Best Albums of the Year 2025

2025 will be remembered as a year where music felt expansive, emotional, and unapologetically bold. Across genres, artists delivered albums that pushed their sound forward while still connecting deeply with listeners. Pop in particular had a defining moment: global stars like Taylor Swift, Lorde, Lady Gaga, and Sabrina Carpenter released ambitious projects that blurred the lines between mainstream polish and personal storytelling.At the same time, alternative-leaning pop voices such as FKA twigs, PinkPantheress, Oklou, and Addison Rae proved that forward-thinking production and internet-era aesthetics could still dominate the cultural conversation. 2025 was a year where the pop landscape in 2025 that felt adventurous, emotionally open, and genuinely modern.

And special shoutout to Rosalía's 'LUX' that surprised everyone as an intimate classical crossover latin-pop masterpiece that became the most-requested pop album on vinyl immediately after launch, and is by far the most well-received pop album of the year across the board.

Hip-hop and R&B also thrived, with some of the year’s most critically acclaimed albums coming from artists operating far outside traditional commercial formulas. Little Simz, Earl Sweatshirt, billy woods, and McKinley Dixon released projects that balanced sharp lyricism with rich, challenging and intricate production, while Bad Bunny managed to show everyone that latin rap deserves a place on the global charts. In R&B, albums from Blood Orange, Nourished By Time, and Sudan Archives leaned into intimacy, groove, and experimentation, offering some of the most replayable records of the year.

Meanwhile, rock, punk, metal, and indie delivered a surge of energy and reinvention. Bands like Geese, Wet Leg, and Wednesday expanded the indie rock playbook even further, and the metal scene saw a couple of extraordinary comebacks from Deftones and Deafheaven who delivered their best albums in years (perhaps even decades for Deftones), while Spiritbox, Turnstile and Viagra Boys remain frontrunners of the metal and punk ethos. Creative comebacks were also evident in indie music this year with Bon Iver delivering a new masterpiece and Pulp returning with one of the best indie rock albums of the year after a two decades long album hiatus.

In other alternative album highlights, we have to give special mention to Alex G, Ethel Cain, and Anna Von Hausswolff. Hausswolff expanded her sound immensely on the monolithic album "Iconoclasts" that was as much a Kate Bush-era synthpop tour de force as it was an unmistakably dark and moody art rock revelation encompassing the atmospheric neoclassical darkwave ambince that has become her trademark.

You can find all these Best Albums of 2025 above + many others, so make sure to check them out. There's sure to be an album that deserves a place in your record collection, no matter your preferences.