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, 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...

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, 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...