The songs list is fun, the TV list is useful, but for me, it’s all about this albums list. If for some reason I could only manage one of these features per year, it would be this one. I’ve done this every year since 2010, when I was just a sophomore in college.
These days, it’s a real squeeze. These features consume my life for a couple of weeks before the new year, and my day job’s busy season starts right around then. It can be a challenge to hold my sleep schedule together during this period! But it’s so worth it. I think I would completely combust if I wasn’t doing this. The albums list specifically is one of the most important rituals in my life.
You know, I keep hyping up 2025 as heralding the return of the rock band to the vanguard of music, but a full 80% of this top ten is solo artists. Damn it!
Great, let’s get on with it. I will see you back here next week for the TV features.
10. Fancy That
by PinkPantheress
For the first time, Pink moves away from the lovelorn bedroom hyperpop and more totally embraces the dancefloor, adopting a more confident persona and filling with this mixtape to the brim with come-ons, sometimes to Americans, sometimes to weed itself, but most characteristically to someone at the same club who needs a bit of encouragement. Fancy That just sounds incredible, in large part because Pink is an absolute monster at sampling. Those perfect synths on “Illegal” are lifted from Underworld, “Nice To Know You” is kept aloft by Sugababes, and obviously “Girl Like Me” is built entirely around Basement Jaxx. It’s just like Pink that Fancy That comes and goes a little too quickly, leaving it feeling a little slight, but it’s such a jump forward in her craft that it still feels like a major pop work by someone who has now established herself as a sure-thing ongoing fixture of the pop landscape.
Listen: “Stateside”
9. Snipe Hunter
by Tyler Childers
You’ve got your songs that sound straightforwardly classic (“Cuttin’ Teeth,” “Oneida”). You’ve got your songs that are pretty silly (“Bitin’ List,” “Dirty Ought Trill”). You’ve got your songs that are laced with humor and characterized by their manic energy (“Eatin’ Big Time,” “Down Under”). You’ve got your song that activates a light in your head which emanates brightly enough to dimly light a dark room (“Tirtha Yatra”). Childers uses each increment on the humor dial in a way that I think I’ve only really heard from Loudon Wainwright.
“Eatin’ Big Time” seems like a subtweet of one Oliver Anthony Music (“There’s a man in the doorway of a motherfuckin’ mansion/Aiming at the feeder where you’d sat to take a feast,” let’s go!!!). “Oneida” is so gorgeous and romantic. But yeah, what opened up this album for me is “Tirtha Yatra,” the crazy song about Childers wanting to visit to India. Snipe Hunter producer Rick Rubin is a lowkey odious weirdo, but I would die to see GQ revive his Epic Conversations series just to talk to Childers about how he spent two years reading the Bhagavad Gita. I am not 100% sure how tasteful Childers’ exchange with Hinduism is (he doesn’t make certain that he’s pronouncing “Kurukshetra” correctly), but especially in the context of American country stars it is a stupendously compelling journey he’s taking, allegedly changing him “metaphysically.” And the strength of Snipe Hunter is that there are like thirty other things on this album that could be the thing you latch onto in the same way.
Listen: “Tirtha Yatra”
8. I Love My Computer
by Ninajirachi
Man, vibe. Absolutely yes. I don’t love my computer to the spiritual extent that Ninajirachi does – I wish I did, because it’s honestly fucking beautiful – but I get it. So much of the life that I’ve built since my first laptop in 2009 has come from behind a Macbook. I use my iPhone so much, but I hold no sentimentality for it. It is a tool, it is a lowly goblin. Replacing my Mac is always at least a little bit emotional.
Yeah, it’s pretty funny to hear “I wanna fuck my computer/’Cause no one in the world knows me better/It says my name, it says ‘Nina’/And no one in the world does it better.” But late showstopper “Sing Good,” probably the only truly fully fleshed-out “song” here, is just an absolutely wonderful origin story about deciding to make music, learning to make music, and subtextually how it feels to be here now. I would want to fuck my computer, too.
I Love My Computer has enough of a foot in hyperpop that it will absolutely scratch anyone’s itch for bubblegum bass, but it’s mostly a mishmash of electronica genres that feels stupid to entirely pin down. What really pops out from I Love My Computer is that Ninajirachi is absolutely ecstatic to be making this music for us. It is the sound of pure joy, of being exactly where you want to be and doing exactly what you want to do. So she dedicates this moment to the one who raised her.
Listen: “iPod Touch”
7. West End Girl
by Lily Allen
I promise I’m not here for the tabloid appeal. I’m enjoying the Stranger Things downfall as much as anyone, but it doesn’t really mean anything to me that the guy who plays Hopper is a bad partner. It’s not that it’s about famous people I’m aware of, no, it’s that West End Girl is about anybody, about a real thing that happened to real people. Chief Hopper’s proposed open relationship metastasizes, escalating from a shitty Facetime call to unnervingly two-faced texts from the other woman all the way to Allen discovering his second location is his pussy palace.
And Allen knows just how to spin a yarn. As she incessantly demands “and who’s Madeline?” your eyes widen when you see the next track: “Madeline.” I am pretty sure that if Taylor Swift had called Matt Healy “4chan Stan,” the entire world would have ended. West End Girl is a riveting death blow, and the music is surprisingly varied, leaning into PinkPantheress for “Ruminating,” interpolating Daft Punk’s “Veridis Quo” for “4chan Stan,” and even getting into dancehall on “Nonmonogamummy” with the help of Specialist Moss.
Allen has spent much of the time since her last great album being a total twat (imagine that last word has a link to an adequate article about the time Allen posted a picture of then-husband Sam Cooper’s penis in black…face (?) and called it Azealia Banks, you’ll just have to believe me), and there’s reason to doubt the innocent act she puts on here. But I just couldn’t look away from West End Girl, and I couldn’t stop playing it.
Listen: “Madeline”
6. Bloodless
by Samia
It should have been obvious that Samia had this kind of album in her. She’d shown signs of brilliance on her prior works, but those releases were relatively uneven. Bloodless is a disarming level-up in focus. She’s nonstop with lines that you have to turn over in your brain enough times that they’ll just live there: “Clad in leopard, clutch the banister/Twirling like a Degas dancer,” “Do you wanna see the heavenly creature?” (as the fulcrum of one of the major songs!), and, yeah, “Trying to feel hugs from Heaven/Jack off to someone who’s pregnant.” Samia and her creative team – largely friends of hers in the Minneapolis music scene, which she’s now officially a part of – have done some pretty serious work with the words, here, but the music itself sounds fuller, more accomplished, more involved. Songs that might have been left to stand largely alone on Honey are given ample instrumental flourish here. And Bloodless is just so strongly shaped too, dropping you into a bottomless pit with “Bovine Excision” and building all the way to the towering emotional release of “North Poles.” It’s the kind of album that’s so strongly realized that you don’t see why she can’t just do it again and again.
Listen: “Bovine Excision”
5. Baby
by Dijon
With Baby, Dijon starts playing Jenga with R&B. Key elements drop out or sometimes never even arrive, the use of sampling can sound like the stitchwork of Dr. Frankenstein, layers might be mixed in intentionally abrasively. This is all wildly overstates how challenging Baby is, it’s really not at all, but his willful misshaping of this music is unlike anything out there. Even when he adds enough back that the effect isn’t largely subtractive – “Another Baby!” and “HIGHER!” in particular – there’s a lingering uncanniness.
Which would be unfortunate if that sound didn’t serve these songs so well. “Another Baby!” sounds like it’s being sung by a collective excited to propagate itself. As Dijon turns his eye to the other adjacent generation, “my man,” about his fraught feelings about his aging father, sounds raw, broken, all over the place. Baby intentionally throws itself into no man’s land, but maybe diving headlong into something unfamiliar and all-consuming is appropriate for the album that rings in Dijon’s parenthood.
Listen: “Another Baby!”
4. Always Been
by Craig Finn
Back in the day, I salivated about the idea of Craig Finn solo work on the strength of his storytelling. He put out his first solo effort, Clear Heart Full Eyes, after The Hold Steady’s fifth album. But after five solo albums (and four more Hold Steady albums), he still hadn’t cut any truly great long-players since 2008’s Stay Positive. It turns out that his work has always really needed a musical conduit to shepherd him along. That had been Tad Kubler and Franz Nicolay, but now he’s teamed up with The War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel. I’m not huge on War on Drugs, but Granduciel’s presence (not just behind the boards but on guitar and a bunch else) makes Finn’s songs come alive.
This crop is largely about people solidly into their adulthood toying with making a big change in their life. The narrator on track two desperately wants to lose people of substances for people of substance. His apology to Dana is heartbreaking, but it remains to be seen if he’s deluding himself and if Dana cares to hear it. Leanna from “Luke & Leanna” loses it when the door slams shut on just the possibility of an affair, even the faint idea that her monotonous life could slightly spice up having provided the necessary ray of hope. Most harrowing is the “Fletcher’s” narrator being too paralyzed to uproot to Seattle like he wants because Fletcher’s friends still give him shit for having built up his move to Denver only to move back home by the holidays. “They’ll destroy you just for trying something different.” The characters on Always Been are all envisioning something different but are at a stage where it’s harder to make the jump. That sounds depressing, but Granduciel’s arrangements keep things sounding triumphant. Maybe even just knowing you want something different is its own sort of triumph.
Listen: “People Of Substance”
3. EURO-COUNTRY
by CMAT
There is just no musician meeting this moment like Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson. So many songs on EURO-COUNTRY are just embarrassingly appropriate for 2025, tackling the sorts of subjects that you might hear Rosie Tucker or Emperor X cover (minus the part where those two can disappear a bit into their own ass (complimentary)). There’s a song about that celebrity chef whose stupid face you have to see at the gas station (no, no that one). There’s one about male expectations of beauty amounting to wanting adult women to look like children. There’s one about, well, wanting to see a Tesla crash. The title track is about the globalization of Ireland after the 2008 global financial crisis ended the Celtic Tiger economic period.
It’s not all so heady. “When A Good Man Cries” is a small country song that’s just about perfect while “Ready” and “Running/Planning” reach thrilling climaxes that find Thompson just absolutely belting. Thompson is a fundamentally great songwriter and doesn’t need the more fun subjects to make a great album. But she does have them, and so she’s created the sort of work specific enough to the moment that it will become a vital totem of it.
Listen: “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash”
2. Getting Killed
by Geese
It’s so odd listening to 3D Country now and hearing Cameron Winter fully indulging in some cheese (“be my…WAAAH-REE-UHR!“). Because Getting Killed, the Geese entry that the vast majority of the world heard first, is so stone cold serious that I halfway understand why some people have compared Winter to Thom Yorke. And I mean, “which music do you hear in Geese?” became the parlor game of 2025. The main thing I hear is Bob Dylan, not so much the generational lyricist part but in the swagger with which Winter gets his rhymes off. Rapidly getting in a series of rhymes that goes bed/dead/shed/lead/bread is the sort of thing Dylan was doing a lot in ’65 and ’66. It doesn’t always have to be impressive on its own. Sometimes just putting some bullshit on the lyric sheet is the real rock and roll move. Is Winter constantly invoking Biblical ideas, or does this band just feel Biblical? You don’t even really notice a screwball line like “you can’t keep womankind in your dreams” because of how they play everything.
The intrigue as to how many layers of irony Winter is on would be moot if Getting Killed wasn’t top shelf rock and fucking roll. Plenty of people recoil at Winter’s voice (another endless source of comparison, we could be here all day), but his bleating is absolutely selling quieter songs like dynamic duo “Half Real” and “Au Pays du Cocaine.” And the band should thank their lucky stars for drummer Max Bassin, because this would be tenfold less remarkable if he wasn’t carrying the rockers. While I think there is a better rock album this year made by a better rock band, they’re a bit too far on the “substance” side of the spectrum. The more stylish Geese are not only charting newer territory, they’re reawakening people to the fact that the rock and roll band is the ultimate vehicle for popular recorded music. And hopefully always will be.
Listen: “Au Pays du Cocaine”
1. Bleeds
by Wednesday
At the epicenter of Bleeds is “The Way Love Goes,” a just-Karly performance of less than two minutes about her breakup with guitarist Jake Lenderman to the tune of the Merle Haggard song of the same name. Hartzman only manages two stanzas, but they’re just dynamite. “I oversold myself on the night we met.” “And I’m scared to death/There’s women less/Spoiled by your knowing.”
But that’s the cherry, not the cake. Wednesday is still the band of boredom and bodily functions: “We watched a Phish concert and Human Centipede/Two things I now wish I had never seen,” “Threw up in the pit at the Death Grips show,” “You keep on feeding that Afrin addiction/Squeezing the bottle and burning from itching,” “I’m sick, can’t fuck, push the pain around/Castrated in my mental death.” And while horror is less central to Bleeds than Rat Saw God, there’s still plenty of it. A juggalo holds court with them and sings them a song, only for them to realize the very next week that she’s a wanted killer. There’s a whole song about the Murdaugh Murders in South Carolina. They’ll meet you outside, they’ll meet you outside.
Hartzman deserves credit as one of the great storytelling songwriters, though her approach is a peculiar one. First off, she almost exclusively relays real events, usually something either she or a friend personally experienced. She’s not inventing from whole cloth, but she has mastered the role of interpreter, usually by being concise, brutal, and blunt in her tellings. Her stories also are seldom songs unto themselves but are arguments in favor of a song’s larger thesis. And she has so many that they all swirl together into a vivid portrait of her Asheville. Wednesday’s albums have always been thus, but Bleeds paints the most filled-out world to inhabit of any of them.
But the true separator is Wednesday as a musical unit. They wield a collective power that translates great songs into something ragged and monstrous, a pocket of Southern rock entirely their own, bleeding into hardcore and wearing it like a glove. Xandy Chelmis’ slide guitar gives many of these songs their color. Hartzman and Lenderman have a frightening guitar attack all their own like the Drive-By Truckers before them. Hartzman’s performance of her stories clarifies their intent as largely non-judgmental shit-shooting, but she’ll hit the key line like it’s a sad truth she’s hearing for the first time. “The sweetest parts of life keep getting bitter every day.” “Feel like I’m almost good enough to know you.” “Even the best champagne still tastes like elderberry wine.”
Wednesday is the best band in the world. I don’t think it’s particularly close.
Listen: “Elderberry Wine”
The Next Fifteen
11. Momma: Welcome To My Blue Sky (Listen: “Ohio All The Time”)
12. Snocaps: Snocaps (Listen: “Heathcliff”)
13. Water From Your Eyes: It’s A Beautiful Place (Listen: “Nights In Armor”)
14. Jens Lekman: Songs For Other People’s Weddings (Listen: “A Tuxedo Sewn For Two”)
15. Bad Bunny: DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (Listen: “NUEVAYoL”)
16. Sabrina Carpenter: Man’s Best Friend (Listen: “Tears”)
17. Clipse: Let God Sort Em Out (Listen: “Ace Trumpets”)
18. JADE: THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY! (Listen: “FUFN (Fuck You For Now)”)
19. Danny Brown: Stardust (Listen: “Copycats” ft. underscores)
20. Los Thuthanaka: Los Thuthanaka (Listen: “Huayño ‘Ipi Saxra'”)
21. The Beths: Straight Line Was a Lie (Listen: “Straight Line Was A Lie”)
22. Amaarae: BLACK STAR (Listen: “Girlie-Pop!”)
23. Lambrini Girls: Who Let The Dogs Out (Listen: “Company Culture”)
24. Sudan Archives: THE BPM (Listen: “DEAD”)
25. Wet Leg: moisturizer (Listen: “catch these fists”)
Further Top Fifty
Addison Rae: Addison (Listen: “High Fashion”)
Allo Darlin’: Bright Nights (Listen: “My Love Will Bring You Home”)
Big Thief: Double Infinity (Listen: “Incomprehensible”)
billy woods: GOLLIWOG (Listen: “Misery”)
Gully Boys: Gully Boys (Listen: “Bad Day”)
HAIM: I quit (Listen: “Down to be wrong”)
Home Is Where: Hunting Season (Listen: “migration patterns”)
Horsegirl: Phonetics On And On (Listen: “Switch Over”)
James McMurtry: The Black Dog And The Wandering Boy (Listen: “South Texas Lawman”)
Jim Legxacy: black british music (2025) (Listen: “father”)
Kalie Shorr: My Type (Listen: “My Type”)
Lady Gaga: MAYHEM (Listen: “Vanish Into You”)
Lorde: Virgin (Listen: “Favourite Daughter”)
Margo Price: Hard Headed Woman (Listen: “Love Me Like You Used To Do” ft. Tyler Childers)
Model/Actriz: Pirouette (Listen: “Diva”)
Oklou: choke enough (Listen: “obvious”)
Panic Shack: Panic Shack (Listen: “Pockets”)
Patterson Hoods: Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams (Listen: “The Forks of Cypress” ft. Waxahatchee)
Pulp: More (Listen: “Spike Island”)
Rodeo Boys: Junior (Listen: “Speedway”)
Skrillex: FUCK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! ❤ (Listen: “SPITFIRE” ft. Hawaii Slim)
Smerz: Big city life (Listen: “You got time and I got money”)
Snow Tha Product: Before I Crashout (Listen: “M.a.M.A”)
Tunde Adebimpe: Thee Black Boltz (Listen: “Magnetic”)
Viagra Boys: viagr aboys (Listen: “Uno II”)
Honorable Mentions
Alex G: Headlights (Listen: “June Guitar”)
Alien Boy: You Wanna Fade? (Listen: “Changes”)
Amanda Shires: Nobody’s Girl (Listen: “A Way It Goes”)
Annahstasia: Tether (Listen: “Be Kind”)
Armand Hammer & The Alchemist: Mercy (Listen: “Laraaji”)
aya: hexed! (Listen: “off to the ESSO”)
Beach Bunny: Tunnel Vision (Listen: “Tunnel Vision”)
Blondshell: If You Asked For A Picture (Listen: “T&A”)
Blood Orange: Essex Honey (Listen: “The Field” ft. The Durutti Column, Tariq Al-Sabir, Caroline Polachek & Daniel Caesar)
Burial: Comafields / Imaginary Festival (Listen: “Comafields”)
corook: committed to a bit (Listen: “THEY!”)
Daniel Lopatin: Marty Supreme (Listen: “The Real Game”)
DJ Koze: Music Can Hear Us (Listen: “Pure Love” ft. Damon Albarn)
Earl Sweatshirt: Live Laugh Love (Listen: “TOURMALINE”)
Effie: pullup to busan 4 morE hypEr summEr it’s gonna bE a fuckin moviE (Listen: “MORE HYPER”)
Erika de Casier: Lifetime (Listen: “Delusional”)
Florence Road: Fall Back (Listen: “Goodnight”)
FKA twigs: EUSEXUA (Listen: “Perfect Stranger”)
FKA twigs: EUSEXUA Afterglow (Listen: “HARD”)
Hatchie: Liquorice (Listen: “Lose It Again”)
Hayley Williams: Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party (Listen: “Parachute”)
Home Front: Watch It Die (Listen: “Light Sleeper”)
Japanese Breakfast: For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) (Listen: “Orlando In Love”)
Jeffrey Lewis: The EVEN MORE Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis (Listen: “Just Fun”)
Julien Baker & TORRES: Send A Prayer My Way (Listen: “Sugar In The Tank”)
Lucy Dacus: Forever Is A Feeling (Listen: “Ankles”)
Maren Morris: D R E A M S I C L E (Listen: “lemonade”)
McKinley Dixon: Magic, Alive! (Listen: “Sugar Water” ft. Quelle Chris & Anjimile)
Mekons: Horror (Listen: “You’re Not Singing Anymore”)
M(h)aol: Something Soft (Listen: “Pursuit”)
Militarie Gun: God Save The Gun (Listen: “Thought You Were Waving”)
Miya Folick: Erotica Veronica (Listen: “Fist”)
Nourished By Time: The Passionate Ones (Listen: “9 2 5”)
PUP: Who Will Look After The Dogs? (Listen: “Hallways”)
Rachel Chinouriri: Little House (Listen: “Can we talk about Isaac?”)
Rhett Miller: A lifetime of riding by night (Listen: “All For You”)
Rochelle Jordan: Through The Wall (Listen: “The Boy”)
ROSALÍA: LUX (Listen: “Berghain” ft. Björk & Yves Tumor)
Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band: New Threats From The Soul (Listen: “New Threats From The Soul”)
Saba & No I.D.: From the Private Collection of Saba and No I.D. (Listen: “head.rap” ft. Madison McFerrin, Ogi & Jordan Ward)
S.G. Goodman: Planting By The Signs (Listen: “Heaven Song”)
Sharp Pins: Balloon Balloon Balloon (Listen: “(I Wanna) Be Your Girl”)
Sleigh Bells: Bunky Becky Birthday Boy (Listen: “Wanna Start A Band?”)
The Ex: If Your Mirror Breaks (Listen: “Great!”)
The Tubs: Cotton Crown (Listen: “Freak Mode”)
They Are Gutting A Body Of Water: LOTTO (Listen: “american food”)
Toby Fox: DELTARUNE Chapters 3+4 (Listen: “Black Knife”)
Turnstile: NEVER ENOUGH (Listen: “NEVER ENOUGH”)
Various Artists: KPop Demon Hunters (Soundtrack From The Netflix Film) (Listen: “Golden”)
YHWH Nailgun: 45 Pounds (Listen: “Sickle Walk”)
And finally, as always, here are some playlists. The first includes one track from every album listed above. The second includes the top ten albums in their entirety. This might be the last year I use Spotify for this, but I just couldn’t turn on a dime to put together something else on time this year.
Joey Daniewicz 