Though I’ve had a hard time regarding 2025 as a great year for music, I will say there was a nice variety of types of albums I got into this year. Some of them were comebacks, some of them were artists at the top of their game crafting great follow-ups, some came out of nowhere, and some were from artists that I’d known about for a while and finally embraced. This is an easy phenomenon to come across in this day and age, since it’s so easy to hear a new artist on your streaming service of choice, which also makes it just as easy to dismiss an artist.
You can listen to a 30-second snippet of a song from an artist deserving of a more thorough deep dive, but if that snippet doesn’t hit for you, you’ll just disregard the artist and move on. Or maybe you do go to the trouble of listening to an entire album (like I did with some of these), and if that album wasn’t quite their best work, or it was and you just didn’t come across it at the right time in your life, you won’t give it a second listen. Either way, I try to remain open to embracing artists I’d ignored in the past, and these were the albums where that paid off this year.
I’ll start off by briefly touching on a few hip-hop artists that I connected with this year, since it’s a genre I always feel a little less qualified to talk about. The first hip-hop album of the year I found myself being taken with was Showbiz! by MIKE, a rapper who has been fairly prolific the past few years (he released another 2025 album, Pinball II, later in the year) and has been one of underground rap’s more buzzed-about artists. I can’t say where Showbiz! really fits into MIKE’s oeuvre, since it was the first time I’d gone to the trouble of listening to a full album of his after being a little puzzled by his loose, monotone delivery. However, I was just happy to hear the way the rapper lets his stream-of-consciousness-sounding rhymes float over some dusty beats that harken to hip-hop’s past while also feeling a little too unusual to pin down.
An artist who I would call a contemporary of MIKE would be Earl Sweatshirt, who not only is a personal influence of his, but also serves up the same conversational rhymes over disarmingly short songs. I gave a listen to Earl Sweatshirt’s breakout album Some Rap Songs back in 2018 when it came out around the same time as other notably brief rap albums (like Pusha T’s Daytona and Tierra Whack’s Whack World). But because it was the most avant-garde of these albums, I just had a really hard time cracking it. I’m not sure too much has changed on Earl Sweatshirt’s latest, Live Laugh Love, but I had an easier time vibing with it. Maybe chalk it up to Sweatshirt’s lackadaisical flow and oblique use of beats becoming more common in underground hip-hop, but my ears are just a little more receptive to it this time around. It’s most likely a case of him being ahead of the curve and me not being ready, but this time, my ears were ready for it.
It should probably come as no surprise that my favorite hip-hop album of the year was a little more on the conventional side and also not too far removed from a bunch of other artists I like, which was From the Private Collection of Saba and No I.D., a collaborative album between rapper Saba and veteran producer No I.D. Saba came out of the same sunny hip-hop/R&B scene that sprung from 2010s Chicago that birthed artists like Noname and Chance The Rapper, while No I.D. was a huge influence on Chi-town’s earlier hip-hop scene, guiding the career’s of Common and Kanye, among many others.
So needless to say, From The Private Collection should sound like an unsurprisingly accomplished record, and surprise, it is! The soulfulness of No I.D.’s production combined with Saba’s playful rhymes are just a delight to listen to and feels like a great culmination of all the various artists that these two collaborators have crossed paths with. While the album does have that same upbeat sound you’d expect to come out of the Chicago hip-hop scene, there is a slight cynicism to Saba’s verses, most notably in “How To Impress”, where he rails against an unnamed hip-hop artist that has surpassed him in fame and fortune.
Well maybe I should return to talking about music that’s a bit more in my lane by touching on 2025’s premier Hot New Indie Band. I had been vaguely aware of Geese the past few years and gave a few songs a listen but never really felt compelled to dig any deeper for whatever reason. However, with the release of Getting Killed this year, if you listen to the type of music I listen to, ignoring this band no longer seemed like an option. I’ll admit that I still didn’t quite get Geese’s appeal after initially giving the album a few listens when it came out (it doesn’t help that the album’s opening track is also its most abrasive).
However, I’ve returned to Getting Killed occasionally over the months since it was released, and I can say I finally see what’s so darn exciting about this band. They’re truly wild in an era where taking risks and standing out feels like a novelty, and there’s something really compelling about their ramshackle sound that wavers between unbridled confidence and feeling like everything could unravel at any moment. Maybe singer Cameron Winter’s voice just takes a little getting used to, but once you do, it feels like the perfect warbly companion to what this band’s on about.
Despite being a fellow Philly-dweller and being in a vein of indie singer-songwriter that I don’t need much convincing to enjoy, I never connected all that deeply with Alex G. I believe I gave 2017’s Rocket and 2022’s God Save The Animals a listen back when they came out, and while I saw plenty to like about his mercurial approach to applying different sounds to his strong songwriting, it never really grabbed me. This year, Alex G made his major label debut with Headlights, and perhaps you could look at it as a thoroughly solid album meant to appeal to folks like me who haven’t given him too much thought despite being around for more than a decade now. But I think what makes this album great is that despite being a really strong batch of songs, it sidesteps feeling like an artist compromising in order to cross over to the mainstream. The production feels a little more polished at times, but at others, it has a kind of lo-fi jangle that fits Alex G’s hummable melodies in just the right ways.
An artist who’s been around even longer than Alex G who I’d never paid much attention to was Ben Kweller, who’s probably best known for his 2000 album Sha Sha, but has kept putting out music and touring at a pretty consistent pace since then. I got dragged to one of his shows this year, and despite not knowing much of his music, I was really impressed with his likable brand of shaggy slacker rock. Cover The Mirrors, the album he released earlier this year feels a bit like a change of pace from his typical tunes, since a lot of it was informed by grief. Kweller’s 16-year-old son died a couple years ago in a car crash and the album is very much about and informed by that tragedy. This is of course heavy subject matter for any album to tackle, but there is something refreshing about the way that Kweller is able to use his knack for catchy melodies to inform these songs with a bittersweet quality that is certainly raw, but also displays an ability to still find beauty in the world, even if it’s a little more empty without a loved one in it.
The last album I’ll touch on might be a bit of a stretch to include in this category, since Sabrina Carpenter was damn near inescapable in 2024. But for whatever reason, her album Short n’ Sweet never quite grabbed me, even if the singles were undeniably fun. Her follow-up album, Man’s Best Friend, feels a bit like the inverse in this regard, as it doesn’t have any singles quite as ear-wormy as “Espresso” or “Please Please Please”, but overall to me felt like a more consistent and surprising set of songs. Carpenter is very much in the same mode as this previous album, combining the pop sounds of the ’70s and ’80s with a modern sheen, while her spicy lyrics are filled with just as many chuckle-worthy one-liners as ever. While the album overall is a bit subtler (perhaps because the choruses are a bit wordier than your average pop singer), there are a lot of songs here that are easy to get stuck in your head if you give them the time. And while the album isn’t a revelation per se, it was the kind of victory lap that did a great job of asserting that Carpenter’s ascension to one of our biggest pop stars was no fluke.