Maff's Favorite Albums of 2025

One of these years, I won’t keep up with new music releases enough to make a list of my favorite albums released that year. At times I wondered if this year was that year. But at the end of it, I made a list of albums I liked enough to say something about, and I had around 42 of them. And then I said something about 20 of them and put the rest in plain numbered list and made a playlist and called it a day.

So what did I listen to this year? There’s a lot of electronic music, both of the ambient (Sam Prekop, Shrunken Elvis, Ichiko Aoba) or instrumental variety (Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Yo La Tengo, Bitchin Bajas) and of the dance music variety (Thomas + James, Lindstrøm, Real Lies, Anthony Naples, Nick León). There’s a few pop albums, but mostly ones with a heavy electronic music bent to their DNA (Oklou, FKA twigs, PinkPantheress, Sofia Kourtesis). The guitar albums are a mix of alt-country (James McMurtry, Wednesday, Rose City Band), indie rock (Florry, Friendship, Geese), power pop (Momma, Pool Kids, Alien Boy, Jay Som), and shoegaze (Greet Death, Wednesday, Hotline TNT).

All of this reflects to some extent where Music has been tracking in recent years: shoegaze has gone from niche subgenre to one of two dominant influences in new guitar music, with alt-country the other, as an alternative to the dominant form of popular music (regular country). It will not surprise you, then, that one of the biggest indie music bands of the year, Wednesday, blends shoegaze and alt-country (they come by it honestly, by which I mean they are causing reactions more than reacting). Emo has largely faded from consciousness and from my lists, although you can see strains of it here and there, amidst the reverb of shoegaze and pedal steel of alt-country and ambition of power pop—its influence is more widespread than pronounced, and that’s reflected in this list as well. And ambient music and dance music and have continued to rise in popularity and utility, for work and play respectively. Utility is good; I cast no aspersions on so-called “background music,” as all music has its own bespoke place in our lives, which is part of what makes music special. In the end, good music is good music. Here’s some good music released in 2025:

20. Yuragi – In Your Languages

In broad strokes, it’s Japanese slowcore and shoegaze, but it covers a lot more ground than the space between those tentpoles.

19. Baths – Gut

Baths (Will Wiesenfeld) has grown more confident as a vocalist and lyricist throughout his career. On this album, that growth becomes enough of a shift to be a controversial move (for some), but his production remains as wonderfully tactile and textured as ever.

18. Momma – Welcome to My Blue Sky

I was always going to be a mark for “Alvvays with heavier guitars” but if the songs are good, the songs are good.

17. Shrunken Elvis – Shrunken Elvis

Ambient-adjacent guitar music with a healthy amount of pedal steel.

16. Youth Lagoon – Rarely Do I Dream

A wonderful companion piece to 2023’s Heaven is a Junkyard, which was among my favorites that year. He just makes beautiful music.

15. Wednesday – Bleeds

It’s no small feat to be the best American alt-country band working today but they’ve collectively been on top for a few years now.

14. Oklou – choke enough

Minimal, glitchy, undeniable electronic pop music. I thought that this album sounded different than I remembered for the first half-dozen times I listened to it.

13. Thomas + James – ATTIC DUBS

Bouncy, energetic, expertly-crafted house music. Each track brings something different to the table and all of them feel essential.

12. Unknown Mortal Orchestra – IC-02 Bogotá

The second in UMO’s “Improvisation/Collaboration” series of instrumental jam session releases. Top-shelf music to write or work to; engaging without being distracting; it wormed its way into my brain.

11. Jay Som – Belong

A lot of late 2010s buzzy indie songwriters released quiet, boring disappointments this year. Jay Som did not.

10. James McMurtry – The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy

A genius storyteller, songwriter, and guitar player. We don’t get many like him. “South Texas Lawman” calls to mind Tommy Lee Jones’s sheriff in No Country For Old Men (2007) if the killing that propelled that narrative had never started up. Comparisons to Cormac and the other McMurtry (his dad) are inevitable, but surpassing those comparisons isn’t. McMurtry has a thick book of unimpeachable songs but his best album hitherto was a live album (Live in Aught Three); The Black Dog may be his most complete studio work.

9. Florry – Sounds Like…

Both the Stones’ Exile On Main Street and louder Big Thief tracks like “Not” make a case that the best rock music comes from a tight band that’s playing loose. Florry follow in this lineage as well as anyone today.

8. Friendship – Caveman Wakes Up

I don’t know that anyone in indie rock does more with less. Sparse like 5:35 PM on a cold November day, when the sun is low and in your eyes.

7. PinkPantheress – Fancy That

Regret to say that as soon as this album opened with a poppy sample of Underworld’s “Dark & Long (Dark Train Mix),” I was done for.

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6. james K – Friend

Dreamy trip-hop pop songs. Like the Oklou album, this album surprised me for the first half-dozen listens.

5. Sam Prekop – Open Close

Remember 2000s art-rock band The Sea and Cake? Well one of the members went on to make analog synth music and this album is wonderful and gorgeous.

4. Lindstrøm – Sirius Syntoms

Naming a track “Thousand Island Man” (presumably a lighthearted nod to the oft-sampled classic Candido house track “Thousand Fingered Man,”) is a pretty good summation of the approach to house music taken by Lindstrøm and other Todd Terje-cohorts in the field I call “space disco.”

3. Greet Death – Die in Love

Heavy shoegaze royalty; often imitated, never equaled. “Country Girl” song of the year shortlist.

2. Coma Cinema – Grand Delusion

Matt Cothrnan is among the best indie rock songwriters working today but it’s his approach to instrumentation and arrangement—both low-key and dynamic—that push this album over the top for me. No one wrote more songs that instantly lodged in my brain this year than he did.

1. Real Lies – We Will Annihilate Our Enemies

Like going to a rave at the end of a wake for 2000s UK electronic music. This was a real “out of nowhere” AOTY for me, but the truth is that this year my music listening journey was driven in largest part by old school UK rave classics: Leftfield, Orbital, the Prodigy, Underworld, and others. And this album was explicitly indebted to and in conversation with that music. I suspect that in the future when I think about what music moved me in 2025, this album will represent the biggest piece of the puzzle of this list.

Maff’s Favorite Albums of 2025