We’re kicking off the new year by looking back at some of our favourite music and culture of 2025. Yesterday saw editorial team member Ioan Humphreys selecting the unlikely bedfellows of grindcore act FILTHxCOLLINS and Desert Island Discs in his selection, and today it’s the turn of Joyzine writers Poppy Bristow and Evan Meikle.
Poppy Bristow
Favourite album of 2025: CMAT – Euro-Country
What a wonderful thing it is when an artist of vision and talent comes out with their first real masterpiece and receives all the recognition they deserve for it. This year, it was the turn of the brilliant CMAT (Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) to break through, with unexpected TikTok stardom and a triumphant Pyramid Stage set at Glastonbury laying the groundwork for her rapturously received third album Euro-Country. And is it any wonder it’s been such a smash? There’s something in this record for everyone, even if you’d usually run a mile from the country-pop milieu that Thompson works within.
Confessional songwriting and relationship gossip not your cup of tea? Thank goodness her searching lyrics are so funny, so generous, so self-deprecating, brimming with cultural references that would do Nigel Blackwell proud. Put off by flatly bleating balladeers who sound like they’re having no fun? Even in the depths of angst, Thompson’s warm, Irish-accented voice swoops and soars like a mockingbird doing loop-the-loops over Nashville. Despairing that nobody writes catchy tunes these days? You’ll be humming ‘Take a Sexy Picture of Me’ till kingdom come.
CMAT socials: Website | Facebook | Instagram | Bandcamp
Read Poppy’s review of the album
Favourite film: The Ballad of Wallis Island
All right, I admit it. Of all the many, many films I watched in 2025, only three were new releases, but The Ballad of Wallis Island managed to be not only my favourite 2025 picture, but one of the funniest, loveliest films I’ve seen all year.
Telling the story of an awkward, obsessive widower who spends his lottery millions on an attempt to reunite his favourite folk music duo, Wallis Island received much-deserved praise from an admiring Richard Curtis, but despite its crowd-pleasing overtones it avoids the obvious rom-com disingenuities to achieve a level of honesty about love and grief that Curtis could only dream of.
While fans of Tim Key and Tom Basden’s Radio 4 Poetry Programme will revel in seeing their breezy chemistry and delicious language play onscreen at last, both of them prove capable of more depth and nuance than even their biggest devotees might expect. The unreasonably talented Basden does superb work in his jaded straight-man role, but it’s Key, who up until now has come across as a man without an earnest bone in his body, giving the performance of a lifetime here. Hilarious, understated, and gently heartbreaking, the whoops-a-daisy whimsy he brings to Alan Partridge’s Sidekick Simon now coats a soulful loneliness which could leave even the stoniest cynic a little choked up.
Evan Meikle
Album – A Man For All Seasons, Insecure Men
A relatively stable and prosperous year for the Fat White Family co-founder Saul Adamczewski saw him produce a blinding second Insecure Men record. A Man For All Seasons, so named rather obtusely after the Robert Bolt play, features some of Adamczewski’s best and most emotionally available music to date, with much more accessible thematic overtones of love and loss.
Balancing genuinely soul wrenching numbers such as ‘Alien’ and ‘Tulse Hill Station’ with quaint pop hits like ‘Cleaning Bricks’, A Man for All Seasons displays some range but mostly wallows in a self-conscious despair. Such committed melancholy is only ever palatable when matched with equal technical excellence, in fact, this album sees Saul return to some of his most accomplished song writing since the halcyon days of peak FWF, a high that has been ironically absent during the depths of the singers struggle with addiction.
If you want expertly crafted and crushingly melancholic ballads mixed with a splash of earworm pop then this is THE 2025 album for you.
Insecure Men: Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp
EP – This Better Be Something Great, Westside Cowboy
2025 was the year of many things, not many of them good, but if it has only one great contribution to music culture then that is without a doubt the emergence of Westside Cowboy as a recognised indie name. Starting out in 2024 from the Manchester student scene, this band has already built a cult following and put out some of the best indie music in years with their signature brand of Britainicana.
Their debut EP, This Better Be Something Great lives up to its title with a no filler five track run of punchy rock hits that signal the start of what one hopes to be a long and successful career at the top of the genre.
If you can, see Westside Cowboy now while you still get the chance to catch them at an intimate grassroots venue, I expect that with the trend that their careers have taken in just over a year, such modestly ticketed events wont last forever.
Westside Cowboy: Website / Instagram / Bandcamp
Musical Discovery – Jackson C. Frank
My favourite musical discovery of the year was by far in a way that of Jackson C. Frank, whilst likely a semi-known entity to many via his much-covered song ‘The Blues Run the Game’, this year saw my first exposure to the tragic folk hero’s discography; perhaps an unsuitable term as the whole of Franks’ incredible works amount to a self-titled debut album and a series of compilations made many decades later.
The life of Jackson C. Frank reads almost like a melodrama, filled start to end with improbable tragedy and misfortune, a background which lends the man’s soulful folk songs a vulnerability that is hard to find in earnest. I challenge anyone to listen to ‘My Name is Carnival’ followed by ‘Tumble in the Wind’ and not be moved by the drastic change from the luscious vocals of a young man to the seasoned, cracking rasps of one so much older.
Film – Tornado
Following his acclaimed debut production Slow West, John Maclean’s Tornado is a similarly understated western-of-sorts that tracks a young girl’s revenge in the Scottish Highlands as she reclaims her Samurai ancestry and evades a murderous gang lead by the quietly sinister Sugarman (as played imposingly by Tim Roth).
As full of heart, tension, and gore as his first picture, Maclean delivers with Tornado a impactful story about identity, power, and violence packed full of memorable performances and that follows you home from the cinema and stays with you for days. Alongside Tim Roth Jack Lowden, Rory McCann, Alex Macqueen and Takehiro Hira make up just a few of the stacked cast of brilliant character actors, but it is the titular protagonist played by Japanese model Koki who steals the show. Brimming with Maclean’s signature silently burning tension, her performance is one of the most overlooked of the year.
Available on Amazon Prime Video, Tornado is a must watch for any lover of westerns, revenge thrillers, and proper slow burn movies, as well as being my number one film of the year.
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