I’ll save you a Control+F—no, Geese didn’t make the cut.
Maybe if I’d made it to the Amsterdam as I’d intended, lead honker Cameron Winter and his indulgent young Brooklynite crew would have finally cracked me. Or maybe they’d have just stayed on that forever lengthening list of bands that I don’t really hate. We’ll never know.
What you will find here are 50 albums that I kept returning to over the course of 2025, not because I was hoping to hear what other people did, but because I just plain needed to hear them again.
And as a bonus, you’ll find another 100-song playlist below. No order, probably incomplete, but full of great tunes, I promise.
50. Todd Snider, High Lonesome and Then Some
Unassuming fella that he was, it’d be somehow inappropriate for Todd Snider to go out with a bona fide classic. Instead, he offers his take on the broken-down bluesman, with guitar work as conversational as his drawl and a few backup gals helping out. It’s solid cosplay, and as always with Snider less tossed off than it feels. He begins by diagnosing “The Human Condition,” which he faces as honestly as any artist, proceeds to grumble about getting stuck next to a bore on a plane, shares truisms like “It’s hard to be happy/Even when there’s nothing wrong,” waits delusionally on a woman who doesn’t love him, and closes with “You've got to live a little.” Yep, that’s the last line on Todd Snider’s last album. You’ve got to live a little. Fitting. Poetic. Sad. He’d have been such a cool old guy. Shit.
49. Skrillex, Fuck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol but Ur Not!! <3
The novelty record that Sonny Moore was born to make is also the raw display of virtuosity that no one who refuses to take him seriously will ever bother to hear. In 46 minutes, 34 cuts collide with haphazard precision as an oily promo voice delivers nonsensical koans (“smoking is bad for your health… especially when it’s your own flesh you’re smoking”), buzzsaw crossfader staggers hither and yon, and bass is not so much dropped as flung downward till it splatters all over the floor. Which minutes will you find most memorable? I personally always perk up when the squiggly synths of the techno-Riverdance parody “DRUIDS” give way to incongruous wubble-wubble-wubbles. There’s even a message of hope, I guess you’d have to call it: “You have got to believe there is something more/You’ve got to believe in the voltage that lives inside us.” If you say so, anonymous fembot voice. As for Warhol, ask Tom Wilson about his production skills.
48. The Kasambwe Brothers, The Kasambwe Brothers
Three Malawi musicians carrying on a family tradition started back in 1987 made their way to the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts. There a residency led to this recording with a label that institution set up to “provide an alternative to the current commercial model.” Both lightweight and sturdy, the Brothers’ acoustic guitar-babatone-drums combo travels well, occasionally suggesting mbube from non-contiguous but not distant South Africa, though maybe my ears are just listening around for reference points. And it’s a delight. Though I’ve got misgivings about the folkloric aspect of this whole arrangement, I don’t begrudge these fellas for shootin’ their shot, or even for admixing Western impurities like violin and cello, tsk tsk. That’s the thing about folklorists, they do get the good shit down on tape. Probably helps that these guys have a little showbiz in them—for starters they aren’t Kasambwes and they’re not brothers.
An enormous personal triumph and a considerable artistic one as well, Lotus follows Simz’s acrimonious split with longtime collaborator (and childhood friend) Inflo, accused here of “Financial exploitation/Emotional exploitation/Calculated and conceited manipulation.” The UK rapper had scrapped four projects since her 2022 album No Thank You, but fifth time’s the you-know-what. New producer Miles Clinton James works up some fantastic settings—dig the contrast between the drumless flute and orchestral backdrop on “Hollow” and the Fela-quoting Afrobeat of “Lion” that follows. While there are lighter moods, as when Simz imitates a “young and dumb” party girl, the best moments are righteous, venomous, and Inflo-directed, like the snarled “You’re not for the culture/You’re just for the cult” or when Simz’s singsong flow rides the slinky bassline of “Thief” like a woman on a mission.
46. Vernon Reid, Hoodoo Telemetry
Guitar hero, tireless champion and conceptualizer of Black rock, and virtuoso forever seeking out a proper context, 67-year-old Vernon Reid isn’t big on solo albums, per se. He prefers to find a role in groups like Masque or Yohimbe Brothers or (the one you’ve heard of) Living Colour. But Hoodoo Telemetry, recorded in memory of his comrade, the late and irreplaceable culture critic Greg Tate, feels personal. The flurry of guitar on the first track suggests you’re in for a straight fusion record but that’s a head fake, because Reid’s concept here is “variety.” He gets lyrical on “Good Afternoon Everyone,” he gets radical on “Freedom Jazz Dance,” he channels Sly on “The Haunting,” he incorporates turntablism on “Bronx Paradox,” he even pulls out his banjo for an old minstrel number, “My Little Zulu Babe.” And yeah, he shreds, especially on “Or Knot” and “Meditation on the Last Times I Saw Arthur Rhames.” If you just asked “who?” you’ve got some reading to do. Maybe start here.
45. Tunde Adebimpe, Thee Black Boltz
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Frontman for era-defining indie band makes belated debut solo album. But though Thee Black Boltz is truly a singer’s record, few frontmen past or present hold the mic with as little ego as Adebimpe. And so the sometimes clamorous, sometimes ominous tracks whipped up with multi-instrumentalist Wilder Zoby rarely stay in their place. One personal favorite is “The Most,” where what I’d call a dancehall riddim for kids is interrupted by a simulated car crash. Lyrics are characteristically dense and allusive, and pretty dark: We’re talking real pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will hours here, with the one where Tunde sings “God knows you’re the worst thing I ever loved” among the cheerier moments. Maybe it’s the context and the contrast that makes “ILY,” where Adebimpe offers up a simple “I love you/With a heart that’s pure and true” over finger-picked guitar, so damn effective.
44. S.G. Goodman, Planting by the Signs
Three albums in, this is where Goodman’s writing catches up with her voice, which has a hardscrabble edge but works toward a lushness she deserves. She can get imagistic without being vague, and the album even closes with an eight-minute allegorical jam, “Heaven,” that never gets too clunky or wears out its welcome. On the centerpiece of this collection, the Kentucky singer-songwriter saves a snapping turtle from some jerky boys and ponders her smalltown upbringing. Softie that I am, though, my favorite is the very straightforward "I'm in Love," with symptoms of said amatory state including “crying at commercials,” “half hour conversations at the check-out line,” and, of course, “dancing in my kitchen, singing into a spoon.”
43. Earl Sweatshirt, Live Laugh Love
A grand old man of the hip-hop underground at the wizened age of 31, Earl raps like a motherfucker without expending any more effort than a track calls for. His latest, the modestly brilliant Live Laugh Love, serves up 11 cuts in 24 minutes, and it’s largely a collab with producer Theravada, who sweetens his woozy, clattery beats with just enough soul samples. Earl remains articulate without articulating, his cadence between a growl and a yawn, and like his old buddy Tyler, the Creator, he’s come a long way from his Odd Future days. Unlike the restless persona-shedder Tyler, however, Earl seems pretty content right where he is.
42. Mekons, Horror
Hey, I heard you like anticolonialism. Can I interest you in an album about the crimes of the British Empire from a collective of weary Marxist rock veterans that kicks off in 1654 with a reggae song about Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell and Queen Elizabeth’s court astronomer John Dee crafting world domination together? Hey, where are you going? More impressionistic than didactic, the Mekons’ latest isn’t exactly defiant stuff—even human dynamo Jon Langford sounds a little battered, and the dominant voice here belongs to unbowed but fatigued Tom Greenhalgh. But these lefty lifers are far from resigned. How else could they make “Physical coercion will not achieve dominance” sound as rousing as “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me”?
I pegged The Current’s favorite industry plants as a one-album wonder, but damn if those skewed instapunk guitars and toughest-girl-in-the-art-school mutters don’t sound as freshly derivative the second time around. Pouty Rhian Teasdale and perky Hester Chambers even get a little riffier here, allowing me to nurture hope that maybe somewhere in the craggy nether regions of the United Kingdom there are still little girls dreaming of being Elastica when they grow up. They can still hold their own in the club (“You wanna fuck me? Yeah, most people do”) but they’re also, well, diversifying. Not only did they write a Strokes song about TV personality (yes I had to look her up) Davina McCall, but they indulge in the “l” word a few times. And just when I start to suspect they think “love” means nothing more than “horny for a specific person for over a week,” they throw in a ballad dull enough to convince me they mean l-u-v. “Jennifer’s Body” is not a Hole cover. “Don’t Speak” is not the No Doubt song. They make it sound so easy. You think maybe everyone else is trying too hard?
40. Ezra Furman, Goodbye Small Head
“If I were a music journalist,” Ezra Furman writes of her latest, “I would call this an orchestral emo prog-rock record sprinkled with samples.” Then she adds, “Thank goodness I’m not a music journalist!” Jewish, trans, and defiant, Furman has been expelling her anxieties into song rather than succumbing to them for 15 years or so; Goodbye Small Head adapts its title from a lyric to Sleater-Kinney’s “Get Up,” and like those punk greats she has a gift for bringing just the the right amount of drama to a situation. The sometimes orchestral, emo in a broad sense, prog-not-quite album climaxes with the truly inspiring “A World of Love and Care,” with Furman declaiming “Human dignity/Was supposed to be a guarantee for all” and urging us all, “Dream better/Dream bigger.”
39. Doja Cat, Vie
With every pop star’s latest album now a lofty career statement, I’ve come to cherish the slight, flighty, flirty pop-rap of a gal who demands “more body, less mind.” This time out Doja claims to be inspired by “the ’80s,” and you’ve gotta wonder what that means to someone who wasn’t alive then. Well, with Jack Antonoff (born 1984, fwiw) calling the shots, it sounds a little bit like Prince (or the contemporaries who ripped him off), the Knight Rider theme, Queen’s dumbed-down Chic bass lines, and at least one saxophone. Whether Doja is White Lotus-ing and chilling with a bi guy on the casually queer “Stranger,” asking the eternal question “Am I gay or am I just angry?,” or boasting “I smell like ice cream and pheromones,” she’s made an album for parading your fine self around while regretting your unfortunate attraction to dick. It is all, as one song title puts it, "Silly! Fun!"
38. Jeffrey Lewis & the Voltage, The EVEN MORE Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis
Lewis is the kind of Lower East Side weirdo they don’t make anymore. A comic book artist and not-quite-folk singer who just exudes pre-gentrification downtown Manhattanness, he turned 50 this year, and he always seems to be releasing a new collection of comically depressed (or depressedly comic) new songs with one band or another. Highlights here include an ode to his favorite drug (Tylenol PM), “Movie Date” (about how his sweetie always falls asleep before the film ends), a song that imagines the late poet/songwriter David Berman going on a crime spree with the writer Amy Rose Spiegel (don’t ask me to explain), and the new classic “Sometimes Life Hits You” (“And you say ‘Ow! Fuck! That hurts!’”).
37. Julien Baker & Torres, Send a Prayer My Way
Two singer-songwriters who’d never previously hit my sweet spot find structure and solace in country music, which focuses their need for self-expression in a common language of tropes and wordplay—you know, “Bottom of a Bottle,” “Downhill Both Ways,” like that. Their songs cover all the downbeat bases, from childhood trauma to addiction to plain ol’ bad love, but the prevailing tone is hardly a downer because we’re hearing two queer southern women proudly reclaiming the music of their childhood while dropkicking its moralism back into the last century. As Torres drawls with a mix of naughtiness and gentility, “There’s no such thing as guilty pleasure, as long as your pleasure’s not unkind.” A special shout out to Aisha Burns’s fiddle, which is high lonesome and then some.
36. Dijon, Baby
If you’re worried about the falling birthrate in the U.S., don’t blame Dijon Duenas. The abstract R&B collagist didn’t call his latest album Baby as just a term of endearment: The title track is addressed to the infant he and his wife had so much fun making. When he follows that with “Another Baby” (“we need to expand the collection”), you’ve gotta wonder if the fella knows about birth control. Dijon is coming off a year where he worked with both Justins (Bieber and Vernon) and throughout Baby you can hear him commune with the horny weirdos who came before him—there are Prince echoes of course, but I hear more of the pop-funk of Scritti Politti. True, his wordplay’s not quite worthy of Scritti’s Green Gartside, though Dijon’s lyrics are cute enough that I wish he’d nudge the vocals up in the mix, especially since that would inspire him to write even cuter lyrics.
35. Madi Diaz, Fatal Optimist
I know, sad songs say so much, but there are also so many of them, and so many lovely voices singing them. So why did Diaz’s latest click with me during a recent nighttime drive through western Minnesota? All I can say is it’s a breakup album rooted in the end of her long-term relationship with fellow songwriter Teddy Geiger, and a well-observed one at that, adding “I wanna be someone who doesn’t know your middle name” and “Some ‘I’m sorry’s are so selfish” to the big book of heartbreak. And it doesn’t settle for anger or sullenness, but passes through multiple moods, just like a real lived-in breakup will put you through. Diaz’s voice hurts in such a resonant way for me, I may just revisit her past albums. OK, maybe not all six of them.
34. Aesop Rock, Black Hole Superette
With the big five-oh in sight, the over-erudite backpacker is still cramming his bars to bursting with less than mellifluous polysyllables, and is his best full-length in nigh on a decade is maybe his most down-to-earth too: On my favorite cut, Aes and his girlfriend find a snail in their home aquarium that multiplies with shocking haste. Runner up: “John Something,” about the guest lecturer in art school who turned the rapper on to When We Were Kings but whose last name Aes can’t summon up for the life of him. He followed this up later in the year with the more (justifiably) stressed I Heard It's a Mess There Too, which is no slouch either.
Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson is a little much—OK, a lot much—and her self-deprecation is as massive and wide-ranging as her desires. Three albums in, the Dublin singer-songwriter arrives at a title that aptly sums up her sound of her rootsy electronics—Euro-Country—though CMAT’s titles rarely tell the whole story. Yes, “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” (which inspired a TikTok dance craze this summer) offers just what the title says, though not without pathos, But the title track is about being torn between home and the broader world, while “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash” explores the complexity of mourning, and “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station,” in which Thompson struggles against her irrational hatred of the overexposed celeb chef (“OK/Don't be a bitch/The man's got kids”) is really a story of displaced anger. Chappell Roan fans feeling adventurous should give her a go.
32. Snocaps, Snocaps
Listeners and musicians have way different expectations from supergroups. Fans expect such projects to exponentially exceed the sum of their parts. Musicians just wanna play music with folks they like. The pleasure here isn’t just hearing Katie and Allison Crutchfield singing together again (what is it about sibling harmonies?) while MJ Lenderman jangles expertly in the background, ensuring his place as the greatest sideman in ’ ‘20s indie. It’s in how simply everything falls into place—or in the way the easy chorus of “Heathcliff” (“When you go down you’ll take me down with you”) and the breezily bleak “Over Our Heads” (“Don't bother chasing us, boys/We'll see ourselves out”) conceal the hard work that makes simplicity appear so effortless. Katie sounds more relaxed temporarily sloughing off the mantle of Waxahatchee, and the revelation in Jenn Pelly’s great Oxford American profile that so much of her writing has been about the Crutchfields’ younger sister, Sydney, and her addiction issues makes this the first Crutchfield opus we can fully experience as an overheard family conversation. Snocaps climaxes with “You in Rehab,” a song for Sydney, then closes with “Coast II,” a reprise of the album’s opener with Alison’s daughter Lola singing. It’s Crutchfields all the way down.
31. PinkPantheress, Fancy That
With PinkPantheress, the difference between an OK track and a troo banger is hard to puzzle out at first. You have to let her songs soak up your attention, like those compressed sponges that sproing into animals after you drop ’em in water. So let’s just say most of the nine cuts on this 20 minute “mixtape” pop. “My name is Pink and I'm really glad to meet you/ You're recommended to me by some people” goes in the Big Book of Great Opening Lines and from there the sugar high never lets up. That she not only quotes Basement Jaxx’s “Romeo” but names a different song after it helps explain her appeal to ancient listeners like me: Her neo-drum ‘n’ bass and two-step garage revamps insist that club music can also be pop in a way you don’t run across so much these days.
30. Craig Finn, Always Been
Probably the most impressive moment of Finn’s quite impressive new set comes on the closing song, “Shamrock,” which illustrates the passage of time via the shift in Minnesota convenience stores from SuperAmerica to Speedway—and the guy hasn’t even lived here in decades. Now that’s an eye for detail. If the strugglers on Hold Steady albums always hold out a hope for salvation that’s reflected in the sweep of the music, Finn’s solo albums center on quieter vignettes about similar down-and-outers, here set to the sympathetic accompaniment of a back-up band inspired by ’70s singer-songwriter rock. This sort of project can be a danger for a writer with a literary bent, but Finn avoids easy epiphanies or ironies. And his characters express themselves with far fewer justifications than most folks with hard luck typically go in for, even if I get the uncomfortable feeling that one of them is going to ask to sleep on my couch “just for tonight.”
29. Open Mike Eagle, Neighborhood Gods Unlimited
Now 44, with a premature midlife crisis behind him, this L.A.-based art-rap lifer simply goes about the day-to-day here. The album opens with a “stone cold idiot” announcing that he “Woke Up Knowing Everything,” but the tracks that follow are deliberately more quotidian. Mike is the only employee at the Daily Planet to be halfway curious about what Clark Kent is up to; Mike swipes Tims from the Mephisto where he works; Mike loses a handful of tracks when his phone gets run over by car. (It’s like when RZA’s basement flooded, wiping out hundreds of beats, he says, “but less, less devastating.”) When pals Video Dave and Still Rift (whom Mike records with as the I-swear-better-than-its name trio Previous Industries) pop in, it’s clear that this is primo hangout rap, just a bright guy free-associating with a comic’s understated delivery over just-memorable-enough beats.
28. Los Thuthanaka: Los Thuthanaka
Fine, Pitchfork. Fine. I give! I won’t pretend to know much about the recordings of Andean folk rhythms that siblings Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton restlessly tinker with here, but pokey they sure ain’t. If “immersive” and “hypnotic” are what you’re after, though, you’d be better off with Uganda’s Nakibemebe Embaire Group. The lure here is how the musicians deliberately disturb—disrupt, if you want to get fancy—any potential trancey effect. What you’ll remember are the guitars that announce “OK, let’s really get this started” two-thirds of the way through “Q’iwanakax-Q’iwsanakax Utjxiwa,” only to fade into what sounds like an overheard carnival procession, or those arena-techno synth chords on “Salay ‘Titi Ch’iri Siqititi.’” If the electronic add-ons occasionally strike me as glorified sound effects, contributing less melodically, rhythmically, or conceptually than they might, well, that’s the price of progress. No matter their heritage, these art hounds are moderns reaching back to tradition for sustenance rather than traditionalists modernizing their sound. They redefine rather than preserve the past by synthesizing it with the present. There are worse paths toward tomorrow.
27. James McMurtry, The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy
McMurtry’s latest has everything you'd ask from the laconic Texan: a little pathos, a little mythos, a sharp eye, a sharper tongue. He’s been charting the decline of the American empire with unrelenting candor at least since "We Can't Make It Here" in 2006, but as he puts it on “Broken Freedom Song,” “Ain’t no fun to sing that song no more.” Here he places the blame squarely on the descendants of the American settlers as "Products of genocide...Tellin' ourselves we're free...Salt of the fuckin’ Earth...In search of a Caesar." He just might mean you.
26. Comet Gain, Letters to Ordinary Outsiders
These tuneful Brits are in their fourth decade as a band, and they sound it (complimentary), though frontman David Feck has been the only constant throughout. Feck’s been looking over his shoulder for at least 20 years now, and his homely voice is indeed that of an “ordinary outsider.” Topics include driving through your old neighbo(u)rhood and wondering if an acquaintance ever left, the imaginary lives that run parallel to our own, and the danger of forming bands with singers who want to be Julian Cope. The music jangles and sometimes even rocks, and the modest little spoken interludes about their lives and careers are as charming as they’re meant to be. “There’s always further,” Rachel Evans warns. “Further for you to fall.” But the one that starts “Do you remember/When we were younger?” proceeds to “How many lives do we have yet? Well, I haven’t found out yet,” and, more crucially, “Keep on going, don’t look back/The past will give you a heart attack.”
25. Big Thief, Double Infinity
The sound of this record put me off at first because this band’s substance has been so bound up in its style. Bassist Max Oleartchik is gone, and with him, coincidentally or not, that sprung a sense of communal creation that was Big Thief’s hallmark. Then I got over myself, and I could hear that all-encompassing wash of reverb not as an airbrushing of idiosyncrasies but just Adrienne Lenker’s latest way of getting cosmic. Unlike most rock mystics, Lenker never comes off like she’s out to start a cult, which is one reason hers is so devoted. Now 34, she acknowledges her insecurities (“I’m afraid of getting older/That’s what I’ve learned to say,” “I’m happy with you/Why do I need to explain myself”) only to let them wash over her with a radical acceptance that appears also to ensure really good sex. Hand me my robe and point me to the compound, kind sister. “Swallow poison, swallow sugar,” Lenker muses. “Sometimes they taste the same.” Like elderberry wine, as another brilliant contemporary of hers might say.
24. Ale Hop & Titi Bakorta, Mapambazuko
Have I mentioned how much I love Nyege Nyege Tapes? The Ugandan dance label has opened my ears to more Afropop than any imprint since Stern’s Africa, and it started the year off right with this pairing of versatile Peruvian electronicat Ale Hop and fleet Congolese guitarist Titi Bakorta. The duo capitalizes on the new hot global music trend of exploring the rhythmic connections between Central Africa and South America, with lots of electronic crashes and whooshes and whistles and farts thrown in lest you mistake the creators for fogies. The beats are perkily cumbia-adjacent and the fleet streams of guitar recall the speed soukous of Diblo Dibala’s Loketo, if that means anything to you. Or even if it doesn’t.
23. De La Soul, Cabin in the Sky
Hard-hearted bastard that I am, I chastened myself at first for getting too sentimental about this comeback. But fuck it, Dave Jolicoeur is a guy worth getting sentimental about. Like too many rappers from his generation—like too many Black men of his generation—he died too young, and the persistence of his buddies is heroic. “If y’all stop then Dave stops,” Posdnuous says a friend told him, and, with help from friends and the ever good-natured Maseo, the surviving MC carries the day. Hooks are borrowed from “This Will Be” and “Cruel Summer” (no, not Taylor’s), Premier and Pete Rock do right by the beats, and “A Quick 16 for Mama,” with Killer Mike guesting, is the rare filial rap jam that isn’t full of shit. Pos and Mase sound younger in their mid-50s than they did hitting 30, and their anti-commercial kneejerks are sure sharper now than when Biggie and Jay were blazing the charts. I sincerely hope your faves sound this live and this wise 30 years down the road.
22. Willi Carlisle, Winged Victory
Carlisle’s queer, class-conscious country music just keeps getting angrier and hornier—and funnier. Here he begins with the self-explanatory “We Have Fed You For 1000 Years,” proceeds to the some-explanation-required downhome waltz “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears,” and then wallops you upside the libido with the beyond-explanation “Big Butt Billy,” a verbal ogling of a nonbinary diner waitron that climaxes with a 12-line ejaculation of wonder from Carlisle you’ve just gotta hear for yourself. And on “Work Isn’t Work,” enduring the contempt of wealthy vacationers and exercising solidarity with the scene girls turned sex workers, he just about reaches his limit—“A bitter morning/The sun is dope sick/And all the world is/Tied off for its fix” might just come off as cynical if the jaunty bluegrass backing would allow it.
As its title suggests, the follow up to Brittney Parks’ brilliant 2022 breakthrough, Natural Brown Prom Queen, is more focused on the dancefloor. To be more explicit, it’s about a life in motion, about figuring out who you are on the fly, in part by using the women you idolize and desire—like the a gal who admits "I ain't never been from the Chi to Dubai/But I'm down for the ride"—as mirrors that reflect your beliefs and ambitions. And along the way, Parks livens up a truckload of rust-belt dance styles with her violin, which by turns conjures up disco strings, East African folk styles, or country fiddle.
20. Frankie Cosmos, Different Talking
Finding herself on the far side of 30 and slightly miffed that she hasn’t magically figured life out yet, onetime bedroom-pop whisperer Greta Kline encourages her band to assert itself ever so slightly on Frankie Cosmos’s sixth album. Though these 17 songs would fit on one side of an old TDK with room to spare, you get the sense that Kline could stretch a song out to a whole three minutes if she wanted. But, like, what’s the point? (She tops out at an epic 2:47, FYI.) Toting around “a tote bag filled with other tote bags” in a city where “everything’s a pothole or a restaurant/And smells like pot,” she can’t “keep from acting like I’m 27” and regrets that “my bitch heart is a fucker.” But there’s something unavoidably optimistic in that bright little voice of hers, and in the way she follows up “I still don’t know what I want” with “I’ll take one of each.” Most importantly, every tune here hits home—maybe because not one of them overstays their welcome.
19. Sabrina Carpenter, Man’s Best Friend
Heteropessimist, her? Nah, she’s just disappointed in her options and doubly disappointed in how she picks ’em, just like so many 26-year-old women before her. (If only I’d known how sorry the competition was when I was young.) Carpenter and songwriting teammate Amy Allen are sharp and funny on the sort of male faults you and they only wish were cliches, with learned helplessness a favorite target. With the only pop boy the pop girls trust, Jack Antonoff, handling production along with 1D accomplice John Ryan, this isn’t as surprising or surefire as Short n’ Sweet. But only Carpenter could bring us the dead-to-rights “Manchild,” “Tears” (“I get wet at the thought of you/Being a responsible guy”), and “We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night,” about a relationship that just won’t end. And while I’m not assuming any of this is strictly autobiographical, Sabrina sure does seem to have it in for somebody’s mom.
18. James Brandon Lewis, Apple Cores
I’m not the guy you turn to for jazz recommendations, but I do try to keep tabs on who’s the brawniest saxophonist in the pack these days. I was hep to Lewis before he teamed up with Fugazi offshoot the Messthetics for an experiment I’m glad to hear is ongoing (I first fell for 2021’s Jesup Wagon with his Red Lily Quintet) but The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis and a Turf Club gig ensured that I kept track of him. Two improvised sessions with the rhythm section of Chad Taylor and Josh Werner led to Apple Cores, on which Lewis appears chiefly to commune with the spirit of Ornetter Coleman, an influence he’s discussed in the past. (Dig this great chat between Lewis and Sean McPherson about Ornette at Jazz88.) Coleman is the inspiration for "Five Spots to Caravan" and the composer of “Broken Shadows,” the only non-original number here. On three numbered title tracks, Lewis wails and honks and squalls. On the meditative “Prince Eugene,” augmented by mbira, he repeats riffs, toys with their structure, and follows the melody where it leads.
Look, when you release a perfect debut and then wait eight years to drop the follow-up, folks are gonna have expectations. That will not be met. This is the work of a star with something to lose, and you can hear the second-guessing in its choice of features, in its changes of pace, in its need to bloat out to 23 songs in 71 minutes while directing suckers not satisfied with the 27-song “Snow Mix” to a 33-song “Ultimate Edition” that’s over 90 minutes. Still, compared not to Invasion of Privacy but to the run of rap albums out there these days, Am I the Drama? wins hands down in skills, beats, personality, the works. From “I’m on your dick/I wanna hold it while you pee” to “I tell these hoes to suck my dick/They put they hair up in a bun,” no one literalizes slang like Cardi. Did she need to take a whole song to roast (who?) BIA? Did any of us need to hear Lizzo sing Four Non-Blondes? Of course not. But if you still care about such things, this album still flows better than the track-after-track-after-track of Playboi Carti’s intermittently brilliant Music, and I keep hearing that’s a classic.
16. The Beths, Straight Line Was a Lie
I’d never have pegged Elizabeth Stokes as a fellow depressive. Though she sings her share of bummers, this New Zealand quartet’s front-Beth comes across as a relatively even-keeled person—maybe it’s just the accent. In fact, Stokes wrote the songs for the band’s latest album, Straight Line Was a Lie, after filling her first SSRI scrip. It’s no insult to say there’s nothing here as brilliant as the title track from 2022’s Expert in a Dying Field—I’d say the same about most albums released in 2025, and few of them have a song that comes as close as “Metal” (“So you need the metal in your blood to keep you alive/And you read the compass in your eyes so you can stay right/So you surf the earth's magnetic core to keep you aligned”). And I’d be hard-pressed to find a more lovely sentiment to share with an old friend than “Never change/Unless you do/Unless you want to.”
15. Robert Forster, Strawberries
The surviving half of the songwriting duo at the core of the great Australian indie-pop band the Go-Betweens continues to grow as a songwriter as he nears 70. Mortality hovered over Forster’s The Candle and the Flame in 2023, released after his wife Karin Bäumler was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Her remission has lightened the mood, and she even duets with him on the charming domestic spat “Strawberries.” Mostly, Forster is flooded with memories of new love that may or may not be autobiographical: “We thought of marriage, we thought of kids/We knew a marriage on the skids/Because of the kids,” he reminisces or imagines. The masterpiece here is the eight-minute “Breakfast on the Train,” which (sorry) climaxes with a hotel hookup that disturbs the neighbors, leaving the clerk to protest “Over the volume of love we have no claim.” It’s funnier the way he sings it.
14. Adrianne Lenker, Live at Revolution Hall
Lo-fi live recordings, pre-show warmups, soundchecks with flubs, casual chatter, excessive crowd noise, a backstage Robert Burns recital—from most artists, I’d find this jumble of 43 tracks, collected from a three-night Portland stand, self-indulgent, not to mention unlistenable. But Lenker isn’t most artists, as you might agree even if you can’t stand her. This two-hour document is more representative of “the live experience” than most straightforward live albums, and far from a messy bit of fan service, it’s a definitive statement of her creative life outside of Big Thief. It’s an opportunity to revel in how her playfully adept acoustic guitar work channels the band’s sound into a single instrument, and you can practically hear how attentive the audience is. OK, so yeah, I’m a fan, and one who’s happy to be reminded of Lenker’s 2024 State Theatre show. Which is why I chickened out of ranking it higher.
13. Amanda Shires, Nobody’s Girl
Alongside (or rather, apart from) Jason Isbell, Shires is one half of the Great Americana Divorce of 2024, and Nobody’s Girl is the “she said” to the “he said“ of Isbell’s Foxes in the Snow. Where Isbell is analytical, a bit cagey, and ready to move on, Nobody’s Girl is an open wound of a record, cycling through all the responses to heartbreak we’ve each endured, even turning to Billy Joel’s The Stranger for solace at one point. (Hey, it’s better than getting bangs.) Think “He erases the details/And I'm history” sounds bitter? Wait for “The thing is, he justifies it, using me/And cashing in on our marriage.” Or “That was a real fucked up way to leave me” from the rocker “Piece of Mind.” Sometimes I can barely stomach it; Isbell’s craft goes down much smoother. But for someone with a low emotional pain tolerance who also distrusts how well he can rationalize things when he’s the one causing the pain (it’s me, I’m the someone), Nobody’s Girl cuts deep. This ain’t your mama’s broken heart.
When I call this Atlanta rapper’s flow buttery I don’t mean uniformly smooth—rich and salty, yes, but sometimes a little cool and sometimes chunky as well. The unfashionably full productions JID rhymes over range from the gospelized “Glory” to the trap-wise “On McAfee,” as you’d expect from a guy who knows both the street and the church intimately. Top-tier guests like Clipse, Vince Staples, and Ciara, not to mention his buds in Earthgang, crowd the mix, leading a Slant reviewer to find the results “restless, overstuffed, and desperate to impress,” To which I can only respond: Yes, and?
11. Bad Bunny, Debí Tirar Más Fotos
Really, Keith? The album where he blends bomba and plena in with the trap and reggaeton is the one that clicks with you? Sooooo predictable. Hey, what can I say? Too self-assured to care about anything as 20th century as “crossing over,” the Puerto Rican “King of Latin Trap” does want to expand his realm—to take in older listeners of the Latin diaspora, that is. And if one pitiful monoglot gringo gets swept up in the process, where’s the harm in that? Along with that extended San Juan residency, the release of Debí Tirar Más Fotos indicated that 2025 was the year Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio truly assumed the mantle of culture hero. And, of course, with an embrace of home comes an undertow of sadness—that it has changed, that you have changed, that nothing will ever be what it was. That hinted sob in his voice that’s always put me off a bit makes perfect sense here. Like the man says, “Ey.”
A longtime Arkestra member, and its leader ever since Sun Ra returned to Saturn in 1993 and his aide-de-camp John Gilmore passed two years later, alto saxophonist Allen waited patiently till after he turned 100 to cut his first album as a leader. And “patient” is the operative word here: Even when the band kicks it up a notch for the bluesy “Are You Ready,” these numbers rollick at their own pace, ambling without ever settling into (heh) lanquidity. On the elegant Afro-Latin “African Sunset,” Allen works his way up and down his instrument with deliberative ingenuity as space-age sound effects hover in the background. Unobtrusive string arrangements cushion several cuts, including the title track, which Neneh Cherry sings with bright aplomb. Hard to say if Allen’s occasionally loose embouchure is a concession to aging or an aesthetic choice, but in either case he isn’t here to show off as a soloist. He’s out to showcase the big band as a living, elastic tradition—a tradition that’s barely older than he is.
9. Lucy Dacus, Forever Is a Feeling
I know it’s not a competition, but Dacus is my favorite boygenius member. She’s the warmest singer of the bunch, and the trio’s most open-hearted songwriter as well. And as with Julien Baker, her experience with the trio has changed her perspective. She’s looking forward more and dissecting past mistakes less, with the line “You are my best guess at the future” proof that there will always be new ways to write a love song. This fine record has largely been met with shrugs and contradictory critiques: For some she’s too prim, for others too exhibitionist. Ah well, like Rick Nelson used to say, ya can’t please everyone. On “Ankles,” Dacus makes her needs clear: hot sex, lifelong love, and help with the crossword in the morning. She deserves nothing less, and neither do you or I. Don’t you dare break her heart, Julien.
8. Edna Martinez Presents Picó: Sound System Culture From The Colombian Caribbean
I first learned about Berlin-based Colombian DJ Martinez when Michaelangelo Matos touted her fantastic tribute to Congolese fretboard speed demon Diblo Dibala in his newsletter this time last year. Where that mix explored the links between Central African soukous and South American champeta, this focuses on picó, the culture of colorful mobile discos (take a look) that spin white label Afropop to the delight of north shore Colombians. Because the only genre here is “records that people liked,” and because those people have incredibly wide-ranging tastes, the dots don’t always connect. The trip from São Tomé’s suave Pedro Lima to the Shoe Laces’ bouncy mbaqanga to Claudio y su Combo’s straight-up rumba to synthpoppers Zaire and “I’m Tired of Living in the Shack” to (whew!) Martinez’s galloping remix of the Algerian rai group Afous could give you jet lag if not whiplash. So think of this more as a Top 40 radio playlist than a DJ radio. Not that that should (or will) stop you from dancing.
7. Margo Price, Hard Headed Woman
Ever since she dubbed her debut album Midwest Farmer’s Daughter in 2016, Price (born in Aledo, Illinois, if you were wondering) has rocked and twanged with a class-conscious edge. But a gal gets restless on the road, and so does her band, which may be why her sound got woolier with the years (or it might just be the weed). In any case, Price curbs the psychedelic extravagances on her latest, Hard Hearted Woman, because she’s got something to say. The anthem here is “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down,” a time-honored credo she credits to Kristofferson and dedicated to Kimmell, but the centerpiece is the obsessive “Close to You,” which aptly namechecks Lucinda and sighs, “We played the jukebox while democracy fell.” Price rarely gets that explicit, but her convictions are firm enough to steel you for the fight ahead, even when she’s borrowing orneriness from George Jones (“I Just Don’t Give a Damn”) and Waylon Jennings (“Take your tongue out my mouth/I’m kissing you goodbye”). Helluva band too, as there had better be.
Allen seems an unpopular figure in her home country, due in part I gather to how she pronounces “beau’iful” despite her posh pedigree but also because she’s an unavoidable tabloid fixture. So it makes sense that this autopsy of a marriage that died by degrees would have something of the tabloid to it—if someone’s gonna drag you through the mud, might as well wallow on your own terms. Consider its lyrical hooks (“Da da da da/Who’s Madeline?” or “I thought it was a dojo/I didn’t know it was a pussy palace” or “If it has to happen, baby, do you want to know?”) the clickbait heds that draw you into personal essays much more revelatory (and juicier) than the norm. A basic plotline: Living separately leads to infidelity leads to an open marriage leads to the indignity of scouring the apps to find companionship. Whatever hubby David Harbour might have to say for himself, Allen’s such a damn pro as a storyteller, phrasemaker, and tunesmith that her version will always ring true. Art can be unfair that way.
5. Jens Lekman, Songs for Other People’s Weddings
A rather predictable thing happened after Danish songwriter Lekman wrote a song called “If You Ever Need a Stranger (To Sing at Your Wedding)” 20 years ago—strangers started asking Lekman to sing at their weddings. Often enough, he complied, and some of his experiences became the creative material for his latest album. Lekman describes the characters he meets on these gigs—the just-married couple sharing a suit that fits them both who he gets stuck behind in the urinal line, the two single sisters at his table who remind him of Marge Simpson’s sisters Patty and Selma—while telling the story of his own deteriorating relationship. As always his speechlike tenor conveys a gentle humanism that his lyrics match, and the string accompaniments—more meringue than frosting—buoy the melodies rather than smothering them.
If there’s any justice (or any future), this hip-hop era will one day be remembered for the dominance of Billy Woods. Woods’s topics range from the surreal to the mundane; he recalls how “Moms showed us where she kept the passports hid” one moment, brags the next about “three beautiful kids and they wake up and make their own beds.” He’s “Deng Xiaoping/Smokin’ oil in the wok,” then he’s ashamed of sifting through an evicted family’s curbside belongings, then he’s opining that “amputation is how you survive/Can’t get away if you don’t leave something behind.” Though 17 different producers contribute 18 tracks, the sound coheres because they all trawl the same murky patch of the underground. If you’re looking for evidence to disprove the half-truth that inspiration comes quicker to the young, this 47(ish)-year-old late bloomer is your man.
I appreciated Karly Hartzman’s writing on Wednesday’s sludgy 2023 breakthrough, Rat Saw God, but this one just moves so much more energetically I had to check and see if they’d traded in their rhythm section. Also helps that Hartzman’s new ex MJ Lenderman is contributing indelible 120 Minutes licks rather than throwing up scrims of shoegrunge scuzz—why, “Pick Up That Knife” woulda fit in fine somewhere deep in the wool of Wowee Zowee. The zippier, hookier music throws Hartzman’s observations into sharper relief, whether she’s breezing past offhand details (“Last time I saw you was a livestream of a funeral”) or revisiting accumulated regrets (watching a Phish concert and Human Centipede, sharing nudes with a guy you can’t bitch out ’cause he’s dead). She’s retrospecting a lot, as 28 year olds will, especially newly single ones. But in a year when Lily Allen and Amanda Shires let loose on their wayward men, “The Way Love Goes” is a sweet reminder that not all relationships end in flames.
2. Tyler Childers, Snipe Hunter
How dare anyone sound so damn confident in 2025. As the world burns, this East Kentucky boy just rears back and sings about whatever strikes his fancy—courting an older woman, eating the rich, learning a newb to ID and forage for herbs and mushrooms—in words that stick with you, whether they’re metaphorical like “hotter than the devil's dick on fire/In a wool sock that is soaked, I mean, completely doused/In kerosene and set ablaze” or as straightforward as “If there ever come a time I get rabies, you’re high on my bitin’ list.” Pretty well-traveled too, with his “observations from a traveling hillbilly” including advice for visitors to Australia (kangaroos are “deer evolved to bеtter boxers”) and a discussion of the Bhagavad Gita that makes clear that this dude knows his dharma from his bhakti. And all set to a nasty ol’ backbeat he calls a “sludge river stomp.”
This narcotically erotic Ghanaian-American’s diasporan fusion keeps the age-old dialogue between continents rolling on. Take her sure shot hit, ”S.M.O.,” which rises from a moody plain of South African gqom but also incorporates a stabby synth bass that, like so much of its keyboard hookery, wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Thriller—an album, you may recall, that borrowed a standout from a Cameroon jazzman and featured a backing band that scored a tongue-in-cheek soft-rock hit called “Africa.” Amaarae just keeps getting hornier as her music grows in rhythmic complexity (“S.M.O.” stands for “slut me out”), cooing with possessive sexuality like a less demure Janet. And from the irrepressible hook of “ketamine, coke, and molly” to the lover who “tastes like Lexapro,” you’d think she diddles herself while reading the PDR. But her sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ “switching genres till we make it pop” ethos is about heightening her senses rather than deadening them. Maybe I’m rationalizing, but her immersive hedonism strikes me as an overdue counterbalance to the pop superstar workaholism exemplified by Beyoncé. “Do you believe in life after drugs?” Girl, you better.
