List

My favorite and least favorite music of 2025 (so far)

The best albums, EPs, mixtapes, and songs I've heard this year. And some of the worst.

Eli Enis

18 Jun 2025 • 8 min read

I published my 2024 year-end list on December 18th, so in the name of consistency, I'm running my halfway-through-2025 list on June 18th. Like last year's midway report, I've decided to cull together an unranked smorgasbord of my favorite 2025 releases thus far. I've segmented the album portion of the list into five broad genre categories, and then included a smattering of individual songs that I've been rocking with this year. Then, behind the paywall, I've dropped in some blurbs on a few releases that I consider my least favorite of the year thus far.

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My favorite "indie-rock" of 2025 (so far)

Cameron Winter - Heavy Metal

"I don't know if I like this" has been my first reaction to several of my favorite artists ever. Alex G. 100 gecs. My Bloody Valentine. Sonic Youth. Negative Approach. Maybe Cameron Winter will one day join those ranks. I wanted to hate this record (I still hate the first song) but I couldn't deny its chimerical brilliance. I didn't get it, and then I did. And now I never won't.

Friendship - Caveman Wakes Up

Unless there's some ferocious guitar magic going on (see: Club Night, Forty Winks), it takes an album like Caveman Wakes Up to shatter my ambivalence toward most modern indie-rock. This album sounds the way the world looks through eyes moistened by the burden of existence. The way the colors get a little richer, the everyday dialogue a little more profound, the sensitivity of each motion turned to 10, as if your body is responding to the affliction with a physiological feat of self-preservation. To remind you what you're missing.

Alien Boy - You Wanna Fade?

And then sometimes I just want to fucking rock. Alien Boy have been working toward this album for years and with You Wanna Fade? they finally got there. The recipe is just right: guitars that scream like comets, hooks that fall off the bone, and lyrics that ache with a palpable ennui. My ears were rattled by this band's triple-axe live assault back in 2023, and I'm thrilled Alien Boy's hair-singeing blitzkriegs now carry over to their recorded output.

Some others:

Horse Vision - Another Life

Glixen - Quiet Pleasures

Club Night - Joy Coming Down

Forty Winks - Love Is a Dog from Hell

My favorite hardcore of 2025 (so far)

Mongrel - Baptized in the Gutter

It's difficult for a heavy hardcore record to cut through the din of brutalists who've been running the genre for the last half-decade. While many of their neanderthalic contemporaries have been using blunt force to gain entry into the zeitgeist (Final Resting Place, Torture), Mongrel wield the blade. Baptized in the Gutter pillages the low-end groove of early-90s Sepultura and the noxious leads of Divine Intervention-era Slayer and then restores those precious metals with a present-day hardcore sheen. Hardcore rarely sounds this metal; metal rarely sounds this hard.

Combust - Belly of the Beast

Everyone, including me, said the same thing about Combust's 2022 debut, Another Life: NYHC circa '88 done right. Belly of the Beast is, on its surface, more or less the same genre exercise, except this time, not even a Danny Diablo feature can weigh this record's anchor in the cluttered port of acceptable nostalgia. The songs are too vivacious, too precise, too limber, too eager to be yelped through a grabbed microphone for Combust's exacting regional style to even register as well-trodden ground. Another Life was testing the durability of a sound from many times ago. Belly of the Beast is timeless.

Balmora - Prologue

"Style matters." Balmora singer/Ephyra Recordings owner Senti tweeted that declaration back in February to endorse another band's acrobatic dancing style, but it could just as easily double as his own band's M.O. After a year of touring and slaying every festival stage in the U.S., the preeminent metalcore revivalists returned this year sounding crueler, smarter, and more enduring. The mosh parts on Prologue are malevolent and the through-composed structure of "Bloodlord" makes no logical sense, yet everything is stylized just so. Every re-listen reveals a new detail – a fetid deathcore bellow, a Synyster Gates-ian string bend, a breakdown that beats crooked like a vulture's neck – that testifies to Balmora's royal status.

Some others:

Never Again - 100% New Jersey Hardcore

Bulls Shitt - Bulls Shitt

Sin Against Sin - Demo

Told Not to Worry - Hands in the Air!

My favorite rap of 2025 (so far)

Playboi Carti - MUSIC

Despite the criminally boring features, the wonky sequencing, the bloat, and the uninspired delay-as-artform rollout, there's still enough on MUSIC that reinforces why Playboi Carti is the most arresting rap star of his generation. His swiss army knife of voices – squeaks, gurgles, grrs, eeees – and preternatural gift for selecting beats that pile-drive the zeitgeist's envelope remain unmatched. It's been a long time since A-list rap felt as sterile and directionless as it does now. MUSIC is a jolt of life. A cause to rally around. A soundtrack to destroy to.

Lunchbox - L.B. Cooper

There's a stretch of road in Pittsburgh that locals will be familiar with. That portion of Bigelow Boulevard between Polish Hill and downtown where the speed limit is 35 but the actual flow of traffic cruises at a cool 50. If you hit that two-mile clip just after sundown, it's a vacant raceway – no shoulder for cops to lurk in, not a single residential building to leer at – and you can zip through at a 65 mph stride, conquering every mild bend and whimsical bump with the unearned confidence of a Need for Speed player. It's a six-speed owner's oasis in a city of interminable traffic lights and slow drivers, and if you listen to Lunchbox's L.B. Cooper while you grip the wheel, you'll feel like Dominic Toretto in that motherfucker.

Coritsa Star - E.M.O.

"Turn that fucking bass up, I don't care, I want it fucking louder." When I first heard Cortisa Star bleat that demand through auto-tune in the middle of "Bomb," I knew we were on the same page. Trunk-knocking bass – fuck that, 18-wheeler-trailer-clattering bass – is the only rational way to experience the irrational fun that encompasses E.M.O. (Evil Motion Overload). Hyperpop has never sounded this dangerous. Rap music rarely sounds this innervating.

Some others:

billy woods - GOLLIWOG

Ghost Mountain - October Country

smokedope2016 - Slow Down

YT - Oi!

My favorite pop of 2025 (so far)

Jane Remover - Revengeseekerz

This has been my kneejerk answer when people ask me what my single favorite album of 2025 is thus far. While certainly subject to change, I can't imagine hearing a more electrocuting, battering, emotionally leveling, delightfully unchained pop record this year. Or next year. Or maybe ever.

oklou - choke enough

A pop album that gets better as it goes on. The first legitimate ripple of the oncoming whisper-pop deluge. OK, maybe Eusexua was the first (or was it C,XOXO?) but choke enough is the most enduring. Maximalism is out. Hyperpop is dead. It's going to be an achingly hot summer, and choke enough is an easy and affordable way to stay cool. Bedrotting with the a/c blasting never sounded this sexy.

Addison Rae - Addison

A little Lana ("Summer Forever"), a little Gaga ("Fame is a Gun"), a little Nelly Furtado ("In The Rain"), a lotta Britney, but even more of the most magnetically suave, intimate, adventurous, authentically cool new voice to enter the pop mainstream this side of Brat. No agenda, no gimmicks, no reason for existing other than to bask in its own luxurious pleasures. Pop music for the sake of great pop music.

My favorite "etc." of 2025 (so far)

Purelink - Faith

My favorite ambient albums are like running water. Utilities that I need in my house for basic survival. Once I flipped on Purelink's 2023 LP Signs, I nary went a day without listening for months. I know I'll be swimming in the pools of Faith for just as long. This trio give me exactly what I want from this style of music: dubby basslines, custard-smooth synths, and a cooling resonance that hits my ears like aloe vera on toasted forearms.

Kathryn Mohr - Waiting Room

I'll always associate Waiting Room with Ethel Cain's Perverts, another doom-folk tome that dropped two weeks prior in the most dismal of January's. Kathryn Mohr's songs are creaky and spectral, as present yet un-pinchable as glints of dust floating in the afternoon sun. Whether she's intoning over ripples of prickly guitar on "Take It" or cooing phantasmic streaks over an escalating bassline on "Driven," every maneuver is in service of a greater, atmospheric whole.

Planning for Burial - It's Closeness, It's Easy

Planning for Burial earned the distinction of being doomgaze's chief miserabilist with last decade's funereal high-water marks, 2010's Leaving and 2017's Below the House. With It's Closeness, It's Easy, Thom Wasluck returns with the project's briskest, most vaguely optimistic set of songs yet. No longer draw solely to dirge, PFB's sound is fanned out with seven-minute jogs and dynamic 'gaze-metal surges, though my favorite mode remains the pendulous gloom heard on the above track.

Some others:

DJ Python - i was put on this earth

Huremic - Seeking Darkness

Raisa K. - Affectionately

Los Thuthanaka - Los Thuthanaka