Well, here we are again, looking back at the year in pop culture in the form of various lists, just as we have been for the last 17 years. I already made it fairly clear in my year-end wrap-up posts that 2025 wasn’t exactly a banner year for music or the world at large. But at the same time, there were plenty of albums I was able to find something to like about, even if it often felt like the year was filled with far more disappointments than pleasant surprises.
But that’s not what this list is for. This for the albums that made a rough year a little less rough, and if I’m being perfectly honest, I found myself feeling a bit better about the year in music the more I delved into what was remarkable about it. Maybe that’s just the feeling I’m having toward turning over the new leaf of a new year, even if there’s just as much uncertainty about what this one will look like. But hey, here’s my attempt to not look back in anger.
Honorable Mentions:
The Beths – Straight Line Was A Lie
KeiyaA – Hooke’s Law
Neko Case – Neon Grey Midnight Green
Pulp – More
Alex G – Headlights
I wrote a few posts last month covering different themes that cropped up from my experiences listening to 2025 music in the hopes of covering all the albums I never got around to writing about last year. However, I wasn’t able to cover everything. Namely, I didn’t cover artists who put up similarly solid follow-ups to great albums, which is how I would categorize the latest from Seattle band Deep Sea Diver, who put out Billboard Heart in early 2025, their first on the legendary Sub Pop Records (RIP the Sub Pop Airport Store at Sea-Tac).
Billboard Heart didn’t exactly reinvent what the band was doing on their standout 2020 release Impossible Weight, but at the same time, it didn’t really need to. Jessica Dobson remains a formidable talent both as a vocalist and guitarist, and the whole band sounded fantastic when I saw them at a small club in Philly last summer. They’re the kind of band that has a sound so big it could fill stadiums, but I’ll just as willingly take them as a scrappy underdog whose energy has them bursting at the seams.
Just a fair warning, there’s going to be a decent amount of indie-country on this list, since it was just that kind of year for me. S.G. Goodman first popped on my radar with her haunting gothic country mystique and billowy voice on 2022’s Teeth Marks, and this year’s Planting By The Signs was an affirmation that she could well be on her way to being one of the more distinct singer-songwriters out there.
That said, I’m not sure if I would say I’m in love with every single song on this album, but it just has such a spooky vibe that I kept getting drawn back in. Also, it needs to be given props for featuring one of my favorite songs of the year in the 9-minute opus that ends the album, “Heaven Song”. Goodman’s refrain of “maybe if I see it, then I’ll want it” contains multitudes, as it’s such a vague, malleable phrase that you can place any sort of meaning you want onto it after a long hard day of doing nothing much at all.
See, I told you there was going to be a lot of indie-country on this list. Greg Freeman’s second album Burnover, feels like an easy album to take for granted in the midst of the boom of this particular kind of shaggy, homespun music. But there’s something a bit more wild about Freeman’s sound that kept me coming back for more. There’s a plethora of musical left turns that Freeman takes over the course of Burnover, while as strange as this album can sound at times, the hooks he infuses into each lyric and guitar hook make the album weirdly addictive. Let’s hope this is just the start of Freeman burning bright, over and over.
Sometimes, reviving the sounds of the past with uncanny accuracy can be nothing more than a nostalgic exercise. And then when it’s done right, it can be downright joyfull as hell. With his Sharp Pins project, Kai Slater envisions a dayglo, jangle pop version of the ’60s that feels familiar, and yet the swooning melodies are so potent that it feels like you’re hearing this type of music with fresh ears. Slater has had such a burst of songwriting in this vein lately that he even released a second album in late 2025 with Balloon Balloon Balloon. While I haven’t quite come around to that album as anything other than more of the same thing, I still have incredibly fond memories of listening to Radio DDR throughout the summer as a sunny escape, drenched in youthful bliss and chiming guitars.
This was another album that I spent a lot of time listening to this summer, as it felt like a warm hug that also wasn’t afraid to be real with you. You know, if hugs had the ability to be anthropomorphic or something. I don’t know where I’m going with this.
Anyways, this year didn’t seem like a great year for hip-hop, not that I’m ever the expert on such things. But this was the year where for the first time in three decades, there wasn’t a single rap single in the Billboard Top 40, which is a little staggering. But like any art form that has had its cultural reach, hip-hop will always be there to provide a platform for both new talents and established artists that still know how to bring their A-game. This collaboration between Saba and No I.D., a rapper and producer who both hail from Chicago and whose sounds blend beautifully, felt like the most fully-formed hip-hop album I heard this year, perhaps because its pedigree was born to succeed. Maybe that doesn’t make it the most exciting album to talk about, but it has so many fun little things going on throughout the album lyrically and production-wise that I just couldn’t stay away.
As someone who was pretty down on Lorde’s 2021 release Solar Power, Virgin was exactly what I needed to get on board with this pop star who’s somehow already been with us for over a decade. This was a return to the vibes of Lorde’s high-water mark Melodrama, but with things pumped up into an even moodier, dancier stratosphere. It’s possible that this “return to form” aesthetic may have dampened some people’s opinions of Virgin, but I had no problem with hearing Lorde do what she does best, especially when we don’t get an album from her all that often. Which made Virgin a joy to blast when you were in the mood to find escape in the kind of precisely controlled chaos that Lorde seems to thrive on.
You didn’t think you were going to get through a Best Albums of the Year list without me getting to talk about my boy MJ Lenderman, did you? After releasing my favorite album of last year, the dude somehow managed to keep busy playing drums in the Crutchfield collaboration band Snocaps and playing guitar for his longtime band Wednesday, who sound about as good as they ever have on Bleeds. There’s just an undeniable amount of confidence to the way the band melds their sludgey alt-country sound with Karly Hartzman’s songwriting, which runs the gamut from raw and punky to sincere and tender, sometimes within the same song. It seems with every year, I get a little more disillusioned with rock bands mattering much these days, but Wednesday have been one of the shining lights that still fill me with hope.
I spent quite a bit of the latter months of 2025 listening to Dijon’s Baby, and yet I feel like this is one of those albums that people will be relistening to and picking apart for years to come. There’s just so much going on here, musically and production-wise, that listening to it with earphones on can sometimes be an overwhelming experience. At the same time, there is a certain warmth to Dijon’s songwriting and choice of colors and moods to accentuate that makes the album inviting, even if it can come off as a strange beast at first. Dijon’s lyrics cover a certain kind of domestic life, concerning things like marriage and fatherhood (hence the album’s title), and the dude finds a way to make positivity infectious without ever being corny. There’s just a very specific alchemy to this album, and I really look forward to subsequent listens.
It took me a while to really get into Geese, but as I listened to them more and more as the year came to a close, it really started to click with me what a special band this is and that they’re absolutely worthy of the hype. I’ve been trying to put my finger on why exactly they’ve been able to make rock music sound so fresh and vital to a lot of young ears, and I have a few theories, but there’s one I’ve been ruminating on lately.
Which is that I think what makes this band so exciting these days is that they’re just so darn human, to the point where it feels like it would be impossible for AI to recreate these songs. Sure, it could try, but it just doesn’t feel like a machine could possibly understand the perfectly imperfect ways all these songs fit together. From Geese’s shaggily syncopated drum parts to their frantic guitar work to Cameron Winter’s wailing vocals that contain so much emotion and so much strangeness at the same time. It’s all just so unique that it feels like the album could only be conceived by four humans jamming furiously away in a New York basement, and that’s a beautiful thing.
2025 was a long strange trip that felt like it might never end, so it was apt for me to spend a bunch of it listening to songs that were long strange trips that I never wanted to end. There just simply wasn’t anything quite like Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band’s second album that came out this year, or possibly any other year. The man combines country weariness and indie curiosity with some of the wisest, funniest, creative lyrics I’ve heard in quite some time. It’s another album that certainly passes the “AI could never make this” test, because you simply would have to have had the experience of living through the weird version of America we live in to create something so multifaceted and specific. But really, this album was just a good hang any time I needed it, and in a year as confusing and chaotic as 2025, who didn’t need that?