The 10 best albums of 2025

2025 felt like a year where popular music was in transition, with many of the big, established stars either choosing not to release an album or dropping proper clangers (looking at you, Taylor Swift). Hip-hop, once an utterly dominant force on music charts, also had an off year, with only a handful of releases moving the pop culture needle.

The space thus ceded allowed for some truly wild, innovative and ambitious records to occupy centre-stage. You had Geese bringing Brooklyn hipster art-rock back from the dead, Rosalia blending pop music with classical concert music, and Bad Bunny returning to the top of the charts with politically-charged música urbana. Closer home, Indian hip-hop leaned further into regional sounds and styles, while indie artists and producers like Sakré, Sudan and Tarun Balani dropped some excellent genre-bending albums.

For all the doom and gloom of 2025—the civil war in dance music over the scene’s financial ties to arms companies and Israeli capital, the Spotify boycott, the looming threat of AI—it has been a fantastic year for new music. And here are the 10 records that really stuck with me, ones that I kept going back to unbidden, weeks or months after I first heard them. In no particular order:

Shikriwal—Natya Alaapika

Some of Indian hip-hop’s heavy hitters released new albums in 2025—Divine, Kr$na, Karan Aujla—but the standout rap record of the year came from a little-known Bhojpuri rapper from the Bihar-Jharkhand region. On Natya Alaapika, he fuses boom bap, jazz, lo-fi electronica and Bhokpuri folk music into a sound that’s global yet strongly rooted in his Purvanchal heritage.

On Purani Baazar, flute melodies and folk rhythms rub shoulders with Bhojpuri braggadocio, while Mahabharat is a moody, ambient meditation on love, community and the everyday upheavals and betrayals of our domestic lives. Vyapar’s paan-stained rhymes swagger with restrained menace as he offers up a moral critique of a market-based society. At its best, Natya Alaapika is a fascinating, unpredictable and incisive exploration of the human condition.

Los Thuthanaka—S/T

“Mind-blowing” is such an overused adjective in music criticism, but listening to the self-titled debut album by Los Thuthanaka really feels like your brain is being abraded by its mix of gloriously unmixed walls of noise, flurries of lo-fi synths, and chopped-up Bolivian rhythms. Bolivian-American siblings Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton carve their way through sounds and geographies—psychedelia, live-electronica, glitchy hip-hop, Andean folk-music, hyperpop, IDM—with total abandon, twisting and warping everything they touch with the flamboyance of a true trickster God.

Huayño “Ipi Saxra” absurdly layers vocal samples of a guy saying “yo” and “go” over monumental guitar riffs and bit-crushed drums like a demon-possessed Tropical Fuck Storm. Parrandita “Sariri Tunupa” is drone music that’s assembled from the deconstructed detritus of digital pop culture. It all sounds like something from a deranged, apocalyptic future, but each track here is also deeply rooted in centuries of folk music tradition. It’s music that you can’t analyse or consume, but music that demands that you surrender to it, both in body and mind.

Viagra Boys—viagr aboys

The fourth studio album by Swedish post-punk sextet Viagra Boys is a meisterwerk of punk surrealism, lurching between the absurd, the ridiculous and the physically grotesque as it mercilessly lampoons consumerism, wellness culture and toxic masculinity. Over brutalist, off-kilter amalgamations of punk rock, electro, funk and free-jazz, the band’s American-born frontman Sebastian Murphy excels at creating hilarious character sketches of the 21st-century manchild—the insecure, overcompensating dudes in your Twitter replies and Instagram comments whose self-loathing manifests as deeply embarrassing misanthropy. But the satire is not one-dimensional, and Murphy retains a sense of empathy for the characters he inhabits and mocks, elevating this self-avowedly “simple and stupid” record into something that approaches sublime profundity.

Sijya—Leather and Brass EP

New Delhi composer, producer and graphic artist Sijya finds her sound on sophomore EP Leather & Brass, released by iconic UK label One Little Independent Records. Every single sound on this six-track EP is hand-crafted and mastered to perfection, even its gloomiest, most distorted synths gleaming with hard-edged studio polish. Working under the guidance of Accidental Records’ Matthew Herbert and Hugh Jones (aka Crewdson), Sijya crafts a sonic world that is haunted and desolate, its industrial environs tinged with rust and regret. Sijya’s voice is the only real source of warmth, but even that is just embers—charcoal cinders that glow red with the sorrow of loss, occasionally pulsing brighter as the heartbreak grows more intense. If you’ve ever felt disconnected and isolated by modern life, you’ll find some much-needed solace and catharsis in the tender tunes on Leather And Brass.

Clipse—Let God Sort Em Out

It may have been 16 years since Clipse last put out a record, but the legendary Virginia hip-hop duo can still deliver hard-hitting coke-rap punchlines and drop lyrical bodies like nobody else. Producer Pharell (of Get Lucky fame) is more inspired here than he’s been for years, crafting beats that swagger with menace and violence, as on Chains And Whips, or soar on the wings of gospel choirs like the otherworldly So Far Ahead.

Brothers Pusha T and Malice show us again why they’re considered such lyrical kingpins, whether they’re boasting about their luxury cars (“The only Audi here is driven by my au pair”) or making spine-chilling threats to their haters (“"Crush you to pieces, I'll hum a breath of it / I'll close your heaven for the hell of it.”) It’s a triumphant return to form, and a challenge to the next generation of rappers to step up their game.

Rounak Maiti—Brute Fact/Home Truth

Rounak Maiti may be better known to Indian music fans as a member of experimental audiovisual collective Excise Dept—whose debut album made my top 10 list last year—but he’s also an accomplished solo musician, producing dreamy indie-pop and synth music under his own name. On his third studio album Brute Fact/Home Truth, recorded during the upheavals of the pandemic and while he was going through his own personal and political crises, Maiti takes the surgeon’s scalpel to his own psyche. Over sonic dreamscapes assembled from wall-of-sound guitars, bubbly synths and bit-blasted percussion, Maiti captures the anxiety and paranoia of the late-night doom-scroll loop, when your darkest fears and deepest truths emerge from the recesses of your subconscious.

Sudan Archives—The BPM

The third record by American singer, songwriter and violinist Brittney Parks—who performs as Sudan Archives—sees her dive deep into club culture, particularly the Chicago techno and Detroit house that her parents partied to in the 1980s. There are forays into trap, Jersey club, drum and bass and experimental beatwork, occasionally within the same track. But while the tempo remains high, the dominant emotion on The BPM is not euphoria but ennui, as Parks explores the tensions between the utopian promise of the dance-floor and the much grimmer reality within which it actually exists. It’s the sound of the club in 2025, where movement and hedonism are an increasingly desperate escape from the world outside.

Djrum—Under Tangled Silence

Sometime during covid, Felix Manuel—the DJ and producer better known as Djrum—lost a nearly-completed album when his hard-drive failed. Following a “mourning period”, he started again nearly from scratch, and ended up creating his most ambitious and inspired work yet. The eleven tracks on Under Tangled Silence veer from piano-house to jazz-infused jungle and melancholic ambient-bass. Incorporating piano, the Irish harp and a host of acoustic percussive instruments—alongside more familiar electronic rhythms and textures—this cohesive, introspective album builds a rare bridge between classical concert music and the club floor.

Wednesday—Bleeds

Geese are getting a lot of (well-earned) plaudits for their album Getting Killed, but for me, it was American alt-rockers Wednesday who delivered the best rock album of 2025. Their sixth studio release, Bleeds is a classic heartbreak record that blends grunge guitar crescendos with country’s steel lap strings, southern-rock barnstomping and shoegaze fuzz. Singer-guitarist Karly Hartzman’s lyrics paint a poetic portrait of life as an underdog in small-town Appalachia, wringing pathos and beauty from snapshot images—riding her bike home from middle school drunk on Four Loko, attending parties where they stoke bonfires with leaf blowers, chopping up lines of ketamine in the motel room. Through it all runs an achingly honest accounting of her broken hearts and emotional bruises, but also of the hard-won resilience that keeps her—and all the characters in her stories, living life on the edge—going.

Skulk—Skin

On her sophomore album—and her first for Indian experimental label/collective ONNO—Goa’s Katyayani Gargi (aka Skulk) merges woozy discombobulated synths and grainy art-pop textures with a voice that drifts between the raw emotion of a Kathleen Hanna and the quirky individualism of Bjork and PJ Harvey. The twelve-track record is split into two halves, one dealing with the personal and the other tackling social and political critiques. But both sides grapple with the same central questions—of survival, and of finding ways to keep your head above water in the churn and chaos of our modern lives.

Bhanuj Kappal is a Mumbai-based journalist.