Top 5 Albums of 2025
As I’ve alluded to recently, wrangling Best Of content has been a core aspect of my identity for as long as I can remember. Certainly since I started making year end mix CDs for all my friends in the mid-2000s. But for my final four years at KCRW, it was the cornerstone, the peak, the culmination of a year spent earning an honest living for voraciously consuming new music and other media, thinking big thoughts about all of it, and condensing those thoughts into something sharable. Maneuvering through so many moving parts was always exhausting (occasionally torturous) and yet, every year when the work was complete and the finished web page was out there for all to engage with… nothing ever felt so exhilarating.
These past few months I’ve been taking a lot of long evening strolls to reengage with some of my favorite music. For a minute there, I was going to attempt something kind of lofty for this missive, maybe I’d find the central theme running through all of the media that really got its claws into me this year. At the very least, I was contemplating pairings. Is Devonté Hynes (Blood Orange) not something of a modern day Lorenz Hart as portrayed ingratiatingly and exhaustingly by Ethan Hawke in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon? Both artists have a way with song craft that at times feels almost mathematically engineered to appeal to my specific brain. Each artist’s songs are so achingly beautiful, always tinged with melancholy, and never too challenging. On a longer timeline I could make the case. Or maybe there’s something about Car Seat Headrest’s sprawling, operatic The Scholars that slant rhymes with the process-forward character studies of the world’s remaining misanthropes in Vince Gilligan’s Apple TV series Pluribus? “Planet Desperation” is both an actual CSHR song title from the 2025 release AND how the focal point characters of Pluribus might be inclined to describe their new reality. Again, give me a week alone in a room with a magically refilling coffee pot and an endless supply of snacks, I could get there.
But I have none of those things. I’m currently typing this between bouts of getting up to freshen my coffee and being actively trained for maximum play efficiency by my latest cat sitting client. I want to write more (a lot more) about TV and film in 2026. But given my active time restraints between now and the window of social acceptability for publishing a best of the year list, I’m sticking to that classic adage of “write what you know.” For better or worse, I know how to write about music and these are the top five albums that made my radar this year, about which I have something to say. The first four were the only pieces of music that I listened to compulsively, because I wanted to, not out of any sense of professional obligation. Within that distinction it’s really only The Scholars and Essex Honey that became obsessions. I’m pretty sure the only other album I listened to more than once for fun was Wet Leg’s moisturizer which is a solid honorable mention. The song “Jennifer’s Body” in particular deserved a lot more play with its film Tumblr nods, bendy, bendy guitar sounds, and ear-wormy refrain of: “I like you, everyday starts and ends with you. Hold me down, I get high on you. Go to sleep just so I can dream of you.” And yet, I gave my official fifth spot to the Pulp album from this year, because there is perhaps no figure in all of modern music that I spend more time contemplating than Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker. I haven’t even engaged with Rosalía’s LUX yet, because I just haven’t felt ready for whatever reason. I did engage somewhat with Geese’s Getting Killed because I’m just as curious as everyone else as to how this charmingly off-kilter Brooklyn art rock band became something like U2 for the time of TikTok, but their whole deal just isn’t super for me [shrug emoji]. Read on for more pinpointed thoughts about the albums that did make my official top five and if you found your way here from my Instagram rantings or a Blue Sky post, please scroll to the bottom of the page and type in your email to get Not Quite Punk delivered direct to your inbox (for free!). You opting into my weekly cultural musings is the best belated Christmas gift/New Year tone-setter that a girl could ask for.
- Car Seat Headrest – The Scholars
Everything that I wrote about this album back in July — when I still had a full time job and ready access to the Substack that’s connected to my work email address — stands. I threw it on again last week and marveled anew at what an achievement it was and still is.
- Blood Orange – Essex Honey
Few have crafted a sonic signature quite like Dev Hynes’: smoldering R&B, breakbeats, folktronica, indiepop, mostly minor chords, and a whole bunch of other pretty sounds bend freely to his will across his carefully executed catalog. Essex Honey in particular is heady and heartrending in equal measure, it coaxes Vini Reilly and Elliott Smith out to the club, and it grapples, really grapples with the fact that sometimes the only thing we have to make any of [gestures wildly] all of this make any sense are the cultural touchstones that we both share and — perhaps more importantly — turn to for company when we are otherwise completely alone.
- Darkside – Nothing
Hypnotic grooves, wild combinations, and song structures that shift midstream make for a listening experience that really can’t be encapsulated in words. This also explains why Darkside’s live show is spoken about in hushed, reverent tones and I have at least one friend who went to every single show of their long weekend residency at Lodge Room earlier this year — both the early and late shows, night after night, perhaps tapping into something ritualistic. If Darkside was in town and performing so close to this person’s home, they owed it to them to be there for the long haul. I’ve yet to experience this for myself, but I did spend a good amount of time with this album in my ears wandering around Marina Del Rey after dark, passing the outlines of fishermen, gazing at boats festooned with Christmas lights, and walking a seemingly endless pier embraced by the abyss.
- Sharp Pins – Radio DDR
If a larger theme of the music that resonated in 2025 is a critical mass of the population embracing violent virtuosity, then Sharp Pins stands in stark contrast. But this (more or less) solo project of Chicago-based popkid Kai Slater has tapped into something similarly uncanny and raw. Not that any combination of young rock bands that elicit any type of response need to be contrasted with each other at all... Dammit, hoisted by my own petard! Anyway, this album is just good, plain and simple. The guitars chime, the vocals beam in from outer space, the melancholy cuts to the bone. Is it the result of careful study (“Losing My Edge” style) of every great British Invasion b-side, Alex Chilton’s full oeuvre, untold hours of Guided by Voices bootlegs, “all the Modern Lovers tracks,” “The Sonics… The Sonics… The Sonics?” Or is it deeper than that, the latest in a lineage of lo-fi/power pop princes who have been promised? It’s all of the above, it’s none of the above, it’s young, it’s urgent, it’s now, and the melodies will have you humming along forever.
- Pulp – More
As mentioned up top, I did listen to this record more than once for pleasure, but not as much as anything else on this list. The thing is, it’s 2025, I’ve seen Pulp live TWICE in the past two years and Jarvis’ unrelenting presence is worthy of a full essay in its own right, which I swear I’ll get around to one of these days. I have big lofty thoughts about how Jarvis and Pulp by extension are the last of a very particular type of post modern rock band that can’t exist anymore. Jarvis is possibly the last person whose been able to pull off simultaneously being a thinking man’s lounge lizard and commenting on being a thinking man’s lounge lizard and this is solely for right place, right time reasons. But that’s as far as the thought goes (for now). I’ll leave you with this hyper self-aware line from More’s lead single “Spike Island:” “I was born to perform, it’s a calling. I exist to do this, shouting and pointing.”