Before I was a full-time film critic, I spent years reviewing albums and interviewing bands. I enjoyed it immensely, and while "music critic" is not my principal job now, I have never switched off that part of myself.
Keeping up with new music isn't just good for the brain, it ensures you don't become one of those people who laments, "I don't know any of these acts on the Grammys/at Coachella." At the start of every January, I create a folder of notable albums that get released that year, adding to it as the months go by. (My 2025 playlist is here.) This becomes my go-to playlist, perfect for long drives across Los Angeles or time spent in my office writing. I like having music on all day, and I'd rather it be new music than songs I know by heart, no matter how much I love them.
It's been years since Pazz & Jop went away, although Uproxx did its best to keep the tradition alive in recent years. But now that Uproxx has stopped publishing its year-end critics poll, I have felt a little empty having nowhere to share my picks for the year's best albums. This is the advantage of having my own site: I can do it right here.
No matter how many years I put together a best-of album list, I always have to remind myself that you never really know a record until you listen to it from beginning to end. In our modern streaming age, the notion of the album as an artistic unit now feels terribly quaint. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't put in the effort to really understand a record by giving it your undivided attention. It's one thing to get obsessed with a song — it's something else to really live in the world of an artist's creative vision for 45-70 minutes.
The 10 albums on my list all resonated more deeply when I devoted that uninterrupted time to them. As individual tracks, maybe they aren't the most dynamic. As a cumulative experience, though, they were undeniable.
Without further ado...
10. Dijon, Baby
The inner workings of Dijon Duenas' mind, set to jittery, sensual, exuberant tunes. Detailing his experiences with marriage and fatherhood with vulnerability and candor, Baby expresses love in all its forms: carnal, paternal, utter devotion, endless adoration. So many marriages don't work out. So many parents fail their children. But this album's beauty and anguish suggest a deep soul who's been thinking about commitment for a good long time. The more the music surges with doubt, the more resilient it simultaneously becomes. The results aren't just moving — they're downright inspirational.
9. Backxwash, Only Dust Remains
Zambian-Canadian rapper Ashanti Mutinta's previous records contained more of a metal influence. She hardly went safe or mainstream with her most recent album: As Mutinta put it in May of last year, "instead of a slasher, this one is more like a weird A24 movie.” The abrasive, riveting Only Dust Remains acknowledges her struggles with suicidal ideation and the world's transphobia and bigotry, and the music is as explosive as her anger and insecurity. By the closing title track, she isn't yet out of the woods. But she's raising a "middle finger to these racists and idiots," refusing to let the bastards grind her down, including the ones in her head.
8. CMAT, Euro-Country
My favorite country album of 2025 came from Ireland. Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson taps into the genre's just-folks relatability to create a collection of sad, funny songs about dumb guys, chasing your dreams and losing a friend. The lap steel guitar is as shiny as the pop hooks. And then there's the singer who puts those big feelings across. Actresses are often praised as having a "girl next door" energy: I have mixed feelings about that compliment, but CMAT's unassuming warmth certainly brings such cliches to mind. (That said, you don't have to be a woman to feel "Take a Sexy Picture of Me" in your bones.)
7. Sudan Archives, The BPM
I flipped for Brittney Denise Parks' last album, Natural Brown Prom Queen, and this new one might be even better. Edging further into full-on dance music, The BPM ripples with confidence, the tracks barely able to contain her creative ebullience. But the faster tempos belie the anxieties she sometimes feels about love and being herself. And she's still making room for that terrific violin of hers. "I'm the finest," she brags at one point. "Yeah, I said it." She can back up her swagger.
6. Turnstile, Never Enough
This Baltimore band had largely escaped my notice until Never Enough was everywhere in 2025. Hardcore punk is not a go-to genre for me, but Brendan Yates' yearning vocals got to me. Not self-absorbed, not overly ponderous, never boringly mopey, he strikes me as a decent guy wrestling with the agonies of the world with genuine sensitivity at a time when a lot of guys are good at faking it. And his band never stops stops bringing the noise, which can be exceedingly lovely when it's not just downright stirring. I've heard some longtime fans mock Turnstile for suddenly turning into the Police. I suppose that means they're just getting more tuneful with time.
5. Apathy, Mom & Dad
As we suffer through the Trump years, Chad Bromley would like to remind us that Ronald Reagan was a pretty terrible president as well. Mom & Dad's title refers not to Bromley's birth parents, who had him when they were teenagers, but Nancy and Ronnie, whose smiling faces adorn the records cover. Although not quite a concept album, Mom & Dad takes the listener back to the 1980s as Bromley recalls with no fondness the crack era and Reagan's war on drugs. (The rapper's parents battled drug addiction in his youth.) Turning 47 in March, Bromley grabs old-school samples and dusty pop-culture references to paint a portrait of an unhappy past that still casts a shadow on our shared horrible present. Mourning the death of the middle class, recalling the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, this album turns nostalgia into a poison pill, every line a killer.
4. Wednesday, Bleeds
Why does this Wednesday album work so well for me when their last, Rat Saw God, didn't? The answer couldn't be more rudimentary: Because it rocks harder. From the gathering storm of its opening track, "Reality TV Argument Bleeds," to the snarling destitution of "Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)" to the fire of "Wasp" into "Bitter Everyday," Karly Hartzman's band has attitude to burn and the guitars to back up their surliness. Sometimes Bleeds allows for a quieter interlude, but the focus never slips. And the Phish and Human Centipede joke in "Phish Pepsi" is a good one
3. Blood Orange, Essex Honey
Beware albums made by brilliant songwriters/composers that are overstuffed with cameos from their famous friends. That is, unless it's Essex Honey, in which Devonté Hynes brings along so many buddies to enrich his already formidable soundscape, letting them blend into the mix rather than sticking out. The result is a glorious record whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts, Hynes' sumptuous voice on top of one incredible arrangement after another. (My god, the saxophones on this album.) Who else would pair the frontman of Turnstile with the dude from Everything but the Girl? Who else would find so many ways to express grief and explore his childhood memories, yet leave so few breadcrumbs, hiding those knotty feelings in endlessly emotional, dreamlike tunes? Recommended listening for your next nighttime drive.
2. Blondshell, If You Asked for a Picture
With all due respect to the more famous Sabrina (Carpenter), I preferred Sabrina Teitelbaum's follow-up to a successful breakthrough in which the artist is bummed to discover that a higher profile does nothing to improve the quality of men in her orbit. If You Asked for a Picture doesn't have Man's Best Friend's winning sense of humor, but its well-crafted indie-rock convincingly articulates the excruciating frustration of being in your late 20s, worried that your romantic life is never ever going to get any better. There's nothing self-pitying about Teitelbaum's observations, recognizing that she's as much at fault as the jerks she decides to date. "Why don't the good ones love me?," she asks with a clarity any heartsick soul will understand. And when she closes the album with "The problem is I don't know what I want anymore," her voice reaching for a falsetto, it crushes me every time. On her debut Blondshell, she toured with Liz Phair, which made sense. Here, she continues to honor that indie legend by further roto-rooting her psyche, finding plenty of hooks if not much in the way of solutions.
1. Craig Finn, Always Been
The Hold Steady frontman always has stories to tell. But from top to bottom, I don't think he's ever crafted anything as uniformly terrific as what he achieves on his sixth solo album. Always Been mostly focuses on a former clergyman making sense of his life after leaving the church behind. But that's just one of the broken individuals whom Craig Finn embodies on this remarkable record, which musically doesn't shy away from his Springsteen-ian aspirations while also embracing a more colorful indie-rock palette. I've been making fun of the War on Drugs for years, but Adam Granduciel's production provides the perfect sonic framework for these emotional, dying-of-the-light songs.
"I told Adam that I wanted to make a direct record — I didn’t want it to be tricky," Finn said in April. "The music is very straightforward. Sometimes we’d try something and find it to be too much. It’s a storytelling record, so it was like, 'Is it getting in the way of the story? Is it supporting the story?' I think that’s a question that you just keep asking yourself."
Always Been's simplicity is its strongest asset and also the reason why listeners might overlook its greatness. Finn is the sort who's easy to take for granted: "Oh, he made another literary album about beautiful losers?!?" But the more you immerse in the record, the more its stories seem to speak to something deeper than these individual lives. It's an album about the loss of religious faith, but all different kinds of faith and hope are shed along the way on Always Been: the idea of the ideal version of who you might become, the belief that things will work out, the delusion that America was ever not rotten. The record has no hint of the momentous, and yet its unfussy directness feels plenty grand. Its landscape of depression, romantic disillusionment, crime, poverty and oblivion is as good a way of encapsulating this failed country as any album I heard in 2025.