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Unexpected comebacks and operatic pop: The best albums and songs of 2025
Unexpected comebacks and operatic pop: The best albums and songs of 2025
Songs about love, sex, tax and demon hunters ranked among the best music of 2025, according to a "poll of polls" conducted by BBC News.
We compiled more than 30 end-of-year lists from leading music publications to come up with a "super-ranking" of the year's best albums and singles, with artists including Pulp, Lady Gaga and Chappell Roan joined by newcomers like pop singer Addison Rae and indie band Geese.
In total, the critics named more than 200 records among their favourites, although the year's biggest-sellers failed to impress them.
Taylor Swift's blockbuster album The Life Of A Showgirl only picked up a handful of nominations. The year's biggest single, Alex Warren's Ordinary, appeared in just one list of 2025's best songs.
Instead, critics selected music that shifted the tectonic plates of pop... Here's a guide to their favourites.
10) Addison Rae – Addison
After a shaky start in 2021, Addison Rae's music career took flight with this collection of shimmering, trance-like hymns to desire. The desire for touch, the desire for fame, the desire for inner peace.
Unlike most modern pop albums, it's the work of just three people, with Rae and her collaborators Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser establishing a stylish, spacey and occasionally off-kilter sonic palette all of their own.
Singles like Diet Pepsi and Headphones On felt simultaneously classic and futuristic, marking Rae out as pop's newest It Girl.
Listen to Diet Pepsi: Sensual, hypnotic and calorie-free pop.
9) Lily Allen – West End Girl
Hell hath no fury like a Lily Allen scorned.
West End Girl is a savage and startlingly detailed portrait of a marriage being torn apart. Allen says some of the details have been exaggerated, but her pain is tangible amongst the artful pop beats and faux insouciance.
The dirty laundry triggered an avalanche of press coverage when the album arrived in November, but the songs have lingered as everyone remembers just how well Allen can craft an intoxicating pop hook.
Listen to Madeline: Where Allen confronts her partner's mistress, and recreates their texts.
8) Pulp – More
Pulp's first album since 2001, More, somehow manages to sound as if it was recorded and shelved in their mid-90s heyday.
The lyrics are the only giveaway that this is the work of a band in their late middle age - as Jarvis Cocker sings movingly about stagnation, divorce and mortality. "You've gone from all you that could be to all that you once were," he laments on Slow Jam.
Yet, at 62, he remains stubbornly committed to the transformative power of love. And the reception Pulp received at Glastonbury this summer went a long way to proving him right.
Listen to Spike Island: A spiritual sequel to 1995's Sorted for E's & Wizz.
7) Dijon – Baby
What a wild year it's been for Dijon Duenas. After contributing to Bon Iver's Sable, Fable and Justin Bieber's acclaimed comeback, Swag, he scored two Grammy nominations for his second album, Baby.
It's a dazzling, harmony-rich R&B record, that channel-hops between genres and moods like a television tuned to the twin spirits of Prince and D'Angelo.
The album's central theme is the ecstasy and chaos of fatherhood, with Dijon addressing the title track to his firstborn, then imploring his wife to expand the family on the subtly-titled Another Baby! Sleepless nights have never sounded so good.
Listen to Yamaha: A swirling 80s funk groove allows Dijon to submerge himself in the bliss of enduring love.
6) FKA Twigs – Eusexua
Eusexua, FKA Twigs has said, is a word that describes "the tingling clarity" you get when you're struck by a new idea, when you kiss a stranger, or even "the moment before an orgasm".
The album attempts to recreate that feeling with a series of abstract, futuristic soundscapes and deconstructed club tracks. Echoing Madonna's Ray of Light (most notably on Girl Feels Good), the hooks are as sharp as the dopamine is addictive.
Listen to Girl Feels Good: A visceral ode to empowerment, femininity and healing on the dancefloor.
5) CMAT - Euro-Country
Coronation Street! Social anxiety! Late stage capitalism! Jamie Oliver! Grief! Road rage!
It's all there on Euro-Country, a riotously enjoyable romp through Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson's inner monologue.
Along the way, she tackles everything from male suicide to the impossible beauty standards that had her "trying to wax my legs with tape" at the age of nine.
Listen to Jamie Oliver Petrol Station: The only song of 2025 to address the need for tolerance through the prism of service station fast food.
4) Oklou – Choke Enough
French artist Oklou – aka Marylou Mayniel – described her debut album as a "quest for meaning, of the need to be touched by anything" in a world where our interactions are stripped of humanity and flattened onto a screen.
Co-produced by Charli XCX collaborators AG Cook and Danny L Harle, it couldn't sound less bratty if it tried.
It's an album of intimate, gauzy pop, almost entirely drumless and built around hypnotic musical loops that short-circuit your emotions. Unplug and absorb.
Listen to Blade Bird: The album's swooning climax, based on a Basque poem about the tension between love and possession.
3) Bad Bunny - Debí Tirar Más Fotos
He might be Spotify's most-played artist of the year, but Puerto Rico's Bad Bunny makes no concessions to commercial trends.
His sixth album is a jubilant love letter to the music of his homeland, mixing traditional genres like plena, salsa and bomba with the hip-swaying pulse of reggaeton.
The irresistible grooves dare you not to get up and dance, while the lyrics agonise about gentrification and capitalism stealing the island's old magic.
Listen to DtMF: A lament for the loved ones he's lost, the album's title track translates as, "I should have taken more photos".
2) Geese – Getting Killed
A savage and unpredictable record, Getting Killed was apparently recorded in just 10 days.
It finds the four members of Brooklyn-based Geese patchworking the best bits of Radiohead, the Strokes, Captain Beefheart and the Velvet Underground into something entirely new and unpredictable.
Frontman Cameron Winter anchors the chaos with his singular warble, and lyrics that swerve wildly between irreverence and incisiveness.
Listen to Taxes: Defiant, taut and full of swagger, Winter chants: "If you want me to pay my taxes / You'd better come over with a crucifix."
1) Rosalía - Lux
If music brings us closer to God, Rosalía wants her music to bring God closer to us.
The Spanish singer's fourth album is an exhilarating - and profoundly moving - exploration of the human condition, that asks why the earthly and the holy have to be so far apart.
It's a monumental work. She devoted an entire year to the lyrics alone, singing in 14 languages, over music that sits at the lesser explored intersection of classical, flamenco and avant-pop.
In an interview with the New York Times, Rosalía agreed she was "demanding a lot" from listeners, "but I think that the more we are in the era of dopamine, the more I want the opposite".
Accordingly, it's an album that reveals fresh new treasures on every listen, as Rosalía argues we're all capable of grace and beauty. We just have to open our hearts.
Listen to Reliquia: As staccato strings are sucked into a vortex of electronic distortion, Rosalía sings about the sacrifices she's made for art and love, and concludes it's better to contribute to the world than take from it.
10) Wednesday - Elderberry Wine
There's a sense of unease bubbling under this gentle indie rock song, as though singer Karly Hartzman is perpetually on the brink of divulging an uncomfortable truth. Built around the metaphor of elderberries, a fruit that can heal or poison depending on how it's handled, the song captures the tension of staying in a relationship you know is toxic.
9) Kehlani - Folded
Introduced by nostalgic strings, Folded became Kehlani's first Top 10 hit in her native US, blending classic R&B themes of heartbreak and longing with modern production. Using the simple act of folding an ex-lover's clothes as jumping off point, Kehlani captures the emotional push-and-pull of saying goodbye.
8) Addison Rae - Headphones On
Addison Rae is a student of pop, and Headphones On is her master thesis – a hymn to music that whisks you away from the world for three minutes of distracted, hypnotic solace.
7) Amaarae - SMO
A seduction, a come-on, a hedonistic exploration of physicality. "Ginga me," Amaarae sings repeatedly over a throbbing electro groove - invoking both the Nigerian pidgin term "ginger me", which means something like "excite me", and ginga, the fluid, hip-swaying footwork of the Brazilian martial art Capoeira. You'll succumb and you'll enjoy it.
6) Bad Bunny - Baile Inolvidable
This boisterous, captivating salsa was recorded live with student musicians from Puerto Rico's Escuela Libre de la Música (take that, AI). But the celebratory atmosphere masks a broken heart, as Bad Bunny is reminded of the ex who taught him to dance. "I thought I'd grow old with you," he laments.
5) Huntr/x – Golden
Sometimes a song escapes its origins and goes into orbit. Golden was the last song written for Netflix's hit animation K-Pop Demon Hunters, but its soaring chorus became an anthem for anyone striving to achieve their dreams. An Oscar nomination beckons.
4) Chappell Roan - The Subway
Two things you can expect from Chappell Roan are theatricality and emotional honesty. The Subway delivers both, becoming a map of loss that carries listeners through a breakup on the streets and subways of New York - capturing that confusing limbo of experiencing grief and loneliness, surrounded by hundreds of strangers.
3) Lady Gaga - Abracadabra
A triumphant return to the sound of her debut album, Abracadabra takes all the Lady Gaga tropes – Nonsense lyrics! Demonic synths! Gothic choruses! – and dials them up to 11. An absolute banger.
2) Olivia Dean - Man I Need
Olivia Dean says Man I Need is a song "about knowing how you deserve to be loved and not being afraid to ask for it". The object of her affections just needs a nudge in the right direction, and this playful, soulful melody should easily set the romance on track.
1) PinkPantheress - Illegal
One of pop's most overused clichés is that falling in love is intoxicating, just like drugs!
So it's a credit to PinkPantheress that she's made the idea sound fresh – zoning in on the fraught awkwardness of hooking up, whether it's with a dealer or a potential new partner.
"It feels illegal," she frets, as her heartbeat races with the drumbeat of this smouldering dance-pop anthem.
BBC News compiled more than 30 year-end lists published by the world's most influential music magazines and critics - including the NME, Rolling Stone, Spain's Mondo Sonoro and France's Les Inrockuptibles.
Records were assigned points based on their position in each list - with the number one album or single getting 20 points, the number two album receiving 19 points, and so on.
The results were the closest we've ever seen. Just 52 points separated Rosalía's Lux from the number two album, Geese's Getting Killed.
In the singles countdown, PinkPantheress was the runaway winner - but the rest of the field was tightly packed, reflecting a year where there haven't been many universally popular, culturally dominant songs.
The publications we surveyed included: Albumism, Billboard, Buzzfeed, Clash, Complex, Consequence of Sound, Dazed, Daily Mail, Dork, Double J, Entertainment Weekly, Exclaim!, The Fader, Flood, The Forty Five, Gorilla vs Bear, The Guardian, Independent, LA Times, Les Inrocks, Line of Best Fit, MOJO, Mondo Sonoro, NME, New York Times, Paste Magazine, Pitchfork, Pop Matters, Rolling Stone, The Skinny, Slant, Stereogum, The Telegraph, Time Magazine, Time Out, The Times, Uncut and Vulture.
Picture credits for the numbered images, in the 10-1 order shown: Columbia Records, BMG, Rough Trade, R&R / Warner, Atlantic Records, CMATBaby / AWAL, True Panther Sounds, Rimas Entertainment, Partisan / PIAS, Columbia Records.
Source: BBC
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