Best Albums of 2025
You better you better you best
In the course of a year I listen to so much stuff for you, dear readers — it’s grueling, relentless work and I’ve been told I’ve developed the ears of a world champion athlete. The payoff is that I get to provide you with this scientifically accurate assessment.
25. Joni Void — Every Life Is A Light
OK, let’s shift into this countdown slowly with the album that lit up my March… slow, deep breaths as we lower ourselves into Joni’s magical, alpha state-inducing flotation tank…
24. Wombo — Danger in Fives
Sydney Chadwick’s angelic vocals scraped up against Cameron Lowe’s slanted lead guitar to conjure a charmingly tonal/atonal and oddly hypnotic take on avant-garde indie rock, sounding more like Brooklyn than Louisville.
23. Piotr Kurek — Songs and Bodies
A gorgeous, melodic/amelodic take on chilled-out lounge jazz. Kurek found a groove and wove unhurried spells around it with his guitar, embedding layers of emotion in chopped up, manipulated vocals.
22. Lust for Youth / Croatian Amor — All Worlds
Hannes Norrvide and Loke Rahbek reimagined synth-pop with the inventiveness and wonder of OMD and the anthemic romanticism of A-ha, spreading waves of idiosyncratic joy in of the year’s most rousing victory laps.
21. Blawan — SickElixir
Jamie Roberts thwacked and thumped and got tribal and funky with all kinds of farty, corroded textures. SickElixir was extreme and uncompromising stuff, but it never lost its sense of fun. Like partying with Bigfoot.
20. Kathryn Joseph — WE WERE MADE PREY
A quietly bloody and violent horror album built around a trembling voice, sparse piano and brilliant songcraft. She embodied both predator and prey in a feral world.
19. Free Range — Lost & Found
With pristine vocals, old-soul wisdom and middle-American sweetness, Sofia Jensen delivered that warm-all-over feeling like no one else. It’s only (indie) rock’n’roll (and country) but Lost & Found was disarmingly intimate and chock full of great tunes to cry along with.
18. Jules Reidy — Ghost/Spirit
The mystical poetry subsumed by witchy, circular guitar brought to mind Stevie Nicks and John Fahey, but Reidy is a real original, fueled by the spiky emotions of a breakup aftermath, tweaking and collaging outside contributions to discover striking new forms.
17. Ela Minus — Día
In 2025 Colombia was the new Seattle, and Ela Minus busted out of Bogotá (and Brooklyn) with her her second album of banging electro-minimalism, getting hyper-severe parties started amongst the haute couture set and everyone else that mattered.
16. Junior Brother — The End
Brutalist freak folk pushed to the raw limits of listenability, but how sweet when the dissonance shifted into golden sunbeams of melody. Ronan Kealy drew on Irish folklore to tackle nothing less than the creep of ugliness into the spirit of modern man. Difficult listening with big payoffs.
15. Shlohmo — Repulsor
Henry Laufer gazed at his shoes through broken glass kaleidoscopes, creating anthemic, grunged-up electronic instrumentals rich with strange and delightful
detail and personality. Repulsor lifted us up again and again to kiss the 2025 sky.
14. Lyra Pramuk — Hymnal
She sculpted in unthinkable strings and androgynous wails to create an aural world of Christ-like passion. It felt both ancient and cutting-edge; highly experimental but also organic, melodic and approachable.
13. Rat Heart — Dancin’ in the Streets
This one radiated out from a core of neon moods reflected on dark, wet streets into diffracted, chopped up experiments and uneasy listening dirty-shoe-gaze for one of the year’s most boldly undefinable pleasures. One might argue that Tom Boogizm is the best rock star name ever.
12. Hilary Woods — Night CRIÚ
Hilz’s gothy incantations crept up from the cold earth and grew all over you like vines. Sweet and droning, like an Irish Hope Sandoval fronting a long-deceased girl group. Night CRIÚ felt medieval and churchy — sorrow, resignation, ascension.
11. Mondo Lava — Utero Dei
The recorded-on-cassette sound quality gave the bi-continental Lavas a ghostly, out of time feel; like getting a series of faded, decades-old postcards in the mail. When they boogied out it felt like the 60s, but the 60s in a faraway galaxy. Utero Dei was sprawling and disorienting and nonetheless just felt right.
10. Two Shell — IIcons
A geyser of fizzy, iridescent hyper-art-dance-pop, these shape-shifting London warlocks have ruled the mid-2020s with booty benevolence. On their second album they drew us in deeper, sharing glimpses of a vulnerable side.
9. EsDeeKid — Rebel
The Masked Liverpudlian shaved the history of hip-hop into a simple prison shank and went on a minimalist rampage: Rebel was eleven short, sharp, glistening thrusts to the belly — it came out quietly in June and by Christmas it was conquering the world amidst hilarious rumors that the Kid was actually a certain A-list movie star.
8. Osees — ABOMINATION REVEALED AT LAST
Running out of superlatives over here — John Dwyer has been at it for like 30 years and he’s still best in show, scorching the planet on a regular basis with gleaming, ear-wormy punk-psych-prog-garage onslaughts. This time around he channeled political rage and leaned hard into a blood-thirsty, bespoke iteration of punk rock.
7. Alex G — Headlights
The sweetest boy with the sweetest chord changes — a lost in America sensibility with a weirdo edge and a gift for sketching poignant details and conveying emotion. Headlights was Alex G at his best — a truckload of great, timeless tunes — a perfect companion to 2022’s God Save the Animals.
6. John Maus — Later Than You Think
We can all relax, he made some mistakes but he’s not MAGA. He’s an intellectual, he’s Catholic, he’s always surprising, not least in his live performances where he’s all exorcism jerks and spasms. His first album in seven years is a shining distillation of his distinctively somber/absurd new-wave church pop; it’s his best one yet.
5. Foxwarren — 2
Andy Shauf went down some mighty queer solo rabbit-holes after the Warren’s last one back in ‘18. This time around they brought unusual structures and a camp sensibility to their melodic romantic indie, incorporating samples of swelling strings and old movie dialog for one of 2025’s most off-kilter pleasures.
4. Maribou State — Hallucinating Love
Masterful stuff, really nothing but bangers, drawing on the lineage of chilled out electronic dance soul with notes of Saint Etienne, Soul II Soul, Moby et al. Songs that feel like they’ve existed since forever and propel your hips up to Heaven right now.
3. Goon — Dream 3
Their endless lysergic sixties summer alpha-state honey-dripping reached a new high, with occasional flourishes of counterpoint — keyboards melting and drifting off-key; Pixies-style screams. But they kept those gooey, levitating harmonies coming.
2. SANAM — Sametou Sawtan
Sandy Chamoun’s voice and presence were quite a spectacle, and she was more than matched by a band that used Arabic music, psych, and art rock ingredients to design a wildly theatrical, deeply satisfying 8-course meal of Lebanese pain and pleasure.
1. John Glacier — Like a Ribbon
A coolly elegant presence, speak-singing her fractured, glassy poetry over sparse, dreamy arrangements, she was in a sense her own genre, a fully formed original. Like a Ribbon was non-stop unknown pleasures laced with understated pathos.
And a few Special Mentions…
Beirut — A Study of Losses
caroline — caroline 2
Debby Friday — The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life
DERBY — Slugger
duendita — a strong desire to survive
KAROL G — Tropicoqueta
Kathryn Mohr — Waiting Room
Lots of Hands — into a pretty room
Mark Van Hoen — The Eternal Present
Media Puzzle — Intermission EP
Moonchild Sanelly — Full Moon
Nick Léon — A Tropical Entropy
Oklou — choke enough
Patrick Wolf — Crying the Neck
Perfume Genius — Glory
Playboi Carti — MUSIC
Richard Dawson — End of the Middle
Rico Nasty — Lethal
rusowski — DAISY
Satomimagae — Taba
These New Puritans — Crooked Wing
Tom Yorke, Mark Pritchard — Tall Tales
Unknown Mortal Orchestra — CURSE