Listening through these songs while starting to write this, it felt like something shifted this year. The best music of 2025 didn’t just sound good, it sounded present, corporal, made by hands and breath and bodies in rooms. Theon Cross hammering sounds out of a tuba at Blue Note that seem to emerge from somewhere primordial. Nils Petter Molvær’s band captured in the fervor of live improvisation. Justin Vernon stripping Bon Iver down to a single voice picking through the wreckage of a relationship. What these recordings share is a quality harder to name than genre; the unmistakable texture of human intention, choices made and revised in real time, and music that could not have been made otherwise.

This presence arrives at a particular moment. In the past year, AI-generated music has moved from curiosity to industry strategy. Major record labels are signing AI “artists”, DSPs now host tens of millions of tracks created by generative models. This is functional wallpaper designed to fill silence, extract micropayments, dilute independent human artist ingenuity and satisfy algorithmic demand for infinite content. The artistic value of these outputs hover near zero. They simulate the surface of music while possessing none of its animated force. A generated track cannot mean anything because nothing was at stake in its making. Responding to a fan asking what he thought about their ChatGPT lyrics in his style, Nick Cave responded:

“Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel… ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.”

No one struggled with a lyric at 3 a.m., no drummer decided to push against the beat, no voice cracked under the weight of what it was trying to say.

What’s fascinating is that the year’s most vital music seems to know this and the artists seem to be responding to it through an intensification of everything AI cannot replicate. The jazz records that dominated my listening this year aren’t just technically impressive but are documents of collective attention; musicians listening to each other in the moment of creation. A model can approximate sounds but it can never approximate the risk.

This turn toward presence and the irreducibly live echoes a similar movement in cinema this year, where the most substantial films have embraced spectacular, sensory forms as a way of asserting what the screen—the theatrical experience—can offer that streaming cannot. In music, the stakes are different but parallel. The best songs of 2025 assert what human musicians can do that their algorithmic simulacra cannot.

Last year I wrote about the forming economic consensus and the economic realities remain grim. Touring costs continue to crush working musicians, the major label system continues to consolidate independent infrastructure and collude with media networks to stifle original innovation. DSPs continue to optimize for engagement metrics that reward the very qualities AI excels at (frictionless pleasantness and background functionality).

And still, profound and original music exists. JID delivers “Gz” with vivid imagery, restless flow and productions that tests any subwoofer lucky enough to carry it at a moment when so many of his peers have retreated into autotune and nonsense lyrics. Monae Marleau self-produces rap tracks laced with venom and radical intelligence. Kaleah Lee fingerpicks her way through songs of such delicate specificity that each note choice feels like a revelation. This is artistry that is less about fighting AI and more about ignoring it entirely by making music so particular and so human that the question of mechanical reproduction becomes irrelevant.

The best songs of 2025 share a quality that could be described as density—not in the sense of complexity for its own sake—but in the sense of every element meaning something and every choice understandable as a choice. Listen to how shame attends to the details of their inner lives in “Quiet Life”, or how The Bats trust a single chord progression to unfold across seventy seconds of dreamscape, or how Deftones, thirty years into their career, still find new textures within their established vocabulary. When the dominant forces in the industry optimize for disposability, the artists who refuse that logic become more visible, more necessary, more strange.

I do not know what the recorded music industry will look like in five years. I suspect a track, composed within an AI construct, will have great artistic meaning. Platforms will likely continue to be filled with content indistinguishable from noise. Major labels will continue to consolidate and touring economics will get worse. But I also suspect that music—actual music—will continue to be made, will continue to find its way to listeners who need it and will continue to do what it has always done.

The songs on this list are evidence of that persistence. Some of them reached large audiences, many of them did not. All of them demanded something from their makers and offered something to their listeners that, currently, no AI can generate. That this continues at all is itself a kind of miracle.

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Justin Vernon has never been content to stay in one lane. From the cabin-in-the-woods intimacy of For Emma, Forever Ago to the expansive electronic experiments of 22, A Million, Bon Iver’s trajectory has been one of restless expansion. SABLE, fABLE walks a line between those poles, leaning toward the folk compositions that first made them famous. “AWARDS SEASON” strips even that back to just a voice, tracing the beginning and end of a relationship. The first verse foretells (“you know what is great? Nothing stays the same”). Vernon keeps the track quiet until arriving at the wisdom of heartbreak (“you know what will stay? Everything we’ve made”). We are nothing without our memories. One of 2025’s quietest moments and none better constructed.

Little Simz has consistently been one of the great modern lyricists and storytellers of modern Britain. She’s an artist whose profound works elevate the consciousness and her powers have only grown with each release. She’s also been honest about the industry’s realities, canceling a US tour over unsustainable costs and speaking openly about the business’s structural failures. “Free,” built from a sample of her own group SAULT, embodies both the aesthetic and the politics. The track climaxes with one of the year’s most inventive flows, Simz playing her lines off against the looped “free” sample, each line finding new angles on the word. Listen for the running bass underneath. M.I.A. proclaimed she was “born free” fifteen years ago. When Simz says it now, you believe her. And she wants you to be free too.

Opens unassumingly with blues guitar inventive enough to lean into jazz and brush drums keeping time. Then the bridge builds to full funk snap. Little Barrie and Heliocentric’s Malcolm Catto have been working adjacent territories for years. This collaboration winds those influences together into something fully formed. The confidence and the inventiveness is audible.

Marleau delivered some of 2025’s sharpest rap lyrics. Working with Whoa1.0, self-recording and producing, she brought fresh intensity to the form. There is no autotune mask, just venom and precision. “I’m going to eat you up and might wear your skin to the Grammys when I read my thank you letter.” The intimate made dramatic and the personal exploded to global scale. Radical ideas from lived experience.

God Does Like Ugly was a no-skips instant classic and nearly impossible to isolate a single standout. “Gz” showcases what makes JID singular with his vivid imagery, playful flow switchups and production engineered to test any subwoofer lucky enough to catch its low frequencies. The craft and virtuosity is meticulous without sounding labored.

Greenwood’s score for One Battle After Another meets one of the year’s great cinematic achievements with work to match. “River of Hills” plays against type—his style is often percussive (see Radiohead’s “Bodysnatchers”)—but here he scores a climax with off-kilter percussion and stabbing strings, earthly rhythm colliding with Bernard Herrmann’s Hollywood.

Vancouver’s Kaleah Lee had one of the great songs of 2024 and her 2025 releases continue exploring fingerpicked folk with the same quiet intensity. “Fever” came from a dream so vivid it followed Lee into waking. It sounds like it was recorded alone (it likely was). Works to capture the strangeness of dreaming that doesn’t appear as logic but as residue. She talks about a line she shouldn’t cross although the line keeps reappearing (“I am not convinced you’ve seen what I’ve seen, and I’ve seen”). These elements elevate the material and keep the music unhurried and intimate, keeping Lee as one of the great modern songwriters and artists.

You can hear the moment The Bats knew what they had. The main chord arrangement is simple. It’s the kind of riff you can close your eyes and play on repeat and make small adjustments to create new layers with each pass. The last seventy seconds do exactly that. The dreamscape plays out with strings shifting incrementally underneath, the larger idea revealing itself.

Deftones stopped chasing new formulas years ago. They found sounds rich enough to sustain three decades of work and “milk of the madonna” carries the energy of a much younger band. The galloping single-string riff in the chorus, Chino Moreno pleading over it with one of the year’s more striking lyrical images (“holy ghost, I’m on fire, holy spirit, I’m on fire”). Thirty years in and still on fire.

Dovetailed by a recording from one of the member’s Grandmother leaving a moving and devastating voice message, “Maybe You Have To” elevates its simple alt-indie musical roots with larger, universal thematic ideas that make their 2025 release essential listening. Underneath it is a furious work of loss and regret.

We were spoiled for jazz releases in 2025, with many of the best releases blurring jazz into wider genre crossovers. Britain’s Cktrl had one of those great jazz albums without pushing too far. Instead he’s captured moments of overwhelming beauty, such as here with “undo my eyes”. Equal to Bill Evan’s recording of “Haunted Heart” on Explorations, “undo my eyes” demands quiet contemplation throughout its runtime.

2025 was my first introduction to Theon Cross. We are indeed lucky to have this set recorded, capturing Cross’ furious musical vision and showcases a group of artists operating at the peak of their improvisational powers. Cross hammers an astounding range of sounds out of the deep tuba, sometimes sounding like Godzilla rising from the deep while interplaying with his brother on saxophone.

Chiminyo combines his bombastic drumming style with a frenzied blend of electronica and jazz. It helps that his playing style captures the energy of improvisation (versus, say, the pre-planned style of badbadnotgood). Into the Storm builds its intensity to great heights before unleashing a monstrous metal-esque drum groove. Good stuff.

South London’s shame walked into 2025 with energy, releasing “Quiet Life” that evoked contemporaries but with enough attention to detail to make it a mid-life soundtrack classic. They have fine attention to the details of their inner lives. It also may have arrived at the same time I was thinking about an upstate escape and a quiet life sounded like the goal.

I can only describe this as something that sounds like London. All brooding mood and soundtrack to a walk in drizzle. Features a great chorus hook and opens with a wonderful statement of intent (“disband the police”), Skeleton crafted one of the finest tracks this year.

An emerging Australian songwriter now living in London, total tommy (Jess Holt) mixes pop sensibility with grunge attack, and in the case here, can write one hell of a chorus hook. This is one of the best chorus hooks released in 2025, only bettered by Chino Moreno in the Deftones’ “milk of the madonna”.

Cleveland’s Chelsea Pastel has been one of the most consistent rappers and is well overdue her break. Always inventive, one of the things that stands out in Pastel’s work is how grounded she seems. She has a good team and group of people around her, allowing her words to speak to more than hangups and mix the (rightly) boastful with the prescient. Check out the flow that starts around the 2 minute mark where Pastel really cooks.

Floats on simple arrangement and construction and carried by the clarity and genius Felivand’s note choices and wording. Smart reflections show up throughout (“Am I woman enough to find out what I need? … I’m 25 and tapped out”) and Felivand’s stature and forgiveness grows by the end of the track.

Jadagu returns with a track that sounds like it was born from suffering distance. A great chorus hook that sounds like it’s always existed, she uses the rest of the track to do harder work of picking apart self-worth, self-love and the slow process of arriving at a place where you can let others in. Smart, smart songwriting.

Driven by a booming kick that sounds like it could be lifted from an Underworld track, the latest Tame Impala’s Deadbeat saw Kevin Parker diving deep into bush doof sounds. Parker’s music has always been more melodic and sentimental than straight electronic and that’s what makes the collision invigorating, expanding the universe of Tame Impala’s sound.

Opens at maximum intensity and maintains that pressure for its entire runtime. The bass sound is one of the fattest you’ll hear this year and the way it interplays with the kick makes the track an undeniable head-bounce anthem.

Saweetie has always had the talent, the flow, the presence and the star quality. The question has been material. “pressure” is a certified a bop that showcases why she can be one of the great pop artists of our time when the song matches her genius. The production gives her room to work and she delivers with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what she’s capable of.

The pop-drum and bass crossover sound has been exploding out of London for the past five years. PinkPantheress, Nia Archives… an entire generation learning that 160+ BPM can carry heartbreak as well as euphoria. Cydnee with a C makes a worthy contribution, adapting the template with a production sound and lyrical insight that evokes intimacy and ease. The vocals float over breakbeats without fighting.

Finley started playing in church groups in the 1970s, busked for tips on the streets of North Louisiana, made it to the semifinals of America’s Got Talent in his sixties, lost his sight, and kept going. Produced by Dan Auerbach (The Black Keys) and backed by Little Barrie’s Barrie Cadogan, the Heliocentrics' Malcolm Catto on drums, this was improvised and tracked in a single day. It’s sizzling funk, hand-clapped tempo, call-and-response gospel that resembles little before it.

Adebimpe continues to expand his sound beyond TV on the Radio, and “Somebody New” explodes with one of 2025’s brightest chorus hooks. Delivered with enough earnest, soaring melody to make you levitate while listening.

Lullaby for the Lost was another exceptional jazz release in a year full of them. McCaslin blends traditional jazz with rock sensibility throughout but “Solace” demonstrates the range most dramatically. After a furious solo and return to the main hook, the track breaks out at 05:38 into full rock groove and is a blistering end to a piece that earns every minute.

Molvær has never been afraid to cross outside jazz’s borders. The live recording captures the fervor and inventiveness of Molvær and his band in real-time, hinting at improvisation as risk and genre as suggestion.

Burial has maintained a frequent pace of releases over the past few years, each one continuing to peel back the layers of modern London. He paints the city as a dreamscape with characters and sounds floating in and out of consciousness, reusing previous compositions of his as memory and present collapse into each other. “Comafields” is London at 3 AM.

There’s nothing technically or compositionally flashy about this piece. It works in a single mood. But what a mood. The techno corollary to shoegaze, it’s hypnotic, enveloping, content to be one thing and be it completely.

Cedric Bixler-Zavala finally stepped away from the high-octave pitch doubler that dominated recent releases and the songs breathe differently because of it. “The Iron Rose” is one of the album’s most subdued and romantic-sounding tracks, moving slow and forlorn, carrying intense emotion in the performance rather than the bombast. It doesn’t match Frances the Mute for maximalism but Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López still create some of the most compelling arrangements around.

Fever dream music that mixes dub, trip hop and sharp noise. The aural equivalent of an exorcism.

I wasn’t particularly impressed with this track when it was first released. It wasn’t until I saw Nine Inch Nails live and they performed a version with Boyz Noise that I heard how powerful the song really could be. The recording doesn’t match that version but I still remember the live sound.

High energy, made for the club. A Ukraine/Brazil collaboration that delivers exactly what it promises. Driving, propulsive, designed to move bodies in dark rooms.

Maruja were new to me and I was impressed by a few of their songs on their 2025 album. “Look Down On Us” was the height of the writing and performance. Captures the angst and angry noise of a working class generation that is shut out of the economy and disconnected from political representation.

MUN SING was the cofounder of Bristol’s club Illegal Data, and has been putting out music through Giant Swan and MUN SING for a while now. “Frolic” is an intense journey through electronica noise. Reminds me of Björk’s dub heavy creations on her seminal Biophilia.

Leading Akinmusire’s eight studio album, “muffled screams” demands patience and focused listening. He lets his trumpet float into the drone-like piano and synth soundscape while we get to witness a haunting journey through his near-death experience. Exceptional music.

Hits a solid groove with the kick and bass locked deep in the pocket. Never reaches the heights of an improvisational jazz recording but still carries the spirit.

Joseph has been carrying a unique flow and style for a few years now. Almost as a stoic marker against his male contemporary rapper’s love-affair with autotune and unintelligible “singing”, his recordings carry the energy and appeal of freestyle’s recorded live.

Armed with an eight-string and a wicked sense of melody and jazz-brain, Brown’s creating some of the great modern jazz guitar records with a sound that’s pushing the genre forward. Brown describes a friend who wants to be better but can’t believe it’s possible. The only path through runs inward. “Alone” is the sound of 3am listening sessions.

Playing through the 1990s and 2000s with post-rock acts like Saosin and Circa Survive, Green works here in a sentimental and sweet composition about their children. Made me space out and think of my own children.

Pachymn continues exploring a dub, roots and electronica with one of the great releases of 2025. There’s always something interesting to find in his blend of live instrument sounds and affected digital noise.

A clever blend of dance groove and pop, Kaeto makes “words” move with a swing usually found in mature acts. She’s writing fantastic music at an early stage of her career and I’m impatient to hear how she evolves.

Now nearly 10 years old, Squid continue crafting some of the most existing punk and post-rock sounds being released today. Six minutes and fourteen seconds is an audacious track length for a song in this genre but that’s always been their mode. The genius of the composition is in the soundscapes they create, allowing themselves to be free of genre conventions and traps.

Another emerging British writer making music that hums and moves with a sense of confidence usually reserved for more established acts.

Funaki rides blurred, desert vibes here, keeping the guitars shimmering in reverb and a strained distant vocal telling the story of regret and moving forward.

Great collaboration of two of the greatest to do it over the past thirty years.

Another entry in this year’s great jazz releases. The collaboration between producer-driven, multi-instrumental composition and Mathod’s trumpet style creates a unique dynamic that makes this track really groove.

Thai-born and now based in Canada, Salin creates jazz masterworks that are a furious blend of tradition and modern compositional ideas.

Cyn is another female mc who had an amazing 2025, releasing some of the best lyrical flows of the year.

Sister Ray’s been releasing some of the smarter alternative/folk of recent years and nothing changes here. Carries the track home with the great chorus lyric, “gotta go home I’ve got work to do, gonna look at you, decide there’s good work to do”. It’s a work of deep sentimentality and original style.

New Jersey’s Sol ChYld is building a catalog of some of the most inventive rap styles in modern music. Criminally underground, “if i gave” continues to expand her lyrical vision and musical ideas from the local to the intranational.

Saunders was behind the desk for Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange and here he writes a track worthy of D’Angelo’s (rest in power) inventive and sexy blend of soul, r&b and afro-futurism.

A long standing collaboration between Rob Muzarek and Chad Townsend, they somehow manage to create controlled avant-jazz works that capture their improvisational genius. This record feels alive.

A New Zealand staple, The Circling Sun are also a band that manage to capture the energy of their cosmic vision on tape, creating recordings that capture their live dynamic.

A West-Australian band that moves at their own speed, “Drone” was the lead single for their upcoming album (due who knows when), and will be their fourth album in 22 years. They’ve been writing at the peak of Australia’s modern progressive rock sound. Here they move closer to straight rock without losing their ability for inventive time signature and groove-laden syncopation.

Kokoroko songs float on a sweet blend of funk and Ghanaian highlife. Saw them this year at Brooklyn Steel and their blend of harmonies was even more overwhelming in person.

Returning to a similar compositional mode that he employed on The Petrified Forest, Biosphere returns to a simple synth pattern interspersed with Joan Lorring reading The Time Of Man from a 1950s radio adaptation. I wasn’t as moved as The Petrified Forest, which sampled Better Davis reading a Villon poem, but the sound and ideas are as interesting as ever.

High energy dance hall that snaps with each bounce.

More great music that reminds me of D’Angelo’s sound. Doesn’t have the same sliding time (the band here plays it more straight) but still flows with ease and funk.

From an album built around the Nabta Playa, a stone circle in the Nubian desert, older than Stonehenge, aligned to the summer solstice. A hypnotic piano riff establishes the pace; you move at the music’s designated speed or you don’t move at all. The patience required is the point. This music is liberation mythology as spiritual practice.

Production leans quasi-jazzy with immaculate sample choice. Boldy and Conway have something adjacent to Raekwon and Method from Wu-Tang (also featured in this list). They have a calm delivery that belies the weight of their craft. A strong rap groove with consistent flow and vivid lyrical ideas. Great collaboration from some of the best rappers working in America.

Incredible funk drum groove in linear pattern style, jazz harmonics, R&B warmth, the two horns locked in consonance. Intricate enough to reward close listening and immediate enough to move bodies

The first proper Wu-Tang album in nearly eight years has them back with a thematic album built around Black Samson, and spitting over sharp boom-bap production and soulful loops that could have dropped in 1994. Wu-Tang continues making decisions rooted in the original vision. The effortless of flow that Raekwon, Inspectah and Method have is one to be studied.

This grew out of Clive-Lowe retracing his father’s journey through Japan. “embrace” opens the album with enfolding synth pads and captured sounds from Japan, subdued at first before expanding into something cosmic.

All fuzz and crunch, King of Rome is a barnstormer of a track. Three minutes of controlled demolition from a band that has spent four decades refusing to be any one thing.

Takes over three minutes to arrive at its chorus and the whole sound detonates through the speakers, rattling the dust off the speaker cover. The way Gaupa holds the tension before arriving at the brutal conclusion makes this an epic record.

Celeste’s voice references Franklin and Holiday but her compositions span jazz-influence to soul and r&b, crafting some of the sharper and intuitive songs of today and her emotional honesty comes through. Hear the way she builds the energy until the end and lets it’s all out. The obsession the song describes mirrors the way it refuses to leave you.

Like the song’s name, Iké voice rises sweetly through the reggae sound. Keeping the arrangement simple, her vocal plays off the low end groove and creates space for a piece to breathe. No crowded arrangement, no competing elements. Iké earns her intimacy.

A collaboration that bore fruits of great historical and contemporary insight into jazz production and wild musical ideas.

A nice blues funk idea that gets expanded on with jazz experimentalism.

The album cover features a trumpet and gun and is an accurate depiction of the wild musical ideas. The vocals are abrupt and lingering while the post-punk grooves are infectious.

From their first recording in 1986, Throwing Muses still carry that sounds of late 80s/90s alternative. “South Coast” is the work of a band who continue to hone their ideas and create invigorating works that have the fingerprint of human inspiration.

Their collaborations of recent years have heralded some of the most exciting recordings. Working on their own, listen to how they keep layering the sound until the end of the track to propel its momentum.

Oasis has perfected the sound of quiet, blues/funk infected r&b.

Launching with an ear-shattering, bright guitar attack, Lifeguard keep the energy high through a noisy punk overture to disappointment.

Texan Chance Peña makes use of his unique, haunting voice to compose this wonderful ode to regret and introspection.

Mixes the music ideas of shoegaze, Krautrock and hardcore to create a hard, crunchy track that bristles with angst and cockiness.

In the extended version, Oakes gives himself more time to expand on the electronica, funk and folk ideas to build a world of sound that could play on repeat for an hour and I wouldn’t care.

One of the most unique sounds I heard this year, it was hard to place its genre inspirations or intentions. Belligerence collides with RP Boo’s polyrhythmic madness and the instruments sound like they’re being twisted and bent into new shapes The work of artists furiously invested in creating something that didn’t exist until they made it.

Heralds back to the indie-pop sounds of the early 2010s with a reverb-drenched vocal and haunting phrases while still sounding like a work of now.

A British-Bahraini multi-instrumentalist, “A Paradise in the Hold” is a great showcase of Ahmed’s inventive blend of Arabic and Western sounds. Vivid, transportive, always reaching toward something out of grasp, Ahmed is making essential music.

Unfurls itself slowly and patiently like a yawn (the good kind).

There is a particular kind of honesty available only to those who were raised inside something they later rejected. Faith, once it has been inside you, does not leave cleanly. It continues to leave questions. “I Don’t Know God” is the reckoning with those questions, arriving two decades into a career built on reckoning.

This is the kind of track that makes a crowded genre feel spacious again.You can hear key influences (Kuti, Marley, Hill) that make the pulse of this Afrobeat groove work, layered with harmonised vocals that turn a hook into architecture.

They’ve been moving toward something darker since their 2020 breakout. The collision of Afrofuturism, punk energy and r&b comes to the fore. Music that sounds like outgrowing yourself.

Not content with a digital toolkit, Dixon reaches for acoustic energy. Gospel choir harmonies, handclaps that snap and breathless verses about memory and resurrection. Live instruments demand presence and Dixon meets them with full intensity.

Evokes London’s moody interiors and the worlds of Burial’s London dread and Massive Attack’s cinematic weight. But Bicep pushes through a chopped break that sounds like a city reinventing itself. The sound of London at the edge of something.

Maara’s remix of Priori’ “Memory Palace”, already drenched in warm techno and a deep meditation on nostalgia, takes the inward drift and makes it levitate.

There’s a particular dread and cinematic build that Massive Attack perfected. That weight is channeled here but goes somewhere further into full industrial stomp.

Staying heavily within the shoegaze sound without being a caricature or stale, Just Mustard have a noise sound that keeps it interesting. The noisy drums remind me of 90s rave.

Spoiled again with another great live jazz recording. The song is built around a very simple but haunting mallet phrase that repeats like a prayer while the band starts to intrude. They introduce history and modernity into the arrangement, making this more communion than spiritual jazz.

Siifu calls it “the shit eye say to myself in the mirror.” From Birmingham via Cincinnati, he’s built a catalog so restless that context becomes impossible. The first part of the track is some of his most abrasive—a furious history, rendered in textures that refuse to resolve.

Stretches past five minutes without urgency running guitar in one ear and melodic lines in the other. A Summer-sweet melody.

Cook trades his saxophone for dry, chugging guitar and stacked harmonies to deliver what amounts to a thesis on gratitude as discipline. In Cook’s vision here, gratitude isn’t passive or sentimental but an act of will.

Music for the late hours, asking more than it answers. Has the romanticism of Jon Brion scoring Paul Thomas Anderson

A warm recording bursting with collective joy. Born in the devastation of the Christchurch earthquake and connects to what endures.

Combines downtempo rhythms with 90s dreamscape. Pop sweetness carried in synthwave warmth.

Working with Alam Khan (son of the legendary Ali Akbar Khan), Shankar explodes in a vibrant seven-beat cycle allowing the sitar and sarod to weave together. Captures the fury of Shankar’s music composition.

Features rhythms that could arrive from any point in the reggae’s fifty-year history but with production that carries contemporary sheen without sacrificing analogue warmth.

My first awareness of Turnstile was from somebody sharing the home-video style recording of their pop-up show in a Baltimore park. I loved the 90s Warped tour aesthetic and was impressed at the performance and connection the band had. From there they appeared everywhere in my peripheral and became undeniable. I’m not convinced of the depth or genius to the songs themselves, but there’s genius in artists having their moment and seizing it while bringing consistency and truthfulness. Even their Tiny Desk culminated in a mosh pit. Yes, it was planned, but showed artists in tune with the scenes they emerged from and the fans who show up today.

Listening through these songs while starting to write this, it felt like something shifted this year. The best music of 2025 didn’t just sound good, it sounded present, corporal, made by hands and breath and bodies in rooms. Theon Cross hammering sounds out of a tuba at Blue Note that seem to emerge from somewhere primordial. Nils Petter Molvær’s band captured in the fervor of live improvisation. Justin Vernon stripping Bon Iver down to a single voice picking through the wreckage of a relationship. What these recordings share is a quality harder to name than genre; the unmistakable texture of human intention, choices made and revised in real time, and music that could not have been made otherwise.

This presence arrives at a particular moment. In the past year, AI-generated music has moved from curiosity to industry strategy. Major record labels are signing AI “artists”, DSPs now host tens of millions of tracks created by generative models. This is functional wallpaper designed to fill silence, extract micropayments, dilute independent human artist ingenuity and satisfy algorithmic demand for infinite content. The artistic value of these outputs hover near zero. They simulate the surface of music while possessing none of its animated force. A generated track cannot mean anything because nothing was at stake in its making. Responding to a fan asking what he thought about their ChatGPT lyrics in his style, Nick Cave responded:

“Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel… ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.”

No one struggled with a lyric at 3 a.m., no drummer decided to push against the beat, no voice cracked under the weight of what it was trying to say.

What’s fascinating is that the year’s most vital music seems to know this and the artists seem to be responding to it through an intensification of everything AI cannot replicate. The jazz records that dominated my listening this year aren’t just technically impressive but are documents of collective attention; musicians listening to each other in the moment of creation. A model can approximate sounds but it can never approximate the risk.

This turn toward presence and the irreducibly live echoes a similar movement in cinema this year, where the most substantial films have embraced spectacular, sensory forms as a way of asserting what the screen—the theatrical experience—can offer that streaming cannot. In music, the stakes are different but parallel. The best songs of 2025 assert what human musicians can do that their algorithmic simulacra cannot.

Last year I wrote about the forming economic consensus and the economic realities remain grim. Touring costs continue to crush working musicians, the major label system continues to consolidate independent infrastructure and collude with media networks to stifle original innovation. DSPs continue to optimize for engagement metrics that reward the very qualities AI excels at (frictionless pleasantness and background functionality).

And still, profound and original music exists. JID delivers “Gz” with vivid imagery, restless flow and productions that tests any subwoofer lucky enough to carry it at a moment when so many of his peers have retreated into autotune and nonsense lyrics. Monae Marleau self-produces rap tracks laced with venom and radical intelligence. Kaleah Lee fingerpicks her way through songs of such delicate specificity that each note choice feels like a revelation. This is artistry that is less about fighting AI and more about ignoring it entirely by making music so particular and so human that the question of mechanical reproduction becomes irrelevant.

The best songs of 2025 share a quality that could be described as density—not in the sense of complexity for its own sake—but in the sense of every element meaning something and every choice understandable as a choice. Listen to how shame attends to the details of their inner lives in “Quiet Life”, or how The Bats trust a single chord progression to unfold across seventy seconds of dreamscape, or how Deftones, thirty years into their career, still find new textures within their established vocabulary. When the dominant forces in the industry optimize for disposability, the artists who refuse that logic become more visible, more necessary, more strange.

I do not know what the recorded music industry will look like in five years. I suspect a track, composed within an AI construct, will have great artistic meaning. Platforms will likely continue to be filled with content indistinguishable from noise. Major labels will continue to consolidate and touring economics will get worse. But I also suspect that music—actual music—will continue to be made, will continue to find its way to listeners who need it and will continue to do what it has always done.

The songs on this list are evidence of that persistence. Some of them reached large audiences, many of them did not. All of them demanded something from their makers and offered something to their listeners that, currently, no AI can generate. That this continues at all is itself a kind of miracle.

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Justin Vernon has never been content to stay in one lane. From the cabin-in-the-woods intimacy of For Emma, Forever Ago to the expansive electronic experiments of 22, A Million, Bon Iver’s trajectory has been one of restless expansion. SABLE, fABLE walks a line between those poles, leaning toward the folk compositions that first made them famous. “AWARDS SEASON” strips even that back to just a voice, tracing the beginning and end of a relationship. The first verse foretells (“you know what is great? Nothing stays the same”). Vernon keeps the track quiet until arriving at the wisdom of heartbreak (“you know what will stay? Everything we’ve made”). We are nothing without our memories. One of 2025’s quietest moments and none better constructed.

Little Simz has consistently been one of the great modern lyricists and storytellers of modern Britain. She’s an artist whose profound works elevate the consciousness and her powers have only grown with each release. She’s also been honest about the industry’s realities, canceling a US tour over unsustainable costs and speaking openly about the business’s structural failures. “Free,” built from a sample of her own group SAULT, embodies both the aesthetic and the politics. The track climaxes with one of the year’s most inventive flows, Simz playing her lines off against the looped “free” sample, each line finding new angles on the word. Listen for the running bass underneath. M.I.A. proclaimed she was “born free” fifteen years ago. When Simz says it now, you believe her. And she wants you to be free too.

Opens unassumingly with blues guitar inventive enough to lean into jazz and brush drums keeping time. Then the bridge builds to full funk snap. Little Barrie and Heliocentric’s Malcolm Catto have been working adjacent territories for years. This collaboration winds those influences together into something fully formed. The confidence and the inventiveness is audible.

Marleau delivered some of 2025’s sharpest rap lyrics. Working with Whoa1.0, self-recording and producing, she brought fresh intensity to the form. There is no autotune mask, just venom and precision. “I’m going to eat you up and might wear your skin to the Grammys when I read my thank you letter.” The intimate made dramatic and the personal exploded to global scale. Radical ideas from lived experience.

God Does Like Ugly was a no-skips instant classic and nearly impossible to isolate a single standout. “Gz” showcases what makes JID singular with his vivid imagery, playful flow switchups and production engineered to test any subwoofer lucky enough to catch its low frequencies. The craft and virtuosity is meticulous without sounding labored.

Greenwood’s score for One Battle After Another meets one of the year’s great cinematic achievements with work to match. “River of Hills” plays against type—his style is often percussive (see Radiohead’s “Bodysnatchers”)—but here he scores a climax with off-kilter percussion and stabbing strings, earthly rhythm colliding with Bernard Herrmann’s Hollywood.

Vancouver’s Kaleah Lee had one of the great songs of 2024 and her 2025 releases continue exploring fingerpicked folk with the same quiet intensity. “Fever” came from a dream so vivid it followed Lee into waking. It sounds like it was recorded alone (it likely was). Works to capture the strangeness of dreaming that doesn’t appear as logic but as residue. She talks about a line she shouldn’t cross although the line keeps reappearing (“I am not convinced you’ve seen what I’ve seen, and I’ve seen”). These elements elevate the material and keep the music unhurried and intimate, keeping Lee as one of the great modern songwriters and artists.

You can hear the moment The Bats knew what they had. The main chord arrangement is simple. It’s the kind of riff you can close your eyes and play on repeat and make small adjustments to create new layers with each pass. The last seventy seconds do exactly that. The dreamscape plays out with strings shifting incrementally underneath, the larger idea revealing itself.

Deftones stopped chasing new formulas years ago. They found sounds rich enough to sustain three decades of work and “milk of the madonna” carries the energy of a much younger band. The galloping single-string riff in the chorus, Chino Moreno pleading over it with one of the year’s more striking lyrical images (“holy ghost, I’m on fire, holy spirit, I’m on fire”). Thirty years in and still on fire.

Dovetailed by a recording from one of the member’s Grandmother leaving a moving and devastating voice message, “Maybe You Have To” elevates its simple alt-indie musical roots with larger, universal thematic ideas that make their 2025 release essential listening. Underneath it is a furious work of loss and regret.

We were spoiled for jazz releases in 2025, with many of the best releases blurring jazz into wider genre crossovers. Britain’s Cktrl had one of those great jazz albums without pushing too far. Instead he’s captured moments of overwhelming beauty, such as here with “undo my eyes”. Equal to Bill Evan’s recording of “Haunted Heart” on Explorations, “undo my eyes” demands quiet contemplation throughout its runtime.

2025 was my first introduction to Theon Cross. We are indeed lucky to have this set recorded, capturing Cross’ furious musical vision and showcases a group of artists operating at the peak of their improvisational powers. Cross hammers an astounding range of sounds out of the deep tuba, sometimes sounding like Godzilla rising from the deep while interplaying with his brother on saxophone.

Chiminyo combines his bombastic drumming style with a frenzied blend of electronica and jazz. It helps that his playing style captures the energy of improvisation (versus, say, the pre-planned style of badbadnotgood). Into the Storm builds its intensity to great heights before unleashing a monstrous metal-esque drum groove. Good stuff.

South London’s shame walked into 2025 with energy, releasing “Quiet Life” that evoked contemporaries but with enough attention to detail to make it a mid-life soundtrack classic. They have fine attention to the details of their inner lives. It also may have arrived at the same time I was thinking about an upstate escape and a quiet life sounded like the goal.

I can only describe this as something that sounds like London. All brooding mood and soundtrack to a walk in drizzle. Features a great chorus hook and opens with a wonderful statement of intent (“disband the police”), Skeleton crafted one of the finest tracks this year.

An emerging Australian songwriter now living in London, total tommy (Jess Holt) mixes pop sensibility with grunge attack, and in the case here, can write one hell of a chorus hook. This is one of the best chorus hooks released in 2025, only bettered by Chino Moreno in the Deftones’ “milk of the madonna”.

Cleveland’s Chelsea Pastel has been one of the most consistent rappers and is well overdue her break. Always inventive, one of the things that stands out in Pastel’s work is how grounded she seems. She has a good team and group of people around her, allowing her words to speak to more than hangups and mix the (rightly) boastful with the prescient. Check out the flow that starts around the 2 minute mark where Pastel really cooks.

Floats on simple arrangement and construction and carried by the clarity and genius Felivand’s note choices and wording. Smart reflections show up throughout (“Am I woman enough to find out what I need? … I’m 25 and tapped out”) and Felivand’s stature and forgiveness grows by the end of the track.

Jadagu returns with a track that sounds like it was born from suffering distance. A great chorus hook that sounds like it’s always existed, she uses the rest of the track to do harder work of picking apart self-worth, self-love and the slow process of arriving at a place where you can let others in. Smart, smart songwriting.

Driven by a booming kick that sounds like it could be lifted from an Underworld track, the latest Tame Impala’s Deadbeat saw Kevin Parker diving deep into bush doof sounds. Parker’s music has always been more melodic and sentimental than straight electronic and that’s what makes the collision invigorating, expanding the universe of Tame Impala’s sound.

Opens at maximum intensity and maintains that pressure for its entire runtime. The bass sound is one of the fattest you’ll hear this year and the way it interplays with the kick makes the track an undeniable head-bounce anthem.

Saweetie has always had the talent, the flow, the presence and the star quality. The question has been material. “pressure” is a certified a bop that showcases why she can be one of the great pop artists of our time when the song matches her genius. The production gives her room to work and she delivers with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what she’s capable of.

The pop-drum and bass crossover sound has been exploding out of London for the past five years. PinkPantheress, Nia Archives… an entire generation learning that 160+ BPM can carry heartbreak as well as euphoria. Cydnee with a C makes a worthy contribution, adapting the template with a production sound and lyrical insight that evokes intimacy and ease. The vocals float over breakbeats without fighting.

Finley started playing in church groups in the 1970s, busked for tips on the streets of North Louisiana, made it to the semifinals of America’s Got Talent in his sixties, lost his sight, and kept going. Produced by Dan Auerbach (The Black Keys) and backed by Little Barrie’s Barrie Cadogan, the Heliocentrics' Malcolm Catto on drums, this was improvised and tracked in a single day. It’s sizzling funk, hand-clapped tempo, call-and-response gospel that resembles little before it.

Adebimpe continues to expand his sound beyond TV on the Radio, and “Somebody New” explodes with one of 2025’s brightest chorus hooks. Delivered with enough earnest, soaring melody to make you levitate while listening.

Lullaby for the Lost was another exceptional jazz release in a year full of them. McCaslin blends traditional jazz with rock sensibility throughout but “Solace” demonstrates the range most dramatically. After a furious solo and return to the main hook, the track breaks out at 05:38 into full rock groove and is a blistering end to a piece that earns every minute.

Molvær has never been afraid to cross outside jazz’s borders. The live recording captures the fervor and inventiveness of Molvær and his band in real-time, hinting at improvisation as risk and genre as suggestion.

Burial has maintained a frequent pace of releases over the past few years, each one continuing to peel back the layers of modern London. He paints the city as a dreamscape with characters and sounds floating in and out of consciousness, reusing previous compositions of his as memory and present collapse into each other. “Comafields” is London at 3 AM.

There’s nothing technically or compositionally flashy about this piece. It works in a single mood. But what a mood. The techno corollary to shoegaze, it’s hypnotic, enveloping, content to be one thing and be it completely.

Cedric Bixler-Zavala finally stepped away from the high-octave pitch doubler that dominated recent releases and the songs breathe differently because of it. “The Iron Rose” is one of the album’s most subdued and romantic-sounding tracks, moving slow and forlorn, carrying intense emotion in the performance rather than the bombast. It doesn’t match Frances the Mute for maximalism but Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López still create some of the most compelling arrangements around.

Fever dream music that mixes dub, trip hop and sharp noise. The aural equivalent of an exorcism.

I wasn’t particularly impressed with this track when it was first released. It wasn’t until I saw Nine Inch Nails live and they performed a version with Boyz Noise that I heard how powerful the song really could be. The recording doesn’t match that version but I still remember the live sound.

High energy, made for the club. A Ukraine/Brazil collaboration that delivers exactly what it promises. Driving, propulsive, designed to move bodies in dark rooms.

Maruja were new to me and I was impressed by a few of their songs on their 2025 album. “Look Down On Us” was the height of the writing and performance. Captures the angst and angry noise of a working class generation that is shut out of the economy and disconnected from political representation.

MUN SING was the cofounder of Bristol’s club Illegal Data, and has been putting out music through Giant Swan and MUN SING for a while now. “Frolic” is an intense journey through electronica noise. Reminds me of Björk’s dub heavy creations on her seminal Biophilia.

Leading Akinmusire’s eight studio album, “muffled screams” demands patience and focused listening. He lets his trumpet float into the drone-like piano and synth soundscape while we get to witness a haunting journey through his near-death experience. Exceptional music.

Hits a solid groove with the kick and bass locked deep in the pocket. Never reaches the heights of an improvisational jazz recording but still carries the spirit.

Joseph has been carrying a unique flow and style for a few years now. Almost as a stoic marker against his male contemporary rapper’s love-affair with autotune and unintelligible “singing”, his recordings carry the energy and appeal of freestyle’s recorded live.

Armed with an eight-string and a wicked sense of melody and jazz-brain, Brown’s creating some of the great modern jazz guitar records with a sound that’s pushing the genre forward. Brown describes a friend who wants to be better but can’t believe it’s possible. The only path through runs inward. “Alone” is the sound of 3am listening sessions.

Playing through the 1990s and 2000s with post-rock acts like Saosin and Circa Survive, Green works here in a sentimental and sweet composition about their children. Made me space out and think of my own children.

Pachymn continues exploring a dub, roots and electronica with one of the great releases of 2025. There’s always something interesting to find in his blend of live instrument sounds and affected digital noise.

A clever blend of dance groove and pop, Kaeto makes “words” move with a swing usually found in mature acts. She’s writing fantastic music at an early stage of her career and I’m impatient to hear how she evolves.

Now nearly 10 years old, Squid continue crafting some of the most existing punk and post-rock sounds being released today. Six minutes and fourteen seconds is an audacious track length for a song in this genre but that’s always been their mode. The genius of the composition is in the soundscapes they create, allowing themselves to be free of genre conventions and traps.

Another emerging British writer making music that hums and moves with a sense of confidence usually reserved for more established acts.

Funaki rides blurred, desert vibes here, keeping the guitars shimmering in reverb and a strained distant vocal telling the story of regret and moving forward.

Great collaboration of two of the greatest to do it over the past thirty years.

Another entry in this year’s great jazz releases. The collaboration between producer-driven, multi-instrumental composition and Mathod’s trumpet style creates a unique dynamic that makes this track really groove.

Thai-born and now based in Canada, Salin creates jazz masterworks that are a furious blend of tradition and modern compositional ideas.

Cyn is another female mc who had an amazing 2025, releasing some of the best lyrical flows of the year.

Sister Ray’s been releasing some of the smarter alternative/folk of recent years and nothing changes here. Carries the track home with the great chorus lyric, “gotta go home I’ve got work to do, gonna look at you, decide there’s good work to do”. It’s a work of deep sentimentality and original style.

New Jersey’s Sol ChYld is building a catalog of some of the most inventive rap styles in modern music. Criminally underground, “if i gave” continues to expand her lyrical vision and musical ideas from the local to the intranational.

Saunders was behind the desk for Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange and here he writes a track worthy of D’Angelo’s (rest in power) inventive and sexy blend of soul, r&b and afro-futurism.

A long standing collaboration between Rob Muzarek and Chad Townsend, they somehow manage to create controlled avant-jazz works that capture their improvisational genius. This record feels alive.

A New Zealand staple, The Circling Sun are also a band that manage to capture the energy of their cosmic vision on tape, creating recordings that capture their live dynamic.

A West-Australian band that moves at their own speed, “Drone” was the lead single for their upcoming album (due who knows when), and will be their fourth album in 22 years. They’ve been writing at the peak of Australia’s modern progressive rock sound. Here they move closer to straight rock without losing their ability for inventive time signature and groove-laden syncopation.

Kokoroko songs float on a sweet blend of funk and Ghanaian highlife. Saw them this year at Brooklyn Steel and their blend of harmonies was even more overwhelming in person.

Returning to a similar compositional mode that he employed on The Petrified Forest, Biosphere returns to a simple synth pattern interspersed with Joan Lorring reading The Time Of Man from a 1950s radio adaptation. I wasn’t as moved as The Petrified Forest, which sampled Better Davis reading a Villon poem, but the sound and ideas are as interesting as ever.

High energy dance hall that snaps with each bounce.

More great music that reminds me of D’Angelo’s sound. Doesn’t have the same sliding time (the band here plays it more straight) but still flows with ease and funk.

From an album built around the Nabta Playa, a stone circle in the Nubian desert, older than Stonehenge, aligned to the summer solstice. A hypnotic piano riff establishes the pace; you move at the music’s designated speed or you don’t move at all. The patience required is the point. This music is liberation mythology as spiritual practice.

Production leans quasi-jazzy with immaculate sample choice. Boldy and Conway have something adjacent to Raekwon and Method from Wu-Tang (also featured in this list). They have a calm delivery that belies the weight of their craft. A strong rap groove with consistent flow and vivid lyrical ideas. Great collaboration from some of the best rappers working in America.

Incredible funk drum groove in linear pattern style, jazz harmonics, R&B warmth, the two horns locked in consonance. Intricate enough to reward close listening and immediate enough to move bodies

The first proper Wu-Tang album in nearly eight years has them back with a thematic album built around Black Samson, and spitting over sharp boom-bap production and soulful loops that could have dropped in 1994. Wu-Tang continues making decisions rooted in the original vision. The effortless of flow that Raekwon, Inspectah and Method have is one to be studied.

This grew out of Clive-Lowe retracing his father’s journey through Japan. “embrace” opens the album with enfolding synth pads and captured sounds from Japan, subdued at first before expanding into something cosmic.

All fuzz and crunch, King of Rome is a barnstormer of a track. Three minutes of controlled demolition from a band that has spent four decades refusing to be any one thing.

Takes over three minutes to arrive at its chorus and the whole sound detonates through the speakers, rattling the dust off the speaker cover. The way Gaupa holds the tension before arriving at the brutal conclusion makes this an epic record.

Celeste’s voice references Franklin and Holiday but her compositions span jazz-influence to soul and r&b, crafting some of the sharper and intuitive songs of today and her emotional honesty comes through. Hear the way she builds the energy until the end and lets it’s all out. The obsession the song describes mirrors the way it refuses to leave you.

Like the song’s name, Iké voice rises sweetly through the reggae sound. Keeping the arrangement simple, her vocal plays off the low end groove and creates space for a piece to breathe. No crowded arrangement, no competing elements. Iké earns her intimacy.

A collaboration that bore fruits of great historical and contemporary insight into jazz production and wild musical ideas.

A nice blues funk idea that gets expanded on with jazz experimentalism.

The album cover features a trumpet and gun and is an accurate depiction of the wild musical ideas. The vocals are abrupt and lingering while the post-punk grooves are infectious.

From their first recording in 1986, Throwing Muses still carry that sounds of late 80s/90s alternative. “South Coast” is the work of a band who continue to hone their ideas and create invigorating works that have the fingerprint of human inspiration.

Their collaborations of recent years have heralded some of the most exciting recordings. Working on their own, listen to how they keep layering the sound until the end of the track to propel its momentum.

Oasis has perfected the sound of quiet, blues/funk infected r&b.

Launching with an ear-shattering, bright guitar attack, Lifeguard keep the energy high through a noisy punk overture to disappointment.

Texan Chance Peña makes use of his unique, haunting voice to compose this wonderful ode to regret and introspection.

Mixes the music ideas of shoegaze, Krautrock and hardcore to create a hard, crunchy track that bristles with angst and cockiness.

In the extended version, Oakes gives himself more time to expand on the electronica, funk and folk ideas to build a world of sound that could play on repeat for an hour and I wouldn’t care.

One of the most unique sounds I heard this year, it was hard to place its genre inspirations or intentions. Belligerence collides with RP Boo’s polyrhythmic madness and the instruments sound like they’re being twisted and bent into new shapes The work of artists furiously invested in creating something that didn’t exist until they made it.

Heralds back to the indie-pop sounds of the early 2010s with a reverb-drenched vocal and haunting phrases while still sounding like a work of now.

A British-Bahraini multi-instrumentalist, “A Paradise in the Hold” is a great showcase of Ahmed’s inventive blend of Arabic and Western sounds. Vivid, transportive, always reaching toward something out of grasp, Ahmed is making essential music.

Unfurls itself slowly and patiently like a yawn (the good kind).

There is a particular kind of honesty available only to those who were raised inside something they later rejected. Faith, once it has been inside you, does not leave cleanly. It continues to leave questions. “I Don’t Know God” is the reckoning with those questions, arriving two decades into a career built on reckoning.

This is the kind of track that makes a crowded genre feel spacious again.You can hear key influences (Kuti, Marley, Hill) that make the pulse of this Afrobeat groove work, layered with harmonised vocals that turn a hook into architecture.

They’ve been moving toward something darker since their 2020 breakout. The collision of Afrofuturism, punk energy and r&b comes to the fore. Music that sounds like outgrowing yourself.

Not content with a digital toolkit, Dixon reaches for acoustic energy. Gospel choir harmonies, handclaps that snap and breathless verses about memory and resurrection. Live instruments demand presence and Dixon meets them with full intensity.

Evokes London’s moody interiors and the worlds of Burial’s London dread and Massive Attack’s cinematic weight. But Bicep pushes through a chopped break that sounds like a city reinventing itself. The sound of London at the edge of something.

Maara’s remix of Priori’ “Memory Palace”, already drenched in warm techno and a deep meditation on nostalgia, takes the inward drift and makes it levitate.

There’s a particular dread and cinematic build that Massive Attack perfected. That weight is channeled here but goes somewhere further into full industrial stomp.

Staying heavily within the shoegaze sound without being a caricature or stale, Just Mustard have a noise sound that keeps it interesting. The noisy drums remind me of 90s rave.

Spoiled again with another great live jazz recording. The song is built around a very simple but haunting mallet phrase that repeats like a prayer while the band starts to intrude. They introduce history and modernity into the arrangement, making this more communion than spiritual jazz.

Siifu calls it “the shit eye say to myself in the mirror.” From Birmingham via Cincinnati, he’s built a catalog so restless that context becomes impossible. The first part of the track is some of his most abrasive—a furious history, rendered in textures that refuse to resolve.

Stretches past five minutes without urgency running guitar in one ear and melodic lines in the other. A Summer-sweet melody.

Cook trades his saxophone for dry, chugging guitar and stacked harmonies to deliver what amounts to a thesis on gratitude as discipline. In Cook’s vision here, gratitude isn’t passive or sentimental but an act of will.

Music for the late hours, asking more than it answers. Has the romanticism of Jon Brion scoring Paul Thomas Anderson

A warm recording bursting with collective joy. Born in the devastation of the Christchurch earthquake and connects to what endures.

Combines downtempo rhythms with 90s dreamscape. Pop sweetness carried in synthwave warmth.

Working with Alam Khan (son of the legendary Ali Akbar Khan), Shankar explodes in a vibrant seven-beat cycle allowing the sitar and sarod to weave together. Captures the fury of Shankar’s music composition.

Features rhythms that could arrive from any point in the reggae’s fifty-year history but with production that carries contemporary sheen without sacrificing analogue warmth.

My first awareness of Turnstile was from somebody sharing the home-video style recording of their pop-up show in a Baltimore park. I loved the 90s Warped tour aesthetic and was impressed at the performance and connection the band had. From there they appeared everywhere in my peripheral and became undeniable. I’m not convinced of the depth or genius to the songs themselves, but there’s genius in artists having their moment and seizing it while bringing consistency and truthfulness. Even their Tiny Desk culminated in a mosh pit. Yes, it was planned, but showed artists in tune with the scenes they emerged from and the fans who show up today.