In spite of a shattered monoculture and dividing attention spans, the studio album still held power as a cultural event in 2025. Everyone from rappers who’d just as soon persist as a hail of singles, like Playboi Carti and Cardi B, to pop overlords like Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter came to the plate. Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, and Doja Cat used their albums to broadcast tastes that span decades. Morgan Wallen, Justin Bieber, Arcade Fire, and Drake sought to turn the page on negative press by refocusing attention on their talents. An album is a megaphone and podium, or an intricate sculpture, or a temporary press whirlwind. The best of this year took the opportunity to nudge us toward a deeper love for our fellow humans, or a greater appreciation of an outstanding auteur’s craft, or a fresh outlook on an existing musical tradition — without losing sight of the hunger for big hooks and cool riffs that brought us around in the first place.
Standing on the Corner, Standing on the Corner 2
The Brooklyn arts collective joined a growing number of artists this year who pulled albums from Spotify as disdain mounts for the company’s payouts and practices. They sent listeners on a quest to obtain their third album: For a few hours on September 11, you could meet someone in a Mickey Mouse costume in Times Square to pay cash for a DVD that turned out to contain the new music. (They’d eventually livestream it and sell copies on their website.) If you found it, you heard a zany patchwork of anachronistic threads. It’s a slippery, ambitious album that investigates past innovation through a lens of modern ennui. It buzzes around history, reverent toward the insular studio funk of Sly Stone, the guitar tones of the Isley Brothers and the Beatles, the memory of late Latin-jazz titan Eddie Palmieri, and beat-based psychedelia and mixtape culture. The ominous “Secrets” advises against keeping things from a lover just after a false-start New Orleans funeral march yields to a folk-blues chant. The woozy “Mr. Postman, Wait!” melds doo-wop vocals, drum machine clatter, and wailing blues-rock guitar. It’s almost like stumbling on an old record warped by the elements. The album shares a shambling music-nerd awe with the work of greats like Madlib.
PinkPantheress, Fancy That / Fancy Some More?
A few of the bubbly originals from the singer-songwriter and producer’s second mixtape carry the potential to be her calling card, like the meet-cute-as-job-interview narrative “Illegal.” After reinforcing her skills as a curt, potent writer with an uncannily keen handle on late-’90s and early-aughts pop culture, the 24-year-old puts her peers and influences on the remixes. U.K. music titans sampled on the mixtape (Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada, Sugababes) return the favor in zesty reworks. Assists from an international cast of admirers — Swedish cloud rapper Bladee, Britpop revivalist Rachel Chinouriri, Brazilian singer Anitta, K-pop group Seventeen — make for one of the most alluring maps of an artist’s taste since Drake flipped Missy and Kanye on So Far Gone.
Oneohtrix Point Never, Tranquilizer
In his growing spate of work in Safdie films and Weeknd albums, producer Daniel Lopatin has developed an aptitude for all sorts of heady interstitial and incidental music. His latest album as Oneohtrix Point Never journeys over gauzy clouds of sound. The sample-based method of his earlier work returns, this time sourced by a trove of sample compilations from the ‘90s and early aughts, when rap and video game music producers had synth presets and eerie noise CDs in common. OPN records often ponder the past through examinations of his predecessors’ tools. But Tranquilizer teems with intent that feels gleaned from years of crafting songs that jostle the listener in service to advancing the plot of a scene or a pop song. Here, he co-opts some of the suspenseful sounds of luminaries like Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka to ruminate on thoughts he had at the dentist’s office.
Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas, Totality
A decade after pairing up for the collaborative album Autoimaginary, Chicago instrumental trios Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas reunited for a second outing. Unlike the more beat-based pleasantries of Bajas’ new album Inland See and the stomping, ominous jazz of Natural Info’s recent Perseverance Flow EP, Totality centers breezy ambience. Four drifting expeditions into elegant quietude find the half dozen players gravitating to an alluring tenderness and weightlessness. The drums, synths, and woodwinds of the patient “Always 9 Seconds Away” tiptoe around each other, never insisting upon themselves the way those instruments can. This is an album to trip into and pass time exquisitely with.
keiyaA, hooke’s law
The multi-disciplinary artist explores themes of love, justice, and self-worth in songs that braid jazz, rap, drum n bass, and soul. Her sophomore album follows her acclaimed 2020 debut, catching us up on the philosophical quandaries and personal initiatives of keiyaA’s last half-decade. She’s a more ambitious and capable composer now; she’s distraught about the murder of her brother. Throughout hooke’s law, the psychedelic bliss of the former development crashes into the agony of the latter experience. As it bandies from tryst to testimony to tragedy, hanging on the words of literary forebears like Pat Parker and Amiri Baraka, the album sketches an arresting image of modern Black femme brilliance and resilience.
Tyler Childers, Snipe Hunter
On his seventh album, the Kentucky country singer-songwriter connected with veteran producer Rick Rubin to negotiate a careful expansion of his traditional Appalachian sound. Tapping the engineer behind Johnny Cash renditions of Soundgarden and Glenn Danzig tunes casts Childers’s stories of downtrodden Americans in a new light. His stripped-down folk and reverent electric country tunes meet more cinematic dressing, shifting song structures, and plentiful distortion. It may itch at first to hear someone whose music typically avoids such producer-ly theatrics and radio format restlessness dive so committedly into it. But the message apparent in Snipe Hunter, whose trip across the planet ends back in the hollers, is that sometimes you need to get outside your realms for a spell to tease out what you really love (and also what you no longer care for) in the first place.
Earl Sweatshirt, Live Laugh Love
Adopting the dead-horse motivational saying “Live, Laugh, Love” as the title of his latest album is both a truth and a self-effacing wink. The crank who once named another one I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside has found genuine happiness and fulfillment in love and family. On Live Laugh Love’s cover, the rapper and producer peers out at the listener over glasses, a smoke of some sort dangling from his mouth. Yeah, this will be your textbook “I’m a dad now” album, it all seems to smirkingly say. Earl’s music is as bright as it’s ever been, proving that he doesn’t need a proclamation of impending doom to get animated, which is not to suggest that he’s above it. He has come out of nihilism and loss having found a center, loving with purpose where sometimes his music hungered most for nothingness. “I remember when I ain’t want it,” he muses in “Live,” creating distance between a devil-may-care past and a better adjusted present. He’s back from the edge — with a toe “still in the void.”
Bad Bunny, Debí Tirar Más Fotos
The Puerto Rican star’s sixth album is a love letter to his home that all but begs you to learn anything about the place and people. His initial forte of bittersweet breakup songs and street anthems is represented in bangers like “KLOuFRENS” but buttressed by journeys into the musical parents and grandparents of Latin trap and reggaeton. This album is musicology as advocacy, but it doesn’t preach, nor soften its message and delivery to reach more ears. To see Bad Bunny live in 2025, fans had to leave the contiguous States; to understand his feelings, you must reckon with his language. The prize for this steadfastness is playing the next Super Bowl halftime show. Haters swear they’ll watch some other counterprogramming debacle, taking nothing from Fotos’s thesis that the people our demagogues conspire to purge from this country have long been essential to its operation and art.
➼ Read Craig Jenkins’s full review of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.
Deftones, private music
The hooks on the Sacramento metal vets’ 10th album are bigger and sweeter than the last batch, at no cost to the intensity. In the punishing “locked club,” singer Chino Moreno juggles carnival barker and Bjork-but-goth vocal routines while the band marches in a bass-heavy chug to a synth-laced clearing at the chorus. Their last five years of touring and finding new demographics through social media have produced a somehow more self-assured version of the band that effortlessly mixed rap, metal, and synth-pop in its first five years. The acerbic tones and pretty chords of catalog classics like “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)” or “My Own Summer (Shove It)” resurface in the new album’s “infinite source” and “~metal dream.”
Dijon, Baby
Studio utility player and singer-songwriter Dijon Duenas had a breakout year thanks to his work on the latest Bon Iver and Justin Bieber releases. His sophomore album is a wonder, the kind of record that used to trickle out more in the past when legends like Marcus Miller, Prince, and Raphael Saadiq would manage simultaneous solo and supporting roles. Dijon pulls signatures from across music history into a sound that feels increasingly his own. Jittery drum programming and shrouding reverb screams Minneapolis in the ‘80s, but the wonky thump and the multiplicity of vocal tracks are just as suggestive of D’Angelo or the raw pain of a Frank Ocean. This is all in service to a batch of songs about the joy and obligation of family. The giddy “Another Baby!” seeks to “expand the collection” just after the title track and opener sweetly walks the artist’s son through the courtship and pregnancy that brought him here. Baby! ponders love in all its rejuvenating and off-putting shapes, sweating with a husband and father’s devotion but sometimes with a son’s pining for a closer connection with an oaklike and unreadable elder. Cycles of musical and parental influence inform an album teeming with guests — D’Angelo regular Pino Palladino, folk-rockers Mk.gee and Bon Iver, pop and indie-rock producer BJ Burton — who never distract from Dijon’s vision.
