It’s the third day of a new year, and I need to start out clean by etching in stone my official SIXTEEN FAVORITE ALBUMS OF 2025 and leaving them behind. I could write a missive chronicling every piece of music that intrigued me (out-do Thurston Moore’s list of 350, perhaps) but this drowning-in-content moment has me wanting to pare down. These are the albums of any style, source or category that I felt drawn to the most, the ones I put on the most, or thought about when the room was silent. A hundred lurking in the shadows will go unannounced at this time.
1. Darkside – Nothing (Matador Records)
Darkside became a trio for their third album; the electronics and guitar wizards added a drummer who invented an electronic percussion system and specializes in utilizing math within music. The sound is fill and varied; the vibe is doomsday, taking creative angles on finding space within the gloom. How to keep creating/living when the world is ablaze around you and everything feels out of your control? They don’t have all the answers but they are asking the questions.
2. Real Lies – We Will Annihilate Our Enemies (Tonal Recordings)
The perfect mix of felt melancholy and physical release through music came with a cinematic sense of place and time, on the third album from the exuberant London electronic pop duo Real Lies. Less tragic in tone than their 2022 masterpiece Lad Ash, these songs seek peace and pleasure within life’s chaos, backed by unfettered club beats with echoes of past, present and future.
3. Damon Locks – List of Demands (International Anthem)
Damon Locks has fronted punk bands, formed jazz combos and integrated his poetry into various types of music. Here he’s orchestrated a communal collage of resistance that uses music, words, and historical sound clips to portray and voice the struggle for justice. An expression of art as a natural human response to oppression, it was grown outward from an artistic manifesto Locks created with his students in a prison arts education program.
4. Holden & Zimpel – The Universe Will Take Care of You (Border Community Recordings)
The music I used most often in 2025 as ‘background’ (get-in-the-flow music for working, writing, cooking, whatever activity in daily life) is bristly, loud and intense – not the sort of musical wallpaper filling out anonymous streaming playlists. James Holden plays synth, Waclaw Zimpel clarinet – the music they play together sounds like both, neither, and like something else entirely. Exhilarating.
5. MÖRDA – Asante III (Asante Music)
The innovations in electronic music developing in Africa are impossible to keep up with, and I don’t pretend to fully try. But this 90-minute excursion into 3-Step, a variation on the South African house music sub-genre amapiano, is spellbinding. DJ/producer MÖRDA guides a collective of artists through twists and turns that belie the smoothness and rhythmic consistency. It’s music with one distinct style filled with surprises along with stretches of absolute beauty.
6. Cici Arthur – Way Through (Western Vinyl)
“Is this the doorway to a deeper frame of mind / God knows I need it,” is the opening lyric. Chris Cummings’ singing is intimate and breathy, a jazz crooner whisper-singing right into your ear so you can hear and feel the meaning every time his voice cracks or rises. The arrangements around his voice (from musicians/producers Joseph Shabason and Thom Gill, buyoed by a variety of collaborators) are impeccable, at times breathtaking. As a whole, Way Through is a gorgeous, emotionally and intellectually substantive tour within human dreams and frailty. It’s a new form of sophisticated pop music that can stun in its tenderness.
7. Adrienne Lenker – Live at Revolution Hall (4AD) One of those Live at Max’s Kansas City type live albums where you hear the side conversations and sense the people around you – except even more immersive and flowing. “Sonic documentary,” the label calls it. We’re in the air for soundcheck and backstage fooling around, for an interview with a dog. The recording method seems to change mid-song. It’s a full experience, a two-hour epic of tender intensity, a deep dive into the flexible, deep spirit and songs of Adrienne Lenker (solo and Big Thief, released and otherwise unreleased).
8. De La Soul – Cabin in the Sky (Mass Appeal)
Mass Appeal’s Legend Has It series was a treasure trove for Golden Era rappers making sometimes unlikely returns. Cabin in the Sky was among the most unexpected, and by far the most thoughtfully devised. Dave (RIP) is present even when he’s not, guests shine throughout, and the group’s legacy is not just celebrated but extended. It’s a eulogy and a celebration and also forward-looking, keeping De La Soul relevant not just as legends but as creators in the here and now.
9. Laurie Torres – Après Coup (Tonal Union)
The minimalist piano compositions here are graceful and meditative. But then there are other touches – field recordings, drums, synthesizers, harmony vocals – used sparingly enough to keep the focus on the piano, but intentionally enough to completely change the feeling in moments – adding tension, uncertainty, mystery.
10. Disiniblud (Rachika Nayar & Nina Keith) – Disiniblud (Smugglers Way)
Ambient music can feel like a static field. And then you have a whirlwind like Disiniblud (‘Disney blood’), a pop-ambient-who-knows hybrid tapping into playful, anything-can-happen energy and a strong stance on imagination’s ability to throw us headlong into the darkest and most uncertain spaces of life.
11. Jens Kuross – Crooked Songs (Woodsist)
There’s indie mythology at work– singer/songwriter fails to make it in the industry, retreats to Idaho, plays a show in a basement with a rising-star artist who suggests he record a more minimalist album akin to his live show. That story might be the attention-getter, but what makes this music lasting is how it captures the tangible aspects of playing music. We hear and feel the breaths, the fingers on keys and strings, the aura of the room and the humans in it. A tribute to the visceral power of song.
12.SML – How You Been (International Anthem)
In some ways the most exciting group in music right now is this quintet of improvisers – all fantastic solo artists in their own right – who play jazz-ish/electronic-ish music that knows few boundaries and utilizes the respective skillset, creative personalities, and array of musical tools of each member, towards something grand, funky and new. Their second album, like their first, is an edited and shaped manifestation of live improv performances – not just capturing their live sound but giving it a new life of its own.
13. Allo Darlin– Bright Nights (Slumberland)
The passing of time has always been front and center in the observational, open-hearted indie-pop of Allo Darlin. This 11-years-later return album is similarly obsessed with places and times, and the people within it – with an earned focus on human connection as the motivating force to carry us through life’s worst moments (Sing along: “…and yes, I know it’s been a shitty year…”).
14. Kalia Vandever – Another View (Northern Spy)
Trombonist Kalia Vandever walks an interesting line between small-group jazz and something more airy and abstract. On Another View her playing is persistently thoughtful and grateful; on several tracks Mary Halvorson’s guitar warps the perspective some, feeding the concept of Another View.
15. Hallelujah the Hills – DECK (self-released)
“This deck of cards is music,” it says on a deck of cards that has a unique artwork on each card, and a digital album to go with it There’s a song for each card, and a myriad of ways to listen to this album that’s really four albums (one for each suit) plus two songs (the Jokers). Not tidy, and not designed to be, this mammoth artistic endeavor from an always intelligent rock band pays off in, wait for it….spades.
16. Galore – Dirt (Speakeasy Studios SF)
The second album from the San Francisco DIY indie-pop band Galore sharpens their sound while retaining the spunky singalong style, and the room for ambiguity within ‘simple’ melodic pop songs.
HAPPY NEW YEAR, dear readers….
[One other thing – here’s a YouTube playlist of one song per album if you’re interested.]
erasing clouds 