Surprisingly high scores? These reviews are taken from Vice magazine, v29n2: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here—you’ll need to subscribe by Friday, August 29 to ensure the summer issue is the first one you’re sent.
Best Album of the Issue: All of them
Worst Album of the Issue: None of them
Best Cover of the Issue: Peter Doherty – Felt Better Alive
Worst Cover of the Issue: Peter Doherty – Felt Better Alive
Barker
Stochastic Drift
(Smalltown Supersound)
Lockdown. Berghain resident Barker fills in paperwork for the job center while I try to beat the queue simulator before the world reopens. I speak Duolingo German and shelve pingers at my standing desk but the virtual doorman won’t let me in. Fet wear arrives from China; I pull down my N95 to reveal a ball gag, the answer’s still no. Five years pass; I give up on returning to Berlin. But now Barker’s back, recapitulating that ambient space between medicated anxiety and chronic relaxation. And I’m busting out my assless chaps and firing up this webcam one last time.
10/10
Lord Marquardt
oqbqbo and Scandinavian Star
In This Together
(IMO)
Most people look at apartment listings on the internet and imagine their families in those homes. Me, I imagine cabals of bug-eyed strangers, assembled over the course of a weekend-long rampage through the taverns and doss houses of my hometown. If you spend long enough looking at the listings sites, you realize something weird: on every single television screen is the same thing, that big fish from Blue Planet. I grind my molars and I can practically taste the whale song. It won’t be long until the rooms you raised your children in are full of ranting feral pissheads. Not everyone dreams of dignity. If only David Attenborough could see you now.
10/10
Albert Shamu
Bon Iver
SABLE, fABLE
(Jagjaguwar)
Sure, these music reviews are just a vessel for the worst jokes you’ve ever read, but how else to respond to a world where the 21st century’s most visionary artists are reduced to selling scented candles and mood mist? The majestic, transcendent SABLE, fABLE boasts a marketing strategy which makes Brat look mindful and demure. Justin Vernon has twenty-seven (27) new brand collabs, with release day brand partners including artisanal ice cream parlors, coffee roasteries, and bagel shops. Fair play, I’d never have dreamt up something so emblematic of the modern music industry as limited-edition Bon Iver smoked salmon.
10/10
Justin Flagrante
Fontaines D.C.
Romance (Deluxe Edition)
(XL)
Being the last people on Earth always seemed a romantic delusion born of the innate inability to imagine existence outside the limits of the self. Now, with the heat boiling the piss in your kidneys, it feels like maybe we’re the chosen ones after all. The fourth Fontaines D.C. album articulates the anxiety and euphoria of our apparent End Times. The new deluxe edition adds a welcome postscript: “It’s Amazing to Be Young” celebrates welcoming a new generation into a dying world as an act of faith in the future. Dress your children in lime green babygrows, throw them towards God, and hope for the best.
10/10
Colonel Slobfucker
Yung Lean
Jonatan
(World Affairs)
In the comments of a YouTube video where Yung Lean talks getting sober, one fan recalls that, at the height of his own drug use, he inherited an axolotl, naming him Jonatan Leandoer because he looked exactly like the Swedish rapper—“something with the distance between his eyes and the set of his mouth”—keeping the amphibian alive through ten years of interstate moves until finally he died, the funeral attended by friends from across the span of the decade—“he was a real G, I’ll see that goddamn axolotl in Valhalla, if I ever make it.” Yung Lean makes you want to be better: for your dead pets, for your family, for the world.
10/10
Ax O’Lottle
Model/Actriz
Pirouette
(True Panther)
For Model/Actriz singer Cole Haden, life comes at you fast—one minute everyone’s comparing you to David Yow from the Jesus Lizard, the next you’re writing songs with Miley Cyrus. The most fitting possible metaphor for these 11 tracks of traumatic lust? Haden on stage at the VMAs, twerking his ass in flesh-colored underwear made from actual human flesh.
10/10
Killer McHann
Self Esteem
A Complicated Woman
(Polydor)
All these years crying in the bathroom to Labi Siffre, little did I know people were creating new soundtracks for my lonely hearts club. Without anyone at all asking her to do it, Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s third album of torch songs pulls off the rare trick of marrying Lighthouse Family and Life Without Buildings (shoutout Sue Tompkins for the cameo on “Logic, Bitch!”—you have been missed), while interspersing the record with bleak electronic slop as if to recognize that all suffering contains within it the possibility of salvation. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to fire up the Bluetooth speaker and get the shower on.
10/10
Toilet Duck
Sally Shapiro
Ready to Live a Lie
(Italians Do It Better)
I wish I had better moments of teenage triumph to recount than the afternoon I paid £20 for an import copy of Disco Romance, the first album by peerless, miserabilist Italo duo Sally Shapiro, but I don’t. There were no experimental dalliances after dark in a friend of a friend’s parents’ bedroom or early forays into the joys and sorrows of a Frosty Jack’s hangover. I didn’t mix or mingle or meet myself in the glowing cherry of a single skin smoked on the swings. I had that Sally Shapiro album, though. And now we have another. Thank heavens for small mercies.
10/10
Darren Fuckerby
Sparks
MAD!
(Transgressive)
Sparks have released 28 albums over the course of 50 years. Some are masterpieces (Nº 1 in Heaven), others are at least intriguing (Lil’ Beethoven) and a few (Hippopotamus, Pulling Rabbits Out of a Hat) are just, well, crap. MAD!—even if the bulk of it sounds like the sort of pseudo-operatic capital ‘R’ rock that Balkan states enter into Eurovision, even if there are songs called “A Little Bit of Light Banter” and “JanSport Backpack,” even if half a century on, the Sparks schtick is wearing thinner than Ron’s tache—is one of the great ones.
10/10
Ron Maelpatternbaldness
Kara-Lis Coverdale
From Where You Came
(Smalltown Supersound)
The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth: each of us is forced to reckon with war, poverty, and an endless succession of ambient records that sound like timid auditions for miserable video installations in the sort of galleries that suck the life force from you one tote bag at a time. Coverdale’s stunning previous record Grafts was the polar opposite of all that, and this one’s a beguiling amalgamation of New Age, minimalism, and 19th century programmatic music. Perfect fodder for all the Boomkat blokes out there.
10/10
Brad Pitt-Closures
Swans
Birthing
(Young Gods)
When Swans emerged from the ashes of New York’s seriously skronky no wave scene in the early 80s, YouTube was a scarcely believable prospect: our viewing habits were dictated to us by broadcasting bigwigs. Now, we get to sit on the bus and flit between clips of men drinking shoe polish, pigeons being sucked into Russian grain silos, six-hour essays about Japanese dating simulators, footage of Oliver Reed being drunk and disruptive, Gabriel Sara ‘Goals Assists & Skills’ compilations, and a lyric video for a brilliant new Swans song from a brilliant new Swans album. Maybe your life isn’t as bad as people keep telling you it is after all.
10/10
Nigel Slayyyter
Stereolab
Instant Holograms on Metal Film
(Warp)
6 Music dads are always getting it in the neck because they’re easy targets: soft-bellied broken-hearted dreamers whose only crime is no longer being able to access the parts of themselves they love most because taking any more drugs will kill them. Finally, then, some succor: Stereolab’s first album in 15 years will put a weary smile on the face of anyone who remembers clutching plastic pints of Castlemaine in a sticky-floored Student Union bar while listening to “French Disko” and arguing about whether Caroline Quentin is fit or not.
10/10
Jonathan Freak
Sleigh Bells
Bunky Becky Birthday Boy
(Mom + Pop)
In the 17 years since Sleigh Bells formed, culture has accelerated to the point where I spend every day twitching like a chimp with a malfunctioning Neuralink, tormented by visions from the digital beyond. Bunky Becky Birthday Boy is how the internet feels: synths programmed with drone strike precision. Saccharine sweet vocals which trigger flashbacks of Bonnie Blue pouting obscenities into the camera. Battle-ready thrash riffs marching out towards World War III. Pray for the horrors yet to come, hopefully we’ll get some good content out of them.
10/10
Spunky Speccy
Saint Leonard
The Golden Hour
(First Run Records)
God bless Saint Kieran Leonard, who’s doing all he can to bring David Bowie back from the dead. Kieran moved to Berlin, got in the booth at Hansa, and even convinced Brian Eno to stop playing padel with Fred Again so they could collaborate on a song. In fact, given the first track is named after Rob Doyle’s Threshold—a book which contains more drugs than all of Görlitzer Park—it’s tempting to wonder if Kieran followed the Irish author’s lead, got one-shotted on ayahuasca, and had his brain rearranged by a 6D reincarnation of the Thin White Duke.
10/10
Young Mesoamerican Corn Demons
Peter Doherty
Felt Better Alive
(Strap Originals)
Pete(r) recently addressed the nerdish specter of artificial intelligence. “Something that can’t be replicated digitally is the human soul,” he told Hot Press, “and the warmth of human contact.” He’s right, AI could never date Kate Moss or burgle Carl Barât, or skip detox in Wat Tham Krabok, or flee a party after someone fell to their death, or break your heart singing “High and Dry” in a minicab, or crush Margate’s biggest breakfast challenge. It’ll never make something as meaningful as Down in Albion, let alone Up the Bracket, or even Felt Better Alive for that matter. ChatGPT? Why don’t you go and DeepSeek yourself some friends, mate!
10/10
Grok ‘N’ Roll Suicide
Jenny Hval
Iris Silver Mist
(4AD)
There’s nothing right-wing podcasters enjoy more than boasting about how influential they are—see “the Red Scare girls basically wrote White Lotus” for proof—so I’m surprised the Perfume Nationalist hasn’t tried to claim a production credit for Jenny Hval’s graceful, vaporous new album. It’s named after a Serge Luten fragrance that costs $320 a bottle, which is roughly what your average incel spends on Patreon subs each month. For what it’s worth, I checked, and there’s an episode of the Perfume Nationalist discussing this scent. The guest is someone called ‘The Gorgonzola Man,’ a good way of describing how your average incel smells.
10/10
Leo De Toilette
Sextile
yes, please
(Sacred Bones)
Is this a 10? After a couple of drinks, perhaps, when you’re all wild and sweaty, covered in the neon guts of a decanted glowstick because you’ve been hakken dancing for five hours straight with the Toys “R” Us mascot and some machine elves. But outside of those very specific conditions? Who knows, some things you just can’t put a number on.
10/10
Donk Draper
billy woods
GOLLIWOG
(Backwoodz Studioz)
Fascist brain rot is nothing if not culturally specific. While America’s conservative reactionaries gladly die for their precious right to bear arms, the enraged boomers of Brexit Britain would risk it all for a racist rag doll. The SWAT team will be blasting billy woods’ paranoid and confusing new record from the police chopper as they storm the lonely hate den where your father-in-law has holed up with a sawed-off shotgun and his collection of vintage Robertson’s jam memorabilia. The old man’s going down in flames and he’s leaving everything to Reform.
10/10
Stephen Yaxley-Lenin
Surprisingly high scores? These reviews are taken from Vice magazine, v29n2: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here—you’ll need to subscribe by Friday, August 29 to ensure the summer issue is the first one you’re sent.
The post Album Reviews, Summer 2025 appeared first on VICE.
