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The Best Albums of 2025
There are plenty of albums that might have made the cut on a different day. But good list-making requires hubris, constraint. A moment of wild and fearless conviction.
Earlier this year, my colleague and bud Kelefa Sanneh suggested that music critics, as a lot, have gone soft—becoming submissive, overly agreeable, and, in some cases, nearly servile. He’s right, of course: reviews sections, when they still exist, are far less salty. Ecstatic disembowelment has given way to a kind of quasi-soothing, everyone’s-a-winner placation, a neutralization surely fed by the same anti-intellectual fervor that’s gripped the culture since at least the first Trump Administration, and hastened by the general economic collapse of the media industry. (It takes a heroic amount of conviction to accept weeks of online hazing in exchange for some paltry sum—or, as one editor Sanneh spoke to put it, “The juice ain’t worth the squeeze.”)
I would also add that the past decade has perhaps left everyone feeling a little worn-out and tender. The world has always been cruel, but we’ve never had such constant, unfiltered access to the ghastly particulars, and it’s hard, after a day of passively witnessing far-off atrocities, to find the energy to, say, properly roast Taylor Swift for alluding to the term “dickmatize” while also not having the cojones to actually use it. (She opts, disappointingly, for “ahh-matize”—girl, if you’re gonna be horny on main, commit to the bit!) We are so overloaded with free entertainment options that it’s easier than ever to simply look away when something doesn’t instantly catch your fancy; whereas it once might have felt urgent, even morally necessary, to dunk on the pop singer Benson Boone for incorporating backflipping into his personality, now I just watch him careen through the air and think, “Look at that kid rip! God bless.”
Being a critic does, however, require the constant interrogation of one’s own tastes and proclivities—perhaps never more so than when compiling a Best Albums list. 2025 felt like a transitional year for popular music, though it’s extremely difficult to say what’s waiting around the corner. Kendrick Lamar’s “Luther,” a swooning, lovesick duet with the R. & B. singer SZA, was the longest-running No. 1, spending thirteen weeks at the top of the Hot 100; Lamar aside, hip-hop mostly continued to cede its chart dominance to country, pop, and Alex Warren, whose gospel-tinged single “Ordinary” was the second most popular song of the year. Warren is twenty-five, and a co-founder of the L.A.-based TikTok collective Hype House, but “Ordinary” feels distinctly middle-aged, destined to be played at dentist’s offices and wedding receptions from now until the end of time. I do not like the song—its particular bombast feels pummelling, gray—but I appreciate Warren’s dedication to old-fashioned, googly-eyed romance: “I thought you had to die to find / Somethin’ so out of the ordinary,” he belts, his voice doused with longing. A lot of the year’s biggest hits were comparably schmaltzy or grating (Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’s “Die with a Smile,” Huntr/x’s “Golden,” a glitchy empowerment anthem from the animated film “KPop Demon Hunters”). Many things change, but incapacitation in the face of love appears to be eternal.
As ever, I want to thank the readers of The New Yorker for listening alongside me for another year. This job routinely sends me to strange and remarkable places, both literally (I spent last New Year’s Eve in the concrete recesses of Madison Square Garden, watching Phish prepare for and perform a four-hour show that included the dramatic conjuring of a thunder goddess), and in a more metaphysical sense—an Elsewhere of the spirit. I’m always grateful to report back. Lately, listening has transformed into such a cloistered experience, a private ritual, enacted on headphones or in our cars, a hyper-convenient way to make the world disappear. It’s easy to forget that music also accelerates communion, a sense of belonging. That’s something I often feel when I’m writing: a giddiness to share the experience, whether it be transcendent or ghastly, with others. I suppose that impulse is at the heart of criticism. It is also, perhaps, the point of being alive.
15. “Tranquilizer”
Oneohtrix Point Never
O.P.N. is the alias of the electronic composer Daniel Lopatin, who makes elegiac, sometimes inscrutable, often instrumental music using computers, synthesizers, and digital detritus. “Tranquilizer,” Lopatin’s stunning eleventh record, was built around a set of commercial sample CDs that Lopatin discovered on the Internet Archive a few years back (the collection was mysteriously removed for a while, then reappeared later, a series of events that Lopatin, who studied library science at the Pratt Institute, surely found both metaphorical and possibly romantic). “Tranquilizer” is a strange and beautiful album, full of haunted melodies and enigmatic rhythms.
14. “Addison”
Addison Rae
Hot take, but “Addison,” the dèbut LP from the TikTok starlet Addison Rae, has turned out to be one of the most unexpected, inventive, and reliably enjoyable pop records of 2025: debauched, earnest, surprisingly vulnerable. Rae’s aesthetic touchstones are obvious (Lana Del Rey, Britney Spears), but her embodiment of them feels hypermodern.
13. “SABLE, fABLE”
Bon Iver
Since the release of “SABLE, fABLE,” his fifth album, Justin Vernon, the musician behind Bon Iver, has been suggesting that he’s ready to clock out, professionally: “I want to be done with this whole thing,” he told the Guardian, in April. If Vernon does retreat from the music business, “SABLE, fABLE,” a collection of songs about devastation, self-acceptance, ecstatic love, and gruelling rebirth, would be an admirable coda. It’s a record that’s plainly oriented toward survival: “There are miles and miles of tape / You can watch it, it’s been saved,” he sings on “There’s a Rhythmn,” a dreamy, buoyant track about recognizing when something is over. “There’s a rhythm to reclaim / Get tall and walk away.”
12. “Bleeds”
Wednesday
This rock band from Asheville makes smart, noisy, country-tinged music; the singer and songwriter Karly Hartzman’s lyrics belie an unusual awareness of just how bizarre and fragile it is that we’re alive at all. I like when Hartzman presents a series of finely wrought images, and lets her listeners suss out the rest of the story: “Misread your name at the wake, snack from a vending machine / Like a smack on the ass at the back of a dream / Mounted antlers in the kitchen on a crooked nail,” she sings on “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On).” “Bleeds” is both catchier and gentler than “Rat Saw God,” the group’s previous LP, but it’s still caustic and punchy when it needs to be.
11. “Mayhem”
Lady Gaga
“Mayhem,” Gaga’s excellent sixth solo album, is a tidy synthesis of everything she does best: dark, throbbing, industrial dance music; lyrics about the intoxication and disorientation of fame; visually striking (and vaguely grotesque) aesthetics. The standard belting and the movie roles are nice, but I desperately missed this iteration of her.
10. “Earthstar Mountain”
Hannah Cohen
It’s hard to ascribe genre to Cohen’s music, which effortlessly braids elements of country, pop, and soul. “Earthstar Mountain” is suffused with a kind of glowing, mid-seventies, Laurel Canyon groove; it’s deeply sensual, but will also make you think of colored glass, gnarled trees, house cats languishing in a sunbeam. (There are echoes of Fleetwood Mac, Relatively Clean Rivers, Linda Ronstadt, Minnie Riperton, and Vashti Bunyan.) Impeccably produced by her partner, Sam Evian—a formidable musician on his own—it contains some of Cohen’s most searching and sophisticated songwriting.
9. “I’m the Problem”
Morgan Wallen
Morgan Wallen is easily the best-selling country artist of the twenty-first century; his fourth album, “I’m the Problem,” spent twelve weeks atop the Billboard 200 this year (somewhat incredibly, thirty-six of the album’s thirty-seven tracks charted on the Hot 100). Wallen is easy to root against for about a million different reasons, but it’s hard to deny his extraordinary virtuosity when it comes to singing embittered ballads about the (many) women who did him wrong: “I found some greener grass and some new blue eyes / And I can’t wait to kiss her in front of you,” he sings on “Kiss Her in Front of You.” I like Wallen’s voice—his East Tennessee accent gives everything a little bit of a nasal sneer, but also a richness, a texture—enough that I don’t even mind when he’s mean.
8. “LOTTO”
They Are Gutting a Body of Water
The fourth LP from TAGABOW, a shoegaze band from Philadelphia, feels like a creative apotheosis. It’s grungy, aggressive, sometimes listless music about feeling desperate and fucked-up (on previous records, the band messed around more with synthesized elements; “LOTTO” is raw and spontaneous). On “American Food,” Doug Dulgarian, the group’s front man, delivers a deadpan soliloquy about memory and accountability: “The benefit of believing you’re bad / Is that you get somebody to blame.”
7. “Eusexua”
FKA Twigs
The visionary English singer and producer FKA Twigs has said that “Eusexua,” a word that she invented, refers to the “pinnacle of human experience.” She described it further as the moment of sublime blankness before something tremendous happens—a big idea, or, perhaps more viscerally, an orgasm. This album (her third, and the first of two she released this year) is loaded with tension and release.
6. “Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party”
Hayley Williams
Hayley Williams, the mercurial, magnetic front woman of the rock band Paramore, has made plenty of very good records, both with Paramore and as a solo artist, but one nonetheless got the sense that a masterpiece was still imminent. On “Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party,” Williams inches closer to genius. Her lyrics can be incredibly funny (“I’ll be the biggest star / At this racist country singer’s bar,” she sings on the title track, a rubbery, entrancing song about having a long, dissociative night on the town), but her writing on heartache is almost unbearably affecting: “And you were at my wedding / I was broken / You were drunk / You coulda told me not to do it / I woulda run,” she confesses on “Parachute,” before the track gets thick with loud, heavy guitar.
5. “Cover the Mirrors”
Ben Kweller
The title of Kweller’s seventh album is an allusion to a practice common among people in mourning—Kweller’s sixteen-year-old son, Dorian, died in a car accident in 2023—and, while “Cover the Mirrors” is animated by the cognitive dissonance of grief (life is the same; life is not the same), it’s also an explosive, occasionally ecstatic rock record. Kweller corralled some notable guests, including MJ Lenderman, the Flaming Lips, Coconut Records, and, on the angry, cacophonous “Dollar Store”—maybe my favorite song of the year—Katie Crutchfield, of Waxahatchee. Kweller can sound heartsick and down bad (“Out of the blue I feel like I am walking through tunnels down to the door / Every day I’m scared more and more,” he sings on “Letter to Agony,” a track that channels Elliott Smith). But there’s a lightness in his voice, too—something sort of like hope.
4. “Lux”
Rosalía
“Lux,” Rosalía’s fourth album, is predictably ambitious: its orchestral arrangements are vast and idiosyncratic, its lyrics are sung in thirteen languages, and its spirit feels firmly existential. Rosalía poses increasingly impossible questions about destiny, God, and the meaning of everything; her vision of what global pop music can be (and do) comes across as cerebral and expansive. In some ways, her closest contemporary is Björk, who is featured on the thorny, operatic single “Berghain.” (The song features a haunting quoted refrain—“I’ll fuck you ’til you love me”—from Mike Tyson, of all people; the line somehow increases in desperation each time it’s deployed.) “Lux” is not Rosalía’s easiest record, or her most immediately comprehensible, but that’s also what makes it exciting: you’ll keep scrambling to catch up with it.
3. “Baby”
Dijon
Before the release of “Baby,” the singer and producer Dijon was best known for his collaborations with Justin Bieber, Mk.gee, and Bon Iver. “Baby” is easily the most compelling experimental R. & B. record since Frank Ocean’s “Blonde”—these are deep, haunted, romantic songs about devotion, sacrifice, and time. Dijon is an adventurous producer, and he refracts and rearranges sound in ways that feel both uncanny and warm. There’s little here that feels familiar, exactly, but this record is still comforting, humane, gorgeous.
2. “New Threats from the Soul”
Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band
Perhaps the biggest compliment I can give an album is to say that it gets richer and weirder the more that you listen to it. Ryan Davis, a singer and songwriter from Louisville, Kentucky, makes tuneful, funny music that’s vaguely rooted in country and indie-rock, but also leaves room for hard left turns, including unforeseeable breakbeats. (There are both musical and extramusical nods to the eccentricity of the late-nineties era of Drag City Records, including Bill Callahan, David Berman, and Palace Music; Davis self-released “New Threats from the Soul” on his own independent label, Sophomore Lounge.) But there’s something else going on in these songs that makes them feel revelatory, almost sacred. I think Davis is close to a once-in-a-generation lyricist, even (especially) when he’s being extra-wordy: “My skull was a dunk tank clown for some schoolyard lass to chastise / My ribcage was a looney bin built to keep my heart out of her hands,” he sings on “The Simple Joy.” It’s a song about wondering what the hell is going on, just in general. “I learned that time was not my friend nor my foe, more like one of the guys from work,” Davis drawls. “Life was safe if you could crack it or not, and I slapped the factory clock / With a rose in my teeth.”
1. “Getting Killed”
Geese
This (very) young Brooklyn band (very) occasionally sounds like other bands (Radiohead, Anohni and the Johnsons, Suicide), but mostly Geese sounds unlike anything I’ve ever heard before—in part because of the front man Cameron Winter’s tense, singular, supernatural warble, and in part because of the band’s penchant (and proclivity) for unpredictable squall. This was the record that made me feel the most hopeful about the future of popular music, all the ways in which the form can still be subverted and made dangerous. “Getting Killed” is feral and disobedient, but also pretty, unguarded, gripping—art for an artless era. ♦
Did you have a favorite album this year? Let us know in the comments. On Friday, Amanda will answer questions about her picks and process in our subscriber chat.
Also from The New Yorker:
Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy, had just given birth when she was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia.
Political leaders across the spectrum are increasingly being threatened and even killed. Is this the new normal?
Is the term “performative reading” a new way of calling people pretentious, or does it reflect a deprioritization of the written word?
The Art of Loving by Olivia Dean?
Actually Geese is bad.