Sound Ward: Favorite Bay Area Albums of 2025

The sounds of the bay in 2025 through the ears of Gabriel Lopez.

My favorite music tells me a secret. I’ve always felt called to sounds that relay an intimacy or a glimpse into the unknowable interior of an artist. For me, the act of listening alternates between biographical and cartographical in nature. And, at the end of the year, I find myself following the maps I made charting the interiors of my favorite records. 

A viral clip is going around of Iggy Pop speaking to the BBC in 2014 where he states “an LP is a being" and I find that to be true. Every album is alive in the head/heart of its maker and then in the inner world of its listener. It is what makes a “best of” list so difficult and ultimately something I don’t really believe in. Yet, the wonderful editors at Current would like my thoughts on some Bay Area albums of this year — which I will graciously hand over. 

This column is not a qualitative analysis of the year’s best records.  Instead I’m offering some notes on albums that spoke to me and told me their secrets this year. Here are five living LPs of 2025.

Kathryn Mohr - Waiting Room (The Flenser)

Kathryn Mohr wrote a good portion of this record in an abandoned fish factory in Iceland during an artist’s residency. Every review of this record highlights this fact but some don’t bother to add that the factory becomes a character in the sonic makeup of the album. In the churning and guttural guitar tones of Mohr’s soundscapes, I feel myself drawn to the industrial underbelly of the world around me. In the grinding and churning hum of the record, I drift along the decay of what once was industry amidst the rubble of a gentrified and disorienting Bay Area. Mohr also offers plenty of the emotional viscosity of humans too with her word play and willingness to exhume love’s haunted presence. This is most salient in the title track “Waiting Room,” which opens with the ghostly line “my love is a vacant chair” and continues naming the many vacuous forms love can take. I keep coming back to this track whenever I feel one of the phantom pains of a past love touch my heart.  

slake - Let’s Get Married (Cherub Dream Records)

slake’s Mary Claire wants to tell you a story. On multiple tracks on her full-length LP from local darling Cherub Dream Records, listeners find themselves retracing Mary Claire’s steps through the foggy hyperreal memories of a conjurer. I use the word “conjure” specifically to highlight the living quality of slake’s songs — black dogs, the edge of winter, creeks full of life, lovers full of grief. There are moments on this record that I find myself lost in Mary Claire’s lyrics like finding a letter from a dead relative letting you in on familial history that most have forgotten.  It is truth bathed in the richness of a lost knowing struggling to be understood.

Cole Pulice - Land’s End Eternal (Leaving Records)

It is hard to write about a record that feels more like a place I’ve been to then something I’ve heard. On Land’s End Eternal, Oakland-based multi-instrumentalist Cole Pulice weaves together saxophone, guitar, voice, and electronic elements to create what I call California Pastoral. Pulice is so masterful in the ways they paint a place, like Land’s End, as both a traversable tangible space and also as a home for divination, feeling, openness. It’s a trope to say you can live in a song but for the tracks on this record it feels possible to make a home in the valleys between choral harmonies and cascading saxophone compositions. I will find myself on the shores of this record many more times grateful that someone is still moved by the beauty of the Bay.

Jordána - Physical Attraction (PPU Recordings)

Physical Attraction is not a record from 2025; in fact it is not a record from this century, instead it is an archival piece from producer Alex “Landy” Hill restored by DC’s PPU Recordings. The production on this record plays with nu-jack swing, street soul, and boogie sound trappings forming a time capsule of a 90s Bay Area that feels so far away now. When I listen to this record, I feel like I’m half asleep in the back seat of my mother’s Toyota Corolla on my way to school in Oakland. In my half-dreaming haze, I’m lost in the tape hiss of a pop song that never was. It’s important to highlight works like this because it undermines the “Throwback-Industrial-Complex” narrative that ascribes worth to these genres based on their meme-ability or presence in a cultural zeitgeist. That is to say a lot of this genre is subsumed by throwback nights and in 5-second loops on Tiktok — which is to say, commodities without artistry. We know major studios and pop stars weren’t the only ones shaping the 90s R&B scene yet the everyday working artists making this sound are often washed away by the major stars. Jordána’s album stands among the best of the era.

8ULENTINA - SURPASSING DISASTER (SILLAGE)

This feels a bit like a cheat as 8ULENTINA no longer lives in the Bay but I truly believe his sonic imprint is ever prescient in the Bay. As one half of  CLUB CHAI, alongside Lara Sarkissian, Esra Canoğullari brought SWANA-influenced global club music to Oakland, forever shaping the aural landscape of Bay Area dance music. I distinctly remember seeing him spin in the Omni Commons basement almost a decade ago, and thinking “this is new” and “this is ancient” in the same breath. On SURPASSING DISASTER, that feeling rings true again. 8ULENTINA weaves together the musical memory of West Asian cultures with the boundary-tearing eruptions of underground club sounds (schizophrenic drum patterns, subterranean bass lines, trance-inducing droning synths) to produce one of the most engaging listens of the year. In a year of inhumane and almost incomprehensible violence towards SWANA peoples by Western empires, SURPASSING DISASTER stands as a testament to resiliency, living history, and the power of building worlds outside the hegemony of the West.

Notable Mentions (from outside the Bay):

Maria Somerville - Luster

james k - friend

Stereolab - Instant Holograms on Metal Film

Los Thuthanaka - Los Thuthanaka

dolo2000 - Lets Meet at Junes