In this segment, we round up the best albums released each month. From Amaarae to Water From Your Eyes, here are, in alphabetical order, the best albums of August 2025.
Ada Lea, when i paint my masterpiece
Following 2021’s kaleidoscopic one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden, relentless touring forced Ada Lea to restructure her life and priorities as a musician, which is not to say she stopped writing songs – in fact, she wrote over 200 over a period of three years, 16 of which made it onto the new album, and most of which originated in the Songwriting Method, a community-based group she kept up that required submitting songs with a deadline. On songs like ‘it isn’t enough’, you can almost hear her rushing to get a song down before midnight, singing, “Today I lost/ Today is gone/ Today I really fought.” Far from impatient or forced, however, when i paint my masterpiece sounds unhurried and precious, glad not to have slipped into past tense. Read our inspirations interview with Ada Lea.
Amaarae, Black Star
“I’m a material bitch,” Amaarae declares on ‘100DRUM’, “but I know the worth of a mind.” On ‘B2B’, she repeats the word “heart” more times than probably any body part mentioned on her new album. And yes, it’s called Black Star and Naomi Campbell appears on one song, but its best track is probably the PinkPantheress duet, which says a lot about its yearning emotionality. Black Star is as exuberant, reckless, and lavish as the Ghanaian American visionary’s major label debut, Fountain Baby, but it’s also mindful and sensitive as it expands on her globalist, Afrodiasporic vision of club music. The more time she spends in the club, the softer – yet no less inventive – her music becomes. You can get off a dozen different drugs, she knows, but no high can match that of a love that outlasts the rush.
The Beths, Straight Line Was a Lie
Linear progression is generally a myth, yet one often projected onto artists, who must continually level up their sound without straying from their original vision. The Beths have indeed tightened, coloured, and expanded their approach since their 2018 breakout Future Me Hates Me, and while they’re not quite making a statement about their own trajectory with Straight Line Was a Lie, the titular realization extends to the way they handle both lyrics and instrumentation: careening between the immediacy, anxiety, and tenderness of their previous albums, but leaving space for different shades of weariness and anhedonia, a void that doesn’t dull so much as activate a new side of New Zealand quartet’s sound. “Let me be weak/ With a sad tear drying on my cheek,” Liz Stokes sings on ‘Best Laid Plans’, closing out an album all about gathering the strength to let it roll down. Read the full review.
Case Oats, Last Missouri Exit
Case Oats recorded their debut album, Last Missouri Exit, after months of playing its songs on the road, which is evident in their buoyant, easygoing confidence. It’s named after a sign on the freeway to Chicago from Casey Gomez Walker’s hometown that, one day, signalled the end of childhood for her. So Last Missouri Exit is a record of early adulthood, but a uniquely incisive and generous one at that, harbouring tenderness for the roughest parts of ourselves that surface in those transitional moments. Seeing it in her friends and bandmates first, Gomez Walker sings with the warmth of knowing the rest of the world will relate. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Case Oats.
Cass McCombs, Interior Live Oak
“I never lie in my songs,” Cass McCombs repeats on ‘I Never Dream About Trains’, a highlight from Interior Live Oak, his 11th album, which means he has certainly released over a hundred. Lest you take his words at face value, the odd specificity of the ensuing lyrics should elicit some skepticism (“I never dream about holding you tight/ On the sand in Pescadero”). What he sings on the previous song, though, is much closer to the truth: “I mean everything I say, or something quite like it.” The meaning of Interior Live Oak, a 12-song double album that follows 2022’s excellent but much more concise Heartmind, remains elusive, but McCombs manages to weave it all together, singing through a cast of unreliable narrators that only cement his own musical consistency and earnestness. They are dancers and cynics, real and imagined, brutally honest and spiritually truth-bearing. If they all, at times, seem buried in sleep, that’s because dreams, they say, have no lies to hide. Read the full review.
Debby Friday, The Starrr of the Queen of Life
Debby Friday likes to craft music that seeps into the subconscious while being intensely physical. “Are you aware of my body? Do you like the way I dance?” she sings on ‘Arcadia’, from her recently released album The Starr of the Queen of Life, immediately following it with: “Could you cut to the core of my matter?” For the Nigerian-Canadian artist, the dancefloor not just a vessel for escapism but a sacred place, teeming with symbolic and actual possibilities, in the vein of FKA twigs’ latest album EUSEXUA. On the dizzying, starry-eyed follow-up to her Polaris Prize-winning debut, GOOD LUCK, Friday steps into the spotlight as a means of interrogating its very performativity, delivering sweaty dance cuts before urging you to see things in a different light. Read our inspirations interview with Debby Friday.
Dijon, Baby
When Dijon sings that he’s on fire, you believe him. But it’s different from any other artist trying to sell the idea that lasting love has the power to obliterate all your insecurities. It’s chaotic, Dijon Duenas affirms, making swooning, infectious, dazzling R&B music that can sound on the verge of a breakdown even – or especially – at its most ecstatic. With help from Andrew Sarlo, Henry Kwapis, and Michael Gordon, the Los Angeles-based musician and producer has no issue fragmenting his most immediate hooks or rendering his voice unrecognizable when he’s most breathlessly trying to express himself. Whatever inspiration it owes to the past, Baby suggests you can no longer make beautiful, revelatory pop music without sounding at least a bit precarious or unwieldy.
Ethel Cain, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You
Ethel Cain‘s latest album is billed as the prequel to her 2022 breakthrough Preacher’s Daughter, a debut album that served as the beginning of a trilogy following three generations of women. If Willoughby Tucker “closes the chapter” on Anhedönia’s alter ego, as she has claimed, it’s an unwaveringly tender and astounding portrait, caught between nostalgia and dreams of violence, tangled yet steadfast in its romantic beliefs. And while she has framed the ambient-leaning Perverts as a standalone project, it also acts as a musical bridge to the new album, which balances her atmospheric and narrative world-building. Cain can’t help but draw a line from love straight to death, but not without submerging herself in it. Read the full review.
Gordi, Like Plasticine
Sophie Payten keeps an endless note on her phone where she jots down lines or words as they come to her. During the eighteen months that she couldn’t bear to write songs, while working as doctor through the pandemic (having just quit to focus on music), those ideas were reasonably scattered. But when she sat in Phoenix Central Park in an early attempt to start piecing together Like Plasticine, it was clear she had absorbed enough accumulating emotion – grief felt and observed, love gained and lost – to mould it into shape. Like both her writing and recording process, the songs on the album aren’t as linear as 2020’s Our Two Skin, but they are revelatory in its softness and malleability, asserting that we are as open to transformation in life as we are in death. Read our inspirations interview with Gordi.
Humour, Learning Greek
The title of Humour‘s debut album is taken from a line from discarded songabout Andrea Christodoulidis’ decision to start learning the language as a second generation Greek, and though he spends most of the album screaming in an American accent that bears out the characters he’s inhabiting, you can hear him speaking it a bit in conversation with his father on the eponymous track, where they read Andreas Embirikos’ poem On Philhellenes Street. “This searing heat is necessary to produce such light,” he writes of the overwhelming weather in Athens, not unlike how Humour’s alluring, dreamlike hooks and tender revelations radiate through their blistering post-hardcore. Christodoulidis amalgamates personal, familial, and mythological stories much in the same way the group bridges styles, resulting in a record that is as fiercely heartfelt as it is surrealist, and, well, humorously absurd. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Humour.
No Joy, Bugland
With a title like Bugland, it feels lazy to call No Joy’s new album playful. It’s really the way Jasamine White-Gluz’s work registers as a playground that’s so thrilling: a place that triggers fuzzy memories, a fantastical portal, a wild abstraction with no equivalent in the real world. Beyond their shared musical interests and boundless genre-hopping – having the most fun in the islands of nu metal, shoegaze, and pop music – it’s where her approach intersects with Fire-Toolz’s Angel Marcloid, who co-produced the Motherhood follow-up not just with wide-eyed maximalism but true enthusiasm. It’s a wonder to hear them play and burst into a swirl of emotions mostly antithetical to the project’s name, to linger and rush out of them – maybe cutting the word in half does it more justice – fully.
Superchunk, Songs in the Key of Yikes
Effortless – that word has been used to describe Superchunk’s steady delivery of punchy hooks and anthemic choruses for over three decades. But even going by instinct requires not just the wherewithal but the inspiration to follow through with the original idea. ‘Care Less’, a highlight from the indie veterans’ new album Songs in the Key of Yikes, is all about trying to. “Whatever you do don’t waste your life/ Searching for a song,” Mac McCaughan quips, a line that, like many things about the record at first glance, can seem fatalistic. But McCaughan and his bandmates’ workmanlike dedication remains indisputable. Instead, he suggests, let the songs come to you. Try to make magic out of words and sounds, but if you find yourself digging or thinking too hard, let a single question – the one that gives the record’s opener its title – be your axis: ‘Is It Making You Feel Something?’ Read our inspirations interview with Superchunk.
Teethe, Magic of the Sale
For their mesmerizing second album, Magic of the Sale, Teethe’s recording process, split between their current home bases across Dallas and Austin, stayed virtually unchanged: tracking demos and uploading them to a shared folder. This time, though, the group of trusted contributors that helped bring to life their tender-hearted melancholy and warm existentialism widened: Charlie Martin of Hovvdy, performing additional piano; Wednesday/MJ Lenderman’s Xandy Chelmis on pedal steel, producer Logan Hornyak of Melaina Kol, and Emily Elkin on cello. “Hear your words like photos felt in sound,” a muffled voice sings on ‘Iron Wine’, stirring a wave of distortion. “Holding what our eyes can’t make up now.” Magic of the Sale sounds like slowing down the blink of an eye, where the smallest, most precious emotions seep into view. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Teethe.
Water From Your Eyes, It’s a Beautiful Place
In an interview promoting his new album Guitar, which was released on the same day as Water From Your Eyes’ It’s a Beautiful Place, Mac DeMarco – the archetypal indie rock prankster, a label also applied to the NYC duo of Rachel Brown and Nate Amos – talked about “the Robin Williams effect.” He explained, “Robin Williams is all fun and games, and then you watch Good Will Hunting and you’re like—fuck. It’s good.” Funnily enough, Amos joked that Williams is “a silent member of Water From Your Eyes” in press materials because a poster from the Mork & Mindy era hangs in his bedroom, where he still makes all the music for WFYE, which now sounds bigger than ever. But the Robin Williams effect is also not a bad way of describing It’s a Beautiful Place, which is characteristically silly, freaky, and clunky – because what’s more awkward than making sci-fi indie rock about cosmic existentialism – until its vast emotional range hits you. Read the full review.
