Editors' Picks 2025
As we reflect upon a busy year at Delayed & for the scene as a whole, our team has once again thoughtfully gathered their personal collection of sonic companions that stood out to them the most in 2025. It’s a daunting task, putting together this list of annual favorites, but it has a rewarding meditative effect for us as well, as we review the past 12 months in our heads, & dig back through our Soundcloud likes & Bandcamp collections. Memories flood back & we notice ourselves, the changes we’ve gone through, the headspace we were in at the beginning of the year versus now. Occasionally the music can bring back memories that may have completely escaped us in the present, stirring up subconscious feelings & bringing us back to a specific time & place earlier in the year. It’s a welcomed sensation, as often times we can be too busy to feel totally present & music can be that much needed guide, bringing you back to your self.
We were lucky enough to spend a handful of moments together with the majority of our team throughout the year, on the floor of the Vall d’Hebron for Mostra Festival & amongst the fog & wooden beams of a special barn in upstate New York this past October. Some of those moments are reflected in these editors’ picks, but also a lot of the picks are deeply personal - it’s music that floated into our consciousnesses as we’ve all gone about our daily lives. Music that stayed with us through those quiet moments at home after a long day, during those frantic mornings on the train on our way to work, on those long drives late at night, on the plane gliding through the clouds, or after experiencing it on a dancefloor amongst friends somewhere far from home.
We hope you enjoy the picks this year as much as we’ve enjoyed putting them together & reflecting upon 2025. Thank you to all of you who read what we write & listen to the music we share & to all of you who make the music & record the mixes, it’s truly our pleasure & we’re so grateful for the community we’re all so lucky to contribute to.
With love,
Team Delayed
FAVORITE TRACK
Irina
Toki Fuko - Insomnia [spclnch]
There is a quiet world that awakens only when the rest of life exhales into darkness, and Toki Fuko’s Insomnia feels like its native language. The track unfolds slowly, like a lone figure wandering through the delicate borderland between wakefulness and dream, a place where shadows think, and silence has a pulse.
Every texture feels hand-carved: muted rhythms tapping like distant machinery, soft granular winds drifting across the mind’s architecture. Instead of pushing forward, the melody reveals itself layer by layer, as if inviting you to examine the hidden gears of consciousness. Halfway through, a spoken voice enters gently, almost imperceptibly. It doesn’t take center stage or offer explanations, but its presence shifts the atmosphere, adding a subtle layer of tension and mystery before slipping back into the mix.
Listening to ‘Insomnia’ is like tracing the outlines of a dream you can’t quite enter but don’t want to lose, an elegant, meditative journey through the inner corridors of stillness where the mind wanders freely.
Theresa
Antonio Ruscito & Luigi Tozzi - Alodrone [ARTS]
Sometimes I feel very small when listening to this track, it's so total in a way, and sometimes it makes me want to rise up. It's a good therapy to listen to it regularly, washes out a lot, a bit like an ego death. The ascend / descend dynamic is one of a kind.
Gilles
Vand - Futureshock [ISOTOOP]
I’ve followed Viktor’s work for years, pretty much from the start, and it’s been a pleasure watching his style loosen and sharpen at the same time. His collaborations this year were strong. Voal with Shoal and Vanertia with !nertia both showed different sides of his thinking. Still, the moment that really stuck came with his solo EP on ISOTOOP earlier this year.
Every track on that record earns its place, but ‘Futureshock’ is the one I keep coming back to. The sound choices are understated but deliberate, and that hi-hat that creeps in halfway through nudges the groove forward without breaking the spell. It’s restrained, functional, and subtly addictive.
Zach
Nexcyia - EG [Good Morning Tapes]
I adore releases that capture moments in time and relationships between friends, and artists. There’s something about the repeated evenings or weekends spent between club nights and studio sessions that is electric and can’t be forced. Adam Doves’ personal project, gets the added touch of some favorites, mu tate and Exzald S to create an incredible track (and EP!) that satiates the ears, and tugs at heartstrings.
Griff
Blue Lake - Oceans [Tonal Union]
I played this one in my Sundays mix for Zach back in April. It stops me in my tracks every time, reminds me of everything & everyone I’m grateful for in this life.
Dan
Will You - Turbo Trip [Oleeva]
This was a tricky one to choose. There has been a ridiculous amount of superb music I’ve listened to this year, across albums, EPs, and live sets, and it has come from all corners of the scene. An element of personal connection was a key criteria for me. Have I played it out? Have I chatted to them about the creative process? Have I chosen to premiere it? And this one ticks every box. I’ve been a fan of Will’s for a while, and we’ve got to know each other more this year, chatting about landscaping gardens, picking up some flowers from lovely little Margaret at her driveway plant store, and the joys and serenity of countryside living in Somerset.
This track featured in my Barn set towards the end on the Saturday night, which is being released very soon. It weaved its way into the latter end, bridging elements of deep ambient house and techno, but it completely got me with its groove and floaty nature. As I mentioned when I premiered it in October, it’s a trip of a track that’s well worth going on. Time, love, and dub all go into Will’s art, and I’m looking forward to getting to know him better and seeing if he can teach me a thing or two in production as we glide into 2026
Michael
mnemonics - Neural Drifts [Workshop]
This choice was something of a flip of a coin between it and DjRUM’s ‘Waxcap’. ‘Neural Drifts’ is an effective little piece of neural hijacking: an overload of stultifying anxiety. A gloomy, twitchy, rolling stepper that is bathed in a desolate haze, conjuring paranoiac dreams, and playing with cyberpunk ideas of exploring the material consequences for the body when it becomes enmeshed in virtual worlds.
FAVORITE RELEASE
Irina
Refracted - In Veil [Titrate]
This year, as I sank deeper into darker experimental realms, ‘In Veil’ became the perfect companion, an album that doesn’t simply mirror introspection but expands it. It teaches us that darkness can be meditative, that ambiguity can be grounding, and that the most profound emotions often grow in the half-lit corners of sound.
Listening feels like walking through a veil of shifting shapes: metallic echoes, deep-breathing drones, subtle distortions that bloom and dissolve. It’s a place where tension becomes serenity, where the unknown becomes strangely comforting.
Refracted has created an experience meant not to be solved, but inhabited, a quiet, resonant world for those who find clarity in shadow and beauty in the slow, transformative drift of experimental sound.
Theresa
Claudio PRC - Self Surrender [Delsin Records]
It's an intimate, elegant and substantial techno album that I listened to in many circumstances and states of mind. Funnily enough I didn't even try to analyze why it's special to me, it just is.
james K - Friend [AD 93]
When I listen to this one I feel like a teenager again.
Gilles
Aris Kindt - Now Claims My Timid Heart [Quiet Time]
This album quietly stole more hours of my life than I care to admit. Francis Harris has been a constant point of reference for me over the past two decades, someone whose sense of balance and restraint continues to resonate. His collaborative work often opens up new corners of his sound, and teaming up with Gabe Hedrick as Aris Kindt proves that instinct right once again.
‘Now Claims My Timid Heart’ sits in that ambiguous zone between ambient and something more grounded, breathing rather than floating. It’s calm without being passive, organic without leaning into nature clichés. Each return reveals a small shift in emphasis, a new detail you missed before, which is exactly why it keeps pulling me back.
Zach
james K - Friend [AD 93]
What to say about this release that hasn’t been said already. Rarely do I pick multiple tracks for Sundays from a single album but this featured almost the entirety. Emotive, raw and a heavy vibe of 90s downtempo, this hits all the sweet spots for me, and soundtracked the year as each single released, was just as good as the last. There are certainly no fillers on it.
Griff
Tunnel Dancers - Energy Is Residual [Mad Habitat Recordings]
Tunnel Dancers is Cousin & Hugh B. I was stunned when Cousin first shared it, floaty krautrock & not at all what I expected from him. It keeps getting better the more I listen.
Dan
OK EG - Silent Green [Cirrus]
This four-track release from OK EG perfectly captures the feeling I’ve had throughout the latter half of the year, seeking softness and calm after a busy summer full of connections, love, festivals, and warmth. It offers atmosphere, alluring voices, and a dreamlike state. The entire release just works, whether I'm listening first thing in the morning with tea or coffee, walking around Finsbury Park where I live, working through my to-do lists, or winding down in a dimly lit room at night. It’s ambient, low-tempo, and deep techno. It touched my soul. I was so happy to have played it out as an opening track for a set in London in November. Autumn in a nutshell.
Michael
Owl - Fragments of Darkness [Huinali]
Owl colonised a lot of my listening time this year. From the brilliant Embodiment mix early in the year to his Delayed x Les Chaos Ambiants mix. His great remix of HEFT’s ‘Anagram 6’ for the Onset Audio 300 LP to the recently released ‘Spectral Shadows’ EP that reminds me of everything I loved in autonomic drum & bass around 2012, but also of nothing in particular. A certain mood board, one heavily cathected in my case, that is then given an extra layer of tension. ‘Fragments of Darkness’, though, is the central figure around which these orbit. It’s beautiful and fragile and haunting.
The notion of ‘fragments’ suits the album, there is a sense of moving through a spatial realm produced in music that drifts in and out of visibility, that cuts in and out at varying registers of intensity, that never fully materialises and is perceptible only through hints, partial images, and the accumulation of its fragments. It is a spectral music, playing with the spectre’s presence as simultaneously close and distant, intimate yet detached and forever out of reach. This ghost can not hurt me. This ghost will haunt my dreams. It is lush, meditative ambience, but permeated with a sense of unease, of the unfamiliar. This lack of familiarity is not in experiencing something new, but in a sense of the familiar becoming strange. Ideas of ‘atmospheric media’ argue that modern sensor technology can now measure our environment at levels below or beyond our perception: they are ‘simply better at plugging into a worldly vibrational sensibility’. The environment, and our activity within it, operates at varying levels, many of which remain hidden, imperceptible or felt only in elusive moments. The sense of unfamiliarity in this album is in how Owl recruits these elusive elements to haunt perception. One sense of ‘ambient’ music is in thinking through how a place, space, or world may be expressed in sound, and ‘Fragments of Darkness’ provides glimpses at how environments may be articulated sonically outside perception and musicality, at varying levels of affect, vibration, and possibility.
FAVORITE MIX/PODCAST
Irina
Gilles Wasserman - The Night Before #45
This year, this mix became my companion, a shelter I could step into at any moment, an intimate refuge that waits patiently. It soundtracked many moments of introspection, half-awake transatlantic flights, and countless blue Mondays.
Theresa
Cio D'Or - Cumulus 33 / Mixtape Discos Movimiento #28
2 words to know everything you need: Cio. Dubtechno.
MNMT 488: Andy Martin
Andy Martin - you won't believe it - seamlessly blends swampy breaks, hypnotic brainmelts, and in fact seemingly EVERYTHING into something very exciting and refreshing. This makes a lot of techno look unfun and boring. I love how little restriction he has in track selection and storytelling. Recommending his Refuge Radio mix for home listening. Defo someone to watch in 2026 and if you don’t have him on your lineup yet, I’d kindly ask you to reconsider 😀.
Gilles
Neon Cleptu 37 → 5RVZ
I have a soft spot for anything that lives in the margins of subtlety, and if I had even a sliver of influence over Google search results, the latest mix from 5rvz would be the first thing you’d see when typing in “deep” or “subtle.” Nothing about it pushes forward, but it holds your attention with a steady, unforced gravity.
What keeps pulling me back is the tension it holds so effortlessly. The mix is calming and slightly unsettling at the same time, eerie in places yet oddly familiar, like a room you’ve been in before but can’t quite place. When people talk about “deep” music, this is what I think of. I don’t think it can go any deeper. Anything beyond this point is lava.
Zach
MDC.311 Aaron J
What an incredible year Aaron has had. Each time I see his name, I’m so happy to support and give gratitude to someone that lives and breathes being DJ, label head, and curator. The amount of time and effort that he spends crafting his sets is apparent in both the mixes, and sets abroad. This mix in particular, I’ve listened to, probably 30 or 40 times. It’s so smooth and if I remember correctly, made with tracks that are a decade old or more. For myself, it doesn’t get better, time is the defining factor for all music, and I love the emphasis here as each is given space to unfold and present accordingly.
Griff
Unrushed 100 - Anthony Child
This to me sounds like an artist having a really good time putting a mix together, being entirely themselves. I remember putting it on the moment I saw it on my soundcloud feed one morning, I was tidying up around my studio & rearranging some things & found myself smiling & laughing, just enjoying such a seemingly ordinary moment. I remember my wife coming down asking what I was listening to & wanting me to send it to her. It makes me think of this little 4-sided Buddha head I have on my studio desk, with 4 different facial expressions: smiling with bliss, laughing, scowling with intensity, & frowning with sadness or fear. Anthony’s mix brings your mind to all of those different emotional corners. It’s just a delight & the perfect culmination of 100 episodes for Mareena’s Unrushed mix series.
Dan
Pjenné - MDC. 308
Pjenné is one of my favourite DJs, and Melbourne Deepcast has delivered some of my favourite podcasts over the years. This combination was special. It’s meticulous in its curation, perfect in length, progression and done with intent. It’s sexy, deep, diverse, and it carried me through the year, being my most-listened-to mix in 2025, hands down, without question. It was released during a transformative time in my life when everything felt bright, exciting, and new, and the mix amplified all those positive feelings. I’ve listened to the penultimate and closing track even when I don’t listen to the whole thing; I just fast-forward, press play, and bop down the street with a huge grin. This one has cemented itself as an all-time favourite, and it’s one of many from this incredible selector.
Michael
Pugilist & Tamen - Samurai Music Podcast 62
After deciding on this mix as my favourite of the year, I realised how unfamiliar I actually was with the second half of it. Not because I didn’t like it, but I’d just spent hours listening to the first 20 minutes or so then rewinding it. It’s a pity because the latter half is, at times, a bit cluttered but brutal and uncompromising and wonderful. Up front though, its the movement through Autechre’s ‘Glitch’ to Synth Sense’s ‘Alien Transmission File #1’ that sets the tone for the mix. Of world or, more accurately, universe building filled with spacious, propulsive rhythmic mutants, the becoming creepy of electronic signals, and evoking imminent alien invasion. This is a winning combination.
FAVORITE SET
Irina
Timnah @ Paral·lell 2025
A beautiful warm-up set that unfurled with quiet intention. It felt as if Timnah was channeling the rhythm of the surrounding mountains, inviting everyone to arrive fully, together. The patience, the execution, the track selection, it all landed perfectly. At the time, we didn’t know it yet, but that Sunday would slowly unfold into a near-perfect day of music shared among friends atop the Pyrenees, and Timnah laid the foundation like a boss.
Theresa
Bassiani invites Luigi Tozzi [live] / Podcast #280
First of all - I am not paid by Luigi Tozzi 😀 I just like to get sucked into these spacious black holes in this mix and also, my god, these drums are incredibly sexy. I like the precision of it, it's clean, punchy, spheric and just calms my mind in between all that whatever-techno.
Gilles
Haruka @ Paral·lel 2025
This year’s Paral·lel Festival was stacked with moments that will stay with me for a while, but the one that completely floored me was Haruka’s Sunday afternoon set. Coming right after a purely magical set from Timnah, which could have easily taken this spot as well, the bar was already high. What unfolded over those next three hours felt unreal in the best possible way. I still remember the looks we kept exchanging, that shared wtf expression between friends, DJs, and incurable music nerds, all dancing under the Pyrenees sun, trying to process what was happening. One of the most essential skills a DJ can have is reading the dance floor, the timing, and their place in the arc of a weekend, and Haruka nailed it with total precision. Haruka understood exactly where we were in the weekend and played to that reality, not against it. The groove stayed light, bouncy, and generous, never tipping into excess or fatigue. It was the kind of set that resets your energy without demanding it back.
Zach
Mostra: Robert Henke presents Dust
This will never translate properly via speakers or whichever device you so choose to play it, but being there in person was a once in a lifetime experience. I’ve heard terms like 3d sound and spatial audio but admittedly, I was skeptical. Being sat in the middle of a warehouse, for the entirety of this performance, was everything I didn’t know I needed, and more. The mind stops fixating on how sounds and samples are made, implicitly counting out phrase changes, fitting the formula and just listens. It’s a rare experience, and I cherish it. Conversations stopped, breathing was forgotten until the last moment, the tension was palpable. I’ve never experienced the grip a live set could have on the audience like this before.
Griff
Reeko @ Mostra 2025
This was such a transformative dancefloor experience for me. It was my first time at Mostra after hearing so much about it over the years. My expectations were maxed out but it somehow exceeded them. I feel very lucky to have had a handful of powerful musical experiences but this one rewired my brain. I wrote a bit more about it on my Substack earlier this year.
Dan
Doltz (live) @ Monument 2025
I have too much to say here. My favourite festival, a secret set from Doltz, and surrounded by my best friends in a Norwegian forest. He is an icon of the scene, among many who epitomise why techno pouring from Japan is some of the most unique out there. There were murmurs and whispers around Veggli and Varden that something would happen after the official programming had finished on Saturday night, and that it did. Doltz knew exactly what he was doing, like he had some contacts in space, sending them signals to take us all up. A live set full of excitement, tension, and drive as we entered a wormhole together. The Theremin was at the helm, sending these signals, teleporting the dance floor to where they belong.