singedsun

Posted by Sean

https://www.saidthegramophone.com/archives/best_songs_of_2025.php

Voilà and please enjoy - for the 21st time - Said the Gramophone's favourite songs of the year. One hundred remedies for the year two thousand twenty-five: selected by me, Sean, up in Montreal. Songs I love more than demon-hunters, damselflies and the numbers six or seven.

If you enjoy these lists, please consider picking up one of my novels.

Said the Gramophone's a very old music-blog. See previous Best lists: 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. I follow just one arbitrary rule: that no primary artist may appear twice.

The best way to browse the proceeding is to click the little arrow beside each song and then to listen as you read. The things you like you can then download by right- or ctrl-clicking with your mouse.

You can also download the complete 100 songs in three parts:

• songs 1-32 (308mb)
• songs 33-66 (272mb)
• songs 67-100 (285mb)
(mirror: part 1 2 3 / 1 2 3 / 1 2 3 / please share any others)
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This list is my work—me, Sean, and not any of Said the Gramophone's past contributors. Don't blame them for my stumbling, bumbling taste.

If this is your first time here, don't hesitate to page through the archives. Papercuts aplenty! You can also follow me on Bluesky.

Among the artists below, roughly 46 are American, 21 are British (an all-time high, rule britannia!), 16 are Canadian, there are four Australian artists, two from Belgium, two from Sweden, two from Spain, and one from each of France, Japan, Denmark, Norway, Lebanon, Ireland and New Zealand. I didn't fall in love with any African music this year, which seems weird; something for me to consider in my listening habits. 53 of the frontpeople/bandleaders are men, 43 are women, none this year are non-binary (as far as I'm aware), and there are 4 mixed duos. This is the way it worked out; it certainly ain't perfect. Here are some charts of this and past lists' demographics.

My favourite songs of the year do not necessarily speak to my favourite albums of the year. Songs vs LPs are like hotels vs houses.

My favourite albums of 2025 were:

• Oklou - choke enough (new, blue, ripple / buy);
• Joshua Burnside - Teeth of Time (folk, agate, woven / buy);
• Horesgirl - Phonetics On and On (electric, shambling, chime / buy);
• Kiran Leonard - Small Brown Bed/With You Waltz (free, folk, improv / buy
• Friendship - Caveman Wakes Up (rowdy, magnolia, poems / buy);
• Matthew Herbert and Momoko Gill - Clay (electronic, diamond, dust / buy);
• Geese - Getting Killed (arson, break-ups, Sendak / buy);
• Jeff Tweedy - Twilight Override (carved, archive, lace / buy); and
• Adrianne Lenker - Live at Revolution Hall (folk, collage, refraction / buy);

And now, without any more stalling, a hundred-layer cake of defiantly mixed metaphors:

(original image by Robert John Thornton)

1. Anna von Hausswolff - "Stardust" [buy]
   I wonder sometimes about what it would be like to assemble these lists at the beginning of the year or at the height of midsummer, instead of at its end, as the darkness sets in. But it's winter now, winter in Montreal, and shadows are gathering everywhere. Dark clouds, bare trees, and an internal shadowiness too - fear, worry, the pall of a period that feels, sometimes, like standing on a precipice.
   
   And in this quivering, shivering time - here on the brink - what I reach for (like the pommel of a sword) is this, "Stardust," by the Swedish shieldmaiden Anna von Hausswolff. "It's time to make mistakes!" she shouts. "The threshold of our future!" Five and a half minutes of organ and scorching guitar, of drums and saxophone, of hoarse, pure-hearted apology. Von Hausswolff is apologizing to the Earth, I think - to nature, to this battered planet. But "Stardust" faces skyward in the end, not to what has already happened but to the part that comes next, after the apology has left your lips. To me, "Stardust" feels like an anthem of revolution, transformation - of human beings' capacity not just to withstand but to change. To march (or, perhaps, to run) with kindness, and courage.
2. Saya Gray - "LIE DOWN.." [buy]
   Après le déluge, this. Saya Gray's "Lie Down" has been slowing my heartrate, soothing my spirit, nearly all year. A glittery stomy, a grieving hope - but above all a sense that peace does come, that grace awaits, given enough patience, distance, luck. "LIE DOWN.." has a hopeful trudge that can't help but remind me of D'Angelo (RIP), even if it's a simpler music, built from straighter lines. It's as if the artists used different calculations to come to the same results: something about struggle, pleasure, and, perhaps eventually, forgiveness.
3. Geese - "Taxes" [buy]
   The diamond centrepiece in Geese's rightly-hailed breakthrough album. Getting Killed is genuinely exciting indie-rock, synthesizing aspects of Wolf Parade, the Stones, Ween and even Morrissey - but with a mix that is adventurous and occasionally gorgonzola-blue, reminding me (at times) of lo-fi hip-hop and 90s electronica. I love that this is a band that likes Nick Drake. Cameron Winter's voice is luscious and expressive, while Dominic DiGesu's rambunctious, handsy basslines prevent things from ever feeling too mannered. Yet "Taxes"' allure is also in its smash-cut: from a doleful, piping opening into the guitar cascades of its second half, like a barrel tumbling offa Niagara Falls.
4. Friendship - "Tree Of Heaven" [buy]
   Friendship's brilliant Caveman Wake Up is an album in the tradition of Magnolia Electric Co. and The Natural Bridge, full of moonlight, blaze and poetry. But there's a weakness to it, a frailty, that feels like an inverse of David Berman's or Jason Molina's work. Those songwriters used music to sing certainty into uncertain lives; the songs of Friendship's Dan Wriggins, on the other hand, feel like sledgehammer-blows to complacency. A track like "Tree of Heaven" isn't about how to chart a course through life - it's a catalogue instead, of small victories and embarrassing defeats. Country music, I suppose, for a country that requires some dismantling.
5. Blood Orange ft. The Durutti Column, Caroline Polachek, Daniel Caesar & Sabir - "The Field" [buy]
   The English songwriter Dev Hynes assembles a whole basketball-team of talent to produce a song like an endless evening game.
6. Westside Cowboy - "Shells"" [buy]
   Something deeply compelling in the construction of this song, its surprising harmonies. Westside Cowboy take the track's full four minutes to erect its arches and its dome. The walls come up one by one, with alcoves and fountains - but the architects are eminently patient with the tempo, the sequence, the arrangement of pieces. Indie rock like this is usually so fumblingly constructed, just a straight-line acceleration of guitars. "Shells" is different, superior, with an appreciation of the way light can streak through stained-glass into a room.
7. Sabrina Carpenter - "Manchild" [buy]
   Even setting aside its enchanting music video, "Manchild" is a pop-song crammed with delights - winks, glints and whirligigs, like a lawn covered in scrap-metal sculptures. I do feel like Sabrina Carpenter lays it on a little thick, overrating her lyrics' wit - but it's more than made up for by the song's playful sound, flying across the room like laughter at a Sweet Sixteen.
8. Horsegirl - "Switch Over" [buy]
   Corduroy motorik. In a just world, that would be a palidrome.
9. Herbert & Momoko - "Babystar" [buy]
   A dance-music of brushes and whispers, tender as cherry-blossom. The Herbert is Matthew Herbert, who has been making playful, experimental electronic music for nearly 30 years. His companion is British-Japanese songwriter Momoko Gill, whose debut solo album only appeared this year. Together, they make music indebted to fellow travellers like Tirzah and Raisa K: "Babystar" is much more sombre and mature than its title might suggest, stitched with watercolour synths, woodwind and a little sitar (?), as plausibly a song about motherhood as one about the sheets.
10. Lola Young - "D£aler" [buy]
    Troubled English pop-singer Lola Young here with another banger - her layered vocals fluttering over a buzzy bassline. There's a delicious command to Young's performance, a sense of hard-won discipline, and much of the strong's strength is in the tension between that resolve and the wobbling sentiment of what Young is singing: "Tell my dealer I'll miss him..."
11. Oklou & FKA Twigs - "viscus" [buy]
    Oklou released Choke Enough back in February, and I admit it took me a few months to recognize the true scale of what she had accomplished. It isn't just a very pretty hyperpop album: Choke Enough expanded the sonic vocabulary of contemporary pop music, uncovering an array of textures that feel as connected to abstract ideas like cloud and cashmere as to references like PC Music or Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. One morning, walking home from school with my eight-year-old, I slipped headphones over his ears - to let him hear the world with Choke Enough playing, to let him discover how the weather changed.

For most of this year, Oklou's "ict" was a lock on this list. But then this collab dropped last month: a duet in a setting of astonishing beauty, organic and yet artificial, churchy and clubby, as patient in its timing as something Bach might have written, stooped at a desk.

12. Bad Bunny - "DtMF" [music video]
    A secret softy's cheeky song for departed loved- nes. Potentially the greatest-ever tune for when you and all your friends have your arms over each other's shoulders and you're swaying, singing, hoping you will never ever really have to say goodbye.
13. World News - "Don't Want to Know" [buy]
    World News' post-punk rides high on a familiar format of jangle, jump and croon, but for the formula to work it requires not just execution but verve. This London group has both, and I've enjoyed all their latest volleys - "Don't Want to Know" offers a dazzle of melody (and golden guitars) that leaves me blinking away, happily blinded.
14. Adrianne Lenker - "no limit (live)" [buy]
    In the flurry of recent Big Thief releases - the band themselves released another new album this fall (see #58) - it's easy to understand why their frontwoman's second live album might be relatively overlooked. But Live at Revolution Hall stands out not as a raw collection of Lenker (or Big Thief) material: it's more than that, a stunning collage of multiple shows and moments, all of them taken "in and around" a venue in Portland during June 2024. It's a worthy and fascinating work, elevated by daring editing - unexpected cuts and backtracks, clipped samples, repetition. As students of these lists will know, I am not usually one for live recordings, let alone live records, but not only is ...Revolution Hall something special, so is a track like this, captured like an animal mid-flight. An tender + unreleased love-song that seems as if it could withstand almost anything, impervious.
15. Yasmine Hamdan - "Shmaali شمالي Tarweeda (Nicolas Jaar Remix)" [buy]
    Yasmine Hamdan's album I remember I forget بنسى وبتذكر is a special one, like a pool of metal ore. Nico's remix elevates what is already a standout single, balancing steely-eyed conviction with a sense of savage grind. The words, taken from Palestinian folklore, offer a dogged kind of spell, while the electronic backing-track feels like hope in an emergency, the sound of sirens slowly falling in sync.
16. Joshua Burnside - "Climb the Tower" [buy]
    I didn't know anything about Joshua Burnside before stumbling upon Teeth of Time, but the Northern Irish musician's fifth album quickly became one of my absolute favourites of 2025. Well-spun folk music, yes - but with an inventiveness that reminds me of Sam Amidon, Caroline or even The Books, folding outside sounds and samples into otherwise traditional material. "Climb the Tower" doesn't need to do very much to do a great deal indeed, drawing the listener close, striking a match, changing the light.
17. Jim Legxacy - "Stick" [buy]
    A song that'll send you out into the night - through the rain, wiping your eyes, toward the warm place your friends are waiting, the ones you've kept.
18. Vanessa Amara - "Don't Let This Feeling" [buy]
    Vanessa Amara is the sobriquet of Danish producers Birk Gjerlufsen Nielsen and Victor Kjellerup Juhl, whose electronic music seems committed to the relationship between repetition, harmony and sentiment. "Don't Let This Feeling" is a song for the part of the movie when a night has reached terminal velocity - when it's 2am and everything is gliding, full of laughter or tragedy, uninterrupted forward motion. "Don't let this feeling / capture your soul," someone's voice warns - but it's a difficult caution to accept. That's the danger, I suppose - that once you arrive here, you might try to stay.
19. Esther Rose - "New Bad" [buy]
    A song about doing bad - Esther Rose's heart gleams like the evil book in the Care Bears movie. It's "a thief," it's "a zombie," it's a terrible power station - and Rose's voice is like electrical wire, sending that energy all the way down to the guitars.
20. Smerz - "You got time and I got money" [buy]
    The truth is, the creep wrote in her diary, all I really want is love.
21. Nilüfer Yanya - "Treason" [buy]
    A new colour of loneliness - blue-grey, burnished, tinted by icing sugar, old snow, tiny feathers.
22. Messages from Angels - "Seedling" [no links yet!]
    On Christmas Eve of 2024, my friend Ryan sent me this song - part of a new project with his friends Hannah and Brad. It's stayed with me ever since - like a burr twinkling on the skirt of my coat. "Seedling" is weird, wind-up folk, like cybernetic Shirley Collins or maybe the dreams of a dying Casio keyboard. Hannah's voice melts and drifts, as if she's getting sucked into a black hole; Ryan, meanwhile, plays a glittering fingerpicked guitar. It's glitchy and digital - but also somehow alive and rambling, like a raspberry bush under the moon.
23. Kiran Leonard - "S/P" [buy]
    Maybe I'm cheating here, with an 18-minute track, more EP-length than "song"-, but "S/P" (a live recording of "Sights Past") is truly one piece, one tune, post-rock or post-folk or whatever you want to call it, a piece of music that begins in sawed strings and longing but moves into steel squall and racket, a stormfront, before breaking into the cheers and handclaps (and background dub) of the room that heard it new.
24. Rosalía - "Dios Es Un Stalker" [buy]
    Rosalía just sings the hell out of this, pouring richness and life into what is already a thrilling composition - water-plumes of strings and cantering drums and a piano montuno like a brightly tiled floor, a promise of banquets still to come. (This is the version of "Dios Es Un Stalker" from the physical edition, not the slightly inferior streaming mix.)
25. Caroline Rose - "conversation with shiv (liquid k song)" [buy]
    Short film in a single song, snappy and clangy, with Rose's singing as sour as a pack of Airheads.
26. Jonathan Personne - "Zoé sur la montagne" [buy]
    There's so little to it, but "Zoé sur la montagne" has been holding me in its hands all year. Corridor's Jonathan Robert sings a song all lazy and hazy - strummed guitar, strolling bass, double-tracked vocals, Charlie Brown piano. A few lines about a girl crossing a mountainside. And yet I hear something much more complex - about care, parenthood, admiration, distance. About showing your love for someone by letting them wander ahead.
27. Jeff Tweedy - "Feel Free" [buy]
    An instruction manual, a walking stick, a skipping-stone kept in a jacket pocket, just in case.
28. Dijon - "Yamaha" [buy]
    One of my favourite vibes of the current era is the futuristic, broken R&B originated by people like Dijon (as well as Jai Paul, Bon Iver and Mk.gee) - a sound like a corrupted Prince mp3. I remain perplexed that it's produced so few true smashes, but I'm more than happy to content myself with hours of tunes like these, chill and funny and surprising, sumptuous without feeling decadent.
29. Prewn - "System" [buy]
    Yowl, scowl, strings and howling guitars. A track gleaming with the black iridescence of a crow, the speckled shine of Izzy Hagerup's singing.
30. coen - "Headbanger" [buy]
    Is this just drum programming? Maybe it's just drum programming. Maybe all of us are just drum programming, drum programming at a genetic level, rhythms preselected for the universe to strike.
31. Sam and Louise Sullivan - "Lonely Days Lonely Nights" [buy]
    Loosey-goosey folk-rock with tangles of electric guitar, juicyfroot horns, rhymes as nourishing as soup. A song to sew onto your garment like a patch, beside emblems for Fairport Convention and The Band.
32. Destroyer - "Cataract Time" [buy]
    Dan Bejar with a gorgeous, kora-coded coda. So pretty it makes you want to rent a bungalow here. "Wastrels look at you sideways / as if to say, 'What happened?'" Act as if you've always been here, on a sling chair, sipping pineapple juice, reading Henry James.
33. Caroline - "two riders down" [buy]
    I suppose I was let down by Caroline 2, the second album from my favourite current band. It's hard to say why - something subtle or arithmetic, sums that didn't quite add up right. But there is still so much richness on the record, richness and courage and also love. "Two riders down" spends its first half twisting itself in knots like the best of the Dirty Three, then its second half unravelling, making sense, trying to work out how many strands make up the braid.
34. Bb Trickz - "leche^^" [instagram]
    Bottled adolescence, blue as Saturday afternoons. Like the antidote to a very, very, very specific poison - some venom requiring a sound like Tokischa crossed with Folk Implosion. Maybe I'm the only one with a fondness for this stuff, but this is my list, I can do what I want!
35. The New Eves - "Cow Song" [buy]
    A song that dwells in the middle-place between The Wicker Man and Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Pagan skankers clomping around, waving banners and lighting pyres, hoisting violin-bows, then chasing a cheese down a hill.
36. YHWH Nailgun - "Animal Death Already Breathing" [buy]
    They call it a "slugger": one that strikes hard or with heavy blows; also, one who hunts for slugs. This song is more of an impression (the impression of a club on your face). Send for help.
37. Bakar - "Lonyo!" [stream]
    "Sending out an S.O.S.," Bakar coos. "It's the summer of love." The guy's almost six decades late, but the shake and flick of "Lonyo"'s beat is enough to imagine pulling out the picnic blankets and trying it all again. I love the schoolyard sample, the grimey wobble, but I'm less sure of the intermittent Hammond pulse, which lights up the part of my brain attuned to Discord notifications.
38. Liz Stringer "Coming Home" [buy]
    Shiny pop balladry in the school of Vanessa Carlton and that 2022 Lewis Capaldi number. For a tune like this to succeed, it requires not just engineering but conviction - and Stringer sounds like she believes every word that she's singing, that she means it very much, and that the world could even change if only her words got through.
39. Cass McCombs - "Miss Mabee" [buy]
    Miss Mabee like an occult, vaguely Tiggy-Winkle-coded Mrs Robinson. Maybe McCombs' tune won't score the credits of an award-winning coming-of-age film, but I like to imagine it in the soundtrack of a Yorgos Lanthimos-helmed American Pie reboot. In a cellar somewhere, a woman holds out a grimy, ancient paw... "Maybe she'll lace your boot," McCombs sings, his grin sounding-through. "Or maybe she'll polish your flute."
40. Turnstile - "I CARE" [buy]
    OK they can call it hardcore if they want. Hardcore like the middle of an avocado. Like the heart of a nutcracker. Like a the mastery of table tennis. Brendan Yates boings around with a Gallagher-brother bounce, tossing out his lines like he's throwing candy to the crowd. What does it mean that I find this (Baltimore-born) song Australian-coded? Do I need to spend more time on the beach?
41. Daniel Caesar - "Call on Me" [buy]
    The lyrics of this song don't give me much confidence in Daniel Caesar's relational intelligence. Ladies, please don't date him. But if I were to listen to the music alone, I can imagine hanging around his door, waiting for him to get off work, wondering what we might get up to together in a city lit-up, alive, astounding. We could buy an antelope. We could board a plane. A dream of what "easy" looks like, dreamed before you even understand what "easy" really means.
42. Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band - "New Threats from the Soul" [buy]
    The Roadhouse Band caused a minor indie sensation when this song was first released: nine and a half rowdy and elegiac minutes, with wheezy clarinet and rambling guitars and Davis's Maker's Mark-marred voice. Mostly it was the words, though - a rhyming poetry that reminded many (myself included) of the late great David Berman. The words are mighty fine. Clever, crooked, sincere: "If you need me you know where to find me," he sings, "North of a puddle and west of a hole." And: "A slew of mismeasurements between the place where I stand and the place where I will rest." This tune would rank much higher if I didn't find something faintly, fundamentally annoying in the musical setting. (There's too much of They Might Be Giants in the Roadhouse Band, tbh.) But perfection is the enemy of the good, and I often get things wrong.
43. Wolf Alice - "White Horses" [buy]
    Before the four horses of the Apocalypse arrive there are some nicer ones, garlanded in green herbs, primrose, mint. They're still harbingers, they still bring trouble. They still gallop at top speed, while the sky churns above them. They'll jump your fence, come and devastate the flowers in your garden.
44. Pink Pantheress - "Illegal" [buy]
    First it stops at a dress shop, then a chess tournament, then an office floor, then a bedroom. A nightclub, an ice-cream parlour, a greenhouse. An elevator that goes up and up forever. (Also recommended: the Nia Archives remix.)
45. Hannah Jadagu - "Doing Now" [buy]
    Languid R&B about knowing what you're doing and also not-knowing. Sometimes the best gift a lover can give you is the patience to deal with your own spiralling-out.
46. Antoine Corriveau - "Suzo" [buy]
    A song like a short film; a court métrage of nervy tempo - gradually accelerating, panic setting-in. Broken windows, bad chords. A fugitive, confrontation, disguises, saxophone. You can see it in your mind's eye, listening: the actors' fear and eyeshadow; their feet on the stairs; the light in Palermo, bright and unremitting.
47. Frog Eyes - "E-E-Y-O-R-E (That's Me!)" [buy]
    Can't tell you what this one means. Sometimes a song's lyrics are like the teeth on a key: this is just how they are, how they must be, to unlock what it is they unlock. Indie-rock that loops back, bucks, delights. Drums that knock upon the wood. Carey Mercer's stammer, aspiring.
48. Medium Build - "Last Time" [stream]
    Nicholas Carpenter begs not to have to say goodbye, hoping that if he can just be sweet enough, bittersweet enough, maybe she'll call off her farewell. Special mention to those snarls of electric guitar.
49. Derby - "Two Step" [stream]
    A frog in a box, blurting a green serenade.
50. Stereolab - "Transmuted Matter" [buy]
    Stereolab return! Still wizards of gravity, gyroscopics, magnetism, house plants. "Transmuted Matter" keeps five or six whole plates spinning, each of them gradually, alchemically, being transformed from solid into gas.
51. Poor Creature - "The Whole Town Knows" [buy]
    Loose, strange folk from the new Irish scene (ft members of Lankum and Landless). "The Whole Town Knows" has trad contours, but its tempo, tautness, and weird, echoey second half site it clearly in the contemporary, balancing the plainsong of the singers with the menace of the horns, snare and strings.
52. Dari Bay - "The Joke" [buy]
    Fuzz so thick you could line your slippers with it, luxuriate, clomp around feeling smug about all your good decisions and well-earned benefits.
53. Parts Work - "Trenton" [stream]
    A new project by Hop Along's unmistakeable Frances Quinlan, working with Thin Lips leader Kyle Pulley. "Trenton" zips and zings with these marvelous stabs of synths and strings, short straight lines that come like a rain of arrows, perpendicular to the momentum of the song. They lend everything a vicious and slightly seasick energy, this gorgeous/hideous counterweight to one of the most distinctive voices in indie-rock today. Wonderful.
54. Daughter of Swords - "Talk to You" [buy]
    A song like a schoolyard game, hopscotch or double-dutch or ballon-poire, and also a song like a squad of monsters, furry and enormous, variously vicious and kindly, absolutely kicking the shit out of each other.
55. Clipse ft. Tyler, the Creator- "P.O.V." [buy]
    Three MCs in blue-black braggart mode, entrancing their fans, bewitching their skeptics, plucking out the hearts of their enemies. "I've topped all these lists / where my prize at?"
56. Mereba - "Ever Needed" [buy]
    An R&B made miniature, the size of a love-letter or hand-mirror. You place your hand on its side and feel its heartbeat racing, invisible.
57. Nia Archives & CLIPZ - "MAIA MAIA" [buy]
    A very forbidding party: Clipz and Nia Archives unspool a battery of jungle drums, dark synths, even as the titular vocal sample swings and clambers in the trees. If only it were longer than three minutes! Fuel this rich burns out real fast.
58. Big Thief - "Words" [buy]
    Come for the warm groove, the wisdom - stay for the electrifying guitar solo, quicksilver spraying everywhere.
59. Real Lies - "Wild Sign I Choose You" [buy]
    A girl finds a medallion on the beach; she brings it home; she doesn't realize it's this running her life now, transforming it, turning all the blacks and blues to golds, the cold-snaps to balmy, breezy, neverending summers. / A new kind of club-facing pop music, from London.
60. Babyface Ray, Samuel Shabazz - "Sin Aire" [insta]
    Two of Detroit's finest rearrange a glittering Jordin Sparks beat ("Sin Aire" is Spanish for "No Air") to make this floating, celestial daydream, high as a Mario cloud level. This is the kind of music I interpret as pure sound; I'm just a guy blowing bubbles.
61. Abel Ghekiere - "Caroline" [buy]
    With "Caroline," the Belgian songwriter Abel Ghekiere pays slow, steady tribute to the artist at #33 (really!). Guitar, piano, saxophone, and a patient uncoiling of heartache - but even when Ghekiere reaches his breaking point, the beat carries on, dry-eyed and remorseless, like a man carrying a letter.
62. Tim Baker - "Giant Eye" [buy]
    Tim Baker's slipped razor blades and silicon chips into this sweet, lulling folk-song. Rare to hear an artist like this engaging so bravely and effectively with the messy stuff of the present: bluetooth and homelessness, algorithms and surveillance, all of it described as with a fine-tipped pen.
63. Broncho - "Funny" [buy]
    Indie-pop as cozy as a self-warming seat.
64. Will Johnson - "Floodway Fall" [buy]
    A gorgeous new one by Austin's Will Johnson: long drives, tummy trouble, the Ronettes' "Be My Baby." A man "part snake / part television," shedding his skin as the commercials roll.
65. ACCESSORY - "CHAIN LINK" [buy]
    Slowcore from Dehd frontman Jason Balla, stretching chords and kindnesses like a reconfiguration of the Jesus & Mary Chain's "Honey." But there's something contemporary to "Chain Link," too - the clipped drum sample, the bratty call & answer near the end. All of it like a long and beautiful emergency.
66. Justin Bieber - "DAISIES" [buy]
    Bieber enlists seven other songwriters - including Mk.gee, Dijon, Tobias Jesso Jr., and the co-creators of songs like Rosalia's "Saoko" and SZA's "Drew Barrymore" - just to make something that feels unworked, natural. Brambly guitar, stomped high-hat, and Bieber's own untreated voice, together making a sound more simple and full of wonder than any other committee project this year.
67. Total Fucking Darkness - "Desolation Boys" [buy]
    One of my favourite gigs this year was the brave, resolute debut show by Total Fucking Darkness - a band that brings together Stars' Torquil Campbell, Young Galaxy's Stephen Ramsay, and veteran engineer Tom McFall. In a room filled with smoke, with the KLF on our brains, we threw our bones around to hard, clattering bpms. A man wearing a mask of his own face sang wry lines about contemporary catastrophe. "Desolation Boys" has long been my pick of their singles, mooring Campbell's rhymes to a fast, hollow house-beat and ebullient 90s drum-fills. Rave music for the end of the world, with Daleks roaming the streets.
68. Eddie Chacon - "Good Sun" [buy]
    Three decades after "Would I Lie To You?" - and at age 61 - Eddie Chacon's R&B has become thin and almost ghostly, produced with absolute magic by Nick Hakim. "Good Sun" makes Chacon sound like a tiny house spirit, reclining under the bed, dreaming of brighter days. But the music isn't diminished by its literal diminishment - it's no less for being smaller. There's a magnificent power to soul music in a smaller frame, like a snail that knows its shell.
69. Djrum - "A Tune for Us" [buy]
    An artist known for his electronic programming works here (and elsewhere on Under Tangled Silence) with the stuff of glittering, yoga-studio-ready instrumental ambience: piano, cymbals, bird trills. But Djrum's expertise surfaces - and the track's allure redoubles - as the work accelerates and complexifies. "A Tune for Us" moves from pure peacefulness into something much more robust, embodied, and very slightly inorganic. A flash of silver under the smooth of skin.
70. Basia Bulat - "The Moon" [buy]
    A waxing, waning highlight from Basia's Palace, its chorus like the tiniest rocket-ship. The singer's silver-tinted backing vocal feels like it's delivered down the line from a landing capsule, ignoring the laws of space and even time.
71. Max Dean ft. Luke Deanb & Locky - "Can't Decide" [video]
    Here we are in Ibiza, sampling a cheese platter while we dance.
72. Haley Heynderickx and Max Garcia Conover - "Fluorescent Light" [buy]
    A favourite and well-worn penny; never mind it's not currency any more.
73. Mackeeper - "Oh Canada" [buy]
    Alas no, not a cover of the Canadian national anthem. Mackeeper's "Oh Canada" is instead an unexpectedly baroque slice of lo-fi bedroom pop, made by two brothers in California. Horns, strings, fingerpicked guitar - but the magic of the song is in its sounds' slight discordance, unreality. There's something unnerving about all that lush wet sincerity atop a dry Bran Van beat.
74. Momma - "My Old Street" [buy]
    A chiming sigh from the new, young wave of shoegaze. Momma's feedback carries them to the roof of their communal childhood home, backs against the shingles til the stars come out.
75. Alex G - "Afterlife" [buy]
    Alex G still seeing through walls and bringing together sounds like an alien gardener. Everything here is palatable and yet also very slightly (rightly) wrong - as if R.E.M. and The Offspring could be smeared together somehow, regurgitated by AI as natural, orthogonal siblings.
76. Mallrat - "Pavement" [stream]
    Bleary Australian electro-pop. A cut-up of samples on a simple grid, satisfying as a breakfast tray.
77. Hatchie - "Lose It Again" [buy]
    More from Melbourne - but Hatchie's Liquorice is all resolutely aimed back towards Scotland, and in particular the reflective riverlands of Cocteau Twins. Instead of secret poetry she's singing twentysomething sense, but the wash of guitars here is all pink orange red; the melodies are all sugar, paper and light.
78. Dawn Richard and Joseph Shabason - "Broken Hearted Sade" [buy]
    Dawn Richard joins Joseph Shabason to reinterpolate his "Broken Hearted Kota" (a 2019 favourite!) in honour of Sade, borrowing words from "No Ordinary Love," "Cherish the Day," and "Is It a Crime." The tune's as rich as it ever was, even when it was being used to soundtrack wrestlers' love - but Richard's vocals endow it with an even stronger sense of gravity, as if "Broken Hearted Sade" were a promise somehow, or a pledge.
79. Winter ft. Tanukichan - "Hide-a-Lullaby" [buy]
    Samira Winter like some fearless junior dinosaur, drowning her blues in feedback blur, counting the telephone poles as they pour across the glass.
80. The Weeknd - "Hurry Up Tomorrow" [buy]
    Maybe I'm the only guy still buying this guy's thing, but Abel Tesfaye has a more curious ear - and a better gift for songwriting - than we're used to for this tier of pop star. With "Hurry Up Tomorrow," I'm also charmed (and intrigued) by the decision to use such a poor vocal take, like a Met Ball guest flouncing around with poppyseeds in their teeth.
81. Racing Mount Pleasant - "Call It Easy" [buy]
    Seven minutes of scrappy English post-rock. Big brass + gang vocals in the first half, then a turn toward tenderness that gradually builds steam, riding a saxophone-solo back to sturm und drang. A song about disappearance, perhaps, which refuses to give up its space.
82. Leith Ross - "'What Are You Thinking About'" [buy]
    More saxophone - but none of #81's rambunctious squall. Instead, Leith Ross draws a beautiful, patient portrait of intimacy, making it sound as simple as simply saying what's on your mind.
83. Bon Iver - "Everything Is Peaceful Love" [buy]
    An unctuous, happy love-song, like a Patagonia-clad "Lady in Red" - Justin Vernon gone utterly camembert.
84. The Beths - "Metal" [buy]
    Jangling guitars and wistfulness - a beloved remedy, useful for generations.
85. Ariana Grande - "twilight zone" [buy]
    A pop-song like so many other good pop-songs, almost indistinguishable (complimentary). One more pearl in a string.
86. Takénobu - "Masshiro 真っ白 (Completely Blank)" [buy]
    Japanese chamber pop with a deep, windy spirit. Takénobu's spent time in the stacks with Arthur Russell and José Gonzalez, studying til his eyes got sore.
87. Weather Station - "Humanhood" [buy]
    Hesitation, anxiety, all that inner turmoil - and then at last the cold clear rush of the river. Not the achievement of clarity but the dawning certainty that clarity can eventually be achieved. Sam Amidon joins on banjo with what is already possibly the loosest tightest band in the known universe.
88. Love Remain - "U.K." [buy]
    Dance music as small and specific as a section of a map - with ink lines and borders, territory, just a handful of names.
89. Neggy Gemmy - "Mysterious Girl" [buy]
    Cinnamon-scented dance-pop, like pirouetting into a room full of vape smoke.
90. Tyler Childers - "Snipe Hunt" [buy]
    Raucous country rock like a Southern-fried "The Walrus & the Carpenter," Childers painting his poem in slashes of green paint. Obsession, disappointment, gardening and paranoia - "Hate is a thing that can poison your veins," he snarls, "And  get in your eyes when you're sweating on stage / Shifting around for a clock on the wall."
91. Wet - "Coffee in the Morning" [video]
    Eighty-three sun-flecked seconds, just a morning's first blinks all diffused and reassembling, and the healing chords of a piano.
92. Jay-Jay Johansen - "Backstage" [buy]
    57 years old, 15 albums in, the Swedish songwriter making music like a man balancing at the top of a pole - poised and spot-lit, weary and erotic, gathering every eye toward him. It is only a matter of time before he rides the trapeze.
93. Casey Dienel - "Outlaws" [buy]
    So thrilled by the return of Casey Dienel (fka White Hinterland), one of my favourite artists from this blog's early days. (Remember the insane night when she played a Said the Gramophone chapel stage with Elfin Saddle, Horse Feathers and Clues? Remember that?) "Outlaws" is a patient, smouldering comeback - a rock-song with the swing and sway of a sunset ride, the gleam of Venus as it lifts above the horizon. "I'm zooming in on you," Dienel sings, with a little Aretha in her, but I like the way this song is a seduction of the self, too; as if the strings and horns are the answer of a spirit hearing something it already knows.
94. Jimmie Kilpatrick - "Satellite" [buy]
    The "power" in "power-pop" comes from guitars and melody, but also the compact engineering of a certain kind of rhyme. "Shotgun" Jimmie Kilpatrick learned his end-rhymes and slants from listening at the feet of the giants; here he rides that expertise like a man astride a rocket, shooting to the heavens as the sparks singe and fly.
95. The Barr Brothers - "She Doesn't Sleep With the Covers On" [buy]
    Love the palmwine stagger to this silly love-song, the way Andrew Barr can't decide if he's singing to his Heloise or for Sesame Street. In the end he lets his guitar split the difference, loosing a sound that's ardent and shaggy.
96. Sophia Stel - "Everyone Falls Asleep In Their Own Time" [buy]
    At once starry and watery - dance-pop like stumbling through the rain, while northern lights swerve unseen, on the other side of the clouds.
97. Armlock - "Strobe" [buy]
    A song of love - blurry, kaleidoscoping, infinite. Armlock are modern-day purveyors of Pinback's early-00s smudge-sound, yet there's nothing backward-looking about them: as they hit their harmonies, paint their pictures, you imagine them staring resolutely at the horizon, ready to greet the dawn.
98. Charlie Puth - "Changes" [buy]
    Give the man his credit: of all the mid-2020s male pop-stars, Charlie Puth's the most ardent student of the form. You imagine him up all-hours with an unfinished .ptx file, testing snare-sounds, vocal fry, bpms. He's not Brian Wilson, sadly - he seems too well-adjusted, and responsive to the market - but nor is he Jacob Collier, a bloodless pop-technocrat. I do believe that Puth may yet release a great song; "Changes" ain't quite it, but it's an excellent bit of craft - shiny as an unopened 1986 Sony Sport.
99. Chuquimamani-Condori - "Breathe Kullawada Caporal E DJ edit" [buy]
    After hearing Chuquimamani-Condori for the first time, this summer, I slammed the bandcamp Buy link with the speed of a 19th century duellist. I'm a listener lit-up by many different things - melody, rhythm, intentness, balance - but often just the sound of something new. An edit like "Breathe Kullawada Caporal" feels like the first beautiful babbles of a newly invented language; it also feels, a little, like you've got music coming at you from multiple tabs at once. The 39-year-old producer smashes Faith Hill's "Breathe" with Aymara pan-pipes and thunderous, overdriven drums - but with a freedom that's frankly astonishing, untethered to any click-track. The song nudges (at times) into incoherence - and certainly it's not for everyone - but it's also one of the most exciting things I heard in 2025.
100. KATSEYE - "Gabriela" [video]
     Katseye came by #100 honestly: this is the song that most effectively infiltrated my house in the weeks leading up to publication, using all the old tricks (and a little Spanish guitar) to stitch an earworm into our drapes. Katseye are a Korean-designed American pop group, and perhaps "Gabriela"'s yet another endorsement of K-pop manufacturing techniques - but I prefer to see it as proof of something else, namely the enduring (and possibly ne plus ultra) appeal of singing the syllables "el" and "la."

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I have a prediction for 2026: it will be tough, but good. Wish us all luck.

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