Los Thuthanaka Won Pitchfork Album of the Year, But Nobody Noticed

Pitchfork's top album of 2025 was never mastered, never uploaded to Spotify or Apple Music, and was surprise-dropped on Bandcamp on a Saturday in March with almost no fanfare. That it won anything at all was, for most listeners, a retroactive discovery.

The album is the self-titled debut of Los Thuthanaka, a duo formed by Bolivian-American siblings Chuquimamani-Condori (the experimental electronic artist formerly known as Elysia Crampton) and multi-instrumentalist Joshua Chuquimia Crampton. The two identify with the Pakajaqi nation of the Aymara people and recorded the eight-track LP in Savannah, Georgia and Nashville, Tennessee. Chuquimamani-Condori handled teclas, sampler, CDJ, ronroco, and bombo italaque; Joshua played guitar and bass. The name Los Thuthanaka translates from Aymara as "The Moths."

Released March 22, 2025, the record existed almost entirely outside the infrastructure that most listeners rely on to discover music. No algorithm surfaced it. No playlist editors flagged it. It lived on Bandcamp, sold as a CD bundled with a full-color 11-by-17 poster, and its audio, by the artists' own account, was never submitted for mastering.

Writing the Pitchfork year-end piece, critic Jeremy D. Larson described it as "a lo-fi psychedelic noise rock piece that broke the VU meters somewhere along the recording process." The music itself pulls from Andean folk forms, including huayño and kullawada, and layers them against avant-rock guitars, white noise, and sampler collage. Track titles in Aymara sit alongside English translations that read like incantations: "The Queer People-Medicines Are Here," "Queer Grandma," "Cat Warlock Ant."

When Pitchfork published its 50 best albums of 2025, Los Thuthanaka topped the list, beating out Dijon's "Baby," Cameron Winter's "Heavy Metal," and Bad Bunny's "DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS." The Wire placed it third on its own year-end ranking. Resident Advisor went further, including it among the ten best electronic records released between 2000 and 2025.

None of that prestige translated into the kind of cultural saturation that typically accompanies a Pitchfork number one. The album's absence from streaming was both a creative statement and a practical barrier: most people simply never encountered it.

Chuquimamani-Condori, in a note accompanying the release, called it "a milestone for me and my brother, bringing prayers for rain and gratitude." Larson's writeup closed with a line that doubled as the album's own thesis: "Los Thuthanaka offer a new national motto for anyone who needs it: Out of one, many."

The follow-up to Chuquimamani-Condori's 2023 album "DJ E" and Joshua's "Estrella por Estrella," the debut marked the first time the siblings had released music together under a shared name. Whether the streaming gatekeepers eventually take notice is, for now, beside the point. The moths don't need the light to find their way.