→ February 10, 2026
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Stick to baseball, 2/10/26.

The top 100 index page is here, with links to all 30 team reports and everything else in the package. If you’re looking for the highlights, you can go right to the top 100 prospects, the prospects who just missed the top 100, and my ranking of all 30 farm systems, as well as the Q&As I did on top 100 day and this past Monday.

Over at AV Club, I reviewed the small-box game Point Galaxy, a sequel game to Point Salad; and Knitting Circle, a lighter game with a similar theme and art to Calico.

My free email newsletter is back as well, and you should sign up for more of me.

I appeared on the Detroit News’ Tigers Today podcast to talk about Detroit’s loaded farm system; on Friar Territory to talk about what’s left in the Padres’ system; on the JD Bunkis Show to discuss the state of the Jays’ system after their World Series run; and on Halo Territory to talk about the Angels’ system and why it’s so bad.

And now, the links…

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→ February 8, 2026
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Music update, January 2026.

This playlist includes a handful of tracks from December 2025 that I heard after I compiled my top 100 tracks of the year or that didn’t make the cut, plus songs from this January, through songs released on the final Friday (the 30th), but not anything released this month. As always, if you can’t see the playlist below you can access it on Apple Music or Spotify.

Courtney Barnett feat. Waxahatchee – Site Unseen. This second single off Barnett’s upcoming album Creature of Habit features Katie Crutchfield, so it couldn’t be more in my personal wheelhouse.

Brigitte Calls Me Baby – Slumber Party. BCMB’s sophomore album, Irreversible, is due out on March 13th; they do one of the best new wave-revival sounds out there, honoring the genre without sounding overly derivative of it. It’s catnip for me.

Arlo Parks – 2SIDED. Parks will release her third album, Ambiguous Desire, on April 3rd; she has yet to miss for me, with this song leaning more into a dance sound beneath her unmistakable voice.

Daughter – Not Enough. This Irish trio’s album Not to Disappear turns ten this year, so they re-recorded one of the tracks that didn’t make the cut, “Not Enough,” which showcases Elena Tonra’s haunting voice over a typically sparse backing track that hints at electronica, folk, and shoegaze.

Makthaverskan – Pity Party. I’d never heard of this rock band from Gothenberg (a town best known for producing melodic death metal), but I love this song, which has some dreamgaze and post-punk elements, and is the lead single from their upcoming album Glass and Bones, which will be their first new album in five years.

Ratboys – What’s Right. I can’t say I’m a huge fan of Ratboys, in part because of Julia Steiner’s warbly, sometimes off-key vocals, but their best stuff can be pretty catchy folk-tinged alt-rock. Their latest album Singin’ to an Empty Chair came out on Friday.

DEADLETTER – It Comes Creeping. I loved DEADLETTER’s very Madness-like 2024 track “Mere Mortal;” and this song is in a very similar vein. Their second album Existence is Bliss comes out on February 27th.

Flea – A Plea. Flea, best known as the bassist who replaced Derf Scratch in Fear, is about to release his first solo album, Honora, in March; it’s a jazz album, featuring six original tracks and four covers, and the two singles to date – this one and “Traffic Lights” – are both fantastic, featuring Flea on bass and trumpet, with Thom Yorke providing vocals on the latter song.

Whitelands – Blankspace. Whitelands is a shoegaze band from London – aren’t they all – who just released their fifth album, but second on a proper label, at the end of January. Sunlight Echoes also includes an appearance from Lush’s Emma Anderson on “Sparklebaby.”

Tigers Jaw – Head is Like a Sinking Stone. Another new-to-me artist, Tigers Jaw hails from Scranton and they’re also about to put out their first album in five years, Lost on You.

The Cribs – Never the Same. I think the main thing I knew about the Cribs was that they’re one of the eighty-nine bands Johnny Marr has joined since the end of the Smiths. They’ve been around for over 20 years now, with their ninth album Selling a Vibe coming out last month; this is the best track I’ve heard, while the album as a whole gets a little one-note.

The Twilight Sad – Designed to Lose. It’s the Long Goodbye, The Twilight Sad’s first album since three members left the band, leaving only founding members James Graham and Andy MacFarlane, will be out on March 27th, a big day for new albums, as it turns out. This song is pretty vintage Twilight Sad, dark and a little gothic-new wave but also still informed by pop.

Butler, Blake & Grant – Lonely Night. That would be Bernard Butler (Suede), Norman Blake (Teenage Fanclub), and James Grant (Love and Money). They released a self-titled album last March, while this is a folk-rock reworking of a song Blake wrote for Teenage Fanclub that that band recorded as “Dark & Lonely Night.”

Billy Bragg – City of Heroes. “When they came for the immigrants/I got in their face/When they came for the refugees/I got in their face/When they came for the five-year-olds/I got in their face/When they came to my neighborhood/I just got in their face.”

Arctic Monkeys – Opening Night. A midtier Arctic Monkeys track off the upcoming Help(2) charity album to benefit War Child, featuring other tracks from Olivia Rodrigo, The Last Dinner Party, Damon Albarn, Fontaines DC, and more.

The Format – Boycott Heaven. The Format just released their first new album in 20 years; they were Nate Ruess’ original band, before he and Jack Antonoff formed fun., which released that one album (note: and one before that, which I missed) and then broke up. I’ve always liked Ruess’ voice, even when they got stupid with autotuning it, and this track showcases it well in a great indie-pop vein.

SAULT – Chapter 1. SAULT’s latest album is full of … salt. It’s clearly a response to Little Simz’ Lotus, which was her album about how SAULT leader Inflo borrowed a seven-figure sum from her and didn’t repay it; here Inflo leans further into his religious act, with songs like “God, Protect Me From My Enemies” and “Lord Have Mercy,” along with hackneyed lyrics like “They’re jealous of what’s in your brain” and “Must go higher. I refuse to fight with fire.” But damn, nobody does ‘70s soul/funk revival like SAULT does.

TIGRA & SPNCR – Do It Like This. If you’re old enough to remember the 1980s rap duo L’Trimm, which had a couple of minor hits in “Grab It” and “Cars with the Boom,” Tigra was half of that group (as The Lady Tigra), and she’s back with an EP called Black Rice. Bunny appears on a different track, “Guillotine.”

Home Star – Come To. This track, by Evan Lescallette of the band Marietta, is perfectly fine punk-pop-emo whatever, but I couldn’t ignore an artist named Home Star.

Blackwater Holylight – Bodies. Metal in general is a male-dominated genre, and doom metal even more so, with the occasional female vocalist but very few all-women bands. Blackwater Holylight is three women, from Oregon, who put out three albums from 2018-21 and then took five years off before their fourth album, Not Here Not Gone, came out at the end of January. This track blends heavy, crunchy guitar lines with ghostly vocals to make it all much creepier than just some guy doing the Cookie Monster voice.

Maria BC – Marathon. Maria BC is an experimental singer/guitarist from Oakland whose music starts out as ambient but often goes in unexpected directions; here, their vocals sound like Alejandra Deheza of School of Seven Bells, set over dark guitar sounds like some of Alcest’s best work.

The Hu – The Real You. The Hu are a Mongolian folk-metal band that incorporates native instruments and throat singing into their music; they’ve toured with Iron Maiden and even covered “The Trooper.” Their third album will be out later this year, and yes, it’s pronounced like “the Who.”

Port Noir – Noir. Port Noir is a progressive rock band that has always at least toyed with metal, but their upcoming album The Dark We Keep seems to lean all the way into the heavy stuff – they’ve actually said on their Instagram that it’s the heaviest album they’ve ever made. Also in the metal space, The Ruins of Beverast has some great guitarwork on their newest album, but the death growls here are way too prominent for me; Kreator’s Krushers of the World had some solid stuff but also got a little clownish, as on the title track; and Sylosis’s “Erased” had some strong thrash riffs but got too metalcore for me.

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→ January 24, 2026
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Stick to baseball, 1/24/26.

I wrote two pieces for the Athletic this week, breaking down the MacKenzie Gore trade and the Freddy Peralta trade. My top 100 prospects ranking runs on Monday.

At AV Club, I reviewed the board game Gingham, a family-level game of area control that gets very tense as the game approaches its end.

I sent out an issue of my free email newsletter last weekend, but the next one won’t go out until at least Monday, for obvious reasons.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: My colleague Paul Tenorio wrote about the kidnapping of soccer coach Adrian Heath, as he was lured by the promise of a lucrative job with a Saudi club. The club exists, but the job didn’t, and Heath was lucky to survive the ordeal.

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→ January 17, 2026
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Stick to baseball, 1/17/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I had three pieces this week, on the Cubs’ signing of Alex Bregman, the Yankees’ trade for Ryan Weathers, and the three-team trade between the Rays, Reds, and Angels. I am primarily working on the prospect rankings, which are scheduled to start running on January 26th.

For the AV Club, I reviewed Iliad, a fantastic new two-player game from Reiner Knizia that made my top ten for 2025.

I am about to hit send on the next edition of my free email newsletter. It was almost done, then I set it aside for a moment, which turned into five days.

I have many links this week to pieces in the New York Times, which I often do because I assume many of you have access to those with your Athletic subscriptions (if you have the bundle). I believe the Times in general produces some of the best journalism in the country. I do not endorse all of the views printed in the paper; I just work there.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The outgoing governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin (R), and the board that oversees the University of Virginia appear to have rushed through the appointment of a new President, even though that candidate, Scott Beardsley, appears to have fabricated or embellished large parts of his resume, according to the Augusta Free Press. After that ran, over 200 faculty members signed a letter to the board saying that the appointment should not stand.
  • The Times also profiled NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who has chosen to fight back against Republicans’ attacks on the public-radio institution and even taken the Trump Administration to court, although some other public-radio figures disagree with her tactics.
  • America, a magazine published by the Jesuits, published a scathing piece on the attempts by the Administration and its toadies to demonize murder victim Renee Nicole Good, just as the Reagan Administration did with the four nuns raped and killed by the right-wing government of El Salvador in 1980.
  • Those “alt” government accounts on social media that popped up during Trump’s first term always looked like grifters, not actual government employees trying to leak information. The Alt National Park Service one is the worst of the lot, and certainly not authentic in any sense of the word.
  • The notoriously left-wing Wall Street Journal exposes how RFK Jr. is cozying up to supplement makers, who peddle unproven and sometimes dangerous remedies that aren’t subject to the same safety and efficacy requirements as prescription medicines.
  • I came across this March 2025 story from the Times about the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, as I saw they have a new album, Liturgy of Death, coming out in February. The article is a heck of a read, and treats the band – who have released just seven albums over 35 years due to suicide, murder, controversies (to put it mildly), breakups – as a sort of counterculture icon. It doesn’t mention that at least one of the current members, longtime drummer Hellhammer has voiced indisputably racist and homophobic views, which I find very hard to understand given that it’s hardly a secret.

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→ January 16, 2026
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Alamut.

I was going down a music rabbit hole in December, working up my year-end lists, when I saw that Laibach, the avant-garde Slovenian group who were especially influential on the industrial scene, had put out a new concept album called Alamut. It’s based on the Slovenian novel of that name, written by Vladimir Bartol, which (this is all stuff I learned in December) inspired the first Assassin’s Creed video game and one of the clans in the RPG Vampire: The Masquerade. Since I’d never read any Slovenian literature, I put in a request in our library system, and lo and behold, the Delaware Libraries have a copy.

Alamut is set at the fortress of that name, just south of the Caspian Sea in what is now northern Iran, in the 11th century, where a religious and military leader named Hassan-i Sabbah is building an army of fanatical assassins who’ll gladly die for his cause. He knows they will, because he has a diabolical plan to convince them that doing so will send them directly to the Islamic version of the afterlife: He’s built gardens behind his fortress and filled them with young women to act as houris, the women who appear in heaven to serve martyrs who died for the faith. He tricks the young men who are learning to become soldiers and assassins by doping a few of them with hashish, then having his eunuchs transport them to the gardens, where they wake up and think they’re in paradise – and that Hassan-i Sabbah, whom they call Sayyiduna, has the power to send them there.

The novel begins by following two characters in the fortress: Halima, a young woman whom Sabbah’s people purchased to serve in the gardens; and ibn Tahir, a young man whose family wanted him to join Sabbah’s garrison to serve as a fedai, a soldier who would give his life for the cause. We see both of them undergo “training,” while getting glimpses of some of the inner workings of the fortress and Sabbah’s command over it, although it’s not until closer to the midpoint of the book that his full plan becomes apparent. Once he has sent several of the fedayeen to his false paradise, he begins to use them, including sending ibn Tahir on a suicide mission to assassinate one of Sabbah’s enemies. Meanwhile, the young women are thrown into turmoil by the appearance and sudden disappearance of the young men, some of Sabbah’s advisers begin to question the wisdom of his plan, and a rival army shows up at the fortress, ready to lay siege to the place and starve the Sabbah’s people into submission.

Alamut is based on some historical truths; Sabbah was a real person who founded an order of assassins called the Hashashin, ruled a Shia Islamic state in the region of the fortress, and may even have been friends with Omar Khayyam. He was also a scholar and a schemer, fomenting insurgencies as far away as Syria. Bartol appears to have used this template to create a fictional analogue to a Slovene nationalist, anti-fascist movement of the 1930s called TIGR, who carried out bombings and assassinations against the Italian occupiers. With none of that historical or cultural knowledge, however, I read the novel on its own merits without understanding those metaphors, if that is what Bartol intended. The prose is somewhat dense, but the story picks up the pace as the novel goes along, with several unexpected twists. It ends with a few points unresolved, although it does adhere to the myth of Sabbah as the ascetic who seldom if ever left the castle through his reign.

I’d recommend Alamut, given how much I learned from it and the way the second half of the plot unfolds, but I also know I probably missed a lot, since I know very little of Slovene history and have almost no knowledge of Islam. I imagine it would also be more entertaining for anyone who’s played the games it ended up inspired, but as I never got into Assassin’s Creed (and am not going to – I’m afraid I’ll love it and get sucked in) I missed that context too.

Next up: I’m a few books on from this, but I’m currently reading the latest Booker Prize winner, David Szalay’s Flesh, which has a sparse, staccato prose style that reminds me of Hemingway’s.

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→ January 10, 2026
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Stick to baseball, 1/10/26.

I had one story this week for subscribers to the Athletic, breaking down the Cubs’ trade for Edward Cabrera. I’m spending most of my time right now working on the annual prospect rankings, which are tentatively slated to run starting January 26th with the top 100.

At AV Club, I reviewed the flip-and-write game Ra and Write, which borrows the theme from the auction game Ra but doesn’t have many similarities beyond that; and Propolis, a bee-themed engine-builder in a small box.

I’m trying to squeeze in another edition of my free email newsletter this weekend before the heavy phone work resumes on Monday. We’ll see how that works out for me.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: WIRED has the story of how a down-on-his-luck private detective named Brad Dennis helped find “Torswats,” a teenager who made well over 300 swatting calls to schools, universities, and other targets, when the FBI appeared not to take the case very seriously at all. The culprit, Alan Filion, is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to four charges, while it appears that the case has sent Dennis in the wrong direction. (Unrelated, but the swatter Dennis knew in the early 2000s who ended up targeting him eventually was charged and convicted, then died quite young in 2023.)
  • The #3 official at the Interior Department didn’t disclose that her husband held a multi-million dollar water rights contract with a lithium mine that her department approved. That story ran a week ago, and there’s been absolutely nothing since then – I don’t see a single member of Congress so much as calling for an investigation.
  • Montana revoked the medical license of a quack doctor who diagnosed healthy patients with cancer and treated them with chemotherapy and opioids, killing at least one of them in the process. This came about due to investigative reports from ProPublica, which found that the state renewed Thomas Weiner’s medical license twice despite complaints about his conduct.
  • The Intercept calls on Democrats to fight back against the MAGA machine’s attempts to destroy trans people, which is straight out of the totalitarian playbook.
  • The city of Wilmington announced a plan to have a local nonprofit manage an encampment for homeless people within the city. Mayor John Carney, formerly the Governor of Delaware, had campaigned on making housing and combating homelessness a priority, but this is the first move forward on that front after his decision in October to ban other encampments and step up enforcement against people with nowhere else to go.

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→ January 8, 2026
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First Class Letters.

First Class Letters is a light party game of wordbuilding, taking bits of Scattergories, Boggle, and other similar games in a simple format where you’ll play seven one-minute rounds, trying to create the most valuable word you can in each round based on the rolls of four dice. Three of the dice will show letters you want to use, while the fourth, the red die, has a forbidden letter – and of course, they’re common ones, A-E-I-O-S-Y.

At the start of the game, you roll the three non-red dice and sort them alphabetically. Those become the required start letters for the words in rounds 2, 4, and 6; your seven words throughout the game must go in alphabetical order for you to score, and these start letters further constrain your options. In each round, you roll all four dice, placing the one forbidden red die on the mail carrier card. If you come up with a word that uses any of the letters on the regular dice, you get one point per appearance of each of those letters in your word. If you use all three letters, you double your score. If you use the red die’s letter by mistake, you score zero, and you will score zero if your word violates the alphabetical order of your seven answers. You’re only allowed to do ‘normal’ words – no proper nouns, no abbreviations, no foreign-language words, etc – although you can always tailor the game to your group/mood, including variants mentioned in the rules that include omitting the red die entirely.

And the resulting game is perfectly fine, although I also didn’t feel like it offered anything new among word games. I do Wordle and the Spelling Bee every day, I will play Boggle if it’s out, my daughter loves Scattergories (I think it’s mid, but I’ll play it), and I’m not sure what First Class letters brings to the proverbial table. “You have one minute to come up with a word that doesn’t use this one letter, uses as many of these three letters as much as possible, and that comes alphabetically after the last word on your scoresheet” is a very specific demand of a game, and each time I’ve played this one, I finished it thinking I wish there were more to it. I like anagrams and building words, and I do like the idea in here that you can up your score with words that reuse letters on the dice, but is that enough to supplant the few word games I already own? I ended up on the ‘no’ side, just barely, even though I do think this game will appeal to a small niche in the word-gaming audience.

Fun side note: I demoed this game at Gen Con at the GameHead booth, right next to Trinket Trove, and when the person giving the demo rolled the dice and explained the rules, I suggested the word “scuttlebutt.” The demo person told me that the rules say it has to be a real word. I, uh, protested the ruling.

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→ January 1, 2026
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Top 100 songs of 2025.

This year’s top 100 took longer than usual to compile for the opposite reason from last year: it was hard for me to get 100 songs I thought worthy of inclusion. You can see my previous years’ song rankings here: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012. I posted my ranking of the top 25 albums of 2025 just before Christmas.

If you can’t see the widget below, you can access the playlist on Apple Music and Spotify.

A few late cuts from the list: SPRINTS – “Need,” Emma-Jean Thackray – “Weirdo,” Geese – “100 Horses,” The Horrors – “More than Life,” Andy Bell – “apple green ufo.”

100. Pynch – Post-Punk/New Wave. “It’s post-punk, it’s new wave, with a little bit of shoegaze.” How could I not like a song that starts with that line? Of course, this song is none of those things – it’s more lo-fi indie rock, and they do name-check that later in the song.

99. The Waterboys feat. Bruce Springsteen – Ten Years Gone. I think this is the Boss’s first appearance on any of my music playlists in any form. I might be ruining my reputation here. I do like the Waterboys, though; “The Whole of the Moon” is one of my all-time favorite songs, and Springsteen’s role is here is a spoken-word reflection at the track’s end.

98. Sharon Van Etten – I Can’t Imagine (Why You Feel This Way). Van Etten’s music has never spoken to me outside of her rare swerves into more uptempo rock and pop territory (“Mistakes” from her last album). Her latest album, Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory, is my favorite from her yet, because the whole record is made out of that very thing, and her voice – which often sounded sleepy to me – translates beautifully to this style of music.

97. Hotwax – Strange to Be Here. I thought Hotwax was going to be one of the ‘it’ bands of the year after their debut album Hot Shock earned some glowing reviews, but I don’t think I heard anything about them after March. They’re reminiscent of Hole and Babes in Toyland, although I saw them mislabeled as grunge in many of those same reviews.

96. HUNTR/X – Golden. It’s a legimately good song. And the movie was great before it ran out of plot at the end.

95. Portugal. the Man – Denali. A crunchy, metallesque song from Shish, probably the hardest song P.tM has done at least since Evil Friends

.

94. Sudan Archives – My Type. I didn’t think of Brittney Parks as a rapper per se – she’s a singer and a violinist – but she drops some high-speed rhymes on this standout track from her latest album The BPM.

93. Sunflower Bean – Crashing Highs. A bonus track on the deluxe edition of Mortal Primetime, this was actually my second-favorite track from this Brooklyn trio this year, an effusive power-pop number that showcases Julia Cumming’s vocals.

92. Friendship – Free Association. Caveman Wakes Up is a bit of a dire affair, a record that is either about being depressed, or a record that is itself literally depressed, leavened just slightly by this song with a distinctive drum hook that stayed in my head for weeks.

91. Suede – Trance State. That hook that comes in at the ten-second mark … just inject it straight into my new wave-loving veins.

90. The Itch – Space in the Cab. If you like Australia’s snarky electro-pop act Confidence Man, you’ll love this track by this British duo, who were previously in a punk band called Regressive Left.

89. Obongjayar – Sweet Danger. Obongjayar blends Afrobeat with western pop sounds, sometimes striving a little beyond his musical reach, but when he concentrates on that specific fusion he churns out mesmerizing pop tracks like this one.

88. Doves – Cold Dreaming. I love the music, but I wish the lyrics were stronger. Doves’ latest album Constellations for the Lonely wasn’t up to their prior standard, unfortunately, with two excellent songs leading it off (this and “Renegade,” released in 2024) followed by a lot of filler before the closer “Lean into the Wind.” Their one-off single that came out later in the year, “Spirit of Your Friend,” would have been the third- or fourth-best song on the LP.

87. Snocaps – Heathcliff. Snocaps are Katie and Allison Crutchfield with MJ Lenderman and Brad Cook. The sisters’ vocals really power their eponymous album, which is filled with boppy Americana tracks, with this one single the best on the record.

86. Pete Doherty – Felt Better Alive. It’s not a Libertines song – this year could have used more of that – but Doherty’s fifth solo album, also called Felt Better Alive, was a pleasant surprise, and a modest hit as well, becoming his first album to reach the UK top ten. Of course, Pete couldn’t let it go without a shot at his bandmates, saying they were “stark-raving mad” to not want these songs.

85. Automatic – Mercury. The first few seconds had me scared that this was going to be a bad imitation of the early 1980s goth-rock/new wave material Automatic emulates, but the drums come in and save the day, turning it into something with more verve, almost danceable despite the synth line that sounds like it should be in a Dracula movie.

84. Rachel Inouriri – Can We Talk About Isaac? This lead track from the EP Little House shows Chinouriri in a more upbeat, almost bouncy indie-pop mode, a shift from the tone of the latter half of her debut album What a Devastating Turn of Events.

83. Deftones – milk of the madonna. I’ll never be entirely on Deftones’ wavelength, but I respect their musical evolution from “My Own Summer” to the more progressive alt-metal style of Private Music. The chorus here has a hell of a hook between the guitar line and the “I’m on fiiiiire” vocals.

82. Clipse – So Be It. Clipse’s Let God Sort Em Out was the duo’s first album in sixteen years, and the reviews seemed to split into two camps: those excited that the pair were back together, and those who viewed the album entirely on its own merits. The rhymes are strong, but the beats aren’t, and it holds the record back. This song has the best music behind Malice and Pusha T’s rapping, as well as a hilarious diss of Travis Scott.

81. Emma-Jean Thackray – Wanna Die. One of the best songs I’ve ever heard about grief and crushing depression, at least in terms of expressing how that feels in the moment. The video parodies the Jazz Club sketches from The Fast Show, if you’re into old sketch comedy.

80. Tunde Adembimpe – Drop. I was disappointed by Thee Black Boltz, Adebimpe’s first solo album, because he seemed so oddly restrained throughout the record, particularly in the music, which is often sparse (“Ate the Moon”) or sluggish (“God Knows”). The best track, “Magnetic,” came out in 2024 and was on my top 100 at #66. This was my second-favorite.

79. Prides – Dynamite. I think Prides might have set the record for the longest time between appearances on my year-end top 100s; “The Seeds You Sow” was #8 on my best of 2014 list, but they’d largely stopped recording on their own after 2018. Also, they might just be one guy now, rather than a trio. I love Stewart Brock’s voice, and they bear some resemblance to other Scottish indie bands beyond the accent.

78. SAULT – K.T.Y.W.S. So now we know Inflo is a fraud and a pharisee, making a whole album about his Christian faith while stealing from one of his close friends and collaborators, which made me consider dropping him entirely from this list … but I do still find his music compelling, even if he’s no longer close to the heights he reached with the project’s first four albums. The latest LP, 10, was a step up from Acts of Faith, but on par with the five albums he released in November of 2022.

77. Elbow – Sober. Yet another track left on the cutting-room floor during the Audio Vertigo sessions, “Sober” appeared on the deluxe version of that record along with “Adriana Again,” which I think is the best song from the entire package.

76. Nabeel – resala. Nabeel is an Iraqi-American band from Virginia, founded by Yasir Rasak, who moved to the U.S. as a baby and grew up on 1990s pop and alternative music. Nabeel’s music is straight shoegaze, with the lyrics sung in Arabic, and there’s a sense of longing and melancholy throughout their latest EP, ghayoom, highlighted by this mournful track.

75. The Tubs – Chain Reaction. The second-best song from Cotton Crown is another jangle-pop gem, not quite as catchy as “Freak Mode” but still an earworm thanks to Owen Williams’ distinctive singing and a frantic guitar riff.

74. De la Soul feat. Q-Tip & Yummy Bingham – Day in the Sun. De la Soul’s surprise album Cabin in the Sky, likely their last given the death of founding member Trugoy the Dove, had a slew of contributions from huge names from the golden age of hip-hop, including Nas, Slick Rick, Common, and fellow Native Tongues member Q-Tip on this particular trick.

73. Hotline TNT – Candle. Maybe the poppiest song on Raspberry Moon, “Candle” opens with a jangly guitar riff and stays upbeat even when the heavy distortion hits. Stereogum called it “fuzz-pop” and I think that’s more apposite a term than shoegaze. (Hotline TNT pulled all of their music from Spotify in protest against the CEO’s investment in a military AI firm, so their songs do not appear on the Spotify version of this playlist.)

72. Anxious – Counting Sheep. Anxious fly way too far under the radar given how catchy and clever their songs are – they’re constantly tagged as emo, when they get covered at all, but this isn’t landfill emo like Taking Back Sunday or Saves the Day; the music is more intricate and a lot less predictable. This was my top track from their second album, Bambi.

71. Little Simz – Thief. The most direct attack on Inflo on Simz’ latest album Lotus calls her former collaborator – who borrowed £1 million from her to put on a SAULT concert and then stiffed her – has her rapping furiously over a spy movie-esque backdrop.

70. clipping. – Dominator. The best track from clipping.’s second album Dead Channel Sky, “Run It”, came out in 2024, but this was a close second. The hip-hop trio is really a Daveed Diggs vehicle, here rapping over some early industrial-sounding beats.

69. Geese – Taxes. The penultimate track on Getting Killed sees Geese approaching a conventional song structure, with a steady build to a majestic finish beneath Cameron Winter’s warble-sung vocals.

68. The Budos Band – Overlander. I confessed to being unfamiliar with the Budos Band until this year, so I’m late to this particular party. It’s instrumental music with a heavy funk line, drawing influence from musical styles from around the world. They may be the only good thing that has ever come out of Staten Island. This was by far my favorite song on their latest album, VII.

67. Blankenberge – New Rules. Blankenberge started out in southern Siberia, close to the border with Kazakhstan, although they’re now based in St. Petersburg. They call themselves a shoegaze band, but their sound is broader than that, with dream-pop and even some traditional hard-rock elements as well. This is the best track off their latest album, Decisions, showcasing their entire sound in one brief song.

66. Castle Rat – Serpent. Castle Rat are utterly ridiculous, a cosplaying “fantasy metal band” from (checks notes) Brooklyn, not Bavaria or Middle Earth, but damn, the guitarwork here would do Tony Iommi proud.

65. The Horrors – Ariel. The Horrors’ latest album is a moody, funereal affair, best exemplified by this song, which starts out with ninety seconds of nothing but Farid Badwan’s vocals over a faint background of sound effects.

64. Thrice – Gnash. I think “Albatross” might be the consensus top track off Thrice’s latest album Horizons/West, but this thing just stomps all over the stage when it hits the chorus, and the intervening verses feel like someone is pushing up the voltage to the point of ignition.

63. Water from Your Eyes – Night in Armor. I’m obsessed with the guitar tone in the opening riff, which mostly continues beneath the talk-sung vocals and constantly threatens to overwhelm the latter. Water from Your Eyes is a duo that includes Nate Amos, who records as This is Lorelei, but his solo stuff does nothing for me.

62. The Hives – Enough is Enough. I’ve maintained for years that the Hives are always good for at least one absolute banger per album; they kept that going with this track off The Hives Forever Forever the Hives, which had a solid runner-up in the title track. I wouldn’t put “Enough is Enough” up there with their upper echelon, but it makes the greatest-hits playlist for me.

61. Sports Team – Bang Bang Bang. I loved Sports Team’s last album, Gulp!, but this year’s Boys These Days turned down the frenetic pace of its predecessor. This track was the most similar to their prior output, this time with a guitar line that rings like a parody of Gene Autry-style country music.

60. Black Honey – Soak. I’ve been a fan of this Brighton indie band for about a decade, but their sound has evolved to become darker and often slower than the early power-pop style they showed on songs like “Hello Today.” This is the title track from their latest album, and the closest they come to that earlier, more energetic vibe, although that darker element is still very present in the bass line.

59. Noname feat. Devin Morrison – Hundred Acres. The lead single from a promised third album from Noname, called Cartoon Radio, also marks her first new music since 2023’s Sundial. If this track is any indication, she’s still in top form.

58. Rocket – Wide Awake. R is for Rocket was one of my favorite albums of the year on the strengths of songs like this one that show their 1990s grunge and alternative-rock influences (notably the Smashing Pumpkins) but are novel rather than mere nostalgia plays, not that I’m above that sort of thing either.

57. Orchestra Gold – Baye Ass N’Diaye. This California-based group calls their music Afro-psych rock. This is accurate. Mariam Diakite’s vocals (sung in Bambara, one of the national languages of Mali) complement the crunchy, bluesy guitar riffs perfectly.

56. Coeur de Pirate – Cavale. Another title track, this one from Béatrice’s latest album, which sees her reaching back into 1970s baroque pop and disco, never more so than on this song.

55. Bleary Eyed – Easy. The title track from this Philly shoegaze band’s latest album – which I found on this list of the best albums of that genre this year – distills the best of their sound, a dreamy but appropriately blurry style that melds the two vocalists with guitars that sound like they’re partially obscured from view. That list wouldn’t match my own, but the top three records, by Total Wife, Bleary Eyed, and They Are Gutting a Body of Water, were all worthy selections.

54. Flight to London – No One’s Forgiven. This was a big year for bands just leaning all the way into early 1980s new wave sounds; Flight to London notes Tears For Fears, Phil Collins, and Depeche Mode as influences, but all I hear on this track from their debut album Instructions for Losing Control is the best parts of Heaven 17.

53. Bartees Strange – DCWDTTY. Strange put out a six-song EP, Shy Bairns Get Nowt, in October, but omitted this single he’d released a month earlier, a punk song that nods to Smart Went Crazy’s “DC Will Do That To You” but that is an original composition. Anyway, this is the best song he put out in 2025.

52. Momma – Cross Your Heart. I soured on Momma after multiple listens, because the album, Welcome to My Blue Sky, turned out to be utterly derivative of their 1990s influences – notably Veruca Salt, whom they nearly ripped off with “I Want You (Fever).” This was the best track that didn’t completely remind me of another song I liked better.

51. Greentea Peng – Nowhere Man. Peng’s latest album Tell Dem It’s Sunny was really uneven, not terribly shocking for an artist who crosses genres and musical borders so easily, highlighted at least by this track about not being of your current time and place, congruent with her career-long exploration of her own ethnic and cultural identity.

50. Bleak Squad – Strange Love. This Australian supergroup, which features Mick Harvey of The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds fame, released its first album, Strange Love, in August, filled with dark, foreboding rock songs that work best when Adalita (Magic Dirt) handles the vocals.

49. The Twilight Sad – Waiting for the Phone Call. The first new song from this Scottish band in nearly seven years features Robert Smith on guitar, and mixes their usual style of post-punk with some traces of mid-1970s Pink Floyd.

48. Wisp – Serpentine. Wisp is Natalie Lu, a 21-year-old singer/guitarist from San Francisco who just dropped her debut album If Not Winter in August; her sound is very shoegaze with dream-pop vocals produced way out front of the walls of guitar.

47. The Beths – Metal. Straight Line was a Lie, the Beths’ follow-up to Expert in a Dying Field, my #1 album of 2022, was probably the biggest disappointment of the year to me; it lacked most of the urgency and energy of the last record, and even when they got the tempo right (“Take”, the title track) the songs lacked the huge melodies of their earlier work. This was my favorite song on the LP, and I wonder if I would have ranked it lower if it hadn’t been by a band I’d previously adored.

46. Yaya Bey – dream girl. Bey released her latest album, do it afraid, and Pitchfork gave it a 7.5, saying just one track was a misfire: this one. So of course I think it’s the best song she’s released so far.

45. Lake Ruth – An Offering. I wasn’t familiar with this trio until hearing this track, from their first album in seven years, Hawking Radiation. The title gives some sense of their sound; it’s space-jazz-rock with the kind of ethereal vocals you would expect from the Cocteau Twins or Lush (a frequent touchpoint for me).

44. Picture Parlour – 24 Hour Open. One of the best guitar riffs of the year, easily. I don’t love when singer Katherine Parlour works at the bottom end of her range – her voice loses a lot of its power, and it sounds more affected, at least compared to how it sounds when she lets it loose on the chorus. This English quintet released its first album, The Parlour, in November, with more tracks of heavily blues-influenced rock and the occasional indie/dream-pop number like “Talk About It.”

43. Danger Mouse & Black Thought feat. Rag’n’Bone Man – Up. The first single from Danger Mouse & Black Thought since their wonderful 2022 album Cheat Codes has the rapper in top form, sounding like he can barely get one line out for his eagerness to get to the next one, accentuated by a big chorus featuring the English retro-soul singer Rag’n’Bone Man.

42. Fontaines D.C. – It’s Amazing to Be Young. There’s a long history of artists writing songs about/for their newborns, including Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness’ “Cecilia and the Satellite” and Stone Temple Pilots’ “A Song for Sleeping,” but this one-off single from Fontaines D.C. isn’t really a departure from their current sound – if you liked 2024’s “Favourite,” which I certainly did, you’ll probably like this track as well.

41. Little Simz feat. Obongjayar & Moonchild Sanelly – Flood. The drums that open this track are so menacing, and then Simz’s rhymes come in, in a near-whisper, punctuated by Obongjayar’s chorus (“As I walk this wicked ground/Keep me away from the Devil’s palm”) and the Zulu-language lines with Sanelly that she delivers with a staccato beat that adds to the percussion.

40. SPRINTS – Descartes. The lead single and best track from SPRINTS’ second album All That Is Over is a hard-driving track that blends punk and metal behind Karla Chubb’s musings on the meaning of art.

39. Natalie Bergman – Gunslinger. Bergman’s second album My Home is Not in this World, produced by her brother Elliot (who is also her partner in the band Wild Belle), was paced by this sultry track that combines elements of country and classic soul.

38. Wolf Alice – Bloom Baby Bloom. The lead single from The Clearing and, as far as I can tell, the album’s biggest hit is a showcase for Ellie Rowsell’s vocals and just her sheer presence – the album is probably the most Ellie-centric of their entire catalog, and this song is one of their most intricate, although the infectious groove it lays down doesn’t carry through the rest of the downtempo record.

37. Skunk Anansie – An Artist is an Artist. Skunk Anansie’s The Painful Truth was the band’s first new album in nine years, and opens with this powerful statement on aging and art, especially for women. The album did well in Europe but the U.S. market never seemed to get what Skin & company were really doing, and that doesn’t seem to have changed.

36. Say Sue Me – In This Mess. I don’t think I’ve had many Korean artists on my playlists over the last fifteen years, as I’m not into K-Pop and bands in other genres don’t seem to cross over much, so Say Sue Me might be the first to make a year-end top 100. They’re a shoegazey band that also takes inspiration from some 1960s surf rock, evident here in the main guitar riff, although everything else here feels very much influenced by early Ride or Lush.

35. Courting – Namcy. The best song off Courting’s latest album was either this number or “Pause at You,” which came out at the tail end of 2024. Regardless, they’re one of my favorite indie-rock bands going after two very strong albums of jangly, off-kilter, utterly joyous songs.

34. keiyaA – I h8 u. It’s hard to pick a best track off Hooke’s Law, with its eclectic mix of genres and styles and even song lengths – the other candidate here, “k.i.s.s.” is just 1:20, so I settled on “I h8 u,” another song with a title that seems to be inspired by Prince and that pushes the envelope that separates catchy from annoying.

33. Sampa the Great feat. Mwanje – Can’t Hold Us. Zambian-born, Botswana-raised Sampa the Great says her next album introduces a new style of music she calls “Nu Zamrock,” which sounds a lot like old Zamrock with hip-hop elements added to it. This track features Mwanje, another Zambian-born singer who, like Sampa, now lives in Australia.

32. Sudan Archives – A Bug’s Life. The best track from my #2 album of the year showcases Brittney Parks’ musical versatility without eschewing melody or veering into self-parody (which she does on one track, “Ms. Pac-Man”), with Parks rap-singing over a Afrobeat-fusion rhythm.

31. World News – Don’t Want to Know. This British jangle-pop band has put out about a dozen songs over the last three years but hasn’t released an album or even an EP. There’s an atmospheric element here that elevates it beyond the original jangle-pop sound from the 1980s, bringing dreamy/shoegaze sounds to their work … man, I just wish they’d put something longer out.

30. Wet Leg – catch these fists. I’m on the outside looking in with Wet Leg, who earn all sorts of critical acclaim for some really strong post-punk melodies (yes) and cheeky lyrics (nah). This and “mangetout” were the two best songs on their sophomore LP, Moisturizer, which saw the duo become a five-piece band.

29. Die Spitz – Riding with My Girls. I need to get back to Something to Consume, the debut album from this Austin hard-rock quartet, who seem to draw from crossover thrash without being quite so heavy in the riffing; when I first put this song on a playlist, there was only a three-song EP, and I missed the full-length album entirely.

28. Sunflower Bean – Nothing Romantic. The best track off Mortal Primetime hits the sweet spot of this Brooklyn-based trio’s sense of melody and their ability to create lush, dark rock tracks with just a single guitar and bass.

27. World News – Everything is Coming Up Roses. They released two songs in 2025 and both were awesome; I ranked this one slightly above “Don’t Want to Know” because the chorus was stuck in my head for weeks, although I think the other track has the better guitar riff.

26. Jay Som feat. Jim Adkins – Float. By far the best song off Som’s latest album, Belong, her first since 2019, this duet with Adkins of Jimmy Eat World has some of the power-pop elements of that band and is far more rock-oriented than the rest of the LP.

25. Preoccupations – Focus. If you played me the first 15 seconds of this song and told me it was the latest track from The The, I’d absolutely believe you; only the vocals give it away. Also, The The don’t do anything this concise any more. Ill At Ease, the fifth album from this Canadian post-punk band featuring two members of the defunct band Women, is more of the same – perfectly solid, with a couple of highlights, well short of my top albums of the year.

24. Deep Sea Diver – Emergency. A pounding rocker off Billboard Heart, this Seattle band’s first album with Sub Pop, which showed some more grunge influence alongside their prior blend of dream-pop and punk elements.

23. Indigo de Souza – Heartthrob. De Souza went in a more indie-pop direction with her fourth album, Precipice, highlighted by this vulnerable track with vocals that remind me quite a bit of Sonia Sturino of Weakened Friends.

22. Waxahatchee – Mud. Two minutes of perfection from Katee Crutchfield, and her only solo output in 2025, although she did release a record with her sister and MJ Lenderman in Snocaps.

21. Jorja Smith – The Way I Love You. Smithwentback in time a bit with this bass-forward club track, still carried by her gorgeous vocals. I prefer the styles of her full albums, where she leans more towards neo-soul and mixes in some grime and trip-hop, but she is my “she could sing the phone book and I’d listen” singer right now.

20. Automatic – Is It Now? The title track from this LA trio’s latest album is a pulsating goth-rock banger that stepped through a wormhole from 1983 to today. I don’t mean to make too much of the drummer being the daughter of Bauhaus’ drummer, but the connection in the music is undeniable. Bela Lugosi lives.

19. Creeper – Headstones. I really dig Creeper, as they remind me so much of bands I loved when I was in high school, but I have a hard time calling them “metal,” at least today. In 1988 I would have sworn a blood oath that they were a metal band, and they also would have had hair teased halfway to God. Anyway, this song rocks, and I’m glad someone is making this kind of music cool again.

18. Sophia Stel – Everyone Falls Asleep in Their Own Time. Stel is a DIY artist from Vancouver who put out a full-length album in 2024 and then an EP How to Win at Solitaire this September, with this as the lead track. The music reminds me of Tasmin Archer’s hit “Sleeping Satellite” and Beth Orton’s “Stolen Car,” with vocals run through effects and more electronic elements.

17. Heartworms – Just to Ask a Dance. Jojo Orme’s debut album Glutton for Punishment is a goth-rock0-dance

16. Cerrone w/Christine & the Queens – Catching Feelings. I didn’t know of Cerrone, who is a 74-year-old French musician and producer (and who definitely looks like a Mike Myers character in this photo), but I’ve loved the work of Christine and the Queens for years, and this is the most ebullient song he’s done in years – certainly since before the Rahim Redcar period, maybe going all the way back to “Tilted.” It’s a modern disco track powered by his strong, high-energy vocals.

15. Geese – Cobra. The best song on Getting Killed is the one that I think has inspired all of the comparisons to Captain Beefheart and other 1970s avant-garde rockers, and it’s probably the best standalone track on the album (meaning you can listen to it in isolation without losing anything from the lack of context from other songs).

14. Portugal. the Man – Tanana. Shish was mostly a return to form for Portugal. the Man, at least in the sense of going back to their earlier, more psychedelic and atmospheric sound, with “Tanana” the best example of them recapturing what was so great about their album In the Mountain in the Cloud, although the lyrics are, in fact, about our disastrous political moment, not about the hard-throwing Angels pitcher from the 1970s.

13. Public Circuit – Samson. I’m slightly obsessed with this track, which could easily slot in between Ebn Ozn and The Blow Monkeys on a new wave compilation album. This NYC trio’s album Modern Church didn’t offer anything else this incredibly catchy, unfortunately.

12. Matt Berry – Why on Fire? I wasn’t familiar with Berry’s musical output until I caught this track, from his eleventh album, Heard Noises; nothing else on the LP comes close to this one’s immediacy or hook, as the rest of it is more ambient psychedelia without this song’s more popular song structure.

11. Suede – Disintegrate. Suede’s post-punk album Antidepressants was one of the year’s best surprises, as it perfectly evoked the feel of a specific moment in music and time, as post-punk morphed into new wave, almost like the soundtrack of Bauhaus breaking up. This was the best track on the record, and I think their best in more than a decade.

10. Emma-Jean Thackray – Save Me. Thackray’s album Weirdo, largely about her grief after the sudden death of her long-term partner, could have been an unlistenably morbid affair, but she offset her lyrics with powerful yet accessible jazz that shows you can develop hooks and melodies beyond the standard four chords. “Save Me” has the best music of any track on the record, although the lyrics aren’t quite as strong as those of the title track or “Wanna Die.”

9. The Horrors – The Silence that Remains. It’s a slow build, but worth waiting it out, as Faris Badwan builds out a funereal atmosphere with a bass-heavy intro that crescendos to a dark, thunderous climax.

8. Maruja – Saoirse. Pain to Power was one of the most interesting albums I heard in 2025, although I wasn’t ultimately sold on it coming together enough to put it on my top 25. This British experimental, cross-genre quartet brings in elements of jazz, art-rock, punk, post-hardcore, even classical, in tracks that range from three minutes to over ten. This was the best song on the record, which I would strongly recommend to anyone who’s into the band Geese.

7. Hotline TNT – Julia’s War. Raspberry Moon was Hotline TNT’s first album written and recorded as a full band, and it really showed in the strength and maturity of so many of the songs on the record; this track has a timelessness to its melody and the layering of the various instruments, rather than the pseudo-shoegaze of their last record (I’ve already ranted about that enough). This is the sound of a band coming into its own. (Hotline TNT pulled all of their music from Spotify in protest against the CEO’s investment in a military AI firm, so their songs do not appear on the Spotify version of this playlist.)

6. Tame Impala – Dracula. I really didn’t like Deadbeat, Kevin Parker’s latest album, which is mostly electronic and lacking any of the melodies or vaguely experimental nature of his previous work, making for a soporific album beyond this one track. “Dracula” isn’t his best song, but it’s his best pop song, and right now it’s the highest-charting of any of his singles on the Billboard Hot 100, reaching #30.

5. Little Simz feat. Michael Kiwanuka & Yussef Dayes. The six and a half-minute closer title track from Little Simz’s latest album has some of her best rhymes over a musical track that would have fit quite well on Kiwanuka’s Mercury Prize-winning album KIWANUKA, with a slower tempo and sparse arrangements – a repeatedly piano sample, a simple guitar line, some pronounced snare and high-hats. The album’s predominant theme is her friend Inflo’s betrayal, but this track broadens beyond that into themes of personal growth, using the common metaphor of the lotus as a symbol of divinity and transformation.

4. Blondshell – Two Times. Easily my favorite song by Blondshell, one where the guitar line and the lyrics are so beautiful that I can get past her warbly, often nasal delivery in the verses. The chorus is lovely as well, including the line “I’ll come back if you put me down two times,” which lends itself to so many interpretations in the context of the entire song.

3. Lord Huron – Bag of Bones. Probably my favorite Lord Huron song, edging out “Time to Run,” but regardless this is peak work, turning a very simple chord progression (like, I was disappointed at how easy it was to play) into a haunting, dirge-like song that, like almost all of Lord Huron tracks, is about someone looking back on the disaster they’ve made of their own life.

2. Wolf Alice – White Horses. Who would have thought that my favorite track off a Wolf Alice album would be sung by the drummer, Joel Amey? Ellie Rowsell does appear on the chorus, and The Clearing is still very much her album, but this song has the best hook on the LP and builds so beautifully that it should have closed the record rather than the letdown of “The Sofa.”

1. Obongjayar – Not in Surrender. How did this song – and its album Paradise Now – not not end up a global hit? I don’t think I heard anything all year that made me want to hit the gas pedal or just get up out of my seat more than this one, a high-energy Afrobeat track with some American R&B and a hint of rock guitar in the chorus, along with a rallying cry to start each verse: “I put my hands up/Not in surrender.”

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Top 25 albums of 2025.

When I started doing best-of rankings at the end of 2013 for music, I had the not all that clever idea to do a number of albums equal to the last two digits of the year and keep that going until I reached 2025. I broke that a few times, going under twice and over once, but we are now in 2025 and I think I’ll stop expanding the list after this. Finding 26 or more albums in an era when the music industry deprecates the format – even if artists still value it – is just more work than I want to put into these rankings, which remain a labor of love. So here are my top 25 albums of 2025, with I assume an unsurprising record at the top spot but I hope a few records that are new even to regular readers.

Honorable mentions: The Hives – The Hives Forever Forever The Hives, Cœur de pirate – Cavale, Black Honey – Soak, Bleary Eyed – Easy, nabeel – ghayoom, Total Wife – come back down, Nathan Salsburg – Ipsa Corpora, SAULT – 10. And since someone will ask, I didn’t care for the Beths’ album.

You can see my previous year-end album rankings here: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and my top albums of the 2010s. My top 100 songs of 2025 will go up some time in the next week.

Unranked. Nell Smith – Anxious. This is a hard one to rank for me, because it feels like a work in progress that will never be completed. Smith died in a car crash in September of 2024 at age 17, after recording this debut album of original material and an album of Nick Cave covers she did with The Flaming Lips. There’s so much promise on this album, and a few standouts among these sparse psychedelic-pop numbers, like “Split the Sky” and “Billions of People,” but it’s very much like a prospect’s rookie season where you see flashes of their ultimate potential but they haven’t put it all together yet. I’m putting it in the last spot on the list, ahead of some albums I would be much more likely to listen to again, so more people might see and listen to it.

25. Thrice – Horizons/West. The follow-up to 2021’s Horizons/East is the superior of the two records to me, and feels more deliberate in lyrics and music, perhaps because the previous one was recorded during/right after the pandemic. Full disclosure – drummer Riley Breckenridge is a friend and we’ve hung out a few times, but I wouldn’t put the record on here if I didn’t like it. These songs sounded incredible live, too. Standout tracks include “Albatross,” “Gnash,” and “Crooked Shadows.”

24. The Tubs – Cotton Crown. This Welsh band, formed by members of Joanna Gruesome, churns out catchy jangle-pop singles that end before they wear out their welcome, with the whole nine-song album coming in just five seconds short of a half an hour. Standout tracks include “Freak Mode,” “The Thing Is,” and “Chain Reaction.”

23. Wolf Alice – The Clearing. I really prefer Wolf Alice when they rock out, because they’re so damn good at it, and Ellie Rowsell’s voice soars over big, crunchy guitar riffs, but as on pretty much every album since their debut, they’ve chosen to mix it up, with ballads (“The Sofa,” the snoozy closer) and country-tinged songs (“Leaning Against the Wall”) amidst some real bangers. I admire the ambition, even if I always want them to pick up the pace. Standout tracks include “White Horses” (with verses sung by drummer Joel Amey), “Bloom Baby Bloom,” and the very 1970s “Bread Butter Tea Sugar.”

22. Rocket – R is for Rocket. I’ve seen Momma’s album on a number of year-end lists, but I found it disappointingly derivative, to the point that several songs sound like covers (notably “I Want You (Fever),” which is so much like a Veruca Salt song it’s embarrassing). So why does Rocket, who are heavily inspired by Smashing Pumpkins and even take their name from a Pumpkins song, get zero respect, when they’re at least bringing more original melodies to a familiar sound? Standout tracks include “Crazy,” “Wide Awake,” and “Another Second Chance.”

21. Creeper – Sanguivore II: Mistress of Death. I prefer their last album, Sanguivore, as this one is a little kitschier across the board, lyrically and musically, but I’m generally so in tune with their overall sound that I liked the album even with some of its excesses. It’s 1980s hard rock with an overly dramatic, Brett Anderson-like lead singer, and I can’t not enjoy it. Standout tracks include “Headstones,” “Prey for the Night,” and “Mistress of Death.”

20. Anxious – Bambi. I guess they’re emo, or screamo, although I just hear a punk-rock band here with some screamed vocals scattered over the course of the album, which is full of melodies – just as their debut album Little Green House was. I love that their profile picture on Spotify has one member wearing a T-shirt that reads “Turning Point,” referring not to the white nationalist movement but to the straight-edge band from the early 1990s. Standout tracks include “Counting Sheep,” “Head & Spine,” and “Audrey Go Again.”

19. Portugal. the Man – Shish. Portugal. the Man is now primarily a John Gourley solo project, and this album, the band’s tenth, is a whirlwind tribute to the vastness of Alaska, calling back to the band’s earlier experimental days (pre-Evil Friends, at least) and recalling the urgent despair of Foxing’s recent work. There’s no “Feel It Still” here, sorry. Standout tracks include “Denali,” “Tanana,” and “Angoon.”

18. Just Mustard – We Were Just Here. This is real shoegaze, maybe the most authentic shoegaze by any band that wasn’t part of the original wave in the early 1990s. If you liked early Lush, or like the sound of My Bloody Valentine with a female vocalist you can hear, you’ll probably like this Irish band, who lean into the genre’s more dissonant aspects in a way that the majority of shoegaze revival acts don’t. Standout tracks include “Endless Deathless,” “Pollyanna,” and the title track.

17. SPRINTS – All That Is Over. This Irish punk quartet released its first LP in January of 2024, then returned with their second this September, showing significant growth and expansion in their sound from their punk and garage roots. Standout tracks include “Descartes,” “Need,” and “Beg.”

16. Courting – Lust for Life, Or: ‘How to Thread the Needle and Come Out the Other Side to Tell the Story’. This Liverpudlian band had one of my favorite albums of 2024 in New Last Name, then returned fourteen months later with this mouthful of an album title. It clocks in at just 25:40, with only nine tracks, and it feels more EPish to me, but still has some infectious alt-rock tracks on it like “Pause At You” (which came out in 2024), “Namcy,” and “After You.”

15. Pelican – Flickering Resonance. I’m late to this party, but Pelican rocks. This is the seventh album from the Chicago instrumental metal band, which has some progressive and post-hardcore elements, and it’s the first to include founding guitarist Laurent Schroeder-Lebec in over a decade. Wikipedia calls them “post-metal” and I have to admit I don’t really know what that means and can’t think of how it applies. This is a metal band, and a good one. Standout tracks include “Cascading Crescent,” “Gulch,” and “Indelible.” If you like these guys, check out Town Portal, whose latest album Grindwork was the #2 album of the year for Thrice drummer Riley Breckenridge.

14. Hotline TNT – Raspberry Moon. This album is the third under the Hotline TNT name, but the first recorded by a full band, rather than as a Will Anderson solo project. The result is by far their best album to date, a far more cohesive and melodic work that doesn’t hide any of its limitations behind distortion. And no, this still isn’t shoegaze, by any definition. Standout tracks include “Julia’s War,” “The Scene,” and the jangle-pop “Candle.”

13. Sunflower Bean – Mortal Primetime. This NYC-based trio returned with their first new album in three years, and first since “Moment in the Sun” became a hit thanks to the TV series Heartstopper, this time adopting a harder rock sound that draws far more from 1970s glam-rock bands like T. Rex than any of their previous material. Standout tracks include “Nothing Romantic,” “Champagne Taste,” “There’s a Part I Can’t Get Back,” and “Crashing Highs” from the deluxe edition.

12. Coroner – Dissonance Theory. Coroner were more influential than commercially successful during their brief run from 1987-1993, when they released five albums, including the technical thrash metal masterpieces Mental Vortex and Grin, the latter of which was ahead of its time but boded poorly for its popularity. The trio broke up after that and didn’t release any further music for thirty-two years, with the guitarist and bassist from those albums still on board for this new album, which sounds like almost no time has passed at all since their last record. Highlights include “Consequence,” ”Symmetry,” and “Crisium Bound.” Some other metal albums of note that I didn’t mention on this list: Castle Rat’s The Bestiary, Messa’s Spin, Testament’s Para Bellum, and Paradox’s Mysterium.

11. Automatic – Is It Now? The third album from this LA-based trio, whose drummer is the daughter of the drummer of goth-rock icons Bauhaus, is a dark electro-rock affair that’s heavy on the synth and bass lines. You can certainly hear that Bauhaus influence here, but these women also clearly have their own sound, and it deserves a far, far wider audience than it’s received so far. Standout tracks include the title song, “Terminal,” “Black Box,” and “mq9.”

10. Obongjayar – Paradise Now. The latest album from this genre-defying Nigerian singer is a sprawling epic of styles and rhythms, often but not exclusively drawn from Afrobeat, with plenty of western rock influences evident across the album. Oddly enough, my least favorite track here is the one with his frequent collaborator Little Simz, “Talk Olympics.” Standouts include “Not In Surrender,” “Sweet Danger,” and “Holy Mountain.”

9. The Horrors – Night Life. Faris Badwan & company released their first full-length album in eight years, and for some reason, it didn’t make much of a dent in the music press at all, which is bizarre given how much praise the previous album, just titled V, received. This record is a darker, more electronic affair, but nearly as compelling as its predecessor, and maybe a little more accessible too. Standout tracks include “Ariel,” “More Than Life,” “The Silence that Remains,” and “Trial by Fire.”

8. keiyaA – Hooke’s Law. There were two albums this year that made me go “WTF” in a good way; this is the first of the two on this list. I’d never even heard of keiyaA before she appeared on (I think) an NPR weekly new music list, and I was already intrigued by the album’s title, which refers to a law of physics that says that the force required to compress a spring scales linear with respect to the distance covered by the deformation. She starts from a modern soul/R&B foundation, but experiments all around it, drawing on electronic music, alternative rock, rap, noise, and more. Her lyrics aren’t always easy to make out in the cacophony beneath them, but they’re sharp and often very funny, too. Standouts include “k.i.s.s.,” “i h8 u,” and “this time” featuring the wonderfully named rapper Rahrah Gabor.  

7. Suede – Antidepressants. Suede promised this would be their post-punk album, and they delivered. This might be their best full-length in 20 years, and it’s probably their most polished and cohesive work yet. Standouts include “Disintegrate,” “Trance State,” and “Dancing with the Europeans.”

6. YHWH Nailgun – 45 Pounds. The absolute most WTF album of 2025, and even going back to it six months later I still find it perplexing and jarring. The entire album runs just 21:04, with ten tracks, none longer than 3:07, and it’s driven by drummer Sam Pickard’s use of a type of shell-less drum called a rototom, along with some complex meters and drum patterns. It’s like nothing I’ve heard before. I also don’t think they can just roll this sound out again on another album; this works once, otherwise you’re just black midi all over again.

5. Emma-Jean Thackray – Weirdo. Thackray’s second full-length album, written mostly by her (with assists on two songs), recorded and produced entirely by her, all in the wake of the sudden death of her partner of 12 years, is a sprawling nineteen-song record, a document of grief and anger at the world, showing no fear in the lyrics or the music. It’s modern jazz, with a strong funk influence and some pop notes, although she’s almost unable to finish a chord sequence in a typical pop pattern. Standout tracks include the title song, “Wanna Die,” and “Save Me.”

4. Heartworms – Glutton for Punishment. Jojo Orme’s debut album was a huge critical success, a real tour de force that blended electronic, post-punk, goth, and even classical elements across nine songs that pulse and throb and just scream their urgency. It sounds like the culmination of years of work, while also sounding like the product of a far more experienced artist. It calls upon some of the best music of my own youth – and I’m twice Orme’s age – without sounding at all derivative of any of it, or even too reliant on any particular genre. Standouts include “Just To Ask A Dance,” “Warplane,” and “Jacked.”

3. Little Simz – Lotus. This was the diss record of 2025, although I don’t think it was immediately obvious who or what it was about. Simz loaned her friend Inflo of SAULT over a million pounds to stage a concert, and he stiffed her, causing her to miss a huge tax payment to the British government and ending both their professional partnership and friendship. The first track, one of the many highlights of the record, is called “Thief,” with the couplet “You talk about God when you have a God complex/I think you’re the one that needs saving,” and it just goes from there. Other than “Young,” there isn’t a miss on the record; other standouts include “Lion,” “Flood” (both featuring Obongjayar), the title track, and closer “Blue,” featuring Sampha.

2. Sudan Archives – The BPM. Brittney Parks’ last album ended up at #2 on my year-end list in 2022 as well; she’s just wildly inventive, ignoring any restrictions of genre, and has an incredible ear for hooks. This is probably the closest I got to a no-skips album this year; “MS. PAC-MAN” is unlistenable, and a jarring departure from the rest of the record. Actual highlights include the title track, “Dead,” “A Bug’s Life,” and “My Type.”

1. Geese – Getting Killed. Obviously. Barely into their 20s, the boys in Geese have expanded beyond their very Gang of Four-ish roots from their debut album Projector, while continuing to eschew typical rock or alt-rock patterns and rhythms and even song structures. It’s post-something, and definitely experimental, but nowhere near as impenetrable as YHWH Nailgun or Yowie or Deerhoof, veering between screamed choruses with car-crash drums and 1970s-inflected vocal melodies that might trace their origins back to 10cc or Slik. Standouts include “Cobra,” “100 Horses,” “Trinidad,” the whole album, really. FWIW, I didn’t find Cameron Winter’s solo album nearly as compelling. (Also, his mother is Molly Roden Winter, author of More: A Memoir of Open Marriage, so that’s a thing.)

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Stick to baseball, 12/20/25.

I got sick out of the winter meetings, so I’ve been slacking on the Saturday posts (and blogging and my newsletter in general). Here are the breakdowns I’ve written for subscribers to the Athletic in the last two weeks, at least:

Over at AV Club, I ranked the ten best new board games of 2025, and reviewed the games The White Castle Duel and Trinket Trove.

I have a few writing things to get done this weekend but I really hope to get another (free) newsletter out before Christmas Day. You can sign up here.

I also appeared on the Cubs Weekly podcast with my friend Lance Brodzowski to talk some Cubs prospects and what it might take to get Mackenzie Gore (very, very hypothetically).

And now, the links…

  • My Congresswoman, Rep. Sarah McBride (D), spoke out about her experience as a trans woman as the House prepared to pass two bills designed just to make trans peoples’ lives hell.
  • Meanwhile, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court struck down that state’s social studies curriculum that mandated all kinds of Christian nonsense, noting that the changes were rammed through without adequate debate or public notice.
  • U.S. students read fewer books than ever; the article points out that teachers assign fewer full-length books, in part because of the belief that kids won’t read them, but that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Other potential causes are state book bans and don’t-say-gay laws, social media, AI, and a privately produced reading curriculum called StudySync that leans more on excerpts.
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