Top 9 Songs of 2025
The best 9 songs of 2025 and I will not listen to any arguments otherwise.
Why 9? Why not? No but seriously, I originally had 10 on this list but once I got to writing I realized I only had stuff to say about 9 of them, so that’s where I landed. This year I started a playlist called “How I’m Feeling Now” where I dumped whatever songs I found myself returning to and then rotated them out once I got tired of hearing them. Sometimes the playlist was close to 20 tracks long, sometimes it barely touched the 20-minute mark, but everything below was on it at some point, some even staying for months at a time. This list is not a critical examination of what was good this year, rather it is a reflection of what music found and moved me along with some attempts to relate why. Maybe it will resonate with you, maybe it won’t, but ultimately I think it’ll be a more enduring document than any attempt to be objective about this exercise.
9. Feng - “Soul 2 Soul”
I don’t know guys, sometimes it’s fun to pretend like it’s 2008 again. Between the uniform of skinny jeans and H&M approved graphic tees, the militant adherence to only posting square photos on IG, and, of course, the bubblegum rap tunes compressed to the point they could serve as ringtones on the EnV2, no one does recession-core quite like Feng. “Soul 2 Soul” is the standout song off the Croydon rapper’s debut mixtape, WTF, my personal highlight in what was a major year for the UK underground. It has all the hallmarks of a classic Feng track: lyrics so basic they sound like a child’s first attempt at rhyme (”Just have some fun, until you see the sun”), an incredibly oversimplified sense of sincerity (”It’s gotta be soul to soul, not flesh to flesh”), and a sugary rush of melodic nostalgia that hearkens back to early Ke$ha and THE E.N.D.-era Black Eyed Peas. Depending on where you sit on the Feng spectrum, this stuff is either incredibly grating or mindless good fun. Me personally, I’m solidly in the latter camp.
8. Money Lang - “Big Smile”
A couple years ago Dario Tronchin (aka Money Lang) sent me an [untitled] playlist of some tracks he was working on. We’d just connected through a mutual friend and upon receiving the link I ripped through the demos, most of which would end up on 2024’s MMM and this year’s Xmas Rush projects. “Big Smile” was my favorite, I must’ve played it 20 times that first day, only later realizing that [untitled] sends a notification every time someone listens to a track you share. My apologies Dario. I eventually lost that link but thankfully “Big Smile” was finally released this year. As a track it’s sort of a one trick pony: a quick, soul loop-powered build that drops into one of the most aggressive synth stabs this side of Daft Punk, repeated twice for good measure. But that trick can leave me juiced for hours, wearing the song’s titular expression the whole way.
7. Horse Vision - “Animal”
My buddy called this European Alex G when I showed it to him back in August, and he’s not wrong. “Animal” has the same wily new-alt energy G came up on during his generational 2010s run. Even though the song begins as a simple duet between rhythm guitars, you can immediately tell it has something else up its sleeve, revealing as much when the drums swing into gear after the first chorus and transform the track from a moody Smiths update into an out-and-out computer rock banger. A lot of the songs on this list are here for sentimental reasons, or because I can connect them back to philosophical ideas I find interesting, this one just crushes.
6. K-Lone - “someone else”
How do you make dance music sound like grief? Sound like healing? Sound like the last rain from the storm over head? Movement is a medicine, a balm for the soul. In the months following my mom’s passing, I danced alone in my childhood bedroom for hours, letting the relief of release wash over me as I gave up. “someone else” sounds like something I would’ve listened to then, a suspended moment of warmth that offers more than escape, rather a deepening, a descent into oneself so far down to the point of dissolution, to the point where you’re absolved.
5. Cleo Reed - “Salt n’ Lime”
The degradation of corporate drudgery, of waking up each day as nothing more than a cog in a giant, unthinking machine, of needing to justify your existence through the most menial tasks imaginable while having your every move silently surveilled by an all-seeing eye. It’s the prison we’ve built for ourselves, and it’s the one that Cleo Reed so sneeringly thumbs her nose at on “Salt n’ Lime.” 8-minute intros are rare, rarer still are they the best tracks on the album, but “Lime” not only succeeds as a microcosm of Cuntry’s intersectionalist lens, it’s also catchy as fuck, leveraging the communal tradition of folk-music to transform Reed’s gripes into sing-along melodies that get stuck in your head for hours.
4. Erika de Casier - “Lifetime”
“Lifetime“ was 2025’s best song about desire and it wasn’t even close. “When the lights out/Do you still see me?” should be standard questioning when trying to determine the seriousness of a relationship. Some women at my office were talking about bringing yearning back to r&b, a genre that’s been rudderless for close to a decade and a half, this is the song I’d show them in response. What sets de Casier apart from her peers is that she writes not about the object of love’s projections, but rather the feeling itself, the act, as it were, of need and fulfillment. On the closing track, she places this dynamic at the center of our selves, a lifelong search that only we’re capable of ending.
3. Zack Villere - “Issy”
Name me a sweeter track, I’ll wait. “Issy” radiates with the orange glow of a fire lit cabin in the dead of winter, a beacon of respite amidst a cold and brutal landscape. Tell me, is love not the same? “I’m here waiting/I’ve been waiting all day/Did you know I missed you,” the type of thing we all hope to find, that you’re the object of someone else’s thoughts even as you’re lost in your own.
2. Playboi Carti - “OLYMPIAN”
If NBC isn’t piping this through every second of it’s 2028 coverage, somebody’s fucking up. MUSIC was undoubtedly its namesake’s biggest moment of the year. While artists like Dijon, Cameron Winter and Addison Rae may have left more indelible marks on 2025, no one sucked the air out of the room like Carti did during those two weeks in March. For an album that was essentially a victory lap for its creator, a reward for reconfiguring an entire genre in his image one fateful Christmas night five years ago, “OLYMPIAN” is its gold-plated podium moment. Carti’s putting 10 cars through traffic, he’s dropping $1,700 on jeans, he’s comparing himself to Michael Jackson, and he just can’t help any of it. This is the product of running off pure id, when you’ve killed your ego only to let something baser take over.
1. Anysia Kym & Tony Seltzer - “Long4”
Sometimes one lyric is all it takes. “No one’s coming to your rescue,” these words stuck with me so easily this year. Perhaps it’s an admission of defeat, perhaps it’s whatever hope is left. After a year filled with cartoonish levels of villainy here in the States, where elites finally dropped the last semblance of respectability to proudly proclaim their own self-interest, all while calling it virtuous in the process, there was no clearer message to the people than this: you’re on your own. While lyrically this track reads more as a message in a bottle to someone from a past life, I can’t help but hear the weight of the impending apocalypse in Seltzer’s cold and militant drums and Kym’s sobering lilt. In his seminal work The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argues for art that meets its moment, that points a way forward rather than recycles old forms. “Long4” was that for me this year, a transmission of resolve from the not so distant future. It only gets harder from here.
Bonus: Top 5 Live Shows
AIR w/Orchestra @ Hollywood Bowl
Joshua Chuquimia Crampton @ Canary Test
Gelli Haha @ Viva Pomona
Nourished By Time @ El Rey
Three performances and three conversations on the technique and practice of live computer music