The Grammy Award for Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album was first given out in 1987 but has contained precious few ambient records among its rank of nominees. There have been ambient-adjacent artists, but the Recording Academy’s view of the genre has always skewed towards either the safe pastures of Windam Hill-styled meditations or the more cryptic realm of neo-classical. There’s a reason why the band Paul Winter Consort has won in the category four times.
So imagine the shock on everyone’s face when the nominations for 2025’s ceremony were announced. Among them was New Blue Sun by rapper-turned-flutist André 3000. Long lost in the musical wilderness as he followed his own muse, André surprised many by collaborating with the many varied voices of the Los Angeles instrumental/experimental scene, including figures like Surya Botofasina, Nate Mercereau, and guru Carlos Niño (all of whom put out excellent records that were contenders for slots on this list). While many felt André was leaning into the public persona many viewed him through, those who sat through the album proper were surprised by its earnest intent, structured spaces, and distinct point of view.
The real kicker was that this record didn’t score a mention for Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album, but instead Album of the Year, competing next to the likes of Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, and Taylor Swift. As easy (and fun) as it is to mock the Grammys, this shock nomination was a boon for ambient-instrumental albums worldwide, giving a glint of mainstream acceptance to a genre that so often gets tossed to the fringes.
Yet ambient records can take many forms, and while many may not snag the headlines and attention that André 3000 can garner, 2024 showed the genre as varied, wild, diverse, and daring as ever. That may not be a televised broadcast anointed with golden gramophones, but rest assured, these albums still went double-platinum in our hearts.
15. Akira Kosemura & Lawrence English – Selene (Temporary Residence)
Selene is the first time the Japan-based keyboardist Akira Kosemura and self-proclaimed sound artist Lawrence English have worked together, and it’s incredible how naturally their worldviews fit together. As if soundtracking a quiet flyover of celestial bodies, Selene‘s strength is in how well the duo holds space for each other. “Twilight Wave” is the epitome of this, as Kosemura’s keyboards start lightly plodding, giving ample negative space between each reverberated keystroke, as English’s synths come in and softly dance through the in-between. It’s casually cinematic but lovingly rendered. While only clocking in at 37 minutes, the album radiates a lifetime of wisdom, inviting listeners into its warm, safe embrace. While it might be the most “stereotypically ambient” record listed here, we argue there is nothing wrong when genre veterans find a unique kinship and combine their strengths. Selene is a rare ambient album that refuses to grow old even after multiple playthroughs.
14. World of White Ice – Who Can Pave the Ocean for Me? (Independent)
The rate at which Angel Marcloid can release music can only be described as “Robert Pollard-esque”. While the Chicago deity primarily trades under their Fire-Toolz moniker, where death metal caterwauls collide with New Age jazz chords from the late 1990s, World of White Ice is an ambient side-project that Angel revived in 2024 with a flurry of releases, ranging from Teething (the project’s first full-length in a decade) to the 24-minute track “Electron Results”. Yet key among this sudden revival was Who Can Pave the Ocean For Me?, a pillar of sound sculpture that uses its 66-minute runtime to its advantage. Angel deconstructs their ideas of what ambient music can do throughout eight songs – four of which clock over nine minutes.
Case in point is “The Spirits Are Lifting”, wherein a simple ghostly tone seems to be enough for us to lounge in before rubbery tom hits start circling your headphones, at which point a streaking, dissonant guitar wail can be heard circling the mix and, at times, even threatening it. There is a slight sense of unease that creeps up through these songs, but only in moments, at times barely visible (“Angels of Light, Phases Repeating”) and at times the revealing the darkness that has been lurking underneath (the aptly-named “Evil Seems to Dwell in Every Corner”).
In the write-up accompanying the release, Angel notes that they are trying to capture the emotional journeys they underwent in their 20s but still are having a hard time understanding. In truth, there is an unknowable quality to the diary-like Who Can Pave the Ocean for Me? However, deciphering that meaning for yourself is part of its charm.
13. Surya Botofasina, Nate Mercereau, Carlos Niño – Subtle Movements (Leaving)
When not becoming surprise Album of the Year nominees for their work with André 3000’s New Blue Sun, Surya Botofasina, Nate Mercereau, and Carlos Niño – all proud warriors of Los Angeles’ experimental ambient-jazz scene – are pursuing their own creative outlets, and all of them put out fascinating and wildly different records this year alone. Yet between all three of them, few records moved listeners quite like their collaborative full-length Subtle Movements.
With dreamy laced keyboards from Botofasina, waves of expertly-woven percussion by Niño, and Mercereau’s trademark “synth-guitar” lines, Subtle Movements at times feels less like an album and more like another chapter in the journey of a collective who have created their own musical language. While “So Much Love” dabbles in a collective hippie group singing, the rest of these Movements carry a range of tones and temperaments, oscillating from Mercereau’s bending-sample experiments in “A Band That Swims Together” to the lush textural journey that “Exploration (Sincerely)” takes the listener on. Vaguely psychedelic but with its feet firmly planted in the soil, Subtle Movements is a symphony, a love-in, an experience, and a movement all wrapped into one.
12. Arushi Jain – Delight (Leaving)
The songs of Arushi Jain take journeys. Her albums are not designed to feature one vibe, her songs not committing to one set of changing chords, no. The music of her sophomore album Delight, which improves on her debut Under the Lilac Tree in nearly every metric, seems to sway gently towards its destination, every track a leaf in a breeze. Look at “I Surrender”, which has a bright descending chord line that only kind of repeats until the bass and washed-out saxophone samples interrupt and guide the melody to new places.
In “Play in the Void”, her voice enters the fray as an instrument, reciting washed-out lyrics that are at times barely distinguishable but always evocative, as Jain knows that the ear picks up on human emotive elements than synthesized ones, no matter how much life and love she pumps into her modular synth setups. Delight is a quiet epic, unafraid to give you backbeats and the occasional upbeat tempo, as there is nothing in the rulebook that says the end effect of any ambient album must be free of propulsion. Sometimes “ambient” feels too broad a term for what Jain is accomplishing with her records, but as she stretches her sound past the breaking point of the genre, we’ll still gladly count Delightamong our instrumental-experimental ranks for now.
11. Nick Schofield – Ambient Ensemble (Independent)
Last year, I received emails regarding a new group called the Nashville Ambient Ensemble. While they put out a lovingly composed record, they defied the “ambient” part of their name by having a singer give us singer-songwriter vocals and lyrics right in the middle of their lush instrumental atmospheres. It seemed somewhat contradictory, or at least non-adjacent, to most ambient-instrumental records, and the contrast was jarring. Leave it to Canadian composer Nick Schofield to reclaim the proper Ambient Ensemble mantra by releasing what is effectively the cross between a traditional piano-driven ambient record and a small chamber orchestra piece.
With a small group of string players and Schofield’s layers of sped-up and sped-down piano takes Ambient Ensemble is a lovely work that floats through clear melodic pathways while still giving the listener a sense of bliss and relief. While clarinetist Yolande Laroche provides the occasional wordless vocal accents to specific musical phrases, the world of Ambient Ensemble feels properly self-contained, with gentle waterfalls of piano chords falling into the airy abyss of reverberated violins. With most of Schofield’s songs clocking in under four minutes, Ambient Ensemble doesn’t waste your time. Instead, it uses it wisely, giving you just enough space to digest his mix of the contemporary and the classical before quietly exiting. It’s a rare record that leaves you wanting more.
10. Michael A. Muller – Mirror Music (Deutsche Grammophon)
Mirror Music is the first solo album Michael A. Muller has released outside of his group Balmorhea, but he continues to bring a band-like sensibility to Mirror Music, his ambient opus. Collaborating with a different musician on every track, his largely organ-driven compositions soon run up against the dusty desert guitar of Tortoise’s Douglas McCombs, the evocative pedal steel work of Chuck Johnson, and the lush cello stylings of Clarice Jensen.
Muller doesn’t shy away from cinematic themes throughout Mirror Music. Still, in these ten songs, he displays the depth of his knowledge and his love of the genre, moving from landscape-hewn tunes that evoke the warm embrace of the morning sun to rain-soaked dirges that wallow in darker emotive tones. While knowledge of how film scores manipulate our emotions can be easily weaponized for quick melodrama, the songs of Mirror Music are smarter and more mature than that, luxuriating in their grooves before switching up styles. Despite the disparate set of collaborators, Mirror Music makes sense as a whole and is evocative enough to hope that this isn’t Muller’s only solo ploy.
9. SUSS – Birds & Beasts (Northern Spy)
SUSS‘ 2022 self-titled album, a culmination of a series of thematic EPs, was planned out by members Jonathan Gregg, Bob Holmes, and Pat Irwin following the sudden 2021 passing of founding member Gary Leib. While deciding to move on as a trio after working their entire existence as a quartet was difficult, the EPs were unique, exciting experiments in different textural spaces. Birds & Beasts, however, truly feels like the first album where the reigning kings of “ambient country” have found time to mourn properly.
The expansive ten-minute closer “Migration” features Leib’s last-recorded contribution, which the band didn’t feel had a proper place to fit into until now. That track’s moody vibe permeates much of Birds & Beastsoverall worldview, alternating from brisk to downtrodden, from being backed by acoustic plucks to finding the sadness in a harmonica solo. It’s the group’s fifth full-length proper. While most groups would find difficulty in living up to a discography already littered with classic recordings, Birds & Beasts showed that even in sadness, there are still new hills to travel over, new sonic territories yet unexplored.