22 December 2025 - The Wicked 25: My Top 25 Albums of 2025

This is a very different post than anything I have ever done here, and I’m doing it for a reason. 

You see, this year, I decided to listen to a lot of albums – I’m trying to reach 1,000 this year, and I will absolutely reach it by the time I hit the one‑year mark of starting the project. As of this writing, I’m north of 800, including nearly 300 albums from 2025. This project has had a strong impact on my musical taste, as maybe you have seen in the last few weeks as I’ve been posting music from a lot of those albums.

What I intentionally did was rate each album on a basis of 1–5 stars. And when I heard the second album that made me say “I wish I had a 6th star,” that told me that there were even elite albums I liked more than others.

What I unintentionally started to do was listen to a lot of new releases and new music – until I realized it, and then I started listening to new music and 2025 music intentionally. I wanted to do something with this information, so I decided to start making this list and give you my top…

…well, I started this intending to choose 10 albums. It is going to be 25 albums, and I would have LOVED to make 50, but… Pitchfork, for example, puts out a top 50. Do you know how many people they’re using to write that? FIFTY. Each review is by a different person. And it’s probably more than that. I’m your only writer here.

But also, you have to remember – this ain't Pitchfork's list. This is one person’s opinion. Music is subjective. I hope you check out and enjoy a lot of this music – but if you don’t, it’s OK. Also, this isn’t a perfect list. Ask me another day, and my #13 might be my #23. Something that didn’t make this list today could be #8 tomorrow. Even as I was making this list, some albums moved dramatically. Spoiler alert: the album I thought was #1 was not even #2.

One final note: some of these artists, I'm posting about for the first time.  I guarantee it's not the last. 

So, without further ado – and with apologies to Lily Allen (West End Girl), Lilly Hiatt (Forever), Doja Cat (VIE), CHUU (Only Cry In The Rain), Snocaps (Snocaps), George Houston (TODC), Mavis Staples (Sad and Beautiful World), Martin Carthy (Transform Me Then Into A Fish), Lorde (Virgin), Population II (Maintenant Jamais), Ela Minus (Día), Yves Jarvis (All Cylinders), Soccer Mommy (Evergreen (stripped)), Throwing Muses (Moonlight Concessions), Blondshell (If You Asked For A Picture), Housewife (Girl Of The Hour), girlpuppy (Sweetness), Black Eyes (Hostile Design), Debby Friday (The Starrr of the Queen Of Life), Lexie Liu (Teenage Ramble), Cœur de pirate (Cavale), Sabrina Carpenter (Man's Best Friend), and, believe it or not, Ribbon Skirt (PENSACOLA) and Lou-Adriane Cassidy (Triste Animal) – here is the LONGEST post I have ever written: my Wicked 25, my 25 favorite albums of 2025

25. Beyries – REPRISES

REPRISES is Beyries looking back at songs she’s already lived with - and some you've lived with, too - and gently turning them over in her hands, re‑recording and re‑arranging them into something smaller, sadder and somehow more hopeful. In a year where I listened to a lot of “new” music, this little Canadian record of re‑imagining and second chances quietly became one of my favorite companions.

Listen: Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

24. Princess Nokia – GIRLS

Princess Nokia spends GIRLS turning her own trauma, desire, and day‑to‑day mess into a loud, joyful argument that women – especially weird, brown, queer, “too much” women – deserve pleasure, safety, and space. The record plays like a self‑help manual disguised as a party, full of hooks about cutting off predators, luxuriating in your friendships, and learning to like the person in the mirror again, and that fierce self‑possession is what makes it feel as vital as anything else being made today.

Listen: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

23. Siula - Night Falls On The World

Siula’s debut barely exists outside of Welsh and UK indie circles, which makes it feel like a secret world you get to carry around. Night Falls On The World drifts between cinematic dream‑pop, ambient electronics and slow‑motion indie, a soft but slightly uncanny haze where memory, grief and late‑night internet solitude blur together; it plays less like a debut and more like stepping into a half‑remembered film reel about lost love and impermanence, with Iqra Malik’s bilingual vocals and Llion Robertson’s production guiding you through the dark.

Listen: Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

22. Oklou – choke enough

This album was my last-in, because it took some time to resonate with me. This is because Oklou makes music that sounds like a dream you can’t quite wake up from, and choke enough is her most complete version of that yet: warped pop melodies, submerged vocals, everything just a little waterlogged and bittersweet. It became one of my favorite relaxation records of the year - the kind of album that sneaks up on you until you realize you know every glitch and sigh.

Listen: Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

21. Marie Davidson – City of Clowns​

City of Clowns is what happens when Marie Davidson points her dry, dark sense of humor at capitalism and nightlife and decides to dance on their graves instead of just eulogizing them. It’s electro, spoken word, satire and genuine anxiety all tangled together, and in a year obsessed with AI and hustle culture, this record felt like someone finally saying, “This is insane, right?” over a beat you can actually move to.​

Listen: Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

20. Clipse – Let God Sort Em Out​

On paper, a Clipse reunion could’ve been pure nostalgia; instead, Let God Sort Em Out is two grown men staring down God, guilt and legacy over a Neptunes production that still sounds sharper than most of what passed for rap in 2025. I loved a lot of rap albums this year - and in fact rediscovered my love for the genre, not only in this album but in many others. This is the one that made me sit up and rewind verses - the one where the weight of the past is right there in every flex and confession.

Listen: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

19. Saya Gray – SAYA

Saya Gray’s SAYA is like scrolling through someone’s brain: songs splinter mid‑phrase, guitars and strings smear into each other, and you’re never quite sure where the groove is going to land. It’s dense and sometimes disorienting - it's not an easy listen, and even took a few listens for me to connect - but once it clicks, it becomes the thing to put on when regular alt‑pop feels too tidy and you want something to gently pull your head apart and rewire it for 40 minutes.

Listen: Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

18. Jayli Wolf – Daughter Of The Haze

Daughter Of The Haze is a debut (that isn't really a debut) that already feels like a world: an Anishinaabe/Cree artist threading folk, dark pop and field‑recording textures into songs about cult survival, intergenerational trauma and self‑reclamation. It’s only 34 minutes, but like Jayli's entire catalog (including her Once A Tree work and her beautiful spoken word YouTube offerings), it hit me like a whole novel - the kind of record where even the quiet moments feel loaded with ghosts and new beginnings.

Listen: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

17. Laufey – A Matter of Time​

Laufey’s A Matter of Time is the rare jazz‑pop - a genre of which I am not generally a huge fan - album that actually sounds like someone working through their twenties in real time, not just playing dress‑up with old standards. She folds big, cinematic arrangements and retro chord changes reminiscent of Karen Carpenter and bossanova around lyrics about panic, heartbreak and trying to be a person, and in a year full of nostalgic pastiche, this one felt like the real thing.

Listen: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

16. Fionn - scum. 

Fionn’s scum. is pure femme‑rage pop‑rock, a tight, snarling little record where every chorus feels like finally saying the thing you swallowed at work, at the bar, on stage. Songs like “Blow” and the title track turn mansplaining, bad exes and low‑level everyday misogyny into sugar‑rush guitar anthems, all Veruca Salt/Elastica‑coded hooks and twin‑sister harmonies that made this one of my go‑to “I'm pissed, but I need to be pissed safely” albums of 2025.

Listen: Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

15. Tyler Childers – Snipe Hunter

Snipe Hunter is Tyler Childers going all‑in on weird spiritual country: talking to gods, playing with garage rock and Phil Spector (and Rick Rubin) sounds, and still somehow landing back in the holler. It’s messy and brave in a way major‑label country almost never is.  This is the album I absolutely expected to dislike and almost didn't listen to - and yet, here we are, talking about it, because it is that undeniably good. 

Listen: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

14. CMAT – EURO-COUNTRY

EURO-COUNTRY is CMAT’s big swing at turning Irish country‑pop into a vehicle for millennial burnout, national history and the absurdity of trying to stay sane in late‑capitalist Europe. It’s funny and theatrical and sometimes devastating, moving from “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station” to “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash” to the title track’s economic trauma monologue, and it was the record I put on when I needed to feel both seen and roasted.

Listen: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

13. Rheostatics – The Great Lakes Suite​

I was not a Rheostatics person, which is exactly why it shocked me how hard The Great Lakes Suite landed: a sprawling, mostly improvised love letter to the lakes that turns geography into this wild, shifting soundscape. Alex Lifeson and Hugh Marsh are here, but the moment that really broke me is “The Drop Off,” built around a haunting spoken‑word recording from the late Gord Downie about Lake Ontario and water stewardship – it’s like having a ghost of Canadian music history standing in the middle of the suite, reminding you why this landscape matters.

So now I'm a Rheostatics guy. 

Listen: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

12. Chaeyoung – LIL FANTASY Vol.1

Chaeyoung’s LIL FANTASY Vol.1 sounds like someone trying to smash together K‑pop idol polish and the messier charm of bedroom pop, and somehow getting away with it. Across these short, twitchy tracks - the process of creating she was atypically intimately involved with - she leans into glitchy beats, chant‑y hooks and playful, sometimes bratty delivery; it feels closer to the hyper‑online experimentation of artists like PinkPantheress or Beabadoobee than to a traditional solo‑idol debut, and that risk‑taking is exactly what makes it so repayable.

Listen: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

11. NewDad – Altar

Altar is NewDad leveling up: a colder, more gothic dream‑pop record than 2024's excellent Madra, that still finds room for bright, surging moments like “Roobosh” and “Everything I Wanted.” It's the perfect grey‑sky album - all smeared guitars, big choruses and that particular kind of Irish melancholy that somehow makes you feel better instead of worse.

Listen: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

10. PinkPantheress – Fancy That

On Fancy That, PinkPantheress stretches her TikTok‑speed pop into something more theatrical and layered without losing the jittery, UK garage‑and‑DnB pulse underneath. It plays like a scrapbook of crushes, catastrophes and rewound memories, and even when it’s meme‑y or chaotic, the emotional throughline kept me coming back time and again.

Listen: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

9. Mallrat – Light hit my face like a straight right

Mallrat’s album title sounds dramatic, but the magic of this record is how gentle its punches are: small, sharply observed pop songs about faith, doubt, crushes and feeling a little out of phase with the world. It snuck up on me as one of my most replayed albums of the last few months, that rare mix of bedroom intimacy and festival‑ready chorus from Australia's next big pop star.

Listen: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

8. Gelli Haha – Switcheroo

Switcheroo is a chaos record in the best way: jagged indie rock, synthy detours, sudden hooks that feel like tripping over a hidden step. It sounded like 2025’s attention span in album form, and I kept coming back to it whenever I wanted something that felt restless and playful but still weirdly, deeply emotional.

Also, the red aesthetic really pops. 

Listen: Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Deezer

7. Lights – A6

More than a decade after Siberia and Little Machines, A6 is the first Lights record that really feels like it belongs beside them - not as a sequel, but as their evolved equal. It’s a neon‑soaked grief diary that shows she is still the blueprint for the new wave of alt-pop, folding the heavier, LŪN‑era electronics into synth‑pop songs about damage, numbness and clawing your way back to yourself. she manages to make the "glitch-pop" trend feel grounded and visceral rather than just aesthetic, hitting with the urgency of someone rebuilding in real time.

Listen: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

6. MUDRAT – Social Cohesion

Social Cohesion is a Molotov cocktail in album form: punk, rave and protest music smashed together into something that feels equally at home in a Melbourne squat gig and a city‑wide march. It’s furious about housing, work, the crisis in Palestine, and the slow death of the social safety net, but it never forgets that revolution needs rhythm, turning policy rage into choruses you can scream with strangers; in a year full of “political” records, MUDRAT actually made me want to do something.

Listen: Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

5. The Beaches – No Hard Feelings

The Beaches’ No Hard Feelings is the kind of record that lets this grown man scream along to songs about queer heartbreak, bad decisions and emotional spirals, and still feel like it’s partly about him. Beneath all the glittering hooks and big, bratty sing‑alongs there’s a steady, unmistakable ache – breakups, mental health crashes, that creeping sense that the wild nights might not last forever – and the band turns it into something that feels like youth’s last, joyful exhale rather than a defeat, which is why the sadness comes off as weirdly hopeful instead of pathetic.

Listen: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

4. Addison Rae – Addison

Addison is the rare major‑label pop debut that understands exactly what it wants to be: glossy, hook‑drunk, emotionally legible and proudly “surface‑level” in a way that circles back around to feeling deep. From the EDM shimmer of “Summer Forever” to the Y2K‑coded bops and slick club touches, it’s an album about pleasure as a serious project, and somewhere in the middle of all that fun it quietly became one of the 2025 records I trusted most to make the day feel better.

Listen: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

3. Ribbon Skirt – Bite Down​

Ribbon Skirt’s debut lives in a dreamlike, fuzzed‑out space where colonial history, small‑town life and Indigenous joy all blur together under a haze of jangling guitars. Songs like “Deadhorse” and “Off Rez” slip from Cocteau Twins‑ish swirl into post‑punk bite, and the way Caroline Buswa writes about survival - both on this album and the PENSACOLA EP that followed it - without sliding into cliché made this feel like the defining rock statement of 2025 for me. 

Listen: Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

2. Ninajirachi – I Love My Computer

I Love My Computer is the album that made everything else in 2025 snap into place: a restless, shapeshifting electronic debut about growing up online, loving the machine that raised you, and reckoning with what that did to your brain. It zips between 2010s EDM nostalgia, hyperpop chaos and glittering trance breakdowns without ever losing its emotional core, and more than any other record this year, it felt like a true self‑portrait of what it means to be a person whose best friend, worst enemy and main instrument has always been a screen.

Listen: Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

1. Lou-Adriane Cassidy – Journal d'un Loup-Garou

If you had told me a week ago this would be the #1, I would have called you nuts. But here we are. Lou‑Adriane Cassidy’s Journal d'un Loup‑Garou is a lush, francophone art‑pop diary that swings from theatrical to painfully intimate without ever losing its sense of melody. It opens with “Dis‑moi dis‑moi dis‑moi,” a plea to a disappearing father that sets the tone for an album obsessed with who made you and who left, and closes with “Celle‑ci vient du cœur,” a literal end‑credits roll where she thanks the people who held her up while she made it. Even when I couldn’t catch every word on the first pass, those bookends—and everything between them—made the record feel like eavesdropping on someone’s most dramatic year.

Across fairy‑tale images of wolves, dragons, poisoned apples and vampires, Journal d'un Loup‑Garou becomes a diary about the monster under your skin and the people who helped put it there. She writes about childhood, abandonment, friendship and step‑parenthood with a specificity that lands even if your French is patchy: a father who disappears when she’s 16, a letter to her partner’s daughter (“Chanson pour Odile”), a messy, loving ode to her best‑friend‑rival Ariane Roy, and finally that closing‑credits roll where she thanks the people behind the camera. It’s huge and theatrical, but it never forgets to be a pop album; the choruses still bloom, the grooves still land, and even the spoken‑word bits feel like late‑night overshares rather than homework

What snuck up on me was how quickly it stopped being “the big francophone concept album I admired” and became the record I put on when I needed to feel understood. If the album is the diary, her live performances this year—especially that theatrical, bone-chilling run at the Polaris Gala—were the exorcism. Between this and its excellent but very different followup Triste Animal - which nearly made this list on its own merits - Cassidy has spent the year doing everything at once and doing it well. Even before I could parse every line, I knew exactly what kind of year she was describing: the one where you realize the scary stories weren’t about monsters out there, but the parts of yourself you’re still learning to live with.

Listen: Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer

Did you agree with all my choices?  There's no way you did!  Tell me in the comments where I screwed up!

At any rate, I've also created a playlist on Spotify with a highlight song from each album.  Feel free to save and share it.