The best albums of 2025 (so far)

Japanese Breakfast, billy woods, Perfume Genius, and Bon Iver delivered some of our favorite albums of the year so far.

By A.V. Club Staff | June 26, 2025 | 11:00am

By Drew Gillis, Emma Keates, and Jen Lennon. Images, clockwise from top left: Bad Bunny, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (Rimas Entertainment); Japanese Breakfast, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) (Dead Oceans); Backxwash, Only Dust Remains (Ungly Hag Records); Perfume Genius, Glory (Matador Records).

Music Features Best of 2025 (so far)

Bad Bunny started the year off right with DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, one of his best albums to date. Since then, there has been a wealth of exciting new music, from anxiously awaited comebacks like Bon Iver to solo debuts like TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe. Here, in alphabetical order, are our favorite albums of 2025 so far.

Aya, hexed!

There is something both repulsive and compelling about hexed!, the sophomore album from U.K. musician Aya Sinclair, who records under the mononym aya. The album art, which depicts aya’s open mouth filled with live worms (with one especially large specimen hanging over her bottom lip), immediately evokes disgust, a sense that these two things shouldn’t go together, though it takes a moment to articulate why. Maggots and insects are drawn to dead flesh; seeing worms bursting out of healthy skin is a contradiction that is difficult to comprehend. It’s similarly difficult to resolve the contrasting sounds of industrial and U.K. house music that dominate the record (literally—these songs are designed to punch you in the face with their confrontational music and lyrics). At first, your instinct is to duck the punch, but by the end of hexed!‘s 10 tracks, you might find yourself in more of a Fight Club-esque mindset, craving the impact to remind yourself that you’re alive. [Jen Lennon]

Backxwash, Only Dust Remains

Only Dust Remains, the fifth album from Zambian-Canadian rapper Ashanti Mutinta, a.k.a. Backxwash, is relentless. Most of the time, her direct lyrics dance along the thin line between honesty and confrontation, but there are times when she leaps, headlong and heedless, across that boundary, like on the seven-minute “WAKE UP.” “Wake the FUCK up,” Backxwash screams, maybe at herself, maybe at others as she grapples with suicidal ideation. Death is a recurring theme on Only Dust Remains; an album note on Bandcamp reads, “These are the songs of a person who was brought back to life but is now haunted by death itself.” That sentiment plays out in the way Mutinta’s words interact with her carefully composed and sampled backing beats, which range from EDM to heavy metal. There is a sense that Backxwash is fighting back against an enemy she can’t fully see or define, striking out in different creative ways to see what’s most effective; even the hits that don’t fully land are worth admiring for their ingenuity. [Jen Lennon]

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Bad Bunny, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS

Bad Bunny’s sixth full-length album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, is a love letter to Puerto Rico. To be fair, the rapper’s passion and advocacy for his homeland have never been far from the surface, but after achieving global megastardom, his music, especially on his previous album, Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana, introduced broader themes and influences. But for DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, Bad Bunny found inspiration in the music he listened to when he was on the road to remind him of home. The album features a slew of Puerto Rican collaborators, from RaiNao to Los Pleneros de la Cresta, and incorporates elements of salsa, plena, and jíbaro. It’s catchy, celebratory, and politically outspoken all at the same time. By returning to his roots, Bad Bunny made one of the best albums of his career. [Jen Lennon]

Ben Kweller, Cover The Mirrors

One of the most common strategies for coping with grief is to surround yourself with loved ones and lean on your support network when you have trouble standing up on your own. And though Ben Kweller’s Cover The Mirrors, an album he recorded as a way to reckon with his grief over the death of his 16-year-old son, Dorian, features several guest musicians (Waxahatchee, Coconut Records, The Flaming Lips, and MJ Lenderman), it never feels as though he’s relying too heavily on them. Instead, they contribute to the album’s somewhat unexpected uplifting atmosphere; it’s not exactly a party, but it does feel more like a celebration of life than a meditation on despair. Even “Letter To Agony,” possibly the album’s most downbeat song (it opens with the line, “Oh, darling / I’m not doing so well”), leads into the poppier “Save Yourself,” with a chorus that implores, “Don’t let it beat you up / When the rose you have / Is a faded color.” “Oh Dorian,” the album’s closer, ends with the heartbreaking but optimistic line, “I can’t wait to hang with you again.” Cover The Mirrors isn’t always an easy listen, but it is, ultimately, deeply rewarding. [Jen Lennon]

billy woods, GOLLIWOG

billy woods’ GOLLIWOG is a collection of horror stories. It starts with “Jumpscare,” the opening track’s beat building discomfiture out of disparate noises—something like an old film projector, followed by a great unknowable thing, a pressure behind your eyes more than a sound; the slow, ominous tinkling of a music box; and eventually a distant buzzing, a swarm of insects just out of reach. “Ragdoll playing dead / Rabid dog in the yard / Car won’t start / It’s bees in your head,” woods raps, and the sounds coalesce into something uncomfortably tangible. This sense of something lurking below the surface pervades every song on the record; underneath woods’ dense, literary lyrics packed with imagery and allusions, the nebulous nature of fear begins to take shape. [Jen Lennon]

Bon Iver, SABLE, fABLE

Everything is (finally) peaceful for Justin Vernon on SABLE, fABLE, his first album under the Bon Iver moniker in six years. While the salmon-colored release sees Vernon at his most straightforward in years, it also pulled a bit of a trick on fans. Last year, Vernon dropped a pitch-dark EP called SABLE, which seemed to mark a return to early-career form. It turned out, however, that those three songs were merely “the last gasping breath” of a Vernon that pitied himself and strove to turn that loathing into art. On SABLE, fABLE, the tracks give way to a brighter, more coherent, but no less entrancing version of the artist, one who can finally see that “January ain’t the whole world.” SABLE, fABLE is a joyous, cathartic entry into the Bon Iver catalogue. And if it really is his last, as its press notes seemed to imply, it’s a perfect note to end on. [Emma Keates]

Erika de Casier, Lifetime

Erika de Casier’s 2019 debut album, Essentials, was an early-’00s R&B throwback that defined her refined Y2K-era sound. On her fourth album, Lifetime, she pivots to ’90s-style trip hop with similarly refreshing results. The album has a dreamy, ethereal quality that peaks on “Seasons,” with its baby-voice vocals and soaring synths. Lifetime also highlights de Casier’s considerable talent as a producer (she self-produced the whole thing); she eschews typical song structures in favor of sonic cohesion, with each song opening with a fade-in and ending with a fade-out. The outro of “Moan” perfectly summarizes the album’s ethos: “Let’s just make love / Build trust / See eye to eye / Listen closely / Live wholeheartedly.” [Jen Lennon]

FKA twigs, Eusexua

Even for an album from FKA twigs, who has always been exacting about her image and music, Eusexua is glossy. The slickness fits with twigs’ current otherworldly cyborg aesthetic, though. The concept of eusexua (a word she invented), according to twigs, is meant to evoke the feeling of getting lost in the crowd on a dance floor, flying high on physical touch and human connection, so euphoric that you transcend humanity and exist as pure feeling. The phrase “this room of fools, we make something together,” which twigs wrote on her hand while at a rave in Prague, was the impetus for the album, and she turns it into one of the album’s standout tracks with the addictive “Room Of Fools.” “Girl Feels Good” brings the pop star back down to Earth for a few minutes with its straightforward, sensual lyrics (“When a girl feels good / You’ll know”). But Eusexua truly shines when twigs melds the dissociation of eusexua, expressed through ethereal techno beats, with lyrics that emphasize the act of feeling, like on the album’s title track. [Jen Lennon]

Japanese Breakfast, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)

Japanese Breakfast frontperson Michelle Zauner has developed a habit of signaling an album’s overall tone right in its title. 2021’s Jubilee marked an unexpected outpouring of joy, while For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is, well, melancholy. But to let the album’s darker mood turn you off would be to miss out on some of Zauner’s most interesting work to date. For Melancholy Brunettes finds the singer-songwriter at both her most introspective and most epic, as she weaves together references to mythic figures like Orlando and Leda with threads from her own life and experience in the public eye. The result is intimate and ornate in equal measure, marked throughout with intriguing melodies and Zauner’s particular brand of gut-punch lyricism. Even in her melancholy, she often finds small, precious glimmers of hope. “Life is sad but here is someone,” Zauner sings on the opening track. Sometimes, it really is that simple. [Emma Keates]

Jenny Hval, Iris Silver Mist

Norwegian musician Jenny Hval found her way to the sound of Iris Silver Mist through a different sense entirely: smell. The album is named for the Serge Lutens perfume of the same name, and it reflects Hval’s interest in perfume, which she rediscovered during the early days of the pandemic. Scent pervades Iris Silver Mist; on “To be a rose,” Hval evokes the smell of roses and cigarettes, and “I want to start at the beginning” brings to mind the smell of cooking burgers. More than literal scents, though, Hval is primarily concerned with the transformational and impermanent nature of perfume, and of existence. On “I don’t know what free is,” Hval sings, “Open up your mouth / Exhale me with your cigarette smoke / Like you gave me life, now set me free.” Iris Silver Mist is contemplative; its songs float by, and eventually break down and disappear, leaving only a sense memory behind. [Jen Lennon]

Model/Actriz, Pirouette

For 40 minutes, Pirouette simmers without exploding into a cathartic boil. This is not a dig; for an album frequently focused on how we present ourselves and the self-consciousness that comes with crafting an identity and the fear of truly letting go, it’s wholly appropriate. While often loud, there are moments of real tenderness on Pirouette; “Acid Raid” finds lead singer Cole Haden plaintive and, smack in the middle of the album, not wanting to say goodbye. “Audience” seems to gesture toward a distinctly closeted kind of self-policing, when even in moments where he’s completely alone, Haden still feels like he needs to perform a specific role. “Cinderella” contains one of the album’s most devastating moments, detailing a desired Cinderella-themed children’s birthday party but backing out. If this all sounds like rather heady material, the music is much more gut-level, pulsing and splitting the difference between a nightclub and a mosh pit. Model/Actriz has a knack for taking these hyperspecific memories and making them universal. [Drew Gillis]

Oklou, choke enough

There has always been a delicacy to Oklou’s work, but on Choke Enough, her first full-length album, the singer born Marylou Mayniel figures out how to take that quality and scale it up. It still feels like we’re in Oklou’s head, but in new locales than on her 2020 mixtape Galore. “Harvest Sky” stakes a decent claim as the clubbiest track Oklou’s released, even if it still sounds like you might be listening from the line outside. “Take Me By The Hand,” which features Bladee, feels murmuring between two lovers, intimate while galaxy-sized thanks to the twinkling synths underscoring their patter. And while Oklou’s work has long felt baroque, Choke Enough takes it even more literally, bringing, for example, orchestral trumpets to the icy-yet-frantic “ICT.” Mayniel may be painting with a bigger brush than she has before, but she hasn’t sacrificed any specificity in the process. [Drew Gillis]

Perfume Genius, Glory

It’s a testament not just to Mike Hadreas’ writing but his voice that he is able to convey feelings so intimate with lyrics that are often extremely esoteric. Some of the subjects that the portraits on Glory, the seventh album released as Perfume Genius, focus on include spectators watching a teen become injured at a football game, the victim of a kidnapping singing from inside the trunk of a car, and three friends shooting what seems like some kind of erotic video. Hadreas never really lets you close enough to be sure of what’s going on, but the distance allows you to glimpse the full picture. The title Glory suggests grand expectations, but Hadreas’ vocals, often compressed into a near-whimper, draw you in to the smallest details. What results is a constant push and pull between the major and the minor, the universal and the personal. Not just one of the strongest releases of 2025, Glory is the kind of album that we’ll be digesting for years to come. [Drew Gillis]

Tunde Adebimpe, Thee Black Boltz

TV On The Radio frontman Tunde Adebimpe began working on his first solo album, Thee Black Boltz, during the pandemic, and while making the album, his younger sister suddenly died. Given the environment from which it emerged, it wouldn’t have been especially surprising if Thee Black Boltz was pretty gloomy. But instead, Adebimpe focuses on the moments that illuminate the darkness like a bolt of lightning. On “God Knows,” he accepts the end of a relationship with grace, singing, “And though it was the best of my life / I know it’s alright that it’s over.” Adebimpe’s vocals are layered over catchy synth-heavy beats by producer Wilder Zoby, who helps define his solo sound. It’s more pop-forward than TV On The Radio; “Magnetic” and “Somebody New” are particularly danceable. Mostly, though, it’s a showcase for Adebimpe’s artistry, a lauded frontman finally stepping out and showing off what he can do on his own. [Jen Lennon]

yeule, Evangelic Girl Is A Gun

yeule, the recording project of Singaporean musician Nat Ćmiel, has gone through various iterations in the past, from shoegaze to glitch pop. Their fourth album, Evangelic Girl Is A Gun, primarily focuses on trip hop. No matter what genre they’re exploring, though, yeule’s music is almost always focused on the macabre. This dichotomy is best exemplified on “Dudu,” with its simplistic and catchy refrain that leads into dark verses (“Overdosed from the pain / Woke up in a bed, restrained”). In the music video for “What3vr,” yeule wakes up on the floor of a decrepit hospital and prowls around covered in blood. It could easily come across as try-hard, but despite all the artifice, there’s something real at the center of yeule’s music. [Jen Lennon]