Our Favorite Albums of 2025

For our second year in a row, we present our favorite albums of the year! We’ve released our favorite songs of the year six years in a row now and you can find this year’s here. Our team is built up of many talented writers, musicians, DJs, and more, and we wanted to give them a chance to talk about which albums this year they were most excited about. Hope you enjoy!

One word I’d use to describe Rosalia’s Lux: transcendence. This album transcends the boundaries of genre, of language, and of self. From the first rippling piano chords, Lux transports you to another realm and invites you to contemplate something bigger than yourself. With a voice both smoky and crystalline, Rosalia asks who can live between Heaven and Earth? Skittering violins surround her voice as she builds up the tempo in “Reliquia” before we settle into a steady driving rhythm in “Divinize.” Acoustic instrumentation provides some solid ground to stand on while we drift between genres, languages, and emotions that melt and swirl together. The intensity and juxtaposition in “Berghain” and the earnestness of the aria-like “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti”  are balanced with the sass of the waltz-like “La Perla” and quiet confidence of “Dios Es Un Stalker.” What the divine is and where it resides is left open-ended - Berghain could be a club in Berlin, a labyrinth in our own hearts and minds, or something else entirely. Lux invites you to explore the possibilities and then to transcend the limits of what you thought was possible. As Patti Smith says at the end of “La Yugular”: “One door isn’t enough. A million doors aren’t enough.” In a world increasingly driven by black-and-white thinking, Lux asks you to broaden your mind, reflect, and traverse the gray area. Turn off all the lights, light some candles, and listen to the album with full attention for the optimal experience.

– Tessa Gregory

Cameron Winter sings like a man at the end of his rope. Equal parts desperate and mournful, the Geese frontman leads the congregation in a gospel of our times. There is a fervor that runs through the album, roiling in operatic blasts of energy and brief moments of quiet beauty. On the opening track “Trinidad”, Winter screams the refrain “there’s a bomb in my car!”, a sonic explosion and thematic statement of intent for the album (it is called Getting Killed, after all). It’s not clear why there’s a bomb or who planted it, but by the end of the album it’s clear that he is the bomb - we are all bombs, pressurized vessels for life’s anxieties, fears, let-downs, ready to explode. The album has an absorbing, even hypnotic, energy driven by Winter’s distinct vocal style mixed with anthemic rock melodies. The standout track “Au Pays Du Cocaine”, is a great example of this. Winter’s warbly croon recites a mantra, pleading with a nameless love “you can change, you can change”, temporarily losing itself in its own prostration. When the mantra is punctuated by “...and still choose me”, we snap out of it, and the true power of its vulnerability is laid bare. It’s tempting to write Geese off as prep school darlings, the indie flavor of the month, but they have tapped into a real undercurrent of our culture. They don’t revel in the melancholy but rather observe it, sit with it, confront it. There’s a bomb in your car and it’s ticking. 

– Adan Magana

Let God Sort Them Out is the fifth full-length album from brothers Pusha T and Malice, known collectively as The Clipse. Their quarter-century-long catalog also includes the legendary We Got It 4 Cheap mixtape series and an oft-bootlegged, unreleased debut. Released in July, LGSTO was preceded by a strategic media blitz that eschewed stunts and social-media virality, instead seeing The Clipse and their super-producer partner Pharrell Williams build momentum the old-fashioned way: engaging prominent platforms, dissing the genre’s top-selling acts, and openly declaring the album’s greatness long before listeners could judge for themselves. Since its release, reaction has largely fallen into two camps: those who hear an undeniable masterpiece, and those who contend it is no better than the group’s previous work, attributing the breathless reception to declining artistic standards in contemporary mainstream hip-hop and pop. Like all of its predecessors, LGSTO finds Pharrell bringing his best beats to the table, the brothers in steel-sharpens-steel lyrical lock-step, and a roster of high-profile, budget-blowing guest appearances. But unlike those earlier records, most of which were celebrated in their moment, Let God Sort Them Out elevated The Clipse to an entirely new strata, earning five Grammy nominations, including a remarkable and telling nod for Album of the Year. Ultimately, the album’s reception isn’t just a referendum on Let God Sort Them Out, but on what excellence in rap can still sound like, and how extraordinary it is to hear an artist refine their powers rather than lose touch with them in middle age.

– Sayre Piotrkowski

Halfway through their show, Wednesday lead Karly Hartzman led an impromptu huddle with her band. After a brief moment, Hartzman gave context: they were tired, having driven up from LA that morning after playing to a tepid crowd the night before and had not started the show with a lot of energy. But that night, the crowd was singing along, headbanging, even breaking out into small moshpits, creating an infectious energy that reached the band. To reward this and keep the momentum going, they were changing the setlist, swapping some of their slower songs for more uptempo barnburners. That night, Wednesday absolutely melted our faces. The alchemy between their musicianship and the crowd had me levitating and it's one of the best shows I’ve ever had the privilege of attending. 

Much has been made of the break up at the core of Bleeds (Hartzman and former-guitarist wunderkind MJ Lenderman split) and this experience led to some of Wednesday’s most achingly beautiful songs. But what makes this album great are the portraits of everyday people and experiences that it paints. It’s important that they are an Asheville, North Carolina band because they write songs about Southerners that are forgotten and obscured by the Nashville monolith. They write about the working class people, about freaks and weirdos that conservatives like to pretend don’t exist there, about people on the edges of society. They do so while drawing from the entire spectrum of music of these peoples, from country and folk to punk (and a dash of hardcore - I’m telling you that show ripped). I didn’t start by recounting that show just because it’s great. I did it because their engagement with the crowd embodied Wednesday’s ethos and musical project. They’re a band of the people, for the people.

– Adan Magana

She made up a word to title this record, which is a very Twigs thing to do if you see her artistic project as a kind of musical sci-fi expressionism. Eusexua might be its apotheosis: a liberated imagination embodied in ecstatic dance in her videos and live shows, a nighttime trip through underground club scenes and raves and then up to heaven with dark electronic textures married to ethereal vocals, aggression meeting gentleness, the spiritual melding with the sexual, freedom found both alone in your head and in community through movement.

– Cecilia Santini

I’ve always been an appreciator of Bon Iver’s work but it was this year’s Sable, Fable that fully enraptured me. When the first few songs from this project were released in 2024 there was some speculation that Justin Vernon (founder of Bon Iver) would be returning to his folky, rustic roots with his next full length project. Those songs, eventually released as the Sable EP in October ‘24 show up as “disc one” - the ‘Sable’ portion of Sable, Fable. They are sparse, sad and intimate. Vernon sets the table with vulnerable and self-reflective lyrics about the troublesome outlooks he has taken on…

I get caught looking in the mirror on the regular
and what I see resembles some competitor
I see things behind things behind things
And there are rings within rings within rings

Perhaps it’s my own recent deep dive into the intersection of healing and nature’s wisdom that makes me vividly associate the rings Vernon sings about here with trees and the often revelatory work of digging up trauma. Though the rest of the record would suggest that my suspicion is at least mostly true. Sable, for all of its emotional beauty, is really just setting the table for Fable, a lush, soaring, intricately produced masterpiece that reintroduces the moody Bon Iver many folks have come to know as an uplifting, unabashedly sincere narrator. 

On “Everything is Peaceful Love,” floating atop euphoric synths, gradually making his way up to his signature falsetto, Vernon sings…

Damned if I’m not climbing up a tree right now and everything is peaceful love
And right in me

(Sidenote, I highly recommend listening to this song -and album- on a bluetooth speaker by a calm river with some of your best friends after taking some good medicine.)

Other highlights include the Dijon collab “Day One” and the Danielle Haim collab, “If Only I Could Wait”

When showing this record to a friend of mine she replied that it sounded like he had had a spiritual awakening. While this has not always been a turn that has boded well for an artist’s work, in this case it found me - and many others it turns out - at precisely the right time.

– Ashkon Davaran

Destin Conrad released his first full-length debut "LOVE ON DIGITAL" earlier this year to immediate praise. So it's no surprise that it's up for a GRAMMY. What is surprising, however, is Conrad's choice to release "wHIMSY"—an alternative jazz EP—just a few months later. "wHIMSY" lives up to its name, featuring both jazz heavyweights like Terrace Martin and Vanisha Gould and R&B crooners like James Fauntleroy and Ambré. While Conrad's full-length debut received well-deserved fanfare for much of the year, "wHIMSY" ventures into different territory—a seamless blend of California jazz, contemporary blues, and R&B. And it's for the real yearners. With songs like "wASH U AWAY", "LOVE!", and "BED-STUY", you are melodically transported into the mind of a lover yearning for a romantic dalliance that never ends. And with only 11 tracks and 25 minutes, it leaves listeners yearning for more, too.

– Hadiyah Daché

Oakland rapper Phillip Banks’ solo debut, East Bay Times, hit DSPs on 11/11/25, his thirty-fifth birthday. Just over six weeks later, it feels fair to give the project the bittersweet distinction of the Bay Area’s “most slept on” album of 2025. When you do hear this record, the first thing that you will notice, particularly if you are listening in the car, is the sonic attention to detail. It is mixed more deftly and delivers a more satisfying knock than most major-label hip-hop records released in 2025. After several listens, though, what truly sets the record apart is Bank's facility with a specific form of setting-as-character personal narrative. The album calls to mind projects as disparate as Richie Cunning’s similarly slept-on Night Train, and totemic classics like Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid Maad City, or Too Short’s Get In Where You Fit In; albums that would not work if their protagonists were not so deeply connected to the places and spaces they speak to and from. The album’s closer, “Hyphy Kids Got Trauma,” shares its name with Pendarvis Hardshaw’s excellent KQED podcast series, but traces its inspiration to something Banks saw “scribbled on the wall,” a gesture that, like all the album’s best moments, lets The Town do the talking.

– Sayre Piotrkowski