Albums of the Year
Streaming platforms want music that doesn’t demand anything of you: records designed to soundtrack scrolling, workouts and shopping baskets, optimised for playlists rather than people. In 2025, the most interesting albums were the ones that resisted that logic — music that asked for attention, patience and sometimes discomfort, and in doing so reminded us what listening is for.
These are the records I kept coming back to, not because an algorithm pushed them, but because they refused to let go.
Kae Tempest – Kae Tempest
A self-titled record that feels like a line drawn under everything that came before it, both musically and personally. The writing is stripped back and resolute, refusing grand gestures in favour of hard-won clarity.
Emma-Jean Thackray – Weirdo
Thackray leans fully into maximalism here, folding jazz, funk, pop and electronics into something exuberant and strange. It’s playful without being lightweight, the sound of someone confident enough to let their oddness lead.
Yalla Miku – Yalla Miku 2
A record shaped by collaboration and movement, where cosmiche electronic production meets anadolu traditions without turning either into pastiche. It feels communal rather than authored, resisting the idea that music has to belong neatly to one place or voice.
Rhys Langston – Pale Black Negative
Langston builds an album that sits somewhere between spoken-word theatre, hip hop and political essay. It’s sharp, funny and furious, using science fiction imagery to interrogate power, race and the future.
Big Freedia – Pressing Onward
Joy is the point and the weapon here, with Freedia’s bounce rooted as much in gospel resilience as in club culture. It’s music that insists on survival through movement, volume and collective release. Reconnecting with Gospel’s roots and reminding America that Christianity doesn’t belong to white right wingers.
GoGo Penguin – Necessary Fictions
GoGo Penguin refine their cool, architectural sound, leaning into restraint rather than spectacle. The record feels carefully engineered, emotionally distant but rewarding in its precision and atmosphere.
Che Noir – No Validation
An uncompromising hip-hop record that lives up to its title, refusing approval or algorithmic friendliness. Sparse production leaves room for exacting, intelligent writing delivered with total confidence.
Jim Legxacy – Black British Music
Messy, intimate and generational, this is an album about ambition, identity and uncertainty colliding in real time. Its genre-fluidity feels natural rather than strategic, capturing a very contemporary sense of becoming.
Green Tea Peng – Tell Dem It’s Sunny
Peng drifts between neo-soul, dub and psychedelia, anchored by a voice that sounds grounded and otherworldly at once. The record is sceptical of power, gently spiritual, quietly defiant, and is surrounded with a whiff of the spliff.
Alfa Mist – Roulette
Mist leans further into mood and texture, letting atmosphere do the heavy lifting. It’s late-night music that values patience, with silence and space treated as instruments in their own right.
None of these records were designed to go viral, pad out playlists or disappear politely into the background. They demand time, attention and a willingness to listen properly — which is precisely why they matter. In an era where algorithms decide what we hear, the most radical act is still the simplest one: choosing what to listen to for yourself.
Two playlists. This is 2025 new music
https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/1rdGBQblzrsP2kXLzBRYgp?utm_source=generator
And this is old music that I added to my collection this year…
https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/1dlHBYcJbPEW0bXfpc2qGd?utm_source=generator
And this deserves an honourable mention:
Music on Screen and Page
As ever, music lovers were almost better served by books and films about music than by many of the year’s new releases. The best of them avoided nostalgia and hero worship, and instead focused on work, power, failure, obsession and — occasionally — joy.
Köln 75
A first-time concert promoter in 1970s Berlin books Keith Jarrett, and everything that can go wrong does. Jarrett plays anyway, producing one of the greatest live recordings ever; a terrific film, only slightly undermined by the lack of actual Jarrett performance.
A Complete Unknown
Timothée Chalamet is excellent as Bob Dylan, but Ed Norton is even better as Pete Seeger, grounding the film emotionally and politically. The Newport backstage scene is frustrating though: Muddy Waters is present but voiceless, while Johnny Cash gets the lines — a strange bit of revisionism.
Sean Combs: The Reckoning
A genuinely horrifying account of abuse, control and complicity. What lingers most is the banality: anonymous hotels, bland interiors, places designed to erase witnesses — chilling in their ordinariness.
We Are Devo
The complete opposite in tone: playful, clever and endlessly entertaining. A reminder that conceptual art, satire and kids’ TV can coexist, and that not every band has to take itself seriously to matter.
Wallis Island
A quietly superior romcom about fandom, regret and the limits of nostalgia. Funny, humane and surprisingly sharp about the emotional bargains people make with music and memory.
Sunday Best: Ed Sullivan
A strong documentary on how Sullivan quietly reshaped American culture by booking Black artists on mainstream television. It’s as much about power and gatekeeping as it is about pop music.
Re-releases
Two reissues stood out.
A new print of Slade in Flame reminds us that beneath the glam was a bleak, unsentimental portrait of the music industry’s machinery. Meanwhile Four Flies on Grey Velvet, directed by Dario Argento’s father Salvatore, returns with a swinging Ennio Morricone soundtrack and all the elegance and menace you’d hope for.
Books
The year’s best music books were led by two autobiographies.
The Drums by Mike Joyce is a grounded, unsentimental account of life inside The Smiths, refreshingly free of myth-making. Bless Me Father by Kevin Rowland is something else entirely: raw, searching and often painful, tracing his lifelong struggle for authenticity and identity.
Next came Everything We Do Is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop, a chapter-by-chapter demolition of the idea that pop evolved in isolation — with the influence of La Monte Young particularly worth revisiting. Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine is essential reading on how Spotify flattened musical culture while concentrating wealth and power in very few hands.
Vivien Goldman’s Rebel Musix, Scribe on a Vibe is a frontline account of punk, reggae and Afrobeat from someone who was both participant and witness — and who made some remarkable music herself.
David Toop’s Two-Headed Doctor finally gives Dr John’s Gris-Gris the biography it deserves.
Photography
Finally, Not Going Home from the British Culture Archive is a beautiful photo essay of clubbers caught in the liminal hours between venues closing and the rest of the world waking up. It captures exhaustion, intimacy and community — the bits of nightlife that never make the flyers.