Drowned in Sound's 25 Favourite Albums of 2025: 10-1

On Monday we revealed numbers 25-11 in our albums of the year rundown, and today it's the turn of the top 10....

We have written a fair bit below but if listening is more your thing... In order to pick this list, Emma Wilkes and I had a natter on the Drowned in Sound podcast about most of these records. We also shared an extended list of recommended records and a bunch of other gossip. If you're not already subscribed, search for "Drowned in Sound" on Apple or wherever you get your pods.

Our favourite albums of the year is presented in partnership with Qobuz - the service for music enthusiasts featuring high quality sound so that we can rediscover music. Listen to tracks from our albums of the year and start your 30-day free trial of Qobuz.

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10) Ethel Cain - Perverts

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Sean: When some people talk about Lynchian music, they're often thinking of luxuriant reverb or Roy Orbison booming out 'In Dreams'. Some think of the overdramatic operatic, the shoegazy swirl or the heavy shadows of Nine Inch Nails' oppressive moment in Twin Peaks: The Return. Whereas "the sound" of David Lynch's work is a disorienting din. It's pitch-bent voices telephoning into your nightmares. It's the chainsaw fuzz of a plug you only hear when it stops and the constant hum of a phone left off the hook.

A similarly dysregulating drone seems to be exactly what Ethel Cain was going for on this incredible piece of work. There's a quiet menace that dominates the opener and this "vibe" lurks behind a silk curtain throughout the record, reappearing as almost the opposite of an interlude, punctuating the record with extended periods of disquiet.

The disorientation relents when slow-mo ballads like 'Vacillator' arrive. It's less like limbering up, more sobering up before feeling as if you'll faint again... and just as you find your feet, the record plunges you back into the sound of a hornet's nest playing at the wrong speed.

Across Perverts' 90 minutes, you're gently caressed, in the dark, by warm hands and pressed against cold surfaces. At times you will feel as if you've wandered into a dustbowl village where you're not meant to be. Think Tom Waits' 'What's He Building In There?', the dissociative haze of Terry Gilliam's Tideland, or Grouper's submerged beauty where the layer of grime is the point.

Easy listening, this is not. The pace will be challenging for some but the reward for your patience is a record that opens itself up to you when the light is just dark enough. And as I said on this week's podcast, it's like a Scandinavian mid-winter's day where the sun seems as if it might rise before plunging you back into the dark.

9) Rosalía - Lux

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Sean: Immense. Maximalist. Euphoric. 13 languages. Saints. Bjork. I listen, therefore I am. And I listen again, and I feel so small because I'm so in awe not just at the vast scale and ambition of this record but the enormity of life.

LUX is music as religious experience, and even as a non-believer this record is exquisite. However, despite the froth of the online discourse, the endless plaudits, the critical acclaim, I am yet to finally know how to confidently write about this record, so instead, here is Rosalía in her own words:

"I promised myself I was going to make an album where I was going to finish the thought, finish the song, go all the way until the end. Motomami was minimalist. This is maximalism... I love what [Leonard Cohen] used to say, which I would repeat a lot while I was making the album: forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. I wanted the light to get in and I wanted it to be called Lux. How to make more space for the light to get in... you have the sense, the feeling that there's a human in there. There's humans in there. It's made by a human. It's about love and from love hopefully."

8) Kathryn Joseph - WE WERE MADE PREY.

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Sean: Don’t be fooled by the all caps, a record that SHOUTS, this is not. WE WERE MADE PREY. is a record with a lingering doom and a haunting, hurting, hunting, raw flesh, dragonfruit, splendour, death and decay, distilled.

Something has changed. It’s as if the Scottish songsmith is in the eye of a far more dramatic storm than the records that have come before and as the hurricane wanes in the second half of the record it's clear her defiance hasn’t shifted an inch. Those previous three records with a piano and a bewitching voice at their core had a simmering intensity but they felt more like a whisky-soaked wake than this flame scorched Viking burial.

Tread carefully. Kathryn Joseph will put a spell on you and you won't be complaining when things fall away six songs deep as 'DEER.' hands you its intestines. From there on, you're either in for the long haul or you're disturbed. Or maybe both.

7) Djrum - Under Tangled Silence

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Sean: Skittering pianos. Swells of synth. A robot bird in a field of tulips. As unlikely turns go, this record has a lot of them. One minute you're in an art gallery in the middle of Paris with drums tickling from a nice soundsystem, then before you know it you're inside an abstract painting and then, wait wait, where have you gone, drum-drmmmm-dummmmmmm-ddudmd-dum... it's all gone a bit Aphex Twin and we're raving in a jungle with aliens playing glockenspiels atop some grrrkkk glitchiness.

I can't begin to describe the journey this record will take you on as it's such a different ride every time. As you descend into the record, you quickly ascend and twirl and bounce around its various bends. You're not so much thrown around, as being led in a merry dance...

Massive thank you to whoever it was on the Drowned in Sound forums who recommended this album earlier this year as it has been a constant soundtrack to my imagination and a weighted blanket for my anxiety throughout 2025.

Fans of Nils Frahm and Four Tet, this one is a must listen for you.

6) Model/Actriz - Pirouette

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Sean: Before Foals arrived on the scene and made math-rock cool, there was so much weird music with odd time signatures that you could sorta dance to. Even before Bloc Party and Biffy Clyro, on most nights of the week in the early 2000s, in most major cities, you could find acts who inhabited a strange hinterland between punk-funk and taut, angular, artsy-af "rock". Sometimes they'd be dressed as liquorice allsorts, other times you'd wander in to see the coolest people you've ever seen screaming choruses about Manga characters. There would also be the Fugazi loving hardcore sorts who'd be shirtlessly dripping in sweat, whispering parables about a family of field mice.

A lot has happened in the time before and the time after Foals performed on Skins and became festival headliners. Which is to say, a band like Model/Actriz with their extravagant rock with disco-friendly odd time signatures could have existed in both eras. Atop it all, their lyrics seem like molten plastic shapeshifting as much as the jaggedy guitars, oscillating and writhing in sub-atomic distortion.

Model/Actriz are maybe the band Panic at the Disco wanted to become after their debut album and probably coulda been in a time of Tool, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and Jane's Addiction. Or the weird-rock band that Muse think they are. Either way Model/Actriz are very Model/Actriz-y and long may that continue.

5) Lambrini Girls - Who Let The Dogs Out

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Emma: Living in ugly times means the mid-2020s has been a ripe time for a new wave of arse-kicking punk, but Lambrini Girls have announced themselves both as true originals and one of the year’s most tremendous success stories. Armed with raucous riffs and sharp comebacks, Who Let The Dogs Out dug into the social ills that other bands wouldn’t touch – gentrification (‘You’re Not From Round Here’), nepotism (‘Filthy Rich Nepo Babies’) and workplace harassment (‘Company Culture’) but fearlessly got personal too. ‘Nothing Tastes As Good As Feels’ is a curdling diary of eating disorders that was wry and self-effacing in equal measure (‘Kate Moss gives no fucks that my period has stopped/I wish I was skinny but it’ll never be enough’), while ‘Special, Different’ was a joyous celebration of neurodiversity that was a vital beacon of righteous truth in a storm of boneheaded waffle about Tylenol and overdiagnosis. What legends they are – and what a brilliant debut album.

4) Heartworms - Glutton for Punishment

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Sean: In case you haven't heard, Glutton for Punishment is one of the most spectacular debut albums in quite some time from a truly special British artist. Heartworms aka Josephine "Jojo" Orme has crafted something almost pointedly British: obsessed with warplanes and military history (she even volunteers at the RAF Museum), revelling in our rich lineage of dark, immersive rock.

Much like Interpol, Heartworms feels part of The Cure's extended universe. There are the languishing guitars and whispered vocals. Songs that swoop and soar, elegant and elongated, dark and misty, joyously menacing but with an occasional smirk. Gothic textures tower over us leaving long shadows and silhouettes dancing in turrets. But besides the obvious, there's also a lot of heart and soul, which makes this record so special.

The monochrome world Jojo creates is rich with sensory textures: fuzzed synths glide along rolling drums and low-hum basslines. The water may be blacker than oil, but it's beckoning you to dive in. C'mon, join us...

3) The Callous Daoboys - I Don't Want To See You In Heaven

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Emma: Having your brain broken has never been so fun as it is on The Callous Daoboys’ records. Their third album cut the ribbon on the fictional Museum Of Failure, in which each track is an artefact in an archive of the future, but the crucial question is – if it’s immortal, can it ever really fail? Both lighter and denser than anything else they’d ever made, I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven ripped conventional genre paradigms into pieces of confetti and carefreely skipped in whatever direction it felt like – chainsaw-like heaviness, nu metal stomp, slinking pop, even some totally shameless Fall Out Boy worship (Callous Fall Out Boys?) with their own stamp on it. The Atlanta sextet are truly making themselves into cult heroes.

2) FKA Twigs - EUSEXUA

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Sean: FKA Twigs is a shapeshifter, both literally and figuratively. I love the way she morphs between records whilst retaining a sci-fi shimmer that could be no one else (try as others might to emulate what she does). With each quantum leap, from album to album and sometimes verse to verse, Tahliah Barnett becomes another version of herself. Whether she's writhing or still, body-poppin' or staring at the rain, she's always in her power.

Her first studio album in five years, EUSEXUA arrives as an act of remarkable resilience. Made while her sexual battery, assault, and infliction of emotional distress case against Shia LaBeouf was dragged through its fifth year (it was finally settled in July 2025), and while his legal team argued her career success proved she wasn't suffering(!?), she was, as her story goes, in Prague, having epiphanies in rave toilets.

Twigs coined the word "eusexua" to describe that sensation of being so euphoric you transcend human form. "Or that moment before an orgasm: pure nothingness but also pure focus, in a state of Eusexua," as she told Vogue. This feeling is stretched and embossed across these 42 minutes of techno-inspired transcendence.

There's something unknowable about a lot of artists, but with FKA Twigs we experience multiplicities: the maker of warehouse rave anthems, the spectral balladeer, and everything in between. EUSEXUA isn't all chrome-plated bangers though, it switches it up a fair bit. 'Keep It, Hold It' channels Kate Bush's Ninth Wave atmospherics, hauntingly suspended in animation. Then tracks like 'Drums of Death' bend n' snap you back to Mad Max's wasteland.

If a euphoria that shimmers like liquid metal forged from survival isn't something you're into, then this isn't the record for you (are you sure you're ok...?).

Note: EUSEXUA has been suddenly updated in the last week with the addition of two new tracks ('Perfectly' and 'The Dare') which changes the opening flow of the record a bit... some of us are still adjusting to that and getting to know the new companion record EUSEXUA Afterglow.

1) Hayley Williams - Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party

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Emma: Hayley Williams’ surprise third solo album will rank as one of her masterstrokes. Dropped in a spectacularly original release campaign leaning on public radio and traditional media, she offered a rich tapestry of ideas and knife-sharp introspection. She contemplates generational trauma and the emotional tumult of fraying relationships and even offers an ode to her anti-depressants, while in the form of ‘True Believer’, she brings her politicism into her art and calls out culture-stifling gentrification, Southern racism and religious hypocrisy. And, if somehow that wasn’t appealing enough, she threw in a cheeky Bloodhound Gang sample on top of it. Two decades in, she’s more beloved than ever, and next year’s live tour will be a beautiful display of community and catharsis.