Friday, January 16, 2026
This week I ranked Kendrick Lamar's albums for Spin, and also wrote about the Tori Amos B-side "Alamo" for the Deep Cut Friday column.
Monthly Report: January 2026 Singles
Thursday, January 15, 2026
1. Edgehill - "Doubletake"
I was recently bitching about Geese bringing back the early 2000s trend of American indie rockers who wish they were Thom Yorke but don't have pretty voices, but Edgehill's singer has a suitably nice voice that I think they pull off a midtempo '90s Radiohead type song pretty well. Edgehill is a trio from Nashville that just signed to a major label a few months ago, some of their other songs have kind of annoying lyrics but I like their first alt-rock radio hit a lot. Here's my new 2026 singles Spotify playlist that I'll be updating throughout the year.
2. John Morgan - "Kid Myself"
North Carolina's John Morgan has written a few hits for Jason Aldean, who guested on his first big single "Friends Like These," but I really like Morgan's full-on solo single "Kid Myself." It's been slowly building on country radio for the last 6 months, I hope it gains some momentum, he's got a good voice and shouldn't just be writing for other people.
3. Ella Langley - "Choosin' Texas"
Ella Langley's first couple country radio hits were some of my favorites of 2024 and 2025, but she's ascending to another level right now, with "Choosin' Texas" rising into the top 10 of the Hot 100 this month once the Christmas songs finally went away. And it's pretty exciting and unprecedented in modern times -- the last solo song by a female country singer in the top 10 was, well, I guess you'd have to define it by whenever Taylor Swift stopped being a country singer (her last top 10 that was a country radio hit was 2012's Red, so well over a decade ago). And before that it was Carrie Underwood in 2007. In fact, Miranda Lambert co-wrote "Choosin' Texas" and it's already the highest charting song she's ever had anything to do with. I don't know if it's more the song or just the timing of Langley's career momentum, but I'm happy to see it either way.
4. Djo - "Delete Ya"
Djo also just got his first top 10 single off the strength of the "Stranger Things" finale boosting the streaming numbers of every piece of music featured in the show or made by its cast members, especially Joe Keery. "End of Beginning" was already as big as it could get on alternative radio in 2024, though, so that's old news, I like his current radio single, hopefully it gets some runoff buzz as well.
5. Sombr - "12 to 12"
I like that this is a bit faster than the Sombr's first two big breakthrough hits, it feels so disco to me that I was a little surprised that it's done better on rock radio than pop radio.
6. Bad Omens - "Dying To Love"
My wife's always been a little more into heavier contemporary rock than me and the Virginia metalcore band Bad Omens has been one of her favorites in the last few years. We're going to see them live in March and I'm looking forward to it, they've been growing on me and "Dying To Love" is my favorite of the singles they've released from their fourth album, it's almost like a power ballad but it had some cool noisy electronic bits. Bad Omens are in that weird point in their career where they've never even charted on the Billboard 200 but they're headlining arenas, I think the new album is gonna do numbers when it comes out.
7. Pooh Shiesty - "FDO"
'First day out' songs that rappers release after getting out of prison or jail have a long history, with Gucci Mane's 2009 classic "First Day Out" being the definitive example. I was surprised when "FDO" was as big as it was, though. Pooh Shiesty was briefly pretty big in 2020 and 2021 before he caught a charge, but Lil Durk stole the spotlight on his biggest song at the time, and for the last few years it felt like his main impact was changing what people call a balaclava. "FDO" is a genuinely pretty impressive song, though, he really made the most of his comeback moment.
8. Wet Leg - "Mangetout"
Every Wet Leg song has at least one line that makes me roll my eyes very hard at this band and their YouTube boomer fanbase, including "Mangetout," but I think it's by far their best song, some really great riffs and vocal melodies.
9. Teyana Taylor - "Bed of Roses"
It's funny, Teyana Taylor is starting to win awards for One Battle After Another and has Oscar buzz, her acting career is really taking off, but I feel like the album she released a few months ago is kinda slept on, R&B radio is playing this and the Lucky Daye duet some but should definitely be playing them more.
10. Offset f/ Gunna - "Different Species"
The Offset/Gunna tandem continues to be great, I'm glad they finally confirmed they're gonna do a collab album.
The Worst Single of the Month: Xania Monet - "How Was I Supposed To Know?"
This 'AI R&B singer' is pretty disgusting stuff, and it's kind of insidious that they gave this character the same last name as current human R&B star Victoria Monet. People have been harping on the AI 'number one country hit' that's only appeared on digital sales/streaming charts, but this song has actually charted on R&B radio, it's pretty worrying that any stations would play this.
Friday, January 09, 2026
This week on Spin I ranked T. Rex's albums and wrote a Deep Cut Friday column about Lenny Kravitz's "Spinning Around Over You."
Movie Diary
Wednesday, January 07, 2026 
In the week between Christmas and New Year's, I mourned Rob Reiner by rewatching Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally, and The Princess Bride. Appropriately, Spinal Tap II felt a little more like a reunion tour than a sequel -- playing the hits rather than extending or resolving a narrative. It's hardly essential, although it got a few laughs out of me ("it won a Holdie," Nigel shredding with the Celtic pub band), but I was filled with appreciation for the fact that Reiner at least got to end his career with a nice little victory lap of one of his greatest achievements.
b) Jay Kelly
Noah Baumbach has co-written some enjoyable movies (The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Barbie) but I don't really rate him as a director at all, I think he's technically smart and occasionally insightful but not talented or original enough to make great art. And Jay Kelly is another movie where you can kind of see all the wheels turning and it never really takes off. George Clooney's performance carries the film, partly because it's so easy to substitute our world's feelings about him as a great movie star with Jay Kelly's world's feelings for him (although it felt kind of annoyingly lazy that a highlight reel of Jay Kelly's filmography was actual clips of Clooney hits). Unfortunately, Clooney is acting opposite Adam Sandler, who's given some great performances when a role is tailored to his strengths, but is just an absolute dogshit actor in a more straightforward role, stiffly reading lines, absolutely unconvincing as a normal man with a job and adult responsibilities and a deep yearning for love and friendship. His scenes with Laura Dern were particularly lifeless, which was especially annoying given that Dern was the best thing about Marriage Story and easily could've been given the room to repeat that here.
I'm not a Paul Thomas Anderson hater like I am with Baumbach, but I definitely don't look at him as reverently as a lot of people do these days. In some ways I like early work the most, and I have vague plans to rewatch a lot of his post-'90s movies because they just didn't really connect for me the first time around. I liked One Battle After Another a lot the first time around, though, I don't know if it's the towering masterpiece it's been made out to be, but very good and not at all a disappointment, Leonardo DiCaptrio and Benicio del Toro and Chase Infiniti are all so great in this.
d) Eddington
Eddington has been lumped in with One Battle After Another and some other recent movies as examples of auteurs making films that very directly address the political landscape of 2020s America. I think Eddington came out a little half baked, though, the weakest of Ari Aster's four features (even Beau Is Afraid, while flawed, is more than the sum of its parts, while this is less). The tonal ambiguity in Aster's movies is usually a strength, but it felt like he wanted to make a movie about COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and antifa hysteria in an 'equal opportunity offender' way that felt progressively more toothless as the story escalated and got more violent. The live action equivalent of a "South Park" episode.
e) Roofman
An excellent movie, either Channing Tatum's best performance or his best performance that wasn't in a full-on comedy, definitely not as lightweight as the commercials make it seem like it will be.
f) Bugonia
I think if I could pick any job to have in the film industry, it would be a casting director, because so much of what works or doesn't work for me in a movie has to do with casting. For instance, Emma Stone is the absolute perfect actor for Bugonia and it's hard to imagine anyone else working as well in that role, much like her previous collaborations with Yorgos Lanthimos. But Jesse Plemons, I don't know, obviously a gifted actor who's been great in lots of things, but I feel like this movie could've had a different, better energy with someone else in that role. The closing montage was kind of amazing, but I didn't really feel anything about the twist that made it possible, in a weird way I think I liked Bugonia the exact same amount that I would have if the ending was a little more conventional and expected.
g) Together
Together is a great vehicle for its leads -- it's more fun to watch Alison Brie and Dave Franco play a troubled couple who are being physically forced together by a mysterious force while knowing that they're a happily married couple in real life. And they're both seasoned comedic actors who have enough dramatic range that they give the story some gravity when it's needed, but lean into how funny it eventually gets. But as someone who's very down with body horror films, I thought it wasn't a home run and it was easy to imagine a more seasoned horror director doing something much more impressive and memorable with this premise.
I wish Rian Johnson was alternating Benoit Blanc movies with other features -- it's been 13 years since Looper, his last movie that wasn't Star Wars or Knives Out -- but he's really good at this stuff, I can't complain, and so far each one is distinct enough that it feels like a worthy addition. Jeremy Renner going down the stairs got maybe the biggest laugh out of me of any moment in the series.
i) Train Dreams
A pretty good movie with Oscar buzz. Once again I felt a little nitpicky about casting, though. I've never really been blown away by Joel Edgerton, he did okay with quietly brooding through the whole movie, but as soon as William H. Macy showed up I thought about how much more engaged I'd be in the story if it was an actor as good as Macy in the lead role. I also didn't love Will Patton as the narrator, or the amount of narration, sometimes it feels like a crutch or creative failure for a screen adaptation of a book to have a lot of voiceover instead of channeling what was on the page into visual storytelling, dialogue, and the nonverbal expressions of the actors.
Adapting Stephen King is particularly difficult work, and Mike Flanagan is one guy who's shown that he's up to the task. I haven't read the 2020 novella The Life of Chuck, but it feels particularly unsuited for adapting for the screen, like Flanagan was almost giving himself a heat check, especially since it's not a horror story -- although its depiction of climate change and environmental collapse in the near future is about as visceral and haunting as any I've ever seen. It's a really interesting, thought-provoking movie, I liked just about everything about it except the narration by Nick Offerman. I'm not even really faulting Flanagan for using narration because it was probably necessary in this instance, but Offerman just done way too much voiceover work in commercials (or, like, fake commercials on "Last Week Tonight") for his narration to not give The Life of Chuck this inappropriate feel of an or a work of satire. Like it annoyed me so much that I wish they'd just realized that and recut the movie with another narrator.
After watching The Life of Chuck I decided to watch an earlier Flanagan adaptation of a Stephen King book that I'd missed. And I really liked it, Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood's performances really made the material work on the screen when there's a lot about the story that probably seemed unfilmable on paper. The whole 'moonlight man' thing almost felt like an unnecessary bonus subplot, though, it's a very Stephen King kind of flourish but I think the movie might have been stronger without it.
"Lover, You Should Have Come Over" was one of the most incredible pieces of music I'd ever heard when I was 17, and I've read so much about Jeff Buckley over the decades since then and pored over so much music and ephemera. I was curious to see an actual feature documentary about him (named after a lyric from my favorite song!) but wasn't sure if it would feel like I had anything left to learn. But Jeff's mother, and two serious girlfriends, most of the members of his backing band, and a few other musicians he knew (Aimee Mann, Ben Harper) really shared a lot, in some instances I almost felt like they overshared. As much as I've obsessed over how sad the story of Jeff's tragically short life is, the movie left me feeling like it was even sadder than I ever knew, which is not a great feeling but I appreciated it as a fan.
Watching this soon after the Buckley doc felt like an interesting flipside -- Counting Crows came out around the same time as Buckley, sold a lot more records, and Adam Duritz lived through his personal crises to tell us about them now as an old man. But it's a similar snapshot of the same era, in fact it focuses so fully on the first two Counting Crows albums that there's just a very quick postscript at the end to note that the band is still around and released an album a few months ago. That means, fortunately, that almost half the film is about Recovering the Satellites, an album that I really adore, and it gave a lot of illuminating context to the experiences Duritz was writing about, and how purposeful he was in putting the band together and deciding how those records should sound, down to whether the guitarist should use pedals or not, or whether the keyboardist should just play piano and organ with no synths. I came away from the movie really admiring him more as a musician and a bandleader.
n) Cover-Up
A great recent Netflix doc about Seymour Hersh, really gave me a renewed appreciation for what investigative journalism was in his era and the lengths people would go to to get a story.
o) Let It Be
I watched Peter Jackson's "Get Back" miniseries without ever going back to the original 1970 film at the time, but after devouring "The Beatles Anthology" recently, I decided to keep going through all the Beatles stuff on Disney+ and watch this. Probably better than it gets credit for at this point, it captures a lot of great personal and musical moments, but it definitely feels like the Jackson version renders it a lot less essential.
Monthly Report: December 2025 Albums
Monday, January 05, 2026
1. Juliana Hatfield - Lightning Might Strike
The Lemonheads released their first new album in a long time in 2025 and it was pretty enjoyable, with some old collaborators like Juliana Hatfield making appearances. But while Evan Dando has gone years and years between new records like many aging rockers, Hatfield is one of those lifers who never stopped plugging away, and at this point has over 20 solo albums. Hatfield is easy to overlook or forget about, as much as I loved 1995's Only Everything and the Blake Babies song "Sanctify," but the fact that she keeps popping up with new music has given me repeated opportunities to keep going to her catalog and appreciating her songwriting more and more. And Lightning Might Strike is an excellent album with songs like "My House Is Not My Dream House" and "Harmonizing With Myself" that are wry, self-deprecating dispatches from the life of a middle aged working class musician. I finished my top 50 albums of 2025 list before really listening to any December releases, so this isn't on there, but it definitely could've been.
2. Erick Sermon - Dynamic Duos: Volume 1
I wrote a Complex piece about the greatest duos in rap history that was originally published on 2/2/2022 but wound up making more waves in 2025, with people like Clipse and Fat Joe and Jadakiss reacting favorably to the list, which was really cool to see. Erick Sermon announced this album in 2024 so I'm not gonna jump to the conclusion that my piece inspired it in any way, but I was still excited about the project and he really delivered on the concept. I don't know that I would've thought of him as the perfect person to produce an album like this, but Sermon's sound really does fit with artists from so many different eras and regions that he can pull off Public Enemy, Cypress Hill, Tha Dogg Pound, Salt-N-Pepa and M.O.P. tracks equally well. The only track that feels like they kind of bended the rules on the concept for a forgettable filler song is the one with The Game and Conway The Machine.
3. Nas & DJ Premier - Light-Years
I added this to my Spin ranking of Nas albums, so I've already said a bit about what I think works and doesn't work about Light-Years. I really like it, though, as much as DJ Premier was probably my first favorite hip-hop producer and could still be my all-time #1, his post-'90s track record hasn't been so stellar that I ever placed really high expectations on this project, I'll take the hard tracks like "Writers" and "Welcome to the Underground" happily and not sweat the songs that aren't as good.
4. Anna of the North - Girl In A Bottle
I make a list of the year's best EPs every year, so I've become acutely aware of how often things that seem to be EP-length get labeled 'albums' on streaming services, and will often wrestle with how to categorize them. At 22 minutes, Girl In A Bottle is in that ambiguous zone, and I'm leaning toward calling it an EP since it's significantly shorter than Anna of the North's excellent 2022 album Crazy Life, but since I've already done my year-end lists, I'm not gonna overthink it too much and just enjoy breezy synth pop gems like "Call Me" and "Waiting For Love."
5. Redveil - Sankofa
I write more about Baltimore music and spend a lot of time in the city, but I've lived in Prince Georges County, Maryland for over a decade. And it's been cool to see PG County's rap scene become more nationally celebrated in the last few years, particularly as its own thing that isn't just lumped in with 'the DMV' (a term I kind of hate), regional stars like Nino Paid, Jaeychino, ST6 JodyBoof, Yung Manny, Lil Dude, and KP Skywalka. Redveil has had a pretty high national profile for a few years now and is kind of on his own thing -- he performed at Camp Flog Gnaw in 2023, which feels appropriate, he's a PG County rapper the same way Tyler, The Creator is an L.A. rapper, the ties to other artists here are more geographic than musical. I love how lush and melodic tracks like "History" and "Pray 4 Me" are, it really feels like he's growing as a producer.
6. Lor Mark - Mark Dugg
In my top 10 albums list for the Baltimore Banner, I included the first album Lor Mark released in 2025, Still Figuring It Out, but he released his fourth album of the year, Mark Dugg, right under the wire a few days before Christmas. Great NASG Chaz and Kooda features, but I hate the ugly piss yellow ChatGPT cover art.
7. Earl From Yonder - Skinwalker EP
Baltimore has one of the best scenes in the country for weirdo avant garde hip hop, and I became a big fan of Earl From Yonder's loud, funny Bad Brains-meets-Three 6 Mafia punk rap in 2025, when he released three projects, and The Wellness Check was close to making my Baltimore Banner list. The 15-minute blast of energy Skinwalker is probably the most guitar-heavy of those projects but "Bed Bath and Beyond" has a great drum'n'bass beat, highly recommended to fans of Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals or JPEGMafia.
8. Icky Reels and Wave Generators - After The Wave (Icky Reels Version)
Height Keech is one of the greats of Baltimore's DIY weirdo rap scene, dozens of albums and over a thousand shows, although he's lived in Michigan and NYC over the last few years. 2025 was a particularly prolific year for Heightman, lots and lots of collaborations and production work, and I've started to see his work resonate more and more with people outside Baltimore, particularly his project with Doseone and the second album by Wave Generators, Height's group with Nosaj of New Kingdom. And at the end of the year he dropped a remix of the first Wave Generators album by producer Icky Reels that put Height and Nosaj's vocals over some pretty different beats, I think I like the original record the most but I really enjoyed the remixes too.
9. B. Eveready - Tapas EP
I recently compared listening to a playlist full of EPs to dining in a tapas restaurant, so I was amused to see the title of Baltimore rapper B. Eveready's recent EP, which also makes for kind of a good companion piece for his other 2025 release, Crab Season. A very short but strong release, "Who?" and "Good $$$" are some of my favorite songs B. Eveready has made to date.
10. Shy Glizzy - I Was Actually Being Humble
After a relatively quiet period, with only one project over the last 4 years, I Was Actually Being Humble felt like a great comeback moment for Shy Glizzy, a chance for him to stake his claim as one of the greats of D.C. rap, much as Wale did with his latest album in November. My favorite tracks are probably "Be On Time" with Nino Paid and No Savage and "On Da Flo."
The Worst Album of the Month: The Game & DJ Drama - Gangsta Grillz: Every Movie Needs A Trailer
The only algorithmic Spotify playlist that I find useful is Release Radar, which shows you new tracks from artists you've listened to in the past. And I don't think I would've even known that The Game released something new in December, because I didn't even really like his music that much even when he was a big platinum star, but a song popped up on my Release Radar 'featuring' Hayley Williams which was really just an uncleared sample of Paramore's "Ain't It Fun." And I was amused that that song got pulled off the album on streaming services after a week or two, thank you, Hayley, that shit sucked. The whole tape sucks, in fact, this guy is beyond washed.
Friday, January 02, 2026
I made a list of the best music videos of 2025 for Spin, and also wrote about "At the Atlantis" by Bad Brains for the Deep Cut Friday column.
Friday, December 26, 2025
I wrote about "This Will Be Our Year" by The Zombies for Spin's Deep Cut Friday column this week. I also wrote about independent artists you may have missed in 2025, and added Light-Years to my Nas album ranking.
The Best of Me, 2025
Sunday, December 21, 2025.jfif)
As I do every year, it's time to take a look back at some of the work I did in 2025 that I'm proud of. There's a lot of bad news out there these days, it can feel sometimes a little futile to spend my time on music and arts and culture when there's some really serious shit happening in the world, but I hope I can keep doing what I do and we can all survive and find joy in things.
- Obviously, my biggest project this year was my first book, Tough Breaks: The Story of Baltimore Club Music, which finally came out in August, many years after I first announced the project. If you've bought it, I'm incredibly grateful to you for supporting this labor of love and the city and the music it celebrates. If you haven't, I will point out that it's a pretty affordable little paperback, and my publisher Repeater Books is running a 50% off sale through December 31st. The rollout for the book has been a lot of fun, I did events with Normal's Books and Records and Red Emma's at the Baltimore Book Festival, Greedy Reads (some video footage here), Motor House (video footage here), and Idle Hour. I did interviews with Rinse FM, The Music Book Podcast, Music Book Club, and John's Music Blog. Last week I was a guest on Midday on WYPR, and you can now hear that interview in podcast form on streaming services. The book was reviewed by The Wire magazine, and Stereogum published a lengthy excerpt of a couple of key chapters.
- Speaking of Stereogum, I also wrote a fun look back at the Crazy Frog era for them.
- On the Baltimore Banner, I interviewed Lafayette Gilchrist and Dapper Dan Midas, and wrote pieces mourning and celebrating the lives of Susan Alcorn and Darsombra's Ann Everton.
- On Complex, I made lists of rapper/singer duos and country/rap collaborations, revamped my old list of the best remixes since 2000, and wrote about some of the most anticipated albums of 2025.
- Over on Spin, I did a lot more interviews than in previous years, including profiles of Yellowcard, Rise Against, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Elbow, Repelican, Haute & Freddy, Bones Owens, and Eyedress, and I also talked to Steve Rosenthal and Anna Canoni about the fascinating work of releasing Woody Guthrie's home recordings. We started the new weekly column Deep Cut Friday over the summer, and I've written about songs by Oasis, My Chemical Romance, Jeff Buckley, Tracy Chapman, John Mellencamp, Harry Nilsson, and Blondie. And I ranked the albums of a lot of artists, including Michael Jackson, Rush, Bjork, Elton John, Marianne Faithfull, Black Sabbath, Public Enemy, Matthew Sweet, and Van Halen,
- Here on Narrowcast, I've spent the last few weeks writing about my favorite albums, singles, remixes, and TV shows of 2025. Throughout the year I also posted lists of my favorite TV shows of the 1990s, my favorite hard rock and metal singles and mainstream rock singles of the 1980s, and my favorite artists of the 1970s. I started to make lists of my favorite movies of every year, starting with 2024 and have so far gone back to 2018. And I made lots of Deep Album Cuts playlists including The Kinks, Phish, Jill Sobule, Sly and the Family Stone, Roberta Flack, Luther Vandross, Angie Stone, The Beach Boys, and The S.O.S. Band.
- The book kind of took up a lot of my time and energy the last two years, so I didn't release much of my own music this year, but a few things came out. I released three Western Blot tracks: one original song, and covers of songs by Lalo Schifrin and Olivia Newton-John. And I played drums on Jack Reidy's "Clockwork," a song on his debut album Raw Deal that came out in March.
My Top 50 Albums of 2025
Saturday, December 20, 2025
I've already posted my lists of my favorite singles, EPs, and TV shows of the year, but here's the big one. As usual, I made a Spotify playlist with one track from (almost) every album:
1. Saba and No ID - From The Private Collection of Saba and No ID
I interviewed No ID in 2023, just after he and Saba started releasing collaborative singles, and learned not just that an album was on the way, but how they'd met. When he was a Capitol exec, No ID tried to sign Saba (who declined and has remained staunchly independent for his whole career), and learned that Saba was actually the son of a Chicago musician he knew back in the day (R&B singer Chandlar, best known for the 2008 single "Never Thought"). So From The Private Collection of Saba and No ID feels like a beautiful intergenerational conversation full of Chicago's rich musical history, and the more I listen to it, the more I feel like it belongs up there in the pantheon of great No ID-produced albums like Resurrection, 4:44, and Summertime '06.
2. Pool Kids - Easier Said Than Done
I got into all three Pool Kids albums over the summer, and while I enjoy the more mathy arrangements on the Florida band's earlier stuff, it really feels like Christine Goodwyne's songwriting took a big leap forward on Easier Said Than Done and the band tailored the arrangements to the lyrics and melodies more. They're so good at just filling every song with interesting little musical details, like the bassline on the second verse of "Sorry Not Sorry" or the harmonies on "Not Too Late." Easier Said Than Done is the first Pool Kids album for Epitaph Records, tracked at the same studio as many grunge classics (Seattle's Hall of Justice), but it doesn't feel as openly nostalgic for the '90s alt-rock canon as a lot of records by young guitar bands these days, like they're trying to make the songs that only this band can make.
3. Clipse - Let God Sort Em Out
One of my more controversial opinions is that Hell Hath No Fury was not a particularly good album and Pharrell completely dropped the ball with his dinky toy instrument beats. So while I was looking forward to Malice's return to the mic, I was definitely not sure if I'd actually like the Clipse comeback album, and was pleasantly surprised to find that Pharrell understood the assignment this time and even got out of his comfort zone with some of the beats on Let God Sort Em Out. And that just sets the table for Malice to completely wreck shit, and inspire his brother to be at the top of his game as well. I'm still annoyed that Clipse did a Tiny Desk Concert and didn't make the song "All Things Considered" part of their NPR performance.
4. Madeline Kenney - Kiss From The Balcony
Kiss From The Balcony is more of a band record than Oakland singer-songwriter Madeline Kenney's four previous albums, with Kenney writing and recording every song with the same two musicians she's toured with. And it builds on their chemistry beautifully without sacrificing the increasingly heady, kaleidoscopic textures of Kenney's other albums. Drummer Ben Sloan is the solid rhythmic foundation of Kiss From The Balcony, but even his drums seem to float and flutter through the mix like Kenney's voice and guitars, it's such a delightful headphone record. "I wanna make this sound like a picture," Kinney sings on "Slap," one of the most vivid tracks on a painterly album.
5. Zara Larsson - Midnight Sun
Zara Larsson is one 2010s pop diva whose new music I never stopped checking for after her initial wave of U.S. hits a decade ago. She's always been a big star in her native Sweden, but her recent resurgence in America and the UK feels a Brat Summer that's more my speed, and she was just a teenager on those early hits, so she's only 27 now and it feels like she's actually just getting started. Her fifth album, with longtime collaborator MNEK as executive producer, hits right on target with euphoric dance pop like the title track and "Blue Moon," as well as entertaining curveballs like the Tiffany "New York" Pollard vocal loop on "Hot & Sexy," and the pair of introspective tracks towards the end, "The Ambition" and "Saturn's Return," that make it feel like a complete musical statement.
6. Amber Mark - Pretty Idea
Tennessee-born singer and multi-instrumentalist Amber Mark is seriously talented, and the two self-produced songs on her third album Pretty Idea make me think that she could (and perhaps should) go off and make a folky acoustic record completely by herself someday. Most of the album, though, is a more fleshed out, omnivorous R&B album, made with the help of two guys, John Ryan and Julian Bunetta, who've made a whole bunch of pop smashes with One Direction and Sabrina Carpenter. Pretty Idea isn't retro so much as it harkens back to an era when soul records and rock records were made with the same instrumentation and sometimes even the same musicians, and both genres benefited from that cross-pollination.
7. Ben Kweller - Cover The Mirrors
Ben Kweller is the same age as me. When we were 15, he was all over magazines and TV as the next-big-thing frontman of Radish, which I found inspiring as I played in some of my first garage bands. When he was 21 and I was 20, I got X's on my hands to see Kweller and Brendan Benson play in a little bar, and I put his song "Falling" on mix CDs for years after that. Now we're both dads in our 40s, but Kweller's teenage son Dorian died in a car crash two years ago. And it's absolutely crushing to listen to this guy I've sort of watched grow up work through this grief, but he hasn't lost that eternal boyishness in his voice, or his ability to find the humor and heart and hooks in whatever he's writing about, even when it's something that sad.
8. Pulp - More
I would've been fine with More feeling like just another one of Jarvis Cocker's post-Pulp albums, because I love a few of those, but More actually does feel like a Pulp album. A lot of it is the prominence of violins, which feels like a particularly deliberate choice given that Russell Senior is the only living member of the classic Pulp lineup that didn't have anything to do with More. And even though Cocker is still spelling out the word "love" and singing about Spike Island like he was in 1995, it doesn't feel like the band is trying to recreate the remarkable moment in time that was Different Class, they're just writing Pulp songs again.
9. Hayley Williams - Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party
Whenever people talk about 'the death of the album,' I just think about how much musicians and listeners alike are united in their love of groups of songs bundled together as a package deal. If the entire industry switched to only releasing singles, practically everybody would be miserable. Case in point: Hayley Williams celebrated her independence after completing a 20-year major label contract by tossing 17 songs out into the world, and thousands of fans made their own playlists of how those songs could be sequenced, inspiring Williams to go ahead and officially make it an album with running order. And it might be the album I listened to the most in 2025 because it became this fun interactive thing. There are things I like about my version of the album, but Hayley's feels like the definitive one now, especially after she added 3 more songs to that initial 17 that actually deepen the story at the center of the album. I don't think Ego Death's weird rollout is a template that could be repeated by other artists (in fact I hope nobody tries, it wouldn't be as fun a second time), but in a weird way I think it articulated how much more satisfying it is to have an album than just a bunch of songs.
10. Larry June, 2 Chainz & The Alchemist - Life Is Beautiful
2 Chainz has made a lot of great music, and it felt a bit like a capitulation to a certain kind of faux-underground (middleground?) rap snob for him to pivot to making an album with the Alchemist and California cult rapper Larry June. But it was the right change of pace at the right time, and I also really enjoyed the more conventional 2 Chainz project that followed, his Red Clay soundtrack album.
11. Aminé - 13 Months of Sunshine
Lots of artists have one big single at the beginning of their career that remains their calling card, for better or worse, as they get better and better at making albums for whatever fans stick with them for the long haul. Bands like Nada Surf earn hard won respect for a career like that, but I don't know if it ever really works the same way in hip hop -- arguably it did for Joe Budden for a while, but I think Aminé really deserves to be celebrated for the catalog he's built since his only Hot 100 hit, 2016's "Caroline." Of my 7 or 8 favorite hip-hop albums of 2025, pretty much all of them are produced by one person except for 13 Months of Sunshine -- it's harder to make a satisfying album that hangs together if you're assembling a record piecemeal from a dozen different beatmakers, but Aminé pulls it off because he has a great ear and a strong sense of what an Aminé song should sound like.
12. Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals - A City Drowned In God's Black Tears
Brian Ennals send a compact disc to my house in 2009, and I thought he was a sharp writer back then and was pretty much the first person to write about his music. So I can't tell you how happy it makes me that he eventually hooked up with a very adventurous producer, became a truly fearless and profanely funny MC, and has a whole lot of other critics besides me singing his praises and can tour internationally off this stuff.
13. Turnstile - Never Enough
I don't know Turnstile so I don't have the same kind of relationship with their growing fame outside of a general hometown pride. But I've played in the same little Baltimore rooms they started out in like the Charm City Art Space and the Sidebar and never fail to get a kick out of seeing what huge festival or tour they're playing know. And I like that they can still play straight up hardcore but have all these other sounds in the mix too (dreamy synth interludes, songs that sound like The Police, Baltimore club music beats) that they don't shy away from stuffing into their records.
14. Nels Cline - Consentrik Quartet
Nels Cline turns 70 in a couple weeks, and I appreciate that my favorite living guitarist is still out here making great, even if we're no longer getting an album or two from him as a bandleader or solo artist every years like we did for decades. I've been more and more interested in the 9/8 time signature in recent years so I enjoyed hearing what Nels Cline does with it on both "The 23" and "Surplus."
15. The Beths - Straight Line Was A Lie
One of my big obsessions this year was a radio station called The Gamut, which has no DJs and a library of 14 thousand songs just running on shuffle all day, of every genre and era, big and small artists. I think the artist that I got into the most because of The Gamut was The Beths -- I immediately fell for their 2020 track "I'm Not Getting Excited" when I heard it on the station, and a few months later the New Zealand band released a new album that consummated that love. Elizabeth Stokes has a great dry wit and relatable way of writing, but the whole band plays with a lot of personality and creativity.
16. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Phantom Island
A few weeks ago I was talking to my brother-in-law and sometimes bandmate John about music, as I often do, and he hadn't heard of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and I just sort of casually called them "probably the best band in the world right now," and he had to stop and clarify if I was joking, and I was not. I wouldn't say that any one of their albums singlehandedly makes that argument so much as the 27 albums they've released in the last 14 years. But Phantom Island, the Australian band's first album with orchestral accompaniment, makes a great case for the band's conventional melodic chops, even if tend to like their records with more gnarly psych/prog styles in the mix.
17. Bruce Springsteen - Tracks II: The Lost Albums
A whole lot of interesting archival recordings get unearthed or re-released every year, and I listen to some of it without ever really feeling motivated to do a 'best reissues' list or work that stuff into the lists I do make. But Bruce Springsteen releasing a box set of 149 songs recorded over the last 42 years, most of them unheard even by diehard fans, really felt like the most exciting event in new old music in 2025. Springsteen cares about the art of the album so much that even his outtakes are thoughtfully sequenced into discrete LP-length collections, each representing a particular sound and time period.
18. Flock of Dimes - The Life You Save
Jenn Wasner just has one of my favorite voices in the world, I'm excited every time she releases something. And while Wye Oak has evolved a lot from album to album, Flock of Dimes is arguably even more amorphous, feeling more like a band than a solo project on The Life You Save. Some tracks like "Instead of Calling" feel like the Americana record she's always seemed like she had in her, while others reflect some of the more modern modes she's worked in on Dijon and Bon Iver's albums this year.
19. Coco Jones - Why Not More?
In a year when R&B on the whole was thriving commercially, Coco Jones's long-awaited full-length debut was one project that I think deserved better, it got lost in the shuffle a little bit. A really thoroughly excellent album, though (YG Marley feature aside), she has a great sense of how to showcase her voice, and there's some really interesting, less radio-friendly stuff on here like "Hit You Where It Hurts."
20. Mick Jenkins & Emil - A Murder of Crows
I don't think Mick Jenkins gets mentioned enough as one of Chicago's modern greats alongside Chance and Noname and so on, he's been so consistent over the last decade and change. And the British producer Emil turns out to be a great foil for him, the jazzy dynamics really allow Jenkins to get more conversational with his flow and sometimes gradually build in intensity.
21. Dijon - Baby
Baby simulates what it's like to listen to an in-progress studio session before it's been cleaned up and mixed down -- bits of other vocal takes and room tone, mixing desk chatter, headphone bleed, levels that suddenly jump when a distortion effect is added, and drums that drop out when you think they're going to hit -- but arranged in an artful, deliberate way that lets you hear what these songs would sound like all clean and polished, and then adds all these other dimensions to them.
22. Rosalia - Lux
2020's Motomami put Rosalia right at the center of the reggaeton/Latin trap/whatever it's called international Spanish pop mainstream, but Lux feels like a statement: she's gonna let Karol G and Anitta keep making club bangers and go do something only Rosalia can do, singing in 13 different languages with the London Symphony Orchestra for an art pop song cycle about spirituality and God. It doesn't sound anything like her flamenco-based acoustic 2016 debut Los Angeles, but it feels a bit like a return to the more academic conceptual roots of her early music.
23. Bad Bunny - Debi Tirar Mas Fotos
If Rosalia took a deliberate turn away from trying to become the female Bad Bunny, Bad Bunny himself simply embraced his place at the forefront of popular music, incorporating some older Puerto Rican musical traditions into the style he's already mastered. Even though Debi Tirar Mas Fotos wasn't a commercial phenomenon on the level of Un Verano Sin Ti, it was far more acclaimed, which is what I really think is what tipped the scales to him getting that Super Bowl gig. It's my favorite Bad Bunny album because he does that weird gasp/inhale sound a lot less, though. At this point Bad Bunny's closest peer is Drake, and he's navigating that rarefied air in a way that Drake could probably learn from.
24. S.G. Goodman - Planting By The Signs
I imagine singing a duet with Will Oldham is the greatest endorsement you can get as a rootsy singer-songwriter from Kentucky, and his voice sounds great with S.G. Goodman's on "Nature's Child." But it was the spellbinding 8-minute closer "Heaven Song" that really knocked me out and unlocked Goodman's third album for me, and after that I went back and realized there are some other genius level songs on here, including the utterly charming "I'm In Love."
25. Lanie Gardner - Faded Polaroids
Faded Polaroids has what I consider the appropriate amount of pedal steel for a country album: almost constant, seemingly in every measure of every song. Country radio playlists barely make room for multiple women these days, much less two women with the same(ish) first name, so I don't know if Lanie Gardner will make it onto the charts alongside Lainey Wilson. But I'm rooting for her, this is the kind of supremely confident 18-song album you don't get from newer artists very often these days.
26. Nourished By Time - The Passionate Ones
I would like to hear what Marcus Brown could do recording with a full band and/or a big pro producer someday, I think his lyrics and his voice are unique enough that it would still retain what people like about Nourished By Time. But I'm glad that he stuck with the sound of Erotic Probiotic 2 for his first XL Recordings album,
27. Florence + The Machine - Everybody Scream
Taking my wife to see Florence + The Machine in 2018 fully converted me, I'm in awe of Florence Welch as a vocalist, especially live. And we're going to see her again in 2026, and Everybody Scream's lead single and title track seems custom made for the stage. But "You Can Have It All" is the one that really brings that classic Florence cathartic grandiosity, and her wit gets a little more cutting with each album, particularly on "Music By Men" and "One of the Greats."
28. Splitsville - Mobtown
Somehow I totally missed Splitsville's '90s/early 2000s heyday when I was a young Baltimore power pop enthusiast, but I'm glad I got hip to the band by the time they returned with their first album since 2003. Power pop isn't usually associated with socially conscious concept albums, but I love that they returned with something ambitious that wrestles with Baltimore's racial and economic equality far more than the average white Maryland band dares to.
29. Repelican - Dim Halo
Jon Ehrens has made so many records under so many names that I often don't know exactly how to recommend his music to other people. But Dim Halo is definitely one of his best and I'm glad I got to make it the focal point of a Spin feature a couple weeks ago, it's as lo-fi as a lot of his records but feels a little more purposeful in its sound, and the lyrics have a bit of a deeper existential meaning behind them than I'd realized before I talked to him about the album.
30. Cam - All Things Light
'Best one hit wonder' feels like a backhanded compliment, but "Burning House" is probably the best country radio hit of the 2010s by someone who didn't have any other big singles. And now that Cameron Ochs has a Grammy for her work on five songs on Cowboy Carter, she's getting a little of that spotlight back with the best album of her career. It's more of a folky Joni Mitchell record (my local AAA station loves "Alchemy"), but "Look At The Pretty Girls" is a great little pop country song that interpolates Adriano Celentano's "Prisencolinensinainciusol."
31. Little Simz - Lotus
I always thought SAULT was a little overrated, so I have to admit to feeling some schadenfreude that Little Simz made arguably her best album after falling out with Inflo (who borrowed a bunch of money from her to fund the first SAULT concert and didn't pay it back, apparently), rebooting her sound with a new producer, Miles Clinton James, and dragging Inflo all over Lotus.
32. Mobb Deep - The Infinite
There was a good Mobb Deep album three years before Prodigy died (and a good P solo album a few months before he died), so it never felt to me like there was unfinished business where I was really hoping for any posthumous projects. But Prodigy apparently left enough unreleased verses in the vault for Havoc and the Alchemist to put together an album that's as good as any of the group's post-'90s efforts, so I'm glad The Infinite exists, it was really my favorite of the whole Mass Appeal Legend Has It series that created so much excitement for aging rap heads this year.
33. De La Soul - Cabin in the Sky
There's a lot less of Trugoy on Cabin in the Sky than there is Prodigy on The Infinite, but this is another Legend Has It album that feels like a fitting sendoff for a classic group, Posdnous really stepped up to carry the album in Dave's honor.
34. Sun & Rain - Waterfall
I used to love to go to Out Of Your Head Collective events in Baltimore, and I've continued to enjoy the jazz/experimental releases Adam Hopkins has put out with the New York-based label Out Of Your Head Records since 2018. Waterfall is the first release from a quartet comprising saxophonists Travis Laplante and Nathaniel Morgen, guitarist Andrew Smiley, and drummer Jason Nazary, and I like how they sound together, I hope Sun & Rain makes more records.
35. Rose Gray - Louder, Please
There's no use in calling anybody the next Kylie Minogue when the first one is apparently going to live forever, but I was happy to hear a debut album from a newer artist who has a similar understanding of the durable pleasures of straight up disco in an age of edgy micro trend hyperpop.
36. Monaleo - Who Did The Body
One wedding and a funeral, Monaleo's real life September nuptials with fellow rapper Stunna 4 Vegas and her October major label debut that was surprisingly fixated on mortality, were the one-two punch that really broke Monaleo through to the mainstream in the fall of 2025. Her punchlines are still funny and ridiculous but the whole southern gothic vibe of Who Did The Body was an interesting creative statement, and she got some of Mike Will Made It's best beats in years. Even the song with Lizzo is really good!
37. Sloan - Based On The Best Seller
I don't begrudge any band for enjoying the career benefits of reuniting after a long breakup (ok, maybe I do begrudge LCD Soundsystem, who seemed to very deliberately go away just long enough to get bigger festival gigs when they returned). But I'm a lot more impressed with bands who just kept at it for decades without so much as a prolonged hiatus, especially Sloan, given that all four members write and sing lead on every album and none of them has really fallen off. Jay Ferguson is the Sloan songwriter who's really aging like fine wine, though, he's had the best tunes for a while now.
38. Superchunk - Songs In The Key of Yikes
Superchunk has had some longer breaks between albums than Sloan and some lineup changes, but I find their longevity similarly inspiring. And while Songs In The Key of Yikes isn't the definitive pissed off punk album of the second Trump term for me like 2018's What A Time To Be Alive was for the first term, Mac McCaughan is still writing songs like "No Hope" that, unfortunately, do speak to what 2025 has felt like for me. Not only is Superchunk now 50% female, it's 50% Lauras, with new drummer Laura King filling Jon Wurster's big shoes pretty well to form a new rhythm section with founding bassist Laura Ballance.
39. Marshall Allen - New Dawn
I can profess my admiration for middle-aged bands who've been making albums since the early '90s, but if you want to talk about longevity, jazz saxophonist Marshall Allen is on a completely different level. Last year he turned 100, and this year he released his first solo album, with the Guinness Book of World Records honoring Allen as the oldest musician to ever release a debut album and the oldest to release an album of new material. Of course, 'debut' is kind of a technicality -- Allen has been recording with the Sun Ra Arkestra since 1958, and leading the band since a couple years after Sun Ra's death in 1993. But New Dawn is an awesome record, especially the closer "Angels and Demons at Play," and I got to see the Arkestra up close this year when Allen was honored as a NEA Jazz Master, and also interviewed the Arkestra's new pianist Lafayette Gilchrist, both highlights of my year.
40. Willie Nelson - Workin' Man: Willie Sings Merle
Willie Nelson, who turned 92 this year, is another example of remarkable longevity, releasing two excellent albums in 2025. The latter, a tribute to his old friend Merle Haggard, is also a swan song for two longtime members of Nelson's band The Family, pianist Bobbie Nelson and drummer Paul English, and I get a little choked up every time Willie tells his sister to take a solo. In fact I love all the studio chatter that made it onto the album, with Willie happily saying "perfect" or "I think that was a pretty good cut" at the end of some takes. Even when "Workin' Man" comes to a slightly awkward stop, Willie says "we can fade it out in there somewhere," and instead of fading it out they just left it all in, which I think was the right decision.
41. Sam Fender - People Watching
I absolutely love Sam Fender's Geordie accent. I'll listen to him sing anything, but I appreciate the plainspoken but principled "I'm not preachin', I'm just talkin'" Darkness on the Edge of Town vibe he's cultivated on his third album.
42. PinkPantheress - Fancy That
I wish America cared more about PinkPantheress's songs that don't have Ice Spice verses. Sure, her reference points are unapologetically British (samples on Fancy That include Sugababes, Just Jack, and Basement Jaxx), but she makes her own beats and fashions her nostalgic Y2K moodboard into a unique aesthetic that she fully owns, nobody in America is really doing it like her.
43. Sparks - MAD!
After slowly getting into Sparks over the years, I dove into the entire catalog in 2025 just as the band's late period resurgence reached unlikely new heights -- in the UK, MAD! charted even higher than the album that made them an actual pop phenomenon over there, 1974's Kimono My House. I have to be in the right mood for the Mael brothers' droll lyrics and synth soundscapes, but they go down easier on albums like MAD! where the touring band adds guitar, bass and drums to most of the tracks.
44. Little Feat - Strike Up the Band
If Sparks isn't the quintessential cult band, it's Little Feat. The band announced last month that they're embarking on a farewell tour in 2026, and with only half of Little Feat's classic '70s lineup still alive, it's probably the right time. But whether Strike Up The Band is the last record album from the band, it's a lovely new chapter, with co-founder Bill Payne contributing a few songs (including "Bluegrass Pines," co-written with Grateful dead lyricist Robert Hunter), and Gregg Allman protege Scott Sharrard channeling Lowell George's guitar sound about as well as anybody has on Little Feat's post-George records.
45. Chance The Rapper - Star Line
I actually liked Chance The Rapper's widely maligned 2019 album The Big Day, so you can take it with a grain of salt that I like Star Line too. But I'm glad Chance finally recovered his confidence from that album's cold reception, even if it took six years. The precocious high schooler who became the man people made fun of for being a wife guy is a divorced thirtysomething now, but Star Line has a hard won determination to it, no cynicism or bitterness.
46. Miguel - CAOS
Prince beamed with pride when George Clinton told him how much he liked Around The World In A Day, telling Rolling Stone, "You know how much more his words mean than those from some mamma-jamma wearing glasses and an alligator shirt behind a typewriter?" I feel like that's probably how Miguel felt when he got Clinton to appear on CAOS's closing track "COMMA / KARMA." CAOS didn't chart, even after his huge Billboard resurgence of his early hit "Sure Thing," and it didn't get particularly good reviews from my fellow mamma-jammas in glasses, but you can't tell Miguel shit because George Clinton gets it.
47. Sabrina Carpenter - Man's Best Friend
Sabrina Carpenter was nominated for the Grammy for Best New Artist for her 6th album, and that just means that she'd been working toward the Short n' Sweet breakthrough for so long that there was no way she wasn't going to come right back as soon as possible with album number 7. For those of us who actually listened to Carpenter before "Espresso" or even "Nonsense," it's gratifying to see her ascend to main pop girl status, but those hits really set the template for her ruthlessly self-aware blonde bombshell persona now, some of the albums before that are very good but much more earnest. Carpenter courted backlash with the title/cover art of Man's Best Friend, and the album feels a little less like a pop blockbuster by going all in on sounding like Olivia Newton-John's pre-Grease country albums, but somehow it all works and it feels like she's going to be here for a while.
48. Rip Van Winkle - Blasphemy
Being overwhelmingly prolific is fine and good when you're on your way up, but it's a lot harder to sustain interest in multiple albums a year when even your diehard fans have already heard more than they'll ever need from you. So I don't blame anyone for not noticing that Robert Pollard was on a genuine hot streak this year with the debut from Rip Van Winkle, his band with members of Joseph Airport, and the 43rd Guided By Voices album Thick, Rich & Delicious. Robert Pollard doesn't have a Thriller, and if he did, it wouldn't be Blasphemy, but it does have a great song called "This Is My Thriller."
49. Cardi B - Am I The Drama?
I don't mind Cardi B taking seven years between albums, she certainly gave us a lot of great singles and features in that time, but her long-awaited second album definitely feels Album #4 -- more to the point, the Album #2 and Album #3 that we never got were probably better than this. You can't keep a natural born star down, though, "ErrTime" and "Principal" and "Bodega Baddie" were worth the wait.
50. Justin Bieber - Swag
Swag would be higher on the list if it wasn't called Swag and didn't contain "Soulful" featuring Druski, the most embarrassingly thirsty thing a white artist has ever put on an album. But if Justin Bieber wanted to impress cynical critics like me with his taste, he did a pretty good job with the stuff he made with Dijon, Mk.gee, Tobias Jesso Jr., Carter Lang, and Eddie Benjamin on this album.