Best Albums of 2025
Luminescent Creatures - Ichiko Aoba
In January of 2025, Japanese songwriter and classical guitarist Ichiko Aoba kicked off a banner year for chamber pop with her new record Luminescent Creatures, inspired by her time free-diving off the coast of Japan. Aoba composed and produced the record with long-time collaborator Taro Umebayashi, both of whose arrangements inspire both the vastness of the ocean and interconnected ecosystems of a coral reef. The duo are careful to keep the focus on where it needs to be, on Ichiko’s voice and guitar, dancing through her delicate compositions that evoke the comfort of an animated movie soundtrack, without feeling cloying or melodramatic. Silence and gentle reverberations keep listeners breathing underwater, marveling at the mysteries in every drop. - Pads
Mercy - Armand Hammer and Golliwog - billy woods
Another year, another set of incredible Backwoodz Studios releases. The elusive Billy Woods continues to be the busiest man in abstract hip-hop, appearing as one part of the now-legendary Armand Hammer on the Alchemist-produced Mercy and also MC-ing the collab-heavy Golliwog, his solo follow-up to the nearly-unmatched Maps from 2023. Golliwog finally answers the big question on everyone’s minds: “What if Dälek and Scott Walker made a horrorcore record with a Danish saxophone player?” Yes, it’s as haunting as it sounds. Woods’ partner-in-rhyme, Elucid, comes out the winner on Mercy, turning in a series of amazingly dialed-in performances and wild-ass lyrical flights (30 seconds into the record he rhymes “myth of meritocracy” with “fuck a cock-and-squeeze”), all while keeping guests like Earl and Quelle Chris in check. Great job, gents, you did it again. - HM
New Threats from the Soul - Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band
If you don’t know Achewood, let me introduce you to your newest rabbithole. The longrunning webcomic is southern idioms, misplaced California optimism, and Pacific Northwest melancholy all blended together into absurdism that drinks Coors while quoting Faulkner. It’s a foundational piece of the weirdo Americana canon alongside Jon Bois, Mark Twain, Flannery O’Connor and Calvin & Hobbes. Ryan Davis’ new one, New Threats from the Soul, has entered the same rarified air: hilarious, crushing, unforgettable.
“It’s a pissing competition between the man I am and the guy I was,” Davis says as an introduction. Davis and the Roadhouse Band straddle a misremembered past and a hazy future: pilfering from drum&bass (“Monte Carlo”) and coloring the funhouse mirror twins of “Mutilation Springs” and “Mutilation Falls” with janky synths plunking merrily next to saloon pianos and swirling pedal steel. It’s possible to fill up the rest of this paragraph with nuggets from Davis’ masterful pen, but the ultimate line, for me, is the one that broke me into tears when I saw them live. After admitting “my ribcage was a loony bin to keep my heart out of her hand,” on “The Simple Joy” Davis moves from the heartbreak that permeates the album and takes the long view. “I learned that time was not my friend or foe/ More like one of the guys from work.” Acceptance, to Davis, doesn’t grant some grand epiphany, but it does lend a sense of contentment. And, as “The Simple Joy” implies, maybe that’s all we need. - NS
Off the Record: Four EPs - Makaya McCraven
For all the praise heaped on Chicago-based drummer and bandleader Makaya McCraven, he’s always been a bit of an outcast in the American contemporary jazz scene. Some have argued that he injects too much hip-hop into his projects, that he’s unoriginal, that he’s playing music he doesn’t, or couldn’t, understand. Those who haven’t been caught under his spell probably won’t be swayed by his 2025 output, which consists of a kookily ambitious four-EP boxset, recorded at various points over the years and released in October by International Anthem and XL as Off the Record. These terrific mini-projects are like if the redheaded stepchildren from four very different families got together for a weed-fueled jam sesh (which is unlikely to be far from the truth). PopUp Shop feels perhaps the most improvised, with visceral bass work from Ben Shepard and wonderful percussion backdrops from McCraven. Hidden Out! features the iconic guitar noodling of one Jeff Parker, best-known for his decades with post-rock outfit Tortoise, as well as the ace trumpeting and saxophone-ing of Marquis Hill and Josh Johnson, respectively. Techno Logic is like Herbie Hancock’s Future Shock as filtered through a prism where Zapp’s “Computer Love” is the only song that’s ever been written. And Joel Ross’ beautiful vibraphone on The People’s Mixtape acts as the great unifier, signaling a sort-of end to a very fun night at the jazz club, one that can be looped, replayed, and heard out of order. McCraven’s sensibilities aren’t for everyone, but he’s made one thing clear: he’s a lifer who doesn’t intend to carve out any path except his own. - HM
On This Day - Tony Molina
Classical punk musician Tony Molina finally lends his talents to a double album of epic miniatures, all carefully aimed at the gaping hole in your heart that comes from grappling with The State of Things(™). He sings of cruel men consuming everything that is good and leaving nothing left for the rest of us. It’s as pure a hit of power-pop as they come, with 12-string guitars and the occasional horn section delivering powerhouse melodies in unconventional methods, unfolding with both masterful precision and deeply human warmth. Tony has always had the power to lodge so many hooks in your head and rip your heart out of your chest in all of 70 seconds. On This Day finds him doubling down for his best, and longest, record yet. - Pads
Opening Night - MK Velsorf & Aase Nielsen
Overlooked amid all the great music coming out of Denmark this decade is Opening Night, a live album by two Danish improvisers inaugurating a new theater in LA. I haven’t seen it on any year-end lists except those of my immediate friend group (mostly because I won’t shut up about it), and it’s safe to say no one involved expected this to be a masterpiece, but here we are. The musical style is striking: hollow drum-machine ambient a few clicks east of K. Leimer or Gaussian Curve, but with peals of ‘80s-FM guitar from MK Velsorf and creepy synth pads from Aase Nielsen that would seem more apt to score a murder investigation than an LA gala. The music seems to come from somewhere else, with a subtle pall of reverb as if to indicate they’re playing in an empty room, or have been shuttled to a corner and forgotten about. Where are all the people?
In a sneaky way, Opening Night is true to the experience of being a working musician, where you’re part of the action but not necessarily part of the party. Subtle water and birds on “House in the Hills” suggest the artists’ minds have astrally projected below the foundations of the building and into a primordial time when there wasn’t any Hollywood. Finally, on the title track, the sound of the crowd rushes in, and we’re oriented so quickly in a time and place it’s like pressure shock. They sound like people you might know. After a while, I began to think of them not as ambient crowd noise but of people trapped inside the album itself, cloven from reality by the same spell that trapped the musicians in their own LaBrean ghostworld and forced to relive opening night over and over again. - DB
Points of Origin - Will Stratton
The scene laid out in Points of Origin’s gentle piano-led number “Temple Bar” conjures the California of Laurel Canyon; one can practically imagine Warren Zevon spinning around on a stool and raising a glass, a wolfish grin on his face. With his virtuosic talent in fingerstyle guitar, Will Stratton has many vivid compositions to his name already, but on his eighth studio album he creates his most colorful musical world yet, one sourced from versions of California both realistic and mythic. (In this detailed guide to each song, Stratton’s explanations make the whole thing sound like a short story collection.) It’s a tapestry full of fine detail; not many people writing music about California would think to name-drop Morro Bay. Where many of Stratton’s best tunes (“If You Wait Long Enough,” “New Vanguard Blues”) center on his vocals and dextrous fingerpicking, Points of Origin is a full band affair, with numbers like “I Found You” and “Higher and Drier” offering an appeal that’s damn near crossover. Listening to Points of Origin I was reminded of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, another nostalgia-tinged remembrance of my home state, one that sticks in the memory for its graceful interweaving of places real and imagined. In the end, the line between those two turns out to be not so defined after all. (Listen to our interview) - Brice Ezell
Remscela - Milkweed
Time is slippery in Milkweed's world, with layers of sound and history piled up onto one another and played back like one of Nigel Kneale's Stone Tapes. Here, the anonymous folk duo set ancient texts (specifically, stories from Irish epic Táin Bó Cuailnge) to original melodies, pair traditional instrumentation and field recordings with preset keyboard rhythms, then thoroughly fuck with everything until it comes out sounding caked with thousands of years of grime and ghosts.
All of their releases, save their shocking-in-retrospect hi-fi debut, play out this way, but Remscéla is their most fully-formed. From the blown-out bass of "How Conchobor was Begotten” and the melting-cassette stop-start rhythms of “Whiter than the Snow is the White Treasure of her Teeth," to "The Milk-Fed Calf," a ballad so bare it somehow feels out of place on what is ostensibly a folk album, Remscéla is Milkweed at their darkest, most violent, and most accomplished. - Julian McAllister
Ride Into the Sun - Brad Mehldau
There’s a vibrant stretch of releases between Brad Mehldau’s 2010 masterpiece Highway Rider and 2025. But none have captured the magic of that double album more than Ride Into the Sun, Mehldau’s tribute to his friend, the late Elliott Smith. As on Highway Rider, Mehldau employs an orchestra to augment the trio, quintet, and solo piano arrangements he uses, in this case for a mixture of new pieces that take inspiration from Smith and new versions of Smith originals. Combine the fullness of that orchestral backing with ace guest players like Chris Thile and Daniel Rossen (Grizzly Bear) and you’ve got an album that’s as much a wholly realized work of art in its own right as it is a loving remembrance for a widely beloved artist. The way that Mehldau makes Smith’s spartan breakup ballad “Better Be Quiet Now” blossom into something that sounds like a jazz standard a hundred years old is the stuff of legend – or, in this case, legends. - BE
saoirse dream - saoirse dream
I've written and re-written a lot over the years on my year-end lists about how I reject the idea of "best ofs" and that ultimately the music that never leaves my heavy rotation over a calendar year makes up the foundation of my lists. I'm not here to compare some albums and try to figure out what makes one "better" than the other. If I had to pick a number one though, I'd be picking saoirse dream's self-titled release because it has not left my rotation since releasing in February this year.
This album has everything I could ever want in a poppy, electronic-infused indie rock record. In the past, saoirse's music was a little more foundationally hyperpop or indietronica, and here they achieve perfect crossover appeal for emo, indie rock and bitpop fans. It packs in crunchy guitar riffs, samples and vocal clips, alt-country solos and even shoegaze textures all through a Jeff Rosenstockian "post-genre" approach to pop music. It's a beautiful, relatable, messy and emotionally kaleidoscopic journey... Hey, it's kinda like being alive. - DG