Every new year, I throw down the best and worst movies of the previous year and my friend and frequent collaborator, Dave Scaddan, writes his Top 20 Albums. There’s a few of the same albums on his list that were on mine, but definitely a bunch I wasn’t familiar with. Genre-wise, it’s a wide ranging list, so there’s something for everyone and a few great surprises to boot.
Now — over to Dave!
DAVE: Here’s the list of my favorite albums of 2025. This year, I discovered a lot of music by artists who’ve been working for a long time but had never entered my orbit before. Fourteen of the twenty artists catalogued here have never been on one of my year-end lists, and many of these artists have just started working with new musical lineups that gelled really well. I hope you’ve had a good year and that you can cull a few good picks from this list.
20 Ninajirachi – I Love My Computer
I often end up using this spot to celebrate an artist who’s been around a long time and releases something solid but doesn’t get lasting comeback cred out of it. In consideration for the “welcome back!” spot in 2025 were artists like Suzanne Vega, Cymande, Clipse,and even Pink Floyd, who finally made a physical copy of ‘Live at Pompeii’ available to the public this year. But no, this 25 year-old Aussie squeezed ’em all out with a compelling debut. ‘I Love My Computer’ got me going back to my old Crystal Castles albums, and reminded me how much I loved all that Ed Banger label stuff a decade or so ago. Ninajirachi makes music that sounds like it was programmed on a laptop, but in this case, that’s a compliment.
19 Conductor Williams and Rome Streetz – Trainspotting
Anything I’ve been able to read about this album seems to have it backwards. The popular take seems to be that while people really like this record, they’re all hyped up about Rome Streets’ rhyming, while simply putting up with Conductor Williams’ production. I’ve heard Rome Streets before, and I still think he’s a passable emcee, I’m just not struck by anything particularly innovative or new this time around. He’s got a good ear for distinctive flows, he’s lyrically proficient and original, and he offers an original voice and the occasional clever parallel. But the real star here, for me, is the Conductor contribution. Williams is manipulating samples and soundbites in ways we don’t usually hear. Maybe he’s trying to obscure his sources to avoid the costs of sample clearance, or maybe he just likes the way a musical sample sounds when it’s slowed down and pitch-shifted WAY beyond the point of a chopped-and-screwed style. Hearing his tracks is like hearing a sample get so bent out of shape that it feels like its musicality is going to collapse entirely, yet somehow it never totally does.
18 Little Simz – Lotus
‘Lotus’ came out in the midst of a messy lawsuit against Little Simz’ longtime producer Inflo, right when it seemed her career was really hitting new heights. She is suing him for millions of dollars of unpaid loans, and ‘Lotus’ marks the first time in years she’s released something without his name on it. Instead, she’s started working with producer Miles Clinton James – he also produces music by London jazz troupe Kokoroko, a group whose music sounds to me like a family of artists using longtime affiliations to create soulful, positive music.
Even if we listened to ‘Lotus’ without knowing anything about these splits, we would know something was up. The album begins with ‘Thief’, a business-breakup diss track if ever there was one, where Simz addresses a cycle of lies, abuses and betrayed trust. This track acts as a springboard for a record full of self-empowerment and rejection of victimhood. The album is full of voices that can be heard all over London’s R’n’B/jazz scene, like Obongjayar’s chorus on ‘Lion’, or on the title track, where Michael Kiwanuka and Yussef Dayes both appear. This is one of the most compelling traits of ‘Lotus’ – that it sounds like the product of a community when it was made amidst a separation.
17 Lamp of Murmur – The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy
Lamp of Murmur is a prolific, one-man California black metal project, fronted by a costumed and face-painted metallion known only by the name, “M”. Four years ago, his music was mostly black metal purity in the most Norwegian sense: horror-inducing vocals, razor-wire guitars, music that sounds like it was made to hurt us. Since 2021, “M” has stopped releasing albums at a one-every-few-months pace, and the music has become more layered and textured. ‘Saturnian Bloodstorm’ in 2023 lifted Lamp of Murmur to a level of black metal perfection. It is a truly frightening listen with an abundance of acidic riffs and plenty of vocal range that still fits the classic black metal mode. ‘The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy’ is something else entirely. Pianos, horror-free vocals, and moments of mellowness in the production make this a risky, but rewarding venture for “M”, who has already proved his worth within the rigid black metal framework. Purists will likely hate this album, but someone like me who enjoys black metal but owes no allegiance to its rules can find this an exciting and surprising listen.
16 Don Was and the Pan-Detroit Ensemble – Groove in the Face of Adversity
Do you remember Don Was? In the 80s, he had a band called Was (Not Was) whose album ‘What Up, Dog?’ scored some hits. One of those hits was called ‘Walk the Dinosaur’ and I am sorry for reminding you about it. I always remembered that band because the B-side of the other single (‘Spy in the House of Love’) was a really funny skit/song called, ‘Hi, Dad, I’m in Jail’, and it was one of my favorite random soundbites to use as a wrench to throw into the midst of a mixtape.
This year, Don Was assembled an excellent group of vintage jazz/funk musicians with Detroit connections to perform and record this six-track live album. This group plays funk music that’s a little “cleaner” than what I usually go for. In fact, if not for the historical/political lyrical content on some songs, this music could almost be considered mainstream. Through the end of 2025 though, I found myself going back to it again and again, just to get that raw-energy funk flavor that only comes from a live show played by great veteran musicians.
15 McKinley Dixon – Magic, Alive!
This album gave me a new surprise every time I heard it this year. I came to it first in June because I’d heard it was a jazz-fueled rap album, which, thanks to groups I loved when I was younger, (Tribe, Digable Planets) always appeals to me. ‘Magic, Alive!’ does sound like it could be performed in a jazz club (even a speakeasy) but there’s way more than that to its appeal. It’s packed with guest vocalists that are very smoothly blended into the groove, while McKinley’s complex, narrative lyrics provide the bedrock. Plus, even just the instrumental tracks of this record would be a great listen, full of energetic horn blasts, slick, sleepy drum beats and the odd wail of an electric guitar. I need to take some time to chase down all the great performers that contributed to ‘Magic, Alive!’ as either vocalists or musicians, including the past work of Dixon himself.
14 Greg Foat – Opening Time
As a pianist, synth player and composer, I guess Greg Foat is supposed to be a pretty big deal, but I never heard him until this year when he did this album as part of a trio with Jihad Darwish on bass and Moses Boyd on drums. Boyd is one of my favorite drummers, so I followed him here without knowing that Greg Foat is an accomplished and revered musician with an interesting catalogue. Seems like I should’ve bumped into him before now.
‘Opening Time’ was one of 2025’s most satisfying mellow listens. It’s cool hearing a drummer as good as Moses Boyd playing through eight tracks where the rhythm never races, still sounding groovy at a very slow tempo. Foat’s piano playing presents itself in sequences of simple little evolving phrases, often wrapping up in a light glissando while Darwish’s bass lies there like a low-end cushion for the melodies to rest on. Don’t listen to this with any notions of genre or category in mind. Ignore whatever your streamer tells you about what “kind” of music this is. Just put it on when you want to hear something relaxing. Whatever ideas you have about categorizing this music will have melted away by the time it is over anyway.
13 Geese – Getting Killed
One of the most lovable things about this album is the hope it’s inspired for the music industry in general. In a year where musical popularity likely had more to do with conforming to industry standards than at any other time since the 1950s, we got ‘Getting Killed’, a weird, shambling, out-of-control record that became incredibly popular and launched new satellites of potential into the rock band orbit.
And hey, it sounds excellent too! It’s ragged, abrasive and delicately imperfect (as rock music should be) and it has made Cameron Winter into a 23 year-old rock star. While his voice reminds me of Jason Molinas’ tortured troubadour persona sometimes, I really don’t want to compare his style to any predecessors; part of his appeal is that he’s doing something we haven’t heard before.
12 Ty Segall – Possession
I get that there’s a certain malaise attached to artists like Ty who are so prolific, it’s nearly impossible to engage with all their work with any depth. I also get that you may have already picked your favorite Ty albums and decided not to dig any further. And, as he mentions in the lyrics of one of the songs on ‘Possession’, maybe we’re starting to see him as a 2010s wunderkind whose peak has passed. This record came out very early in 2025, so I’ve had lots of time to go back to it, and while it seems to have slipped through the critical cracks, I think that’s a mistake and a shame. Here, Segall is foregoing a lot of the psychedelic swirl and volume of his usual style, putting more emphasis on his vocal harmonies and lyrics.
11 Melody’s Echo Chamber – Unclouded
Melody Prochet’s French dream pop project has cracked this list before. This year she did it with her usual irresistible vocals and by assembling a great group of musicians to play with. Reine Fisk of Stockholm’s mighty Dungen plays guitar on this record. Malcolm Catto (a guy who’s been enlisted to play percussion for both Madlib and DJ Shadow) is behind the kit throughout ‘Unclouded’, really pushing Prochet’s songs to another level. The whole thing rips with hooks and beats while still being an album you could close your eyes and take a nap to. It’s like if Julee Cruise had Robbie Krieger and Shiela E on tour with her, and I love it.
10 Rochelle Jordan – Through the Wall
I am loath to repeat the fact that in a lot of online comments about this record, people are praising it because they say it reminds them of Crystal Waters. You remember her. She had that song, ‘Gypsy Woman’ in the 90s with that, “la da dee, la da dah” bit in the chorus. I never liked that song, so I hate to admit that the comparison makes sense. Sort of.
Rochelle Jordan is mastering the kind of R’n’B that made hits in the 80s and 90s, and the first full track, ‘ladida’ does have a refrain that sounds a little like ‘Gypsy Woman’, but ‘Through the Wall’ is so much more than the catchy disco-pop she’s been compared to. Jordan brings a slightly older woman’s perspective and range to the kinds of hits we used to hear from people like Paula Abdul, Janet Jackson, even Whitney Houston on her bubblier numbers. Having grown up with this sound as the source of so many popular songs, I love hearing it done to perfection all these years later. Jordan has the gift of being able to sing a line of lyric that’s pretty simple with enough conviction to make it deep and catchy. Hearing her team up on tracks with fellow Torontonian Kaytranada is exciting too – they’re like a powerhouse of Canadian dance and soul music.
9 Theon Cross – Affirmations
I used to think it was crazy that school age kids would choose the tuba out of all the instruments they could learn in the school band. The case is huge, it’s one of the heavier instruments, and no one ever really gets to play a fun melody or solo on the tuba; it usually just plods along with a simple bassline. Theon Cross could make a lot of solid counter points to my anti-tuba leanings. On this set of live recordings, he and a well-equipped band use an under-appreciated instrument to accent and lead a series of great performances. Cross can play this brass instrument like it has strings. He punches out notes like he’s plucking them, bending them, extending them to places the human mouth and throat should not be capable of. He evolves his instrument beyond the realms of jazz and classical music, embracing the ways a tuba could play reggae, grime, funk, and ambient music. He also shows a knack for putting a great band together, much like Brandee Younger does when showcasing her harp skills in a quartet or quintet. The other musicians playing this set with Theon Cross are just as good as he is, even though their instruments might sound more familiar and traditional in terms of how they’re being played.
8 Ela Minus – Dia
I don’t want to make this sound like a make-up call, but that might be what it is. I have spent the last five years completely in love with an EDM record called ‘Acts of Rebellion’ that this Columbian/Canadian one-woman artist made in 2020. ‘Acts of Rebellion’ was a glaring omission from my Best Albums of 2020 list because I didn’t hear it until 2021. This stuff happens sometimes – it’s an unfortunate side-effect of my buy-in to the insanity of calendar culture.
Anyway, ‘Dia’ is more great EDM from an artist with a great ear for texture. Before ‘Dia’ dropped this year, Ela Minus had only released a smattering of singles, collaborations and remixes in a four-plus year interim, which led to a lot of anticipation for another full-length. Her sound is picking up where it left off, leaning on her skills as a builder of grooves, and showcasing some of her burgeoning pop sensibilities. ‘Dia’ takes us through walls of synthy performance, knowing when to drop a beat, a bassline, even a poppy chorus. If mentioning this here leads people back to ‘Acts of Rebellion’, I feel like that would be positively restorative.
7 Deafheaven – Lonely People With Power
Returning to form with a heavier, more aggressive approach, Deafheaven gave us more of what we loved about them in the first place in 2025. Back in the early 2010s, this group, basically a black metal band with some penchant for lush, introspective touches, deservedly became critical darlings and released two great albums, ‘Sunbather’ and ‘New Bermuda’. This stint put Deafheaven on the map in a way that allowed them to consider their band as a kind of permanent entity, where next moves and stylistic choices suddenly seemed weighty. So when they entered into a stage of “reinvention” in 2021, and made ‘Infinite Granite’, which smoothed over all their acidic aggression, it was disappointing, but totally understandable. Blending beauty into blackness was what made them great in the first place, so it made sense that they’d want to see what pulling back the blackness might do for their sound. Just because it didn’t work doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have tried it.
‘Lonely People With Power’ sounds more like those groundbreaking early albums than anything they’ve done since, a return to form, I guess. George Clarke’s pained, screamed vocals are back. Kerry McCoy’s irresistible riffing and droned speed-strums are back. The blast-beat drums of Daniel Tracy are back, running this whole outfit like an engine from a machine that portends doom. ‘Lonely People With Power’ has the feel of a great band rediscovering itself with a sound that’s been absent for just long enough to make us realize what we were missing while it was gone.
6 Femi Kuti – Journey Through Life
Femi Kuti is the son of Nigerian musical and political legend Fela Kuti, and he’s been releasing his own music since the late 80s. While he may not be as fierce or funky as his dad, he does sound a little like him, and shares one of his father’s most important talents: the ability to put together a band. ‘Journey Through Life’ is full of drums, bass, horns and chanted background vocals that gel with a tightness that comes through live and on record. You can hear about a dozen contributors playing together on all these tracks, never giving anyone a solo or a spotlight, just putting it together with feeling and an unmistakable grounding in Nigerian funk/rock.
5 Cory Hanson – I Love People
Even when Cory Hanson was fronting his band Wand, he was a bit of a shapeshifter, switching from heavy psych to whimsical folk to syrupy pop with ease. I didn’t always love these shifts of tone, but when two of your favorite bands are The Cure and Ween, you learn not to disrespect an artist’s need to break out of expectations. Now on his own, Hanson is putting most of his emphasis on his ability as a guitar player and songwriter, presenting tunes that could’ve come from Blitzen Trapper or Gram Parsons. This is a very American album in a time when that label could mean a lot of things, but as Hanson finds his place in that spectrum, he does some great work and shows that he still has some surprises up his sleeve.
4 Aesop Rock – I heard it’s a Mess There Too
I know, like Ty Segall, this guy’s back catalogue is intimidating, and maybe I won’t be able to convince you to binge the whole thing, but one of hip hop’s most verbose, prolific emcees had a great year in 2025. Along with his first LP of the year, (‘Black Hole Superette’) Aes got busy this year, and ‘I heard it’s a Mess There Too’ was a really slick style shift for a rapper/producer who’s put out plenty of product in the 2020s. This time around, Aes doesn’t mess with any fancy production – quite the opposite. Using what sounds like a simple drum machine and a toy piano, he strips everything back to basic, catchy, funky, spooky tracks and performs his usual quirked-out lyricism overtop. The style is so elementary that when he does include something like a vocal sample or a bassline, it hits twice as hard.
3 The Hidden Cameras – Bronto
The gay clubs always played the best dance music. That was what always struck me most when I was a hetero guy in my 20s following friends to whichever hot spots they wanted to go to on any given night, sometimes ending up in places I’d never been. In my 30s, when house and jungle had fully become part of the mainstream, I’d sometimes think about how ahead of the game some of those queer DJs were when they were trying to give people something to dance to, keeping the pulses up, keeping the good feeling vibes going.
The Hidden Cameras feel like part of that same legacy that groups like The Pet Shop Boys, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Bronski Beat, and especially Hercules and Love Affair have forged. Homosexuality isn’t really an essential part of the sound of any of these bands, but it is a part of the overall identity, especially when one accepts the corollary that gay = clever about dance music. Hailing from Toronto, but well versed in European club scenes, The Hidden Cameras unearthed a gem in 2025. ‘Bronto’ has all the same pop sensibility of the aforementioned groups, and also their slick sense of EDM production. This is a record that soothes as much as it pulses – it could be danced to or relaxed to, depending on the mood of the listener. The expertly handled pop/dance songcraft on ‘You Can Call’ made it my favorite track of the year.
2 Darkside – Nothing
This is a duo getting more and more comfortable making music together. Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington have now done three albums together and they’re all great, easy to go back to, and difficult to categorize. While it’s easy to sort them into the “Electronic” category, it fits even less on ‘Nothing’ than it has in the past. Harrington plays plenty of different instruments, and can use all of them to insert a hook into one of Jaar’s ambient backdrops. Darkside seem to be playing more with different vocal distortions, different editing and programming, and different inspirations this time. At times, the genres switch up so suddenly without detracting from the overall flow of the album that it can feel a little like listening to the best work of some sample-happy artists like The Avalanches. I sometimes wonder while listening to ‘Nothing’ if this might’ve been the kind of path that fellow genre-defiers Ween might’ve found themselves on if they’d kept making music together through the 2020s. Don’t miss this one if you’ve liked this duo before, and don’t let them slip past you if you’ve never heard them.
1 S.G. Goodman – Planting by the Signs
There’s a lot of livin’ in this set of songs by Kentucky singer/songwriter S.G. Goodman. The slightly strained vocals Goodman always delivers carry a certain pain and truth that I sometimes balk at going back to simply because I know it will be an emotional ride. A heavy ride, if you will. ‘Snapping Turtle’ will likely always be the centerpiece of this record for me, mostly because it encapsulates exactly the reasons why I keep going back to Goodman’s music even though I know they will probably make me wipe my eyes on my sleeves at times. When she begins by singing, “When you’re a farm kid in a small town / you drive before the legal age,” I know I’m listening to a song that has been fully lived. I know this even more clearly when Goodman recounts an experience that she’s proud and ashamed of at the same time, a violent and heroic encounter that’s too nuanced to be fictional, intercut with lines about becoming a young mother and questioning whether life’s lessons could really be taught by some kind of god.
The search for meaning surrounds the songs on ‘Planting by the Signs’, which is one of the things that makes it so wise and sad. Goodman looks through her family’s past, the history of her home state, the pets she’s had and the vehicles she’s driven, all with a folksy, Southern American bluntness. Listening to her music, you get a sense of her character and past that no wiki page could ever hope to provide. No one will ever need to write a biography of this person because it’s already all there in her songs, and I hope there’ll be many more to come.
