It’s easy to get blinkered by e-bikes these days, but to do that would be to miss out on a pot pourri of exciting, innovative, and downright sexy new mountain bikes. Not to mention the fact that e-bikes remain an expensive luxury compared to the best entry-level full-suspension bikes. So to highlight the slick and the trick, we’ve compiled a little compendium of cool new conventional bikes.

Rachel Atherton on the new S.150

Taking pride of place as our thumbnail hero hike is the robotic Atherton S.150, with its machined and bonded chassis. This is Atherton’s clever solution to the problem of how to build a bike that looks unmistakably like an Atherton, but that costs less to buy and can be built in larger numbers. And they’ve done that by using CNC machines to subtract material (hence the ‘S’ prefix) from billet aluminium, instead of ‘printing’ lugs using additive manufacturing (hence the ‘A’ prefix on the high-end models). This one’s the S.150, a heavy-hitting trail bike built to survive the perils of Dyfi bike park and the Atherton’s merciless wrecking crew.

Jamie getting loose aboard the new Santa Cruz Hightower.

The seamless carbon lines of the latest Santa Cruz Hightower is the yin to the Atherton’s yang, even though they aim to do the same thing. With a more capable suspension set-up and new split shock tunnel design, this is a classic 29er trail bike that’s been refined even further.

Forestal’s Siryon arguably looks even better without a motor.

To Andorra next, and a shock addition to Forestal’s formerly e-bike exclusive range. This is the new analogue Siryon, an enduro bike with some seriously clean lines and sculpted curves. Hopefully this marks a fresh start for the beleaguered brand.

Back down to earth price-wise with a trio of full-suspension bikes offering the kind of cheap thrills that’s crucial to the health of our sport. There’s the relaunched Calibre Bossnut, back bigger and better than ever after a hiatus. Boardman’s MTR has also had an update and aims more at the mile-munching brigade. And then there’s the new Voodoo Canzo that kind of splits the two down the middle. Which ever way you dice it, 2025 is looking very healthy for anyone looking for a great bike on a tight budget.

There’s something about a downhill bike, and the new Pivot Phoenix definitely has that ‘something’.

For the hardtail aficionado, Merida’s highly regarded Big Trail also makes the list, and we’ve also included a couple of quirkier offerings from Geometron – with its gearbox-equipped G1 – and Pivot with its jack-shaft driven Phoenix DH bike.

All of these are new MY25 bikes, launched in the latter half of 2024, but this is only January, so we expect a raft of new models to hit the market during the next 12 months. The question is, which ones, and how all the excess stock in the market will affect sales of these new models?