The Best Albums of 2025

In spite of a shattered monoculture and dividing attention spans, the studio album still held power as a cultural event in 2025. Everyone from rappers who’d just as soon persist as a hail of singles, like Playboi Carti and Cardi B, to pop overlords like Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter came to the plate. Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, and Doja Cat used their albums to broadcast tastes that span decades. Morgan Wallen, Justin Bieber, Arcade Fire, and Drake sought to turn the page on negative press by refocusing attention on their talents. An album is a megaphone and podium, or an intricate sculpture, or a temporary press whirlwind. The best of this year took the opportunity to nudge us toward a deeper love for our fellow humans, or a greater appreciation of an outstanding auteur’s craft, or a fresh outlook on an existing musical tradition — without losing sight of the hunger for big hooks and cool riffs that brought us around in the first place.

10.

Standing on the Corner, Standing on the Corner 2

The Brooklyn arts collective joined a growing number of artists this year who pulled albums from Spotify as disdain mounts for the company’s payouts and practices. They sent listeners on a quest to obtain their third album: For a few hours on September 11, you could meet someone in a Mickey Mouse costume in Times Square to pay cash for a DVD that turned out to contain the new music. (They’d eventually livestream it and sell copies on their website.) If you found it, you heard a zany patchwork of anachronistic threads. It’s a slippery, ambitious album that investigates past innovation through a lens of modern ennui. It buzzes around history, reverent toward the insular studio funk of Sly Stone, the guitar tones of the Isley Brothers and the Beatles, the memory of late Latin-jazz titan Eddie Palmieri, and beat-based psychedelia and mixtape culture. The ominous “Secrets” advises against keeping things from a lover just after a false-start New Orleans funeral march yields to a folk-blues chant. The woozy “Mr. Postman, Wait!” melds doo-wop vocals, drum machine clatter, and wailing blues-rock guitar. It’s almost like stumbling on an old record warped by the elements. The album shares a shambling music-nerd awe with the work of greats like Madlib.

9.

PinkPantheress, Fancy That / Fancy Some More?

A few of the bubbly originals from the singer-songwriter and producer’s second mixtape carry the potential to be her calling card, like the meet-cute-as-job-interview narrative “Illegal.” After reinforcing her skills as a curt, potent writer with an uncannily keen handle on late-’90s and early-aughts pop culture, the 24-year-old puts her peers and influences on the remixes. U.K. music titans sampled on the mixtape (Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada, Sugababes) return the favor in zesty reworks. Assists from an international cast of admirers — Swedish cloud rapper Bladee, Britpop revivalist Rachel Chinouriri, Brazilian singer Anitta, K-pop group Seventeen — make for one of the most alluring maps of an artist’s taste since Drake flipped Missy and Kanye on So Far Gone.

8.

Oneohtrix Point Never, Tranquilizer

In his growing spate of work in Safdie films and Weeknd albums, producer Daniel Lopatin has developed an aptitude for all sorts of heady interstitial and incidental music. His latest album as Oneohtrix Point Never journeys over gauzy clouds of sound. The sample-based method of his earlier work returns, this time sourced by a trove of sample compilations from the ‘90s and early aughts, when rap and video game music producers had synth presets and eerie noise CDs in common. OPN records often ponder the past through examinations of his predecessors’ tools. But Tranquilizer teems with intent that feels gleaned from years of crafting songs that jostle the listener in service to advancing the plot of a scene or a pop song. Here, he co-opts some of the suspenseful sounds of luminaries like Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka to ruminate on thoughts he had at the dentist’s office.

7.

Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas, Totality

A decade after pairing up for the collaborative album Autoimaginary, Chicago instrumental trios Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas reunited for a second outing. Unlike the more beat-based pleasantries of Bajas’ new album Inland See and the stomping, ominous jazz of Natural Info’s recent Perseverance Flow EP, Totality centers breezy ambience. Four drifting expeditions into elegant quietude find the half dozen players gravitating to an alluring tenderness and weightlessness. The drums, synths, and woodwinds of the patient “Always 9 Seconds Away” tiptoe around each other, never insisting upon themselves the way those instruments can. This is an album to trip into and pass time exquisitely with.

6.

keiyaA, hooke’s law

The multi-disciplinary artist explores themes of love, justice, and self-worth in songs that braid jazz, rap, drum n bass, and soul. Her sophomore album follows her acclaimed 2020 debut, catching us up on the philosophical quandaries and personal initiatives of keiyaA’s last half-decade. She’s a more ambitious and capable composer now; she’s distraught about the murder of her brother. Throughout hooke’s law, the psychedelic bliss of the former development crashes into the agony of the latter experience. As it bandies from tryst to testimony to tragedy, hanging on the words of literary forebears like Pat Parker and Amiri Baraka, the album sketches an arresting image of modern Black femme brilliance and resilience.

5.

Tyler Childers, Snipe Hunter

On his seventh album, the Kentucky country singer-songwriter connected with veteran producer Rick Rubin to negotiate a careful expansion of his traditional Appalachian sound. Tapping the engineer behind Johnny Cash renditions of Soundgarden and Glenn Danzig tunes casts Childers’s stories of downtrodden Americans in a new light. His stripped-down folk and reverent electric country tunes meet more cinematic dressing, shifting song structures, and plentiful distortion. It may itch at first to hear someone whose music typically avoids such producer-ly theatrics and radio format restlessness dive so committedly into it. But the message apparent in Snipe Hunter, whose trip across the planet ends back in the hollers, is that sometimes you need to get outside your realms for a spell to tease out what you really love (and also what you no longer care for) in the first place.

4.

Earl Sweatshirt, Live Laugh Love

Adopting the dead-horse motivational saying “Live, Laugh, Love” as the title of his latest album is both a truth and a self-effacing wink. The crank who once named another one I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside has found genuine happiness and fulfillment in love and family. On Live Laugh Love’s cover, the rapper and producer peers out at the listener over glasses, a smoke of some sort dangling from his mouth. Yeah, this will be your textbook “I’m a dad now” album, it all seems to smirkingly say. Earl’s music is as bright as it’s ever been, proving that he doesn’t need a proclamation of impending doom to get animated, which is not to suggest that he’s above it. He has come out of nihilism and loss having found a center, loving with purpose where sometimes his music hungered most for nothingness. “I remember when I ain’t want it,” he muses in “Live,” creating distance between a devil-may-care past and a better adjusted present. He’s back from the edge — with a toe “still in the void.”

3.

Bad Bunny, Debí Tirar Más Fotos

The Puerto Rican star’s sixth album is a love letter to his home that all but begs you to learn anything about the place and people. His initial forte of bittersweet breakup songs and street anthems is represented in bangers like “KLOuFRENS” but buttressed by journeys into the musical parents and grandparents of Latin trap and reggaeton. This album is musicology as advocacy, but it doesn’t preach, nor soften its message and delivery to reach more ears. To see Bad Bunny live in 2025, fans had to leave the contiguous States; to understand his feelings, you must reckon with his language. The prize for this steadfastness is playing the next Super Bowl halftime show. Haters swear they’ll watch some other counterprogramming debacle, taking nothing from Fotos’s thesis that the people our demagogues conspire to purge from this country have long been essential to its operation and art.

➼ Read Craig Jenkins’s full review of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.

2.

Deftones, private music

The hooks on the Sacramento metal vets’ 10th album are bigger and sweeter than the last batch, at no cost to the intensity. In the punishing “locked club,” singer Chino Moreno juggles carnival barker and Bjork-but-goth vocal routines while the band marches in a bass-heavy chug to a synth-laced clearing at the chorus. Their last five years of touring and finding new demographics through social media have produced a somehow more self-assured version of the band that effortlessly mixed rap, metal, and synth-pop in its first five years. The acerbic tones and pretty chords of catalog classics like “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)” or “My Own Summer (Shove It)” resurface in the new album’s “infinite source” and “~metal dream.”

1.

Dijon, Baby

Studio utility player and singer-songwriter Dijon Duenas had a breakout year thanks to his work on the latest Bon Iver and Justin Bieber releases. His sophomore album is a wonder, the kind of record that used to trickle out more in the past when legends like Marcus Miller, Prince, and Raphael Saadiq would manage simultaneous solo and supporting roles. Dijon pulls signatures from across music history into a sound that feels increasingly his own. Jittery drum programming and shrouding reverb screams Minneapolis in the ‘80s, but the wonky thump and the multiplicity of vocal tracks are just as suggestive of D’Angelo or the raw pain of a Frank Ocean. This is all in service to a batch of songs about the joy and obligation of family. The giddy “Another Baby!” seeks to “expand the collection” just after the title track and opener sweetly walks the artist’s son through the courtship and pregnancy that brought him here. Baby ponders love in all its rejuvenating and off-putting shapes, sweating with a husband and father’s devotion but sometimes with a son’s pining for a closer connection with an oaklike and unreadable elder. Cycles of musical and parental influence inform an album teeming with guests — D’Angelo regular Pino Palladino, folk-rockers Mk.gee and Bon Iver, pop and indie-rock producer BJ Burton — who never distract from Dijon’s vision.

Other Musical Highlights From This Year

Below are the rest of the specials that stood out to Jenkins throughout the year that didn’t crack the final top-ten list.

Lily Allen, West End Girl 

There are few immovable rules in popular music, but one of them is that you probably shouldn’t fuck with Lily Allen, author of songs like “Smile” and “Fuck You” where some poor, unsuspecting detractor is nearly defenestrated in song. Her fifth album, West End Girl — recorded in ten days last December, when her split from Stranger Things actor David Harbour after five years of marriage was revealed — suggests that rule has been broken. West End Girl dramatizes a woman’s inability to read her successful husband, whose jealousy and hunger for extramarital sex weigh on the protagonist in devastating and narrative-intensive pop tunes. Cruising confidently through disparate song forms as she comes to the conclusion she’s being lied to, the singer lashes out in elegantly crushing yarns like “Pussy Palace,” a snarling ode to discovering a trove of sex toys and letters and realizing your marriage was more open than you thought. “Ruminating” twists in bed at night while a man is stepping out; “Relapse” takes its feelings of betrayal and fragility out on the dance floor. It’s very fully formed and versatile for a work the songwriter describes as “autofiction.” Cooking this grenade for most of a year to drop on the doorstep of the final season of the ex’s television series says as much as the pith of “Madeline” and “Tennis” that Lily Allen is back in her vengeful element.

Tortoise, Touch

Touch, the first full-length by venerable Chicago post-rock outfit Tortoise since 2016’s The Catastrophist, catches the quintet pushing past the most bucolic stretches of the previous release. The group has often gotten its kicks from bowling listeners over with the vastness and strangeness of its requisite parts; this wily two-drummer situation can take the shape of a majestic rock band or a coterie of techno-organic aliens. But Touch, the eighth album, settles on sweetness, its grooves not far removed from what the Francophiles in Stereolab have been up to lately. These are some of the more tunefully serene passages in a 35-year journey. But the old abrasiveness lives, quietly stalking the edges of the mixes. “Works and Days” foregrounds trebly, churning squeals that offer an unsettling edge to an otherwise sedate song. The clattering “Elka” wants to remind us that our chill indie-rock dads can still make combatively loud noise.

Geese, Getting Killed

Regrouping after front man Cameron Winter’s acclaimed 2024 solo debut Heavy Metal, Brooklyn country-rock alchemists Geese delivers their most potent batch of lackadaisical country rockers and Tom Waitsian grit to date in Getting Killed, their fourth album. Winter’s vocal presence imagines a fearless indie oddball like Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus going for the full prattling gusto of the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger; the band tussles and sways exhilaratingly underfoot. “You can’t keep running away from what is real and what is fake,” he howls in mid-album gem “Islands of Men,” as a punchy groove threatens to shake the headphones off a listener’s face. Elsewhere, the percussion-heavy title track complicates a choir-adorned fuzz rocker, the raucous production slowly untangling into a sedate coda. Produced by Seattle beat-maker Kenny Beats, Getting Killed pulses with the mutinous volatility of the year into which it has crash-landed.

Wednesday, Bleeds

Bleeds, the by turns acrid and rustic sixth album from Nashville quintet Wednesday, is here to remind you never to typecast southern rock as implicitly, exclusively country-tinged. The twang and strut of the pithy “Phish Pepsi” — “We watched a Phish concert and Human Centipede,” singer-guitarist Karly Hartzman intones, “Two things I now wish I had never seen” — are Music City catnip. But the band, featuring North Carolina riff whiz MJ Lenderman, is just as affecting, drenched in distortion. Wednesday takes the shape the often darkly terse and occasionally impressionistic storytelling demands, buzzing through folk, grunge, and alt-country as Hartzman sings of breaking hearts and ambling around America’s forgotten places.

Blood Orange, Essex Honey

The early 2020s were a tight spot, not just globally but also personally for Dev Hynes. The producer and singer-songwriter’s flagship Blood Orange project slowed its release output, dealing not just with a pandemic but the illness and death of his mother. Essex Honey, the full-length follow-up to 2019’s Angel’s Pulse mixtape, is shaped by grief but just as much so by meditations on a place of origin, on family and provincial neighborhood character. A twee folk edge augments the artist’s signature smudging of R&B’s boundaries; in moments where it leans decidedly British, Essex Honey is a reminder that Hynes was once the Lightspeed Champion guy. The vastness of the sample set and guest list — bits of Elliott Smith and Durutti Column songs meeting vocals from Lorde, Caroline Polachek, and Mustafa to bridge “indie” and “pop” worlds — is owed to Hynes’s unfussed versatility. They wander in and out of the frame like visitors to the bereaved, sweetly supporting downcast acoustic numbers and slowly unfolding drum ’n’ bass heaters.

Tyler, the Creator, Don’t Tap the Glass

Tyler, the Creator has taken time out of the world tour for last year’s Chromakopia to spin the block and urge you to live in the moment. Don’t Tap the Glass, a quick-hit follow-up for that sprawling opus, doesn’t float too many lofty ideas beyond the notion that you should be dancing. Kick-starting the initiative is an arsenal of snappy, hooky nods to early B-boy culture and post-disco, aughts club bangers, and anarchic Odd Future anthems. The compositional slipperiness on display in the towering “Don’t You Worry Baby” and “I’ll Take Care of You” — odes to Atlanta crunk, Miami bass, U.K. jungle, and ’90s R&B — undercuts the West Coast rapper, producer, and arranger’s noisy assurance that Glass is low-stakes sonic expedition.

Hotline TNT, Raspberry Moon

The blearing and hissing riffs of Wisconsin–to–New York transplant Will Anderson often get him flagged as shoegaze, a sound profile the My Bloody Valentine fan is admittedly aware of but not necessarily in thrall to. Raspberry Moon, his expanding former solo project Hotline TNT’s third full-length, expresses evolving interests and ambitions. The latent J. Mascis-ness of the early work is foregrounded in rippers like “The Scene,” and the softer songs in the back end like “Dance the Night Away” — no Van Halen — benefit greatly from extra hands of the full band on frets and kits. Raspberry Moon is not beating the shoegaze allegations; fuzz still sits at center stage, giving listeners the feeling of spending a gig stationed in front of the guitarist’s amp. But a dollop of ’95 alt-rock sweetness almost overpowers it.

Annahstasia, Tether

Annahstasia Enuke’s voice — by turns a breathily bassy and sweetly soaring instrument — snatches you sideways across time. Draping or else scraping over sparse folk tunes on her debut album, Tether, it’s enjoying enthusiastic comparisons to Tracy Chapman and just as often conjuring earlier predecessors — Odetta, Rosetta — who could make beautifully quiet music but weren’t confined to it. Tether aims to be just as untethered: It sets up a spectrum spanning hushed intimacy (“Take Care of Me”) and rustic plushness (“Waiting”), but louder production in “Believer” and “Silk and Velvet” increases guttural, soulful sharpness. A stunning versatility renders moot the latter’s wondering if it matters when Annahstasia makes a sound.

Fallujah, Xenotaph

Crushing, tuneful and proggy, but never exactly long-winded, Xenotaph, the sixth full-length from San Francisco death-metal outfit Fallujah, is a wonder of balance and precision. The second outing with singer Kyle Schaefer at the helm after 2022’s Empyrean finally gives the newest member space to worm his way into the unit’s compositions, and the textural breadth benefits massively. The mission to try and squeeze more dynamic tension into compact spaces yields gorgeous atmospherics that never feel like tacked-on synth sweetener across highlights like the mournful “Labyrinth of Stone” and the raggedly triumphant title track. The melodies are subtly beefier, and the whirlwind flights of technical death-metal wizardry get breathers. It feels like much more ground is being covered without taking much more time to get there

Stereolab, Instant Holograms on Metal Film

The first new album since 2010 from British French indie-rock institution Stereolab is a treat, a reunion effort with both a keen understanding of a band’s deal and the chops to honor the classics without falling prey to self-parody. Stereolab’s signatures — tricky grooves coated in effects, ’60s and ’70 French pop and German rock influences filtered through modern tech, disaffected invective colliding into psychedelic optimism — remain potent. Halfway into the floaty, almost eight-minute epic “Melodie Is a Wound,” co-founder Lætitia Sadier sighs that “Truthfulness has fallen into desuetude” before a long, uplifting jam blows stormy thoughts away. “Colour Television” worries sweetly that the titular medium is “killing the possibilities of there being other stories, conceptualizations of progress and development” while splashing chords and propulsive drums imply enduring faith in human connection. If you pay close attention, Holograms sells respite for worried minds; if you don’t, it’s all swanky Saturday-afternoon slaps.

Lido Pimienta, La Belleza

While pondering the history of Italian choral music, from early Christian hymn recitals to medieval castrati, Toronto-based singer-songwriter Lido Pimienta began to wonder how her Colombian Wayuu ancestors might’ve expressed themselves musically as contemporaries. La Belleza, Pimienta’s third studio album, is a celebration of Indigenous life and rhythm also laying claim to the majestic orchestration of centuries of art music. The booming “El Dembow del Tiempo” dresses the titular Afro-Latin rhythm in suspensefully chilly woodwind and string arrangements; Belleza sings of dripping mango juice with jaw-dropping power and dynamism. The half-hour is a transportive barnstorm tour of an alternate universe where the voices of the exploited dominated, and “classical” and “chamber” music never signified a European upper crust.

billy woods, GOLLIWOG

The artwork for billy woods’s GOLLIWOG, which situates its namesake post-antebellum minstrel doll in a rustic Christian-Girl Summer backdrop, prepares intrepid listeners for a reflection on the glaring persistence of America’s oldest horrors. The fruits of cycles of inequality are perhaps most potently pondered in the rapper’s breathtaking pairing of “BLK XMAS” and “Waterproof Mascara.” The former depicts the eviction of a family hovering at the poverty line and a trickle of neighbors who come out to pick over a pile of their abandoned belongings, heating the excruciating scenario until it boils over: “Everywhere, it’s hungry mouths / It’s gnawing doubt / Dreams where teeth keep falling out.” “Mascara” peers into hard, sometimes grisly choices made by parents in a bind and the childhood trauma and adult malaise in its wake as woods slips from what seems to be a recount of his own family’s exit from Africa following the death of his father to a grim ideation about going out like Sylvia Plath. His often uncompromisingly somber and occasionally very funny narratives weave several threads of American independent music — via assists from the Alchemist, El-P, Conductor Williams, Shabaka Hutchings, and more — into a unified, intricate, and imposing rap tapestry.

Julien Baker and TORRES, Send a Prayer My Way

Send a Prayer My Way, a collaborative album uniting Tennessee troubadours Julien Baker and TORRES, could’ve taken literally any shape, arriving after the latter’s boisterous boygenius Record and the former’s strutting, chugging What an Enormous Room. Toying with the idea of working together in 2020, the pair, who met at a show a decade ago, agreed on a country album on a lark. But Prayer is not your humdrum, surreptitious post–Cowboy Carter cash-out. The duo’s catalogues tussle with a southern conservative Christian upbringing; embracing country is examining the culture their early work resisted. The gutting “Off the Wagon” and “Tape Runs Out” reveal two naturals whose excoriating writing is not far removed from the yearning heart of a country weeper.

Miki Berenyi Trio, Tripla

The spark for the gossamer compositions on Tripla, the breezy and fully formed debut by London’s Miki Berenyi Trio, ignited when Berenyi was asked to perform a set of songs from her former flagship outfit Lush in a string of appearances promoting her 2022 memoir, Fingers Crossed. Alongside partner Kevin McKillop, the titular Moose in early ’90s shoegaze progenitor group of the same name, Berenyi sketched out dream-pop reductions aided by drum machine. Songs came with demand for more performances; the format is both creatively freeing and quietly nostalgic. It helps the couple and bassist–slash–utility player Oliver Cherer chart a course through dance music and hip-hop while hinting at what it might’ve sounded like if the guitars-and-programmed-drums mindset of early Cocteau Twins met the grooves of the aughts.

Jane Remover, Revengeseekerz

A winking and very online sensibility crashes into hearty and self-effacing writing throughout the catalogue of 21-year-old Jane Remover — a.k.a. Leroy, a.k.a. Venturing — whose disparate projects scratch unique itches. A few years ago, Jane coined Dariacore, melding breakbeat nostalgia and manic hyperpop, but they more recently tilted toward shoegaze. Revengeseekerz takes their talents to twitchy EDM-rap. The taste profile might seem jarring, but it’s true to the modern drip of nü-metal sonics into hip-hop, and video-game sound signatures into a plethora of exploding and imploding microgenres. The best Revengeseekerz songs arm the arresting singing voice centered throughout the February Venturing album Ghostholding with a toned-down version of the Dariacore chaos. “Fadeoutz” and “Dreamflasher” suppose that the listener can handle all of the artist’s bursting interests at once, thundering through grooves that imagine a candy-flipping Yeat.

Scowl, Are We All Angels

Scowl is a Cali punk outfit guilty of the hardcore-community capital crimes of accessible melodicism and participation in a 2023 Taco Bell commercial. Merging alt-rock’s gritty tunefulness with the speed and ferocity of skate punk and hardcore, their sophomore album, Are We All Angels, wears the reputation for tunefulness and the Cheesy Gordita Crunch connection proudly. Disparate ingredients — screams, clarion vocal harmonies, tense breakdowns — melt into appealing combinations draped in a haze of guitar noise gracing the frenetic, menacing “Fleshed Out” and “Special” and the slower, sweeter “Suffer the Fool (How High Are You?)” alike. However you choose to file Angels, every drum hit lands like a slap over the head.

Skrillex, Fuck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol But Ur Not!!

Skrillex spent the last two albums proving that he was still good for an engrossing body of work following the collapse of the mainstream American dubstep wave he washed in on years ago. The two-hit combo of Quest for Fire and Don’t Get Too Close flexed expansive tastes and connections well beyond the confines of the old signature sound. So it was a shock to hear this year’s surprise April Fool’s Day mixtape Fuck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol But Ur Not!! carry him back to dubstep and to discover there’s still gas in the tank. Warhol is a career retrospective disguised as the artist’s memorial-tribute mixtape to himself. Alluring remixes of recent tunes rub elbows with sought-after B-sides and song fragments that are trickier to place chronologically. Flow and sound design are as breathtaking as the presentation is unabashedly silly. Less Eras tour, more cannonball run, Warhol condenses decades of change into a zany 45 minutes.

aya, hexed!

It feels reductive to describe Aya Sinclair as a “singer-songwriter and producer.” The vocal performances on the 31-year-old U.K. artist’s sophomore album hexed! range from carnival barker to lingering apparition, and the sound design bends, morphs, and corrodes unpredictably underfoot. Like the real, live earthworms in her mouth on the cover art, the songs writhe and slide like invertebrates. Hexed! pokes discomfitingly at questions of identity and dependency while building bridges between punk, noise, dance music, and shoegaze, sonics adjusting to the flavor of bravado or anomie coursing through the lyrics. “Heat death” burbles darkly toward an explosive hook that lands like an answer to the wish for the end of the world intoned in the verses. “I am the pipe I hit myself with” howls as buzzing synths ascend. Hexed! mirrors the jolting luminescence of an epiphany setting in.

Backxwash, Only Dust Remains

Death is ever present in the work of Montreal rapper and producer Backxwash, from face-paint gesturing to Zambian communal ceremonies to tense riffs summoning extreme metal signifiers. Only Dust Remains, her fifth album, follows the resolution of a trilogy initiated in 2020’s Polaris Prize–wining God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It. Soaring and elaborately arranged compositions brush against lyrics haunted by blood and violence. This show of sweetness fighting back against a sense of hopelessness builds an apprehensively brighter perspective than earlier work. Can the artist pouring shoegaze ooze into “Disassociation” and playing the pain of “Stairway to Heaven” off luxe psych-rock want the world to end?

Neil Young, Oceanside Countryside

A seemingly endless succession of exquisite Neil Young archival releases suggests the Canadian Crazy Horse and CSNY vet shelving almost as much heat as he ever put out in the ’70s, when he dropped the devastating Harvest, On the Beach, and Tonight’s the Night but stashed away Homegrown and Chrome Dreams. This year, the 79-year-old guitar giant shared Oceanside Countryside, a 1977 gem whose threading of folk and country dovetails with the mood of the late-decade roots-centric offerings American Stars ’n Bars, Comes a Time, and Hawks & Doves. The lonesome alternate takes of familiar songs from the era imply a slightly more stripped though no less gorgeous Bars coming out in some parallel universe.

Darkside, Nothing

Darkside — an on-again, off-again collaboration between singer-songwriter and electronic producer Nicolás Jaar and guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Dave Harrington — expanded into a trio in the 2020s. Listeners noticed the gains on 2023’s Live at Spiral House, a rehearsal space recording bringing drummer/programmer Tlacael Esparza into the fold. February’s Nothing, their third studio album, filters the bubbly, groove-oriented psychedelia of earlier works through more conventional songwriting structures. The result is summery repose interspersed by alluring surprises: The pulsating, oceanic “Are You Tired? (Keep on Singing)” drifts toward an unexpected cosmic-rock interlude you’d sooner expect to encounter deep in a Grateful Dead tape. The soulful, bipartite centerpiece “Hell Suite” plays by the book everywhere except Jaar’s vocal, equal parts lounge lizard and absurdist Dusty in Memphis reimagining.

Marshall Allen, New Dawn

The longtime Sun Ra sideman and Sun Ra Arkestra bandleader Marshall Allen set intimidating Guinness World Records this year; at 100, he’s the oldest human ever to drop a debut studio album. The work in question, winter’s New Dawn, is a stately tour of a woodwind lifer’s gifts. Allen basks in the sweet repose of “African Sunset” and the title track, the latter of which houses a smoky vocal from jazz scion and pop royalty Neneh Cherry, and plays a more commanding role in the playfully squawking “Sonny’s Dance” and the huffing big-band jam “Are You Ready.” At ease everywhere from flitting free jazz to looser, funkier textures, Allen abides, insistent but never overbearing on a session well worth the wait.

Kelela, In the Blue Light

Breaking early on in a scintillating performance at Manhattan’s famed Blue Note to stress that it was a dream-come-true engagement to play the jazz club where she once studied neo-soul pioneer Amel Larrieux, Washington, D.C., singer-songwriter Kelela hints at a deeper splash into those roots. The show, documented with the live album In the Blue Light, jettisons the skittering, moonlit electronics of the star’s back catalogue, softening stark arrangements formerly designed to hug the vocalist like a wintry chill. The already-breezy “All the Way Down” is delivered with an even subtler touch than on the studio recording; pulled away from the propulsive drum programming, the decade-old mixtape heaters “Enemy” and “Bank Head” foreground the soulful songwriting underfoot. It’s an achievement getting those sparse originals to feel more stripped.

➼ Read Tirhakah Love’s 2023 interview with Kelela.

Larry June / 2 Chainz / Alchemist, Life Is Beautiful

The divergent journeys binding the bicoastal rap brotherhood of Larry June, 2 Chainz, and the Alchemist meet at one key point: the exquisite retro airs animating June’s Doing It for Me and Al’s deluge of independent releases jut out in Chainz tracks like “Threat 2 Society.” Life Is Beautiful pulls the Atlanta vet into the mind-meld that yielded the formidable 2023 Al and June full length The Great Escape, and the trio disappears into a spirited boom-bap backslide together. The wordplay is as colorful as the sonics are sedate, tag-team player parables sailing over production seeking a slippery middle ground between East and West Coast throwback jams. It’s a reminder of the pliability of Al’s minimalism, catnip not just for your Mobb Deeps and Griseldas but also your Kendrick Lamars and Lil Waynes. Life Is Beautiful is another gem in a growing trove of left-field collaborative outings, offering more sample-crazed analog daydreams.

MIKE, Showbiz!

The first thing you notice pressing play on Showbiz!, the latest full length in a nonstop stream pouring out of Bronx rapper-producer MIKE, is the bass. It’s a commanding, center-stage presence, the ruddy root the ideas sprout from. Even the high end feels woozy and drowned, like foliage piercing a melting frost. Hefty low end hugs tastily pitched-down loops the artist uses to wax exhausted. “You gotta be, I mean, probably above me,” the boisterous “Artist of the Century” begins. “Proud of me, working against the odds and the ugly.” You don’t expect the bustling flute-funk jam to float in on a note of familial grief and questioned faith delivered via hazy internal rhyme, but entwining joy and grief is a constant in MIKE’s catalog. The song and album aren’t always as piercing as the couplet, but brevity allows Showbiz! to hit a listener with alternating sweets and hots, its shifting moods anchored by the subterranean frequencies in the beat.

FKA Twigs, Eusexua

FKA Twigs’s Eusexua recalls another time neither distinctly past nor future. The sexual politics are very now but the sonic predilections spread out over key points in dance music’s past. All the while, the artist’s overarching dream of a utopian bond between the techno- and organic ponders philosophical tenets that will bind the rest of the century. Eusexua balances Boiler Room banger material and heady atmospherics. Production is conversant in the sleek, metallic otherworldliness couching manicured hooks in Eurodance classics. But unlike those points of reference, lyrics here don’t merely gesture toward sensuality. They hash out boundaries and dismantle hangups. Eusexua offers a soundtrack for bedrooms and basements fit for balling and bawling sessions.

➼ Read Craig Jenkins’s full review of Eusexua.

OsamaSon, Jump Out

A tugboat chugging across an ocean of Playboi Carti clones, 21-year-old Ohio rapper OsamaSon makes coarse rap that appears to pilfer the Atlanta goblin’s utensils. But the tunefulness and, well, enunciation showcased on his third album, Jump Out, are equally related to Chicago drill melodicists like Sicko Mobb, and closer in content and delivery to emo-rap crooners and the hazy absurdism of the Pack than rage. Bite-sized highlights like “Round of Applause” and “Insta” float on their deceptively chipper hooks as the rapper tries to kick a sour mood: The former’s video-game fanfare is a set piece for beef, and the latter’s soulfulness arrives shackled to anesthetized sighs. As with his Midwest predecessors, mixing smooth hooks and abrasive storytelling complicates alluring simplicity.

Mac Miller, Balloonerism

Mac Miller’s unreleased work explains and presages the stylistic shifts his successive studio albums yielded, revealing a never-ending question of what kind of artist he could or should be. Proving his mettle by easing into the burgeoning indie and mainstream Cali rap movements in the early 2010s, he went back and forth between delivering a tight commercial argument for radio airplay and a more totalizing dive into his bursting gifts as a multi-instrumentalist. Balloonerism, recorded in 2014 seemingly in the overflow of the darkly impressive Faces, catches Miller working through the prior mixtape’s still-pervasive darkness with a widening creative palette. It took a back seat to the emotionally and musically slippery GOOD:AM, a winning (and called) shot at a big-league push. But the bad feelings tucked away in jarringly candid cuts like “Rick’s Piano” are just as potent as singles of the era. You wish the late rapper, singer, and studio Swiss army knife didn’t second-guess his work but see why an artist having brushes with public scrutiny and disapproval might think again about sharing too many thoughts about drugs and death at one time.

➼ Read Craig Jenkins’s review of Balloonerism.

Lambrini Girls, Who Let the Dogs Out?

Who Let the Dogs Out?, the debut from Brighton duo Lambrini Girls, marries timeless, machine-gun licks and modern problems. Their breakneck pacing and crunchy low end fuse aspects of noise-rock, grunge, and post-punk exuberantly: “You’re Not From Around Here” leans into the grit of early Sub Pop classics, “Company Culture” mirrors the sinewy precision of Gang of Four, and “No Homo” queers garage rock. It’s all in service to the rip-roaring screeds of lead singer Phoebe Lunny, who chats whip-smart shit about the miserable state of xenophobia, workplace sexual harassment, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, and hypermasculinity. She’s a riot from the commanding, emasculating, “How big is that dick in reality?” in “Big Dick Energy” to the enthusiastic self-help checklist served in album closer “Cuntology 101”: “Setting boundaries is cunty.”

Ethel Cain, Perverts

By turns a budding chart sensation, a political firebrand, and an enthusiastic cataloguer of cryptids, Ethel Cain interrupts a stream of gossamer pop, folk, and rock records with Perverts, a droning rejection of the accessibility of her 2022 Billboard top-ten debut Preacher’s Daughter. Beyond the breathy “Vacillator” — a drifting love song conjuring early Cowboy Junkies — and the mournful “Punish,” the agenda is largely the eerie juxtaposition of beautiful and terrifying noise. Feedback carries the anguished wail of “Thatorchia” out to sea, and distortion and reverb drown out pop hooks in “Onanist.” Perverts eases into the maelstrom of 2025: Moments of sweetness are beset by mounting discomfort, and time seems to creep by at half the anticipated speed. The sound is no less southern in spirit than Daughter’s gothic tales of generational ills and church trauma — it’s just more interested in luxuriating in the ambiance. The heat check is delightful.

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