SPINAL BAP'S TOP ALBUMS OF 2025

Bonable Iverable – Sable, Fable

In terms of humanity’s history of mental breakthroughs, it was up there with Archimedes’ “EUREKA!” moment, the apple on Newton’s noggin, Paul McCartney’s ‘Yesterday’ dream and whoever saved us from hours of slicing bread for ourselves.

According to one feature on Justin “Bon Iver” Vernon, “It didn’t initially dawn on him that both Sable and Fable contain the word ‘able’”.

The tepid soul record, with its inadvertent rhyming scheme, was merely the tip of the fatberg, however. The real vision came in the way it was marketed. There were partnerships with everything from Malaysian matcha shops to Todd Snyder and his $300 pink hoodie.

The release raised a number of ponderable questions: Is Sable, Fable a saleable, scale-able, stable, retail label? Or an unbearable, fatal, stale, flail; valuable only to the diabolical merchandise table? Are you able to be persuadable to an inedible, Sable Fable Papal Anal Bagel or other peripheral apparel, available on general sale? Is it a palpable, fateful, foible, signifying unstable, inescapable, insatiable capital?

The Last Glinner Party – From The Pariah 

A certain Irish comedy writer was furious when he discovered this flouncing tribute act. Born as biological women, they prance around in dresses, identify as Graham Linehan and write verses about dense main characters with even thicker sidekicks. So offended was the sitcom scribe, he ceased writing jokes altogether and spent the rest of his short time on this planet attacking strangers on the internet for 19 hours a day. After all that effort, the long-desired marriage proposal ceased to arrive from the offices of JK.
 

Joe Talbot – Oh Great Heaper 

Music is so last century. No one cares about it anymore. We live in an age when most consumers only want to listen to other people’s conversations, no matter how banal. Idles’ pseudo-yob Joe Talbot is the latest popstar who’s clocked this profitable trend and pivoted accordingly. Therefore, this is the inaugural Spinal Bap list to feature a podcast. “This is something I wanted to do for a long time,” explained Talbottybumbumpants when he launched the ‘pod’ back in September. “I want to suck the knowledge out of the people I look up to and love.” Ambition fulfilled, it definitely sucks.

Needless to say, this untrained interviewer gets the least out of his guests with questions such as: “I dunno like it’s like I dunno yeah I guess like I dunno is it like whevver you yeah like coz wot my ferapist woz sayin the ovver day woz it’s like literally yeah, like that and fings, d’ you reckon?”

Next thing you know he’ll be presenting Front Row on Radio 4. 

Mayhem – Lady Gaga 

In the run-up to Mayhem’s latest album, Lady Gaga, there was talk about a return to their roots. The years prior had seen no shortage of genre experimentation, from country to old standards. Another thing that had confounded fans was the misguided casting of Jørn “Necrobutcher” Stubberud as Joaquin Phoenix’s paramour in Joker 2. So it was nice to hear Mayhem lean back into their strengths: twisted black metal which makes you want to burn down churches and hail Satan. The result was the strongest pop album of the year.

Charli XCX – Charli’s Substack

Music is so last century. No one listens to it anymore. People only glance at Substacks these days, usually while listening to Joe Talbot’s podcast. Cambridge’s Charlotte Aitchinson is the latest popstar to who’s clocked this profitable trend and multitasked accordingly. Therefore, this is the inaugural SB list to feature a subscription-based publishing service.

Needless to say, the educated aesthete in question ruminates perceptively, at some length, about why the popstar Charli XCX is quite so cool, the upshots of being the popstar Charli XCX, the minor downsides of life as the popstar Charli XCX, and the abundant creative juices of the popstar Charli XCX. Fair enough. No one was expecting a post-structuralist approach to the deconstructed semiotics of quantum entanglement. Write about what you know. Or, as Mark Twain put it, “Gaze at one’s nearest navel.”

Pulp – More Pulp

The album with the most desert rock cover of the year was actually a plea for listeners to meet their minimum of five a day by consuming fruit juice with extra fibrous bits. Bon Iver liked the idea so much he launched his own line of Sable Fable Drinkable Table Vegetables.

Suede – More Antidepressants 

Ageing like a fine whine.

Deftones – Private Moresic

The Part Chimp of nu-metal.

Tiny Seagull – Possession

The Great Black-Backed Gull can be 31 inches long with a wingspan of 1.7 meters. That is nearly six foot! By way of contrast, the Little Gull has a body length of half that size and a wingspan of 27 inches. The comparison is striking. What a tiny seagull! Yet what our tiddly avian friend lacks in scale, he makes up for with frequency of appearances. As might be expected from a bird that has wide Palearctic distribution, stretching from northern Scandinavia to the North American Great Lakes, Possession is a wide-ranging record that operates over a broad palette. ‘Shoplifter’ is a song about a destitute kleptomaniac determined to wrest rogue crisps and chocolate from the Brighton branch of Londis. It climaxes when two saxophones soar as if pursuing insects off the water or marine invertebrates from rocks during the winter months. On ‘Alive’, Seagull sings “It’s cold outside / Cold Outside / So naturally, I humble thee who come to me to be alive, be alive”. Never has the need for a migratory journey, which might take such a small creature as far south as the Carolinas or Caspian Sea, been so mystically captured in music. Tiny seagull, yes. But what a big, big heart.