Top Albums of 2025

In the grand scheme of years in history, 2025 wasn’t too bad, was it? I mean, it wasn’t 536 CE, after all. We didn’t face mass crop failures and famines. We will, down the road, but we didn’t this year. It wasn’t the year of the Plague of Justinian in 541 CE or the Black Death of 1347. Hell, it wasn’t even the covid pandemic of 2020. Sure, there was geopolitical instability, genocide, the arrival of fascism in the West again, the 1968-style flu epidemic, the onrushing apocalyptic climate crisis, and the nagging idea that bird flu is waiting to make all this seem like a lark. No nuclear weapons detonated, though. An asteroid didn’t collide with the planet. The theme for the year could be summed up succinctly as this: 2025 – It Could Be Worse.

As usual, of course, there was some great music that was put out, regardless of what your dumb drunk uncle told you. They have made great music after 2000, and contained herein are 100 examples of this. This could easily have been 300 examples, but anything over 100 is a list comprised mainly of madness. These are the top albums of 2025, and the cut off has to go somewhere. Regardless, beyond the top albums of 2025, there are piles of new music released every week that deserve your attention. Below are five albums that almost made the cut, but didn’t – honourable mentions, if you will. After, follow the link to begin the top albums of 2025 proper.

Honourable Mentions

**Park Jiha – All Living Things [tak:til] – February 14th**

**Jason Isbell – Foxes In The Snow [Southeastern] – March 7th**

**Sunny War – Armageddon in a Summer Dress [New West] – February 21st**

**Lambrini Girls – Who Let The Dogs Out [City Slang] – January 10th**

**Sharon Van Etten – Sharon Van Etten and The Attachments [Jagjaguwar] – February 7th**

Continue to #100-81 of the Top Albums of 2025!

[ 100 – 81 | 80 – 61 | 60 – 41 | 40 – 21 | 20 – 01 ]

Lost Ghosts: A New Collection of Haunting Short Fiction

Arlo Parks – Ambiguous Desire

Arlo Parks

Ambiguous Desire

Released April 3rd, 2026 on Transgressive Records

Per Spectrum Culture:

Compared to her previous work, Ambiguous Desire is quite the left turn for Arlo Parks. However, it’s a left turn that takes her back into what drew people into her music in the first place.

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Exodus – Goliath

Exodus

Goliath

Released March 20th, 2026 on Napalm Records

Per Spectrum Culture:

The thrash metal veterans keep on keeping on.

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The New Pornographers – The Former Site Of

The New Pornographers

The Former Site Of

Released March 27th, 2026 on Merge Records

Per Spectrum Culture:

This is a different New Pornographers than the one that existed in the past. This is not necessarily a good thing.

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Dälek – Brilliance of a Falling Moon

Dälek

Brilliance of a Falling Moon

Released March 27th, 2026 on Ipecac

Per Spectrum Culture:

Brilliance of a Falling Moon presents the long-running underground duo as being the best at what they do, bar none, a glimmering dream of grimy ‘90s basement hip hop alive and well in the glittering corporate void of 2026.

Madeline Cash – Lost Lambs

Madeline Cash

Lost Lambs

Released January 13th, 2026 on Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Per Spectrum Culture:

Lost Lambs is an assured literary debut, the kind of book that presents a writer whose voice is vibrant and who isn’t afraid to balance intricate connections with an irreverent sense of humor. The noise around its launch says more about the insecurities of the publishing marketplace than it does about the novel itself. Lost Lambs ultimately stands on its own feet, as a sharp, funny, slightly overengineered machine that hums with its own sense of purpose and announces Madeline Cash as a writer worth keeping an eye on.

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Marielle V Jakobsons – The Patterns Lost to Air

Marielle V Jakobsons

The Patterns Lost to Air

Released February 20th, 2026 on Thrill Jockey

Per Spectrum Culture:

The Patterns Lost to Air is, in its essence, the sound of a composer re-learning to control a body that no longer fully cooperates.

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The Paranoid Style – Known Associates

The Paranoid Style

Known Associates

Released February 13th, 2026 on Bar/None Records

Per Spectrum Culture:

The Paranoid Style’s fifth full-length album defines the warm embrace of imperfection, a welcome relief in a music climate that can be too obsessed with exact details.

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We Make The Village: The Kickstarter

Out now live and loud is the Kickstarter for We Make The Village, a new collection of short fiction by Canadian authors surrounding the theme of community, and what it means.

Put together by West Coast author Asha Jade Goodwin, this collection features a wide array of thoughts on what it means to be in and out of community with others. As per the Kickstarter page:

From rejection to acceptance, support to sacrifice; in this anthology, you’ll find a mix of it all, fiction and non-fiction, stories and poems. What does community mean? Who is a part of our community? How do we cultivate community in our own lives? What if we are rejected from our community?

We Make The Village will feature 40 stories from 30 Canadian authors and at least five original illustrations from a Prince George artist.

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More to the point, We Make The Village will feature “Rooming Situation,” a new short story from me that was written during a period where I was in some despair about the state of the housing market and the future of how we live together. That period has not ended, of course, and it’s worth taking some time to think through the consequences of a world where you aren’t likely to be able to buy a house if you didn’t own one by 2021 at the latest. Multiple roommate living situations become a sort of forced found family situation, and while that can be difficult to deal with, there’s also a certain magic in the relationships that get formed.

Until one of them snaps, of course.

There are a lot of great reward tiers available for We Make The Village and it’s worth the time to go through them. In addition to getting the hardcover edition, you can also get collection boxes with stickers, bookmarks, and postcards, as well as multiple copies of the book that you can give as gifts. The authors are from all over Canada, so if you’re looking to keep your elbows up, you might as well go all the way, eh?

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