The lists have been tallied, the year’s almost come to a close, and after some debate and discussion, lobbying for our favorites and giving an extra endorsement to some underrated gems, our list of the best albums of the year has been finalized. As it does every year, it covers all genres: rock, rap, electronic, country, metal, folk, jazz, punk, and various shades of gray in between. And we wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s full of longtime favorite artists and new discoveries, MVPs and underdogs, and though it’s ranked, I think we all know that’s fairly arbitrary, other than to emphasize that the albums at the top are those that nearly everyone agreed on. So let’s get to it. Enjoy our list of the 50 Best Albums of 2025.
Blurbs by Adam Blyweiss (AB), Adam P. Newton (APN), Brad Cohan (BC), Casey Burke (CB), Colin Dempsey (CD), Dom Lepore (DL), Elliot Burr (EBu), Emily Reily (ER), Flora Arnold (FA), Jason Brow (JB), John-Paul Shiver (JPS), Jeff Terich (JT), Kurt Orzeck (KO), L.D. Flowers (LDF), Langdon Hickman (LH), Louis Pelingen (LP), Michael Pementel (MP), Tyler Dunston (TD), Tom Morgan (TM), Virginia Croft (VC), and Wil Lewellyn (WL).
Note: When you buy something through our affiliate links, Treble receives a commission. All albums we cover are chosen by our editors and contributors.
50. Home Front – Watch It Die
Earlier this year, Home Front’s Graeme MacKinnon told me that, with winters as forbidding as Edmonton’s, “everyone here has to dig their way out of the snowbank.” The idea being that everyone made the effort to get to the venue, so it’s only fair to give them the best fucking show you possibly can. And that goes likewise for the band’s sophomore album Watch It Die, an angst-ridden yet ultimately uplifting blend of synth-pop and street punk, goth-industrial and soaring new wave melodies. Having graduated from studio project to certified stage wreckers, they brought that energy back for a set of life-affirming anthems, amplifying their sound with a physicality and intensity that’s all the more energizing as a result. When you need to dig yourself out of it, it’ll give you the fuel you need. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
49. Barker – Stochastic Drift
Six years removed from his solo debut, the second album from this partner in Barker & Baumecker and the Leisure System label splits the difference between dancefloor throb and calming frequencies. Stochastic Drift specializes in dub that creeps like an advancing army (“Positive Disintegration”) and breakbeats with wide open spaces (“Cosmic Microwave,” “Fluid Mechanics”), every attacking reggae chord and jazz progression beckoning you to stick around for the decay. It’s one of the year’s most aggressive natural highs, offering listeners a choice between focus or the loss thereof. – AB
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
48. Pile – Sunshine and Balance Beams
Pile have been hammering noise rock and post-hardcore into weird new shapes for so long that for a brief moment it no longer sounded that much like rock. Sunshine and Balance Beams could have been a continued pursuit of refracting punk riffs through a fragmented lens, but instead they recommitted to the idea of making a great rock record with all the basic elements: guitar riffs, taut rhythms, Rick Maguire’s versatile vocal performances covering a range of gentle croon to menacing bark. It’s an album of raw muscle and raw nerves, refocusing their abrasive aesthetic and refining it into more concise and efficient vehicles for melody. They’re some of Pile’s hardest hitting songs, the product of a well honed set of musicians barreling full steam ahead. Hard as it goes, Sunshine and Balance Beams retains a progressive streak that reveals itself unexpectedly—not long after Maguire shouts, “If there’s no room for cowards now, then who the fuck are you?” in “Born at Night,” a flood of strings comes crashing through, a reminder that there’s nothing particularly straightforward or expected about this at all. – JT
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
47. Ichiko Aoba – Luminescent Creatures
On Ichiko Aoba’s 2020 album Windswept Adan, the Japanese singer/songwriter opened up a portal to music tethered to film’s emotional language. Luminescent Creatures is her return from that realm and she applies its dream logic to her staccato, minimalist guitar work. In practice, the record plays like a meeting of her patented style and Windswept Adan’s lushness rather than a progression, and “aurora” is the most direct compromise between the two sensibilities. However, most of Luminescent Creatures unfolds in subtler ways, showcasing a nuanced development for Aoba. She’s finally found a way to match the ethereal feeling she formerly conveyed with only a guitar. Turns out, it took a litany of flutes, violins, cellos, and harps to do so. – CD
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
46. SML – How You Been
The grooves remain cyclical and self-referential, filtered through an abstract, late-stage Miles-like lens. Jams such as “Taking Out The Trash” serve as a wake-up call that SML—the Los Angeles-based experimental jazz supergroup featuring bassist Anna Butterss, synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson, percussionist Booker Stardrum, and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann—was serious on their debut, Small Medium Large, from a few years back. Their new album, How You Been, introduces some downtempo directions that leave a more lasting impression, opening a new chamber within the polyrhythmic cipher. However, the biggest discoveries here, like in “Brood Board SHROOM,” lie in the flow of the rhythm itself, with symphonic bass tones descending in the background. While everything feels slow, it’s still precise, warm, psychedelic, and just as captivating as the 4/4 jams. This quintet seems to have unlocked that same warmth at a lower groove, and it works. – JPS
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
45. Djrum – Under Tangled Silence
It’s remarkable to consider that something as graceful and beautifully executed as Djrum’s Under Tangled Silence was born of frustration. Felix Manuel, while working on what would become the follow-up to his 2018 album Portrait With Firewood, found himself fighting a losing battle with technology, losing most of his productions in a hard drive failure. In the process of starting over, he sought new focus in the piano, of which he’s been proficient since childhood. Those performances are the heart of Under Tangled Silence, an album that’s frequently playful in its IDM mischief (“Three Foxes Chasing Each Other”), occasionally intense in its beat-driven fury (“Let Me”), but rarely less than stunning. It takes only one listen to a brief solo performance like “Hold” to understand this is anything but a conventional electronic album. – JT
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
44. Rochelle Jordan – Through the Wall
Rochelle Jordan curates a vintage yet futuristic mix of ’90s R&B, pop, hip-hop, soul, and electronic music on Through The Wall. That’s how ROJO, the Los Angeles-based British-Canadian artist, attracts the most adventurous—aka dope—producers to collaborate. When Byron the Aquarius, Terry Hunter, DāM FunK, and long-time collaborator KLSH all work on the same project, UK garage influences, house tracks with sleek hooks, and cocoa butter vocals come through. It’s comforting that Jordan chooses this as her brand, cause no one is making sexy dance music with as much polish and sheen as this. – JPS
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
43. Backxwash – Only Dust Remains
After her scathing previous triad of albums, Backxwash is willing to turn the tide for once, taking more time to unravel Only Dust Remains, another tour de force in her unfolding evolution as an artist. The commitment to refine her strengths reflects throughout—the 7-minute showstopper “Wake Up” is merciless, the lighter loops of “Undesirable” carry a welcoming gentleness, and “Stairway To Heaven” achieves a ravishing high with a guitar that claws toward the skies. Backxwash might have settled past the trilogy, but now she’s ready to pave a path toward somewhere new, welcoming more light amidst the darkness. – LP
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
42. HAIM – I Quit
There’s a constant theme of shedding dead weight throughout HAIM’s fourth album, I Quit. Opening track “Gone” finds Danielle Haim singing “I’ll be whatever I need,” and later on “Blood on the Street,” Este Haim sings, “And I can count on my one hand / all the times that you really made me feel free.” And on the laid back R&B-influenced single “Relationships,” the band is ready to say goodbye to those too. The album employs a strong set of instrumentations to accompany these declarations, whether it be poppy percussion or searing guitar solos. The band’s bond feels stronger than ever as both Alana and Este take lead vocals on their own songs (“Spinning” and “Cry”, respectively) and the album reinforces their ambidextrous musicianship. I Quit is HAIM having their most fun while they lose what’s holding them back. – VC
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
41. Turnstile – Never Enough
Never Enough’s first side ends with frontman Brendan Yates exploding in 90 seconds of frenetic joy with “Sunshower.” Everything feels good. Everything feels right. “And this is where I want to be,” he shouts, before this kinetic moment subsides to a peaceful soundscape featuring flautist Shabaka Hutchings. Dichotomies abound in Turnstile’s excellent fourth album, as the band grapples with themes of regret, loss and resolution while bleeding hardcore with electronica, pop punk, and new wave. Never Enough concludes the transformative trilogy of 2018’s Time & Space and 2021’s Glow On. Along the way, Turnstile shed its hardcore conventions, often to the chagrin of the scene’s purists. But hardcore is alive and well; it doesn’t need Turnstile to save it, and they wouldn’t want to. Turnstile’s happy doing their own thing; after all, this is where they want to be. – JB
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
40. ShrapKnel – Lincoln Continental Breakfast/Saisir le feu/Armature
Choose your own ShrapKnel adventure: Ramshackle razor’s edge funk with Bruiser Brigade beatmaker Raphy? Apocalyptic menace echoing through space with future-rap seer Mike Ladd? Crackling psychedelic grooves with Richmond samplesmith Ohbliv? Embark on these journeys separately or together, as part of a triptych of exploratory hip-hop albums that each showcase the versatility and breadth of the Philly/New York rap duo in concise but inspired half-hour installments. It’s a bigger arena for PremRock and Curly Castro to lyrically spar, offering some of their most dazzlingly seamless verbal gymnastics on a banger like the classic rock-riffing “Mercure” or the white-knuckle demolition derby of “Bare Knuckle Blade Party.” What could have been information overload ends up as their most fun series of albums, effortless and infectious even as the bar’s been raised past where the notches end. – JT
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
39. Cloakroom – Last Leg of the Human Table
Don’t call it a phase. Cloakroom may be right at home in the shoegaze revival but with their fourth album they prove themselves impossible to pin down. The thickly distorted bass and inconceivably downtuned guitar riffs still abound, more voluminous than burly, buoying up Doyle Martin’s classically airy vocals, but interspersed now are more softly dreamy sections. The opening lick on “Unbelonging” and the nostalgia-drenched tone on “Bad Larry” showcase a delightful penchant for The Police-ification of indie rock but by way of Lynch’s Roadhouse stage. It’s the entanglement of those experiments with their refined shoegaze sound that brings this album to life. – FA
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
38. Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory – Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory
“Who wants to live forever?” asks Sharon Van Etten on the gorgeous, doom-laden opener for her debut with her four-piece band, The Attachment Theory. Van Etten’s captivating, mysterious album explores feelings of isolation, sadness, and hope in a heartless world. She tackles regrets on “Idiot Box”; addresses heavy guilt on “Life (What It Must Be Like)”; looks beyond the grave in “Afterlife”; reaches acceptance on “Idiot Box”; and imparts wisdom on “Something Ain’t Right.” Van Etten’s own skeletons remain hidden, and that makes the album powerful: It lets us fill in the blanks so we can exorcise our own traumas. Love, a tried-and-true artistic muse, lacks value here; it’s the final destination and how we get there that’s keeping Van Etten rapt. – ER
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
37. Preservation & Gabe ‘Nandez – Sortilège
The sounds on this record—the electronic guitar which sets the stage for “Spire,” the snippet of piano glissando on “Muay Sok,” the crackle and the clarity throughout—are so memorable, the perfect counterpoint to Gabe ’Nandez’s intricate divinations. Texture is the word I think of when I think of this album—both a meticulously crafted sonic texture, which splices field recordings, snatches of dialogue, and melodic fragments, and Gabe ’Nandez’s interwoven lyrical texture: “There is no escape from the laws of fate you are stapled too / These are observations, I clock my prey like a sabretooth.” – TD
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
36. Tyler Childers – Snipe Hunter
The headline of Snipe Hunter, Tyler Childers’s seventh album, is its musical risk-taking. “Country” is an inadequate descriptor for this record. Aided (and maybe emboldened) by producer Rick Rubin, Childers experiments with vocal modulations, takes dissonant solos, and sometimes gets downright symphonic without ever losing the thread. The songs are both sturdy and complex, like standards overlaid with new textures. But for all the sonic flourishes, the real triumph here is Childers’ lyricism: by turns penetrating, wise, self-deprecating, conversational, goofy. In one of the best songs, he imagines a pilgrimage to India after having spent two years reading the Bhagavad Gita; in another, he calls kangaroos “deer evolved to better boxers.” And that’s not even to mention “Bitin’ List,” surely one of the funniest kiss-off tracks ever written. Snipe Hunter is the work of a songwriter who can seemingly get away with anything. – CB
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Rough Trade (vinyl)
35. No Joy – Bugland
Jasamine White-Gluz allows more than enough space for her signature shoegaze sound to get a little weird, having incorporated elements of metal and pulsing electronic dance music on 2020’s Motherhood (as well as contributions from her death metal vocalist sister Alissa). In context, Bugland isn’t that much weirder; White-Gluz’s collaboration with Fire-Toolz’s Angel Marcloid opens up their sound to usher in utopian virtual chimes, baggy breakbeats and even a ferocious black metal hiss—sometimes all at once, as on the maximalist closer “Jelly Meadow Bright.” But Bugland by and large feels like the wondrous destination where No Joy had always been headed, blurring the lines between fantasy and reality in an endlessly infectious yet playfully glitching set of alt-rock and dream pop that employs the tools of shoegaze to find the biggest and brightest hooks rather than drowning them in a few too many layers. Bugland isn’t a place you’ll find on a map, but once you’re there, you’ll never want to leave. – JT
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
34. Open Mike Eagle – Neighborhood Gods Unlimited
Everything on Neighborhood Gods Unlimited is broken: phone screens, perception, our brains, even Open Mike Eagle himself, the pieces of which he’s slowly buying back in small amounts. It sounds bleak, and on some level it is—few albums better capture what it feels like to live in a world that nickel and dimes you to madness than Neighborhood Gods Unlimited, a warmly funny and vulnerable set of hip-hop that delves into feelings that should prove relatable to just about anyone who hears it. Like Mike’s own sense of self, it’s also fragmented, abstract and disjointed, but given a hazily accessible set of productions from the likes of Child Actor, August Fanon, and Kenny Segal, providing incidental music for its programming about stumbling through one indignity after another. But Open Mike Eagle’s ability to laugh at it all and still conclude that “the fact that we exist is magic” keeps its light from ever dimming and its heat from ever fading, a reminder that it’s still worth trying to put those pieces back together. – JT
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
33. The Necks – Disquiet
In this world of so many attention-sapping distractions, we need more works like the meditative Disquiet. The 24th album (all of which are brilliant) from Australian jazz experimentalists The Necks is an improvised three-hour-long epic that’s so absorbingly hypnotic you can practically feel your dopamine-sapped brainwaves resetting. All four enormous tracks (the shortest track “Causeway” is still 26 minutes long) are spell-binding, however, the hour-and-a-quarter long “Ghost Net,” with its interlocking rhythms and gradual melodic shifts, is one of the most striking pieces released in 2025. There’s something borderline spiritual about Disquiet’s repetitions and invocations. Locking into their mystical frequencies is an essential experience, not just for adventurous listeners, but also those seeking a bit of mental peace in this loud, hectic world. – TM
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
32. Margo Price – Hard Headed Woman
In a career built upon being an outspoken iconoclast, Margo Price has arrived on her crowning achievement. Hard Headed Woman is a 12-song testament to standing true to your convictions in the face of a calcified and recalcitrant establishment. Sure, this is sharp and sassy country music that’s reverent to its forebears, but a genuine warmth pervades the album. Even as Price engages in bold storytelling about life on the road and the trials of trying to be a full-time working musician, the music reveals an artist with an undeniable love for what she does, despite the difficulties. She lives life on her terms, as evidenced by the crisp songwriting that gives her backing band plenty of room to breathe. The album pulls no punches, but it’s bereft of bitterness while she aims to push country music toward something better. – APN
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
31. Viagra Boys – viagr aboys
After the cohesive Cave World, Viagra Boys got bored with staring into the void and waiting for it to stare back; So, they stole its wallet, DM’d its girl and did all its drugs. The result is the endlessly charming viagr aboys, an album that’s as much a return to form for these post-punk delinquents as another volley in their campaign to uncover wisdom through unabashed debauchery. Sebastian Murphy holds court in the gutter with his charismatic scumbag anthems (“Man Made of Meat,” “You N33d Me”) and musical musings rife with conceptual continuity: shrimp; worms; wiener dogs; romance. Viagra Boys may celebrate delinquency as a way of life, but viagr aboys refuses to succumb to the world’s hatred and malice. There is purity in its heart. It is sleaze as an act of resistance. – JB
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Rough Trade (vinyl)
30. Hotline TNT – Raspberry Moon
One of the year’s best shoegaze albums, Raspberry Moon found Hotline TNT expanding into a jangling ’90s indie rock feel at times, with Will Anderson’s vocals playing a more important role in the mesmerizing songwriting. Raspberry Moon has some of the best production and guitar sounds of 2025, balancing a raw organic warmth with the swirl of effects that make them who they are. There may be less punk influence left in their veins, but they’ve traded up for more nuanced melodies and catchier songwriting. – WL
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
29. Jason Isbell – Foxes in the Snow
Few living artists embody the word “integrity” more than Jason Isbell, who is on the fast track to receiving the universal respect that forebears Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson garnered. Isbell continues to bring together Americans in an age where cultural fragmentation is omnipotent, and he’s done it once again with Foxes in the Snow. This record doesn’t feature his 400 Unit backing crew, but its measure as a landmark is the same. The White Stripes took two weeks to record Elephant; Isbell only needed five days to record this, his latest masterpiece. It won’t be his last. – KO
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
28. DJ Haram – Beside Myself
The true hallmark of Beside Myself rests in how effortlessly DJ Haram combines dystopian IDM with religious iconography. On her impeccably crafted Hyperdub debut, she fuses hip-hop, two-step, and samples of Middle Eastern instrumentation to create spectral horror-jazz. It’s rife with standouts such as “Lifelike,” Stenography,” “Loneliness Epidemic,” and “Sahel,” brash and unapologetic but deeply introspective, as a bevy of guest vocalists speak candidly about systemic ills and sociopolitical issues. Distorted snare claps act to disorient as bass grooves thrum with menace, while syncopated beats do battle with grinding guitar riffs. Beside Myself is equal parts maximalist rage, ambient movie soundtrack and crackling grime. – APN
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
27. Annahstasia – Tether
I was on a plane the first time I heard Tether—not the ideal place to listen closely to music. Even with good headphones, the pressure and the surrounding noise can make hearing little details difficult, but Annahstasia’s singular voice and captivating songwriting cut through it with disarming clarity. Annahstasia has a way of contorting words into fantastic shapes which take on new life with each iteration. When she sings phrases like “Say that I’m the villain of the story,” “To buy her silk and velvet,” and “’Cause I get lonely / And I know you get lonely too” over and over, it can become overpowering. Stray lines stick in your head like mantras. – TD
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
26. Nourished by Time – The Passionate Ones
Marcus Brown’s musical namesake, Nourished by Time, says everything about what drives him: Things get better with time. Earlier releases written in his parents’ basement eventually led to international acclaim, but that came from hard work, perseverance and passion. The aptly-titled The Passionate Ones proves Brown hasn’t forgotten his roots. It glistens with the hope of dreaming of better, where Brown draws from his passion to encourage others to act similarly. His lo-fi synth-pop and R&B fusion is at its most uplifting on “Automatic Love” and “Max Potential” which swell with motivation, also on “9 2 5” and “Baby Baby,” where he holds the world’s powers accountable. Such inspiring notions make The Passionate Ones so necessary in today’s precarious world. – DL
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
25. Cate Le Bon – Michelangelo Dying
From the start of Michelangelo Dying, there’s a brash, earthy quality to Cate Le Bon’s sound. Opener “Jerome” feels spacious and lush, playing with texture as horns blare against delicate guitars. While this album feels freer in its form compared to its predecessor Pompeii, there’s a connecting quality of drudgery between the tracks. “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?” listens like a sullen dance floor ballad, Le Bon’s vocals swaying through the chorus, as she delivers the aching line “I thought about your mother / I hope she knew I loved her.” Le Bon reflects and turns inward, crafting a musical landscape all her own. – VC
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
24. Lifeguard – Ripped and Torn
Chicago trio Lifeguard made their Matador debut with a pair of EPs that showcased their prowess for hard-driving, abrasive post-hardcore and an accelerated artistic growth alike. With their (technically speaking) first proper full-length, Ripped and Torn, the impact is just as heavy but the direction far more gnarled and abstract. Juxtaposing thorny post-punk riffs against dub-inspired echo effects, transient random noise bursts and echoes of art-punk iconoclasts This Heat and Laddio Bolocko. Yet the young group retain their sense of melody and immediacy even when delivering sheets of metallic guitar against rippling bass drum reverberations on “Like You’ll Lose” or offering oblique statements such as “Words like tonality come to me” on “TLA.” I can’t say I know what that means or even if I’m supposed to, but Lifeguard’s curious confusion sounds incredible all the same. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
23. Mary Halvorson – About Ghosts
Mary Halvorson leans back, delivering a more playful set of new pieces compared to the intense and often somewhat esoteric Bone Bells from earlier this year. Her guitar still sounds like it’s made of rubber, as close to a Looney Tunes rendering in sound as you can get, really. The harmonic choices are still hip and the melodic motion is spry and surprising but always, always fun. The past four years have seen half a dozen records from Halvorson, all with quite different character. It’s a blessed wonder, her creativity. – LH
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
22. Messa – The Spin
Messa’s The Spin is the best quasi-doom metal, high-drama, vintage-tinged album of the year (the category is not as narrow as it seems). As “Immolation” demonstrates in how it unfurls from a piano ballad to an ’80s guitar solo climax, the Italian group’s first album on Metal Blade succeeds by making gloominess cool. Messa believe only in full steps, no half measures, and find overlap with the only other genre that could match their Pallbearerian levels of overexpression—goth rock. The result is expectedly exaggerated, yet played seriously. It’s why the horn solo on “The Dress,” which should come off as saccharine, rings sincerely and appropriate. Of course that’s what heartbreak feels like, Messa implies, did you expect it to be subtle? – CD
Read more: Review | The Best metal albums of 2025
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)
21. Jim Ghedi – Wasteland
The title of Jim Ghedi’s latest album might seem a bit on the nose just looking at the album cover and hearing (an answer to) the plain query in his apocalyptically gothic interpretation of “What Will Become of England.” The noise rock inflections on his particular style of folk do ominously boom more than jangle. But just as with the millennia-long history of the British isle, one must take a longer view. There is mourning and warning aplenty, to be sure, but always mixed with the yearning desire for hope and connection to land that makes any folk music great. – FA
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
20. Sumac and Moor Mother – The Film
On paper, it shouldn’t work. Free jazz-influenced sludge metal combined with spoken word/rapped poetry. It sounds like a recipe combining steak, ice cream and champagne; three great individual flavors that, when blended together, make for an indigestible mess. Against the odds, however, The Film adds up to an audacious and devastating success. Moor Mother’s lyrical obsessions (the looseness of time, the horrors of black history) combine quite spectacularly with Sumac’s clangorous, potent, free-form heaviness. On “Scene 2: The Run” you can practically feel the bombs falling (the Gaza genocide weighs heavy on the album’s mood), while transcendent album highlight “Scene 5: Breathing Fire” takes us towards the stars, away from all this mayhem. Spectacular and essential auditory art. – TM
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
19. Circuit des Yeux – Halo on the Inside
Chicago artist Haley Fohr has spent most of her time as Circuit des Yeux smothering folk and chamber pop in noise and digital processing. The eighth Circuit des Yeux LP, rhythmic and gothic in the extreme, rests at industrial’s doorstep. She introduces the album with the declarative, “In time you’ll see me/Through all things dreamy,” and proceeds to arrange and program wobbly synths, low-strung basslines from the 1980s, and breathy vocals in an affected tenor. Halo on the Inside matches the faded shades of gray of This Mortal Coil as well as the sinister majesty of contemporaries like Yves Tumor. – AB
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
18. Hannah Frances – Nested in Tangles
Hannah Frances’ 2024 album Keeper of the Shepherd wasn’t her debut but felt like a new beginning, its lush arrangements and intricate performances providing gorgeous vehicles for introspection and soul-searching. The seed planted with that record has flourished into an even more lively and verdant sound with Nested in Tangles, a similarly ambitious and versatile album whose branches reach out farther into prog-folk interludes, gently complex spoken word pieces and a uniformly gorgeous sound that draws inspiration from progressive rock and jazz. It’s at times a heavy listen, Frances unafraid to touch the tenderest nerves (“Blue herons flew over our house as it burned down/Anger lingering on in all that’s left of it has left and gone“; “The fear of everyone leaving/Keeps me leaving first“). But the landscape is never less than breathtaking. – JT
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
17. Greet Death – Die in Love
Shoegaze’s Achilles’ Heel is sacrificing sincerity to better serve magnificent melodies and massive guitar volume. But the term “shoegaze” doesn’t just simply imply looking down while performing, or bashfulness—it can also be the telltale sign of a liar: Someone who can’t look you straight in the eye because they know they’re inauthentic. Greet Death has a clean conscience in this regard: Every song of theirs is blessed with a brilliant touch. Greet Death look directly at you the entire time they play Die in Love, because they rightly know this is the next-level rock. – KO
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
16. Eli Winter – A Trick of the Light
Opening cut “Arabian Nightingale” alone would be enough to guarantee a spot on our list. We here at Treble have collectively been getting more into country, being all working class types of a certain age, and this sits right next to our well-documented love of jazz, especially of the toothsome variety. So when Winter comes along not just blending the two but also letting each stand on their own, zig-zagging like a mathematician working out every permutation of an idea he can out to paper, it’s hard for us not to love it. Add in the ramshackle warmth of that distorted indie rock hum and it’s heaven for us. – LH
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
15. Model/Actriz – Pirouette
Model/Actriz has caused a stir in noisy music circles, with the effect of a metallic spoon grating against its glass of caustic acid. After debut Dogsbody acted as the arrival of a fully-formed unit, Pirouette is rightly positioned as the choreographed flourish displaying all the group’s earned praise: the machinery of Jack Wetmore’s guitars chiseling through throbbing disco drums and bass swells, and Cole Haden conjuring incantations about gnashing dogs and Prada. There’s a delicious, dancey sort of dread you get from “Doves” and “Cinderella, with monologues juggling self-doubt and self-expression to bring the tension from low simmer to fever pitch and establishing 2025’s most claustrophobic club night. – EBu
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
14. Armand Hammer & The Alchemist – Mercy
On 2023’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, producers such as DJ Haram and El-P built imposing fortresses with trapdoors around billy woods and ELUCID’s lyrical puzzle boxes. But on 2021’s Haram, the duo found a natural counterpart in prolific producer The Alchemist, whose eerie soundscapes traced the duo’s own harrowing observations like curls of smoke. That shade of sonic menace has only darkened on Mercy, Armand Hammer’s second collaboration with The Alchemist, as woods and ELUCID tighten the tension through invasive capitalist mechanisms, bodies torn apart by war and trying to survive day-to-day life on the precipice. But there’s a warmth that radiates in spite of that darkness, on the gorgeously soulful “Calypso Gene” and the charmingly nostalgic “Super Nintendo.” The title quality is something in woefully short supply, but Armand Hammer are still generous enough to share. – JT
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
13. Geese – Getting Killed
Few musical moments in 2025 had quite the jolting immediacy of Getting Killed opener “Trinidad”: After a light backbeat and flecks of Emily Green’s wah-wah guitar, Geese explodes into noise-rock chaos. Lead singer Cameron Winter bellows “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!!!!!” and by God you believe him. Though Geese’s third album doesn’t remain this nuts, it’s never predictable. It changes on a dime constantly, switching song styles, tempos, and polyrhythms (the band may currently have rock’s best rhythm section in Dominic DiGesu and Max Bassin) in tracks like “Husbands,” “Half Real,” “100 Horses” and especially the walloping “Taxes.” Cameron Winter’s shitfaced-Harry-Nilsson vocals and cryptic lyrics will undoubtedly polarize or turn people off. But the best advice in that regard comes from another polarizing work, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet: “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.” – LDF
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
12. Earl Sweatshirt – Live Laugh Love
Even at his most ornery or most garishly violent, Earl Sweatshirt has always held onto a kernel of earnestness, a desire to wring truth from painful life experience. On Live Laugh Love, the now-31-year-old father of two brings that earnestness to the fore. As with most of his projects, the record doesn’t even crack the 30-minute mark but contains more verbal dexterity than most rappers manage on an album twice its length. That the loop-based production is no great leap forward hardly matters; what’s really illuminating here is Earl’s newfound distance from his own struggles. He makes pronouncements about his pain rather than suffering through it in real time, as in the lowest moments of Some Rap Songs or I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside. He even ends the album with an encouraging address to listeners: “At the end of the day it’s really just you and whatever you think / I’m airmailing you strength.” As the kids say, Live Laugh Love finds Earl in his unc era. But he’s only getting better. – CB
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
11. Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo – In the Earth Again
Notable good band Chat Pile seem keenly aware of their reputation in certain circles. Instead of bitching online or in the private messages of fans and critics, they do the better thing; challenge themselves, expand, grow fat and show people who’s boss. The presence of Pedigo, a country/folk guitar wunderkind with a magic ear, gives the band permission to explore their more atmospheric capacities, making a similar kind of evolutionary leap that made groups like Anatomy of Habit and Oxbow grow beyond mere noise rock to expansive rock composers. You get the sense we’ve barely seen what the band is capable of. And Pedigo? Well, he’s as great as he’s always been, whether you’ve been paying attention or not. – LH
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)
10. Lucrecia Dalt – A Danger to Ourselves
Described as “a fearless reflection on the unfiltered complexities of human connection,” A Danger to Ourselves, the latest effort from experimental polymath Lucrecia Dalt, is just that, hitting on all emotionally wrought, tenderly poignant and visceral cylinders. Its 13 songs revealing in bare-bones view the next-level musicianship and heart-rending beauty of Dalt’s wildly creative progression. With a wall of dizzying electronics, loops, processed beats and dissonant spurts ping-ponging behind her, the sublimely-voiced Dalt, with crucial assists from collaborators like David Sylvian, Juana Molina and Camille Mandoki, has created an arresting acoustic and sonic sprawl that is beyond entrancing. – BC
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
9. Sudan Archives – The BPM
Sudan Archives has a way of shapeshifting not just over the course of an album but within a single song as well, always keeping the listener on their toes. On The BPM, she refuses to be pinned down or boxed in. And yet, even with so many ideas, the record never feels cluttered, only kaleidoscopic. It’s layered with techno and house beats perfect for late night listening, as well as Sudan Archives’ violin, which floats into the back half of the opener “DEAD” and concludes “YEA YEA YEA” with crystalline sustained notes. Though the record covers a wide range of emotional territory, an irrepressible self-assurance is consistent throughout, embodied in a line from “LOS CINCI”: “Sometimes I can get real low but I am high right now.” – TD
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
8. Deftones – private music
Over the past 30 years Deftones have carved out a discography of immense metal anthems wrapped in dreamy ambience. Their ability to seamlessly blend contrasting styles has cemented them as one of the most beloved and influential acts in alternative metal. Deftones themselves have always been driven to push themselves farther—each of their records building upon the last—and private music, their 10th studio album, no exception to this rule. From the dreamy ambiance of “infinite source,” to the melodic rush of “cXz” and the groove-laden heaviness of “milk of the madonna,” private music is a stunning new peak in a 30-year legacy. – MP
Read more: Review | The complete Deftones catalog
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
7. Clipse – Let God Sort Em Out
Being from Virginia doesn’t often give you much in the way of skin in the rap game. God bless Clipse and their return, our greatest rap royalty, paired again with Pharrell. Push’s ability not just to write but deliver lines makes him read more as a cool as fuck coke poet than a mere entertainer; Malice, his too-often underrated brother, offers a keen counterbalance to the debauchery of Push. They are devil and angel, one corrupting the other while the other redeems the first. There’s magic here that any who know generational epics or the lingering cracked bone of familial history will see, brothers on different paths, united by love, letting us see their private dialog in cinematic rap vision. – LH
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Rough Trade (vinyl)
6. Agriculture – The Spiritual Sound
Agriculture embrace grounded, human storytelling, setting themselves apart from black metal’s familiar darkness via songs of thoughtful reflection and hope. With their second studio album, The Spiritual Sound, the California act expand upon their excellent debut, offering an experience that rejects passive listening and rewards deeper engagement. All the performances on The Spiritual Sound—from the electrifying riffage on “Micah (5:15am)” to the majestic ambience of “Dan’s Love Song”—are defined by the technicality of their performances as well as the depth of their emotional impact, all which come together for a breathtaking new vision in heavy music. – MP
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
5. The Armed – THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED
The Armed are more an art project than a band, with ULTRAPOP aiming to create the most bombastic pop music through the lens of hardcore possible and Perfect Saviors being a pastiche of pop and alternative rock with an unlimited budget. Conversely, the most that can be said about THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED is that it does what it says on the tin. Through its single-minded thesis, The Armed reassert why they are the most exciting hardcore-adjacent band of the past 15 years, as good at burning off faces (“track 1”) as they are at shoegaze (“Broken Mirror”) as they are at pop-punk (“I Steal What I Want”). THE FUTURE IS… is blunt (duh), but in that bluntness is beauty, albeit a glitchy, ear-piercing beauty. – CD
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
4. Wednesday – Bleeds
Growing into a less discordant sound on Bleeds, Wednesday continue to refine their blend of alternative country and noise pop. The juxtaposed, intertwining lead and rhythm guitars of MJ Lenderman and Karly Hartzman are at their most potent on songs like “Townies” and “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On).” And Hartman remains a master of funny and vivid storytelling, her lyrics featuring vignettes of North Carolina life like “We meet up at the on ramp, drink 20/20…You saw a pitbull puppy pissin’ off a balcony.” And it all comes to a satisfying, if unsettling finale with “Gary’s II,” a real-life tale of a mistaken identity attack by a cuckolded husband suffered by the band’s landlord, wrapping up a stellar set of songs that doubles as a great short-story collection. – GH
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
3. FKA twigs – EUSEXUA
The only good thing to come out of that shitty remake of The Crow was the end of FKA twigs’ extended battle with writer’s block. She stumbled upon a rave away from the cameras and lights, and found energy and inspiration enough to produce EUSEXUA. Cross-pollenating come-hither hyperpop (the title track, “Girl Feels Good”), synth-pop and industrial suggestions (“Drums of Death”), trip-hop (“Striptease,” “24hr Dog”) and more, it’s a singularly focused and heady celebration of dance music in all its forms. The album title is FKA twigs’ portmanteau of joy and hedonism, but it may as well have been called “e pluribus unum”: from many subdivisions, one great whole sonic party. – AB
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Amazon (vinyl)
2. Deafheaven – Lonely People With Power
When we last heard from Deafheaven on 2021’s Infinite Granite, they sounded like an entirely different band, most of the black metal elements stripped from their sound in favor of a full commitment to dream pop and shoegaze that the albums leading up to hinted well enough they could pull it off. When they reemerged anew with their sixth album Lonely People With Power, they changed course yet again, not only recommitting to the heaviest aspects of their sound, but with an emphasis on more concise compositions and more visceral execution. Less a case of simplification than distillation down to something more potent, Lonely People With Power stretches past an hour but feels like their tightest statement, paring down their sprawl and packing more impact into every riff, even when delving into moments of shimmering gothic rock (“Heathen”) or surging post-hardcore (“Body Behavior”). What they’ve left behind in gradually unfolding epics (for the most part—”Amethyst” is pretty colossal) they more than make up for with anthemic immediacy and emotional depth. Before its release, vocalist George Clarke described Lonely People With Power as “doubling down on an identity it took a decade to fully understand.” This is where Deafheaven fully arrives. – JT
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Amazon (vinyl)
1. billy woods – GOLLIWOG
On “BLK XMAS,” a highlight of billy woods’ best and most challenging LP to date, guest MC Bruiser Wolf epitomizes its ethos as well as any rhyme by woods himself: “All the shit you seen … Nightmares didn’t come during dreams.” woods then goes on to depict how neighborhood residents pick through belongings left behind after a sudden eviction. The horror-film imagery and sound effects in which GOLLIWOG’s producers drench the album are nothing compared to its stories of racist-capitalist community destruction and the acts it drives people to. “How many times I gotta tell you kids, it’s us in this room/That’s it/Don’t trust aaanyone,” woods raps, to evoke his mother, on the Preservation-produced “Waterproof Mascara” (which, admittedly, is sonically terrifying).
Bleak but thoroughly realist storytelling defines GOLLIWOG—narratives that evoke the filmography of Charles Burnett as much as they do Mobb Deep, GZA or Big L. The eviction story at the center of “XMAS” gets re-evoked in “Cold Sweat,” (produced by Atmosphere’s Ant): The narrator’s tiny revenge against a racist society is sanguinely refusing to move so his cheap fuck landlord can’t flip the building. “Maquiladoras” compares an amputee war vet to a fly woods’ narrator trapped under a jar that won’t die. Moments like this, or the impressionistic indictment of neocolonialist corrupt African nations (e.g., the DRC) on “BLK ZMBY” are far scarier than the slasher samples in the background of “STAR87.” In a year as pitch-black bleak as 2025, GOLLIWOG feels especially resonant, though the subjects it explores in novelistic detail are, in various ways, millennia old. Sometimes we need art that barely hints at the possibility of happy endings. – LDF
Read more: Review
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
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