The Ten Best Songs of 2025
The following ten songs are the ten best songs that were released in the year 2025.
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10. Jane Remover – ‘JRJRJR’
Label: deadAir
Genre: Rage
Wake up, filthy. Jane Remover hotwired 2025 into existence in the early hours of January 1 with an eruption of rage that finally brought the long tail of Carti’s Whole Lotta Red legacy full circle. Not only a mind-melting cacophony of digital sound, ‘JRJRJR’ is also the kind of scorched-earth personal treatise that parasocial fans of other artists could devote their lives to never receiving. Jane practically debases herself in search of green shoots growing out of the wreckage of a life upended by performance: “Rehearsing songs I hate in Silver Lake, trying not to cry / Then I step up off the stage and they don’t know I lost my mind / Bitches wanna crack some jokes, wanna see me crack a smile / Can’t say ‘I love you’ no more ‘cause I hear it all the time”.
What she finds by way of an answer to her emptiness falls somewhere in between abandon (“I might ball out on a new face, change my name, then my city”), revelry (“Let the DJ save your life, bro, we cheated death again”), and, critically, the promise of absolution. “He was on my mind long before I ever met him / I’d put down the mic just to feel that way forever”. ‘JRJRJR’ is a thrilling music recording, but more importantly it is a triumph of sentiment. The song acknowledges despair and celebrates desperation. JR takes stock of her pain, then throws herself to the ground in prayer because that’s all she can do. It just so happens that ‘JRJRJR’ also sounds like the gates of hell being flung open.
9. Stella Donnelly – ‘Standing Ovation’
Label: Dot Dash Recordings
Genre: Jangle Pop
Stella Donnelly’s new album, Love and Fortune, is a stunning and stunned rumination on the dissolution of a dear friendship that absorbs every nerve and lays it plain on the page. It’s a pretty short record, but if for some unjustifiable reason you don’t have time to listen to it all, you can absorb the album’s ocean of feeling in less than five minutes by simply listening to its opening track, ‘Standing Ovation’.
The song’s first act is a dreamlike, eerily tender portrait of love, just Donnelly’s generous voice atop a bed of pillowy synth, quietly reminiscing about little moments of inalienable significance: “We carry on like muck-up day / when I wrote your name on everything.” So it’s a little disarming, then, when ‘Standing Ovation’ suddenly breaks into brisk drums and a sweet ‘n sour lead guitar lick, quick-cutting into breezy, ever-so-slightly queasy jangle pop. It’s like a whole new song, and when Donnelly returns, sounding cheerier than ever, you get the sense that she’s writing from the perspective of a whole new life.
“It’s a standing ovation”, Donnelly laments, “for someone who never replies”. Caustic, immaculate one-liners are Donnelly’s great strength as a songwriter and that may be the best one she has ever written. It is a lyric that embodies an acute sense of dislocation—devastating, but sighed sweetly over a freeway-pace instrumental that’s so catchy it’s almost unbecoming. “Could you do me a favour and pick out the truth from a life? / I could never replace someone as big as you were in mine”. If Donnelly’s truth is that the loss of her friend has left her without a home, ‘Standing Ovation’ suggests the only way to find her way back is to take off fast and far away with no plan in sight.
8. MIKE, Niontay & Tony Seltzer – ‘Shaq & Kobe’
Label: 10k
Genre: Cloud Rap
10k soldiers stand to attention. MIKE and Tony Seltzer present their Pinball album series as the product of low-pressure experiments in the off-season between major projects for both artists—MIKE punches in with first-thought-best-thought raps over the glitziest production dormant in Seltzer’s hard drive—but it frequently delivers some of the most fascinating material in either artist’s catalogue. On ‘Shaq & Kobe’, the duo draft in 10k’s rookie-of-the-year-three-years-running, Niontay, to address the open question of whether two rappers can run a three-man-weave. The answer is a foregone conclusion.
Seltzer’s beat is the phantom third man in this arrangement, heady and swirling and panning from side to side in your headphones like a basketball being cheffed around the court. Meanwhile, MIKE and Niontay trade bar-for-bar, more conversational than competitive. “[Niontay] Me and MIKEy be like Shaq and Kobe, uh-huh / [MIKE] yeah that’s twin, uh-huh, Zack and Cody, uh-huh”.
That sense of Disney Channel joviality is key to what makes the song so deliriously fun: ‘Shaq & Kobe’ is basically an exercise in MIKE and Niontay one-upping each other with one-liners until one of them bursts out laughing and can’t continue. Eventually, MIKE comes up with, “I just hit that shawty I call ‘bro’ like she androgynous”, a punchline so unimpeachable it forces Niontay to break the fourth wall entirely. “I just put down the phone and shook my head like, ‘**** stop it’”.
7. Olof Dreijer – ‘Iris (Nídia Remix)’
Label: Dekmantel Records
Genre: Batida
Another year, another Olof Dreijer production that is the most stunning club track of the year, another hiccupping, breathtaking Nídia rework that no other producer could approximate. Her remix of Dreijer’s ‘Iris’ is so casually excellent that it borders on pro forma—the most shocking thing these two particular artists (no hyperbole the two most inventive producers on Earth right now) could produce is a song that you would maybe deem not quite perfect.
But this song is perfect, albeit in a thoroughly wonky way. ‘Iris’ is as polyrhythmic as a floor-filler can be without it becoming a little bit exhausting. Frenzied kuduro drums fizz and pop over a springy four-to-the-floor pulse, Dreijer’s signature fibrous synths zip across the stereo field and digital bird chirps yield a dizzying chaos. It is not a particularly dynamic song—once ‘Iris’ hits its raucous stride, it stays in the fast lane for three minutes and then, suddenly, brakes to a stop. But perhaps this is little more than a suggestion of what it must feel like to be a savant—as Olof Dreijer and Nídia surely are—making art for mere mortals: no accoutrements necessary, no reason to agonize over structure, simply tap into that ambrosial wellspring of inspiration for one perfect loop, and call it a day, just like the last year.
6. Wednesday – ‘Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)’
Label: Dead Oceans
Genre: Creek Rock
Karly Hartzman is a proud Carolina Girl who has parlayed her talent for writing still-life scenes of Southern disrepute into also becoming the It Girl of 2020s indie rock. Her literary voice is so singular that it almost begets parody—anyone making shithead country music in 2025 (many such artists) was downstream of Hartzman singing about opioid overdoses in Costco carparks on 2023’s Rat Saw God. That voice is primarily what makes Wednesday, her band, so fantastic and essential. And it is in the foreground on ‘Wound Up Here’, most notably when Hartzman conjures the image of a “pitbull puppy pissing off a balcony” in the middle of her eulogy for a friend who died while still a kid.
But what’s unusual about this particular Wednesday record is that it channels most of its power not from Hartzman’s usual collage of unsettling anecdotes but instead from the simple repetition of a uniquely haunting line: “I wound up here by holding on”. It is suggestive of the common thread that binds all of the characters Hartzman has written over the years, and perhaps the theme most central to Wednesday’s art: doom. It also nods to the enduring influence of Townes Van Zandt on the band, and specifically his most prophetic lyric, the first great one he ever wrote. Little else is as devastating as a story about someone trying to wait out a storm that threatens to swallow them whole; better to rail against it. It’s easier than just waiting around to die.
4. Big Thief – ‘How Could I Have Known’
Label: 4AD
Genre: Folk Rock
Tonight, I just happened to stumble across the following quote while reading an old review of A Moon Shaped Pool: “Radiohead have a unique grasp on how easily profundity can slip into banality. Their music is obsessed with the point where great truths harden into platitudes, where pure signal meets wretched noise.” It is all too fortunate that I come across this sentence now, because I have to write this Big Thief blurb, and it gives language to an idea about the band that I have been circling for some time now, only in reverse.
In recent years, Big Thief have begun to grasp how easily banality can slip into profundity. In particular, Adrianne Lenker’s writing has become obsessed with the point where platitudes harden into great truths, where wretched noise becomes pure signal. ‘How Could I Have Known’, the song that closes the band’s sixth album, Double Infinity, is the ultimate vindication of this method: a song that means a lot although it says very little, a song that has been written a hundred thousand times before, a song that is predictable and withering and beautiful all the same. A song that wrecked me more than once the past year, perhaps because I had not learnt how to safely wield its brutal truth.
“They say time is the fourth dimension / they say everything lives and dies”. They certainly do. And in the hands of a lesser writer than Adrianne Lenker, those lyrics might read as mind-numbingly trite. But by the time they arrive, at the bridge, the song has already proven itself to be one of beguiling simplicity, one that sits easily with cliché and contradiction. I am still uncertain about whether ‘How Could I Have Known’ is best read as a love song of emptiness or as a breakup song of warm pathos, although Lenker clearly welcomes this abstraction.
“How could I have known, in that moment, what we’d turn into? / I was alone, in that moment, when I first met you.” The song hinges on this one lyric—disarming, debilitating, and entirely tautological. Its question implies at once no answer and yet a deep, radiant conviction. Surely, this is the metaphor Big Thief have been chasing for as long as they have been making music. Just before ‘How Could I Have Known’ reaches its final act, Lenker starts to repeat the song’s hook before trailing off and leaving her band to finish the words without her, which reminds me of something I once read about Britney Spears but felt strangely universal: desire requires a void.
4. Dean Blunt & Elias Rønnenfelt – ‘4’
Label: WORLD MUSIC
Genre: Gothic Pop
Over the course of 2025, every couple of weeks I would experience a day where I found it nearly impossible to function unless I listened to ‘4’ by Dean Blunt and Elias Rønnenfelt, like, close to ten times. It is quite an unglamorous impulse—less craving than compulsion—insofar as I have relished listening to it every time and yet have never been completely satisfied by each successive replay. Hit me; hit me again.
That’s a little strange, though, because ‘4’ sounds more glamorous than anything else Blunt or Rønnenfelt has released in years: twinkling gothic pop that grows ever-more tuneful and starry-eyed with each successive movement. Rønnenfelt’s lyrics oscillate between angsty resignation and profound hope, though Blunt only pays attention to the latter impulse when lashing his canvas with watercolour guitars. “I don’t remember hunger / don’t even know its name”, Rønnenfelt announces with a fleeting burst of optimism, and so too do you realise these prickly punk troubadours have finally given you someone to root for.
3. Alex G – ‘Logan Hotel (Live)’
Label: RCA
Genre: Slacker Rock
Alex Giannascoli has been writing stories of fracture and disrepair into poignant, stirring rock music for many years now, so at this point I would expect to be inoculated against any of his new songs making me too emotional. But that didn’t stop me from getting a little wobbly hearing ‘Logan Hotel (Live)’ for the first time, and then every successive time I played it this past year, which my digital overlords count to be no less than 30 times. “I think that no matter what you choose, now / You’re gonna have to lose, now”. Usually, Giannascoli—a narrator who tends to notice the writing on the wall and go gently into that good night—would sing a line like that with a sigh. Instead, on the relatively fiery closer to his wry, soothing album Headlights, his voice better recalls a dog’s bark, both resolute and desperate.
It’s not quite clear what fate Giannascoli is worried may befall him, but for the fact that he is paranoid about street revellers outside his window and it is unclear whether he is singing to anyone other than himself. “Baby, hold on, now”, Giannascoli softly repeats, as if they were the only words that made any sense, “I ain’t gonna let you go”. Purring guitars lullaby the song to its denouement before a pang of something like grief bubbles up within you once you realise that you never wanted it to end.
2. Sabrina Carpenter – ‘15 Minutes’
Label: Island Records
Genre: Pop
You know the moment when a pop song suddenly reveals that it has a perfect conceit? The saturated history and strictures of pop music make it fundamentally difficult for chart-topping songs to stand out from the pack, but when they do, little else in music is more thrilling. And the beauty of the slot-machine nature of pop success is that, often, the stuff that makes a hit can be traced back to just one magic line. I keep dancing on my own! Because we are living in a material world! But loving him was red! Thank you, next!
“I can do a lot in fifteen minutes!” Ah, of course. Another one to add to the pantheon. ‘15 Minutes’—released quietly in the off-season between the back-to-back smashes Short n’ Sweet and Man’s Best Friend that catapulted Sabrina Carpenter from Taylor Swift co-sign to the beacon of pop’s potential in the 2020s—is a nauseatingly great pop song, the kind you presumably have to strike a Faustian bargain, or, at the very least, do a Fleetwoodly quantity of gear to create. Powdery ‘80s boogie production proves the ideal foil for Carpenter’s irrepressible wit and astute recognition of her imperial era. “When my time’s up, baby”, she warns, “I’ll leak some pictures, maybe”. I’m sure some people would argue that two minutes easily feels like fifteen minutes—we should all hope Sabrina Carpenter’s fifteen minutes feels far longer than that.
1. Snocaps – ‘Over Our Heads’
Label: ANTI-
Genre: Country Rock
‘Over Our Heads’, the finest song I heard this past year, radiates the hard-earned wisdom and tossed-off charm that you can only really access after a lifetime of closed doors and severed contracts in the music industry. Katie (Waxahatchee) and Allison Crutchfield, siblings and indie rock luminaries, started a band together this year after fifteen years of fruitful solo excursions following the demise of their breakout outfit P.S. Eliot. And from the delightful, freewheeling debut album from Snocaps—the Crutchfields’ latest incarnation with MJ Lenderman and Brad Cook in tow—emerges the most resplendent two minutes of rock music, ‘Over Our Heads’, dropped into the album so casually and over so swiftly as to suggest its magic wasn’t even fully apparent to its creators. But it is a divine song—clipped pop-punk drumbeat, springy acoustic strums and a tearaway, garage-y lead guitar all in service of the Crutchfield sisters in rare form, voices entwined, facing up to calamity with gritted teeth. “Twenty-four hours left and, baby, what happens next is anyone’s guess”. And because they are rock stars, naturally their solution is to run.
‘Over Our Heads’ very quickly turns into something untameable and irresistible, a third-act thriller that takes in still-life suburbia and charges away from it: Ford Ranger tearing up the interstate, newborn tucked under one arm, slipping through dank alleyways and unclicking locked doors. It is a song of pure adrenaline, and consequently it is unexamined—the Crutchfields manage to sing the word “leave”, or some analogue of it, six times within its brisk runtime. As songwriters, both sisters are renowned for their scorched-earth interrogation of the past, for the ruthless way they mine personal history in search of essential truths. But ‘Over Our Heads’ plays out in real-time, leaving them with no other option than to wait for the truth to present itself spontaneously. What’s remarkable, then, is how deeply the song burns with conviction with no resolution in sight. ‘Over Our Heads’ becomes a song of knowing that you don’t know where you’re going. The song careens to its conclusion; the sisters grin in unison. They admit they’re stranded with their grief, then turn to face the audience. “Don’t bother chasing us, boys”, with a wink, “we’ll see ourselves out”.
Thanks for reading our blog in 2025. Finally, we have reached the end of our material covering this strange, solemn year. If you click the button below, you can check out a spreadsheet of all of Redshift’s favourite music from 2025.
Weekly ratings roundups recommence this Sunday, at which point Redshift turns a new leaf and begins to document the music of 2026. We have some nice surprises in store.
Sam Gollings
26 January 2026