Jon Caramanica
Hearing the Past, and Reckoning With the Future
Musicians know how to make music, and they know — even if they insist they don’t — how to bake in answers to the critiques that await them. Many of this year’s best albums seem to anticipate listeners’ responses and use them as creative fodder. It’s a reflection of how genres and subgenres are being morphed by online feedback in real time, and how sometimes (often the most exciting times), that fun-house mirror feedback loop can be more thrilling than the original input. These are albums as dialogues — fans can listen to their heroes, and then listen for themselves, too.
1. Effie, ‘Pullup to Busan 4 More Hyper Summer It’s Gonna Be a Fuckin Movie’
The rising Korean hyperpop star Effie is a heretical innovator, and this six-song EP — her best music in a year of several releases — feels like a deeply logical eruption. Imbibing from the spirit of 100 gecs, the freedom of 2hollis, and the pop scramble that often defines the best K-pop (a scene Effie exists outside of), her approach adds up to the sound of right this second. And also, undoubtedly, of tomorrow.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
2. Jim Legxacy, ‘Black British Music (2025)’
An exemplar of mourning under the spotlight: The London rapper, singer and producer Jim Legxacy’s third album is an accumulation of tears collected into bruised hip-hop and folk songs that sound like trying to hold on tight to a good memory while the world kicks you again and again.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
3. Justin Bieber, ‘Swag’
An album that sounds like a dream, half-remembered and sometimes half-sung. It is the high-water mark for the pop superstar Justin Bieber, who has seemingly long wanted to sing the R&B of the late ’80s and also the late ’90s, but was prevented from doing so by the strictures of fame. He’s here now, sounding a little exhausted but relieved.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
4. Rosalía, ‘Lux’
The idea of popera isn’t new, nor is the idea of globe-traveling within an album, but in an age of small and quick and dirty innovations, the scale and ambition of “Lux” is an aggressive position statement. Rosalía is a restless and relentless consumer of the world and its many ideas, and the rare artist in any medium who wants to leave the places she goes better than she found them — and actually can.
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5. They Are Gutting a Body of Water, ‘Lotto’
This album of violent and inquisitive shoegaze music is the fourth by this Philadelphia band, and by far its most robust and challenging. The songs grind and squeal and vibrate like tiny earthquakes, but despite their gut-kicking intensity, they manage to feel bright, as if desperately shrieking about the raw power of hope.
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6. Bon Iver, ‘Sable, Fable’
Take your favorite Bruce Hornsby album out for a rager at the bar. Let it try things it never has before; lose sight of it as it wanders off into the night. Breathe a sigh of relief as it stumbles back and shudder as it relates the stories of what it’s seen and done. Then hold it close as the sun rises and it whimpers uncontrollably when faced with the reckless decisions it made and can’t take back.
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7. Addison Rae, ‘Addison’
The onetime TikTok star Addison Rae’s debut album is a meditation on the many shades of 21st century American girlhood, from tabloid excess to Tumblr poetry. Rae is a perennial student, a devoted mimic, a natural at identifying a vivid world and then inhabiting as if it were always built to her specifications.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
8. Water From Your Eyes, ‘It’s a Beautiful Place’
Water From Your Eyes doesn’t see rock music as a set of rules or restrictions or even established poses and attitudes. Rather, this duo approaches it like a dustbin of abandoned once-meaningful gestures, rifling through them to offer resuscitation and recontextualization. This erratic and idiosyncratic album is a masterful and funny bricolage of pop-punk, no wave, power rock and more, each component an object of triumph and also scrutiny.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
9. Bad Bunny, ‘Debí Tirar Mas Fotos’
Now more than ever, the future can sound dizzyingly disconnected from the past. So leave it to Bad Bunny, pop’s foremost theorist of cross-generational exchange, to make an album so thoroughly modern and present that is also explicitly rooted in, and an argument for, the joys of tradition. Everything old was once new, too.
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10. YHWH Nailgun, ’45 Pounds’
Like a pair of early DFA Records bands squaring off in a cage match.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
11. Taylor Swift, ‘The Life of a Showgirl’
Perhaps the most evanescent album in Taylor Swift’s catalog, “TLOAS” doesn’t show its work. It simply, and non-ostentatiously, locates Swift in a particularly unanxious moment of showing off what she has, and how it makes her feel. That means songs about the pleasures of being hated, the pleasures of hating, the pleasures of being the boss, the pleasures of domestic bliss and the pleasures of pleasure.
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12. Sailorr, ‘From Florida’s Finest’
The debut album from the Vietnamese American R&B singer Sailorr is inventively bawdy, psychologically intricate, friskily sung, unflashily catchy. It’s a winking, whispered invitation into an idiosyncratic acoustic soul underworld where exes are dispatched with wry razzle-dazzle.
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13. Morgan Wallen, ‘I’m the Problem’
The most famous man in country music makes one of the saddest albums in pop, an unflashy catalog of reluctance and regret that suggests that one of the biggest freedoms afforded by superstardom is the right to wallow while everyone cheers.
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14. Oklou, ‘Choke Enough’
This prim and spooky dream-pop album from the French singer Oklou is, from a distance, cloudy and saccharine. But holding it up to the light reveals a startlingly sturdy skeleton within, an indicator of a profound pop gift that eventually, one suspects, will be presented in far less coy fashion.
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15. Clipse, ‘Let God Sort Em Out’
At the intersection of street rap and praise music, Clipse — the brothers Pusha T and Malice — are navigating midlife crises: the loss of their parents; the moral reckoning over past ills; and the delicious, irresistible taste of beef that’s oh so hard not to salivate over, no matter how firmly life attempts to pull you away from the table.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
16. YFN Lucci, ‘Already Legend.’
YFN Lucci is often overlooked in accountings of the Atlanta sing-rap hierarchy, partly because of his legal issues stemming from his long-running (and now seemingly resolved) tensions with Young Thug. But his second album, and first since getting released from a four-year prison stint, is ostentatiously beautiful, with a vivid undertow of melancholy.
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17. Playboi Carti, ‘Music’
Prior Playboi Carti albums have been about denialism — what if all the core tenets of rap music were simply stripped away, demolished with a cannon and reduced to the primordial? This overlong but convincing album is the logical next step: How do you begin to build a whole world atop that very alluring rubble?
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
And 8 more for good measure …
Algernon Cadwallader, “Trying Not to Have a Thought”; Amaarae, “Black Star”; Corridos Ketamina, “Corridos Ketamina”; Nick León, “A Tropical Entropy”; Odumodublvck, “Industry Machine”; OsamaSon, “Jump Out”; Earl Sweatshirt, “Live Laugh Love”; Zach Top, “Ain’t in It for My Health.”
Lindsay Zoladz
Leveling Up and Breaking Out
There are no obvious consensus picks for the best album of 2025, in part because the release schedule was light on marquee names, and in part because some of the year’s most hotly anticipated albums (Lorde’s unfortunately tepid “Virgin”; Sabrina Carpenter’s inferior sequel to “Short n’ Sweet”; Taylor Swift’s spiritually hollow behemoth “The Life of a Showgirl”) turned out to be disappointments. But that also means it was a great year to discover new artists and immerse in more under-the-radar releases, the kind likely to inspire more heterogeneous and less predictable year-end lists.
1. Geese, ‘Getting Killed’
One of the many warbling prophets we meet on the exhilaratingly droll third album by the New York rock band Geese proclaims, in the voice of the frontman Cameron Winter, “A masterpiece belongs to the dead.” Usually true, but this one is for the living, and the young. All four members of Geese are under 25 and sound like they grew up considering the Stones, the Strokes, Captain Beefheart, the Velvet Underground and the Red Hot Chili Peppers under the same umbrella of “classic rock” — forefathers to be learned from, honored and, occasionally, witheringly mocked.
The focal point here is the stingingly wise lyricism (and cilantro-divisive vocal stylings) of Winter — emboldened by the rawness of his cult-beloved 2024 solo album, “Heavy Metal” — whose seasick yelp dances on the edge of tunelessness to arrive at a deeply affecting, off-kilter kind of beauty. (Unless you think it tastes like soap.) But the band’s hypnotic grooves (courtesy of the bassist Dominic DiGesu and the drummer Max Bassin) and occasional cathartic freakouts give this record some serious muscle. “Getting Killed” is an odyssey, a farce and, above all things, an arrival of a great New York band.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
2. Water From Your Eyes, ‘It’s a Beautiful Place’
Speaking of great New York rock bands coming into their own, Water From Your Eyes, the Brooklyn-based project centered around the vocalist Rachel Brown and the guitarist Nate Amos, levels up on this pointed, pummeling seventh album. Brown’s disaffected deadpan surveys the absurdities of our burning, increasingly automated planet (“Born in between / The world is so beautiful, but born to machines”) while Amos’s blazing, layered guitar parts add jet fuel to the pyre. Throughout, the pair strike an impressive balance between rangy experimentalism and confidently concise songwriting, resulting in, among other curiosities, the politically conscious cow-punk tune “Blood on the Dollar” and the closest thing Water From Your Eyes may ever come to writing a disco song, the hilariously dry “Playing Classics.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
3. Smerz, ‘Big City Life’
The Norwegian duo of Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg capture the thrills and frustrations of life in a densely populated metropolis on this charmingly odd album, which is full of fine-grained details, sputtering rhythms and offbeat humor. Its breakout hit, “You Got Time and I Got Money,” is a sensuous, swooning slow-dance that reveals Smerz’s sweetly awkward idea of a pickup line: “Baby, can I see you naked? Even though I love how you dress.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
4. Bad Bunny, ‘Debí Tirar Más Fotos’
Bad Bunny’s “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” is to Puerto Rican musical history what Beyoncé’s two most recent albums have been to electronic music and country: sprawling, studious statements that make sharp connections between past traditions and present trends but are way too much fun to ever feel like homework.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
5. Bon Iver, ‘Sable, Fable’
The first few tracks of this stirring two-part LP make it seem like Justin Vernon is returning to the icy, cabin-in-the-woods folk that characterized his earliest releases as Bon Iver. But, as he admits the moment this record sheds its old skin, “January ain’t the whole world.” The bulk of “Sable, Fable” is a warm, prolonged thaw, during which Vernon’s music sounds more direct, vulnerable and — thanks to contributions from artists like Dijon, Danielle Haim and Flock of Dimes’ Jenn Wasner — collaborative than it ever has before, as if Walden Pond had suddenly become the site of a lively dinner party.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
6. Dijon, ‘Baby’
This year, the producer and pop experimentalist Dijon Duenas had a hand in two releases that explored the joys and challenges of first-time fatherhood: Justin Bieber’s mixed bag of “Swag,” and this more searching, outré and ecstatic solo album, on which Duenas seemed to shatter traditional song structures to bits and collage the shards into sparkling new shapes.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
7. Greg Freeman, ‘Burnover’
The Vermont singer-songwriter Greg Freeman has the sort of Malkmus-esque drawl and canted wit that usually gets one labeled a slacker, but listen closer to the tales he spins on his jangly second album, “Burnover” — of a firefighters’ strike on the title track, or the dissolution of a relationship on the excruciating heartbreaker “Gallic Shrug” — and you’ll hear an uncommonly alert and receptive songwriter whose antennae stands bolt upright.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
8. Jade, ‘That’s Showbiz Baby!’
One of the year’s best pop albums was about the life of a showgirl — just not the one you think. This kinetic debut LP from Jade Thirwall, a former member of the British girl group Little Mix, is a bold, hook-filled declaration of autonomy from a pop star finally able to show the full range of her talent.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
9. Alex G, ‘Headlights’
On his first album for RCA, a major-label deal leads the one-time indie auteur Alex Giannascoli to reflect wryly on success (“hoping I can make it through to April on whatever’s left of all this label cash,” his narrator winks on the muted acoustic tune “Real Thing”) but thankfully does nothing to tamp down his sonic eccentricity, evident on booming rockers like “Louisiana” and eerie ballads like “Beam Me Up.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
10. PinkPantheress, ‘Fancy That’
The U.K. musician PinkPantheress has never sounded lighter, freer or flirtier than she does on this effervescent song cycle, which charts the fluttery thrill of burgeoning romance and suggests the one-time breakout artist has still got plenty of new registers to explore.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
And the next 10:
Amaraae, “Black Star”; Haley Heynderickx and Max García Conover, “What of Our Nature”; Sharp Pins, “Balloon Balloon Balloon”; Mamalarky, “Hex Key”; Lady Gaga, “Mayhem”; Earl Sweatshirt, “Live Laugh Love”; Horsegirl, “Phonetics On and On”; Rochelle Jordan, “Through the Wall”; Rosalía, “Lux”; Mavis Staples, “Sad and Beautiful World”
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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