All The Music of All The World’s Best Albums of 2025
Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.
It’s become gauche, when a writer is introducing their Top X albums or movies or TV shows or nail files of 2025, to pretend like they hate list making. “Oh, art is subjective,” they say, or “lists are ruining the discourse” they say.
Phooey to all that: I’m a list-making sicko who keeps track of every book, movie, and album I listen to each year, and then rank them, because it helps bring order to the noise that is the previous year. We pass time so quickly in modern society, each year feeling shorter than the last. So listmaking makes me feel like I have some control, some birds eye view of what just happened in the last 12 months. I don’t, probably, but the list helps at least.
So, what you’ll read below is All the Music of All the World’s 20 Best Albums of 2025. I ranked them, because making a list without rankings is cowardice. This list does not reflect the views of Victrola, because this is my column, and I’ll write about multiple Musica Mexicana albums if I want to. Here we go:
20. Lukas Nelson: American Romance
Despite being a great bandleader and songwriter in his own right—that’s his band, Promise of the Real backing Bradley Cooper in A Star is Born—it’s impossible to not tie Lukas Nelson to his dad’s work as the greatest songwriter to ever live. But this record does enough to hopefully put some distance between him and Willie; here Lukas dissects the shattering of romance in the modern age, a sad record that revels in the solitude of making your way through life alone thanks to a variety of breakups and miscommunications. It’s not as rocking as his records with the Promise of the Real, but on this solo debut that’s kind of the point: no country album sounded as high and lonesome as this one this year.
19. Laufey: A Matter of Time
It would have been impossible to imagine, even five years ago, that a woman bringing back Blossom Dearie, Barbara Lea, and Dinah Washington-esque vocal jazz would be one of the biggest acts in the world. But here Laufey is with her third album, yet another set that is entirely charming, and entirely her. Slightly less jazz-forward than her previous two records, this one is centered around a theme of time—there never being enough of it, there being too much of it to understand. This is 2025’s elite dinner party album; it goes with every occasion.
18. Mavis Staples: Sad and Beautiful World
Mavis Staples is one of our national treasures: the greatest soul singer still with us in 2025, a woman whose music soundtracked the Civil Rights movement, and every movement since. This album, produced by indie rock producer of the moment Brad Cook, is mostly covers, but every song Mavis sings she makes her own, and at this late stage, that’s by giving every track torch song gravitas, like she’s got to get these words out or else. She covers Sparklehorse, Kevin Morby, Tom Waits, and Porter Wagoner, among others, and references being the only Staples left, and how far we still have to go as a society. It serves as a sad, beautiful reminder that the work is never finished.
17. Brandee Younger: Gadabout Season
The jazz harpist’s third LP from the legendary Impulse records is a blend of Alice Coltrane-esque spiritual jazz and light, airy funk like Patrice Rushen pioneered in the early ‘80s. It’s a testament to Younger’s effortless style and magnetism that Gadabout Season feels fresh and new and not just a recreation of those influences. My favorite jazz album of 2025.
16. Colter Wall: Memories and Empties
The fifth album from this throwback country singer—whose voice sounds like the granite slabs in The Brutalist—is itself a throwback concept album with a breakup and the drinking that both precipitates and follows it being the thematic tie to these songs. He also pokes fun at the lack of commercial prospects his music has with “1800 Miles,” a song about how far his Saskatchewan ranch—where he lives and works and writes his songs—is from the Nashville firmament at the center of country music. I keep thinking I’ll grow tired of his sound—the howling, gravelly voice over instruments that sound airlifted out of a Marty Robbins album from 1959—but every release has me back, clapping like a seal as he makes another turn of phrase I don’t see coming.
15. Wet Leg: moisturizer
Like a cinder block to the cerebellum, this record by the previously quiet and jangly indie rock band is a gnarly, knotty record about love and its complications. “Catch These Fists” is the sound of a band fully arriving. Wet Leg used to sound like a sum of their influences. That song—and more on this record—sound like them putting a boot into them.
14. Whitty Remarks: Nary A Care
In interest of full disclosure, I am thanked in the credits for this album. But even so, this is one of the most emotionally uplifting albums I heard this year. When Whitty Remarks frontman Travis Whitty’s dad—whose last voicemail to Travis opens the album-- passed away following a long battle with substance abuse, he turned his grief, and his journey of learning to live with that grief, into this album. It’s like an indie-folktronica version of The Year of Magical Thinking.
13. Haim: I quit
The fourth Haim album leans into the pop end of their pop rock after their last album, Women in Rock Pt. III openly skewered how they were always confined to the pop side of the record store genre divide. But that’s just fine: They are at their best when they work multiple earworms inside single songs. “Relationships” has something like four hooks, and “Down to Be Wrong” broils and recedes like an old Stevie Nicks song. Her solo work is a good comparison point: The songwriting here repeatedly tackles the way relationships feel like wars of attrition and hostile retreat feels like the only option. Their best album yet.
12. Wednesday: Bleeds
My number five for the year is this year’s best breakup album, but this indie rock crawler is the year’s best “we’re about to breakup” album, as the songs written by frontwoman Karly Hartzman are filled with references to strained bonds, to arguments, to communication being difficult-to-impossible, to a general ennui permeating a relationship. That she and Wednesday’s guitarist, M.J. Lenderman, broke up shortly before this album’s release, and he stopped touring with them, doesn’t come as a surprise listening to Bleeds. A mixture of many southern rock styles—it at times sounds like both R.E.M. and Drive-By Truckers—this is the band’s most fully realized album.
11. Eslabon Armado: Vibras De Noche II
The eighth album from the Paterson, California Musica Mexicana band Eslabon Armado is devoted to those late-night thoughts you have about exes, those middle of the night hail Marys you throw out to a new fling, the spark of love, the agony of heartbreak. Written entirely by lead singer Pedro Tovar, this sequel to their 2020 breakout celebrates the acoustic sound of Sierreño music while pushing that sound into what could be its future. Even if you can’t speak Spanish, this record is the most vibey of 2025.
10. Rosalia: Lux
If there is a better name for this album than Lux, the word hasn’t been invented yet. Rosalia—the savior of flamenco, Spain’s greatest cultural export since Pablo Picasso—learned to sing in 14 different languages for his album, hired the London Symphony Orchestra to back her up, got Bjork, Yves Tumor, Charlotte Gainsbourg, one half of Daft Punk and Pharrell Williams to help, and sculpted the album into movements centered around different female saints. On paper, that might result in a disaster. In practice it’s grand, sprawling, beautiful, wild, riveting and affecting. It’s fun to watch an artist walk a knife blade above an open volcano, and here Rosalia moonwalks across it.
9. Big Freedia: Pressing Onward
Known primarily for her raunchy and raucous New Orleans bounce records, here Big Freedia brings her ass-shaking music to the sanctified sanctums of the Baptist church, combing forces with church bands and church choirs. That doesn’t sound like it should work, but it’s a record that somehow folds funk, disco, gospel, bounce, jazz, soul, and hymns into some new genre of music. This record is made to clap and smile along to, which we all could use more of right now.
8. Dijon: Baby
No artist had a wilder 2025 than Dijon: He was the main artistic collaborator on Justin Bieber’s Swag albums, earning a Grammy nomination for Producer of the Year. He also had a bit role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another as a revolutionary connecting Leonardo DiCaprio to his network. In between there, he released Baby, the most ground-moving, genre-advancing R&B album since Frank Ocean’s Blonde. It’s hard to talk about Baby without immediately comparing it—positively!—to giants like Frank and D’Angelo (RIP), which speaks to how perfect this sophomore album is. He builds a new vision of R&B while pulling from all the greats, layering his own voice in revelatory ways, blasting out his beats and textures so that slow jams become psychedelic voyages. Give the guy the Producer Grammy, and unlimited budget to do whatever he wants to do next.
7. Bad Bunny: DeBi TiRaR mAs FoToS
In a year where it was more or less criminalized to be Latinx in public in certain American cities, Bad Bunny became a Culture War lightning rod when he was announced as the Super Bowl halftime show. It’s clear that no one complaining has actually spent any time with Bunny’s records: No one on earth is making records as wide-lensed, as fun, as inclusive, as daring as Bad Bunny right now. This album from January that serves as a survey of the last 20 years of Puerto Rican music reimagined in Bad Bunny’s vision, led to a massive residency in San Juan, and felt ever present this year in a way his past records didn’t always. It’s a record for the beach, for the club, for getting ready for work, for eating dinner in a fancy restaurant. I can’t wait for the Super Bowl.
6. Tyler Childers: Snipe Hunter
Since he broke through with 2017’s Purgatory, Tyler Childers has been slowly outrunning all the expectations put on him as an Appalachian boy who has country music by the back of the neck. That has meant instrumental fiddle records (Long Violent History), triple LPs of one album recorded three ways (Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?), and records that sound unfrozen from 1977 about loving his wife (Rustin’ in the Rain). Snipe Hunter feels like another left turn in that he’s back to making a record that is as straightforward as Purgatory; but that doesn’t mean some kind of regression. This is an expansive vision of what his country sound could sound like, with garage-esque rock butting up against big voiced Americana. “Eatin’ Big Time” was the song about a deer hunt that was most fun to scream along to in your car with the windows down in 2025.
5. Lily Allen: West End Girl
The rawest album of 2025 by a wide margin, Lily Allen—who first broke big during the MySpace era what feels like 600 years ago—hit the studio in the immediate wake of the implosion of her marriage to Stranger Things’ David Harbour. The result is a classic divorce album—think the modern Here, My Dear—that is so specific in its details that it feels like listening to someone read a divorce deposition. That in and of itself would make this record can’t miss—rarely does an artist just come out and say what wrong, from cheating to…let’s call them bedroom accessories—but Allen’s way with a hook and sing-along moments of great strife make this the most riveting pop record of 2025.
4. Camp Trash: Two Hundred Thousand Dollars
Originally launched as a Twitter meme—remember when those were a thing?—Camp Trash are now a real band, and their second album takes the emo-tinges of their stellar debut—2023’s The Long Way, The Slow Way—and adds post-punk angularity (particularly on “Heaven or Wisconsin”) and a bigger sound. It’s the kind of record that makes you wish you were in an old car with your best friends, hooting and hollering like life is going to give you everything you want.
3. Chino Pacas: CRISTIAN
Like the Lisan al-Gaib of Corridos Tumbados, Chino Pacas’ sophomore album delivers on all the hype that accompanied the 19 year old when he arrived on the scene a couple years ago with his co-signs from all the big acts and Drake. Expanding his palette to include acoustic banda songs in addition to his near-R&B slow jams and hip-hop cyphers, this feels like the first step of Chino Pacas’ evolution to being something like the Bad Bunny of the Musica Mexicana scene. He’s going to break big, the question is just when.
2. Bon Iver: SABLE, fABLE
Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon arrived to indie rock fame in an untraditional way: His girlfriend dumped him, and his band broke up, and, battling depression, he locked himself in his family’s northwest Wisconsin cabin and wrote the best indie folk record of the 21st century, For Emma, Forever Ago. Over the course of three more Bon Iver records—Bon Iver, Bon Iver, 22, A Million and i,i—he expanded the scope of what a Bon Iver record could be, adding collaborators, instruments, and sonic textures that in the end were almost diametrically opposed to his solo folk beginnings. After touring his last album, and COVID, Vernon was forced to shut down Bon Iver as an entity in a way he hadn’t had to before, not knowing where or what to do next.
That answer arrived this year with SABLE, fABLE a record that finds Vernon grappling with what it means to be an artist, and reckoning with whether he leaned into his own depression in order to write music, and what he’s lost in his life by doing that. In this extremely personal dissection of his own motives and motivations it becomes universal: You leave this record thinking about how your choices and decisions of how to act and behave have shaped you in the near 20 years since the first Bon Iver record. Vernon says this is probably it for the Bon Iver name; if that’s true, it’s a perfect way to go out.
1. Clipse: Let God Sort ‘em Out
The first words on the first Clipse album, 2002’s Lord Willin’, are younger brother Pusha-T sneering “Playas we ain’t the same, I’m into ‘caine and guns.” Nearly 25 years later, that’s basically the same on Let God Sort ‘em Out. But their comeback this year was the best musical story of 2025, a triumph of brotherhood, of aesthetic vision, of using rap to process grief, of waking up the other side of 40 and questioning what your life has been lived for, of the continued greatness of Pharrell Williams as a producer, of the surprising fact that Kendrick Lamar might be able to rinse Drake in a rap contest, but he is outshined by the brothers Clipse on their song together.
The particulars in case you’re not familiar: After years basically fighting the music industry for their right to release music—they had their original 1999 debut, Exclusive Audio Footage, shelved, and their sophomore album, Hell Hath No Fury nearly suffered the same fate—in 2009, Malice, the older brother in the duo, decided to step away from rap and devote himself to the ministry, changing his name to No Malice in the process. Pusha-T became the greatest coke rapper to ever live, serving as Kanye West’s dark id before Kanye’s own dark id became a Nazi, and delivering classic solo albums that basically sounded like Clipse albums without Malice.
Then came COVID, and the deaths of the brothers beloved parents—who were separated, but friendly and in each other’s lives—and Pusha’s expulsion from Kanye-ville, and a reunion of the brothers. But they didn’t want to do the normal studio thing: Instead, they decamped to Paris to record the entire album with Pharrell while he worked as the creative director of Louis Vuitton. Pusha had to pay eight figures to buy his way off Def Jam to have Kendrick on the album following the Drake/UME lawsuit, adding a level of mystique to the album’s creation.
The result? The best rap album of the 2020’s, a cohesive, banging album with raw nerve lyricism and beats that sound expensive. It’s one of those albums where your favorite track changes every listen through. One time it’s “So Be It,” the next it’s “Ace Trumpets,” and its hilarious “YELLOW DIAMONDS LOOK LIKE PEE-PEE” non-sequitur. Sometimes it “Birds Don’t Sing,” which has straight forward stories of the brothers finding out each of their parents died, and sometimes it’s “All Things Considered,” with its absolutely devasting opening line of “How I’m doing? All things considered let’s be specific / my mama cheek I miss it, I wanna kiss it.” The rest of the time it’s “F.I.C.O.” with its vintage Clipse percussive rhyme sequencing that has you popping like Stone Cold Steve Austin returned to the ring when they finally use the titular name.
They say that the monoculture is dead, and that’s probably true. Everyone can live in their own silos and never see into anyone else’s. But as long as Clipse is in my silo, I’m happy to be in here, listening to songs about ‘caine and guns.
Honorable Mentions:
Tunde Adebimpe: Thee Black Boltz, Danny Brown: Stardust, crashPREZ and Manwolves: It All Comes for Me, Ghostface Killah: Supreme Clientele 2, Jensen McRae: I Don’t Know How But They Found Me, Nala Sinephro: The Smashing Machine (Official Soundtrack), That Mexican OT: Recess, Joshua Ray Walker: Tropicana and Stuff, billy woods: GOLLIWOG
--Andrew Winistorfer
