As you may or may not have noticed, I did not do a whole lot of writing about music on this blog in 2025. In fact, this has been the longest time since we started this website that I didn’t write a single post about a new album.
There are a few reasons for this. The first being that the first half of the year just didn’t have a lot of standout albums for me. Sure, there were plenty that I was happy to listen to and got me through those early cold months of the year. But even as we got deeper into 2025, there weren’t as many exciting albums that usually come out in the Spring and Summer that remind me what it means to be alive. Then there was the fact that I just felt generally busier than usual this year, perhaps due to planning a wedding among other things. There’s also that nagging conceit that maybe I’m losing touch with new music and perhaps it’s time to retreat to the music of my youth like every other aging millennial. And then of course there’s the big elephant in the room that the year was just a hard one to be excited about if you were paying any attention at all to the news, and that seemed to make pleasurable things like music just a little harder to enjoy.
Which may be why this overall felt like an underwhelming year for music. It also didn’t help that there were a bunch of albums in the indie sphere that I tend to pay attention to that just didn’t quite hit like many artists had in the years preceding 2025. Then there was the year in pop, which also didn’t have quite have the amount of ubiquitous standout albums as we’ve gotten the past few years from our beloved pop girls (though a few tried valiantly). Because I didn’t write about music at all in 2025 and it would just be too hard to try and fill in the blanks with the bite sized catch-up reviews that I typically do this time of year, I’m going to just write a few posts with a particular theme. And considering the tone of this year, it feels most appropriate to start with the year in disappointments. That’s not to say that there weren’t any standout albums from 2025, since there were plenty, but let’s revisit this feeling of disappointment first and get to the good stuff soon enough.
I think I’ll start with a few albums that I probably would have pegged as being pretty good in any other year, but because they didn’t provide the kind of transcendent bliss I needed in early 2025, their charms felt a little empty. The Weather Station released one of the more coolly singular-sounding albums of the post-pandemic era with 2021’s Ignorance, along with a more pared-down follow-up, How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars, in 2022. Both these albums saw front-woman Tamara Lindeman settling into a groove of jazzy, etherial indie rock accompanied by weirdly comforting lyrics about climate doom. In January 2025, she reemerged with Humanhood, an album with slightly more personal lyrics, but musically it’s mainly in the same breathy vein as Ignorance.
This album should have been something I ate up with a spoon, but for some reason I just wasn’t feeling it when it was released and never felt the need to go back to it until now. Maybe that was because Humanhood was released just a little too early in the year for me to be ready for new music, while the fact that it felt so familiar compared to The Weather Station’s high watermark album left me a bit apathetic. Then there’s the fact that this band has such a pristinely icy sound, primed for winter, but lacking the same allure the rest of the year, especially if you’re as seasonally inclined as I am. It’s for this reason that this album is starting to sound a little better now as the days get darker and those sweaters start to come out of the closet.
Another Canadian band that released an early 2025 album that I probably should have been a little more satisfied with was Destroyer and their latest, Dan’s Boogie. The titular Dan Bejar has led this band into something resembling sonic consistency for the first time in their career. Ever since 2011’s Kaputt, they’ve kept to this synthy, atmospheric sound that has stood in contrast to the band’s penchant for switching things up with each new album during their first decade or so of existence. That’s not to say they haven’t still had moments of left turns, as 2015’s Poison Season had more of a Great American Songbook bent, while 2022’s Labyrinthitis learned to find the abrasiveness in the band’s increasingly smoother sound.
While I did enjoy Dan’s Boogie for no other reason than that this band doesn’t seem capable of putting out a bad album, it’s possible that there was a slight feeling of complacency that I couldn’t feel just a tiny bit of. Maybe that’s more on me for wanting something a little bit new, when Bejar and co. have found a lot of interesting ways of reconfiguring this weirdo electro-pop sound that they’ve settled on. Also, Bejar had admitted to being a little more playful with the lyrics on this one, and there are certainly moments that feel both surprising and delightfully Bejar-esque (“Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World” anyone?). Still, it feels like most of these songs could have been slotted into any of the last three Destroyer albums (all of which were quite good), so it makes it feel like Dan’s Boogie is there to bolster an already accomplished discography rather than be its own distinct world unto itself.
An artist who did make more of a left turn with their latest album was Japanese Breakfast, with the appropriately titled For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), which really leaned into the sad girl vibes that have always been bubbling beneath Japanese Breakfast’s music, but were always offset by a indie-pop buoyancy. Though I didn’t like this album quite as much as any of Japanese Breakfast’s previous releases, I’m not that mad at it for taking the approach it did. After the breakout success of 2021’s Jubilee along with Michelle Zauner releasing her best-selling memoir Crying In H Mart that same year, there was just no way anything was ever going to live up to following in the footsteps of those two works.
So in a way, maybe it’s fitting that Zauner instead of trying to reach further for mainstream success with her latest album, scales things back a bit. None of these songs have the pop savvy of “Be Sweet” (though “Picture Window” is a low-key jam) and are decidedly introverted little folk-tinged songs, a slight deviation from the more spacey sounds seen on an early album like Soft Sounds From Another Planet. Overall, it feels like an L.A. album with its breeziness and left-field cameo from a prominent Hollywood weirdo (hey there, Jeff Bridges). Though producer Blake Mills has a way of making “an L.A. album” not sound like such a bad thing, as there is a kind of comfortable sheen that he brings to Zauner’s more introspective songwriting. Again, it’s not the kind of album that elevates Japanese Breakfast to another level of fame, but considering the album’s contentment to just be for the sad women out there, maybe that’s for the best.
Perhaps a similar category to the understated follow-up to a breakout success is an album that simply was never going to be as good as its predecessor. Haim released one of my favorite albums of the decade back in 2020 with Women In Music, Pt. III, so going into their latest, I Quit, I just didn’t have much hope that they were going to be able to top, even if the lead single “Relationships” was a bummer of a banger. So lo and behold, I was right! I Quit just simply was not as good as good as WIM, Pt. III and that’s ok when you’re being compared to one of the more perfectly playful pop albums in recent memory.
Once again, we have an album that goes in all sorts of different directions and tries to fold a bunch of different pop sounds into Haim’s sunny California pop-rock stew. But here, things just feel a little undercooked. Which of course is a bit strange considering the album’s five-year gestation period, but maybe that’s a little easier to understand when the last album included a pandemic album and a long delayed tour (I believe I ended up seeing them on that tour in Summer 2022). Here, they went for a shaggier, diaristic approach, with Danielle Haim taking center stage and writing about her recent break-up from producer Ariel Rechtshaid, and his knack for producing this band’s disparate influences in a cohesive way is missed here.
That said, there are a decent number of songs I like here (“All Over Me” and “Down To Be Wrong” were other solid singles), but the album really loses steam in its second half. I suppose I would have been more into the album’s slightly sprawling nature if there was a little more variety and energy to the production, but there’s just something a little flat about the sounds here that make these songs almost feel like demoes. I hate to say that, since I know Rostam Batmanjlig was producing this album without the help of fellow Vampire Weekend collaborator Rechtshaid, and I’ve always loved the guy, but even though there are plenty of good ideas here, something about them doesn’t always quite click. That said, Haim’s second album felt a little similar in its slight inability to capture its predecessor’s magic, so maybe the next one will be a new revelation.
There were few albums this year that I was rooting for harder than the latest from Car Seat Headrest. After breaking out on the indie scene in 2016 with Teens of Denial, the project led by Will Toledo, put out a pretty good follow-up with Double Fantasy in 2018, and things have been a little rocky since. 2020’s Making A Door Less Open felt like a caustic response to Toledo’s newfound fame, filled with some interesting forays into more electronic territory, but overall felt intentionally difficult. Then there was Toledo’s health troubles, which started in 2022 when the band was on tour, when Toledo caught Covid, which developed into long Covid, which led to him being diagnosed with histamine intolerance, leaving him bedridden for a stretch as the band debated disbanding.
What resulted in Car Seat Headrest’s return was The Scholars, an album that was more of a team effort by the band and less of a Toledo solo project, with the entire band receiving writing credit. What this also resulted in is an album with a lot of ideas going on, maybe too many I would argue. Three songs on here breach the 10-minute mark, which I didn’t find too daunting considering this band can be very good when toying around with song structure and the ambitions of a catchy rock song. I also like that the album returns to the rock opera territory of Twin Fantasy, but something about The Scholars just doesn’t quite all fit together, as thrilling as sometimes can be. There’s a part of me that thinks maybe I could grow to appreciate this album with more intense listening, since it is so dense. But for now, it feels like it doesn’t quite live up to its ambitions.
There are other albums I could touch on that I just didn’t give that many listens, which perhaps means they couldn’t have been that disappointing, since my expectations clearly weren’t that high. I think the last album I’ll touch on is one that would probably be pegged as a disappointment for a lot of people, but I’m not sure it’s quite in that category for me. Yes, I’m talking about The Life of a Showgirl, the latest from the inescapable Taylor Swift. I say this wasn’t a huge disappointment for me because I was too bored to ever make it through all of 2024’s Tortured Poet’s Department and was pretty mixed on Midnights, which I guess means I’ve never been quite as on board with Taylor as I was during Folkmore/Evermore. Call me a typical male music snob, I suppose.
The Life of a Show Girl was probably a disappointment for a lot of Swifties because it saw the singer reuniting with Max Martin, one of the great hitmakers of our time and one of the architects of Swift’s seamless transition from the country to the pop world back in the Red/1989 eras. Now, I would say Martin and co-producer Shellback hold up their part of the deal, as the songs are pretty structurally sound in terms of being filled with catchy hooks and free of the flab that sometimes bogs down Taylor albums (and in particular the last one). But the lyrics here are just not very good at all, to the point where otherwise perfectly enjoyable songs become unlistenable because the lyrics are so nauseating and out-of-touch.
Seeing as Swift is who she is, there are plenty of people who have already gone to the trouble of picking apart the cringe of this album, from the penis-worship of “Wood” to the pointless Charli XCX diss track “Actually Romantic”, with more astute observations than I’m capable of. So I’ll just say it all feels a bit silly. Which, of course, is tough for a listener like me who was finally won over by Swift’s foray into more mature songwriting. Unfortunately, it seems she’s regressed here into a desperation for relevance that she doesn’t need, considering she’s the biggest thing on earth. Though because she seems so self-conscious of her image, I suppose we’ll see if the album’s mixed reception leads to her rethinking the direction of career. Who knows.
Well, that’s about all the disappointment I have in me for now. I just felt like I needed to exorcise a little bit of this underwhelming feeling since it has pervaded a lot of parts of this year, especially when the continuing development of AI slop has really had me feeling like art and creativity are at an all-time low. Luckily, my next few music posts (and our oncoming Top Ten lists) should be a reminder that there’s still plenty of good stuff that can rise above the mediocrity of it all.