Over the last couple of months, Treble has rolled out a slew of new genre-specific quarterly columns and one of those I have the honor of writing: best experimental records. I’ve dubbed the column Without A Net and it goes without saying the pantheon of experimental music is indeed all over the map, and with this column I try to cover all the bases. The banner reads The 25 Best Experimental Albums of 2025” but I could have easily written up tons more; the amount of incredible music released this year was dizzying. As you’ll see, this list is not numerical but in alphabetical order—it’s all “best” in my book.
Read on for just a small stack out of a mountain of stellar albums dropped in 2025 and know I wish I could have blurbed about dozens more (no slight to anyone but space is limited!). Here, you’ll find noise, stoner rock, Americana, free jazz, metal, Moravian folk and more under the wide net of experimental music.
And stay tuned for the next installment of Without A Net in 2026.
Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons – Live in Philadelphia
At age 101, Sun Ra Arkestra leader and maestro Marshall Allen is an eternal creative force of nature, a tireless visionary and an inspiration to us all. In 2025, the unstoppable Allen dropped two keepers: New Dawn, his first-ever solo album (highest recommendation) and Live in Philadelphia from his Ghost Horizons ensemble, recorded when he just turned 99. An incredible document featuring Allen teaming up with a disparate cast of first-rate musicians from nine live shows at music venue Solar Myth then fine-tuned in the studio with stellar post-production treatment, Live in Philadelphia is affirmation of his cosmic genius. Each of the album’s sixteen pieces inflects a different mood and aura as guests like Wolf Eyes, James Brandon Lewis, James McNew of Yo La Tengo, longtime Arkestra guitarist DM Hotep, vocalist Tara Middleton and many more delve into noise and ambient explorations, krautrock and big-band music that is far-out as it is joyous. Long live Marshall Allen.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Eric Arn – fixe Idee
Back in ye olde 1980s, guitarist Eric Arn did time in the crucial Connecticut psych-rock outfit Crystalized Movements alongside pre-Major Stars’ axe hero Wayne Rogers, witness to his sonic obliterations. Over the subsequent decades, Arn has honed his own singularly left-of-center vocabularies where expertly crafted and improvisatory language is his forte. fixe Idee might just be the fullest realization yet of his backwoods bending and strumming magic. A part composed and part free-for-all that invokes, in part, the American Primitive style of John Fahey and the freakish folk of Sunburned Hand of the Man, in the end fixe Idee is all Arn’s language: ruminative guitar work that splinters off the the beaten path into unexpected directions. Like his old band name implied, these are indeed, “crystalized movements.”
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Lea Bertucci – The Oracle
Composer, improviser and ace sound mangler Lea Bertucci has been a vital cornerstone of the New York City experimental scene and beyond for well over a decade, sculpting site-specific aural fields from a bevy of instruments and contraptions such as electronics, saxophone, magnetic tape, voice and more. The Oracle continues Bertucci’s trajectory into other worlds of probing the emotionally deepest of tones, timbres and textures. What’s mind-boggling is that the interstellar sound waves, ethereal transmittals and nightmarish contortions that Bertucci conveys are coaxed from only knotty voice manipulations and indecipherable, off-the-cuff language. The Oracle’s unsettling, slo-motion warp-scapes serve as a brain-scrambling and numbing soundtrack to this trainwreck of a world right now—and an escape from it.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Blank Hellscape – Hell 2
No disrespect to Wolf Eyes (big fan here! Just scroll down to ‘W’) but the trip-metal and psycho-jazz duo have mellowed, somewhat, with age. Enter Austin, Texas trio Blank Hellscape (helluva name) to assume their place atop the noise music throne. They fittingly call themselves a “nightmare band” and judging from the apocalyptic and claustrophobic fuckery they spew on the sprawling double LP Hell 2 you’ll probably be waking up in a sweat-filled soak from some horrific dream. The pulverizing and beastly grind and wallop the fellas in Blank Hellscape hurl from their junkpile of drum machines, synths, tapes, electronics and guitars—and deliciously topped by Andrew Nogay’s deranged caterwauling–is just what the evil doctor ordered. Gloriously mangled chunks like “Dying In America,” “I Am Experiencing The Wrath of God” and “Gap In My Brain” are not just nightmarish but have a strange catchiness, too.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Zachary Cale – Love’s Work
Last year’s Next Year’s Ghost and his latest Love’s Work reveal Zachary Cale as a prolific heart-on-sleeve tunesmith and singer and inventive stringer in the vein of Jim O’Rourke. Cale can moodily and tenderly croon as he did on the former with melancholy piano as its backdrop, and on the latter, go the countrified guitar route–both to deeply moving effects. Love’s Work is Cale’s first all-instrumental record and boy is it a thing of beauty. With help from super-multi-intrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, drummer Jeremy Gustin and JR Bohannon on bass, drums and pedal steel, Cale takes center stage with acoustic guitar in tow, picking out gorgeously melodic and driving Americana that should be playing on a radio as you drive on a picturesque road trip with the windows rolled down and the wind rustling about. Think Yo La Tengo’s soundtrack music guitarscapes, O’Rourke’s Bad Timing and John Fahey’s American Primitivism.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Laura Cocks – FATHM
The sonic maelstrom that Laura Cocks produces from their flute is its own singular entity. No one plays flute with the radical abandon as the New York City experimentalist and TAK ensemble executive director and member. On the mind-expanding universes of sound that Cocks blasts out on FATHM, their first solo album of improvised compositions, the flautist paints a spattering kaleidoscopic spectrum of texture and tone that is so bare-bones that the listener can their hear every breath, grunt and growl. The shapeshifting improvisations on FATHM run the gamut from paint-peeling squawks, hurricane-force honks and mutilated blows to tender subtlety and thoughtful meditations.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Jeremiah Cymerman – UNTITLED
When it comes to Jeremiah Cymerman, descriptors like “doom metal clarinetist” has been bandied about (this writer included so guilty as charged). The downtown NYC staple and solo artist has also worked with Charlie Looker of Extra Life and Kayo Dot’s Toby Driver so his metal cred is warranted. On UNTITLED, Cymerman raises the bar of extreme and atmospheric hellscapes through the shrieks of his clarinet and the gnarliest of blown-out electronics. It’s Cymerman at his most brutal and brooding as he unleashes drone-metal-jazz terror, heady landscapes and scale-smashing heaviness with vital contributions from Jamie Saft, Jessica Pavone, Henry Fraser and Zachary Paul. Cymerman is donating 100% of the proceeds from UNTITLED to providing emergency aid in Gaza so you know what to do. Click here to pay-as-you-wish and know it’s going to the worthiest of causes.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Julia Úlehla and Dálava – Understories
The profoundly moving and vivid avant-folk meditations that Dálava makes resemble musical tales from a distant place and time. On Understories, that’s just the idea. The duo of otherworldly vocalist Julia Úlehla and Aram Bajakian, an incredibly versatile guitarist who slung the axe for Lou Reed on his final tour, dissect and reimagine ancient Moravian traditional folk music written by Úlehla’s great-grandfather. The sound-worlds Úlehla and Bajakian create sublimely intersect free-form avant-garde leanings with traditional mythologies that are so hauntingly beautiful and complete with an aura of mysticism amounting to ceremonial meditations that just aren’t made for these times. Totally entrancing singing and adventurous guitar work.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Melvin Gibbs – Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2
The game-changing arc that bass king Melvin Gibbs brings to the table is the stuff of avant-jazz, punk and funk legend. Gibbs has laid down the thick, low-end groove for Arto Lindsay, Rollins Band, Sonny Sharrock, Defunkt, Harriet Tubman and more. As a composer, solo artist and knob-twiddling sound designer at the board, he’s a madly creative scientist. The epically mind-blowing Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2 is the truest testament to Gibbs’ superhuman wizardry and collagist virtuosity. The six sprawling luminous, free-flowing and tripped-out odysseys, anchored on dizzying hip-hop beats, thumping grooves, scratchy funk and techno propulsions offers Gibbs’ take on the Great Black Music concept. He also enlisted serious star-power to realize his glitchy, twitching and spasmodic vision including, guitarist Pete Cosey(!), trumpeter Chris Williams, Tubman drummer JT Lewis, keyboardist John Medeski, Body Meπa bandmate Greg Fox and others. Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2 is a modern-day On The Corner, Body Meta and Get Up With It. Sick stuff.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Will Mason Quartet – Hemlocks, Peacocks
The academic credentials of composer and drummer Will Mason as an Associate Professor of Music and his deep probings into the experimental music template go hand-in-hand. Mason’s musical technique is scientific in its compositional approach with a microscopic attention to detail and cerebral in its broad scope. Mason’s Quartet’s transcendent Hemlocks, Peacocks is all that and more, a riveting and revelatory multi-movement composition that is effortless in its ability to hop from exquisite avant-jazz-leaning passages, head-snapping, odd time-signature drum-led patterns and wild fills to profound surveys into tones and drones. Mason and his next-level quartet, made up of tenor saxophonist Anna Webber, alto saxophonist Daniel Fisher-Lochhead and keyboardist deVon Russell Gray, interpret his microtonal chamber-jazz vision with surgical focus and the vim and vigor of free-improvisation. Impeccably recorded by ace engineer Joseph Branciforte.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
James McKain / Damon Smith / Weasel Walter – …seeing the way the mole tunnels…
Over the last couple of decades, the perennially inventive and wholly brutal tandem of The Flying Luttenbachers’ mastermind and drums powerhouse Weasel Walter and double bass maestro Damon Smith have restored faith in the American avant-garde jazz and free-improvisation movement through relentless touring and vital recordings dropped on their own staunchly DIY labels. Their long list of collaborators have counted the legendary Roscoe Mitchell, guitarist Sandy Ewen and more titans. Here, the pair link up with fellow wild-eyed iconoclastic saxophonist James McKain for an absolute whiplashing bruiser of a set that finds them zigzagging from maximalist take-no-prisoners fire-breathing and minimalist telepathic exchange with distinct moments of whimsy to introspective vocabulary. As the title suggests, the McKain/Smith/Walter trio are the moles tunneling through the dregs of the shitshow called the good ol’ U.S.A. with the fiercest of freethinking abandon. Best to listen up.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Ava Mendoza/Gabby Fluke-Mogul/Carolina Pérez – Mama Killa
With Mama Killa, this all-star avant-metal power trio, arguably, belted out the heaviest noise feast of the year. You’d expect nothing less from these three shredding heads: Brooklyn experimental music pillars, guitarist Ava Mendoza and violinist Gabby Fluke-Mogul and drummer Carolina Pérez, whose mighty Melvins-esque pummel would make Dale Crover blush. In this threesome’s arsenal lays a sludge-thick sonic assault of hefty shards of Sonny Sharrock-like damaged blues (a Mendoza hallmark), walls of noise a la Sonic Youth, violin cries and howls and tilted time signature-laced and blastbeat insanity. While Mama Killa has its free-improv-ish stretches and moments, the eight pieces here are built on a controlled chaos of hefty meticulousness and purely methodical drumming. Head-bangers for avant-gardists.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Thomas Morgan – Around You Is A Forest
The jazz pedigree of ubiquitous bassist Thomas Morgan is off the charts. Morgan has played with giants like Bill Frisell, the late great Paul Motian, 2025 MacArthur “Genius” Craig Taborn and John Abercrombie, among tons of others throughout a long, distinguished career. Around You Is A Forest is Morgan’s solo debut and it’s unlike any bass recording you’re going to hear. Just throw out any perceptions you might have because Morgan’s Around You Is A Forest floats and flutters like a sonic daydream. That out-of-the-box dynamic is thanks to Morgan’s own creation and utilization of what he’s dubbed WOODS, a virtual instrument he designed that, when sounds are fed into the machine, brain-frying constellations of patterns, tones and timbres unfold like the pieces of a puzzle being decoded. Sure, it sounds nerdy and geometric but what Morgan and guests like Frisell, Taborn, drummers Dan Weiss and Gerald Cleaver, Ambrose Akinmusire and Immanuel Wilkins achieve is like an experiment in jazz from an entirely other dimension of space and time.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Motherfuckers JMB & Co. – Music Excitement Action Beauty
Besides having a killer band name (what’s better than “Motherfuckers” lit up on the marquee), this underground supergroup go way deep into the stratosphere with the spaciest and tastiest of riff-powered jams on the very fittingly titled Music Excitement Action Beauty. Featuring Jim Thomson (formerly of GWAR and SST Records cult faves Alter Natives), Mark Minsker and Brian Weitz, better known as Geologist of Animal Collective fame (hence, the “JMB” in their moniker), these “mofo’s” crank out stoner zoners that hurdle from Krautrock rhythms, psychedelic chugging, deep grooves and free-improv freakouts–usually within the same song. Kinda like Sunburned Hand of the Man but on less levels of “out.”
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Weston Olencki – Broadsides
A few years back, Weston Olencki titled one of his records, “Old Time Music.” The sound artist, multi-instrumentalist and composer has a special knack for sketching sound canvases cut from a historically driven cloth. Broadsides exudes that mysterious feel of spinning a 78 rpm record and hearing the hiss, scratch and crackle as the needle hits wax. Olencki’s plucking of banjo and autoharp and use of field recordings amid the raucous din balances traditional folk vernacular with avant-garde collaging resulting in a rollicking road record (it was inspired by a tour across the American South they embarked on) that is unpredictable at every turn and corner of its journey.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Orcutt Shelley Miller – Orcutt Shelley Miller
The tripling of avant-everything guitar and Harry Pussy noisenik Bill Orcutt, bassist Ethan Miller, formerly of psych-noise legends Comets on Fire and currently Howlin’ Rain leader, and Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley is a power trio dream come true. This well-oiled, bottom-end groove and monster riff machine epitomize the “power” in power trio on their killer self-titled debut. The second Orcutt inaugurates this epic ride with his 1970s arena-rock sludge voodoo oozing from his guitar on “A Star Is Born” and the colossal one-two-rhythm-punch of the Miller/Shelley tandem kicks in, you know you’re in for a helluva trip. Mind-bending stoner rock, slow-burning Neil Youngian cocaine-laced blues and bass groove-packed ecstatic choogle made for speeding down the highway, the Orcutt/Shelley/Miller threesome is fire in every way—not to mention the epic beards (well, Shelley has some catching up to do to Orcutt and Miller there).
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Zeena Parkins / Cecilia Lopez – Red Shifts
Improvisational music titan Zeena Parkins has been a crucial linchpin of New York City’s experimental and avant underground for decades, a singularly forward-looking sound artist whose investigations of the harp has opened up new sonic possibilities of the instrument that has bent minds and ears. Cecilia Lopez traverses likeminded sound-deconstructing terrain, an electronics and synthesizer upstart with a propensity for probing textural and tonal depths with adventurous aplomb. It’s only natural that Parkins and Lopez would partner up and Red Shifts represents their first-time union. It lives up to the billing. The dazzling and disorienting realms that Parkins (on electric and acoustic harp and Ebow piano) and Lopez (on electronics, synths and RED, her self-made electronic instrument made with speaker wire) culminates in interplay that’s from the cosmos. The multilayered confluence of playful blips and bleeps, abrasive screeches, shimmering drones and sparkly strings-plucking that percolates from each piece prompts you to wonder, who’s playing what and how do they achieve such glorious soundscapes? No matter. Just immerse yourself in the sorcery of Red Shifts.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Rootless & Starbirthed – Rootless & Starbirthed
The cosmic country-fried goodness made on this collaborative record by acoustic guitarist and samplist Jeremy Hurewitz, aka Rootless, and the now-defunct duo Starbirthed drift like slow-moving puffy white clouds enveloped by the bright blue sky. The marathon-length pieces on their eponymous record are the picture of serenity as it layers upon layer rustic and gauzy strumming and the warmest of twangy picking with humming drones and swirling synths that serve as an elixir to the soul. A multitiered, colorful array of cathartic sounds to tune out to. So good.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
The Royal Arctic Institute – The Royal Arctic Institute
File it under ambient country, East Coast cosmic country or jazzy Americana, the laid-back, spaced-out and sunkissed twang-laden zoners that The Royal Arctic Institute have been perfecting over the last several years are instant bliss. On The Royal Arctic Institute, the Jersey/NYC outfit—led by the core group made up of guitarist John Leon, bassist Dave Motamed (of SST rock legends Das Damen and 90’s grunge heroes Cell) and Lyle Hysen (also of Das Damen)—expand their mind-bending and feathery country-baked horizons with pedal steel, synthesizers and keys that transport its instrumental dreamscapes into the outer regions. The Royal Arctic Institute provides an escape and a much needed one, to say the least.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Jamie Saft – Greatest Organ Hits
You may know the awesomely bearded piano and keys virtuoso Jamie Saft from his essential work with Iggy Pop, Bad Brains and John Zorn, in addition to his mountain of solo joints and bandleader outings. This chill dude is seriously the king of vibe, groove and tone. And Greatest Organ Hits is definitive proof of that. A master multi-instrumentalist, this groove-ilicious batch finds Saft perched at his Yamaha Electone FX-3 and HC-2 Organs as cool as any cat as he latches onto bluesy, dubby and psych-jazz rhythms that pulse and flow with a full-on jammy pulse. Many of Saft’s Holy Grail of influences and inspirations bubble to the top here such as Stevie Wonder, ZZ Top, Coltrane and Dylan.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Three-Layer Cake – Sounds The Color of Grounds
If you’ve pondered how the Minutemen might have sounded like in the 21st century had D Boon lived, Three-Layer Cake might just be the closest manifestation of that. Of course, there will only be one Minutemen but TLC is the next best thing. The econo trio, made up of bass-man and Minuteman Mike Watt with a pair of New York avant-punk vets, guitarist/banjoist Brandon Seabrook and drummer/noisemaker Mike Pride, rip out a mind-melt that harkens back to the glory years of SST Records and the New Alliance label (the imprint once run by Watt and Boon). What causes jaws to drop is Sounds The Color of Grounds was recorded remotely; this threesome wasn’t even in the same room. Despite that, the synergy is off the charts, thanks to Pride’s wizardry at the boards in piecing together the funk maelstrom, big, booming bass riffs, percussive knick-knacks and Watt’s rhymin’ and spielin’ into a unified mofo of a statement.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Jeff Tobias – One Hundredfold Now in This Age
Maybe you know Jeff Tobias from Sunwatchers or Modern Nature but the NYC DIY mainstay and activist is also a hell of a solo artist in his own right. The prescient synthesizer-throbbing art-pop sprawl One Hundredfold Now in This Age backs that up in the most earworm-filled way possible. Tobias dubs it “anti-imperialist pop composition maximalism” and what better way to start an album with his soothing voice calling to “burn the American flag a hundred times a day” set against a lovely tapestry of emotive and soaring synths and strings-fueled goodness. Throughout its ten call-to-action anthems, Tobias explores lyrical themes of current real-world horrors through a bright synth-pop lens that would light up a dancefloor. With contributions from guitarist Wendy Eisenberg and other luminaries, Tobias’ pulsating stylings fuse the bleak with hopefulness (should-be hit “Gimme Coherence” is perfection). One Hundredfold Now in This Age is undoubtedly the catchiest political record you’re going to hear this year.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
The Whimbrels – The Whimbrels
The hall of famers who make up avant-punk/no wave/noise act The Whimbrels bring such major cred to the table that before even spinning their debut record, you know it’s gonna rule. After all, this guitar-dominated group features veteran titans of Glenn Branca’s ensembles, Swans, New Radiant Storm King, The Scene Is Now and more legendary NYC underground rock movers and shakers. The Whimbrels’ triple guitar assault of Arad Evans, Norman Westberg and Luke Schwartz conjures the coiled and snaking alchemy of Television’s Verlaine/Lloyd tandem but it also brims to the rim with clang and clatter cut from Sonic Youth’s dissonant cloth. And their noisy, jangly and off-kilter rockers—topped by speak-sing vocals—are stuck-in-your-head-level catchy. The Whimbrels might have served up the guitar record of the year.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Wolf Eyes x Anthony Braxton – live at pioneer works, 26 october 2023
The alliance of Noise music titans Wolf Eyes and the 80-year-old avant-garde jazz maestro Anthony Braxton actually goes back some twenty years. Back in 2005, the psycho-jazzers teamed up with the indefatigable composer on Black Vomit, a face-grinding throwdown of sax skronk and electronics-fueled pyrotechnics. Thanks to the noise gods, that slab wasn’t a one-off. In 2023, John Olson and Nate Young reconvened with Braxton at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works for another clash of these uncompromising minds. This live set may not approach Black Vomit’s aural assault but it more than makes up for it with brain-bending meditations that seemingly floated in from another realm. With Olson and Young delivering a one-two electronics-splattered punch, Braxton rattles off majestic passages, phrases, squeals and squawks from his alto, sopranino and bass saxophones that are life-affirming. Trip metal, maybe not; cosmic jazz, certainly. – Brad Cohan
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Yowie – Taking Umbrage
I’m convinced that the rubberband-snapping, mad professor-like warp speed riff-rock that Yowie improbably whip up cannot be played by actual human beings. Taking Umbrage, the trio’s fourth album, is truly on an unattainable level of bionic strength. They call their mathy and proggy precision “hypercomposed” but it should be more like hypercomposed—to the millionth degree. That’s how apeshit Taking Umbrage is. It makes like-minded instrumental bands like The Flying Luttenbachers, Don Caballero and Ruins seem pedestrian and radio-accessible by comparison. Yowie’s superpower is their affinity to employ not just jaw-dropping rigor but pull it off with an elasticity and loosey-goosey bent that makes songs like “Lemon Stroganoff” and “Museum Fatigue” such a hoot. Prepare for head-exploding tons of fun and a barrage of notes to your heart’s content.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
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