I Die: You Die Top 5 of 2025

And so, with parts 25-16 to 15-6 in the bag, we’re on to the Top 5 of 2025. Pulling back the curtain a bit, this was a year where our list rankings were decided in razor sharp margins, and via criteria that went beyond how much we liked an album in theory and in principle, but in how it spoke to our grander aims and ambitions for this website, now almost 15 years into its existence. No spoilers as to what you’ll find below, but we’d like to think that there’s a pleasantly circular and complete vision of how we view Our Thing visible through this year’s list, appropriate as we’re already discussing some changes in how we approach this exercise in years to come. All that said, let us know in the comments what your favorites for 2025 were, and tune into tomorrow for the Year End wrap up podcast, which will have a breakdown of the list, our honourable mentions (a stacked list in 2025) and more commentary on the calendar year that was. On to the Top 5!

5. Comaduster
Memory Echoes
self-released
It’s impossible to capture the scope of Comaduster’s Memory Echoes in the space afforded to us here; beyond the difficulty of pinning down the project’s genre (a mix of IDM, industrial, bass music, and prog songwriting), the sheer size of Real Cardinal’s vision for the record is as vast and complex as his ultra-detailed programming and production. The record’s Slaughterhouse-5-squared narrative of time collapsing and pulling apart goes beyond simple flavouring of the songs and actively shapes their construction; sounds shred and tear apart to reveal another song behind or beneath the track you were listening to, motifs are presaged or revisited through entirely different modes and instrumentation, and at various points the album collapses into a singularity of focused sound before derezzing and becoming something new and different. It’s challenging to be certain, but more than that, it’s Cardinal’s most deeply personal work, and despite notable contributions from collaborators Mari Kattman, Alex Reed and Elijah Hennig, it’s his voice, both literally and figuratively, that keeps the album from turning into an exercise in abstraction or technical intricacies. For all it’s science fiction trappings and musical and production reach, we’ve never heard Real Cardinal as open as he is here, and for the record’s manifold twists, and shapes, it’s easily his most compelling and tangibly emotional. Read our full review.

4. Bootblacks
Paradise
Artoffact Records
Bootblacks aren’t a new band by any means, but with Paradise they’ve truly come into their own, zeroing in on their musical identity and the vitality and charm of their live shows in grand fashion. Assisted with production from Automelodi’s Xavier Paradis, vocalist Panther Almqvist, synthesist Barrett Hiatt and guitarist Kalle Fagerberg have a relaxed confidence that begets the record’s focus, allowing them to slip their post-punk bonds and dive headfirst into shimmery italo disco (“Leipzig”), smooth new wave (“Only You”) and arty punk-funk (“Wilderness”) while still sounding uniquely like themselves. Panther’s laconic charm has always been one Bootblacks’ great strengths, and he leverages it to the utmost on cuts like single “Forbidden Flames”, leaning into the song’s undeniable chorus through sheer personality and charisma. For their part Hiatt and Fagerberg are in rare form, the former’s programming and sound design morphing smoothly into whatever shape the song requires, while the latter’s rhythm parts and leads have a tasteful, spidery charm, unshowy and perfectly suited to the record’s sound. More than any other album released in 2025, Paradise has been the easy choice to throw on for any given scenario; it’s propulsive enough for the club or a party, chill and groovy enough for casual home listening, and has the tunes to put on in mixed company of all tastes. Bootblacks made all the right moves, and made an LP that is effortlessly entertaining from first note to last. Read our full review.

3. grabyourface
Sadgirl Mixtape
self-released
Crafted intermittently over the past seven years, grabyourface’s Sadgirl Mixtape distills a lifetime of hurt into an unremitting hour of listening which, as the title suggests, skips from genre to genre, many of which have been hitherto unexplored by Marie Lando. The one-two punch of that musical range and commitment to depression was a radical break from the noisy EBM and post-industrial magnetism that had shaped our view of grabyourface up until now, but it’s also what made this one of the year’s most potent records. Like Robert Burton’s An Anatomy Of Melancholy, Lando offers a singular catalog of pain which gains power by virtue of the differences between its component parts. To call Sadgirl Mixtape a “concept record” because of its theme or construction would be to miss the point: “I Dream Of A Future Without You” and “You Will Never Be Happy” are connected wholly by the depth of their pained feeling. The distinction between the former’s menacing keys and piano (recalling “Something I Can Never Have”) and the latter’s hauntological black metal quotation, the self-incrimination which tinges the helpless death spiral of a long since doomed relationship in “Future”, the resolute fatalism of “Never Be Happy”: it’s in this wide range of unique points and positions that grabyourface established herself as the chief miserablist of 2025.Read our full review.

2. Seeming
The World
Artoffact Records
2025 has been a nightmare. Maybe not an unprecedented one, but also one we’re not so naive to think will disappear the moment the calendar flips, or even when it happens. It’s a nightmare we have to keep fighting and keep living in. And not for the first time, we find ourselves grateful to have Alex Reed’s work as Seeming serving not as “soundtrack” or “mirror” for the zeitgeist, but rather as handbook and fuel for weathering it. On fourth Seeming LP The World Reed’s strategies for endtimes which never fully arrive and never fully end range from the therapeutic (remembering that “I am more than the pain I’m in” on “Nova”) to the phenomenological (the delirious, sublime rapture found in one’s quotidian life blurring into the animal and the eternal on closer “Winterlight”). Musically, much of the record to be found roaming between the territory of stormy, strident art rock which Seeming knows well, and that indistinct yet august land to which synthpop greats like Alphaville and Tears For Fears have gravitated as they’ve aged. It’s a flexible yet readily identifiable mode which allows the impetuous riot of “Zebra Tramples Horse Trainer” to fit right in along the ambiguous synthtopia of “The Tomorrow Place”. Those of us who’ve been longtime listeners of Reed’s work will likely hear a kinship in The World with the wintry observances that marked Seeming’s 2014 debut and even Reed’s preceding work as ThouShaltNot, but perhaps more importantly, those just stumbling upon Seeming will find as tight and unified a listen as the project’s ever offered, and one which they didn’t know how badly they needed to hear as the gyre perpetually widens. Read our full review.

1. Encephalon
Automaton All Along
Artoffact Records
Back in 2011, we declared Ottawa industrialists Encephalon’s debut LP The Transhuman Condition our number #1 album of the year for a variety of reasons both objective and personal, but primarily because it felt like the exact album we founded I Die: You Die to champion; a heady mix of club-ready dancefloor electro, rock-tinged compositions with elaborate arrangements, and baked in themes of techno-futurism and the perils thereof. In the years since, “Listen to Encephalon” has been something of a mantra for us, a reminder of why we do this, and what kinds of artists we’re here to examine and celebrate. 2025’s Automaton All Along, the Ottawa based act’s fifth record served as a reminder of why Matt Gifford and Alis Alias’ work has continued to fascinate and inspire us in 2025.

After the band’s 2022 LP Echoes found them summarizing the concepts and themes that had informed their catalogue up to that point, Automaton All Along is something of a fresh start, albeit one that carries on their tradition of high-concept frameworks. The ever-so-of-the-moment theme of artificial intelligence, and existential questions of determinism, free will, and the nature of creation are a perfect canvas for the band’s sleekly designed take on electro-industrial; machinelike and orderly at the outset on the scene-setting “Last Day at the Institute”, digitally fluid and thoughtful on “The Machines” and propulsive and precise on club bids such as the excellent “Like The Real Thing”. The design of their songs is a function of their theme and vice versa; you can’t make grandiose “What are we here for?” cybernetic rock opera by half-measures, and every decision, every lyric, every beat and note serves the whole as much as it does the song, yet another way the record addresses emergent consciousness.

That sense of unity only makes the musical variety on display here that much more impressive. From melancholy downtempo to glitch to hammering, staccato machine rock, Encephalon try on a set of guises which would be difficult to believe come from the same act were it not for their preceding fifteen year track record and on-record omnivorous tastes. And taking a further step back, that range says something about the spread and amorphous shape of post-industrial music as a whole during Encephalon’s tenure. We’ve always said that the borders of Our Thing were porous but that we know it when we hear it; a record like Automaton All Along covers all the outlying territory while still holding to the most core aesthetic elements of electro-industrial as we understand it.

“Life finds a way to fuck you.” A gripe which could likely be heard from any barstool philosopher around the world in any century, but one that has added poignancy coming from an artificial being gaining consciousness just in time to have an existential crisis regarding their own planned obsolescence and mundane purpose. In an age of enshittification, AI slop, and algorithmically manipulated emotions and politics, it’s darkly fitting that a record with as down the pipe industrial concept as Automaton All Along feels so au courant in 2025. Who’s better suited to deal with the fresh hells which await every time you pick up your phone than those of us raised on a steady diet of Blade Runner and Front Line Assembly records? Encephalon are Our Thing incarnate, born and bred, and Automaton is them at their most versatile and addictive.

Read our full review and listen to our interview with Encephalon.

Thanks very much for reading. We’ll be back tomorrow with a podcast reviewing our Top 25 and discussing some honorable mentions.