The 50 best albums of 2025

10.

Little Simz

Lotus

The sixth album from Little Simz marked a sea change for Simbi, who has navigated music industry turmoil and her falling out of a key creative partner in Inflo which left a 2.2 million-pounds loan unpaid and aired in public.

Lotus introduces a new production crew to work on the record, with punk, jazz and afrobeat brought into the Simz sound more readily with chief producer Miles Clinton James, while still sounding like the recognisable artist that has made her name to this point – so stirring strings and Cleo Soul-esque backing vocals (from Lydia Kitto) are still present, as is a burning anger at her former collaborator, but there’s also a lot of fun and playfulness on this record.

Obongjayar returns on two tracks and Moses Sumney, Little Dragon’s Yukimi, Sampha, Michael Kiwanuka, Yussef Dayes, Miraa May, Wretch 32 and Moonchild Sannelly also appear.

9.

They Are Gutting a Body of Water

LOTTO

Philadelphia shoegaze band TAGABOW (for short) bring an palpable urgency to the genre, along with a smoggy nineties’ alt-rock style on their fourth record LOTTO.

While shorning off their electronic and experimental edge in favour of pristine distortion, hypnotic riffs and guitar fuzz, They Are Gutting a Body of Water recall OG shoegaze innovators My Bloody Valentine in their guitar expansiveness.

There are also sonic shades of and US alt-rock ’90s bands like Slint and Nada Surf (the spoken word draws the comparison to that band’s biggest hit ‘Popular’).

LOTTO is up there with the most thrilling guitar rock records of the year, tickling a very particular itch, channelling the best of alternative rock sounds of the last 30 years which TAGABOW smash into their own unique formation in the process.

They Are Gutting A Body Of Water play Dublin’s Whelan’s in February.

8.

Loyle Carner

hopefully !

The fourth album from UK rapper and lyricist Loyle Carner finds the artist in reflective fatherhood mode, who sings for the first time (after Fontaines D.C.’s Grian Chatten ghosted his request apparently) and the result is an album buoyed by the joys of life experiences.

Loyle Carner formed a new five-piece band for the record, and their playing dynamic is a big part of the appeal of hopefully !. It moves his sound into a new realm, it’s softer, gentler and more intimate, and as his Glastonbury set showed this summer, it’s one he can bring to big stages.

7.

Billy Woods

GOLLIWOG

The Washington DC-based New York artist rap auteur has been on a roll of great albums in recent years, whether solo (2022’s Aethiopes really struck with me), or with collaborators Kenny Segal (2023’s Maps was a highlight) and ELUCID as Armand Hammer. GOLLIWOG might be his most singularly brilliant album yet.

GOLLIWOG is an album consumed by themes of horror – not the clichéd boogiemen of cult films, but the everyday corrosive effect of modern living, and the pain we inflict on each other in the grim everyday.

It’s at times suffocating in its sulphuric atmosphere, but that’s part of the appeal, with Woods spouting free-wheelin’ rhymes that draw on the stuff of nightmares and unsettling vignettes set to eerie dank productions, broken jazz beats, sinister basslines, sampled speech and synth horror score atmosphere.

Production comes from a coterie of names like The Alchemist, Kenny Segal, EL-P, Conductor Williams, Preservation, DJ Hara and Saint Abdullah.

We already knew few rappers could make albums like Billy Woods, but GOLLIWOG is a new apex in his discography of evocative albums, swimming in the mire of humanity’s worst impulses.

6.

Geese

Getting Killed

The Gen Z rockers are the buzziest band of the moment – a Brooklyn band who with this third album are ditching their previous alt-country-blues rock sound and embracing an experimental indie-rock sensibility that recalls the buzz bands of yesteryear – Wolf Parade, TV On The Radio and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, along with more underground names like Boredoms and Liars.

Lead singer Cameron Winter’s solo record Heavy Metal released in December last year was the first sign of a change of mood and vocal style but Getting Killed exudes a freewheeling experimentalism and energy that is disorientating and exciting, with Winters’ voice cragged and dank in the mix.

The album flits between various shades of alt-rock – the TV On The Radio-esque blustery jazzy “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!!” rock of ‘Trinidad’, the twinkling indie yarl of ‘Cobra’, the tribal indie crescendos of ‘Husbands’, the scuffed up Vampire Weekend-esque jam of the title track, the Broken Social Scene comparison-inviting ‘Islands Of Men’, the bluesy rollick of ‘Au Pays Du Cocaine’ and the revenue-goading anthemic indie pop ‘Taxes’.

With the band being in their early 20s, the cloak of influences feels genuine and it’s chiming with a younger audience, and working for those of us who were around the block first time.

At the same time, Getting Killed creates its own merits. The 2000s indie-rock revival just got its headliner.

5.

Clipse

Let God Sort Em Out

The return of brothers Pusha T and Malice on an album 15 years on from their disbandment, with Pharrell back on the boards, and guests Kendrick, Tyler, The Creator; The Dream, John Legend and Nas bringing their A-game, Let God Sort Em Out is thankfully, Clipse at their absolute white hot best.

Surprisingly for known coke-rappers, the album opens with ‘The Birds Don’t Sing’ a moving song about their parents who passed four months apart, but for the most party these are yuugh-heavy rap bangers with both brothers matching each others bars with precision with regular gangsta fixations of snow white powder and luxury living among the devilish cruel missives aimed at lesser peers.

‘So Be It’ is built on a track from 70s Saudi Arabian artist Talah Madah that is one of the best uses of a sample this year, ‘POV’ is classic Push, and ‘Chains and Whips’ survives its backroom label fussing that saw the Drake and Kendrick beef have the knock on affect of Clipse buying themselves out of their Universal label contract in order to release the album with the K-dot verse intact (the album came out on Jay-Z’s Roc Nation) to become one of the rap songs of the year, on one of the classic rap albums of the year.

4.

Oklou

Choke Enough

You might call the French producer, singer and artist Oklou’s music hyperpop as it is sometimes deemed, but there is something altogether nebulous and viscose at play on this proper debut album.

Ambient dream pop is another way to describe it, but there’s something genuinely off-kilter and close to confounding in how the album moves between melodies and textures – from trance to quiet passages. It feels like post-PC Music experimental pop, that features an AG Cook and Danny L Harle production credits though most of the record was co-produced by Oklou with producer Casey MQ.

Understated yet grand, minimal yet somehow maximal, choke enough is thoroughly 2025 music, digital yet full of soul, heart and weirdo pop morphs.

2.

CMAT

Euro-Country

The third album from Ireland’s global pop star makes good on the cheeky promise of her nascent career. CMAT is now genuinely one of the finest songwriters and live performers operating in a global context, with Euro-Country reflecting Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson’s own brand of pert and hearty countrified pop singalong anthems, writing with supreme confidence about her lack of it, self-examining with a poignancy, self-awareness, melancholia and pop culture.

CMAT has been a great lyricist and songwriter since the beginning, with an ability to encapsulate a home truth in a funny grinned line or relate her own experience through a larger scale – with every song featuring at least one lyric line to make you guffaw or hit you in the feels.

Not much has changed musically but producer Oli Deakin is back continuing the fruitful partnership the pair developed on the debut album 2022’s If My Wife New I’d Be Dead.

Euro-Country is a better record than the debut and 2023’s Matias Tellez-produced Crazymad, for Me, with CMAT’s songwriting prowess finding yet another higher level once again.

There’s a gliding level-up gallop to these songs that is best encapsulated by the title track, which has quickly inserted itself on the mantle as the best song inspired by the ravaged wake of the Celtic Tiger on Ireland’s people, a country, in keeping with her lyrical themes – she has called “the most toxic boyfriend i’ve ever had”.

The album features some of CMAT’s best single songs – ‘When A Good Man Cries’ is ebullient country pop, ‘Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’, ‘Take A Sexy Picture Of Me’, ‘Running/Planning’ and ‘Lord, Let That Tesla Crash’ are top tier Euro-Country bangers, adding up to one of the most replayable albums of the year.

1.

ROSALÍA

LUX

There was no easy guessing what direction Rosalía would take it after two wildly disparate albums – the flamenco pop R&B of El Mal Querer and genre-slicing global experimental pop of Motomami, but Lux is an innovative work led by the ambitious mind of Rosalía.

2025 was a year that musicians and the music industry grappled with AI slop, a new world in which prompt jockeys can make AI songs dubiously trained on existing catalogues go viral and top charts, as major labels seek to do deals with AI companies looking to exploit music catalogues in the name of innovation.

Enter the Catalan singer’s Lux, a breathtaking album made many hours of deep human research and performed by a huge cast of talented humans. AI could never.

Lux takes its inspirations from the writings of French philosopher Simone Weil, Brazilian author Clarice Lispector and other critical literary thinkers along with the lives of past female saints of history – like namesake Saint Rosalia of Palermo – who renounced her wealth and went to live in a cave for the rest of her life, echoed in the singer rejecting material wealth on ‘Sauvignon Blanc’ (Translated – “I will listen to my God / I will throw away my Jimmy Choos”).

Lux realises an album of mountain-moving movements in four parts through orchestral spirituals, with The London Symphony Orchestra performing throughout.

These chasmic sonics plays to Rosalía’s operatic and flamenco strengths, and the depth and expression of her voice, in which she sings in 13 languages (Catalan/ Spanish, Arabic, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Mandarin, Portuguese, Sicilian, and Ukrainian – in the album’s construction she deferred to the knowledge of translators and phonetics experts for pronunciation and grammar).

Lux swells with operatic and orchestral motion – a living, breathing work where you can feel the thrum of instruments, the turning of sheet music, and the power of Rosalía’s voice – hers is one of the most emotionally-affecting in modern music, and it gets to work here.

The entire record is imbued with imaginative digital production as the orchestra performance is wrapped up with booming and stuttering percussion. Rosalía is a master at pulling at various threads and making them sound whole – as electronic and hip-hop touches are sown in throughout this grand but often intimate-pierced record of huge intention.

There are thematic references to spirituality, deities, temptation, crying statues and religious artefacts, as Rosalía reflects her brittle self in the wake of her called off engagement with the Puerto Rican singer-songwriter Rauw Alejandro informing comparisons to a crumbling relic on ‘Reliquia’ ( Translated – “Take a piece of me, keep it for when I’m gone / I’ll be your relic”), cracked porcelain on the Japanese monk-inspired song ‘Porcelana’ (Translated – “I’ll throw away my beauty / Before you have the chance to ruin it”) or just pointed and poignant insults on the delicious revenge lark of ‘La Perla’ (“The local disappointment, national heartbreaker / An emotional terrorist, the greatest disaster in the world.”).

Love and faith move the earth on ‘Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti’ ( Translated: “You are the most beautiful hurricane / That I have ever seen / The finest of dolmens / Would rise for you / You make the Earth tremble / And it rises by your side / But when the one who cannot rise, is you?”) and the lead single ‘Berghain’ is the album’s grandiose and immediate experimental classical pop moment, Rosalía’s heavenly sacred operatic style contrasting with urgent Vivalidi-esque strings, a cosign verse from the inimitable pop auteur Björk and a lusty coercive Yves Tumor interjection.

The elemental force of Rosalía, the singer, the artist, is reflected in her lyrical preoccupations – the intimate writ large on the earth, heaven and sky – as her faith in God centres her vision and resolve as the album moves towards the fourth and final movement.

The accusations of Rosalía as a global cultural vulture was previously aimed at Madonna, another singer who gainly explored the duality of God and lust.

In Rosalía’s case, Lux is a compelling argument for traversing musical borders and drawing from disparate forms and ancient crafts to create a shattering masterwork of pop music that ascends and transcends its sources. Lux is also a timely reminder of the indelible importance of deeply sculpted human authorship, emotion and creativity.