The Berlin composer gets his hands into everything, crafting a deeply personal set of agreeable jazz numbers that bleed out into aspects of electronic music and smoky vocals. The compositions are left open, so that it’s not being didactic but rather inviting the listener to bring their own experiences and ideas to the sounds they are presented with. It’s a collaborative album in the fullest sense, one where the listener is as much a part of the music as the composer.

Earl has come a long way from his shock rap days, and honestly from his misanthropist shut-in era as well. He’s still a poet, and even though his flows are still muddy and obscure, they’re more coherent than his experimental peak on Some Rap Songs. Live Laugh Love is an album of mood over method, one where the man’s clear skills stand side-by-side with his musings on growth and his need to avoid straightforward drum-focused beats. You can smoke an ounce to it, but you can also get deeply lost in it.

Many bands aspire to the throne of Hawkwind, but few if any make it as far as approaching the carpet. Space rock is one of those genres that sounds easy enough to do on the surface but is extremely hard to do at a high level. Population II, straight outta Quebec, have come closer than any band in recent memory. Mixing hard rock tendencies with lengthy psychedelic explorations of the interior, Maintenant Jamais is as lysergic a trip as you’ll take all year.

Justin Vernon’s first two albums, the haunted For Emma, Forever Ago and the clean, gigantic Bon Iver, were two of the finest records of the Obama era. Everything he did after – the hip hop hook mongering, the experimental glitch-pop records, even Monsters of Folk and Volcano Choir – were ill-fated attempts at recovering that magic. To be sure, SABLE, fABLE isn’t on the level of those records either, but it comes closer than anything in 15 years. A lot of the extraneous stuff surrounding the record, like the weird salmon sales that accompanied it, can be forgiven by listening to the album itself, which dives back into the rustic Wisconsin cabin past before sliding gently into Vernon’s slick, yacht-infused future.

Trevor Powers did a couple of albums of synth-heavy experimental indie pop in the Before Times before disappearing. With most artists, that would be that. They came back in 2023 with Heaven Is A Junkyard, stripped of synthesizers and baring their soul in a new, urgent fashion. Rarely Do I Dream continues in this vein, marrying big drums and big pianos to Powers’ room-filling but oddly hushed voice.

Equal parts folk rock, new Americana, and the Magnolia Electric Company, Friendship’s fifth album sets them apart as the heirs to Jason Molina’s doomer vibes while at the same time proving that they’ve spent a lot of time listening to Silver Jews at the same time.

Rebecca Taylor’s follow-up to 2021’s Prioritise Pleasure – and her third post-Slow Club overall – finds her waxing furiously philosophical on the realities of being a woman this far into the 21st Century. It’s affirming and also crushingly honest, a sweeping performance piece that moves beyond the pop cage singers of her ilk are so often shoved into.

As you might imagine, Ben Kweller’s latest album deals in grief and the raw aftermath of loss. The death of his 16 year old son in 2023 was devastating, and on Cover The Mirrors he gathers together an array of guests to help him sit musical shiva. The list includes Waxahatchee (on the striking power pop anthem “Dollar Store”), the Flaming Lips, and M.J. Lenderman. Kweller, for his parts, writes emotionally evocative alt rock that will have you feeling a certain type of way even if you’ve never lost someone in your life.

The duo’s debut record comes on the back of a series of well-regarded EPs and delivers well on their early promise. Lilo’s vision of indie rock soars in all the right places but also keeps itself grounded by a judiciously applied love of early slowcore, all shimmering guitars and sad-eyed longing.

As the title might suggest, The Clearing is the calm at the peak, the delivery on promise after the ups and downs that have characterized their career to this point. It lacks the high points of some of their more frenzied earlier work, but it skips the lows as well, giving only the creamy middles.

An album of field recordings and barely-there instrumentation, Kathryn Mohr’s latest is an exercise in building atmospheric dread with as little as possible. It’s not all slow-burn uneasy dreams and anxiety-riddled drones, though; “Petrified,” “Driven” and “Take It” are honestly rather catchy, like the more lucid moments of your weird nightmares.

The British rapper’s latest comes on the heels of having truly gone through the wars. Her longtime producer and friend Inflo accepted an extremely large loan from her and then ghosted her on it. This left her finances in turmoil, unable to pay her taxes, and making the prospect of recording and touring dicey. Much of Lotus deals with this, spiking with anger, regret, and betrayal. It’s also one of the more sprawling, soulful albums she’s ever put out, proof that whatever problems she has to navigate she has the talent and will to bull through with style.

After several albums of concepts, stories, and artsy hip hop, Tyler graced the summer of 2025 with pure, pump-up-the-volume dance rap. It’s more brash and dancefloor-ready than anything he’s done in the post-plague era, and it sets itself apart immediately. It might not fit in with the trajectory laid out for him by critical outlets, but it slaps hard and it will get you moving despite yourself.

The first in what is likely the most important feature of this year’s data, the Odd Musician Going Kinda Poppy, or what could be referred to as the Hounds of Love Move. Jenny Hval has created some of the best ambient weird soundscaping music of the past ten years, but on Iris Silver Mist her approach is more warm and open, going widescreen to let the pop light in. We talk a lot about mining the ’80s for inspiration, but here Hval digs out premium veins, and fashions them into fascinating shapes.

After falling afoul of addiction, Danny Brown got sober. It’s a trajectory that an untold number of artists have been on. The soundtrack to his rehab journey, though, was hyperpop, which is a new wrinkle in the story. Stardust, his post-sobriety record, is stuffed full of sounds that were inspired by hyperpop and other deconstructed club artists, including Frost Children, 100 gecs, and SOPHIE. In contrast to his last solo record, 2023’s Quaranta, Stardust revels in having fun with his music again; he sounds nimble and joyful in his lines again, without the sometimes ugly mania of his Scaring The Hoes collab with JPEGMAFIA.

In a world where corporate-polished dorks like Morgan Wallen and Jason Aldean run around crashing out about ‘citiots’ and hurling racial slurs, country looks like a pure plastic slop, music for suburban cowboy wannabes to blast in their expensive lifted trucks as they drive them to the grocery store and back. Tyler Childers is a timely reminder that there are all sorts of artists working within the tradition that don’t just sign off on Nashville pop sight unseen. Snipe Hunter is full of good cheer and humor, Appalachian trad storytelling, and big loud guitars that cross back over the bridge into the blues and rock ‘n’ roll. Jason Aldean is posturing with cops and telling you to try that in a small town; Tyler Childers is making shuffling boogie about koala bears, Buddhism, and girls, dodging those same cops, and using Rick Rubin to make everything as in-your-face as possible.

Funky, soulful, and above all smooth as hell, Butcher Brown’s latest is the watchword for modern jazz fusion. They explore a wide variety of Atlantic musical forms, from East Coast dancefloors all the way down into Brazil and then out into the Caribbean. The various guest vocalists alongside the array of styles makes Letters From The Atlantic feel like a compilation in the best way.

Once a staple of indie radio and playlists in the Obama era, Tune-Yards have become something of an also-ran in recent years. This is ironic mainly because they are putting out their best work now, 14 years later. Stripped down and less frantic than their previous work, Better Dreaming deals in solid hooks, relentless rhythms, and Merrill Garbus’ voice, now honed down into something sharp and precise.

James Brandon Lewis has been quite prolific in the last several years, recording with Jesup Wagon, the Messthetics, and his own full band. The trio he records with under his own name put out Eye Of I last year and return this year with Apple Cores, a modern bop outing that splits the difference between older influences like Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry and modern sax masters like Kamasi Washington and Shabaka Hutchings. It’s a sticky, hip hop-adjacent affair that stands firm alongside modern jazz classics and carves out his own soulful space.

People are clamouring for a pop album that feels like it’s fully artistically realized and not just a Disney Channel star growing up in the limelight. That explains some of the massive, overwhelming hype Lux received in 2025, but not all of it. She does, after all, sing in 13 different languages, augment her songs with the London Symphony Orchestra, and combine disparate aspects of genres to craft an undefinable style. It fully deserves its Pop Album of the Moment status; even if you don’t understand what she’s singing about most of the time, it’s delivered in such a maturely emotional way that it’ll hit you like a brick regardless.

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