My favorite albums of 2025 weren’t exactly magic tricks, but you had to listen to them closely to keep from getting head-faked. A country music traditionalist was the freshest in his field. A middle-aged rapper sounded more alive than many half his age. There were conceptual pop albums with concepts that didn’t matter, and a TikTok superstar who was better at singing hooks than dancing to them. Each of these albums rewarded curiosity, attention and interrogation — rewards that felt significant as the soulless head fakery of AI continues to puree this world into a soup of meaningless superficialities.
10. Rosalía, ‘Lux’
Phew. This aggressively orchestral, opera-curious, polylingual ode to saints and martyrs across the ages feels like way too much — so go ahead and get ravished, mind-blown, tongue-tied, misty-eyed, whatever you need to feel in unfeeling times. Does any of it feel better than smiling along with Rosalía when she giggles during that one pause in “La Perla”? She’s at her best when she’s undercutting her grandeur with her humanity, and I’m convinced she’s resourceful enough to have made an even better album with two paper clips and a rubber band. Maybe that’s what’s next.
9. Zach Top, ‘Ain’t in It for My Health’
The Nashville industrial complex remains unsure how to wrap its arms around this handsome young singer of handsomely forlorn country songs. Is he a big-hat revivalist being readied to inherit the chair Chris Stapleton keeps warm? Or is he a change agent powerful enough to make the world forget about Morgan Wallen? Turns out, the quietly seismic shift on “Ain’t in It for My Health” isn’t a matter of style so much as attitude: Top’s music communicates sadness without self-pity.
8. Rafiq Bhatia, ‘Environments’
Here’s a wonderful jazzlike album that uses techy tools — digital sampling software that allows Bhatia to summon all kinds of heavy weather from his electric guitar — to generate simple results. A song titled “Rain on the Canopy: Melting Sky” pantomimes the pitter of rainfall. “Aviary I: Sunrise” evokes a whole lot of birds waking up. If this music sounds like the world, be reminded that this world sounds like music.
7. Intermission, ‘Power Corrupts’
One thing that kept Joy Division from becoming the most spirit-depleting rock band to ever exist was the drumming — namely, those dance-friendly flashes that gave the group’s romantic gloom-saying a countervailing levity. Flash ahead four decades, and this San Diego punk quartet is inverting the idea, interrupting their shapeless growls with four-on-the-floor beats that make gravity feel like it’s pulling harder than it should. Suddenly, your dancing shoes are Vans with waffle soles made of lead.
6. Nourished by Time, ‘The Passionate Ones’
Prince casts a long shadow across today’s pop music, but it’s hard to locate Baltimore’s Marcus Brown of Nourished by Time in that purpled darkness. His music feels more Princely than it sounds, foremost because Brown avoids his hero’s shrieky falsetto in favor of a wide baritone that feels oddly desirous, as if he were eager to drink up the entire world. “We don’t have to be so average,” Brown bellows, “and I say that with love.”
5. James Brandon Lewis, ‘Apple Cores’
The Brooklyn-based saxophonist kept two heroes at the front of his mind during this session — the jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and the jazz critic Amiri Baraka — but, as ever, the back of his brain refused to keep quiet, teeming with thoughts of John Coltrane, molecular biology, the paintings of Paul Klee, the poetry of Aimé Césaire and lots more. Add surplus thought waves from drummer Chad Taylor and bassist-guitarist Josh Werner and we might begin to understand why these no-nonsense improvisations sound this remarkable. Broadening minds funneled into tightening grooves.
4. Bruiser Wolf, ‘Potluck’
What this fabulous, 40-something Detroit rapper fails to mention when he explainshow his “lyrics flow from my heart to my larynx” is that, en route, the rhymes seem to get filtered through our collective memories of ’80s game show hosts, ’70s cinema pimps, the verses of CeeLo Green circa Goodie Mob’s first two albums and various Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Snagglepuss, even!
3. FKA Twigs, ‘Eusexua’
That album title is an unfortunate portmanteau of “sex” and “euphoria,” which Twigs tried to frame as a buzzword/concept during this album’s rollout, going as far as to describe “Eusexua” as a state of being akin to the “pinnacle of human experience.” A meaningless idea, but then the British pop singer threw all of her melodic agility and granular attention to detail into it, and now, achieving “Eusexua” feels strangely and impossibly sweet, like devouring a Honda-size tuft of cotton candy one molecule at a time.
2. Playboi Carti, ‘Music’
With 2020’s “Whole Lotta Red” still in the lead for rap record of the decade, Carti steps down from the mountaintop, but with his feet still planted on some kind of edge. The edge of existence, maybe? Throughout these half-abstracted, entirely exhilarating rap songs, the Atlanta auteur sounds like he’s erasing himself, masking his voice in deceptively anodyne rhymes, playing footsie with oblivion. He originally titled it “I Am Music,” then scrubbed himself from that, too. The air buzzing around our heads is all that’s left.
1. Addison Rae, ‘Addison’
“Don’t ask too many questions.” Sorry, but when a TikTok star with 88 million followers sings that line on the finest song of the year’s most luscious pop album, we have no choice. For starters: Is making parasocial dance videos the best preparation for 21st-century pop craft? Or is this just what happens once the Madonna songbook fully seeps into the digital groundwater? Or does Madonna only have as much to do with this music as Lana, Enya and Charli XCX? Is “Addison” the first true opus of the post-“Brat” wave? If so, where’s everybody else? Why does this woman sound so singular, so scrupulous, so savvy, so alone?
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