2025 in music
January 1, 2026
I am an album listener. As the millennial I am, I prowl music websites week after week to find the great things everyone is writing about or the stuff nobody is listening to. And yet, there’s plenty I haven’t gotten around to trying this year. I was surprised to find I’ve heard nothing from The Quietus’ top 20, only three albums out of this top 10 on The Conversation, and that most of Paste's best albums eluded me.
Perhaps more so than in other years, I found myself circling back to the albums I liked the most, revisiting them over and over. In no particular order, then: this is them.
Makaya McCraven: Off The Record
A collection of four EPs, recorded live over the course of a decade, this is a great jazz/hiphop hybrid. Sometimes structured, sometimes freeform (“spontaneous composition”, as McCraven says on the opener), the album as a whole shows the many facets of the drummer, band leader and self-proclaimed “beat scientist” who has been putting out a great body of work almost yearly since 2017 (see also: Universal Beings, We're New Again, In These Times).
Collaborating with heavyweights like Theon Cross (tuba, electronics), Jeff Parker (guitar), Junius Paul (bass), and Ben LaMar Gay (cornet, voice, percussion, synths, electronics, and a ... diddley bow), McCraven delivers an album that’s equal parts mesmerising and funky, traveling between jazz grooves and boombap with an ease that makes you wish you'd seen any of these shows in person.
Jonny Greenwood: One Battle After Another (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Whenever Jonny Greenwood (the Radiohead and The Smile guitarist) signs on for a score, my ears perk up. His soundtrack to Phantom Thread is one of my most played albums (ever), and I regularly pick out his work on The Power of the Dog, too.
His soundtrack for Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest is tremendous again. It brings together elements from a lot of his previous work, even including a hint of his Octatonic volumes, too. The album, like the film, continuously staggers forward, and bounces from beauty (Guitar for Willa) to jarring undertones (Mean Alley) and percussion (River of Hills), back to beauty again (Trust Device). I highly recommend you catch the film in the cinema to experience it in full ornate.
Youth Lagoon: Rarely Do I Dream
An album I kept gravitating back to for its nostalgic feel, Youth Lagoon’s Rarely Do I Dream is glued together by home recordings, and explores memory, family, growing up, and loss. It feels folkorish at times, with Trevor Powers painting these little vignettes that you wouldn't find just anywhere, featuring a variety of characters like the “king of the parking lot”, a detective, a vampire, and Lucy—wherever you grow up, there's never a dull moment if you're paying close attention.
Along with the crackle of vinyl and the warm, fuzzy sounds of his family's home recordings, Youth Lagoon's drumming takes centre stage. The album is driven by percussion, more so than is usual in his work, and it pays off. It pulls me in, drives me forward, and when the VHS tape stops, I keep rewinding it.
Radiohead: Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003-2009)
Hail to the Thief always flew a bit under the radar for me. Overshadowed by their later albums, I never played it in full all that much. Yet when Radiohead surprise-released these live recordings, I was immediately blown away. This was the live album I didn't know I needed, and for a while there I couldn't stop playing it.
It sounds fantastic: from the crunchy guitars on Go To Sleep to the gloomy synth on Where I End and You Begin, and from the forlorn piano on Sail To The Moon to the crowd's most raucous reception on There, There. The album, along with the announcement of their European tour, felt like a victory lap, and I'm gutted to have missed out on seeing them perform live this past year.
Earl Sweatshirt: Live Laugh Love
As Earl ages the beats grow weirder, the crackle becomes more pronounced, and the rapping gets better and better. Live Laugh Love, again, is an album dense as treacle, but Earl makes it all sound like it took no effort whatsoever. There’s layers to his lyrics I'm still trying to figure out, and he’s funnier than ever; if you're missing DOOM, Earl might satisfy your cravings (“Affogato cream and coffee, wally walker out the bottle drinkin’, I never got on LinkedIn”—case in point).
In comparison to the sad Earl we got to know on I Don't Like Shit I Don't Go Outside, Live Laugh Love sounds like he’s having the time of his life, with his daughter and his wife.
Geese: Getting Killed
If you want me to pay my taxes
You better come over with a crucifix
You're gonna have to nail me down
The first time I heard these lines and the joyous guitar that follows it, from Taxes, I laughed out loud in appreciation. What the hell is this?, I thought, before the album—in record time—became a mainstay on my bike rides, drives, and train travels.
Geese has risen to the moniker of the hottest rock band in the world, taking over the baton from Fontaines DC with an album that is chaotic, delirious, hilarious and, honestly, hard to follow. Read up on a few reviews and you’ll start to believe they’re rock & roll’s only hope. I'm seeing them live in 2026, and I have no doubt it’ll be a show to remember.
Cameron Winter: Heavy Metal
Technically released in December of 2024, and thus too late to feature on many end-of-year lists last year, I felt compelled to include it here. Cameron Winter, the Geese frontman, did this before the Geese album came out, earning him immediate comparisons to folks like Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan.
The lyrics on his solo album are sometimes prophetic, often gorgeous, sometimes campy, and, again, hilarious. Love Takes Miles is something of an anthem. Cancer of the Skull is glorious. $0 feels enlightening, yet deeply funny (“God is real, I’m not kidding this time, I think God is actually for real, I wouldn’t joke about this”; still none of us will ever know if he truly is for real). And, Drinking Age pierces the soul, every time.
Seeing him perform live—by himself, at a piano, only half facing the audience—was an experience I won't ever forget, and he just kept repeating that magnificent feat wherever he went (Manchester, London, New York). Wherever he takes things next, I’ll be hanging on his every word.
Blood Orange: Essex Honey
2018's Negro Swan by Blood Orange is one of my five most-played albums. 2019’s Angel's Pulse was a mixtape, and I was eager for a new full-length. With Essex Honey, he did not disappoint.
It's an album about grief, which, admittedly, it took me a while to realise (“Since you died, it hasn't stopped raining”). The songs are so elegantly and intricately layered, making the heavy underlying material very palatable. Floating string arrangements, fluttery piano chords, a variety of field recordings, and lively drumming—this is an album that sounds like someone taking their time to grieve as much as it does like someone moving forward, making their way through its stages.
The album plays like a beautiful collage that finds its balance between nostalgia and euphoria, interspersed with—or pierced by—those feelings of grief that spurred on the work in the first place.
Saya Gray: SAYA
I wasn't familiar with Saya Gray’s work until this year, and I don’t remember how this album surfaced on my radar, but I very much enjoyed submerging myself in its lush landscapes. The songs on SAYA—“magpie art pop”, I read somewhere—are densely layered, but never overwhelmingly so. She rewards you for listening to them using a good pair of headphones, to pick out her strong basslines, guitar riffs, contagious percussion, and funny, prickly lyrics sung in her fluttery voice (“If you don't like me now, you're gonna hate me later”). This is a break-up album, after all.
Oneohtrix Point Never: Tranquilizer
I appreciate Daniel Lopatin’s work. His soundtracks for Uncut Gems and Good Time are a mainstay in my rotation (the former released under his owner name, the latter under his moniker of Oneohtrix Point Never). Most of his work as OPN, though, largely hasn’t stuck for me. I’ll play albums of his, and I appreciate how impressive their production is, but they never really captivate me. I often find them a little too overwhelming and chaotic.
Until the release of Tranquilizer, that is. Apparently an amalgamation of decades-old sample DVDs bought—a premise that sounded like it was going to be equally overwhelming—this album, to me, is his most appealing yet.
It's experimental, for sure, but not as chaotic as his other work (yet too chaotic to be dubbed ambient music). The opener reminds me of Pink Floyd, while the penultimate song shapeshifts between rhythms that sound at home on Frank Ocean’s Endless and Kanye West’s Yeezus. My favourite, Cherry Blue, feels to me like an ethereal, heavenly soundscape and, as with most of the album, is best played on a nighly walk through the city.
Djrum: Under Tangled Silence
The piano is the backbone of this album, and around it everything builds, tumbles and crashes in ways most unpredictable and most pleasing. Layer upon layer of (what sounds like) field recordings, elements of techno, complicated drum programming and that recurring piano make this one of the most exhilarating albums I’ve listened to all year. There are elements of house, techno, dubstep, and even gabber, interspersed with jazzy (improvised) piano playing and string arrangements, and if that sounds like nothing you've ever heard before, you're probably right.
Like Tranquilizer above, it pairs especially well with a nightly walk in the city.