Albums I Enjoyed in 2025
I listened to a lot of good music last year and now I wanna talk about it.
I actually wanted to talk about it weeks ago when a year-end list would've been more relevant but I'm slow!
This is meant to be a loose reference guide/resource listing some albums you should try at some point.
I don't recommend sitting and reading the whole thing at once, but you're welcome to if you want I guess.
I'm gonna start with some thoughts and navigation tools, but if you want to jump straight to the albums, here's a link.
Some Thoughts
This should've been a series of posts that I made throughout 2025, where I talked about whatever I'd been listening to recently...
But I didn't do that! So this is what happens when I let those plans pile up for a whole year. Hopefully I won't do that again this year.
I ended up revisiting these albums a lot while I was writing this. It was fun! But the whole thing took a while.
This list is not really ranked. Stuff will be closer to the top based on how excited I am to share my thoughts about it, which is not always the same as how good I think it is relative to the others. I'm not bothering to figure out my 12th favorite album of 2025 vs my 11th. I liked all of these albums!
This is all music I first listened to in 2025, whether it came out in 2025 or not. It's all recent though.
Some more thoughts down at the end.
Navigating This List
Every entry has these common features, so you can get a few different indications of what the album is like, and decide if you want to try it:
- Album title and artist name
- Album cover art
- A few genre/descriptor words
- Lyrical excerpts
- My own thoughts about the thing
Also for mobile users only (hidden on desktop) there's a clickable table of contents, and each entry will have a link at the bottom to take you back to the contents.
Desktop readers can use the outline view on the right to jump around.
So scroll around the page, skim a couple entries, maybe read a lyric or two, and pick something! Read my perspective of what's enjoyable or compelling about an album if you feel like it.
If you want more of a structured on-ramp, I have a couple tools for you.
Spotify Playlist
I put a few tracks from each album on a playlist. I had plans to be super intentional about track sequencing, to make something that you could just put on and listen straight through while reading or whatever, but that was too much effort and the post is too big to read straight through anyway, so instead this playlist just follows the same album order as the main list.
Prolly doesn't flow particularly nicely, and idk what the shuffle experience is like, but if you're more likely to try new music if you have a couple particular tracks to sample here and there, this is for you!
Genre Cloud
I also threw together an interactive genre descriptor tag cloud thing. (Source code here.)
This is a basic snapshot of what sort of music taste is represented in this list.
Click a tag to see the full list of albums associated with that tag.
You can then click any album in the list to jump straight to the full entry for that album.
Albums!
Okay here's the main list have fun lmk if you find something you like from this. <3
Full Albums List (mobile-only)
- Live At Revolution Hall (Adrianne Lenker)
- 2 (Foxwarren)
- Night Palace (Mount Eerie)
- Straight Line Was A Lie (The Beths)
- Double Infinity (Big Thief)
- Imaginal Disk (Magdalena Bay)
- Cancionera and De Todas Las Flores (Natalia Lafourcade)
- Keep Me On Your Mind / See You Free (Bonny Light Horseman)
- Glory (Perfume Genius)
- Lives Outgrown (Beth Gibbons)
- Only Dust Remains (Backxwash)
- I'm Only F**king Myself and This Wasn't Meant For You Anyway (Lola Young)
- Forever Howlong (Black Country, New Road)
- Virgin (Lorde)
- For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) (Japanese Breakfast)
- Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party (Hayley Williams)
- Lux (Rosalía)
- Who Is The Sky? (David Byrne & Ghost Train Orchestra)
Live at Revolution Hall (Adrianne Lenker)
live / singer-songwriter folk / field recordings
2025 (via 4AD)
"Here we are. For a brief infinite moment. Together in this room, everything has led up to this point."
[object clatters] [Adrianne chuckles]
"And we're together!"
True and rare, to travel through the chambers of your care
Soft and true, to welcome in the emptiness with you
If love will grow, how do we follow the light
Which ripples like a dream over the serene summer night
And it knows no limit
"This is one of my favorite songs.. uh, of mine." [laughs]
"But I for some reason never.. it never ended up anywhere and.. I dunno, I barely ever play it.
Think it's just one of those like, personal songs. Play it just for feeling better."
We moved into a real house, a wild field behind it
I wanted to be an inventor
Collected scraps to make a portal
I wanted so much for magic to be real
So many dreams of flying, rising high over the crowd
And they'd go "Oh man, look at her go!"
And I'd go!
"Request for a double piano 'Zombie Girl'
Just piano! Just piano but you two playing together on piano? Can we hear that?
...Ready?"What's on your mind, what's on your mind?
What's on your mind, what's on your mind?
What's on your mind?[laughter] "Yay!" "That was fun."
I usually don't get into live albums but this ended up being my favorite release of 2025, easily.
And I really liked a lot of stuff in 2025!
Most of the live albums I've listened to are straightforward, high-quality recordings of some songs that some artist played over the course of some performance(s). Maybe they'll leave in some chatter, crowd noises, some of the transitional time where the band is setting up for the next song, or they might even just give you a whole show unedited, front-to-back. This album is not straightforward.
Live at Revolution Hall plays like a mildly psychedelic, scrapbook-style audio documentary covering a few days of Adrianne Lenker's 2024 solo tour. What makes it compelling is its commitment to capturing so many moments that are not performances of the songs I already know and love, and presenting these vignettes with equal reverence for how they contribute to the atmosphere of the tour. There are moments that speak to what it's like to attend shows like this, to perform for a lovely crowd, to prepare and practice before the doors have opened, and to play and fiddle around on the road with your musician friends.
You'll hear fragments of soundchecks that stumble or hold while someone in the background asks for "more piano please". Venue workers joke around or give directions in between checking IDs at the door. Fans record brief messages for Adrianne. Adrianne records notes-to-self and can't figure out how to turn off the recorder. Between shows, she asks a fan for some artistic direction after they request that she draw a star on a poster or something. They giggle about it.
Adrianne's presence throughout is as warm and genuine as you'd expect from her. What I didn't expect was to come away with such an appreciation for Andrew Sarlo's mark on the project. Sarlo is this album's recording engineer and producer, whose goal was to "put friendship at the focal point making this a loving memento from one friend to another" (source).
You feel that in the editing. There's a live version of Lenker's song "Indiana" on this album, here titled "indiana & sneezing". You hear the intro, the first verse, and a couple sneezes from the audience, clearly from the same person. By the end of the first chorus they've sneezed enough times that Adrianne takes a second to throw out a "bless you" over the short interlude before the song's second verse. While the crowd laughs in reaction, the album transitions to the next track, its attention flowing to a different moment entirely. "Indiana" has another verse and another chorus, but "indiana & sneezing" is about something else, so it does not.
That next moment, by the way, isn't in front of a crowd. It's some other time and place entirely. It's not really even a song, but the transition is seamless anyway. "indiana & sneezing" leaves off in the middle of a performance as laughter ripples through the crowd around the room, and the next track picks up with Adrianne giggling, among friends, at her own attempts to cover Dick Gaughan's rendition of "Now Westlin Winds". Laughter bridges these two moments, as it does many others on the album. These quieter off-stage interactions between Lenker and the other touring musicians add a layer of color to their group dynamics: even when they're not performing, they still share quality time, silly thoughts, and even more music with each other.
Those more private performances often feel almost conversational, they're so casual. At the start of one recording, as Lenker strums the opening chord of an unreleased song, she quickly introduces it with "Got one for ya", and launches into the first verse. It's apparently unfinished; she trails off at the end, saying "That's all I got! That's an old, old..." and the response is an incredulous "How old is that!?". Later, in a similar off-stage moment Adrianne clears her throat, ready to play "fangs", but she's interrupted by someone (Runsteen?) starting to sing "Moon River". She chuckles, joins in for a second, then gets on with "fangs". In the background under Lenker's performance you can hear little murmurs from others in the room, tracing out portions of the song with their own humming voices. She ends with a thoughtful "Maybe I should play that one". Looks like she did, but the on-stage performance does not appear on the album.
Sometimes Sarlo stitches multiple performances together, letting these public and private contexts and spaces blur into each other. A spacious, tape-hiss-filled soundcheck with background chatter might bloom into a polished, fully-accompanied, proper performance with audience reactions. One standout (and an album highlight) is "anything - live", which interpolates a few different perspectives of a couple different performances all in the same track. The overall impression echoes that of the album itself. It lands somewhere deep in the middle of everything - down in the front row, in the back of the room, on the stage, in preparation and in execution, in play and in careful practice, in the art and the artist and the community around the both of them.
Nick Hakim and Josefin Runsteen, the pianist and violinist that accompany Lenker onstage, also deserve special mention for their influence on the sound and experience of Live at Revolution Hall. They take what were originally (already-stellar) solo Lenker songs and turn them into collaborative, transformative reinterpretations of those pieces in their (also-stellar) performances. "real house - live" sheds some of the pensive, wandering slowness of its studio version and takes on more driving and dynamic instrumentals. Runsteen's violin climbs and soars as Lenker describes her dreams of flying. Hakim's piano is the core that sticks around when the rest of the accompaniment drops away as Lenker recalls her family mourning their dog. Elsewhere, the ethereal atmosphere of "Symbol" takes on a more dramatic, intense undertone in "symbol - live". "ruined - check" starts a bit loose, a bit silly, before reaching an emotional peak that wallows in the catharsis just a little bit more than "Ruined" does.
These sorts of reinterpretations fit right in among Lenker's wider body of work. She herself has never been afraid to re-record and re-release new studio versions of old songs in new contexts or with new collaborators. See "Indiana" (1, 2), "Terminal Paradise" (1, 2), "From" (1, 2), "Vampire Empire" (1, 2), and probably some others I'm forgetting. She takes a similar approach to live performance. In interviews, she's said "I might be angry one night and let it flow through me and scream and go a whole tour without feeling like it's natural to do it again" and "If you love a live [performance] recorded on someone's phone, it's cool. Just listen to that" (both from this Vulture interview). There's a delightful freedom in this approach that lends each unique performance, each new interpretation an almost sacred validity. The goal is not to recreate the same magic of a studio version, or to approach some idealized perfection, but to find and fulfill a new magic in the expression, in that space, with those people, in that moment.
Andrew Sarlo said of the project, "It was impossible to do this album without the immense love and respect I have for my friend. Watching the power of the music disarm and permeate feels a bit like an 'I told ya so' but I am still amazed every time. From the sidelines I cheer" (source). I'm so glad he got his moment of smug satisfaction, cuz he was absolutely right. Live at Revolution Hall is truly singular, and so loving. Now I just need to actually see her live, lol.
2 (Foxwarren)
sample-heavy / chamber pop / soft rock
2025 (via ANTI-)
And though I've not been listening to what you've been saying
I have my own words prepared
I'll put you right back where you belong
And though I have no formal training on the current subject
Once I open my mouth you'll see how sharp I really am
I'll bet you sing just how you laugh
Toss your head back, let it out light and free
Follow through, again and again, my heart is filled with you
I'll bet you dream just how you laugh
With the meaning of life from the dew in the tall grass
Follow through, again and again, my heart is filled with you
I didn't expect much from this album, so it ended up being perhaps the most surprising release I paid attention to this year. 2 takes the soft rock sound that Andy Shauf is known for, cuts it up a bit, weaves it among other clippings from old film recordings, and adds some groovier beats for good measure. Fragments of scene dialogue serve as vignette-style introductions or song transitions and modified samples of orchestral passages from old romantic melodramas lay the foundation for each song. The usual soft rock suspects (bass, piano, guitar, etc.) fill things out. Shauf's voice floats on top. It's an unlikely-sounding collage that works delightfully well.
2 is a tight, quick album. By the end, the aesthetic feels properly explored but not overplayed. The first couple tracks cut to the chase, making a compelling enough argument for what the album is after, so you should have a good idea of whether you'll want to stick around by then. If you do, you'll find that 2 is well paced and dynamic, with nicely distributed highlights that deliver a reason to keep listening every couple minutes. I had this album on loop for a good chunk of the year so I can attest to it rewarding repeat listens pretty well.
It's also conceptually cohesive, but not in the plot-heavy way that Shauf's solo work is known for. Usually with Shauf you're looking out for repeat names or common references between songs that hint at the broader storyline you're meant to be piecing together. By contrast, 2 works more with character archetypes in a lyrical approach that feels much more thematically direct, coming from Shauf. Over the course of 2's runtime, he leverages the unique experimental aspects of the album's sonic approach to also construct a thematic and narrative collage out of those separate dialogue fragments. Shauf's own lyrics act as the glue that binds these different characters in their different contexts to the same overall picture of the (melo)drama of romantic domestic partnership. Ultimately, that picture is not particularly self-serious. The dialogue and film score samples are all exaggerated, and the band's own arrangements are light and groovy. Shauf's lyrics often feel playful. There's some sarcasm. At its core, 2 prioritizes its own fun and experimentation above all else. It is clever, and there's plenty to consider, but mostly it's just light and fun. It's a good time!
If you're curious about Andy Shauf's solo work, I think The Party is still the quintessential Shauf recommendation.
(This album has a version with all the stems separated on Bandcamp which is always fun to see.)
Night Palace (Mount Eerie)
experimental / slacker rock / folk
2024 (via P. W. Elverum & Sun)
Some affection is mercurial
I've gone in and out of favor with no footing
But my love for you my child is as permanent as sky
Breathe forever beneath the canopy of my life
While you wait through winters coals illuminate your night
Salmonberries will return and you are always in my eye
I love you
Returning home Odysseus rides the ferry at night
I finally return to the end of our long road
There's been weather again and there's debris on the mud beneath tires
Clawed down by a sky unloading
And I see a cutting reflection of something I don't recognize through the dark trunks
I go out into it to look
I told a fish, "I like how you move through the water as one flowing muscle"
The fish said,"I dig your style too, man"
Cold wind howls through this whole album, and rain pelts or patters, and wood cracks and crackles in the flames. Guitars buzz and hum and break down into dirty, noisy chaos, melting into a fog of fuzzed-out cymbals and unidentifiable droning. Drums bang on like tree limbs knocking together in a maelstrom. Some other musical stormy natural imagery goes here. Something about black birds. Whatever, Phil Elverum is better at this sort of thing than I am; he's had like 30 solid years of professional practice.
Night Palace is overtly noisy and abrasive in the way that thunder, wind, sleet, colonization, genocide, privilege, and existential nihilism are. It is also captivating. Beautiful, in the way that the windswept and storm-carved landscapes, or the ever-shifting, ever-rising oceans, or the blurry and fraught present moment shaped by foggy (and fraught) history, also are. I guess it's sort of a slacker-rock folk-rock album, but Night Palace is so drenched in experimentation and exploration that genre tags and descriptors feel particularly inadequate here. It's got field recordings and spoken word tracks. It's got drone and noise and a little black-metal screaming. Small folk tune interludes and expansive rock ballads. All a bit waterlogged, a little weathered and worn, but with sharp edges left exposed here and there. Somehow Elverum weaves a coherent album listening experience out of the noise and natural chaos, and it's like nothing else. Night Palace sounds like Night Palace.
The subject matter is also a surprisingly-coherent hodgepodge. Elverum muses about seemingly anything and everything, a whole scattered mess of topics and concepts that bleed into and tumble out of each other. Nature runs its roots through everything, though, and through the wind and fog it all holds together.
I kinda want the book version. Also the vinyl would be cool I guess. Please give this album a try.
(This album has a version with all the stems separated on Bandcamp which is always fun to see.)
Straight Line Was A Lie (The Beths)
powerpop / indie pop rock
2025 (via ANTI-)
I still go, it's been a year now
Past the chain link fence that keeps out
With the bridges all still blown out, you can't amble anymore
Overgrown, abandoned
I take off my shoes to cross and
Find the current has forgotten how it felt to break the world
And I know
I'm a collaboration! Bacteria, carbon and light.
A florid orchestration! A recipe of fortune and time.
Yeah it's a lot to take in!
When I try, I see a short word.
If I go digging I'll never stop
Fossilized nightmares in every spot
Ancient pottery filled with fault
In the negative space that held my soul
I wanna scream your name
I wanna know what I've got
I wanna love till my heart stops
I love how intentional Liz Stokes is with her lyrics. She's usually conversational and often direct, but she also knows how to wring meaning out of abstraction, when to pull out a metaphor, play with imagery, or build a narrative. There's usually something concrete, something particular that she's aiming at with each song. Her ideas always feel approachable, but the process of discovery is still satisfying. I'm not describing a hollow lyrical puzzle box either. There is intent in the structure, and an emotional truth at the core.
It helps that the rest of The Beths are also great at what they do. Stokes is a great vocalist. They have a great lead guitarist, a great drummer, and a great bassist. Their arrangements are great. They've polished their powerpop chops over 4 albums now, and this is definitely their smoothest, most refined album yet. They've always excelled at that full, energetic, driving rock sound, with their signature full-band harmony, but in Straight Line Was A Lie The Beths show more willingness to play with space, and to bring the tempo down from its max setting now and then. The result is an album that feels more considered, more varied than some of their prior work.
Straight Line Was A Lie is also thematically strong. Stokes gave an (excellent) interview where she discusses the process of writing each song, and finally tying it all together. After writing most of the album, and "being able to kind of see it as a whole, it was like, what's the throughline, what's the theme? What's my brain been trying to tell me over the last two years with this body of work? And that was when 'Straight Line Was A Lie' came. ... that song, I, like, coughed it out on the bus." It became the opening, the title track, and the throughline. Straight Line Was A Lie, as a song and an album, is about grappling with your own internal limitations and shortcomings within the chaos of the external world, "falling into the folly of believing that everything would keep getting better, and that progress is just inevitable and you just keep improving, [when] really it's more just finding meaning in the work, finding meaning in the maintenance, and just going through until... until you die."
They played most of this album live in a special KEXP session that's worth watching.
That Stereogum interview really is good.
Their YouTube channel is full of fun videos of behind the scenes studio moments and tour video diary stuff.
Their bassist's Breakfast and Travel Updates blog is also legendary. Here's the one for the day when all their instruments got stolen. Yikes.
Double Infinity (Big Thief)
psychedelic folk rock
2025 (via 4AD)
My mother and my grandma - my great grandmother too - wrinkle like the river, sweeten like the dew, and as silver as the rainbow scales that shimmer purple blue. How can beauty that is living be anything but true?
So let gravity be my sculptor; let the wind do my hair; let me dance in front of people, without a care; let me be naked, alone, with nobody there, with mismatched socks and shoes and stuff stuffed in my underwear.
Incomprehensible, let me be.
I'll follow you forever, even without looking
You call we come together
Even without speaking I can tell what you are thinking
Even without saying
We dream our dreams together, even without laying in the same bed
And you sang for me!
You sang for me
Big Thief is the best, okay? Adrianne Lenker's music is fun and cool. I understand that people think the lime artwork is weird, but I got a sorta marbled green vinyl version of this album out of that, so I don't wanna hear any limes grapes gripes about it.
The first half of Double Infinity is one continuous flow of Big Thief jamming out in peak form, in the company of like 10 additional session musicians. It leans into their psychedelic side enough to sound fresh, and into their jammy improvisational side enough to sound fun, and into the like 10 additional session musicians enough to sound full and collaborative. Excellent sequencing and track transitions. This is the second Lenker-related project of 2025 that uses laughter as an effective song transition. Hehe.
The back half of Double Infinity is the divisive encore. There are interesting choices here! "No Fear" is a lyrical mantra over a bass mantra. "Happy With You" finds a simple truth and doubles down on it, and triples down on it, and quadruples, etc., over the jammiest of all the jams. "Grandmother" has funky improvised backing vocals and another simple, sentimental lyrical core. I like each of these choices in isolation, but they're all right next to each other in the same 3-track run, so they join forces to become "that sorta weird and ultra-repetitive section of the album". I like these tracks! But they're an overall pacing bump. At the same time, I wouldn't want to touch that first half to redistribute these tracks elsewhere. Bit of a dilemma.
Double Infinity also did the thing where it's a 9 track album that had 4 singles come out ahead of its release, including 3 of the 5 tracks that make up that excellent "first half". I already think of singles as a sort of necessary evil for the industry, best avoided by the listener (for albums you're already anticipating) as much as possible. Double Infinity was a great case study for when pre-release rollout seems fine-tuned for sabotaging online discourse when the album finally comes out in full. Take Laraaji's vocal improvisations on "Grandmother" out of the context of the album's overall tone. Give people enough time to take for granted the wonderful verses of "Incomprehensible". Disrupt the sublime sequencing and flowing transitions of the album's first half. What highlights remain for discussion? Well, there's always that sorta weird and ultra-repetitive section!
Imaginal Disk (Magdalena Bay)
synthpop / psychedelic / maximalist
2024 (via Mom + Pop Music)
Fate, lead me astray
Take me whole and wash me away
All along there was a story
Spare me all the allegories, please
Damn, man, play that thing
Makes me think of summer winds
And faces that I know
Just the ones I love to hold
I swear that through your eyes
Everything is brighter all the time
Adored and discussed to death for very good reason. Imaginal Disk is 54 minutes of crazy production acrobatics in the form of dance-y synthpop that will sometimes just seamlessly phase transition into proggy psychedelic synth-rock (or any number of other synth-things) for fun. Lyrics trend toward the abstract, maybe even a bit vague, but they definitely get the vibes across. This thing is just wall-to-wall bangers with extremely polished and detailed production that reveals more and more of itself on repeat listens. It's well worth checking out, topped a lot of the 2024 year-end lists, super well-received, go listen etc etc.
Okay here are my two maybe slightly less common notes about it.
One:
I didn't really get into the "loose concept album" that's buried in here. I get the broad strokes and how they relate to themes of self exploration and consciousness and whatnot, but in terms of particulars, of characters and plot, there's very little here that's tangible enough to firmly grasp without stepping outside the "text" of the album itself.
I appreciate that the music videos and other media around the album apparently go further to suggest these particulars! It seems that the tangible concept of a story does actually exist around this album in some form. I also appreciate that both members of the Magdalena Bay duo acknowledge the "looseness" of the concept. In their words, "once we had the music and we had the sequencing and we listened through the record, we were like, 'Well, we could overlay this story on top of the music' - and that’s the story of the visuals. But it’s not necessarily inextricably tied to the music, it’s just a layer of meaning on top of the record" (source). I think Imaginal Disk stands well enough on its own, even in a form that lacks those particulars. The full-fledged narrative experience is not required. That way lies endless fan theories about what all even happens if you're interested, though.
Two:
On first listen I did not pay attention to my progress in the tracklist, so I was 90% sure I was listening to the last song on the album like 4 separate times. This didn't end up being a bad thing, it was just funny on a first listen. The sequencing and track transitions work well if you're paying attention! I think they just happened to write several good candidates for album closers here, and I was a bit distracted when I initially checked this out. I've made up for that blunder by listening to it a bunch more times since, so I think we're all good now.
Cancionera and De Todas Las Flores (Natalia Lafourcade)
singer-songwriter / mexican chamber folk / strong vocals
Cancionera - 2025 (via Sony Music)
DTLF - 2022 (via Sony Music)
Que te vaya bonito, Nicolás, adonde quiera que lleves tu vuelo
En la tierra seguiremos cultivando ese amor para vivir que tú has sembrado
Que te vaya bonito, Nicolás, no tengas miedo de cruzar la puerta
Pues los dioses, los maestros de esta tierra reclamaron a este mundo tu presencia
Natalia Lafourcade has been popular for a while, but these albums brought her into my little sphere of music discussion, and I'm glad cuz they're delightful.
De Todas Las Flores has a stripped back, intimate presentation that puts a lot of emphasis on Lafourcade's vocal performance. Arrangements often feel understated even when there's a lot going on technically. Guitars, strings, and background vocals convey plenty of movement and progression underneath Lafourcade's vocals, when she's not weaving in and around them herself. Tracks often take on something of a blooming shape, gradually adding background elements over time until you can see their full form. Then they might twist a time or two to show you another angle. Lafourcade's performances convey an element of discovery, like you're seeing a little something new tumble out of her in the process of recording.
Cancionera feels like Lafourcade and her ensemble of collaborators enjoyed the process of creating De Todas Las Flores, and they wanted to do it again, but bigger and warmer, leaning into the fun, the discovery, and the ensemble. They committed to recording full takes live to tape for this, with "18 musicians playing together with Natalia in a live setting" and "no tricks, no contrivances of any kind" (source). So Cancionera has a sense of place and of community that was present at times in De Todas Las Flores, but was not nearly so strong. There's somewhat less melancholy in the subject matter too, leaving room for more playfulness to shine through.
For Cancionera, Lafourcade takes on a whole alter ego, a "songstress soul [that] cornered me into maximum creativity through dance, exploration of movement, exploration of painting, many things I love and had perhaps kept locked away in a drawer" (source). You can see this songstress persona in the album's music videos, which lend a vibrant cinematic dimension to the whole experience of the album. Cancionera takes on an exaggerated studio setting draped in heavy blue and red stage curtains and cut through with dramatic lighting. It also gains a full cast. You can see the actual humans that brought it into being, put some faces to voices and instruments, and place Lafourcade's own immense presence into the context of those 18 fellow musicians. Watch everyone smile, clap, and dance as they discover the music together.
In these videos, the songstress persona is larger than life, and sometimes she breaks past the bounds of the dark studio to venture into nature. In the studio she often fills the frame, defines the space. In nature the songstress is instead a small streak of flowing red that dances through fields, under forest trees, over sand dunes, or waist-deep in waves of sunlit water. Lafourcade presents De Todas Las Flores as an "introspective and deeply emotional journey," and it certainly has much to offer there. Cancionera, on the other hand, "is a musical and visual manifesto" that seeks "to transform music into a space of wonder". You should listen to De Todas Las Flores, because its journey is worth it. You should experience Cancionera as a full audio-visual work, because its space is wondrous.
Here's another link to the Cancionera videos.
Keep Me On Your Mind / See You Free (Bonny Light Horseman)
folk rock americana
2024 (via Jagjaguwar)
Speak to me, muse, of the way that it feels
To be free as a sparrow that flies in the field
Aw, she likes me to borrow, she loves me to steal
Alright
Speak to me, muse, of the sun going down
And the hurrying past of the burying ground
With the green, green grass growing all around
Alright
I saw the kids we once were in that picture you sent me
Cupping a cig on the fire escape, reeling a line of laundry
Singing to the mandolin over the roadside din
Standing in your kitchen singing to the mandolin
Thumbing through The Waste Land, making eggs to Graceland
Singing to the mandolin, singing to the mandolin
And your legs, your legs all the time
You were running like a pony by the oceanside
There was sea salt in the bedsheets where we slept at night
And your legs, your legs all the time
A big long album packed full of S-tier americana rock. My most-listened album of 2025. I guess it's fair to say it's a bit bloated, but I also have a hard time deciding which tracks are worth cutting. This was my comfort album in late spring. It's got 20 tracks, it's just over an hour long, and there were a few days where I just had it on a back-to-back loop.
The pitch for Bonny Light Horseman is that they're an indie folk supergroup of 3 artists that have been quietly influential for a long while. Anaïs Mitchell is best known for the concept album turned stage musical Hadestown. Eric D. Johnson is known for Fruit Bats and the Shins. Josh Kaufman plays a ton of instruments and has a whole slew of producer, musician, composer, arranger, and songwriter credits (notably with The National and Taylor Swift among many others).
The pitch for this album is that these 3 master artists decided to just get together and have a fun time recording some good songs that they wrote, man. Clearly they put significant time and thought into the writing part - there's plenty to chew on in the arrangements and the lyrics - but the recording process itself comes across as this free-flowing effortless experience. They recorded much of the album in public, at an Irish pub with a little crowd. It feels candid, like you could've been sitting at the bar having a beer while these insane musicians were throwing down and having a great time on the other side of the room. It's never a full on audio documentary like Adrianne Lenker's live album above, but the end result is just unvarnished enough to infuse this album with the character of a particular setting, and its performances with the essence of a particular moment.
Mitchell and Johnson each have striking, peculiar, strong voices. They play co-lead with vocals a lot, trading perspectives and handing verses back and forth. You might think they'd clash when they come together and harmonize, but they complement instead. I was a fan of Anaïs Mitchell before I knew about this band, so I showed up to this album for her, but I've stuck around for the synergy of the group.
If you like Mitchell's vocals and her poetic, highly structured approach to lyrics, definitely check out Young Man In America or one of her other solo albums. She's great.
If you're curious about the pub and the process for this album, you can see some clips from the recording session in these videos for Old Dutch and When I Was Younger.
Glory (Perfume Genius)
art rock / progressive / atmospheric
2025 (via Matador Records)
Can I get off without reliving history
and let every echo just sing to itself?
Can I move on without knowing specifics
while memories hum like a hive shaken out?
Did it glow in the dark? Was there a choir winding on?
Can you hear me at all?
It's only your name repeating
Green and wide
Bolts of white iris tenderize
Sobs from the silo
Hung, dried, left for tomorrow
Loosened, roving stray
Guest of body
Now in quiet glory
Glory
Finding shade
Perfume Genius continues to put out consistent, stylish, well-realized albums. It's a bit subdued, but Glory still feels like a culmination of all the stylistic experimentation and progression that Hadreas has undergone through his career. There's some old and some new. "Me & Angel" echoes the minimal piano ballads of his first few albums. Several tracks carry on a more-accessible continuation of Ugly Season's progressive, psychedelic experimentation, where Hadreas stretches tracks out like putty, seeing if he can twist a couple more shapes out of them before they break. The name Jason makes another return. Alan is all over the production credits (and in some of the videos). Longtime producer Blake Mills is still here. The band that joins him is familiar to such an unusual degree that it's noteworthy that Hadreas "wrote a lot of these songs on the piano because [he] was leaving room for the band" (source).
Conceptually, Glory is "about trying to be as much as I can where I am ... [and appreciating] all the things I've been carrying this whole time that haven't changed" (source). Hadreas's perspective as a reasonably successful, (now middle-aged) gay man in (indie alt-)rock is still frustratingly rare. It's clear he still carries the weight of that reality with him. Such an expansive and fuzzy mission statement, being as much as he can be, is the perfect approach to take here. Hadreas is introspective and anxious - about his life, his career, his body. He's self-isolating and critical of his self-isolation. He anticipates grief, explores abstract archetypal tragedy, and examines the absurdity of the idea that creativity needs tragedy, feeds on it. He exalts the beauty and the struggle of his own long-term relationship. He wallows and he soars. He's nasty and silly and sexual. He may or may not cannibalize his friend Tate? I'm not entirely sure.
Hadreas manages to be as much as he can be, where he is, and there aren't very many artists where he is, and I'll take as much as I can get, because I definitely need it.
Here watch this one.
Lives Outgrown (Beth Gibbons)
progressive / psychedelic / chamber folk / strong vocals
2024 (via Domino)
Tell me all you want to say
Tell me who you are today
Free from all I hear inside
Come over here,
Listen to me
Far from our conscious mind lie those fallow fields
Where open hearts will wander
Sweet whispering love, come to me
When you can
Best known as the lead singer of the legendary Portishead, Beth Gibbons doesn't release music very often these days, so Lives Outgrown is a rarity. It's also high quality and wonderfully experimental while still ultimately feeling grounded in a chamber folk sound, albeit a particularly lush one. James Ford effectively plays an entire eclectic orchestra of instruments. He has a few dozen instrument credits in the personnel notes! And then sometimes there's also just a whole actual orchestra in there, too.
Despite all this production, the album generally sounds deep, rather than big, to me. It's brooding and atmospheric more than it is bombastic or theatrical. Either way, it's quite dense, with arrangements exploring a wide range of textures and global influences. I particularly like the amount of thought given to the percussion here, which is often just as dynamic and textured as the other instrumental arrangements. Meanwhile, Gibbons delivers her vocal performances with a deftness that perfectly matches the eccentricity of everything else.
Lyrically, Lives Outgrown is often bleak, sometimes hopeful, always beautiful. Gibbons expresses grief, frustration, and disappointment with the personal maturity of 60 years of perspective. Utlimately she works toward a sunlit clearing of an ending that feels both hopeful and hard-earned. For all the introspection and retrospection that comprises most of the arc of Lives Outgrown, "Whispering Love" is a look forward and outward, toward the safety and the unity that we know must be out there, somwehere, even if it has not been here with us for some time.
Only Dust Remains (Backxwash)
hip hop / rap / heavy
2025 (via Ugly Hag Records)
No matter how you quote this
Never mince your word and everything is heard
Just know the judges remain partial in these solemn moments
You might be judged but there is love between the hocus pocus
I hope you know this
Life as a kid, the fuck happened to me?
My tragedy scene is seen as the last bastion of me
So the day of judgement
Won't try to play republic
Won't try to sway the covenant
Absolve me, I'll stay repugnant
A voice whispers but I can't hear it
She's miles away 'til it's all clear in me
What wasn't I seeing? What wasn't I being?
Eyes too wide, I couldn't see
Feet on the ground, I was walking away from me(quoting Nina Simone)
"My thing, what I hope to do all the time, is to be so completely myself,
which that's what I hope I am,
to be so much myself that my audiences, and even people who meet me, are confronted.
They're confronted with what I am, inside and out, as honest as I can be.
And this way, they have to see things about themselves."I was walking away
Away from me
The Nina Simone quote in the title track of Only Dust Remains feels like a thesis statement for the whole album. Backxwash performs a raw (angry, self-critical, cathartic) self-excavation over the course of this album. She confronts and expresses her self, and she does so openly. Thoroughly, (visciously,) completely. She does the same for humanity in general, though. Institutional injustice and historic violence come out attached to the viscera and soaked in the same blood of personal, individual trauma. Backxwash's production matches the weight and intensity of the subject matter throughout. It's heavy, it's a lot, it's worth experiencing. Come see things about yourself.
This project comes after a trilogy of albums from her, all of which leaned into harsher horrorcore and industrial production elements. I respect these projects! There's plenty to get out of them, but I'm glad to have Only Dust Remains as a considerably more accessible entry point for Backxwash. "VIBANDA" and "IN THY HOLY NAME" are worth a listen if you're curious about those other projects, though. I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES is particularly good imo.
I'm Only F**king Myself and This Wasn't Meant For You Anyway (Lola Young)
alt pop-rock / singer-songwriter / strong vocals
IOFM - 2025 (via Island Records)
TWMFYA - 2024 (via Island Records)
You make it hard to see beneath the rubble
While I shovel that shit to the left, say you're not that kind of guy
I work hard to stay in your good books
But you don't even read, so why do I try?
Young's vocals are absolutely killer on both of these outings, and she has this violently passionate, unapologetic frankness that gets certain tracks and lines lodged in my head until I come back and listen again.
The one-two combo of "Good Books" into "Wish You Were Dead", the first two tracks from This Wasn't Meant For You Anyway, made such a strong first impression on me. The rest of that album is decent, but its follow-up, I'm Only F**cking Myself, feels more consistent in quality and somewhat more daring in its variety, so it gets a slightly higher recommendation from me overall. The album is well sequenced to get the most out of that variety without wearing out any one particular sound.
On repeat listens, I do tend to skip the intros, outros, and the apparently-obligatory voice memo acoustic recording as a second-to-last track on both of these albums. On paper I appreciate these glances into Young's writing and recording processes! In practice the contrast is a bit too jarring to feel like it fits with what I'm looking for when I return to her music.
Anyway, Young's trajectory as an artist is exciting, and she seems to be building momentum with these releases, so I'll definitely be looking out for whatever she does next.
Forever Howlong (Black Country, New Road)
baroque pop / art rock / theatrical / lots of instruments
2025 (via Ninja Tune)
The moon was low and the road dusty
When I was captured by some thieves
My pockets emptied
I said "You'll have to kill me to cut this jewel out of me"
They let me go
I shall boil some beans
I should get my vitamin B
The last video I watched told me the pH of my gut microbiome was certainly causing my blues
So I fill myself up with fiber as dusk begins to set
It's always been thrilling to see BC,NR pull together and execute their massive, elaborate compositions, and flex their extensive instrumental skills. That's still true for Forever Howlong. With 3 singers taking turns to fill in for their departed frontman, there's now even more variety where before the vocals were a constant sonic throughline. Each new frontwoman takes their own slightly different approach to lyrics and performance, and repeat listens had me picking apart those differences more and more, personally. I find it a bit awkward in hindsight. I have preferences between each singer's vocal quality and lyrical approach now, and it might take some work on my part to avoid disappointment if the next album doesn't strike a balance with the vocalists that suits those preferences. At least the arrangements and the instrumental performances will probably always be compelling, all else aside!
If you want to literally see them execute some of their elaborate compositions, check out this KEXP performance.
Virgin (Lorde)
electronic alt pop
2025 (via Universal Music New Zealand)
I've been the siren, been the saint
Been the fruit that leaves a stain
I've been up on the pedestal
But tonight I just wanna fall
Oh, where did it go?
Wish I'd kept the Clearblue
I'd remember how it feels to
Be so bare in the throes
I wish I'd kept the Clearblue
I'd remember how it feels to be
Vulnerable, intimate transparency is the whole entire idea here, and I think it works. Virgin does not hit the same astronomical heights of wall-to-wall catchy danceable pop anthems that Melodrama achieved, which makes sense. It's clearly aiming in a different direction. It does manage to avoid the somewhat baffling, awkwardly bland territory that Solar Power got a bit lost in. Compared to Lorde's first couple albums, Virgin is still mellower, slightly slower, but it's more in tune with the sound and style of those albums than Solar Power was.
And the slower pace doesn't mean there's less to appreciate in the production! There's a lot going on in the sound design and vocal processing (or lack thereof). Surprising amount of noise and distortion going on. Lots of emphasis on the vocal performance. In production, they were after "this very raw and primal-sounding album," where "finishing was about not overdoing it, and leaving edges unsanded" (source). We're still in the context of mainstream pop here, so "raw" and "primal" are kinda relative terms, but you can definitely see that direction in the final product.
Confessional lyrics fit the mission of the album, and Lorde covers topics like sex, self-image, and identity with a sort of graceful candor that feels relatively approachable to me, even when she's talking about an eating disorder or being explicit about sex. Many of these topics are framed as examinations of past experiences, struggles, or trauma, now resolved (at least partially). You can see what these struggles and worries and revelations were, down to the bone, and straight through the skin under the zipper - right in the pelvis, even - now that it's over. This doesn't necessarily detract from that mission, it just contributes to the approachable feeling. There's a grounded stability in Lorde's perspective that leaves room for catharsis and exploration without feeling unsafe.
For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) (Japanese Breakfast)
soft / chamber pop / chamber folk
2025 (via Dead Oceans)
Well I better write my baby a shuffle good
Or he's gonna make me suffer the way I should
Deep in the soft hearts of young boys so pissed off and jaded
Carrying dull prayers of old men cutting holier truths
Heart breaking like a punch card
Keeps his mouth shut, keeps his mind fixed and well hidden
You dream enough for two, dear
Picture window, looking out on somewhere else
Japanese Breakfast has been bombastic and jubilant. They've been gritty and abrasive. Ethereal, subliminal and dark. Here they're a bit subdued, on the subtle side, but still lush, detailed, polished. Michelle Zauner is still an excellent lyricist and vocalist. Here she examines traditional and contemporary masculinity from a few different angles, often through the lens of desire. In her words, this album "is largely about people, often men, who find themselves seduced by temptation and are duly punished for it" (source). For Melancholy Brunettes might not reach out and grab you as directly or as forcefully as some of Japanese Breakfast's prior work, but there's plenty here to sit with and consider, and it's all so soft and cozy you might as well settle in.
Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party (Hayley Williams)
alt pop rock
2025 (via Post Atlantic)
And I know that you're probably telling yourself that
No one's gonna love me like you did
And I know that you're probably right about that but
Someone's gonna love me different
And I want someone to love me different
Blood oath baby took a vow unspoken
Not on speaking terms now
You could pick up the phone
You could pull up to his house
You could find out you're alone if you keep fucking around
A solid hour of extremely solid pop rock from Paramore's Hayley Williams. She's on her own but still very much in her element here. I think if you've liked anything she's done recently you'll probably also find plenty to appreciate in Ego Death. There are 20 songs on this thing and they're pretty much all very good.
That said, it's hard for me to talk about this project without talking about how it was released. Williams originally released it as 17 individual singles. Before they hit streaming, there was (briefly) a whole interactive thing where the songs were presented as little icons with no clear listening or release order. Ego Death was not even originally conceived as an album. Williams said (in an instagram reel, so it's hard to cite,) "the truth is, I didn't set out to make an album. I just needed to write, and I ended up with all these songs, and ... I've never really known what I think the full experience of all of it should be, as if it's one big body of work. I mean, it is a body of work, but I kind of just want to know how you're experiencing it." Elsewhere, she talked about wanting to see other people's perspectives of the project, and about feeling like she was too close to the material herself. She was "in the eye of the storm, like you're making things, you're going through shit, and you can't possibly have perspective". It became a collaborative community effort. Williams asked fans to send in playlists with the singles arranged in their personal preferred sequence, with the idea being that she'd pick one she liked for the eventual album release. Then the album came out, and it had 18 tracks on it instead of 17 (a new closer track!). Then a month later, a 19th track came out (another newer closer!). Another week later, there was a 20th (hey, new closer!).
This release process was just very much Not My Jam. On the one hand, it was a genuinely interesting experiment! What if the project is a body of work that just isn't an album? What if you actually have to engage with it differently? On the other hand, it is an album now! For people who want it (or anyone new to the project), there is now one official answer, a single canonical order. We didn't do anything with multiple official track sequences or alternative releases or something like that. So Ego Death is an album, but it's a weird one, where I know for certain that the track sequencing was done entirely in retrospect, and the artist had mixed feelings about imposing her own artistic perspective on the sequence, and about sequencing the tracks at all in the first place. It was a community effort, but it also turns out that the community had an incomplete set of songs to work with, so the new ones just became the last 3 tracks. Or maybe "Parachute" was the intended ending all along, and the other two are bonus tracks? I'm not sure. There was a limited "Hayley's Mix" physical release that ended on track 18, with the other two appearing crossed out in sharpie on the front of the CD, but I dunno if this expresses artistic intent about their inclusion or just teases those tracks, which hadn't released yet. They are now included on all the currently-available physical releases that I've seen. Notably, she never made the 3 newest tracks available as singles on streaming services, so if you wanted to drop them into your own personal preferred sequence you'll have to pull them from the album, I guess.
I'm someone who will avoid listening to singles from artists I like so that I can hear them in their full intended context (and intended sequence) when the album releases, so this was gonna be a tough sell for me regardless. Here, there was context but no sequence, unless the sequence was what we as a community wanted to make of it, unless maybe it actually wasn't after all. I don't even know anymore. At least the songs are really good! The songs are really good. Listen to the songs, they're good.
There's a pretty cool making of video for this project.
LUX (Rosalía)
maximalist / orchestral / operatic / art pop / strong vocals
2025 (via Columbia Records)
Sobre mi ataúd KTMs quemando rueda
Lágrimas y goma se derriten en la madera
Gasolina y vino tinto, puros y chocolate
Bailando con amor encima de mi cadáver
Hoy se derrocha, burlando la suerte
Y lo que no hice en vida, lo hacéis en mi muerteTírame magnolias
Tírame magnolias
Everything about this album is impressive. The production quality. The intricate arrangements and orchestral instrumentation. The number of languages used. Most of all, Rosalía's vocal performance transcends as the standout among standouts. This album topped a lot of year-end lists, so there's no end of entirely-deserved praise and analysis of it out there. I recommend this article with 4 different perspectives on why it was NPR's album of the year.
Who Is The Sky? (David Byrne & Ghost Train Orchestra)
quirky silly art pop
2025 (via Matador Records)
My love gave me a moisturizing thing, said "Hey David, put this on your skin. It says it's anti-aging, antioxidant too. Go ahead and try it, let's see what it can do."
Woke up the next morning, and what do I see? I look like a baby, but I am still me. My honey wakes up. She looks over and screams.
That lotion is magic! I look like I'm three.
Who is this guy? Oh it's the Talking Heads guy. David Byrne is still doing David Byrne Things at 73. His modern solo work is supposed to be about as much stage production as musical concert. With that in mind, you should watch the Tiny Desk concert he put on for this album.
Resources For Music Discovery
I put a lot more effort than I usually do into keeping up with newer releases in 2025, and it turned out to be fun and rewarding!
Here are some resources that helped me do that, and some associated advice.
- Wikipedia keeps a big list of notable album releases each year. Here's the 2026 list. It's usually an incredibly long list, but it's a good one to skim through occasionally to keep an eye out for releases from artists you recognize. It gets updated frequently.
- For discovery, I like to check community lists like RYM's top of 2026. I'll also browse general music communities like /r/indieheads and /r/popheads when I feel like dealing with Reddit. People also like AOTY but I'm not as familiar.
- It can also be worth keeping up with some of the big music publications! Your Consequences and Stereogums and Pitchforks and the like.
- I also like to keep an eye on KEXP and Tiny Desk for performances from people I recognize.
My biggest tip is just to be more intentional about it. All of these resources give you more ways to actively seek out new experiences, and to avoid missing stuff you're already interested in. The whole idea is to go practice being intrigued by something you don't know much about, and then practice following through on that curiosity.
Things like radio stations an discovery queue features are not really my jam, but if you're good at turning passive interest into active curiosity then those are valid options! Just gotta remember to actually take a minute, when you happen hear something new that you like, to go track it down so you can explore it more fully.
If you need something even more foundational than any of this, you could always check out one of the higher-profile "top N albums of all time" lists! RYM has one that is dynamic and based on ratings from its community. The somewhat recent Apple Music one stirred up a lot of discussion. There are a bunch of these. I've never actually picked one and listened to everything on there but it seems like a fun thing to try if you want a more guided way to experience some new music.
I'm looking for more resources and tips like this, so if you have some please share! Leave a comment or email me!
Closing Thoughts
If you read any portion of this post, thank you!
Let me know if you got anything out of it, or if you have any other thoughts or feedback.
(..I know the post is long though. They won't all be like this!)
I'm always on the lookout for more good music, especially if it's not my usual jam right now, so feel free to leave me any recommendations!
I know I missed a bunch of good stuff from 2025. I've got a couple things I intend to go back to already but let me know what else I've missed in the meantime lol. You can see my whole 2025 listening history here, on last.fm. Requires login but LastFM is cool so you should just make an account tbh.