Note: People generally enjoy this feature by reading and listening to the top ten (or at least the ones they haven’t heard) and then making their way to the larger playlist provided at the end of the feature. I try not to include too many songs (usually around forty) because I want listening to them all to be a realistic proposition, so that playlist is all bangers. As always, for maximum effect, play it fucking loud.
After 2024’s landmark year in pop, 2025’s chart pop landscape will always be remembered as brutally desolate, possibly the worst year ever for the charts.
It felt like last year was stuffed with big stories. Brat summer, Drake vs. Kendrick, Chappell Roan becoming an out-of-nowhere super fucking megastar, Sabrina Carpenter becoming a Main Pop Girl, Doechii’s full court press into the highest tier of hip hop. This year we have…KPop Demon Hunters? Addison Rae, whose lack of impact on the Hot 100 is proof that gay club playlists should figure more into their algorithm? Geese??? The year lacked narrative and compared to 2024 felt rather boring.
But there is simply too much music coming out these days for things to not be basically okay, and while this will always be the year where fucking “Ordinary” was the undisputed Song of the Summer, these are the ten songs that made the best effort at freeing 2025 from that indignity.
10. “Take A Sexy Picture Of Me”
by CMAT
Thirty-two years ago, Liz Phair sang “fuck and run, even when I was seventeen” before appending a distressing corollary: “even when I was twelve!” Here, Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson echoes that trick, unnervingly lowering the referenced age further and further: “and make me look sixteen” (uh), “and make me look fifteen” (uh oh), “and make me look fourteen! Or like ten, or like five, or like two, like a baby.” “Take A Sexy Picture Of Me” is CMAT’s reaction to hostility to women in the public eye, particularly women whose bodies and behavior don’t conform to patriarchal expectations. And in this year of the specter of Jeffrey Epstein, Thompson twists the knife on the real nature of those expectations.
9. “Sabado”
by Snow Tha Product
Snow Tha Product – who’s been around forever but whose most popular track by far is her BZRP Music Session, it happens – discovers that a family member secretly voted for Trump and wanders around an extended family gathering like this whodunnit’s Benoit Blanc. Was it the aunt that spoiled her children? The pizza-faced cousin who hates being American? The guy who says the n-word? The stuck-up cousin stuck coveting what she sees on TikTok? The drunk uncle with internalized homophobia? After she judges her family in the first verse, she spends much of the second thinking of her cousin who’s aggressively culturally assimilating, marrying to have blonde kids and only ever speaking English.
This all Says Thing About Society and our cultural moment, absolutely, but with Snow rapping over a wacky, barebones, frantic, sousaphone-buoyed beat, the overall effect is more a comedy about a family that didn’t really need the political inciting incident for their party to devolve into chaos.
8. “Man I Need”
by Olivia Dean
Maybe it’s here because I’m so starved for worthy chart pop, but this has to be by far the most Inoffensive and Normal song I’ve ever included in these roundups. I’m just not made of stone. Dean’s easygoing vocal is winsome and charming, and Zach Nahome – a red name on Wikipedia who hasn’t done a lot and hopefully has requests just pouring in now – makes this feel perfectly smooth, like a dish that has just the right amount of butter in it (i.e. you can tell it’s there but don’t feel bad about it). The bones of the song are solid though not outright exceptional, but sometimes you have to recognize a 13/10 execution.
7. “Cinderella”
by Model/Actriz
The “Cinderella” lyric sheet reads like an ode to the beauty of opening up and revealing yourself to another person. But through the prism of Model/Actriz’ horror movie post-punk, you’re reminded that it can also be a nightmare to fight your way through this stage of loving someone and unpacking childhood grief, here the kind that can follow a man who loves other men and aches for feminine self-expression. Singer Cole Haden notices “I’m embarrassed to be clever when you’re honest,” and finally takes the dive. His story of wanting a Cinderella party for his fifth birthday is one of those stories that a parent might process as nothing but for Haden must have felt like everything, and it’s a trick of the mind that it still does. And so “Cinderella” is history’s most terrifying love song.
6. “Manchild”
by Sabrina Carpenter
I actually took a while to come around on “Manchild.” I instantly flinched hearing the exact same ice cream sundae synth sound from “Good Luck, Babe!,” which just came out last year! Sabrina, you had just escaped from the “Say So” allegations!
But “Manchild” is the ultimate Sabrina Carpenter song, less apiece with her sharp but shaky new album and more like a bow to tie around her less relationship-positive Short n’ Sweet. Her pop persona has crystalized into the sort of Looney Tunes character who always wins but you always root for anyway. The men might not work out, but she not only has the last laugh, she outright ends up in a position of much higher regard and respect.
And the “Good Luck, Babe!” synths really do make that chorus pop.
5. “Townies”
by Wednesday
Karly Hartzman recalls two teenage memories of girlhood violation. In one, the popular clique’s rumor mill gives her a friend a reputation as someone easy, someone always down. In the other, Hartzman’s own friend spread her nudes around. But she never got to yell at him about it, because he DIIIIIII-IIIII-IIIIII-IIIIIIIIED!!! The song combusting on that one word isn’t celebratory exactly, but that story ends with the villain paying for it. And then some. And then a lot, really.
“Townies” is Wednesday’s most melodically satisfying outing, its verses made all the better to listen to by Hartzman’s vocal pressing into alliteration and assonance as she makes her way around the slightly knotty rhyme scheme. And then only Wednesday could make the sonic bursts that make up the chorus work quite this effectively.
Hartzman concludes with surprising forgiveness. Her dead friend was just a kid without the tools to understand the hurt he was creating. “All you can do is hope everyone grew up to become decent and empathic adults,” Hartzman has said about “Townies.” But not everyone gets to grow up, either.
And the townies are just townies. They can’t even help it.
“But then I told my friend from high school that I wrote that song to quell any remaining anger that I had for those girls. She was like, ‘That’s awesome! But I did give him a handjob.'”
4. “I Want You (Fever)”
by Momma
I loved “Speeding 72,” but I wasn’t wowed by the rest of Household Name and didn’t expect them to be an ongoing concern on these lists. But on Welcome To My Blue Sky, they’ve returned with a new, fully-realized approach, wielding dreamy production and astonishingly perfect guitar sound. “I Want You (Fever)” is the ultimate showcase for their new strengths, sporting gushing, rushing guitars that make it the most satisfying guitar track I’ve heard in years. Co-leads Ella Friedman and Allegra Weingarten both cheated on their partners while touring behind Household Name, and while Welcome To My Blue Sky spends the bulk of its time processing the regret and embarrassment from that, “I Want You (Fever)” is about that inciting incident, portraying the deed as so scandalously fun and gratifying that you can at least understand why an otherwise decent person might lapse to succumb to something primal. (Editor: We are not pro-cheating at Joey Daniewicz dot com. Please do not cheat on your partner.)
3. “Taxes”
by Geese
There is reason to doubt that “Taxes” is about taxes. Unlike “Taxman,” a truly overrated Beatles track promoted by the George Harrison Industrial Complex (I’m onto you guys!), Cameron Winter is not a rich man complaining about participating in a society. Perhaps it is about the psychic torture of doing taxes, in which case “I don’t deserve this/Nobody deserves this” becomes the truest thing ever said.
But “Taxes” scans more as a song about resisting paying your karmic debt to the universe, fleeing from your chickens coming home to roost. Winter plays a sadsack, but then on “you’re gonna have to nail me down,” the song detonates. The tempo shifts, the drums change up, the guitar riff kicks in. What sounds like a pleasant jangle pop backing track in isolation instead sounds expansive and violent. Winter’s vocals rise to match the transformation. “I will break my own heart from now on,” as sadsack on paper as “I should burn in Hell,” comes off as insistent, resolute, determined. When “Taxes” is over, it’s like a powerful wind has come to a sudden stop.
2. “Blue Valentine”
by NMIXX
NMIXX has rapidly ascended the K-pop hierarchy in just one song. Their previous hits just didn’t congeal quite right, the typical clashing sonic and melodic ideas sounding a bit less controlled. “Blue Valentine” takes you on an ambitious tour of musical ideas, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. The slow motion curveball right before the chorus sounds right at home.
For a song about a love that is beyond saving, “Blue Valentine” sounds more thankful than desperate, the chorus about good times past hitting like “Auld Lang Syne,” the opening melody sounding every bit as eternal.
My second favorite K-pop song I’ve ever heard, not that I’m the expert in that field (yet). Play this at the funeral pyre for what NewJeans NJZ NewJeans could have been and cry your eyes out.
1. “Yamaha”
by Dijon
How does he pull it off?
It all starts with a synth stab that sounds straight outta “Wonderful Christmastime.” As “Yamaha” settles into the song proper, Laurie Anderson’s voice pulses and hovers and keeps this thing floating inches above the ground, and…is he using Doug E. Fresh for that bass sound throughout???
“Yamaha” is not a masterpiece of lyrics or storytelling, but it’s a bit of absolute mad science, easily the most melodically powerful entry on Dijon’s adventurous album Baby. It obviously owes a fair bit to Prince – not just in sound and subject but the ways Dijon discusses sex, devoting the ode not just to the act itself but to the woman – but it’s also unmistakably Dijon’s, the sort of sound that could have only come from his brain.
And it just hits that pleasure center like nothing else, my brain lighting up for the backing vocal chants, the drum machine, that big melody on the refrain, a dazzling Swiss watch of sonic elements. It makes me so happy when it comes on, when I unexpectedly hear it in the wild. “Yamaha” obliges by expressing my feelings about it: in awe and wonderment, but above all tickled. I’m in love with this particular expression of this particular emotion.
It’s just beautiful that in the year D’Angelo departed this mortal plane, we’ve seen another R&B genius who sees the game so differently fully realize himself. How does it feel?
The Next Fifteen
11. Jens Lekman ft. Matilda Sargren: “On A Pier, On The Hudson”
12. Viagra Boys: “Man Made Of Meat”
13. Hilary Duff: “Mature”
14. PinkPantheress: “Tonight”
15. Addison Rae: “Headphones On”
16. Kate Nash: “GERM”
17. PinkPantheress: “Illegal”
18. CMAT: “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station”
19. Water From Your Eyes: “Playing Classics”
20. Amaarae: “S.M.O.”
21. Smerz: “Feisty”
22. Chappell Roan: “The Subway”
23. Craig Finn: “Luke & Leanna”
24. Fiona Apple: “Pretrial (Let Her Go Home)”
25. Kehlani: “Folded”
Honorable Mentions
Alex G: “Afterlife”
Amanda Shires: “Piece Of Mind”
Chappell Roan: “The Giver”
Doechii: “Nosebleeds”
FKA twigs: “Girl Feels Good”
Florence Road: “Heavy”
james K: “Play”
Jim Legxacy: “’06 wayne rooney”
Margo Price: “Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down”
MARIS: “SUPER F★CKING MEGA ST★R”
RXKNephew: “john fetterman”
Sabrina Carpenter: “House Tour”
Selena Gomez, benny blanco & Gracie Abrams: “Call Me When You Break Up”
Sleigh Bells: “Bunky Pop”
Wet Leg: “mangetout”
Here are the Spotify playlists, like usual. The first has all of the songs above, the second is just the top ten. This might be the last year I use Spotify for this, but just couldn’t turn on a dime to put together something else on time this year.
Joey Daniewicz 