In this segment, we round up the best albums released each month. From billy woods to Matt Berninger, here are, in alphabetical order, the 13 best albums of May 2025.
billy woods, GOLLIWOG
“Everything buffering, reality lag and jump/ Sometimes barely recognize the people I love,” billy woods raps on ‘Golgotha’, a line that cuts to the core of his hallucinogenic writing. The Brooklyn rapper articulates bad dreams, ghostly memories, and gloomy, cross-generational visions with strange lucidity, and while GOLLIWOG marks his first full-length effort without a primary collaborator in six years, he’s hardly alone in it. Sometimes it’s hard to trace who’s relaying whose story, how the past blurs into the present, though woods points to a tale about an evil golliwog – the racist caricature the record is named after – that he wrote as a child, remembering how his mother said it needed some work. So we get a challenging, unsparing 18-track record that stands among the all-timer’s very best.
caroline, caroline 2
“Not everything needs to even out.” The line stands out amidst the elusive tapestry of ‘Beautiful ending’, though the closer to caroline’s second album doubtlessly lives up to its titular promise. Not everything needs to resolve lyrically to make some sort of sense; not everything needs to line up musically to leave a mark on you. caroline 2 is a delightfully uneven yet meticulously crafted record, one that’s enamoured not so much with the disparateness of its parts as it is in the delicate act of stitching them together. In it you can hear empty spaces and vast stretches of time, people existing in the same room yet setting themselves adrift, bridging distances big and small. I can’t imagine not submitting yourself to its spell.
Deradoorian, Ready for Heaven
Angel Deradoorian wants her process to feel immediate, but unlike the meditative and jammy Find the Sun, Ready for Heaven took time. The singer-songwriter started writing music for the record by herself in a really small, uninhabited town in upstate New York, but ended up reworking and editing it tirelessly across various stages. In their recorded form, the songs remain fluid and kinetic while carrying a blazing, prickly intensity all the way through. Even at its most despairing and subconscious, Ready for Heaven feels like a wake-up call. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Deradoorian.
Florry, Sounds like…
Sparks fly all over Sounds like…, Florry’s second album with Dear Life Records. It’s impossible to deny on the record’s euphorically charged, lyrically intriguing opener, ‘First it was a movie, then it was a book’, but there’s plenty of magic to be found as the Vermont-based septet loosens up on the rest of the record. Like pretty much every album coming out of Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studios, this one, co-produced with Colin Miller, sounds lived-in and magnetic. There is a rawness, at times even an explicit emptiness, in bandleader Francie Medosch’s lyrics, but it’s hardly something to stop the band dead in its tracks. “I was hoping to use this song to talk about/ Something that had been going on but I could not get it out,” she sings on ‘Dip Myself in Like an Ice Cream Cone’. Something like it, still, spills out.
Jenny Hval, Iris Silver Mist
The follow-up to 2022’s Classic Objects, named after a fragrance made by Maruice Roucel for the French perfumerie Serge Lutens, doesn’t dwell on Jenny Hval’s love of perfume but draws on it as a means of interrogating her relationship with performance. Though ISM has evocative properties for Hval, she was more directly inspired by a comment she came across online that it “would be what the ghost in Hamlet could wear.” It resonated with her, she said, “because it was how I thought of myself as an artist — a ghost from a time when music mattered, still hammering away — and my record, which to me was sounding ghostly and was invaded by hazy, smoky and powdery textures.” Vaporous and haunted, Iris Silver Mist is also gripping and sensuous enough to convince you that it still matters, here and now. Read the full review.
Kali Uchis, Sincerely,
Kali Uchis
’ records tend to feel like a breeze, even when the Colombian American singer-songwriter drifts between styles and languages. But Sincerely,, her latest album, seals itself into her very own paradise. Though it elicits many of the same pleasures as 2024’s Orquídeas, it feels like a world apart: the album boasts no guest features, with the majority of the songs growing out of voice notes and sung entirely in English. Its dreamy, timeless euphoria may scan as one-dimensional, but there’s delight in hearing Uchis luxuriate in the transformations of her life, still admitting insecurities while letting the good parts bleed together. Her music often feels sun-kissed; here, she soaks it all up. Read the full review.
Matt Berninger, Get Sunk
If the last time you engaged with Matt Berninger’s songwriting was through the most recent National albums, Get Sunk’s backstory and overarching mood will sound familiar. In 2020, the frontman struggled with a long period of writer’s block and depression that informed 2023’s First Two Pages of Frankenstein and its surprise companion, Laugh Track. But while Berninger’s second solo album, the follow-up to his gorgeously refined 2020 debut Serpentine Prison, emerged from a similar headspace, the sinking here happens deeper in his subconscious, words slipping out of the blurry space of memory, sleepiness, or a complete breakdown. Working with producer Sean O’Brien and a cast of musicians including Booker T Jones, Meg Duffy (Hand Habits), and Julia Laws (Ronboy), he keeps himself right on the edge. Read the full review.
Mei Semones, Animaru
Featuring nearly the same backing band as last year’s Kabutomushi EP, Mei Semones‘ full-length debut deepens her seamless blend of dreamy bossa nova and jazz-inflected indie rock, maintaining a gorgeous atmosphere while dynamically maneuvering from one odd feeling to another. There’s so much heart and charm in it, though, that no part of its eclectism feels alienating. “There’s something I like about it,” she sings of the ‘Dumb Feeling’ that opens the album, then spends the rest of it elaborating in a musical language entirely her own. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Mei Semones.
PUP, Who Will Look After the Dogs?
“I got caught in the teeth of the thoughts that keep me awake,” Stefan Babcock sings on ‘Paranoid’, a blistering highlight off PUP‘s new album Who Will Look After the Dogs?. Gnawing at intrusive thoughts is baked into the Canadian punk outfit’s DNA, but the despair that pervades the follow-up to 2022’s The Unraveling of PUPTheBand is so visceral that it threatens to throw the band’s signature mix of darkness and snark way off balance. Babcock wrote more, and more alone, than he has for any other PUP record, and while learning to be aware of his headspace was a crucial part of the process, inspiration also struck by practicing the things that grounded and distracted him. Read our inspirations interview with PUP.
Shura, I Got Too Sad for My Friends
After the pandemic halted the momentum of the Shura’s previous album, forevher, she found herself at a roadblock – unable to listen to, much less write, music that inspired her – but also a different kind of community in video game streaming. She’d chased her dream of living in New York, albeit at a time of stifled human interaction, before moving back to London without realizing that’s what she was doing. I Got Too Sad for My Friends not only offsets some of the encroaching loneliness with guest features from Cassandra Jenkins, Helado Negro, and Becca Mancari, but blankets its accompanying despair with rich swirls of sound and textured instrumentation, even upping the tempo on some of the pop songs. Read our inspirations interview with Shura.
Smerz, Big city life
Up until now, Smerz records have tended to pique my interest, even amaze, then soon slipped from my mind. But Big city life, the Norwegian duo’s fuzzily glorious new album, clicked in immediately – and demanded repeated listens. Evocative of their experiences in New York and their hometown of Oslo, the record – playful and, to borrow one of the track titles, feisty – resonates on a wider scale. Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt’s eccentricity remains intact, layering one ambiguous feeling after another, but never without pulsing forward. “I’m realizing lately/ That I won’t feel like this again,” is the closing sentiment on ‘A thousand years’. Might be half-remembered, even imagined, but never anything less than real.
Stereolab, Instant Holograms on Metal Film
Fifteen years may have passed since Stereolab’s last album, but no amount of time – or retro-futurist aesthetics – can keep the Groop’s music from feeling pertinent. Instant Holograms on Metal Film, the follow-up to Not Music, airs out the despondent mood that record left fans with in all its tight propulsion, and even some of the headiness that has marked their whole career. Intuitive as it always feels, their approach seems to react first to the identification of a structural issue: “The goal is to manipulate/ Heavy hands to intimidate/ Snuff out the very idea of clarity/ Strangle your longing for truth and trust,” Laetitia Sadier sings. So Instant Holograms, as unmistakably and engagingly Stereolab as its predecessor, leans into more humanist impulses, resulting in one of their most open-hearted, forward-looking, and essential collections to date. Read the full review.
yeule, Evangelic Girl Is a Gun
Evangelic Girl Is a Gun is billed as “an homage to the artist’s role,” but the artist being Nat Ćmiel, it is also a diffusion, fragmentation, and untethering. Their latest album as yeule continues to both explore and fracture its liminal identities while delivering one of their most plentifully catchy and euphoric records to date. In past yeule albums, those qualities yielded highlights; here, as they explore the intersection between post-humanism and pop stardom, they constitute the norm. While still trading in a mix of art-pop, alt-rock, and trip-hop, it’s the most alert yeule has sounded.
