Top Ambient Albums of 2025 – Winter Edition
As I said in my Top Ambient Albums of 2024 rundown, music lists with “Top” in their title are a little bit sus. With that being said, I’ve had a chance to listen to a lot of new ambient music this year, so here’s my list (in no particular order) of the top ambient albums of Winter 2025.
Best Ambient Albums of Winter 2025
Hometown Girl – U.e.
Release Date: January 16, 2025
Label: 28912
It’s a little bit jazz, it’s a little bit drone – but really it’s maddeningly relatable. If you’re unfamiliar with “U.e.” then you’ll probably recognize them by their other alias, Ulla Straus. Hometown Girl feels very analog and warm – kind of like reading a book under dim streetlights on a deserted road just after a good rainstorm. It breathes in the dust and exhales something half-remembered.
Not Around But Through – AMULETS
Release Date: Feb 21, 2025
I’m going to be honest, this is the first time I’ve heard Randall Taylor (AMULETS) work. I was surprised to learn that they’re based in Portland where Micro Genre Music is based, so this worked out great for us. We love discovering new music, especially when it can be found locally. Ambient music often makes me feel sad … there’s a sadness here and feels so fucking good. Standout track is “Velis” – it’s stretched out in all the right places.
Between the Glaciers and the Bay – Production Unit Xero
Release Date: Feb 4, 2025
Label: Heterodox Records
Production Unit Xero’s latest offering is beautiful and haunting. Laced with cold synths and deep, droning waves, this is the kind of sound that lingers in your bones. There’s an immediate sense of space – vast, open and untamed. A good ambient album is one where you forget you’re listening to music, and the music feels like sight, touch. For me, it brings me to a certain place – a tide swallowing shore. The water my reach your chest, but you know you’re safe. Even when you’re standing on the edge of the world and realizing that none of it belongs to you.
Be Somewhere Twice – African-American Sound Recordings
Release Date: January 10, 2025
A lush kalimba dances and collides headfirst with choral waves of sound, with processed field recordings bubbling beneath – words are so limiting. If you’re a lover of ambient music, you’ll understand the rush, that jolt of discovery when you stumble onto something raw, something original. It’s a shaky trip through harsh terrain, but soon morphs into a lullaby, dripping with culture and drenched in experience.
Spirit Frequencies – Orkun A.
Release Date: January 1, 2025
I’m so glad we’ve progressed to the point where I can listen to an album like this and say it has an old school vibe. Okay, maybe progressed isn’t the right word – but if this is entropy, I’m very happy with it. This album hums and the debris it shakes from your consciousness slips through the cracks in your mind. Deep pulses and spectral echoes: just what I hoped my ambient music would sound like in 2025.
Eccodust – Eccodust
Release Date: January 1, 2025
Label: Vivarium Recordings
This is my first foray into the realm of Eccodust, the collab of akaJazy and Floor 0. I’m really into this album – it captures that liminal feeling, that edge-of-dreamscape unease where everything is real and nothing is true. Lots of deep, pulsing bass to keep that huge weight in your stomach nice and heavy. Don’t be fooled by the whimsical field recordings sprinkled through out – this album is dark.
Crossing the Threshold – Dianna Lopez
Release Date: January 4, 2025
Dianna Lopez seems to be exploding these days and rightly so. The music on this album lurks like wind through tall grass. Their delicate vocals are an absolute delight – they shimmer and haunt the fuck out of you. Where do the spirits reside? Somewhere in between Georgia and California, on every lost highway, while listening to this music. Definitely give this a listen.
ISKRA – Olga Anna Markowska
Release Date: January 31, 2025
Label: Miasmah Recordings
I love this album, but fair warning: it’s tense as fuck. Do not let that haunting cello fool you – the amount of tension this album builds is palpable. Olga’s music has a commanding presence. Call it a foreboding, maybe an unease – a sense that something is always just out of reach, waiting to strike. Its mixture of strings and experimental electronic walls of noise perfectly represents where we are right now. Or maybe I’m projecting.
Children of Eidolon – 400 Lonely Things
Release Date: January 24, 2025
If haunted houses could dream, this is what they’d hear. I’m not sure what spirits have my riled up, but this album is definitely spiritual. 400 Lonely Things has crafted something eerie, something mournful. I was surprised to learn that these songs are more a compilation taken from large list of unreleased tracks – surprising because it goes so well together. My only complaint is that it isn’t longer. Definitely put this on your list of albums to check out.
