Many happy returns, meatbags! There are many exciting things afoot in 2025, not least the 2024 roundup I completely failed to get off the ground in time for the bells. Before Chinese New Year dawns on us and the publication of that piece becomes a matter of life or death urgency, allow me to present...

Best new Bandcamp discoveries

While prowling Bandcamp on the hunt for new and exciting sounds is undoubtedly the second most rewarding online hobby after correcting other people's grammar on Pornhub comments, n0teeth cannot claim to have intrepidly slashed through the digital undergrowth and captured these prize beauties himself. Both artists were promoting their wares online in one way or another and in both instances we were instantly won over by the fresh meat they were bringing to the slab.

Palazzo's Monstrosity Coil: the name is highly evocative. We're getting flashes of Tesla, Doctors Caligari & Frankenstein and the schizophrenic delusions of James Tilly Matthews. The ominous clanking noises all suggest this monstrous coil is some kind of diabolical machine at work, driving mad the minds of men.

Open Casket Soundsystem takes a more straightforward but no less thrilling approach, all churning low-end bass murk and metallic crashing. Strange vocal incantations loop into layered, repetitive hums that sound either like the warmup to an occult ritual, or someone singing along with a washing machine.

Two artists bringing treats for jaded ears, with many more hopefully to come!

The year in reissues and retrospectives

2024 saw both the reissue AND "re-visit" of Opus Dei (of which more soon) as well as the reissue of Selected Ambient Works II and a compilation of Amboss tunes under the title Basic Training. Stay tuned for more on Laibach!

Five of the best

Norillag - The Union Of Death

We said it at the time of release and we'll say it again: this thing is a fucking masterpiece. And while relistening to it more recently n0teeth briefly entertained a surreal daydream of the first two tracks soundtracking the seven dwarves' jackbooted march towards the mines for another day's hard graft drilling, dynamiting and pickaxing. Except there's a hundred of them and while they're down t'pit a hundred other dwarves are beating steel panels with hammers and another hundred are manning the oil derricks. Whether these Disneyfied Stakhanovite visions were an intentional aspect of The Union Of Death or not, n0teeth once again thanks Norillag for fashioning a frighteningly powerful new industrial vocabulary from the scrap metal of the past.

Mert Akyurek - Schwarze Nacht Abschlussball

The extremely prolific Turkish synth wizard wasn't going to leave us wanting for a release in 2024, and trotted out one of his most spellbinding albums to date. Like all the best explorations of vintage synth sounds - and as an unwilling connoisseur of some of the worst, n0teeth is plenty qualified to judge - Akyurek uses the tools at his disposal to craft strange, uncanny new landscapes and build weird, wonderful new worlds that are neither retro nor futuristic but suggestive of another dimension entirely outside of our own time and space. I've belled about Gatekeeper's marvellous 2010 EP Giza on here before (and will no doubt do so again). The pyramids which that sepulchral synth duo transported us to with their sinister sounds were a hologram, a mirage on the Saharan skyline; likewise, the wonders of the world Mert Akyurek shows the listener are ethereal, intangible, always just beyond our grasp. Screw SpaceX, Virgin Galactic or whatever that bald Amazon scab's toy rocket company was called, I want to go wherever the good ship Akyurek is taking us next.

Zamilska - United Kingdom of Anxiety

The latest salvo from the reigning queen of malevolant technoid abrasion comes hot out the traps with a D-beat drumroll that reminds the listener exactly what this "punk sensibility" is that is often ascribed to her music. Fans of NZ's bass guitar (ab)use will love what's on offer here. "Better Off" harnesses Zamilska's trademark dirty, grinding, organic-feeling bass to a clattering yet restrained beat, over which huskie (a new name to us) lends their sultry pipes. The overall effect is of a more industrial take on Death In Vegas - rasping noise set against calm, softly intoned vocals. She's basically just doing industrial rock now isn't she? n0teeth is more than ok with that. A sound as abrasive yet layered as this is in no danger of turning into sickly, saccharine slop like Celldweller any time soon. And if you want grindcore vocals battling it out with shrill mizmar wails, get "No Gods" in you.

Non-Bio - Every Chalice Poisoned

"He emerges from the mouth of the shaft as an infant emerges into the world; naked and caked in filth." Every Chalice Poisoned is harder, noisier and more percussive than anything this one-man South London industrial band & long time n0teeth favourite has released before. The harshness in this sound doesn't rely entirely on distorted kick drums however, and NB's experimental side shines through in the metallic klings and klangs peppered throughout, especially on "Spite" or the bizarre frog burp effects of "Salt In The Wound". Like all my favourite power noise albums, Every Chalice Poisoned takes me to a cold, steel world where the lightning is harsh and the sound reverberates against bare concrete. But it's in that space that Non-Bio develops his own peculiar voice, rather than imitating his continental contemporaries on Ant Zen.

Lord Spikeheart - The Adept

Despite one or two tracks falling into the same uninspired breakcore-meets-extreme-metal jam that the likes of Drumcorps have been doing for a decade or two, the vocal half of Duma displays some stunning rhythmic ingenuity on his debut album, which was mastered by Emptyset's James Ginzburg who also appears on a track. Not to mention pushing his adventurous - occasionally terrifying - vocal stylings just that little bit further. At times he sounds like if Ogre was an actual ogre: gargling death growls over funereal grinding percussion. For the most part, the extreme metal elements are in the atmosphere rather than the instrumentation, which is more like Ansome's steel-thrashing take on techno. Noise-rap machine Backxwash joins the party on 33rd Degree Access - an album highlight for us.

Some of the rest

Five years on from their debut album, Rochdale trio Prangers returned with another startlingly original assemblage of sounds in the form of the Gomp four-tracker, telling curious tales of polydactyly and whatnot. Autumns - Dyslexia Sound Source showed the Derry dungeonmaster continuing his fascinating forays into the world of dub with bassy, reverb-heavy numbers like "Buy Me A Cornet". An collab between the man with the Scanner and widowed Technohead Michael Wells bore unexpectedly pleasant and jazzy fruit in the form of Zero. Container - Yacker saw n0teeth's favourite analogue slime merchant at his most rancidly effervescent. Veering between unrestrained speed-fuelled shouting fury and sublime eeriness, Shock Doctrine - Sapience might just be the most aggressively inventive shake up of post punk's guitar, bass and drum machine formula I've heard in years. Minimalist industrial clicks, slams and drones, intriguing twinkling percussion, underpinned by hefty bass guitar and seasoned with Middle Eastern pipes: all in a day's work for supergroup Eros on Your Truth Is A Lie. On Toda la Verdad Sobre Dame Area, the duo treated us to their vicious yet danceable sonic assault in both Italian and Spanish. Sickly harsh white strobe light synth distortion was the name of the game on Consumer Electronics - Surge, Normal Bias have started sounding almost impossibly Cabs-like on Kingdom Come and there was also a king's ransom of new releases from Einstürzende Neubauten, Maquina, Ulver, Somatic Responses, Istasha, Black Asteroid, Nordvargr, Cyberaktif, Wvalaam Klous, Osheyack & Nayash, Paranoid London, British Murder Boys, Flint Glass & Ah Cama-Sotz and Noirodyn. Jesus Christ this is an exhausting hobby sometimes. Maybe this year I'll take up listening to paint dry.