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 I’ve done in recent years, I have a list of honorable mentions…

• A Great Time to Be an Empath – Panel
• Balloon Balloon Balloon – Sharp Pins
• Big city life – Smerz
• Cotton Crown – The Tubs
• Dancing Shoes (EP) – Nilufer Yanya
• Die in Love – Greet Death
• Evangelic Girl is a Gun – yuele
• THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED – The Armed
• Hell is an Airport – Liquid Mike
• Losin’ – Colin Miller
• Lost & Found – Free Range
• Magic of the Sale – Teethe
• Natural Pleasure – BRONCHO
• Ripped and Torn – Lifeguard
• Snocaps – Snocaps
• System – Prewn
• This Better Be Something Great (EP) – Westside Cowboy
• Twilight Override – Jeff Tweedy

…but I also have three records that did not make the full lists for unique reasons that I wanted to highlight via blurb anyway, so I gave them special awards. They are:

EP that I’ve probably listened to a lot more than most of the albums on this list but doesn’t qualify for it because it isn’t technically an album: 

Planet Popstar – Wishy

In my songs of the year list, I wrote about how Wishy’s “Fly,” along with a few other of their songs, are exemplary of what I call “prestige Sugar Ray” – music that takes otherwise unfashionable tropes from late 90s pop (DJ scratches, sunny production) and puts an indie spin on it. While there are plenty of tracks like that on Planet Popstar, Wishy also dip into what you might be able to call “lovestruck Superchunk,” taking the spikey guitars of the Merge Records pioneers and crafting it into something poppier and friendlier. The result is a six track release that, despite its brevity, is both dynamic and innovative, an evocative exploration of the promise of blue skies and the yearning that lies beneath them.

Recommended tracks: “Fly,” “Planet Popstar,” “Over and Over”

Album that technically came out in December 2024 that everyone added to their 2025 list that I want to add to mine but decided not to for reasons explained below:

Heavy Metal – Cameron Winter

Most high profile music outlets like Pitchfork or Rolling Stone release their end of year lists in November or early December, which creates a kind of unofficial pre-Thanksgiving eligibility window for artists who want their music to be featured on them unless they want to roll the dice and hope had their work will be remembered nearly a year after it was released. The latter is what happened to Heavy Metal, the debut solo album of Geese frontman Cameron Winter, which came out on December 6, 2024, but was such a huge hit that it wound up being ranked number three on Pitchfork’s 2025 list, while standout track “Love Takes Miles” was named as the best song of a year it didn’t even come out in. 

I don’t have an issue with this – editorial deadlines are real and in a business so dependent on traffic, you need to cut some corners to grab attention and give every release the proper attention you feel it deserves. I considered including Heavy Metal on my own list, too. But I actually waited until the end of December to start compiling my list specifically because I knew one album coming out that month (which you will read about soon) would probably make it, and it felt unethical to give Cameron Winter special dispensation (and me a cop out) when I don’t have the some constraints of these other outlets. Still, I would very much encourage you all to listen to this album – despite being more musically conservative in some ways, it’s actually far less accessible than Geese’s Getting Killed, mostly because Winter chooses not to bury his moaning, froggy vocals among busier instrumentation, opting for simple piano ballads instead. That might be a bit much for some people to swallow but, for me, it cast a light on Winter’s surreal, almost spiritual songwriting, and reframed him as a kind of Tom Waitsian figure if, instead of growling about characters, Waits bellowed about ruminations on God, love, and the future instead. For the best possible effect, listen to this album while driving down a snowy suburban DC road on a placid afternoon, as I did many times this winter. 

Recommended tracks: “The Rolling Stones,” “Nausicaä (Live Will Be Revealed),” “Love Takes Miles,” “$0”

Album that would be on this list if I weren’t lazy and had listened to all of the albums I should I listened to before I made it: 

Let God Sort Em Out – Clipse

I tend to roll my eyes at Gen X and elder Millennial nostalgia for 2000s rap acts – it might be my favorite era of the genre too, but do we really need a new Outkast album? Are we really sure that Lil Wayne will ever release anything worth listening to again? At what point do we not all become boomers wishing that the surviving members of Led Zeppelin would get together for one last record?

It’s that attitude that led me to delay listening to Let God Sort Em Out, the first release from Virginia Beach legends Clipse since 2009. And, as it turns out, it’s an attitude that has gone on to make me look like an idiot. Paired again with producer Pharrell Williams, Pusha T and Malice sound like they haven’t missed a beat, delivering surgical verses that cover both their historical interest areas (namely, selling cocaine) and reflections on aging in a world that privileges youth. But perhaps the most impressive thing about Let God Sort Em Out is that, in a musical era defined by bloat (particularly when it comes to hip-hop), Clipse and company keep things simple, blunt, and to the point: no track is over four and a half minutes, the production is sturdy and invigorating, the lyrics sharp and succinct. I am sorry I doubted you, Clipse; let the fact that I even have to write this entry stand as a monument to my shame.

Recommended tracks: “Chains & Whips” feat. Kendrck Lamar, “P.O.V.” feat. Tyler, the Creator, “Ace Trumpets,” “M.T.B.T.T.F.”, “F.I.C.O.” feat. Stove God Cooks

---

Ok, enough throat clearing. Here are numbers 25-11 of the Top 25 Albums of 2025:

25. The Burden of Desire – voyeur

There is part of me that realizes that voyeur, with their male/female vocals and noise-y guitars, are kind of like Greta Van Fleet but for Sonic Youth instead of Led Zeppelin. But, what can I say: I like Sonic Youth, and I like the way that voyeur faithfully recreates their formula on The Burden of Desire – considering that it was produced by former Sonic Youth collaborator Martin Bisi, I’m apparently not the only one who feels this way. If they innovate on Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore’s formula at all, it’s by introducing more overt themes of longing and desire, framing them as a cumbersome, almost curse-like facet of human emotion that only leads to more confusion and suffering. The only rational response, it seems, is to create a maelstrom of noise. 

Recommended tracks: “I Don’t Want To,” “The Burden of Desire,” “Split My Heart,” “Thorn”

24. Ghostholding – venturing

Despite being the rare Millennial who grew up borderline detesting the pop punk and emo pop that dominated the airwaves of my youth, I’ve been nevertheless intrigued by modern artists’ attempts to reframe and adapt those genres into something a little more intellectually stimulating (even when those artists are Willow Smith). Venturing’s Ghostholding, a side project from Clark, New Jersey (hey, that’s where my mom’s from!) electronic artist Jane Remover, is probably the best I’ve heard of the bunch so far. Blurring the familiar aughts emo elements – the heartending choruses, power chords, and screams – under noisier shoegaze, venturing bridges the gap between melodic rock and the “hyperpop” of acts like 100 gecs and the reverb heavy singer/songwriter work of mk.gee, pushing all of those styles forward despite pulling so heavily from the past. Far from a pure nostalgia play, it’s a bold statement that demonstrates that you can still forge something new from something old. 

Recommended tracks: “Play my guitar,” “No sleep,” “Believe,” “Dead forever,” “Famous girl”

23. Worldwide – Snõõper

I like punk rock generally, but it’s no secret that a genre built around simple chords, shouted lyrics, and general feelings of alienation and anger can get stale quick. Thankfully, Snõõper have spent most of their career trying to inject a sense of manic glee back to the scene by recording breakneck bangers about getting the keys to the company car and marveling at their own speed. Despite introducing the mechanist precision of a drum machine to their sound on Worldwide, Snõõper still feel freewheeling and wild, focusing their intensity on precise bursts of energy, like a five year old whaling on a blow up punching bag with the focus of Muhammad Ali. It truly puts the “racing” in racing thoughts, as if one’s own inner monologue were in a competition to outpace everyone else’s. 

Recommended tracks: “Company Car,” “Worldwide,” “Guard Dog,” “Star 6 9,” “Pom Pom”

22. You Wanna Fade? – Alien Boy

When I reviewed Alien Boy’s debut album Don’t Know What I Am back in 2021, I praised their instrumentation and production but clowned on their overly earnest lyrics. Maybe it’s because, as a 31-year-old, I feel less pressure to come off as cool and detached, but I found myself regularly relishing similar choruses on their follow up You Wanna Fade?, which manages to tighten up the group’s songwriting while sacrificing none of its heart. Songs like “Changes” and “You Want Me Too” add credence to the early comparisons to the Gin Blossoms by matching catchy melodies with shimmery production and simple three-chord structures, while “I Broke My World” adds a heavier, noisier dynamic to the formula. Calling it “power pop” would somehow understate both its sweetness and its strength. 

Recommended tracks: “Changes,” “I Broke My World,” “You Want Me Too,” “Another Brand New Me,” “Everything Stays,” “Bleeding in Yr Pocket” 

21. Hunting Season – Home Is Where

If you harbored any doubt that alt-country was ascendant in indie rock, then Home Is Where’s Hunting Season, which sees the New York-by-way-of-Florida group add a serious sense of twang to their chunky post-hardcore, should disabuse you of such foolish notions. Granted, this stylistic shift shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise – Home Is Where always had a penchant for harmonicas, and lead singer Bea MacDonald’s whines and screams always carried a hint of a drawl – but the group’s success in applying their trademark intensity to tracks centered around acoustic guitars and pedal steel is still remarkable if only for how natural it feels. MacDonald has said that each track on Hunting Season is about an Elvis impersonator dying in a 13-car pileup (to be clear – that’s 13 different Elvis impersonators; whether or not they’re all dying in the same pile up is unclear to me) and while that might be kind of a joke, it also make sense – this is loud music steeped in a kind of surreal Americana that is sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, but always overwhelming. 

Recommended tracks: “migration patterns,” “black metal mormon,” “artificial grass,” “shenandoah,” “the wolf man,” “roll tide”

20. THE COUNT – Frog

On 2025’s SABLE, fABLE, veteran indie folk warbler and electronic experimenter Bon Iver tried his hand at being a sexy R&B singer to perfectly adequate results. That same year, New Rochelle, New York duo Frog, whether intentionally or not, created the best approximation of two drunk guys trying to pull off the same thing in a mostly empty bar. Framing THE COUNT in such a way undersells how deeply felt  (“BITTEN BY MY LOVE VAR. XI” is a beautiful duet sent to a minimalist organ riff) and deeply quirky (that same song includes the lines “And, babе, I know it’s crazy I don’t see you that often”/”All I wanna do is take you back to my coffin” and “Did I mention?”/”I got that new suspension”) but a big part of its appeal is the way it bends over backwards to slip R&B and rap tropes into its piano and guitar based template. These songs aren’t about Drake picking up models in the club – they’re about people with beer goggles trying to fight off their loneliness through sloppy hook ups and slumped over slowdances. It’s sad, relatable, and relentlessly entertaining. 

Recommended tracks: “BITTEN BY MY LOVE VAR. XI,” “SAX-A-MA-PHONE VAR. XII,” “COME COME COME VAR. XIV,” “BARUCH ATTA (IN THE MIDDLE SONG) VAR. XVI”

19. Stardust – Danny Brown 

In the 2010s, Danny Brown helped push rap forward to collaborating with and borrowing the textures from millennial acts seated and the intersection of indie pop and electronica like Purity Ring and Charli XCX, creating a kind of two way street between the genres that was largely abandoned after rap become both more dominant and more siloed off from outside trends. In 2025, he does the same thing for a new generation of electronic music on Starburst, working with glitchy hyperpop artists like Frost Children and femtanyl to once again smash boundaries and breathe new life into hip-hop. But beyond its innovations, Stardust feels like a breath of fresh air because of how free and loose it can be, unburdened by the rage that defines so many young hip-hop artists, unshackled to the questions of legacy that dog older artists, and cured of the sleepy anhedonia that plagues artists in between. Despite its abrasiveness, despite its noise, this is a record that’s mostly fun and always adventurous, something many rappers would do well to take note of. 

Recommended tracks: “Copycats” feat. underscores, “1999” feat. JOHNNASCUS, “Lift You Up,” “Whatever the Case” feat. ISSBROKIE, “1L0v3myL1f3!” feat. femtanyl, “The End” feat. ta Ukrainka, Zheani, and Cynthoni

18. Radio DDR – Sharp Pins 

If Tony Soprano is right and “remember when” is indeed the lowest form of conversation, then I shudder to think what it means to be nostalgic for nostalgia. Whatever epithet it deserves, tar me accordingly – one of the reasons I love Sharp Pins’ Radio DDR is because it reminds me of a time when indie artists pulled liberally from 60s garage rock and power pop, a form of imitation that Kai Slater flawlessly imitates on this record which, true to its title, sounds like a kind of scrambled radio station that East Germans would listen to get a taste of what life was like on the other side of the Berlin Wall. But beyond production and vibes, Radio DDR is chock full of infectious hooks and sweet melodies straight from the Bob Pollard, Alex Chilton, Mo Troper, and Tony Molina playbooks that strikes the perfect balance of bliss and melancholy that defines all great pop music. It’s nice to know that even though the peace and love thing didn’t work out, there’s still somebody out there keeping the musical dreams of the most overdiscussed decade alive.

Recommended tracks: “Lorelei,” “You Don’t Live Here Anymore,” “If I Was Ever Lonely,” “When You Know,” “I Can’t Stop,” “With a Girl Like Mine”

17. Caveman Wakes Up – Friendship

When I interviewed Friendship guitarist Peter Gill back in 2020 (for a piece about his other band, 2nd Grade), he described their sound as being influenced by Bill Callahan and Lambchop – comparisons I found so apt that, as someone lukewarm on both of those artists, kept me from really engaging with the group. But lead singer Dan Wriggins’ songwriting chops have sharpened in the last half-decade or so, and Caveman Wakes Up is the slowcore country record that the currently twang heavy indie scene needs. Appropriate for the group’s Maine roots, there’s an early winter night quality to Caveman Wakes Up, which sees Wriggins zero in on the little details that can make everyday live simultaneously bleak and revelatory, be it memories evoked by a vacant stoop or an anonymous roommate playing Resident Evil in your living room. Despite featuring a song titled “Free Association,” the songwriting here is anything but – instead, it’s a reflection of the way that our distracted, overstimulated, and thoroughly unsatisfied minds try to process the world around us.

Recommended tracks: “Tree of Heaven,” “Free Association,” “Love Vape,” “Resident Evil”

16. LOTTO – They Are Gutting a Body of Water

In modern musical lingo, the lines between shoegaze and dream pop are frequently blurred, which sands off some of the rougher edges of the former genre. But on LOTTO, They Are Gutting a Body of Water restore the bad vibes to shoegaze, featuring songs about fentanyl withdrawal and homelessness whose lyrical heaviness are matched only by the crushing weight of the band’s guitars. Despite the misery documented on LOTTO, this is also an occasionally hopeful and sensitive record that insists the same momentum that causes us to descend can also help us arc back up into flight. The music follows suit, plunging to guttural depths before fighting its way back up for air, all while Doug Dulgarian’s muffled voice tries to guide you through – certainly from a distance, but present nonetheless. 

Recommended tracks: “the chase,” “sour diesel,” “american food,” “herpim”

15. Welcome to My Blue Sky – Momma 

One would think that, having already recorded a hooky, 90s-inspired album about being a touring rock band, Momma would shift their focus lest they run back the same formula to diminishing returns. Well, Momma did, in fact, run back the same formula, but the results still feel as fresh and vital as ever. If 2022’s Household Name was about the escape that rock and roll affords, then Welcome to My Blue Sky covers what happens after our heroes ride off into the sunset and try to hold onto relationships and their own sanity while living a decidedly unconventional lifestyle. Despite those inherent tensions, the music still sounds as blissed out as ever, balancing the group’s trademark crunching guitars with kisses of synths and drum machines that just emphasize what a surreal, and often frustrating, experience living out your dream can be.

Recommended tracks: “I Want You (Fever),” “Rodeo,” “Last Kiss,” “Bottle Blonde,” “Ohio All the Time”

14. Trash Mountain – Lily Seabird

The influence of Lucinda Williams on Lily Seabird’s music is undeniable – Seabird even shares the same raspy drawl despite being from Pennsylvania and not Louisiana. But whereas Williams’ career and environment lent itself to Southern Gothic storytelling and life-on-the-road-and-in-the-studio foibles, Seabird’s forces her to contemplate the dilemmas of modern artistry and bohemia – its precariousness, its impermanence, its questionable viability. And yet, Trash Mountain is a very warm record musically – Seabird sounds like she’s singing from a front porch, unsure of where her career, or her life, should go next. So she does the only thing that makes sense: she sings.

Recommended tracks: “Harmonia,” “Trash Mountain (1pm),” “Sweepstake,” “Arrow”

13. Belong – Jay Som

Belong doesn’t feel like Jay Som’s pop play so much as their pop experiment, a collection of potential singles that brightens the project’s typical hazy production and sees mastermind Melina Duterte shift her focus from texture to hooks. Duterte doesn’t just wear her pop-punk influences on her sleeve on Belong – she literally puts them on the album, inviting Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins and Paramore’s Hayley Williams to provide backing vocals on tracks that would’ve had a decent chance at charting if they’d been released twenty years earlier. But don’t let this turn towards accessibility fool you – there are still plenty of tracks on Belong that would, well, belong on the group’s prior releases, ranging from fuzzy noise rock to atmospheric dream pop. Rather than view conventionality as either a prison or an aspiration, Duterte sees it as just another sonic pathway to explore, arranging it neatly on her shelf beside her other hues and modes.

Recommended tracks: “Float” feat. Jim Adkins, “What You Need” feat. Soft Glas, “D.H.,” “Casino Stars,” “Want It All”

12. Burnover – Greg Freeman

The “burned over district’ refers to a region of central and western New York where the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening “caught fire,” so to speak, giving rise not only to Mormonism and the Shakers but to the early women’s suffrage movement and even utopian socialist communities. Greg Freeman’s Burnover isn’t directly about those phenomena, but it is about trying to reignite passions that have long felt dormant – whether it’s the civic pride of a striking firemen’s union or a love that’s slowly curdling into indifference. Freeman is the perfect avatar for these tales of decay and hope, singing in a high, twangy whine that calls to mind both Stephen Malkmus and Jason Molina, and writing vividly about both relationships on the rocks and post-industrial decay. He makes the most of his canvas, too, transcending country rock tropes and incorporating brass and strings to make the record feel like not just a sketch, but a full landscape. 

Recommend tracks: “Point and Shoot,” “Rome, New York,” “Gallic Shrug,” “Curtain”

11. Sounds Like… – Florry 

While most of the modern indie acts experimenting with country choose to pull from guitar heroes like Neil Young or sage, wry songwriters like David Berman and Will Oldham, Florry lifts their twang from the boozy, swaggering Western era of The Rolling Stones. In the most reductive terms possible, Sound Like… kind of, uh, sounds like a band trying over and over again to record their own version of “Dead Flowers” and “Honky Tonk Women,” but such comparisons downplay Florry’s own penchant for chaos and weight. Nearly every song on Sounds Like… feels like it’s on the brink of collapse, right before it gets pulled back up again by lead singer Francie Medosch’s quirky, nasally vocals or the fiddle, harmonica, and bluesy guitar littered throughout the album. As a 31-year-old, I’ve recently fallen into the bad habit of pointing to every other album I listen to and claiming it’s about being in your 30s. But Sounds Like…, with the way it recklessly flies by the seat of its pants, only to find itself back home safe again, is a quintessentially 20-something album about trying to figure out what to do with your life. Like most 20-somethings, it never finds an answer – instead, it gets bored, gives up, and gets drunk with its friends.

Recommended tracks: “First it was a movie, then it was a book,” “Waiting Around to Provide,” “Hey Baby,” “Truck Flipped Over ‘19”