To make a list is immediately to begin second-guessing it. This year that’s especially true below the Top 10, in my list of 20 runner-up albums, for which I had double that many candidates I could easily substitute in. That feels representative: It was a year of almost endless abundance in the realm of worthy, small-to-medium, inspired, and well-crafted works by newcomers and veterans alike. Sometimes really veteran—the one that falls first alphabetically is by free-jazz stalwart Marshall Allen (of the Sun Ra Arkestra), who turned 101 this year and actually put out two 2025 albums brimming with life.
But on the big pop level, the action was much more muted. While 2024 saw the charts bubbling with exciting debuts and competition for space among young stars, there were only a few big stories there in 2025. In fact, the songs that were huge in 2024 were still sucking up all the atmosphere. Those that did muscle through tended to be in the vein of Alex Warren’s “Ordinary,” a title that describes the quality it has in aggressive abundance. “Golden,” from the Netflix anime smash KPop Demon Hunters, did liven up the late summer but was ultimately by a fictional band aimed at children, a group that by definition cannot grow, have an opinion, or make any other kind of lateral move. Meanwhile, the Taylor Swift bubble did not pop but audibly deflated some with the disappointing The Life of a Showgirl; Sabrina Carpenter stuck mostly to her (still effervescent) script on Man’s Best Friend; and Lorde rebounded artistically but not so much commercially with Virgin.
The two major exceptions came from outside the Anglo-American mainstream: Bad Bunny’s proudly Puerto Rican Debí Tirar Más Fotos, which has ruled streaming since he released it in January, and the rococo, operatic Lux by Spain’s Rosalía, which she released only last month. They’re both models of an ambitious cosmopolitan aesthetic that makes L.A. and Nashville, for instance, look practically parochial. Addison Rae’s emergence as influencer–turned–pop star was for me just confirmation of that stagnancy.
Frankly, how could it be otherwise in an America whose elites have been taking a hacksaw to institutions, trying to censor any independent expression they come across out of explicit hostility to diversity, covering up every truth, and instilling fear by sending masked goons out to stalk and seize people in the streets? A kind of horrified paralysis has taken hold. No doubt a lot of entertainment machers are cautioning their artists not to make any sudden moves, while it’s still too soon for any definitive uniting aesthetic to have arisen among the opposition. What a lot of people are seeking is escape.
In music, that includes an increasing movement among musicians and listeners alike to escape from the clutches of Spotify, not just over the long-standing concern that it rips artists off but now especially because its CEO is investing in A.I. weapons. How much better any of the other streamers are is an open question—Apple, like other tech companies, has been kissing the ring at the White House all year—and so is whether and how the streaming system itself can be reformed. Meanwhile the affordability “hoax,” as President Donald Trump calls it, continues to erode the viability of touring for everyone but superstars—who will now charge you the price of a summer vacation to see a concert—while media consolidation is putting control of the industry in ever-fewer corporate hands.
These trends have been underway for ages of course, but in the current dystopian mood, with disillusionment with online culture at an all-time peak, it’s hard to look around and see anything but enshittification everywhere all at once. In a harbinger of what’s sure to come in 2026, entirely A.I.-generated “artists” and songs are proliferating online and beginning to creep into the charts (though no, not at the top of any of the charts that matter, contrary to sensationalistic headlines).
In these lists, then, I’ve tried to celebrate the most human of human music-makers, though not always ones who shy from turning technology to their own ends. In the first one, I write at length about each of the 10 albums of the year that I love most, highlighting one song from each of them that either stands for the whole or has been overlooked in other reviews, or simply piqued my curiosity for other reasons. That’s followed by the aforementioned list of 20 albums bubbling under. Next comes a list of 20 singles that indicate there’s still some life in pop music but very broadly defined. Finally, there is an addition especially for 2025, to show that some artists have been finding the will to confront the sociopolitical emergencies we face: “20 Songs That Met the Moment,” though of course there are many more out there. It includes a song released just this past week from artist-activist Carsie Blanton, who was briefly incarcerated as part of a Gaza aid flotilla in Israel last summer.
As Blanton sings in “Little Flame,” “A hundred years, a hundred more/ We throw our weight against the door.” May music continue to lend us the strength to push back against the odds in the doubtless difficult year ahead.
All lists are alphabetical by artist.
Top 10 Albums
Bad Bunny, Debí Tirar Más Fotos
“Pitorro de Coco” is far from being the most popular song on 2025’s most popular album. But this time of year, I also tend to have holiday music on my mind, especially my favorite kind—depressing-ass holiday music. Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio makes a fine addition to that canon with this tune, in which he mourns a lost love’s absence over Christmas while getting blasted on the titular drink, a moonshine rum with coconut milk, traditional for the season in Puerto Rico. In the nationalist spirit of most of Debí Tirar Más Fotos, where folkloric sounds and cultural references mix promiscuously with the contemporary and commercial, this track evokes jíbaro, a strings-and-percussion-based country or mountain music that’s out of fashion now except, sometimes, at Christmas. I propose that it inspire your own holiday beverages, or maybe drinks for Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show in February.
The Beths, Straight Line Was a Lie
On its fourth studio album, this New Zealand indie foursome powers down its power pop a notch to deal with more somber subjects, including physical and psychological health issues lead singer Liz Stokes went through between records, as addressed on lead singles “Metal” and “No Joy.” But this group (named for the diminutive of Elizabeth that Stokes doesn’t use) never loses its Kiwi humor, its jazz-schooled dynamism, nor Stokes’ patient way of letting a song lead her to its own meaning. On “Mosquitoes,” she recalls in her homespun, contemplative voice the ambles she took during quarantine by a local Auckland creek that later rose up in disastrous floods. In the end she returns to walk in the debris, humbled by natural forces. The song likewise shifts scale from its acoustic beginnings as the band’s sound swells ever bigger and brighter, as if again to put the singer in her place. The Beths never show off the smarts of these moves; they simply set them up and then seem quietly surprised themselves by what ensues.
CMAT, Euro-Country
As brash as the Beths are modest, Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, aka CMAT, is Ireland’s answer before the fact to Chappell Roan. She has a similar style of femininity as drag, and that blend of outrageousness and vulnerability, as crowds saw at her breakout Glastonbury performance this year. But she’s a few steps ahead in sophistication, especially on this third album, which deals in large part with being on the verge of 30. It reaches its most profound depths on the title track, though other songs may be wittier or bawdier. “Euro-Country” describes not only its own ABBA-meets-pedal-steel musical idiom but CMAT’s take on recent Irish history, as a nation caught between identities in the “Celtic tiger” economic boom of her childhood, and now still recovering from the 2008 crash, when as she remembers “the das started killing themselves all around me.” A musical memoir of both her life and our times.
Mary Halvorson, About Ghosts
It seems that the jazz composer-improviser and guitarist Mary Halvorson has had at least one album on every list I’ve made for years now. I’m far from alone in celebrating her. Her name usually features in DownBeat’s annual critics polls, and she’s received a MacArthur “genius” grant. About Ghosts is her third record with her Amaryllis sextet, and accordingly their most assured and relaxed. “Carved From” is one of the most accessible, rhythmically agile tracks on the album, yet still full of wiggly filigrees and slips and slides over preplanted booby traps. The record was produced by John Dieterich of long-running avant-rock band Deerhoof, whose Frankenstein-themed 2025 album Noble and Godlike in Ruin could easily be on this list too. So could the one that Halvorson’s group made with out-jazz titan John Zorn this year, The Bagatelles Vol. 1, as well as her collaboration with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, Bone Bells, and one by Amaryllis vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, Of the Near and Far. Halvorson’s celestial gravity brings a lot of lights into her orbit.
Mekons, Horror
A new Mekons album was what some of us desperately needed in April after several months of Trump II. And the anarcho-punk collective that formed way back in Leeds in 1976 has delivered some of its most potent medicine with these post-folk songs of imperialist legacies, military-industrial plots, gnostic enigmas, and occasional communal uplift. The acerbic drawl of guitarist Tom Greenhalgh upstages Jon Langford’s erudite bonhomie this time around. But as always, Mekons fans relish any song sung by Sally Timms. The title of this one, “A Horse Has Escaped,” reminds me of John Mulaney’s joke during Donald Trump’s first term that it was like a horse had gotten loose in a hospital. But in this eerily hovering song, the fugitive horse stands more for something vital that’s gone missing without anyone knowing how. Memories are dimming of a time when things were different—weren’t they? It could be about a faded relationship or (as on many songs here) about aging. But it’s a Mekons song, so we know it’s also about rescuing humanity whether we merit it or not.
Rosalía, Lux
If Bad Bunny is the populist choice for album of the year, Rosalía’s Lux must be the music-geek favorite. Yet, encouragingly, the Catalan star’s album is also populist on some level, despite being a soaring international, multigenre, polyglot, feminist-spiritualist, orchestral Gesamtkunstwerk. (German is one of the 13 languages here, on lead single “Berghain,” which also features Björk, as well as cult artist Yves Tumor singing obscenities borrowed from Mike Tyson.) It renews the idea of the operatic as a popular art, and there’s a direct jolt in the conviction with which Rosalía delivers each highly calibrated line. The album’s maximalist aesthetic refuses to shrink to social media–sound bite size. My pick “La Perla” is one of the simpler songs, a lilting, musical theater–like string of barbs aimed at some feckless fuckboy. In this context, it’s a reminder that rap beefs aren’t new and all kinds of cultures have a tradition of insult contests, such as flyting in medieval Europe or naqa’id in Arabic poetry. Afterward, with the dude thoroughly demolished, Rosalía can return to seeking God between flamenco claps or in the flutters of Portuguese fado, but it’s a refreshing break midway through the Lux odyssey.
Cécile McLorin Salvant, Oh Snap
Another staple of my annual lists, the jazz-trained singer Cécile McLorin Salvant has been heading ever further toward her own eclectic vision of art song for years now. But the “snap” in the title of her new one is the sound of a true break, as she and her creative partner Sullivan Fortner surprisingly pull synthesizers and dance beats into the mix. The title track is probably the most fully realized demonstration of what’s new here, beginning as playful, skittering R&B, then pivoting in and out of a more abstract reverie backed by synths and organs heavily under the influence of Kate Bush, a turn foreshadowed by Salvant’s incredible 2022 cover of “Wuthering Heights.” Now if we could only get her and Rosalía in the same studio with their two complementary blends of the high minded and the down and dirty.
SML, How You Been
Just a year after its acclaimed debut Small Medium Large, this quintet of leading players on the L.A. jazz scene returns with another collection of funky collaged aluminum and cinderblock sounds. The tracks are drawn from collective jams that are then pulled apart like Legos and edited into new assemblages, on the model of producer-arranger Teo Macero on Miles Davis’ fusion records, as well as of Brian Eno on albums such as Talking Heads’ Remain in Light. The title track of How You Been particularly reminds me of the latter, with its percussion shuddering and chiming as cascades of panicked guitar and horns tumble down its slopes. It’s easy to imagine David Byrne barking blank-eyed aphorisms over top. And yet it also sounds like something that only could have been made today, or perhaps the day after.
Wednesday, Bleeds
I am a sucker for most everything Wednesday does, standing as it does at the intersection of so many of my favorite things. Southern gothic crossed with teenaged melodrama. Country song structures meeting squealing detuned ’80s/’90s guitars (which people lately insist on calling “shoegaze,” and, well, we don’t have room to deal with that). And poetic compression applied to everyday vernacular speech. On Bleeds, Wednesday singer-songwriter Karly Hartzman and compadres don’t reinvent their style from 2023’s similarly great Rat Saw God, but they continue to refine and reinforce it. This album has an additional Rumours-esque charge from having been made while band members Hartzman and M.J. Lenderman were on the verge of splitting up, as heard devastatingly on “The Way Love Goes,” this album’s Merle Haggard–echoing radioactive core. (You absolutely should read her essay about this.) Nearly every song packs a wallop and a tease, but I’ve chosen “Bitter Everyday.” Partly because “Townies” and “Elderberry Wine” have been discussed enough. Also because of the irresistible signature Hartzman story in the third verse about a Juggalo lady who wandered up to her porch and sang a beautiful song, but later turned out to be wanted for murder. Also the repeated bit about the point being to “get past the cold spot in the lake.” But mostly it’s because the evolving end line of the chorus is an homage to Iris DeMent’s killer 1994 song “Easy’s Gettin’ Harder Every Day.” For that alone, Wednesday has my irreversible devotion.
Billy Woods, Golliwog
Between his solo work and his collaborations with Elucid as Armand Hammer, Billy Woods has been positively dominating my U.S. rap listening in the past few years, along with a few others like Mach-Hommy and, this year, the Clipse and De La Soul reunions. That’s as much a sign of my having fallen behind on new hip-hop artists as anything else, but it’s also because Woods’ albums are so dense and engrossing that they can take up a lot of time. (Although this year’s Armand Hammer outing, Mercy, with the Alchemist, hasn’t hit the sweet spot for me so far.) Consider the Golliwog track “Corinthians,” which in less than three-and-a-half minutes, over a horror-soundtrack bass pulse and string stabs, quotes passages from the 1918 Lu Xun short story “Diary of a Madman,” critiques artificial intelligence as well as American military spending in Gaza, references the titular Bible book’s passage about seeing through a mirror darkly, and alludes to several near-death experiences. In an interview, Woods said that the song was about, “Examining the idea of the spectacle that is modern existence, and living where, at times, you’re like a scarecrow that can see everything happening but feel no ability to affect the world around you.” A chillingly exact description of how 2025 has felt way too often.
… Plus 20 More
Marshall Allen, New Dawn
Neko Case, Neon Grey Midnight Green
Tyler Childers, Snipe Hunter
Cici Arthur, Way Through
Cymande, Renascence
Lucy Dacus, Forever Is a Feeling
Dijon, Baby
Frog Eyes, The Open Up
Jonny Greenwood, One Battle After Another (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Rochelle Jordan, Through the Wall
Lorde, Virgin
Hannah Marcus, Ten Bones From a Virgin Graveyard
The Mountain Goats, Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan
Lisa O’Neill, The Wind Doesn’t Blow This Far Right
Kassa Overall, CREAM
Ken Pomeroy, Cruel Joke
Alan Sparhawk with Trampled by Turtles, self-titled
Bruce Springsteen, Tracks II: The Lost Albums
Sudan Archives, The BPM
Cameron Winter, Heavy Metal (released late December 2024)
Top 20 Songs
Amaarae ft. PinkPantheress, “Kiss Me Through the Phone Pt. 2”
Kelsea Ballerini, “I Sit in Parks”
Justin Bieber, “Daisies”
Blood Orange ft. the Durutti Column, Tariq Al-Sabir, Caroline Polachek, and Daniel
Caesar, “The Field”
Sabrina Carpenter, “House Tour”
Charli XCX ft. John Cale, “House”
Miley Cyrus, “End of the World”
Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band, “New Threats From the Soul”
Saya Grey, “Lie Down”
Lady Gaga, “Abracadabra”
Haim, “Take Me Back”
Ella Langley, “Choosin’ Texas”
Little Simz, “Flood”
Moliy ft. Silent Addy, Skillibeng, and Shenseea, “Shake It to the Max (Remix)”
Chappell Roan, “The Subway”
Robyn, “Dopamine”
Joseph Shabason and Dawn Richard, “Broken Hearted Sade”
Taylor Swift, “Father Figure”
Water From Your Eyes, “Playing Classics”
Hailey Whitters, “Casseroles”
20 Songs That Met the Moment
Fiona Apple, “Pretrial (Let Her Go Home)”
Backxwash, “Wake Up”
Carsie Blanton, “Little Flame”
DJ Haram ft. Armand Hammer, “Stenography”
Dropkick Murphys, “Who’ll Stand With Us?”
Greg Freeman, “Burnover”
Googly Eyes, Joy Oladokun, August Ponthier, “Jesus and John Wayne”
Yasmine Hamdan, “Shmaali شمالي Tarweeda (Nicolas Jaar Remix)”
Jenny Hval, “The Artist Is Absent (89 Seconds Rewrite)”
Brian Jackson and Masters at Work, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”
Kneecap, “No Comment”
Lankum, “Ghost Town”
Jim Legxacy, “Stick”
Lincka, “Chinga la Migra”
Ribbon Skirt, “Wrong Planet”
Jobi Riccio, “Wildfire Season”
Mavis Staples, “Beautiful Strangers”
Tropical Fuck Storm, “Goon Show”
Suzanne Vega, “Speakers’ Corner”
Hayley Williams, “True Believer”