Best Albums 2025

Faced with writing about the best albums of 2025 a bit late, I figured an extra six months of perspective might help me make some decisions about which albums truly were the best of last year.

Truth be told, it didn’t feel like the best of years for albums last year, but that just might be me getting much more in to the various mixes on Apple Music. While I am passionate about the album format where you get to listen to a set of songs by one artist, I do find that I am also very appreciative of mixes these days that blend together sometimes surprising choices of songs. For example, there was an excellent Beats in Space mix by Paula Tape that included an old mix of a sacred spirit track and sent me down the rabbit hole of listening to that album again.

So, while 2024 produced so many good albums I effectively ended up writing a top 30, it felt like 2025 was a bit thin on the ground by comparison. This list of ten is mostly from my most-streamed albums on the Albums app, though some of these I also own on vinyl and have played a ton there too.

10. Big Thief “Double Infinity”

Cover of Double Infinity by Big Thief

Big Thief and its members are fast becoming a few of my favourite acts. I think I mentioned in my review of Adrienne Lenker’s “Bright Future” album last year, Big Thief’s previous double album “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You” has been one of my favourites of the past five years.

With “Double Infinity” the band are down to three core members and deal with losing their bassist by stuffing the studio with additional guest members. These include Laraaji, who once made one of the albums in the Ambient series with Brian Eno. (“Ambient 2: Plateau of Mirror” by Brian Eno and Howard Budd is one of the entries in my understated classics series.)

The songs on “Double Infinity” are a lot baggier, fluffier and looser than on the previous albums, regularly padding up to the five minute mark and beyond, losing themselves in riffs and improvisations. I believe the technical term is a “loosie”, a largely improvised (or improvised-feeling) tracks that pass the time sweetly.

If you went to one of their gigs and they played none of these songs, you wouldn’t be too sore about it. The opener “Incomprehensible” is probably the most forceful thing on the record, a driving pulse underneath some affirmative lyrics about ageing. I’m exactly the right audience for these kinds of lyrics.

While almost every song on “Dragon…” felt like a gem mined out of a rich creative seam, these just feel kind of squishy. They’re fine to spend time with on a summer evening but none of these songs are going to change your life. In some ways, it feels like a liberated record because of that.

9. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma “Gift Songs”

Cover of ‘Gift Songs’ by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma

Unlike the Big Thief album, “Gift Songs” is entirely improvised. Comprised of five pieces ranging from three to eighteen minutes long, all of which involve pianos, bass and subtle drums. Right from the off, it’s completely compelling even if it never fully resolves into a coherent recognisable form. It feels more like generative music that has been produced according to rules, which is still possible to perform, though these days you’d expect it to be generated with computers, synths, or tape loops.

The opening track “The Milky Sea” is the highlight, stretching out eighteen minutes into an expanse of eternal time whether it’s a wintry rain storm or a summer heatwave, whether it’s late dark night or a bleary early morning. If I had this album on vinyl, side one would get worn out.

The rest of the album explores different variations in similar ways with similar titles in “Gift Song 1”, “Gift Song 2”, and “Gift Song 3”. The titles don’t give much away and neither does the music, just shifting and exploring space and time with simple musical patterns.

The last track “River That Flows Two Ways” is a bit more fierce, with some more prominent bass and drums, with a feel like some of the tracks on Liars’ classic album “Drum’s Not Dead”. It’s still meditative, but it definitely asserts its presence more than the other tracks.

If you followed my recommendation of the Total Blue album last year, I think you’ll also like this one a lot.

8. Panda Bear “Sinister Grift”

Cover of ‘Sinister Grift’ by Panda Bear

Much as I loved Panda Bear and Sonic Boom’s 2022 album “Reset”, I was put off of “Sinister Grift” when I read in reviews that it was a break-up album. That said, when I got around to listening to it, I didn’t find that many moments to be that maudlin. The sadness and weight that hangs over some of the songs (like “Venom’s In”) feels more like rueing the passing of a summer’s day rather than lamenting a lost love. It feels quite subtle.

There are some very good songs on this album. I especially the spoken word Portuguese bits on “Anywhere but Here” and the last song, a collaboration with Cindy Lee, “Defense”. Elsewhere, “Praise” picks up where “Reset” leaves off with its 60s Beach Boys vibes. “Ferry Lady” is one of those songs where you never know the words but find yourself humming it all day nonetheless.

It’s a good album to listen to while waiting for more Animal Collective records (or Panda Bear and Sonic Boom ones). I wish I’d managed to get a copy on transparent Curacão blue vinyl while it was still available!

7. Black Country New Road “Forever How Long”

Cover of ‘Forever How Long’ by Black Country New Road

BCNR have had an interesting and restless career as a band, involving losing a lead singer and several changes of direction. Though I was drawn in by some of this lore, I was mostly attracted by the singles. I’ve only heard this album and haven’t felt the urge to explore their past work off the back of it. I don’t mean that in a snarky way, it’s clear that the band must now be in something close to its final form.

Currently they are a six-piece of multi-instrumentalists, with vocal duties shared between the three women in the band. Each vocalist has a particular sound and songwriting style, which does make for a pretty uneven album while the songs are unfamiliar. And some of the songs are pretty odd, so they remain rather unfamiliar rather longer than some of the others.

The more immediate songs include the lead single “Besties”, which has a very charming video. More pop songs need harpsichords in them. Elsewhere, I really love “For The Cold Country” especially when it goes all rondo and repetitive at the end like a Philip Glass vocal piece.

In fact, writing this review makes me realise I need to listen to it even more. I’ve got a lovely copy direct from their website with beautiful embossed artwork and pressed on red eco vinyl.

6. Ora The Molecule “Dance Therapy”

Cover of ‘Dance Therapy’ by Ora the Molecule

Ora The Molecule came to my attention when Tim Sweeney included two of her songs across three successive Beats In Space mixes. When “Dance Therapy” came out, she also did a Beats In Space mix that was crammed full of interesting electronic music, some of which was known to me and some of which was new and exciting.

“Dance Therapy” is a concept album about an alien molecule who comes to Earth and gets changed into a woman in order to experience the many delights and pitfalls of personhood. At the risk of supplying spoilers, the plot arc is not unlike that of The Little Mermaid. The Hans Christien Andersen version, that is: things don’t end that well.

While that sounds rather heavy, it’s actually a fun album crammed full of danceable pop songs that is a whole heap of fun. The songs are catchy, even if they feature words like “gastroenterologist” at points. It’s all quite frothy but superbly produced - a truly unique album that I’ll remember for years to come, which is why it makes it on to my best of year list.

5. Idlewild, “Idlewild”

Cover of ‘Idlewild’ by Idlewild

While perhaps this self-titled album doesn’t quite roar back to the heights of “Hope is Important” or “100 Broken Windows”, it nonetheless represents a decent victory lap several years after disappearing following a series of rather banal self-funded albums. I admired what they tried to do, but for all their experimentation, something dropped off after their excellent “Make Another World” album in 2007.

“Idlewild” though is a belter. Ten great songs with clever lyrics filled with everything I loved about the band in the first place. The only let down, as always, is the lack of a lyric sheet. The topics seem to range from ‘Roddy as ingenue’ (“You said you keep coming round, of course you would / With your copy of Undermilkwood / Quoting the lines that you really wish I understood / You’d even pray that I would”, “(I Can’t Help) Back Then You Found Me”) to ‘Roddy as arch sage’ (“Don’t be so undecided / Because nothing’s here to stay / Nothing’s here to stay”, “Make It Happen”). Of course, Roddy-as-sage always sounds like an ingenue, and vice versa, which is the skill of it. I think only Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie writes in this way better.

You always feel seen and loved by an Idlewild song, and these are no different. A short, sharp, and sweet blast of nostalgia. If it ends up being their sign-off, it will be a good one. It even has a final song called “End With Sunrise” which feels very on the nose: “your destination lies / in the stories that don’t resolve / or end with sunrise”.

4. Kassian, “Channels” / “Channels Remixed”

Cover of ‘Channels’ by Kassian

Channels is a beautiful album. It’s reminiscent of other classic dance albums in my collections like “Nothing is Still” by Leon Vynehall or Oxia’s “Time In Mind”.

“Sun” starts as a calm breathy interlude dominated by strings before beefing up into a floor filler halfway through. “Joss Bay” brings the beats from the off, with a twangy bass line and nagging vocal sample. I also really love “Sunset Park” although part of this is because the tracks sound quite similar, the album feels like a cohesive whole.

About six months after Channels was released the band released a remix album, the imaginatively titled “Channels remixed” with what the band described as a beefier sound. These remixes, whilst determined to drive the doofier parts of the album into the club, don’t really change the overall direction and vibe of the album. It’s still pretty chill, just a bit more toe-tappy. All the tracks I’ve mentioned above - “Sun”, “Joss Bay”, “Sunset Park” - have longer, remixed versions: in each the strings get pared back a bit and the beats given a bit more heft. The remixed version also ditches some of the quieter textural pieces between tracks in favour of getting on to the floor a bit quicker. The tracks also feel a bit more separate: if you don’t like a long amorphous mix that ebbs and flows, then the remixed version might be the one for you.

3. DJ Koze, “Music Can Hear Us”

Cover of ‘Music Can Hear Us’ by DJ Koze

I’ve appreciated DJ Koze for a long time, especially when his tracks turned up at pivotal points in mixes. He just has this magical way of building tracks. But until now his albums have left me a bit cold. I couldn’t really get into “Knock Knock” and his excellent production on Róisín Murphy’s “Hit Parade” was perhaps undermined by the weakness of some of the songs: they were fussy arrangements that never seemed to get going.

“Music Can Hear Us” is also fussy, but in a good way. The album as a whole feels chaotic, a sort of musical protoplasm that shifts and staggers in all directions at once. In any given moment it’s serene, or moody, or frenetic, or poppy, but it’s also a swirl of all the combinations of those things.

Right from the get-go, the opening track “The Universe in a Nutshell” sets up the entire experience of listening to this album in just under 8 minutes. There’s lush instrumentation and the production is so captivating, it’s like a sort of fog hanging over the whole track. It’s a track that I love listening to when I leave the house for a walk on a hot sunny day.

Another great song is “Unbelievable” - where Ada’s vocal is given so much room to just be in the mix. All the production that swirls around it, the synth washes and bells, it all recedes whenever she is singing, giving the whole song this cavernous feel. And in the non-vocal parts, the beat is insistent and nagging, all the while something that just grows and throbs. It’s a delicate monster.

The collaboration with Sofia Kourtesis is amazing, albeit simply because it sounds like loads of other tracks from her EPs. There’s a really cool downtempo and downbeat track about halfway through called “Vamos A La Playa”, showing that the album isn’t all a happy-clappy positive vibes kind of affair. There’s too much darkness in the world to ignore it, even if - as per the collaboration with Damon Albarn - the ideal is that “pure love loves purely”.

2. Brian Dunne, “Clams Casino”

Cover of ‘Clams Casino’ by Brian Dunne

Sometimes you read a review of an album and think “hmmmm I’m going to like that”. So it was with Brian Dunne’s “Clams Casino”. I think I was also drawn to it because it shares its title with a song by Cassandra Jenkins.

This is an album of pure pop songs. It was a bit of a surprise to me in 2025 to hear such a thing. The touch points are all those wonderful songs you hear on 80s and 90s pop playlists. There’s a touch of Paul Simon, a bit of Dire Straits, even a bit of Huey Lewis and the News. Meanwhile, the lyrics are bang up to date, relaying tales of the terminally online and the economically precarious. The title track addresses men’s mental health, “Graveyard” seems to be about online dating, and “Play the hits” is a subtle take on the problems of being creative in a world that constantly drives you toward averaging-out and recreating pre-existing material.

Some of the songs are devastating. “I Watched The Light Go” is about seeing contemporaries fail and give up hope. “Some Room Left” offers a slight relenting (“I guess there’s still some room left in my heart”) but “Rockland County” twitches with anxiety (“we’re stone cold sober in the heart of / right back where we started from”), while “Gracie Mansion” (“Lately, I feel so far away / I try and try but I can’t explain”) is quietly brutal.

There’s definitely some salt in the sugar, but overall this is an exuberant collection of well-written earworms, that have really gotten into my head.

1. Alabaster DePlume, “A Blade Because a Blade is Whole”

Cover of ‘A Blade Because a Blade is Whole’ by Alabaster DePlume

I’ve learned that there are two types of people in this world: those that like jazz and those that don’t. I’ve realised that I’m one of the types of people who does. Every now and then, a record like this comes along and I love it.

The great thing about “A Blade…” though is that it’s actually crammed with great songs. Sure, you’ve the moody New Orleans jazz funeral match of “Oh My Days” to start things off, but then immediately afterwards you have “Thank You My Pain” with its laconic spoken word verses and “Invincibility” with its sweet crooning chorus. (The latter also has a deeply weird video that I’d urge you to check out.)

Elsewhere, “A Paper Man” digs into the business of people saying stupid stuff on social media, the title being a play on words between a paper tiger and a straw man. The 42 minutes flies by, ending with the sweet seven and a half minute closer “That Was My Garden”. Various things are revealed to have been Albaster’s garden: a car park, a crime scene, the corner where you store the recycling bins. It’s that combination of anger, resistance and equanimity that sums up the whole of 2025 for me.