My Favorite Albums of 2025
Here's my list of Favorite Albums of 2025, the year that it currently is. Just in time, once again.
Wait, you say it's January 2nd? Sorry, I have been busy. But I listened to and loved a lot of music this year, and this blog post is one of the few times a year I get to do any personal writing. So here it is, I hope you enjoy.
In case you missed my songs list, check it out here.
The playlist is at the bottom, but first here are my thoughts.
10. Silvestre - Fantasma: Fantasma, the brilliant collection by Portuguese-speaking Bay Area producer Silvestre is certainly the most obscure album on my list. I am not even sure how I stumbled upon it, maybe through a Bandcamp Daily recommendation, or by idle scrolling through SoundCloud. However I found it, I am glad I did, as it was one of my favorite worlds to get lost in this year. Silvestre is shockingly versatile, with a deep knowledge of niche subgenres that he uses to turn Fantasma into a shape-shifting set that consistently surprises. Fantasma kicks off with “Dead,” featuring a rage rap instrumental with 2-step percussion and echoing keys, leading into “Coming Of Age,” a liquid DnB heatrock with the propulsive energy and haunting atmospherics of a Metroid Prime boss level, into “Skip The Ad,” one of the few songs with vocals; home to tossed-off rhymes over skeletal marimbas and Detroit rap bass. The opening triptych is indicative of the see-sawing journey Silvestre takes us on with Fantasmas, never staying in one sonic realm for longer than 3 minutes, but never losing control of the vibe. Additional highlights include the bass-heavy happy house “Lineage,” the underwater Jersey club “Morto Vivo,” and the morphing lo-fi “Not Enough.”
9. De La Soul - Cabin In The Sky: For decades, De La Soul brought an inimitable sense of playfulness to hip-hop, never taking themselves too seriously while being very serious about their craft. Two years ago, what should have been a triumphant moment for the group–resolving their tangled legal issues and bringing their classic albums to streaming services–turned bittersweet, as Trugoy The Dove, aka Dave, aka Plug Two, passed away just weeks before the release. The two-man dynamic between Dave and Posdnous had always been the lifeblood of the band, and while Pos and Maseo found creative ways to perform in 2023, I would never have dreamed that they had another excellent album in them. I was wrong: Cabin In The Sky is a sibling of sorts to A Tribe Called Quest’s We Got It From Here, another Native Tongues album that commemorates a legend while adding a new jewel to a legendary catalog. Cabin In The Sky doesn’t reach the levels of excellence of De La’s classics like 3 Feet High & Rising, De La Soul Is Dead, and Buhloone Mindstate, but it comes much closer than it has any right to. Trugoy’s presence hangs over the album, as Pos and Mase promise to carry on the group’s legacy, never stopping lest the memory of their partner fades. De La bring an extensive guest list–including producers like DJ Premier, Pete Rock, and frequent collaborator Super Dave West, and rappers like Q-Tip, Black Thought, and Killer Mike–and Trugoy appears on several songs, but Posdnous carries the emotional load, putting on for his late bandmate by packing his verses with pearls of poignant wisdom. Pos balances sorrow with silliness, bringing levity to what could have been an emotionally overwhelming listen. The album reaches a peak with its closing 2-piece: “Cabin In The Sky,” Pos’s final farewell to his friend, and “Don’t Push Me,” a joyous, self-produced Trugoy solo track, which allows The Dove to have the last word.
8. Ben LaMar Gay - Yowzers: International Anthem, the Chicago-based avant-garde label, has become a genre unto itself these days, distributing daring, non-notated, improvisational music that intersects with jazz, while bucking the genre’s staid traditions. Windy City native Ben LaMar Gay is one of the label’s standout signees, bringing folkloric tunes to life with futuristic sounds, jazz chops, and invigorating spoken word. Yowzers is a bracing and bewildering listen, creating a joyous cacophony to undergird Gay’s deeply personal lyrics. Arranged for quartet–Cornet, guitar, and percussion, with a variable fourth instrument (often piano)–Gay’s compositions spring from deceptively simple melodies, hammered home with hypnotic variations and incantatory repetition. The artist infuses Yowzers with a sense of gonzo unpredictability, fitting polyrhythmic grooves (“damn you cute”), spiritual a capella (“i am (bells)”), epic narratives (“John, John Henry”), and much more into his rich tapestry.
7. Cory Hanson - I Love People: As a member of Wand and on his past solo efforts, Cory Hanson established himself as a modern guitar hero with his epic psychedelic jams and distorted axe theatrics. On his 2025 album I Love People, Hanson turns down the volume and sits down at the piano, replacing the thunderous buzz of his usual guitar attack with a studio orchestra. The artist flexes a writerly muscle that I frankly did not realize he had, delivering a cycle of songs that could have been recorded by The Wrecking Crew during their ‘60s peak. Opener “Bird On A Swing” sets the tone, an easy-breezy country tune with a plainspoken poignancy, creating a vibe that Hanson sustains throughout the album: “I'm a lonely bitter soul/I got sadness in my skull/And I'm only kind to strangers/They're the only people I don't know.” The Leon Russell-esque stomp of the title track is a highlight, as he declares his love for the fortunate and downtrodden alike, punctuating each pronouncement with a joyously obnoxious horn fanfare: “I love people who teach children to swim,” he sings "It's nice of them." I Love People is a timeless bit of cosmic Americana, an unholy mix of Neil Young, Gene Clark, Glen Campbell, and Glenn Frey, tied together with knowing humor and a deep dedication to craft.
6. Nino Paid - Love Me As I Am: The DMV street rap scene has been going crazy for several years now, but it has long lacked a breakout star. KP Skywalka is too regional, Tommy Richman is too pop, Goldlink is, well, Goldlink. Luckily, Baltimore’s Nino Paid is here to assume that mantle. On Love Me As I Am, the 24-year-old rapper puts a twist on his region’s sound with his superb ear for production, favoring instrumentals that combine the cloudy atmospherics of plugg with the thudding low end that defines Baltimore/DC crank. Weaving through those instrumentals with his double-time flow, Nino cuts a sympathetic figure, elegantly elucidating his thoughts and feelings about escaping a rough past, without forgetting about those he left behind. Songs like “Joey Story,” a testament against losing hope inspired by a friend’s suicide, “Something To Live For,” and “Play This At My Funeral” show off Nino’s sharp songwriting, which starkly relays the realities of street life through fleshed-out vignettes that zoom by in two minutes or less. The somber moments are highlights, but Nino never lets the mood get too grim: he can shit talk with the best of them, as proven by bonus track “Cooln,” a ping-ponging collab with fellow breakout Babychiefdoit, and the twinkling “Progress Report.”
5. billy woods - G*LLIW*G: My singles list was full of party anthems and escapist fantasies, but I counted on billy woods to bring the real shit. He is one of the few artists who truly captures the ugliness of our ignoble present, taking a magnifying glass to the issues most would prefer to ignore. A spiritual sequel to 2022’s Aethiopes, which is still probably my favorite woods album, 2025’s G*LLIW*G is a tour-de-force, providing some of woods’s most haunting and unsparing tales to date. “BLK XMAS” spotlights an eviction in his neighborhood, the family in question leaving their belongings on the streets and their neighbors feeling sorry for a short time before picking at the remains like vultures. The DJ Haram-produced “All These Worlds Are Yours” unites woods with his Armand Hammer partner E L U C I D and London woodwind wizard Shabaka Hutchings, pulling no punches as it examines the human cost of “first-world” comfort: “Today, I watched a man die in a hole from the comfort of my home/The drone flew real low, no rush, real slow/He curled up into himself, a fetus in the womb, womb was the Earth/Grenades landed at his feet and he scrabbled in the dirt.” Kenny Segal’s “Born Alone” illustrates the inextricable connection between woods’s tragedies and triumphs, his baby’s bare foot reminding him of his cousin who died decades ago, “laid out in the streets, no kicks, limbs askew.” Over and over again, woods imagines himself as a victim of violence, lending his voice to the helpless and respecting their pain, remembering the fallen as he fights for a better world.
4. Friendship - Caveman Wakes Up: With his craggly voice and poetically plainspoken lyrics, Friendship frontman Dan Wriggins draws inevitable comparisons to late legends like David Berman of the Silver Jews and Jason Molina of Magnolia Electric Co. It’s a lofty standard that most songwriters, no matter how good they are, struggle to meet, but on Caveman Wakes Up, Wriggins proves worthy of that formidable legacy. Accompanied his band’s ambling and amiable country-fried grooves, Wriggins wrings profundity out of the mundane, waxing rhapsodic about chilling on stoops, buying dirt-cheap cigarettes, playing survival horror video games, and finding God while doing yardwork. Never one to be pinned down, Wriggins also occasionally finds mundanity in the profound; “Hollow Skulls” shrugs off the vast cosmos as if they’re no big deal: “Never have I seen the stars so boring,” he sings. Time after time, the ghost Wriggins’ substance abuse raises its ugly head, as he reminisces about weeping over an advertisement in “Betty Ford” or wastes his life away on the couch on the self-loathing “Resident Evil.” Caveman Wakes Up is a testament to the daily struggle to stay sane, even as the forces of nature and society seem to be conspiring against you. “Only natural to dream,” he sings on “Free Association.” “I’ve been having some bad ones.”
3. Nourished By Time - The Passionate Ones: Nourished By Time recorded my favorite album of 2023, Erotic Probiotic 2, and his 2025 follow-up The Passionate Ones is just as good. Blessed with a bigger recording budget, courtesy of XL Recordings, NBT’s Marcus Brown uses those resources to flesh out his sound and indulge his every artistic impulse. The core of his appeal remains–80s freestyle mixed with avant-pop and nu-skool R&B–as do the preternaturally wise lyrics and plentiful vocal stims (“BABY BABY! BABY BABY!”), but The Passionate Ones is shaggier and looser than his previous efforts, leaving more space for transcendent musical moments that only Nourished By Time could provide: the ringing piano arpeggios that close “Jojo,” the house breakdown that starts and ends “9 2 5,” the stuttering chorus of “BABY BABY,” the “Walk This Way” drum break that anchors “It’s Time.” Brown has emerged as an excellent and emotional vocalist, leaning into his natural quaver to emphasize the questions posed by his lyrics: “May you always have a fight/Be it wrong or be it right/Shed a raindrop when you cry/But beware of sedatives and passing time,” he sings on “9 2 5.” Brown makes clear that he refuses to abdicate on the key moral issues of our time, even as he searches for a way to enjoy his time on this dying planet. The album reaches a stunning emotional climax with the final two-piece of “When The War Is Over” and “The Passionate Ones,” the latter of which punctuates Brown’s quest for answers with a sighing falsetto: “Am I a ghost? Am I history?/Have I lost my reflection?/I’ve got no protection.”
2. Dijon - Baby: Dijon’s magic trick is his ability to push the sound of music forward without seeming to break a sweat. His album Baby fights against the mores of this frictionless, algorithm-driven era, offering clanging guitars, smashed vocal samples, muddy drum sounds, and wild variations in volume to discourage passive listening. It’s an album that forces you to lean in and pay attention, rewarding close listeners with its idiosyncratic rhythms and grainy timbres. If any of this makes Baby seem like a difficult record to listen to, I assure you it isn’t. Dijon is an ace songwriter and a melodic savant, following the North Star of legends like Prince (someone online described the sound of this album as sounding like “64kb Prince MP3s") and D’Angelo, turning out mini-masterpieces like “Yamaha” and “Another Baby!” that paint a lush and sensual portrait of domestic bliss. Baby feels like a landmark, as Dijon and his collaborators (including my other fave Mk.gee) have landed upon a new signature pop production style for this decade, one informed by earlier eras (80s adult-contempo pop, 90s R&B, 2010s Hip-Hop), but not beholden to nostalgia. Expect a lot more albums to attempt to sound like Baby in the very new future, but expect few to reach the original’s combination of sonic adventurousness, raw emotion, and ace musicianship.
1. Annahstasia - Tether: On a highlight from Gang Starr’s Hard To Earn, Guru famously proclaimed “It’s mostly the voice that gets you up.” He was talking about hip-hop, but it’s an aphorism that casts a much wider net. In a year with plenty of great albums, I made my number one choice by considering what Tether has and nothing else does: Annahstasia and her bewitching, all-powerful voice. Annahstasia emerged fully-formed with Tether, her debut album, wielding her contralto (she might even be one of the rare female baritones!) like a knife, cutting through to the heart of her songs with power and grace. Her stretched syllables and breathy vibrato defy easy comparison, echoing at different times artists like ANOHNI of ANOHNI and the Johnsons, Tracy Chapman, Moses Sumney, and even Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile. Annahstasia supports herself with spare arrangements, spotlighting her own accomplished acoustic guitar playing and adding speckles of piano, orchestra, and choir to provide color, rising and falling in intensity to suit the rhythm of the songs. Opener “Be Kind” sets the tone, beginning with sighing a capella before her knotty guitar enters, her poetry enhancing the drama of her performance: “I deserve to rest In a California king bed/With my arms outstretched/And my dreams bleeding from my hеad/Into the sheets instead,” she intones. Many of the album’s highlights, including “Unrest” and “Slow,” a duet with Obongjayar (who also has a strikingly unique voice), keep a similar subdued palette, but the album soars when Annahstasia lets loose. On lead single “Villain,” her voice crescendoes to an emotional climax, as soft horns make their presence felt and a gospel choir brings it home: “Say that I'm the villain of the story.” Closer “Believer” brings a heavier guitar sound, echoing confessional indie rock masters like Songs: Ohia or Sun Kil Moon, burning slowly until the singer unleashes her full vocal power with a plea for uninterrupted intimacy: “Can I be lonely here with you?” A product of nearly a decade of behind-the-scenes toil, fighting with labels and vocal coaches who tried to mold Annahstasia into something she wasn’t, Tether is a triumph, marking the arrival of a vital new voice and a decisive blow against the forces who wish to turn beautiful music into consumerist sludge. I can’t wait to hear what she does next.
________________________________________________________________
Thank you so much for reading! As promised, here is the Spotify playlist featuring selections from my full list of 100 Favorite Albums of 2025..
Playlist:
Full list:
Annahstasia - Tether
Dijon - BABY
Nourished By Time - The Passionate Ones
Friendship - Caveman Wakes Up
billy woods - G*LLIW*G
Nino Paid - Love Me As I Am
Cory Hanson - I Love People
Ben LaMar Gay - Yowzers
De La Soul - Cabin In The Sky
Silvestre - Fantasma
Juana Molina - DOGA
DjRUM - Under Tangled Silence
Lelo - New Detroit
Herbert & Momoko Gill - Clay
keiyaA - hooke’s law
Makaya McCraven - OFF THE RECORD
Lucrecia Dalt - A Danger To Ourselves
Titanic - HAGEN
Sudan Archives - The BPM
Greg Freeman - Burnover
Rio Da Yung OG - F.L.I.N.T. (Feelin’ Like I’m Not Through)
Ringlets - The Lord Is My German Shepherd
SML - How You Been?
Hannah Frances - Nested In Tangles
Yves Jarvis - All Cylinders
snuggle - Goodbyehouse
Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes - Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes
EsDeeKid - Rebel
quickly, quickly - I Heard That Noise
NoJoy - Bugland
Niontay - Fada<3of$
Westerman - A Jackal’s Wedding
KP Skywalka - I Tried To Tell You
Bad Bunny - DeBí TiRaR MáS FOtoS
Rochelle Jordan - Through The Wall
Real Lies - We Annihilate Our Enemies
Saba & No I.D. - From The Private Collection of Saba & No I.D. Vol. 1
Stereolab - Instant Holograms On Metal Film
The Tubs - Cotton Crown
Steve Hauschildt - Aeropsia
The New Eves - The New Eve Is Rising
K-lone - sorry i thought you were someone else
Jim Legxacy - black british music (2025)
Teethe - Magic of the Sale
Hayden Pedigo - I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away
Pino Palladino & Blake Mills - That Wasn’t A Dream
Lindstrøm - Sirius Syntoms
Earl Sweatshirt - Live Laugh Love
Oren Arambarchi - Ghosted III
Disiniblud - Disiniblud
PinkPantheress - Fancy That/Fancy Some More?
Navy Blue - The Sword & The Soaring
Zukenee - SLAYTANIC / KNIGHT SHIFT
Armand Hammer - MERCY
Cameron Winter - Heavy Metal
Playboi Carti - MUSIC
The Beths - Straight Line Was A Lie
Flock Of Dimes - The Life You Save
Sharp Pins - Radio DDR
Defcee & Parallel Thought - Other Blues
U.S. Girls - Scratch It
Cate Le Bon - Michelangelo Dying
Duval Timothy - wishful thinking
water margin - Gleaming Cursed
Saya Gray - SAYA
Amaarae - BLACK STAR
Bickle - Gut Feeling
G Herbo - Lil Herb
Horsegirl - Phonetics On And On
Barker - Stochastic Drift
Oklou - choke enough
Lunchbox - L.B. Cooper
Cold Specks - Light For The Midnight
Paul Wall & DJ.Fresh - The Tonite Show
Fly Anakin - (The) Forever Dream
$ilkMoney - Who Waters The Wilting Giving Tree…
Monaleo - Who Did The Body
Geese - Getting Killed
Water From Your Eyes - It’s A Beautiful Place
George Riley - More Is More
Acopia - Blush Response
Mexiko Dro - Still Goin the EP
Thirteendegrees - Clique City Vol. 2 / BLACK FRIDAYZ
Zelooperz - Dali Ain’t Dead
S.G. Goodman - Planting By The Signs
Home Front - Watch It Die
Bloody! - So Wavy Luciano
Home Is Where - Hunting Season
Anthony Naples - Scanners
Destroyer - Dan’s Boogie
Shabason, Krgovich & Tenniscoats - Wao
Adeline Hotel - Watch The Sunflowers
Laurie Torres - Aprés coup
Panda Bear - Sinister Grift
Pulp - More
Rosalía - LUX
DaBoii - HEART OF A LION
Khadija Al Hanafi - !OK!
Sam Prekop - Open Close
Nick Leon - A Tropical Entropy
















