The Best Music of 2025

As 2025 is quickly coming to an end, we're releasing our music highlights for the year! We asked some of our friends to give us 5 of their favorite songs and albums as well. Nicole's selected highlights will kick things off and Ryan's top 10 list will wrap things up. Enjoy!

Perfume Genius: Glory

The live show for Glory isn’t a concert, per say. It’s more akin to an exorcism. Mike Hadreas doesn’t just perform the songs, transporting you to a glass cathedral of emotion with his achingly beautiful vibrato. He fully commits to modern dance, writhing and contorting and wrapping himself in microphone cords, all while being spun on a lazy susan at center stage. Each performance is a unique presentation, and at my Hollywood show’s finale, a man who looked like he’d stepped out of a Tom of Finland illustration beat Hadreas with bouquets of multi-colored flower bouquets, spraying petals into the crowd. It’s a fitting artistic direction for an album about the fragility of love, the anxiety of self-doubt, and grappling with your innermost fears. With tracks like “Me & Angel”, “It’s A Mirror,” and “No Front Teeth,” all produced by the brilliant-as-ever Blake Mills, Glory is a career highpoint. 

BEST ALBUM WITH AN ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST COMPANION VIDEO

Lily Allen: West End Girl 

If The Life of a Showgirl is a portrait of a pop star with a victim complex but no dragons left to slay, West End Girl feels like its inverse. A take-no-prisoners account of the horrors of being married to David Harbour, Allen’s pain and anger feel real and righteous at every blunt lyrical turn. The listening experience is suspenseful, like a “Bluebeard” cautionary folktale. Each confessional song unlocks brownstone rooms haunted by infidelities, lies, and the ghosts of Duane Reade bags with, well, you know what inside. It’s devastating. It’s expertly crafted. It’s as potent as any pop released this year. It’s also worthy of a spot in the break-up album pantheon, right alongside classics like Rumours and Blue. 

BEST ANTIDOTE TO AI

Rosalía: LUX

Each day of 2025 has brought with it a fresh batch of billionaire-fueled horrors. The first AI “artist” to reach the Billboard chart. Open AI partnering with Disney to create a perpetual stream of Goofy slop, to the satisfaction of absolutely no one except the most odious men on the planet. Maybe that’s why LUX feels so radical. Arranged in four movements and sung in 14 languages, it’s the opposite of an artificially induced dopamine hit. With its genre-hopping sound and lush orchestral arrangements, it’s avant-garde art that’s crafted, deliberately, to nourish your soul. Like her spiritual mother (and “Berghain” collaborator) Björk, Rosalía knows how to deftly weave modern and classical elements to produce something challenging, spellbinding, and most importantly, human. 

BEST ALBUM THAT’S ALSO A BOOK 

Jens Lekman: Songs for Other People’s Weddings

Detractors will tell you that Swedish singer-songwriter Jens Lekman is, in higher doses, dangerously saccharine. These are the same people who will tell you not to get the third refill of lingonberry juice at the IKEA cafe. It’s important that you don’t listen to them. Because real Jens-heads know that it’s this nectar of sincerity that makes his music so singular and so worth savoring. That’s never been more true than on Songs for Other People’s Weddings, a companion album to a novel of the same name and a project inspired partly by Lekman’s real-life side gig as a wedding singer. Twee as they may be, it’s impossible not to be charmed by the album’s plucky tracks and vivid cast of characters. It might just be the best collection of love songs since Magnetic Fields gave us 69 of them. 

BEST SONG FROM A BAD MOVIE

Nine Inch Nails: “As Alive As You Need Me To Be” (From the TRON: Ares soundtrack)

It’s a pity that Disney is still stuck in Morbin’ Time. Because if not for the inexplicable casting of sex pest Jared Leto, there’s a chance more people would have seen TRON: Ares. And if more people had seen TRON: Ares, more people would be talking about its absolutely insane NIN soundtrack. For fans of peak-era NIN, it’s an industrial delight. It’s also a worthy successor to Daft Punk’s previous contribution to the TRON-iverse. Give it a listen, and pretend the movie doesn’t exist. 

BEST BRIT POP REVIVAL 

Pulp: More 

It was the Brittest of times. It was the poppest of times. It was a time that brought back bucket hats and the brothers Gallagher. But even against the arena-sized shadow of Oasis, I’ll remember 2025 as the year that brought back Pulp. Their first studio album in 24 years, More is a euphoric collection of songs that does the near impossible: it acknowledges a band changed by age without sacrificing their vitality, razor wit, and signature horniness. No, this isn’t a watered down Pulp. It’s still Jarvis Cocker, the world’s preeminent slinky little freak. Only this time, he’s slipping through the LA “Farmer’s Market,” head full of sensual thoughts, arms full of sensible canvas bags. 

BEST MUSIC ENDORSED BY CILLIAN MURPHY

Geese: Getting Killed, Cameron Winter: Heavy Metal

Cillian Murphy name dropped Geese during a press tour, injecting them into the consciousness of film bros everywhere. Pitchfork hailed “Love Takes Miles” as the #1 song of the year. Flannels are back in the pit. Brooklyn is operating at 2008 levels of indie cred. It’s a Cameron Winter winter, and it’s no wonder. Mumbling and mysterious, Winter simply doesn’t sound like any of his contemporaries, or frankly, like anyone else at all. It’s a rare and enigmatic sort of Lou Reed-ness that’s evident on both his solo album and on Getting Killed. And it’s a voice supported by melodies and rhythms that swim in your head long after you’ve stopped listening. Maybe Geese and the second coming of indie cool are just recession indicators. Or maybe they’re indicators of something much weirder and more wonderful that’s bursting beyond the horizon. I’m excited to find out. 

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