This 10 Best Worldwide Records of 2025
As the year draws to a close, we reflect on the international releases that pushed boundaries. Here is a countdown of ten exceptional albums that characterized the year in music.
Number Ten: The Percussionist Sarathy Korwar – There Already Is Beauty
A continuous, 40-minute suite of cyclical percussion might not seem the easiest musical proposition. Yet, south Asian drummer and composer Sarathy Korwar turns this insistent rhythm into a unexpectedly magnetic work. Directing an ensemble of three drummers, Korwar creates a dense percussive vocabulary across the record's 10 movements. The work references minimalist concepts from Steve Reich as well as Indian classical phrasing, all anchored in the repetition of a persistent, driving motif. As the album progresses, this refrain starts to mirror the hypnotic repetition of ritual music, pulling the listener deeper into Korwar's unique percussive world.
Number Nine: The Lebanese Artist Yasmine Hamdan – I Remember I Forget
Coming off an long absence, Arab singer-songwriter Yasmine Hamdan returns with a mournful set of songs. She expands on the Arabic-language, dub-tinged aesthetic that made her a staple in the Middle Eastern independent music landscape since the nineties. Hamdan's vocal delivery is soft and ruminative, singing delicate melodies over the bowing strings of a track like Hon and the rolling trip-hop beat of Vows. During more energetic moments such as Shadia and Abyss, she employs a wavering, yearning vocal technique against electronic lines with North African flavors and clattering electronic percussion. The musical backdrop is sparse and restrained, yet this minimalism offers the ideal environment for Hamdan's emotive lyricism to resonate. This is a record well worth the wait.
Number Eight: The Mexican Producer Debit – Desaceleradas
From Mexico electronic artist Debit has a knack for uncanny reworkings of traditional music. For her new album, Desaceleradas, she focuses on the 1990s variant of cumbia rebajada – a slowed, dubby version of the shuffling Latin American musical style. Debit drags this sound even further, running its signature synths and syncopated rhythm through veils of sludge and hiss to create a fresh, sinister beat. Periodically ambient and discomfiting, Debit transforms the exuberant party music of cumbia into a enduring, ethereal afterimage.
7. The São Paulo Producer DJ K – Liberator Radio!
Sheer intensity is the key term for the music of Brazilian producer Kaique Vieira, also known as DJ K. Inventing his own genre of "bruxaria" (witchcraft), Vieira stacks a cacophony of alarms, pummeling bass tones and screamed lyrics on top of the classic Brazilian genre of baile funk. This captures the propulsive sound of urban celebrations. On his second album, Radio Libertadora!, Vieira cranks up the energy, adding everything from four-on-the-floor techno beats to samples of the Islamic call to prayer into his frantic bruxaria mix. The result is a notably hyperactive and punishingly loud 40-minute sonic journey. Give in to the assault and Vieira's bold productions become strangely freeing.
Number Six: Mohinder Kaur Bhamra – Disco Punjabi
Religious vocalist Mohinder Kaur Bhamra's 1982 album of disco music and traditional Punjabi tunes is a reissued masterpiece. Produced by her son, music producer Kuljit Bhamra, Punjabi Disco's ten tracks offer an strikingly captivating fusion of the sharp sound of early synthesizers and drum machines with her fluid classical Indian vocal technique. Electronic percussion echoes the wavelike tones of the traditional drums, while synthesiser melody replicates the classic sound of the harmonium on tracks such as Pyar Mainu Kar. Elsewhere, bossa nova rhythm takes center stage on Soniya Mukh Tera, and Nainan Da Pyar De Gaya boasts a up-tempo disco bass groove. It's a dancefloor fusion created more than ten years before the rise of Asian Underground music.
Number Five: Enji – Sonor
Mongolian vocalist Enji's gentle new release, Sonor, expands on her jazz-inflected sound to deliver some of her most diverse music so far. Departing from her training in traditional Mongolian "long song" singing, the record's 11 tracks veer from the soft jazz-pop melodies of downtempo number Ulbar to the German spoken-word lyrics and twanging guitar lines of Unadag Dugui. The album also includes a lively, funk-tinged cover of the 80s Mongolian pop hit Eejiinhee Hairaar. Utilizing a live band rather than her usual setup of guitar and bass, Sonor's sound remains intimate, drawing the listener into the gentle soundscape of her distinctive voice.
Number Four: Derya Yıldırım and Her Band – Yarın Yoksa
Inspired by the 1960s legacy of Anatolian rock established by groups such as Moğollar, German-Turkish singer Derya Yıldırım's latest work alongside her group blends the electric jangle of the electrified saz with dreamy keyboard and R&B-inflected lines. It's a 1970s throwback sound rooted in Yıldırım's commanding falsetto and shaped by producer Leon Michels' analogue tape aesthetic. But, on Turkish standards such as the nursery rhyme Hop Bico and 60s classic Ceylan, the group reaches dynamic new territory. They develop slinking, downtempo grooves and soaring vocals that give a novel, off-kilter twist to the Turkish psych sound.
Number Three: Lido Pimienta – La Belleza
Sacred music, Eastern European folk melodies and symphonic arrangements converge on Colombian singer Lido Pimienta's extraordinary latest work. Orchestrating music for the sixty-member Medellín Philharmonic Orchestra, Pimienta and producer Owen Pallett explore a vast range including the liturgical vocals of opener Overturn (Obertura de la Luz Eterna) to the dramatic counterpoint melodies of Aún Te Quiero and the rhythmic reggaeton-inspired beats of the brass and woodwind-led El Dembow del Tiempo. It is Pim
