The worst songs of 2025
Featuring AI-generated slop, corny rap failures, a semi-cancelled band hitting rock bottom, MAGA worship with an ex-sitcom lead, and the final boss of co-worker music.
Year-end season is normally all about positivity—publications pick their favorite albums and songs from the previous 12 months, and then we all argue over placements and omissions. “Where’s __?” is an honor nearly as great as getting named “album of the year” by some magazine. But very few places are willing to call something bad, let alone the “worst of the year.” So we’re going to round out 2025 by doing just that, because there’s so much awful music going around that we don’t even bother covering half the time. Our ears deserve better, so consider this ranking us pushing back against the mediocre powers that be.
But while constructing the list, we ran into a truth we couldn’t ignore: there is a lot of alt-right-sympathizing, MAGA-worshipping, AI-generated slop posing as “music” out there. Hell, we had to save a chunk of this article just for the really gross stuff. Let us preface what you’re about to read: numbers 17-6 are bad songs; numbers 5-1, however, are irredeemable nadirs of the human race that you should never ever listen to. Here are our least favorite songs of 2025. On Friday, a worst albums ranking will go up on the site. And before we dive in, let us leave you with some especially dishonorable mentions—songs that no one on staff had the spoons or tolerance to write about: King Combs & Kanye West: “The List”; Falling in Reverse ft. Hardy: “All My Women”; Tory Lanez ft. SOS, DSTNY, & King Midas: “Back Out$ide”; Slaughter to Prevail: “Lift That Shit.”
17. Benson Boone: “Mystical Magical”
Look, Benson Boone has a good voice, a great mustache, and an impressive party trick (backflips, obviously), but for reasons that remain mysterious, he just cannot seem to write a song that should resonate with anyone older than about 13. His 2024 hit “Beautiful Things” specialized in the particular flavor of anguish most familiar to middle schoolers convinced they’re experiencing life’s absolute nadir, and this year’s “Mystical Magical” continues the trend, now swapping angst for a kind of vibes-only romantic babble most of us outgrew with puberty. Case in point: “Once you know what my love’s gonna feel like / Nothing else will feel right / You can feel like moonbeam ice cream.” …Huh? “It feels so mystical, magical, oh baby / ’Cause once you know, once you know.” Know what, Benson? The most you can glean from the lyrics is that the speaker seems to be vaguely coercing an unwilling woman into dating him (“All you do is push me out / … / I know you’ll come around to me eventually”), which really just makes you wish you didn’t pay attention to the words in the first place. Between last year’s impassioned-but-never-elaborated plea about all the “beautiful things that I’ve got” and this song’s endless, unearned insistence that his love is “mystical” and “magical,” I’m beginning to believe Boone has built an entire career out of confidently insisting that something is profound and then refusing to clarify what that something actually is. Sonically, “Mystical Magical” reaches for the candy-colored bounce of “Watermelon Sugar” and somehow misses even that, landing on a version of whimsy so manicured it never actually feels fun. Like the lyrics, the music keeps telling you how magical it is instead of letting anything magical happen. It’s the equivalent of a camp counselor insisting everyone’s having fun—which may explain why it feels so perfectly engineered for pre-teen summer camp talent shows. —Casey Epstein-Gross
16. Doechii: “Anxiety”
The first sign that something is amiss here is in the instrumentals: you think you’re about to indulge in some 2010s “Somebody That I Used to Know” nostalgia, only to realize too late that you’re trapped inside a bad song, being tortured with memories of a better song that’s just out of reach. “Anxiety” is technically from 2019, though Doechii released it officially this year after it blew up on social media. This was also the year that I was terrorized by this song, which appeared everywhere from Instagram reels to CVS aisles. Nothing about it works: the melody is awkward and clumsy and doesn’t fit with the Gotye sample at all, the lyrics (“I bounce back, no pogo / Unhappy, no homo”) have the effect of a bad high school spoken-word performance, and the less said about the chorus the better. I like the argument that the skin-crawling sensation I get from this song is actually very good, see, because it evokes the sensation of anxiety that the song is about, as if this were some experimental deep-cut and not, at the end of the day, a pop song that literally piggybacks on the biggest hit of 2011 just to pay poor homage to it. The most disappointing part of the whole “Anxiety” affair is that Doechii does have many, many good songs in her catalog, and yet I have no clue why this, of all things, is what everyone chose to steamroll me with. —Lydia Wei
15. Lil Wayne ft. BigXthaPlug & Jay Jones: “Hip-Hop”
Lil Wayne was once a plausible candidate for the best rapper alive, and he knew it. With those early Tha Carter releases, plus mixtapes like Da Drought 3, 2000s Wayne was on a hot streak that couldn’t be denied. That momentum comes to an emphatic, screeching halt on his latest album, Tha Carter VI, most notably on the BigXthaPlug- and Jay Jones-featuring “Hip-Hop.” It’s a major disappointment to hear someone who was such a vital force in rap deign to such lows. Here, he sounds at once robotic and deflated, a combination that’s impressive in all the wrong ways. After forcing bland syllable soup down our throats, Jay Jones comes in with an allusion to the first Carter entry. It’s an unintentional reminder that maybe you should just listen to that album instead. —Grant Sharples
14. Kesha ft. T-Pain: “YIPPEE-KI-YAY”
If you’ve ever wanted to experience what it was like listening to the radio in 2014 again, back when collaborations between pop stars and rappers were the hottest music trend, look no further than this dated-as-all-hell country-pop remix from Kesha’s equally passé Period. Beginning with a grating “biiiiiiiiitch,” the song attempts to conjure a honky-tonk atmosphere with its handclaps, yeehaws, and lyrical gestures at liquor and bartenders, but its relentless boastfulness will make you want to down your last shot and bolt for the exit door rather than stay and sing along. Not even the charismatic vocal stylings of T-Pain could save this, as he labors to fit in a set of clunky rhymes right as his verse ends. What could’ve been a fun duet between two artists who both popularized Auto-Tune early in their careers instead registers as the kind of oppressive earworm you’re forced to endure at a Yard House. —Sam Rosenberg
13a. Taylor Swift: “CANCELLED!”
“CANCELLED!” is a rallying call-to-arms for the worst people you know: the types who can post seven Instagram stories in a row about how unbothered and above-the-drama they are and then crash out over an Uber Eats order gone wrong, the types who take the joke “I support women’s rights and women’s wrongs” way too seriously and believe it the moral imperative of feminism to be a girlboss asshole. On a chorus with a dark, brooding synthscape that recalls a watered-down Pure Heroine (and I hate to even invoke that album here), Taylor Swift bemoans how easy it is to catch flak in this industry; lucky for her, she likes her friends cancelled, “cloaked in Gucci and in scandal.” Much like every failed stand-up comedian declares in their inevitable comeback Netflix special, Swift believes that she’s being crucified (even after her billion-dollar Eras Tour) not because she has ever done anything wrong or even remotely worthy of critique, but because society is a uniquely vituperative force. This total and obliterating lack of self-awareness is the seed from which every other terrible element of this song emerges: the cringey, meme-laden songwriting (“Did you girlboss too close to the sun?”, “bring a tiny violin to a knife fight”), the lazy indie-rock production, the uninspired AO3 dark romantasy-flavored imagery (poison thorny flowers and matching scars, I’m sure.) —Lydia Wei
13b. Taylor Swift: “Wood”
There are so many deflated, disappointing, letdown tracks on the already unnecessary and self-indulgent The Life of a Showgirl. And I don’t hate “Wood” just because it’s about Travis Kelce’s penis. I hate it because of the way Taylor Swift talks about Travis Kelce’s penis. Couldn’t she have come up with better alternatives than “cocky,” “wood,” and “hard rock”? Is this the tortured poet she kept talking about? She clearly couldn’t let Sabrina Carpenter corner the market on horny blondes without a fight. But instead of approaching it with any amount of wit, Swift opts for the most obvious, 2011 Wattpad-era synonyms that don’t even go far enough to become innuendos. Sue me for expecting more from the artist who has appointed herself our collective “English Teacher.” It’s like she’s playing the penis game with herself, setting up a line like, “His love was the key that opened my thighs” to have its own built-in mic-drop moment, letting it linger in dead air as if to say, “Yup, I’m a sexual being.” The whole thing feels like that Miranda Cosgrove “I actually do cuss a little” video. And not for nothing, lyrics aside, it is a complete musical ripoff of “I Want You Back.” Max Martin, did you not realize the backing track was lifted straight from the Jackson 5’s debut single? Were the songwriting credits not even contemplated? I fear Swift is contractually obligated to play this on her wedding day. Call it reparations. —Cassidy Sollazzo
13c. Taylor Swift: “Actually Romantic”
Nothing is more embarrassing than watching someone bring a middle schooler’s pen to a nonexistent fight. Allegedly a diss track about Charli XCX, “Actually Romantic” finds Swift making jabs at the English singer over a “Where Is My Mind?” ripoff, calling Charli a coke fiend and a “toy chihuahua.” Most stomach-churning is when Swift tries for the “you’re so obsessed with me, it’s gay” angle, which I thought we’d all banished to 2008; in a nauseatingly cloying voice, Swift sings about Charli’s supposed hatred of her: “It’s kind of making me… wet.” Earlier this year, as part of the promotional cycle for The Life of a Showgirl, Swift spoke on a radio show about her favorite lyrics from the album. “‘I pay the check / Before it kisses the mahogany grain’,” she said of “Father Figure.” “I’m like, ‘That’s my favorite type of writing, right? Where you have to think about, “What do those words mean?”’” Watching Swift fawn over her own usage of the word “mahogany”—three vowels, in this economy?!—you wonder if this woman, once considered our preeminent lyricist, has Benjamin Button-ed herself to an elementary reading comprehension level. “Actually Romantic,” likewise, continues this trend of cognitive decline. Part of what makes the track so uniquely terrible is that, when you revisit the Charli hit that supposedly inspired it—brat’s “Sympathy is a knife”, where Charli sensitively grappled with her own feelings of jealousy and insecurity—it’s astonishing how Swift could’ve failed so stratospherically in getting the point. “Actually Romantic” is the pinnacle of what Showgirl suggests: that Swift—a billionaire, untethered to our human realm, mired in an insatiable, almost Sisyphean chase of constant chart-topping and constant vindication—has not only lost her ability to make good (or even halfway decent) art, but more crucially her grip on reality. —Lydia Wei
“I Ain’t Comin’ Back,” the second of Morgan Wallen’s collaborations with Post Malone, is as uninspired as their first outing together. The racist-pariah-turned-racist-megastar muses on his controversial starpower and uses it as a springboard to explore romantic strife from such a self-serving perspective that it precludes nearly all introspection beyond acknowledging that he’s a stereotypical “bad guy.” “There’s a lot of reasons I ain’t Jesus / But the main one is that I ain’t comin’ back,” Wallen sings in the chorus. If only he actually went away. Get this man to God’s country so the rest of us can go to the devil’s land, presumably where the songs are much better. —Grant Sharples 
I genuinely cannot understand the hype surrounding Audrey Hobert, and to me her rise often feels like a psyop orchestrated by Big Gracie Abrams. Likewise, I’m convinced that “Sue Me” was specifically engineered in a lab to make people go insane. I’m unmoved by the ditsy white girl diarist school of songwriting (“Not that it matters, but I’m breaking patterns / And getting so good at pilates”), which is the spiritual equivalent to a quirked-up @subwaysessions fit, but what makes this song go from bad to unbearable is its chorus: bludgeoning and nauseatingly repetitive, Hobert warbling “Sue me I wanna be wanted” over and over again like a bad migraine pounding behind your temples. The strategy here, apparently, is catchiness by brute force. —Lydia Wei 
“Semi-Charmed Life” is a product of its era—peak ‘90s, post-Nirvana radio rock. I eat that shit up. It’s the greatest song about smoking crystal meth (well, that and Green Day’s “Geek Stink Breath”), and I don’t want to hear anybody cover it, interpolate it, or sample it. Just leave it alone! mgk is consistently embarrassing, if only because he takes his very bad music a little too seriously. His latest album, lost americana, is a catastrophically tasteless homage to artists who have more talent in one atom than he does in his entire body: the Who, Guns N’ Roses, the Black Crowes, the Strokes, even Semisonic! Don’t get me started on the Kate Bush rip in “indigo.” I thought tributes were supposed to be good? Or, at the very least, sincere? The worst offender on the lost americana registry is “starman”—which makes a mockery of Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life.” It’s a terrible interpolation. mgk embraces the traditions of Americana music—rewriting folktales as you pass them down—but squarely misses the point. Interpretation or re-imagination are not meant to be selfish acts, but “starman” is full of self-serving, shallow nostalgia grabs. My expectations for an mgk record have never been very high, but “starman” proves that every musician he cites is a better writer than he is. I can’t believe I’m from the same area code as this fucking dolt. “I been up for day-ay-ay-ays cuttin’ up the yay-ay-ay-ay, rollin’ up the flay-ay-ay-ay. That’s a three-way-ay-ay-ay”? I’m gonna k*ll myself today-ay-ay-ay after listening to this. —Matt Mitchell 
Will Smith is one of the corniest rappers of all time. I like the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as a sitcom but hate it for enabling Smith to have a music career beyond 1989. The proof is here in 2025, with Smith’s vapid album Based on a True Story, the worst consequence to emerge from him slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars a few years ago. Instead of going to therapy, Smith went into the studio and came back out with what is now the most embarrassing part of his career: Based on a True Story. But it’s the one-off “Pretty Girls” single that pisses me off. Here we have a crass rap song long past its expiration date. Not even a higher BPM couldn’t save this slop’s generic songcraft and flaccid beats. Personally, I have no interest in hearing Will Smith write songs, let alone ones like this. I don’t know who OBanga is. Did he give Smith the green light on a line like “I like BBLs and that stands for ‘Bad Bitches Link Up’”? “Pretty Girls” is what you get when a man who slept with a lot of women in the 1990s still hasn’t left the 1990s. —Matt Mitchell
We have to put a stop to Maroon 5. Once again, Adam Levine and the other guys have gotten away with a song (and album) so terrible that it won’t recede into the background. As you wait in line for your CVS prescription, your ears will perk up, and you’ll marvel at how offensively awful Levine’s songwriting has become. Abominable clunkers like “You’re a lucky star / Shining in a bankrupt sky” stick out over an instrumental that’s the aural equivalent of dry wheat toast. In the bridge, LISA from BLACKPINK attempts to resuscitate this corpse of a tune but to no avail. This shit probably goes so hard if you’ve never heard good music before, though. —Grant Sharples
“Alien Nation” might be the worst Arcade Fire song to date. The awful instrumentalism—horribly panned vocal microphones and insectoid clips mixed oddly into a platter of synthesizers—isn’t quite as heinous as the lyrics, which are drowsy, unstimulated notes-app ramblings deluded by out-of-pocket mentions of a “fake friend phone,” “Black Friday cyber attack,” “the God of love,” and “freeway fracking.” None of those words mean anything—their lack of cohesion could have painfully fit well on Everything Now—and “Alien Nation” is sorely listless until a semi-cancelled Win Butler’s robotic groveling stumbles into a thesis of some kind: “I return to all my enemies all the pain they would like to or could have caused me. I return this evil to them with love, in the name of the Alien Nation.” Ignorance is a potent drug. It’s no wonder Butler’s wife finally left him. —Matt Mitchell 
Can someone please tell me why the “BROTHER WAKES UP IN MIDDLE OF LAKE PRANK!” guy is now topping the charts with possibly the most offensively unmemorable pseudo-Christian rock song ever recorded? There’s a lot that frustrates about “Ordinary,” but you can’t say it’s not aptly titled. In fact, it is so ordinary, so bloodless and generic and pre-optimized, that it feels less written than immaculately conceived—assembled in a lab to go viral, never once passing through a human nervous system. It’s as if someone fed Imagine Dragons’ entire discography into ChatGPT, asked it to calculate the mean, then handed the lyric sheet (featuring gems like “world was in black and white until I saw your light” and “shatter me with your touch, oh Lord, turn me into dust”) to a former Hype House Tiktoker who just discovered both Christianity and a reverb plugin. It is the Pokémon final evolution of every song you’ve ever heard in a Forever 21 dressing room—the final boss of coworker music. That’s ultimately what makes “Ordinary” so grim: it can’t even manage to be bad in an interesting way. It sounds exactly like the career its ex-influencer creator seems to want: inoffensive, algorithm-approved, and boasting the aesthetics of sincerity without the inconvenience of personality. Grim indeed. —Casey Epstein-Gross
“1965”, from Jessie Murph’s Sex Hysteria, yearns for the era of tradwives in beehives. It’s ironic, by the way, but that hasn’t stopped the TikTok crowd from using the song to soundtrack their own misty-eyed moodboards of Priscilla Presley and The Notebook. Murph must be happy to have her cake and eat it too, and choosing to appeal to the streaming racket of Mormon wives is certainly in line with this convictionless attempt at satire. Everything about this song is an absolute insult: its condescending assumption that I would somehow hear Murph’s simpering, Amy Winehouse-on-helium impression and think to myself, “Yeah, I’d like to put this on instead of Frank”; its petulant little suggestion that the only reason I could possibly dislike it is because I simply haven’t fully understood its satire, and not at all because it’s plain old bad and because there’s zero intelligence behind its middle-schooler-that-just-learned-how-to-curse lyrics (“You fuckin’ fuck, fuck you”); its feeble pop-trap attempt at 1960’s crooner chic that sounds like it was produced by someone locked in a windowless room while being forced to listen to Meghan Trainor’s “Like I’m Gonna Lose You” on repeat. Really, if Murph wanted to offend me this badly, I wish she’d saved herself the effort and just slapped me instead. —Lydia Wei
Rap music is worse because Dave Blunts makes it. He’s a clout-chasing loser who can’t play a show without an oxygen tube in his nose, a velour tracksuit hugging his waist, and a cup of lean in his hand, and “First Day Out the Hospital” is one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard in my life, let alone just this year. At the very least, it’s the worst non-alt-right rap song since Hopsin’s “Happy Ending.” Blunts raps about no one wanting to fuck him (and if they do, it’s just “for the fame”) and then spends an entire verse talking about another rapper liking trans women. He’s more worried about people “talkin’ shit in the comments, but they broke and unemployed” than his songs making any sense. But it takes talent to be enjoyable, and Blunts’ presence in hip-hop or otherwise is a plight on mankind. He’s the worst person in the Xbox party chat—Kanye West’s choice for the “best rapper on the planet.” The fact that Blunts is credited as the only songwriter on West’s Nazi raps should tell you everything that you need to know about his worth as an artist. —Matt Mitchell
Putting Tom MacDonald on any “worst of” list is just a layup nowadays. The dude has made a career out of peddling racist, anti-woke garbage and calling it “rap music.” He’s not even a legitimate musician, just a cancer with vocal cords ripping off Black culture while spewing MAGA filth. MacDonald’s bars are always the same, talking about praying at the altar of daddy Trump, taking a bath in liberal tears, and flying the American flag. “If you want our freedom, come and take it back, bet you can’t” shows up here because MacDonald can only speak in right-wing pundit regurgitation, and it’s just such deeply unserious politicking to sit with. But, having an Auto-Tuned Roseanne Barr on this song is the real prize. Here are just a few of her lines:
It’s a little hard to put any of Ye’s recent releases on here at all, the same way it’s a little hard to force a coughing baby to go up against a hydrogen bomb. But unfortunately for you and me both, there simply cannot be a Worst Songs of 2025 list without “WW3,” which is easily one of the ugliest and dumbest songs I’ve heard in a long time (with honorable mentions to Ye’s “Cousins” and “Heil Hitler” to boot—what a banner year it’s been for everyone’s least favorite Nazi). In “WW3,” Ye proudly announces he’s “antisemitic, fully,” brags about reading Mein Kampf before bed, declares “all my n****s Nazis,” then paints himself as the victim by whining about how “they just don’t understand me.” Buddy, they understand you just fine. In fact, that’s why they fucking hate you. Lyrically, it plays like a Twitter spiral with a half-hearted beat underneath it—custody complaints, nitrous jokes, Trump name-drops, and swastika flexing, all delivered with the confidence of a man who thinks saying something outrageous automatically makes it meaningful. It’s Ye at his laziest and most repellent: replacing ideas with slurs and self-pity, then acting offended when no one applauds. There’s something truly tragic about it: once one of the sharpest writers in the game, he now sounds like someone workshopping slurs and calling it a worldview—calling it music. It’s not provocative, it’s not shocking, and it’s certainly not smart. It’s just a tantrum, looped. Never before has hate speech sounded so pathetic, so desperate for attention, so soaked in secondhand embarrassment. The only thing “WW3” actually detonates is whatever dignity Ye had left. —Casey Epstein-Gross 
There is bad music, there is offensive music, and then there is “We Are Charlie Kirk,” which is less “music” than it is proof that God has fully abandoned us, whatever timeline we’re in is beyond saving, and we should all probably just kill ourselves. Really, it’s not even a song; it’s AI-generated alt-right grief-slop tailor-made for deep-faked Kirkified Obamas to lip-sync to on Tiktok—and no, none of those words were in the Bible, which is itself ironic for a song that keeps invoking God the way a desperate podcast invokes its sponsors. The “song” sounds exactly like what it is: a computer guessing what a “serious” song sounds like after being force-fed a slurry of megachurch anthems, right-wing martyr fantasies, and PragerU comment sections. Every chorus swells with the hollow triumphalism of a movement that believes volume is conviction and repetition is truth, mistaking bland uplift for moral courage. It’s the Braveheart speech, as imagined by someone whose only experience of heroism is yelling Bible verses into a megaphone at an empty mall food court. 
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