This was a big Life Events year, but that didn't have much of an impact on my music listening. Being in Texas for four years likely shaped my preferences a little bit (give me alllll of the woman-fronted indie alt country you can dig up) but I haven't been back in the Bay long enough to see a pendulum swing back toward (checks notes) E-40?
My pre-2025 albums that should've made their respective lists: Geese's 3D Country (2023) and Cameron Winter's Heavy Metal (2024) (which, to be fair, I could've slotted on this year's list given its December 2024 release, but look, it's hard enough to whittle things down to ten albums so I'm going to give myself this pass). You may be sensing a theme.
Oh, and Carole King's Tapestry, but I wasn't making lists yet (or alive) in 1971. So it goes.
My first two runners-up for 2025 are hardcore/pop-punk/whatever-you-want-to-label-them albums: NEVER ENOUGH by Turnstile and Who Will Look After The Dogs? by PUP. Both are fun hangs, and I suspect either or both may have ascended to the top ten if I had gotten myself to one of their shows (i.e., to one of their mosh pits) this year.
I don't want to dwell on disappointments, but I have to agree with Stephen Hyden's take that there were a lot of middle-of-the-road "legacy act" albums this year. HAIM, Lucy Dacus, Big Thief, Lorde, Japanese Breakfast... I looked forward to each of these releases hoping to uncover a new obsession, but instead found myself reaching for their older material. I haven't lost faith in these artists or anything so cynical as that, but it was as good reminder that I could afford to explore: five of my top ten are artists that haven't appeared in my top tens before. (Yes I'm counting Clipse, and yes, I know that's ridiculous.)
Swiftie update: bleh. I'm not sure this version of Taylor has anything left for me. That's fine; I haven't yet grown tired of her miraculous pre-2024 catalog.
And one more thing before moving on to the list proper. What's up with Dijon's Baby? I saw Dijon open for Bon Iver in 2023 and was intrigued by his energy and stage presence. Justin Vernon is obsessed with and inspired by him. Pitchfork has anointed him their artist of the year, a distinction that they seem to have invented this year solely to inform the internet how hip they still are. But every time I listen to the album, I'm left a little empty. I appreciate it at the micro level. The production hits. The vibes, too. It should be my new Blonde, right? But the songs just aren't there for me. I find myself tuning it out, like some kind of indie RnB muzak. I don't know. I'll revisit it periodically. Perhaps my moment of inspiration will come.
10. Indigo De Souza – Precipice
Precipice doesn't really do anything that Any Shape You Take or All This Will End didn't do, and maybe I should dock it for that, but I found myself listening to this album over and over again.
Jay Som is back! I don't know if it was intentional, but this album plays like if my favorite songs from 2005 were reimagined as written by the kind of artist I want to spend my time in 2025 listening to. Seriously, am I the only one sensing a The Ataris influence?
I tried to get into Wednesday a couple years ago with Rat Saw God but it didn't click for me. Bleeds did, though, from the jump: the opening scream of "Reality TV Argument Bleeds," which sets the tone of, yeah you might get something nice like "Elderberry Wine" and some of the best lyrics you'll hear all year, but ultimately we're here to shred.
7. Tyler, the Creator – DON'T TAP THE GLASS
I don't care if Tyler brushes this off as a chill / fun album. There aren't many artists that could put out something this high quality a year after Chromakopia.
6. Bartees Strange – Horror
Bartees continues to blend a diverse set of influence that happen to be influences that I am extremely into. I don't know if this fits the "more cohesive Bartees" that I hoped for a couple years ago when Farm to Table came out, but I think this is what Bartees is. The musical diversity is the point.
5. Clipse – Let God Sort Em Out
Ding ding ding. We have a winner! A non-Tyler rap album in my top ten, for the first time since 2019. I don't think this is "the world is healing" moment so much as it is that Pusha and Malice are so practiced at what they do. It is precise, up there with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, IGOR, and blonde, doing exactly what it is setting out to do. I'm not saying I like this album as much as those, but it starts off with the only rap song that has ever made me cry and somehow transitions seamlessly into the unrivaled coke rap that you'd expect.
I feel silly explaining why I like a particular rap or hip-hop album given how little I listen to the genres these days. I only listened to this because it's the Clipse and the album was getting rave reviews. But I'll stand by everything that I wrote in the above paragraph.
My now-warm reception to LUX is what happens when I push through my initial indifference. I had to. I mean, the Dissect podcast had to drop an emergency episode to convince its listeners that yes, yes, this album was a work of genius, please go listen to it.
I don't obsess over lyrics and their deeper meaning, but I do find myself a bit at sea with non-English lyrics. I suspect some part of Rosalía knew that an album sung in fourteen languages was going to be a hard sell, so she made sure that the music itself was undeniable.
So: I don't know what anything means (beyond the opening weekend cliff notes from the Dissect episode) but even in the "worst case," just taking her voice as an instrument, this is obviously one of the best albums of the year. I'll report back once I've learned Spanish, Arabic, Catalan, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Mandarin, Portuguese, Sicilian, and Ukrainian.
3. Bon Iver – sABLE, fABLE
Ugh, men will tell you they don't obsess over lyrics and then make their top three albums of the year three whose lyrics shape the whole experience.
I already sung the SABLE EP's praises on last year's list (number 4!), hoping and assuming a follow-up album was on its way. I didn't expect it to be a direct follow-up, i.e., part of the same album. The release strategy worked well here: Bon Iver dropped an extremely Bon Iver EP, let it sink in for a little while, and then repurposed it as a literal transition into a new kind of Bon Iver music, taking a few steps back from nostalgia and loss and a shuffling toward hope and fulfillment. I suspect making the Sad Stuff was weighing on Justin, and if this is the way for him to find inspiration and continue to release classic record after classic record, well, it sounds pretty magnificent to me.
no, we don't need no window curtains / and we can let the light come in / and we can shed your earthly burdens / of this I am certain of / you was made for me
2. jasmine.4.t – You Are The Morning
We strolled into the Lucy Dacus show halfway through the first opener, jasmine.4.t. We had listened to the album once in preparation, but I was in no way prepared for the power of standing in the third or fourth GA row and hearing the rawness of "Elephant" and "Woman" live and stripped down. We were bathed in empathy. It may sounds corny or trite, but that's gotta be one of the best outcomes of live music, if not music as a whole. I looked around at the mostly-younger-than-me-and-queer audience that Lucy Dacus attracts and I couldn't help but feel like jasmine.4.t was exactly what we all needed in that moment, especially in Texas.
After the show I wasn't sure if listening to the album would hold up against what I felt that night. But, it delivered. I still feel a version of that empathy bath each time I listen. It helps that it was co-produced by the boygenii. It's still pretty stripped down, which I think is fitting for the first album of someone who is hoping to wreck you as thoroughly as her. It's just like... a really well-produced stripped down.
1. Geese – Getting Killed
Every year there are some albums on my list that give me a lot of hope for the Future Of Music. And every year there are some incredible albums that I can't stop listening to. But they haven't tended to be the same album.
For my list-toppers, I have sometimes favored albums closer to some simplistic definition of perfection: albums that are keen to tell you how meticulously they've been crafted, where every listen is a musical treasure hunt. Getting Killed is not that album. The album tracks themselves don't even feel like the definitive version of each song (see the From The Basement set for an crystal clear refutation of that notion), but more like a gateway into their own messy world. The best versions of these songs don't even exist yet. The best versions of these songs might never exist.
What is Cam even talking about? What is going on? Why am I hanging onto the thinnest, tightest thread, exhaling only after "Long Island City Here I Come" comes crashing to a close? Is this what they wanted?
