The Biggest New Music Releases in August 2025

Throughout the summer, the industry insiders and big-name media have been saying the same thing: there’s no real “song of the summer” this year. Maybe it’s because of the endless scroll of disposable playlists, the way streaming keeps shuffling everything around, or the pull of nostalgia, sending listeners back into old catalogues – patterns we’ve been tracking in this column for months. It’s a listening landscape so fragmented that it can be easy to get lost.

But here’s the thing: good music never stops moving. Away from charts, algorithms and seasonal hits, there are still sounds worth chasing. So, here are our six picks for August: from Lebanon to Brazil, from raw guitar riffs to introspective, psychedelic, even transcendental moods. As always, you can find them on our playlists on the Tidal and Spotify.

New EP: Kurt Vile, Luke Roberts – Classic Love (EP)

What is a classic love? Some say it’s a love that lasts forever. Others picture something old-school – a family, a house, a garden, a dog. But on their new five-track EP, Kurt Vile and Luke Roberts offer a different take. For the two American singer-songwriters, classic love isn’t about longevity or exclusivity – it’s about transience and the scars it leaves behind. “It was a one-of-a-kind classic love”, Vile sings. “Just like a sunset, because it fades out… and goes away”. That runs through the sound of the EP. On one side, you’ve got raw, honest folk elements – fingerpicking, full-band intros, and soaring solos. On the other, Vile’s signature touch shines in subtly complex arrangements and production. His delivery balances clever and melancholic, zoned-out and precise, funny and quietly heartbreaking.

The EP includes five tracks, with two versions of the title song. There’s also a rework of Vile’s 2008 track Slow Talkers, which streamlines the fingerpicked theme but loses some of its original weird charm. The real highlight, though, is the closing cover of Beach House’s Wildflower, which trades the band’s dreamy wall of sound for soft, rhythmic strumming that feels stripped-back and intimate.

Listen/Buy here.

New Album: Chuquimamani Condori – Edits

Chuquimamani Condori is recognised as one of the most innovative artists in today’s experimental electronic scene. They were supposed to feature in this column a couple of months ago – via Los Thuthanakas – but Edits gives us a second chance.

For the uninitiated: Condori is a Bolivian-American artist now based in Nashville. Over the past decade – first as E+E, then as Elysia Crampton and now under their Aymara name – they’ve built a sonic language where continuity and transformation carry equal weight. Their work blends folk traditions, fragments of North American country and Andean genres like tarqueada and huayño, warped through radically pitch-shifted vocals, heavy deep bass and digital dissonance – always resisting easy classification.

If DJ E (2023) played like a personal manifesto, Los Thuthanakas (2025) upped the voltage with guitar riffs and noise bursts, earning praise across the board. Edits – self-released, like the previous two – takes it further again: a 100-minute, 24-track sprawl of reworks, mash-ups and unearthed cuts from the hard-disk archive.

Siku flutes and Andean rhythms clash with harsh loops; ancestral chants morph into futuristic litanies – at times echoing forgotten country ballads, other times imploding into pure pitch. A world to lose yourself in – like nothing you’ve heard before.

Listen/Buy on Bandcamp.

New Album/2: Steve Gunn – Music for Writers 

Steve Gunn’s new album Music for Writers could just as easily be called “music for the soul”, because that’s where it resonates.

Unlike his previous work, this is his first fully instrumental record, built not on lyrics or storytelling but on atmosphere. Drones, vaporous textures and wide open spaces invite the listener to merge the music with their own surroundings. And because Gunn recorded everything himself between Brooklyn, Berlin and Latvia, the palette is stripped back: guitars, synths, field recordings and endless reverb.

There is a sense of openness in the album which blurs the line between ambient and nature, creativity and meditation, daily life and transcendence. And that openness is established from the start: Sky (debesis) floats on steel guitar and delicate picking, while Park Entrance and Sunday – the only track to feature folk guitar – paint pastoral, dreamlike scenes. Even the rare hints of melody dissolve into abstraction. Cat unravels into stream-of-conscious picking, while Slow Singers on the Hill loops a shifting keyboard figure that seems to melt as it repeats.

What kind of writer this album addresses remains unclear. But what is clear is its hope: that the music, as Gunn said, might serve as “a ground for thought, a companion for work, daydreaming, grief, happiness, sadness, or simply a place to rest”.

Listen/Buy on Bandcamp.

Project + Cover: MPB Ano Zero / Caxtrinho – Máfia de Miçanga

For fans of MPB – Música Popular Brasileira – there’s something fresh to dive into this summer. MPB Ano Zero, launched this June, is a project that retraces the history of Brazilian music between past and present: a new single every Tuesday, each featuring a contemporary artist covering a classic by the great masters – from Caetano Veloso to Chico Buarque, Gilberto Gil, Dona Ivone Lara and more. Each track is paired with a short documentary, offering interviews with artists and insights into the chosen song. By the year’s end, these 21 singles will come together in a compilation celebrating Brazilian music, while the 29 artists – the core of a new scene – will gather for collective concerts that echo the legendary gatherings of MPB’s golden age.

This month saw the release of a new single by Caxtrinho, one of our favourite emerging voices. His 2024 album Queda Livre was among last year’s highlights, and for MPB Ano Zero he reimagines Máfia de Miçanga, an ‘80s classic by Almir Guineto. Pure joy.

Single Track: Animal Collective – Buddies On The Blackboard

For years, the members of Animal Collective have each nurtured their own solo or side projects. Avey Tare probably has more parallel projects than albums with the band itself. Geologist has been playing with Motherfuckers JMB & Co, who dropped an album in June 2025. Panda Bear keeps pushing his solo career to celestial heights, most recently with the brilliant Sinister Grift. But whenever the Baltimore collective regroups, you know it’s time to pay attention. This past June they released a new single, Love On The Big Screen, and on July 29 they followed it up with its B-side, Buddies On The Blackboard. Co-produced by Avey Tare and Adam McDaniel at McDaniel’s Drops Of Sun studio in Asheville, the track is a hyperactive, whirlpool-like blast. It harks back to the band’s early cartoonish melodies, with Panda Bear chanting on repeat “on the blackboard” while Tare throws back the counterline.

Of course, no Animal Collective track would be complete without their trademark psychedelia, here soaked into a warm, dub-tinged bass groove.

Listen/Buy on Bandcamp.

Ziad Rahbani: Ziad Rahbani (1956 – 2025)

We’ll admit it: we discovered Ziad Rahbani’s music late – just a couple of weeks before his passing, thanks to a recommendation from an artist deeply inspired by him. A precious tip, for a truly invaluable legacy.

Rahbani – playwright, composer, pianist and so much more – passed away suddenly on July 26. The son of legendary Lebanese singer Fairouz, he quickly stepped out from under the shadow of his family name. A true pioneer of Arabic jazz, he crafted a sound free from the usual Western frame, fiercely political and rooted in the complexity of Lebanon’s history.

He was also a linguistic innovator, weaving Lebanese ammiyeh – a form of dialectical slang – into his lyrics and satirical plays, reshaping the role of language in music and theatre. And if so-called Arabic funk is having a moment now, Rahbani was already there, decades ahead.

We mourn his loss – but more than that, we hope you’ll explore his art: the music, the plays, the films. We learned that ourselves, in our own strange timing: it’s never too late to discover something that matters.

Hear an hour of his musical world in a mix by DJ Victor Kiswell on SoundCloud.

Camillo Vegezzi is a freelance music writer based in Milan. He has collaborated with various music magazines and is a contributor to the cultural section of Il Manifesto. Read more of Camillo’s writing on Something Curated here.

Lorenzo Villa is a writer and editor based in Milan. He writes about lifestyle for Harper’s Bazaar Italia and collaborates with the literary magazine Galápagos. Read more of Lorenzo’s writing on Something Curated here.

Header photograph courtesy of Chuquimamani Condori.