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. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

Everybody loves a comeback, and there were some good ones in 2025. I wasn’t sure exactly what the qualifications for what constitutes a comeback should entail for the purposes of this post, but I kinda just went by whether an album felt like a comeback to me. A lot of these artists hadn’t released albums since the pandemic times, and I have to assume this global event also impacted the gestation periods for a lot of these albums to some extent. Whatever the case, these were artists that I was happy to hear from this year and who I hoped wouldn’t keep me waiting so long for another follow-up. Continue reading →

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.

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