2025 was one of the most electric years in music I’ve experienced in a long time. Let’s focus on that for a bit instead of basically everything else that happened in 2025. Here’s some of my favorite stuff that was released this year.
Here’s the whole playlist if you want to listen along:
https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/eoy-25/pl.u-e98lDEjfPd3198
https://music.apple.com/us/album/blade-bird/1779808073?i=1779808096
I knew when this album was announced—in 2024—that it would be the album of the year. It was. An achingly beautiful album, constructed with breathtaking intricacy and compositional prowess. It represents the sharpening and elevation of the vision Oklou has been crafting for years now, and it delivers on the promise of her earlier work. Truly, I am grateful to be alive to experience music like this.
https://music.apple.com/us/album/rage/1791458466?i=1791458467
No I don’t have the faintest clue what he’s saying. But the chemistry between Realo and producer notinbed transcends the language barrier. Pure, unfiltered energy.
Honorable mention to notinbed’s ‘emotional behaviour 2’, which almost made this list.
https://music.apple.com/us/album/let-me/1798265319?i=1798266020
Any distinctions you might try to make about Djrum’s work are automatically meaningless. What is this album? Who gives a shit? Unbelievably well-crafted, dizzying in its range, heady but sumptuous, challenging but never off-putting. It’s a complete, self-contained world. Very few can pull off what’s achieved here. Even fewer can make an 11 minute instrumental track that keeps you locked in for its full running length. Djrum has made like ten of those.
https://music.apple.com/us/album/believe/1790907805?i=1790907811
Indie music generally is a tough sell for me nowadays, but I think it’s Jane Remover’s hyper-contemporary sensibility that gives their guitar-forward side project so much sticking power. ‘Ghostholding’ checks the required boxes to pass as an indie album. But its use of compression and distortion, its sweeping ambient sound design bedrock, and Jane’s rap-indebted inflections imbue it with energy and idiosyncracy that’s increasingly hard to find in the genre.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt9Yod0KgsM&pp=ygUMZXNkZWVraWQgNWFt
You know those records where you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when you heard them for the first time?