As with my songs of the year list, I ended up with so many albums I loved this year that I felt the need to make a list of 25 instead of my typical 20. I won’t claim it’s the most stylistically diverse list you’ll come across – there were a lot of clear trends this year, and I bought in fully to a few of them. But I like to think it highlights some artists you may not have heard of and gives some eloquent praise to artists you already know and love, which feels like the purpose of this kind of an exercise anyway. 

As in our songs of the year list, Alex Hunter provided an alternative slate of his top albums of 2025, along with a little message about the year in music: 

“Here are my favorite 20 albums from this year. I was surprised how there  was so much talk about, from the  the “death” of music culture, the slow limp of labels and all of the discussion of rap not being on the charts anymore, which gave fire to that argument. But we got so many interesting bodies of work that will have longevity. See my list below.”

• Let God Sort Em Out – Clipse
• A Hit Dog Gon Holla – JasonMartin and Mike & Keys
• Supreme Clientele 2 – Ghostface Killah
• Through the Wall – Rochelle Jordan
• GOLDFISH – Hit-Boy and The Alchemist
• PHOLKS (EP) – Leon Thomas
• Mercy – Armand Hammer
• Unlearning Vol. 2 – Evidence
• Criminally Attached – Boldy James and Nicholas Craven
• Gangsta Grillz: Every Movie Needs a Trailer – The Game, DJ Drama, and Mike & Keys
• Deadbeat – Tame Impala
• Dedicated to Cadalee Biarritz – Big K.R.I.T.
• Once Upon a Time – Jay Worthy
• The Fall that Saved Us – Odeal
• MUSIC – Playboi Carti
• everything is a lot. – Wale
• Life is Beautiful – Larry June, 2 Chainz and The Alchemist
• Glockaveli – Key Glock
• Alfredo 2 – The Alchemist and Freddie Gibbs
• Showbiz! – MIKE

Nice picks as always, Alex. Readers can also find part one of my list here. Alright, let’s get this thing over with – here are my top 10 albums of 2025:

10. Holo Boy – This Is Lorelei

This Is Lorelei’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star, which was my favorite album of 2024, was a bit of a heavy affair. Described by project masterminder Nate Amos as a “delayed recovery album,” even its most upbeat songs cast regretful shadows that Amos tries to crawl out from under in order to get himself into the healing light of sobriety and self-forgiveness. This Is Lorelei’s follow up Holo Boy is, by comparison, much lighter and looser, a chance for Amos to experiment without all of those darker feelings plaguing him. Made up of rerecorded tracks from his pre-Box for Buddy catalog, Holo Boy is diverse and nimble, slotting in electronic tracks like “Mouth Man” and slower, more deliberate songs like the title track next to spunkier, poppier tunes like the acoustic “My Friend 2” and straight ahead rocked “Name the Band.” Amos’ palate is broad, but this album demonstrates that, sometimes, such a diverse skillset is best served by keeping things simple and to the point. 

Recommended tracks: “But You Just Woke Me Up,” “Name the Band,” “Mouth Man,” “Holo Boy”

9. It’s a Beautiful Place – Water from Your Eyes

Speaking of that diverse skillset – Nate Amos explores it to an even greater extent with his bandmate Rachel Brown on It’s a Beautiful Place, the latest album from his main gig, Water from Your Eyes. Their most accessible record to date, It’s a Beautiful Place manages to introduce more pop sensibilities to WYE’s arsenal without sacrificing any of their eccentricity. The duo’s approach to songwriting brings to mind a mosaic or stained-glass window. They take well-worn tropes – grunge-y guitars, quirky synths, even the modern indie turn towards alt-country – break them all up, and then put them next to each other to create patterns that range from the fractured to the fractal. Brown’s deadpan delivery makes the group come off as cool and detached, but the funhouse of sounds swirling around them belies the clear joy they feel in creating and experimenting with music. 

Recommended tracks: “Life Signs,” “Nights in Armor,” “Playing Classics,” “Blood on the Dollar”

8. New Threats from the Soul – Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band

“We have pushed limits that were not our own,” Ryan Davis sings in New Threats from the Soul’s second track “Monte Carlo/No Limits.” But the truth is that the limits he pushes on this hour-long, seven-track record feel very much his own, and like that of American music as whole. Davis seeks to take cracked country rock and elevate it to the level of high art by stretching out song lengths (the shortest track here is 5:55) and wandering down lyrical trails that might feel long and winding but always come back to the same core themes of living on society’s periphery and loving the view. It’s an attempt to launch an otherwise earthbound genre into a plane of higher consciousness, to turn sad country songs into suites and transform honky tonks into opera houses. But there’s nothing orchestral or ostentatiously “progressive” about the music on New Threats from the Soul – like a drunken, late night conversation with a friend, it’s drawn out and circuitous, but nonetheless makes its own kind of twisted sense.

Recommended tracks: “New Threats from the Soul,” “Monte Carlo/No Limits,” “Better if You Make Me”

7. The Passionate Ones – Nourished by Time

The phrase “PBR&B” was coined in the early 2010s or so to describe a kind of smooth, soulful music that was favored by the “hipsters.” Sometimes, I feel like it’s an embarrassing, reductive label to describe a rich set of artists and records, but it fits perfectly for Nourished by Time, not just because this project from the mind of Marcus Brown sounds like early Blood Orange and Solange, but because it sounds like R&B written by someone who can only afford to buy cheap beer. That struggle between the material and the emotional drives The Passionate Ones, which sounds like a long drive home from the night shift that causes you to ponder what it is you’re really doing with your life. Its production is soft and ghostly, but its synths and guitars hint at the “hateful life” Brown sings about on “9 2 5,” making for a combination of the gritty and the gauzy that feels true to life. R&B is a genre built on longing – but instead of sex or romance, Brown is aching for a world that lets him live on his own terms, one where all struggle will, finally, come to an end. 

Recommended tracks: “Automatic Love,” “Max Potential,” “9 2 5,” “BABY BABY,” “When the War is Over”

6. 1000 Variations on the Same Song – Frog

One of the marks of a great album is when it makes you reconsider a genre or artist you never cared that much for. On 1000 Variations on the Same Song, Frog do that for me by reinterpreting the styles of  Obama era indie folk bands like Fleet Foxes and Band of Horses, taking their earthy, falsetto heavy sound and pushing it to its limits, like tightening a string on a guitar until it breaks. Frog’s take on this music is spare, silly, and full of incongruous nods to hip-hop and R&B (apparently Kodak Black and Prince were on repeat in the studio while the record was recorded). “I admit I wrote this in a bar” doesn’t feel like a confession of alcohol dependence so much as a confirmation that this is music that manages to be both desperate and quotidian. There’s something absurd about the Migos-esque way Daniel Bateman repeats “I’m buckin’ em down, I’m buckin ‘em down, I’m buckin’ em down” on “HOUSEBROKEN VAR. IV,” but anyone who’s hung out with drunk white guys (or been a drunk white guy themselves) knows that urge to launch into a struggle verse is real, and there’s something charming about how plainly and earnestly Frog captures such a moment (and many similar ill-advised, liquor induced moments) on this record. Every writer knows that when you try to sit down and write something serious, something goofy will inevitably slip through.

Recommended tracks: “DOOMSCROLLING VAR. II,” “HOUSEBROKEN VAR. IV,” “BLAMING IT ALL ON THE LIFESTYLE VAR. V,” “MIXTAPE LINER NOTES VAR. VII,” “WHERE U FROM VAR. VIII”

5. GOLLIWOG – billy woods

GOLLIWOG is a gnarly, unwieldy work for a gnarly, unwieldy time. Woods’ previous album, 2023’s breakthrough Maps, framed a life of constant travel as a liminal, dreamlike existence. GOLLIWOG, by contrast, depicts modern life as a waking nightmare – one in which someone, whether it’s the government, your own family, or something dark lurking in the woods, is always watching, leaving you constantly looking over your shoulder, ready to pull the passports from your drawer and cash from your mattress at the drop of a hat. The music itself, provided by an all-star cast of producers, is dark and mournful, replete with sighing horns, eerie synths, pianos, and horror movie samples that don’t hint at, but guarantee, danger is lurking around every corner. Billy woods is an intensely private, almost anonymous artist who’s never revealed his real name or face publicly. GOLLIWOG might as well be his I-told-you-so-moment, released into a world where his desire to stay off the grid went from possibly paranoid to definitely justified.

Recommended tracks: “STAR87,” “Waterproof Mascara,” “Corinthians” feat. Despot, “Pitchforks & Halos,” “Golgotha,” “BLK ZMBY,” “Born Alone,” “Lead Paint Test” feat. E L U C I D and Cavalier

4. Headlights – Alex G

“Some things I do for love”/”Some things I do for money”/”It ain’t like I don’t want it”/”It ain’t like I’m above it” is a hell of thing to sing on your major label debut, and probably the exact thing that goes through the mind of someone who launched their career from their bedroom once they’ve actually signed a record contract. But if Alex G had any concerns about becoming a sell out, he tries his damndest to not make it so on Headlights, whose singles are still loaded with his quirky proclivities (weird synths, quirky falsetto, unconventional song structure) and whose deeper tracks are as cosmically strange as anything he wrote as an independent artist. Releasing a record on RCA may not be consistent with Alex G’s previous DIY ethos per se, but using RCA’s money to write a song that sounds like Daniel Johnston singing a showtune or a modern Vince Guaraldi ballad is, if not strictly anti-establishment, bold and outre in a way that few artists get the chance to be nowadays. In recent years, Alex G’s music has been defined by that push and pull – between youth and age, between excitement and comfort, between worldliness and godliness – and even if his sound might be a bit more polished than it has been in the past, it’s lost none of its heart or profundity. 

Recommended tracks: “Real Thing,” “Afterlife,” “Louisiana,” “Oranges,” “Far and Wide”

3. Phonetics On and On – Horsegirl

If you know me, you know that I tend to like music that’s a little noisy and messy. I like the friction of feedback and distortion, the idea of trying to wrest order from chaos. In that respect, Phonetics On and On is unique because it values precision and stillness over all of those things, and still manages to sound “punk” (whatever that means) in the process. After mining familiar post-punk influences on their debut album, Horsegirl dug deeper into the genre here, pulling from artists like The Raincoats who were innovative because they recognized that the genre could maintain its edge even as it got quieter, more intellectual, and more intimate. Yes, the video for its lead single might call to mind Wes Anderson, but to call Phonetics On and On “twee” would be implying that its earnestness disguises a sly irony and detachment. Instead, Phonetics On and On, with its simple guitar lines, gentle percussion, and childlike use of strings, seeks to strip both music and emotion down to its purest essence – to capture the sense of comfort of waking up next to someone you love, or the satisfaction of watching schoolchildren walk together in neat little rows. It is an album about small joys that, paradoxically, makes a big, bold artistic statement. 

Recommended tracks: “2468,” “Julie,” “Switch Over,” “Information Content,” “Frontrunner”

2. Getting Killed – Geese

Search Geese or frontman Cameron Winter on Twitter and you’ll find a lot of misguided attempts to compare both the band and its frontman to New York cool kids of yore like Lou Reed and Julian Casablancas. It’s an understandable impulse, but ultimately misguided. Reed was cool because he wrote about the seedy underbelly of New York. Casablancas was cool because he wrote about sex and partying from the perspective of a Manhattan rich kid. Winter and Geese, on the other hand, are cool despite how uncool their tastes and inclinations are. So much of modern indie rock is defined by its 90s influences, but Getting Killed sounds like an indie rock album that was released into a world where the 90s didn’t exist – rather than filtering their proggy forefathers like Yes and Steely Dan through the lens of the alternative rock explosion, Geese feel like they’re trying to burrow closer to the source, owning their weirdness (the skronky horns and guitars, Winter’s froggy vocals) in a plain way that eschews many of the ironic crutches their peers have leaned on for the past decade or so. It’s a renewal of certain rock and roll ideas long thought abandoned, a simultaneously reverent and forward approach to music that makes for an exciting, refreshing sound.

Recommended tracks: “Trinidad,” “Cobra,” “100 Horses,” “Au Pays du Cocaine,” “Taxes”

1. Bleeds – Wednesday

I went through my cycle of self-deprication regarding my predictable taste and predilection for all things Wednesday and MJ Lenderman in my songs of the year list, so I’m just gonna own it here. You reach a point in life where, no matter how expansive your pallet is, you come to realize that you believe that there are certain ways great music should sound. Bleeds encapsulates those ideals for me. It is an album that understands when to pull back and lurch forward, when to scream and when to whisper, when to celebrate and when to mourn. The grunge-shoegaze-country hybrid that Wednesday have concocted has been well-documented, but this might be its apex. Bleeds sounds like a creature emerging from deep in the Carolina swamps, one that’s absorbed the combined pain and joy of the surrounding communities and translates it into alternatingly ugly and beautiful poetry. There’s lots of death on this album, lots of noise and distortion, but there’s also lots of life – campfire stories told about lost friends and lost loves, charming yarns about mistaken identities and teenage foibles. It’s that mix of emotions, that mix of scruffiness and eloquence, the idea that high art can be dredged from the lowest of culture and the lowest of emotions, that makes Bleeds so special. All great rock music is rooted in the provincial. All great rock music seeks to transcend its origins. It’s the contradiction between the two that creates music magic, and one that Bleeds explores expertly. 

Recommended tracks: “Reality TV Argument Bleeds,” “Townies,” “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On),” “Elderberry Wine,” “Pick Up That Knife”