The hard truth is, no matter how many albums we review each year, there are always countless releases that end up overlooked. That’s why, from now until the end of December, we’re bringing back our No Album Left Behind series and singing the praises of our favorite underrated records of 2025.
In Ben Ratliff’s latest book, Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening, the professor and former New York Times critic ruminates on the fluidity of music, on how an engaged listener is attuned to its perpetual motion. “Music develops,” he writes. “Its makers, working at their best, can’t entirely know the music’s outcome for itself, themselves, or you. Music is nonvisual, and if that’s a limitation, it’s one that helps.” What Ratliff is getting at is how music fundamentally resists rigidity and stasis. Even within one song, there is a sense of nonlinear progression from one point to another. How we arrive at that point is up to the songwriter’s discretion—and Aya Sinclair is preternaturally gifted at carving that path.
There is never a stagnant moment on hexed!, Sinclair’s second album as aya. Across ten dizzying tracks, the South London-based electronic experimentalist emphasizes music’s malleability in myriad forms. hexed! throws unwary listeners into its vertiginous world in media res. Synthesizers vaporize and marble and liquify, as if being sculpted from raw materials in real time. Tempos shift without warning. Stray sonic ephemera enters the mix as quickly as it leaves. aya forces us to witness a grotesque metamorphosis, prying our eyes open and never allowing us to avert our gaze from the gristle. She’s here to ensure we have the best bad time imaginable.
From the album’s introductory moments on “I am the pipe I hit myself with,” aya delivers on the song’s promise with metallic scrapes and continuously pitch-shifting vocals, as if sonically brandishing the titular rusty scrap-turned-weapon. When pulverizing percussion and her staccato exclamations about time slipping off her hands take over, it plays out like a cathartic release, the pent-up frustration finally given an outlet. It only picks up from there: “off to the ESSO” is a full-on electroclash banger, best suited for grimy clubs in the depths of Tartarus rather than paradisal ones in Elysium. Its brisk, unrelenting four-on-the-floor kick drum is aggressive and unrelenting, insisting you move and contort your body alongside the music’s real-time transformation. The whole thing plays out like an involuntary incantation. It’s wild to think that this is somehow aya’s most accessible song to date.
Even though hexed! hews to pop conventions more than its predecessor, the droney, soundscape-heavy im hole, aya’s methodology (and the ensuing result) is still heady and singular. The reason her production sounds so tangible this time around is because of her adoption of physical modeling synthesis, in which a synthesizer is modeled after an instrument like a guitar or piano, and the performer can modulate aspects such as string tension, vibrations, and other physical characteristics. “It’s a far more physical relationship that you have with tone-shaping,” she told Pitchfork earlier this year. When she was creating this record, she was “designing all of the instruments, which are real and yet not real.” It’s a style of synthesis commonly found in SOPHIE’s work, but where her music contains a rubbery, plasticized effect, hexed! sounds as if it were recorded at a construction site and molded into anti-club jams. It sounds like the craft of an experienced alchemist.
She takes a similar approach to language, twisting it into knotty, novel shapes, as pliable as the sounds she constructs. “Everything get lens, everything get crook / Everything get bent, everything get shook / Every line’s a cross, every crossroads, look out,” she chants on “heat death,” her words couched in a cacophony of her own making. “Navel gazer” begins with one of the most indelible lyrics on the record: “So there I woz / Hand up my schnoz / Lickin stickin pickin / Just a couple bits and bobs.” aya’s delivery here is playful and winking, like a hideous gremlin’s in a Grimm Brothers fairy tale. “Cast a spell, form a sigil / In spite of the inertia / This nasturtium, feed the thirst / I feel a blurse working,” goes a standout line in the centerpiece “peach,” coiling like a worm through winding warrens.
This is just one of many nods to witchcraft throughout, from the record’s title to the lyrical references to the spellbinding arrangements. It’s fitting, given that hexed! sounds like the creation of someone who has access to unearthly powers that remain out of reach for everyone else. Fortunately, we get to relish the brews and concoctions, filled with writhing and squirming ingredients like those on the wretched album cover, that aya has given us. The potion tastes disgusting, an abject mixture that simultaneously intoxicates and excites. Despite its grotesqueness, there’s something thrilling about it. It’s unlike anything else. aya knows that we’ll happily drink some more.
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.
