2025 was an explosive year for so many genres. Indie rock had its biggest success story in years, your favorite post-punk band no longer sounded like one, and critics wondered if the latest music from one of the world’s biggest pop stars even qualified as pop. Some of the best songs of 2025 sounded explosive, too, though a great number of catchy songs were rendered in more muted, hazier tones than we’re used to. We’ve been highlighting them throughout the year in our new monthly column, and here we rank 50 of them, including a few that didn’t make those lists.

---

50. underscores, ‘Do It’

I was late to the underscores hype, overlooking April Harper Grey’s 2023 album Wallsocket. But ever since her July single ‘Music’, I’ve been all in. Irrespective of the different strains of pop it weaves together, ‘Do It’ is even more infectious as it playfully interrogates the conditions of a relationship. “If you want it/ Better know that this ain’t gonna be the real thing,” she warns After all, there aren’t many things reserved for that realness, that absolute investment: “I’m married to the music,” she sings, and the best this suitor can hope for, in line with underscores’ ‘Music’, is to match the BPM.

49. Black Country, New Road, ‘Besties’

Jaunty, playful, wholesome – if you haven’t tuned into Black Country, New Road in a while, you may be surprised these words confidently describe ‘Besties’, the lead single from their new album Forever Howlong. Then again, fans who have kept up with the band since Isaac Wood’s sudden departure in 2020 will recognize it as a sequel of sorts to ‘Up Song’ from the live album Live at Bush Hall, which spun around the refrain, “Look what we did together/ BCNR friends forever!” But while Georgia Ellery doesn’t sing on any of the Bush Hall tracks, her endearing and emotive vocals take center stage on ‘Besties’. In a statement about the song’s music video, director Rianne White said: “Knee-high in January’s jacket of mud, darkness, fields, street corners and a pack of hounds we found the beating heart of a world made better by chasing love and connection.” ‘Besties’ definitely felt like that upon its release in January.

48. Teethe, ‘Magic of the Sale’

The subject of ‘Magic of the Sale’ reveals itself in the opening lyrics: “Pain goes down/ Watch it go down, watch it go down.” Because Teethe is, generally speaking, a slowcore band, that means the pain goes down slowly, shadowily. But the lead single off the group’s new album mirrors so many other ways in which we bear out trauma: resilience, connection, even beauty. The origins of that pain may remain elusive, but the string arrangement that sweeps over the titular chorus encapsulates all the melancholy persisting in the margins. Boone Patrello and Madeline Dowd’s verses, meanwhile, signal the ways we trade that pain, not for gain, but to lift each other up. And ‘Magic of the Sale’ may be a slowcore song, but it’s not designed to bring you down – Teethe’s ambitions lie elsewhere.

47. Living Hour, ‘Things Will Remain’

Before this year, I hardly took many photos; I hated being the one to take my phone out and capture a moment after it’s already passed. But the fragility of life reminds you of the relative permanence of some things, and I now carry a camera with me wherever I go. ‘Things Will Remain’, the gorgeous closing track off Living Hour’s understated new album, Internal Drone Infinity, lands somewhere between a lullaby you remember from childhood and a group photo you’ll cherish for the rest of your life. “Yearn-core” is how the Winnipeg indie rock band has described its music, and what’s more core to the longing experience than a still image? “Almost didn’t take a photo/ But I’m happy that I did,” Sam Sarty sings with a group of friends, “‘Cause it melted all around me/ When I crossed across the bridge.” It refers to a “desperate collage of ice blocks,” but superimposed, as the music drifts into the ether, is everything you might hold dear.

46. The Antlers, ‘Carnage’

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ 2021 song ‘Carnage’ opens with a childhood memory of Cave’s uncle decapitating a chicken outside his country home in Mount Martha. “A rain deer frozen in the headlights steps back into the woods,” he later sings, “My heart it is an open road where we ran away for good.” On the track of the same name that leads the Antlers‘ first album in four years, however, such cruelty has no metaphorical usage. Over muted keys, Peter Silberman describes a series of violent incidents against animals,  in order, it seems – judging from its slow-burning escalation – of severity, from toad to fawn. The spine-chilling refrain, however, focuses on the casual perpetrator, the one barely paying attention, rather than the victim or its level of intelligence. The way he thins and stretches his breath between the words “accidental” and “damage,” you’re forced to acknowledge the kinds of suffering even the environmentally conscious would brush off, though we all contribute to it.

45. Backxwash, ‘9th Heaven’

As if acknowledging that fans have been waiting a while for the follow-up to Backxwash’s trilogy of albums, the experimental rapper’s latest is built on anticipation. For most of its runtime, the track roils and swirls over a celestial instrumental and Backxwash’s simmering existential anxiety, which is enough to give the repeated “drummer coming” a foreboding air. The drumming is obviously a metaphor, but when it does come, it sounds quite unlike how you’d probably expect: programmed and breakneck, less like the sky opening up to swallow the artist whole than a gentle lift. “I feel,” Backwash declares, making the pause matter, “So motherfucking free.” It’s not hard to believe.

44. Sister., ‘Two Birds’

In its strange little way, ‘Two Birds’ begins in medias res: “Then she told me we’re grieving/ And it stays in the air.” Hannah Pruzinsky and Ceci Sturman, who lead the New York indie band Sister. and whose voices intertwine on the song, are singing about leaving their old apartment and having to live apart for the first time in nearly a decade. ‘Two Birds’ crystallizes the moment that shared grief becomes tangible and overwhelming, hanging in the atmosphere yet reverberating through the body – both bodies. They decide to go to a friend’s birthday party, only to find themselves going back to their packed-up music room and make something: “I need you on the last night/ To write the rest of it down.” The rest of the band conjures a fuzzy intimacy, the prettiest noise, as if scabbing at that old wound, or taking one last good look around.

43. Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory, ‘I Want You Here’

In my review of Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory, I tried to explain what makes ‘I Want You Here’ such a monumental closer on the indie rock star’s collaborative effort with her bandmates. Maybe it’s about being drawn to songs about standing at the edge of the Earth, but almost a year after listening to it for the first time, it still moves me to tears. As a non-single, it may have a tiny fraction of the amount of views that Van Etten’s most popular song on YouTube (the by-now-iconic ‘Seventeen’) holds, but I’m sure I’m not the only one, either. ourculturemag.com/musician/sharon-van-etten’s world-defiant romanticism – the yearning that remains uncompromised and all-consuming in the face of incalculable hurt – amounts to this open-ended declaration: “It sets the stage/ A moment.” To me, it sounds but a breath away from heaven.

42. Wolf Alice, ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’

The first thought that should pop into your head when that jazzy piano riff kicks in: This goes hard. Ellie Rowsell quickly commands your attention with lines like, “Fucking baby, baby man,” then pierces through the facade as she howls, “I’m so sick and tired of trying to play it hard.” While making their Greg Kurstin-produced new album The Clearing, the Wolf Alice frontwoman tried to avoid the guitar as a means of rejecting the “girl singer in band” trope, resulting, at least on first single ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’, in her most chameleonic performance yet. She channels frustration into self-assurance, then radiant vulnerability. “Every flower needs to neighbour with the dirt,” she sings, a symbiotic relationship where she naturally comes out on top.

41. Stella Donnelly, ‘Feel It Change’

When a relationship’s run its course, no judge will satisfy your need to be proven innocent better than the person who’s no longer in your life. “I made a wish upon a satellite/ That you’d come over tell me I was right/ That I’m the perfect friend who does no harm,” Stella Donnelly sings on ‘Feel It Change’, the melody so breezily agreeable, her voice so gentle – and, considering the three-year gap since her last album Flood, so missed – that even her winking sense of humour couldn’t stand in the way of believing her. Yet Donnelly is too self-aware to let the truth slide, admitting she’s lying as soon as she says she can fix it all. And while another artist might slip the most brutal confession in the margins, she makes it the chorus: “I love you baby but I’m scared to be near you.” She repeats it like someone who knows love and fear are incompatible, rubbing it in the face of the one still oblivious, and smiling it out.

40. They Are Gutting a Body of Water, ‘trainers’

Doug Dulgarian doesn’t assign a subject to the line “Treat death like a teacher’s pet”: the I is crushingly silent, the possible you just as self-incriminating. But hanging over ‘trainers’ like a dark cloud is that we. They Are Gutting a Body of Water are just as much about conjuring uproarious noise as they are about cutting through it, and while most contemporary bands would sing such lyrics with moody submission, TAGABOW’s cacophony seems to actively blast against it. The moments of quiet are just as necessary and pervasive. “Dawn spreads over dead sunsets,” Dulgarian sings, the death-obsessed’s thought on an early walk to the store. What you hope, at the end of the day, is that it’ll teach you to live.

39. Deftones, ‘milk of the madonna’

No band can make cataclysmic music sound quite as sumptuous as Deftones, who were quick to remind us of that fact with the early private music single ‘milk of the madonna’. In his invocation of bloody rain, thunder, quaking winds, and most of all fire, Chino Moreno sounds utterly consumed yet invigorated by the pummeling force of the instrumentation, which relents only for a few ethereal seconds before the song’s final chorus. “The display ignites your mind,” he sings. How could it not? When so many contemporary shoegaze bands reach for the same imagery while sounding oddly unaffected by it, Deftones still match their legacy with passion.

38. Asher White, ‘Cobalt Room: Good Work / Silver Saab’

A killer sludge riff sweeps the floor on ‘Cobalt Room: Good Work / Silver Saab’, the 7-minute centerpiece of Asher White’s new album 8 Tips For Full Catastrophe Living. Then the narrative, like White’s ludicrous range of sonic reference points – Brazilian Tropicália, experimental jazz, death metal, krautrock – gets all wound up. Inspired by Claire Denis’ 1999 film Beau Travail, White sings from the perspective of an aging military wife who, in her words, “is left to imagine the sort of fraternal love and belonging her husband is enjoying at camp and begins to suspect it is his way of actualizing an unrealized gay lifestyle and subsequently reflects on their marriage with newfound skepticism.” White’s theatricality has a touch of the absurd: “I know the house had cost us nothing but I felt so evacuated/ Mornings would draw the dust to settle where you once had masturbated.” It’s almost cartoonish, but she lets the festering frustration spill out, craving its own release.

37. U.S. Girls, ‘Bookends’

“70,000 men, why am I wondering where Riley went?” Meg Remy sings ten minutes into ‘Bookends’. “Gotta speak at the end of my breath/ Cause I’m still wondering where Riley went.” The Riley in question is late Power Trip frontman Riley Gale, and as a tribute, a lead single, or a U.S. Girls song, ‘Bookends’ is nothing short of unconventional. Drawing from Eyewitness to History, a book about people’s eyewitness accounts of historical events, the track ping-pongs between references, soulful meditations, and solos from several different instruments, but when you arrive at that ten-minute mark, those final two minutes sound revelatory. Remy’s vocals grow piercing and primal, blurring the line between despair and transcendence. Caity Arthur, the director of the song’s music video, referred to subverting “the traditional narrative of death as a despairing void, rather, portraying it as a euphoric transitory experience.”But the best you can get out of it all, Remy seems to suggest, might just be plain acceptance. “Like it or not/ That’s what you got.”

36. Hotline TNT, ‘Julia’s War’

Raspberry Moon marks the first time Will Andersen has recorded a Hotline TNT album with a full band – guitarist Lucky Hunter, bassist Haylen Trammel, and drummer Mike Ralston.  The lead single ‘Julia’s War’ arrived as proof of that sense of togetherness, owning a “na na na” chorus and pushing Andersen’s vocals to the front of the mix; not so that you can make more of the lyrics, which remain rather cryptic, but as if to nudge you to sing – not just hum – along. When it’s this catchy, even the most introverted shoegaze fan won’t have to try so hard to come out of their shell.

35. Samia, ‘Bovine Excision’

”I was drawn to the phenomenon of bloodless cattle mutilation as a metaphor for self-extraction – this clinical pursuit of emptiness,” Samia curiously said in a press statement about ‘Bovine Excision’, the lead single from her third LP. Synonyms she finds for being empty in the song: “untouchable,” “impossible,” and Bloodless, the title of the album. But the blood that runs through ‘Bovine Excision’ burns bright and hot: the twangy guitars fried with grit, her own voice exploding in the mirror as she sings of being drained. But the need for self-effacement, though ambiguous, reveals itself to be but a symptom of an unattainable ideal, or simply a desire for warmth – to be warmth, “cup of tea in your cold hand.” Hide yourself as you might, you can’t deny the beating of your own heart, and Samia cuts through the metaphor for something palpably human.

34. Ethel Cain, ‘Nettles’

In what is technically the post-chorus of ‘Nettles’, Hayden Anhedonia delivers a devastating line: “Gardenias on the tile, where it makes no difference who held back from who.” Devastating as a postscript in the love story of Ethel Cain and Willoughby Tucker, whose wedding remains a distant dream because we’ve already learned of the latter’s death. We know Cain’s fate, too, through Preacher’s Daughter, but ‘Nettles’ – the first song she wrote in the house in Alabama where she finished that album – serves as a prequel. And it’s devastating, too, because though it passed through many iterations, the track’s vision of Americana stretches over eight minutes yet remains as sweet as can be, nestled by layers of fiddle, pedal steel, and banjo; a devotional that dares not be entirely mournful or anything less than idealistic. The story of two teenagers “in a race to grow up” is a familiar one in the Ethel Cain universe, but what’s moving about ‘Nettles’ is how they’re forced into the slowness of adulthood through “the flicker of the hospital light,” and how the song itself honours and extends that slowness, clearly beyond the realm of realism. Where it makes no difference if it’s nettles or gardenias, suffering or love. Where it’s always.

33. Tyler, the Creator, ‘STOP PLAYING WITH ME’

Tyler, the Creator is in aggressively braggadocious mode on ‘STOP PLAYING WITH ME’, the only song from DON’T TAP THE GLASS to get a music video, but it hardly sounds provocative. The rapper has already gathered us all on the dancefloor; he’s effortlessly boastful, which most fans should find familiarly thrilling. Unlike the comeback record by Clipse, who appear in the visual, it’s less a game of who’s playing who. It’s not even his words that do most of the talking; the taunt is in the bassline, the muscle in the beat, the ad-libs the cherry on top. They’re all saying: you know the game’s already over. Now let’s have some fun.

32. Matt Berninger, ‘Bonnet of Pins’

“It takes a lot to really disappear/ Always leave traces in the leaves,” Matt Berninger sings on ‘Bonnet of Pins’, the first words we get to hear from his next solo album. At first glance, it seems to dig further into the depressive patterns of the National’s last two albums, which came out of a period of creative and personal burnout for the singer. But on the lead single from Get Sunk, the narrator is not the one who appears as a ghost. “The closest thing she’s ever found to love/ Is the kind you can’t get rid of fast enough,” he says of the person suddenly reemerged, flesh and bones and all, the one finishing off his drink. It sends a jolt through his nervous system big enough to turn ‘Bonnet of Pins’ into one of Berninger’s most revitalizing solo songs to date. “Poor you,” the ghost shrugs. But you feel way more than pity.

31. Pulp, ‘Spike Island’

‘Spike Island’ begins, rather innocently, by tracing back the kernels of inspiration: “It’s a guess/ No idea/ It’s a feeling/ Not a voice/ In my head/ Just a feeling.” Jarvis Cocker delights in drawing out the word feeling, letting it lead him towards earnest self-reflection around his time in the spotlight: “I was conforming to a cosmic design, I was playing to type.” As the first glimpse into Pulp’s first album in 24 years, it couldn’t be more fitting. But this being Pulp, Cocker’s stream of consciousness renders the song knottier the more anthemic it becomes. An aside – “And by the way, Spike Island” – becomes the refrain, a complicating reference to a 1990 one-off gig by the Stone Roses that achieved legendary status despite being plagued by technical issues and bad organization. Cocker latches onto not the aspect of fame but the phrase one of the DJs on the line shouted out: “Spike Island, come alive!” The irony, it seems, is that you can’t command a feeling; if you’re lucky, though, you can simply revel.

30. Chappell Roan, ‘The Giver’

Chappell Roan’s long-teased country pop offering could have raised a few eyebrows, but whether it’s been stuck in your head since its Saturday Night Live debut or its official release in March, you know that fiddle is all camp, no cringe. Roan delivers a country song with all the panache and playfulness of knowing she might never put out another one without making this one sound like a one-off. You can get plenty of airplay out of a song with a winking hook like “I get the job done,” but the single becomes an anthem via the gasp-inducing lines it sneaks in around the chorus: “Girl I don’t need no lifted truck/ Revving loud to pick you up/ Cause how I look is how I touch.” The rest of whatever project it ends up appearing on may be stylistically louder, but ‘The Giver’ sounds as effective as it claims to be.

29. The Beths, ‘No Joy’

You wouldn’t call The Beths’ latest single joyful, but it’s an unusually sprightly depiction of anhedonia. It’s not exactly new territory for the band, whose last album, Expert in a Dying Field, showed their proficiency in slipping hooks into heartbroken anthems. But as the first preview of their fourth album, Straight Line Was a Lie, it finds vocalist Liz Stokes less concerned with painful emotions than her own brain chemistry, especially as she started taking an SSRI that, aside from everything else, introduced a barrier to songwriting. “Heartbeat barely pumping,” she sings, yet the band’s naturally locked into a rhythm; Stokes said her musical instincts “weren’t as panicky,” but fight-or-flight is exactly the response ‘No Joy’ seems to incite in its final moments, like every new layer is pulling at her tear ducts. To expel anything – even the opposite of joy – would be delightful.

28. billy woods, ‘Misery’ [feat. Kenny Segal]

billy woods introduced his new album GOLLIWOG with a Kenny Segal collab that sticks to the formula the pair mastered on Maps while marking a kind of lyrical shift. The album supposedly finds the rapper revisiting a story about an evil golliwog (like the one on the album cover) he wrote when he was nine, but one hopes no part of ‘Misery’, a song that includes the line “she came to me already wet with sex,” can be traced back to his childhood. The jazz-inflected track is dreamlike in a way that seems to travel through time even though it only lasts two minutes, blurring the line between ecstasy and confusion, night and the morning after – so fast there’s barely a moment to question any of it.

27. oklou and FKA twigs, ‘viscus’

The ache in ‘viscus’ is subtle but palpable. It would be easy for oklou, who sings of letting herself “get lost so deep inside me,” to let it drift into the ether for a wispy, delicate song rounding out the deluxe edition of her widely celebrated debut, choke enough. Instead, she bonded over it – chronic stomach pain, specifically – with FKA twigs, meditating on the body not just as a temple but a home we carry throughout our lives. Their voices intertwine wonderfully, but once twigs’ comes in on its own, it is purely reassuring: “I wanna find a place I feel alive/ The beating of my heart/ Is sure a place to start.” No amount of sunshine, fame, or someone else’s faith is enough to grant you that feeling, but as ‘viscus’ turns these porous thoughts over, it offers an opportunity to recenter – or better yet, restart.

26. Snocaps, ‘Doom’

Beneath its emotional resolve, ‘Doom’ is about a relationship hanging by a thread. Unassuming though it may start, it turns into one of the most striking songs Katie Crutchfield has written in years, trying to keep casual about “this sentimental rot” but churning out one of her biggest choruses to date. The self-titled album from her and Allison Crutchfield’s new band arrived with little fanfare, and MJ Lenderman and Brad Cook keep their contributions to a minimum. But even the song’s production, stifling rather than amplifying its simple arrangement, serves Katie’s lyrics about running out of breath: “You tell it like it is/ And you’ll suffocate/ Every sight that’s rife/ With a jet black big sky/ Emptiest night,” she sings, almost gasping for air. But she knows she’ll be just fine.

25. Blood Orange, ‘Mind Loaded’ [feat. Caroline Polachek, Lorde, Mustafa]

As you hit play on Blood Orange‘s Essex Honey single, maybe you’re on vacation somewhere. Maybe the weather’s different, or your phone is on Airplane mode, or you try to trick your brain into a steady place. But the voice still hits you like a good look in the mirror: “You still seem the same/ Still broken, can’t think straight.” Few artists can articulate this blurry state of brokenness with the same ghostly splendor as Dev Hynes, let alone get Lorde and Mustafa to deliver a brief but gut-wrenching Elliott Smith interpolation or have Caroline Polachek punctuate his own lush melodies. The beauty here is as undeniable as the darkness, taking the not-quite music in your mind and making it sound rich and unalone.

24. Perfume Genius, ‘No Front Teeth’ [feat. Aldous Harding]

“Better days/ Nothing touch me/ Light it breaks on the wings of a dove,” Aldous Harding sings celestially on ‘No Front Teeth’, the first glimpse of transcendence we’ve gotten from Perfume Genius’ forthcoming album Glory. (And this is not to discount lead single ‘It’s a Mirror’, which is also great.) The first time it sweeps in, Harding’s voice is breathlessly unaccompanied and demystified by crashing guitars that line closer to Mike Hadreas’ fervent vulnerability. Then his voice, uncannily, joins in the chorus, before being muddled in layers and processing. The song turns out to be massive, burning slowly toward the revelation that, really, everything is going to be fine. Not in an ironic or flippant way, but like those rare occasions where it actually feels spiritually illuminating. Hadreas vocalizes this realization before Harding comes in, but if you want the feeling laid out in all its, well, glory, let ‘No Front Teeth’ unfold. 

23. feeo, ‘Here’

It doesn’t take long for feeo, the London singer born Theodora Laird, to describe what’s happened to the city she calls ‘Here’. “The sun won’t shine/ Not the real one anyway/ Not the sun that once kissed us awake,” she sings over a lone pad that sounds, simply, like a void. As she makes her bid for saying goodbye to this place, a slightly crunchy, fingerpicked guitar opens up the song like a wind that could carry the couple away. feeo curls back into numbness, but her point, like her poetry, is crystal clear: “This place was built to last/ It wasn’t built for love.” As if to demonstrate how much she’s worn the argument, even the feeling thin, ‘Here’ is the longest track of her debut album Goodness, stretching out to seven minutes. But it’s also an absolute highlight, making you feel like feeo does: small, powerless, itching for change.

22. Smerz, ‘You got time and I got money’

Be honest: When you listen to Smerz’s ‘You got time and I got money’ – which you could obsess over since March but recently took on a wonderful new flavor with a Clairo-featuring remix – does it feel like two humans singing it? Does it feel like Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt are swooning over a mortal embrace? It’s timeless, of course, and so many of the things the Norwegian duo put stock in appear romantically intangible – bodies, money, vacation. At the same time, no alien lover could channel yearning by venerating such things as T-shirts, shoes, and laundry detergent. Comfy yet starry-eyed, they repeat the title as if to say: Let’s believe in something bigger.

21. MJ Lenderman and This Is Lorelei, ‘Dancing in the Club’

When his cover of This Is Lorelei’s ‘Dancing in the Club’ was released, MJ Lenderman revealed that Box for Buddy, Box for Star was the album he listened to the most in 2024. By inviting him to take on the track for the record’s deluxe edition, Nate Amos expresses his own admiration by way of trust: someone like MJ Lenderman could only bring the song’s lonely desparation higher up the surface. Lenderman understands that fucking up your guitar means fucking up your heart, not just the other way round. He’ll slow down the song and draw out the lyrics to make their dissociation feel more personal than situational. And he will, of course, take pleasure in singing the words “A loser never wins/ And I’m a loser, always been,” lifted as they seem from his own Manning Fireworks. More than self-lacerating, though, the cover arrives as a source of comfort, too: being your own worst enemy doesn’t mean you can’t be seen, or find yourself a little less alone.

20. Wet Leg, ‘CPR’

Wet Leg would never write a conventional love song. ‘Being in Love’, a highlight from the British band’s self-titled debut, likened the feeling to nausea, distractibility, and being punched in the guts. ‘CPR’, the second single from their sophomore LP moisturizer, feels quite a bit like being punched in the guts, but it’s actually revitalizing. Over a chunky, buzzing bass line, Rhian Teasdale muses on the life-or-death-ness of the whole relationship dynamic; maybe being in love doesn’t always feel like “the world caving in,” as it does on the band’s earlier song, but diving off a cliff. Not saying it’s healthier, necessarily, but when Teasdale wonders, “Is this a vibe?,” the answer is obvious.

19. Dijon, ‘Yamaha’

The immediate acclaim surrounding Dijon’s sophomore album speaks, in part, to how immediate and universal its songs are, rendering emotions with the perfect mix of gloss and fire, past and future. ‘Yamaha’ may stand out because it’s one of the album’s most accessible-sounding songs, but also because, in an effort to express just how big the euphoria of being in love is, it’s one of its longest songs. Dijon and his cast of collaborators (in addition to close confidants like Mk.gee, Cara Delevingne is listed as a co-writer here) layer in so many sparkling synths and acrobatic harmonies they almost muddy the mix, but they don’t collide around his voice so much as the earth-shaking beat. “So, shall I repeat?” he asks at one point, “Still want you more.” Four and a half minutes is enough, but he sounds like he could go on forever.

18. Bad Bunny, ‘DtMF’

If you do not speak an ounce of Spanish, ‘DtMF’ makes you want to go through the trouble of learning at least the words in its chorus – one of the best and instantly tear-inducing singalongs of 2025. At one point in the song, Bad Bunny mentions just a few of the Latin genres his eponymous album spans – reggaeton, salsa, bomba, plena – but in both its stylistic experiments and communal spirit, the track is subtler and more understated than most anything on Debí Tirar Más Fotos. It imprints its message slowly, emotionally, hazily, so that we might learn something from its regretful tone: a language that goes way beyond words.

17. Sabrina Carpenter, ‘Manchild’

Man’s Best Friend stomps out in full country mode with its fantastic lead single, ‘Manchild’, a song with so many hooks it’s not hard to find something new to appreciate each time. The first thing, for me, was Sabrina Carpenter’s summation of the immature men that constitute the album’s subject matter: “Why so sexy if so dumb? And how survive the Earth so long?” Then it was the decision to rhyme the title with “Fuck my life,” belting it out so that we could all scream along in the car. It’s a pop song that makes seemingly no sense, which makes it all the more fun – not hard to get so much as just sneakily complex.

16. HAIM, ‘Relationships’

When you’ve got a summer jam in your hands, you don’t mess with it too much, so HAIM keep ‘Relationships’ smooth and bouncy as they boil I quit‘s thesis down to, “Fucking relationships, am I right?” There’s something absurd and unifying in taking pleasure in that conclusion, which is what the song does over a pristinely sleek R&B beat. It absolutely makes sense as a lead single, and in the context of the album, it oddly picks things up: the line “You really fucked with my confidence” may be validated by other songs on the album, but this one’s too much of a delight not to sound confident. There’s no “he said, she said” here – just an acknowledgement that we’ve all, even that you, been there.

15. Lady Gaga, ‘Abracadabra’

Lady Gaga has always been singular in her ability to marry frantic theatricality with pure pop precision; in that way, ‘Abracadabra’ is far from surprising, even as its music video arrived in the midst of the 2025 Grammy Awards ceremony. To this day, any pop artist daring to make music this brilliantly nonsensical, melodramatic, and infectious should stand out; coming from Gaga, it’s bound to border on nostalgia, and ‘Abracadabra’ indeed comes very close to sounding like a facsimile of the singer’s glorious heights. But as the appearance of multiplicity became a central theme on Mayhem, ‘Abracadabra’ successfully bridges former personas. However much you choose to read into it, the song no doubt does the trick. 

14. Rosalía, ‘Reliquia’

Rosalía sings in 13 languages on LUX, but there’s something spine-chilling about her reverting to her native Spanish on ‘Reliquia’, a song that finds her breezing through world cities that have left a mark on her. The same way LUX resonates regardless of how many of its languages you speak, ‘Reliquia’ feels like a personal map of memory no matter the extent to which you can project upon it – though I can’t help but be moved when she begins with Jerez, a birthplace of flamenco and the place where I lived when MOTOMAMI broke through. I know people who might relate more to losing their temper in Berlin or running away from Florida. Rosalía memorializes all these places over a string arrangement that makes her sound like she’s hovering above the earth, not fully tied down to a single place but attached to so many. “We are dolphins jumping, going in and out/ Of the scarlet and shining hoop of time,” she sings – a rough translation, a half-shared understanding, the thing that brings us together.

13. Addison Rae, ‘High Fashion’

Addison Rae’s first new music of 2025 wasn’t just an instantly intoxicating pop song, but quite an innovative take on the “I don’t need you” subgenre of pop music. The titular subject is Rae’s alternative to a lover’s cheap affection (and drugs of indeterminate value), and she proclaims her preference with a sultry sense of humour: “You know I’m not an easy fuck/ But when it comes to shoes I’ll be a slut,” she sings. The ethereal production affirms that Rae is really on a different plane, while her airy vocals don’t cloak so much as luxuriate in her conviction. It’s almost enough to disguise the trace of denial that still makes it onto the song, a moment of vulnerability that also reveals the song’s greatest trick: “I know how to make the hard things look really easy.”

12. Florry, ‘First it was a movie, then it was a book’

What a way to rev things up. Listening to ‘First it was a movie, then it was a book’, the first song on Florry’s upcoming album Sounds Like…, it’s hard not to start paying attention; the single stretches out to seven minutes, but just when things start feeling a little loose, that guitar riff grips you back in. Vocalist Francie Medosch embodies a character on the verge of a breakdown, the only plausible response to seeing your life play out onscreen: “If I wasn’t feeling so empty baby/ I’d give that movie five out of five.” The narrator tries to write a movie, then a song, but it’s only while watching one not based on their life that the revelation strikes: “I saw myself in everyone, how’d they make a movie like that?” Whatever it is, Florry possess the same kind of gift. 

11. Nourished by Time, ‘9 2 5’

It’s a familiar story: an artist waiting tables by day and making music by night, barely holding it together yet holding onto a dream. Musicians have written this kind of song from varying levels of success and cynicism, and while Nourished by Time’s ‘9 2 5’ is written in the third person, you have no doubt Marcus Brown’s perspective comes not just from experience, but from the heart. He neither revels nor quite rebels: this is a glistening dance jam whose circular groove might mirror the unchanging rhythm of the narrator’s life – “hateful,” is how he describes – but the brightness of the instrumentation also hints at where Brown’s head is currently at. He’s not tacky or patronizing about it, though, just wishful: “May you always have a fight/ Be it wrong or be it right/ Shed a raindrop when you cry.” And maybe write a song about it.

10. Lorde, ‘What Was That’

“What was that?” is another way of asking, How’d the years whip by so fast? The lead single from Lorde’s new album Virgin is her first in four years, but really, it takes us back to the Melodrama era, and lyrically even further back: “Since I was 17, I gave you everything,” she sings. A gut-punch, but not nearly as important as the following line: “Now we wake from a dream, baby, what was that?” Jim-E Stack and Dan Nigro’s production is punchy but curiously muted, as if the realizations Lorde wakes to are just now settling in. “Can’t see myself yet,” she sighs at the beginning of the song, before the memories start kicking in. 

9. Momma, ‘I Want You (Fever)’

The word in parentheses makes all the difference. Yes, “Pick up and leave her/ I want you, fever” makes for one hell of a catchy chorus, but fever – beyond encapsulating the feeling of the song, which is about the kind of unrequited love that makes your blood boil with longing because it’s more about knowing the other person wants you – also feels like a switch, allowing all pent-up desire to swirl up the surface over one of Momma’s most irresistible riffs yet. The duo said the song is “about wanting to be with someone who has a girlfriend, or someone who isn’t over their ex,” but the “or someone” is open to projection. Really, it’s about the fever, and we all want it.

8. La Dispute, ‘Environmental Catastrophe Film’

One takeaway from La Dispute’s astounding nine-minute epic ‘Environmental Catastrophe Film’ is that time moves ceaselessly, and only in one direction. I try to keep this in mind as one of its couplets – “If you give in to the poison inside/ Could they deny you when you try to get in?” – takes me back to the visceral reaction I had upon hearing the band for the first time as a young kid, more than a decade and a half ago, and one of their most quoted lyrics: “Can I still get into Heaven if I kill myself?” While the song’s nuanced storytelling was lost on some listeners in that climactic moment, I can’t imagine the same happening with ‘Environmental Catastrophe Film’, in the middle of a three-part narrative that takes into account the history of the polluted Grand River, the creation of the Christian Reformed Church, and furniture manufacturing. Sitting in the midst of it all is a boy for whom time doesn’t seem to just be moving forward: grieving the old friend who died by suicide, he’s lost in the swathe of metaphors and allusions, finding comfort in their dissolution: “Watch the past fall away/ All our lives against the blade/ Because the time goes and we change/ Not what we made but what can be.”

7. Water From Your Eyes, ‘Playing Classics’

Before you accuse Water From Your Eyes of cashing in on Brat Summer, consider ‘Playing Classics’ as a dizzying bit of time travel: last year, Water From Your Eyes played the same stage at Primavera Sound 2024 as Charli XCX just hours before for the festival’s big finale, where she debuted songs like ‘Everything is romantic’ and ‘365’ before BRAT‘s release. At the time, I couldn’t imagine that Nate Amos and Rachel Brown would make anything that sounds remotely like ‘Club Classics’, but no musical venture is totally inconceivable for this band. If earlier single ‘Life Sings’ amalgamated an indie rock devotee’s disparate influences, ‘Playing Classics’ channels their presence in the club through existential non-sequiturs like, “Tried to make it to hereafter/ Just wound up at the mall.” These days, you may well hear ‘Apple’ in a place like that, stripped of all its power. ‘Playing Classics’ remembers dancing more like a transcendent exchange: “Souls with something to lose/ Take that long hard road from here to the truth.”

6. Amaarae, ‘S.M.O’

You don’t need to have listened to more than a few minutes of Amaarae’s excellent Fountain Baby to guess that the title of her Black Star single stands for “Slut Me Out.” It’s an infectiously layered and unmistakably sultry jam that flaunts the Ghanaian-American artist’s fusion of styles, which she helpfully points out include Ghanaian highlife, Detroit club bass, zouk, and Janet Jackson’s Control. All of those references may come through, but they do nothing to distract from the titular message of the song, let alone Amaarae’s presence and comedic flair: “I wanna week with her, she taste like Lexapro.” No pop song in 2025 could take the edge off like this one.

5. Destroyer, ‘Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World’

‘Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World’ is as gloriously theatrical as its title. The instrumental, replete with hazy synths and gritty guitars, is as memserizing as Destroyer’s best, but it’s the ceaseless “la la la” vocals that really sell the edge-of-the-world feeling. Then there’s Bejar’s relentlessly poetic delivery – to say nothing of his lyrics. “I whisper/ Hey, breeze/ Where you going?” he sings, not at all whispering. From there, every line offers something you could pore over, that could simultaneously connote nothing but drunkenness. What’s undeniable is that the song is effervescent with longing, and the subject of this longing? “Every person I meet,” but also, ultimately: “Death by illumination.” It’s up to you to connect the dots. 

4. caroline, ‘Tell me I never knew that’ [feat. Caroline Polachek]

caroline exploded back into view with ‘Total euphoria’, the first preview of their sophomore full-length. Then came an even sweeter surprise: a Caroline Polachek feature on ‘Tell me I never knew that’. caroline’s experimental music often teeters on the edge of abstraction, a pattern that’s mirrored not only in the song’s lyrics but its treatment of Polachek’s deconstructed pop melodies. “Maybe I don’t wanna be anyone/ And I don’t wanna be somebody else,” she sings, contemplating not the nature so much as the desire for a static identity. Then Casper Hughes’ vocals soar, impossibly reminiscent of Jonsi, to set the focus on layers of feeling and embodiment. It might as well be coming from a different world, but it hits too close to home. 

3. Alex G, ‘Afterlife’

It’s tempting to describe ‘Afterlife’, the lead single from Alex G’s 10th album and major label debut, as “life-affirming.” But what kind of life are we talking about? Not this one, certainly, nor some kind of traditional conception of the beyond. He sings reverently of a liminal space between “heaven and the TV screen,” as if directly feeding off his work scoring Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow. But rather than eerie and foreboding, ‘Afterlife’ is buoyed by mandolin strums and sparkling synth, “filling up the tank with” this big bright light of inspiration, however slippery its definition. It’s one of Alex Giannascoli’s sunniest songs to date, but don’t mishear that single-word refrain: “Son,” he sings with sheer delight. It’s weird how that burden of responsibility can also make you feel like a kid again, and Alex G runs with the feeling.

2. Geese, ‘Taxes’

On the surface, the narrator of Geese’s best single seems to be astoundingly annoyed by the idea of having to pay his taxes, even willing to turn himself into a martyr. “You better come over with a crucifix,” Cameron Winter bellows, “You’re gonna have to nail me down.” More deeply and to the point, though, he sounds preternaturally committed to the whole morality of personal responsibility, making the band behind him sound all the more eerily uplifted. “Doctor! Doctor! Heal yourself,” he commands, an insufferably self-involved setup for the most ego-crushing joke: “I will break my own heart from now on.” Society – no, God – be damned.

1. Wednesday, ‘Elderberry Wine’

‘Elderberry Wine’ is a warm, gentle sigh of a song. But don’t let it fool you: “Sweet song is a long con” is the first line Karly Hartzman sings on Wednesday’s first single since 2023, suggesting that the body of work it ended up on won’t necessarily go down so easy. On songs like ‘Bull Believer’, Rat Saw God’s gargantuan first preview, every instrument served to accentuate the excruciating pain; here, their purpose is consolatory. When she sings that “everybody gets along just fine,” the point isn’t just that appearances are deceptive, but that the bubble is bound to burst. When you’ve tasted the hangover so many times, you can’t help thinking about the long run. “I find comfort that angels don’t give a damn,” she realizes, her band sounding quite angelic. If only us humans weren’t so wound up by fate.