The Top 10 Albums of 2025

Underneath mainstream visibility, 2025 was an exceptional year for music, making the process of selecting the best albums intensely challenging. While charts and casual streams often offer bland, algorithm-driven pop, artists across genres continued to produce deeply resonant works that grappled with our times, blending hope, reflection, and artistry.

10. Iris Silver Mist Jenny Hval

Norwegian art-pop innovator Jenny Hval delivers an album that balances bold experimentation with melodic beauty. As both a musician and novelist, Hval crafts songs full of conceptual depth and lyrical intricacy. Inspired partly by pandemic-era preoccupations with scent, the album evokes memory, intimacy, and subtle critiques of performance, recording, and digital life. Luminous synths, delicate field recordings, finger-picked guitars, and textured percussion underscore Hvals clear, compelling voice.

9. Big Ugly Fust

Aaron Dowdys North Carolina-based project merges literary ambition with Southern musical heritage. Drawing on twang, pedal steel, and regional storytelling, Big Ugly blends raucous fiddle-driven songs with nuanced commentary on life, politics, and working-class realities. Tracks like Spangled demonstrate the bands knack for crafting deeply felt anthems that honor and reinvent local traditions.

8. Live Laugh Love Earl Sweatshirt

Ten years after his raw, confessional debut, Earl Sweatshirt presents a more reflective and emotionally layered work. Live Laugh Love channels personal experiences of marriage and fatherhood into contemplative, free-associative hip-hop. Tracks like TOURMALINE intertwine grounded lyricism with intimate storytelling, revealing a matured and introspective side of the rapper.

7. Its a Beautiful Place Water From Your Eyes

New York duo Water From Your Eyes offer an inventive indie-rock album that captures both the absurdity and beauty of contemporary life. Rachel Browns deadpan vocals and Nate Amos inventive guitar work create a soundscape that is simultaneously quirky, thoughtful, and effortlessly cool, perfect for navigating the urban chaos of today.

6. Blurr Joanne Roberston

Glasgow-based singer-songwriter Joanne Roberston delivers ambient folk that emphasizes minimalism and raw emotion. Sparse acoustic guitar and her ethereal voice create a mesmerizing, intimate experience. Collaborations with cellist Oliver Coates heighten the albums emotive power, transforming simplicity into an enveloping, almost meditative sound world.

5. Deb Tirar Ms Fotos Bad Bunny

Bad Bunny dominates pop culture in 2025 with an album celebrating Puerto Rican heritage. Deb Tirar Ms Fotos blends reggaeton and Latin trap with traditional Puerto Rican rhythms like salsa and bolero. Joyful melodies and live instrumentation make it a culturally rich, globally resonant record, solidifying Bad Bunnys position as a transformative figure in contemporary music.

4. New Threats From the Soul Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band

Kentucky songwriter Ryan Davis channels his storytelling prowess in a second solo effort that combines twang, wordplay, and expansive track lengths. His baritone and the bands loose yet compelling sound create music that feels both intimate and grand, blending indie-rock narrative with the verbal dexterity often found in hip-hop.

3. Essex Honey Blood Orange

Dev Hynes returns to his childhood home in Essex to craft an elegiac, deeply personal album. Essex Honey fuses dream-pop, R&B, and experimental elements to explore loss, memory, and reflection. Collaborations with Caroline Polachek, Tirzah, and others create a richly textured and emotionally resonant experience that is both sophisticated and moving.

2. Lux Rosala

Spanish artist Rosala expands her artistic palette on Lux, singing in multiple languages, incorporating orchestral arrangements, and engaging with spiritual and historical references. The album blends avant-garde pop, operatic vocalization, and philosophical themes, creating a bold, immersive listening experience. Tracks like La Perla and La Yugular exemplify her innovative approach to contemporary music.

1. Getting Killed Geese

Brooklyn quartet Geese deliver a ferocious and exhilarating breakthrough with Getting Killed. Their high-energy art-rock combines chaotic instrumentation with darkly witty, existential lyrics. Frontman Cameron Winters irreverent croon pairs with intense rhythms to create a sound that is both urgent and unrelentingly compelling, capturing the essence of modern New York noise and youthful intensity.

Author: Ava Mitchell