Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2025” coverage here.

So this is the future?

Judging by mainstream music in 2025, humankind is not in a particularly creative place. The year’s main storylines included the rise of AI slop and cartoon K-pop. A number of once-lively hitmakers churned out forgettable product. The most-streamed tracks came out in previous years; the songs of the summer sounded like winter.

An escape from the malaise was simple: listening more broadly for new music. The best albums of this year were strange and personal. Artists tunneled in idiosyncratic directions, invented their own grammar, and told stories only they could tell. Whether they used stately cellos or dubstep wubwubs, they regarded technology not only as a tool but as an inspiration, a co-creator, one that opens certain creative paths and discourages others. Though we may be on the cusp of a major shift in how music is made, achieving excellent results will always require a thoughtful approach to the methods.

Apologies to FKA Twigs, Audrey Hobert, Wednesday, Playboi Carti, Olivia Dean, Bad Bunny, Erika de Casier, CMAT, Deftones, and Addison Rae—you also kept me, to quote the year’s best pop song, headphones-on.

The antisocial rage of punk rock sometimes flows from an embarrassing source: jealousy of the beautiful people. The Brooklyn foursome of Model/Actriz confesses to this secret on an album that captures the tricky relationship between individuality and voyeurism. In brooding spoken word, Cole Haden portrays his identity as vampiric, fueled by his obsessions—both intimate and parasocial—with others. Spidery guitars and pistoning rhythms from his super-tight band help infuse the mosh pit with the suspense of Rear Window.

Listen to: “Cinderella”

9. Clipse, Let God Sort Em Out

The internet-era rap pioneers Pusha T, age 48, and his brother, Malice, 53, reunited after a 16-year hiatus to deliver an album that, blessedly, shows their ages. The cool ruthlessness of their earlier years has ripened into fine crotchetiness; in compact, barbed verses, they mourn shared tragedy, kvetch about the content creators who’ve taken over hip-hop, and flaunt their capital portfolios (a new flex: “Now I’m 10 times the E.B.I.T.D.A.”). The queasy chords and off-kilter momentum of Pharrell’s beats suit two masters looking down from their perch, sickened by what they see.

Listen to: “So Be It”

8. Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band, New Threats From the Soul

Country music is booming because the genre’s central riddle—why the good times can’t just stay good—feels urgent in periods of change. The 40-year-old singer Ryan Davis, a cowboy wiseacre with a drum machine and the patience for 11-minute anthems, riffs merrily on such existential mysteries. You could spend a lifetime contemplating the crooked poetry of this rollicking album only to accept that, as Davis sings, time is not your friend or foe but “more like one of the guys from work.”

Listen to: “New Threats From the Soul”

7. Anna von Hausswolff, Iconoclasts

Some of the hardest rock and roll of the year came from … a pipe organist? This 39-year-old Swede sings with the gusty verve of Stevie Nicks or Kate Bush, and her arrangements simmer and explode with sax, guitar, and what can only be described as war drums. Released on Halloween, the album first scans as a spooky mood piece, but if you tune in to the lyrics about psychological collapse and world-weary grief, the heaviness becomes crushing.

Listen to: “Struggle With the Beast”

6. Lily Allen, West End Girl

To know one’s mind and communicate its contents clearly is a sign of enlightenment—and for that reason, if few others, the 40-year-old British singer Lily Allen should feel at peace. West End Girl narrates a scandalous divorce tale shaped by celebrity, nonmonogamy, and sex toys. Her deadpan delivery and gliding melodies land the plot twists crisply; the beats melt dancehall and soul elements into a drooping, numbed dreamscape. The rock-solid union of metanarrative and musicality gives Allen the security to share destabilizing emotions with wild candor.

Listen to: “Pussy Palace”

5. Dijon, Baby

The first track of this album celebrates the birth of a baby—and then comes the second track, titled “Another Baby!” The way that life unfolds in herky-jerky, unpredictable rhythms informs the experimental approach that Dijon, a 33-year-old producer-singer, takes to R&B. Hints of New Jack Swing, Prince, and Frank Ocean align and realign like slot-machine symbols, and Dijon’s voice dissolves into particles or stacks into choirs. The warm songwriting steadily points in the only direction we ever really get to go: forward.

Listen to: “Yamaha”

4. Geese, Getting Killed

If the 2010s were a decade in which the internet made American culture feel overlit and surveilled, the 2020s are more like an overgrown swamp, governed by murky forces and entanglements. Geese, a quartet of young rock virtuosos from Brooklyn, capture the vibe shift in freaky fidelity. As the band thrashes like a beast in a bag, Cameron Winter moans with rude confusion, as if he’s jarring loose from a barstool nap. He sounds like he’d have something to say, something important, if he could just think straight. But none of us can.

Listen to: “Long Island City Here I Come”

3. Rosalía, Lux

I would love to claim that I learned a lot from Rosalía’s tour through 13 languages and as many classical-music styles. The truth is that the flamenco-fusion artist undertook years of research and hired the London Symphony Orchestra not to teach—nor even, despite her saintly air, to preach. Rather, Lux connects on a strongly emotional, and catchy, level. Crying on the couch or humming on the street to her upward-arching trills, listeners need reckon with only one high concept: the power of music to move the soul, even if you have no idea how it’s doing so.

Listen to: “Reliquia”

2. Oklou, Choke Enough

Headphones are now so ubiquitous that they’re getting blamed for society’s ills—yet some albums still demonstrate how magical it can be to listen closely, and listen alone. The 32-year-old French singer-producer Marylou Vanina Mayniel deconstructs trance music as if with a jeweler’s chisel, making delicate dioramas that call to mind ruins covered in snow. Her voice is a glowing, childlike meep, and her tingling synths massage the inside of the listener’s skull. If you’re considering psychedelic therapy, maybe try this album first.

Listen to: “Choke Enough”

1. Ninajirachi, I Love My Computer

As the Baby Boomers aged, they sang about driving the Chevy to the levee; as Zoomers age, they’re going to nostalgize their screens. This seemingly dreary outcome can actually be life-affirming, insists the 26-year-old Australian dance artist Ninajirachi. She first caught my ear in 2021 with electronic pop that seemed crafted in her bedroom but was bolder, and more viewpoint-driven, than the work of studio pros. Now the cover of her coming-of-age concept album, I Love My Computer, portrays her where her generation seems coziest: amid devices, houseplants, and anime toys.

You needn’t have been a kid during the early-2010s reign of Skrillex and Avicii to be moved by the significance that EDM had on Ninajirachi’s cohort. On “iPod Touch,” she sings of stumbling upon a “song nobody knows” online and going to sleep with it pulsing from under her pillow. The synthetic claps and noisy basslines of her production evokes mega raves, but she’s singing—in a tone as sweet and liquid as cereal milk—about music’s ability to elevate normal life: “It sounds like first day, hallway, starting year eight / It sounds like beach day, heat wave, stoned and afraid.”

The monsters of the internet are here, too. The most chilling-thrilling listening moment of my year was first hearing “CSIRAC,” whose chipmunk-pitched chanting dramatizes a Siri-like entity playing pied piper to a curious child. On subsequent songs, Ninajirachi sings about the destruction of her innocence through sexting, and the trauma of coming across a beheading video. With haunted vocal multitracking and big, shuddering beats, the album builds to a climax in which hope and fear are swept into the same rush of human experience.