December 13, 2025

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic shares her favorite songs and albums of 2025 and then, in order to adequately represent a year of exploring far beyond familiar territory, shares even more.

Graphic illustration by David Mascha for NPR

Hello enumerators,

Here we go again. Or maybe I should say here we’ve been. It’s mid-December and since I know most everyone reading this is, like me, a glutton for music, I’m willing to bet your seams are bursting after all the best-of-the-year lists you’ve absorbed. (As with pie, though, I always find another bite irresistible.) NPR Music published its official lists of the best songs and best albums of 2025 this week, and as usual they’re extra eclectic and highly listenable. Having worked in all kinds of music spaces — record stores, magazines, a museum — I can say that the non-commercial radio crowd is the most likely to resist hype and pay attention to how music actually hits people’s ears.

Not all critics employ the attentiveness to small details that a radio DJ set requires. We writers are more likely to get caught up in arguments that take us away from that format’s main ingredients — a great hook, transporting rhythm, expert production, a voice or an instrumental turn that feels new. In 2025, with no clear path toward the mainstream and the very thought of a shared middle where all kinds of fans can meet fading from view, music often seems to be ruled by high concepts, crazy moves and careful poses — gestures that gain quick notice but don’t necessarily bear repeating. By design, our 2025 lists honor what sustains music rather than what’s flashy.

We were encouraged to choose albums and songs that mattered to us personally, the ones we shared with friends and family (including the family of friends that constitutes public radio’s audience) or that kept us dancing in the driver’s seat or staying up past midnight with headphones on. Larger cultural conversations are reflected here — Rosalia’s Lux was a top choice, and you’ll see other much-discussed artists from Geese to Wednesday to Bad Bunny and Bon Iver. But you’ll also find emerging artists that my colleagues championed, like Nashville rocker and Stephen Thompson fave Annie di Russo, or old favorites who still deserve shine, like Top Dawg Entertainment’s house producer Kal Banx, whose first-ever solo album won Rodney Carmichael’s heart. A dozen members of NPR Music’s team published top 10 albums lists, and collectively they offer a state of the musical union that feels organic, grown from the experiential ground of our work as diligent listeners deeply aware of how lucky we are to live every day immersed in sound. They’re worth exploring.

Surveying the vast forest of lists published on the web, I’ve noticed that the zeitgeist is turning toward the NPR way. The aforementioned buzz artists are showing up everywhere, but beyond that small group and a few others, consensus has pretty much collapsed. Instead, there’s a beautiful cacophony that, after a while, reveals itself as thrilling diversity. Extending my forest metaphor, let me suggest that the best way to approach music in the 2020s is to walk through its thickets while staying attentive to every level of its growth. The floor is where most artists start, playing to small audiences in their hometowns or online havens. The understory is what many of us share when we check out what tours are passing through favorite mid-sized venues or who made it to a late-night television show. The canopy is filled with music that sparks conversations between parents and kids, or coworkers in the break room — what’s left of the endangered musical middle class. And the superstars reside in the overstory, defining many conversations from a distance.

Even as this ecosystem remains at risk from threats that drain its resources and upset its balance, we who love it can still move through it with care. Time spent really taking in its many layers will reveal connections that were, at first, obscured. And then there are the links that form below our view — across genres, scenes, formats and borders, musicians speak to each other even when they don’t realize it, tapping into long lineages and fresh ideas. The forest always has something new to reveal. And diversity is what keeps it alive.

My own lists this year reflect attempts to find new corners of music’s green world while continuing to tend to the one where I live. Southern artists speak to my life as a Nashvillian, and singer-songwriters touch my writer’s heart. Feeling the disconnection to others’ realities cultivated by our paradoxically overconnected screen lives, I also yearned to better understand how people with lives very different from mine relate through music. Seeking music from Palestine as the bombs fell, I began exploring Arabic music in late-night YouTube sessions that also took me to Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and beyond to the European cities where refugees gather. Noticing that political music was proliferating on my social media feeds, I sought out voices from the streets and found every style of protest imaginable. Pursuing experimental sounds, I ended up in Asia, at a crossroads where animé soundtracks meet electronic auteurs. Always looking for more great stories, I found them in Scotland, central France, upstate New York and nearby Kentucky. All this roaming happened as I sat at my computer.

I do get out sometimes, though — I mean I use my legs to transport the rest of me to places where other bodies gather — and I’m hardly immune to the influence of my fellow critics. So you’ll see some titles here that also adorn other lists. And the first entry on my songs playlist is by an artist whom I think would have earned myriad top spots if his album had been released a couple of months before its December delivery date: Dove Ellis, the new desolation angel instantly beloved by lovers of high romantic balladeering, whose monumental voice and elliptical songwriting is likely to make big waves in 2026. (He’s currently touring with Geese.)

You can find my primary records of these sonic travels here (albums) and here (songs), on our main lists. But writing this newsletter allows me to indulge myself further: first, with a list of albums that expand my top 10 to a top 20; and second, a playlist of 15 songs to complement the five I chose for NPR Music’s list. Together that’s 25 bonus songs and albums, in honor of the year. I hope it will send you on a global wander similar to my own. Ecology connects us all beyond oceans and invisible boundaries; so does music. I hope my lists celebrate and encourage more thinking across lines that must not define us.

ALBUMS, 11-20

Ambrose Akinmusire
honey from a winter stone
My friend and the country’s number one jazz writer Nate Chinen is right when he says this suite from trumpeter and composer Akinmusire is “not just a jazz album.” For one thing, the rapper Kokayi makes sure hip-hop is embedded in its grooves. But it’s also quintessential jazz in the way it contains its multitudes while expanding them at every turn, channeling the pain and resolute joy of centuries of Black resistance.

Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band
New Threats From the Soul
A bard with a painter’s eye, Davis writes homely epic that are surreal in the friendliest way. He expands — and expands, and expands — upon his daily life as a working artist and cornerstone of the indie rock scene in Louisville, Ky. and environs. Listening to this album is like reading the fourth novel by a writer whose entire bibliography you will subsequently absorb in one winter break-long binge.

FKA Twigs
EUSEXUA
Who is Kate Bush’s heir? I ask myself that every year. FKA Twigs is much more than the bearer of England’s art-pop lineage, but with this fantasia on the theme of pleasure and club beats, this glamorous multi-hyphenate shows she is as mystical, and as ultimately grounded, as the mother of all winged pop creatures.

Annahstasia
Tether
“Time breeds time, and violence breeds more silence,” sings Annahstasia Enuke over a pooling acoustic guitar part in “Slow,” a centerpiece of this twilit oasis of an album. Singing in a gently encompassing contralto like an angelic descendant of Odetta, Enuke encourages listeners to confront the violence in their lives and hearts not forcefully but through contemplative practice. Her songs begin as mantras and become testimonies to patience and inner growth.

Hannah Cohen
Earthstar Mountain
This year was a great one for pastoral psychedelia — mind-expanding music with softness and clarity at its core, often made by women with a great ear for pop and a desire to blow up the formulas. This catchy, deep collection of upstate New York domestic bops is the best of the bunch.

Jim Legxacy
black british music (2025)
Recombinant R&B is all the rage right now, decentered and fragmented like the identities of the self-styled outsiders who fashion it. Sometimes this style can feel unresolved, but in the hands of this producer/polymath, the shattered view is the point. Refracting the diasporic sounds that have defined Black British music for decades and blending confession with sharp snapshots of London life, Legxacy makes an argument for history as always partial, personal and in dispute.

Terrenoire
protégé.é
Here’s a left-field find. I was drawn to this duo of Spanish-born brothers based in the French industrial town of Saint-Étienne because of their album’s song titles: What was up with that dog in the dock? Or the madman in a car, turning right? I got hooked on Théo Herrerias’s smoky voice and the way the pair remake the chanson using electronics and subtle hip-hop influences. I still know barely anything about Terrenoire, but hours of listening have lodged their dreamscapes in my head.

Ichiko Aoba
Luminescent Creatures
Humility is not a quality often associated with performers, but this Japanese sonic watercolor artist always keeps herself in perspective. Inspired by dives she took among the jellyfish and plankton of the Ryukyu Archipelago, Aoba’s translucent songs carry the listener through submerged landscapes, both in the waters whose vastness enchant and frighten her and in the mind: “Inside each of us,” she intones, “there is a place for our stars to sleep.”

Lido Pimienta
La Belleza
Lido Pimienta does not accept limits. The Colombian Canadian visionary taught herself to write chamber music during the pandemic, then collaborated with composer Owen Pallett to go fully orchestral for this film score-inspired project. Incorporating dembow rhythms, choral voices and the energy of reggaetón, it is a work that truly transcends while never coming feeling forced. “‘World music’ is just the classical music of brown people,” Pimienta said in a recent interview. Here she defeats colonialist categories and makes the orchestral deeply personal.

Brogéal
Tuesday Paper Club
The Pogues’ shadow hangs long and wobbly over celtic rock, but rarely can a band both absorb and go beyond Shane McGowan’s influence. On its debut album, this Scottish five-piece shows it has the range while maintaining the commitment to uplifting the folkways of its hometown of Falkirk. They nod to The Jam and The Beatles while busting out the reels; it all melds perfectly. Funny, raucous, tight and shambolic at the same time, Tuesday Paper Club is a new-generation scramble for greatness that fully earns its spot at the top of the lineage

15 MORE SONGS
(Get the full playlist here)

Dove Ellis, “Love Is”
Gen Z adventurers have been reconfiguring R&B, hip-hop and indie rock for a while; finally, someone’s doing it for the singer-songwriters. A 22-year-old Irish oracle whose angelic tenor invites many comparisons but whose Blakean sensibility sets him apart, Ellis is the voice of the coming year, and this is his most succinct manifesto.

Brandi Carlile, “Returning To Myself”
What happens after the starburst of a breakthrough passes? On an album that lovers of melodic soul-searching shouldn’t take for granted, Carlile asks herself the hard questions, never more compassionately than on this spare title track.

Jaylann, “Ha Wlidi”
Moroccan pop star Jaylann shows utter command in this clarion call inspired by a lament recorded in the 1970s by the political rock band Lemchaheb. Jaylann and producer Beathoven channel traditional elements through an Afrobeats sensibility to create a patriotic anthem that has taken the country by storm.

Amaarae, “Girlie-Pop!”
Genre fluidity becomes gender fluidity in this little slice of sexiness inspired by the nightlife in Brazil. Amaarae syncopates desire itself as she contemplates the many creative uses of the phrase “hooking up.”

Kenshi Yonezu, “IRIS OUT”
In Asia, pop music is inseparable from other tech-forward art forms like animé, and singers play with identity with the ease of cartoon heroes vaulting through the sky. Yonezu, who started as a synth-driven vocaloid singer, has soundtracked several animés, and this theme song to the latest installment in the Chainsaw Man series fully captures the excitement of those films.

Dave featuring Nicole Blakk, “Fairchild”
The bold, unaffected directness of this song startled me: When has a man so sensitively addressed the subjects of a woman suffering a sexual assault? England’s rap standard-bearer wisely shares the narrative with the coolly composed Blakk; when their voices intertwine while detailing the myriad ways women endure men’s unwanted aggression, the effect is devastating.

Cleo Reed, “Salt n’ Lime”
Late-capitalist melancholy never sounded so sweet as in this payday anthem, an indictment of the hustle that acknowledges how hard it is to avoid it.

Kae Tempest, “Statue In The Square”
How to speak truth to power: Kae Tempest, long a pillar of English literary circles and queer communities, lays out his lived reality in measured but uncompromising bars throughout this refusal of trans erasure. The chorus feels prophetic: “They never wanted people like me round here / but when I’m dead, they’ll put my statue in the square.”

Sydney Rose, “We Hug Now”
Cruelty can sneak into a relationship without much warning, especially among young people trying emotions on for size. This earnest, crushing elegy for a friendship gone terribly wrong has hit a nerve: With hundreds of millions of streams across social platforms, it’s the soundtrack to a billion tears shed behind closed doors.

Kashus Culpepper and Sierra Ferrell, “Broken Wing Bird”
Culpepper has a chance to break through in mainstream country, but this Alabaman with red clay in his voice is a Southern soul man through and through — which means, of course, that he’s also a country singer. He shows his lonesome side on this existential ballad blessed by harmonies from Americana favorite Ferrell.

Nick Shoulders, “Dixie Be Damned”
I’m sick of trying to explain why the South is beautiful even though its history is so marred by ugliness, and why it’s the people, the ones who stand for love and compassion, that makes it great. From now on, I’m going to let this song by Arkansas traveler Shoulders do the explaining for me.

Selma French, “Little Sisters & Friends”
This gentle incantation about intergenerational connectedness from French, a Norwegian folk singer and fiddler, is cool and luminous, like endless summer twilight.

TUL8TE, “El Hob Gany”
“I feel like I’ve walked into my father’s wedding,” reads one of the comments under the YouTube video for this irresistibly danceable seduction by the masked Egyptian lover man whom everyone loves to imitate on TikTok.

The Neighborhood Kids, “They Aim At Us”
There’s so much protest music circulating in mostly obscured channels right now. Here’s a missive marked by pride and resistance from the streets of Southern California.

Cain Culto and Sudan Archives, “KFC Santeria”
I put this song at the end because, frankly, it’s outrageous in several different ways. It’s also utterly unique: A Kentucky-raised Columbian/Nicaraguan fiddler and rapper who was once an Evangelical worship leader fully lets his freak flag fly, ably assisted by one of the most daring electronic pop auteurs in the game today; she’s a mean fiddler, too.

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The Best Music of 2025

You can find links to every list in our team’s Best Music of 2025 package collected on one page here. It has our list of the top 125 songs, our picks for the year’s best albums and personal top 10s from a dozen team members you know from All Songs Considered, Alt.Latino, Tiny Desk and beyond. Bookmark it — it’ll have more, including lists of the year’s best classical and jazz, and coverage of the year in music news, soon.

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One More Thing

Thanks to all who suggested additions to my list of best cover songs over the last couple of weeks. Your choices aren’t all from this year, but they all go somewhere fascinating. I’m happy to share these!

Piers Faccini and Ballaké Sissoko, “Special Rider Blues” (Skip James)

Blondshell, “Diet Pepsi” (Addison Rae)

Kate Bush featuring Trio Bulgarka, “Rocket Man” (Elton John)

Gary U.S. Bonds, “The Pretender” (Jackson Browne”)

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