Checking out the annual harvest of “Album of the Year” lists is always a valuable reminder that music criticism is polluted with hipster weirdos. Their primary purpose is co-signing effusive poptimism handjobs for the major label flagship products & festival PR projects that pay the bills. In exchange for that service, they’re allowed the self-indulgence of spotlighting their favorite oddball outsider art and insisting that it’s all a generational work of genius.
Brooklyn Vegan, which began as a food guide for gentrifying interlopers to find bodegas that respected their dietary pronouns, is somehow a cultural force in 2026. In that corporate-owned capacity, they have proclaimed “Like a Ribbon” to be the third best rap album of 2025, trailing behind the return of The Clipse and the latest magnum opus from billy woods. Like a rube, like a mark, I took the bait. I had to hear it for myself.
For the record, I was not altogether wrong. John Glacier is a poet from London with an experimental ear and a truly world-class team behind her. That is only partially a compliment, but props due to Roxie Warder for getting her client some huge opportunities and trans-Atlantic reach. I don’t regret giving this a close listen, but I wasn’t too chuffed, neither.
Hard lines need to be drawn here: this ain’t rap, something the auteur herself readily acknowledges. Talking to Rough Trade, her summary was “hazy, raw textures and words that I think of as my journal entries, spilled out for you to hear.” Taken on its own terms, then, this is 11/10 product. My problem is how fundamentally lazy that product is. Most of these songs are a handful of sentence fragments being repeated for minutes at a stretch.
The production, largely handled by Kwes Darko, is the saving grace here. He understood the assignment. This LP had to be, at every turn, sonically interesting and surprising, because the main character here is so subdued, almost eager to disappear into the background. The beats themselves are mostly somnambulant, background noise for upscale boutiques. It’s in the margins where this album really shines: the effects work, the dense sample layering, and most especially, the transitions between tracks.
It’s not enough to redeem the album. The “first thought, best thought” ethos has bequeathed us a generation of music makers proudly serving up their demos and sketches as high art. They’re all right, too. Their work exists beyond critique, simply because there’s not enough actual work involved to criticize. If that’s paying the bills and keeping you in Burberry, I refuse to hate. That’s a beautiful hustle.
Just the same, out here in the real world, there are well over a hundred albums that came out in 2025 that are exponentially better than “Like A Ribbon.” For what it is, though, it’s as good as it could be. Three Dickies for a thought-provoking listening experience, even if few of those thoughts were provoked by her actual lyrics.
