We’re midway through the year, which means it’s a good time to take stock of six months’ worth of music you shouldn’t miss. If you’ve been following the monthly Best Albums column we launched in January, you’ll be familiar with many of the releases that have left the biggest impression on us so far in 2025. This list also includes some great albums from the first half of June, plus a record so uncompromising it took several months for me to take in – and, in a hilarious instance of alphabetical sequencing, you’ll find two of those records we haven’t yet reviewed, presenting two very different versions of pop, right at the top. Here is our list of the 50 best albums of 2025 so far.
Addison Rae, Addison
As if titling a song ‘Fame Is a Gun’ isn’t enough provocation, Addison Rae opens it with the lines: “Tell me who I am/ Do I provoke you with my tone of innocence?/ Don’t ask too many questions/ That is my one suggestion.” It’s tempting to intellectualize Addison in the context of the TikTok-dancer-turned-pop-singer’s personal narrative, or the references she wears on her sleeves – Lana, Britney, Madonna – or even the stream of singles that sold more and more people on the prospect of Addison. But tune into Addison and it becomes clear that innocence is a synonym for sincerity, which is the main reason its every move and mood – euphoric and wistful, woozy and downcast – feels seamless; though working with the writer-producer duo of Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser across the record adds to the cohesion. Rae luxuriates in it all even as she maintains an air of detachment. She cares, of course – just don’t think too hard about it.
aya, hexed!
Don’t let that cover artwork throw you off – take it as a warning sign. Though informed by sobriety, that newfound perspective edges the London-based electronic producer into an even more abrasive direction than her ketamine-fuelled 2021 debut, im hole. Because the reality of sobriety – its very soberness – can be even more horrifying, like a blinding light on the rear-view mirror where total fuckery is just a gasping breath or nightmare away. “I’ll never let myself forget/ They had me out on a witch-hunt/ When I found myself,” she intones on the opening track. aya’s production lets sounds – drawing from her childhood fascination with nu-metal and emo – ferment, spiral, and soften, only for her vocals to slice right through. It’s as wry as it is impossibly visceral and dazzling, like a manic dream you wouldn’t wake up from even if you could.
Bad Bunny, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS
That Bad Bunny would make an album that finds him reconnecting with the musical traditions of Puerto Rico, one that triumphantly doubles as a love letter to his motherland, is no surprise. But you barely have to scratch beneath the surface to acknowledge just how piercing, comprehensive, and ambitious of an effort Debí Tirar Más Fotos is – not only does it survey genres like salsa, plena, and música típica, but for those listening on YouTube, each of its accompanying 17 visualizers serves as a history lesson about Puerto Rican history. As musically rich as it is daring, the record also scans as one of Bad Bunny’s most personal, reeling from different kinds of loss, from cultural displacement to heartbreak. It’s way less of a detour than the global superstar reaching a new peak in predictably admirable fashion.
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.
Black Country, New Road, Forever Howlong
Building on 2023’s Live at Bush Hall, Forever Howlong leverages Black Country, New Road’s fluidity as a band with a heightened level of precision and strikes a subtler balance between sonic lightness and emotional intensity. With vocals, and largely songwriting, now split between Tyler Hyde, Georgia Ellery, and May Kershaw, the album serendipitously, yet potently, coalesces around a female perspective, but the experiences they relay reach far beyond these three women. It’s in the loneliest moments that you hear them band together, all playing out time. Read the full review.
Bon Iver, SABLE, fABLE
First, Bon Iver reframe the entirety of last year’s SABLE, EP by repurposing it as the prologue to their fifth studio album. Throughout it, Justin Vernon puts a lot of stock in that prefix: things are perpetually jumbled, but they can be remade, maybe even replaced. Each new path buzzes with possibilities, but fABLE does away with the fear and paranoia these can stir up, attaching itself, miraculously, to an abundance of joy. It’s clear-headed and radiant, drawing upon elements of soul and R&B that Vernon has harnessed before, but never with such refreshing immediacy and purpose. “Seek the light,” he urged all those years ago, and damn it if he won’t keep looking. He’s in such good company, after all, and it’s showing more than ever. Read the full review.
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.
Circuit des Yeux, Halo on the Inside
If the best word to describe the sound of Halo on the Inside is “nocturnal,” that’s because the process behind it was quite literally that, too. Haley Fohr, the Chicago-based artist who records as Circuit des Yeux, lived alone through the making of her -io follow-up, working 9pm to 5am (make sure you read that right: pm to am) down in her basement studio. As much as it serves as an exploration of Fohr’s inner world, or that of the characters she fashions, it’s also a challenge to transform her working space: into a gothic club, a dream, an ideal destination. Here, continuing to push the boundaries of her sound means forays into minimalism and throbbing dance music, harnessing the imagination – more than darkness itself – as the animating force. Her astoundingly operatic vocals must steer their way through vocal effects, layering, and whirlwinds of noise – partially crafted with producer Andrew Broder (Bon Iver, Moor Mother, Lambchop) – as if evading oblivion. Read our track-by-track album review.
Colin Miller, Losin’
While he continues to build an impressive resume as an engineer, Asheville musician Colin Miller found time to make and release Losin’, the heart-wrenching follow-up to 2023’s Haw Creek. Featuring MJ Lenderman on drums and guitar, as well as his Wednesday/The Wind bandmates Ethan Baechtold (bass, keys, aux percussion) and Xandy Chelmis (pedal steel), the album was recorded at Drop of Sun with producer Alex Farrar. There are a couple of layers to the its title: the record untangles a period of intense grief following the death of Gary King, who owned the Haw Creek property and served as a father figure to Miller; it’s also a literal reference to trying to win the lottery in hopes of buying the home, which he rented for 13 years. Even when the pain swells, echoing in every note his friends play, Miller keeps up the effort – if not for the unattainable, then simply to keep the engine running. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Colin Miller.
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.
Destroyer, Dan’s Boogie
The world of Destroyer‘s Dan’s Boogie is one of sweeping beauty tumbling towards erasure. “‘There’s nothing in there/Everyone’s been burned,” Dan Bejar sings on ‘The Ignoramus of Love’. “I remix horses.” That third line, which nods to the Bill Callahan song ‘I Break Horses’ and reimagining Patti Smith’s Horses, is evidence of how other pieces of music – as well as film and literature, the boundaries being so blurred in Destroyer’s estimation – permeate Bejar’s subconscious lyrical process. You can’t always trace a direct connection between them as a listener, but you also can’t shake off the way a particular tangle of words, sounds, or images might have bled into Bejar’s madcap expression. It’s Destroyer at their most undiluted and fearless, and the results are both satisfyingly murky and illuminating. Read our inspirations interview with Destroyer.
Ela Minus, DÍA
DÍA is no less self-reflective than Ela Minus’ breakout debut, 2020’s acts of rebellion, a record whose fragile, blurry intimacy was tied to a year of pandemic isolation. Though it revs up every strain of electronic music the producer and singer-songwriter, born Gabriela Jimeno, likes to toy with – from icy synthpop to sinewy ambient to brazen electroclash – the new album only vows to dig deeper. In hindsight – and by expanding the setting of her creative process to include not only her native Colombia but also the Mojave Desert, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Mexico City, and London – she grew warier of the blind optimism that spreads through the genre and sought to punch through the façade of her own project. “Writing DÍA I thought, ‘Wait, who am I really?’” she said. Definitive or not, the answer it provides is heartfelt, gritty, and self-affirming. Read the full track-by-track review.
FKA twigs, EUSEXUA
There’s no shame in describing the deepest of pleasures in simple language: “It feels nice,” FKA twigs declares on ‘Room of Fools’, a highlight off her third album EUSEXUA, while another track is called ‘Girl Feels Good’. But the pop iconoclast is as gifted at putting things succinctly as she is at nuanced expression of both body and soul, which is why she’s spent so much of the album’s rollout trying to describe the word she coined for it. The record may not be as loose as her 2022 mixtape CAPRISONGS, but certainly retains some of its clubby exuberance, as well as the spell-binding eroticism of LP1, in mapping that slippery state of being. That it’s a place worth exploring goes without saying. Read the full track-by-track review.
Florist, Jellywish
Emily Sprague has no trouble baring her soul out in her lyrics. Intimacy, like tenderness, has and never will be a difficult thing for the Florist enterprise, or “friendship project,” as they call it, which includes Rick Spataro, Jonnie Baker, and Felix Walworth. The challenge, bigger than ever on their first album since their resplendent 2022 self-titled effort, is sounding at peace with a world hurtling towards catastrophe; staying soft, friendly, and curious when grief continues to bear its mark on you. But the music can also only be as delicate as the line between the threads of consciousness Sprague bounces between – waking, altered, existential – thin enough to let light slip through yet expansive enough to get lost in. For all its quiet optimism and awe, Jellywish is never quite restful or easygoing; much in the same way that, for all its introspection, it never truly stands alone. Read the full review.
Fust, Big Ugly
After releasing their sun-kissed, soulful debut Evil Joy in 2021, Fust – now a seven-piece featuring songwriter Aaron Dowdy, drummer Avery Sullivan, pianist Frank Meadows, guitarist John Wallace, multi-instrumentalist Justin Morris, fiddlist Libby Rodenbough, and bassist Oliver Child-Lanning – decamped to Drop of Sun to record Genevieve with producer Alex Farrar, with whom they reunited for their astounding new album, Big Ugly. Named after an unincorporated area in southern West Virginia, around which Dowdy’s family has deep roots, the record is conflicted yet aspirational: homey while grappling with the mystery of home, hopeful when hope rests between the promise of a new life and relenting in old, slow, ragged ways. As the title may suggest, it wrings beauty out of the most unexpected places, honing in the band’s knack for making small feelings appear monumental – that is, closer to their true experience. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Fust.
Great Grandpa, Patience, Moonbeam
Great Grandpa‘s music sounds so splendid, the lyrics so fantastically poetic, it’s easy to undermine their intimacy. “It’s closer when I see you, damn,” goes the hook on ‘Emma’, a highlight on their latest album Patience, Moonbeam, and they return to that damn for a cathartic explosion on the single ‘Doom’. The band’s first album in six years yearns and plays around for a sense of euphoria, and even if it sometimes falls short – of the feeling, not reeling you in – their synergy achieves a kind of unburdening that feels like a gift. “All dark things in time define their meaning,” Al Menne sings on ‘Kid’, making Pat and Carrie Goodwyn’s mournful lyrics sound tenderly affirming. “And fold sharp ends/ Into their mouths.”
Hannah Cohen, Earthstar Mountain
Hannah Cohen released her third album, Welcome Home, the year after she and her longtime partner and collaborator Sam Owens (Sam Evian) moved to the Catskills and started converting their home and barn into a recording studio and retreat. Cohen’s first album in six years, Earthstar Mountain, is a different kind of invitation to the life the pair have built, surrounded by beauty both natural and musical, once again produced by Owens and featuring peers such as Sufjan Stevens and Clairo. It’s just as lush and enchanting as anything she’s put out before, but dustier and sneakily vulnerable, too, bridging the ordinary and magical, pleasure and frustration, even as they seem to breeze through it all. “The rug could get pulled out/ The heartbreak could get loud,” she reminds herself on the closer. “Better to measure it in dog years.” Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Hannah Cohen.
Horsegirl, Phonetics On and On
You don’t always know what Horsegirl are singing about, but you know someone in the group does. Perhaps more than anything, their sophomore album, Phonetics On and On, delights in and charms through its deceptively childlike and unwaveringly playful language, which spins choruses out of practically every variation of “da da da.” Having moved from Chicago to New York between albums, the trio enlisted musician/producer Cate Le Bon to pare down and declutter the sound of 2022’s Versions of Modern Performance while amping up the absurdity in the subtlest places. Through the uncanniness and restraint, though, shines naked emotionality. “It’s oh so plain to see,” Nora Cheng sings at the very end, “How often I think sentimentally.” Whether repeating or tangling up the same words, Horsegirl make you want to sit down and listen. Read the full track-by-track review.
Ichiko Aoba, Luminescent Creatures
Luminescent Creatures takes its name from the closing track of Ichiko Aoba’s previous effort, 2020’s Windswept Adan, an enchanting and richly rendered record that expanded both the Japanese singer-songwriter’s palette and audience. Working with arranger Taro Umebayashi and creative director Kodai Kobayashi, Aoba’s ambitious vision for that project included a script for an imaginary movie, telling the story of a girl who is exiled to Adan Island. By the end, Aoba wrote in the album’s companion book, “the body of the girl had vanished instead, transformed and reborn into a variety of living things.” That may leave the island uninhabited by humans, but Aoba has no trouble furthering the fantastical journey, breathing music into all other life forms that permeate the universe she’s built around it. Inspired by her visits to Japan’s Ryukyu Archipelago, she augments her field research with vivid imagination and luscious orchestration, so that the immense can feel improbably immersive. “Inside each of us there is a place for our stars to sleep,” Aoba sings on ‘Luciférine’, diving beyond a place, beyond sleep, into dreams. Read the full track-by-track review.
Jane Remover, Revengeseekerz
Jane Remover could have spent several albums coasting on, even softening, the blend of shoegaze and bedroom pop that made 2023’s Census Designated a success. Instead, the experimental artist cemented their status by pushing everything – including the limits of those genres, but also rap, pop, and club music at large – to the red. Revengeseekerz puts its money on the feverish excess and self-referentiality that could deter fans who came on board with the last album, but the unbounded rawness that rises to the fore makes this record an absolute blast. It’s explosive and dexterous in ways that put the self above everything: “Might close up shop,” Jane sings ‘Fadeoutz’, “if it means I can live my life.”
Japanese Breakfast, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)
Don’t let the title – itself a nod to a John Cheever short story – fool you: the deeper you listen to For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), the harder it is to pigeonhole it. It’s less for any kind of female archetype than it is about a certain brand of foolish masculinity it frames as both timeless and contemporary. It’s about Michelle Zauner, too, a singer-songwriter and author who, following the pop-inflected glee and success of Jubilee, her 2021 breakthrough as Japanese Breakfast – not to mention her similarly lauded memoir, Crying in H Mart – felt the need to shuffle through a cast of fictional characters variously removed and reflective of her own pensiveness. Her nuanced, moody vignettes are matched by richly baroque and luscious production courtesy of Blake Mills, who lends mountainous resonance even to the subtlest songs. Read our track-by-track album review.
jasmine.4.t., You Are the Morning
During the pandemic, facing complications from myalgic encephalomyelitis and long COVID, Jasmine Cruickshank underwent heart surgery and was bed-bound for almost half a year. It was then that she decided to come out as trans, end her abusive marriage, and escape to Manchester, where she found – and was able to write through – her queer community. Backed by an all-trans band, jasmine.4.t. became the first UK signee to Phoebe Bridgers’ label Saddest Factory Records, and Bridgers, Dacus, and their boygenius bandmate Julien Baker all produced her remarkable debut full-length, You Are the Morning. Treading the line between intricate, tender-hearted folk and stormy indie rock, the album swoons with the rush of new love, spins catharsis out of the wildest lows, and reimagines the past into a light-filled future. It’s in the throes of hope and change, Cruickshank reminds us, that we see each other best. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with jasmine.4.t.
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.
Kathryn Mohr, Waiting Room
Though Kathryn Mohr‘s music remains insular in nature, every record she’s made since 2021’s As If has required some sort of separation from home: she laid down her 2022 EP, Holly, produced by Midwife’s Madeline Johnston, in rural Mexico, whose desert environment had a palpable influence on the music. Her latest effort and debut full-length, Waiting Room, was not only self-recorded but also conceived over the course of a month in eastern Iceland, as Mohr wove together songs in a windowless concrete room of a disused fish factory. The effect of the place is captured visually on the album cover and sonically through Mohr’s use of field recordings and imagistic writing, but the record only burrows further inward, at once liminal and confrontational, embodied and otherworldly. From the grungy, nightmarish exorcism of ‘Elevator’ to the ambient romance of the title track, it stirs the horror and tenderness out of big, empty spaces, be they physical or emotional. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Kathryn Mohr.
Lily Seabird, Trash Mountain
Trash Mountain is named after a pink house sitting on a decommissioned landfill site at the back of Burlington, Vermont’s Old North End, which Lily Seabird has called home for several years now. But the singer-songwriter has also spent much of that time on the road, touring her own music and as a bassist with Greg Freeman, Lutalo, and Liz Cooper. Freeman, along with Robber Robber’s Nina Cates and drummer Zack James, accompany her on just a few songs on the new album, which is intentionally sparser than previous efforts like 2024’s Alas, (which was accompanied by an acoustic EP in its Lame-O Records reissue) and 2021’s Beside Myself. Rough-hewn yet warmly realized, the album centers on Seabird’s captivating voice as it lingers on a moment, trembles in grief, or sighs around a melody for just that bit more relief. “Where the wind blows everything I try to remember and forget/ On the edge of town/ Where when I’m home I rest my head” is how she describes Trash Mountain, recording to bask in its comfort a little longer. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Lily Seabird.
Maria Somerville, Luster
On Maria Somerville‘s 4AD debut, Luster, there’s hardly a line between pristine songs and spacious atmospherics. The Irish musician is an expert at diffusing it, just like her curiosity towards the natural world wafts into her internal one. The follow-up to 2019’s All My People is lush, liminal, and luminous, all those “l” words that earn the record its title. Even at its most reserved, it expands beyond the sense of solitude it seems to be inspired by, rendering it one of the most inviting – and best – dream pop albums you’ll likely hear all year.
Masma Dream World, PLEASE COME TO ME
Before it became a way of invoking a world of spirits and ancestors as Masma Dream World, singing was, for Devi Mambouka, a means of communing with nature. The name of the project alludes to a dream she first had when she was six, in which she walked through a nightmarish landscape, lost in a veil of smoke and darkness; demons erupted at the sound of her voice, but what terrified her the most was that it was a voice she couldn’t hear. In America, Mambouka began a new kind of musical and spiritual journey, getting deep into meditation, Hindu mysticism, and Vedantic texts. Sounding by turns meditative, tortured, and exultant, the follow-up to her 2020 debut Play at Night transmutes the abyssal language of devotion and the divine feminine through cavernous electronics, spine-chilling noise, and a powerful voice that succumbs to forces beyond her control. It makes the void sound like an embrace, and the embrace immortal. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Masma Dream World.
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.
MIKE, Showbiz!
The music MIKE makes instantly feels like an intimate dialogue, and Showbiz! is no exception. Between his richly lackadaisical delivery and hypnagogic use of samples, the looseness and fluidity of the New York rapper-producer’s approach keep the listener engaged but never more than arm’s length away. Yet what remains beyond grasp for MIKE, always at an odd distance, is the perfect sense of home, something he keeps searching for across the LP – though “home” is where he recorded all of it, in phases after stretches of touring. Similarly, he muses on the idea of breakout success more than simply lounging on it. “The prize isn’t much, but the price is abundant,” he raps on ‘Artist of the Century’, an apt summation of the whole project.
Oklou, choke enough
Oklou‘s debut LP, choke enough, is eerily enchanting yet damn near impossible to pin down. The French-born, London-based vocalist and producer, born Marylou Mayniel, may have been honing in her leftfield stylings for a decade now, but the way she flavours every trace of genre on choke enough – which finds her working with A.G. Cook, Danny L Harle, and co-producer Casey MQ – gives it the feel of an instant avant-pop classic. As giddily lush and Y2K-infused as it is dreamily ambient – but above all vaporous – the record zones in on the experience of decentering from one’s self, the way it stretches over a period of years and the glimmers of life peaking through the cracks. It’s an album you can’t help but get lost in, yet it never totally loses itself, anchoring in a world of in-betweens.
Panda Bear, Sinister Grift
Way before it was meticulously sequenced, Sinister Grift – Panda Bear’s first record to feature all his AnCo bandmates, with notable appearances from Cindy Lee, Spirit of the Beehive’s Rivka Ravede (Lennox’s partner), and his daughter Nadja – began with Lennox and his co-producer and lifelong friend Deakin (Josh Gibb) laying down material in his newly built studio in Lisbon. Like its ecstatic take on heartbreak, the record reconfigures country tropes, classic rock chords, and reggae rhythms without quite distorting or diluting them. It sounds at ease with its menace and disconcerted by its playfulness, and these are all words you can twist around every time you press play.
Perfume Genius, Glory
Set My Heart on Fire Immediately was the title of Perfume Genius’ 2020 studio album, and of course, there’s always the fear of burning out. ‘It’s a Mirror’, the confident lead single from his astounding new album Glory that marked a shift from the diffuse grooves of 2022’s Ugly Season, still bows down to the feeling of “a siren, muffled crying/ Breaking me down soft and slow.” But if there is a weariness seeping through the familiarly lush and vibrant tapestry of Glory – which reunites Mike Hadreas with producer Blake Mills, while elevating his backing band of Meg Duffy (Hand Habits), Greg Uhlmann, Tim Carr, Jim Keltner, and Pat Kelly – it’s not at the expense of catharsis, freedom, or indeed glory. The album is tender-hearted and open-ended, loosening into a level of directness that not only feels new for Hadreas, but gives even its heavier subjects a weightless air. “My entire life… it’s fine,” he sings on ‘No Front Teeth’. The affirming going to keeps hanging in the silence. Read our track-by-track album review.
Pulp, More
On their first album in 23 years, Pulp are still caught up with the inexplicable nature of beauty and love. But for perhaps the first time in the group’s history, Jarvis Cocker seems less fazed by those things, homing in on the feeling and spelling out the ineffable, sometimes literally, as on the early single ‘Got to Have Love’. More is the product of waiting, not taking, a long time to make something – of your fears, of missed opportunities, of time itself. “The universe shrugged, then moved on.” And then it hits you. In the wake of longtime Pulp member Steve Mackey’s death in 2023, as well as the passing of Cocker’s mother early last year, the follow-up to 2001’s Scott Walker-produced We Love Life feels effortful yet elegant in its insistence on expressing love, not just the kind that endures, but the ones that disintegrate or never even really existed.
Samia, Bloodless
Samia introduced her third album by tracing a line between the inexplicable phenomenon of bloodless cattle mutilation – ‘Bovine Excision’ – and her own experience of womanhood. Though there are pockets of Bloodless that remain a mystery no matter how many times you listen or scrutinize the lyrics – too many poetic turns of phrase, contexts erased, men blurring together – the bigger draw is Samia’s unique ability to turn the inexplicable into the phenomenal; to make beauty out of a void, not necessarily by filling it. It may leave you with more questions than it answers, yet it astounds and surprises you at every turn. The songs rip straight through the heart – even if you have no idea how they even got there.
Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory
Subtlety is a virtue in the singer-songwriter world. In the face of a dying earth, however, and energized by collaborating for the first time in a writing capacity with her live band, the Attachment Theory – Devra Hoff on bass and vocals, Jorge Balbi on drums and machines, and TEEN’s Teeny Lieberson on synth, piano, guitar and vocals – Sharon Van Etten has made one of her boldest and biggest-sounding records to date. (The impeccable production work by Marta Salogni, who’s informed similarly charged records by Björk and Depeche Mode, also deserves credit.) Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory is as thunderous as it is propulsive, disquieting in its storm of existential questions but deliberate in how it sequences them; sounding like doubt at times, despair at others. But at its most resonant, Van Etten’s voice soars with pure wonder, unburdened by judgment or an easy way out: “Oh, what it must be like.” She’s singing about Southern life here, but really, about compassion – one of the few things that still doesn’t come attached with an expiration date. Read the full track-by-track review.
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.
Squid, Cowards
Life on the road has shaped Squid’s worldview – and worldbuilding – but they won’t write a song about touring. Not exactly. The way it’s broadened their perspective bleeds through the characters, settings, and influences behind the art-rockers’ third album, Cowards, which pares down the knotty textures of 2023’s O Monolith. It begins as a relatively straightforward, or straightforwardly manic, catalog of evil, but its framework slowly becomes more slippery, oblique, and widely evocative. It’s unhinged and prickly, like trying to pick the salt out of the ocean, before zooming out and plunging in. “And we just play our songs/ To the sea,” Ollie Judge sings on the very last song, suddenly shifting the gaze back to the group, or society as a whole. “And hope that nothing comes/ And washes us away.” Read the full track-by-track review.
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.
The Ophelias, Spring Grove
It’s been five years since the Ophelias’ last album, Crocus, but its follow-up, Spring Grove, is by no means a post-pandemic document. Spencer Peppet’s lyrics burrow much deeper into past wounds, burdened by dreams that recur without end or explanation, blurring the line between the present moment and what’s clearly come to pass. When the titular Spring Grove cemetery comes up, it is in reference to the summer of 2014, yet as if neither person would now be the first to speak. “The feeling of you haunts me and I/ Know that I can recognize that,” she confesses on new single ‘Cicada’, and the whole record gives it shape even when the ghosts cease to follow. Read our interview with the Ophelias.
The Weather Station, Humanhood
The Weather Station
’s work has earned praised for its seamless elegance and fluidity, especially since Tamara Lindeman expanded the project’s folksy origins on 2021’s breakout Ignorance. But never has the Toronto-based singer-songwriter paid attention to the seams – the parts of life and art that, as she acknowledges on the closer ‘Sewing’, most people are willing to ignore – as she does on her visceral new album, Humanhood. Affording space to both the sophistipop grandeur of Ignorance and the free-flowing intimacy of its companion LP, 2022’s How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, Lindeman and her remarkable band trace the process of dissociation, laying out the broken pieces and the possibility of reintegrating them, the shakiness of truth and all the purpose it provides. Humanhood keeps moving like that, imperfect but enlightened, the music an “undulating thing,” as Lindeman puts it, “this blanket I seem to be making from pride and shame, beauty and guilt.” Read the full track-by-track review.
Tune-Yards, Better Dreaming
On ‘Heartbreak’, the opening track on Tune-Yards‘ new album Better Dreaming, Merrill Garbus sings about surviving not just in spite of, but within, times of horror and disintegration. It is a persistent theme on Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner’s first album since 2021’s sketchy., even as the mood and pace of its expression varies: “For a child raised under unbreathable skies,” she sings mournfully on the sparser ‘Get Through’, “I want so much more than just getting by.” More direct and rapturous than you’d expect given the weight of its subject matter, Better Dreaming is as strongly animated by the desire for motion as it is steadfast in its vulnerability, letting it creep through both slower and more vibrant moments on the record. In introspection as well as in dance, it never moves without liberatory purpose. Not knowing how is kind of the reason.
Turnstile, Never Enough
Plenty of popular music has taught us that fame can be isolating, but Brendan Yates has been singing about loneliness way before the breakout success of 2021’s Glow On. What’s changed with their new album Never Enough, which has received a more muted but still loving response, is the vantage point. “This is where I wanna be/ But I can’t feel a fuckin’ thing,” Yates declares on its track ‘Sunshower’. While seeing them live in the wake of Glow On provided a rare example of how jubilant and light-hearted moshing can be, the remarkable thing about seeing them at the same festival right after the release Never Enough was how similarly riled-up the audience could get despite the overriding melancholy of the new songs. Never Enough sounds a hell of a lot like Glow On, except the rip-roaring songs are phased out by tastefully meditative synth passages, or playfully augmented by horns. It still works, above all, because the underlying sentiment rings true.
Weatherday, Hornet Disaster
Diving into Weatherday’s latest outing, Hornet Disaster – which stretches over an hour and 16 minutes – is a daunting task, but the Swedish experimentalist sounds more exacting, determined, and addictive than ever. Six years after Sputnik’s debut LP under the moniker, Come In, and just a few after an impressive split EP with Asian Glow, the 19-track LP’s replayability justifies its overwhelming length, while the density of its noise-pop is made legible by intense and equally uncompromising emotion. “Our heartbeats in sync/ Our only real link,” they sing about halfway through the record. After just a single listen, you can’t help but clap along, enmeshed but blissful in the shared chaos.
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.
YHWH Nailgun, 45 Pounds
45 Pounds is as trashy as it is taut, as harsh as it is relentlessly hooky. It’s a combination that brings to mind contemporary purveyors of controlled chaos such as Gilla Band and Model/Actriz, though what’s remarkable about the New York-based experimental outfit’s corrosive, improvisational blend of punk, hardcore, and electronic music is how fully realized – and funky – it sounds on their debut full-length. Zack Borzone’s vocal chops manage to stand out amidst the discombobulating interplay between Jack Tobias’ radiant synths and Sam Pickard’s frenzied percussion, which peaks on the penultimate track ‘Blackout’. It sprints forward while keeping you on your toes.
Youth Lagoon, Rarely Do I Dream
After finishing his tour in support of 2023’s Heaven Is a Junkyard, Trevor Powers stumbled upon a shoebox of home videos from his childhood in his parents’ basement. It’s no surprise, given his textured, self-reflective approach to songwriting, that audio samples from the tapes would end up on his next album as Youth Lagoon, Rarely Do I Dream. Powers’ most powerful tool, however, isn’t nostalgia but juxtaposition, which he employs to harden the line between the innocence of childhood and the violent currents of today, between juvenile dreams and intoxicated fantasies, obliviousness and imagination; and to diffuse it, too. The record also finds Powers making some of his most dynamic – and dynamically sequenced – songs to date, which only underlines the thematic contrasts. For every pillowy melody and irresistible chorus, there is a tragic story that’s hard to chew, characters with murky backgrounds, memories that can’t be erased. It’s relentless and revitalizing – proof that whatever Powers does next might look to the past, but will hardly look like the thing that came before. Read the full track-by-track review.
