The Top Albums of 2025

Looking back, for me this was a year about creating limits. I was overwhelmed (a shared sentiment these days), and the result was a harsh imbalance. Too much going in, not enough going out. Applying this to music and how I got to the list of albums here: Over the course of the year I gradually streamed less and spent more time (and money) in record stores.

It’s become true, and often painfully, that if you want something to stay in this world, you need to try and hold onto it.

Which brings me to my 2025 playlists. There’s one small thing you can do to improve the lives of the artists whose work you’re already streaming, and that’s switching from Spotify to a service that better compensates them for their labor. With that in mind, here are this year’s playlists along with what I like about each platform:

Deezer: Full albums + song picks / These playlists are exportable to Spotify and Apple Music in a couple of clicks, and Deezer pays artists better than those (and most other) streamers.

Qobuz: Full albums + song picks / By far, Qobuz offers the highest per-stream artist payouts. And even as other platforms may advertise high-res audio streams, Qobuz shows exactly what sampling rates you’re getting on every track. So if you don’t trust the bigger platforms (and why should we?), it’s nice to have some transparency that you’re getting what you pay for.

Bandcamp: Song picks / Outside of buying a record directly from an artist at a show, purchasing music over Bandcamp is one of the better ways to support musicians. And because you can (and should) download your purchases there, it’s one way to be certain you’re hearing the full-quality audio—and that you can still listen should the music vanish from platforms.

Now on to the lists. The following albums aren’t ranked by preference or best-ness, but mostly in chronological order of when I heard them, which seems about as good a way to organize a list as any. Also, there really were supposed to be only 10 but I failed on imposing that limit because all of these needed to be here.

The albums

Voice Actor and Squu, Lust 1

The most enveloping album I heard all year. From the very start, I was submerged into this lush, grainy ambience, where I spent who knows how many hours this year. A record that bends the brain in all the nice ways. / Bandcamp, Deezer, Qobuz

Whatever the Weather, Whatever the Weather II

Loraine James continues to astound on her second album under the Whatever the Weather moniker, but this time around it’s warmer (ha?), more spatial, like a journey through memories, where staticky field recordings aren’t illusory backgrounds, but intentional snippets that become their own sorts of instruments. / Bandcamp, Deezer, Qobuz

HxH, STARK PHENOMENA

When I first listened to this album in the early spring, and specifically “Pyrex Vision,” I was so taken with the first part of Ayorinde E. Peebles’ spoken-word description of meditating in an isolation tank: “In this vision, I’m inside this, like, massive swirl, it’s like a giant whirlpool full of junk and metal and just loud and painful, and I recognize that this was my state of mind.” That tracked so accurately with where I was right then, inside a vortex of confusion and sadness within our political climate of that moment. Eight long months later, it’s this passage, explaining the first, that lands ever harder: “It was like that’s it, that was also you, that’s what you are.” A gorgeous album already, now it brings me a kind of closure to the year: It’s rare to experience an album with actual healing properties. / Bandcamp, Deezer, Qobuz

Minor Hexachords, Brinkmanship

A meticulously layered, thick ambient dub soundtrack for the post-Butlerian jihad. These are songs to get lost in, unpredictable grooves refreshingly free of artificiality: No texture, no organ warble, no bass pattern ever seems to repeat exactly. I’m not sure how I found out about this album, but I recall being transfixed the moment I heard it—and I would very much like more please. / Bandcamp, Deezer, Qobuz

Purelink, Faith

Just when I think I have any of the songs on Purelink’s latest ambient excursion figured out, I hear something new. A change in the EQ, I hear something new. Switch to headphones, there’s something else. This album is a beach with shifting sands, where you wind up somewhere new without ever moving. / Bandcamp, Deezer, Qobuz

Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer, Different Rooms

I’ve been streaming this album since it came out this summer, but it wasn’t until I got the CD and read the liner notes that I learned about the process behind the album, which makes this already excellent work even more of a marvel. Briefly: Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer record all their live shows, which is one place where they improvise new ideas, and for this album they took those recordings and rearranged them and recorded new parts, turning them into the record we now have here. Or in other words, the real album was the songs we made along the way, etc. / Bandcamp, Deezer, Qobuz

Matt Jencik and Midwife, Never Die

Hands down, the best shoegaze I heard all year—which isn’t a surprise when Madeline Johnston (aka Midwife) is involved. I love absolutely everything about this album, it’s fuzzy in all the right places, edgy in the others, captivating throughout, and with a sharp sense of humor. A soundtrack to a Gregg Araki movie that’s begging to be made. / Bandcamp, Deezer, Qobuz

Sa Pa, Ambeesh

My obsession with Sa Pa started back in February with “Captigon,” a song that brings subtlety down to a new level, where rhythmic undertones feel like a melody somewhere between real and imagined. Really, it’s just kind of amazing. Then only a few months later, we were rewarded with an entire album of this bass-rattling, woozy stuff. Though it plunges similar depths, it’s entirely different territory—you just have to be willing to listen for it. / Bandcamp, Deezer

Giant Claw, Decadent Stress Chamber

Eight compact maximalist pop symphonies from Keith Rankin, who in the space of four minutes can build an entire sonic universe, expand it to its limit, and tear it all down. Honestly, it’s bewildering. And there are so many similar pockets of goodness to curl up with throughout this album. With Death’s Dynamic Shroud and Giant Claw, every one of his albums is somehow more ambitious than the last, and somehow never falls over the edge into just, really, come on, too much. / Bandcamp, Deezer, Qobuz

Vvarp, Power Held in Stone

It’s choral doom metal, which—phrased like that—doesn’t sound especially new, but Vvarp is creating something quite different here, where speak-singing vocal harmonies absolutely levitate above a majestic, bottom-heavy guitar-bass-drum sludge. Together, it’s a wholly awesome, inspired outcome far beyond the sum of its parts. / Bandcamp, Deezer, Qobuz

Marv, Keyboard Suite II

There are albums that take you places, and there are albums like this—that meet you where you are, that tell you that you are where you are supposed to be. This is the most grounding album I’ve heard in a long, long time, fun and joyful and wondrous, and unashamedly so. It’s music you can breathe to, that welcomes you to be comfortable in your own skin. / Bandcamp

Blood Orange, Essex Honey

Music and memory as collage, where Dev Hynes weaves (and sometimes brings) his influences into a unique work where songs don’t start and end in any sort of expected fashion, but abruptly change course, sometimes multiple times within a single track. This is a scrapbook of sound, but one that stands on its own, whether or not you recognize—or even particularly care to notice—the references. / Deezer, Qobuz

Suede, Antidepressants

For me, Suede was the sound of the summer, as they dropped three successive singles over the warmer months—each one more intense than the last—culminating with the release of their 10th studio album at the start of September. This album is the wiry, urgent sibling to 2022’s Autofiction, which itself was a more urgent evolution on the band’s trademark dark, atmospheric rock and roll. Very much looking forward to the third in this anticipated trilogy. / Deezer, Qobuz

The Necks, Disquiet

This album is more than three hours long and the standard American reaction to that is “who’s got time for that” and that is only part of the problem with how society views music, is comfortable devaluing it, and figures we should only let computers make it. A convenience-led culture wants audio that fits neatly into whatever else is going on that day, and a 20-minute-plus track like “Causeway,” which layers in deeper and deeper levels of intensity, drawing you to a state of introspection where you’ll stumble upon truths about yourself and your moment in time and realize the ways you might change or improve—well we can’t have you doing that. / Bandcamp, Deezer, Qobuz

Oneohtrix Point Never, Tranquilizer

When the first set of tracks from this album made their way into the world in late October, I was not in the mood. I nitpicked the songs. I looked for problems and refused to accept them as choices. It was not love at first listen, but I was being a difficult listener. Finally it was Pol Taburet’s spectacular video for “Cherry Blue” that snapped me out of whatever mood I’d been in, and from that moment I let the music in, and from there it very quickly captured my heart and lifted my soul at a time I needed exactly that. / Bandcamp, Deezer, Qobuz

Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello, Trinity

Process does set interesting things into motion, and that’s also true on Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello’s latest album together, where each track features a third collaborator who drops some unexpected ingredient into their ambient explorations. Whether it’s a foreboding piano melody from Chris Abrahams (The Necks) or free-form percussion from Brendan Canty (Fugazi) or turntablism from Marina Rosenfeld, it’s wonderful to hear how that one extra something changes everything. / Bandcamp, Deezer, Qobuz

Loula Yorke, Hydrology

Modular synth heaven, organic and flowing like the water that this album is a hymn to—sometimes calming, sometimes ominous, always moving ahead. These six tracks present a comprehensive swirl of emotions, all voiced through a narrow array of instrumentation. What a ride. / Bandcamp, Deezer, Qobuz

EPs, mixtapes, DJ sets, compilations, and other things that aren’t “albums”

On Shards, composer Tim Hecker unearthed various pieces originally written for soundtracks.

The best mix I heard all year was from Glyn Maier of the Enmossed label, who also released the Marv album mentioned above.

Arvo Pärt’s “Silentium” reimagined at half speed by A Far Cry is, somehow, a more emotional experience than the original.

With the Suspension of Belief EP, Gyrofield charted a new and thrilling course far away from the pitch-perfect drum and bass she exemplified on this year’s “Akin.” Don’t miss her excellent DJ set from May at Resident Advisor.

The three songs on the Harp Players’ Destruction are very special, and should not be missed. Those vocals.

Picnic’s beautiful Two Friends EP is a tightly structured kaleidoscope of sound.

I found myself inside a lot of very long songs this year, and the slow build of Ezekiel Honig’s “Broken Time Can Go in Many Directions” is worth the experience.

Burial doesn’t miss, and Comafields / Imaginary Festival was no exception.

Klein’s Sleep With a Cane mixtape is a rich collection of new ideas, and maybe even a peek at where she may be heading next.

“Brillante Color” from Jorge Elbrecht won’t leave your head once it enters, and is part of the Galán project he’s been teasing this year.

More on the long song front, the two sides of Doris Dana’s Nostalgia mixtape for Enmossed are a whole journey I unexpectedly got wrapped up in.

The six EPs released on False Aralia this year are a deep, rewarding, and necessary vibe. In addition to Bandcamp, here are playlists on Deezer and Qobuz.

Based on the two songs I’ve heard so far, one of the albums I’m looking forward to next year is Shane Parish’s Autechre Guitar, which is exactly what it sounds like.