Jon Caramanica
Tearing It All Apart
On the one hand, living in an environment in which sounds whiz by at an almost incomprehensible speed means that few things stick around as long, or as powerfully, as they once did. But on the other hand, that’s necessitated new forms of listening, and also of musicmaking. Some of the most exciting young talents working today aren’t settling into old aesthetics (though a few still are), but rather breaking styles apart and building new patchworks from the pieces. (In the interest of spreading the wealth, I have not included any songs from albums or artists who appear on my best albums of the year.)
1. Sleep Token, ‘Caramel’
A huge, gloriously silly and brutally effective amalgam of abandoned styles ripe for reinvigorating — rap-metal, dream-prog, pop-reggaeton, backpack hip-hop, cosplay rock, metalcore and more.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
2. Katseye, ‘Gnarly’
The sound of K-pop collapsing? This symphony of skronks and whirs is about experimentation, globalization, decimation and celebration.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
3. EsDeeKid, Fakemink and Rico Ace, ‘LV Sandals’
The sound of the British hip-hop underground molting in real time — a brazen attitude, an ineffable chorus, a trio of rising stars, an anthem for the world.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
4. B Jacks featuring Zeddy Will, ‘Get Jiggy’
This song from a pair of up-and-comers carved out a space for modern-day hip-house. Exuberant and bright, fleet and funny.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
5. Brandon Lake and Jelly Roll, ‘Hard Fought Hallelujah’
Imagine salvation were a W.W.E. match.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
6. Ian, ‘2025 XXL Freshman Freestyle’
The flow that launched a million memes. The young rapper Ian continues to find little-explored side doors, like this TikTok manna full of stop-start cadences, hyper-referential rhymes and a willingness to be the butt of the joke.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
7. Dexter in the Newsagent, ‘Special’
What a delightful, patient, encouraging and nourishing whisper of a love song from a London newcomer with big ideas about R&B hovering just below a very unassuming mien.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
8. Templuv and 347aidan, ‘Last Shot’
Why wouldn’t one of the year’s most moving pop songs — living somewhere between new wave and SoundCloud rap — come from a video game competition?
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
9. Romy Mars, ‘A-Lister’
This irresistible ditty is the savviest entree into pop possible from a child of privilege — skewering the trappings of celebrity while openly craving them, then rolling your eyes at yourself for not knowing better. It’s the real brat.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
10. Tate McRae, ‘Sports Car’
The Canadian would-be diva excelled on this return to the old-fashioned burlesque pop of two decades ago, all thump and sigh and slither and head tilt and exhale.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
11. Drake, ‘Nokia’
This is balmy Drake — in the sense of lyrics designed to sooth and caress, in the sense of music that summons a warm-weather listening clime, and in the sense that after all the kerfuffles of 2024 (which continued to resonate this year), he remains capable of accessing a version of himself that’s prettily (and perhaps pettily) blithe.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
12. Graham Barham, ‘Oil Money’
The logical apex of years of country-rap fusion is this reimagining of hip-hop’s beloved excesses through the lens of a landman who’s struck it big. It’s a wild blast of down-South bluster.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
13. Geese, ‘Trinidad’
Talking Heads + Grateful Dead + James Chance + Neil Young = a blistering, erratic yet curiously grounded jam that constantly threatens to implode but is too cool to actually do so.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
14. Kehlani, ‘Folded’
The R&B of the mid- to late 1990s had elegance and attitude in equal measure, a byproduct of how the success of hip-hop threw it into a cultural tug of war. This song revisits that moment with pinpoint precision.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
15. 2hollis featuring Nate Sib, ‘Afraid’
This relentlessly peppy hyperelectropop bomb truly just boils down to two close childhood friends huddling tightly together to collectively work out how they’re planning to deal with incipient fame.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
16. Moliy & Silent Addy featuring Shenseea and Skillibeng, ‘Shake It to the Max (Fly) (Remix)’
A global dancehall anthem that bridged Africa, the Caribbean and the United States with one very pressing, very sweaty chant.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
17. 41 featuring A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, ‘Naked’
An unrelentingly sad drill-R&B collaboration that can’t decide if it’s trying to heal the wound of a breakup or dig in deeper and make it bleed even more.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
18. Kocky Ka, ‘Down for Too Long’
A beautiful wail from a New York hip-hop newcomer that also somehow evokes the icy tragedy of depressive ’80s synth-rock.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
19. Timothée Chalamet, ‘Outlaw Blues/Three Angels’ (Live on ‘S.N.L.’)
When you’ve spent years practicing your mimicry of one of pop music’s essential cranks, you earn the right to go on television and demonstrate that you can shred, too — a bridge between petulance old and new.
20. Gelo, ‘Tweaker’
A hilarious curio of the current online moment: An N.B.A. washout with family name recognition turns a drudging appearance on a livestream into evanescent hip-hop gold. Nothing meaningful has followed, nor does it have to.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
And 10 More!
Asake and Tiakola, “Badman Gangsta”
BigXthaPlug featuring Bailey Zimmerman, “All the Way”
Fuerza Regida & Grupo Frontera, “Me Jalo”
Huntr/x, “What It Sounds Like”
Pluto featuring YK Niece, “Whim Whamiee”
Sombr, “Back to Friends”
Summer Walker, “Heart of a Woman”
Wednesday, “Townies”
The Weeknd, “Cry for Me”
YoungBoy Never Broke Again, “Shot Callin”
Lindsay Zoladz
Blasts of Sass (and a Few Tears Too)
Some of the year’s most memorable singles found veterans reinvigorating their sounds with raw truths and fresh aesthetics, while others felt like coming-out parties for fresh faces — real and animated. From the mainstream to somewhere just beneath it, here is a sampling of what 2025 sounded like to me.
1. Huntr/x, ‘Golden’
Sometimes, a pop song is so undeniable that it’s destined to be a smash, regardless of whether it’s sung by a familiar supergroup or an unknown and fictitious group of computer-animated demon hunters. “Golden” takes its structure from Broadway’s most showstopping “I Wish” numbers and gives it a fresh coat of K-pop gloss, escalating toward the tippy-top of the singer Ejae’s range as it reaches a high note that talent show contestants will be attempting for the rest of our lives. That ascending pre-chorus melody is already ubiquitous enough to feel like a modern pop standard. My condolences to the Archies.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
2. Olivia Dean, ‘Man I Need’
Olivia Dean’s Sade-smooth vocals glide across this breakout smash, full of heart, soul and elegance. In a time when airwaves and playlists overflow with caustic cautionary tales about ghostings and man-children, there’s something refreshing about a song that yearns so sincerely for connection — “Talk to me, talk to me” — sung with a hopeful belief that a good man is still possible to find.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
3. Justin Bieber, ‘Daisies’
On this true gem in his mixed bag of “Swag,” someone — perhaps the co-writers and co-producers Dijon and Mk.gee, both of whom have experimented with lo-fi sounds on their solo albums — had the brilliant realization that Justin Bieber would sound amazing fronting a high school garage band’s attempt to write a doo-wop song. A great pop song doesn’t always need polish — in fact, “Daisies” proves that sometimes the opposite is true.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
4. Ella Langley, ‘Choosin’ Texas’
A love-triangle country tune so timeless, you can imagine it being sung by Dolly, Tammy or Martina. Here, the newcomer Ella Langley, who co-wrote it with Miranda Lambert, finds her signature hit, and delivers it with a smoky warmth that goes down as smooth and sad as a bottle of Jack drunk all by oneself.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
5. Oklou, ‘Blade Bird’
The French musician Marylou Mayniel, who records as Oklou, explores the tension between possession and freedom on this beguiling ballad from her dreamy debut album, “Choke Enough.” “Blade Bird” is a folk song fit for the 21st century, its acoustic arrangement adorned with synth blips and artful modifications that only make Mayniel’s plaintive vocals all the more devastating.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
6. Sabrina Carpenter, ‘Manchild’
Sabrina Carpenter’s latest three-and-a-half-minute stand-up set disguised as a sugary No. 1 smash seems at first to be an unsparing roast of a Neanderthal-esque ex: “Why so sexy if so dumb, and how survive the Earth so long?” But by the bridge, Carpenter admits a certain culpability, chasing the admission “I like my men all incompetent” with a flirty wink at some potential man-children in waiting: “Hey, men!”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
7. Lady Gaga, ‘Abracadabra’
For her latest trick, Mother Monster reappears in a plume of crimson smoke to prove that “fan service” doesn’t have to be an insult when it’s done right.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
8. Tate McRae, ‘Sports Car’
The Canadian phenom Tate McRae offers her take on one of pop music’s most tried and true topics: fogging up the windows of a very expensive vehicle. With its chorus chanted in a carnal whisper, McRae loosens up her buttons and effectively mines the sweatiest early-aughts pop, resulting in a thoroughly tactile hit that sounds like slick bare skin on a leather seat.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
9. Lily Allen, ‘Tennis’
Not every song works on Lily Allen’s headline-grabbing, fearlessly confessional breakup album “West End Girl,” but everything clicks on this catchy standout, which is alive with paranoid detail (“Then you showed me a photo on Instagram / It was how you grabbed your phone back right out of my hands”) and smiling-through-the-tears pathos.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
10. Chappell Roan, ‘The Giver’
In the afterglow of her breakout year, Chappell Roan deferred the pressure to release a full-length follow-up to “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” with a single so fully realized in its style that it felt like its own one-song era. “The Giver” is a high-kicking, fiddle-embroidered anthem that celebrates female pleasure and pays loving homage to the glossy pop-country of the ’90s, really putting the exclamation points in “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
11. Perfume Genius, ‘It’s a Mirror’
Mike Hadreas embraces the grain of guitars on this sumptuous, ever-escalating single from his latest album as Perfume Genius, “Glory,” confronting a swirling maelstrom of fears with a self-assured swagger.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
12. Cardi B, ‘Bodega Baddie’
On this deliriously fun, sub-two-minute blast of adrenaline, Cardi B hops on a sample of Magic Juan and El Prodigio’s frenzied 2001 single “Ta’ Buena” and injects it with her own Bronx baddie attitude. Cardi B merengue album when?
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
13. Wet Leg, ‘Mangetout’
On this grinning kiss-off with sass to spare (“Get lost forever!”), Wet Leg’s Rhian Teasdale leaves the target of her ire staring a little too long at a bag of snow peas before the pun finally dawns on him: Man. Get. Out.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
14. Haim, ‘Relationships’
Though Danielle Haim sounds tripped up by the logic of relationships, this sleek lead single from the sister trio’s “I Quit” otherwise glides along with unbroken ease, all but demanding to be choreographed as a three-person roller-skate routine.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
15. Momma, ‘I Want You (Fever)’
Hats off to the Brooklyn-based indie band Momma for realizing the shoegaze revival needed its own “Call Your Girlfriend.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
16. Drake, ‘Nokia’
Even in his off years, Drake always seems to manage at least one undisputed bop. On this one, produced by the young Sierra Leonean musician Elkan, a mildly self-deprecating Drizzy flips through his digital Rolodex — might his life need a little bit of Stacy? Becky? Keisha? Ashley? Dani? — and gives the world his own Mambo No. 2025.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
17. Amaarae and PinkPantheress, ‘Kiss Me Thru the Phone Pt. 2’
This amorous and infectious pop reverie playfully riffs on a 2008 Soulja Boy hit, providing a standout moment on Amaarae’s excellent album “Black Star,” and further cementing a year of subtle reinvention for PinkPantheress.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
18. Doja Cat, ‘Gorgeous’
Summoning the full force of her “College Dropout” flow, a charismatically candid Doja Cat calls out impossible beauty standards without acting like she’s completely above them — a timely and appropriately ambiguous anthem for a year when we were supposed to believe that celebrities shouting out their plastic surgeons was an act of generosity.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
19. Lola Young, ‘Spiders’
An explosive vocal performance from the pop powerhouse Lola Young elevates this sludgy rocker about yearning for a partner with complementary demons.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
20. Fust, ‘Jody’
This gut-punching ballad from the North Carolina country-rock group Fust plays out like a quiet ode to loving, however imperfectly, over the long haul. “Me and Jody’ve been at this since high school,” sings the frontman Aaron Dowdy in his warm hug of a voice, “we’ve been at this now longer than we’ve not / And I think that as I watch her stir her heavy with her finger/ I’ll never get enough of what I’ve got.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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