Every year is a great year to be a music obsessive. 2025 was a year that felt like music was both a catalyst for change and the much-needed escape hatch.
It was also a year where profit-driven corporations went gloves off with non-consensual AI and humanity raised its collective fist aloft.
Being human, whether that's being wonderfully weird or painfully honest or building sonic landscapes peppered with easter eggs for lyric-decoding fans, feels like the dominant theme in all the records we adored this year.
Resistance, rage and resilience feature too but those themes are perhaps a given every year if you've been paying attention to our album of the year lists for the past 25 years.
We'll share our top 10 later this week but for spoilers, listen to this week's Drowned in Sound podcast where we chat through our favourites and a pile of honourable mentions. Listen on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
Anyway, in the words of Stealing Sheep, let's gooooooooooooo!
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.
25) Deftones - private music
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Sean Adams: No band in the history of music has quite managed to mix the sensual with the brutal snarl as Sacramento's Deftones. For many fans this welcome return was the album of the year. Given the half-life of previous records, we're probably going to regret not having this higher when rock history is re-written with the benefit of hindsight...
Emma Wilkes: Wait?! What?! This album is of a sublime quality for a band three decades deep in the game – lithe, sexy, sabre-toothed, even dreamy and romantic when it chooses to be. How many bands do you know who have remained so consistent over so long and are adored more than ever? And how many bands 30 years in can produce a banger like ‘milk of the madonna’? It should definitely be higher...
Sean: Sorry! Editor's decision is final... Really loved this interview the band did with Zane Lowe, especially around 35 mins when Chino confesses "as a band we're more into making sound than writing songs. The sounds are what really inspire us. For instance, when we made White Pony we were into DJ Shadow and we were into drums and low end..."
24) Alan Sparhawk - With Trampled by Turtles
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Sean: As a LOW super fan, it's so great to have Alan back on guitars and gentle banjos, without the wonderfully experimental vocal explorations. On this record you can still feel him wrestling with the grief of not just losing his band mate but also his life partner. Perhaps the most powerful moment on this devastating record is when their daughter Hollis Sparhawk's voice drifts in on the gloriously melancholic 'Not Broken'. This tune is the centrepiece to a record that feels like glorious dawn light pouring through the window as a huddle of friends prepare for better days.
23) Addison Rae - Addison
Sean: "Can't a girl just have fun?" ponders Addison Rae, the TikTok star turned pop sensation, at the start of 'Money is Everything' a tune that sounds like electro-pop hero Annie partying with Scandi-bop-maker Lykke Li. It's such a ridiculous tune that ends with a kiss, and for much of 2025, as the world has been on fire, this record has been my padded escape room. Not to sound like a noughties poptimist raving about Paris Hilton's 'Stars Are Blind' - and I know the hooks and production might not seem like much on first listen - but it's oh-so moreish.
22) Sudan Archives - The BPM
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Sean: Brittney Denise Parks pka Sudan Archives is not your usual violinist. Whilst the violin is still very much here and definitely not an NPC, there is so much magic riding in these grooves that you could be double-checking that this is the same artist who made the transcendent Vespertine-y Athena, with tunes like 'Confessions'. It's not that the synths and beats weren't always there, but the - ahem - BPM is definitely more notable on floor-fillers like the euphoric mid-album trilogy of 'A Bug's Life', 'The Nature of Power', and 'My Type' or the banging 'A Computer Love' which feels like Squarepusher remixing Janelle Monáe. This exactly the sort of record you'd expect from an artist who started out on Brainfeeder and found a home on the incredible Stones Throw label, which released records by Madlib, MF Doom, and J Dilla.
21) Stealing Sheep - GLO (Girl Life Online)
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Sean: There's something a bit Herbie Hancock doused in neon paints about the fifth studio album from Liverpool's self-manufactured grrrl-gang. It's not that their epic synthy tunes haven't had a deconstructed-funk groove to them before but there's even more poise in the chaotic pop fun. It's the sort of command of the studio as an instrument that only a collective who knows themselves, their tools, and trusts their instincts can manage.
Whilst lyrically GLO deals with living and loving in the internet era, sonically the record has the feeling of machines pushed right to the edge of malfunctioning... and then revelling in the glitches as purple smoke plumes and glitter n' gloop pours from your ears. Like a 90s kid TV show, prepare to be gunged and hugged and tickled by this sensational record featuring guest appearances by Big Joanie’s Estella Deyeri, She Drew the Gun, Mickey Dripping, and Manchester-based MC Meduul.
20) Scowl - Are We All Angels
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Emma: 2025 was the year that Scowl blossomed into the most original version of themselves. 2021 debut How Flowers Grow was a looser, rougher nail-bomb of rage, but they’ve channelled their aggression into barbed, grungy yet sweetly melodic bangers. With vocalist Kat Moss stepping up to sing far more than scream this time around, the Santa Cruz quartet proved how catchy they could be, but with space for the rawness of their emotions – burnout, existential dread, capitalism-driven fury – to bleed through. Hardcore heads loved it, but anyone with an appetite for guitars will too.
19) Horsegirl – Phonetics On And On
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Sean: Something about this record makes me nostalgic for Life Without Buildings, Camera Obscura, The Sea & Cake, The Moldy Peaches, and the films of Miranda July. They sound like the sort of band that you catch when you turn up early to see Franz Ferdinand and buy everything on their merch desk before their set has finished. If you're into breezy art-rock with a gentle jangle and AI-defying Sonic Youth tunings, you're in for a treat.
18) Anna von Hausswolff - Iconoclasts
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Sean: What Colin Stetson does with a sax, Thundercat does with a bass, Tim Hecker does with synths... Anna von Hausswolff does with a pipe organ. She pushes it sonically beyond what you've ever heard it do before. Her sound is atonal, discordant, harrowing, haunting, hypnotic, droning, loud, calm, vibrant, late-night street siren-like... and that's just the opening three minutes of her latest and potentially greatest record to date, Iconoclasts. Then there's her statuesque voice casting its shadow across the glittering rumble. Much like Rosalía's Lux, this majestic record revels in pushing the scale of where music can go to its very outer limits and sweeps you out there with it.
17) Deafheaven - Lonely People with Power
Emma: Deafheaven’s softer, more melodic 2021 album Infinite Granite divided their fanbase, but those listeners were united in their reverence all over again with their newest effort. Though they their scalding black metal side rose to the surface again, it’s clear they didn’t think of Infinite Granite as a misstep from some of the more ethereal moments on offer. They could be tender, but also bitingly real, particularly in mid-album highlight ‘Body Behavior’ in which they depict a man showing an younger boy pornography as a bonding ritual that chips away at the boy’s loving, nurturing instincts. Pacy and diverse, they made an hour of music feel like it whizzed by in half that time.
If you're into heavy music, here's a clip from this week's albums of the year podcast where Emma talks about some of the great rock and metal records of 2025
16) Postcards - Ripe
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Sean: There's a feeling of ascending to this fifth record from Lebanese trio consisting of Julia Sabra (also a solo artist and member of Snakeskin), Pascal Semerdjian and Marwan Tohme, who was released on the brilliant Ruptured label. It's that spiralling upward feeling you get from post-rock records, but in this case the the malevolent sky seems to inhale you. Meanwhile, menacing drums lurk beneath glimmering guitars creating this uneasy feeling that all the best art-rock records muster (translation: imagine PJ Harvey collaborating with Explosions in the Sky). It's a record that's taught and intense, which is hard not to link to living through a time of Israeli airstrikes. And as the accompanying notes on their Bandcamp state 'As violence inches ever closer, Ripe grapples with life in Lebanon and what it means to stay. But the band refuses to be consumed by the darkness.' A gloriously chilling record.
The magnets on your mother’s fridge
Your heartbreaking heritage
Our ancestors may have known
There’s nowhere left to go
Scattered words in all three languages
Scars that always seem to itch
The stench of slaughtered cows in summer
Like living in a giant gutter
The cactus growing in my throat
There’s nowhere left to go
Dust bunnies behind bedroom doors
The craters left by meteors
The windows we rebuilt once more
Never fully close
15) Idlewild - Idlewild
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Sean: At this point in their career, ten albums deep, you'd think that the poetry and punk loving Scots would have slid into complacent, phoned-in, polite-rock. With this self-titled record thundering into action with 'Stay Out of Place', any evidence of their mellowing is hard to find. Even when the pace dips the sonic landscapes that emerge are more like the gnarly parts of the highlands than some quaint lake. The hook-riding record ricochets as fast as Roddy Woomble's eloquent synapses ping from philosophically pondering the meaning of life to nods to Dylan Thomas.
14) Little Simz - Lotus
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Sean: After taking out legal action against her longtime producer and childhood friend Inflo for huge unpaid loans, there’s a glimmer of revenge amongst these lotus leaves. The album spans punk, samba, soul, jazz, cheeky pop, and Afrobeat, with Miles Clinton James surrounding Simz’s voice with unfussy arrangements. The title track, featuring Michael Kiwanuka and Yussef Dayes, is the album’s extraordinary centrepiece with Simz digging deep over a timeless. It’s not like Simz’s mantelpiece needs any more awards but this album sure deserves all the gongs it gets.
13) Nova Twins - Parasites & Butterflies
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Emma: When put through the merciless paces of touring life, there’s only so long before you feel yourself fading. Nova Twins learned this the hard way after soaring to even greater popularity, but as depleted as they were, there was rich inspiration for album three. As such, Parasites & Butterflies took on darker tones, venturing to more vulnerable places than ever across a patchwork of buzzing guitar work and lofty choruses.
Of course, Amy Love and Georgia South couldn’t be held down forever. Every so often, their sense of joy and confidence surged back to life-affirming effect. They’ve carried that through into their powerful on-stage speeches this year decrying transphobia and calling for a free Palestine, and becoming ambassadors of seemingly everything, working with Amnesty International, Independent Venue Week and Music Minds Matter. Altogether, it affirms how important a force they are in British music.
12) Lily Allen - West End Girl
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Sean: Lily Allen manages to create something potent without any garnish. I've been ruminating (ruminating, ruminating...) on what to say about this record and decided it'd be a folly for me to try to describe this record when Sophie Heawood wrote this incredible must read response to it. Here's a taste:
Female rage, what a beast. Line up: here we all are, in these songs. I’ve not been wed but I’ve been lied to by a clever man and every word rings true. It’s only one person’s side of the story, it eviscerates a person who, in my memoir writing workshops, we would say isn’t in the text to defend himself. We would advise against writing with an axe to grind. To not portray yourself as the outright victim of your own life. Yet somehow it avoids that by - not being bitter? Because actual bitterness brings your ego into the room first, but this album is led by the ache. “You’re a mess and I’m a bitch,” Lily sings, quietly, about her man. About her open marriage that is open in the same way a door is open when it slams in your face.
As the comedian Davina Bentley said recently,
“I get asked out by a lot of guys in their 40s who practise ethical non-monogamy. And for me, ethical non-monogamy is exactly like the Democratic Republic of Congo. Just because you put a describing word in front of something, it does not make it that.”
11) Darkside - Nothing
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Sean: When dub meets synth sounds so cool they're glacial, it could be a recipe for hipster twaddle. With Nicolas Jaar involved, it couldn't be further from twaddle. In fact, Nothing manages to reach far beyond the James Blake and Bon Iver blue mist and plunge you into a warm lake as the sky turns the Prince Pantone (that's always my colour of the year). It's a record that skitters, glitches, bloops, swirls and sighs. At times the record feels like the coolest sci-fi soundtrack you've ever heard, at others like some mystical pirate video game adventure. These nine moreish tracks will expand and contract your mind, cause your lips to pout and head to bop in the best possible way.
That's all for now... If you're not already subscribed, sign up to be the first to find out what's in our Top 10:
Drowned in Sound's Albums of the Year 2025
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- Darkside - Nothing
- Lily Allen - West End Girl
- Nova Twins - Parasites & Butterflies
- Little Simz Lotus
- Idlewild - Idlewild
- Postcards - Ripe
- Deafheaven - Lonely People with Power
- Anna Von Hausswolff - Iconoclasts
- Horsegirl – Phonetics On And On
- Scowl - Are We All Angels
- Stealing Sheep - GLO (Girl Life Online)
- Sudan Archives - The BPM
- Addison Rae - Addison
- Alan Sparhawk - With Trampled by Turtles
- Deftones - private music
Heard all of those? Listen to our honourable mentions shoutouts in this clip from this week's podcast:
DiScuss our albums of the year and much more over on our forums:
