2025 Number 1: Moron Police

Gemma's Top Ten Albums of 2025

Number 1: Moron Police - Pachinko

If I look at my favourite albums of 2025, it appears to have been another fairly conservative year. Many of the Big Names released albums that have been worthy, often even a return to form. IQ, Dream Theater, Spock’s Beard, Gazpacho and Karmakanic: They have mostly played it safe, perhaps feeling that, as their careers approach their later stages, they better play to their strengths and stay close to the sounds that made them big. You can’t fault them for it. But I’ve spent most of 2025 looking for an album that truly excites me.

Enter Moron Police. They’re a young band from Norway that’s shown promise in the past, and here’s that great big album that delivers on that promise, and then some. There’s a dinosaur on the cover, so it has to be a winner. This album is totally unstoppable, just filled to the brim with energy, a mad cocktail of pop, metal and prog but with only the good bits, more hooks in three minutes than most bands manage over an album and a creative whirlwind not seen since the early years of the Flower Kings or Moon Safari. It’s hard to pinpoint exact highlights when every song is great, and most songs aren’t even that long. The songs all flow together as a joyful whole that keeps finding new ways to be awesome at every turn. This is the most addictive album of the year. Give it up for the first Norwegian band that tops my list!

There’s bits of prog, metal, country, J-pop, house, bits that sound like Primus or System of a Down, bits that sound like synthwave and bits that sound like Thank You Scientist. None of it should go together but it really, really does. It’s even a bit of a concept album, though what exactly the concept is I’m not entirely sure. Something involving Japanese arcade games, cormorants and kittens, the absence of God, and probably late stage capitalism. I’m not finding any actual dinosaurs in there. Nothing’s perfect!

Although it’s a lighthearted, silly and bouncy album, this one is unique in their catalogue for having an undercurrent of tragedy, as Moron Police lost their drummer in an accident a few years ago. I think that loss can be heard on the album, too. There’s a heartfelt maturity underneath the youthful energy. Whatever the concept is, at the end of the day this is an album that is about living life to the fullest and refusing to let your head down, in spite of everything. Maybe that’s what I was looking for most in 2025. 

I’ve heard many great albums this year, but this is the one I can never wait to listen to again! And that for a band called “Moron Police”, who once wrote songs such as “Omnivorous Sexosaurus” and “T-Bag Your Grandma”. There is hope for us all.

2025 Number 2: IQ

 Gemma's Top Ten Albums of 2025

Number 2: IQ - Dominion

 

Have I been taking IQ for granted? I’ve seen them live a few times, and they are consummate professionals, but it’s been a hot second since I’ve really fallen in love with their work. 2004’s Dark Matter stands as one of my all time favourite albums, but I’ve been famously lukewarm on their output since, which for me has taken on a darker, colder, more distant feel.

With Dominion, I feel like I’m on board again. Whereas I felt previous albums to be ponderous and oppressive, this one feels much more open, subtle and melodic. Like a load has fallen off it. We have an expansive, cinematic prog album here where giant, bombastic tracks are alternated with light acoustic ballads. Structurally, I think it’s the first time they’ve put the big epic at the start. Other than that, I’m hearing that classic IQ sound that you can love or hate. After so long, this material manages to hit that spot again that Ever and Dark Matter did.

IQ are, in the best possible way, a band out of time. Nobody really sounds like them. They will occasionally nod to Genesis, but they don’t sound like a seventies band. They don’t sound much like Marillion (songs called “Neverland” notwithstanding) or any of the other remaining bands of their generation, either. And they certainly don’t sound like any of the newer prog bands. They are retro and timeless at the same time. Peter Nicholls has the ultimate prog voice – complete with the “aquired taste” label – and yet he barely sounds like anyone else. Nobody plays guitar quite like Mike Holmes. IQ are an island unto themselves.

Their albums are few and far between and therefore Events. I’m glad I’ve been enjoying one of these Events again. You can’t take them for granted. 

 

2025 Number 3: Jacob Roberge

Gemma's Top Ten Albums of 2025

Number 3: Jacob Roberge - The Passing 

I can’t help but feel my own generation has produced relatively few progressive rock stars. There’s plenty of gen-X proggers to go around, while us burnt-out, avocado-munching, diamond-mine destroying prog millenials have very little to our name. True to form, probably. But at least the new generation is showing promise.

Take Jacob Roberge here. He’s a twenty-year-old French Canadian, too young to have seen Spock’s Beard with Neal, the same way I was too young to have seen Marillion with Fish. He’s been killing it on YouTube for a while, and he’s made one of the most impressive, accomplished debut albums I’ve heard in a while.

The songs ebb and flow with great sensitivity, a lot of piano, occasional harder edges and a great ear for composition. Jacob has some of his roots in classical music, and it shows. What strikes me most is the extremely high production values, almost unheard of in an independent debut album. Like yesterday’s Jonas Lindberg, he’s listened a lot to Neal Morse, but whereas Jonas is mostly incluenced by his sound and vibe, Jacob takes his arranging and composing style in his own direction.

But there’s a poise to it all, an elegance, like he’s not quite going all out… until the last song. You have to admire the ambition of an artist who lets his debut album end, not just on an epic, but a ruddy 30 minute one! I’ve seen this go badly wrong before, but Jacob here completely knocks it out of the park. The Passing is an instant classic, full of brilliant transitions and a dynamic range that every prog master would take their hat off to. Clearly this is where his strength lies. I hope it will be celebrated as the great work it is, my single favourite song of the year and one I see myself play many times more after the year is done.

If this is your first album, it’s an amazing achievement. Doesn’t talent skip a generaton?

 

2025 Number 4: Jonas Lindberg

Gemma's Top Ten Albums of 2025

Number 4: Jonas Lindberg & The Other Side -  Time Frames

Neal Morse hasn’t been on my year-end list for ages. Last year, he made an album with young men, this year he made an album with old men, next year he’ll make an album with his regular band and it all goes in one ear, out the other. 

I’m much more interested in the impact he’s having now that a generation of musicians influenced by him are coming of age. Jonas Lindberg is one, tomorrow’s featured artist is another. Jonas Lindberg, just like Monika Roscher, started his band as a school project, and has gone from strength to strength since.

Everything that’s good about Neal Morse is what’s good about Jonas Lindberg. It’s catchy, it’s enthousiastic and energetic, it rocks and grooves and there’s no shortatge of instrumenal freakouts and great, spacy keyboard solos. As a musician, I notice that this guy sure loves his lydian mode… just like Neal. It all sounds very open and inviting, it’s instantly enjoyable but rewards repeat listens. And, of course, you have to have that big old epic at the end.

Is it the most original thing ever? I don’t need every single album I listen to to be on the bleeding edge of avant garde, man. I’m just glad stuff like this is still being made by people other than the old guard. This is the kind of music I fell in love with as a teenager, and now I’m falling in love with it again. Lindberg brings his own youthful energy to the table, an effortless fluency that makes it all sound easy. He’s got the right voice, too. The well of Swedish prog talent still has far from run dry.

 

2025 Number 5: Steven Wilson

Gemma's Top Ten Albums of 2025

Number 5: Steven Wilson - The Overview

Every two years, like clockwork, Steven Wilson gives us a new album. And every two years, like clockwork, the fans and lapsed fans get a new puzzle to solve. How the heck are we going to interpret this one? How does it fit into his wide discography? How well does it make good on his galaxy-sized talent? How arrogant can he afford to be for the coming two years? And how well does it wash the taste of The Future Bites out of our mouths?

After the long, expansive, alienating Harmony Codex, he has now presented us with an album built like an old LP, with two side-filling suites. His Misplaced Childhood, his Thick as a Brick? If you expect that modest 40-minute running time to mean a pointy, wordy, song-based album like the previous examples, you got Wilson’d. Quite a lot of this is instrumental, experimental and often ambient. It’s very much in the vein of Harmoy Codex, though more consistent and easier to digest.

Meant to invoke the existential loneliness of the astronaut who contemplates his insignificance when confronted with the terrifying vastness of space, The Overview is haunting and melancholy. There are also elements of witty irony, thanks to XTC’s Andy Partridge’s lyrics. His contribution to the first suite ends up being the heart of the whole album, the wry human touch that counterpoints Wilson himself, who drifts ever further into space like a latter day Major Tom.

The album has an otherworldly beauty to it that works very well with its own existentialist concept. There’s aslo many great, exciting musical passages in here that please the old proghead in me. I’m very comfortable calling this my favourite of his since the underrated To The Bone. That was a very grounded album, and I’m ready for Wilson to come back down to earth again. I can’t deny that these days his albums seem more meant to analyze and scrutinize than to simply enjoy. But I likewise can’t deny his output is always unpredictable and exciting.

2025 Number 6: Karmakanic

Gemma's Top Ten Albums of 2025

 

Number 6: Karmakanic - Transmutation

Have Jonas Reingold and John Mitchell never crossed paths before? It was only a matter of time before the two men with the longest resumés in prog this side of Steven Wilson would team up. The man from The Flower Kings, the Steve Hackett band, Kaipa, The Tangent and The Fringe asked the man from Arena, It Bites, Lonely Robot, Kino, Frost and the John Wetton band to sing on his new Karmakanic record, and the result is quite curious. Curious to hear this quintessentialy English voice work his way through lyrics written by a Viennese Swede, for whom English is perhaps his third language. 

 

Nevertheless, it largely works, and Jonas opens a full can of tasty prog for us. Pointy tracks and proggy tracks galore, always with a great ear for melody and hooks. It doesn’t break with tradition much; we’re firmly in celebratory, indulgent Third Wave Prog territory here, even with a second-wave vocalist. Mostly melodic and upbeat, in the style of Yes but always just a tad more rocking.

The guest list is a veritable Who’s Who of prog rock superstars, featuring Simon Phillips, Craig Blundell, the omnipresent Randy McStine, Luke Machin, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. The fact that Jonas himself is one of the greatest living bassist is certainly a great added value.

One great thing about 2025 is this: the epics are back! There were a few years there when the big names in prog seemed to eschew the side-filling rock symphonies, but everyone’s back doing twenty minute pieces, and Karmakanic’s title track Transmutation is a very fine example of the form. Jonas Reingold learned the art from Roine Stolt at The Flower Kings, and this is the year he has matched and perhaps surpassed the master. Long live the King.

2025 Number 7: Spock's Beard

Gemma's Top Ten Albums of 2025

Number 7: Spock's Beard - The Archaeoptimist

I have to be honest, I was very surprised to hear from Ryo Okumoto that Spock’s Beard was still an ongoing concern. Nobody wants to admit it 25 years into their Post-Neal period, but the harsh truth is that the band have always struggled without their most talented member. And after that one time they did make a bona fide Post-Neal masterpiece in X, another big lineup change threw everything into disarray all over again. The fact is, I’ve never vibed with any of their albums in their Ted Leonard line-up, and so many years after the underwhelming Noise Floor I expected we’d seen the last of the once-mighty Beard. All its members are happily working on solo albums and other projects such as Pattern-Seeking Animals, so is there anyone who was really clamouring for a return of the Beard?

Well, not only are they back, they’re back with a fantasitc album, surely their best one post-Neal along with X. Whereas the MVPs on previous albums were Dave Meros and his writing buddy John Boegehold, this time around it’s Ryo who pulls most of the compository weight along with new “shadow member” Michael Whiteman, of I Am The Manic Whale fame. Ryo was always the band’s jester, mostly writing instrumental novelty tracks, and I wasn’t a huge fan of his latest solo album, but he’s really pulled it out of the bag with this one.

The album is full of nods to classic Beard, but it feels earned. The anarchy, unexcpected twists and pure joy of playing that so characterized the band in their heyday is back again, stronger than it’s ever been before. There’s the tunes to carry it all, too, with the titular epic a very strong centerpiece that gives an otherwise lightweight album some needed gravitas. The influence of Whiteman also gives this very American band a certain sense of British thoughtfulness that works unexpecteldy well for them.

There are still questions around the future of the Beard. Especially listening to the last song, which speaks about bowing out with grace and moving on, sort of alluding to the possibility that the end of Spock’s Beard might be near after all. Damn, now I don’t want them to stop anymore. But if this is it, they picked a high note to go out on. Ryo is Rock ‘n Roll!

2025 Number 8: Gazpacho

Gemma's Top Ten Albums of 2025

Number 8: Gazpacho - Magic 8-Ball 

 

 

Rating a new Gazpacho album is always a tricky one. Their albums need months, years, to percolate and mature. Their best one remains 2007’s Night, and that’s an album that took me years to appreciate.

This one strikes me as a more song-based and immediate album… by Gazpacho standards, so not very immediate at all. Nevertheless, a song like We Are Strangers nestles itself in your brain. Gazpacho were always a warm, organic sounding band, but even with electronics, vocoders and synthesizers they manage to conjure up their signature otherworldly beauty.

After a cluster of strong opening songs, the album downshifts a bit into some slower songs that don’t really seem to have as much going on on the surface, but don’t let it lull you into a false sense of security. The title track has a surprising bite to it, and then the closing salvo of “Immerwahr” and “Unrisen” go straight for the throat, reminding us all why Gazpacho is a band that inspires so much devotion around the world. 

Will this turn out to be another timeless Gazpacho classic in the long run, or is this to be one of their less essential releases? We may not know until another few years have passed. But I like what I’m hearing, so a place in the lower regions of the top ten seems my safest bet. Putting an album called "Magic 8-Ball" at number 8 is too good not to. Expect more Norwegians on my list.

 

 

2025 Number 9: Dream Theater

Gemma's Top Ten Albums of 2025

Number 9: Dream Theater - Parasomnia

 

Something weird happened to me this year, something I thought would never happen... I became a Dream Theater fan. I’d never been a Dream Theater fan before. I don’t know exactly why but the biggest prog metal band in the world always kinda passed me by, with their oversinging vocalist, solos-before-tunes approach, paper-thin lyrics and certain less-than-mature elements to the fanbase. You know who you are!

But hey. I’ve matured, at least. Someone has to. Good old Mike P returned to his stool, competently kept warm by Other Mike, and I thought I might as well give them another shot. And, you know what? Turns out I do like Dream Theater after all. James LaBrie, the worst vocalist in prog? Actually, he sounds fine. The tunes are fine. The lyrics are fine. And the solos are, indeed, awesome. I think I just like heavy metal more than I used to. You can probably thank Haken for that.

I went back and checked out some of their classic albums, and this new one can stand among them comfortably. It isn’t a world-shattering masterpiece, but as a consolidation for the prog metal giant that just got their most legendary line-up back together, it doesn’t have to be. It just needs to re-establish why Dream Theater are probably the best band at being Dream Theater, and it does a great job of that. A tad safe, perhaps, but warm and comfortable.

On the scale of Heavy Metal Loudness, this one ends up on the “very loud” end, and, considering how much I’m enjoying Train of Thought, that’s apparently how I like my Dream Theater. Tasty stuff. I may have missed out on their heyday, bu I’m glad I still get to enjoy the biggest prog metal band in their second youth.

 

 

2025 Number 10: Yungblud

Gemma's Top Ten Albums of 2025

Number 10: Yungblud - Idols 

 

Is Yungblud prog? I don’t know. He looks a lot better with his shirt off than most prog rockers do, that’s for sure. 

Every generation needs a young upstart who will try to bring rock back to the masses, and if we must have one of those I’d much rather have someone like preening, posing, sentimental Yungblud than whitebread bores like Imagine Dragons. This guy at least has some passion to him, and some genuinely queer vibes that so many artists forget is part of the makeup (in all senses of the word) of rock ‘n roll.

I haven’t heard much from him from before this album, but from what I understand he used to be more playful and swaggering and lighthearted. This one is big and grand, talking of love and passion and death with utterly wild abandon, every moment more important than the last.
Of course, it’s the lengthy opener “Hello Heaven Hello” and the proggy “Ghosts” that draw me in the most. I want more than just verses and choruses.

While the Cool Britannia swagger and irony will be the thing that catches the eye of the magazines and tastemakers, it’s the genuine passion that will build up a real fandom, and our boy here is well on his way with this album. Apparently a second part is coming later. I’ll be listening.

Yungblud, like so many before and after him, is destined to fail gloriously in bringing rock back to the mainstream, but he will look damn good while doing it. Especially with his shirt off.

Gemma's Top Ten Albums of 2025: Honourable Mentions

Gemma's Top Ten Albums of 2025: Honourable Mentions 

 My name is Gemma, and this is what I do.

Foto Rene Secreve

Foto Rene Secreve

Foto Rene Secreve

Currently, my own musical endeavours mostly concern covering the prog rock classics of the 70s and 80s. As a singer, I always try to bring some exuberance and flamboyance to the table. Prog rock is big, showy music, after all.

My fiancée is a classical musician, and increasingly I'm beginning to see myself as someone who does something similar. The same way a chamber choir or a symphony orchestra would bring the compositions of baroque musicians or classical auteurs to the stage, bring it back to life, keep this older music circulating in live settings for people to enjoy and experience live in the room, so too does a rock covers band keep the music of past composers alive and circulating on the stages of the world. Someone has to.

Consider Genesis. When those boys from Charterhouse started out, they never intended to be a live band at all. They considered themselves a collective of composers, writing songs perhaps for other people to perform. Destiny had other plans and Genesis ended up legendary rock stars, but now that they are older and (maybe?) retired we can begin to view them as the composers they always intended to be. We treat their body of work the same way a philharmonic orchestra might treat the symphonies of Beethoven.

How do we play these songs? What do the sounds and words mean to us, in the modern day? How do we keep old music sounding fresh and exciting? What do you put on a live setlist, and what do you leave off? Why is that keyboard solo in Firth of Fifth so damn difficult? How can a musician mediate between the audience and some tricky music?

And can we turn it into more than just a nostalgia trip?

I understand the need for nostaligia in a scary world. I also understand the desire to see and hear older music performed - I don't know if you've seen the pop charts lately, but it's a wasteland! The slow burning death of rock music has been foreseen for ages, the sudden onset death of pop music took even me by surprise. No wonder nostaliga is booming. What else is there? But I also see our nostalgia being used against us. Our warmest memories reheated, repackaged and sold back to us, for profit, and for our sedation.

As a rock covers singer, am I complicit in this? I see the problems with nostalgia, but I am not immune. Is it better to retreat into the past, endlessly looping our familiar tunes, spiraling out of the present day while all that we hold dear is grinded down and regurgitated by the slop machine?

Maybe that's why I am more excited than ever to present to you my Top Ten Albums of the year. As always, we will count down to the new year and share my number one on new years' eve. 

For all that I celebrate the music of days gone by, I still get very excited about new releases every year, and I even get a little indignant when people tell me "they don't make music like they used to". Pardon me? They very much do! You just aren't listening!

Well, I did. I always try to to pay attention and listen to the newest releases, and here's what I found. Nothing could be more wothwhile than to celebrate those artists still standing, still believing that there is a place for new music, new progressive music, in the age of Slop.

After all, no one really wants to listen to music made by AI.

 

Here are some albums I liked this year that just about didn't make it to the actual top ten. That should tell you it's been another year full of strong releases. Give it up for: Magic Pie, The Flower Kings, Sleep Token, Flor de Loto, Nuova Era, Phase Transition, Dim Gray, Smalltape and Cardiacs.

Tomorrow I will share my number 10 favourite album of the year.