Album of the Year Contenders

The people who advised us to survive ’til ’25 need to come outside and provide an update. The nuts and bolts have loosened on the roller-coaster ride of civil society and shared reality. Everyone strapped in it is wondering how their car will handle the forthcoming turbulence. Where does your mind travel to abate the worry of cruising off rails into the unknown and uncharted? For some of the best albums of the new(est) year, that tether, that shelter, is home. It’s geography, history, family, and tradition. Others conceptualize a gilded escapism, or a stabilizing coming to terms with never being able to guess what’s around the corner.

Albums are listed by release date, with the newest up top.

Send a Prayer My Way, a collaborative album uniting Tennessee troubadours Julien Baker and TORRES, could’ve taken literally any shape, arriving after the latter’s boisterous boygenius Record and the former’s strutting, chugging What an Enormous Room. Toying with the idea of working together in 2020, the pair, who met at a show a decade ago, agreed on a country album on a lark. But Prayer is not your humdrum, surreptitious post–Cowboy Carter cash-out. The duo’s catalogues tussle with a southern conservative Christian upbringing; embracing country is examining the culture their early work resisted. The gutting “Off the Wagon” and “Tape Runs Out” reveal two naturals whose excoriating writing is not far removed from the yearning heart of a country weeper.

A winking and very online sensibility crashes into hearty and self-effacing writing throughout the catalogue of 21-year-old Jane Remover — a.k.a. Leroy, a.k.a. Venturing — whose disparate projects scratch unique itches. A few years ago, Jane coined Dariacore, melding breakbeat nostalgia and manic hyperpop, but they more recently tilted toward shoegaze. Revengeseekerz takes their talents to twitchy EDM-rap. The taste profile might seem jarring, but it’s true to the modern drip of nü-metal sonics into hip-hop, and video-game sound signatures into a plethora of exploding and imploding microgenres. The best Revengeseekerz songs arm the arresting singing voice centered throughout the February Venturing album Ghostholding with a toned-down version of the Dariacore chaos. “Fadeoutz” and “Dreamflasher” suppose that the listener can handle all of the artist’s bursting interests at once, thundering through grooves that imagine a candy-flipping Yeat.

Skrillex spent the last two albums proving that he was still good for an engrossing body of work following the collapse of the mainstream American dubstep wave he washed in on years ago. The two-hit combo of Quest for Fire and Don’t Get Too Close flexed expansive tastes and connections well beyond the confines of the old signature sound. So it was a shock to hear this year’s surprise April Fool’s Day mixtape Fuck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol But Ur Not!! carry him back to dubstep and to discover there’s still gas in the tank. Warhol is a career retrospective disguised as the artist’s memorial-tribute mixtape to himself. Alluring remixes of recent tunes rub elbows with sought-after B-sides and song fragments that are trickier to place chronologically. Flow and sound design are as breathtaking as the presentation is unabashedly silly. Less Eras tour, more cannonball run, Warhol condenses decades of change into a zany 45 minutes.

It feels reductive to describe Aya Sinclair as a “singer-songwriter and producer.” The vocal performances on the 31-year-old U.K. artist’s sophomore album hexed! range from carnival barker to lingering apparition, and the sound design bends, morphs, and corrodes unpredictably underfoot. Like the real, live earthworms in her mouth on the cover art, the songs writhe and slide like invertebrates. Hexed! pokes discomfitingly at questions of identity and dependency while building bridges between punk, noise, dance music, and shoegaze, sonics adjusting to the flavor of bravado or anomie coursing through the lyrics. “Heat death” burbles darkly toward an explosive hook that lands like an answer to the wish for the end of the world intoned in the verses. “I am the pipe I hit myself with” howls as buzzing synths ascend. Hexed! mirrors the jolting luminescence of an epiphany setting in.

Death is ever present in the work of Montreal rapper and producer Backxwash, from face-paint gesturing to Zambian communal ceremonies to tense riffs summoning extreme metal signifiers. Only Dust Remains, her fifth album, follows the resolution of a trilogy initiated in 2020’s Polaris Prize–wining God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It. Soaring and elaborately arranged compositions brush against lyrics haunted by blood and violence. This show of sweetness fighting back against a sense of hopelessness builds an apprehensively brighter perspective than earlier work. Can the artist pouring shoegaze ooze into “Disassociation” and playing the pain of “Stairway to Heaven” off luxe psych-rock want the world to end?

A seemingly endless succession of exquisite Neil Young archival releases suggests the Canadian Crazy Horse and CSNY vet shelving almost as much heat as he ever put out in the ’70s, when he dropped the devastating Harvest, On the Beach, and Tonight’s the Night but stashed away Homegrown and Chrome Dreams. This year, the 79-year-old guitar giant shared Oceanside Countryside, a 1977 gem whose threading of folk and country dovetails with the mood of the late-decade roots-centric offerings American Stars ’n Bars, Comes a Time, and Hawks & Doves. The lonesome alternate takes of familiar songs from the era imply a slightly more stripped though no less gorgeous Bars coming out in some parallel universe.

Darkside — an on-again, off-again collaboration between singer-songwriter and electronic producer Nicolás Jaar and guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Dave Harrington — expanded into a trio in the 2020s. Listeners noticed the gains on 2023’s Live at Spiral House, a rehearsal space recording bringing drummer/programmer Tlacael Esparza into the fold. February’s Nothing, their third studio album, filters the bubbly, groove-oriented psychedelia of earlier works through more conventional songwriting structures. The result is summery repose interspersed by alluring surprises: The pulsating, oceanic “Are You Tired? (Keep on Singing)” drifts toward an unexpected cosmic-rock interlude you’d sooner expect to encounter deep in a Grateful Dead tape. The soulful, bipartite centerpiece “Hell Suite” plays by the book everywhere except Jaar’s vocal, equal parts lounge lizard and absurdist Dusty in Memphis reimagining.

The longtime Sun Ra sideman and Sun Ra Arkestra bandleader Marshall Allen set intimidating Guinness World Records this year; at 100, he’s the oldest human ever to drop a debut studio album. The work in question, winter’s New Dawn, is a stately tour of a woodwind lifer’s gifts. Allen basks in the sweet repose of “African Sunset” and the title track, the latter of which houses a smoky vocal from jazz scion and pop royalty Neneh Cherry, and plays a more commanding role in the playfully squawking “Sonny’s Dance” and the huffing big-band jam “Are You Ready.” At ease everywhere from flitting free jazz to looser, funkier textures, Allen abides, insistent but never overbearing on a session well worth the wait.

Breaking early on in a scintillating performance at Manhattan’s famed Blue Note to stress that it was a dream-come-true engagement to play the jazz club where she once studied neo-soul pioneer Amel Larrieux, Washington, D.C., singer-songwriter Kelela hints at a deeper splash into those roots. The show, documented with the live album In the Blue Light, jettisons the skittering, moonlit electronics of the star’s back catalogue, softening stark arrangements formerly designed to hug the vocalist like a wintry chill. The already-breezy “All the Way Down” is delivered with an even subtler touch than on the studio recording; pulled away from the propulsive drum programming, the decade-old mixtape heaters “Enemy” and “Bank Head” foreground the soulful songwriting underfoot. It’s an achievement getting those sparse originals to feel more stripped.

➼ Read Tirhakah Love’s 2023 interview with Kelela.

The divergent journeys binding the bicoastal rap brotherhood of Larry June, 2 Chainz, and the Alchemist meet at one key point: the exquisite retro airs animating June’s Doing It for Me and Al’s deluge of independent releases jut out in Chainz tracks like “Threat 2 Society.” Life Is Beautiful pulls the Atlanta vet into the mind-meld that yielded the formidable 2023 Al and June full length The Great Escape, and the trio disappears into a spirited boom-bap backslide together. The wordplay is as colorful as the sonics are sedate, tag-team player parables sailing over production seeking a slippery middle ground between East and West Coast throwback jams. It’s a reminder of the pliability of Al’s minimalism, catnip not just for your Mobb Deeps and Griseldas but also your Kendrick Lamars and Lil Waynes. Life Is Beautiful is another gem in a growing trove of left-field collaborative outings, offering more sample-crazed analog daydreams.

The first thing you notice pressing play on Showbiz!, the latest full length in a nonstop stream pouring out of Bronx rapper-producer MIKE, is the bass. It’s a commanding, center-stage presence, the ruddy root the ideas sprout from. Even the high end feels woozy and drowned, like foliage piercing a melting frost. Hefty low end hugs tastily pitched-down loops the artist uses to wax exhausted. “You gotta be, I mean, probably above me,” the boisterous “Artist of the Century” begins. “Proud of me, working against the odds and the ugly.” You don’t expect the bustling flute-funk jam to float in on a note of familial grief and questioned faith delivered via hazy internal rhyme, but entwining joy and grief is a constant in MIKE’s catalog. The song and album aren’t always as piercing as the couplet, but brevity allows Showbiz! to hit a listener with alternating sweets and hots, its shifting moods anchored by the subterranean frequencies in the beat.

FKA Twigs’s Eusexua recalls another time neither distinctly past nor future. The sexual politics are very now but the sonic predilections spread out over key points in dance music’s past. All the while, the artist’s overarching dream of a utopian bond between the techno- and organic ponders philosophical tenets that will bind the rest of the century. Eusexua balances Boiler Room banger material and heady atmospherics. Production is conversant in the sleek, metallic otherworldliness couching manicured hooks in Eurodance classics. But unlike those points of reference, lyrics here don’t merely gesture toward sensuality. They hash out boundaries and dismantle hangups. Eusexua offers a soundtrack for bedrooms and basements fit for balling and bawling sessions.

➼ Read Craig Jenkins’s full review of Eusexua.

A tugboat chugging across an ocean of Playboi Carti clones, 21-year-old Ohio rapper OsamaSon makes coarse rap that appears to pilfer the Atlanta goblin’s utensils. But the tunefulness and, well, enunciation showcased on his third album, Jump Out, are equally related to Chicago drill melodicists like Sicko Mobb, and closer in content and delivery to emo-rap crooners and the hazy absurdism of the Pack than rage. Bite-sized highlights like “Round of Applause” and “Insta” float on their deceptively chipper hooks as the rapper tries to kick a sour mood: The former’s video-game fanfare is a set piece for beef, and the latter’s soulfulness arrives shackled to anesthetized sighs. As with his Midwest predecessors, mixing smooth hooks and abrasive storytelling complicates alluring simplicity.

Mac Miller’s unreleased work explains and presages the stylistic shifts his successive studio albums yielded, revealing a never-ending question of what kind of artist he could or should be. Proving his mettle by easing into the burgeoning indie and mainstream Cali rap movements in the early 2010s, he went back and forth between delivering a tight commercial argument for radio airplay and a more totalizing dive into his bursting gifts as a multi-instrumentalist. Balloonerism, recorded in 2014 seemingly in the overflow of the darkly impressive Faces, catches Miller working through the prior mixtape’s still-pervasive darkness with a widening creative palette. It took a back seat to the emotionally and musically slippery GOOD:AM, a winning (and called) shot at a big-league push. But the bad feelings tucked away in jarringly candid cuts like “Rick’s Piano” are just as potent as singles of the era. You wish the late rapper, singer, and studio Swiss army knife didn’t second-guess his work but see why an artist having brushes with public scrutiny and disapproval might think again about sharing too many thoughts about drugs and death at one time.

➼ Read Craig Jenkins’s review of Balloonerism.

Who Let the Dogs Out?, the debut from Brighton duo Lambrini Girls, marries timeless, machine-gun licks and modern problems. Their breakneck pacing and crunchy low end fuse aspects of noise-rock, grunge, and post-punk exuberantly: “You’re Not From Around Here” leans into the grit of early Sub Pop classics, “Company Culture” mirrors the sinewy precision of Gang of Four, and “No Homo” queers garage rock. It’s all in service to the rip-roaring screeds of lead singer Phoebe Lunny, who chats whip-smart shit about the miserable state of xenophobia, workplace sexual harassment, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, and hypermasculinity. She’s a riot from the commanding, emasculating, “How big is that dick in reality?” in “Big Dick Energy” to the enthusiastic self-help checklist served in album closer “Cuntology 101”: “Setting boundaries is cunty.”

By turns a budding chart sensation, a political firebrand, and an enthusiastic cataloguer of cryptids, Ethel Cain interrupts a stream of gossamer pop, folk, and rock records with Perverts, a droning rejection of the accessibility of her 2022 Billboard top-ten debut Preacher’s Daughter. Beyond the breathy “Vacillator” — a drifting love song conjuring early Cowboy Junkies — and the mournful “Punish,” the agenda is largely the eerie juxtaposition of beautiful and terrifying noise. Feedback carries the anguished wail of “Thatorchia” out to sea, and distortion and reverb drown out pop hooks in “Onanist.” Perverts eases into the maelstrom of 2025: Moments of sweetness are beset by mounting discomfort, and time seems to creep by at half the anticipated speed. The sound is no less southern in spirit than Daughter’s gothic tales of generational ills and church trauma — it’s just more interested in luxuriating in the ambiance. The heat check is delightful.

Bad Bunny’s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS is a wonder of threading art and advocacy, a collection of catchy tracks stuffed with multifaceted Puerto Rican pride from its lyrics to its genre selection to its employment of local artists and studio space. A surface listen will yield an appreciation of its blending of aggressively produced and pastoral sounds, but more steadfast attention unearths a treasure trove of homages. Love is shown to everyone from rapper Héctor el Father to educator/philosopher Eugenio María de Hostos. In true Spotify final boss fashion, you don’t necessarily need to grok the entire context this music fits into — the succession of salseros and reggaetoneros it takes to get to a song like the winding “Baile Inolvidable” — for a hook to catch you. But DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS rewards every dip with more unforeseen spoils.

➼ Read Craig Jenkins’s full review of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.