The 30 Best Rock Albums of 2025

Featuring Geese, Wet Leg, Suede, the Beths, Cass McCombs, Panda Bear, and more

December 3, 2025

In 2025, the best rock music radiated self-assurance. That sometimes meant staking a claim to micro-genre legacies, but just as often meant leaning hard into idiosyncrasies. This year’s best and boldest rock came from Britpop veterans and emo-revival heroes who returned to level up their sound; feminist punks and indie upstarts making electrifying debuts; and regional artists fearlessly embodying local traditions. Below, find our top 30 rock albums of 2025, chosen by Pitchfork staff writer Nina Corcoran and editors Sam Sodomsky and Marissa Lorusso.

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.)

30.

Suede: Antidepressants

In 1995, it was hard to imagine Suede making a third record, let alone existing for another 30 years. Against the odds, Brett Anderson has led his Britpop survivors into the most consistent, constructive phase of their career, and Antidepressants has enough restless energy and hooks to make you believe their best days could still be ahead of them. –Sam Sodomsky

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

29.

Lambrini Girls: Who Let the Dogs Out

On their debut album, the Brighton punks give the V-sign to racist cops, sexist bosses, capitalist pigs, and every other kind of loser. Their fuzzy, rambunctious songs land like an uppercut straight to patriarchy’s jaw; that they sprinkle the tracks with wry humor and communal joy make the knockout even more thrilling. –Marissa Lorusso

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28.

Chime Oblivion: Chime Oblivion

In his latest side-project, Osees frontman John Dwyer borrows punk luminaries from Bow Wow Wow, FKA Smiley, Flying Luttenbachers, and more for his most inspired album in years. Together as Chime Oblivion, they jam through no-wave acid trips and spiral into dubby proto-punk, snapping together like misfit magnets escaping fridge-door normalcy. –Nina Corcoran

27.

James McMurtry: The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy

A man stares at himself in the mirror as his mom calls him down for dinner. From any other writer, this might be a passing detail. For James McMurtry, it’s a nightmarish portal into a long line of generational trauma and addiction with a dash of so-sad-you-have-to-laugh humor. On his latest album—with a title inspired by a sketch belonging to his late father, the writer Larry McMurtry—the Austin, Texas songwriter tells big stories through the smallest details. –Sam Sodomsky

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26.

The New Eves: The New Eve Is Rising

Drawing back violin and cello bows like arrows, the New Eves forge their righteousness into primal rage on The New Eve Is Rising in a flurry of post-punk and rustic folk. Whether planting seeds from forbidden fruit, or dancing into battle with a flaming sword, the Brighton quartet offloads the shame that generations of women carried in the fight for independence and bodily autonomy. –Nina Corcoran

25.

They Are Gutting a Body of Water: LOTTO

Doug Dulgarian sings of “getting run over and over and over” on his Philly shoegaze band’s fourth studio album; the lyric describes a drug relapse, but it doubles as a description of encountering They Are Gutting a Body of Water’s sound. LOTTO matches the band’s whirring riffs with lyrics about addiction and mortality, meeting the bleakness of modern life with feedback and chilly reserve. –Marissa Lorusso

24.

Benjamin Booker: Lower

“They bugged the house again,” warns Benjamin Booker. On Lower, his first album in seven years, he purges the nightmares that make his blood pressure rise. Booker tapped hip-hop’s favorite producer, Kenny Segal, to translate his disgust through blown-out distortion and samples—whip cracks, school shooting audio—capturing America’s history, past and present. It’s confrontation at its most effective. –Nina Corcoran

23.

Sharp Pins: Radio DDR

Any devotee of Guided by Voices knows that assessing the band’s work piece by piece is kinda missing the point. It’s not about the tiles; it’s the mosaic. So what a joy it is to hear Radio DDR, the dazzlingly catchy, collage-like second album from Lifeguard’s Kai Slater, and witness a new installation just getting started. Pop Zeus has a new heir apparent. –Sam Sodomsky

22.

Horsegirl: Phonetics On and On

Horsegirl’s debut album was the work of star students of indie rock history: Belle & Sebastian and My Bloody Valentine namechecked as inspirations; members of Sonic Youth featured on a couple tracks. But their second album is less studious than gloriously intuitive, filled with minimalist post-punk structures that leave space for the band to indulge new linguistic fascinations and playfully repetitive motifs. Playing hooky never sounded so cool. –Marissa Lorusso

21.

Wet Leg: moisturizer

During Wet Leg’s cultural takeover of 2022, critics pegged them as blog-rock revivalists with puerile quips and a bag of hooks. On moisturizer, the British band confesses they’re so much more. With brash choruses about brawling and even catchier slow songs about falling in love, Wet Leg find their calling as hopeless romantics throwing their arms in the air. –Nina Corcoran

20.

The Beths: Straight Line Was a Lie

As sung by New Zealand songwriter Elizabeth Stokes, the title of the Beths’ “Metal” comes out sounding more like “middle.” And when she affirms you need it in your blood to keep you alive, there is a kind of sadness to the thought, a reminder that, no matter how busy and ambitious we are, something very delicate and infinitesimal ultimately decides our fate. And as she sings, her bandmates conjure a jangling maelstrom that sounds a little like the Cure going pop. It’s simple stuff—the type of song that elicits instant applause when played live—but, on any given listen, it feels like the secret to the universe. –Sam Sodomsky

19.

Panda Bear: Sinister Grift

On Sinister Grift, Noah Lennox gets his arms around what he’s chased across his albums in Animal Collective and as a solo artist and channels them into his most unequivocally beautiful collection yet. As its reggae-tinged rhythms, sun-kissed harmonies, and timeless pop melodies morph into the record’s hazier, haunting back half, its portrait of loss and regret still manages to sound disarmingly easy. –Marissa Lorusso

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18.

Pigeon Pit: crazy arms

In the lineage of countrified folk-punk intersecting with emo, Pigeon Pit sit squarely between Bright Eyes and Home Is Where. The Olympia band follows its frontwoman Lomes Oleander as she upholds community on crazy arms, splaying rapid-fire fiddle over dreams of outlasting poverty and harmonica solos soundtracking odes to dream-job fallacies. To keep your head above water, Pigeon Pit suggest getting to know those next to you on the liferaft first. –Nina Corcoran

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

17.

caroline: caroline 2

The London group’s second album focuses its sprawling, cinematic blend of post-rock and avant-folk while dialing up the ambition. Their collectivist ethos isn’t just evident in caroline’s eight-person configuration but in the very construction of their songs: Elements seem to work at cross purposes—string swells and Auto-Tune; gently strummed guitar and off-kilter percussion; classic harmonies and experimental drones; crescendoes and silence—and yet complement each other unexpectedly, perfectly. Then the climaxes of these songs come, they feel both inevitable and inventive. It’s as romantic as a sunset and just as many-hued. –Marissa Lorusso

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16.

Cameron Winter: Heavy Metal

For a quiet, old-fashioned solo album whose surrealist lyrics and wounded delivery sometimes tested the border of outsider art, audiences embraced Heavy Metal with open arms. In a breakout year for the Geese frontman, these proudly idiosyncratic songs helped set the stage: a sustained moment of open-hearted intimacy before the world came rushing in. –Sam Sodomsky

15.

Cusp: What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back

Some of indie rock’s most replayable albums don’t indulge grandiose concepts or sounds; they just document the present cleanly and succinctly. Cusp add their own snapshot to that archive with What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back, where the Chicago quartet embraces conversational candor dipped in bursts of shoegaze and quaint melodies. It’s small scope is endlessly enjoyable. –Nina Corcoran

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14.

Grace Rogers: Mad Dogs

“I wanted to be that genre of man,” Grace Rogers sings on her debut album, before completing the thought in a sad little spiral: “On Instagram, on Instagram.” It’d be one thing if the Kentucky songwriter were simply the first artist I’ve heard to spin poetry from the junkyard of aspirational content that finds its way into our feeds. But that’s just one corner of her sad, rabid Americana, a landscape whose folk songs feel refreshingly timeless and eerily current. –Sam Sodomsky

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

13.

Water From Your Eyes: It’s a Beautiful Place

For their sixth album, Nate Amos and Rachel Brown concoct an absurdist alt-rock cocktail that throws their every impulse in a blender: rap-rock cadences, indie pop jangle, grunge sneer, head-spinning electronics, a love of shoegaze, a touch of prog. Brown’s lyrics hint at a cryptic optimism, though the songs’ constant shapeshifting offers its own sort of existentialism, too: Nothing lasts, harshness lurks, and pleasures can spring up in unexpected places. The result is dense and delicious. –Marissa Lorusso

12.

Hannah Frances: Nested in Tangles

After singing with the range of a one-woman choir on her last album, Hannah Frances casts an even dizzier illusion on Nested in Tangles. She alters her arrangements mid-verse, invites Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen to fingerpick guitar, and sifts horns through prog structures, splintering a saga of “mommy issues” into off-kilter compositions. Don’t bother trying to avert your gaze from the intricate sorcery. –Nina Corcoran

11.

Destroyer: Dan’s Boogie

Dan’s Boogie knows how to make an entrance. A snare kicks down the door and suddenly we’re immersed. With its swirl of Mellotron and spoken vocal delivery like he’s just introducing the band, “The Same Thing as Nothing at All” is our gateway to one of Destroyer’s most immediately gratifying works, as grand and welcoming as he’s ever sounded. –Sam Sodomsky

10.

YHWH Nailgun: 45 Pounds

Imagine your subconscious translating the racket of a paving truck outside your window into the dream you’re currently having and you’re halfway to conjuring the sonic universe of YHWH Nailgun. On their debut album, the New York musicians unspool bass pulses that stalk chaotic percussion like a predator; stabs of clanging guitar; vocals that sound—in the best way—like Kim Gordon with a brutal head cold: vertiginous as a nightmare and visceral as real life. –Marissa Lorusso

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M(h)aol: Something Soft

What are the best shoes to run for your life in? The safest response to unsolicited nudes? The quickest giveaway that this one-night stand might hurt you? M(h)aol use noise-rock’s innate paranoia to replicate the toll of marginalized people’s survival instincts. Centered around singer-drummer Constance Keane’s anxious vocals and the warped manipulations of two bassists—one of whom, Jamie Hyland, engineered the album as well as Gilla Band’s eerie debut—Something Soft repeats its unsettling imagery in flashes until the fear sets in firsthand. –Nina Corcoran

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

Cass McCombs: Interior Live Oak

No one sets a mood like Cass McCombs. To say nothing of his cryptically comedic lyrics or his merry-go-round way with melody, the quality shared among his best records is somewhat difficult to pin down, the feeling that you’re being transported to some cozy haunted house that only exists as he plays. His 16-track opus Interior Live Oak earns its place among those pillars of atmosphere: a vivid, overflowing statement that’s spacious enough to live inside. –Sam Sodomsky

Algernon Cadwallader: Trying Not to Have a Thought

It’s been 14 years since Algernon Cadwallader’s last album, but the emo-revival heroes’ reunion collapses that distance from its first finger-tapped riff and howled melody. Rather than a mere nostalgia trip, the record pushes the band’s sound forward, thanks in large part to its lyrics—replacing the band’s goofy imagery of yore with arguments that community and memory are our best bulwarks against imperialism, capitalist excess, and political rot. –Marissa Lorusso

Neko Case: Neon Grey Midnight Green

Decades into her music career, Neko Case sounds relieved to be alive. Neon Grey Midnight Green, her first solo album in seven years, breathes deep with the perspective that the good will outweigh the bad if you do your part. Accompanied by 20 string players who brought her to tears, she backstrokes through wonder and awe, letting arrangements whisk her away with the relief of a film’s protagonist finally seeing her path clearly. “Closing time never comes,” sings Case. Thank god. –Nina Corcoran

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

If you and your friends are Ryan Davis fans, then you might be familiar with a certain mode of communication: the all-caps lyric quotes, texted back and forth. New Threats From the Soul, which contains only seven tracks but spans nearly an hour, might be the highest concentration of suitable lines in his catalog yet. I could defend my point, or I could just leave you with this: “YES I HAVE A PLAN. YES I HAVE A PLAN. YES I HAVE A PLAN. AND MY PLAN IS TO RUN.” –Sam Sodomsky

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

Alex G: Headlights

Alex Giannascoli’s ninth album opens with rock songs so pristine and stately—so down-the-middle and plainly beautiful—you might worry that he used his major-label upgrade to sand off his songwriting’s delightfully rough edges. But as the album progresses, he sneaks in, then centers, idiosyncratic choices—an offbeat sports reference, an unexpected synth line, a vocal that sounds like the Peanuts gang in a horror movie—and continually draws beauty out of them. His lyrics reflect on parenthood and childhood, on creative success and commercial realities, and he delivers them with a startling certainty. It’s his most ambitious release, but also his most intimate: straight from the heart, equally strange and stirring. –Marissa Lorusso

First Day Back: Forward

With their self-released debut album, the Santa Cruz five-piece confirm they know the unspoken traditions of emo: name your band after a primary influence (Braid), craft the cut-and-paste artwork yourself (check), and, most importantly, open your album with a full-throated yell (“Sure, Ok.”) No wonder Forward became an instant classic in the emo scene, a largely online community gold panning for the unrestrained, emotive, know-it-when-you-hear-it feeling that made the ‘90s a wellspring. From the Cap’n Jazz-coded “Wait, Do You Hear That?” to the Sunny Day Real Estate heaviness of “Gone On,” First Day Back bring Midwest emo into the modern day with striking violin and a lead singer bent on pushing her vocals into every shape imaginable. –Nina Corcoran

Geese: Getting Killed

“You can be free and still come home,” Cameron Winter pleads near the end of Getting Killed. On a record that refuses to be pinned down, let alone scoured for meaning, it’s a rare moment of insight into the minds of these New York twenty-somethings as they navigate their creative breakthrough. Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay to their radiant third album is that it sounds like nothing else right now; its rhythms are too intricate, its lyrics too absurdist and confrontational, its production too clear and bright. And yet, their music has never felt so effortlessly commanding. Turns out, the freer they get, the closer they are to home. –Sam Sodomsky

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

Wednesday: Bleeds

A bloated corpse in the river, vomit in the moshpit, a baseball bat to the kneecaps: On Wednesday’s sixth studio album, Karly Hartzman sharpens her eye for specificity until her songs function like, as one lyric puts it, “a razor on a waterslide”: a visceral outpouring alongside the rushing muck of everyday life. Beneath her is a band that has locked its formula of country twang overlaid with shrieks of steel guitar and barbed-wire guitar riffs. Hartzman’s songs, drawn from her life in North Carolina, dig through small-town drama to pinpoint the humanity in freaks and weirdos and the brutality of life on the margins. The band calibrates its explosions like perfectionist demolitionists, but Bleeds’ squall isn’t its only show of force: In the album’s quieter moments, just when you think the dust has settled, Hartzman expertly unveils the detail that knifes you in the gut. –Marissa Lorusso