Below the surface of the mainstream, music had a wonderful year—making the task of whittling down 2025’s best albums to a top-10 list maddeningly difficult—though you’d hardly know it from looking at the pop charts or overhearing the anodyne streambait that tends to fill public spaces. Culture’s tech overlords have made it easier than ever to come across AI slop or algorithm-worshipping TikTok influencers masquerading as pop stars, but the profiteers won’t win their war on human art without a fight. My favorite albums reckoned deliberately with our existential moment, offering flickers of hope and grace under pressure.
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10. Iris Silver Mist, Jenny Hval
The music of Norwegian art-pop hero Jenny Hval is as daringly adventurous as it is bracingly incisive. Also a novelist, Hval’s episodic songs brim with intertextual references, conceptual grist, and spoke-sung experimentation, but never stray far from the pleasures of melody. Her latest LP is among her most classically beautiful yet, inspired in part by a pandemic-era fascination with the intimacy of scent; the title references a favored perfume that she described as “ghostly” and “underground.” Hval’s restless melodies and at-times Proustian lyrics trail cigarette smoke or the fragrance of roses toward litanies of memory, all the while deconstructing the very natures of stage performance, recording technology, and digital existence. Exalted synths glow alongside vérité field recordings, finger-picked guitars, textured drums, and Hval’s lucid voice, which always cuts through.
9. Big Ugly, Fust
“Oh what country, friends, is this?” sings Aaron Dowdy, quoting Shakespeare on his kicked-out country jam “Mountain Language.” The question says as much about Dowdy’s lyrical ambitions in Fust (he is a Ph.D candidate in literature at Duke) as it does about his crack North Carolina band’s not-uncomplicated inheritance of twang, pedal steel, and poignant Southern storytelling. Named for a creek in Dowdy’s home state of West Virginia, Big Ugly’s fiddle-laden drinking songs are as raucous as they are nuanced, as ripping as they are dignified. They’re made of highways and repossessed hospitals and the Shenandoah Valley and working-class consciousness, of “feelin’ like a sparkler that’s been thrown off a roof” on a riff-drunk last-call anthem, titled “Spangled,” an unmistakably political gesture. Like fellow North Carolinians Wednesday and MJ Lenderman—local stars descended from the likes of Lucinda Williams and Drive By Truckers—Dowdy carves complex new visions into the idioms of his upbringing. “Oh, I love this town,” he sings at Big Ugly’s close, “It shows me my lonesome’s written in the stars.”
8. Live Laugh Love, Earl Sweatshirt
Ten years ago, the rapper Earl Sweatshirt put out I Don’t Like Sh-t, I Don’t Go Outside, a titular expression of angst and depression to rival Nirvana. His latest title, Live Laugh Love, brandishes the irony of his early years to deliver a comparatively upbeat though evermore complex work, a shift brought on by the promise and anxieties of marriage and fatherhood. “She found me on the streets, she vowin’to keep my feet grounded/For my sweet child,” Earl raps on the slow-swaying “TOURMALINE” and roots that equilibrium into every note. Coursing beneath the 24-minute Live Laugh Love is something like Earl’s free-associative pep talk to the world and himself.
7. It’s a Beautiful Place, Water From Your Eyes
The best 2025 rock albums keep you guessing. This experimental indie missive from the New York duo of vocalist Rachel Brown and multi-instrumentalist Nate Amos is a delightfully uncanny soundtrack for fast-walking through the city, contemplating the current horror-show reality and the fact, despite it all, that Earth still really is a beautiful place. Accordingly, Water From Your Eyes’ proggy, taut, alt-rock bricolage captures an existential absurdity. Between Amos’ high-watt riffage (“Nothing’s funnier than a guitar solo,” he has said) and Brown’s deadpan poetics, which approach rapping on the highlight “Life Signs,” Water From Your Eyes is architecting its own definition of indisputable cool.
6. Blurr, Joanne Roberston
This ambient folk album from a fixture of the UK underground uses minimalist instrumentation—little more than Roberston’s luminescent voice and brittle acoustic guitar—for maximalist feeling. It’s night music that paradoxically feels a bit like staring at the sun. Robertson is both a visual artist and a mother, and her abstract, elemental art accordingly is as imagistic as it is comforting, like dappled light cast breathtakingly on a wall, or an avant-garde lullaby. Featuring collaborations with cellist and fellow Glasgow resident Oliver Coates on standout tracks, Blurr rings out raw expression from a divinely hushed sound.
5. Debí Tirar Más Fotos, Bad Bunny
Pop-wise, 2025 was Bad Bunny’s year. A defining star of music’s past decade, who has revolutionized pop culture by putting the Spanish language atop its pantheon—a course on Bad Bunny’s impact launched this fall at Yale—the música urbana supernova elected to make his “most Puerto Rican album ever.” This vivid opus celebrates Puerto Rican rhythms by bridging reggaeton and Latin trap with the acoustic sounds of previous generations, like salsa, plena, bolero, and perreo. Benito put the live instrumentation and joyful hooks of hits like “DtMF” and “Nuevayol” on the world’s stage—soon to take pop culture’s biggest platform at the Super Bowl LX halftime show.
4. New Threats From the Soul, Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band
When Kentucky-bred songwriter Ryan Davis was still playing in his previous band, State Champion, the indie-rock legend and Silver Jews frontman David Berman—a Gen X hero for listeners obsessed with the fine line between lyricism and poetry—called Davis “the best lyricist who’s not a rapper going.” The promise of that sterling endorsement bloomed this year with Davis’ second solo album. The twangy underdog dispatches of New Threats From the Soul are ear candy for fans of the kind of magnetic and unrelenting creative wordplay still more common in hip-hop than DIY rock, as Davis’ baritone and the band’s down-home looseness power behemoth track-lengths that might leave you a bit pleasantly bewildered.
3. Essex Honey, Blood Orange
Dev Hynes made his name as a consummate New Yorker—an art-pop synthesist of the city’s panoply of sounds—but he grew up outside London in Essex, where he returned in 2023 to be at his mother’s bedside before she died. In the holding pattern of grief, Essex Honey exquisitely takes stock. Time collapses as Hynes transfigures flashes of youth (via nods to Yo La Tengo and the Replacements) through poised dream-pop, R&B, breakbeats, and avant-garde touches. Just as loss clarifies the air in every room, so every bar of Essex Honey feels vivid and charged. Hynes’ stirring melodies sew together Essex Honey’s styles and collaborators—including Caroline Polachek, Tirzah, and cellist Mabe Fratti—into a profound and elegantly understated tapestry of elegy, memory, and surprise. (Who but Hynes would put novelist Zadie Smith’s sumptuous singing and Turnstile frontman Brendan Yates’s visceral drumming on the same track?)
2. Lux, Rosalía
For her third full-length, the Spanish pop visionary sings in 10 different languages, collaborates with the London Symphony Orchestra, and communes with the sacred teachings of various nuns and female saints. Her immersion into cross-cultural divinity takes root on LUX in vanguard beats, searching timbres, and a colossal, sometimes operatic voice, attuned to pop iconoclasts like Bjork (featured on LUX) and Kate Bush. She references Eve and philosopher Simone Weil and lilts like a thesis, “I was made to divinize.” Rosalía’s religious inquiries—more like art concepts than actual consecration—shapeshift through highlights like the ruthless sing-song kiss-off “La Perla” and cosmic, Sufi mysticism-inspired “La Yugular,” which samples an archival interview clip from none other than Patti Smith.
1. Getting Killed, Geese
Three albums in, this ecstatic breakthrough dropped the quartet of 23-year-old Brooklyn art-rockers square into the eye of hype’s storm. If the coolly calamitous sound of Getting Killed is any indication, they’ll weather the chaos of Geesemania just fine. High-octane discord hasn’t gone down this easily in decades. In his destabilized croon, frontman Cameron Winter warbles through wryly irreverent and highly mimetic lyrics about God and taxes and loneliness and death, like “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life,” or “The Lord has a lot of friends/ In the end, he’ll probably forget he’s met you before.” When he gnarls “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR” (caps essential) on the opener “Trinidad”—a litmus test weeding out the passive listener—it feels like dizzied nonsense but also like a civilization driving itself off a cliff. The band’s fevered rave-ups and corporal rhythms teeter just on the edge of collapse and take half a century of New York noise with them.
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