Ranking the best songs and albums of a given year has become something of a tradition here at The Postrider and, truth be told, when I started thinking about writing as a career when I was in high school, it’s all I really wanted to do. I wanted to write record reviews and do artist interviews and things like that, too, but, probably because the end of year and decade lists of outlets like Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and even the dearly departed Blender helped me discover and learn about so much important music, I came to think of list making – placing a stamp on what records should be remembered from a certain period of time, as the true work of any critic. In 2025, I took this feeling to its logical extreme – this list will be the first time I have written about music since my best of 2024 list about a year ago. 

Coming into writing this list, I wondered if that drought was a sign that it was time for me to consider winding down from writing about music altogether. After all, I don’t go to as many shows as I used to, don’t have as much time to listen to as many albums as I used to, and am not talking to people as ingrained with the industry/various scenes as I used to. As I sifted through the year, I felt like I kept coming back to the same artists and genres, that my taste was stagnating, and that I didn’t have much interesting to say about the art form anymore. 

But then a weird thing happened. I started preparing for this list and I realized that there was a lot of damn good music released in 2025, and I had a lot to say about it. In fact, 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. 

I do think that 2025 will come to be thought of as the watershed year of the decade, when many of the seemingly indomitable tendencies of the 2010s were shaken off and replaced with exciting new artists and sounds. The alt singer-songwriter mode that dominated the music of my youth and young adulthood has slowly begun to be phased out, replaced by artists who pull from grunge, alt country, and even prog rock in a way that would’ve been thought unstylish 15 years ago. To put a finer point on it – Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, two thirds of boygenius, both released albums this year. Despite my affection for that group and those artists, neither of those albums, and none of the songs from them, wound up on my lists. That’s also the case for Japanese Breakfast, who released my favorite album of 2020. These records weren’t terrible, but they did feel stale, rooted in a kind of manneredness that gave way to something a little shaggier, a little messy, a little hungrier in 2025. At the same time, other 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 (just like last year, I’ve compiled a list of honorable mentions here).

So let’s get right down to it, then – here’s part 1 of The Postrider’s Top 25 Songs of 2025.

25. “Better” – SPRINTS

The guitar feedback that opens “Better” revs up like an engine, wrongfooting the listener into expecting another grungey rocker from the Irish four piece. Instead, the song settles into a steady but rumbling tempo as lead singers Karla Chubb and Sam McCann ruminate on a relationship on the rocks. The way the shoegaze elements of the guitars wait beneath the mid-tempo rhythm signals that “the storm inside” the two are singing about is threatening to spill over at any time, and recalls early 2010s-rock radio plays from groups like Silversun Pickups and The Joy Formidable, who brought shimmery distortion to the mainstream before the Zoomers were old enough to make Zoomergaze a thing. Normally, that’d make me lament how, ten or 15 years ago, “Better” could be a hit – but with the unexpected ways pop music has trended in 2025, who knows. 2026 might just be SPRINTS’ year.

24. “If You Know Me” – Hudson Freeman

Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter Hudson Freeman made waves on social media after sharing a demo version of “If You Know Me,” drawing listeners in with its melancholy acoustic riff and simple, mournful vocal about a friend/a lover/whoever’s failure to truly understand and connect with him. In the full studio version, Freeman shrewdly preserved the demo’s rough-hewn appeal, leaving the riff warped and distorted but adding a rhythm section, electric guitar, and fiddle to fill things out. Instead of sounding overly slick or ornate, the fleshed out version of “If You Know Me” was elevated from a backyard tape recording to a dusty barroom lament that’s equally bitter and aching, a timeless track about not being seen by someone who insists that they know exactly who you are.

23. “mangetout” – Wet Leg 

Sometimes, Wet Leg feels like a band that’s trying too hard (see: the forced Zoomer slang slinging on “Catch These Fists”). Other times, it feels like they aren’t trying at all (see: the moronic “Chaise Lounge”). But sometimes, they write a genuine alt/indie radio banger that justifies the hype. On their second album, moisturizer,  that song is “mangetout,” a catchy kiss off that sees lead singer Rhian Teasdale re-seize her place in the spotlight from a pain in the ass ex (who may or may not be former bandmate Doug Richards). The jumble of ideas that Teasdale and Hester Chambers manage to pack in – from the title (a French word for peas, which also acts as a kind of anagram for “man, get, out”), to the percussive “get lost for ever” that presages a tuneful, confident chorus (“You wanna fuck me, I know, most people do”) to the almost tender, cooing bridge – recalls the kind of alt rock alchemy that used to notch bands surprise hits in the mid to late 90s, but result in self-explanatory hits today.

22. “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” – Jeff Tweedy

Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy’s solo work typically tends to the more sensitive and introspective, so it’s nice to hear him let his hair down and emulate his proto-punk heroes on “Lou Reed Was My Baby Sitter,” the opener of the third(!) disk from his 2025 album Twilight Override. Twitchy and febrile, “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” doesn’t cover the same scuzzy subject matter as its title figure, nor devolve into the kind of noisy anarchy Reed was capable of, but it does paint a picture of the kind of places that the singer-songwriter, and rock and roll in general, drew otherwise mild manner kids to – the spilled drinks, the sticky carpets, the smokefilled eyes. It’s an ambiance that anyone who goes to rock shows revels in, and one that Tweedy seems to think is as important to the genre thriving as the music itself. “Rock is dead” is a canard that’s been repeated so often it’s become a cliche, but Tweedy has still written a necessary rejoinder to it. As long as there are idiots singing, as long as there are kids who want to feel everything until they feel nothing, as long there are singers like Tweedy still willing to throw in a few Iggy Pop-style “rawrs” in their songs, rock and roll will, in fact, never die.

21. “Play Me” – Fcukers 

“Indie sleaze” is mostly a made up thing perpetuated by Zoomers who weren’t old enough to experience the heyday of American Apparel and Williamsburg loft parties, but if there’s one act who could probably lay claim to the phrase, it’s Fcukers. Yeah, part of it is their name, but most of it is their brazenness – from their dismissal of “nimby kimby indie rock bullshit,” to most likely lying about opening for Speedy Ortiz, to the way they shamelessly sample hip-hop and alt rock and ape street fashion. While their beats, which, on “Play Me,” range from propulsive, wobbly dubstep to a syncopated breakdown, are a big part of their appeal, it all comes together thanks to Shanny Wise’s simultaneously deadpan and teasing vocal style. Her “I just wanna rock right now” (itself lifted from a Golden Age classic) is nasal to the point of mockery, her rap verses winking and intentionally corny, both of which are balanced by her breathy work on the chorus. Like most of Fcukers music, it lures you in and then points and laughs at you when you get too close. 

20. “(I Wanna Be) Your Girl” – Sharp Pins

Recreating Guided by Voices’ lo-fi production aesthetic is easy. Recreating their tuneful, kaleidoscopic songwriting, less so. But Sharp Pins’ Kai Slater, who, in true prolific GBV fashion, released two albums in 2025, has figured it out, nowhere more so than on the jangly “(I Wanna Be) Your Girl” from November’s Balloon Balloon Balloon. He’s able to pull it off by reaching back even further than Guided by Voices, drawing heavily from power pop legend Big Star to craft a lovelorn single worthy of 70s AM radio. The beats are familiar to anyone who’s listened to such music before: longing, repressed feelings bursting through at an inopportune moment, and a sense of bitterness that Slater manages to make sound sweet anyway. Like any great song, it’s the execution, in all its warped, scratchy, glory, that puts it over the top.

19. “Waterproof Mascara” – billy woods 

When a rapper opens a track by asking the producer to “Turn it on,” you probably aren’t expecting the next thing you hear to be a woman crying – and you probably aren’t expecting that sound to be the bedrock of the entire song. But that’s exactly how “Waterproof Mascara,” the most paranoid song from a paranoid album, starts, and that’s before it piles on the horror movie pianos and ghostly theremin to really bring you to a place of dread. Billy Woods, for his part, sounds numb to it all – “Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it,” he says about his father’s death, before describing how it caused him and his family to flee the country. From there, his verses only get more surreal – visions of a suicide attempt met with laughter from his children, a woodland creature luring someone to their doom, Goldilocks waking up to be told, “Wake up, bitch, you in the wrong place.” The only thing Woods can do to cope is smoke more and more weed, but no matter how numb he gets, he never forgets the track’s core, despairing message: “Don’t trust anyone.”

18. “Trash Mountain (1pm)” – Lily Seabird

Anyone who’s ever pursued a career that can take you out of the typical 9 to 5 will tell you that it can be lonely, almost depressing, to be doing nothing in the middle of the day when the rest of the world is doing something, and it’s that ruminative, out-of-place mindset that Lily Seabird explores on “Trash Mountain (1pm).” Named after her neighborhood in Burlington, Vermont, “Trash Mountain (1pm)” sees Seabird restless after a long tour – she takes walks for the sake of it, running into homeless people raving about taxes, kids playing in detritus, and a pair of sneakers hanging from a telephone wire during her stroll. Amidst melancholy harmonica and slide guitar, she ponders the difficulties of adjusting to life off the road, and how even in moments of repose, we can be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things we have to do. Like the song’s title implies, Seabird thinks these things merely accumulate, until, finally, we’re ready to “bury it all.”

17. “Mouth Man” – This Is Lorelei

“Mouth Man” is, appropriately, all about mouth feel – frontman Nate Amos rattles off an apparently unrelated string of words and phrases throughout, seemingly more interested in how percussive or melodious they are (or, in the case of “money,” trying to force it into percussiveness by repeating it three times) instead of what they actually mean. It’s a dynamic he tries to recreate musically, too, both which his voice, which moves from the falsetto of the refrain to the quasi-rap of the rest of the track, and with the music, which features taught guitars, pianos pounded to the point of atonality, and a “whapa” sound effect that might be a drum machine, might be a door slamming. More than a pure stream of consciousness, it’s a fascinating exercise in stripping music down into something elemental and then building it back up into something tuneful and danceable.

16. “Fly” – Wishy

For the past year or so, I’ve been struggling trying to come up with a name for artists like DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ, Wishy, and (occasionally) Soccer Mommy who take the sunny, glitzy pop and pop rock the late 90s and early 2000s and morph it into indie music. Now, I think have I have my answer: “prestige Sugar Ray,” a title I came to based in part on the fact that the best Wishy song of the year has the same name of that band’s biggest hit, but also because, musically, they have more in common than you might expect. Like Sugar Ray, there are subtle DJ scratches and samples on Wishy’s “Fly,” as well as a paradiddlic rhythm section that might throw in some bongos, and a general sense of end-of-history lightness. Of course, while Wishy might sound all blue skies and optimism, the lyrics bely a deeper sense of melancholy – vocalist Nina Pitchkites sings about her desire to not “need to know the taste” of being without her lover, and how she can’t find any satisfaction, even when she knows he has “nothing to prove.” Her lover’s response? Time will move along, “come back down to earth.” Easy advice when you’re not listening to a song that makes you feel so light and airy.

15. “Medicine for Horses” – Viagra Boys

The funny thing about Viagra Boys (outside of their name, I guess) is that, despite being from Sweden, their stateside-born lead singer Sebastian Murphy makes them sound incredibly American. Sometimes that’s explored in grotesque ways like “Man Full of Meat,” but other times it’s explored in grotesque and perversely romantic ones like “Medicine for Horses.” Opening with Murphy listing out ways he wants to kill and self-mutilate himself (driving into a wall, calcifying his pineal gland), he eventually talks about how he wishes he could pay a guy to get a horse to stomp his head in, which then prompts him to think about “the plains of North America,” an image he just can’t shake. That longing for the wide open American frontier – its promise of an ever expanding horizon, and its threat of danger, desolation, and isolation – keeps cropping like an intrusive thought, with Murphy eventually confiding that the only person who can keep him from obsessing over it is his wife. But he tells that to someone who isn’t his wife, and after he asks for his spine to be cracked open and for the fluid to be used to either recreate him hundreds of years from now or to heal horses. Somehow, someway, he’s going to make sure that he becomes an almost elemental part of the West, even if he dies trying.

14. “”Rome, New York” – Greg Freeman

Jauntiness and the late, brilliant singer-songwriter Jason Molina aren’t things that typically went together, but on “Rome, New York,” Bethesda, Maryland-bred artist Greg Freeman tries his hand at such a synthesis, pairing Molina-style Rust Belt imagery and a similarly thin, mournful vocals with barroom piano, playful pizzicato and, in the song’s coda, a children’s choir. Trading in Molina’s Ohio for Upstate New York, Freeman takes a stroll through a dark and desolate parking lot in search of something. A woman? Heaven? Whatever “pine box hills” are? All we know is, he probably doesn’t find it, and he’s left pondering “the broken dreams of the broken-into cars,” a beautiful description of ugliness that recognizes both thief and victim as equal players in a cosmic game of incompleteness. 

13. “Playing Classics” – Water from Your Eyes

When it comes to dance music, the best vocal performances are usually either dry or desperate. Leave it to Water from You Eyes, very much not a dance artist, to find the perfect middle point between the two. Inspired by Charli XCX’s Brat, “Playing Classics” sees the duo of Nate Amos and Rachel Brown try to create their own, well, club classic, piling on every trope in the book – trance-y drum machines and basslines, clean house pianos, upstrummed guitars – in order to produce a swirling, imminently danceable six-minute track. Brown’s vocals shift from droll commands (“look”; “shake six”) to ominous descriptions of wars playing out on stage, perpetual debt, and “idols for the end of an age.” It’s the perfect distillation of a dance floor headrush, a thrilling state reached both despite and because of the brokenness of the world.

12. “Cinderella” – Model/Actriz 

With its pinprick guitars and thumping bass, “Cinderella” has most of the same sleazy, “utterly divine” elements of most of Model/Actriz’s decidedly decadent catalogue. But as lead singer Cole Haden gets closer and closer to sealing the deal with a guy he’s met at a bar, and the music ramps up in erotic intensity, he reveals the truth – this is all a front. The sex dungeon synths, the breathey vocals, it’s all a way for Haden to protect the little Cinderella-loving boy inside of him, to cope with his “fear of betrayal.” Letting all of this out, and letting the band behind him crash in on itself, he experiences a release more satisfying than regular sex. No matter what happens going forward – no matter if Haden and this “noble,” “elegant,” and “kind” interlocutor ever see each other again – he promises that he “won’t leave as I came.” Forever transformed, but still not afraid of a dirty joke.

11. “Frontrunner” – Horsegirl

After releasing an album of occasionally chilly post-punk in 2022, New York via Chicago trio Horsegirl came back in 2025 and released an album where one of the best tracks is decidedly… cozy? “Frontrunner” is a song so simple it almost defies explanation – an acoustic guitar dutifully strums along while an electric one adds spare accents and brushed drums and a tambourine pitter-patter along in the background. The band harmonizes about the simple pleasure of spending a lazy morning with your partner – waiting for them to wake up, and, once night comes, waiting for morning to come so you can do it all over again. It’s easy to think that great art can only come out of pain and struggle. But sometimes, the best music is that which captures something already beautiful and makes it sublime.