In this segment, we round up the best albums released each month. From Alex G to Tyler, the Creator, here are, in alphabetical order, the best albums of July 2025.
Alex G, Headlights
Hushed, gorgeous, and warmly elusive, Alex G‘s major label debut is a high watermark in a career full of them. There’s still a treasure trove of childhood memories for the singer-songwriter to dig up, to try and bridge the disparate pieces and fill the missing ones. “I’ve searched far and wide/ For a place like this/ Now I can close my eyes,” he sings at one point on Headlights. And what happens then, in the blackness? Maybe his voice thrives, writing out every word, rescuing his younger self. Maybe it gets all distorted, firing up his imagination. Maybe he’ll get dizzy with the big bright light; maybe he’ll miss the one glaring right at him. Read the full review.
Coral Grief, Air Between Us
There’s a searching, exploratory quality to Coral Grief‘s music. Far from coasting on the comforting tropes of dream-pop, the Seattle trio’s debut album – recorded with engineer Nich Wilbur at the Unknown, a small church-turned-studio in rural Anacortes – anchors in a sea of noisy, delicate textures, bending them in accordance with the complex emotionality of Farr-Morrissey’s lyrics, a rarity in the genre. “The zeal of my heart, buried in the sand,” she sings. You don’t have to dig too deep to feel it. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Coral Grief.
Folk Bitch Trio, Now Would Be a Good Time
There’s a reason Folk Bitch trio have stuck with the name they came up with as teenagers, retaining the stark minimalism of their Jagjaguwar labelmate Angel Olsen’s early work rather than synthesizing and dramatizing their influences like their gothic contemporaries in The Last Dinner Party or Black Country, New Road’s newly baroque, female-fronted sound. Subtly varied, searching, and beautiful in stranger ways than meets the eye, the songs on their debut album were workshopped on tour and recorded in Auckland over the winter of 2024, so in some ways they feel tied to a moment in time (both good and bad). But all three members are unequivocally yearning for more, something to believe in as a union. Read the full review.
Forth Wanderers, The Longer This Goes On
“I met you when I was so young/ And you were so young/ And I was so blunt,” Ava Trilling sings on ‘Barnard’, a highlight from Forth Wanderers‘ first album in seven years, making her intentions clear in what might stand as their most anthemic chorus to date: “I want to forgive.” During the summer of 2021, Trilling and songwriter/guitarist Ben Guterl met up for the first time since the band’s breakup, having one of several conversations that would help them reconnect as adults. As dynamic as it is expressive, The Longer This Goes On is a rare product of piled-up emotions and musical growth, inextricable from memories of youth but so much more inspired in its uncertainty and transience. When it goes, there’s no time to think about the duration; for the album’s half hour, at least, Forth Wanderers sound totally locked in. Read our inspirations interview with Forth Wanderers.
Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band, New Threats From the Soul
After more than a dozen years of honing his songwriting with the band State Champion and a few experimenting with drum machines and weird synths, Ryan Davis sounds grounded yet unconstrained on his sophomore record with the Roadhouse Band, far removed from the romantic ideals of music yet deeply existential and strangely spiritual about it. The songs are not simple but wordy, knotty, and outstretched while hinging on some elemental truth. It may not bring back the feeling, but it might make you feel, as Davis later sings, “with the feelings that I don’t express.” That’s more than most music, now or ever, would joyfully bestow. Read the full review.
Sister., Two Birds
Sister.
‘s Two Birds is both a culmination of a decade of friendship and a document of its changing shape; Hannah Pruzinsky (aka h. pruz) and Ceci Sturman stopped being roommates for the first time since meeting during their freshman year of college, a transition that cuts through the fuzzy catharsis of the title track. Conflicting yet strangely mutual feelings sit at the heart of the album, or like a knot in the throat, untangling itself through shared memories, vulnerabilities, refrains – and an awareness, both musical and lyrical, that reaches beyond the two, three, or four people in a room. “Weren’t you moving towards eternity?” goes the last line on ‘Honey’, which sounds like a relief. If something’s always changing, doesn’t that mean we get to hear its echo into infinity?
Tyler, the Creator, Don’t Tap the Glass
The third and titular rule of Don’t Tap the Glass is the most ambiguous, which is somewhat reflective of the overall balance the record strikes: it’s a straightforward rap-party project whose kineticism is undeniable, but, arriving less than a year after the densely packed Chromakopia, it also can’t help but attach itself to Tyler’s self-mythologizing canon in mature, often meta ways. The album should keep longtime fans engaged long after the party’s over, but for at least the 29 minutes that it’s on, it both lifts you up and cools you down. Good dance music not only gets your body moving, but makes you forget yourself for a moment. For an artist as conscious of his ego as Tyler, the Creator, that’s no small feat.
Vines, I’ll be here
Cassie Wieland fleshes out her sound on her debut full-length as Vines, I’ll be here, adding a real sense of dimension to the melancholy that pervaded 2023’s Birthday Party EP. The opening track is called ‘I’m getting sick’, but it’s only the start of the journey, which later includes track titles like ‘Happy is hard’, ‘Tired’, and ‘Keep Driving’ one after the other. By the closing title track, the record stretches its wings outward, pushing beyond the mental spiral that weakens its subject. “I’m almost home and I want to turn around,” she sings on ‘King of Swords’. “I’ll do anything to leave my skin.”
Wet Leg, moisturizer
On the first song of their self-titled debut album, Wet Leg were feeling uninspired, beaten down, and zoned out, equating it all to the same oddly desirable state: ‘Being in Love’. Three years later, the Isle of Wight five-piece – helmed by Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers – open their sophomore album by reevaluating: being in love isn’t a thing you “kinda like.” It’s an emergency. It makes you sound ravenous, maniacal, silly, and melodramatic, all adjectives that describe moisturizer even as Wet Leg maintain their deadpan humour and offbeat aesthetic. Yet the record, once again produced by Dan Carey, softens into and soaks up its pleasures and contradictions, the way it can appear fantastical even as the sobering reality kicks in. What ‘Being in Love’ describes as “some kind of fucked up trip” is just “happy comatose,” which isn’t a bad slogan for moisturizer. Apply gently; it just might do you good.
