New in our year-end coverage is the inaugural recognition of our favorite record label. We consider their impact on the year and how they define their sound, curate their roster, and celebrate their community.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2025 wrap-up coverage here.
One of the best and most distinctive albums this year sounded like a falling anvil wreathed in flames. Another of the year’s highlights might have been a forlorn ghost singing lullabies at your bedside, or your gravesite. Yet another closed the gap between doomsday soothsaying, beautiful love songs, the buzzing of broken refrigerators, and the august majesty of whales. Still another fused math rock, free jazz, and leftfield electronics into a cryptic juggernaut rolling beneath the banner of a breathless existentialist koan: “To name something is to know something and to know something is to know I know nothing and that’s what I really want. See?”
At first glance, these records—YHWH Nailgun’s 45 Pounds, Joanne Robertson’s Blurr, feeo’s Goodness, and Moin’s Belly Up—might not seem to share much, if anything, in common. But one important thing connects them: They were all released by London’s AD 93—one of the most interesting, unpredictable, and ambitious record labels working right now.
AD 93 is rooted in London’s electronic scene of the mid-’10s, when post-dubstep and techno were fusing into spiky club abstractions. But these days, club music is a rarity in the label’s catalog, and no single musical style could be said to define its output. Instead, what unifies AD 93’s diverse roster is something more like an ethos: a shared spirit of adventurousness, disregard for convention, and raw emotion.
Those qualities were in ample supply on everything AD 93 released this year. Guitarist Oren Ambarchi and drummer Eric Thielemans dissolved their playing into 47 minutes of long-form improv on the live document Kind Regards. Polish composer Wojciech Rusin molded processed vocals and 3D-printed reed instruments into plasticine chamber music on Honey for the Ants. Bass-music mystic Shackleton and GNOD’s Marlene Ribeiro drizzled down dubby, vividly colored psychedelia on The Rising Wave.
It wasn’t all so heady. With an assist from grime OG Riko Dan, the anonymous duo known simply as Tracey put together an EP spread across ambient R&B, shambolic indie pop, and a black hole of a club anthem that was the year’s best song about fucking; New York singer-producer james K brought an ethereal touch to the trip-hop revival, turning in one of the year’s most frictionlessly listenable albums. And while much of the energy came from brash young upstarts with provocative ideas, the label also found space for ambient veteran Biosphere, who worked samples from a vintage radio play—itself adapted from a 1926 novel about rural life—into a contemplative lament for climate change.
“What I like about AD93 is how the releases don’t necessarily make sense in terms of genre, but that’s precisely what makes the label consistently interesting,” says Mat Schulz, director of Poland’s Unsound festival, which featured five artists from the label’s roster at this year’s edition. “Who else right now is going to put out Moin, Tracey—but also Wojciech Rusin? That shows a certain bravado, which I respect.”
Speaking over Zoom from his London office, label founder Nic Tasker tries to zero in on the essence of AD 93, contrasting the label’s early, clubby days with those of erstwhile peers like Hessle Audio or Livity Sound. “I feel like they went very deep on one particular sound,” Tasker says. “And I think what I’m always interested in is a bit of a pop sensibility. Even those club records, the Kowton or Avalon Emerson records, are almost like pop songs. Even an Alpha Maid track that’s almost like a noise track, to me it’s got some level of pop in there. That’s probably the thing that ties all those things together.”
Granted, Tasker’s notion of pop is probably far more expansive than typical definitions of the term.
Speaking from home in Glasgow, Robertson, who joined AD 93 after recording for a string of underground labels including Dean Blunt’s World Music, ventures the word “experimental” as an attempt to describe the label before she cuts herself off: “That seems too simple, to say ‘experimental.’” She reckons that jazz, improv, and punk are the lifeblood of much of the label’s output, but what most distinguishes it is its “heart-on-sleeve” quality, a vulnerability that her own heartbreakingly morose music has in spades. “Some people hate that term,” she says. “I use that term because it’s all I know.”
Talk to enough people associated with the label, and it soon becomes clear that the real unifying force behind AD 93 is Nic Tasker himself. Yet just as every great label head has discovered their fair share of artists, Tasker was himself plucked from obscurity by another label A&R with a keen eye for budding talent.
AD 93 got its start under the banner of Young, then known as Young Turks. Home to the xx, FKA twigs, and SBTRKT, the label was founded by Caius Pawson in 2006 under the banner of storied London independent XL. Sampha parlayed a role as the label’s first intern into a successful recording career there; Tasker was the label’s second intern. It was a Young Turks A&R named Tic—the “mythical, creative, philosophical, musical DNA of Young,” as Pawson puts it—who recruited him. “Tic has a beautiful ability to find people and bring them into the fold,” Pawson says. “And he found Nic.”
Tasker admits that he was never really a musician, aside from a few attempts to play drums (“badly,” in his own words) in bands in school. Nevertheless, he loved music, and in his early 20s, he threw himself into the London scene. Online DJ platform Boiler Room and tastemaking internet radio station NTS were both starting up around the same time; he got a job at the former and a show on the latter. He recalls, “I was just enthusiastic and reached out to those people and was like, Can I be involved?”
Some labels take a shotgun approach, signing as many acts as they can, but Young Turks opted for a slower, more deliberate pace, putting out roughly an album a year and focusing on intensive artist development. But by the early 2010s, with the UK’s post-dubstep scene in full bloom, Pawson and Tic began dreaming up a series of white-label 12"s, a kind of rapid-response approach to the quickly evolving scene. “Nic jumped at it,” Pawson says. “He loved the idea and wanted to help. And very soon it was his.” Tasker was out there in the trenches—putting on shows, DJing all over the world, tracking emerging sounds, discovering new talent. “He was doing all the things you would advise someone to do if they wanted to find a way to work with artists,” Pawson says. “He was just doing it all and always with a sense of self. It made sense for him to drive it forward.”
“The more we discussed it, it became clear that it would operate more like a sublabel that I was going to take charge of,” Tasker says. Young Turks had earned the nickname YT among its employees; from there, it was just a short skip to dubbing the project with the homophonic name Whities, even though by the time of its first release, the imprint had evolved from white labels into proper 12"s with eye-catching sleeve design.
In 2017, Tasker took the label independent. The music industry is a notoriously cutthroat business, rife with tales of backstabbing and skullduggery. So your faith in humanity may be somewhat buoyed by learning that Pawson and his partners simply gave Whities to Tasker. “I mean, he was doing all the work,” Pawson reasons. “Caius was very generous,” Tasker recalls. “He just said, you don’t have to pay anything, just take the name, go and do your thing.” (Tasker still works out of the Young offices, in fact. “It’s an amicable relationship,” he says.)
Between 2017 and 2020, Whities flourished, becoming a reliable source for some of the most audacious club music in the Western world. It racked up underground staples like Lanark Artefax’s “Touch Absence,” Overmono’s “iii’s Front,” and Bambounou’s “Temple.” At the same time, it was stretching its wings, venturing into ambient with Leif’s Loom Dream, electroacoustic and spoken-word fusions with Rupert Clervaux’s After Masterpieces, and Arabic poetry with Abdullah Miniawy and Carl Gari’s Whities 023 (The Act of Falling From the 8th Floor).
Then came 2020. With the abrupt and extended shuttering of clubs and festivals, the bottom dropped out of the dance-music market. And as the Black Lives Matter movement forced a reckoning with the institutional racism embedded in electronic music, the name Whities—both a pun on the initials “YT” and a reference to the white-label format—suddenly seemed less innocuous than it once had. Even before BLM arose, Tasker, a native of multicultural London, had asked friends and peers if the name bothered them. “Some people would say one thing and some would say the other,” he says. Ultimately, “I just felt a bit weird about being a white guy with that name. I didn’t want there to be any ambiguity about it.” In June 2020, Whities officially changed its name to AD 93. (Less than a year later, Young Turks changed its own name, which it had borrowed from a Rod Stewart song, to Young, out of concerns about the term’s historical links to the Armenian genocide.)
“I’m glad I did it,” Tasker says of the name change. “When I look back on it now, I think in some ways it probably was the start of a new phase of the label, which is less club orientated. I’m still really proud of a lot of records from that period. But it just felt like a nice progression—a second chapter, basically.”
Perhaps no artist better exemplifies AD 93’s rapid evolution than Moin. In 2019, while the label was still called Whities, Tasker was listening to records at a friend’s house when his friend pulled out the 2010 debut EP from Raime, the duo of Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead. Raime were early cornerstones of Blackest Ever Black, a goth-hearted label that had cast a seductive shadow over the 2010s underground, but the duo had recently pivoted to weightless grime. Tasker’s friend knew Andrews and Halstead, and Tasker asked to get in touch with them.
Back in 2013, Andrews and Halstead had shown a slightly different side of the duo on a self-titled EP under the alias Moin. It shared Raime’s gloomy demeanor, but where that group had originally drawn on dubby strains of UK post-rock, Moin nodded to a more abrasive lineage of post-punk and post-hardcore—a more rhythmic one, too, thanks to powerhouse drumming from Valentina Magaletti, a versatile percussionist and prolific collaborator across the experimental scene. Tasker wanted to know if the musicians were interested in reviving the Moin project for his label.
Andrews and Halstead admit that they were surprised by Tasker’s query. “It seemed like an odd fit for a label that, at the time, seemed more oriented toward electronic music,” Halstead says. But the timing was also uncanny: They were just wrapping up the writing of their debut album as a trio with Magaletti. “Before we had even considered a home for it, Nic was there,” Halstead says. “Which goes to show his aptitude for picking up acts early.” (Some of running a successful label comes down to what some might call luck, and what might look to others like a sixth sense. That was hardly the only time that Tasker reached out to an artist at precisely the right time; something similar happened when a friend tipped him off about feeo. When he got in touch with her, she happened to be nearing completion on her debut album. “It’s actually amazing how much that has happened over the years,” Tasker says.)
By the time Moin’s album Moot! was released, the label had become AD 93, and the trio of Andrews, Halstead, and Magletti helped chart a new way forward. The label evolved rapidly over the next few years, growing to encompass apocalyptic drum’n’bass from cult icon Christoph de Babalon; squirrelly Balearic from Leif, a staple of Wales’ beloved Freerotation festival; experimental composition from Wojciech Rusin; muted noise-rap from Coby Sey; a chamber-ambient tribute to the cycle of life and death from Dylan Henner; and home-listening techno from Pavel Milyakov. The range could be staggering: After Joanne Robertson joined the label with the folky, acoustic Blue Car, the next album, by Abyss X, drew on ’80s industrial and ’90s alternative rock. Not long after that came Jasmine Wood’s Piano Reverb, recorded on a century-old piano in an abandoned Irish church.
When I ask Tasker why AD 93 releases what it does, he disavows any kind of long-term strategy. “I think I’ve always been driven by whatever my taste at that moment is,” he says. “The main thing for me has just always been working with artists and people that I find inspiring and want to be around. I’m not a musician—or I tried, but I wasn’t very good. So I think I’m sort of trying to piggyback off those people who are very creative.”
A father of two young children, he readily admits that he no longer goes out clubbing the way he once did, which might help explain AD 93’s shift away from dance music. When he was younger, and clubbing regularly, his nightlife habits naturally found themselves reflected in the label’s makeup. “And then, for a variety of reasons, your tastes change and adapt and evolve, and your reference points change,” he says. “I find it exciting to just follow my gut and what I’m interested in. There’s not necessarily an overarching plan. I’m just like, Oh, this is cool, I want to be involved with this. And that feels like a very nice way to work.”
AD 93’s artists are effusive in their praise for Tasker. Magaletti says that he’s usually one of the first people to hear her new material—in part because he always gives her the freedom to shape the music however she feels it should be. “It’s a very natural, trusting dynamic,” she says: “He’s present, engaged, and supportive, but he never imposes himself creatively.”
Other artists agree that, among label heads, Tasker is refreshingly hands-off—a quality that surprised me, given the label’s high bar for excellence. “He gave his two cents but he let us do our thing,” says Jack Tobias, who plays synthesizer in YHWH Nailgun. “In terms of involvement, I think Nic being into the work I created was more than enough,” Coby Sey says. “Nic knows that I’m hands-on with every aspect of my records and trusts me to take the lead on projects I’m in, and only steps in when I ask for his opinion on tracklist order or artwork.”
Lanark Artefax, who has been with the label since the Whities days, contrasts AD 93 with dominant trends in contemporary music culture, which he says tends to reward speed or visibility over ideas. “I struggle to want to have anything to do with that, but working with the label has been the opposite,” he says, commending Tasker’s ability to protect his music and ideas from external pressures.
Tasker believes that his strengths as a label head—both patient and protective, taking the lead when he needs to and getting out of the way the rest of the time—are things he’s learned over time. “Maybe when I was younger I was more wrapped up into getting into the granular parts of wanting to A&R,” he says. “Like, ‘This bass drum needs more EQ,’ or ‘You should take out this break,’ or whatever. But none of that matters, really.” Over time, he’s come to realize that the minutiae of a given recording aren’t what really matters. “It’s the way that music makes you feel and the emotional connection that you build with it.”
“I’m a dad now, and I feel like since I became a dad, I’m a bit more patient and a bit more empathetic. The music that people make is a very personal thing. It’s an extension of themselves. So having that empathetic approach, I think, serves me well.”
I’ve been trying to think of other labels that occupy a similar position in the contemporary independent landscape as AD 93, and coming up blank. It’s hardly without precedent; Warp is another label with origins in dance music that eventually expanded to include a vast range of indie rock, R&B, singer-songwriters, and experimental music. But Warp was founded in 1989, in a vastly different cultural context. It took decades for it to become the label that it is today, and along the way, in diversifying, it has arguably lost something of its essential Warpness; I’m not sure that the Warp imprimatur, after more than 400 LPs and hundreds more EPs, carries quite the same sense of intentionality that AD 93’s does. AD 93’s catalog may be even more stylistically diverse than Warp’s, but its curatorial choices all build toward a greater understanding of the label as a creative entity in and of itself.
A closer parallel would be 4AD in its 1980s heyday, when its buy-on-sight logo meant that diehard fans of the label were exposed to not just gothic staples like Bauhaus and the Cocteau Twins but also Dif Juz’s new-age jazz, Colourbox’s avant-pop, scabrous college rock from Pixies and Throwing Muses, and even the a cappella folk singing of Le Mystere des Voix Bulgaires. 4AD is still around, of course—in fact, Tasker moonlights doing A&R for that label as well—but, like Warp, in the label’s many shifts over the years, the idea of a “4AD artist” no longer signifies what it once did, if it still signifies anything at all.
In its careful balance of range and focus, AD 93 is a reminder of the power that record labels have to make meaning. That power has been greatly diminished in recent years. You could argue that Apple’s decision to omit record labels as a search term in iTunes was the beginning of the end; although Bandcamp, fortunately, has helped labels maintain their link to the most faithful fans. The kind of fans that, while they might not buy every single release on AD 93, understand that the experience of listening to YHWH Nailgun is actually heightened by the vast gulf separating that band from Joanne Robertson. The artists on the label’s roster may not have each other in mind when they’re in the studio, but once their records are out in the world, they are placed in conversation with one another. As a fan, you want to unpack their similarities and differences—even if the only real guiding thread, in the end, is Tasker himself.
“You look at this year’s releases alongside ours—like feeo, Moin and Joanne Robertson—and AD 93 is the glue between all of our vibes” says YHWH Nailgun’s Tobias. “It’s just taste. Although we all sound different, there’s a similarity to what we are all trying to do in music. Nic sees that. You also take what previous artists have done on the label and put it all together. The aesthetic is just constant momentum forward in music and culture.”
Is Tasker the throughline? “Yeah, I think so,” Pawson says. “I mean, I have the bias of knowing him, and knowing him before and seeing it grow. As a friend, I’m incredibly invested in him. But I do think it’s him. I think it’s his tastes and I think it’s his passions. He often feels like a curator to me.”
Robertson echoes Pawson’s assessment. “He reminds me of a smart gallerist,” she says. She should know: Robertson is a painter as well as a musician, and she describes her visual art as integral to her musical practice. Tasker recently purchased one of her paintings, which now hangs in his living room.
She says it’s “kind of like a song painting,” and you can see why she might liken its cotton-candied swirls of pink and blue and yellow to music—it seems to flow from side to side, and also up and down, like sloshing water, or snarled branches. “It feels like a kind of traveling,” she says. “But it’s quite like some of my music. My paintings are a little bit like songs, and it’s definitely a more mellow song. It’s like a glimpse. It’s sort of like a nice blanket or something—the colors, the marks, big chunky shapes, like a piece of textile, almost. But it also has a landscape in it, maybe. I’m not really sure. It’s very abstract, but has this shape, which reminds me of a suitcase or a dog.” It sounds, in other words, entirely fitting for AD 93: a small world unto itself, infinitely open to interpretation.