Welcome to The Elite Extremophile’s Top Prog Albums of 2025! As usual, this is a two-part list of 50 total entries. Part two is here.
As a reminder, the music on this list spans December 2024 through November 2025. Music from December 2025 will be on the 2026 list. I’m sure there is plenty of good music I missed, but when it comes to the reviewing, this is a one-man operation. (My proofreaders/editors, Kelci and Dan, have been very helpful, as always.) There are also certain trends and styles I simply don’t like very much.
2025 was a fantastic year for progressive rock and related genres. I was spoiled for choice with this list, and this may be the overall-strongest batch of recommendations I’ve given to date.
Super-prolific Chicagoans Cheer-Accident are back with their 26th full-length release. This album has a more electronic feel than most of their releases. It’s still rooted in oddball, angular progressive rock, but the synths help smooth out some edges. Coupled with some smart and infectious melodies, I would rank this as among the band’s best. (At least of the half-dozen or so of their albums I’ve heard.)
Score: 81/100
Band: Eden Lantsêm | Album:My Guts Rest upon Your Lips Like the Breath of Forgotten Lovers | Genre: Zeuhl, Progressive metal | Bandcamp
The latest solo project from Swiss multi-instrumentalist Tim Nyss sees him exploring the world of zeuhl with an especially heavy twist. The four long instrumental cuts on this release lurch and thunder with the power of sludge metal, but it’s all in service of Magmatic oddness. Rhythms vary between martial and irregular-but-urgent, and avant-garde chords slash and slam across this record. This is a harsh, heavy release and is one of the few successful meldings of zeuhl with metal that I’ve run across.
WEEED, a favorite local band of mine, recently decided to call it quits. I’d featured them on this site at least three times before, with two of those reviews being quite positive. Originally based on Bainbridge Island, I saw them play in and around Seattle a number of times, and they always put on a killer show, blending smart psych rock with improvisational freak-outs. They relocated to Portland a few years ago, and they’d been largely quiet since the pandemic.
In announcing their dissolution, they also announced a farewell show (which I sadly missed, due to a scheduling conflict) and a trio of records they’d been sitting on. I’m going to take this opportunity to cover these three releases as a send-off to this band. This won’t be quite as in-depth as my full-length reviews, but it will cover more than a typical Odds & Ends.
Edensong is not a band I was familiar with before writing this review. They play a brand of semi-metallic progressive rock with significant folk influences. The band also has a dedicated flutist, so the comparisons to Jethro Tull are pretty easy. Those comparisons are also pretty apt, as Tull’s influence can be heard throughout this record.
Oh boy! Jethro Tull is back with a new album. I gave their lasttwo releases middling-to-lukewarm coverage, so I didn’t exactly have very high hopes for Curious Ruminant. Overall, though, I was pleasantly surprised. They leaned hard into folk music, and the album is mostly a success. It’s not going to be a contender for my album of the year, but if you’re looking for some decent, proggy folk rock, this is a good choice.
It’s time for The Elite Extremophile’s Top 50 Prog Albums of 2024! This is the first half of the list, and you can find the second half here.
As a reminder, the music on this list covers December 2023 to November 2024. I spend much of December compiling and editing this list, so I push releases from that month into the following year’s list.
This is also a one-man operation, in regard to reviewing. (Many thanks to my proofreaders/editors, Kelci and Dan.) I’m sure there’s plenty of great music out there I simply didn’t get to. I’ve also got my own biases against certain styles and trends.
2024 wound up being an alright year for the sort of stuff I cover here. It felt like it started off somewhat slow, but in the end, it wasn’t too challenging for me to find 50 records worthy of being highlighted.
Band: Å | Album:Åtråvärld | Genre: Progressive rock, Folk rock | Bandcamp
The latest release from this Swedish act sounds almost as if late ‘70s Jethro Tull were from Scandinavia. It’s lightly-crunchy progressive folk rock with a healthy dose of flute. The mood here is a little hazier and more psychedelic than anything Tull ever did. Jazz elements are apparent, too, and this whole record has a wonderfully laid-back feel to it. This is very much music for walking through the woods. But, y’know, proggy.
This lovely little EP does an incredible job blending the smooth sounds of 1980s Japanese jazz with biting, acidic guitar tones and progressive songwriting. The three songs presented here provide a wonderful mix of sounds and moods, and the closing epic “Traveling Sleepers” is especially emotive and powerful.
This Russian quartet plays a smart, artsy variety of folk rock. They blend their own Slavic roots with jazz, modern classical, indie rock, and other bits and pieces from around the globe. The instrumentation is often intricate and full of unexpected twists. They build lush and varied textures, and they’re able to blend strong pop sensibilities with a spirit of adventurousness and experimentation.
Score: 81/100
Band: Agusa | Album:Noir | Genre: Progressive rock, Space rock | Bandcamp
I liked this release a lot more than I expected to. Agusa is a band I like–each of their last two albums have made my year-end Top 50 lists, after all–but one of my gripes is that they can be a bit noodly and long-winded. This album is a soundtrack for a film, so I was particularly cautious. Would the scattershot nature of soundtracks hamstring this work? Instead, this is a delightfully varied yet purposeful and coherent release. Folk, jazz, and space rock elements are incorporated naturally, alongside Agusa’s usual prog stylings. This album is also more consistently lighthearted than much of their other work, which is a nice change of pace. The shorter runtimes for these tracks also behoove the band, as they’re able to put forward fun ideas and meditate on them for a bit without needing to build some huge suite. Things do sag and slow down a bit near the album’s end, but it’s far from a fatal flaw in this case.
Band: April 1830 | Album:The Adventures of Space Pig | Genre: Progressive rock | Bandcamp
This Philadelphian band claims to write songs about “pig failure,” and that alone grabbed my attention enough to give this record a spin. (For what it’s worth, the vocals are relatively low in the mix and somewhat willowy, so actual themes of pig failure can be hard to discern.) The music is energetic, often drawing from pop and punk. Certain passages remind me of Cardiacs, if Cardiacs were a very synth-forward, female-fronted band. It’s fun and inventive, and I had a good time listening to this.
Custard Flux’s fifth full length album is their first fully-electric endeavor. They’ve ditched their (mostly) acoustic schtick, and it has resulted in a pretty good release. The band tightened up their songwriting after 2022’s bloated-as-hell Phosphorus, and that renewed focus is appreciated. The music here is catchy and punchy, and the swirling, psychedelic textures are enjoyable. Hints of alternative rock crop up on occasion, too.
As I mentioned in a recent review, I’ve been on something of an avant-prog kick, almost by accident. In the last month or so, the most exceptionally and intentionally weird things have leapt out the most to me. In turn, this oversaturation of weirdness is starting to cause a bit of avant-burnout on my end. I feel like I need a palate cleanser. So, instead of scouring through Bandcamp in the hopes of finding something new and wonderful to cover, I’ve dipped back into my (very) occasional series, Lesser-Known Gems. As far as potential candidates for this series go, T2’s debut album, It’ll All Work Out in Boomland, is probably the best-known that I’ll cover. I recently compiled a list of around forty potential LKG subjects, and this album has, by far, the most reviews and ratings on Rate Your Music of anything on that list.
It’ll All Work Out in Boomland may be the framing device I’ll use for this column, but you can almost think of this as a mini-Deep Dive (Shallow Dive?). Boomland will be the primary focus, but I’ll also write to some extent about the archival release, T.2., and their three albums they put out in the 1990s.
T2 was founded in 1970 and led by drummer-vocalist Pete Dunton. Dunton had been a member of a few psychedelic bands prior to this, including Please, Neon Pearl, and Gun (another future LKG candidate). Joining Dunton in T2 were Neon Pearl bassist Bernie Jinks and guitarist-keyboardist Keith Cross (who was only 17 at the time), whom Jinks knew from another band he was in, Bulldog Breed.
This trio captured lightning in a bottle on what was for many years their only release. They took the hard-charging, blues-influenced hard rock of acts like Cream and The Jimi Hendrix Experience and blended it with forward-thinking jazz, folk, and experimental flavors. This is one of those pieces of music where human language feels especially inadequate for describing it, but I’ll do my best. Seriously, just go listen to this.
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