The best albums of 2025 so far

What if the witches of Macbeth were just misunderstood ravers who were really into Ministry and on the verge of a breakdown to end all breakdowns? The second album from London’s aya gives that answer, but also leaves us with many questions. That’s thanks to its strange alchemy of sounds pressed together with the calamitous urgency of shearing tectonic plates, sending jungle, nu-metal, techno, and spoken word falling into its endless abyss. —Jordan Darville

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Inspired by horror films and an unfinished short story woods wrote as a child, Golliwog is another classic work from one of rap’s great modern masters. A triumph of existential terror and tragedy, it’s a grim listen, but it’s hard to come away from Golliwog not feeling like woods has articulated something previously beyond your scope of language. —JD

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Released in December, Heavy Metal is too good to fall between the cracks of “best of” eligibility periods. The solo debut of Geese frontman Cameron Winter is cryptic, funny, heartfelt, ironic, and always deeply moving. With just a piano and his powerfully cracked voice, Winter writes songs that get existential about religion (“$0”) and accurately nail feeling like a piece of shit (“Drinking Age”). After a recent London show I heard someone call him “the new Bob Dylan” — but what stands out, from the voice to the unique point of view, is how everything Winter does so well comes exclusively from himself. —David Renshaw

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DJ Python puts his voice at the forefront of this delicately sculpted EP, swapping out his trademark “deep reggaeton” club-orientated music for a gloomier but equally tactile sound touching on shoegaze and trip-hop. The diaphanous “Marry Me Maia” establishes the languid tone early, a heavy sigh of a song cloaked in a delicate layer of ambient synths. Even at its heaviest, as on the deconstructed U.K. rap track “Dai Buki,” i was put on this earth holds a perfectly hypnotic gaze. —DR

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“Ashes fall in August / In October, the blood shines,” Eiko Ishibashi sings in Japanese near the end of “October,” the opening track of Antigone. Her new album is named for a tragic Sophocles heroine, sentenced to be buried alive after attempting to give her brother a proper burial against the orders of the king. It’s also an unflinching look at the end of the world. Still, it’s not a hopeless record. As the apocalypse crashes around Ishibashi in slow motion, her voice glows strong and bright, emitting a light that couldn’t survive if she’d really given up. —Raphael Helfand

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Written and produced solely by herself (and released on her own label), Lifetime is a hard reset for Erika de Casier. Not really in vibes — like her previous works Lifetime mines the past for inspiration, this time ‘90s trip-hop and liquidy R&B — but in focus. 2024’s Still was ambitious but felt scattered in vision. Lifetime, meanwhile, is locked in as one tight, stylish package of music that’s all working toward a singular, sublime goal. There are flashes of Sade, Janet, and Madonna in its 11 sepia-tinted songs, but after this album, de Casier deserves to be known as her own sound’s originator. —Steffanee Wang

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What the Feng, the debut album of 19-year-old rapper Feng is 10 songs that alternately soar and tremble as he walks us through his life philosophies and offers words of carefree encouragement. The Croydon, England, MC’s exhortations to “be nice” and “have fun” are simplistic, sure, but songs like “Mum im an artist” and “Soul 2 soul” are so open-hearted you can’t help but agree. Sometimes life really can be as straightforward as “don’t be afraid of what comes next / just do your best.” —Vivian Medithi

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Popping a molly and “finding yourself” at a rave is a trope that doesn’t need to birth any more art but I’ll make an exception for FKA twigs’s Eusexua. Inspired by her own awakenings after going to a warehouse party in Prague, the record unintentionally solved a personal frustration of mine that had been building: her increasingly esoteric music. Eusexua’s themes of personal emancipation collide with twigs’ embrace of the most unencumbered, pleasure-seeking music of her career. “I’m tired of messing my life up with overcomplicated moments,” she sings on “Sticky.” As in her life, twigs has found something that serves her art better. —SW

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Whereas Chicago trio Horsegirl embodied the scuzzy post-punk and no wave of idols Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo on their debut Vision of Modern Performance, their sophomore record, Phonetics On and On, was a chance to reflect on the growing pains of their post-teenage years: going to college in New York City, and dipping their toes in adulthood. Trading noisy guitars for charming, twee-pop that would fit on the soundtrack of Juno or (500) Days of Summer, Horsegirl’s more stripped-back and thoughtful musings are where they are at their loudest. —Cady Siregar

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On Luminescent Creatures, Ichiko Aoba sings of dissolved demarcations between life and death, light and dark, angels and demons, earth and sea and sky. The record contains some of the most beautiful songs I’ve heard, orchestral pop arrangements that blossom with the sound of Aoba’s angelic voice. Driven by the desire to demonstrate the shared experiences of all living creatures, from humans to plankton, Aoba created a masterpiece that glows as bright as the creatures who inspired it. —RH

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Every song on this album hits and is Gaga at maximum power: She’s seething on “Perfect Celebrity,” infatuated on “Blade of Grass,” disgustingly cool on “Killah.” When I got the chance to speak with her earlier this year, she said making the record was the most confident she’s felt in her entire career. That’s evident in the music which was influenced heavily by greats like Prince, Michael Jackson, and David Bowie but positions Gaga not as an acolyte but peer. —SW

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Back in April, I watched lil2posh swan across a crowded stage at Reggies in Chicago, half-performing the hits of his new tape Fiesta Boy. A friend who tagged along was aghast, but it made perfect sense to me: the Chicago native’s bop-inflected music, heavily indebted to local icons Sicko Mobb, prioritizes glamorous style over substance. Of course, his tunes reward closer listening too; from the hushed cascade of “show …” to the grandiose sweep of “100 dollar autograph …” posh’s “Hannah Montana swag” cuts through clear and bright. —VM

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For most of her career Lucy Liyou thrived on experimental ambiguity. The songs of Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name are still complex messages suspended in baths of subtext, but their medium is the pop ballad. Unsurprisingly, Liyou’s interpretation of “pop” differs from most, but the lion’s share of these tracks reverberate with unmistakable melodrama. Many are about breakups, but they’re not traditional breakup songs. They’re fractured vessels, overflowing with love that endures even when it’s unrequited. —RH

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Made after a long-desired return to Somerville’s birthplace of Connemara, Luster finds the Irish dream-pop artist at ease, if not exactly at peace. “Too many stories, what I am, what I’m not,” she sighs on “Projections” as waves of guitar and Northern Lights-colored synths float around her. From the gothy “Violet” to avant-garde harmonizations of “Flutter,” Luster is an enchanting tribute to the endless search. —JD

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True friendship is when you and your best friend break up with your long-term partners at the same time and commiserate about it in the back of a tour van, writing the best songs of your lives — a.k.a. the real story behind Momma’s Welcome To My Blue Sky. “I Want You (Fever)” is a dream-pop banger that embraces desire when you’re already taken, and is a celebration of the unabashed recklessness your twenties are made for. “Stay All Summer” and “New Friend” eye the possibilities of an unknown future instead of a shackled present you no longer want. —CS

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French musician Marylou Mayniel’s latest album sits at the intersection of icy club aesthetics and rigorous classical training, the same place artists like Caroline Polachek and FKA twigs call home. Flickering synths wash in and out of songs like “obvious” and “ict,” on which Mayniel conjures a palpable sense of freedom with a line as simple as “Strawberry dancer, vanilla summer.” Guests Bladee and underscores join at uptempo moments, especially the latter on “harvest sky” which stands out like a flickering neon light on a crisp winter night. —DR

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I can’t even be mad that PinkPantheress’ latest album ends at a trim 20 minutes. Compared to the micro songs she was releasing just a few years ago (that still punched above their weight), the U.K. producer and singer has jumped levels at stuffing more of everything into her bite-sized bricolage club music: samples (from Basement Jaxx to Jessica Simpson), textures (the dirty alarms on “Stateside”), and flirty PinkPantheress-isms (“My name is Pink and it’s really nice to meet you”). The Gen Z tastemaker can be imitated but never beat. —SW

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Lately I’ve been thinking about MUSIC as a cipher for the American Dream, a clout-juiced meritocracy where the winners swallow their idols whole, shit money, and become teflon with every new allegation. Each Swamp Izzo tag and CardoGotWings snare roll seem to hit harder than the last, cracking across the eardrum like a firework or a gunshot. —VM

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End of the Middle is full of family scenes, constantly time traveling between generations, learning what’s changed and what hasn’t through simple juxtaposition. On “Removals Van,” we hear about the narrator and his brother’s shared childhood climbing trees outside a house that “backed right onto the old tramway.” Then, suddenly, everything in the house is ready to be moved, and Dawson and his partner are “having a curry on crossed legs, surrounded by boxes,” WhatsApping drunken selfies to relatives. —RH

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Glass pints of Actavis going for $2,500, $10,000. A 9-year-old killing a rabbit. A green Brabus pulling off slow as shit, “like a crab moving.” Vivid images tumble acrobatically out of Rio Da Yung OG’s mouth like contortionists crammed in a clown car. Following a 44-month stint in federal prison, the Flint rapper’s punchline flow has coiled into something more painterly, and his penchant for outrageous bars is balanced by unpolished glimpses of a traumatized psyche. —VM

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This is flirty, eclectic pop about living life in the big city as young women about town, trading secrets about disappointing Tinder dates and the endless supply of losers in the dating world. The album’s best song, “You got time and I got money,” is a jazzy track dedicated to the rush of being in love and how it’s the everyday details that really make life worth living: “I like these clean t-shirts on you.” It’s hard not to blush when Smerz asks, “Baby, can I see you naked? Even though I love how you dress.” Send this album to a person you’re crushing on. —CS

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Soon after the release of Crooked Wing, Jack Barnett, who’s one half of These New Puritans with his brother George, was handed a small revelation. “Someone said to me that it’s a love song to decay,” he wrote on Instagram. That feels right. Perhaps the cliché about how energy never dies is apt here: On Crooked Wing, These New Puritans shed almost all of their pop-leaning instincts in favor of a suite of borderline liturgical compositions grown in the fertile banks of their own River Styx, full of searching pilgrims and ambiguous omens. —JD

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Every yeule album is a way for Nat Ćmiel to explore the boundaries of their art. On Evangelical Girl is a Gun, Ćmiel dons gothic cyberpunk visuals and wields a shiny pistol as they ask questions of self-sacrifice and worship, of martyrdom and crucifixion. Her off-kilter, electro-pop with shiny Y2K touchstones (Avril Lavigne with some hints of Caroline Polachek and The Corrs’–influenced vocal melodies) descends into an ultimate rave party at the underground warehouse, otherwise known as the place of worship for yeule fans worldwide. —CS

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YHWH Nailgun make dissonant music with the swagger of a band oblivious to outside noise. Some parts of 45 Pounds, the New York band’s debut album, sound like rapid-fire assault rifles rattling against concrete, while others have a frictional force that propels them past the clouds and into rarefied air. There is an intensity to the music that makes every squall, shriek, and gurgle sound crucial. At just 21 minutes long, 45 Pounds incomes and goes quickly, but its impact is unshakeable. —DR

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