New in our year-end coverage is the inaugural recognition of our favorite record label. We consider their impact on the year and how they define their sound, curate their roster, and celebrate their community.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2025 wrap-up coverage here.
One of the best and most distinctive albums this year sounded like a falling anvil wreathed in flames. Another of the year’s highlights might have been a forlorn ghost singing lullabies at your bedside, or your gravesite. Yet another closed the gap between doomsday soothsaying, beautiful love songs, the buzzing of broken refrigerators, and the august majesty of whales. Still another fused math rock, free jazz, and leftfield electronics into a cryptic juggernaut rolling beneath the banner of a breathless existentialist koan: “To name something is to know something and to know something is to know I know nothing and that’s what I really want. See?”
At first glance, these records—YHWH Nailgun’s 45 Pounds, Joanne Robertson’s Blurr, feeo’s Goodness, and Moin’s Belly Up—might not seem to share much, if anything, in common. But one important thing connects them: They were all released by London’s AD 93—one of the most interesting, unpredictable, and ambitious record labels working right now.
AD 93 is rooted in London’s electronic scene of the mid-’10s, when post-dubstep and techno were fusing into spiky club abstractions. But these days, club music is a rarity in the label’s catalog, and no single musical style could be said to define its output. Instead, what unifies AD 93’s diverse roster is something more like an ethos: a shared spirit of adventurousness, disregard for convention, and raw emotion.
Those qualities were in ample supply on everything AD 93 released this year. Guitarist Oren Ambarchi and drummer Eric Thielemans dissolved their playing into 47 minutes of long-form improv on the live document Kind Regards. Polish composer Wojciech Rusin molded processed vocals and 3D-printed reed instruments into plasticine chamber music on Honey for the Ants. Bass-music mystic Shackleton and GNOD’s Marlene Ribeiro drizzled down dubby, vividly colored psychedelia on The Rising Wave.
It wasn’t all so heady. With an assist from grime OG Riko Dan, the anonymous duo known simply as Tracey put together an EP spread across ambient R&B, shambolic indie pop, and a black hole of a club anthem that was the year’s best song about fucking; New York singer-producer james K brought an ethereal touch to the trip-hop revival, turning in one of the year’s most frictionlessly listenable albums. And while much of the energy came from brash young upstarts with provocative ideas, the label also found space for ambient veteran Biosphere, who worked samples from a vintage radio play—itself adapted from a 1926 novel about rural life—into a contemplative lament for climate change.
