Earlier this month, the Paste team unveiled its list of the 50 best albums of 2025. Thank you for reading it and for not ragging on us too bad for our picks (or omissions). As is tradition, we’re following that list up with something more bite-sized: the best EPs of the year. What is an “EP” and what is an “LP” is subjective at this point. Obviously there are no All Delighted People predicaments in this list, but we aren’t immune to a 30-minute extended play. Here are the rules we’ve set: we aren’t including any projects that wound up featured on full-lengths later on, and we’ve also chosen to forgo including EPs made up of re-imagined songs. And, to clarify before you dig in, we did not consider Ethel Cain’s Perverts for this list. It was already featured in our AOTY ranking.
This batch of records is a fun one, including releases from Best of What’s Next alumni (Wishy, Grumpy), recent cover stars (Maruja), and AOTY hit-makers (Jane Remover). If you’d like to catch up on our year-end albums, songs, and debuts rankings, I highly suggest checking those lists out. Thanks for spending time with us again. Here are Paste’s picks for the 15 best EPs of 2025.
15. Whitmer Thomas: Tilt
I’ve been a big Whitmer Thomas fan since watching his heartbreaking yet hilarious HBO special The Golden One in 2020. Though his Golden One music was more of the traditional route of comedy songs, Thomas’s innate ability as a true musician and songwriter shone through in his 2022 album The Older I Get The Funnier I Was. What was meant to be a humorous record, where he’d roll his eyes at the romanticization of nostalgia, turned into a genuinely beautiful album about revisiting his adolescent memories, capturing the juxtaposition of his traumatic childhood and the moments that got him through it. The LP was one of my favorite albums of that year, so needless to say, I couldn’t wait for new music from Thomas. This year, we got his Jay Som-produced EP, Tilt. Against a steady, shuffling beat on “Bronco Buster,” Thomas introduces the characters at a rodeo, like “Denim Dan,” who uses his time at the rodeo to distract himself from his bitterness over his divorce, or the clown who “got too bucked around” and can’t remember his kids’ names. While part of Thomas’s charm comes from storytelling of his own life, he’s just as great a songwriter when he’s pulling the focus off himself, using the 2-minute runtime to craft a narrative that’s bittersweet in just the right ways. —Tatiana Tenreyro [Saddle Creek]
14. MexikoDro: Still Goin the EP
Last month, Field Medic sent me this text about the MexikoDro EP: “hes on some other shit – just talking about staying home & going to bed early but somehow its tough af.” My sunroom brother was not wrong: Still Goin the EP is a lifestyle record from one of Atlanta’s best rap exports. The plugg architect gets nostalgic for post-recession trap music, rapping about the everyday delights that have kept him indoors. Also, this EP is 14 songs long. At a 30-minute runtime it’s basically an LP. But MexikoDro is on his Sufjan shit, finding God, drinking wine, and going to bed by 9:00 PM. No more pills, only salad. Rehab is especially far away when you’ve found a good routine. “No Date” is one of the best rap tracks of the year, thanks to BapeBrazy’s Southern mixtape touch. MexikoDro puts superstardom into self-care. —Matt Mitchell [Republic]
13. Wishy: Planet Popstar
We are devoted Wishy fans—and rightfully so. Our favorite Indiana band has had a momentous 2-year run: releasing two EPs in 2023, Mana and Paradise, and following it up last year with their debut album Triple Seven, a record that found spots on both our best albums and best debut albums lists for 2024. On top of that, the band was featured as part of our Best of What’s Next series last August. All of this is to say: if you’re new around here, go give Wishy a listen. They’ve already shared their third EP, Planet Popstar—a buoyant fever dream of indie-pop nostalgia plucked straight out of the aughts. The guitars on “Over and Over” are an instant earworm, anchored throughout the track by Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites’ near weightless vocals. Meanwhile, the snare heavy rhythms and steady, flowing groove brings to mind (or my mind, at least) the effortless cool of early Yo La Tengo. Since Mana, Wishy have matured at an amazing rate. They’re still pulling on the same threads of longing and self-reflection and gazing down at the same guitar pedals, but the music is different—arriving both more refined and intentional in every foggy lyric and fuzzy riff. —Gavyn Green [Winspear]
Read: “Wishy: The Best of What’s Next”
12. MSPAINT: No Separation
Those Mississippi boys in MSPAINT wreak havoc on my nervous system. It’s been two years since their debut album Post-American came out but the band whet our appetites summer with No Separation, a bonkers clip of industrial synth-punk, thanks to the presence of producers Julian Cashwan Pratt and Harlan Steed of Show Me The Body. No Separation is an anti-capitalist, pro-revolution compendium of fast and stunning songs. Vocalist Deedee rejects the disillusionment of abusive cycles on “Surveillance,” singing “There’s no prescription for scorched earth with desert fronts, outside of cities where the bodies get dumped. That’s our future” with not abandon but poise. On “Wildfire,” MSPAINT reckon that we ough to all fall together while the world’s falling apart. But the point of No Separation pokes through all the corrupt shit on “Angel,” when Deedee, both present and beautifully, gestures to the rest of us: “You’re good enough.” —Matt Mitchell [Convulse]
Dancing Shoes showcases Nilüfer Yanya’s acrobatic instrumental skills and her pull towards exploratory music. While other artists abide by sticky hooks and addictive choruses, Yanya’s appeal lies in her ability to let her songs develop—making each track feel alive as it unfolds and is satisfyingly balanced. Dancing Shoes has its fair share of scratchy, industrial embellishments, but Yanya puts herself at the core, so each song has a soft heart and spiky exterior. While the industrial drumming overpowers the songs’ stripped-back core at times, and some shaky synth embellishments lack the confidence to justify their presence, the songs on Dancing Shoes are a surprising and lush collection. Each of the four chapters bleeds into new genres and transforms along the way. That’s the beauty of giving your darlings some sitting time: you’re giving them the space to breathe. —Camryn Teder [Ninja Tune] 
I reckon Comafields / Imaginary Festival is among Burial’s greatest ambient releases. The 2-song, 23-minute EP is half-cinema, half-hauntological clip farm. “Comafields” scatters and swirls first in a Biblical dressing: “I saw something—flower, bloom from nothing,” a voice ushers. Quickly the song swarms through the consciousness, building a rave out of piled samples and spoken-word samples. Breakbeats collapse into 4/4 kicks. Someone, maybe Jens Lekman or Sinéad O’Connor, the internet suggests, says “You put your arms around me” over and again. “Comafields” from the 5:00 mark onward is my favorite section of a Burial song in maybe a decade. On the EP’s B-side, “Imaginary Festival” unspools into a scattershot, moody, spacious glow of choppy Auto-Tune, next-room-over synths, and crunchy, crashing drones. “Imaginary Festival,” great as it is, hits like an Untrue B-side. And hey, I’m certainly not complaining about that. —Matt Mitchell [Hyperdub]
Dean Blunt and Elias Rønnenfelt know how to strike up a mood. They made one of my favorite songs of the year together, the one-off “tears on his rings and chains,” but their collaborative EP Lucre just soothes. The seven songs make for a transient 16 minutes, sweeping not only through some of Blunt’s best guitar work yet but inspired vocals supplied by Rønnenfelt. It’s a record that zigs, zags, rinses, and repeats. Sometimes it’s lush, sometimes it crushes. The Vegyn-produced “4” begins with sludge but ends in a hypnosis. A backbeat on “3” sounds like it’s being played backwards until the song’s key-change swirls like a ‘90s alternative Top 40 treasure. Rønnenfelt’s performance on “7” is a key standout, as he runs into the mix and wraps his vocals around Blunt’s every-which-way strumming. Lucre is like a tag-team match; the songs are layered with sensibly poetic phrasings and open tabs. “5” is the most satisfying rock song of the year, and I’m not sure Blunt has ever sounded as sweet as he does here. I hope that he and Rønnenfelt make music together forever. Hell, let’s toss Vegyn in there too. —Matt Mitchell [WORLD MUSIC] 
Is this actually an EP? I want it to be, so it is. The three years that have passed since the release of Grace Ives’ last album, Janky Star, have felt like a hundred. There’s not a pop record from this decade that I care about more than Janky Star. “Shelly”! “On the Ground”!! “LULLABY”!!! Oh, my God. Thankfully, the check I sent in to renew my Grace Ives Fan Club membership has finally cashed and she’s spending it well in Los Angeles. Earlier this autumn, she shared three new songs—“Avalanche,” “Dance With Me,” “My Mans”—and all of them are all fantastic. Like, alarmingly great. If I had to pick my favorite? I mean, “Dance With Me” is dramatic crash-out music that Ives calls “a step outside of the house”—written in libraries across Los Angeles after she got the hell out of a suffocating, destructive Brooklyn: “I was drinking, lying, and hiding. I fell down stairs; I called out sick; I stole; I was a shitty girlfriend, a bad daughter; I abandoned the few friends I had; I cried and vomited beyond bile. Gross. When I finally stopped drinking, I stopped lying. I gave up trying to control everything and let life take over. I saw my life clearly.” On the new tracks, Ariel Rechtshaid’s production serves as a great duet partner for Ives’s DIY pop mein. She’s not hiding away anymore but bursting with joy, letting sincerity color the confidence and chaos in a potpourri of synths, piano, pump organ, mellotron, strings, and guitar. Singles is gonna blow out every speaker I can find. I quote a famous T-shirt: “Play Grace Ives.” Hearing a line like “I think I could be like the air” was worth the wait. —Matt Mitchell [True Panther]
1010benja is still the madman he was on Ten Total last year. Incorporating influences spanning Hideo Kojima and John Frusciante, his work is engulfed in pop, trap, drill, and gospel music. “YAM” is tremendous and brief, noodling in maximalist soul singing and scraping guitar licks. Put on a pair of headphones and the song turns into a ceremony. 1010benja’s voice is gummy and poppy; his harmonies are robust and passionate. The song’s cymbalism and gospel-snippet backdrop contracts while a guitar solo cruises. “Such a loveliness,” 1010benja sings, “a soft-hearted bashfulness.” Recorded in a Kansas City basement, “YAM” stands for “YOUR ASS, MINE” and that tone refracts in the music, when 1010benja’s croons tone into the muscular and his guitar playing lands there even more so. “Lightrope” is what I want everything to sound like. I want blistering rock riffs packed into gang vocals, flashy snares, and rap ‘n soul production. I like a busy song; “Lightrope” feels new each day, each session. The minutes it spends in my headphones get longer. 1010benja floors me because he’s doing five things well at once. Knowing it’s just him and an engineer making the racket of an entire band… I mean, what the hell, man? After Ten Total lit me up last year, I bet whatever 1010benja is eyeing next will do the same. Album, EP, singles run, nothing at all, whatever. He could play guitar while reading the phonebook and I’d be all in. 3X10 is magic in three bursts. —Matt Mitchell [Tabloid Recordings] 
Tír na nÓg is an atmospheric deluge spread across four parts. It’s music you can collapse into, orchestrated by Maruja, one of Europe’s most-exciting bands. “Aon,” Dó,” “Trí,” and “Ceathair” offer a krauty, jazz-flecked expanse. The saga—a 20-minute concerto posing as separate songs—is full of improvisational tonal bends. It’s unpredictable but not devoid of entropy, a telepathic bond shared between four people in lockstep. And the music of Tír na nÓg always collapses into itself: Maruja employ big, shattering guitars, saxophone tapestries, and thick, caterwauling percussion; the songsn never flatline but crush in fogs of droning, potent static. The EP mirrors the band’s live show, which has become a must-see, word-of-mouth phenomenon, and I’d wager that few post-rock names are on Maruja’s level right now. Tir na nÓg begs the question: How much higher can this band possibly go? —Matt Mitchell [Music For Nations] 
Remember last year when Jane Remover released some of the best pop music of the year, like “Magic I Want U,” “Flash in the Pan,” and “Dream Sequence”? Me too! It seems that Jane couldn’t let 2025 end without dropping her third project, the ♡ EP, which features all four of her 2024 singles plus two new songs, “So What?” and “Music Baby.” The EP is a detour from the rage-dance bombast of 
The Grumpy circus is officially in town, and it shows no signs of leaving anytime soon—their current docket is already overflowing with fresh material waiting to be released. Most immediately is Piebald, an EP titled after an old term for black-and-white animals, which continues down the road Wolfed took care to pave last year, leaning further into the band’s commitment to contrast: joy and grotesquerie, silliness and seriousness, cut and dry. “Harmony” itself, featuring claire rousay and Pink Must, is, predictably, strange and tender and a little warped at the edges—a sonic postcard from the outer boroughs of poppy indietronica, stamped with three different names and none of the expected genre markings. The testimonials are precisely what one might expect from this trio of artists, and it’s glorious, like a dream blunt session trapped in a press release. “Bird Parts,” with ex-Girlpool vocalist Harmony in tow, is full of Auto-Tune and acoustic plucks, glitchy, warped harmonics, and lyrics about a marital collapse/love triangle still being unpacked. It’s a perfect pop song mangled in turmoil. “My girl isn’t mine, I’m a bottom feeder,” Heaven Schmitt sings. “I can’t kiss her but she calls me when I really need her.” It’s shattering to listen to, magnified by Grumpy’s extraterrestrial vocal, Harmony’s dream-world accompaniment, and mutated, lovesick, rock ooze. Each song Schmitt gives away is a planet of its own; in a perfect world “Crush” blows out all the mall speakers; Piebald is piecemeal ecstasy. —Casey Epstein-Gross & Matt Mitchell [Bayonet] 
Westside Gunn went OG Griselda on Heels Have Eyes EP earlier this year. Five great tracks full of immaculate beats and high-res flow. I mean, the dude raps his ass off in a 10-minute package. His ear for samples has always been aces (he even samples his own song, “Underground King,” on “Einstein Kitchen”), but Heels Have Eyes is just further confirmation that he’s running circles around his peers—impressive, considering that he apparently wrote some of these songs, “Goro” specifically, the night before the EP came out. But “Goro” is fantastic, complete with a sample of the Georgettes’ “Would You Rather.” I also need to mention: Cee Gee’s production is supremely clean, with his lean backing tracks wired into Gunn’s tight phrases (“Life of being locked up since Nixon / Let go and let God lead you, be richer’). “Egypt” packs in the finesse and delightfully samples Doechii’s Apple Music interview. “Einstein Kitchen” doesn’t even crack 90 seconds but it might be the best song in Gunn’s entire Heels Have Eyes franchise. —Matt Mitchell [Griselda] 
One of the best records you’ve never heard is Wellswood, the 2022 LP from New Orleans picker and talker Thomas Dollbaum. I think about that music often, especially a song like “Florida,” and I think about these words always: “I promise you my teeth if you promise me your hand. I’m going to give you the most beautiful funeral that I possibly can. We may never grow old but we sure as hell can’t stay young.” Dollbaum is an archivist and curator I look to for guidance in my own remembering. He’s part Jesus’ Son-age Denis Johnson and part Nebraska-age Bruce Springsteen; his words, fenced by weapons of Americana and swampy, twangy pastorals, will show you life and death through the necessary, oft-harsh artifacts found in-between. But there is beauty in that, just as there is beauty in Dollbaum’s Drive All Night EP, which he wrote after the sudden passing of an old friend. Tracked by Clay Jones in Mississippi two years ago, Dollbaum’s longtime co-conspirators Kate Teague and Josh Halper come back to him again, interpreting the sounds and movements of his folktales and histories—memories of the places he and his late friend grew up in. Dollbaum likens these songs to James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” and it’s impossible to think of “Lives of Saints” or “Angus Valley” in any way but Wright’s poem’s concluding revelation: “I have wasted my whole life.” The music sticks with you, just as Dollbaum’s art always has, like melancholy in your belly. —Matt Mitchell [Dear Life Records]
Gabriel Jacoby’s debut EP makes every room spin. Eight tracks, 20-minute runtime—it’s all a groovy gas, no brakes. Jacoby’s touch for funk and soul is stellar, and gutta child is massive even when it’s coming down—full of brass, hand-claps, and some serious stank. His Carolina singing skates through moods, sweeping into a buttery, raspy baritone with falsetto accents. I saw somebody online recently compare Jacoby to D’Angelo, which is high praise I’m not ready to totally dismiss because “the one” exists. gutta child is soul music splashed with pop bombast magic: the “hey, hey” backing of “hello” is contagious; the Tom. G-assisted “bootleg” flirts with primo Nelly rhythms; “dirty south baby” is so musically flavorful that even the harmonica sounds hot. The percussion throughout the record sugars each rim with rattles and clinks; Jacoby turns the bridge of “bootleg” into a damn house party. “be careful” and “baby” are deadly sensual, both tracks swooning louder than an atom bomb. The saxophone at the end of “be careful”??? You can literally hear the sweat dripping off the keys. The only flaw I can find in gutta child is that it doesn’t go on forever. —Matt Mitchell [Pulse Records]
