Best Albums I Listened To in 2025
- Horrible Occurrences (2024) by Advance Base
Ashworth has always had a talent for compelling character studies, and he brings that to bear here with an Andy Shauf-like concept album, a collection of tangentially-related vignettes all set (I think) in Richmond, VA. Each of these is a perfect little tragedy, small in scope but laden with emotion, delivered in his characteristic baritone, sighing and rasping with the weariness of a troubadour who wishes he had happier things to sing about. As with all his work, the music is not overly complex, the simplicity of his arrangements serving to underscore his evocative storytelling.
- Some Distant Memory (OST) (2019) by Amos Roddy
Another Roddy OST for a game I haven’t played (though this one I actually might at some point), and another Roddy OST that’s SO GOOD. He always picks the best synth sounds, and the way they’re layered with the piano creates such a warm, complex soundscape. There’s a more improvised feel to some of these tracks that I wouldn’t normally associate with his work but I like it. Just a feast of aural goodies.
- Straight Line Was A Lie (2025) by The Beths
The Beth’s first three albums felt like a complete trilogy: the excitement and trepidation of a new relationship, the struggles of trying to make it work, and the melancholy of letting it end.
As such I didn’t know what to expect from a new album, what thematic territory they would tackle next. The answer is, maybe unsurprisingly given everything, Elizabeth Stokes’ mental health.
“I thought I was getting better / But I’m back to where I started” she sings on the opening track, which itself starts out with these jagged, punky guitars, mellows out a bit, then right at the end is almost violently interrupted by a stab of guitar feedback. She gets more explicit on “No Joy”: “Anhedonic on the daily / Wanna feel but I am failing, I am failing.”
As you might imagine, though a few of the songs do go harder than you might expect, the album doesn’t quite hit the emotional highs of their previous work. But it does dig deep, both thematically and musically. It’s an album you’re going to want to sit with for a bit and let it grow on you, and one that opens up new possibilities for them that I’m excited to see them explore further.
- Hidden Smiles (2020) by Bob Boilen
- HOQUIAM: Bon Fire Demos (2025) by Damien Jurado
I think at their best demos have this sort of rough charm and vulnerability to them, and that’s definitely the selling point here. Plus, I mean, it’s Damien Jurado, so most of the songs are pretty good. But I’m more fascinated by the circumstances, that these are from a collaboration with his brother and yet all the songs are by Damien and he’s the only one on the recordings, so his brother is only felt as an absence.
- Live at St. Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle, WA, August 7th 2024 (2024) by Damien Jurado
What a beautiful album. Jurado wisely opts for simple arrangements and lets the acoustics of the space do the rest, creating an absorbing soundscape that you can just fall into.
I’m actually a couple albums behind so a lot these songs were new to me, and thus I can’t compare them to the studio versions (I can now with the ones off Passing the Giraffes except how do you compare them he doesn’t even sing those songs on the album; but these are good and very helpful for figuring out some of the lyrics). But the ones I did know certainly don’t suffer from the comparison: I prefer this version of “I’ve Never Known Alice,” and maybe “A.M.AM” as well; meanwhile it’s fascinating to hear him tackle “Sheets” over 15 years later, with his more mature voice and different sensibilities, and “Cloudy Shoes” is imbued with a different emotional weight here as he really pushes vocals (not sure if that was a choice or if his voice was starting to go and he had to push through it).
And on top of everything else, you don’t hear a peep out of the audience until the end. Best live album I’ve heard in years.
- Passing the Giraffes (2023) by Damien Jurado
Jurado has gone from releasing a solid album every 2 years, to releasing a solid album every year, to now just shooting out gems left and right to the point that I can’t even keep up. It’s astonishing and frankly a little aggravating.
Passing the Giraffes is an album that sounds, at first listen, like a long-lost rarity from the 60s, but is such a perfect distillation of those sounds, applied to Jurado’s more contemporary songwriting sensibilities, that it could really only exist after the fact. Listening to it is like immersing yourself in an alternate reality, one in which it’s always a chilly fall day where you’re curled up on the couch with some hot chocolate and your favorite album on the hi-fi. Gorgeous harmonies, lush retro production (the mono recording serves the artistic intent so well that I’m not even mad about it), and a sweet sense of melancholy and nostalgia. Love it.
- Billboard Heart (2025) by Deep Sea Diver
- Patience, Moonbeam (2025) by Great Grandpa
So I originally listened to this at 3 am after already being awake for two hours, and I thought it was amazing but also that I might be delusional. Then I listened to it again and no, it really is that good.
The lyrics are often a mishmash of vaguely connected images and ideas (think Bon Iver or Damien Jurado), but buoyed by bold compositional choices, complex arrangements, strong melodies, and Menne’s always-emotive vocals (you won’t find it mentioned in the press release or liner notes so I don’t feel comfortable making too much of it here, but I do think it’s notable that parts of this album were recorded before Menne transitioned, and the rest was recorded after, and you can hear vocals from both eras throughout the album, possibly even on the same song a few times.) And then there’s lines like “Ladybug, saw that written on her like she Doctor Bronner” and I just—it’s so stupid and so good. And the quotes, there are quotes here from The Beatles’ “The End” and “Black Hole Sun” just dropped in with such unassuming confidence.
This whole album is so confident, just full of strong choices that go in some wildly unexpected directions but still create a coherent work. And then that closer that just absolutely destroyed me. The pause in that drum fill, just letting you steep in the emotion for a second before it explodes. And then you think it’s winding down and they’re like “No we have one more part that will rip out your heart.” So good.
- Great Album (2018) by GREAT TIME
There’s so much going on on this album, and a lot of it works. The rhythm section absolutely holds it down with some amazing grooves, and while the rap features are whatever the beats are pretty good, I especially love the way they use the piano sample on “Hi C’s.” Even “Runnin’,” which is fairly straightforward rock, works.
There are some flaws: the aforementioned lukewarm rap features, some especially distracting sounds (e.g. the farty snares on “Rah’n Tah’n Kregg” and the weirdly boring harp on “Lazy Lilly”), and with how many different things they’re doing inevitably some are just not up my alley. But it’s impressive that they can apply themselves this capably and inventively to so many different genres, even if it makes the album feel a little random.
Too bad it seems like they never did anything else.
- Exploding Star (2025) by Heather Maloney
What a gorgeous album, love the warm, enveloping production (especially on that opening opening track) and maybe Maloney’s best vocals of her career (those runs on “Things I Thought I Need” my god), and all serving these gently heartbreaking songs as she works through her father’s death, just beautiful.
- Karine Polwart’s Scottish Songbook (2019) by Karine Polwart
It’s a good album, with some lovely renditions of Scottish classics (though I’m a bit miffed that she picked one of my least-favorite Frightened Rabbit songs to do, would’ve loved to hear her take on one of the more emotional songs), but mainly I want to use this opportunity to once again shout out Forever Songs, the miniseries she did for The Essay, about the process of putting together a concert for her ailing neighbor during lockdown. It’s one of the best things I’ve listened to all year.
- Celeste OST (2018) by Lena Raine
Weirdly, it was Celeste that actually got me into Lena Raine, and yet when I went to Bandcamp I ended up buying pretty much everything except the Celeste OST. I just bounced off it for some reason, but now that I’ve finally come around to it I have no idea what happened.
Raine’s characteristic blend of chiptuney synths and warm piano is on full display here, with a great main theme that you’ll never get tired of even as it’s restated throughout the album, with different instruments, tempos, and harmonizations giving it a different feel every time (my favorite is probably “Madeline and Theo,” I love the way the guitar and piano sound together.)
And I don’t usually notice the drums on her tracks, but “Resurrections,” “Scattered and Lost,” and “Starjump” all have really killer percussion parts.
One thing I love about Raine’s work that I hadn’t really thought about until now is her use of grace notes. You can hear them pretty much everywhere but especially on the piano-focused tracks you can really hear the physicality of them, they bring such life and humanity to those parts.
So glad I came back around to this, a beautiful soundtrack and works surprisingly well as an album in its own right.
- The Villain (2025) by Mal Blum
While the album loses me a bit in the middle, it opens strong with some of their best writing (“A small request to all my friends / Don’t let them name me once I’m dead” on “A Small Request”; “I try to hold a love for you / When they ask me, I say, ‘It’s complicated’ / But I don’t think it is” and “You don’t have friends / You have meetings” from “I’m So Bored”; “I killed the previous tenant / In my head, or so they said” from “Killer”), and closes strong with the tense “Too Soon,” the remorseful title track, and the beautifully sad “Husbands and Other Strangers.”
More Pity Boy than Ain’t It Nice (and much as I love “Candy Bars and Men” and “Anybody Else” I do think that’s a good thing), but informed, I think, by the latter’s exploration of warmer instrumentation and slower, quieter songs. Definitely worth the wait.
- Giant Elk (2023) by ME REX
ME REX, more than any other band I listen to (originally this said “more than any other band I know” but I’ve watched that Laura Crone video about Ghost so), has really built a world out of their songs. Not narratively, per se, though you might be able to piece something together (and this album does, I think, have something like a narrative arc to it, though its couched in abstract, semi-mythical terms), but in the sense that they’re constantly re-using motifs, referencing their own songs, re-recording them, reprising them with new lyrics, or writing sequels.
Giant Elk has its own internal set of recurring motifs and evolving phrases (e.g. “We are not monsters, I promise”, “the best part of a century”, “split in half”), but also centers on songs that connect to their previous work: “Halley” is a sequel to “Haley” (which is especially appropriate given the recurring nature of Halley’s Comet), “Oliver” is a reprise with new lyrics, and “Spiders” is a re-recording with the same lyrics (which lyrics also reference several other songs—like a, I don’t know, like a thing with a lot of connections all sort of spinning out from a central point, what would you call that…)
All of which is to say this is a sort of turducken of an album—no, that’s a horrible metaphor. Inception? Lazy. Hmm…I don’t know, the point is listening to this album is itself a really cohesive and immersive experience, but then also listening to it in the context of the rest of their work heightens that effect in a way that I don’t think you could get with any other band. After the sort of failed experiment of Megabear—I love that they tried that but if you think you can actually listen to those songs in any order you’re fooling yourself—this is their true magnum opus. So far, anyway.
- Erotica Veronica (2025) by Miya Folick
First 3 songs are all really strong, felt like she was building a really interesting, complex emotional portrait…and then that part kind of falls off. There’s some of it in “Fist,” “Hate Me,” and “Love Wants Me Dead,” but for the most part the rest of the albums succeeds on the strengths of the arrangements and production—which fortunately are pretty strong. Highlights in that respect are the groove-driven “Felicity” (love when the winds come in at the end) and warm, harmonically surprising closer “Light Through the Linen” (those chords after the chorus will wake you up, and I’m always a sucker for a good piano part.)
Definitely not what I was expecting from her (way more acoustic guitar for one thing), but not bad. She remains an artist that I’m always curious to hear what she’ll do next.
- ROACH (2022) by Miya Folick
When this album first came out I was so annoyed at almost half of it being just the 2007 EP that I boycotted it. But I’m over that and I thought it might be interesting to see if those songs felt different in the context of the album, and they must have because the three I wasn’t into before I am now, along with pretty much the rest of this album.
I had been holding up Premonitions as her best work, largely on the strength of “Thingamajig” and “Cost Your Love” and the fact that it was such a bold move after the washed out (though still good) sound of Strange Darling, but the thing about this album is there are so many bangers. There’s “Oh God,” such a strong opener, love the vocals on that, “Nothing to See,” which somehow I didn’t recognize as the gem it is the first time around (also I’m generally wary of flanging but it works great here), there’s “Drugs or People” with that chorus holy crap what a chorus, “Cartoon Clouds” is still a perfect melancholy summer song, and “Ordinary” would give Lana Del Rey a run for her money.
Really the only song that completely missed me is “So Clear,” which is just a little too sparkly. Everything else is pretty-good-to-great. And for me this album fills in the gap between the more art-pop elements of Premonitions and the very singer-songwritery Erotica Veronica. Really glad I came back to this, it’s easily her best album.
- it’s hard to be a fish (2025) by Montaigne
Bit of a rollercoaster at first with this one. I can’t stand really shrill high sounds, and those little digital blip noises on “keep going!” were like needles in my brain. But then “talking shit” is so fun—e.g. the harmonies on “you’re a dick!” are so delightfully sarcastic, and then there’s the guitar/”badabapa” bit—and a return to form for them after the more mainstream, hyperpop sound of making it! But then “get older” didn’t really hit me, so at that point I was kind of prepared for the rest of the album to be a real mixed bag.
But it isn’t! Or if it is it’s like a bag of Runts but without the cherry ones (I don’t like cherry). The oceanic soundscape helps build this really cohesive feel to the album—it’s a vibe, and from track 4 on you can just immerse yourself in it.
There are also some great lyrics (“When I’m stranded / how do / I swim back to me / and not to you?”; “I’m not buying it / I am renouncing the monetary system”) and probably their most intimate vocal performance (on “so fast in the water”).
There are definitely individual songs from their first two albums (“Till it Kills Me,” “For Your Love”) that I’d rank above most songs on here, at least in terms of sheer impact, but I do think this is their best album yet, and I have renewed excitement for this new stage of their career.
- moisturizer (2025) by Wet Leg
As fun as their first album was, I’m getting kind of tired of detached irony and was hoping their follow up would lean more into sincere emotions. And it did!
Maybe slightly overcorrected, in fact, as most of these songs kind of restate the core theme of being in love and not all of them necessarily do anything new with it. Still, they’re mostly good songs, and they’re definitely stretching their sound in interesting ways—there are still some rockers on here, but there’s also the city pop-evoking “pokemon” and psychedelic torch song “11:21.” I think those two (and “mangetout,” and maybe “jennifer’s body”) are the ones that will stick with me, more so than the songs that harken back to that first album sound. I just don’t think they can recapture the magic of that debut, and won’t help themselves by trying.
p.s. My pet theory is that “11:21” is secretly riffing on “The Court of the Crimson King.”
p.p.s. Did you catch the Elliott Smith reference? That’s when I knew this was gonna be the sincere album.
- Wintersleep (2003) by Wintersleep
Musically, there’s a charming shambolic quality to it, especially with how the vocals are mixed, that really serves to add some variety to the more repetitive, shoe-gazey tracks.
It’s a mixed bag lyrically, but highlights include the aggressive satire of “Caliber” (“You should take a beating willing / Do it in the name of the cause / Do it for the feeling that one day / Maybe you could be your own boss”) and the devastating simplicity of “Butterfly” (“Mom told me good people never die / It’s not fair.”) and “Ambulance” (“Fingers dialing / And you’re not breathing / And I can’t find the medicine // If this is a joke then please tell me so / So i’ll know”).
Overall it’s a good album, rough around the edges but that’s what makes it work.
Certain of Eventual Failure 