The 40 Best Albums of 2025 So Far
The year is halfway over, and these releases have left the biggest impressions on us.
Every June, the Paste Music crew tallies up the best albums of the year so far. It’s a great way to present our favorites to you, but also to each other. This list is a snapshot of our favorite LPs that came out between January 1 and June 6, and our year-end ranking will likely look much different. We’re alphabetizing this installment, and come December we’ll settle the score numerically like always. But let us know in the comments which release has been your favorite, and tell us which LPs should be on our radar for the next six months. Now, without further ado, here are our picks for the 40 best albums of 2025 so far.
Backxwash: Only Dust Remains
On Only Dust Remains, Ashanti Mutinta conjures everything from the meta-existentialism of Moor Mother, to the prog-rap of Young Fathers, digital intricacies of clipping., and Yeezus levels of damp, brash Auto-Tune. The perspective repeatedly switches between micro and macro, as Backxwash, ever the intergenerational, socio-political magician in rap, casts a spell on Black trans life through gothic, scorched-earth overtures, unpredictable pop tangents and prompt lyrical critiques of global corruption and genocide. Vicious lead single “Wake Up” boils for seven minutes and lends itself to the testimonies of trauma. Loud, swirling and complex samples collapse into a terrifying overture, where Mutinta shouting “WAKE THE FUCK UP!” over and over becomes an instrument added into the mess. “9th Heaven” is an electric squash of anxiety, as Backxwash’s flow stretches around a crying vocal sample. She reckons with labor, drugs and purpose. Piano notes twirl like pirouettes, as she summons a “drummer coming,” programming beats into a Biblical ecstasy evoked through mentions of the archangel Gabriel and Adam eating the apple. On “History of Violence,” she condemns the world’s leaders using freedom as a bartering chip; she recalls videos of dying Palestinian children and reckons with what power fuels a slaughtering of innocent children: “These fuckers gonna say it’s all about peace. Check the stats, motherfucker, it’s all about greed.” Only Dust Remains is Backxwash’s most conventional album yet, but its resistance and expansiveness are never sacrificed. These songs are caustic, knotty monoliths, and Mutinta bedecks her sacrifices with challenging, orchestrated resignations; the occultic, unsettled energy of her previous releases gets substituted with potent electronic abstraction. —Matt Mitchell [Ugly Hag]
Bad Bunny: DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS
Benito Martínez Ocasio—AKA Bad Bunny—thrives best when the album’s focus is close to his heart. After his 2023 record nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana, I worried that the Puerto Rican trap star had been lost to Hollywood. He was dating a Jenner sister and making songs about fame, losing his relatable touch. But with DeBí TiRAR MáS FOToS, we get to know the real Benito: the one who declared as a kid that he was a “salsero” before becoming enamored with reggaeton. He’s a wistful and sensitive soul who acknowledges that with his new life as a megastar comes some sacrifices, such as losing his longtime partner, and is learning to not lose touch with the things that truly matter. Released on the eve of Three Kings Day, DeBí TiRAR MáS FOToS feels like stepping into a Puerto Rican holiday party, one with salsa (“BAILE INoLVIDABLE”), pleneros (“CAFé CON RON”), and some “PiToRRO DE COCO” to celebrate. It’s a lively celebration of boricua culture and one that reminds us not to take it for granted, with Martínez Ocasio warning that with wealthy Americans moving into our island for a tax break, we’re being priced out and forced to move elsewhere, diminishing what turns Puerto Rico into the isla del encanto. —Tatiana Tenreyro [Rimas]
Benjamin Booker: LOWER
Few artists in recent memory have re-invented themselves like Benjamin Booker has on LOWER, an album that will shock its audience. On “SAME KIND OF LONELY,” an audio sample of a school shooting dissolves into a clip of his daughter cooing. The push and pull of violence of LOWER begins to simmer into a kiss amid the “bones and rotting flesh” of your slow expiration on “SLOW DANCE IN A GAY BAR.” “I just want someone to see me,” Booker croons in a twilight-dim hush. “I am beginning to see the beauty all around me.” It’s a swell of clarity on an album full of questions. It’s wounded and aching. A guitar string gets plucked through tender, Kenny Segal-made beats. A keyboard twinkles like a dainty sunrise. Even at its most sacred, LOWER is a challenge. Through the thrums of razor-blade guitars and a dense drumbeat you can feel deep in your lungs during “BLACK OPPS,” Booker insists that “they’ll kill you while you sleep.” There’s a sweetness to “POMPEII STATUES” masking a sinister underglow of swirling, burning caustic drones. The acoustic “REBECCA LATIMER FELTON TAKES A BBC” is named after the first woman and last slave owner to serve in the United States Senate (she was also only a senator for one day) and riffs on self-flagellation, pleasure and racism (“You watched me from the porch and touched yourself, didn’t you? The pain you must have felt watching me go home at night to love, real love”) and a diss that’ll rattle your insides (“Those eyes, those thighs, were you never much to see? Tired eyes and skin like concrete, she could melt the ice caps with that beautiful smile”). LOWER can make for a maddening listen. It is, all at once, full of air yet claustrophobic. The songs often—and in colorful ways—illustrate breaking points. They’re intimate and brutal, juxtaposing delicacy with wretched banalities. —Matt Mitchell [Fire Next Time]
Read: “Benjamin Booker, Beyond Recognition”
billy woods: GOLLIWOG
Psychodrama is nothing new to a Brooklynite whose decades-long career is defined by records steeped in anxious atmospherics, but rarely has that dread sounded so acute. GOLLIWOG’s myriad producers, many of whom are previous contributors to billy woods’ catalogue, color-grade the MC’s murky tableaus. Sometimes, they fabricate the entire set. On “STAR87,” Conductor Williams pairs tinny boom-bap with quivering violins, errant bass, and the unceasing ring of landlines. (“They wanna know where the bodies is hid,” woods’ narrator reveals eventually, as if it would ever help.) woods opens “Waterproof Mascara” with a portrait of a weeping mother before shifting subject but Preservation keeps that weeping in the foreground, looping incessantly like a dark splinter lodged in the heart. The crackle of a palpitating digital heartbeat thrums underneath al.divino’s introductory verse on “Maquiladoras” until the first gunshot is fired, after which a heartbreaking piano chord punctuates the demarcated timeline. In lesser hands, GOLLIWOG might read too overwhelming or leaden to be enjoyable, but in the same vein as 2023’s patchwork Maps, woods makes plenty of room for crucial doses of levity. Modern existential nightmares receive an absurdity apropos to their context (“Uncanny valley AI hit him with the hesi screaming ‘Carrie,’” cracks woods on “Corinthians”); dream and nightmare logic allows for a surprise punchline (“I time-traveled and still picked Darko Miličić,” on “Cold Sweat”); the twisted, MF DOOM-honoring “Misery” is a lascivious, evocative outlier; dark comedy naturally abounds on a particularly gutting anecdote in “Lead Paint Test” (“Father put her out her misery on the kitchen floor / Mom said, ‘Be proud of her, she made it home’”). It’s woods being woods. Even when the subject is heavy, his pen can’t help but carve a devilish grin. —Rob Moura [Backwoodz Studioz]
caroline: caroline 2
Three years after releasing their eponymous debut album, caroline tighten their sound while simultaneously giving it more room to breathe. Where the eight-piece’s first record was more meandering—recorded and pieced together from improvisations with little foresight—caroline 2 feels deliberate and controlled, with scattered eruptions set against eerily stripped-down vocals. It’s an exercise in restraint, knowing exactly when to detonate for maximum effect. The record opens with a jolt, the piercing “Total euphoria” building from a single electric guitar into a scattered, rhythmically mismatched round of two guitars and drums. It’s the most overtly post-rock moment, highlighting the group’s affinity for the incongruent. caroline 2 also features bolder production choices, with the group leaning into more electronic textures (like the oscillating synth that hums underneath the chaos of “Total euphoria,” the flanging, autotuned vocals at the midpoint of “U R UR ONLY ACHING”). These elements never overwhelm the raw instrumentation, instead enhancing it. The electronic flourishes help the bright, Caroline Polachek-featuring “Tell me I never knew that” slot in seamlessly, with her signature vocal effects echoing through the mix. caroline 2 is such a visceral listening experience because you never know what’s going to come your way next. Songs often switch course midway, unraveling into hypnotic rounds (“Coldplay cover”). Vocals drift in from a far-off corner (“Two riders down”) just as often as they sit squarely in your headphones (“Song 2”). Fragmented, in-the-moment lyrics complete the circle, nodding to the improvisational spirit that still drives their work. The blend of electronic and analog reaches its peak on the closer “Beautiful ending,” where clarinets and violins swirl around walls of distortion, feedback, and tightly layered Auto-Tuned vocal harmonies that flicker in and out of earshot. —Cassidy Sollazzo [Rough Trade]
Colin Miller: Losin’
Colin Miller makes the kind of music you already know the words to on a first listen. At least that’s how I felt when the weeping guitars went subterranean during “Birdhouse” and I suddenly began singing “If I stay here, I will die in silence here” along with him. The multi-instrumentalist’s new LP, Losin’, is yet another example of a Tar Heel entering Drop of Sun Studios and exiting with the best album of their career. Losin’ is a filled-out upgrade from the Haw Creek material, and Miller has bettered himself in all pertinent areas—singing, writing, playing, the whole enchilada. “Porchlight,” which swerves and aches from Xandy Chelmis’ pedal steel, is a lost-in-translation, ships-in-the-night tale of heartache. But our narrator isn’t some hangdog sap. He might be waiting up for an old flame back home, but someone in Beaumont, Texas is just as sweet on him. MJ Lenderman swaps roles with Miller and steps behind the drum kit, cutting loose on a snare rattling like a box of bang snaps. “Porchlight” is a track with harmonies that could roar in 105.5: The Outlaw’s daily rotation, and “Darlin’, you know you’re still my #1 tube-top angel” may very well go down as the lyric of the year. In vignettes of colorful and country-fried bedroom-folk, Miller tames his small-life suffering with a rural language spoken in the pitch-black of maudlin adulthood (“It’s a good day at the wreckyard, it’s a bad day for my heart”). A track like “Cadillac” sounds effortlessly timeless, arranged with renders of NASCAR crashes, tinted windows, toothy laughs, and routines of “suckin’ down coffee, Pall Malls, and oxygen.” Micro and macro blame encroaches like a summer hot spell, but you can find sketches of King’s beloved image in the foibles, as Miller sings “there goes all my hope for you” and his vocals stack in twos, maybe threes before locking into Lenderman’s guitar leads—lines blackened with the right amount of sludge. —Matt Mitchell [Mtn Laurel Recordings]
Deafheaven: Lonely People With Power
Lonely People With Power is Deafheaven’s most confident and direct set of songs yet, combining everything the band does best and more. Bands grow and evolve, and if you’re lucky enough to be doing this for 15 years, you’ll have naturally learned some lessons along the way. While Infinite Granite may not be the consensus pick for Deafheaven’s best album, it might be their most important, since it became a true launch point for the band’s unwillingness to settle. Lonely People With Power sees them flexing their muscles in a way they haven’t since their run from Roads to Judah through New Bermuda, and Justin Meldel-Johnsen’s bombastic production brings a newness to an already familiar volume. There are no punches pulled on these songs, no Oasis-like breakdowns or piano-driven interludes. Clarke’s screaming is also very much back and, aside from the scaled-back trio of “Incidentals” interludes—two of which feature Boy Harsher’s Jae Matthews and Interpol’s Paul Banks—Lonely People is a relentless onslaught of metal. For 15 years, the band has never settled, always pushing the boundaries of what their music is capable of. What started out as a black metal project between George Clarke and Kerry McCoy has matured into something way beyond just a simplistic genre classification. Deafheaven have totally entered into a league of their own, and Lonely People With Power is their legacy. —Jeff Yerger [Roadrunner]
Read: “Deafheaven Find Joy in the Chaos”
Dutch Interior: Moneyball
While Dutch Interior’s two previous albums—2021’s Kindergarten and 2023’s Blinded By Fame—were low-stakes and lo-fi affairs, Moneyball is more intentional. On their Fat Possum debut, the band embraces their namesake, reinterpreting past forms in a different light. There’s the Merle Haggard-esque shuffle of “Sweet Time,” (which includes an interpretation of the Allman Brothers Band’s “Jessica”); the ‘70s FM chug of “Sandcastle Molds”; the Harvest Neil Young warmth on “Wood Knot.” This is old-sounding music made by a group that’s done their reading and understands its musical heritage. Sure, Moneyball relies on old tricks, but Dutch Interior gives them new life. When the group finally turns the amplifiers up for the riff on “Fourth Street,” it’s an earned release. The song is named after their Long Beach neighborhood where they recorded Kindergarten. It’s the thesis to Moneyball’s endearing humanism: an ode to the friendships that make up the band and hold it all down. Despite the members’ varying songwriting approaches, Moneyball never loses the core identity of Dutch Interior. While it helps that the five vocalists all sound relatively similar, the real identity of the band comes from the community of the musicians themselves. It’s in the way that their personalities balance each other out: country twang alongside eerie folk, electric riff-rock next to delicate acoustic guitar. It’s the sounds of their friendships baked into the songs: natural, comfortable, and communal coexistence. That’s what makes Moneyball greater than the sum of its parts. —Andy Steiner [Fat Possum]
Last year, we named Ela Minus’ 2020 album, acts of rebellion, as one of the best debuts of the decade so far. Cut to now, and the Colombian electronic musician has released her long-awaited follow-up, the impossibly great DÍA. Mixed by Marta Salogni and mastered by Heba Kadry, it’s an LP full of big-budget, catchy dance tracks—namely “Broken,” “Upwards,” and “QQQQ.” But there are ambient stretches within as well, including “Combat,” a song that has stuck with me since I first heard it. If acts of rebellion established Minus as a subversive, vital artist bridging the gap between New Order and Aphex Twin, then DÍA solidifies that point even further. The state of electronica as we know it is fuller because Ela Minus is making music within it. DÍA is unforgettable. —Matt Mitchell [Domino] 
Sounds Like… is as grand an upgrade that any ruckus-throwing batch of troublemakers like Florry could make. The sludgy accoutrements of “Waiting Around to Provide”—which hocks a phrase from 
The third record from art-pop auteur FKA twigs, EUSEXUA, is a tour-de-force odyssey through the club and back, inspired by Prague techno raves while on location shooting last year’s remake of The Crow. An ambitious upscale from her last two full-lengths, EUSEXUA sees twigs assuredly grabbing her audience’s attention and keeping it with steely confidence. Pulling together various collaborators, from Eartheater and Koreless to North West and Dylan Brady, twigs elevates herself to new heights and remakes pop (once again) into her own idiosyncratic vision. Like she does in the title track’s 
Bookended by collapse, Big Ugly is a mausoleum for small Southern bygones, wrought in close detail by Aaron Dowdy: torn-down small towns where heaven seemed in-reach, a beer-fisted past self with nothing else to hold, the cans and cigarettes that lined a shabby old convenience store’s shelves. In answering questions of Southern living, it raises an age-old, universal query: What does it mean to love people and places once they’ve become part of history, one that hasn’t quite passed? The album’s title derives from a West Virginian area based around a Guyandotte River tributary named for the crooked, “Big Ugly” creek rushing through it. A hastily assembled Internet guide to Appalachian West Virginian communities introduces Big Ugly as “one of those place names newspaper columnists grab on a slow day,” but Dowdy saw more than a conspicuous headline in the nickname—the evocative, oddly affectionate word pairing captured the essence of the songs he’d been writing: unfiltered snapshots of hardscrabble Southern living zoomed in on the people and places. Fleshed out by a full band and esteemed guest players, Dowdy’s final compositions are, indeed, big. They aren’t always pretty, per se (although exquisite fiddle pulls and glossy keys attenuate some of the denser offerings, to an unearthly, beautiful effect), but unabated love seeps from every cranny of even the gnarliest, craggiest constructions, deluging every corner of the heart. Each song is a microcosm of its own, and the anecdotes within each, if banal, are so intensely vivid that it’s challenging to imagine them having solely transpired on paper—you can almost trace the steps of every character, deepening their footprints as you meander the dirt roads winding across 11 chapters. —Anna Pichler [Dear Life Records] 
One of the greatest feats of songwriting—of any writing, really—is arranging words into combinations that no one else has ever constructed before. Contrarily, there’s also a challenge in taking a phrase or expression that’s been echoed a million times, and using it in a way that forces the audience to really think about these familiar words. The latter is where a record like Phonetics On and On, the sophomore effort from formerly-Chicago-now-New-York-based rock band Horsegirl, thrives. As its title suggests, Phonetics is a record closely concerned with the shape and texture of each sound. The rumble of Gigi Reece’s drums ushers in the call-and-response hook of opener “Where’d You Go,” before the song spins out into a wiry, “Heroin”-reminiscent guitar outro, while more downtempo tracks like “Rock City” and “Julie” recall the eerie simmer of The Velvet Underground & Nico’s most haunting slow-marches. Similarly to the Velvet Underground’s ever-influential debut, the Cate Le Bon-produced Phonetics has an affinity for stretching the distance between instruments and hypnotically fixating on a single musical element (akin to the punishing sheen of the guitar chords on “Venus In Furs,” or the dirgelike chimes parading through “All Tomorrow’s Parties”). Closer “I Can’t Stand To See You” is Horsegirl’s “After Hours,” a mellow singalong that begins with Nora Cheng extending an invitation: “Do you want to go home now? / The night’s almost through / Let’s sit on the floor now / And talk, me and you.” A copy of Lou Reed’s classic solo album Transformer lurks in the background of the “Switch Over” music video as a piece of blink-and-you-miss-it set dressing. So many of Phonetics’ song structures revolve around taking something that is, at face value, simple or unremarkable, and repeating it until all association has been wrung out. It’s the same effect as flipping a lightswitch on and off, opening and closing the same door over and over again, or getting a single word or phrase so stuck in your head that a few minutes of letting it float around in there turns it to gibberish. —Grace Robins-Somerville [Matador]
It turns out you can never truly go back home; on Luminescent Creatures, Ichiko Aoba doubles down on the grandeur with a new album that’s even more accessible, and perhaps even more thematically cohesive than its direct predecessor. The link is so direct, in fact, that it shares its title with the final song of Windswept Adan. Their settings are also contiguous—both are filled with portrayals of islands and oceans, hills and towers, human inhabitants and superhuman entities. But where Adan’s opener, the murky pump-organ-led “Prologue,” rolled in slow as fog, Luminescent Creatures’ “COLORATURA” gives way almost immediately to Umebayashi’s cascading keys, Junichiro Taku’s skyward flute trills and Aoba’s ethereal breathwork. The song prefaces an altogether lighter-hued, but no less absorbing album of songs inspired by the geographical splendor of the Ryukyu Archipelago south of Japan’s mainland. Adan’s forests and fog come across as claustrophobic compared to Luminescent Creatures’ open air and sky. Throughout, Aoba works in the granular, aurally ornamenting her melodies in ways made striking from the silence that surrounds them. Take “mazamun,” named for an impish rain spirit of Aoba’s creation, and the sounds that accompany the close-mic’ed roll of her fingers on the keyboard; in the creak of the stool and the pressure on the keys, she conjures post-storm raindrops on foliage. Compare that to the way the piano on subsequent track “tower” seems to glide on air, and how, amid Aoba watching the world pass from afar, it feels fittingly isolated from reality. These tiny little touches aren’t just decoration; they are the spiritual center of the record. Like a pop-up book, they add a crucial dimension to Aoba’s otherwise gorgeous melodies. —Rob Moura [Psychic Hotline]
Revengeseekerz is the most straight-forward Jane Remover release yet, and sort of a combination of their poppy 2024 singles and Ghostholding, though this record is lighter on the rock part. For 12 songs, Jane is a self-referential tornado rummaging around in a maximalist ether, embellishing micro-genres and splitting continuums into their own playground of crushing techno, EDM, and blazing hyperpop. The intervals of stillness that balmed Census Designated have vanished, as Jane stacks diss upon diss, vaunting through rap templates that have been submerged beneath mayhemic, static-walled cyphers. “There’s two of me, I’m cloning out,” they bawl on “TWICE REMOVED.” “Dead man flexing, show some ass now.” Revengeseekerz is not just a horizon of touch or an appetite for wrongdoing, but a portal. From the haunted “Of course you can touch my body” anaphora in “angels in camo” to the “Bitches dick suck then they go and bite my sound” sneak in “Dreamflasher,” Jane presents a complicated, scornful world. These songs contradict themselves, peddling a fast living while the bodies in motion ache to settle. “Dreamflasher” is a skeleton key for Jane Remover, a condemnation of success in the sprawl of good dick and the messes we make when the lights go down. Fame is irrelevant if there’s no one praying on your name back home; In their cybernated mysticism, Jane sings, “Baby tell me what’s the point of preaching to the choir if I can’t see you in the crowd.” “TURN UP OR DIE” jerks and tremors like edits in a grindhouse cut-scene, dropping gauzy, compressed melodies into a melange of chipped and shredded circuitry. “Give dead bitches proper sendoff,” Jane raps, before the song crescendos into the best beat drop of 2025 so far. Out of a pocket of futuristic, siren synths awakens a motto: “Make some noise, do it live, save the file, do or die.” The Jane Remover we hear on Revengeseekerz is flawed and vulnerable, even in the perfect, muted melee of their greatest curation yet. This music hemorrhages with pleasure and regret, yet it aches just to love. Fast living, pop stardom, fandoms, changing cities—it’s all a gas and it all unravels. Second guesses come aplenty; drugs help put the room back in color. The stylistic choices of “TWICE REMOVED,” “angels in camo,” “TURN UP OR DIE,” and “JRJRJR” might give you whiplash, but Jane Remover’s poetry is the big door prize that awaits you. “I never felt this beautiful and gifted, forgive me if I feel myself tonight,” Jane sings, winking at their habit of reinvention. —Matt Mitchell [deadAir]
There’s been much talk about this album being “baroque” in its sound, but I’d argue that of any artistic movement, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is more rococo in its flowery effusiveness—just listen to the charmingly childish hoot of the recorder over angelically plucked strings on opener “Here Is Someone.” Even in the album’s darker moments, it reminds one more of the faded, haunted beauty of an intricately decorated rococo drawing room gone to seed than the heavy contrast and bombast of the Baroque. “Here Is Someone” serves as an overture of sorts, both thanks to the luscious abundance of strings and the fact that it lays out the album’s central theme: her own guilt over wanting to pull back from the overwhelming reality of fame. “Quietly dreaming of / Slower days but I don’t want to / Let you down we’ve come so far / Can you see a life where we leave this behind?” she sings, and you can almost see her addressing her bandmates as she does so. This track also boasts one of her best lyrics to date due to its heart-wrenching simplicity: “Life is sad but here is someone.” Beyond the symbolism of the songwriting and the inherent richness of the lyrics, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is one of Japanese Breakfast’s most self-referential works to date—both within the album itself, and Michelle Zauner’s catalog at large. Self-referential creations can often feel navel-gazey, but in this case, they’re more than a gimmicky collection of Easter eggs; these are connected moments that enrich the meaning behind songs and join them together into a cohesive body of work. —Clare Martin [Dead Oceans]
When Lady Gaga says that Mayhem is a “pop album,” she’s using that description loosely. It’s not a sibling of The Fame, or Born This Way, or Chromatica—even though all of those titles have mothered Mayhem into existence. Gaga, who is knocking on the doorstep of 40, has finally drawn from her greatest wellspring of inspiration, be it the chaos of counterculture punk, the panging, crushing metallic walls of Nine Inch Nails, Prince’s output with the New Power Generation or, unequivocally, David Bowie’s discography, namely Fame. She returns to the spaces of Chromatica, pulling from boogie and French house; she restores the sleazy, crooked divinity of The Fame with a potent dose of sex, power and resistance. “Vanish Into You” is her best song since “Judas”; “Zombieboy” welds a stupefying, Chic-like, four-on-the-floor rhythm with a head-splitting, angular guitar stroke; “How Bad Do U Want Me” summons the synths of 
Lifeguard’s story sounds straight out of a coming-of-age film. Before graduating high school, the trio got signed to storied indie label Matador, following word-of-mouth success in their local Chicago scene. Thriving from a young age isn’t that surprising anymore. Artists like 
Lonnie Holley, now 75, takes the liberation of Oh Me Oh My and amplifies it into rhythmic, widescreen boldness on Tonky, a record titled after a childhood nickname—and, perhaps, not just a nod to an innocence no longer reachable but Holley’s tribute to a part of himself that was nearly erased. Jackknife Lee returns here, bringing his thickset production and a cinematic gloss with him, and we get a litany of guest stars. Mary Lattimore’s gossamery harp colors Holley’s thesis statement on “Life”: “Life is a reason for us to love / Go to a depth of love that is greater than any love that ever existed within you”; Open Mike Eagle delivers a “Black fist to North Star” verse on “The Same Stars,” which also features the words of Birmingham sculptor Joe Minter; billy woods outros the Mount Meigs-shaped epitaph of “I Looked Over My Shoulder”; Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock funnels a metallic pulse into the bedrock of “What’s Going On?” Tonky, like all of Holley’s albums, is poetry set in motion through fluid, emotional and inventive music composed by Lee. His language is rhythmic and his stories are concentrated, even as they span centuries. Here, Holley is the oral storyteller and the archivist, logging the suffering and abuse that first touched his forefathers and foremothers and trickled down into his own childhood decades and decades later. His language is generous and all-encompassing, even if many of the men and women he sings about, be it those ghosts he knew in Mount Meigs, or the ancestors he has known but not yet met, are gone. And, in days beyond this one, Holley’s generation will leave us, too. So who will continue to tell the stories of those lost in the shuffle of history’s nameless survival? Tonky suggests that it will be Holley’s collaborators, kinfolk and strangers—his progeny near and far, who recite his songs like signposts bound by both blood and water and map what suffering lingers in the vernacular of humanity itself. They will say the names. The forgotten will always hold their shape. —Matt Mitchell [Jagjaguwar]
If there’s an album with an 8-minute song on it, I’m locked in. Now, if there’s an 8-song album with five 8-minute songs on it? That’s dangerous. But the debut album of Los Thuthanaka—the sibling duo of Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton—is a digital collage that never peters out. Full of DJ tags, vocal samples, bit-crushed synths, experimental renditions of Bolivian music, kullawada, dance-punk, and plunderphonics, “Apnaqkaya Titi,” “Awila,” “Ipi Saxra,” and “Q’iwsanakax Utjxiwa” are like chapters more than they are songs. The siblings dedicated their debut to Chuqi Chinchay, an Aymara, “staff god” deity painted “all the colors” and said to be a guardian to queer people, and Los Thuthanaka is an album for anyone who’s romantic about making music. You can hear every piece rattle and shake, in the magnificence of elementalism. Keytars, videogame-like sound effects, chanty language shaded by thick curtains of noise, bombo italaque, smaplers, and the juxtaposition between ancestral callbacks and futurism color this time-traveling instrument of queer resitance. Every second burns heavily; every second feels impossibly present within you. —Matt Mitchell [Self-Released]
Lucy Liyou’s newest album, Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name, is many things: spare ambient pop, diaristic soul-bearing, experimental sound collage. But perhaps most significantly, this unexpectedly direct record from Liyou finds the Los Angeles–based musician taking an altogether different approach to what documentation looks like, and the effect it can yield. Gone are the days of grounded familial scenes narrated with the precision of stage direction or diary entries; now, emotions rather than actions are rendered the sharpest. Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name has no shortage of emotionally intense spells in its relatively short span, from “Arrested” swelling into pleas of “please learn to love what I am now,” to the refrain of “Jokes About Marriage” yearning for commitment in face of crushing distance. It’s far more spacious than anything Liyou has made before—unafraid to leave the negative space beyond her piano and voice fully exposed—but it carries a clarity of sentiment that feels as urgent and passionate as ever. For as murky as any scenic details may be, the emotions Liyou sings about are anything but. When Liyou sings about love and heartbreak, desire and melancholy, you feel it as sharp as a blade, slowly digging the wound a little wider with each new motion. —Natalie Marlin [Orange Milk]
Magic, Alive! is McKinley Dixon’s fifth album, and it’s also the biggest risk he’s taken yet—a collection of tracks always flirting with overproduction and clutter. The music is brimming with orchestration; it’s not “everything but the kitchen sink,” but “everything and the kitchen table.” Dixon isn’t afraid to add more voices and hands into his musical soup, and each song is an elixir of jazz-rap, with pockets layered in chain-link grandeur. Every chapter of Magic, Alive! is bigger than him, yet his verses focus on the micro with historical hip-hop citations, literary allusions, and horror films metabolized into heady sonic palettes. Like the illustrations he animates in his spare time, the rarely-pedantic Dixon meticulously sketches expressions of people he both knows and imagines. His lyrical fascinations with mythology are decorated in rare and endangered fits of orchestral patterns; the noisy percussion, mechanical poetry, and blood-boiling strings haunt the magic Dixon is chasing in the epilogue of Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?’s block-bending cynicism but never smear it. As he raps on “Listen Gentle”: “It’s tragic, trying to keep my kindness in my steps with lightning in my eyes.” Dixon sinks his teeth into the Magic, Alive! story on “We’re Outside, Rejoice!,” as he summons a concrete pastoral again but doesn’t wear out its meaning. There are far too many front doors still unopened on his turf to stop painting the neighborhood just yet. A tint of blue washes over the brotherhood at the song’s core: “I love laying with you here in the grass, feels like it was just us in the worlds that passed.” Dixon speaks in Toni Morrison titles while seeking redemption and clinging to memories the bodies around him have sung into life. “My face inhales the sun, grab your hand with no plan then we run!” Magic, Alive! is a conceptual, allegorical achievement—a story of three young kids whose friend passes away, the monuments they build in his memory, and the lives they’d kill themselves to restore. —Matt Mitchell [City Slang]
In October 2024, MIKE followed up his March record with Tony Seltzer, Pinball, with the very good and hazy stream-of-conscious track “Pieces of a Dream,” a hazy stream of consciousness rap with an immaculate vibe that’s matched effortlessly by its “I ain’t sober yet, all this smoke finna break my lungs” line. MIKE knows how to set a scene, and the way his flow harnesses an energy of its own is nothing short of miraculous and graceful—you can’t help but dissolve, too. “Could’ve broke from the way we were, I don’t know if you could save me, love,” he raps. “Get cold and wet, God know that the rain ain’t done.” Cut to the end of November, and the prolific rapper cast an even wider net across his next chapter, releasing the incredibly sublime new single “You’re the Only One Watching.” The song came as a part of his new album, Showbiz!, which MIKE self-produced under his dj blackpower alias. The backbeat in “You’re the Only One Watching” is exactly what you’d expect—woozy and soulful, paired with a slow-burn flow from MIKE that unfurls beneath a stretched-out, pitched-up vocal sample. It’s a splendid, hypnotic two-minute trip—an obvious nod to MIKE’s all-caps hero, MF DOOM, just as a Dilla comparison is in order for the noise of “Burning House.” “Spun Out” calls to mind the sounds of Memphis rap before unfurling in a techno whirlwind, while visions of boogie bands and gospel choirs bring a level of spirituality to Showbiz!’s experimental vibrancy. This material, yet another piece of MIKE’s stable and curious discography, is his strongest effort to date. —Matt Mitchell [10k]
I grew up watching Miley Cyrus on Disney Channel; I was a teenager when she set out on that run of solo albums that included the very good Bangerz and its very bad psychedelic follow-up, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz. What she’s done in the 10 years since has been unpredictable, to say the least, but I’m glad I’ve been witness to the journey. She’s made stops in country, glam rock, and industry pop, picking up two Grammy Awards in the process. And say what you will about how overplayed “Flowers” was two years ago, but Miley has proved that she’s incapable of staying in one genre lane for longer than an album cycle. And I appreciate that about her artistry, even if the results are sometimes less than great. Luckily, Something Beautiful is the greatest LP effort of her career, indicated by its four singles—which span the depths of jazz, psych-pop, industrial rock, and R&B—are any indication. “Prelude” features writing from 
It’s clear that Model/Actriz delight in contrasts, more evident than ever on tracks like the blown-out, electroclash-colored “Poppy” (complete with a piercing, pop-diva high note from vocalist Cole Haden) and the aptly-named “Diva,” where Haden croaks out “I’m such a fucking biiiiitch, girl, you don’t even know” over a The Fragile-pitched industrial wail. We hear the group having more fun than ever, twirling through both the heaviest (“Ring Road”’s two-minute, full-on onslaught of distortion) and gentlest moments (“Acid Rain”’s folksy tribute to hummingbirds and Haden’s grandmother) in their brief but muscular catalog. As Pirouette comes to a close with perhaps its most straightforward track—the melodic, post-rock flavored “Baton”—not only have the roiling distortion and pounding grooves tamed into a lusher string arrangement, but Haden’s voice too has softened, thanks to producer Seth Manchester’s masterful placement of the melody at the foreground of the mix. As Haden runs, gracefully, across the middle of his register, the beat picks up slightly and starts to grind. It’s clear we aren’t just hearing a band come to some abstract consciousness on their sophomore effort. Rather, here is a group with so much command over their sound that they can unravel and retwist it at every angle on every track, or surrender with a campy, sludgy, and ever-twirling grace. It’s a perfect source. —Madelyn Dawson [True Panther/Dirty Hit] 
Well, that was the weirdest elevator ride we’ve been on in quite a while. By “that,” we’re referring to Hotel Paradiso, the latest effort by Brooklyn-based ambient artist Moon Mullins. Upon pressing play on “Lobby Music,” you’re immediately transported to a dimly-lit pocket of a sleazy hostel and served up a way-too-tall cocktail (or maybe something a little more mind-altering). It feels a little bit sinister, a little bit seductive: swirls of synth intertwine like legs locking in a surreal tango, while the ominous beat sounds like it’s been submerged underwater, or crushed beneath a weighted blanket. Call it what you want, but “Lobby Music” surely isn’t just background music—Mullins possesses the ability to tell stories without verbal language, channeling imagistic, dynamic narratives into his sinewy melodies and visceral production and bridging the gap between Angelo Badalamenti and the Caretaker. “Sandpearl” is a song you can listen to for the rest of your life. Before you check into the Hotel Paradiso, you ought to stay in “Sandpearl” for a while. The song dares to enchant with its dapper, string-wielding, cowboy-calling, out-of-time fantasy. And who better to call upon for such a delightfully heroic and sun-dappled soundtrack than Molly Lewis, the Australian whistler whose debut album On the Lips was so good it landed on our year-end list in 2024, alongside the likes of Kim Deal, Friko, and English Teacher? Lewis’ talents are apt for the very same noir lounges and smokey casino rooms that linger in the backdrop of Hotel Paradiso. What falls from her lips during “Sandpearl” curls like a theremin. It’s been a minute since instrumental music sounded this slick. You can practically taste the gin. —Anna Pichler & Matt Mitchell [Ruination Records] 
Natalia Lafourcade has built one of the strongest catalogues of the last 20 years, rewarded with four Grammy Awards in the last nine alone. Her work has moved through genre romances, widening through the tropics of pop, bossa nova, cumbia, free jazz, salsa, and Latin rock. On Cancionera, Lafourcade reunites with Adan Jodorowsky, who produced her last album, De Todas las Flores, in 2022. The result is a trove of historical, sentimental, and spiritual music—songs recorded in one take that blur the line between the fabled and forthright. Cancionera, which translates to “songbook,” lives up to its title, displaying organic, lovelorn, and complex restraint across chapters oscillating between the traditional and the experimental. The rumba tones of “El Palomo y La Negra,” or the delicate balldary in “Mascaritas de Cristal,” or the flamenco synergy of the Israel Fernández-assisted “Amor Clandestino,” or Lafourcade’s duet with El David Aguilar on “Como Quisiera Quererte.” The resonance of these songs transcends any language barrier; you can hear the soul unfurl in its perfection, in Hermanos Gutiérrez’s lap steel on “Luna Creciente,” and in the mystifying field trappings of “Lágrimas Cancioneras.” —Matt Mitchell [Sony Mexico] 
Nothing on You Are Always On My Mind fits together perfectly. Assemblages of generic string loops and prominent drum production mix with a litany of samples and entrancing vocals, all slightly out-of-step with each other. It feels like musical Jenga, where if any one feature slips too far behind, the entire structure could crumble. There’s a Tirzah-like murkiness crossed with the emotional vocabulary of more eaze. Even textural differences feel unnerving: “no good” balances attention-yanking drums with legato string passages, and each pointed drum hit feels just ahead of any change in the strings. Skittish electronics dart overhead, following their own rules, as Lia Ouyang Rusli sighs, “Anyone can see / I’m no good for you.” She represents a dialogue between her trans self and a prior self, riddled with put-downs designed to suppress. It feels like water pressing against a dam, chipping away at the masonry with every shift of the current. Rusli’s hip-hop roots are essential touchstones that complicate the pop romance from which she starts. Rusli’s first two solo works as OHYUNG, Untitled (Chinese Man with Flame) and PROTECTOR, are collages of rap and dark, ambient pop that are as personal as they are rich with commentary. You Are Always On My Mind lands somewhere between the hauntological dance music of 
Oklou’s conservatory roots flare up on songs like “ict” and “obvious,” but I wouldn’t dare say that choke enough resembles the pockets to which Handel, Telemann, Wagner and Mendelssohn often fell into with their symphonies. That would be ludicrous. Mayniel is far less individualistic than that, and she certainly appears to have no interest in splicing overwrought bombast into the even-tempered DNA of her own songcraft. But, what she does well is serve her music with nostalgia, desire and distance. You can hear the air slipping past every note she and her producers, 
The latest LP from Panama City Beach’s best modern export, Of the Highway is a country-fried hootenanny. 21-year-old Zane McLaughlin’s band practices the art of swamp magic across 10 installments, anchored by “Plate Numbers,” the best and straightest rock song of 2025 so far. Of the Highway is a portrait of many details, like the weeping waltz of Jeffrey Phunmongkol’s pedal steel and Jacob Frischer’s fiddle on “Chrome Drumset,” the drunk highway rasp of “California,” and the slow-burn kiss of distortion poking between banjo plucks on “Wake Me.” It’s an album you hear once and think about forever, with its guitar overdrive, outlaw debauchery, and Sunshine State urchins fully in view and under the watchful eye of oldstar’s alt-country forebearers, like Uncle Tupelo and Steve Earle. The songs are confessional, highway-bound, and sensationally chromatic—like the woozy punk bursts of “Nail,” or the Econoline fever dream of “Christmas” that’s part-Jeff Tweedy, part-Kurt Vile. McLaughlin’s lyricism is sensationally unique, full of pull-quotes and scrapbook poetry: “You’re as bright as the stadium lights that keep the night away”; “I was baptized in the kitchen sink, I think I’m alright for now”; “And if I break down, I’ll walk until the asphalt stains my feet. I’ve got a thing for the blacktop, I hope you’ve got a thing for me.” And of course “Plate Numbers” bends to the will of the rock god headsplitters and features one of my favorite lyrics of the year: “We’ll be riding horses and we’ll ride ‘em fast, ‘cause Lord knows my Suburu won’t take us far enough.” oldstar may be new to me, and they may be new to you, but one thing’s for sure: They’re damn good for every wide-open, rabble-rousing, dumb, young soul who needs music like this. —Matt Mitchell [Self-Released]
Glory is bold and tender, moving through flourishes of optimism and fear, and unapologetically overwhelming whatever space it lingers in. While there is always a longing in Perfume Genius’s music, Glory presents a version of Mike Hadreas that’s more grounded in the pocket of his ever-evolving identity. His music is as immediate as ever, but Glory shines with a fresh and unrelenting gloss. “Capezio” utilizes an uncanny tremolo to reintroduce Jason, a frequent moniker for silhouettes of men in Hadreas’ stories, while “Clean Heart” glistens with a bittersweet sparkle akin to “Nothing At All” from Set My Heart on Fire Immediately. These atmospheres are quite intricate, and there is surely a sea of creativity in collaboration, as musicians who have become integral parts of the Perfume Genius project—Tim Carr, Jim Keltner and Alan Wyffels—contribute immeasurably to the depth in texture and movement of the record, decorating the careful path laid forth by Hadreas.
Continuing his evolving relationship with producer No ID, Chicago rapper Saba took his time rolling out their collaborative project, The Private Collection of Saba and No ID, a proper follow-up to his great 2022 record Few Good Things. After dropping “How to Impress God,” “Woes of the World” and “Crash,” The Private Collection is finally here and features contributions from Eryn Allen Kane, BJ Chicago Kid, Raphael Saadiq, Kelly Rowland, MFnMelo, Ibeyi, Frsh Waters and Tru, among countless others. This is a family album; a vault of a Midwest great’s most synergized successes. It boasts “head.rap,” a song so good it ended up on our year-end list in December 2024. “head.rap” shines thanks to a resounding choir of backing vocals from singers Madison McFerrin, Ogi and Jordan Ward. In the verses, Saba contemplates Black hairstyles, growing out dreadlocks and self-expression. “Searchin’ for an avenue, ways to reflect my current attitude,” he muses. Views of the world / I’m Malik to my grandma, who used to braid my hair / But I had to cut ‘em at the school / And it was Black ran, I’m just a Black man lookin’ for a good day.” No ID’s production flourishes here, too, with flutters of guitar and hand-clap percussion. “head.rap” was a textbook summer gem dropped into the world at just the perfect time, and From the Private Collection is destined to follow suit. For my money, “a FEW songs” is a SOTY frontrunner. —Matt Mitchell [From the Private Collection]
Sam Fender’s music has never been a stranger to bombast, a common mode for him especially on Seventeen Going Under. But on People Watching, he embodies a true singer-songwriter identity, most obviously on the pensive, granular closing track “Remember My Name.” Fender’s vocal is front-and-center, while horns provided by the Easington Colliery Band swell behind him and an atmosphere drones inwards. “Humor me, make my day,” he sings, his octave scaling upwards into a glass-shattering cry. “I’ll tell you stories, kiss your face, and I’ll pray you’ll remember my name.” A lot of Fender’s appeal comes through in his lyricism. On People Watching, phrases about ordinary people are ballooned by indie-rock expanse and colossal, swaggering hooks. Even the listicle, wounded declarations of “TV Dinner” beckon a fist-pump. Though he’s now 30 and reckoning with a level of fame that’s reached an all-time high, Fender still fills his record with the motifs he’s confronted for nearly a decade, taking aim at the intersection of mental health and masculinity (“Oh, I have friends who were cast aside / A young, meek lad with a curious mind / Just terrified of what the church would have to say”) and the government’s systematic abandonment of England’s lower classes (“Just another kid failed by these blokes and their crumbling empire”). Grabbing the baton from Jarvis Cocker and Paul Weller, Fender is unafraid of singing about the ugliness sown by the hands of boot-on-your-neck privatization and bleak, distressing capitalism. They’re political songs, sure, but they’re his diary entries, too. —Matt Mitchell [Polydor]
Musically, Bloodless is unrestrained to a single palette: There’s the folk-rock of “Spine Oil,” the minimal guitar strums on “Proof,” the pastel-pop of “Lizard,” and the bubbles of AutoTune lingering in the undertow of “Craziest Person.” Samia is more daring with her arrangements than ever before, especially on “Carousel,” a song distant and uncanny until it explodes into power chords igniting a catharsis. The six-minute closer “Pants” ignores any pop structure at all, transitioning from a cinematic build to breezy, folk-like waves ebbing and flowing. Bloodless is both wayward and painfully sharp, its songs potent with matter-of-fact lines that cut to the heart of it all without ever spelling anything out. References to leeches, blood pacts, and blood lost buoy at the surface of Samia’s sometimes-oblique writing. She’s “a sun bug” with “no shortage of brilliance, if you can catch me in a clear cup,” shining only when trapped in the glass. Or, she “wants to hitch [her] fire to your candle,” burning only when constricted by the wax. Oftentimes, the lyrics hit with inarguable certainty: “You don’t know me bitch,” she puts it, simply enough, on “Proof.” Bloodless is the work of a poet at the top of her game. —Andy Steiner [Grand Jury] 
After 10+ years of flirting with nearly every classic-rock trope under the sun, Sunflower Bean has returned with Mortal Primetime, a record which casts aside the traditional rock-band impetus to choose an era, genre, and style of rock and roll’s past to emulate—and instead embraces all of them. Sure, it still sounds like the same band—pivoting smoothly from soft-rock ballads to dirty ’80s power chords to Fleetwood Mac to T. Rex to Heart to the Who to you-name-it-it’s-probably-in-here—but with a newfound command of all those musical grace notes. Before, it always sounded like the group was delightedly excavating one old strain of retro sound after another and breathing new life into them; now, it feels like they’ve finished digging through every last crate of rock vinyl from the past 50 years, picked their faves, and pulled them together for a master class in rock fusion. This is a record proudly playing to the cheap seats, indulging in the most shopworn of rock cliches in a manner that pushes them through the looking glass to make them fresh again. Put plainly, this album has fun, and isn’t embarrassed to lean into it. —Alex McLevy [Lucky Number Music] 
Here is the charm of Cotton Crown: The juxtaposition of Owen Williams’ words with the bright jangle rock within is what makes the album an enticing listen. Guitarist George Nicholls, bassist Max Warren and drummer Taylor Stewart play with a high-level intensity and togetherness, and the music they make will sound familiar to anyone who might’ve put “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” next to ”I Believe” from Life’s Rich Pageant on a mixtape. The ringing guitars and high BPMs make Williams’ morose storytelling go down smoothly, like finding out a pint of Guinness is not as heavy as it seems. Even when the Tubs are channeling Johnny Marr on “Narcissist,” or Bob Mould on the yearning “One More Day,” the music sounds fresh—despite the obvious borrowing from sounds made popular on college radio stations during the Reagan years. All the while, the Tubs’ music is never bogged down by the lyrical content. It’s never dour, always moving. “Strange” is what ties all of Cotton Crown together, where the “subterranean world of grief” is laid bare in Williams’ own roundabout way. It’s a song he took a decade to write, afraid of sounding too corny on the mic. It’s the most autobiographical song Williams has written so far, one that features his own sideways humor about the weirdness of grieving, for both himself and the people around him. It also happens to be the sunniest-sounding track on Cotton Crown. And what does Williams have to say at the end of this momentous song about his dead mother, the one that took him so long to write? “I’m sorry / I guess this is it.” —Jeff Yerger [Trouble in Mind] 
Evangelic Girl is a Gun serves as a means of reflection, bringing all of yeule’s different variants under one banner. They travel through personas, talking to their previous selves and reckoning with what lies at their core. It’s a record entrenched in emotional confrontation, with aesthetics that speak to the dark places within ourselves that we often opt to ignore. It’s a world of skulls, straitjackets, dirt bikes, full body chains, cyber sigilism, blood drinking, bone chewing, fangs, giant cats flying overhead, deep, brooding darks, and bright, blinding whites. It’s the depths of the underworld, and yeule guides us into a realm where identity splinters and then reforms. Fragments and glaciers coexist on Evangelic Girl is a Gun, appearing in flashes but switching up before you even get a chance to get comfortable. On opener “Tequila Coma,” yeule references their aliases within the first verse: “Offline, I count them / All of the names that I choose.” Further into the bôa-meets-Portishead psych rock track is the first mention of a “she” that yeule refers back to throughout the album. “She’s dark and divine / Sacrificial lamb of mine” hints at a version of themself they’ve left behind in their transformation from conspicuous genre disruptor to experimental pop pioneer. —Cassidy Sollazzo [Ninja Tune] 
YHWH Nailgun’s debut album, 45 Pounds, is a quick listen, but it will linger inside you long after “Changer” ends. Think 
The experience of Youth Lagoon’s latest album, Rarely Do I Dream, embraces sentimentality and memory, but the project is not gobsmacked by melancholy. Rather, it’s a collection of music filled with kind self-reflection and hopeful imagination, as Trevor Powers approaches the totality of life through small, digitized and grainy moments, showcasing and scattering them across irresistible melodies and buttery piano leads propelled by infectious drumming. The field recordings of him and his family, including his brother Bobby, become a compositional element and ground the surreal character portrayals in vibrant snapshots of childhood, forming the foundation for Powers to, once again, reinvent Youth Lagoon. Above the found audio lies Powers’ most sonically diverse album to date, injecting the smooth atmosphere of 2023’s