My 10 Favourite Albums of 2025

10. Tennyson - aka

Favourite songs - it's idea!, walk backwards

Tennyson's production style has always been a bit of a limbic hijack for me. Something about how he uses instruments like kalimbas, earthy percussion sounds, and modified vocals is satisfying in its own right, and that's before you get to the songwriting itself. This album might not hit the highs of his 2019 EP Telescope, but it's still tremendously enjoyable. What sets Telescope apart is that there was still an emphasis on song craft, and this is much more to do with sound design. Both are valid practices, and both something Tennyson is excellent at, but the moments of this album I enjoyed the most were when he really dug into his songwriting chops. it's idea! is the perfect combination of his quirky, euphoric sound design, and understated but confident vocal delivery. This album might learn harder on the algorithm-core kind of production, opting to be something you can much more easily put on while you're cooking, but your attention and engagement is still rewarded, and hopefully this album acts as a gateway to the Telescope EP for more people, which I cannot stress the quality of enough.

9. Earl Sweatshirt - Live, Laugh, Love.

Favourite Songs - exhaust, INFATUATION

It felt weird trying to isolate favourite songs from this album just now, because I don't think the intent is to listen to this as individual songs. With a 24min runtime, this is supposed to be one cohesive experience, like sitting down and flicking through a big scrapbook. Ideas constantly intermingle, never overstaying their welcome or distracting from the overall aesthetic statement this album is trying to make. The title of the record might have some people looking at it funny, and that's also entirely the point. This is Earl's reckoning with ironic detachment, individualism, and those things being mutually exclusive with raising a family. This album's beautiful, especially when taken in context with Earl's overall emotional and narrative arc up to this point. Sick!, my album of the year 2022, was like a breath of fresh air, like he'd reached a clearing in the woods. This continues that feeling, with Earl being three more years into fatherhood and seeing what really matters to him. Sometimes you don't need to be a superhero. Sometimes all you need to do is live, laugh and love.

8. Pino Palladino & Blake Mills - That Wasn't A Dream

Favourite Songs - Contour, Taka

This album is the liminal space where two great minds intersect. This whole thing is so deliberately un-rigid, like a beautiful hand-whittled wooden kitchen utensil. Every performance from every musician leaves the perfect amount of space for everyone else but also for the listener to situate themselves within the environment. I could tell you the instrumental lineup of the album but even that would be doing a huge disservice to the creative treatment those instruments are give. To say that Taka is a guitar-led piece is to not only miss the point of the arrangement but also to undersell just how much is done with the timbre and placement of the guitar (and bass). This isn't just a great album by two great musicians, this is also a great experiment in analogue sound design, and a reaffirmation of the statement that was their first album.

7. billy woods - GOLLIWOG

Favourite songs - A Doll Fulla Pins, Waterproof Mascara

billy woods is the best rapper of this decade. Every individual song has more lyrirical finnesse and power than most albums put together, and what's even more ridiculous about that is that billly's output is monumental. I would have expected him to lie low after an album as good as Maps, but he's straight back in with this sprawling, challenging, scary album. That's also not to mention the album he put out as part of his rap duo Armand Hammer (an album which, at this point, I've yet to get round to.) The production is gloomy, evocative and off-putting. The lyrical content is ranges from eerie to scary to straight-up gruesome. The delivery is visceral and urgent. This is not an album for the faint of heart, but if you can stomach it, it's deeply rewarding.

6. clipping. - Dead Channel Sky

Favourite Songs - Mirrorshades pt.2, Ask What Happened

I should like this album a lot more than I do. That's not to say I don't like it, but there's something in this album stoppng me from loving it. When you put everything together on paper, this should be something made exactly for me; a band whose last album I absolutely loved making an album in the genre I just made a foray into (go and stream Megastructure). Maybe my dislike of some parts of this comes from it being a mirror held up to my own creative work; everything that leaves me slightly cold or cringing or confused about this album is probably also present in my last album, them both being segmented, self-produced cyberpunk concept albums. In interviews with the band, I feel a lack of certainty and conviction in what the plot actually is, it's like they wanted to invoke the imagery of a plot without doing any of the actual plotting. And as I had that reaction, I thought to myself - what's actually the plot of Megastructure? Did I want to say something specific, or did I want to cash in on the messages broadcasted more clearly by other writers while maintaining a safe distance from it?

Anyway, when this album gets things right, it gets them really right. The production is the perfect mixturer of slick modern hip-hop production and grungy analogue geekery that we've come to expect from them. The bars manage to walk the delicate line of being well-delivered rapping while also being concise worldbuilding, and at no point does it feel like one is being sacrificed to serve the other. There's always energy, there's always intrigue, and there's always reward for the listener when trying to decode Bill and Jonathan's insane production style or keep up with Daveed's mile-a-minute word spinning. If it sounds like I wanted more from this album, it's because I did. I wanted it to lean further into it's influences and to really give us a consistent plot and a world to chew on, instead of something that does a really good job gesturing towards all of those things. I also still listen to it a lot, and enjoyed seeing the live versions of earlier this year. Looking forward to what the boys come up with next.

5. Little Simz - Lotus

Favourite Songs - Flood, Peace

How does she keep doing it? Good music from Simz is starting to feel like an inevitability more than a surprise. Her discography is starting to look like one of the all time greats, especially considering where she could go next. It's worth framing it this way because Lotus isn't any kind of spectacular album, it's really good, but it's also something that has to be taken in context; this is yet another rung on the ladder that Simz is climbing to be in discussion for hip-hop GOAT status. The fact that music like this comes from her every couple of years is quite amazing.This also doesn't sound like anything else on the market. Flood is an anxty, threatening meditation, as well as proof that her and Obongjayar need to hurry up and do a whole album together. This is followed immediately by Young, a tonal shift so abrupt you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd left autoplay on and this was a different artist you were listening to all of a sudden. Simz has a lot to unpack on this album, specifically about a professional relationship that ended quite dramatically, but that doesn't stop her from enjoying herself or following her artistic curiosity. The result is something that's quintessentially her. I can see how some people might feel that she has a particular brand that's gone on for a while now, but to my ear she's tapping a vein that not many other artists have access to, and what she's returning with is something that's un-emulatable.

4. Dijon - Baby

Favourite Songs - Baby!, Kindalove

Much like Simz, this is another link in the chain for Dijon. He's carving a totally unique place out in the music landscape, and that place is definitely an acquired taste. This album took a while to grow on me, but there are some beautiful moments in it. The opener is a beautiful account of having his first child, speaking to his son directly, telling him about the pregnancy. This album is full of stuff that feels just as personal, if not in the literal sense, in the production sense. Dijon is sought after for his production sensibilities as much as his songwriting, and this is a real showcase of both of them. Some of it can feel jagged and prickly and disorienting, but it's all part of the process of being brought into Dijon's world, and he's done an excellent job of making something that feels transportive like that.

3. Bon Iver - Sable, FABLE

Favourite Songs - Day One, Speyside

This is going to sound like a bizarre way of praising this album - it shouldn't work. I think that Justin Vernon's voice and the kind of production style the latter half of this album is going for are inherently at odds with each other. Some of these feel like beats produced for other artists that Justin's voice has been put on much later. And yet, this album's great. It's so refreshing to hear this band in a good mood, enjoying the sense of being a larger, more communal project than it's ever been. Much like the Earl Sweatshirt album, the sense of relief, the clearing in the woods, that big deep breath after your sinuses are finally clear, is running throughout the whole record. The additional contributors, both credited in the song names and in the liner notes, provide a complex and diverse set of influences, really making this feel like even more of a group project than the previous album, which is one of the things I remembering enjoying the most about that as well. Looking at the overall trajectory of Bon Iver as a project, it's amazing to see it go from one guy in a cabin in the woods, to a whole community of people contributing to making this music, and the gradual upward change in mood alongside more homies coming into the studio isn't a byproduct, it's the point. Justin having a whole community germinate around this project is a beautiful thing, and I for one hope this community of artists and contributors continues to grow if this is the result.

Album Of The Year 1 - quickly, quickly - I Heard That Noise

Favourite Songs - Take It From Me, Enything

We're doing things differently this year. There were two albums that were so good and so equally important for my year as a listener, that they both deserve being talked about as defining moments. This album came into my life when I was meeting someone I hadn't seen in many years. I asked what their album of the year was, and this was it, and I agree. This thing rules. I shouldn't have to make any kind of case for this, the quality of the songwriting and the idiosyncratic way in which it's produced should speak for itself. Around every corner of this record you're met with immaculate lyricism, slightly crunchy and asymmetrical production, and perfect delivery. I love how there's precisely two beats of drums in the whole of Drawn Away, it's an insanely restrained but inspired decision. The baritone guitars on Raven create this uncanny feeling of something you recognise but with a strange alien property. This album is like happening upon the witch's house in the woods in Kiki's Delivery Service. It's a bit chaotic, and you're clearly entering someone else's space, but everything is where it's meant to be, and once you find a seat and make yourself at home, there's an incredible amount of peace to be found in here. There are lots of albums on this list that will be much more subjective (including my other album of the year), but this is the one album that I recommend unequivocally for everyone. Beautiful, beautiful album.

Album Of The Year 2 - Jim Legxacy - black british music (2025)

Favourite Songs - stick, i just banged a snus in canada water

This album is monumental. I was telling everyone after his previous mixtape, that whatever he produced next was going to be something special, and I'm very glad to be right on this. Jim takes everything, his experience from the last tape, his features and collaborations, and the trauma from his life, and forges them into this immaculate portrait of the UK music scene and his place in it. The self-produced beats are constantly pulling from influences that you wouldn't expect, Jim's use of vocal processing is varied and diverse, giving his voice a fresh sound on every track. This is also another great example of something like Future Nostalgia by Dua Lipa, something that combines elements from days gone by into something fresh and never heard before. For Jim, this nostalgic elements come from the era the album name is supposed to be a double-entendre for: BBM. Throughout the album promotion cycle, the Blackberry is used as a central visual motif. Take that and combine it with song titles like '06 wayne rooney, and you're instantly given images of what it was like to be in secondary school in the mid-00s. BBM, Xbox 360, Fifa Street, Sony Ericsson, the DS Lite. This is an album full of cultural signifiers, but it doesn't settle at being a nostalgia-bait cashgrab. It's using the kind of hiraeth one feels for days gone by as a way of reckoning with where we are now. For Jim, that means having to readjust to life without his sister, and still dealing with repercussions of being homeless after a legal situation with his father. All of this is extremely overt, and Jim talks directly about how all of this is affecting him, and that's beautiful. It doesn't always make for comfortable listening, but I appreciate that this might also have a huge trickle-down effect. I'm excited to see what happens when a whole generation of rappers who may not otherwise have spoken their mind start speaking their mind in the way that Jim does so expertly.

But this isn't just about Jim Legxacy, this is about black British music. At a first glance, one might assume that he's making some kind of claim on this definition and this aesthetic, and that would be to miss his point. In an interview with Kids Take Over, he explained that this concept is still extremely nebulous, and the conversation he wants to try and foster is one where we really start to consider not just black British musicians as isolated individuals, but the actual aesthetic and cultural smorgasbord that is black British music. That could be whoever comes to mind for you; it could be Seal, it could be Labbi Siffre, it could be The Prodigy. It could be the thousands of black producers and session players that help shape some of the most important elements of British musical culture.

Right after this album came out, I went to see Bloc Party play a sold out show on Brighton beach. The show was amazing, but it also gave me a chance to use what Jim had said in this interview to really consider who this band are. They aren't just a defining point for indie rock, even though they undoubtedly are, this is black British music. Kele as a frontman wasn't making music that was enjoyed in spite of his blackness, or his queerness for that matter. Those are central to the experience that he's bringing to his songwriting. This is something we've incorporated into our cultural canon without necesarily understanding the roots of. Silent Alarm is an important piece of black queer history as much as it is a piece of rock music history, if only for the impact Kele's voice has had since.

By presenting such a dynamic and rich album, Jim Legxacy isn't just making an excellent record, even though he is. He's asking us to look at the situation at large. It's asking to directly engage with cultural elements of music and art that would otherwise have been omitted had that person not come from that background. Going forward, it's not good enough to take a great piece of art from someone who is deliberately citing their cultural heritage and simply claiming it for the British musical canon, as if there's not a huge amount of outside influence. The other important job is that we avoid using this aesthetic Jim is highlighting as some kind of reductive umbrella term, saying that black British music should sound like something particular, it's just not that simple. Black British music can sound as individual as the artist who is making it at that time, and for 2025, I'm very glad it sounded like this.

Honourable mentions

Oklou - choke enough

If I'd found this album earlier in the year, I'd definitely be putting this in the list. blade bird is a stunning tune, and that alone puts it in the discussion.

Quadeca - Vanisher, Horizon Scraper

This was my first exposure to Quadeca, and I need to go back and do the archeological dig now. Wonderful experience.

JID - God Does Like Ugly

If ten was a bigger number, this would be in the top ten. JID's penmanship and delivery is something to behold, and the length and density of his past two projects is staggering.

Clipse - Let God Sort Em Out

This album feels like it's been stored in liquid nitrogen for the last 15 years and we're getting it straight out of the freezer, this thing is cold, it's crisp, it's sharp, it's defined.

McKinley Dixon - Magic, Alive!

The only thing stopping me from properly ranking this album is the fact that I enjoyed his previous album more, but this is still undeniably an album worth your time, and I'm very excited to see how McKinley and his creative crew keep evolving.