The 50 Best Albums of 2025

Featuring Rosalía, Dijon, Cameron Winter, Erika de Casier, Addison Rae, MIKE, and more

December 2, 2025

The best albums of 2025 spanned seismic rage rap, intricate guitar music, protest folk, spacey dream pop, and laptop twee. A virtuoso of experimental electronic music re-emerged, a Brooklyn band became the poster child of an alleged rock revival, and a sibling duo made us reconsider how we even listen to music. The LP is sturdy as ever.

Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2025 wrap-up coverage here.

(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)

50.

Sharp Pins: Radio DDR

Whether by age or by disposition, Kai Slater is shameless. His second album as Sharp Pins—self-released late last year and re-released by K Records earlier this year—never shies away from the obvious pop reference, whether it’s the Beatles or Big Star, the Kinks or Guided by Voices, and the young Chicagoan even cops a British accent on several of these songs. He might be steeped in rock’s past, but he never lets his record collection speak on his behalf. Instead, Slater deploys those touchstones to show how pop songs can speak broadly to very specific emotions, how a chiming guitar can convey intense loneliness, how a sparkling vocal melody can lend dignity to sadness. Slater’s shamelessness is precisely what makes Radio DDR sound so gloriously relatable. –Stephen M. Deusner

49.

Bassvictim: Forever

The friction within Forever by Bassvictim is powerful enough to make the ensuing hope feel like it was always there. Atop producer Ike Clateman’s scrappy electropop, vocalist/cellist Maria Manow counts the scabs and loose teeth of her childhood as a means of pushing forward. When Clateman yells “Fuck!” in the midst of a placid piano solo, when Manow’s cheery vocal layers coalesce, when dissonant cello and synth crunch give way to a crystalline climax, Forever feels like the zenith of delusional optimism. “Lil Maria” serves as the spiritual centerpiece: As Clateman’s spine-tingling melodies collapse under massive 808s, Manow uplifts her younger self, shouting to Lil Maria as if they’re sitting on opposite sides of a playground. The song’s last line echoes in my head long after her voice cuts out: “Well the future is now, and it’s fucking amazing!” –Olivier Lafontant

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

48.

Perfume Genius: Glory

Glory pushes perversion to its limit. Cruisers are feral swine with a taste for gore; fabulously muscled, weeping quarterbacks are guided into a welcoming lap; camboy spit is treasured as if it were saffron. The album deepens Perfume Genius’ longtime partnership with producer Blake Mills, with storming crescendos, flutes that sugar plum dance, and bass that groans like an over-burdened mule. Mike Hadreas’ gallows humor finds its ultimate target in his younger self on “In a Row,” a satire of martyring your life in the service of art in which he dreams of the creative “meat” he’ll get out of a violent abduction. The image etches into your brain like the girlfriend in the trunk of the rapper Hadreas once gave a full beat. –Owen Myers

47.

james K: Friend

Music lovers like me are apt to call an album as beautiful as james K’s Friend a miracle. How else could something so glimmering and delicate have come to be other than by the will of the divine? But instead of a miracle, I think Friend is more of a magic trick, and, in a way, that’s a bigger compliment. It was not forged out of thin air, james’ featherlight vocal melodies and her bewitching instrumentation not an ineffable object but the result of dedicated handicraft. Songs like “Play” and “Hypersoft Lovejinx Junkdream” are both intricate and powerful, a host of genres all sublimely interwoven to make a deft pop statement. As dazzling as a rabbit pulled out of a hat, and as wily and soft too. –Matthew Schnipper

46.

Cleo Reed: Cuntry

Cleo Reed doesn’t just make folk music; they embody it. Across Cuntry, their indignant yet hopeful second album, Reed calls upon their ancestors for strength in dealing with the inequities of 2025 while blending traditions and styles in the same butter churn. You can hear it in the bustling folktronica of “Salt n’ Lime” and “Americana,” the straightforward bluegrass of “Women at War,” the flecks of hip-hop sprinkled throughout “Strike!” and “No Borders.” Every genre on display, the album argues, is a product of the same Black folk tradition. The borders between them aren’t porous; they’re nonexistent. For Reed, all traditions were made to be subverted, and Cuntry reframes the heartland as a Black and queer-friendly soundscape inching toward a better tomorrow. –Dylan Green

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

45.

MIKE: Showbiz!

When MIKE doesn’t glide as a rapper, he is a sputtering engine: coughing, snorting, humph-ing and haw-ing, until somehow, as if summoned, the hardest shit ever comes spilling out of him. Long a beacon for the morbidly depressed, his gravelly baritone has shifted with age—not the croak of a lost teenager, but the lived-in voice of a legend who has survived to tell the tale. That grown-up commandeers Showbiz!, an album whose supernatural skill is offset by the humble human at its center. “I ain’t no prophet, nigga,” MIKE raps, and it’s a shame: He sure does sound like one. –Samuel Hyland

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

44.

Annahstasia: Tether

Tether could have been a classic of modern singer-songwriter fare. In its opening tracks, Annahstasia Enuke evokes the exacting poetics of Bill Callahan, the textural generosity of Bon Iver, and the singular vocals of Adrienne Lenker. It is so intimate that you can hear the corners of her lips peel apart as she sings her way through despair, her voice somehow commanding and wounded. But as Tether blooms, each petal is stranger than the last, from a duet of balletic soul with Obongjayar to the grand “Silk and Velvet,” a transcript of Annahstasia’s internal debate about self-care versus selling out that nears post-rock power. “Can you be a believer,” she sings to start the triumphant finale, “in all my possible possibilities?” Enuke languished for years in major-label limbo; Tether, an overdue debut, is a riveting testament to the possibilities that system almost squandered. –Grayson Haver Currin

43.

Panda Bear: Sinister Grift

Panda Bear’s latest solo record begins with a dubbed-out snare hit, nearly interpolates “La Bamba,” and has a song named for a weed edible so powerful it’d make a horse lie down. Sounds like a great time, right? Well. The lightest and most accessible record Noah Lennox has ever made—an album you could slip into any SoCal kickback unnoticed—is at its core devastatingly sad. Recorded in the wake of an intense divorce, its light chassis and expert construction carry the considerable weight of grief, depression, and heartache with the steadiness of a beach wagon rolling on hard sand. What makes Sinister Grift stand out in the Panda Bear catalog is how comfortable it is with its own simplicity, how little it feels like it has to prove, and how intimate it feels as a result. –Sadie Sartini Garner

42.

FKA twigs: EUSEXUA

In its original form, the eleven songs on EUSEXUA navigate ideas of anticipation, indecision, shifting interpersonal independence. “We’re open wounds/Just bleeding out the pressure,” FKA twigs declares on the backroom anthem “Room of Fools.” Dancing is one way to do this; sex is another; knowing when to be alone, a third. All are unstable, but twigs embodies these strategies across big tent floor-fillers spanning Eurotrance, jungle, and rave. The album edges listeners through what would be climaxes in lesser hands. “Striptease” has at least three of them; the first minute of “Drums of Death” out-sizzles entire careers of other electro-sleaze producers and then moves on. The fluid truth of EUSEXUA is that wounds don’t close, but like the best dancefloors, you can keep finding new ways in and out of them. –Jesse Dorris

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal

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41.

KP Skywalka: I Tried to Tell You

KP Skywalka raps with the same pep in his step as SpongeBob bouncing from his pineapple home over to work, gangly legs hitting pavement. Whether he’s narrating grisly shootouts or reminiscing on homies he lost or stressing about bills or recounting freaky Unkle Luke-type sexcapades, the D.C. rapper has this intense energy in his babbling flow (and a clear love for Black music and all its branches) that renders every scene in Technicolor. I Tried to Tell You is the body of work that comes closest to capturing all of his contours. It’s got plenty of local energy in the go-go inspired drums, the indulgent R&B sampling and KP’s punch-in flow, occasionally moving beyond the city’s soundscape through collaborations with Philly’s Skrilla, Atlanta’s 10kdunkin, and more. No matter the style, KP is all gas, no brakes. –Mano Sundaresan

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

40.

keiyaA: hooke’s law

keiyaA comes with venom on hooke’s law—for ex-lovers, landlords, and even herself. Her debut Forever, Ya Girl was focused on protecting her peace and exercising self-love, but for her second album, she surfaces her messiest feelings, leaving the intimate bedroom R&B behind and pushing into a more sinuous, experimental sound. Gnarled electronics, breakbeats, blown-out Auto-Tune, and playful sampling are all on the table as she weaves together a twisted scatterplot of her anxious mind. keiyaA turns up the intensity and turns herself inside-out, exposing a heart that’s been battered and bruised, but still beating. –Shy Clara Thompson

39.

Che: REST IN BASS

REST IN BASS is a near-suicidal album, lurching from lean withdrawals to ballistic warfare to promises of going “27 club.” Dying young and dying alone don’t seem to depress Che in the slightest, who goes so far as to say he’d “die for the music;” if anything, his brushes with the void spur him to wilder performances and face-melting instrumentals. To the unfamiliar and incurious, the cacophony is unintelligible mush, but Che’s melodic knack and unpredictable cadences hold as much feeling as flash, yielding some of his most potent songs yet. Ecstatic highs are juxtaposed with crushing lows: he moonwalks across the effervescent “Eardrummer,” screeches over a Merzbow-channeling cesspit (“On Fleek”), and skates off lovestruck (“Marceline”). Through it all, Che’s flow is diabolical, possessed, always on the verge of hitting escape velocity or reaching critical mass. –Vivian Medithi

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

38.

Hayden Pedigo: I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away

Hayden Pedigo’s certainly no monk—until now, his jokester’s sense of irony has stood in stark contrast to how lovely and graceful his approach to fingerstyle guitar is. But on his latest and greatest album, I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away, he embraces simplicity. Piano notes glimmer like water droplets on blades of grass; a fiddle melody transports you to another time; twangy strings bend and hum as if they were pausing for beats in the middle of a story that’s been told a million times. And Pedigo is telling a story that’s been told before: the story of the lone guitar player, surrounded by a world slowly slipping away, singing his wordless song to whoever might stop to listen. –Sam Goldner

37.

Blawan: SickElixir

More than once on SickElixir, you may be reminded of the bridge in Korn’s “Freak on a Leash”—you know, the part that goes too feral for human language. These, in fact, are the tamer moments of Blawan’s second LP, a geyser of caustic psychedelia that makes the deranged club rippers of his early career feel like standard DJ fodder. However twisted, though, these tracks are always groovy as hell, never arty, and composed with an (admittedly demented) pop sensibility. Technically virtuosic, nightmarish as it is crazily fun, SickElixir is a high point in this techno iconoclast’s unique oeuvre. –Will Lynch

36.

Wet Leg: moisturizer

Maybe that 80-quid pot of Drunk Elephant really can save you: moisturizer totally transformed Wet Leg, turning the Isle of Wight five-piece into a band as funny, acerbic, and clever as NME always said they were. The primary fuel for this album was frontwoman Rhian Teasdale discovering she was queer and, subsequently, falling in love, and it finds endless joy, tension, and entertainment in those things: “catch these fists” and “mangetout” gleefully turn the epithet “man-hating lesbian” into a badge of honor; “jennifer’s body” and “davina mccall” make having a crush sound as sweaty and intense as it actually is, while “pillow talk” is so horned-up that it would make most self-professed gooners blush. That track gets to the core message of moisturizer: Fake freaks need not apply. –Shaad D’Souza

35.

Playboi Carti: MUSIC

Where do you go after pushing Yeezus’ hip-hop-meets-noise provocation to its logical conclusion, birthing an entire subgenre of rap and stoking years of frenzied anticipation? Playboi Carti’s answer was to go wide. MUSIC contains a multitude of Cartis: the elastic-voiced goon (“LIKE WEEZY”), the spiritual descendant of Wayne (“RADAR”), the deep-voiced Future acolyte (“DIS 1 GOT IT”). Carti reaches for the stars on this record but seems equally content playing to the experimental underground. MUSIC demonstrates that Carti can speak to the center and the periphery of pop culture simultaneously. –Mehan Jayasuriya

34.

Lucrecia Dalt: A Danger to Ourselves

No stranger to mythological beasts—Amazonian soul-suckers, enchanted snakes, aliens made of dead skin—Lucrecia Dalt unleashes her unruliest spirit yet: unbidden love. Written and recorded in the throes of an all-consuming new relationship, A Danger to Ourselves is the Colombian musician’s most impassioned album yet, a document of tender bliss and animalistic lust. It’s also her strangest, harnessing amorphous electronic abstractions, screen-kiss fantasias, and the junkyard percussion of vintage Tom Waits. Dalt’s work has always been otherworldly, seeking out new dimensions in her shape-shifting sonics. This time, she expands her musical horizons while turning her gaze closer to home, reaffirming that desire itself is the final frontier. –Philip Sherburne

33.

Ichiko Aoba: Luminescent Creatures

Ichiko Aoba fills her eighth album with yearning chords and spectral harmonies so evocative as to be nauseating, melodies so wistful and eye-misting as to pose a threat to national security, at least in nations dependent on positive vibes and productivity. There are intoxicating traces of chanson, jazz, chamber pop, and folk. But where communalist folk speaks to the people—dreams of toppling industries through collective action—Aoba’s compositions could achieve the same result by coaxing a population into stupor. You could broadcast Luminescent Creatures from every speaker in the world, all at the same time, and workers would down tools and think of home, lulled into a labor strike. The powers that be would love for the Japanese singer-songwriter to remain a secret; in the right hands, Luminescent Creatures could be the most dangerous album of the year. –Jazz Monroe

32.

WNC WhopBezzy / 70th Street Carlos: Out the Blue

WhopBezzy, a Baton Rouge shit-talker who loves ass-shaking, and 70th Street Carlos, a Baton Rouge loudmouth who loves ass-shaking even more, get together on some of the biggest, brassiest turn-up beats to hit the Bible Belt since the heyday of Trill Entertainment. Out the Blue pulls together strands of Dallas boogie, Mannie Fresh bounce, and the rags-to-riches motivation rap that has been holding down their hometown for decades, as the bash brothers go in for damn-near 40 minutes of SEC homecoming weekend blowout music. Shit, if you can’t get down to this, it might be time to hang up the jersey. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

31.

Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band: New Threats From the Soul

Eight minutes into the titular opening track of Ryan Davis’ second solo LP—after he’s quoted A Tribe Called Quest and the Spinners and referenced Moki Cherry, Helen of Troy, and several cartoon characters in his Kentucky twang—you may begin to wonder: Is he serious? But Davis’s signature writing style, turning indie-rock sprawlers into wordy durational challenges, tends to incite a better question: Why let this awesome song end? Two decades into the songwriting practice he began as a fine arts student and continued on as a DIY lifer, Davis has emerged as the first formal innovator of the 2020s indie-country boom. His postmodern poet’s eye for detail sees the high in the low, the endurance of the underdog, chronicling a drifter’s transformations on the endless road to becoming a little more enlightened. –Jenn Pelly

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

30.

Oneohtrix Point Never: Tranquilizer

The Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco looks how you’d hope—a palatial Greek Revival-style complex filled with overflowing bookshelves, vast humming data machines, and creepy ceramic statuettes that look like they were obtained at Disney’s “It’s a Small World” auction. It’s an awesome physical space that seems bogged in the ectoplasm of all the digital ghosts within its walls; this could just as easily describe the new Oneohtrix Point Never album, Tranquilizer, made with a sample pack that appeared, then disappeared, then reappeared on the Internet Archive. Daniel Lopatin builds a vast physical monument to permanence, a place that’s always available to explore; it’s a poignant theme to examine on the heels of the MySpace and DatPiff apocalypses, in a time when it’s easier than ever to release music but also easier than ever to lose it. –Daniel Bromfield

29.

YHWH Nailgun: 45 Pounds

A YHWH Nailgun song feels simultaneously like a guillotine and like the rush of deliverance, a “river of flies” aerated by “wingsweat in the sky.” The New York band’s hyper-tense debut 45 Pounds ripples with Zach Borzone’s opaquely beautiful images and gasping vocals. The band plays like a military ensemble for the cruelest warlord in history; Sam Pickard drums with dizzying precision while Saguiv Rosenstock’s quivery blade of a guitar lacerates the mix. The tracks explode with world-historical significance, empires rising and collapsing in a time-lapse that gives you no chance to find footing. Crucially, it’s not just pure chaos; songs brim with meticulous micro-hooks and shrapnels of ear candy that crack like Call of Duty headshots. –Kieran Press-Reynolds

28.

caroline: caroline 2

Post-rock, once a genre that sold out 5,000-capacity venues in the aughts by spinning tales of hope and apocalypse, has retreated to shadowy dive bars in the 2020s. It’s there that bands like caroline find grandiosity in the minutiae. On caroline 2, the London post-rock octet is as attentive to discreet arrangements and fractured vocal manipulation as they are to creaking floorboards and knuckle cracks, extracting emotional epiphanies from slow-motion banjo strums, isolated clarinet notes, and an abundance of pregnant pauses. Even when caroline collaborate with Caroline Polachek, their pop cousin on the nomenclature flow chart, they find a way to splinter vocal harmonies in exacting ways. They understand how stillness captures everything that lyrics and music can’t, pushing the sum of their subtleties into a symphonic vision of interiority. –Nina Corcoran

27.

Djrum: Under Tangled Silence

A marvel of world-melding production, Under Tangled Silence begins with a piano-led, faux-ensemble piece that crinkles at its edges with the fine details of a deep house track. By the time we realize that we’re listening to dance music, Djrum has already reinvented the genre.

This reclamation is a refusal: of orthodoxies, factionalism, and consistent BPMs. Like a scientist, laboring away for years on a hypothesis, Djrum proves that concert music and breakbeats share DNA, and that rhythm is as mutable as melody. The immediacy of this album’s innovations makes its vision seem retrospectively inevitable, as if electronic music has always housed such varied sensibilities under the same roof. –Daniel Felsenthal

26.

Erika de Casier: Lifetime

Lifetime sounds beamed in from an alternate universe that poses a tantalizing question: What if Hope Sandoval fronted Sade? Erika de Casier’s oneiric fourth album, dropped with little fanfare on her own label this spring, furnishes her downtempo electronic R&B with a newly serene weightlessness. Lifetime fuses anti-gravity trip-hop made for the afters with low-lit, yearning sensitivity, flowing outward like a dispatch from a quiet storm DJ on the brink. Amniotic sub-bass, tactile drum fills, and looming synths drape the Danish singer’s soft-spoken vocals like a silk robe, all while she breaks down heated romances and missed connections with a sharpshooter’s precision. Entirely self-produced, the album is a starkly elegant showcase for de Casier’s talents behind the boards, building unpredictable compositions that melt seamlessly into one another. Even as you move to these songs, they needle deeper into your psyche: The endless dial tones on “The Chase” grow agonizingly unreturned by the final beat; “Two Thieves” filters a furtive love affair through boom-bap drum kicks and a screwed-down outro, as tense as the clandestine temptation at the song’s core. De Casier is completely, coolly at ease throughout, channeling each sea change in mood into a smoldering new late-night classic. –Eric Torres

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

25.

Rochelle Jordan: Through the Wall

Rochelle Jordan commands, “Say grace,” and heads bow—a humbling request from one of today’s most compelling haute couture club divas before soaring her voice toward the Creator. Her third album, Through the Wall, is an hour-long session of grown and sexy, drawing its power from fabulous Black dance-pop prima donnas who kept their sensuality tempered, tones hushed, and hair high. Its levitating centerpiece, “Bite the Bait,” is a love potion, a seminar in the lost art of seduction. But the real magic here is Jordan’s ability to tantalize through testimony; the fact that she knows this is her best work yet. The hustling ’90s house beat and lethal one-liners on “Ladida” leave her enemies in the dust, jaws agape that they “can’t interrupt” her ascent or stand to see her, “...looking so juicy,” on “Sum.” While the textures on TTW are expectedly dry cleaning only—sueded quiet storm R&B, Midwest house, and UK garage— the prevailing frequency being emitted is that of an elite artist recalibrating her purpose. Sure, an encore is priceless—so is knowing you’re limitless. –Tatiana Lee Rodriguez

24.

Blood Orange: Essex Honey

By the time Essex Honey came out, Dev Hynes was already more than a decade into blending genres into a concrete smoothie. OK, yes, yearning R&B melismata. OK, yes, breakbeats, boom-bap, and an exploration of other Afrodiasporic sounds with curiosity, but also curatorial restraint. OK, yes, Caroline Polachek. Sure, the everyday heartbreak and the tiny triumphs of urban life. Again?

Yeah, again. Hynes knits more and newer collaborators into the Blood Orange posse. What once sounded futuristic now feels like a resolute Black outsider present. And as Essex Honey ends, hand percussion pans from ear to ear as if passed by on the street by Hynes himself. The progress may be incremental, but with Essex Honey, Blood Orange re-emerges as an institution, setting an example for making pop that is layered and personal. –Adlan Jackson

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal

23.

Alex G: Headlights

On Headlights, Alex G surveys the iconography of his past work from the other side of 30 years old and a major label deal. In the process, he recovers the pieces of himself that had always loomed beneath the surface to construct his first true self-portrait. The lifelong Philly resident writes explicitly from his own perspective, putting the idealistic dreams of his youth and the character sketches of his old records in conversation with his present self: a new father and reluctant “career” musician. It’s a well-navigated turn toward greater vulnerability that comes alongside his prettiest songwriting yet. And, fortunately, his newfound maturity hasn’t stifled his eccentric impulses. “Bounce Boy” fully realizes his past experiments with Auto-Tune and hyperpop-adjacent electronica, while tracks on the record’s final stretch look to The Muppet Movie and Vince Guaraldi’s Peanuts scores to generate Headlights’ most tender moments. On “Is It Still You in There?” a children’s choir asks the titular question as jazzy keys float by. Despite the world-weariness and disillusionment that come with growing older, Alex G is still the same dreamer that he’s always been, with glimmers of optimism and awe beckoning around every corner of the record. –Jude Noel

22.

aya: hexed!

Transformation is grotesque: rupturing tendons, knitting bone, stretching skin. Like Demi Moore with a bad dose of The Substance, experimental electronic producer aya’s second album hexed! is stuck in transition and forced to take in the horror of its own misplaced parts. aya’s precisely disgusting sound design and jaw-grinding rhythms fall somewhere between gabber and nu-metal, and she molds this toxic foam around lyrics about doing too much K, dreaming about worthless chavs, and letting religion curdle her self-worth, all in hopes of transcendence. “I am the pipe I hit myself with,” she gasps in the opening track, then she spends a concussed half hour showing off the bruises. This is visceral music about viscera, precisely arranged and performed with the desperation of a final girl clawing her way back toward her would-be killer. –Sadie Sartini Garner

21.

billy woods: GOLLIWOG

Each song on billy woods’ GOLLIWOG unfolds with the knowledge that death, or perhaps a fate worse than, waits behind every corner. His characters stare up at planes as bomb hatches swing open, or wake from nightmares, only to find themselves trapped in coffins. They’re threatened by vampires, soulless record executives, corrupt politicians, abusive fathers, and the American military apparatus, and woods cleverly constructs the moments where they know it’s all fucked. He’s approached this subject matter throughout his career, but rarely sustains that bullet-sweating, white knuckle tension for an entire LP. Here, he writes like an amalgam of Shirley Jackson, Mariana Enríquez, and Frank B. Wilderson III, crafting a speculative opus titled mere degrees from our reality. It’s harrowing and horrific, the cathartic laughter after the jump scare catching in our throats. –Dash Lewis

20.

Nick León: A Tropical Entropy

Every time you traverse South Beach, you encounter a different kind of city. Inspired by the cognitive dissonance that Joan Didion experienced in Miami, Nick León creates a refreshingly untidy tapestry of the city’s dance music on A Tropical Entropy. Beats morph, soften, and smear as if León is patching in the perreo, cumbia, and Eurodance that he’s hearing on a midnight cruise around the city’s avenues and backroads. It’s an exhilarating trip with an undercurrent of sadness that comes from being devoted to a place that doesn’t always love you back. “Yo soy un adicto,” León sings over steel pans that are muffled as if they are coming from inside a club’s walls, before being pulled back into the thrum of the night. –Owen Myers

19.

Titanic: HAGEN

Titanic, the duo of cellist and singer-songwriter Mabe Fratti and composer and multi-instrumentalist Héctor Tosta, show that pop experimentation doesn’t have to be academic. On their second album HAGEN, they pull from a grab bag of noise, funk and lush orchestration, beginning most of the songs with clear-cut rhythms, distorted melodies, and dulcet vocals before they expand into dazzling synth pop. But even though HAGEN is brimming with ideas, it reminds us of one simple truth: There’s not a whole lot better than letting go on the dancefloor. –Vanessa Ague

18.

PinkPantheress: Fancy That

Like many girls who came of age in the aughts and early 2010s, PinkPantheress spent plenty of time reading fan fiction. A classic Pink track feels like it could have been lifted straight from a self-insert, the kind where the protagonist meticulously shaves her entire body on the off chance that she’s invited backstage to hook up with the band. On her second album, Fancy That, she’s evolved from brooding over unrequited love atop breakbeats to embracing a much more flirtatious and forward tone. “Come talk to me. Do you want sex with me?” she whispers on “Tonight.” You can almost picture her twirling a fluffy pastel gel pen, feet kicking in the air, as she writes in her glittery Girl Tech Password-protected journal.

A year before dropping Fancy That, and a year after her debut LP Heaven Knows, PinkPantheress told GQ that Estelle’s “American Boy” is always in the back of her mind when she’s making music. Her globe-trotting single “Stateside” pays direct tribute to the 2008 classic. “You can be my American boy,” she croons, out of breath, professing devotion to someone she’d traverse the globe for. Its pulsing, understated bass pumps over looping synths could soundtrack the theme song of a Kim Possible episode. She has a unique ability to invoke ’90s and Y2K nostalgia without getting bogged down in homage. Most impressive is her knack for getting people to hum along to borderline stalker tales of her tracking flight paths and staring at printed out posters of her crushes on her wall. –Heven Haile

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal

17.

Water From Your Eyes: It’s a Beautiful Place

That mysterious girl in your math class—the one who’s always carving the Anarchy A into her desk—is looking at you. She has a cassette tape in her hand with your name on it. Do you accept? Of course you do. Cramming it into your Walkman, a shimmering and strange world comes into view: Stereolab’s Dots and Loops, Slint’s Spiderland, and Smog’s Knock Knock combined into an ecstatic kaleidoscope. You’re listening to It’s a Beautiful Place, the exquisite new record from Water From Your Eyes. Ten songs beamed in from some far-off land of power pop, electronica, and grunge, the album proves that the band sounds far greater than the sum of its two-person lineup. “So, what’d you think?” the girl asks the next day. “I think we should start a band.” –Arielle Gordon

16.

Rosalía: LUX

In Gravity and Grace, the philosopher and Catholic mystic Simone Weil writes of God’s love as fundamentally unknowable; an abstract totality who loves us but whom we can only embrace in the dark. Rosalía’s album LUX is a modern inquiry into that darkness, a sacred and profane fusion of pop and classical music that approaches timeless spiritual questions through the lens of a modern seeker. Guided by a rogues’ gallery of female saints and holy women, the singer probes into love, desire, and eternity, sampling a broad palette of genres and tongues to illuminate distinct aspects of the soul. Even if her resolve to cast off her Jimmy Choos in “Sauvignon Blanc” isn’t as mortifying as anything Teresa of Avila or Catherine of Siena got up to (don’t look it up), the gift of LUX is the little light Rosalía shines on life’s greatest mysteries. –Harry Tafoya

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

15.

Earl Sweatshirt: Live Laugh Love

Hearing Earl Sweatshirt rap year after year is like keeping up with an old friend. On Live Laugh Love, Earl ages gracefully, his voice huskier and his musings deliberate and dense. The sample-heavy beats crawl and bounce as if they’re jams ripped from your grandfather’s record collection, warping and cutting in and out. Earl traverses the dreamscape unpredictably, stitching together anxiety-tinged reflections on fatherhood, blistering free-association stretches in the tradition of MF DOOM, and evocative self-meditations. If I could, I would go back ten years and tell a young fan obsessed with I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside that Earl only gets better from here—just with a different shape and tone, but with the same curiosity about rap that resists stagnation. —Matthew Ritchie

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal

14.

Barker: Stochastic Drift

First, Barker axed the all-important kick drum; then he brought it back. With Stochastic Drift, where the tracks have self-aware titles like “Reframing,” his skill at unraveling dance music cliches has coalesced into a dedicated style of its own, ready to be unraveled all over again. Streaks of color meld into dubby swatches. Personalized mechanical instruments bustle in and out of focus, tempting ambience into groove. It’s a studio record, neck-deep in technique, but moves with a DJ’s feel for automated, responsive spontaneity. Like watching a massive mural painted in time-lapse, the album hooks you in by preserving the embryonic space before art has decided what it’s going to be. –H.D. Angel

13.

Sudan Archives: The BPM

Since her 2019 debut, Brittney Parks has been on a crusade to rescue the violin—fiddle, that is—from the buttoned-up image Western culture has foisted upon it. For the latest phase of that battle, she went to the club: The BPM, Parks’ third album as Sudan Archives, ratchets up the tempo and drops the bass, sending her bow bobbing and weaving around rhythms from trap, Jersey club, drum’n’bass, and beyond. This dance floor becomes a site of awakening—a stage for Parks’ desire, bravado, and pursuit of personal liberty. Dance music, like the self, is in perpetual flux, its constituent parts deconstructed and reassembled in new and surprising formations. On album opener “DEAD,” Parks calls the roll of her various selves: old and new, light and dark. They’re all present, bound together by the beat in sweaty, ecstatic proximity. –Olivia Horn

12.

Addison Rae: Addison

Addison Rae overcame being the most popular TikTok dancer to become one of the less popular new pop stars, and as soon as we realized she meant it, we were all in. I saw her come out at Madison Square Garden with Charli XCX in the fevered months post-BRAT and she did not hit that note, but literally no one cares anymore because Addison is this year’s most stylishly indexed and tonally refined pure pop album. “Diet Pepsi” is irresistible. “High Fashion” is camp. Happiness equals one shitty pair of wired earbuds and one cigarette. Louisiana’s sweetheart and her Scandinavian pop wizards (production duo Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd) make it look so easy: no features, no skips, no deluxe editions. This is how It Girls are born. –Anna Gaca

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal

11.

Smerz: Big city life

Big city life is relative. You don’t need to move to New York City to understand the nervous buzz of walking down unfamiliar streets in new shoes, ready to finally start living. Even a not-so-big city like Oslo (pop. 700,000, curfew 3 a.m.) might spark the same feeling—a queasy combination of glamour and isolation, arrogance and melancholy. That’s the alluring contradiction that Norwegian duo Smerz embodies on their second album, a 24-carat enigma wrapped in a faux-fur coat.

Expanding on the scenario-play of 2024’s Allina—a fashion collab written for a fictional pop star—the Norwegian duo sound like they’re acting out scenes from last night, eerily inhabiting the same inner monologue. In a genreless haze that’s part lounge lizard, part ’80s Downtown scene, they take a magnifying glass to the in-between moments: a trip to the club toilets, a smoke on the balcony, a pep talk on the way (“These streets are yours/Feel the music, roll the dice”). Are they playing a character? If so, she’s honest about it. Bossy, insecure, vain—and quotably so: “My IQ low and my shoe heels high/I heard that they broke up, hahaha,” she deadpans. A brat, basically. But when did that stop anyone from winning a popularity contest? –Chal Ravens

10.

Amaarae: Black Star

There’s a fair amount of sex, drugs, and Young Thug flows on Fountain Baby, Amaarae’s 2023 crystalline dance pop triumph, but Black Star is all sex, drugs, and Young Thug flows. Instead of coasting right into the slot as one of the next pop girls, she blows it all up for a frenetic, ridiculously horny, drugged-out document of self-indulgent partying and not giving a single fuck. Wildly repurposing old pop-rap radio hits, using massive levels of pitch manipulation, and weaving big, glossy spins on rave-ready techno, Brazilian funk, and Jersey club into her Afrobeats foundation, Black Star is a loud and abrasive, incohesive, and out of pocket (c’mon she’s out here riding around in Waymos and comparing her balcony sex to Ruff Ryders rapper Drag-On) romp through the Black diaspora.

I’d understand if you get the itch to compare Black Star to the other ambitious, studied, and dot-connecting pop staples of the recent past. But the truth is that it’s way riskier, more in conversation with the sex-crazed club pop of France’s Theodora and the disruptive 2010s Atlanta homage of Playboi Carti’s MUSIC. By calling her album Black Star and inserting herself on the cover as the black star on the flag of her native Ghana, the record comes with the expectations to not just make a fun Amaarae album but to do justice to that ideological framing. Yet the album feels light and pressure-free, going full steam ahead with ideas that are still taboo in a lot of Black immigrant circles that tend to lean religious—all the coke and ketamine of “Starkilla,” the casualness to how she claims, “My bitch and my nigga the same sex” on “ms60.” She might be the boldest pop star we have right now. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Nourished by Time: The Passionate Ones

Let’s say John Bagot Glubb was right, and the average empire does take 250 years to fall—we’ll be cooked by next year. But the anticipatory dread has been permeating in American minds for decades. Marcus Brown of Nourished by Time has spent his career basking in it, pointing towards the Doomsday Clock like the crazed bearded nigga on the block yelling about The Rapture. The Passionate Ones, Brown’s potent, irresistibly dancey second album, gestures towards this collapse not through political hand-wringing, but through his intense longing for intimacy despite it. “Low on money/Quite high on passion,” he spits on “BABY BABY,” and the latter comes through wholeheartedly: The wonky iridescence of “Idiot in the Park,” the gospel-tinged freakout of “Crazy People,” the sheer singalongability of “The Passionate Ones.” No skips in sight.

In a parallel, more just reality, “9 2 5” would stand tall as a chart-topping, generation-defining hit. Even more distinct than Brown’s fluorescent synths and hip-swinging percussion is how much that warbling voice of his carries. “Oh brother, it’s a hateful life/And ya got two choices, either left or right,” he sings, pausing a bit for a jovial breakdown. “He’s freakin’ the 9-to-5.” That this album’s smooth meld of dance punk, disco, rap, and R&B never halts itself to drive its message home is crucial. I’ll still be dancing to it once the shit hits the fan. –Olivier Lafontant

Joanne Robertson: Blurrr

Joanne Robertson’s gossamer, improvisatory folk is more eraser marks than pencil strokes. Even the “r” in Blurrr is smudged. On her sixth album, the Glaswegian singer-songwriter and painter sweeps away the lines between voice and fingers, fingers and guitar, guitar and the thrum of Oliver Coates’ cello. Her lyrics, riddled with em-dashes and elisions, seem to map her spontaneous neural firing. On “Gown,” Robertson is momentarily possessed by the living ghost of Chan Marshall, though where Moon Pix once languished in the throes of sleep paralysis, Blurrr is totally lucid. “I run the world/I run this reality,” she sings on “Friendly.” “You’re lying down in my dearest dream.” –Walden Green

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Geese: Getting Killed

Crossover albums often come fully formed, as if the songwriter’s pop bona fides were just destined to materialize there and then. Geese’s third album, Getting Killed, is nothing like that at all. The New York quartet’s music is—and has become—huge in spite of itself. Winter’s soulful charms are odd and insidious, persistent like a problem that nobody knows what to do with. And like a problem, Getting Killed asserts its upside-down reality upon you—a reality where Winter, rocking on a rocking chair, is well within his rights to look up from his poetry book and ribbit a line like, “You can’t keep womankind in your dreams,” and you will take it, and you will want him to do it again.

Getting Killed is tapped into a universal consciousness, but not the illuminated, Alice Coltrane kind. It is the kind that never shuts up, that makes you want to tap out before it kills your spirit. Maybe this is why Winter is “trying to talk over everybody in the world” on the title track, or why he seems to be speaking generationally when he adds, “I can’t even taste my own tears/They fall into an even sadder bastard’s eyes.” It is probably why, in any case, Geese seek a bit of jouissance, a flare of Beefheart-at-Stax abandon. Getting Killed diverts art rock through the dirt-lined grooves of jam music and Allen Toussaint to arrive at a transcendental vagueness that encompasses mind and body, navel-gazing and insurrection. It does not have good advice—it may not have a worldview—but it has the desire and the means to leave you utterly insensible. –Jazz Monroe

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Wednesday: Bleeds

Eight years in, Wednesday finally know who they are: proud North Carolinians, trusted friends nursing tired hearts, busybodies who need a soda break. After a decade of shoehorning Americana into shoegaze, Wednesday emerged as the preeminent kingpin of the genre they pioneered, the self-described “creek rock.” On Bleeds, their sixth studio album, Wednesday sprawl out in grunge crescendos and lap steel breezes, more comfortable than their desperate wailing suggests. It’s the sound of complete self-discovery.

And yet Bleeds ceases to sit still. Singer-guitarist Karly Hartzman writes with the attention to detail and empathetic eye of a poet laureate thrice her senior—and not just in song. She extracts profundity from a pitbull puppy peeing off a balcony, a tooth cracking on a cough drop, or driving someone to the airport with the handbrake on. Even when recounting the now-deceased ex who circulated her nudes or fighting off sobs tracking “The Way Love Goes,” she twists the faucet of shame, dread, and anxiety until something resembling forgiveness drips out. Knowing yourself gives you tools to live, but life keeps upping the pace as always. –Nina Corcoran

Bad Bunny: DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS

Watching DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS unfold felt less like following an album cycle and more like enrolling in a year-long crash course on Puerto Rico. Proudly sporting the pava—the campesino hat of the island’s rural working class—Benito drags that symbol into every song, visual, and public appearance, parading around the world as both patron saint and chronicler of Puerto Rican music, art, aesthetics, and politics. The record’s sprawl—salsa, bomba, plena, bolero, old‑school perreo, house, and glossy urbano—hits like a powerful alcolado for a festering wound. The culprit? The ghosts of global imperialism. “I can’t forget you/You taught me how to love/Taught me to dance” the choir chants on album centerpiece “BAILE INoLVIDABLE.” He's not really singing to a lover, but speaking directly to la isla.

DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS stunningly melds the past, present, and future sounds of Latin America straight into a cross‑generational soundscape and formula for real‑world activism: digital memorials, anti‑gentrification chants, and No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí, the island’s first‑ever concert residency at El Choliseo, an unapologetic fuck you to U.S. colonialism. By refusing to tour anywhere on the mainland, he helped rake in hundreds of millions for the Puerto Rican economy. This is the most famous, commercially bulletproof male Latin pop star alive, and he’s spending his imperial phase uplifting the aesthetics and stories of Puerto Rico’s most marginalized, with the pava tilted at the empire. –Gio Santiago

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Oklou: choke enough

Like fuzzy memories, swaths of choke enough blot out the details and train you to make them out. Here’s one example: Oklou will often play the coolest arpeggio on a keyboard you’ve ever heard, then shove it all the way back, like you’re hearing it through a wall, nurturing it in a bed of pads and percussion and giving it space to bloom. You often hear melodies so soft and faint in the mix that they’re abstracted away from the physical textures of instruments. Tapping into the innocence of Bach preludes, they can feel like exercises in counterpoint, pure and classical and technically precise.

The runaway success of choke enough this year suggests a quiet revolution in pop music, a reorienting around the worlds that can be created and explored across albums. In the margins, drifting throughout, is Oklou’s voice, nimble and sprite-like, conjuring images of ice cream trucks and “blade birds” in the French artist’s second language. Her hooks are these slight, porous little things that sometimes spiral out in lockstep with those arpeggios, enveloping your mind like mushroom colonies. –Mano Sundaresan

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Cameron Winter: Heavy Metal

Heavy Metal was almost shelved. It was not commercial enough, was the label’s thinking. It was going to fail. But then it didn’t. In fact, it has made its author, Cameron Winter, into a somewhat unlikely star. Heavy Metal is a weird, gorgeous, vast, and tricky record. A song like “$0,” with its many allusions to God, and whether or not he is “actually for real,” is not exactly Top 40 fodder. “Nina + Field of Cops,” is like if you set an Anne Sexton poem to a Vyvanse prescription. The hook on “Drinking Age,” a piano ballad, is, “I met who I’m gonna be from now on/And he’s a piece of shit.”

But pieced together, Heavy Metal swirls itself into a tremendous rock record. If you were to pin down its central conceit, it would be something like: Love can transform you. God can transform you. Art can transform you. And all of these things are actually the same thing. Case in point: “Love Takes Miles.” Here, Winter is singing in declarations. Love, he muses, can make you fit it all in the car! It makes the lights brighter! It takes miles and it takes years, just to get it right. To get it really good. There are moments on Heavy Metal where Winter is Jeff Mangum when he sings about how having sex can Ruin Your Life. Elliott Smith exclusively when he’s playing keys, and Nick Drake with his pink, pink, pink moon. But more often than not, he’s just Cameron Winter. And that in and of itself, is a miracle. –Sophie Kemp

Dijon: Baby

Dijon’s Baby is an overindulgent collagist fantasy. There are simple drum machines, providing enough thumps and thuds to shake a family portrait off the wall. There are Prince-esque yelps, so you know how good the sex is. There’s a humorous royalty-free baby whine, so you know what good sex leads to. Settling down suggests a newfound restraint that comes with domesticity, but I think Dijon would beg to differ. Every song on Baby feels like it could explode at any second—his mostly unintelligible croons about his kin are drenched under layers of distortion and compression, surrounded by rattling instruments. On “(Referee),” just thinking about his wife’s demeanor and the way she carries herself is enough to make his words come out all jumbled (“Amen! Say when! Sermon! Semen!”). How Dijon balances the tension between his reserved songwriting and the theatricality of everything else makes Baby the most sincere devotional album in recent memory: Here’s a man who wants to proclaim his love as loud as possible but knows that the best things should be kept close to the chest. –Rae-Aila Crumble

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal

Los Thuthanaka: Los Thuthanaka

Here’s an Onion headline that is tattooed on the back of my brain, from a brief notice with the dateline September 12, 2001: “Bill Gates Finally Getting Into Kid A.” Of all the things in this mille feuille joke, I love the outmoded phrase of “getting into” records. It’s a beautiful practice to let your opinions sit on the shelf like jarred homunculi while struggling to describe how exactly music makes you feel. To say that Los Thuthanaka, the self-titled album from Chuquimamani-Condori and their brother, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, requires some time on the shelf might be an understatement. But get into it, and you’ll know this is a special record, so ahead of its time, and so worthy of your own.

Los Thuthanaka is an album about transience and permanence, the mutability of sound and its deep roots. It’s an instrumental record, a lo-fi psychedelic noise rock piece that broke the VU meters somewhere along the recording process (it was never mastered; it is not on streaming services). But there are so many voices that speak through—and on behalf of—the siblings: electric guitars, electric keytars, mid-century acoustic Andean folk instruments like the ronroco, buried samples of Música Boliviana Popular, Italaque drums from indigenous Aymara people. “Ipi Saxara” features a fried, elliptical riff over a traditional Andean huayño rhythm that is syncopated almost out of time while CDJ backspins and chintzy Yamaha sound effects rain down on the track. Surrender to the wormhole, to the sound of clipping and chaos, to the trans state where you can make out five centuries of music history dancing with each other.

And frankly, none of this would be half as good if this shit didn’t swing so hard. Chuquimamani-Condori’s career as a supersonic producer—whose imposing body of work speaks for voiceless and oppressed people around the world—culminates in this project. They and their brother Josh keep these songs off the grid by borrowing traditional Bolivian styles of huayño, like Salay and Kullawada, to introduce new and novel pockets of rhythm. The cascading drums of “Awila” and the breakneck (or break-your-neck) tempo of “Apnaqkaya Titi” feel like witnessing the birth of sound. The entire Western canon of dance music is rooted in the folk music of indigenous peoples, who brought the concept of syncopation to colonial ears and created the rhythms that moved people toward a higher power. And here it is, back from the past, like you’ve never heard it before.

Los Thuthanaka offer a new national motto for anyone who needs it: Out of one, many. It’s head music, body music, spiritual music, polemic party music, decolonized plunderphonics, or as the title of the angelic opening song is translated from the Aymara language: “The Queer People-Medicines Are Here.” In this new era where we sell the time it takes to think about things to tech companies and their large language models, here is an album that asks something from you: time, patience, reorganization, reframing, and reconnection. Maybe you’ll take an ideological read into what an “unmastered” album signifies, or maybe you’ll take a musicological read into the microtonal noise artifacts popping off in your earbuds as a new harmonic modality. None of this is told; all of this is shown through the ancestry of two siblings who made music to honor their family and their people’s history. Simply put, it’s a story about the journey home, one of the oldest stories in the world. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp