Rob Sheffield’s Top 20 Albums of 2025

Good Flying Birds win full points for truth in advertising. When a bunch of scrappy guitar-jangle punchers name themselves after a Guided By Voices song — the eighth-best song on GBV’s best album — they’re setting the bar high. Even more so when they name their album Talulah’s Tape, inspired by the legendary Eighties Brit indie sensations Talulah Gosh, Amelia Fletcher’s third-best band. (She’s had almost as many great bands as GBV have great songs.) Indianapolis mastermind Kellen Baker pours his miserable heart into the gorgeously bittersweet power-pop of “Fall Away,” with Susie Slaughter’s harmonies and tambourine.

“I got the whole world between my hips” — now there’s a philosophy of life. Jade is the self-proclaimed “It Girl,” breaking free from the U.K. girl group Little Mix, with a mix of disco kicks and electroclash indie sleaze. Fame, fame, fatal fame, the cruelest of mistresses, yet that’s Jade’s one and only true love, the angel of her dreams, except maybe the ex she roasts in “FUFN (Fuck You for Now).” As for her sensitive love ballads — that’s showbiz, baby.

Shoegaze, one Nineties story that never ends. They Are Gutting a Body of Water has been one of the most crucial neo-shoegaze bands over the past decade, from the DIY hotbed of Philadelphia. LOTTO is their most intensely emotional noise yet, a showdown with addiction and disease and death. It’s an exorcism of an album — heavier than heaven, hotter than hell, bold as love.

An album full of quiet secrets, passed on from era to era and block to block, buried deep in the beats. It’s two Chicago hip-hop legends from different generations — the cerebral virtuoso Saba and the production godfather No ID, who made the beats that Saba grew up on. But they join forces to reach the higher ground, with Saba calling himself “the fly ghetto-empath anxious poet,” meeting with the wise elder he calls “Confucius.” The closer you listen to their sonic arcana, the more stories you hear.

The Spanish guitar romantic Álvaro Lafuente Calvo opens up his folk and flamenco-inspired acoustic sound, as he leaves the village and heads to the big city to find himself and get loose. He’s fascinated by American folk songs about Spain. “It’s funny how for them, ‘Spanish leather’ carries this exotic quality,” he told Rolling Stone, “when here we just say cuero.” But he takes fresh inspiration from city sounds, especially the glorious legacy of Eighties Madrid new wave glam-pop, like the mighty Mecano. Gorgeous tunes like “Puerta del Sol” and “Port Pelegri” tingle with the thrill of youthful self-discovery, where you blink and suddenly every direction you see is full of new possibilities.

Why do musicians always break your heart? “We’re Musicians,” Pictoria Vark sings, in one of the wittiest explanations ever about this timeless question — they’re on the road charming strangers, both listeners and lovers, always in it for the next song. (Or as she sings, “Every verse becomes a chorus/In every subsequent performance.”) Pictoria Vark is the spoonerism alias of the indie singer-songwriter with the ungoogleable name Victoria Park. Nothing Sticks unfolds like the journal of a wandering young heart who rambles from town to town, from feeling to feeling, celebrating the transient moments of youth and turning each one into a tune.

The noise-rock bubble bath of the year. You don’t “listen” to Water Damage so much as you consent to enter an ambient space wherein you get mauled by a dozen or so hairy Austin lunatics with the motto “Maximum Repetition Minimal Deviation.” Four tracks, all around the 20-minute mark, tons of guitars, tons of drums, heavy thunder-thud riff-pound devotionals with plenty of quiet spaces until the noise kicks in and elevates you into a trance state, with a little help from art-rock eminence grise David Grubbs on guitar. Turn off your mind, have a panic attack, and float downstream, heavy on the “down.”

A low-fi cheapo indie gem best heard on cassette — it’s been parked in my boombox for months. Kai Slater is one of the hardest-working men in show business, a Chicago DIY scene wunderkind who’s even higher up on this list with his other band, Lifeguard. For this Sharp Pins album, he just spent some quality time with his bedroom four-track tape deck to crank out a delightfully catchy solo banger full of mod guitar fuzz. As for subtle nuance…there isn’t any. Cool.

Young love, grunge love. Momma’s Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten met in high school as Pavement fans in Southern California, and these days they cram their guitars full of a mommalode of slacker angst. All over the album, they drive around and cheat on their hometown honeys and drink too hard and have a blast screwing up their chaotic-enough-already young lives, feeling “stuck in 22.” And when it’s time to finally face up and make tough emotional choices, they decide instead to hit the road and write more great songs about wanting it both ways, which is how it goes when you’re 22.

Marcus Brown is the sly R&B auteur who goes by Nourished by Time, from Brooklyn via Baltimore and Berklee. He turned heads in 2023 with his debut, Erotic Probiotic 2, but he aims even higher with the ambitiously high-strung futuristic soul of The Passionate Ones. It’s playful yet elegiac, as in the house beats of “9 2 5,” hyped up into an obsessive portrait of getting eaten alive by your day job, or the sped-up vocal chirp that hooks the glam-rock “Max Potential.”

Welcome back, Pulp — a smashing return for Jarvis Cocker and his crew of Britpop gods. Since Pulp were one band who broke up at the precisely right time — i.e., when they stopped enjoying it but before they started loathing each other — there’s a wonderful lack of neurosis around this reunion. Compared to the Gallagher brothers, who could reduce a stadium to tears simply by hugging onstage (including me), they had no unfinished business, no scores to settle; they just realized the world could use a few more Pulp songs and nobody else could write them. (It’s been tried — oh, how it’s been tried.) “Grownups” is a song Jarvis started writing 30 years ago, but as he told me this spring, “Maybe the song decided to grow up.” Sex and love and death and grief and shopping, plus posing, lots of that, especially the Bowie-glam ziggydelia of “Spike Island.” There’s no attempt to reckon with fashion — Jarvis is absolutely sincere in his ignorance of how massively influential he is on modern pop. (Which pains me, but I’m glad it doesn’t pain him.) For a more pompous kind of band, More would be the climax that sums up their career. For Pulp, it’s simply more. Glad they decided this was worth doing.

Addison Rae, pop princess of the year. The breathy synth-pop rush never quits, with Swedish production queens Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd in charge, as Addison whispers and sighs about the glitter life, from “diamonds are my best friend like I’m Norma Jean” to “I’m not an easy fuck, but when it comes to shoes I’ll be a slut.” The threesome’s template was Madonna’s Ray of Light, though it sounds more like Britney circa In the Zone, with her vocals in the ASMR range. Sometimes she’s a fool for the city, as in “New York” (her favorite part of the trip is dropping off her bags at the hotel? Relatable!) and sometimes she appreciates the great outdoors, as when she sighs, “I’d rather feel the sun kiss on my skin/With a cigarette pressed between my tits.” But wherever she is, she sounds deliriously lost in her own glam fantasy world.

The Hold Steady frontman decides to make a real L.A. record, in the mode of 1970s troubadours like Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon. He even poses for the cover photo on the same bridge where Randy Newman stood for the cover of Little Criminals. He teams up with the War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel for an ambitious album-length narrative, full of down-and-out hustlers on the fringes of society, following a disgraced pastor who loses his faith, “pissing off a pretty vengeful God.” (He expands the story with the companion book, Lousy with Ghosts.) Twenty years ago, he was singing “boys and girls in America have such a sad time together”; these are men and women in America, having their sad times alone. Yet he makes it uplifting instead of depressing. Sad but true: “The ones we’ve known longest can pull us down strongest.”

We got Clipse back in 2025, a reason to rejoice. Pusha T and Malice don’t waste time rehashing their past — they’ve got work to do, nostalgia and “Nosetalgia” be damned. Two brothers, with two vastly different minds, come together out of love for the family and the game, for their first album since the 2000s. King Push, the Lemmy of coke rap, has never wavered from that one thing he does better than anyone. (Last album he was “cocaine’s Dr. Seuss”; this time he’s the “Bezos of the nasals.”) Malice stepped back and found his religious mission, under the new name No Malice. (As he says here, “I done disappeared and reappeared without a voila,” which rhymes with “Drugs killed my teen spirit, welcome to Nirvana.”) They flex with Kendrick in “Chains and Whips,” three MCs pushing the limits. (“I don’t fuck with the kumbaya shit,” Kendrick says in the year’s least shocking news update.) But Pusha gets the album’s best boast: “You rappers all beneath me, beloved like the Bee Gees.”

Dorothy Parker famously quipped, “That woman speaks 18 languages and she can’t say no in any of them.” Rosalia sings 13 languages on Vox but she can’t admit defeat in any of them, blowing up a host of spiritual and sexual cravings into a unique art-pop epic of motomamidolatry. The Spanish pop visionary makes Lux her own version of Madonna’s Like a Prayer, where the hyperbolic excess doesn’t get in the way of her personal expression — it is her personal expression. Rosalia brings her yo me transformo imagination to a sonic reliquary of female mystics and saints, Madonna definitely included. Fave moment: the way Rosalia dances barefoot through the hushed “La Yugular” until she busts out that sampled Patti Smith interview from 1976. “Seven heavens — big deal!,” Patti rants. “I wanna see the eighth heaven, tenth heaven, thousandth heaven! It’s like breaking on through to the other side — it’s just like going through one door. One door isn’t enough. A million doors aren’t enough!” That sums up Lux perfectly.

Geese blew up into the most exciting rock-band rampage in years, with miles of style and songs for days. Their sound evokes an In Rainbows tribute band covering Fear of Music with vocals that split the difference between Stephen Malkmus and Adam Sandler. (If he had a Nineties SNL character called “Indieboy,” he’d be screaming “There’s a bomb in my caaaaar!”) Cameron Winter’s solo breakthrough Heavy Metal set the table for this one in so many ways, but Getting Killed explodes with all their four-way crazy-rhythms exuberance. If you care about what goes on inside Cameron Winter’s head, which is by no means necessary but recommended, you might wonder how he comes up with lines as great as “I can’t even taste my own tears/They fall into an even sadder bastard’s eyes.” (If 23-year-old indie boys were this funny about our emotionally stunted problems when I was one, we all might’ve been marginally less insufferable.) But Geese could go anywhere from here, and following them is going to be a blast.

The underground virtuoso rap poet explores his nightmares, and probably also yours. Two different friends, after I recommended the album, told me flat-out they couldn’t get through it because it was “too scary,” and who could ask for higher praise? “Dislocated” is a vision of escaping the surveillance state, with Woods and ELUCID vowing “I can’t be located,” over an off-kilter jazz track from L.A.’s Human Error Club. It’s about learning to hide in plain sight — how to disappear completely. Tough talk, from “Corinthians”: “You don’t wanna know what it costs to live/What it costs to hide behind eyelids.”

Taylor Swift made the year’s most divisive album, which has been Number One practically every week since it dropped — you know, that kind of divisive — and it’s basically a sister album to Reputation, or Reputation And It’s Actually Romantic But Also Still Reputation. I used to hear it as a Rep sequel, yet now it sounds more like the second chapter in a Rep trilogy, but either way, it’s total emotional excess, kicking off with three of her splashiest songs, especially the violet-mascara meltdown of “Elizabeth Taylor.” It’s Swift doing what she does best, which is write songs, and not doing what she doesn’t do at all, which is help you make sense of it. Like Rep, it’s got a bait-and-switch concept that disappears for over half the album. She keeps trying to tiptoe up to ordinary adult feelings like a responsible eldest daughter should, except good Lord is she terrible at tiptoeing, so she can’t resist overdoing it every time, because that’s who she is. She wears so many different masks on this album, in her gallery of feminine masquerades, from Ophelia to Ronnie Spector to Kitty Finlay, but she’s even less interested than usual at giving up her secrets. Something about Taylor will always tempt people to start doing the discourse math in their heads before absorbing the music — that started when she was 17 and will never change. But this is the life she’s chosen, and she’ll never know another.

I’ve been hitting play on this art-punk guitar omelette first thing every morning for six months and haven’t figured out a word, so don’t come sniffling to me about emotional content. Who wanted emotional content in 2025? You don’t need more feelings in your life, you need more guitars, so enter Lifeguard. Three Chicago boys, so young, two of them still in their teens, yet expertly versed in the tricks of the trade. (The rhythm section met as tweens because one noticed the other one was wearing a Tortoise T-shirt, which is the most bizarre sentence I have typed all year.) They walk away with this year’s “you think it’s easy but you’re wrong” trophy, because if it were easy, we’d get a dozen records this good every summer. But the wonderfully brash power-clang guitar attack of “T.L.A.” is theirs alone.

Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman tells her heart-piercing stories about ordinary people trying to hold on —even though holding on is how she wound up here, which is nowhere. The Asheville, North Carolina, punks make this a rootsy twang-gaze portrait of small-town heartache, with Hartzman bringing a cast of losers and dreamers to life. It’s poignant to hear her harmonize post-break-up with her ex and guitarist MJ Lenderman. (They also made the extremely strange Live at Third Man Records, one of the most awesomely awkward live albums you’ll ever hear, just the two of them squirming uncomfortably through every song.) But Hartzman has so much compassion for the folks in these songs, even the ones who treat each other brutally, she makes you root for them all.