2025 is not a year of surprises.
It is a year of continuation — and escalation.

The madness goes on. In the United States, the kleptocratic circle around Donald Trump moves ever closer to dismantling what remains of democratic structures. What once looked like grotesque political theater has hardened into something far more dangerous. The public spectacle provided by Trump and Elon Musk — part ego clash, part digital monkey cage — surpassed even the most cynical expectations. What followed felt less like politics and more like a rehearsed descent into absolutism.

Europe, which spent centuries suffocating under monarchs and unchecked power, now watches this regression with disturbing familiarity. The idea that history could run backward no longer feels theoretical — it feels engineered.

Against this backdrop, 2025 produced a set of records that felt like signals from different emotional frontlines.

A Return No One Expected

Out of Leeds came something almost unthinkable:
Red Lorry Yellow Lorry returned with „Strange Kind of Paradise“ — their first album since 1991.

More than three decades of silence, and suddenly this.
The record doesn’t pretend the world is fine. It doesn’t chase relevance. Instead, it sounds like a band that has seen cycles repeat and understands that “paradise” is always a suspicious word. In 2025, Strange Kind of Paradise feels less like nostalgia and more like a warning: survival does not equal progress.

Voices from a Shattered Region

From Beirut, Postcards released „Ripe“ — an album created far closer to real instability than most Western protest records ever come.

While democracies elsewhere erode through apathy, spectacle, and algorithmic distraction, Ripe carries the weight of lived collapse, grief, and stubborn persistence. It is music shaped by a reality where political failure is not theoretical, but visible in streets, faces, and daily consequences.

In a year saturated with hollow rhetoric, Postcards sound devastatingly — and urgently — real.

No Nostalgia, No Excuses

Germany’s punk legends EA80 returned with „Stecker“ — their first full album since 2017, and a brutally strong one.

There is no sentimental comeback here. No softening.
Stecker sounds like a live wire plugged straight into the nervous system of the present. At a time when far-right movements across Europe — AfD, Le Pen, and their ideological relatives — recycle empty promises and historical amnesia, EA80 deliver clarity instead of comfort.

Germany has seen this before.
Almost a hundred years ago.
And we all know how it ended.

Light as Resistance

In contrast, Stella Diana from  Italy offered something fragile yet defiant with „Everything Goes Through the Light“.

The album doesn’t deny darkness — it insists on passage.

In a year where power increasingly feels opaque, aggressive, and unreachable, this record treats light not as optimism, but as resistance. The idea that truth, grief, and fear must pass through illumination to survive.

Silence Where There Should Be Noise

One of the great disappointments of 2025 remains the response — or lack of response — from American musicians and artists.

Too many continue as if nothing fundamental has changed, as if the Trump era were merely an interruption rather than a warning. The hope that “things will go back to how they were” feels dangerously naïve — and historically ignorant.

Critical voices exist, but they are far too few.
And silence, in moments like these, is not neutrality

A Year That Demands Memory

2025 is not subtle.
It demands awareness, resistance, and remembrance.

„Jahresgutachten2025“ is the soundtrack for a year in which democracy feels fragile, history feels uncomfortably close, and art is once again forced to answer a simple question:

Do you react — or do you pretend nothing is happening?