The hard truth is, no matter how many albums we review for Paste 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.
The soft, subliminal world of Maria Somerville’s Luster is one of my favorite places music has taken me this year. Her finely crafted pop-psychedelia conjures a sound that sits somewhere between shoegaze and ambience, where each song is a three-dimensional landscape touched by post-punk, slowcore, and astral-projected hypnagogia. Here, the Irish singer-songwriter—and frequent host of NTS’s Early Bird Show—joins the ranks of experimental pop aficionadas like Astrid Sonne and ML Buch. While trying to describe the sonic quality of Luster, I keep favoring symbolism over specificity. To do the sound justice, thinking about in terms of rippling lakes and grassy plains feels more faithful than adhering to musical technicalities. Each song feels like an exploration in setting rather than technique, with motifs that circle back to the sky and its pathways. Luster’s environment is distinct, holistic, fabled.
And sometimes, these environments manifest more literally: cooing songbirds and crashing waves ease into the instrumental opener, “Réalt.” As Somerville makes way for the proceeding “Projections,” she widens her scope, sifting through layers of wispy vocals that keep the language at an arm’s length. You can just make out the “all my love for you is not hanging onto something else” line, but only when the song heaves with her breath, slowly undulating. A good chunk of Luster consists of wandering ballads like “Projections,” with Somerville’s voice at the forefront—which commands the form of each song somewhat listlessly. At times, she’s all but indiscernible, like in “Halo,” which doesn’t adhere to any strict meter, finding its footing instead through a reverberating guitar and murmured melody. “Corrib” falls into this camp as well, when Somerville sings so close to the microphone you can hear her lips touch between vowels. Her intimacy is assigned a physical landmark: “Through the fields looking at you / All the memories / Now’ve come true around us.”
When Somerville needs a rhythmic anchor, she reaches for deep, bassy percussion and sedated drumwork. “Garden” utilizes her knack for a hazy sheen of dream pop, with a beat that grooves languidly beneath a shimmering guitar. She opens the song in medias res, singing, “Into the passage of time,” and encapsulating Luster’s relationship with temporality. The lyrics read like a fragmentary poetic experiment; Somerville begins phrases she never completes, writing in flashes of imagery and memory: “I’d give you what I / In time I’d go around / Swimming through the / And out of the cave.” In between spurts of abstraction are moments of concise feeling—like in “Violet,” the record’s thematic center, the chorus of which I’ve found myself recalling like a sacred maxim, feeling every bit affirmed each time I hum along to “I belong to life and love.” Somerville’s music is often lyrically sparse, giving the words she chooses even greater resonance. “Violet” is her love letter to transformation, for all of the upheaval that comes with it. The beat softly ticks like a polite clock, warning that “the sea of change” will soon come crashing in.
For all its environmental imagery, the world of Luster can also be intangible. “October Moon” sees Somerville calling to a friend that’s left the earth entirely. “In heaven I look away,” she sings. “To know you more and more while you are sleeping.” The song’s echoes and dreamscapes ache with tired longing and move with the assertion that someday “I’ll meet you there.” Somerville feels stuck in a tug of war between hindsight and hopefulness, returning time and again to transience when her songs can’t quite reach the present. If I could bottle up Luster into one line, it would be “waves of time, watching it roll away.” Like the best ideas from Cocteau Twins, Grouper, and Julianna Barwick, Somerville’s second record doesn’t move in a straight line but meanders and breathes, in expanse and in blurs.
