The Ten Best Albums of 2025
My favourite albums of 2025 are namely because they each sounded like no other record that came out this year. This made writing about them exceptionally hard. Artistic points of comparison are a music writer’s bread and butter and are also crucial for search engine optimisation. I really loved the blurbs I wrote for my favourite albums last year; sadly, these are not quite as good. But the records are, they are beautiful, they are worth your time. Thank you for reading this year. More words in 2026.
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10. Pink Must – Pink Must
Label: 15 love
Genre: Slacker Rock
Pink Must was conceived by its creators Mari Maurice and Lynn Avery as a grunge collaboration and recorded thirty years after the genre’s popularity crested. True to form, it presents like grunge personified at age 30. The newly-formed Brooklyn duo’s album is prickly but quiet, wounded but gentle, quantised but proudly unsophisticated. It is grunge in everything except, paradoxically enough, how it sounds. Brittle guitars, clipped breakbeats and Ableton string samples are Pink Must’s raw canvas—if the abiding sentiment of the 90s underground was one of disillusionment with the mainstream, here is the rock music of alienation entirely—over which they conjure weary still lives that say more than words ever could. “Apologising when I walk out the door”, Maurice recalls on ‘Long In The Arms’, “I’m not even sure what for”.
9. Smerz – Big city life
Label: Escho
Genre: Alt Pop
Big city life, the second album from the slinky Norwegian pop duo Smerz, is the most elegant album of the year by some distance. It knows it, too. This is a record that bleeds cool, that follows cool to its logical conclusion, that freebases cool and suffuses its veins with the stuff. And it is for that reason that I wouldn’t blame you for harbouring a little scepticism for Big city life, an album that makes trying hard sound as effortless as a twilit twirl in the middle of a deserted street. But the thing about elegance is that it implies self-assurance, and Smerz clearly understand the mechanics and mystique of pop songs as well as any Nordic producer worth their salt. Their craft is impeccable. They take the basic elements of pop—drums, programmed and otherwise, keyboards and strings (very little guitar, as distinct from rock music)—as their palate but manipulate each element in such a peculiar way as to render their music strange and charming. Drums are frosty and funkless, strings are curt but funky, keys are tuned like grand pianos but played so unpredictably that they almost recall a children’s recital. Henriette Motzfeldt and Catherina Stoltenberg are frank songwriters but their music has an inexplicable softness to it, and this juxtaposition infuses Big city life with an immense amount of personality. “Make your way over here if you wanna learn the tricks”, Smerz beckon, feigning as if they would be willing to let you in on their secret, “One, two, three, four, five, six, fix!” Whatever that means.
8. Geese – Getting Killed
Label: Play It Again Sam
Genre: Alternative Rock
Geese’s carnivalesque guitar music and frontman Cameron Winter’s snarling Dylan-worship are a fun combination, but they are a fake-out. The Brooklyn band’s third album comprises forty-five minutes of breathless schizo-rock made by four freakishly talented twenty-somethings, yet you can boil down its beauty to a mere handful of moments where Winter lets his guard down to reveal a solitary lyric that could knock the wind out of you. It happens on the title track, ‘Getting Killed’, which lurches from Stones-y garage rock to late-2000s Radiohead virtuosity and back again until Winter finds the wherewithal to simply sigh, “I have been fucking destroyed by the city tonight”. It happens on the deep-cut highlight ‘Half Real’, which comes to rest at the purest distillation of the insecurity that lies at the core of every song Cameron Winter has written: “They may say that our love was only half real, but that’s only half true”. And it happens most gloriously on lead single ‘Taxes’, when Winter interrupts his extended Jesus joke halfway through the song with a command of startling clarity: “I will break my own heart from now on!” Over chiming guitars, he sounds genuinely ecstatic to have had that morbid revelation. Love may kick you back and forth, but truth? Ah, there is a far more emboldening possession.
7. Introspekt – Moving The Center
Label: Tempa
Genre: UK Garage
The Manchester DJ and scene figurehead Finn McCorry has this great tweet about ‘The Judgement’, one of the first singles Skream and Benga ever released, describing it as if “you can hear dubstep trying to escape garage”. Put simply, this is the precise sound of the long-awaited debut LP from LA-based UK bass producer Introspekt. Punctuated by heavy breaths and moans, Moving The Center is a steamy, restless 2-step record that retains none of the pop sensibility of the early garage house scene and absorbs all of the tense restraint of the dubstep sound that permeated through mid-2000s South London. That concept alone is an interesting enough prospect in 2025, but the album transcends by way of how naturally it inhabits the sound of a notoriously white, woman-free zone and yet how reverently it takes cues from the Black and feminine history of dance music. Sleek, sophisticated, deeply felt—it’s fitting that an album bearing a track called ‘Dilation’ would draw inspiration from an imagined past where brostep was never able to metastasise out of the UK bass scene. No scary monsters, just nice sprites.
6. billy woods – GOLLIWOG
Label: Backwoodz Studioz
Genre: Rap
Has billy woods ever before captured the menacing allure of his own art as succinctly as follows: “The English language is violence, I hotwired it / I got hold of the master’s tools and got dialled in”? woods makes this assertion as early as two minutes into his gnawing 2025 solo outing, GOLLIWOG, and three seconds later he will claim to be “Deng Xiaoping smoking oil in the wok”, which is how you know that you’re not about to hear him simply go through the motions for the hour to come. billy woods has been making grimly hilarious, desperately sad rap for over twenty years now, and in GOLLIWOG he has made his most grimly hilarious and desperately sad record yet. It is an album that nods to the genre of horror-as-entertainment—a creepy 50s doll commercial here; a tormented nursery rhyme there—but is less preoccupied with jumpscares as it is with the more nauseating possibility that what lies behind the door you never open may not surprise you. “Twelve billion USD hovering over the Gaza Strip / You don’t wanna know what it cost to live, what it cost to hide behind eyelids”. As ever, GOLLIWOG finds woods rapping about real horrors, not imagined ones, that don’t leave space for speculation so much as they are condemned to the passage of time. Better to be put out of your misery than to be spared by your adversary and left to wither away, ‘Maquiladoras’ suggests: “Trapped a housefly in a pint glass and waited for it to die / It’s still alive”. Perhaps the quality of mercy is strained, after all.
5. DJ Narciso – Capítulo Experimental
Label: Príncipe
Genre: Batida
DJ Narciso’s Capítulo Experimental—one of three full-length records released by the prolific Lisbon producer this year—is an album of batida made for unlocking jaws. Batida made for dilating pupils. Batida made for why does this club feel like it’s closing in on me. Batida made for the anything-could-happen moment. Batida made for flirting with monasticism. Batida made for widening the gyre. Batida made for reincarnation. Batida made for adhering to the Rick Rubin method. Batida made for unlocking the Lex Luger secret formula. Batida made for uninstalling Ableton. Batida made for cancelling your Spotify subscription. Batida made for getting blocked on Soulseek. Batida made for releasing the hounds. Batida made for reopening a cold case. Batida made for crime, but not punishment. Batida made for walking out of your own intervention. Batida made for ODing on stimulants. Batida made for ODing on depressants. Batida made for having a really, really bad feeling about this. Batida made for twirling the ice in your cup. Batida made for taking a sip. Batida that you simply can’t bring yourself to pause. Batida made for crossing the Rubicon. Batida that you didn’t realise you always wanted. Batida that won’t ever let you forget. Narciso may look inwards by definition, but he’ll show you what music can really do.
4. Joanne Robertson – Blurrr
Label: AD93
Genre: Chamber Folk
“When you take a bomb ass selfie” was Joanne Robertson’s justification for the Mona Lisa-like album cover of her sixth album, Blurrr, the blinding success of which plastered her knowing look all over music websites and magazine inserts for nearly a month. It is, to be fair, a gorgeous shot—gentle and grainy, reminiscent of a time of low-integer iPhones and the good-old Internet, smirking, one of Robertson’s eyes obscured by wispy hair making it difficult to tell whether her expression is one of sincerity or cynicism.
“Blurrr was written in between painting sessions and also whilst raising a child” was Robertson’s explanation of her album’s origin. Together, these curt insights help to articulate the chief concern of Blurrr—the year’s best folk record and also its most tender—liminality. Everything is beautiful and just out of reach on Blurrr; its music is never tactile, always airborne. Robertson’s lightly affected, fingerpicked guitar sounds languid and holographic, as if your hands could pass right through it, often shrouded in a weightless mist of cello courtesy of collaborator Oliver Coates. Her breathy voice floats one atmosphere above the music, slowly tracing melodies that undulate like an aircraft passing through a patch of minor turbulence. The natural position when listening to Blurrr is looking up, not down.
It is an immediately breathtaking album made all the more desirable for not revealing too much of itself. I return to this record constantly—I suspect I will for years to come—because I adore it and yet I don’t really feel like it’s mine. It seems to imbue a truth that I am not yet mature enough to understand. Robertson’s vocals are unintelligible, her lyrics beside the point. What do the songs on Blurrr mean? Not quite sure; I think the answer is blowin’ in the wind.
3. Earl Sweatshirt – Live Laugh Love
Label: Tan Cressida
Genre: Rap
“Rap is like the world’s longest conversation, and every generation the conversation gets a little bit smarter.” MIKE and Earl Sweatshirt (Thebe Kgositsile), kindred spirits and two of hip hop’s most radiant voices, sat down in October and reflected on the artistic promise of rap. Kgositsile replied, “Rap is the number zero. You can multiply it, throw anything in it and it’s just zero. It can be folk, it can be gospel, it can be anything. It’s forever.”
If there’s a thread that binds together the eleven songs that comprise Kgositsile’s fifth solo album, that’s it. Live Laugh Love is a love letter to rap performed by one of its finest ever artisans in the form of his life. “My peripheral’s decorated, that mean you can’t get away ‘cause I can still see you every day / I lace my cleats and give ‘em praise / Get your head in the game”, announces Kgositsile to open the record, and so does his enduring conversation with rap’s ecosystem recommence. His rapping on Live Laugh Love is technically stupefying, frequently hilarious (“My lil baby stack like she from the gang”, from ‘Gamma (need the <3)’) and compulsively honest—‘CRISCO’ emerges from the album’s dense web of basketball lore to grapple with the familial trauma that has stoked the Earl Sweatshirt myth since Kgositsile was a teenager. “I’m saying sorry for the pain I caused, God know my heart and that I’m out here trying to change the course”, Kgositsile confesses, an apology that becomes a life-affirming resolution when he reveals that rap is the guiding framework through which he works through inner turmoil: “Peeling layers off, in the lab sauced, kinda”.
You get the sense that Kgositsile has even stunned himself with the record he’s managed to create. “This level took an awful lot to reach, applied pressure for the diamonds that you see glisten”, he admits on ‘Heavy Metal aka ejecto seato!’ while indulging in some well-deserved album self-promotion: “I just dropped it, you should go and cop it, I released it!” Celebration is the correct impulse when it comes to Live Laugh Love; I find just listening to it, having had no part in its creation, to be a burning source of pride. Like watching World Cup Final Messi or 2013 Bron, Live Laugh Love is one of those exceedingly rare opportunities to witness a generational talent triumph at the one thing they were evidently born to do. It’s made only more luminous by the understanding, familiar to most Earl Sweatshirt listeners, of how much turbulence Kgositsile had to weather to arrive at his victory lap. “The low hum of hunger had my stomach singing a song of sadness, wishing it wasn’t flat”, he solemnly recalls on ‘INFATUATION’, thankful that, this time, the pain won’t linger. “Tonight we dining where?”
2. Los Thuthanaka – Los Thuthanaka
Label: Self-released
Genre: Aymara Electronic
What more is there to say about the consensus album of the year? Perhaps I will make my contribution by way of an anecdote. I first heard Los Thuthanaka, the debut collaborative record from siblings Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, on a bleary-eyed dawn drive from Sydney to Canberra make it back in time for work in the morning. Los Thuthanaka is decidedly not drive-to-work music, yet the oddity of the situation made it a curiously fitting context in which to get to know the album.
The most important thing to note about Los Thuthanaka is that it is hallucinogenic music: not psychedelic in sound, per se, but arranged and structured to the point of surreality, in a way that doesn’t bear resemblance to any discrete music recording, well, ever. At least nothing I have come across before. To listen to Los Thuthanaka is to be periodically alarmed at how acclimatised you have become to the intensity of the music before you. These are songs that begin already big and busy and then, gradually, imperceptibly, swell to gargantuan proportions. Something about them—perhaps that they are mixed so loudly and left unmastered, perhaps that their lumbering Aymaran dance rhythms are perpetually in motion—lulls you deftly into a trance, and soon you are at ease with the cacophony of the music. To recalibrate my senses, I occasionally press play on a Los Thuthanaka song five minutes into its runtime, and I tend to find the force of the music quite overwhelming when I’m not yet under its spell. It is a marvel that music this massive could be anything other than destabilising.
But it isn’t destabilising. It is fortifying and humbling. Los Thuthanaka is an album infused with indigenous wisdom that moves with a brutal physicality, and hearing it on the road, at speed, surrounded by agriculture and wind farms, mostly in the dark, was probably the most moving and powerful musical experience I had all year. This is a record that consumes all the air in a room and feels unbound by time; a record that devotes itself to the Aymaran spirits that protect queer people; a record that finds its greatest comfort in dislocation and the unknowable. In other words: Los Thuthanaka is wickedly fun dance music that answers to a higher calling, digital music made to be heard and felt in the elements. What sheer good fortune that I was able to encounter it in such an impressionable state, surrounded by vastness, with time on my side.
1. Anysia Kym & Tony Seltzer – Purity
Label: 10k
Genre: Cloud’n’b
Come here, have a taste of this. Do you have any faint recollection of being a toddler, eyes glazed over watching your parents cook in the kitchen, when they would give you a finger of sauce to lick, or a wooden cake spoon to suck on? Maybe you can still sense the first time they let you have a swig of beer or a sip of whisky? Do you ever remember watching someone you half-know digging out a morsel of powder under a smartphone torchlight for you to try? That feeling—breaching the unknown; your eyes widening with the taste of something illicit, the memory of which lingers far longer than the intoxication—that’s what Purity captures. An album of minute-long vignettes of the lush life waiting for you behind the curtain of the third dimension, a life you only ever catch a glimpse of through the fleeting portal of novelty. The finest album of this year.
Which is also to say—an album that barely registers as real. Anysia Kym and Tony Seltzer’s dazzling, alien opus may be the closest music will ever come to replicating a lucid dream. I have never heard a producer-artist operation as symbiotic as this one, so much so that the metaphysics of the album’s arrangement starts to break down over its duration. Kym doesn’t seem to sing over the top of Seltzer’s skeletal, attention-deficient cloud rap beats so much as exist inside of them, the figment of a headrush that momentarily takes you out of reality. The seams of this music are nowhere to be found; the notion that you could look at an Ableton stack and decipher the composite elements of ‘Diamonds and Pearls’ improbable. Each semi-song on Purity is so intuitive, so accordant with the untreated melodies hard-wired into your subconscious, that it becomes exhausting to try and focus on anything else. The album is over in less than twenty minutes but the person you were before it no longer really exists.
In truth, there are some things I can write about Purity that are tethered to the world we all live in, not just the one that exists up in my own head. It’s a little incomprehensible that this album was made by two people, and not the product of a single prodigal auteur raised on a diet of Aaliyah, DJ Rashad and Timbaland. The degree of control that Seltzer wields over his production is exhilarating: ‘Automatic’ opens with six distinct, otherworldly loops, which Seltzer then chops up into a beat in real time; ‘Speedrun’ sounds like Pi’erre Bourne being introduced to a think break. And if the whole ‘lucid dream’ analogy seems a little far-fetched (it isn’t), then I will admit that Purity is, in some incomplete sense, druggy music. This is most obvious when the eerie, narcotised slump of ‘Afterparty’ temporarily grinds the album to a halt like a fent lean. “I don’t think the party is over”, Kym hesitantly suggests over Seltzer’s woozy, lurching beat. Go on, then—comedown’s coming. That gear won’t bump itself. And lick the spoon when you’re done.
Sam Gollings
29 December 2025