Favorite Albums of 2025

1. Who’s the Clown? - Audrey Hobert
This album, to me, came out of nowhere and completely became the soundtrack to my summer. My soft spot for confessional-driven pop music (Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Gracie Abrams) was a mystery to me until New Yorker critic Amanda Petrusich, in profiling my favorite band The National, wrote that sad teenage girls and sad dads are close emotionally. Hobert, for me, fits this perfectly while also injecting a great bit of humor. This album is infectious, funny, and one I returned to often throughout the year. I’m very curious to see where she goes next.

2. Time Indefinitely - William Tyler
Tyler is a new-to-me guitarist who in recent years has turned from country/folk-flavored music to a more experimental register. This instrumental album centers on Tyler’s guitar playing but is also layered with sounds, samples, and the occasional drone. At time, it reminded me of one of my favorite albums from last year, Bill Orcutt’s How To Rescue Things, with its layered textures. (Tyler also did a collaborative album with Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden that was a highlight of my year).

3. How You Been - SML
SML, the experimental California-based jazz (?) group, has made top ten albums for me for two years in a row now. How You Been, the follow up to their debut album last year, is a live recording of improvisational jazz that was then deconstructed and put back together into something completely new. I found myself returning to this album (along with revisiting their debut) often in the last few months. (Bonus points: my daughter heard me listening to this while making dinner one night and came into the kitchen to say “I like this music”.)

4. Regarding Film - John Roberts
John Roberts, the New York-based multidiscplinary artist always hits right but something about this album really grabbed me. Mixing melodic piano, bass, and saxaophone with subtle textures, this album is transporting in a quiet way, perfect for late nights and early mornings.

5. Stay with me - Alexander Biggs
Biggs, the Australian, singer-songwriter, makes quiet, DIY/bedroom music that feels both fresh and nostalgic at the same time. Building on his previous album, Hit & Miss (which I loved), this new album sticks to the best of his previous work. I can’t explain how he does it, but all these songs feel like memories from various points in my life, like songs I’ve heard before, but wholly new at the same time. I wrote about that here.

6. Ghost Notes - Kim Hiorthoy
I listen to a lot of ambient and experimental music across the sprectrum from drone works to more textural soundscapes. Hiorthoy is a new-to-me-artist in this space and captures the sweet spot of my tastes in the genre. His first full-length album in a decade, the album is both organic and digital, propulsive and quiet, Hiorthoy described this album as “electronic music that is acoustic”. It’s one that revealed something new to me each time I listened to it.

7. SABLE, fABLE - Bon Iver
It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve been listening to Justin Vernon’s Bon Iver project for fifteen years, since his debut album For Emma, Forever Ago. I’ve delighted in how he’s evolved the project and assumed this album was a return to his early acoustic work after he released the first three tracks as a standalone EP, late last year. Those three tracks, however, were merely a prelude to yet another reinvention: a full-fledged, dare-I-say euphoric pop album. It’s an album that somehow feels like new territory for Vernon yet still very clearly a Bon Iver album.

8. Get Sunk - Matt Berninger
I already mentioned The National is my all-time favorite band and I tend to go anywhere lead vocalist and principal songwriter Matt Berninger wants to take me. This solo album follows on the heels of a massive two-part National project last year and he appears to show no signs of slowing down. This album, more directly than the National records, chronicles his recent depression and writers block, showing an artist emerging with a new sense of direction.

9. Cover the Mirrors - Ben Kweller
I’ve never been a big Ben Kweller fan though I’ve been familiar with his music for at least a decade now. This album, which deals with the recent death of his teenage son by a car crash, hit me in a way his music never did before. Like the Alexander Biggs album above, this one felt like it could have been a soundtrack to various moments in my own life, somehow immediately familiar in an impossible way.

10. Never Enough - Turnstile
Throughout my life, I’ve listened across genres and I’m especially interested in music that blends my understanding of what a specific genre can contain. Punk and hardcore, for example, are fascinating in their flexibility and Turnstile’s new album embodies that. Clearly rooted in the hardcore tradition, the album pulls in pop, electronic, and alt-rock for a rousing fun album I couldn’t get enough of this summer.

Honorable Mentions

Ten more great albums in no particular order:

Getting Killed - Geese
Drifts - Arp
caroline 2 - caroline
Alan Sparhawk with Trampled By Turtles
Highwallow & Supermoon Songs - Saintseneca
Psychic Geography - DOVS
Baby - Dijon
Quiet Pieces - Abdul Mogard
Different Rooms - Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer
Swamp Spirit - Space Drum Meditation

Over on Are.na, I kept a running list of albums that stuck with me. As of this writing, there are 36 albums there.

Spotify Playlist

Along with my Are.na journal, I also kept a Spotify playlist of songs from the year that stuck with me. As of this writing, there are 101 songs, clocking in at just over 7 hours. You can listen to the playlist of my favorite songs here.

Other Notes

Spotify Wrapped told me my two most-listened genres this year were (1) Drone and (2) Jazz which sounds right to me. I fell hard for jazz when I was in college but fell out of it a bit over the last decade years. I spent a lot of time this year defamiliarizing myself with old favorites and exploring new artists.
Spotify also told me my most listened song was Audrey Hobert’s “Sue Me”, from my favorite album of the year. The album I listened to more than any other, however, was K-Pop Demon Hunters. I want to blame my kids but I also was into it.
Not on these lists — my top ten, honorable mentions, or even my Are.na long list — is Taylor Swift’s new album which really felt like a let-down to me. It seems to me she’s stuck, reiterating the same themes and styles. I keep waiting for a big stylistic jump for her, in the way 1989, Reputation, and Folklore surprised. She’s not the only favorite artist who released new albums that I found largely forgettable. Chance the Rapper’s follow-up album had its good moments but failed to live up to his masterpiece, Coloring Book. Lorde’s new album, howevver, was truly a return to form and much better than her previous lackluster release.