For my final entry in these year-end looks back at 2025 in music, I figured I’d end on a hopeful note by touching on the artists that make me optimistic about the future of music. These are the artists I would consider discoveries — artists who came out of nowhere and impressed me with their latest albums despite not having any familiarity with them previously. It of course feels harder and harder to discover up-and-coming artists these days, since the algorithm tends to just point you toward whatever artists various music companies want you to invest your time in. But luckily, it is still possible for new voices to break through the status quo, and here are the albums that caught me by surprise.
I suppose I’ll start with what was the most pleasant surprise of 2025 for me album-wise, which was New Threats From The Soul by Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band. Ryan Davis had been kicking around for years in the country-rock band State Champion and released his first album with The Roadhouse Band in 2023, but had completely flown under my radar. While New Threats From The Soul has a kind of ambition and impeccable laidback wit to it that makes you wonder how Davis’s talent could’ve gone unrecognized for so long, at the same time, it informs the album magnificently. This is an album with tons of lived-in wisdom and road weariness, with a kind of “who gives a fuck” attitude that can only come from getting older and realizing the parameters society sets out for you aren’t necessarily worth abiding by.
Namely, that if you’re writing country songs, they don’t necessarily have to be straight to the point. The average song on New Threats From The Soul is about 7-minutes long, and yet because Davis’s lyrics are so good, I really have a hard time wanting them to end. I’m tempted to just drop a bunch of great one-liners here, but I’ll just say my favorite is “I learned time is not my friend or my foe, it’s more like one of the guys from work” from “The Simple Joy”. And for all of the great lyrical moments on the album, the musically adventurous nature of the album keeps these long rambling songs from ever getting remotely boring, landing on this sound that feels both unlike any country album I’ve heard and yet familiar enough to be a source of comfort.
There was a part of me that was tempted to write an entire piece just on the year in indie-country, since 2025 turned out to be another year full of great albums that bridged the divide between these two genres that has felt particularly pronounced the last couple of years. Seeing as I’ve never had a problem with country music working its way into indie music, I’m all for this recent trend, and one more album to throw on this pile was Burnover, the sophomore release by Vermont-based singer-songwriter Greg Freeman. I’d feel a little tempted to compare Freeman to one of the current kingpins of this genre, MJ Lenderman, but there’s something a little more wild about Freeman’s sound. Both in his vocal delivery, which has a kind of nasally howl to it, and in his backing band’s ability to throw in all sorts of various instruments (sax or flute, anyone?) into a fairly traditionally rocking sound. It’s the kind of album that displays a lot of talent and has me thinking this probably won’t be the last time Freeman puts out a great album.
Shifting gears a bit, I will confess that I often struggle with connecting to Spanish-language music, or really any music not in English, perhaps because I am such a lyrics guy. Maybe that will change a bit in 2026, since I did enjoy the 2025 albums by Bad Bunny and Rosalía, but one album I found myself coming back to a lot was Vendrán Suaves Lluvias, the second album by Mexican singer-songwriter Silvana Estrada. This album was pretty easy to get into just because Estrada’s brand of jazzy/folky goodness is undeniably gorgeous, and she has a fantastic voice that complements these gentle compositions wonderfully. There’s something pretty straightforward about the presentation here, with every little acoustic guitar or string arrangement being in exactly its right place. While one could argue that the arrangements are at times a little too pristine, it’s a little hard to complain when it’s just as easy to get swept up in Estrada’s easy way of delivering these tunes.
You could certainly label Silvana Estrada as a bit of a traditionalist, and the same can also be said for Sharp Pins, the solo project of Kai Slater, who gave their 2024 album Radio DDR a proper release on K Records this year. You only have to listen to Sharp Pins for a few seconds to get the impression that Slater has a major fascination with ‘60s jangle pop. There’s also a strain of Guided By Voices that certainly runs through this project as well, but there’s something more pure and carefree about this particular brand of resurrecting the power pop sounds of the past with a shaggy lo-fi flair. This, of course, probably has to do with Slater being a mere 20-years-old when he recorded this album, which gives it this very authentic sense of youth music of the past melding with genuine youth of today. Sharp Pins even dropped another album in late 2025 with Balloon Balloon Balloon, which I’m not sure I’ve quite connected with as much yet, but as Radio DDR proved, this band’s nostalgia may evoke skepticism at first, but with a few listens becomes irresistible.
The last album I’ll touch on is one that I think caught a lot of people by surprise in 2025, which was Baby, the sophomore album released by Dijon. The singer-producer had a pretty huge year overall, appearing on both Bon Iver’s and Justin Bieber’s albums from this year, while this release casually revealed that this guy seems to be some sort of mad genius. One of the great musical losses of 2025 was another R&B genius, D’Angelo, and for me, Baby feels like the messy, beautiful album that picks up where D’Angelo’s final album Black Messiah left off. It’s the kind of album that takes a few listens in order for you to recalibrate your ears to all the various fuzzy, interlocking components that make up Dijon’s sound, which coalesces like a bunch of puzzle pieces that don’t match, and yet somehow fit together perfectly.
I know that’s probably not a perfect metaphor, but that just proves how unique of an album this is and how tired I am from trying to make sense of this year. So that’s all from me for now on 2025 music. I’ll see you in a few weeks when we start posting our top tens.