

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Moving on from last year’s III I III (THIRD EYE GEMINI), which reworked David Dutton’s original genCAB songs and added a few new ones besides, Open Grave is the first new release since. The song itself is a fist-pumping industrial banger, full of hooks, punchy synth work and another of Dutton’s trademark, melodic choruses. Also worth the admission is the B-side, a savage take on the Nine Inch Nails track Last, which comes through the walls complete with guitars and a sense that Dutton has, like many of his listeners, been familiar with this track for an awfully long time…

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/Sugar
/House of Dead Memories

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A very unexpected reunion announced during October was of Sugar, with Bob Mould reuniting with his two bandmates (David Barbe and Malcolm Travis) for live shows in New York and London next May (and I managed to secure tickets for me and a friend for the first of the two London shows). But even more surprising, perhaps, was a new song. A buzzing, guitar-led alt-rock song that is exactly the kind of thing I loved from Sugar in the first place, in a somewhat meta-move, the song appears to be about burying the hatchet and moving on with your life…

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/Odonis Odonis
/Come Alive
/Odonis Odonis

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Toronto’s darkwave/industrial duo Odonis Odonis made a hell of a splash with the searing album Spectrums, which felt like listening to an album while watching through a field of blinding, brilliant white light, such was the intensity. Four years on, after a diversion to collaborative work on 2023’s ICON, the first tracks from their upcoming self-titled release suggests that they may have dialled back the everything-on-full approach a bit. Hijacked is straight-up darkwave goth, but Come Alive is much more distinctive. It inches forward like a predator, full of chiming guitars and ominous basslines that seem to nod to the much-missed The Soft Moon, with the vocals delivered like shadowy threats amid lots of reverb.

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/Bruise Blood
/You’re In Control
/You Run Through the World Like An Open Razor

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Mike Bourne is part of /amodelofcontrol.com favourites Teeth of the Sea, and this first solo album from him comes with a strange origin story about a malevolent, taxidermied parrot in the blurb for it. There’s a feeling, too, that Mike Bourne is making a point of pushing his sound here in different directions to the parent band: the four-to-the-floor power of You’re In Control is rather more direct than ToTS usually are, although those acid synths that weave through the track hark back to at least one mighty piece. Elsewhere, too, there’s definitely an uncanny feel to it, which is a departure, as are the nods to Big Beat and EBM, in much more overt ways. Mike Bourne clearly has a wide sphere of influence to draw from, and somehow here he seems to be referencing an awful lot of it, without the album sounding disjointed.

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/Zanias
/Naiad
/Cataclysm

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I sometimes feel like I missed the boat a bit with Alison Lewis’ work as Zanias. By the time I first heard her work, it was some way in and it was difficult to get into, although as with her latest material, there’s no doubting the production and composition skills here, as the songs are lush and detailed. The pick of the new album, though, is the fierce breakbeats of Naiad. Named after the water nymphs of Greek mythology, Lewis’s vocals float and shimmer above the beats, the synths coming in pulses like the waves crashing onto the beach. An elegant, impressive song.

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/The Twilight Sad
/WAITING FOR THE PHONE CALL

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The first new song from The Twilight Sad in seven years (it’s been that long?!?) sees the group changing tack again somewhat. WAITING FOR THE PHONE CALL arrives on an electronic pulse, that nudges closer to techno, before bursting into a techno-rock hybrid by the time we get to two minutes in, and some of the guitars are supplied by Robert Smith (whom The Twilight Sad have become a regular support band for). It sounds like James Graham has had a tough time of it in recent years, with allusions to deaths of loved ones and issues processing the news in the press releases for this song. Not for the first time, Graham has channeled that pain into the one outlet he knows, his music, and the result is another exceptional song from this band.

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/Die Krupps
/Will nicht – MUSS!
/Will nicht – MUSS! / On Collision Course

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I have to admit that I wasn’t especially keen on recent single On Collision Course, but the sister single from the upcoming EP, Will nicht – MUSS!, is much better. A big, bombastic industrial rock track, it uses the melody from Edvard Grieg‘s In the Hall of the Mountain King as a nagging refrain, while the video is based on Fritz Lang’s M and has lots of fun with the band in era-appropriate trenchcoats and hats. There’s a new album coming in 2026, too, and going on their excellent recent live shows, this veteran band are still in rude health.

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/The Tiger Lillies
/Stupid Life
/Serenade From The Sewer

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The song pretty much anyone who attends the groups’ current run of shows at the glorious Wilton’s Music Hall (reckoned to be the oldest surviving, intact, Music Hall anywhere) will be humming at the end. It has that characteristic oompah bounce that many of their songs have, and here Martyn Jacques rails against conformity – something The Tiger Lillies have never, ever edged toward – making it clear just how stupid he thinks it is to measure your own thoughts and image against the opinions of others before yourself. The word “stupid” is repeated a lot, and the video is gloriously bizarre and funny too.