Sick of What I Want: The 30 Best Albums of 2025 So Far (#10-1)
They can be located
PinkPantheress (Photo by River Callaway)
10. Pinkpantheress, Fancy That
It’s historically a bitch for a singer who came up riding a signature riddim to stick the landing in other forms. I mean, when’s the last time you heard from Katy B? But Victoria Walker is no producer’s pet; half her dynamite debut “mixtape” To Hell With It was her beats, and so is half the “Boy’s a Liar” mix that crossed over to number three stateside. Still, dance-pop is a tricky balance to maintain as trends shift faster than their practitioners’ feet. After 2023’s Heaven Knows fell short on both heaven and knowledge, Walker’s right to return to her mixtape roots, especially in clubby sub-three-minute snippets like “Stars.” While I wish the auteur added more to source materials like classic Streets and Basement Jaxx (twice!) samples, everything here kicks in hard when it does, just like her co-conspirator Ice Spice’s also-excellent, also-brief Y2K! last year. And she’ll be right to return to her mixtape roots, too.
9. The Ex, If Your Mirror Breaks
When your Steve Albini tribute kicks off with a Bo Diddley beat, you’re doing it right. “Beat Beat Drums” (hell yes) sets up the intense vamp, and “Spider and Fly” quiddles ominously betwixt Call the Doctor and Trout Mask Replica. That’s your spectrum of color. Like any avant-punks worth their drone of course they frequently evoke Sonic Youth, especially Lee Ranaldo’s recited, towering “NYC Ghosts and Flowers.” But the Ex is more relentless; besides the fact they’re 45 years old where SY topped out at 30, the thousand cuts of their guitars and circular drum incantations have no forgiving rise and fall. They occasionally build a rousing density, as on the perfect closer “Great” from their first LP since COVID, but even when Katherina Bornefield sings they never sweeten. So they sound like protest and damnation at the same time when they chant “loss, loss, loss.” This is noise-rock where nothing is accidental and every strike of the instrument matters. Get out the vote.
8. Samia, Bloodless
The most songful nepo baby since Frankie Cosmos doesn’t need her third LP’s lead “Bovine Excision” to be a highlight. It’s miracle enough that such a title is not a miss, and within six minutes she’s hitting them out of the park on the knockdown “Lizard,” “Dare,” and “Fair Game” all in a hypermelodic row, with the latter somehow carrying on the “Bovine Excision” concept (“you won’t get your blood back”). Then we get the prematurely yanked “Craziest Person” and eventually “Proof” (“you don’t know me bitch”) and her most rousing cut, “North Poles” which, if you’ll let it, tackles the nepo baby complex like no one’s yet dared: “When you see yourself in someone / How can you look at them?”
7. Skrillex, Fuck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol but Ur Not!! <3
I normally resist all-caps stylizations but that very silly title simply cannot be rendered otherwise, and if anyone embodies the caps-lock-as-hand-grenade spirit it’s the Gangster of Wub. Like Lady Gaga’s Mayhem, this is a big, blatant cry for us to get back together: a microwavable bag of 2013 ADHD sonics crammed into 34 subdivisions over 46 minutes, with callbacks to the immortal Bangarang, which I decided should be SPIN’s fifth-favorite record of the 2010s. Best of all, no Bladee. And like Mayhem, despite my own desperation for noise-pop musical voids to be filled and the capability of these folks to do it, it’s not quite enough. Skrillex’s great records total 30, 12, and (so close!) 44 minutes (and 32 and 33 if you count the almost-there Jack Ü and More Monsters and Sprites — which should refer to beverages — respectively), but they were also fresher, more maximal. These are sparer and the not-really-name guests (other than, um, Sigur Rós’ Jónsi, I’m only familiar with Dylan Brady, from true Skrillex successors 100 gecs) are mostly hiyas and DJ tags. But then again, so are the “songs,” though the tags are a riotriot, especially on “Biggy Bap” (“I have Skrillex trapped in my basement, play this at full volume or I’ll put him in the hole: free Sonny Moore,” “My life is in shambles”). Mostly arresting beats-in-a-blender with loud and/or personable interjections, this is a true mixtape à la M.I.A.’s Piracy vs. Terrorism. Which is ultimately why it wins me over, by committing to its fragmented madvillainy with a desperate context that I guess comes from real terrorism. Lady Gaga should do one — after all, she thinks she’s Andy Warhol but she’s not. Bring the noise.
6. Horsegirl, Phonetics On and On
Under Cate Le Bon’s tutelage they’re starker, slower, more minimal and vastly more beautiful than on the promising if vague debut. If that sounds like Young Marble Giants, well, they’re more the set concrete this trio’s blooming flowers from. Nothing tops the opener, which adds lively pogo to their sensibilities, but as the momentum winds down over a whole song cycle, the jangling attractions don’t. The tunes aren’t as simple/memorable as Dehd’s Flower of Devotion or as intriguing/complex as Palberta’s Palberta5000. They just sit nicely in the middle, quite still. Plaintive. Their rhythms are so childish they’re avant-garde; their rhythms are so childish your kid can tambourine along.
5. Food House/Gupi/Fraxiom, Two House
I know nothing about a one of the principals but rhyming “molecule” with “polycule” is one way to get my attention. So is rapping with the massaged awkwardness of a hyperpop Bloodhound Gang. For once a 54-minute album is so wordy because it has a lot to say. Well, a lot to rattle off anyway: jokes galore rebounding off the backboard of unexpected rhymes landing with a swish. The constancy of the tunes is as simultaneously locked-in and grating as a They Might Be Giants stan could hope, as squirty sonics squelch around the room with post-PC Music plasticity and bounce. The shiny-balloon synths, slip-sliding Auto-Tune, and relentless dedication to off-the-cuff unseriousness brings the Black Eyed Peas’ The E.N.D. to mind of all things, if it was cleverer about being stupid and also trans: “I don’t know what to do about my testes” is a good summum for end-stage patriarchy in several ways. “Remember I’m the shit / Jack U, ‘Febreze’” is a horrifying reminder that song is ten years old now. “Spotify is stupid / Spotify is Satan,” yes, and even cissies can relate to “I need a type of therapy that hasn’t been invented yet.” A quick ctrl+F for “gecs” in my friend Colin Joyce’s review turns up zilch because he knows a lot more hyperpop than I but that doesn’t make it unworthy of the comparison. So chat, is 54 minutes too long? What if I told you it was hyperpop’s own Da Drought 3? Actually, Fraxiom sells it better than I can: “It’s crazy 200 bpm hyperpop, but the songwriting is so good and the lyrics are so real that it might even be able to bring tears out of someone who pays a mortgage.”
4. Billy Woods, Golliwog
More routine excellence from the decade’s best MC who didn’t win 2025’s Best Rap Album Grammy or play its Super Bowl halftime show. His darkest/weirdest since Aethiopes (and not a moment too soon) appropriates windy ambience from folk horror and frequently invokes the undead. The sound is jazz from hell, the verbiage “my people fled to the mountains because there’s nowhere white people won’t go,” “I’ve told lies in my time but never once over a beat,” “the English language is violence,” “she’s not a fan of me, I get it,” “history never repeats, it do rhyme though,” “Miles Davis / I slept in the basement,” “you can’t make this shit up but you’re welcome to try,” and the only credible time a major rapper has ever insisted “I still live hand to mouth make no mistake.” Only the Stones interpolation reflects a budget that’s risen since 2023’s Maps put him on those. But the final cut of 18 insists “I won’t be located.” And then he’s gone.
3. Corook, Committed to a Bit
I don’t care who you are or what your taste in music is, “They!” is an astonishing work of social advancement in song and they aren’t really my thing either. Until now, anyway. And it’s hardly the only jaw-dropper here: “Worcestershire,” “Pepto Bismol,” “Medicine,” and of course, “Death.” First complaint is that an album called Committed to a Bit turns out to actually not be — they ditched the funny for the most part — and the second is that it makes me miss Mx. “If I Were a Fish” being funny. But only because this tour de force is so constantly devastating, which anyone languishing in a concentration camp right now could tell you isn’t entirely the artist’s fault. Corinne Savage’s naked humanism is such an antidote to the black-heartedness destroying this country right now that it’s hard to not cry with them. Even if “Joke’s on Me” is a little histrionic for me, I can’t deny a nonbinary American the right to emote it so seismically.
2. Erika de Casier, Lifetime
“Tell a xennial that Madonna’s Bedtime Stories was trip-hop and they’d throw $60 at a colored vinyl (or worse, four of them) but color me embarrassed: I had no idea her prints were all over NewJeans’ Get Up, my all-time favorite 12 minutes of K-pop.” That’s what I wrote ten days ago, followed by “NewJeans have more in common with 100 gecs than de Casier’s increasingly vaporous chillout,” but de Casier had the last word. Within 72 hours of publishing, I fell hard for centerpiece “Delusional,” which samples the same Cypress Hill squeal 100 gecs did, then the addictively sneaker-pimping “The Chase.” Now I can’t stop playing all of it, so maybe I’m the vaporous one. If only I could chill out like this. “Super Shy” felt too slight on the first several tries, too.
1. Marshall Allen, New Dawn
I don’t know how to review the best album of 2025 because I’m about as equipped for the genre as American healthcare is for a 101-year-old who still enjoys a cig. Big band meets “Telstar” space FX on “African Sunset” before Neneh Cherry gladhands the title track into swing-band blues on “Are You Ready.” The raucous “Boma” brings Fela Kuti’s hooky Afrobeat to the Village Vanguard. Having served a third of his life in Sun Ra’s universe-opening Arkestra even before coming to lead it, Allen knows every stop on this train because the man himself is a century of great jazz. His Guinness-certified “debut” album could disintegrate Trump’s weak particles into unknown, beautiful space.