GL.25.15: Caseysimone Ballestas
GL.25.19: VIKRAM JOSEPH
GL.25.20: Kevin Wyckoff
GL.25.21: Sidney Southerland
GL.25.22: Jazzmen Williams
GL.25.23: Megan Swidler
GL.25.24: Carl Anderson
GL.25.25: Matt Jasinski
***
Writing about my favourite songs of the year has been a sporadic tradition since my early 20s, initially via the medium of Facebook notes (remember them?) and then on my own rarely-used blog – really cool to have it next to some other great retrospectives on Burn Your Hits, and to have had the motivation to actually do a list for the first time since 2022.
I’ve limited myself to two songs per artist. 2025 felt like a really strong albums year, and a very decent singles year, although number one was a tough choice – a lot of very, very good songs but nothing that declared itself as an obvious winner (I think any of my top 5 in 2016 would have finished top overall this year, for example, but the 2025 undercard would win comfortably).
Anyhow, here we are: 50 of this year’s best, featuring three artists with days of the week in their name, two songs called “Doom”, and a number one (spoiler alert) about the 2008 financial crisis.
***
50. Indigo De Souza - “Heartthrob”
49. Moonchild Sanelly – “To Kill A Single Girl (Tequila)”
48. The Tisburys – “Forever”
47. Fontaines D.C. – “It’s Amazing To Be Young”
46. Debby Friday – “Lipsync”
45. Jay Som – “Past Lives”
44. Nick Leon – “Bikini (feat. Erika de Casier)”
43. JADE – “Plastic Box”
42. Florence & The Machine – “One Of The Greats”
41. Charli XCX – “Chains Of Love”
40. Chappell Roan – “The Subway”
39. Samia – “Bovine Excision”
38. Great Grandpa – “Doom”
37. Caroline – “Two Riders Down”
36. Alien Boy – “You Want Me Too”
35. Pool Kids – “Exit Plan”
34. Ethel Cain – “Fuck Me Eyes”
33. Geese – “Cobra”
32. Wednesday – “Bitter Everyday”
31. Deftones – “Milk Of The Madonna”
30. Momma – “My Old Street”
A complicated relationship with one’s hometown, for summer? Groundbreaking. But Momma transcend any cliches with a wall of fuzzy, sparkling guitars that hit like a Siamese Dream; they acknowledge the hold that the place they grew up will likely always have over them, and also the fact that “it wants to bury me”. “My Old Street” stretches out like the summer holidays, with pummelling melodic riffs that fade into dusk like just another balmy suburban evening.
29. Saturdays At Your Place – “I’d Rather Be In Michigan”
Two minutes, four chords, extremely good vibes, little Midwest emo guitar flourishes, long-distance longing and an unwavering commitment to keeping the spirit of Modern Baseball alive in 2025: sometimes that really is all you need.
28. Algernon Cadwallader – “Attn MOVE”
On Trying Not To Have A Thought (their first album in 14 years) Algernon Cadwallader returned far more expansive than I remembered them, both musically and in their subject matter. Nowhere is this more evident than on “Attn MOVE”, which starts as a history lesson over patient math-emo guitars, and builds to a paradoxically triumphant-sounding coda (“Some black clouds never go away / Just hover in place and change their shape right in front of your face / This – is – AMERICA!”).
27. FKA Twigs – “Striptease”
Nocturnal and intimate, “Striptease” is a more contemplative moment on the back half of the club-oriented EUSEXUA, all Burial soundscapes and Caroline Polachek vocal runs. It’s “Cellophane” for the club kids, a glitchy small-hours soundtrack that serves as both comedown and come-on.
26. Turnstile – “Look Out For Me”
Never Enough was an album I struggled to fully engage with in its entirety, but on “Look Out For Me” Turnstile are in total command of their craft. The first two and a half minutes are just a regular, perfectly good Turnstile song, before it segues into a blissed-out electronic second movement which tilts towards heaven.
25. Snocaps – “Doom”
The Snocaps album falls pretty close to what I’d have imagined a P.S. Eliot album would sound like in 2025 - as someone who treasures every data point on the arc of the Crutchfield girls’ careers, its very existence is pure wish fulfilment. I feel bad not picking an Allison song – there are some very good ones – but “Doom” scratches the itch of my longing for the unrefined intensity of Katie’s old stuff, while sounding like it would fit seamlessly into a modern-day Waxahatchee set.
24. Moving Mountains – “Everyone Is Happy, And Nothing Is Good”
Moving Mountains were a very welcome revelation to me in 2025 – widescreen alt-rock with the unabashed sincerity of third-wave emo, a little reminiscent of Prawn and the Appleseed Cast and far more so of Arrows. On Pruning Of The Lower Limbs – as it turns out their fourth album, and first in 12 years – the guitars lope like forest deer and the vocals ache like a bruise. “Everyone Is Happy…” unfolds like scenery from a car window, with a crackling chorus and an outro that’s soft and forgiving like sleep.
23. Hotline TNT – “Julia’s War”
Just a huge sugar hit – guitars that roar from the speakers, a vocal line in the verse that’s almost certainly borrowed from an early Jimmy Eat World song (but I can’t work out which one), an enormously hooky chorus - and a completely gratuitous “na-na-na” bit, just as a treat.
22. Big Thief – “Incomprehensible”
‘Incomprehensible’ goes down so smoothly – a feathery thing that just drifts in a melodic haze and then takes its leave – but it’s a meandering, meditative song that feels like a whole life in four minutes. It starts out as a dream-like travelogue and ends up as a paean to ageing (“Wrinkle like the river / sweeten like the dew”) rendered in a series of beautifully wordy couplets that pretty much only Adrienne Lenker could produce.
21. Blondshell – “Event Of A Fire”
A raw emotional centrepiece on a very emotionally raw album, “Event Of A Fire” completely rejects the idea that a chugging mid-tempo indie-rock song can’t achieve excellence. The buzzing guitars that kick in after the first chorus, the hyper-specific lyrics (“Part of me never left her in 2012”), the fact that it seems to be about several different people: all things I love in a song. Two points of order: one, apparently “New Jersey’s Tony Soprano memorial centre” doesn’t exist, which is a shame – and two, please do not listen to the version with Conor Oberst singing on it.
20. Youth Lagoon – “Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas)”
I hadn’t listened to a Youth Lagoon album in 10 years but was very glad I gave Rarely Do I Dream a chance. “Gumshoe” is strange and lovely, Trevor Powers creating a collage of fragmented childhood memory and supernatural detective fiction that feels benevolently Lynchian, one of the year’s most idiosyncratic earworms.
19. CMAT – “Take A Sexy Picture Of Me”
Barely a day has gone by since this came out in May that the second verse (the verse that birthed the woke macarena) hasn’t rattled around my head like so many pills in a bottle. “Take A Sexy Picture Of Me” is both extremely silly and extremely raw in that specifically CMAT way – she writes very personally but can also be funny in her sleep, so every song sits somewhere on the sad <------ > irreverent spectrum. On first glance this is more the latter, but you don’t have to look too far beneath the glossy pop-soul surface to notice that dealing with body image stuff as a suddenly quite famous pop star is perhaps not-fun. Now, all together: “I did leg tings! And hand stuff! And single woman banter!”
18. Zara Larsson – “Midnight Sun”
Breathy, pulsating, sweaty electro-pop for humid summer nights, “Midnight Sun” builds tension that comes close to (but, quite exhilaratingly, never quite finds) release, even in its euphoric final thirty seconds. It’s a phenomenal piece of pop music, carried by Larsson’s vocal runs, the pizzicato synth undercurrent, and the percussion that seems to ride recklessly over rather than underneath it.
17. Perfume Genius – “It’s A Mirror”
A very fine album throughout, Glory nonetheless has a hard time living up to its opening two tracks, both among the best songs Mike Hadreas has ever written. “It’s A Mirror”, the album opener, is an exceptionally pretty country-tinged rocker which, despite the subject matter being isolation and anxiety, feels rapturous (a key change into the final chorus will do that).
16. Wolf Alice – “White Horses”
If the edges of Wolf Alice’s music sometimes feel a little smooth on The Clearing, “White Horses” is a crisp, propulsive palate cleanser towards the end of the album. I’ll always appreciate an album track with a lead vocal from a band member who is not the main singer – not enough bands do this! – and here Ellie Rowsell cedes the spotlight to drummer Joel Amey. Having discovered that his grandmother was from the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, it’s a song about family and identity – “Just need an answer to the question in the taxi” is a really funny line if you’ve ever been interrogated (with the best intentions) on where you’re really from. The segue from Rowsell’s pre-chorus into the gusty, fist-pumping chorus is majestic.
15. Oklou – “Harvest Sky” (feat. Underscores)
I’m not entirely sure why, but the vocal hook on this sounds extremely 2013 to me. “Harvest Sky” is an unlikely banger, a slow-burning trance-pop song which feels haunting and restrained even as it goes full club-anthem – exciting, inventive alt-pop of the sort that we haven’t had a lot of lately.
14. PUP – “Hallways”
Stefan Babcock has made a career out of being a wreck and laughing about it, but you can’t easily joke your way out of a line like “When one door closes / it might never open / there might be no other doors”. “Hallways” is explicitly a break-up song, but undoubtedly those doors refer to everything else that feels like it might be getting away from you in your thirties, too. It’s elevated by one of PUP’s most memorable choruses – and as a band, they’re maturing in little increments, steering away from perpetual musical adolescence but retaining their distinctive chaos and dark humour.
13. Haim – “Relationships”
The breeziest, most effortless pop jam of the summer, “Relationships” is all about space – the emotional space Danielle Haim craves, but also the space between the two-note synth motif, the coquettish funk-bass and flirty piano, the Y2K-pop spoken word snatches, the rolling beat. Rostam and Danielle have absolutely killed it here on production – I’m not sure anything in 2025 sounded cooler than this.
12. Anxious – “Bambi’s Theme”
I’m still not quite over Anxious having to cancel their summer co-headline tour. Their 2022 record Little Green House is, for me, an all-time great debut album, and the follow up is almost as strong, perhaps losing a bit of raw immediacy but adding muscle and retaining their tight songcraft and emotional heft. “Bambi’s Theme” is Anxious at their best, a piledriver stuffed with hooks, trademark vocal overlaps and duelling guitars – if their debut often recalled Texas Is The Reason, this hues closer to early Get Up Kids, and I feel lucky that we get to have both. Come back to the UK in 2026, boys.
11. Perfume Genius – “No Front Teeth (feat. Aldous Harding)”
Even better than “It’s A Mirror”, the second single from Glory is a symphonic rock song, with a bluesy, gnomic opening and sections of bombastic guitar pyrotechnics, glued together by a delicate, breathtaking anti-chorus in which Harding’s gossamer vocals take centre stage. Seeing this brought to thunderous life with Mike Hadreas performing an interpretative dance on and around a chair at their Roundhouse show was one of my live music highlights of the year.
10. Wednesday – “Townies”
Wednesday are a little bit unstoppable right now – a second successive critically acclaimed album, a guitarist who’s an alt-rock darling in his own right, and in Karly Hartzman, a generational songwriter and a vocalist who can contort her voice into almost any shape - the way she elongates and oscillates the words “died” , “down” and “around” on the chorus of “Townies” is kind of absurd. It’s one of the poppiest Wednesday songs, which belies the subject matter – slut-shaming, essentially, laced with blunt humour (“You sent my nudes around / I never yelled at you about it / ‘cos you died”). The final chorus, sludgy and in half-time, adds a layer of grime to the difficult memories that Hartzman dredges up.
9. Rose Gray – “Everything Changes (But I Won’t)”
Not that I ever went clubbing very much, or took drugs really at all, but this reminds me of my 20s so viscerally. It’s an unexpectedly gorgeous bit of rain-soaked night bus music, rendered in minor key synths and weary beats. The line that follows the title is “… when the party stops being fun,” and Gray reassures her lover she’ll be there “when you come down from the drugs”. It’s romantic but it’s also deeply melancholy, and there’s a nagging sense that the promise in the title might be one that she can’t ultimately keep.
8. Deftones – “Infinite Source”
Private Music is so much better than a Deftones album in 2025 has any right to be. A quite ridiculous early run of tracks culminates in the elegiac metallic shoegaze of “Infinite Source”, which is perhaps more ecstatic and more emotional than they’ve ever allowed themselves to be. The tiny snippet of the middle eight that repeats before the final, heavenward chorus kicks in (“All of our dreams / all of these years”) might be my favourite moment in music this year. It reads as a farewell – “Last time adorning the stage / a final wave and bow” – but on the form they’re in, I really, really hope it’s not.
7. Geese – “Taxes”
Really, just about every song from Getting Killed, my favourite album of the year, could be on this list. The thing with Geese is that, because they sound weird and off-kilter and syncopated by comparison to most indie-rock, it takes a moment to adjust to their wavelength – but once you do, it’s a strange and wonderful place to be. “Taxes” was the first Geese song I heard and served as a perfect gateway – a rattling pop song with clean, chiming guitars, adorned with Cameron Winter’s ragged, compelling drawl (sort of Spencer Krug as evangelical pastor vibes), which gathers momentum like a runaway train.
6. Charmer – “Arrowhead”
An absolute barnburner, featuring probably the best opening to any track this year. A series of machine-gun drum fills explodes into a searing emo riff, followed by a scorching first verse – it most specifically reminds me of Title Fight’s “Numb, But I Still Feel It”, one of the great rock songs of the century. “Arrowhead” refuses to be linear but never loses intensity, culminating in a pile-up of post-hardcore riffs and burning itself out in barely 2:20.
5. Alex G – “Afterlife”
Cresting a wave of mandolin that sounds like a murmuration of birds, “Afterlife” is achingly nostalgic, both out of time and also very much Out Of Time. The lyrics are allusory and evocative, but Alex has rarely sounded as direct or sincere. The pre-chorus (“Reflections / coming through the radio / the telephone / the TV / when my horse was kicking”) has such a Michael Stipe cadence to it, and in the context of a song that is deeply about youth it feels evocative of the way that music and friends felt as a teenager, everything heightened and dissonant and confusing. A song that feels more special the more time I’ve spent with it.
4. Lorde – “Shapeshifter”
The song that properly hooked me on first listen to Virgin and, along with “David”, one of the two that stands up months later as an elite Lorde song. “Shapeshifter” is spectral, seductive dubstep-pop that was kind of the feel-bad hit of the summer – if Melodrama was a break-up album full of hyper-intense emotions, “Shapeshifter” perhaps describes what came after, Lorde trying to protect herself by being casual, unavailable and cosplaying as whatever she felt her lovers wanted her to be. Her realisation, after reflecting on “everyone that I’ve slept with / all the metal that I’ve messaged” (a really nice couplet), that “tonight, I just wanna fall” brings huge emotional heft – Lorde’s vocals have rarely sounded better, and the last minute, as strings and synths swirl around the final chorus, is sublime.
3. Caroline – “Total Euphoria”
Several people trying to tune their instruments at the same time, coalescing into a gentle cacophony of guitars, horns, drums, “did we ever talk about how you left them?”, waxing and waning – then, at 2:45, what sounds like two trains sounding their horns as they meet on a mountain pass. Heavy dissonance, as if plunged into a pool, before the song, as we know it, starts to regain its clarity. A finale that sounds like what believers think it must be like to die. “Total Euphoria” is a feat of chaos maximalism – post-rock in the most literal sense – and is not just innovative but also unexpectedly, dizzyingly emotional.
2. Samia – “North Poles”
The penultimate track on Bloodless, Samia’s best album to date and one of my favourites of the year, is just a great example of her ability to find vocal melodies that feel impossibly familiar and use them as vessels for wrenching songs about love and friendship. Rich, jangly and with a gentle but inexorable forward momentum, “North Poles” makes my heart very full. “When you see yourself in someone / how can you look at them?” is such a good line about what we look for in others; meanwhile, I really enjoyed learning that the seemingly ineffable line “Everyone’s Sofia / you cannot stop crying” is literally about her friend tripping on mushrooms and thinking everyone in the room was her sister Sofia. Samia is emerging as one of the very best of her peers through sheer force of personality, turning anecdotes and inappropriate thoughts and non-sequiturs into songs that are messy, funny and wholly loveable.
1. CMAT – “Euro-Country”
Like “Stay For Something” on 2022’s Crazymad, For Me, “Euro-Country” is a widescreen epic on which CMAT goes against the habit of a musical lifetime and plays it almost entirely straight. Instead of a bruising break-up song, “Euro-Country” looks outwards and backwards, examining her relationship with Ireland and the 2008-shaped financial and socio-political earthquake that moulded her childhood. There are two lines that stick with me particularly – “I was twelve when the das started killing themselves all around me” (I had to read up on this) and “I feel like Kerry Katona” (don’t we all?). It’s a gorgeous slow-burn, with Ciara’s vocals especially rich, and the song punctuated by an Irish language-intro over beatific organ, waves of mournful pedal steel, and a call-and-response with herself as a child in the chorus.
No comments:
Post a Comment