It’s December 29th, a Monday in the middle of the interregnum between Christmas and the new year, between work and… work. Breaks don’t come often enough these days, and when they do, I struggle to honour them properly in ways that actually restore me. This year’s break may just be long enough to make a difference though, between the festivities falling mid-week and a generous employer who comped the balance of the entire two weeks.
It has been a year of incredible, enormous change for me. I remember “announcing” this in last year’s reflection but could not have imagined the half of it.
For the first time in over a decade, I am working “full time” again. This has taken some getting used to — it’s like a muscle I hadn’t exercised in a long time, and the transition often left me quite “sore.” That said, if you know me at all you already know that it would take a very special job for me to give up my freelance consulting work and its freedoms. I’m happy to report that I seem to have found something so unusual and challenging that I felt happy to take it on, fully and completely. I’m working at the Ignatius Jesuit Centre, a 600-acre (240-hectare) farm just North of Guelph, no more than 6 minutes from my house by car. The land has been owned by the Jesuits, a 485-year-old Catholic religious order, for over a hundred years. Originally bought to host the novitiate for “Upper” (English) Canada, it later transitioned to being an Ignatian retreat centre, a L’Arche-style intentional farming community, an organic/regenerative community farm, and a nature conservation area with over 15km of publicly accessible trails.
Why me and why here, you may ask. Well, as religious orders undergo generational and financial changes, their properties often have to be re-imagined, both for reasons of financial sustainability and purpose. I had joined the community board of directors on a volunteer basis in 2024 and — following a series of challenging discoveries and necessary decisions in early 2025 — suddenly found myself not only employed but also leading the organization through a monumental change program. It has been an extraordinary experience so far. I’ve always known that I have many talents but have rarely been in a position to bring so many of them fruitfully into my work at the same time. Every day I work on complicated and fascinating things that are new to me — from planning & development to regenerative farming to nonprofit fundraising to theology. The overall goal is to find financially sustainable ways forward for the property and its associated operations, to keep it from being sold and becoming another subdivision.
It may be too early to claim that I somehow “stumbled” into my purpose here (and I’m keenly aware of how middle-aged white men like to conceal their privilege by claiming that things just happened to them), but it feels like important work, locally and for the world. The intention is to build an “eco campus” of sorts that leans into the centre’s existing strengths in alternative farming and farmer training; conservation and restoration work; and spirituality, in order to provide as many opportunities as possible for (re)learning how to have a respectful, reciprocal and hopeful relationship with the natural world. I call this my “Latourian project” in memory of the French anthropologist and philosopher so important to my thinking in the past decade, who spent the last decades of his life working on the central challenge of our time, the environmental/climate polycrisis. The gift we are stewarding here is the land, a strikingly beautiful and large peri-urban “park” full of opportunities for quiet contemplation, purposeful work and transformational learning. Land, as both Indigenous and Catholic teachings now agree, is creation as gift — not a gift to just (this) one generation, but to all generations to come. As such, it should not be a commodity to exploit but rather treated lightly, and with respect. In fact, an entire new ontology will be required of us humans — a way of seeing the world not as separate from us, but to see ourselves as part of it, and it as an essential part of us. Against the odds and the prevailing economic/social system, my team and I are trying to find our way by following this lofty, contrarian aspiration. My work, in many ways, is to act as a translator, someone who speaks fluent “Capitalism” and also sees how things really ought to be, someone to shoulder some of the burden of connecting the one to the other and keeping them connected.
If at the end of last year I had questions about what exactly I was doing in Guelph, now I know. Naturally, my “Guelph community” has also expanded as a result of my work. I’ve met many really wonderful people and am almost starting to feel like I’m part of something bigger, not just a Toronto expat who somehow landed in Guelph. I say “almost” because it’s clearly a process, and because wherever I go, there I still am.
If you’re curious to come and visit, let me know. We can go for a walk together, have a meal. If you’re coming from further afield, I have a guest room or two in my house. Come and stay!
With that, on to the music!
Wishing you all good things in 2026,
Each year, there are many “late arrivals” to the long list of candidate “best new albums.” I discover them sometime in December, usually courtesy of the good work of journalists (and random Redditors) publishing “best of the year” lists. As you might imagine, everything musical piques my interest, even if only fleetingly. What have I overlooked? What did I not know about? What should I have heard earlier in the year when it first came out? Each of my holiday blog posts has a smattering of such late discoveries. Sometimes, they don’t entirely stand the test of time. And while I stand by previous years’ posts and what I say in them, I notice that some of the older recommendations have not remained in rotation. This year I’ve decided to write substantial notes only about those albums that have not only emotionally resonated but also stayed with me, calling to me for repeat listening during the year. I will list other things I think you should hear separately at the end, without any commentary.
As musical years go, I couldn’t quite find a “theme” for 2025. An entire industry can never be said to be treading water, of course, but it’s clear that in the post-Covid and Big Streaming era, there are multiple concurrent dynamics at play that virtually guarantee an ever-greater degree of fragmentation. Simultaneously, there’s never been more good music available, so much of which you’ll never get to hear. (Catching up is a fantasy.) “Niche” isn’t the exception anymore, it’s everything now. The mix of algorithmic curation, impossibly expensive concert tickets, disappearing smaller venues, lack of third spaces and the associated disappearance of public sociality involving music, cultural polarization — all of these factors contribute to situations where it’s entirely feasible to meet a culturally literate, educated person who’s never actually heard of Sabrina Carpenter but passionately hypes up their local free jazz ensemble or has algorithmically “discovered” an artist on social media who by most standards never really deserved to be discovered in the first place. There really is no mainstream anymore. Despite the “traditional” media’s best efforts, there are very few of us who still have both curation and “stretching ourselves” on our radar.
I’ve long thought that music ought to be taken seriously as an endeavour — not just making it but also listening to it. To grow, we need to stretch ourselves, and algorithmic curation aims for the opposite of that. A typical algorithmically generated playlist strives towards the mid-point of sameness, and so everything it presents ultimately becomes a stream of pap. Music found like this doesn’t want to be listened to, it’s seeking to be background entertainment, a mood-setting prop, “vibes.” Best to resist the urge to float atop a stream of sameness and expose yourself to things that actually demand your attention. Oddly, you do this for you, not the music.
Here are the year’s new albums that have stayed with me from first listen and been playing over and over again. Notably, it’s nearly an all-women line-up this year…
Alison Krauss & Union Station — Arcadia: This was a very welcome return and came delightfully early in a “slow” musical year (at least as far as my preferences and interests are concerned). Krauss and Union Station always had a certain dynamic together that she never quite managed to find in any other musical context (her solo work ran the risk of cheerfully veering into a kind of soft “country lite” while her two records with Robert Plant were critically acclaimed, yet I always felt that her clean, light voice seemed like a curious fit with Plant’s). Union Station manages to frame her flawless bluegrass soprano perfectly, giving it a context that embeds her fragility in something earthy, connected to the countryside, to American myth and folklore. It may also be a matter of songwriting: this context is where Krauss receives the best songs, material presumably custom-written for her voice and this band. My favourite track is “The Wrong Way,” a sad-but-hopeful bluegrass ballad of profound beauty, beautifully sung, played and recorded. I quite like Russell Moore’s voice — he’s the newly added “other” lead singer in Union Station, replacing Dan Tyminski who has mostly moved on to pursue a solo career. Arcadia is proof positive that there’s much life left yet in American acoustic roots music, and not just from the margins (although this can be great if you know where to look).
Big Thief — Double Infinity: I think this is absolutely in the “top three” of my favourite albums of the year, if I were to rank them (which I won’t). This band had always seemed interesting to me in some sense, but the on-the-ground reality of actually listening to their music was sometimes ruined by their insistence on sticking to a somewhat limited sonic palette defined by “folk-based alternative Americana.” It was always clear that Adrienne Lenker is a gifted lyricist and vocalist, but I’d felt that their sound wasn’t the ideal vehicle for it. I know several people who love this band fiercely, but I couldn’t quite get there until now. Double Infinity’s expansive, slightly more experimental sound departs from the mould (the narrative is that their long-time bass player left the band so they invited various studio musicians to collaborate on this album) and immediately makes for engaging listening. Suddenly, for me, the songs are properly served by the music, qualitatively aligning and providing suitable context for each other. My favourite track is “Words,” a swirling, dancing wonder of a song that sounds like it should have been on Emmylou Harris’ seminal, Daniel Lanois produced Wrecking Ball (Lenker’s voice occasionally seems to channel Harris too, in its determined, slightly raspy, steely, bell-like clarity). Every track is distinct, a lovely self-contained piece of music, yet the songs bleed into each other, making for a beautiful album listen. Truly an outstanding record — proof, perhaps, that unexpected constraints (the departing bassist) can bring about beautiful results. I don’t really know very much about the people in Big Thief, but I hope they’re very proud of what they accomplished here.
Bon Iver — Sable, Fable: This one’s a bit tricky and almost didn’t make the cut here. It’s undoubtedly very good, but I don’t love all of it. For context, I’ve been thoroughly on board with the evolution of Bon Iver’s sound over the last few years. I think the cutting-edge production work that starts with 22, A Million genuinely introduced something new into “folk rock” (even if it came from Kanye West in some ways). I think the smashing-together of folk/country songwriting with these very contemporary electronic production techniques really paved the way for something new to happen, and we’ve since heard the results in various unexpected places, like Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Low’s final two albums. Sable, Fable is very good, and while I don’t think it’s the best record Justin Vernon has made, it’s carried by three truly special, uniquely wonderful tracks — “Awards Season,” “Speyside” and “Day One.” Each of these belongs in the songbook of timeless country(ish) classics. They are wonderful, strange, complex, moving works, and all the best parts of Vernon’s work are there: lyrics both profound and resistant, leaving more to the imagination than they spell out; the element of time judiciously applied (a good song needs time to unfold); Vernon’s sonorous baritone; the dry, spacious, infinitely multi-layered production that’s deservedly so certain of itself. A musical moment like the unexpected arrival of a steel guitar that frames the lyric “Oh, how everything can change / In such a small time frame / You can be remade / You can live again” in “Awards Season” is so startlingly beautiful that it gives me goosebumps every time I hear it. “Day One” is a mind-bending showcase of how to use dense hip hop production techniques to make one of the most remarkable folk pop ballads I know. Its sheer musicality feels like I’d like to go and live in this song every time I hear it. In a world where songs like these are possible, the others on the same album will almost by default be judged for being mere great songs (which I actually think they are). — I think the album would have benefited from more judicious editing as a sequence. First, there was the Sable EP very late last year. In April, Sable, Fable appeared, preserving the 4-track sequence of the EP and tacking on 9 more songs. My sense is that a “deluxe redux” version with different sequencing would easily make this Bon Iver’s second-greatest album. So maybe it’s a question of making a playlist…
Flora Hibberd — Swirl: Flora Hibberd, a British singer-songwriter who lives in France and recorded this album in Wisconsin, has listened to all the cool music, clearly. And instead of producing an encyclopaedic pastiche, she’s somehow integrated everything she learned and made an album whose songs sound familiar but are in fact completely new — and brilliant. Her voice, a clear, comfortable, powerful, cool alto, reminds me of Chrissie Hynde or Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier. Her enunciation is crisp and exacting, making her finely crafted lyrics easy to pick out. Lines like “There is a form I haven’t discovered / it doesn’t appear to those who go searching / So I sit back and try to imagine nothing” and “I will sit in the gathering gloom next to you until it all comes true” from “Every Incident has Left Its Mark” are poetically flawless, and once you’ve heard the fierce guitar workout in the last minute of the same piece, you know you’ve just heard a perfect song. There is something Beatles-like in this music: it’s incredibly self-assured, certain that these are great songs, and delivering them with the exact sonic containers they deserve. I think Hibberd is a truly unique new voice. You should make a point of hearing this album.
Ganavya — Nilam: I don’t feel particularly well equipped to offer technical listening notes about this. Ganavya is a New York born Tamil singer-songwriter, thoroughly trained in Indian classical music. Her music gracefully straddles various genres — “world music,” Indian classical, folk, “new age” (not so much as genre but as use case), maybe jazz. Its base temperament is calm yet it often builds to beautiful intensities. There is a kindship here with an album I wrote about last year — Arooj Aftab’s Night Reign. Apart from sharing at least one studio musician, the connection is more in what it’s trying to accomplish: a successful, respectful, non-appropriative fusion of Indian classical music with Western folk sensibilities. It does this exceedingly well. There is another type of musical genealogy here that may have gotten lost in the generational switch — this type of fusion has been attempted before, sometimes with strikingly similar results: both Sheila Chandra and Susheela Raman, British singer-songwriters with origins in the Indian subcontinent, have mined the same seam. Nilam has been a go-to “reset” album for me this year. At the risk of offering a truly hackneyed analogy, giving it a thorough listen is a bit like doing for a walk or doing twenty minutes of breathing exercises. You may not think you need Ganavya, and then you discover that you actually did.
Lorde — Virgin: Lorde, whom I’ve written about here many times before, remains an especially wonderful songwriter and, particularly, lyricist. On Virgin, she reconnects with the musical style she is most typically associated with, a kind of electronic alt-pop. These songs aren’t the big, happy, disco numbers of a Dua Lipa or Sabrina Carpenter. They are more serious than that, darker, cleverer in many ways. This album reads like the diary of a pop star who is actually an ambitious rocker/poet in disguise. There’s always something alternative about Lorde, something slightly dangerous and unstable, something anxious and ambitious and desirous that strives to transcend the here and now. In the way Lorde represents herself on social media or videos, there’s always a slight sheen of… I was going to say a “lawlessness,” but that’s not quite right. It’s an unpredictability, a deliberate tension between the opacity of someone immensely famous we can never really know, and the persistent sense that she is trying to connect with us by sharing her fears, anxieties, brokenness, darkness. A song like “Clearblue” (“I’m scared to let you see into the whole machine, leave it all on the field / Your metal detector hits my precious treasure/ I’m nobody’s daughter / Yeah, baby, I’m free, I’m free”) can leave you stunned, moved by someone else’s strange, intimate confession that you don’t remember asking for — but something has shifted and now you’ve connected to a vulnerability deep within yourself while dancing in your kitchen.
Oklou — Choke Enough: “Music, but just the good bits,” as one commentator puts it. Oklou, actual name Marylou Mayniel, is a French alt-pop singer, songwriter and producer. She operates in a realm of beautiful, abstract, sensuous music that is, in many ways, quite singular. Maybe not completely so — it has a kinship with the music of Enya, Kate Bush, FKA twigs and the most ethereal, fleeting moments of vocal trance. I was (am) completely in love with Oklou’s first album (Galore, supposedly a “mixtape,” whatever that means — I’ve never understood why we need that particular category of disavowal). Oklou’s work always projects a sense of never-quite-there-ness, that it’s always about to break out, to explode. And I mean that both in a musical sense, and in the way one thinks of artists about to “hit it big.” I’m not sure Oklou will ever get there, nor can I quite imagine that she wants to. But the pervasive sense of “nearly there” is pivotal for her music, somehow. That said, I think “Harvest Sky” (with Underscores) and “Viscus” (with FKA twigs) are precious gems of musicality. “Harvest Sky” is oddly pagan and muscular, bursting at its own gentle constraints, sounding like a massive drop is always about to arrive, and without a doubt one of the most effective pieces of music I’ve heard this year.
Rosalía — LUX: Many critics called this the year’s best album, and it absolutely is. Nothing else really comes close. Rosalía, the Spanish avant garde pop star who has already made flamenco and reggaeton into higher art, here takes on exploring our relationship with “the vertical.” The proud lineage is Björk’s maximalist art pop, music entirely on its own experimental track, and Björk herself appears in “Berghain,” the track that appeared first, in a short but strangely symbolic and pivotal feature. LUX is in essence a pop album, but with atypical subject matter: Rosalía spent a year or two reading hagiographies (biographies of saints) and let herself be inspired by historical holy women who themselves combined verticality and creativity, such as Hildegard von Bingen or Clare of Assisi. (It seems deeply spiritual; however, be warned: don’t expect piety here.) There’s been much talk about the thirteen languages Rosalía sings in here, and the fact that she recorded parts of it with the London Symphony Orchestra. And yet, my immediate response was that this is a pop album first and foremost, not symphony or opera, although clearly she was aiming for an expansive, transcendent sound palette. As she says in an interview, “There has to be another way of making pop,” and this record is proof that there is. (In general, she is an incredibly intelligent, charming, articulate and fearless interviewee; one can learn a lot about creative process by watching longer conversations with her, like this one.) The other essential thing to understand is that she comes from a flamenco vocal tradition, so a lot of the vocal lines here feel indebted to that, whether the ultimate intent is “aria” or “banger.” — Am I likely to try and decipher each nuance of lyrics in the languages she sings in? No. The music is so strong and satisfying that I don’t think it’s required. It’s also strange that this only came out at the beginning of November; it feels like I’ve been listening to it the whole year. And on every listen, there’s something new: another hook, another classically voiced “banger,” another heart-stoppingly beautiful flamenco or fado turn of phrase. As I’m writing “around” my reception of this I’m realizing my words may not be able to do it justice. Be warned that it rewards a total suspension of disbelief. You cannot allow yourself to judge while you’re listening — because you don’t understand the lyrics, because it’s not “pop” in the comforting sense, because it’s weird. I guarantee that it’ll transform you in some way if you give it half a chance. (I say “half a chance” deliberately because I think it has so many hook-y surfaces, like Velcro, that’ll stick to you anyway — in this sense alone, it is undoubtedly “pop.”) (It’s not really possible to pick out a “favourite” track on a five-star album, but the one I keep going back to is “Mio Christo piangi diamante,” apparently about Saints Francis and Clare of Assisi’s friendship. Rosalía herself calls it an “aria,” one she laboured over for the better part of a year. My favourite bit — which makes me laugh every time — is its irreverent ending, a snippet from a voice note that has her describing the lead-up to the final chord… a split second before we hear the actual chord. It feels like the ultimate moment of “horizontality” after we’ve experienced something that works so hard to be transcendent — hearing the humble voice note reminds us that we can all start somewhere small and connect to something higher.)
Sarah McLachlan — Better Broken: This is the “comeback” album of the year that more or less nobody will hear. And that’s a shame because it’s genuinely brilliant. McLachlan is a sublime songwriter whose craft seems to only have become better with the wisdom of the additional years. She’s in excellent voice here, nuanced, expressive, her trademark flips into her head voice strong as ever. The songs concern themselves with decidedly middle-aged themes (parenting, traumatic breakups, the climate crisis, finding new love…) — and who can blame her? Pretensions of eternal youth are for rockers and people who haven’t been to therapy, and happily, McLachlan falls into neither category. The songs are finely crafted, often elegant, and studiously manage to steer away from “cringe” (as the kids might say, whoever they are…). Among all this beauty, it may be the production that’s the true hero here: as beautifully recorded music goes, this album should get every prize for its sound in 2025. The musicianship and production put me in mind of Peter Gabriel’s work over the years; the work of someone who can afford to take all the time in the world to write, record, think, refine… and to keep going until it’s actually perfect. It’s the kind of music that you, as a critical listener, as someone who thinks of herself as a bit of a hipster, might have to gear yourself up for. I mean, it’s Sarah McLachlan, the woman who founded Lilith Fair, who was incredibly famous in the 90s and who’s obviously no longer de rigueur now. But if you can get over yourself for 45 minutes (and you really should!) you’ll be richly rewarded.
Saya Gray — SAYA: Saya Gray is a multi-talented, Toronto-based musician, songwriter and producer, the kind who — despite being quite young still — very clearly has an enormous wealth of musical experience. From a family of multiple professional musicians, she was exposed to all sorts of musical styles early on, and it shows in her own music. That said, it’s all of a piece. It’s extraordinarily inventive, the writing and production inseparable from each other. Many of the more unusual musical phrases — for example, the halting riff in “SHELL ( OF A MAN )” — become instrumental to the track, in a way that George Martin’s faux harpsichord on the Beatles’ “In My Life” does. Gray’s music, for me, aesthetically fits into a “rock” idiom, mostly, in a dynamic field whose suspending pillars are prog, folk, chamber, and art pop. I find my mind drifting to Bowie’s late work, or Pink Floyd’s pretty, hypnotic, floating 10-minute workouts. I can’t entirely say why — they’re not necessarily operating in the same musical idiom but share an aesthetic intent and many points of reference. More than occasionally, her songs suddenly, unexpectedly, erupt in unashamedly, unspeakably, goosebump-inducing musical moments, like the chorus in “PUDDLE ( OF ME ),” putting me in mind of Brian Wilson’s best work. SAYA is the kind of record you have to give yourself over to. Expect nothing, especially from your own instincts about what’s authentic and cool, and try to just experience this. It’s testament to a truly superior musical mind. In many ways, she’s singular right now. I can put this on and 40 minutes later emerge with a firm sense that I’ve just connected to a beautiful soul.
Other albums that are very good & that you should hear:
Aesop Rock — Black Hole Superette & I Heard It’s A Mess There Too
Africa Express — Bahidorá
Annahstasia — Tether
Billy Nomates — Metalhorse
Black Country, New Road — Forever Howlong
Bob Mould — Here We Go Crazy
Brìghde Chaimbeul — Sunwise
Clarice Jensen — In Holiday Clothing, Out Of The Great Darkness
Darkside — Nothing
Hayley Heynderickx & Max García Conover — What Of Our Nature
I’m With Her — Wild And Clear And Blue
Karol G — Tropicoqueta
Kassi Valazza — From Newman Street
Lamomali — Lamomali Je t’aime
Laufey — A Matter Of Time
Ledley — Ledley
Linda May Han Oh — Strange Heavens
Lisa Knapp & Gerry Driver — Hinterland
Madison Cunningham — Ace
Makaya McCraven — Off The Record
Mukasamuka — Desert Mood (EP)
Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force — Khadim
Patrick Watson — Uh Oh
Pitney Meyer — Cherokee Pioneer
Poor Creature — All Smiles Tonight
Pygmalion, Raphaël Pychon — Bach Mass in B Minor
Robert Plant/Saving Grace — Saving Grace
Saint Etienne — International
Shelby Means — Shelby Means
Silvana Estrada — Vendrán Suaves Lluvias
Sofi Tukker — Butter
Spafford Campbell — Tomorrow Held
Stereolab — Instant Holograms On Metal Film
Valerie June — Owls, Omens, And Oracles
VARO — The World That I Knew
Wet Leg — Moisturizer Zoé Basha — Gamble