By the Zonagirante.com team @spinning zone
Cover art by Zonagirante Studio
There's no single way to listen this year. Nor is there a dominant sound that explains what's happening. The musical landscape of 2025 shifts, becomes intertwined, contradicts itself, and expands from different points across Latin America and its diasporas. Some albums are born from intimate electronica, others from social friction, others from noise as a refuge, and still others from pop understood as a risk.
What unites the works gathered here is not a genre or a closed scene, but a way of using sound as a living material. Music that is felt in the body, that doesn't settle for repeating formulas or occupying a comfortable space. Recordings that engage with the present without fully explaining it, that embrace tension, blending, and diversity as a natural part of their language.
These aren't "albums of the year" chosen by consensus or algorithm. They are albums that, each in its own way, are shaping 2025 from different perspectives, pushing boundaries, proposing new paths, and leaving their mark. Listening to them is to embrace that movement.
Ela Minus — Day
We believe that one of Gabriela Jimeno's, AKA Ela Minus's, greatest strengths is her status as a sound inventor, a title few musicians can legitimately claim. In times when many songs are remembered more for their textures than their melodies, Ela has built her own universe using electronic instruments she designed herself. Day, his new album, confirms that journey with clarity and ambition.
Anticipated by singles like Combat, Upwards y Broken, The album brings together ten powerful, emotional, and profoundly modern songs. These are anthemic tracks, capable of being played on any radio station without sacrificing experimentation or originality. Tracks like I Want to Be Better, Idols, QQQQ u Onwards They celebrate strange noise, conscious dance, and movement as a form of intimate resistance.
Day It is an album destined to expand onto stages around the world and consolidate Ela Minus as one of the most stimulating voices in contemporary electronic music.
Industrial Plant — Punk Wave Without Barriers Vol. 1: Getting to Know Each Other
From New York emerge two Dominicans who blend rage, flavor, and fun without asking permission. Planta Industrial sounds as if the punk spirit has been infused with Caribbean culture and decided to shatter any stylistic boundaries. Here, merengue, post-punk, dark wave, electronica, pop, and Spanglish rap coexist, all in a single pulse.
A mix like this only works if it's approached with humor, irreverence, and zero regard for good manners. This album pushes, overwhelms, and shakes things up, with enough energy to dismantle any rigid notions of scene or belonging. Teteo in The Bronx It's fierce and tireless funk; When will you return?, Instead, it proposes an unexpected ending: a synthwave bolero that borders on the unthinkable.
One of the most powerful releases of the year and a band that is just beginning to show its reach.
Hard Crew — How does it sound?
Hip hop in Colombia stopped being a promise a long time ago. How does it sound? It's confirmed from the first beat: raw, direct, and urgent Bogota rap, without makeup or complacent formulas. Hard Crew works with lyrical muscle, attitude, and an honest relationship with the streets, combined with playfulness, exploration, and openness.
One of the album's key elements is the use of slam dancing as an expressive tool. It's not just what's said that matters, but how it's said: body, voice, and presence all at the service of the message. Musically, the album engages with classic East Coast hip hop, but also incorporates merengue, dembow, and Caribbean rhythms, all while maintaining its local identity.
How does it sound? It's not meant to accompany household chores. It demands attention, volume, and an awkward question hanging in the air.
Hiru — The Essence
Much of the current Latin American musical avant-garde resides in independent female scenes, and The Essence This is a clear confirmation of that. Hiru, the alias of Chilean artist Amaia de Arteagabeitía, has created an elegant, luminous, and profoundly contemporary album.
Initially rooted in the folklore of the Southern Cone, Hiru now embraces a musical language that blends hip hop, R&B, pop, and subtle hints of jazz. Across eight tracks, her infectious flow coexists with meticulous and sophisticated production, designed to appeal to diverse listeners and shared urban experiences. Beasts, Alongside Alma Kerouani and Emilia, she reveals a cosmopolitan identity that does not lose its roots.
The Essence It's an album for returning home, to listen to slowly and confirm that Hiru is already part of that vanguard that continues to grow.
Lightning Trip — Lightning Trip
There is music that transforms distortion into refuge. Viaje Relámpago's debut belongs to that lineage. Songs born from instrumental chaos envelop the rage of these times in layers of beauty and restraint.
The project brings together key figures of the Argentinian indie scene such as Fer Blanco, Mariano López Gringauz, Sebastián Kramer, and Germán Perla, and incorporates elements of 90s shoegaze without succumbing to nostalgia. Ambient and distorted guitars create dreamlike and protective soundscapes, while the vocals remain intimate, avoiding the scream as an emotional shortcut.
This isn't an album designed for the market or for show. It's music for headphones, to let the noise converse with your inner self and, at times, bring calm.
flat earth — natural
At Zonagirante, we unabashedly confess our devotion to shoegaze. That's why we celebrate natural, the new album from the Brazilian band Terraplana. Formed in Curitiba in 2017, the quartet refines an identity here where abrasive guitars coexist with whispered vocals and enveloping atmospheres.
Freshly presented at SXSW, the album achieves a blend that is both ferocious and inviting. The instrumental explosion unfolds alongside an intimate allure that avoids easy screaming. The voices of Stephani Heuczuk and Cassiano Kruchelski intertwine elegantly over a bed of raw, reverberating rock.
Charlie It marks one of the highest points of the journey. Noise that doesn't attack: it seduces, contains, and lingers.
Tei Shi— Make Believe I Make Believe
There are albums that function more as territories than as statements. Make Believe I Make Believe He is one of them. Tei Shi constructs here a mobile space, traversed by multiple biographies and an idea of pop that moves without inherited molds.
The album features ten songs where pop acts as a flexible structure. Best Be Leaving it is installed as an immediate axis; 222, Together with Loyal Lobos, he works with percussion and vocals as layers that brush against each other. The closing with Nanaimo The pulse rate decreases without breaking the cycle.
A self-assured album that moves forward without nostalgia or anxiety to please.
Suspiria — Visions
Visions It's not presented as a debut, but as a breakthrough. Suspiria's first album understands pop as a space to dismantle expectations. Behind the project is Débora De Rivero, a multidisciplinary artist who seamlessly blends music, performance, and audiovisual language.
The album's nine songs function as sensory pieces where the voice becomes texture and the production constructs landscapes that unfold before they are explained. Avant-pop, electronica, dembow, and hyperpop appear integrated into a unique, sensual, and strange logic.
Brief, intense, and uninhibited, Visions It proposes an idea of pop as friction and experience.
Marilina Bertoldi — Who do you work for Vol. 1
Rock is not a relic. Who do you work for Vol. 1 She demonstrates this with urgency and clarity. Marilina Bertoldi delivers ten tense, direct, and brief songs, where love, rage, country, and survival are expressed without mincing words.
The album engages with a deeply Argentine tradition, but doesn't get trapped by it. Bertoldi takes those roots and pushes them toward a rougher, more contemporary present. Here, rock isn't a pose: it's everyday resistance.
An album that already feels like a reference point for the genre in this era.
Vondré — 00:00
00:00 It functions like a pressure chamber. Vondré's second album maintains a constant tension from the moment the silence is broken. Ten dense songs, coated in reverb and distortion, sustain a dark and demanding atmosphere.
The voice, seemingly fragile, advances steadily through the fog. There are echoes of shoegaze, early grunge, and post-punk, but always in service of its own unique identity. It's not a comfortable or easy album. Amidst the strain, a tense, raw beauty emerges.
An album that doesn't just accompany: it leaves a mark.
La Vida Bohème — No man's land
From a persistent dream is born No man's land. La Vida Bohème's fifth album imagines a territory without borders where oppression, exile, resistance and fraternity coexist in the same Latin American pulse.
It's not a classic protest album. It's a work designed for attentive listening, where aesthetic risk is part of the message. Rock, electronica, hip hop, and pop intersect without hierarchy in eleven songs that renew the band's musical language.
Henry D'Arthenay's voice remains clear at the forefront, underscoring the importance of the speech. Street in the sky It establishes itself as one of the most moving moments of the year.
After almost twenty years, La Vida Bohème continues to push forward.
