The Best Albums of 2025

Published December 11, 2025 at 5:00 AM EST

If there's one question that professional music lovers hear most often, it's some variation on: "Heard any good albums lately?" We always have, of course, but when it came time to highlight the cream of 2025's crop, the members of the NPR Music team could not agree — with one glaring exception. There was something off-balance about the music of 2025. Some genres felt like they were flaming out, others being awkwardly reborn; whatever conveyer belt it was that delivered new pop stars all year in 2024 seemed in need of maintenance; the threat of streaming services and social media delivering a spoonful of A.I. slop cast a shadow on the whole project of "discovery."

Our solution was to get personal: Each of a dozen people on our team — critics, podcast hosts, editors and Tiny Desk producers … sometimes all of the above — made a list of their top 10 albums of 2025 and then singled out one album we'd recommend to anyone who came calling. Call it whatever you want: elite, no-skips, AOTY, No. 1, best-of-the-best. This is the 12-pack of albums that get our most enthusiastic recommendations. We might not agree on much, but the principle of sharing what we love is easy common ground.

Next to each of our picks below, you'll find a link to that writer's personal top 10. And if you want to know the one album we agreed on in 2025, you'll find that here.

Annie DiRusso

Super Pedestrian

_{Record Label: Summer Soup Songs}
_{Release Date: March 7}

For anyone lucky enough to find it beforehand, Annie DiRusso gave the world the Super Pedestrian Summer it needed, courtesy of a brash, big-hearted album full of blustery, hook-forward rock jams about dudes being disappointments, in-between spaces and "good-ass movies." A wall-to-wall, no-skips account of youthful ennui and conflicted longing, Super Pedestrian piles on grand choruses and tiny gut punches in songs that bang and sway and surprise. It all adds up to a glorious debut from a singer who's graduated from bedroom pop on TikTok to national tours and songs that come packaged with their own signature dance moves. If all goes as it should, DiRusso's next stop ought to be stadiums. —Stephen Thompson

Queralt Lahoz

9:30 PM

_{Record Label: Say It Loud}
_{Release Date: April 4}

9:30 PM confirms Queralt Lahoz as one of Latin alternative's greatest rising thrill-seekers. Her second album arrives with energy-generating maximalism, using insistent beats and crashing instrumentals to peak attention. In quieter moments, she locks you in. Her voice, impossible to turn away from, is sultry and soft, yet gritted and insistent. Lahoz plays in contrast with expertise, dancing on the edges of eras and genres as she pairs a voice of generations with captivating strings, melodic piano and off-kilter, contemporary production. Every element of contemporary flamenco-based sound is represented. Her sound, while enticing and sleek, goes beyond poppy flash. There's a texture to its shine that's made to last. —Anamaria Sayre

Mary Halvorson

About Ghosts

_{Label: Nonesuch}
_{Release date: June 13}

It usually only takes an instant to recognize the sound Mary Halvorson gets out of her hollow-body guitar: percussive but pliable, with the odd subversive wobble. Her voice as a composer and orchestrator is no less unmistakable, as she proves on About Ghosts, a thinking person's thrill ride that supplements her hyperacute chamber-jazz ensemble, Amaryllis, with a pair of terrific saxophonists, Brian Settles and Immanuel Wilkins. The guests make their presence known, joining a dynamic roster of improvisers that also includes trumpeter Adam O'Farrill, trombonist Jacob Garchik and vibraphonist Patricia Brennan (each of whom dropped their own worthy albums this year). Listen carefully and you'll hear traces of the "Pocket Piano" synthesizer that sparked Halvorson's creativity as a composer, along with a heartfelt tribute to a former bandmate, the pedal steel guitar genius Susan Alcorn, who died early this year. Modern jazz is forever evolving — and so are those in active dialogue with that tradition, as Halvorson and her intrepid colleagues keep reminding us. —Nate Chinen, WRTI

Kal Banx

RHODA

_{Label: Top Dawg Entertainment}
_{Release date: August 15}

"I just always thought home is a place, but it's a feeling. And not having that feeling f***s with me a lot," Kal Banx utters at the outset of his debut double LP, alluding to the source of pain so eloquently weaved throughout RHODA. For the journeyman producer who left his native Dallas to become one of hip-hop's most sought-after sound designers, it's a revelation gained while grieving the loss of his mother and tracing his lineage back to the family matriarch for whom the album is named. Banx spends 25 tracks chasing down that feeling — not just recreating it but bathing us in it — through random snippets of recorded convos, voicemails from worried family members lending their support, his undying devotion to Dallas bounce and blue notes, and a collective of moody collaborators (Pink Siifu, Baby Tate, Mez, Smino, Buddy, Maxo, Maxo Kream, AUDREY NUNA, SiR, Isaiah Rashad, C.S. Armstrong and more) crafted into one cohesive whole. In a genre where vanity is virtue, the double album is usually reserved for displays of ego or bloated attempts at juking the algorithm. But Banx steps from behind the boards, introducing himself as a rapper-producer (and sometimes singer), with a voice full of carnal yearning and divine soul-searching. By the time the album draws to a close, with a taped conversation of his mother offering words of encouragement, that intangible feeling Banx has been after finally hits home. —Rodney Carmichael

Nourished By Time

The Passionate Ones

_{Label: XL Recordings}
_{Release date: August 22}

"We don't have to be so average," Marcus Brown of Nourished by Time sings on "It's Time." "And I say that with love." But what does it mean to be average? On his excellent album The Passionate Ones, it means to be complacent — to submit to your masters, to abandon your dreams, to throw your hands up at a dismal future as it comes barrelling toward you like a freight train, as if to say, "What can be done?" Inspired by the artist's own experiences pursuing music in between the toil of wage work, The Passionate Ones is an album that makes the case, with love, that you can't let life's daily grind crush you. It's a sneakily political album, its anti-war, anti-police brutality and class-conscious messaging cloaked in an upbeat meld of synth-driven '80s R&B and Brown's singular voice, which can animate even the most heartbreaking sentiments with a magnetic resilience. "I need a girl to cause a little civil unrest," he sings on the frenzied "BABY BABY," contorting what sounds like a long lost freestyle track into a protest anthem. This is pop music for the apocalypse — not for submission, but for survival. —Hazel Cills

Gwenifer Raymond

Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark

_{Label: We Are Busy Bodies}
_{Release date: September 5}

Quiet as it's kept, fingerstyle guitar had a brilliant year that dug deep into and expanded upon the tradition. And yet, nothing quite like this record reaches into the dark crevasse to uncover something so brash and beautiful. Gwenifer Raymond, the Cardiff-born guitarist now based in Brighton, calls her music "Welsh Primitive," a clever play on what John Fahey wrought. For years, Raymond's music lingered in that shadow, but on Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark, she calls upon the mythology and folk horror tales of her homeland to imbue her music with a haunting hypnosis. You feel the thrash and burn of her fingers as she rushes up and down the fretboard, yet never lose sight of her intricate melodies. There, too, are moments to catch your breath as she slings a slow, mud-driven blues, but with a sense of creeping dread that ghosts follow not far behind. To this headbanger, Raymond's ferocious fingerstyle and percussive physicality create a one-woman speed metal band. —Lars Gotrich

Wednesday

Bleeds

_{Label: Dead Oceans}
_{Release date: September 19}

I know an album's a keeper when its greatness reveals itself in layers. My first listen to North Carolina band Wednesday's sixth album, Bleeds, had me texting friends about the leaps frontwoman and principal songwriter Karly Hartzman was making as a vocalist: She'd never sounded this unfettered — this punk — nor this tender-hearted, this country. A while later, I noticed that the band's support is what made her expanded range possible; every member was somehow leaning with perfect balance into both her chaos and her increasing commitment to craft. Then I became obsessed with the songs themselves. Going through a slow, public breakup that would have turned others myopic, Hartzman had instead honed her sense of empathy. Gut-wrenching confessions intertwined with acute observation and character-building render Bleeds novelistic, a Blood on the Tracks for the thrift-store generation. Returning to Bleeds six months later, I keep finding more buried in its grimy floorboards. Sick jokes and confrontations, meltdowns and stretches of pure beauty: This is what life sounds like when you're paying attention. —Ann Powers

Patrick Watson

Uh Oh

_{Label: Secret City}
_{Release date: September 26}

Patrick Watson has always made the kind of music that leaves you wondering how it's done, a startling, otherworldly mix of prepared instruments, found sounds and electronics, with his often vaporous and always transfixing falsetto floating in the center. But this year's uh oh is one of the most ravishing albums of his 25-year catalog. The title echoes those dizzying moments in life when everything suddenly goes wrong, inspired by Watson's own struggles with a vocal chord hemorrhage that left him unable to speak or sing for months.

For much of uh oh, Watson reflects very directly on the anxiety and unraveling he experienced after losing his voice. Songs like "The Wandering," "Choir in the Wires" and the title cut all ruminate on the ways we use our voice to not only speak, but to weep and laugh and bond with others, and how lost Watson felt without that connection. He sings of loneliness, even in the company of others, feeling profoundly vulnerable and adrift. At times, he confesses, he feels like he might explode from the maddening mix of helplessness and desperation.

But even in the album's bleakest moments, Watson retains a sense of wonder and, ultimately, gratitude, aided in no small part by a group of guest singers and friends who appear on most of the tracks, including Martha Wainwright and Sea Oleena. As with much of Watson's collected works, uh oh sounds like a treasury of mythical fables or fairytales for grownups. But in this case, these sometimes terrifying tales end happily ever after, with the return of Watson's voice, and a newfound appreciation for life. —Robin Hilton

Clarice Jensen

In holiday clothing, out of the great darkness

_{Label: 130701}
_{Release date: October 17}

The restless cellist, who swims in several ponds — classical, electronic, experimental, drone — has left most of her high-tech gear behind on an album that places the sounds of the acoustic cello up front. The result is a blanket of string sound that caresses, mesmerizes, sings and swirls with subtle help from loops, delays and octave shifters. Jensen's inspiration comes from J.S. Bach's set of six suites for solo cello, an encyclopedia of voices, textures and emotions worthy of a lifetime's study. The album's title track riffs on the opening arpeggiated flow of Bach's first cello suite, but then gets looped and layered with an expansive, aching line that soars above. Another track, 2,1, unfolds as a quasi-Bachian sarabande that pits a buzzing electronic pulse against undulating layers of wistful cello double stops. In holiday clothing might be too out there for some classical purists (their loss), but it did strike a chord with the emo crowd when Jensen toured with My Chemical Romance this summer, playing the piece From A to B as an interlude between sets. You're never quite sure what you'll get with a Clarice Jensen album; this time, I think we got her best yet. —Tom Huizenga

Dave

The Boy Who Played The Harp

_{Label: Neighbourhood}
_{Release date: October 23}

There's a moment on "Chapter 16," one of the many exquisite set pieces from The Boy Who Played the Harp, where the grime luminary Kano dubs Dave "the rap messiah." It's lofty praise, not unwarranted, but Dave has chosen a different path: that of a musician turned anointed king, in the image of his biblical namesake. It is from that position that the decorated rapper delivers a searing self-assessment, one that doubles as criticism of hip-hop's star model and the surrounding culture that props up such figures. His is a lyricism not just of technical skill and booming authority but immense gravity, underscored by grand productions of piano, strings and acoustic guitar that exude grandeur and resplendence. The great irony is that Dave's skepticism of the crown makes him best fit to wear it at this moment: There is an underlying nobility in asking what it means to wield power, and how best to use such means to serve those you speak to and for. —Sheldon Pearce

Daniel Caesar

Son of Spergy

_{Label: Republic}
_{Release date: October 24}

Daniel Caesar's fourth album, Son of Spergy, has miraculously managed to dethrone 2017's Freudian as his career-defining moment. While parallels between the two projects are abundant, here he addresses the f-words (family and faith) head-on. There's always been a gospel influence incorporated into most of Caesar's music, but this time he courageously removes the R&B disguise, going straight to the pulpit. From top to bottom, he simultaneously honors and reconciles his upbringing, his lovers and himself. The most notable reconciliation is with his longtime friends, business partners and Freudian producers Matthew Burnett and Jordan Evans, which sets the sonic table for something that feels like healing. I haven't felt this moved, this emotionally connected, to an album in a very long time. —Bobby Carter

Rosalía

LUX

_{Label: Columbia}
_{Release date: November 7}

After listening to LUX for the first time, I spent days trying to understand why it felt both new and familiar. Then it hit me: The more I listened and read Rosalía's deeply personal lyrics, the more it reminded me of jazz saxophonist John Coltrane's seminal spiritual statement, A Love Supreme.

Hear me out.

By the time Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme in 1964, he had already experienced what he called a spiritual awakening that helped him kick addictions to alcohol and heroin, while exploring the sonic and musical limits of his saxophone. A Love Supreme is his moment of coming face to face with God. On LUX, after almost an hour's worth of intense and very musical meditations on things like feminine mysticism, light versus dark as well as spirituality and sacredness, Rosalía also comes face to face with God. But she asks God to meet her halfway: "God descends and I ascend / We meet in the middle."

LUX meets the musical legacy of A Love Supreme in the middle and picks up where that classic left off. —Felix Contreras

***

Read about NPR Music's No. 1 album of 2025 here.

Read about NPR Music's favorite songs of 2025 here, and listen to a playlist on the streaming platform of your choice here.

Graphic illustration by David Mascha for NPR.