The Best Albums of 2025 (So Far)
My ranking of the best pop, rap, and indie albums released so far this year, from Addison to Lorde, and the unexpected new friends in between: it's the Good Everything So Fars!
One of the great gifts of my life is that, last year, I moved into an apartment suspiciously close to my work (and, for that matter, my gym and my grocery store). It’s so close. Like, I really should walk. Have you ever been to Tennessee in the summer, though? It’s like being inside a Komodo dragon’s mouth (where I presume it is very humid). So I drive.
The downside, I learned, of living fantastically close to work is that, by basically eliminating my commute, it really cuts down on my music-listening time. And yet, I strap on my headphones and find a way — while cooking, cleaning, staying cool on late-night walks. 2025 has been an awesome year for music — I had to find a way to jam. These are the 2025 Good Everything So Fars.
Honorable Mention:
Clipse, Let God Sort Em Out
CLIPSE HAS A NEW ALBUM COMING OUT THIS WEEK. I REPEAT: CLIPSE HAS A NEW ALBUM COMING OUT THIS WEEK. CURRENTLY ON MY APARTMENT BALCONY SHOUTING INTO ONCOMING TRAFFIC THAT CLIPSE HAS A NEW ALBUM COMING OUT THIS WEEK.
10. Addison Rae, Addison
Honestly, hell yeah. On Addison, Rae doesn’t sail off into uncharted seas – but she does frolic, funkily, fetchingly, in the rivers and lakes that we’re used to. Channeling Britney and Lana, swerving into FKA twigs territory, and riding high on her Charli co-sign, Rae blasts out a dozen kinda weird tracks (positive) that tik when you’d think the social media star would tok. “Diet Pepsi” remains the irrefutable banger. “Money is Everything” and “Fame is a Gun” broach similar subject matter – Rae’s wild bonanza of professional success – from opposite ends of the saccharine sing-songy pop rainbow. The best of the bunch is “High Fashion,” synths spiraling into a bacchanalian haze. I don’t really know what she’s singing about – but it sounds like it feels good.
9. billy woods, GOLLIWOG
I don’t want to listen to someone tell me about a dream they had. Too slippery, ethereal, pretty and irrelevant. But I’ll listen to billy woods tell about his nightmares. GOLLIWOG is a creeping, off-kilter, malevolent oratory from one of the best rappers alive. It’s dissonant and dissolving, all piano clinks and wobbly beats, steadily paced by the indefatigable woods. Two of the most approachable (and best) tracks are “Cold Sweat” and “Corinthians,” on which woods snarls whippy quips too dark to laugh at over haunting, throbbing bass. He excoriates the government for funding war, sears capitalism’s hostility to the Black experience (a golliwog is a racist 19th century doll caricature), and speaks plainly of the lived terrors he’s seen: a “wild-eyed rocking horse / mouth carved into a frown.” On “Golgotha,” the most gnarled, faltering track on the record, woods says, “House full of ghosts / half-wonder if I’m one of ‘em.” It’s this half-wonder that comes through: is woods a ghost, or is he telling a ghost story? Either way, I’ll listen.
8. Blondshell, If You Asked For A Picture
Blondshell, the stage name of 28 year-old Sabrina Teitelbaum, is awesome. You should be listening to Blondshell. If You Asked For A Picture picks up where 2023’s self-titled left off, all guitars and quavering snark and what might be regret but gets transformed by Blondshell’s voice into something nobler, something like belief. Blondshell is a master of the brooding minor-key jam that older kids at my high school would’ve loved in, like, 2002 (“Arms,” “He Wants Me,” and “Man”), and also the windows-down ripper that goes so hard you forget it’s kinda sad (standout “What’s Fair” and “23’s A Baby”). Kinda sad, and kinda awesome.
7. Spiritbox, Tsunami Sea
Spiritbox vocalist Courtney LaPlante soaks the opener (“Fata Morgana”) and the entirety of the record in waves of grief and watery metaphor. Over oceanic guitars, splashing cymbals, and boundary-less synths, sorrow cascades. LaPlante wades into grief, pain, and depression – a not-unusual theme for the band or the genre – with a shocking, hydroelectric aliveness. Spiritbox makes an album about grief and loss and being lashed by nor’western rain, but LaPlante is never not controlling the sea. Her screams so jarringly, snatchingly in-control, so charismatically arresting, that you’ll let Spiritbox, and her, pilot you anywhere. “Pain is nothing but an infinite enemy,” she yowls, and she’s a catch ahead of the beat, leading the charge – like she’s revving the boat from the prow of the ship.
6. Bad Bunny, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS
DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS is a swirling kaleidoscopic haze of Puerto Rican musical homages and political rallying cries from superstar Bad Bunny. When it came out the first week of the year, I wasn’t ready – even the stuttering pulse of “Nuevayol” couldn’t warm me; amid my own political disaffection, I didn’t have ears to hear his ("Lo Qué Le Pasó A Hawaii," "Turista"). But Bad Bunny is inevitable. His immense talent for melody, for comedy, for conjuring harmonies both musical and emotional, civic and human, surges through the record. The textured history of Puerto Rican musical genres – the smoky salsa of "Baile Inolvidable," the sleek reggaeton of “Perfumito Nuevo” – sprawls beneath Bad Bunny’s fingertips. My ears are open. I hear.
5. FKA twigs, EUSEXUA
“Imagine a derelict building, and there’s just mist everywhere so you can’t see where you’re going…You go inside this big warehouse and everyone is dancing…They’re just like angels, every single person’s just an angel.” This is how FKA twigs described her creative rebirth to British Vogue. A word didn’t exist to properly describe it, so she called it eusexua. This became the name of a song, and it became the name of her arresting 2025 album. twigs’s visualization works well – you can hear those dancing club angels stomping it out to “Perfect Stranger, “Drums of Death,” and “Childlike Things.” “You’re not human anymore,” twigs goes on, describing her word, her album, her music, “you’re just a feeling.” Or describing what the transformative, mountaintop “Sticky” and “Striptease” do to the listener.
4. Sleigh Bells, Bunky Becky Birthday Boy
This is how I described Sleigh Bells’s new album in frantic texts to my friends: It sounds like they invented a whole new rainbow. Colors I’ve never seen or heard of before. Impossible to imagine them not having fun while making this. It’s a Lisa Frank dolphin in a pinball machine. And anyway, it all holds up. It’s a world in which you’d wanna jump, play, frolic, blast. Everything Treats gave us fifteen (!) years ago. “Your pop metal dream came true.” The double bass remains alive. I’m pretty sure there’s a kazoo on “Badly”? “Wanna Start A Band?” and “Really Special Cool Thing” bookend an animatronic circus party frenzy. It’s dazzling and overwhelming.
3. Oklou, choke enough
Just put it on, and listen to the entire thing straight through. choke enough, the second full-length album from French artist Oklou (born Marylou Mayniel), is staggeringly beautiful. A gauzy, holy thing, ambient and pop and tenuous and adventuresome. Oklou the lyricist is a delightful guide through this world – “Is the endless still unbound?” she wonders on the opener (in addition to wondering, “What’s the name of your sheep again?”). At times the songs feel like a soundtrack to a PC video game on which a character goes on a mythic quest. “Family and Friends” is aching. “Obvious” sounds like a dance party by yourself when you’re a kid home alone on summer break. “ICT” is about an ice cream truck. Perhaps what’s so yanking, what about Oklou tugs so purely at my heart, is her earnestness, her childlikeness – “Choke Enough” and “Take Me By The Hand” just sound bone-stripped vulnerable. There’s hardly anything there at all. She crammed an album full of sounds, then took almost all of them away. Lean in close.
2. Momma, Welcome to My Blue Sky
Couple years ago I worked at a restaurant. The iPad that controlled the music was at the host stand, and seemingly every other night a song would come on — driving and loud, soft and welcoming — and I’d power walk through the dining room to the host stand. “Who IS THIS?” I’d ask Hannah, the host. “It’s Momma,” Hannah would tell me, every time. I’m not sure why that knowledge was difficult to metastasize, to remember. Perhaps because Momma, when it comes down to it, sounds like something I’ve heard before. It’s not that it’s not unique — it’s that, for a kid of Y2K, it sounds like home. The revving guitars, the snare getting absolutely walloped. The vocal harmonies from songwriters and Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten that sound like how running your hands over a field of wildflowers feels. This year’s Welcome to My Blue Sky causes me to ascend to higher planes. The band plays with dream pop on “Bottle Blonde,” Midwest emo on gigantic closer “My Old Street,” and jams so loud on “Last Kiss” my Dad sat up in his seat. I can only assume my Spotify Wrapped will reveal that I’ve listened to “Rodeo” and “Ohio All The Time” 500,000 times. To me, home is the Tennessee backroads — and Momma makes me want to take a drive, roll down the windows, and blow my speakers. Loud enough that someone might just run up to me and ask, “Hey, who IS THIS?”
1. Lorde, Virgin
From the second Charli XCX riled her ass into the studio and onto a song with a BPM over 100, Lorde was always going to be back. The question was: What would back look like for the now-28 year-old artist? She’s lived a thousand lives as a star. She released “Royals” during Barack Obama’s first term. Her last album, 2021’s Solar Power, was winky and prettily drab. Forget arm’s length: it seemed to keep listeners – and herself? – at ocean’s length distance. Seems like she kept her friends at bay too, for which Charli called her out on “Girl So Confusing,” and…here we are. Lorde is back.
And though she might not bring the hammer, she still brings the scalpel. Her shear-sharp attention for little details in this human life, which has always been Lorde’s true superpower, is at work. The first verse short story about an eclipse in “Current Affairs.” All the little bedazzled nuggets from “GRWM.” But just four little words in “Man of the Year” did it for me: “Swish mouthwash, jerk off,” Lorde, telling it like it is. And then the huge laser synth pulses, and Lorde is fully alive.
The art itself — a musing on her gender identity, her body, her mother — is affecting in its own right, Lorde learning precisely how much skin she’s willing to reveal, on wax and off. “Broken Glass,” a song about her struggle with an eating disorder, rides like a Melodrama deep cut, down to the self-deprecating call and response (and the panting breaths on the second verse, which echo “Sober”). This line from the chorus of “Favourite Daughter,” written about her mother, is the best and most tears-inducing line on the album: “Everywhere I run, I’m always running to you.”
Thank God for Charli, waking Lorde up. That way Lorde can get back to doing what she does best: waking us.