The Best Albums of 2025

Did someone say something about abundance?

First things first: Music is good. In fact, I’m tempted to say that the worst music is better than the best no-music. Obviously, this is a highly context-specific statement; in a crowded restaurant with poor soundproofing, I’ll take silence over a bad playlist at sadistic decibel levels any day. I’m probably exaggerating music’s infallibility. But my point is that when it comes to year-end lists, we’re really just splitting hairs.

What bounty we have been given, because so much music is so incredibly good! I can arbitrarily pull out a competently well-made ambient record from the promo pile—I’m listening to one of those right now as I type this, more or less at random—and it delivers the kind of immediate satisfaction that obviates rankings entirely. This music is good, and my life right now is better for it, I think to myself. That’s enough to know.

Still, I’m in the critical profession, and everyone’s time and money is limited, so there’s a practical use value to the year-end list tradition: They help funnel the truly exceptional to a receptive public, in an era of mind-boggling abundance. My 2025 spreadsheet of albums to consider for possible review (or at least to consider for considering for review) numbers more than 1,500 entries. From that list, I ended up writing 306 reviews for this newsletter this year, plus another 40-odd reviews for Pitchfork. That’s a lot.

Of course, I also believe there’s an important difference between music that reliably elevates my mood and artworks that challenge, surprise, and enrapture. And so, at the risk of reinforcing arbitrary hierarchies of taste, I think it’s worth celebrating those exceptional achievements.

I’m sympathetic to Drew Daniel’s argument that art shouldn’t be ranked. But I’ve also been a member of both the critical profession and the online community of amateur critic-fans for long enough that I can’t help but find some entertainment, and also value, in list-making, even if the act is primarily a conversation with myself—an opportunity to ask myself what I value and why, and how my standards might or might not have changed in a given year. For those very reasons, in fact, I think I’ve enjoyed making my year-end list more this year than ever before.

The question remains, then: To rank or not to rank? Part of me thinks it would be fairer to just present an alphabetized list of my favorites from the year. But I’ve chosen to rank my very favorite favorites. Listeners of a certain age will be familiar with the idea of Desert Island Discs—a BBC show launched in the 1940s whose central conceit eventually became shorthand for the very idea of curating a list of personal favorites. (I’m pretty sure I first encountered the concept in Pulse!, Tower Records’ free, in-store magazine.) As I see it, if you’re going to select a fistful of albums to bring to a desert island forever, well, you’re already ranking them above the nearly infinite list of records you’re not packing in your steamer trunk. So you might as well rank the whole damn shebang.

Below, you’ll find a ranked list of my 30 favorite albums (it was originally going to be 20, but I couldn’t bear to leave out the next 10), with mini-reviews (or not so mini, in some cases) for each. I didn’t do a list of my favorite songs, because the song has never been my preferred unit of focus. I love lots of songs, but my enjoyment of them feels more context-specific to me, in a way that makes them impossible to rank. Something about the more substantial scope of albums lends itself, at least in my mind, to a kind of critical accounting.

I should note that I didn’t include any Balmat releases here, for obvious conflict-of-interest reasons, but I love everything we released this year and hope you might too.

I’ve also included three additional unranked lists of 45 more excellent records that helped define my year. I’ve divided those into three categories of 15 records each: Drifting (atmospheric or ambient-adjacent), Dancing (dance music, more or less), and Songing (which is the best word I could come up with for more or less song-based music, though much of it is instrumental) Some of those records could probably work just as well on one of the other lists. Categories—they’re arbitrary!

I thought about writing some comprehensive thoughts about The Year in Music but quickly abandoned the idea. The older I get, the less interested I am in trend pieces and What It All Means-ism. Perhaps it’s because the more widely I extend my ears, the more it becomes clear that so many things are happening in so many places at once that trying to construct a narrative around it feels arbitrary and restrictive. I’ll leave those stories to others. Me, I like records, one at a time. (Well, with a little bit of overlap, if I’m DJing them.) These were my 30 favorites of 2025, plus 45 more, for good measure.