Dear listeners,
The longest Amplifier playlist of the year is finally here: five hours, 90 tracks, each of which was chosen as a 2025 highlight by either me or my colleague Jon Caramanica — and, shockingly, a few that were even selected by us both.
I kid, but I do love how little overlap there was on my and Jon’s lists this year. Sure, there were a few albums and songs we agreed on (Bad Bunny’s love letter to Puerto Rico “Debí Tirar Mas Fotos,” Water From Your Eyes’ deadpan art-rock dispatch “It’s a Beautiful Place,” Tate McRae’s slinky Y2K-pop throwback “Sports Car”), but we mostly had wildly different takes on what represented the year’s best music. Jon is not a huge fan of my personal album of the year, the New York rock band Geese’s exhilarating “Getting Killed,” but I admit that until I saw his list, I’d never even heard of his, a 13-minute EP from the freewheeling South Korean hyperpop artist Effie.
These aren’t isolated instances, though: A sense of variety runs through a lot of the year-end lists I’ve seen. The past few years have featured some culture-defining consensus picks atop many critics’ albums of the year lists: Last year had Charli XCX’s brash “Brat,” the year before had SZA’s proudly unruly “SOS” (even though it technically came out in December 2022), and the year before that was dominated by Beyoncé’s dance floor dissertation “Renaissance.” But 2025 didn’t have that sort of obvious choice, and I don’t think I was alone in finding some of the year’s blockbuster releases from the likes of Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen a little lackluster. As this playlist attests, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t interesting music hiding in more obscure corners, waiting to be discovered.
Make your way through these tracks and see if you come across some discoveries of your own. I can almost guarantee that you won’t like everything you hear, and if you do, congratulations — your certificate is in the mail.
Did we miss your favorite album or song of the year? Or did you find a new favorite thanks to this playlist? Let us know.
And if you haven’t been paying much attention to new music in 2025, consider this your lucky day: Here’s a comprehensive primer that will get you up to speed, just in time to make a year-end list of your own.
Listen to the playlist on Spotify.
Listen to the playlist on Apple Music.
I’m getting out of this gumball machine,
Lindsay
Listen along while you read.
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Lindsay Zoladz is a pop music critic for The Times and writes the subscriber-only music newsletter The Amplifier.
The post Hear the Best Albums and Songs of 2025 appeared first on New York Times.
