Looking back at the songs I played the most in 2025, I can sense my own hunger for music that felt wounded, carnal, unfamiliar, tactile, and askew—far from the uncanny sheen of A.I., far from the devastated feeling I get when I must scan a QR code to see a menu. I have listed fifteen of my favorites below. These are the records that best balanced my humors and kept me afloat. (“It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation,” as Melville wrote at the start of “Moby-Dick.”) There are plenty of albums that might have made the cut on a different day, including excellent new releases from Big Thief, Guided by Voices, Jason Isbell, the Weather Station, Justin Bieber, Turnstile, Jeff Tweedy, Bad Bunny, Craig Finn, Sam Amidon, Sabrina Carpenter, Michael Hurley, Lucy Dacus, Billy Woods, Horsegirl, and Mac DeMarco, among others. But good list-making requires hubris, constraint. A moment of wild and fearless conviction.
As ever, I want to thank the readers of The New Yorker for listening alongside me for another year. This job routinely sends me to strange and remarkable places, both literally (I spent last New Year’s Eve in the concrete recesses of Madison Square Garden, watching Phish prepare for and perform a four-hour show that included the dramatic conjuring of a thunder goddess), and in a more metaphysical sense—an Elsewhere of the spirit. I’m always grateful to report back. Lately, listening has transformed into such a cloistered experience, a private ritual, enacted on headphones or in our cars, a hyper-convenient way to make the world disappear. It’s easy to forget that music also accelerates communion, a sense of belonging. That’s something I often feel when I’m writing: a giddiness to share the experience, whether it be transcendent or ghastly, with others. I suppose that impulse is at the heart of criticism. It is also, perhaps, the point of being alive.
15. “Tranquilizer”
Oneohtrix Point Never
O.P.N. is the alias of the electronic composer Daniel Lopatin, who makes elegiac, sometimes inscrutable, often instrumental music using computers, synthesizers, and digital detritus. “Tranquilizer,” Lopatin’s stunning eleventh record, was built around a set of commercial sample CDs that Lopatin discovered on the Internet Archive a few years back (the collection was mysteriously removed for a while, then reappeared later, a series of events that Lopatin, who studied library science at the Pratt Institute, surely found both metaphorical and possibly romantic). “Tranquilizer” is a strange and beautiful album, full of haunted melodies and enigmatic rhythms.
14. “Addison”
Addison Rae
Hot take, but “Addison,” the dèbut LP from the TikTok starlet Addison Rae, has turned out to be one of the most unexpected, inventive, and reliably enjoyable pop records of 2025: debauched, earnest, surprisingly vulnerable. Rae’s aesthetic touchstones are obvious (Lana Del Rey, Britney Spears), but her embodiment of them feels hypermodern.
13. “SABLE, fABLE”
Bon Iver
Since the release of “SABLE, fABLE,” his fifth album, Justin Vernon, the musician behind Bon Iver, has been suggesting that he’s ready to clock out, professionally: “I want to be done with this whole thing,” he told the Guardian, in April. If Vernon does retreat from the music business, “SABLE, fABLE,” a collection of songs about devastation, self-acceptance, ecstatic love, and gruelling rebirth, would be an admirable coda. It’s a record that’s plainly oriented toward survival: “There are miles and miles of tape / You can watch it, it’s been saved,” he sings on “There’s a Rhythmn,” a dreamy, buoyant track about recognizing when something is over. “There’s a rhythm to reclaim / Get tall and walk away.”
12. “Bleeds”
Wednesday
This rock band from Asheville makes smart, noisy, country-tinged music; the singer and songwriter Karly Hartzman’s lyrics belie an unusual awareness of just how bizarre and fragile it is that we’re alive at all. I like when Hartzman presents a series of finely wrought images, and lets her listeners suss out the rest of the story: “Misread your name at the wake, snack from a vending machine / Like a smack on the ass at the back of a dream / Mounted antlers in the kitchen on a crooked nail,” she sings on “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On).” “Bleeds” is both catchier and gentler than “Rat Saw God,” the group’s previous LP, but it’s still caustic and punchy when it needs to be.
11. “Mayhem”
Lady Gaga
“Mayhem,” Gaga’s excellent sixth solo album, is a tidy synthesis of everything she does best: dark, throbbing, industrial dance music; lyrics about the intoxication and disorientation of fame; visually striking (and vaguely grotesque) aesthetics. The standard belting and the movie roles are nice, but I desperately missed this iteration of her.
10. “Earthstar Mountain”
Hannah Cohen
It’s hard to ascribe genre to Cohen’s music, which effortlessly braids elements of country, pop, and soul. “Earthstar Mountain” is suffused with a kind of glowing, mid-seventies, Laurel Canyon groove; it’s deeply sensual, but will also make you think of colored glass, gnarled trees, house cats languishing in a sunbeam. (There are echoes of Fleetwood Mac, Relatively Clean Rivers, Linda Ronstadt, Minnie Riperton, and Vashti Bunyan.) Impeccably produced by her partner, Sam Evian—a formidable musician on his own—it contains some of Cohen’s most searching and sophisticated songwriting.
9. “I’m the Problem”
Morgan Wallen
Morgan Wallen is easily the best-selling country artist of the twenty-first century; his fourth album, “I’m the Problem,” spent twelve weeks atop the Billboard 200 this year (somewhat incredibly, thirty-six of the album’s thirty-seven tracks charted on the Hot 100). Wallen is easy to root against for about a million different reasons, but it’s hard to deny his extraordinary virtuosity when it comes to singing embittered ballads about the (many) women who did him wrong: “I found some greener grass and some new blue eyes / And I can’t wait to kiss her in front of you,” he sings on “Kiss Her in Front of You.” I like Wallen’s voice—his East Tennessee accent gives everything a little bit of a nasal sneer, but also a richness, a texture—enough that I don’t even mind when he’s mean.
8. “LOTTO”
They Are Gutting a Body of Water
The fourth LP from TAGABOW, a shoegaze band from Philadelphia, feels like a creative apotheosis. It’s grungy, aggressive, sometimes listless music about feeling desperate and fucked-up (on previous records, the band messed around more with synthesized elements; “LOTTO” is raw and spontaneous). On “American Food,” Doug Dulgarian, the group’s front man, delivers a deadpan soliloquy about memory and accountability: “The benefit of believing you’re bad / Is that you get somebody to blame.”
7. “Eusexua”
FKA Twigs
The visionary English singer and producer FKA Twigs has said that “Eusexua,” a word that she invented, refers to the “pinnacle of human experience.” She described it further as the moment of sublime blankness before something tremendous happens—a big idea, or, perhaps more viscerally, an orgasm. This album (her third, and the first of two she released this year) is loaded with tension and release.
6. “Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party”
Hayley Williams
Hayley Williams, the mercurial, magnetic front woman of the rock band Paramore, has made plenty of very good records, both with Paramore and as a solo artist, but one nonetheless got the sense that a masterpiece was still imminent. On “Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party,” Williams inches closer to genius. Her lyrics can be incredibly funny (“I’ll be the biggest star / At this racist country singer’s bar,” she sings on the title track, a rubbery, entrancing song about having a long, dissociative night on the town), but her writing on heartache is almost unbearably affecting: “And you were at my wedding / I was broken / You were drunk / You coulda told me not to do it / I woulda run,” she confesses on “Parachute,” before the track gets thick with loud, heavy guitar.
5. “Cover the Mirrors”
Ben Kweller
The title of Kweller’s seventh album is an allusion to a practice common among people in mourning—Kweller’s sixteen-year-old son, Dorian, died in a car accident in 2023—and, while “Cover the Mirrors” is animated by the cognitive dissonance of grief (life is the same; life is not the same), it’s also an explosive, occasionally ecstatic rock record. Kweller corralled some notable guests, including MJ Lenderman, the Flaming Lips, Coconut Records, and, on the angry, cacophonous “Dollar Store”—maybe my favorite song of the year—Katie Crutchfield, of Waxahatchee. Kweller can sound heartsick and down bad (“Out of the blue I feel like I am walking through tunnels down to the door / Every day I’m scared more and more,” he sings on “Letter to Agony,” a track that channels Elliott Smith). But there’s a lightness in his voice, too—something sort of like hope.
4. “Lux”
Rosalía
“Lux,” Rosalía’s fourth album, is predictably ambitious: its orchestral arrangements are vast and idiosyncratic, its lyrics are sung in thirteen languages, and its spirit feels firmly existential. Rosalía poses increasingly impossible questions about destiny, God, and the meaning of everything; her vision of what global pop music can be (and do) comes across as cerebral and expansive. In some ways, her closest contemporary is Björk, who is featured on the thorny, operatic single “Berghain.” (The song features a haunting quoted refrain—“I’ll fuck you ’til you love me”—from Mike Tyson, of all people; the line somehow increases in desperation each time it’s deployed.) “Lux” is not Rosalía’s easiest record, or her most immediately comprehensible, but that’s also what makes it exciting: you’ll keep scrambling to catch up with it.
3. “Baby”
Dijon
Before the release of “Baby,” the singer and producer Dijon was best known for his collaborations with Justin Bieber, Mk.gee, and Bon Iver. “Baby” is easily the most compelling experimental R. & B. record since Frank Ocean’s “Blonde”—these are deep, haunted, romantic songs about devotion, sacrifice, and time. Dijon is an adventurous producer, and he refracts and rearranges sound in ways that feel both uncanny and warm. There’s little here that feels familiar, exactly, but this record is still comforting, humane, gorgeous.
2. “New Threats from the Soul”
Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band
Perhaps the biggest compliment I can give an album is to say that it gets richer and weirder the more that you listen to it. Ryan Davis, a singer and songwriter from Louisville, Kentucky, makes tuneful, funny music that’s vaguely rooted in country and indie-rock, but also leaves room for hard left turns, including unforeseeable breakbeats. (There are both musical and extramusical nods to the eccentricity of the late-nineties era of Drag City Records, including Bill Callahan, David Berman, and Palace Music; Davis self-released “New Threats from the Soul” on his own independent label, Sophomore Lounge.) But there’s something else going on in these songs that makes them feel revelatory, almost sacred. I think Davis is close to a once-in-a-generation lyricist, even (especially) when he’s being extra-wordy: “My skull was a dunk tank clown for some schoolyard lass to chastise / My ribcage was a looney bin built to keep my heart out of her hands,” he sings on “The Simple Joy.” It’s a song about wondering what the hell is going on, just in general. “I learned that time was not my friend nor my foe, more like one of the guys from work,” Davis drawls. “Life was safe if you could crack it or not, and I slapped the factory clock / With a rose in my teeth.”
1. “Getting Killed”
Geese
This (very) young Brooklyn band (very) occasionally sounds like other bands (Radiohead, Anohni and the Johnsons, Suicide), but mostly Geese sounds unlike anything I’ve ever heard before—in part because of the front man Cameron Winter’s tense, singular, supernatural warble, and in part because of the band’s penchant (and proclivity) for unpredictable squall. This was the record that made me feel the most hopeful about the future of popular music, all the ways in which the form can still be subverted and made dangerous. “Getting Killed” is feral and disobedient, but also pretty, unguarded, gripping—art for an artless era. ♦
