2025 in Music, Part 1: Christmas Eve Teaser

We’re¹ taking over the regularly scheduled spots on the calendar² for the next two mornings to give you the 2025 year in music! For the third time, I’ve made an attempt to rank and review my favorite songs of the year, a project that seems to get bigger every year since I started.

This year ended up being a lot more difficult to rank for me than the last couple of years. It feels like a flatter year in music quality than the last couple of years, where there are a lot more songs that could potentially make the list, but few obvious delineations in quality.

That caused me a lot of problems trying to trim down the list. A couple of months ago, I finally got down to 70 or so songs to consider for the final top 40, but I still had a lot of work left to sort through them all and finalize a list I was satisfied with for publication. And, of course, that whole time, the year just kept going, so more music came out. And there was a lot more I had to sort through in this year than the last two. Between the volume and having a lot of songs I wanted to recognize, the main article this year will be counting down 60 songs instead of 40.

So, that’s one way of saying the pre-countdown article is going to ramble a lot so I mention a bunch of the songs that didn’t quite make it. (And I probably have still left out a fair number that I couldn’t find space for.) And the sheer volume of music means there’s probably some anti-recency bias on the list; it’s probably going to favor songs earlier in the year, that not only had time to really sink in for me, but also that I know I’m not sick of after listening to for many months. That said, I spent some time at the end of the year going through some later releases, and that shook up what I thought was going to be a fairly settled list. So maybe there’s no such bias.

Even considering all that, there are still some quite good songs I won’t get around to mentioning at all. And there’s a bunch of music from this year that I never got to hear at all, even if I meant to (sorry, Lily Allen)— nearly all of what I get comes from the radio here (shout-out), and I find it tough to make the time to actively seek out new music otherwise, with everything else I have going on. If you read Ben’s weekly column— and I believe he’s doing his own year in review next Tuesday— you will see very few artists mentioned there in here. Not because he’s wrong, but because I just didn’t get around to them. And despite all that, there’s still nearly 125 artists who get mentioned today and tomorrow. There’s just a lot of new music out there!

As this is the countdown’s third year, we’re also getting to the point where bands are starting to recur, which kinda sucks for writing about them. “Hey, you remember what I said about this band’s sound two years ago that’s the reason I like them? Yeah, the same thing applies here” doesn’t make for very good reading or writing.

On the bright side, unlike last year when I made some significant changes to the 2023 list, I have very little I’d correct from 2024. Maybe “Strange World” and “Good Luck, Babe!” are a little higher. Maybe Tunde Adebimpe’s “Magnetic” replaces “Love of a Girl,” maybe I find a way to get Sam Fender’s “People Watching” on the list. That’s about it, though— I’m pretty satisfied. (Indeed, my most embarrassing overlooked detail of the year is still from 2023— for months, I thought Doja Cat’s “Paint the Town Red” was from 2021. I don’t know why. It’s great in any year.)

Anyway, let’s start with a bunch of weird and unnecessary categorization of some of the songs I heard this year that will not be in the final countdown. Let’s start with a genre I was sarcastic about last year…

Best Work From Stomp-Clap Hey-Ho Bands

Mumford & Sons – “Rushmere” – The upbeat and rollicking nature of the song makes it quite a bit better than most of their work, even if it’s so formulaic you can predict the moment when the instruments are gonna drop out for the a cappella chorus. (Well, I did, anyway.)

The Lumineers – “Same Old Song” – They’re well past the point of crashing in basements while they try to make it, but, as above, the song has an energy and propulsion that makes it better than most of their work.

“Best” may be relative, but that should make up for last year’s incredibly sarcastic stomp-clap hey-ho category. And now, a different incredibly sarcastic category.

Jenna Maroney “You Really Brought the Songwriting Computer’s Words To Life” Award

Benson Boone – “Mystical Magical”

In a span of just a couple of weeks I heard this song in a grocery store and in a Target commercial, and that’s what it seems designed for. Then after writing up this award I heard it in a YouTube commercial for Fortnite, which further validated me. (And then I read reviews of the album it’s on that contained phrases like “music for people who like how music sounds, but not for people who like music” and “[written] in a brisk 17 days, and unfortunately, it sounds like it,” and I felt further validated still.)

Some Songs From Bands of Yore

There were a surprising amount of artists who date back to the 90s or even earlier releasing new music in 2025, some of them for the first time in a long time. Some of those will be on the countdown; this section is for the ones I thought were pretty good, but didn’t quite grab me enough to make the final list.

Nine Inch Nails – “As Alive As You Need Me to Be”
Stereolab – “Aerial Troubles”
Garbage – “There’s No Future in Optimism”
Sublime – “Ensenada” – Bradley Nowell’s son is singing for the band now, and he’s a dead ringer for him voice-wise. If you’re nostalgic for Sublime and don’t just want to listen to the self-titled album again, this will probably do.

I’m not really a Deftones guy, so maybe some of the people here who are into them can tell you more about their new album.

Some Songs From Bands of 21st-Century Yore

Either bands that got their start or became big then, or ones that didn’t fit in the previous category because they never really stopped making music.

My Morning Jacket – “Everyday Magic”
The Black Keys – “The Night Before”
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard – “Deadstick”
Neko Case – “Wreck”
Jeff Tweedy – “Enough” and “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” – Damn it, “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” is pretty cool and I wish I had more time to consider it, but it came to me so late that I’m not going to try to figure out where it might belong.
Mclusky – “Way of the Exploding Dickhead” – First new album since 2004!
Franz Ferdinand – “Night or Day”
The Hives – “Enough Is Enough”
The New Pornographers – “Ballad of the Last Payphone”
OK Go – ” A Stone Only Rolls Downhill”
Tame Impala – “Dracula” – Tame Impala has always been one of those bands I generally find solid and listenable but don’t find myself compelled to seek out. But this was pretty enjoyable, and also there’s just something I find funny about about a song called “Dracula”— maybe it makes me think of “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah,” maybe it makes me think of monsters enjoying each other’s company, dancing, holding their evil in check. Or maybe, when a musician has been active this long does it, it makes me picture that they’re like, “Okay, I’m out of topics, time to start writing about the supernatural.”

Eno / Byrne Section

David Byrne & Ghost Train Orchestra – “Everybody Laughs”
Brian Eno & Beatie Wolfe – “Suddenly”

Unnecessarily Confusing Band Names Award

Geese and Goose

These are two separate bands. I liked what I heard from Goose’s Dripfield in 2022 (namely, the title track and “Hungersite”), but the new singles I heard didn’t get my attention as much. (Goose did release two albums this year, which I haven’t seen anyone mentioned on the countdown do since… The Smile did it last year.) I have heard people rave about Geese, but I have not connected with them yet, even though both their album and lead singer Cameron Winter’s solo debut have gotten raves from many other places this year. My most solid memory of Geese from this year was their BBC Radio 1 session cover of “You Get What You Give,” probably because I already knew the song, and it struck me as pretty inessential unless you thought the original should have been more gloomy and morose. Not that I’m nearly that negative on their original work, but none of it has made me understand why Geese has gotten such a “Damn, this is the band now” reaction from so many people.

Yachter of the Year Award

A lot of the music I went over this year carried some kind of 80s influence or influence from the smooth, easy sounds of yacht rock or yacht R&B or whatever genre you can throw “yacht” in front of to communicate its easy breeziness. Surprisingly, this award doesn’t go to Thundercat, who did give us “I Wish I Didn’t Waste Your Time” this year, although he’s basically retired from consideration since that’s all he does now and has been doing for years. (Did you know he was once in Suicidal Tendencies?)

This was going to be a bigger section, but I liked the other songs I was going to put in here well enough to mention them elsewhere. So I will officially give this award to Bon Iver – “From,” a song so drenched in maple-syrup synth-strings you’d think Justin Vernon was the two-time winner of the Philadelphia Regional Grammys. (His Michael McDonald impression isn’t quite all the way there yet, though.)

Songs that might have made it if I gave the artist more than one spot

Laufey – “Silver Lining”
The Beaches – “Did I Say Too Much” and “Lesbian of the Year”
The Velveteers – “Bound in Leather”
Momma – “Bottle Blonde”
Tyler, the Creator – “Stop Playing With Me”

I like all of these, and I like all of these artists, but I already had a strong entry for each one, and enough other artists to highlight that I didn’t feel like throwing these songs into the mix as well. (I guess I could have thrown a few other artists on here, but I have enough to do already.) I didn’t deliberately set out to limit the countdown to one song per artist (and in one case, I did not), but it worked out neatly enough that I saved these for here. (Uh, and, whoops, I guess now you know five artists that will be in the top 60. The preceding paragraph contained spoilers and should not have been read by young children.)

Special Mention

Clipse – Let God Sort Em Out

As happy as I was to see Pusha and Malice back at it, and as much as it’s a fine return to form, there was no one song that grabbed me like “Yes, this is my shit.” It does still deserve mention, though.

Just Plain Honorable Mentions

I wasn’t trying to get to an even 100 at first, but then I got close enough that I pushed myself for it. Then things got more complicated, especially as I continue to hear new music I wasn’t aware of even at this late date. I finally decided, after already pushing on the deadline, that after a certain point I’d just hold over anything new for 2026. So here are the Honorable Mentions; i.e. #100-#76.

Actually, that’s not entirely true: While my first priority for any song was putting it in the top 60 (and then in the final cuts if it got bumped out), after that, anything that fit another category went there instead of here. So it may or may not be the actual top 100— I might like, say “Everyday Magic” or “The Night Before,” let alone the songs in the previous section, more than one or two of these. But I’m also past the point of trying to figure this out on any more of a granular level than I already have.

Between that, that I had to do a little late digging to get to an even 100, and that I’m not even sure I didn’t overlook a few songs I might have preferred to ones I actually put on here, you might be asking what the point of this section is. And I don’t know that I have a good answer! But I tried to make it worthwhile by making a last pass at it in the last week, even making a couple of changes and final cuts, so at least I can firmly say “I like this song” about everything in here. It’s alphabetical by artist, not in any ranking, so I’ll leave you to guess what those last entries were.

Barry Can’t Swim – “Different” – Certainly not my usual thing, as glitchy and blippy as it is, but the fact that it wormed its way into my brain despite that speaks well for it.
Big Wild – “Love Any Longer” – There are times where an anthemic chorus works really well for me (you may read about some of those tomorrow). There are times where it makes me feel like I’m going to hear the song in a car or insurance commercial soon (say, The Head and the Heart’s “Arrow”— I feel like I can picture the wheat field in the commercial when I hear it). This one lands somewhere in between— good enough to merit mention, but leaning a little too much to “going to be used to sell me something soon” for me to like it more.
Blankslate – “Nov. 16 (Paper Ducks)” – Local!
Blondshell – “T&A”
Bob Moses – “Time of Your Life”
Cass McCombs – “Peace”
Curtis Harding – “The Power”
Dead Pioneers – “My Spirit Animal Ate Your Spirit Animal” – Local agitprop punk band led by an indigenous activist. They’re not subtle, but sometimes that’s for the best. And that title is pretty funny.
Destroyer f/Fiver – “Bologna”
Diva Cup – “JAWZ” – Local!
Doechii – “Anxiety”
DNA Picasso – “PINTEREST” – Another local artist giving us a pretty cool and inventive slice of club hip-hop.
Four Tet – “Into Dust (Still Falling)”
Greg Freeman – “Gulch”
Indigo de Souza – “Heartthrob”
Jesse Welles – “Horses” – Why don’t more songwriters mention the Tao in their music? We should fix that.
The Last Dinner Party – “This Is the Killer Speaking”
Lord Huron – “Watch Me Go” – Also “Nothing I Need”; I had a pretty difficult choice picking which one to include.
Luke Roberts and Kurt Vile – “Classic Love”
Moonpool – “Autumn” – Local!
Mt. Joy – “Coyote”
The New Eves – “Rivers Run Red“
Sabrina Carpenter – “Tears” – Almost uncomfortably horny at times, but that chorus is really catchy. (Well, maybe except for how “responsible guy” has to be shoehorned in to fit— surely there was a more elegant way to phrase that.) I’m now realizing that being of the generation of Ray Charles Diet Pepsi commercials, I might be subconsciously drawn to a properly delivered “uh-huh.”
Snocaps – “Heathcliff”
Tycho f/Paul Banks – “Boundary Rider”

The Final Cuts

The last fifteen songs that didn’t quite make the list. Considering the list grew to sixty this year, that might seem like a weaker endorsement than in years before, but I think there was just a really deep bench of good songs this year. Despite everything I said about sinking to madness earlier, after reviewing and finalizing these 15, I actually was able to rank them. (I was only able to rank the final three cuts from here in the previous section— “Love Any Longer,” “This Is the Killer Speaking,” “Nov. 16 (Paper Ducks)”— before I gave up.)

75. Perfume Genius – “It’s a Mirror”
74. Alex G – “Afterlife”
73. Sudan Archives – “MY TYPE”
72. Jay Som f. Jim Adkins – “Float”
71. DOPE LEMON – “Electric Green Lambo” – This and Parcels were both Yachter nominees until they got upgraded.
70. Japanese Breakfast – “Picture Window”
69. Big Thief – “Incomprehensible”
68. Parcels – “Safeandsound”
67. Good Neighbors – “Ripple”
66. Great Grandpa – “Ladybug”
65. Pinkshift – “Reflection”
64. HAIM – “Relationships”
63. UFOs (Braxe + Falcon, Phoenix) – “UFO” – My fondness for the acts in question probably helped this one.
62. Royel Otis – “Moody” – “Foam” is still my favorite, but this is pretty good too.
61. Of Monsters and Men – “Ordinary Creature” – You know this has to be good because it overcame my bias against that silly-ass band name. I guess that piano bit hits me just right. The final cut from the top 60.

Coming tomorrow: Your actual Christmas gift, the full countdown of the top 60. Be warned that it will be like three times as long a read as today’s article (unless you just skim the writeups just to see what’s on the list).

1. I use “we” a lot in the course of this feature. I guess “we” just means “me and my opinions.” ↩︎
2. And this way, Lauren doesn’t have to find another movie to watch and share with you all. I think she likes watching movies, though, so I’m not sure if this is a good deal for her. ↩︎