Music Monthly: The Biggest Releases and Reissues, January 2025
By Lorenzo Villa and Camillo VegezziDecember and January are always peculiar months for the music industry. Year-end charts and bold announcements of upcoming projects dominate the discourse, while many noteworthy releases slip under the radar. This month we want to talk about a debut album full of contrasts; a book exposing the dark side of music streaming; an experimental soundtrack with soundscapes as bold as its visuals. Plus, an electronic cumbia to move to; a reissue that uncovers a unique meeting of minds in 1960s Turkey; and the great David Lynch’s love of music, remembered.
New Album
Cameron Winter – Heavy Metal
Writing songs can be a painful process – moments of joy or breakthrough are often overshadowed by long stretches of struggle. Listening to Heavy Metal feels the same, especially when empathizing with the artist behind it.
Cameron Winter, frontman of Brooklyn band Geese, makes this clear: his debut solo album was a labor of pain. “I will keep breaking cups until my left hand looks wrong / Until my miracle drugs write the miracle song”, Winter sings in The Rolling Stones – his heartbreaking baritone accompanied by a mellifluous guitar that sounds like something from a Songs of Leonard Cohen ballad. Despite being only 22, Winter is both seasoned and shrewd – immediately shifting gears with the upbeat Nausicaa, clearly aiming to hook a soul-pop audience. The contrast between joy and sorrow runs throughout the album, as do nods to iconic artists past and present: the melancholic spoken word delivery in Drinking Age channels Sun Kil Moon, while the eerie, incessant Nina + Field of Cops echoes Dylan’s Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.
The album’s deliberately misleading title, however, sets the tone: this isn’t an easy listen. While tracks like The Rolling Stones, Drinking Age, $0, and Cancer of the Skull (another Cohen-esque tribute) leave a mark, the album’s weight and intensity can be overwhelming. But then again, Heavy Metal was never meant to be light.
Listen via Bandcamp.
Book
Liz Pelly – Mood machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
Last month, we kicked off this column with a dystopian take on the overwhelming power of platforms like Spotify in defining the music market. A newly released book by journalist and musician Liz Pelly takes the conversation further, unveiling unsettling truths about how streaming is transforming the way we experience music.
From Spotify’s 2006 debut, with promises of music democratization and piracy disruption, to its evolution into an audio hub promising “music for every moment”, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist breaks down the rise of streaming and its less glamorous realities. It highlights the dual perspectives of platform users: the listener, who pays with their money and personal data, and the musician, whose struggle with declining revenues affects creator and consumer, but is mistakenly viewed as irreversible.
“I’ve long been confounded by the expectation that we simply accept the dealings of the powerful as unexplainable,” writes Pelly. Her investigation – built on years of research and over 100 interviews with artists, producers and Spotify’s former employees – seeks to break this stasis. What it uncovers is bleak: artists’ earnings are reduced and obscured; payola-like practices driven by major labels shape exposure; algorithms dominate curation. At the heart of Spotify’s strategy lies the mood machine, a system promoting playlists stacked with low-cost, stock, and anonymous music. An approach that trains users to rely on curated playlists as background soundtracks to their lives, guided more by mood or genre than by artist or song – and thus resulting in the minimizing of creative artistry.
Liz Pelly’s book is a must-read for anyone questioning the grip of streaming on music culture. “Streaming claimed to solve piracy, but for many independent artists and listeners, the problems of the ultra-capitalist music business were never solved”. Yet, alternatives exist, and new ones are emerging – if we choose to nurture them.
Liz Pelly – Mood machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, Atria/One Signal Publishers, pp. 288.
Film/Soundtrack
Daniel Blumberg – The Brutalist (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
The Brutalist, the intense drama directed by Brady Corbet, has already racked up awards at the Golden Globes – best director, best drama, and best actor for Adrien Brody – and it’s aiming to do the same at the Oscars, with a big push for best original score. Indeed, it is the music by British composer Daniel Blumberg – former member of the indie band Yuck with an acclaimed experimental solo career – that succeeds in creating dissonant atmospheres that are precise enough to realise a sonic representation of Brutalist architecture.
The agonising atmosphere of concrete and metal is rendered with screeching horns, industrial percussion, and minor tones that combine with gentle piano melodies reprising the opening theme Overture (Ship). The score, a monumental work seven years in the making, came to life through collaboration with a multitude of artists, bringing their touch to its layered, resonant soundscape.
Blumberg’s approach is anything but conventional. From experimenting with prepared pianos in Chair to diving into chaotic jazz-infused orchestral sections (Jazz Club), to the piano lullabies of Erzsébet and Library, Blumberg pulls out all the stops, creating more of a truer soundtrack – noises, suggestions, atmospheres – than simply music for film.
Listen via Milan Records.
Single track
Karen y los Remedios – Las Muchachas (Mexican Institute of Sound Remix)
Silencio, the 2023 debut album from Karen y Los Remedios, marked another bold release from ZZK Records, the label that pushed cumbia into the electronic age. The Mexican trio reimagines the Afro-Colombian ancestral genre blending it with Norteño airs, Peruvian traditional sounds and distinctive trip-hop, downtempo and dream-pop influences.
Las Muchachas – Mexican Institute of Sound Remix is the first taste of Silencio Remixes, out on 11 April, where tracks from the album are reworked by artists from across genres and borders. Camilo Lara, the Mexico City-based DJ and producer behind Mexican Institute of Sound, transforms the original track’s dark, almost reggaeton vibe with a more distinctly cumbia-digital atmosphere, with psychedelic patterns and hip-hop touches that are bound to make an impression. An album to watch, already shaping up to be one of the most fun releases of the year.
Listen via Bandcamp.
Reissue
Don Cherry/Okay Temiz – Music for Turkish Theatre 1970 (Caz Plak Records)
During the final days of December and the early stretch of January, the music world slows down. It’s the season for reflecting on the year gone by, while discographic releases thin out. This lull offers the opportunity to revisit a reissue from late November, released by the Turkish label Caz Plak Records. Music for Turkish Theater 1970, a collaborative work by free jazz master Don Cherry and the visionary Turkish percussionist Okay Temiz. It is a brief yet dazzling gem – just over twenty minutes in length – but one that revives an incredible, little-known story.
The album is the score for a theatrical play written by James Baldwin, who in the 1960s found a culturally stimulating refuge in Turkey (find some interesting insights on his Turkish decade here). The play – an adaptation of John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1967) – delves into homosexual relationships and prison violence within Istanbul’s detention system of the time. Despite being censored by the local governorship for its themes, the production was a resounding success, drawing an audience of 30,000 during its two-month run.
The recording, restored directly from the original master tape, is both ethereal and evocative. Cherry, with his distinctive free and eccentric technique, moves smoothly between trumpet, flute and piano; meanwhile, Temiz’s percussion conjures mesmerizing rhythms inspired by traditional Turkish music, mirroring the dramatic tension of the play. An instant-cult reissue, unveiling yet another of the many artistic dimensions of a genius like Don Cherry.
Listen via Bandcamp
BONUS TRACK
David Lynch, 20 January 1946 – 15 January 2025
Header image courtesy of ZZK Records.