Alternative Album Chart: the best new indie and alternative albums this week
We’re now firmly into 2025, and that means it’s time for the return of the Alternative Album Chart. There’s no doubt that last year was an excellent 12 months musically, with an array of artists releasing albums that wasted no time impressing themselves upon the psyche and going down as favourites. It might be hard to top, but this latest lap around the sun has certainly started off on a firm footing.
The album of the week comes from Manchester artist, jasmine.4.t, in the shape of You Are The Morning. A masterclass in sincere songwriting, underpinned by her recent experiences of coming out as a trans woman, the record is poetically moving, musically diverse, and altogether well-executed, featuring moments of pure abandon and others of sheer emotional weight. Produced by the eminent Boygenius, who also offer their backing vocals to a track, this is a marvellous way for the artist to introduce herself to new listeners.
In another significant release, Malian rock powerhouses Songhoy Blues return after five long years with Héritage. Finding the band shifting their sound in line with their well-documented experiences with having to move to the Malian capital of Bamako due to the civil war in 2012, they’ve stretched the scope of their sound, fused it with other flecks of traditional music they encountered in the city, and crafted a record that is as vital as anything they’ve released before. It’s another key reminder that brilliant music doesn’t have to be made by Westerners on a laptop. The expressive might of this album is potent.
Elsewhere this week, The Weather Station reaffirms that genres and tags are fast becoming obsolete with the intangible, mystifying Humanhood, Teeside’s Perfect Chicken get truly bonkers on Pecking Order, and Lots of Hands unlock the door to intense nostalgia with the aptly named Into A Pretty Room.
Find this week’s Alternative Album Chart below.
The best new indie and alternative albums this week:
You Are The Morning – jasmine.4.t – [4]
You Are The Morning, the debut album by Manchester’s jasmine.4.t is of an exceptional sort. It’s not very often that an artist manages to lucidly bottle the many intricate layers of their personal life, build an album that’s constantly morphing musically, and do something that feels unique. But that’s precisely what she’s done with this effort. After a while of making waves underground, you get the sense that with backing from boygenius – Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus – who produce the album, everything is set for a stellar career.
The album’s focal point is that the light breaks through every morning, no matter how black the darkness is when the new day enters. Jasmine.4.t is a trans woman, and the album candidly and intrepidly details her experiences after coming out as such. This encompasses their mixed reactions from her close friends, the divorce it precipitated, the precarious housing problems that followed, and, on the other hand, just how key friendship was to getting her through it all, by providing a sofa, warmth and support as she became who she really is. She credits this support from the community with saving her life, and the hues of this gratitude, as well as her concerted activism, are heard clearly in some of the songs.
Autobiographical, accomplished and thematically substantial, You Are The Morning has already made a great case for itself ahead of the mass of albums that are to follow in 2025. It’s an essential body of work. Have the tissues ready; this is new sincerity songwriting at its finest.
Héritage – Songhoy Blues – [4]
You might wince at the idea of moving back towards traditional values, considering how much positive progress we’ve made societally in the last century or so, but in some respects, paying homage to the customs of your ancestors can ultimately bring you closer to your culture. On Songhoy Blues’ fourth studio album, Héritage, the Malian desert blues outfit have toned down their frenetic West African interpretation of rock music to deliver an album that functions as a love letter to the country’s rich cultural past.
Displaced from their home in the North of the country due to the civil war that broke out in Mali in 2012, the band settled in their new home in the capital of Bamako, where they were given more access to a wider variety of music that encompassed the traditional music of other ethnic backgrounds. As a much more liberated city, they had the freedom to express themselves through the electrified sounds of desert blues, mixing together elements of Western rock and funk with music from the Saharan region.
However, the group had always wanted to bring things back to the music that they would initially have been exposed to and brought up on in their hometown of Timbuktu, and on Héritage, this sideways step away from the desert blues, or tishoumaren, sees the band focus on a folkier and more acoustic version of their sound without needing to fully reinvent themselves in the process.
Songhoy Blues might have gone through numerous changes in their sound and personal circumstances, but their music is just as vital as ever, and gives a fine insight into the wealth of musical history that Mali has to offer as a nation.
Humanhood – The Weather Station – [4]
With every new album, we are constantly reminded of the loss of genre, and we do not mourn. Catalogues and labels in music take their last breath as the boundaries that artists surround themselves with grow smaller and smaller. The Weather Station steps over whatever remains as if they are nothing more than lowered curbs outside abandoned homes, as their new album, Humanhood, is a perplexing twist of styles that are as alluring as they are confusing.
It’s hard to understand where the starting point would be for songs by The Weather Station. The array of instruments and styles of music at their fingertips must make it hard to pick a starting block, and yet, despite the inevitable challenges that come with this versatility, the songs sound perfectly put together, cohesive, and tight in their execution.
Perhaps this album fails to adhere to rules so much because of how it was made. No blueprint, no structure, it is the by-product of six musicians improvising at Canterbury Music Company. Extracts from this improvisation were separated, and the songs were built around them. Starting point? The starting point is thin air and an artist’s intuition; any shape you do come across is an afterthought. The result is that the album sounds raw and has the tension of something coming into existence in real time.
Pecking Order – Perfect Chicken – [4]
John Cooper Clarke once said that the genius of the Ramones was that ”they understood that it was better to have clever lyrics about moronic subjects than the other way round”. Well, Dr Clarke, what about moronic lyrics about moronic subjects? Where does that factor into the grand scheme of how punk ought to be?
In truth, this transition towards the divvy certainly feels timely. While it might seem utterly tangential to go off on an academic note about an album by the mental masked trio of Perfect Chicken, allow me to indulge—lord knows, they’ve certainly indulged themselves. Back in the days of the Dadaists, they claimed their daftness had nothing to do with nothing (double negative intended). But it certainly served to reflect the utter insanity of World War One.
Maybe that’s what these lads from Teeside are doing? Having a daft laugh and joke in the beloved tradition of the likes of Viz and Vic and Bob before the laughter stops. Either way, it’s endearing. And it is elevated by being short, sweet, and backed by clever music that they’re dubbing ‘regressive rock’. It’s a sound and energy that could certainly cause you to grumble if you’re in a less agreeable mood. But the lads don’t mind that. they’ll wait with a cup of tea until you’ve settled down and you’re ready for some refreshing stupidity that feels oddly subversive.
I Still Want To Share – Sophie Jamieson – [3.5]
“I think what holds this record together is the idea of attachment rather than love,” Sophie Jamieson explains. “The clinical, less romantic nature, the ugly nature, but also the very human nature of that.” Throughout I Still Want To Share, Jamieson delivers spine-tingling vocals set to the backdrop of tentative, almost folk-leaning self-reflection, offering confrontational musings through the lens of heartbreak, uncertainty, and longing.
While many tracks carry similar blends of melancholy and blissful relief, each incorporates the right dosage of poetic lyricism and narrative unpredictability, reframing memories and experiences many could view as mundane in an entirely new light. In Jamieson’s world, each featherlight touch, brush of morning light, and trips to the local drive-ins become canvases for romantic expression, even when the relationships themselves are far from perfect.
However, that’s precisely the appeal of the record. Instead of concerning herself with perfectionism, she leans into her own flawed characteristics, crafting vivid stories from a heart that doesn’t know much more than how it longs to feel whole. Beyond the enticing themes she incorporates lies her gorgeous vocal delivery, which, even during moments when the songs dip in intrigue, carries them through to the next section, like waiting for a soft ocean wave to crash in and take you away once more.
Into A Pretty Room – Lots of Hands – [3.5]
Turning the feeling of memory into art is a talent. I’m not talking about the memories themselves; I’m talking about the feeling of them—of being lost to the world for a moment as you wander back into an old one, revisiting some day or some moment or some person in the past and existing only in that place in your head. You know, realistically, that it’s entirely made up as a product of your own nostalgia. But you also know you want to stay a while. Newcastle‘s Lots of Hands have that talent, and Into A Pretty Room opens up the door to that place and ushers you in.
As Lots Of Hands combines band sensibilities, clearly inspired by the more approachable genres of rock and folk and clearly informed by their teenage years spent meeting in a music program and bonding over more youthful musical loves, with a glitchier, electronic side. In doing so, the production details feel like twinkles overlayed only these songs. Rock and experimentation mix and Lots Of Hands have also stumbled into their perfect balance of the two. These two sides exist in perfect harmony, and the instrumental interludes all serve the bigger picture, managing to make guitar music more immersive and electronic music more intertwined.
Subtle yet deeply impactful, Lots Of Hands feel primed to take an essential spot in a lineage of artists capable of articulating a specific feeling that’s almost impossible to vocalise. But with a mix of acoustic and electronic details, an array of genres and both poetic and plain lyrics, they manage.
