Sounds Great's Top 20 albums of 2025
It's been a while. Much like Cameron Winter, I've been in my New Radicals era.
I’m watching outside the bedroom window of my new duplex.
It’s only the third or fourth day here. Unhung picture frames speckle the carpet.
Around them, fireworks. An autumnal pile of sticky, used 3M Damage-Free Command Strips (Size Extra-Large) wrappers. Outside, it is fall for real. I’m in the bathroom now. The day is about to begin.
But first, I’m sidetracked by a distraction so puppy-like it’s almost parody.
There’s a squirrel in the yard.
Mia — oh my God! — there’s a squirrel in the yard.
I’m the Joe Buck of this second-floor bathroom, shouting down the hallway.
He’s dashing across the roof of the garage.
He’s on the powerlines! He’s tip-toeing down the sideline of our neighbor’s wooden fence! Oh my heavens!
He’s got a morsel of food! A nut, perhaps? Cartoonish!
He’s at the 20, 10, 5.
And then the thrill is gone.
He’s placed the nut in a stash at the top of a fence post. He’s careful with it, setting it gently into a nook next to the day’s other treasures. He stops for a second to make sure it’s sturdy. And then he’s gone. I close the blinds, wondering if he came back for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Perhaps he just wanted to savor the forage. I get it.
Because much like Cameron Winter, I’ve been in my New Radicals era.
About a year ago, I launched Sounds Great out of necessity. In a new city, without great job prospects, I did the one thing I knew how to do: write about music. I sent several newsletters into the void and kept at it for about six months.
And then at the end of May, finally, one got some momentum. I watched my email inbox on family vacation as a tsunami of notifications rolled in.
New subscriber! New subscriber! New subscriber!
The next week, I started a very cool new job. A dream job. Still, I had every intention of riding this mild Substack success into a double-threat lifestyle. I set time aside to write on my days off.
But much like New Radicals after dropping their criminally underrated commercial breakthrough Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too — I laid low for a little while. I simultaneously broke the fevers of fruitless blogging and job searching, yet I was creatively paralyzed. I can’t quite explain why.
I got a beer with a friend recently and talked about writing and he asked why I talk about it in the past tense. I didn’t have a great answer for that. Maybe someday we’ll know. But a wise man once said you get what you give & you got the music in you (& threatened to kick Courtney Love and Hanson’s asses).
So I’m going to write about music again. And I’m picking up where I started with Sounds Great last December: the big year-end Album of The Year list.
If you’re new here and thinking…
“Wait, when did I subscribe to some blog called Sounds Great? Ohhhhh… This is the guy that wrote the one-sentence album review thing. What’s his deal again?”
First of all: These album write-ups are going to be a lot longer than one sentence. The annual year-end list gives me a chance to wax poetic about the records that changed me, so I’m going to do that. Bear with me.
Second of all: Let me re-introduce myself. I’m Gannon. I’m a writer and I talk about music for a living. I love 90’s pop-rock and DIY emo and alt-country and complicated hometown relationships and romance and the Minnesota Vikings and squirrels and hope and you. I love giving up just when things start to get good, and I love coming back right before they get worse. I love “Sparkle Song” by Florist and these 20 albums from 2025.
This is the 2nd Annual Sounds Great Year-End List.
I hope I didn’t just give away the ending.
Before we get started, here is the list of albums that didn’t make my Top 20 but I still loved a whole lot. It’s even sorted by genre for easy browsing. So please do not comment and say “You didn’t include ____?!”
Just kidding, please do.
Talking about the music you love is neat.
However, if your favorite album isn’t on this list that means I hated it and it was bad.
twangy things:
Dutch Interior - Moneyball
Ken Pomeroy - Cruel Joke
Fust - Big Ugly
Colin Miller - Losin’
Sam Moss - Swimming
Harlow - Cows Come Home
Shallowater - God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars
Friendship - Caveman Wakes Up
Free Range - Lost & Found
Pigeon Pit - crazy arms
Julien Baker & TORRES - Send a Prayer My Way
Jason Isbell - Foxes in The Snow
Snocaps - Snocaps
emo-adjacent:
Slow Joy - A Joy So Slow At Times I Don’t See It Coming
Have Mercy - the loneliest place i’ve ever been
Dead Calm - Keep Moving
Moving Mountains - Pruning of The Lower Limbs
The Casper Fight Scene - S/T
Stay Inside - Lunger
Militarie Gun - God Save The Gun
sad folk summer:
Arny Margret - I Miss You, I Do
Ian Huschle - Algae Days
chrysalis - dog songs
Hut - Hut
Kiernan - Always, I Love You
Rapt - Until The Light Takes Us
Cottonwood Firing Squad - horrible and wonderful and figuring it out
Clara Mann - Rift
Darci Phenix - Sable
Way Dynamic - Massive Shoe
Of Monsters and Men - All is Love and Pain in The Mouse Parade
Emily Hines - These Days
the Rap Album Of The Year Grammy Award:
Ovrkast. - While The Iron Is Hot
Clipse - Let God Sort Em Out
Chance the Rapper - STAR LINE
Little Simz - Lotus
redveil - sankofa
Tyler, The Creator - DON’T TAP THE GLASS
Danny Brown - Stardust
that vague Rock/Pop section at record stores where they put King Gizzard next to Kesha sometimes and it feels like a cop-out because it is:
Bon Iver - SABLE, fABLE
Petey USA - The Yips
Runnner - A Welcome Kind of Weakness
Alex G - Headlights
Florence and The Machine - Everybody Scream
Emily How - How Are You Lately?
Walter Mitty & His Makeshift Orchestra - Yikes Almighty
Lorde - Virgin
Wet Leg - moisturizer
Bartees Strange - Horror
Jay Som - Belong
caroline - caroline 2
Viagra Boys - viagr aboys
Geese - Getting Killed
20. Great Grandpa - Patience, Moonbeam
The first full-length album from Great Grandpa in six years was worth the wait. With lush orchestral arrangements, glitchy accents and stellar world-building, this is an album worth living in. It’s a storybook of vignettes full of lyrics so abstract you can paint your own masterpiece over the top of them.
Take “Never Rest,” the de facto opener, for example.
Edelweiss
You said that cause it sounds nice
Heavy wore your face, everything here waves
Ground the spore, palomino-trained boar
In plastic from the Hague
I answered your call as the bike would sway
Other tales are so viscerally real that vocalist Al Menne sounds like an old friend, shooting the shit on an apartment balcony at the end of a long night. There’s a real balance to this record. It sits between unsettling and settled, longing and stasis. More than anything, it’s full of empathy. The cathartic “Task” is a perfect example.
Saw you at the party
We called you by your new name
You had changed
But the heart of you was still the same
19. Jeff Tweedy - Twilight Override
A couple years ago, Jeff Tweedy published a book called How To Write One Song. It’s a great read and a magnifying glass into the brain of somebody who couldn’t stop at one or ten or 20 songs for his new triple-album Twilight Override. Despite my fractured attention span, this 30-song project is probably my favorite Tweedy release since Wilco’s self-titled.
“Stray Cats in Spain” and “Throwaway Lines” are all-timers in his catalog. “Enough” is as perfect of an outro as you’ll ever hear, a cowbell-driven singalong that wraps a bow on Tweedy’s 110-minute sermon.
“Feel Free” is one of my personal favorites. It’s a sparse, six-minute outlier. It’s a fresh haircut reclined on the lawn, cloudgazing. It’s one of those roller coaster loop flat-rides at the County Fair, spinning circles around the song you haven’t written yet.
If only somebody wrote a book on how to do it.
18. Park National - You Have To Keep Searching
Equal parts spritely and contemplative, this is East Coast emo-tinged indie at its best. Fans of beachy bands on that New Jersey-New England runway (like Oso Oso, Future Teens, Macseal and Valleyheart) will eat this up as much as I did.
You Have To Keep Searching is a nesting doll of songwriting scenes that come back to sear you on the third and fourth listen. It’s also ridiculously catchy. I think about the hook of “Edgerly” often. On his third record, Park National’s Liam Fagan drifts between humor, self-deprecation and genuine crisis with grace.
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry:
On the dash of grandma’s old Corolla
A Radiohead CD
If there was one thing you taught me
It’s how to disappear completely
You’ll keep searching:
Can I carry the weight of this guilt?
And the fear that I’m standing still
And die on top of that hill and let ‘em live
17. Postcards - Peace, Love, The American Dream, Sadness, and Everything In-Between
The only thing more audacious than that album title — and the album cover I always mistake for a lovechild of Bright Eyes’ Fevers & Mirrors and Lifted on first glance — is Postcards kicking off this record with a helpful fact about Advil. But that audacity pays off. Because this ripper of a record is actually a functioning painkiller.
For those who love wistful crescendos and decrescendos, this is for you. The Denver emo band Postcards delivers top to bottom on this tracklist.
The three-song run from 6-to-8 is a perfect case study: back-to-back-to-back, the band gives you an explosive exorcism on “Stare at The Light,” a summery singalong with the hopeful “Rabbit’s Foot” and a devastating ballad in “Suffer the Consequence” to cue up the album’s final act.
That’s the Everything In-Between, I assume.
16. Walker Rider - Fair
The new album from Minneapolis-based, North Dakota-born alt-country band Walker Rider is produced by Colin Miller (of The Wind) and features Advance Base. That’s a dream sentence right there. The real thing lives up to its elevator pitch.
“93” is among this year’s best album openers. Wyatt Dronen’s warbled, lo-fi vocals recline in a rocking chair over this cornfield of a country song. The lullaby is so cozy it almost conceals the track’s grisly grief. The same can be said for “Til’ I’m Through,” a found-footage foray into a relationship’s beautiful mundanity. This is a must-listen for fans of North Carolina country-grungers like Fust, Sluice and Wednesday.
Oh yeah — that Advance Base appearance? It meets the hype, too. Owen Ashworth harmonizes one of the record’s best verses on the lovesick “Free”:
You faked a seizure at the rock show
Because the band suckеd and you wanted to go
I was mad as hell on the ridе home
I couldn’t help but laugh when you sang their song
And I was not prepared for loving you
And now it’s all I do
15. girlpuppy - Sweetness
All due respect to the absolutely bonkers Lily Allen album, but this gets my trophy for 2025’s Breakup Album of The Year. These heartbroken lyrics feel so startlingly tangible. Invasive, even. Sweetness captures the whole emotional tornado of a long-term split. There’s the anger. The nostalgia for the early days when things were simple. The cherry core of sadness at the center of the Ben & Jerry’s pint.
“Windows” grabs you by the jugular, while its hook bubbles along on the word “you” over and over. “Beaches” breezes over airy slide guitar and bright strums but girlpuppy’s Becca Harvey is singing about learning to hate someone you once loved. “I Was Her Too” is a brutally literal song about infidelity. Harvey wants to save the next girl in line from being the next girl in line.
“Sleeping with her while my clothes were covering your floor,” goes the hook. “And I don’t know why I’m surprised, ‘cause I was her too.”
14. Truman Sinclair - American Recordings
From what I understand, Truman Sinclair got his start playing in Chicago metal bands as a teen before later fronting the emo band Frat Mouse. Now, he’s penning retro folk songs chock full of harmonica and Wild Wild West ethos in the style of Hank and Cash (I mean, the album is literally called American Recordings). It’s a wild pivot, but Sinclair sticks the landing with grace.
More than anything, he writes the hell out of a hook. Several moments on this album get stuck in my head often, none more than the opening lines of revenge fantasy “Joel Roberts.” Other favorites include the strumalong, s’mores-roastin-ready buddy odes “Frank” and “Sit By My Fire.”
But the Neil Young-ish ballad “Bloodline” gets my nod for best verse on the album. There, you can really feel Sinclair’s heavier roots.
And they’re filling your mind with addictive design
Can you feel that pine, stop them drilling that line
They’re sucking blood blind from the earth
I feel them die, I hold my sign
13. Samia - Bloodless
I don’t say this lightly: Bloodless is Samia’s best work yet. She’s got a killer discography already. But on this new LP — where the now-Minnesota-based singer examines the idea of emptiness and what it means to be drained of self — the clarity of vision is unmatched.
On Bloodless, Samia writes with literary wit. In just the first two tracks, she references cattle mutilation conspiracies and a hole Sid Vicious punched in a wall in a Tulsa music venue. There’s body horror and religious imagery, self-deprecation and self-affirmation, social anxiety and skinny dipping. This album is a meticulous web of observations and contradictions, tied together by pristine production by Hippo Campus frontman Jake Luppen and Samia’s signature knack for shifting tones — sounding fully angelic on just about anything.
Every song is intentional, even the 66-second de facto interlude “Craziest Person.” There, Samia reckons she’s drawn to whomever in the room is crazier than she is, before getting cut off by the invasive, hooky “Sacred.” The gem of the album’s back half is “Proof,” an acoustic dirge lamenting self-destructed friendships, punctuated with a whispered, one-line chorus:
“You don’t know me, bitch.”
12. ZORA - BELLAdonna
Another album local to us here in Minnesota, but this one is a surreal hyper-hip-hop concept album about a sort of femme fatale vigilante, moving through the night to fuck up anyone who dare cross a woman.
The A-side is especially nasty, with bass-busting bangers like “THE BITCH IS BACK (Press),” “VIDEOGURL” and “FASTLANE” (which flips the Uncle Luke “pop that-pop that” sample harder than French Montana or Travis Scott) setting the tone.
These tracks are equally ready for the club as they are for the getaway car. They’re sexy, explosive and cinematic. From top to bottom (“head2toe” is CRAZY), BELLAdonna has perhaps this year’s best rap production. It has beats that boast the audacity of early M.I.A., the ringtone-readiness of an aughts rap .mp3 and the electronic sensuality of hyperpop pioneers like SOPHIE. This is a really special record.
11. Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band - New Threats From The Soul
This album is a masterclass in spinning a Ferris Wheel around an idea for longer than you expected the carnival ticket to get you.
It’s a country album within a rock album within an indie record within a Neil Young compilation within an even better country album. Mathematically, the average track on New Threats From The Soul is 8 minutes, 10 seconds. There are lines about Jessica Rabbit, a license plate that reads “OJDIDIT” and Dionysus at a urinal.
This is my favorite verse:
I was a cactus flower
I had Heisman buzz
Now it’s a pissing competition
Between the man I am and the guy I was
This is my favorite song:
Oh, the simple joys.
10. Joey Valence & Brae - HYPERYOUTH
Yeah, I’m putting JVB in the Top 10 for the second straight year. Sue me.
If you aren’t familiar with Joey Valence & Brae, these hooligans got me hooked last year with their bonkers NO HANDS, which wears the duo’s influences aggressively on both sleeves: Lady Gaga, Skrillex, Beastie Boys, Lil Jon, Daft Punk.
The artery of JVB’s work, though, is an inimitable humor. A loud and immature silliness so endearing because shamelessness just doesn’t exist anymore. Everything is so culturally drenched in detachment and irony now that a JVB song feels like a time machine. And that’s actually why this album exists — the duo have said that the inspiration behind HYPERYOUTH is seeing nobody dance at the club anymore. It made these two feel so old and embarrassed for their generation that they made a cohesive, crisp club record about fighting to feel young while everything gets older and staler around you.
That vision gives the album some real weight, like on the early 2010’s indie-core ballad “LIVE RIGHT” and the Bobby Caldwell-sampling “HAVE TO CRY.” They also enlisted three of this year’s best features: JPEGMAFIA on the explosive “WASSUP”; Rebecca Black on “SEE U DANCE,” which sounds like prime Timbaland and Nelly Furtado; and TiaCorine on the album’s best track, the bouncy “BUST DOWN.” Considering the thesis, perhaps the best reference point for this new project is KIDS-era Mac Miller, who gets a shout on the album’s first line.
Here’s a selection of the album’s funniest bars:
I’m half amazing and half Asian
I’m so good, you could say I’m am-Asian
I feel like Gumby, ‘cause all I see is green
I hear your drum beats, yeah, you just a MIDI-me
I asked the bartender where my coat is
Went for some Chinese food and the fortune cookie told me I was goated
(*gong sound*)
9. CMAT - EURO-COUNTRY
If there were one artist I’d stake my bets on being the Next Household Name, it’s CMAT. She’s a singular songwriter and perhaps an even more impressive vocalist. As a music fan, vocal chops are largely secondary for me. If anything, many of my favorite bands are fronted by debatably bad singers. But CMAT has some chops. She hits notes on this record that give her songs an almost four-dimensional feel.
EURO-COUNTRY is this year’s gold standard in pop songwriting. It’s infectious and remarkably textured. CMAT examines two identities on this record: her own and that of her home country, Ireland. That tone is set by the anti-consumerist title track and its successor, the twangy reflection on relationship guilt “When a Good Man Cries.”
Each song seems to be a set-up for the next track’s gut-punchline. Names like Dorian Gray and Janis Joplin are verbs in her lyrical world. I think a lot about the ballad “Coronation St.,” where CMAT pronounces “23” with a staccato drawl, making it sound more like twenty-tree. It seems like a simple quirk of dialect. But even accents have accents on this record, because the next song, a brutal analysis of grief called “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash,” opens with:
I heard death comes in threes
I misheard it, being from Dublin
I thought “death’s in the trees”
Which makes sense
Cause they’re the saddest cunts of plants I have seen
8. Sleeper’s Bell - Clover
I didn’t realize until moving to the Midwest just how ruthless winter is, and how much better gentle music sounds when the snowglobe is shivering around your city. So in early 2025, I spent a lot of time with sparse and gentle folk albums like Clover, the debut full-length from Chicago band Sleeper’s Bell. Of all my folksy favorites, this has stood the test of time more than any other.
It’s as contagious as the seasonal flu, layered with catchy choruses and acoustic riffs so soft you can almost hear fingernails striking the nylon. There are subtle instrumental moments that set this record apart from your standard set of bedroom folk tearjerkers: the saxophone line on “Bad Word” and the pedal steel on the slow-strummer “Bored,” to name two.
Above all, lead singer-songwriter Blaine Teppema is a whiz at writing an opening lyric. In my years as a journalist, I’ve taken a lot of pride in whipping up a good one-sentence lede here and there. But Teppema is on some real Gay Talese levels when it comes to grabbing your attention.
“The world is full of things that don’t belong to me and I wanna keep that phone call in a cigar box full of crushed flowers,” opens “Phone Call.”
“Passing Through” jumps in with a question: “Who can blame anybody for how they treat a person passing through?”
But every great longform story has a good kicker to match its lede. And Sleeper’s Bell saves their haymaker for last, ending Clover with the pensive ballad “Hey Blue.” It’s an empathetic uppercut of a song, written seemingly to a friend who was victimized. It closes with a lyrical bouquet:
Hey blue, hey you
Your world is so real
But mine is, too
It’s minus-5 outside and this album will be in my winter rotation for years to come.
7. Racing Mount Pleasant - Racing Mount Pleasant
Do you like Bon Iver’s self-titled? How about Black Country, New Road’s Ants From Up There? Still think often about how it felt hearing early Modest Mouse or Funeral by Arcade Fire for the first time? Did you spend your 2025 Getting Killed?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, get ready to hear your new favorite album: Racing Mount Pleasant.
The self-titled sophomore record from the Ann Arbor band f.k.a. Kingfisher is gorgeous, lush and plays out like you’re trying to fit an entire orchestra through the eye of a needle. There are tender moments of acoustic yearning and swells of orchestral anxiety. There are whispery male-female vocal harmonies chased by room-shaking bursts of saxophone, trombone and harmonium. There’s an ethereal, symmetrical two-song suite called “You” at the center of the tracklist’s seesaw — and it’s arguably the best moment of all.
“We’re just two strangers by the bedside,” goes one line on the second half of “You,” as lead vocalist Sam DuBose shrinks backward. “Tell me it’ll be alright.”
This is one of those records you can’t just listen to one track from. It’s resistant to the put-on-a-playlist-and-shuffle norms of the streaming era. Each track leaves you begging for its successor. One listen to “Call it Easy” and you’re sucked Augustus Gloop-style by the soaring strings and half-dozen backing vocalists into the other side of the needle, trapped like a monkey’s paw in Racing Mount Pleasant’s instrumental winter. Grab a coat, it’s gonna be a while.
5. Dove Ellis - Blizzard
My favorite trophy to give out every year is the Oh Fuck! I Have To Change My Year-End List Now! Award. This is the album that comes out in the weird dead zone between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when year-end lists are being finalized in newsrooms nationwide. In 2022, that title went to the December banger of a record from Little Simz, NO THANK YOU. Last year, it was the surprise Kendrick drop.
This year, it’s fitting that the unprecedented winter surprise is literally called Blizzard. It’s a wallop of a folk-rock album by a mysterious Irishman named Dove Ellis, who I caught wind of on the r/indieheads subreddit when this came out in early December. The first two comments set a high bar, and he cleared it.
The Jeff Buckley comps are valid. Ellis performs with an enigmatic vocal flair that’s best approximated somewhere between Buckley, Cameron Winter, Thom Yorke and Heaven (the place, not the Australian heavy metal band).
The album flutters with effortless pacing between flooring folk balladry (“Feathers, Cash”), off-kilter rock catharsis (“When You Tie Your Hair Up”) and even one traditional Irish jig (“Jaundice”). But the crown jewel is “Pale Song,” which might be one of the best tracks of the decade. I won’t bother putting it into words. I’ll just let you experience it. If our world is just, that song will be 2026’s “Love Takes Miles” on the indie corner of the internet.
This is why I publish year-end lists at the end of December instead of at the beginning!
5. Momma - Welcome to My Blue Sky
Momma’s still got it. There’s no other way to put it.
After this band put out Household Name — one of my favorite records of 2022 — my expectations were unreasonably and unfairly high for their next LP. But somehow, some way, Welcome To My Blue Sky might be even better.
For one, it’s got just as many fuzzy rock earworms. “Stay All Summer” and “Bottle Blonde” are irresistibly singable and ripe for a road trip. “I Want You (Fever)” is one of this year’s best singles and “Ohio All The Time” registered on the Richter scale at their show in Minneapolis in May. The whole album is also packed with whirring guitar riffs that scratch a nostalgic itch for the piece of me that yearns for Cadogan-era Third Eye Blind and Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness-era Smashing Pumpkins.
But what gives the newest Momma LP even more bite than Household Name is the depth on the back half. The title track and “Take Me With You” are acoustic-forward stunners. And “My Old Street” is the record’s final bow, a sucker punch for nostalgics like myself.
I’ll keep my expectations high for all future Momma releases, because I know I won’t be disappointed.
4. Wednesday - Bleeds
Speaking of bands who’ve earned unwieldy expectations but manage to keep surpassing them … Wednesday is back with Bleeds, my favorite record of theirs yet.
Everything you expect to get out of a Wednesday album is here. Karly Hartzman is in her lyrical bag, her voice cracking over visceral lines about pitbull piss and picking ticks. There are shredding song conclusions where the guitars sound like they’re stuck in a tattered duffel bag, ripping zippers from the seams to get to you. There are dirty-yet-empathetic sketches of their home state of North Carolina.
But what makes Bleeds feel different is the blood, the lore, the well-documented heartache behind its christening. Listen — I’m the type of person to avoid song backstories. They often spoil a track for me.
But how do you not well up a little bit hearing the Merle Haggard ode “The Way Love Goes,” knowing the king and queen of countrygrunge — guitarist MJ Lenderman and Hartzman — recently split up from their yearslong relationship? How do you not let the tears flow when reading Hartzman’s brutally beautiful Vulture essay about recording that track?
How do you not take an extra lap around the neighborhood to collect yourself after listening to country ballad “Elderberry Wine,” the Best Song Of 2025? It takes about two and a half strums and a one-sentence tale of driving to the airport with the E-brake on to send me into a tailspin.
And the pink boiled eggs stay afloat in the brine
Cause even the best champagne still tastes like elderberry wine
3. Sarah and The Sundays - Like A Damn Dog
I’ll be honest. It wasn’t a great winter. Underemployed and overwhelmed, I stumbled numbly through my first Minnesota February. I begged to feel something other than negative-10-degree cold. But in this year’s most pleasant surprise, Like a Damn Dog lit a bonfire in my diaphragm.
This is a sad album, something that caught me off guard and I’m not sure why. I loved the last Sarah and The Sundays album, The Living End, which had some somber B-sides, but I chose in the last several years to remember the sunny parts. When I think of that album, a college favorite, I recall upbeat songs like “I’m So Bored” soundtracking dumb drunk parties and third dates.
But this time around, I listened to Sarah and The Sundays while walking through corporate skyway systems, bouncing between coffee shops to apply for jobs I didn’t want. And the bleakness of these songs built a doghouse for me to curl up in for a little while.
The ones that sit with me the most? The existentially anxious “Afterlife,” a song about hitting a death spiral after losing the family dog. “The Cue,” an accelerating prologue that splits you down the middle with its final act. “Sweet Tooth,” an acoustic ballad that features the lyric “I still hate my hometown for no good reason,” so any good friend of mine knows it was, statistically, my most-listened-to track of 2025. “Crystal Ball,” a crescendoing crooner about wanting to know something bigger is around the corner, even if it’s just the valve release of freeway traffic.
Is life in flux all I know?
I just wanna go home
Maybe calling this a sad record is shallow. There are certified indie-pop bangers like “Pipe Down,” “Looking Dead at The Function” and “Casanova,” which are very fun and begging to go diamond on college radio.
But it’s interesting what sticks with you. Sometimes you spend the day making snow angels and remember the mud on the carpet. I’m choosing to sit by the fireplace.
2. jasmine.4.t - You Are The Morning
I have a request of you. Tell me who you are. Speak about love with an honesty so human that even the worst motherfuckers can’t deny you. Create something with an ounce of the earnestness jasmine.4.t works with on her debut album You Are The Morning and we just might be okay.
The boygenius-produced first LP from Manchester’s jasmine.4.t is a panoramic photo of life as a transgender woman. Roses, buds and thorns. It’s an orchestral, gentle and dense record. At the heart of it is a love story about Jasmine finding and falling for another trans person. There’s a slew of swooning lyrics that feel like they’re written from the eye of a hurricane. In a world where discrimination against our trans friends and family is both culturally and legally expanding, Jasmine is at the kitchen sink on the album’s opener, falling in love.
I know the thoughts that drive your lips to curve
The thoughts I know well, but sure as hell don't deserve
This record puts dizzying tales of gender transition next to relatable fables about love — like the gentle slow dance “You Are The Morning,” which feels sonically like a disciple of Carrie & Lowell-era Sufjan Stevens. The Phoebe-featuring “Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation” feels almost oxymoronic, with its buoyant banjo and accordion behind lyrics about having a dissociative panic attack at a grocery store while Guy Fawkes Night fireworks trigger PTSD.
The outro, “Woman,” ends with a straightforward proclamation to all those who deny identity, even passively.
You say it's hard when you don't have the language
It's only hard to talk to people like you
'Cause I know who I am
And I understand that I am in my soul
A woman
But the plucky acoustic title track — a crushingly sweet love song that feels like a deep inhale after years underwater — gives us the album’s core idea. It’s an expression of love so sincere I’m convinced, perhaps idealistically, that even the coldest of hearts can be thawed by it. I hope they listen. I’ll let jasmine.4.t have the last word on this track, with an explanation from the album’s press release:
“This song is about the healing found in queer friendship. It is about queer people’s resilience in the face of violence. It is about our potential to bring about change within ourselves, those around us, and the world at large. I think trans people in particular have an incredible ability to change this world.”
1. Florist - Jellywish
I spent the day after the day after Christmas in my old neighborhood in downtown Phoenix. It’s the place where Mia — my partner of five years — and I first met five years ago. We’ve lived in three cities since. About two years into this five-year run of ours, I wrote a song in my iPhone notes about how different the city skyline looks since we had our first date. It’s unrecognizable now. It’s 70 degrees in December and I’m equal parts alarmed and held. I’m terrified, yet I’m cozy with the memory of that time we walked one block to get coffee and held eye contact with a golden retriever on an apartment balcony. We imagined our future and it looked like today.
I recall a day in May where Mia and I had a heavy conversation, one of those talks where you can tell things are going to be different for a little while. I walked to my temp job, spent an hour in a desk, brewed coffee and washed dishes and created Microsoft Teams events for well-meaning people who have known my name for about three weeks. I felt sick to my stomach. I walked out of the office. Into the spring air; into Mia’s arms; into the driver’s seat of my car; into a hike of an urban waterfall; into the sand on the shore of the Mississippi River; into the future, together.
Jellywish exists at the inside of the wishbone holding together these two worlds: the one where I let love die a cubicle death, and the one where I let love draw me home.
It’s a stunning, sparse indie-folk record from a band I’ve long adored. Singer-songwriter Emily Sprague sounds like clouds on these lilypad strums. Little bits of field noise put this record firmly in nature. But it’s the stream-of-consciousness storytelling that captures a 1080p image of my headspace on an average day.
There is so much love. The springy “Have Heaven” is full of unbridled joy. On “Moon, Sea, Devil,” Sprague simply sings: “I want to be a family with you.” “Sparkle Song” — perhaps my favorite song of the year — is a gentle love letter to mundanity with the one you hold. It’s the crease in the couch cushion where we’ve sat, ate, spilled popcorn and secrets and tears. It’s a weekday.
“Our Hearts in a Room” asks if that is enough:
Is this all you’ve ever wanted?
Is it all you believe is true?
Is it all our dreams collided?
And is that you?
And that’s the even more arresting question underneath the surface of Jellywish: On a planet where AI images of rivers are draining the real ones, how does one find the will to sit on the banks? When the world is ending, what does it look like to continue?
To continue loving, feeling awe, storming out of work at 10 a.m., looking that dog in its sweet damn eyes and stopping to think about how crazy jellyfish anatomy is.
The second lyric of the album, on the gorgeous intro “Levitate,” puts it this way:
Should anything be pleasure when suffering is everywhere?
Is this life too long? Or too short to have no want?
A few days before the new year, I’m flying home to a blizzard. Mia’s by my side and I’m chemically designed to open my phone to an almanac’s worth of algorithm-generated content. Saturday is gone. I remember the waterfall in pictures.
The outro, “Gloom Designs,” which Sprague describes as the album’s thesis statement, plants us back in the soil. It comes back to love.
Is this love something that blends into the sky?
Or is it placed upon the countertop?
It’s been a long time since we laughed until we cried
It’s been a short time in the entirety of life
I remember the first time we held hands. It was right here on these Phoenix streets. Really, right here. I held your palm at the wrong angle and we walked like we broke our collarbones. It’s the funniest story, and I’d love to hear you tell it again.
We’re still here. We’re always right here.
loved this! was excited by the chrysalis shoutout!
Great pick Jazmine 4t!