There was so much good stuff that I expanded my songs and albums list from 20 to 25 – a nice bit of symmetry given the year, and a sign, perhaps, that I am not as washed up as a music critic as I thought. 

This year, as the singer-songwriter mode that dominated the previous decade of indie rock faded away, artists explored tenderness beyond the acoustic-guitar-and-hushed-vocals template, making post-punk sound pretty, and mining previously uncool pop sounds to create something daring and unexpected. For as drained as I felt about ideas when it came to music, the people making it seemed like they were overflowing with them.

Before we get started on the Top 10 of 2025, as always, we have an alternate list from Postrider contributor Alex Hunter, who compiled his own favorite songs of the year: 

And now, the rest of my list:

10. “Taxes” – Geese

On the onset, “Taxes” is all about powerlessness – lead singer Cameron Winter accepts that he “should burn in Hell” and acknowledges that there are levies he is legally bound to pay. But as the drums rattle on, as the backing vocals share his resignation, Winter makes some bold statements. He might deserve damnation, but he says “I don’t deserve this.” And if Caesar wants him to render unto him what he believes is his, well, then break out the cross and the nails, because that’s the only way he’s going to get it. After making that defiant declaration, the song unfurls, reaching skyward in a sort of heaven-sent rebellion. It’s not just that Winter is rejecting things prescribed for him. He’s actively taking control, seeking healing, salvation, and even heartbreak on his own terms. Whether a protest against the tax-funded violence currently playing out across the country and abroad or a more simple statement about forging one’s own life path, “Taxes” stands out as a generational statement about throwing off the expectations of the old world to form a new one, no matter what price we might have to pay along the way.

9. “Afterlife” – Alex G

It’s a perfectly natural impulse for an artist’s fans to fret about what will happen to their music after they sign to a major label. But when the artist in question is Alex G, perhaps the more pertinent question is what he will do to the label – like, say, force them to release a mandolin based-track with a one word chorus as a lead single. Such is the genius of “Afterlife,” perhaps the most propulsive song Alex G has released yet, pairing poppy gated snares with surreal synths and Giannascoli’s typically quirky vocals, which twist into an otherworldly falsetto at the end of the first refrain. The typical Alex G tropes are hit on, too – childlike innocence and heavenly transcendence contrasted with earthly corruption, anarchic anxiety cured by the purpose found in romantic and filial responsibility. The “afterlife” in question is not a literal heaven or hell, but a feeling of rebirth and renewal, of entering a state of love and comfort once thought of as inconceivable, one so pure as to be unreal.

8. “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)” – Wednesday

Indie rock songs (or songs of any genre, literally) about where a person is from generally fall into one of two categories: “God, I love my hometown” or “God, I hate my hometown.” Part of what makes Wednesday an important band is that they embraced the former even though it meant singing about North Carolina and not New York or LA, but on “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On),” they flip the script a bit. Instead of introducing their home via a story about a quirky landlord or the camaraderie of a neighborhood bar, they open “Wound Up Here” by dredging up the corpse of a drowned high school football star, then paint a bleak picture of drinking off a highway, flubbing a eulogy, and staring into the eyes of a mounted deer head. I still have no doubt that Karly Hartzman, MJ Lenderman, and company love where they come from, but this intense slice of swamp grunge is a reminder that staying in one place for too long isn’t just stagnation – it’s certain death, inviting the current of time to pull us to our end.

7. “New Threats From the Soul” – Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band 

Describing songwriting as “poetry” is often obnoxious and always cliche, but I can’t think of a better way to describe the lyrics on Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band’s New Threats From the Soul, which takes the barroom ballad and expands it into sprawling, Walt Whitman-esque verse, nowhere more so than on the album’s title track. Like Whitman, Davis tries to find the midpoint between the high and the low – the woman he’s singing about is both Helen of Troy and Betty Rubble, Moki Cherry and Peggy Bundy; the caged bird sings, but he does it on a backyard chain swing, filling out a W-9 tax form. At its core, “New Threats from the Soul” is about a man fretting about what he missed, about how the choices he made in the past –the passions he indulged – left him on the periphery of polite society. But the quirky woodwinds and fingersnaps indicate he’s doing the best he can with it, and the backing vocals show he’s not alone. All he can do now is look ahead and try and regain control, even if his own soul keeps trying to lead him astray.

6. “Float” – Jay Som feat. Jim Adkins

You have to appreciate the ambition of inviting Jim Adkins of Jimmy Eat World, author of a surprise top five hit, to contribute barely-there backing vocals to the lead single of your new album. While Jay Som hasn’t seen similar chart success (yet), songwriter and lead singer Melina Duterte does find a new level of pop sensibility on “Float,” which applies her gauzy atmospherics to a more traditional pop rock structure. The song’s lyrics, about sitting with the anxiety of transition between one’s past and one’s future, feel like a reflection on Jay Som’s turn to more accessible material. Whatever the merits of floating with versus fighting your faith as Duterte insists, the song makes for an instant sing-along-as-loud-as-possible-at-a-show classic. 

5. “Cradle the Pain” – Morgan Nagler

It may only be the fifth-ranked song on this list, but “Cradle the Pain” is far and away the best titled song of 2025: Morgan Nagler’s guitar squeals, whines, wails, and weeps throughout this supremely assured slice of fuzz pop. Best known for cowriting with artists like Phoebe Bridgers and HAIM, Nagler brings a sense of well-earned confidence to “Cradle the Pain,” a track so well-constructed that it seems inconceivable that Nagler only has five songs released under her own name on Spotify. The grumbling bass and rhythm guitar make her sound like a sleeping giant finally coming to life, and the song’s lyrics, about forging ahead through setbacks and realizing one’s own power, feel like the perfect thematic note on which to start your first solo album cycle. This list is, by its nature, a backward looking exercise, but “Cradle the Pain” is the rare entry that points at something exciting just over the horizon.

4. “Elderberry Wine” – Wednesday 

For a while, it seemed like Karly Hartzman and MJ Lenderman were going to be their generation’s version of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore – an indie rock power couple co-fronting a band that defined their own version of cool while reinventing guitar-based music in the process. But then Lenderman’s solo releases began to eclipse Wednesday’s own, and everyone started touring too much, and the romance fell apart. For many indie fans, this was likely a dispiriting development, and the fact that Lenderman didn’t join Wednesday on their latest tour probably didn’t instill them with a lot of confidence either. But “Elderberry Wine” might just be the signal that the end of the Hartzman-Lenderman pairing may have been the key to saving Wednesday – if not in the short term, then certainly in the long term. 

“Edlerberry Wine” is, contrary to much of Wednesday’s music, a sincerely sweet song – Xandy Chelmis’ squealing feedback is replaced with sunkissed pedal steel, Hartzman’s screams with her own cracked version of country warbling. But, as the title suggests, the threat of things turning sour is ever present: elderberries, if not processed properly, stay tart and poisonous; the pickled eggs can be overbrined, fantasies of future children become laments of time lost. “Elderberry Wine”’s tenderness is rooted in that tension. The country songs about good times are only precious because of the songs about the bad times. Drinking with your friends is only fun because you can’t do it every night. Being in love is only special because you have to work at it to keep it up. “Elderberry Wine” is all about striking that balance between the sweet and the sour, about reminding you that to be happy you also had to have felt a little bit of pain, and that, sometimes, you have to abandon one path to keep yourself firmly on another. 

3. “Information Content” – Horsegirl

At the risk of sounding absurdly pretentious, “Information Content” doesn’t feel like a song to me so much as an art object. The percussion beats on metronomically, with rare moments of syncopation. The guitar phrase repeats itself, elliptically, like a radio broadcast sent into space. The bass, when it’s not imitating that phrase, consists of mere eighth notes. Spare and pristine, it’s like a Larry Bell sculpture come to life.

Initially, that economy extends to the vocals – in between childlike “ah hoo, ah hoos,” Nora Cheng sings about being still in a room, “translating my talk to tones.” It’s not just a song about songwriting, but about making something that will be converted into… information and content, an impersonal way to talk about a personal thing. But then the chorus kicks in. That human element, the one reduced to repeated notes, gains steam. The guitar, still thin, becomes more driving and complex. Cheng’s voice is joined by another. The verse happens again, but another signal has been added to the transmission. The waves layer on top of each other. Another chorus, and then a coda, where the brittle structure begins to give: the guitar scratches and scratches, the cymbals splash, and the whole thing falls apart. 

When people talk about nature, they tend to be thinking of trees and bugs and things like that. But on “Information Content,” Horsegirl contemplate the border between sentient life and the electromagnetic spectrum; the waves that keep our brain running, our senses working, the very fabric of our reality intact. And for as sterile as that may all feel, the way this exploration leads them right back to nursery rhyme rhythms, to these changes in air pressure that, beyond all reason, trigger our emotional response, suggests that, despite all we know about the way sound may interact with the brain, there’s still something we can’t quite explain about the way it connects with the heart.

2. “Au Pays Du Cocaine” – Geese

I love Geese, but I hate, — hate, hate, hate – the way they’re talked about online. And I get why: Cameron Winter is an otherwise normal seeming Zoomer with the taste and croaky voice of an old man; he seems to take his occasionally absurd lyrics about a bug buzzing in his car and horses dancing very seriously; his mom is famous for writing a book about polyamory. He’s quirky in a way that gives him an air of mystique that, thanks to social media, most artists lack, which makes him a perfect canvas on which to paint a million memes. 

But for as annoying as all of that is, it just makes “Au Pays Du Cocaine” that much rawer, that much more of an absolute heartbreaker. Forget Hank Williams. Forget Sinéad O’Connor. Forget Bonnie Raitt. Did any of them ever sing “You can stay with me and just pretend I’m not there?” Did any of them write a verse that’s just “You can change” repeated nine times before ending with “You can change and still choose me?” Did any of them pair these lyrics with a lullaby guitar that made their song sound like a crumpled up, automated valentine? Did they make the mere image of a sailor in a big green coat on a big green boat sound like the saddest goddamn thing in the world? No, no they did not. None of them translated the absolute pathetic nature of being in love with someone who wants to leave you the way that Cameron Winter does on this song, and I’m not sure that anyone will ever be able to do it again, either.

1. “Dancing in the Club (MJ Lenderman Version)” – This Is Lorelei and MJ Lenderman

Look, I get it. You’re probably rolling your eyes right now. Not only is my number one song of the year a cover, but it’s a cover of a track from This Is Lorelei’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star, my number one album of 2024. And not only is it a cover of a song from my favorite album of last year, it’s a cover by MJ Lenderman, who released my favorite song of 2024, and who still plays lead guitar for Wednesday, a band I have written about ad nauseum over the last couple of years (and twice in this list). Of course this was my favorite song of the year. Of course I pulled from the now well-worn pool of young indie dudes who make country rock adjacent music. Of course, of course, of course.

But what can I say, when a song speaks to you, it speaks to you. There’s the historical resonance – Nate Amos said that “Dancing in the Club” was “dreamt up for someone else to sing,” and Lenderman’s cover revitalizes the tradition of classic indie bands playing their friends’ songs mere months after they’ve been released. As someone who’s yearned for some feeling of a coherent indie rock scene, this is as good a sign as any that the genre is in a healthy, vibrant place.

And then there’s the song itself. Amos’ original was bleary-eyed and breathless, a perfect evocation of being heartbroken while the world, like dancers in a club, rushes on around you. It sounds like something that could hypothetically be played in a club, too. But Lenderman’s version sounds like it should be played in a bar. It could be played on stage in a bar, as the patrons look on in quiet reflection. It could be played on a jukebox as, like Amos, people sing softly along, retracing its words like the streets of an abandoned hometown. It could be played on a karaoke machine, as the singer and his friends reflect on their lost youth, their shared struggle and suffering. Either way, the playing card imagery gives it something indelibly American. And the flawless couplet that is “A loser always wins”/”Yeah I’m a loser, always been” deserves to ring on forever wherever sad songs are sung. 

Music is an art and a business, yes, but even more so than that it’s a part of culture, a vital condition that is reflected in both the form and content of Lenderman’s “Dancing in the Club.” It tells the story of the listless Millennial the way that Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” told the story of the searching boomer; its traditional country rock instruments weave its very modern lyrics about singing into your phone and cross-continental communication into a deeper tradition. And its mere existence as a song written by one artist, and then performed, transformed, and perfected by another demonstrate that, despite its commodification, music is still something that’s shared, still something that connects people who never realized that they were thinking and feeling the exact same thing as some other person, even if they were millions of miles away. 

The first time I ever heard Billy Joel’s “Captain Jack,” I was sitting in the back seat of my parents’ car. Almost without thinking, my dad, driving, and my mom, in the passenger seat, started singing along to this deeply sad song about isolation and purposelessness. It was a stirring image: I had seen my parents sing along to many songs before, but nothing like this, nothing that seemed so deeply felt and personal, nothing that seemed to speak to a youthful pain they had both experienced at some point in their lives. I’m not Nostradamus, but I would be shocked if, at some point, my future children don’t see me slip into a similar trance with “Dancing in the Club.” Every time it comes on, it grabs me and doesn’t let go. It’s the story of me and my friends, the story of our times, transposed into something timeless. It is, in a word, generational.