Bluesky

The Lebanese Civil War. Corporate agri-capitalism. Tips for surviving a nasty divorce. Violence, unfettered avarice, and the need to hold on to your heart—all of these, among other timely themes, infuse a group of widely varied but generally excellent albums released over the past year. A horrible time in so many ways that we know all too well, 2025 also gave us some terrifically inventive, ear-stretching, and entertaining music. It was an exceptionally good year for music, in fact, especially for music that engages bad times incisively and offers up ideas for how to survive. 

Many of the most inventive recordings were hybrid works, carrying on the genre-blending and style-blurring that virtually defines music in every category these days, making the very idea of categories quaint. I’ve been curating lists like this one for decades, and when I started, early in the 21st century, it felt strange to mingle albums of pop and jazz and hip-hop and classical and other kinds of music; but now, everything seems at home with everything else. If only that sensibility of companionable differences, of strength in unity, carried through the rest of the world. 

My picks for the 11 best albums of 2025, in alphabetical order by artist:

ARTMS, Club Icarus 

Pronounced “Artemis,” after the Greek goddess, ARTMS is a fab K-pop quintet spun out of the South Korean teen-idol factory Loona, and their music is the scientific formula for pure joy converted to sound. Bouncy and playful, with strains of retro hip-hop beats and undercurrents of EDM tonality, the six songs on this EP have a flawless sheen that’s simultaneously enchanting and, in its meticulous flawlessness, a little unsettling. (Not to be confused with the superb American jazz quintet Artemis, who also released an exquisite new album, Arboresque, this year.) 

Ted Hearne, Farming 

An unclassifiable composer of seemingly inexhaustible imagination, Hearne combines narratives of William Penn and Jeff Bezos to spin Big Tech capitalism as settler colonialism by digital means in this audacious techno-pop song cycle. The libretto is adapted from historical archives and contemporary texts, cut-and-pasted over sound constructed by Hearne from sampled sources. Farming is performed by Hearne and the magnificent Philadelphia-based choral group the Crossing, under the direction of Donald McNally.  Imperial Triumphant, Goldstar 

This three-piece experimental metal band plays in black robes, wearing masks of Apollo, Hecate, and Baal, and cheeky mythic cosplay boils over in the plastic cauldron of their music. Goldstar, their seventh album since the group formed in 2012, is a blood feast of courses cooked up from death metal, jazz, and new music. Are these guys serious? I hope so. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be so deliciously silly.  Kronos Quartet, Witness 

The Armenian American composer and documentarian Mary Kouyoumdjian, a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2024, collaborated with the celebrated musical adventurers Kronos Quartet on two suites of oral-history testimony—about two bloody conflicts that her family endured—set to chamber music on this gravely serious and stirring album. “Bombs of Beirut” is a three-movement sound collage employing audio from interviews that Kouyoumdjian conducted with her family about the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–1990, while “Silent Cranes” draws from archival materials about the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Lady Gaga, Mayhem 

I don’t want to get into a comparison of Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, but… actually, I do. I enjoyed Swift’s 2025 release, The Life of a Show Girl—but while it’s fine, it’s filled out with puffy sound-alikes of her earlier songs and doesn’t hold up as a concept album. Lady Gaga’s Mayhem is pure pop on a higher level: fresh and tuneful, with winks at her earlier music that feel wryly self-aware, not self-plagiarizing. It’s an album of smart pop that doesn’t pander, by an artist who can make any kind of music she wants to but makes pop the best.  Little Simz, Lotus 

Following a tempestuous split from her longtime collaborator, Inflo, the London-based hip-hop artist Little Simz enlisted a new producer and cowriter, Miles Clinton James, for this pulsing, finely textured album, full of quick and jabby rapping. The sonic atmosphere is bright and alive, with trap-kit drumming and analog instruments (piano, guitar, saxophone) helping to show off Simz in full bloom.  Thomas Morgan, Around You Is a Forest 

This out-of-left-field project could have come off as a gimmicky mishmash, but it works, inexplicably. Morgan, a jazz bassist best known for his lyrical playing with guitarist Bill Frisell, has invented a digital instrument using SuperCollider, a three-decade-old computer-programming platform. Almost but not quite AI, it is generative within limits and has a retro sound that’s a near-amalgam of a marimba, a zither, and Squidward’s clarinet. Morgan programmed it to play in trios with himself on bass and a series of guest instrumentalists from the top ranks of jazz, including Frisell, Henry Threadgill, Ambrose Akinmusire, and Craig Taborn, along with the poet Gary Snyder on the closing track. All of them sound like they’re having a blast jamming with Morgan’s funny old robot.  Pulp, More 

Eclectic and rangy, Pulp has always come across as more mature than its vain, sex-obsessed lead singer and principle lyricist, Jarvis Cocker. After a 10-year break from playing together, the group has reunited and released its first album in 24 years. Cocker is 62 and now has other things to sing about, including the regrets and feelings of resignation that often come with age. This is a sober album, but a Pulpishly eclectic one: vintage Brit-pop charm mixed with oddball dashes of jazz, music hall, and Weimar cabaret.

Rosalia, Lux 

Lux is one of the richest and most impressive works of music I’ve heard in years. It’s grand in scale, a kind of orchestral art-pop, with music cowritten or arranged by Björk, Caroline Shaw (the Pulitzer Prize–winning multi-hyphenate), and a list of others from the realm where classicism and adventurism intersect. It’s just as grand thematically, tackling matters of womanhood, mysticism, and love in its varied forms. Over 18 tracks divided into four movements, classical style, Rosalia sings with ardor in 14 languages, though you don’t need to know any of them to be moved by this music.  Mavis Staples, Sad and Beautiful World 

The sorrows and the joys of life both come through in this elegiac new album from Mavis Staples, the sole surviving member of the Staple Singers. Backed by marquee stars of Americana, blues, and roots music (Buddy Guy, Jeff Tweedy, Derek Trucks, Katie Crutchfield, Patterson Hood, and more), Staples sings a selection of reflective songs, most of them relatively recent (the title track, by the late Mark Linkhous) or new (“Human Mind,” written for the album by the Canadian singer-songwriter Allison Russell). She sounds magnificent, subtly tapping all the sadness and beauty in a voice weathered by 86 years in this world.  Teyana Taylor, Escape Room 

Five years after announcing her hiatus from performing, the R&B singer and songwriter has returned with an epic account of suffering and surviving a tumultuous divorce. Taylor’s back in a big, big way—and I’m not talking about her star-making turn in One Battle After Another. Escape Room is essentially an oratorio disguised as a pop album, with nine segments of spoken word by guest artists (including Sarah Paulson, Niecy Nash, and Jodie Turner Smith) interspersed between 22 original songs of raging, yearning, and exulting in freedom.