Top 40 Albums of The Year 2025, Part 4

December 23, 2025

Top 40 Albums of The Year 2025, Part 2

December 22, 2025

Top 40 Albums of The Year 2025, Part 1

December 22, 2025

Best music of 2025: Special Mentions

December 11, 2025

Read my interview with We Lost The Sea for Distorted Sound

10. We Lost The Sea - A Single Flower

I’ve waxed lyrical about my love for We Lost The Sea and their seminal 2015 album Departure Songs. Their performance of that album in full at ArcTanGent this year had a tent full of grown men and women (OK, a lot of bearded men) with tears in their eyes. Their other set was all songs from this year’s new album, whose themes dwell on the debt we owe the planet for the damage we’ve caused, and the looming price to pay. It’s hard to match the extraordinary impact of Departure Songs, but musically at least, A Single Flower is a step above that record, and certainly one of the best post-rock albums of the year.

9. The Callous Daoboys - I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven

DAOBOYS MENTIONED

By this point, the batshit mathcore-meets-Fall Out Boy shtick of The Callous Daoboys is well-established. After their slightly more accessible 2023 EP, the anticipation for I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven was stratospheric. The resulting album requires a fair amount of investment, tied together as a future museum exhibit of the band, and lurches between unhinged NSFW lyrics over ungodly guitar noises and songs that are maybe even pop-adjacent - particularly the curveball Lemon, tied together with a Fatboy Slim-style drum groove. This could have been a massive breakout that made The Callous Daoboys one of the biggest names in metal; instead, it’s far weirder, more challenging and of a higher quality than you could possibly expect.

8. BRUIT ≤ - The Age Of Ephemerality

There should be a separate gong for the top-rated post-rock album on this list, given it’s the inspiration for this blog’s title. So, congratulations to BRUIT ≤ on having this year’s Best Post Rock Album. As well as moonlighting as the backing band for M83, the French outfit produce a brand of post-rock that avoids the formulaic, pushing hard a liberal message on an album infused with commentary on the destructive nature of the current technology age. With such a firm socialist grounding, it’s unsurprising that you can’t find this on The Bad Streaming Site (or any of the other ones, like TIDAL), so you’ll have to listen on Bandcamp instead.

Listen on Bandcamp

7. Allegaeon - The Ossuary Lens

Oops, more death metal. The great trick of The Ossuary Lens isn’t the delightful flamenco guitar that finds its way into several tracks, or the unexpectedly powerful clean vocal hooks. It’s that it gets better and better with each song. Sure, the formula should be that you frontload your best songs and singles, and maybe in the playlist age, a lot of this doesn’t matter as much. But it certainly leaves a pleasant aftertaste when you feel an album continually reaches new heights on track after track.

6. Deafheaven - Lonely People With Power

After the breakout blackgaze hit that was Sunbather, Deafheaven corrected with the much heavier and challenging New Bermuda, shrugging off some of the NPR fans to double down on their metal bona fides. A decade later, and the pattern repeats: 2021’s Infinite Granite indexed more heavily on the (shoe)gaze over the black (metal), prompting thoughts that the band was trending toward a softer sound. Lonely People With Power reverses that with some of their heaviest and most complex work (see: the shifting time signatures of Magnolia). It’s a heavy meal of an album that does require some dedicated repeat listening, and I’m still not 100% on board with it, but I wouldn’t bet against hindsight labelling this their finest work to date.

5. The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die - Dreams of Being Dust

We’ll abbreviate the band name, shall we? TWIABP are best known for being a large collective making beautiful, introspective emo songs with a touch of prog. Their last album was a firm favourite of mine, a sprawling, indulgent record finishing with two 20+ minute songs.

Most bands tend to get a little softer as their careers go on, removing the abrasive or technical edges from their sound. Fifteen years into their career, TWIABP appear to have looked at the state of the world and replied with a resounding “Fuck this shit”. Dreams of Being Dust goes full hardcore mode, replacing the soothing, clean vocals with pissed-off screams and the playful, bright textures with full-throttle power-chord distortion. As unexpected as the tonal shift is, what’s even more surprising is the quality of it - many bands have had a go at lizard-brain hardcore riffs and fallen flat on their face. And there’s enough TWIABP DNA mixed in to make Dream of Being Dust uniquely theirs.

4. acloudyskye - This Won’t Be The Last Time

Some more gongs: This Won’t Be The Last Time is my most listened to album of 2025. I honestly don’t know how I came across this record, but it’s great. It’s hard to define - it sits closest perhaps to the likes of Porter Robinson with a bright and modern electronic sound, but with some of the speedy melodic runs you’d see in a math-rock record. And the songs are incredibly catchy, bouncy and powerful too. I’ll concede that a lot of albums on this list (and indeed this blog) are not terribly versatile in the settings you can listen to them, and I’m generally suspicious of anything that doesn’t reward active listening. But you can put this album on in the car, at a party, or during a deep headphones session and still get something new out of it.

3. Astronoid - Stargod

By far the cheesiest record on this list, Stargod sounds like a fusion of what you imagine the best ’80s Journey songs sound like, but with a modern metal sheen. As a sentence, this sounds intolerable, and I continue to surprise myself by finding Stargod to be incredible. Perhaps it’s the black metal/blackgaze origins of Astronoid, owing more than a little to the intense optimism of firm blog favourite Alcest. Perhaps it’s the earnest positivity of the record, both antithetical to and maybe an antidote for the relentless negativity of the world. Or perhaps it’s because Stargod is full of absolute bangers that even Journey would be jealous of.

2. Lorna Shore - I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me

“But Chris,” I hear you cry. “Isn’t your number 2 slot traditionally reserved for a jazz album?” It disappoints me to say I’ve listened to very little new jazz music in 2025. (Please send me recommendations.) Part of this is that album reviews for a heavy music outlet drive much of my listening, or records from the album club I’m part of. One of this year’s Album Club suggestions was Pain Remains by Lorna Shore, whose deathcore insanity I expected to bounce off of completely: the most gnarly of vocal squeals and growls alongside comically over-the-top breakdowns and artificial symphonies. But of course, it’s a masterpiece.

The new Lorna Shore album has a few differences: the lyrics (no, me neither) are a little more personal, and the symphonic flourishes have a larger budget behind them. But really, this is much of the same that made Pain Remains great: unrepentant epic maximalism. The double kicks run at 200 miles per hour; there are wild guitar solos alongside those outrageous breakdowns; and those sweeping strings and horns punch through everything. For most, the death growls and pig squeals of Will Ramos will be a high bar to entry, but scratch beneath the surface and you’ll recognise the versatile talent, able to do technical things with his voice that few, if any, can match. This was very nearly my #1 album, but it is a touch too ridiculous.

1. Rosalía - LUX

LUX is also ridiculous. And yes, I’m aware that 1) this is a pop album 2) this is an unoriginal pick given its mainstream popularity, also topping The Guardian’s Album of the Year list (a newspaper whose music journalists I almost always vehemently disagree with).

I don’t think anyone saw this coming from Rosalía, most famed for her vocal talent atop the standard Latin/R&B fare. Here, she’s crafted a record of contemporary classical music(!) and Portuguese fado(!!) performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, with lyrics in 14 different languages. It has themes of divinity. It has some astonishing, opera-adjacent vocal performances. It has Björk! But most importantly, amidst all this complexity and huge swings, it has incredible pop tunes and heart-string moments.

I’m delighted that LUX exists. In a world where so much of pop is cookie-cutter formulaic, this is daringly experimental and avant-garde, but never hard work for the listener. It makes much of contemporary classical music feel tired, milquetoast. In a world where more and more generative AI is pushed upon us, including in boring, templated music generation, this is an explosion of originality and humanity. You just don’t see records like this.