This Ten Best Worldwide Records of the Year 2025
Looking back on the musical landscape of global music that expanded horizons. We explore ten exceptional albums that defined the year in music.
10. The Percussionist Sarathy Korwar – There Is Beauty, There Already
The concept of a 40-minute, uninterrupted piece built on insistent percussion could sound like it isn't the most accessible listening experience. However, south Asian drummer and composer Sarathy Korwar turns this driving beat into a hypnotically captivating piece. Leading an group of three drummers, Korwar crafts a dense percussive vocabulary over the record's 10 movements. The album references minimalist concepts from Steve Reich alongside Indian classical phrasing, each grounded in the recurrence of a continual, pulsing refrain. The longer one listens, this refrain evokes the hypnotic repetition of ritual music, drawing the listener further into Korwar's distinctive percussive world.
9. The Lebanese Artist Yasmine Hamdan – I Remember I Forget
Following an eight-year break, Lebanese vocalist and composer Yasmine Hamdan returns with a melancholy album of songs. She expands on the Arabic-language, dub-influenced style that established her as a fixture in the Arab alternative scene since the nineties. Hamdan's vocal delivery is quiet and introspective, delivering tender melodies atop the bowing strings of a track like Hon and the rolling trip-hop groove of Vows. For more upbeat numbers such as Shadia and Abyss, she uses a wavering, yearning vibrato against north African synth lines and clattering electronic percussion. The album's sound is minimal and restrained, yet this minimalism creates the ideal canvas for Hamdan's expressive songwriting to take center stage. This is a record truly deserving of the wait.
Number Eight: Debit – Desaceleradas
Mexican producer Debit excels at eerie reimaginings of traditional music. For her latest release, Desaceleradas, she zeroes in on the 90s style of cumbia rebajada – a slowed, dubby version of the shuffling Latin American dance music genre. Debit drags this sound even further, running its signature synths and syncopated rhythm through veils of distortion and hiss to create a new, menacing beat. Periodically ambient and unsettling, Debit transforms the joyous party music of cumbia into a persistent, ghostly echo.
7. DJ K – Liberator Radio!
Sheer intensity is the operative word for the output of Brazilian producer Kaique Vieira, also known as DJ K. Coining his own genre of "bruxaria" (witchcraft), Vieira piles a onslaught of alarms, explosive bass tones and shouted lyrics on top of the enduring Brazilian genre of baile funk. This recreates the propulsive sound of neighborhood block parties. On his new record, Radio Libertadora!, Vieira escalates the intensity, throwing in everything from techno kick drums to samples of the Islamic call to prayer into his unruly bruxaria mix. The result is a especially frenetic and overwhelmingly noisy forty-minute sonic journey. Submit to the noise and Vieira's unapologetic productions become oddly liberating.
Number Six: The Singer Mohinder Kaur Bhamra – Disco Punjabi
Religious vocalist Mohinder Kaur Bhamra's 1982 album of disco beats and Punjabi folk melodies is a reissued treasure. Recorded by her son, music producer Kuljit Bhamra, Punjabi Disco's ten tracks offer an remarkably compelling combination of the synthetic sound of early synthesizers and drum machines with her fluid classical Indian vocal technique. Drum machine patterns mirrors the rolling tones of the traditional drums, while synthesiser melody replicates the traditional sound of the harmonium on tracks such as Pyar Mainu Kar. At other times, Latin-inflected grooves is prominent on Soniya Mukh Tera, and Nainan Da Pyar De Gaya channels a up-tempo funky bass rhythm. It's a dancefloor fusion delivered more than ten years before the global breakthrough of South Asian electronic music.
Number Five: Enji – Sonor
From Mongolia vocalist Enji's soft fourth album, Sonor, builds upon her jazz-inflected sound to present some of her most wide-ranging music so far. Stepping outside her training in traditional Mongolian "long song" singing, the record's 11 tracks veer from the gentle Norah Jones-esque melodies of downtempo number Ulbar to the German spoken-word lyrics and trilling guitar lines of Unadag Dugui. The album also includes a lively, funk-inflected cover of the 1980s Mongolian classic Eejiinhee Hairaar. Featuring a full backing band rather than her usual setup of guitar and bass, Sonor's sound remains intimate, inviting the listener into the warm acoustics of her singular voice.
4. Derya Yıldırım and Her Band – Yarın Yoksa
Inspired by the 1960s legacy of Turkish psychedelia established by groups such as Moğollar, Turkish-born, Germany-based singer Derya Yıldırım's third record with her band Grup Şimşek blends the distinctive buzz of the amplified traditional lute with woozy keyboard and classic soul melodies. It's a nostalgic vibe grounded in Yıldırım's commanding falsetto and shaped by producer Leon Michels' warm, tape-saturated sound. But, on Turkish standards such as the nursery rhyme Hop Bico and 60s classic Ceylan, the group finds lively new territory. They craft sinuous, downtempo grooves and powerful vocals that give a novel, off-kilter twist to the Anatolian psychedelic style.
3. The Colombian Artist Lido Pimienta – La Belleza
Sacred music, Eastern European folk melodies and orchestral strings converge on Colombian singer Lido Pimienta's stunning fourth album. Orchestrating music for the sixty-member Medellín Philharmonic Orchestra, Pimienta and producer Owen Pallett explore everything from the liturgical vocals of opener Overturn (Obertura de la Luz Eterna) to the dramatic interweaving lines of Aún Te Quiero and the syncopated reggaeton-inspired beats of the brass and woodwind-led El Dembow del Tiempo. Yet, it is Pim
