25 Best Albums of 2025

In a year where Morgan Wallen’s 37-track album I’m the Problem spends twelve weeks atop the Billboard charts and as Taylor Swift’s worst album is on its tenth week, a depressing thought clouds my mind.

Is popular music dead?

I’m not referring just to the idea of pop music being vapid or not worth including on lists like these — that’s somewhat always been the case. It’s more about the death of monoculture, and the inability of one of America’s greatest institutions to rise above the fray of factionalism and unite everyone in song and dance. I live in Nashville — the supposed epicenter for Wallen and Swift — and for the most part, their music is culturally insignificant. I can walk around most parts of Nashville and not once be bombarded by the supposed two biggest stars in music. When bringing them up, you’re more likely to start a tense sociocultural debate about their merits as people rather than diving into which song should be the next single.

The Billboard charts in 2025 merely reflect what artists have the most unified cults at the moment. What else could explain the mostly-niche heavy metal acts of Sleep Token and Ghost topping the charts? The only album to topple Swift from the top the last few months was Do It by Stray Kids, which is a 14-minute EP from a K-Pop group that receives minimal attention in music criticism. Nobody seems capable of capturing the zeitgeist, and it’s left a massive void only to be filled by little factions — music made for the few, only to culturally resonate for a bubble that pops ever so quickly.

Then of course, there’s a strong argument to say good riddance to inescapable pop music. Who the fuck needs to hear “Uptown Funk” or “Happy” ever again? The biggest singles this year were “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters and Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” — two songs I skip as quickly as possible. Pop music at its worst creates this agonizing sense that everyone around you is under mass psychosis and lost all sense of artistic taste, but at its best, it’s doves surrounding Prince in a bathtub as a guitar starts wailing; it’s the opening synth notes of “Formation”; it’s the jubilation at a LGBTQ+ bar when “Abracadabra” came on a month after its release.

What all that means for these 25 albums I have picked as the best of the year is that there are few unifying presences among them, apart from the biggest Latinx artist in the world who remains in his own category. The best rock albums are from gnarly and confrontational East coast indie bands; the best hip-hop albums are from underground savants who scoff at any radio airplay; the best electronic albums take no joy in beat drops or rave culture but rather fuss over every synth chord or BPM change imaginable; the best R&B albums seek influence from every corner of music and are even a direct descendant of our dearly-departed D’Angelo. And for the best pop albums — the genre is not dead, and even if their music never fully crosses over, the exuberance and bliss they create is enough to sustain any listener they can find.

This is a random collection of albums, and few will like all 25 (that’s ok, it’s my list and all art is subjective blah blah blah). You may not see any individual album here as a true unifying cultural touchstone, but together they represent what this music industry is at its best — a space for any aesthetic vision, untethered by commercial expectations, meant for all of us that will always have the curiosity to press play.

[Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal is not included here; it is a 2024 release and has been added to the Annual Best Albums page.]