A year of essential listening.

2025 was a year that rewarded depth over immediacy, with artists across genres crafting records that demanded time, attention, and emotional investment in return for their revelations. From billy woods' unflinching horrorcore documentation of state violence to FKA twigs' hedonistic ode to ego dissolution, the year's standout albums refused easy categorisation, instead carving out spaces for vulnerability, political reckoning, or experimentation.

Whether through Oklou's contradiction-laden electronic maximalism or Tortoise's decade-later return to their jammy post-rock roots, 2025's best records proved that genuine innovation still emerges when artists trust their instincts over algorithmic logic.

Below, VF's Kelly Doherty, Alex Flowers, and David Murray share the albums that soundtracked our year.

anaiis

Devotion & The Black Divine

(5db Records)

Timeless spiritual music rooted in neo-soul, alt-R&B, gospel, and the deep emotional bond of motherhood runs through the third LP from singer-songwriter anaiis. It unfolds as a set of teachings on tenderness, heartbreak and memory, carried by live-sounding vocals, choirs and warm bass. Interludes featuring activists and Black feminists add depth, ground the album in lineage, care and shared wisdom. Their voices feel like guidance passed forward to listeners who might need it. Ultimately, it’s an album that seems to place a hand on your shoulder and tell you, gently but firmly, to believe in yourself and your own power. Alex Flowers

Big Thief

Double Infinity

(4AD)

Big Thief returned as a trio this year (following the departure of bassist Max Oleartchik) to release Double Infinity, a nine-track, 42-minute record—almost an EP-sized release for a band built on gargantuan double albums. Whilst Double Infinity doesn't mark a major departure for Big Thief, its wistful indie rock stylings further solidify their reputation as wisdom whisperers as Adrianne Lenker's poetic lyrics explore making peace with the foundational role of an ex ("Los Angeles"), the process of aging ("Incomprehensible"), and, in album highlight "All Night All Day," a devotional approach to oral sex. Lenker's simultaneous deconstruction and exaltation of every relationship and  feeling continues to hold impressive power, whilst the outfit's loose, lived-in instrumentation grows more assured with each release. KD

billy woods

GOLLIWOG

(Backwoodz Studios)

billy woods' run over the last few years has been relentless, with each record sharpening its intent. GOLLIWOG feels like the moment where something tips. The unhinged tension that's long lived in his music is pushed fully into anti-establishment horrorcore: beats lurch and swarm while images of colonial violence and trauma are at the fore. On "BLK ZMBY," the repeated chant of "ZOMBIE" circles over a locust-like haze, less a hook than a bad feeling you can't shake.

Woods' wit still cuts through despite the darkness. "The English language is violence / I hotwired it" lands with the offhand precision he makes look effortless. In a year where the news cycle regularly felt like a horror film running on a loop, billy woods has made a record that captures brutality without drowning in it. KD

Blood Orange

Essex Honey

(RCA Records)

Dev Hynes returned to his childhood in Essex for Blood Orange's most cohesive album yet, processing grief and identity through a cavalcade of jazzy guitars, 80s-styled synths, classical motifs, and gently sung melodies. Featuring subtle contributions from Lorde, Caroline Polachek, and members of his extended musical family, Hynes creates arrangements that feel alive and meticulously crafted. The album grapples with loss and the haunting gaps between who you are and who you once were, but refuses to wallow: lush instrumentation and warm production offer consolation and lightness. Essex Honey never uses beauty as a denial of pain, but as a way to live with it. KD

Caroline

Caroline 2

(Rough Trade)

London-based eight-piece caroline refined all the promise and potential of their debut and delivered a sophomore album that’s more consistent but by no means predictable. It’s a testament to the band’s willingness to experiment with sound, space, texture, and genre that this record stands out among the recent post-rock wave. Unafraid to oscillate between experimental and often dissonant sections with competing elements and those more traditional and soft instrumentally and vocally, it’s exciting never being sure where this record is taking you next. There’s even a lovely feature from their namesake, Caroline Polachek, to sweeten the deal. DM 

Chat Pile & Hayden Pedigo

In The Earth Again

(Computer Students)

This collaboration between Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo imagines noise-rock emerging after a nuclear fallout. Chat Pile deliver corrosive, dystopian sludge while Pedigo threads in a mythical, almost pastoral grounding. His quiet refrains clash with their chaos, creating a light–dark tension that feels like standing still after a tidal wave of anguish. The record reshapes American doom into something emotionally bare and exposed. It underlines how resilience actually works: not by avoiding pain, but by moving through it, carrying the cracks rather than hiding them. It’s a reminder that the human spirit doesn’t shatter; it adapts, hardens, and grows in ways you don’t expect. It’s heavy, cathartic music that makes you want to smash down walls and build something better. AF

CMAT

Euro Country

(CMATBABY)

Irish pop-country icon CMAT achieved a breakout success with the massive Euro-Country this year. The album realises her unique blend of pop culture savvy, irony, and millennial rawness to create a refreshing, anthemic, and often deeply affecting body of work. Veering between hooky observations on femininity and parasociality to reckonings with Ireland's post-Celtic Tiger economic collapse and the mundane triggers of personal grief, CMAT uses her camp persona to illuminate an often flattened young Irish experience. A heart-warming counteraction to streaming-era genericness that proves pop audiences can be trusted with well-crafted songwriting, no matter how niche the subject. KD

Eli Keszler

Eli Keszler

(LuckyMe)

Eli Keszler’s self-titled album is a vibrating mesh of percussion and voices that never fully settles and every surface quietly vibrates. Echoing his soundtrack work, he leans into instability: in Wild Wild West, Sofie Royer’s crooning vocals slip beneath layers of electronic interference; in Sun, dub-tinged textures feel both alluring and suffocating. What’s it all about? A sense of loss? Perhaps on the surface, but here it isn’t framed as tragic, but quietly presented as a fact of living. A constant tension hums underneath, seductive yet uneasy, as if it’s always on the edge of revealing something you’re not entirely sure you want to know. It’s a work of emotional disorientation that still pulls you in with precision. AF

Erika de Casier

Lifetime

(Independent Jeep Music)

Danish singer-songwriter Erika de Casier leaned fully into her '90s R&B influences on the self-written, self-produced Lifetime. Writing sophisticated, slow-burn jams for people with Mubi subscriptions and commitment issues, de Casier chronicles crushes, romantic swerves, and late-night desire across languid trip-hop beats and reverb-drenched synths. Her sing-speak delivery maintains studied coolness despite the lustfulness of her subjects, creating an intriguing tension between style and content – de Casier’s aesthetic may be controlled, but her emotions are certainly not. From yearning to reconnect with an old flame on opener "Miss" to obsessing over an online stranger on "Delusional," Lifetime captures crush-induced fizziness in its many forms with emotionally specific songwriting and layered production. A confident, understated highlight of the year. KD

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FKA twigs

Eusexua

(Young)

FKA twigs opened the year with Eusexua, a sweaty, sensual club-ready record bursting with hedonism and the vulnerability of a life spent escaping through late nights, dancefloors and lust. From the gently building anticipatory title track to the sparse wind-down of closer “Wanderlust”, twigs captures the seductive appeal of stripping away your context, whether to spend the night with a stranger (“Perfect Stranger”), inhabiting a persona for a lover (“24hr Dog”) or simply letting it all fall away in the anonymity of a basement (“Room Of Fools”). With a blend of trance, techno, and pop production, alongside twigs' characteristically commanding vocals, Eusexua is a breathtaking ode to ego dissolution in the dark. KD

Joanne Robertson

Blurrr

(AD93)

Blurrr never quite settles. Loosely strung guitar, slow-motion melodies and vocals that feel permanently on the verge of dissolving leave everything slightly unmoored, as if the record is always escaping you. On tracks like “Ghost” and “Always Were,” Robertson’s voice sinks deep into reverb, sometimes barely more than a trace, songs passing without asking to be followed too closely. It feels less written than released.

Blurrr moves freely, uninterested in narrative or resolution, like stumbling upon a private ritual and being granted access. KD

Maria Somerville

Luster

(4AD)

Maria Somerville's long-awaited 4AD debut cut through the swathes of dream pop and shoegaze released this year with a strikingly austere vision from Connemara. Luster evokes the expansive, wee-hours music of Somerville's early morning NTS show, gliding across swirling synthesisers, relaxed trip-hop beats, and hints of dark industrialism. Where much atmospheric music leans into beauty, Somerville resists easy prettiness, instead carving out a starkly isolated sonic landscape. Her plainspoken yet ambiguous lyrics emerge half-obscured by overwhelming textures, an impressionist approximation of a diaristic pop album. KD

Nazar

Demilitarize

(Hyperdub)

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Demilitarize pushes deeper into Nazar’s world of shattered soundscapes, fractured storytelling and political memory. Barely intelligible vocals drift over harsh kuduro rhythms, creating the sense of a mind sorting through trauma, reaching for some form of inner monologue solving internal conflict. Electronic bursts, alarms and disembodied voices flicker in and out as if each track is willing itself into existence, like a digital ouija board. It’s disorientating but magnetic. The music feels dissected and rebuilt, functioning like a set of instructions written both by and for the artist as an attempt to understand himself. AF 

Nourished By Time

The Passionate Ones

(XL Recordings)

The Passionate Ones sounds like it's running on nerves. Nourished By Time pulls R&B into punk territory with rough around the edges songs that refuse distance from the reality they're describing. "9 2 5" captures the grind of work and repetition with bluntness as capitalism is rendered as something monotonous and airless rather than spectacularly evil.

Electronic, house, jazz, and new wave elements merge naturally, forming a sound that feels new without resorting to trend-chasing. A clear-eyed read on late capitalism's psychic toll. KD

Oklou

Choke Enough

(True Panther)

Choke Enough is electronic music that settles comfortably in contradiction, nestling itself between minimalist restraint and maximalist ambition. Oklou blends trance’s hypnotic repetition with acoustic textures — oboe, flute, breathy woodwinds — creating a sound that feels both unmistakably digital and strangely folk-like. Her melodies hover rather than assert, tender and suspended, even as the record itself is dense with ideas.

Drenched in Y2K nostalgia, neo-pagan lyricism and flashes of medieval instrumentation, the album risks overload on paper. What makes it remarkable is how lightly it lands. Choke Enough carries its excess with grace, delivering a gentle but addictive punch that expands contemporary electronic music into a new, quietly radical lineage — one where intimacy and ambition coexist without friction. KD

Pink Siifu

BLACK’!ANTIQUE

(Dynamite Hill)

The fourth studio album from abstract hip-hop artist Pink Siifu is a collision of industrial hip-hop, experimental noise, R&B, funk, soul and more. It opens with an audible assault of weaponised sound that’s less trap and more Death Grips, all clipping bass waves, shrieked vocals and visceral outbursts in place of conventional flow. In its second half the record cycles genres, drifting into the blissed-out cloud rap familiar from Siifu’s earlier work. It’s an unpredictable, peripatetic rollercoaster uninterested in meeting your expectations, his constant shapeshifting is exactly what keeps it compelling, adventurous and challenging. AF

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Pino Palladino

That Wasn’t A Dream

(Blake Mills Label)

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British bass icon Pino Palladino reunites with LA multi-instrumentalist Blake Mills for a follow-up to their 2021 release Notes With Attachments, and only the second studio album Palladino has put his own name to in a decades-long career. It’s a record that purposefully drifts, ambling through compositions that leave you comfortably restless, suspended between Palladino’s warm, hypnotic, squelching bass lines and Mills’ restless guitar. The atmosphere is sometimes languid, sometimes exuberant and even chaotic, yet it always feels effortless and precisely shaped, never losing its purpose. It’s the kind of album that would be a perfect companion for a long walk and a testament to two musicians with incredible instincts. AF

Smerz

Big City Life

(Escho)

In a year dominated by minimalist, observational pop, Smerz' Big City Life stood out for its particularly acute vision. Across stark MIDI tones and repetitive drum programming, the Norwegian duo chronicle big city anticipation and alienation through lonely archetypes. Smerz observe their characters with little sentimentality, letting sparse production and deadpan delivery convey plainspoken highs and lows as effectively as any emotional crescendo. Spearheaded by cult hit "You got time and I got money," a standout track of the year, Big City Life captures the fractured reality of urban living without flinching. KD 

Tortoise

Touch

(International Anthem / Nonesuch)

Touch feels like sitting in on an endless jam between old friends who just happen to be a seminal post-rock band. After nearly a decade away, they’ve returned with a new album, a refreshed sound and yet still unmistakably trademark Tortoise. The album encompasses numerous styles seamlessly moving with ease between spaghetti-western riffs, garage-rock force and electronic pulses. They didn’t set out to be a genre defining band, they simply play with the looseness that made them iconic in the first place. Giving us a confident, tightly shaped record that leaves you wanting more. AF

Venna

Malik

(Cashmere Thoughts)

This record is a reminder of how jazz continues to evolve in the hands of young artists who understand both its roots and its future. It blends hip-hop, soul and R&B with the collaborative energy of the South London scene, moving through a day–night cycle of deep listening, looseness and hedonism. The album charts an early-career journey shaped by mentorship, travel and community, unfolding like a documentary of lived experience rather than a debut record. It’s confident, understated and full of warmth, celebrating the joy of making music with people who lift you up and shape who you become. AF

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