I loved Sam Fender's last album, 2021's Seventeen Going Under, I keep a CD in my car and enjoy it regularly. It's too soon to say whether People Watching is as good, better, or not quite on the same level. But I will say this: Seventeen's best songs were mostly singles, while my favorite songs on People Watching so far are ones that weren't released in advance, particularly "Chin Up," "Something Heavy," and "Crumbling Empire." All of Fender's albums have gone to #1 in the UK, and I'd really like him to get a bit more famous in America, hard to say if that will happen, though. Here's the 2025 albums Spotify playlist I'm constantly updating as I listen to new releases. 

Two women from different Nottingham bands formed Rattle when one of them asked the other for drumming lessons, and they decided they liked playing together and could make music as a duo with just drums and vocals. There's some cool polyrhythms on their third album, Encircle, and my favorite weird time signature, 5/4, makes appearances on "Your Move" and "Argot," but Katharine Eira Brown's vocal melodies sound strangely good accompanied only percussion, I admire how much they commit to that unorthodox setup. 

2 Chainz has fallen from mainstream prominence more than some of the other big southern rap stars of the 2010s, but I think he's an incredibly consistent MC and I've enjoyed just about all his projects. Doing a project with California cult rapper Larry June and a legendary producer who's been shoring up his underground cred in recent years, The Alchemist, feels like kind of an obvious way for 2 Chainz to impress people who don't give him the respect he deserves. But he's been overdue for a pivot to something besides radio-friendly trap, so I hope this is the beginning of a fertile new chapter, he sounds great on these beats and gets off some great bars on "I Been" and "Bad Choices." 

Marshall Allen began playing with Sun Ra in the 1950s, and has led the Sun Ra Arkestra for the last few decades since Sun Ra's death in 1993. But New Dawn is his first release as a solo artist, and in fact he's set a world record as the first musician to release a debut album at the age of 100. New Dawn is excellent, Neneh Cherry sings the title track, but Allen's sax is a dominant texture on the other tracks. Some more really nice use of 5/4 on "Angels and Demons at Play." I think it's just beautiful that after a lifetime of supporting and carrying the torch for Sun Ra, Allen is giving us something that's distinctly his own. 

Dirty Hit has a strong enough track record of putting out records I've enjoyed that I'll check someone out just for being on the label. And the big pretty pedal steel parts on Saya's first two songs "This Is Why (I Don't Spring 4 Love)" and "Shell (Of A Man)" hooked me right away, a lovely album with some very smart, perceptive lyrics. I also dig how the hardest rocking part of the album is at the very end, the last minute or so of "Exhaust the Topic." 

I've really enjoyed some Tate McRae songs, but they've mostly been underperforming singles and promo singles ("Uh Oh," "She's All I Wanna Be," So Close To What's "2 Hands") rather than her biggest hits. So I'm not necessarily confident that market forces are going to nudge her music in the direction that I'd prefer, and in a weird way commercial concerns have already made me like this album less than I did the first time I heard it: 3 days after its release, the album was replaced on streaming services with a deluxe edition that adds one new song and moves "2 Hands" from track 2 to track 14. It's a pretty good pop record, though, I like "Signs" and "I Know Love" a lot. McRae wrote most of the album with Amy Allen and Julia Michaels, the same people Sabrina Carpenter wrote Short n' Sweet with, and to their credit they don't feel like especially similar records, they're each tailored to the artists' respective personas and voices. So Close To What is the first time an artist from Canada's prairie provinces has had a #1 album in America since I think Bachman-Turner Overdrive (surprisingly, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell never topped the Billboard 200). 

Durand Bernarr is one of the most impressive vocalists in R&B today, he was a singer in Erykah Badu's touring band for a few years. He's got that classic gospel-trained range but he really loves doing those nasal funk singer runs, sometimes he goes right past Bilal and all the way to Rick James. Bloom is 77 minutes long and it wears you out a little, but it's a good record. 

Husband-and-wife duo Michael and Tanya Trotter are usually referred to as being from Washington, D.C., but I recently learned that they met in Laurel, Maryland, which is where I live, so that's pretty cool. I worked with them once a few years ago, just for a few minutes teleprompting a promo for one of their television appearances. Anyway, they're both really talented singers, kind of more on the Americana/southern soul side of things but I hope their new record benefits from the whole raised profile of Black artists in country music these days. 

Tyga has been in the porn business for a while -- he produced and appeared "in a nonsexual role" in 2012's Rack City XXX: The Movie, which was nominated for three AVN awards. Given the kind of hypersexual stuff younger stars that NLE Choppa and Sexyy Red have been releasing lately, you'd might expect NSFW to be pretty edgy, but it really sounds to me like the same mild, passionless monotone club rap Tyga has been making for his entire career. 

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »