The Best Albums of 2025
Poor old 2025 just going. It has been a gloomy year of trouble and disaster. I should be glad of its departure, were it not that 2026 is sure to follow.
But at least the music was pretty damn good. In addition to all the great albums we heard this year, I always like to start with a couple from last year that I missed.
Albums from Last Year
I try my best, but sometimes truly extraordinary albums slip through even my fingers.
Detroit noise rock band Prostitute created one of the most ear-splitting debuts of this still-young century. This album left me totally dumbstruck by the sheer punishment of all its sound and emotion. By the close of the final track I found myself unable to speak, tears welling up in my eyes. Music is nothing if not a conveyance for feeling, and this album utterly destroyed me.
Geese frontman Cameron Winter set out to set himself apart from his band’s sound with his chamber-freak-folk solo debut. The instrumentation is spare and cold, while his meandering, almost-stream-of-consciousness lyricism reads over it like a vibrato poetry slam. The people that were totally shocked by the direction of the newest Geese album clearly hadn’t listened to this first: the wavy experimental slow-burn style of songs like this year’s “Islands of Men” is all over this.
With that out of the way, we can start this list proper, beginning with this year’s wall of text…I mean, Honorable Mentions
Honorable Mentions
Aesop Rock Black Hole Superette; Alex G Headlights; Allie X Happiness Is Going to Get You; Annahstasia Tether; Annie & The Caldwells Can’t Lose My (Soul); The Armed THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED; Bad Bunny DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS; Barker Stochastic Drift; Big Black Delta ADONAI; billy woods GOLLIWOG; Bon Iver SABLE, fABLE; Clipse Let God Sort Em Out; Durand Jones & The Indications Flowers; Earl Sweatshirt Live Laugh Love; Ethel Cain Perverts; Florence + The Machine Everybody Scream; Gabriel Jacoby gutta child; Hannah Frances Nested in Tangles; Hayden Pedigo I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away; HEALTH CONFLICT DLC; Heartworms Glutton for Punishment; Hercules & Love Affair Someone Else Is Calling; Ichiko Aoba Luminescent Creatures; JADE THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY!; Japanese Breakfast For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women); Kali Uchis Sincerely,; Lucrecia Dalt A Danger to Ourselves; Madison Cunningham Ace; Maria Somerville Luster; MIKE Showbiz!; Mulatu Astatke Mulatu Plays Mulatu; My Morning Jacket Is; Nation of Language Dance Called Memory; Navy Blue The Sword & the Soaring; Nine Inch Nails TRON: Ares; No Joy Bugland; Open Mike Eagle Neighborhood Gods Unlimited; PinkPantheress Fancy That; Preoccupations Ill at Ease; Richard Dawson End of the Middle; Sharon Van Etten Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory; Širom In the Wind of the Night, Hard-Fallen Incantations Whisper; SPELLLING Portrait of My Heart; Suede Antidepressants; Tennis Face Down in the Garden; Ty Segall Possession; Water from Your Eyes It’s a Beautiful Place; Wolf Alice The Clearing; yeule Evangelic Girl Is a Gun; YHWH Nailgun 45 Pounds
All of those albums are definitely worth your time, but to me, these are even better—the best albums of the year…
The 50 Best Albums of 2025
If you want a front-to-back club tracklist that can be used for any high energy purpose, Splendour & Obedience is the perfect album for you. The beats start within seconds, and don’t stop until you’ve made it all the way through, tinted with disco shade that leaves its marks on every track. From the slinky, dark opener, “Birth of a Smirk,” to the drag-fabulous “Queen of 14th St,” to one of this year’s songs of the year, “I Gave Birth 2 U,” the grooves are infectious, the beats are hot, and every moment screams fog-filled backlit dance floor. This is the album I wish Hercules & Love Affair had made to follow-up their debut, so full of old-school nightclub influences, but with the enhanced production of today, giving the bass and claps a crisp, clean feeling, while letting the sleaze and grime of a shady 80’s New York discotheque seep into every pore. Just listening to Decius, I can feel the sweat and energy of the club; I dare one to actually play it over their sound system.
If last year was the year of the pop album, 2025 is assuredly the year of the dance album, and any and every subgenre that could be possibly be mixed with it. For example, Rochelle Jordan mixing the sultriness and longing of R&B with the jumped-up beats of classic 90’s house. It is a match made in heaven. Songs like “Doing It Too” and “On 2 Something” could be the soundtrack to your next sexually inappropriate Zumba class. Through the Wall is like listening to a Solange album while expecting a “PUMP UP THE VOLUME” to sound off at any minute, and I am fully here for it. And as if that combo wasn’t enticing enough, songs like “Ladida” and “The Boy” go right for my weakspot: big beat EDM that somehow highlights live percussion. I. Am. Melting. It’s why “Funkytown” is the best disco song. It’s why Soulwax’s Nite Versions is the best dance album of the 00’s. It’s why I’m addicted to the Chemical Brothers, and I don’t think I’m ever gonna get clean. This Rochelle Jordan album is all of that, plus the sensuality of Sade, so you can just hook it up to my veins please.
Every once in a while, the zeitgeist will latch onto something and you will suddenly see it everywhere and wonder where it came from. Right now, Geese is that thing. I adored 3D Country, their absolute masterpiece of an album, in 2023. This album is very different from that one. Where 3D Country was cleanly produced and distinctly paced, Getting Killed is hazy and lazy (but, you know, in a good way). That said, those of us who had been paying attention to Geese since their 2021 “debut” could tell you that this band is never the same twice. What once was a post-punk band who wore their influences on their sleeves became an indie-cowpunk-yacht-rock band that made the most interesting rock album of the decade. And now there’s Getting Killed, combining the meanderings of vocalist Cameron Winter’s solo project with a bluesy roots rock sound. Fans of 3D Country will still find those wild stabs in “Trinidad,” the wildest song of the year, featuring none other than JPEGMAFIA on backing vocals, and the raucous Mardi Gras street party of the title track. But the album’s truest sound appears on slow burns like “Cobra,” “Husbands,” “Taxes,” and the most beautiful rock ballad of the decade (yet), “Aux Pays du Cocaine,” filled with soft island string arrangements and mournful wishes. I may not be as enamored with this as 3D Country, but I am still in awe of just how inventive and interesting this band can be without losing the plot to self-indulgent noodling.
There was one purpose to Sleigh Bells’ newest release: make a summery album with the boundless energy of a puppy. Dear lord did they deliver. From the jump, “Bunky Pop,” a song about lead singer Alexis Krauss’ dog (“the best girl in the world”), fills you with that happiness and spirit; you can feel it rising up in you like a mood dial being turned all the way to “ebullient.” Lead single “Wanna Start a Band?” is a very tongue-in-cheek memoir about Sleigh Bells itself that has all the hallmarks of some of their very first hits: treble-heavy drum machines, massive walls of guitars in the chorus, random vocal blips. Meanwhile, “Roxette Ric” is Krauss’ memoir of her own experience trying to find her place in the music world, complete with happily ever after: “Roxette it’s so you / Your pop-metal dream came true.” Then there’s “This Summer,” the most perfectly named song of the summer, and of the year. It’s overflowing with ridiculous riffs, huge blasts of kick drums, and summery images of hot asphalt, surprise sun-showers, and having to leave your friends from camp. Bunky Becky Birthday Boy is the culmination of everything Sleigh Bells could be, making this their best and most perfect album, 15 years after they first blew the tweeters out of my speakers with their debut, and listening to it fills me with such unadulterated joy that, for a minute, I’m actually, truly happy.
Do you ever wish your pop albums were less produced and LOT weirder? Then Baltimore native Nourished By Time has the record for you. Opener “Automatic Love” has all the minimalism and hypnagogy of John Maus (minus all the reverb, NBT likes his vocals clear) and is the perfect start to this incredibly inventive album. A track like “Max Potential” brings comparisons to Thundercat’s Drunk, with the weirdness mixing with an earnestness that is rarely found in the avant-garde spaces, the bare, bass-heavy verses juxtaposed with big, flashy, ornate choruses. More hypnagogic influences from the likes of MGMT are prevalent on a track like “9 2 5,” as well as some EDM flashes, with its speed kicks and chopped up vocal samples. Then there’s big Genesis Owusu energy on tracks like “BABY BABY,” that instant hookiness mixed with cornball vocal delivery and blasting synths. Maybe it’s odd to like an album purely because it reminds me of other albums, but NBT has combined all the best parts of the artists I mentioned and trimmed all the fat. This is pop distilled into its most primordial form: upbeat, lean, and undeniable.
As I stated in my write-up of Song of the Year, “CUNTISSIMO,” I previously only felt ambivalent towards MARINA (or, Marina & The Diamonds, if you’re a longtime fan). A song here and there would make it my way, and…meh, not bad but not particularly memorable. Princess of Power is MARINA the pop star emerging from a chrysalis, masterfully owning her sound and presenting it for all as if for the very first time—a rebirth. That imagery is everywhere too: the title track’s reference to “blooming like a flower;” lead single “BUTTERFLY”s … butterfly-ness (it’s a pretty obvious metaphor); this is the album where she feels like she is fully herself, fulfilled and unashamed. Usually that’s not something you can really hear, but with Princess of Power you can, like she was timid or playing a role before. I love it all: the sick house beats on the title track, the counterpointed strings on the chorus of “BUTTERFLY” (and its falsetto interlude that literally makes me cry: “to become a butterfly / parts of me had to die”), the hard beats and hi-NRG of “CUNTISSIMO,” the hyperpop of “ROLLERCOASTER,” the utterly brilliant arrow-thwacking sound effects hidden all over “CUPID’S GIRL,” the half-ballad-half-barn-burner “METALLIC STALLION,” the silly self-awareness of “EVERYBODY KNOWS I’M SAD,” the adorable cat love on “HELLO KITTY” (“You can come back to my place / But you must like cats”), and the longing for the days of disco on super-bop “I <3 YOU.” MARINA is not some unknown entity, and she doesn’t need my approval, but I can whole-heartedly say that this is the most fun I’ve had with a pure pop album in a long time.
With LUX, Rosalía makes her case to be this generation’s Bjork. The folkiness of her debut, Los ángeles, followed by the blasting pop perfection of El Mal Querer and MOTOMAMI, now leads her to her own Vespertine. LUX is a gorgeous compilation of art pop, filled with chamber orchestras and full choirs, but also mind-melting 808’s and catchy choruses that I find myself humming even without truly understanding them (I am trying to learn Spanish, but this is significantly more advanced than I am prepared to translate). But as I’ve mentioned in many other write-ups of “world music,” the beauty of music, especially well-made music, is that the message and emotion is conveyed regardless of language. And if there is a master, and I mean a true MASTER of conveying emotion through song, it’s Rosalía. Parts of this album shocked me with their complexity and invention, points where the naked orchestra slowly reveals itself from behind an expertly-produced veil of distortion or compression; ear-blasting drums giving way to strummed violas; massive choirs so profound it feels like their voices could push objects around the room. This is a work of complete genius.
If you need to say you don’t care about the cyberbullies who ruined your life when you recorded a novelty song at 13, singing “I’ll stay hot and you stay judgey,” over one of the hottest beats of the year is certainly a good way of doing it. And that’s exactly what Rebecca Black is doing on “Salvation”, the opening title track to her most recent offering. Yes, that Rebecca Black, and she is here to destroy your memories of her younger self with an all-killer-no-filler 20 minutes of hyperactive electropop.
“TRUST!” is an obvious standout, being on this year’s song list, with it’s lusty lyrics, slow-build intro, and brilliantly hidden whip-crack effects hidden throughout. The track explodes into a dancefloor rager that agreed to your sub/dom fantasies and you forgot the safeword. Then, “Sugar Water Cyanide” takes a hyperpop bubblegum tune and slowly devolves into an experimental deconstructed club track that the late SOPHIE would have been proud to produce. And that same influence is present on “Tears In My Pocket,” with its super-processed vocal samples used as synth stabs and its overly-gated drum tracks, mixing new electro production with old-school techno technique (gods, I hate that techno is “old school” now).
My current personal favorite, “Do You Ever Think About Me?,” is the avatar of rage-filled heartbreak. Its frenetic pace and eccentric chopping of both synths and vocals is reminiscent of the best Crystal Castles tracks. It’s a club single you can mosh to. The track gets more hyper, more incensed as it progresses, layer upon layer adding to the emotion, the beat, and the distortion until it simply can’t go on. When it ends, you have no memory of how it began, much like SALVATION itself. How can even the brief 20-minute runtime go by so quickly? How can I not remember what I was doing while it was on? Why do I want to hear it again, and again, and again?
Apologies in advance to FKA twigs, but a lot of this entry is going to be about 90’s electronica, because… well, that’s what she made here. FKA twigs has always been on the more dance side of pop, but always on the fringe, exploring dubstep (the moody kind, not the Skrillex kind) on her first album, and glitch on her second. But this, her third proper album, reaches back to a time I long to return to.
I think, like many 10-year-olds in the 90’s, that my first introduction to electronic music came not from pirate radio or clubs, but from video games and grimy movies. Hearing Fluke and Propellerheads on my N64’s Wipeout, or Prodigy, Meat Beat Manifesto, and …Propellerheads, again, on The Matrix soundtrack, opened up a world to me that I didn’t fully understand was musically possible. Like most kids, my early musical interests were those of my parents, who, having come of age in the late 60’s to 70’s, meant a lot of guitar-driven rock or folk music. This whole…computers and DJs thing was an entirely new concept.
From there I dove in, hard. Fluke was a major obsession right away, particularly their 1997 breakbeat masterpiece, Risotto, which I memorized every note and movement of within days of first listening to it. Then there was Prodigy’s Fat of the Land, another 1997 phenom, and its obvious hits, like “Firestarter” and “Smack My Bitch Up.” Then there was the love of my electronic music life, Chemical Brothers, and their—jeezus, all these albums came out in 1997, maybe there’s something to unpack there—masterwork, Dig Your Own Hole, which I listened to obsessively before turning my eye towards their other perfect albums, Exit Planet Dust and Surrender.
All of that is to say… wait, how old is FKA twigs?
LOL, she’s one year younger than me. We definitely had the same electronic music childhood.
Sorry, continuing. All of that is to say, listening to EUSEXUA immediately transported me to that first spin of Rissotto, or Decksanddrumsandrockandroll, or Music for the Jilted Generation, or Actual Sounds + Voices, or Crystal Method’s debut, or Underworld’s perfect three-album run. The feeling of putting on headphones, the CD spinning up in your discman, and the thrum of that downtempo bass filling every audible space, making music seem like it was capable of anything. EUSEXUA does that in every song, in every way.
The title track is obviously excellent, but “Girl Feels Good” brings serious Fluke vibes with its synth choices and downtempo pace. Then “Perfect Stranger” emmulates the best of Underworld, with its forward click track and jazzy breakbeat. “Drums of Death” is the glitch track that made its way through the haze of 90’s nostalgia, but it exactly the palette cleanser necessary at this point in the album, and it’s a sick, slick banger in its own right.
More 90’s big beat and breakbeat abounds on “Room of Fools” and “Striptease,” and who am I kidding, it’s everywhere. But what I want to make very clear is that EUSEXUA is no pale imitation or tacky homage. FKA twigs has taken the synth palettes and drum patterns of those great bands and made them her own, completely. This is an album that drips with 90’s nostalgia, but is entirely now, and could only be made today by this artist. She is a genius at taking these building blocks and constructing unexpected, unexplainable skyscrapers of unimaginable beauty. This is a time machine that transports you to a universe with different laws of physics.
“F-U-C-K-Y-O-U / Now let me tell you the truth / I have to have it my way / There is no justice anyway.” Marie Davidson sings on “YAAM.” A more poignant line has not been written this year, and while I wouldn’t normally give an album the top spot purely out of topicality, it helps that it’s also a front-to-back dark-electro banger that never misses, musically or thematically.
Marie Davidson was unknown to me before this year. To that I say, maybe Pitchfork isn’t totally dead? Either way, one listen and I was hooked to this goth-synth electroclash album.
The opener, “Validations Weight,” provides some of the most beautiful synth chords and patterns on the album (I promise, the rest of it is very, very ugly, in the best way possible) that feel like the score so some sci-fi video game. In the background a synthetic British lady’s voices interplays with Davidson’s own as they read out a combination of Alain de Vulpian’s Towards the Third Modernity, 1984 and nameless tech company user agreements. Juxtaposed with the glistening synths, it paints a harrowing picture.
“Demolition” begins the album’s song-forward main body with grizzly vocal effects—a combination of pain-grunts and cynical laughs—and butt-punching* beats. The darkwave synths lingering in the back and making up the main bassline are familiar to patrons of leather clubs and dark haunts as Davidson reads out her character’s manifesto: that once she owns everyone’s data, she will have complete control of everyone and everything. “I do what I do, and I do it well: extraction,” she whispers sinisterly over the headbobbing drums.
The sort-of title track, “Sexy Clown” lifts the mood musically…a little; the palette is still very much that of the 80’s industrial dance scene, but the tempo is up and the bass is closer to a major chord. This is the first foray into the truly danceable parts of the album, an experience that leaves you feeling conflicted and a little gross: is this subject—selling ourselves to tech-bro-salamanders to avoid IRL awkwardness—really something we should dance to? But that beat is undeniable, as is the brilliance of Davidson’s chorus: “If I really had to choose, I’d rather be me than be you / Can you feel the cutting edge, of my dying tenderness? / It’s the ugly opposites that make your beauty meaningless.”
The dark beats keep pulsing on “Push Me Fuckhead,” a not-subtle nod to Davidson’s socio-political inspirations for the song: mainly, that the world’s slow descent into the crush of being permanently online will only push us all to madness. Her pointed jabs at “self-help” and “self-care” scammers are only matched by the interlude where she…poetically describes a challenge-response authentication prompt: “stare at the squares, what do you see? / How many busses? How many trees?”, before getting to maybe my favorite line delivery of the year: “bitch, don’t forget to recycle.” When the track comes to its final conceit, the beats really start blasting and the tech noises start blaring. Did she pass the prompt check or not?
A song of the year follows, the fantastic, ingenious “Fun Times.” I’m not sure if I want to dance like the South Park goth kids or start fighting people, but this song is effective at inspiring both. The majority of the sound palette could have easily been from a doomy 80’s sci-fi like Terminator or Running Man, while the synth stabs in the chorus scream 80’s new wave synthpop. It’s a match made in some sort of TRON-based heaven, which is then combined with 1st or 2nd generation video game effects to make the headbanging beat. I’m really hoping Davidson scores the next Nicolas Winding Refn film.
The lyrics are a basic message, mainly that since time is short and since the world is ending anyway, we might as well give into hedonism. The simplicity of a line like “tick-tack-tick-tack, time is never coming back,” is immediately paired with the deliciously catty “will I lose on what a choose? Find out in my interviews.” Her choice to meander in and out of French and English highlights her lack of fucks to give. It’s a brilliant track, and one that I have played literally dozens of times since discovering it.
The clubfloor soundscape that is “Statistical Modeling” follows much the same structure as the opener, mostly intriguing, addictive beats with the occasional vocal sample thrown in to keep the atmosphere consistent. But that then leads us into “YAAM,” the track with which this entry began. It is simply the most effective dance track on the album, and for me, the year. The call-and-response spelling of “fuck you” to begin the track is read out over the hardest beat in a generation, dappled with the sound of painful electric pops, and ray gun effects. “I try to keep it civilized, but I’m just unable to lie,” is her refusal to abide wallflowers and to follow normal lyrical decorum, before demanding of the world’s oligarchs “give me passion, give me more / I want your ass on the floor.”
Like I said, normally I don’t let topicality dictate list placement. It actually hurts more than it helps, as it often dates the work to a specific time that can’t be related to even a few years later. But there’s something about Davidson’s lyrics and themes that make them…timeless. Technology isn’t going away, and the people that control it aren’t going to magically become altruistic; we have to make them. But right now, Davidson, and myself, are incredibly pessimistic about the future. Her lyrics and, even more so, her music clearly subscribe to that worldview. My country is circling the drain and trying to drag the rest of the world with it so fewer and fewer people can have more and more money.
Capitalist ghouls will—yes, will—destroy the planet to say they own the ashes. It’s a tale as old as time. And no music has ever felt this close to a viscerally tactile embodiment of that philosophy.
Thanks to everyone who followed along this year. I hope you enjoyed as much music as I have, and bitch, don’t forget to recycle.
Happy listening!
*Yes, butt-punching. The beats punch you in the butt.