Top 10 Albums of 2025
Capping off a year of music writing with some notes about my favorite records.
2025 was the year I started blogging about music. Writing that sentence alone on New Year’s Eve after having turned 29 a few months ago feels like a bit of a farce, but oh well, better late than never I suppose. I’ve wanted to write about music since I was 10 years old, I remember asking my Mom if she’d help me set up a website where I could do so but she refused, too stressed with the demands of motherhood and running her business to spare the time. I hold no ill will towards her for it, but I do wonder if my life would’ve been any different had she said yes. Anyway, I’m glad I started now, I’m glad I forced myself to write 400 words about music each week, I’m glad I posted them online for others to see, and I’m especially glad that people actually took the time to read them. Writing is often frustrating and painful and tiring but I really do enjoy it, it’s been a gift to actually find a craft I care to return to. I have some new ideas for how to move this whole endeavor forward in 2026 so we’ll see where those take me, in the meantime please enjoy this list of records I enjoyed in 2025.
10. Felt Out - Are You With Me?
I recently did an interview with these two where we talked about this album extensively so I’ll keep this one brief. Are You With Me? was truly unlike anything else I heard this year. Its folding of phosphorescent digital noise into trip-hop’s characteristically pensive grooves was a revelation, while Somanath’s ear-twisting vocal melodies, influenced by Carnatic ragas, were a never ending source of wonder. A beautiful album about the many selves we share with one another and how music can tie a thread through them all.
9. Feng - “Soul 2 Soul”
I’ve never played Persona 4 so I’ve never been to the fictional Japanese department store at the center of this mixtape’s title, but if it’s any bit as fun as the 18 tracks on dolo’s latest offering I’ll be grabbing a copy expeditiously. I’ve always enjoyed the LA rapper’s music for its laid back stoner mysticism, how it slaps life’s mundane fragments together into hazy collages that may or may not have deeper meanings, who’s to say? But with Let’s Meet At Junes dolo deigned to descend from the smoke cloud of enlightenment and reveal himself as a mere mortal like the rest of us, dealing with the pain of heartache, the pestering of haters, and the tediousness of stacking cash. His admissions are made all the more enjoyable by the tape’s cartoonishly space age production, most of which is handled by dolo himself. You could spend a lifetime analyzing the contents of a day, trying to decipher the hidden messages behind every passing moment, but you could also just make a song about it and move on.
8. Cleo Reed - Cuntry
A true, dyed in the wool epic. With Cuntry Cleo Reed sought to capture not just an entire nation, but an entire musical tradition, taking a century’s worth of woes yielded by racially stratified and gender divided empire and enrobing them in layers of Black sonic innovation stretching across blues, folk, hip-hop and soul. The fact that she succeeded in producing a document of such scope is cause for celebration enough, but even moreso given the level of craft, acuity and cuttingness it meets its subject matter with. Tracks like “I Been Out Here Hustlin’” and “Always the Horse, Never the Jockey” reconstitute retro musical forms, the slave song and the finger-picked folk tune, into modern laments about the invisible struggle of Black women, while the Billy Woods assisted “Strike!” is a Dadaist deconstruction of capitalism’s exclusionary roots set to a beat that sounds like it could’ve come from an early clipping. project. That’s just the level of range on display here.
7. Money Lang - Xmas Rush
When I interviewed Money Lang about this album earlier in the year we talked about our shared love of the holiday season. While it can be easy to be cynical about this time of year, what with its rampant consumerism and underlying thrust of white Christian supremacy, there is still something special about the entire world reconvening with friends and family to celebrate the passing of another year. The joy of return is palpable throughout Xmas Rush, which was written almost exactly two years ago when the producer was afforded the opportunity to spend a week in a high-end recording studio over the Christmas break. It’s his most personal album to date, brimming with a naked sense of glee that speaks to house music’s roots as an ameliorative force for dark times.
6. Mila Culpa - Face Off
The sound of an extended moment of clarity. Philly DIY rocker Mile Culpa transitioned this year and showed her scars in the process, inviting listeners behind the scenes to watch the visceral demise of the self and the construction of someone new in its place. Every track cuts deep, every lyric is penned with a knife’s edge, but in spite of that piercing gaze, Face Off lands surprisingly soft, opting for earnest melody rather than power and force to get its point across. Indebted to the similarly quiet force of Elliott Smith’s songwriting, Mila Culpa stretches things further by seamlessly integrating her proclivity for analog noisemaking into these tracks, enlivening them with humor and grit in the process. For me, there was no rawer, more open document of autobiography in music this year.
5. Israel Jones - Go With God
There’s no better feeling than watching an artist deliver a body of work you know they’ve had in them for years. I’ve followed Jones since the release of his 2023 EP Bigga Purpose and have always been impressed by his mastery of rap’s mechanics and the strength of his distinctly Floridian vision of Southern hip-hop. Go With God stands on the same twin pillars, but this time around employs them in a search for the South’s soul, an attempt to uncover and elucidate the third coast’s rich history as an underappreciated hub of cultural innovation. The journey is equal parts societal and personal in scope, doubling as Jones’s goodbye letter to the region that raised him after he relocated to New York last year. It’s a tremendous achievement that reinforces the power of rap as a tool for storytelling, a curious alchemy of beat and rhyme that can transport you to a different place, a different time, even inside somebody else’s head.
4. Erika de Casier - Lifetime
Within the first few minutes of pressing play on de Casier’s surprise fourth album, I jumped from my chair and shouted, “She’s back!” into my empty apartment. After releasing one of the most influential albums of the last 6 years (I think we owe a good chunk of our extended Y2K return to Essentials), de Casier signed with indie label royalty 4AD for a pair of follow-ups, 2021’s Sensational and 2024’s Still. Both albums revisited the early-00s pop she mined on her first record, but with a wider and more emboldened approach to the production, which, in my opinion, unfortunately resulted in more diluted songwriting. Lifetime was a return to independence for de Casier as well as a return to form, featuring a heavily concentrated dose of her best material in over a half decade. Across 12, 90s r&b-indebted tracks, de Casier stripped back desire to reveal its bleeding heart. Sometimes that heart’s flighty (“The Chase”), sometimes it’s scandalous (“Two Thieves”), and sometimes it’s uncompromisingly intimate (“You Can’t Always Get What You Want”), but it’s always spellbinding.
3. YHWH Nailgun - 45 Pounds
This album truly stunned me. It’s exactly what rock and roll should be, roilingly dangerous and shot through attitude. No band sounded more like itself this year. Between the dumb violence of Sam Pickard’s empty rototoms, the mangled rage of Zack Borzone’s bile-laced vocals, and the blinding flash of Jack Tobias’s dulcimeric synths, I could pick YHWH Nailgun out of a lineup anywhere. Not only that, but I could listen to YHWH Nailgun just about anywhere too, their scorched earth approach meant that no matter what mood I was in, turning on 45 Pounds would immediately attune me to the group’s vitriolic spew. Like scouring the tongue to cleanse the palette.
2. Joanne Robertson - Blurrr
The type of record that buries you, leaves you holed up in a shack somewhere huddling against it for warmth. A transmission of tenderness for the end of days, a reminder that we are all human and that we will all seek comfort in one another, no matter how bad things get. I think it’s fitting that I have trouble finding the words to describe this album because inherently its beyond them, at least that’s what I believe Joanne is signalling the way she submerges her lyrics behind mushmouthed deliveries. Because sometimes words fail, even while you’re using them, masking the aim of expression in the syntactic logic of language. Better to make noise without thought, to cling to whatever’s there in the room with you.
1. Raven - GNOSIS
One of my all-time favorite albums is The Detroit Elevator Company’s Soundtrack [313]. The debut record from multi-disciplinary artist Neil Ollivierra’s tragically under heard from ambient techno project is a sublime sonic distillation of nighttime in the Motor City, unparalleled in its balancing of mood and movement to build worlds that seem to expand without end, that stretch out into the infinite before your very eyes. This year though, one project very well may have risen to match that mark. GNOSIS, the latest from San Francisco dance producer Raven, was my album of the year for many reasons, not the least of which being its ability to envelop me so completely with every listen. The project’s cover is a multi-layered and multi-hued swirl of amorphous blue forms tesselated by a grid of dots that impose yet more geometric forms onto its surface. The blending of mathematical rigidity with informal drift is an apt analogue for the music within, itself being a finely tuned but unconstrained exploration of synthetic noise. Central to the record is the notion of reinterpretation, as several tracks recycle the same tonal motifs. For example the penultimate track “Unlimited Edition” revists the cascading synth notes of the earlier “Infinite Edition” but bumps up the bpm and adds a driving house beat. And then there’s “In Loving Memory” which performs a similar treatment to the bubbling melody first found on “Infinite Red Roses.” These symmetries speak to the music’s endless depth, how what may appear as a fixed object in time and space is actually the product of an unceasing recursive process. Truly an album to get lost in.