Favourite Albums of 2025: The Top Ten

The third and final post of my 2025 AOTY Series finally arrives with my top ten albums of the year.

Here are the ten albums that dominated my listening this year; according to my last.fm stats, they’ve combined for almost 2,000 song plays since January. I’ve always been an album guy, and I find my musical joy in albums that I can happily play from start to finish. Outside of actually enjoying the music, the ability to listen to an album in its entirety is my primary criterion for inclusion on my AOTY list. As such, you can guarantee that by the time we get to the top ten, every single album is an all-killer-no-filler affair.

For my regular readers—especially those who have been following along with Dan Pal’s excellent 2025 Top Ten Songs countdown—there shouldn’t be any great surprises here. There seems to be a theme running through my top ten list this year: albums that embrace sounds reminiscent of previous eras. That’s not necessarily surprising given how much current music tends to borrow from earlier genres and sounds. From my perspective, the older I get, the more I seem to find comfort in sounds that take me back to times when my life—and the world around me—were simpler and less emotionally demanding. While I still love hearing music that feels brand new, ground-breaking and exciting, nostalgia in new music certainly carries a potent attraction.

As with last two posts, these albums are sorted chronologically by release date (and alphabetically for albums released on the same date). The header for each album is hyperlinked to a site where the album is available for digital download—to Bandcamp where available or alternatively to the hi-res audio site Qobuz. If you find yourself falling in love with any of these albums, please consider purchasing them—either in physical or digital form—to support the artist directly.

Once again, it’s been another amazing year for music and I’m excited to see what 2026 will have in store.

Happy listening!!

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Will Worden - The Only One & All The Others

Standout Track: Lovin’ You Forever

Despite there being very little information about him on the interwebs, Will Worden seems to have arrived as a fully formed country star, one in the mould of a Glen Campbell or a Charley Rich. With its countrypolitan sound and the design of the album cover, along with Worden’s appearance, you could be listening to an album from the late 60s or early 70s. While I wouldn’t refer to them as inspirations per se, I do hear echoes of a couple other songs on “Lovin’ You Forever”. The melody on the first lines sung by Worden reminds me of the melody of the opening vocal on “A Ticket Back to Georgia” by Head East. And the descending sequence that repeats throughout the song—first on the organ and later with the strings—hearkens back to some of the descending organ work on “Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite!” by The Beatles. This is a beautifully crafted song, the standout track from one of my favourite albums of the year.

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Sharon Van Etten - Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory

Standout Track: I Can’t Imagine (Why You Feel This Way)

I was quite late to Sharon Van Etten’s music as I didn’t hear her until 2014’s Are We There. That album, and her subsequent two releases, all made my top 25 and I always look forward to new music from her. Her latest release, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, takes her music in a different direction with several songs that could quite easily have been released in the late 70s or early 80s. Honestly, with its fast-paced new wave and disco influences, “I Can’t Imagine (Why You Feel This Way)” sounds like it could be an unreleased Blondie song.

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Blondshell - If You Asked For a Picture

Standout Track: Change

In 2023, Sabrina Mae Teitelbaum, who performs as Blondshell released her self-titled debut, an album that was a top 20 release for me that year. While there haven’t been any major shifts in her sound, she’s matured as a songwriter and her new album, If You Asked For a Picture, hits a lot of musical sweet spots for me. Lyrically, the album focuses on relationship challenges, both with family—primarily her mother—and with love interests, and the choices she makes in navigating the difficult emotional terrain. Musically, the album borrows liberally from fuzz-infused and dreamy 90s alt-rock, the nostalgia of which makes the album a comforting listen for me.

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Young Gun Silver Fox - Pleasure

Standout Track: The Greatest Loser

Wearing their yacht rock influences proudly on their musical sleeves, the London-based duo Young Gun Silver Fox has released an album of absolute gems on Pleasure. Album opener “Stevie & Sly” makes clear what you can expect for the next 35 minutes: “Take me back to Stevie and Sly / Take me back to 1975 / It’s where I wanna go”. So strong are the influences of Steely Dan throughout the album that, for the first half dozen or so listens, I was sure I was hearing “Steely” (as in Dan) rather than “Stevie” (as in Wonder). There’s something for every fan of modern yacht rock, with echoes of Hall and Oates, Christopher Cross, Doobie Brothers, and Earth, Wind and Fire spread across the album. Given its relatively short running time and how much I love every track, this has been one of my most played albums of the year (second only to my next pick).

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Bruce Springsteen - Twilight Hours (Disc 6 of Tracks II)

Standout Track: Late in the Evening

I’ve never been a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen; while I’ve enjoyed his bigger hits over the years, the last album of his I purchased was 1984’s Born in the USA. I can’t deny his songwriting and talent, but his music—and his singing—generally hasn’t appealed to me. So I paid very little attention in late June when he released Tracks II, his 7-disc collection of unreleased album-length material. With my curiosity sufficiently piqued after reading a handful of glowing reviews about the sixth disc, the Twilight Hours album, I finally decided to give it a sample. And I’m happy I did because I was, quite frankly, blown away. When reviewing “Late in the Evening”, my standout track—and my favourite song of the year—here’s what I wrote:

While Springsteen’s not a classic crooner, the album is reminiscent of Frank Sinatra’s 1955 classic “In the Wee Small Hours”. With only a limited knowledge of Springsteen’s catalogue, this sort of vulnerable meditation on loss and loneliness was a revelation to me; quite frankly I didn’t know the Boss had it in him. It’s a song that will stay with me for a long time.

If you haven’t listened to Twilight Hours (disc six of Tracks II)—especially if you’ve never really been a fan of Springsteen—I urge you to give the album a chance.

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Durand Jones & The Indications - Flowers

Standout Track: Been So Long

Although I missed out on their debut self-titled album in 2016, I’ve enjoyed the music of Durand Jones and the Indications since 2019’s American Love Call, which was a top ten album for me. After an appearance in my top 20 in 2021—and a solo album in 2023, which didn’t appeal—Jones and his core collaborators of Aaron Frazer and Blake Rhein are back with Flowers, an album I consider to be the best of their career. While I’d call this a classic soul record, it also delivers shades of disco, funk, and R&B along with the delicious vocals of Durand Jones and Aaron Frazer. Jones’ vocals are soooo silky smooth but also edge into gruff and gritty territory when conditions warrant. And Frazer, now with a couple solo records under his belt, really shines both on lead and background vocals. While some have criticised a lack of variety in the tracks, I love the sound they’ve created here and am more than happy to consume the entire album in one sitting.

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Lord Huron - The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1

Standout Track: Bag of Bones

I was late coming to Lord Huron as they only popped up on my musical radar in 2021 when they released their fourth studio album, Long Lost, which was a top ten release for me. Songwriter and lead vocalist Ben Schneider sure knows how to construct a lovely melody and there’s none better on this album than on “Bag of Bones” with the variable refrain anchored by the line “I believed you’d never get far without me”; it’s absolutely gorgeous. The Kristin Stewart-voiced spoken-word track “Who Laughs Last” is quite different than anything else on the album. The track, which centres on a long night drive, is carried forward by a propulsive and driving guitar rhythm and when Schneider’s vocals join the mix in the chorus, it provides a glorious climax. While this isn’t the most cohesive album—it moves around quite a bit musically and stylistically—the variety is actually one of its high points for me.

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Kathleen Edwards - Billionaire

Standout Track: Billionaire

I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that this album was my first exposure to Kathleen Edwards, the Canadian singer-songwriter who has been releasing music for over 20 years and is a well-respected artist in the Americana (Canadiana?) genre. Billionaire is the fifth long player for Edwards, and her first since 2020’s Total Freedom, which peaked at number 24 in her home country. Edwards is one of a trio of female singer-songwriters—I’d add Suzanne Vega and Mary Chapin Carpenter—on my AOTY list this year that really stand out for their impeccable songwriting. The title track from the album is gorgeous and heartbreaking in equal measure. The song memorialises loss and is punctuated by scenes that might otherwise seem mundane: the sweet look on someone’s face when they come through the door, or secret messages left behind to be found by their loved ones. Another favourite is “Need a Ride” in which Edwards details all the ways we’ve learned to mistreat each other—rightly or wrongly, with the best intentions or not—and the reality that, inherent within our shared humanity, we ultimately need each other and should perhaps treat each other accordingly.

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CMAT - EURO-COUNTRY

Standout Track: EURO-COUNTRY

I first became aware of Irish pop singer Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, who performs as CMAT, in 2023 when she released her second album, Crazymad, for Me, which I liked but didn’t love. Her latest, EURO-COUNTRY, covers a lot of territory, from observations on growing up during Ireland’s boom years and the later financial crash (“I was 12 when the da’s started killing themselves all around me”), to the bombastic and ridiculous “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station”, to odes on the imposed anxieties and implicit vulnerabilities of being a woman. When discussing her first two albums in their August review of the album, Pitchfork referred to Thompson as “an artist who has the voice of a barmaid Adele, the rhinestone cool of latter-day Jenny Lewis, and comedic chops all her own”. While that feels like an apt description, I’d also add that she brings a keenly observant eye and an acerbic wit to her songwriting, along with a knack for delivering emotional gut punches. This is an engaging and thought-provoking album.

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Anna von Hausswolff - ICONOCLASTS

Standout Track: Stardust

By all accounts this is experimental Swedish singer-songwriter Anna von Hausswolff’s first move towards a more pop-like style of music. While it still feels rather experimental to me, it’s also the most compelling album of the year. I quite literally felt myself compelled to listen to this album from start to finish and probably did so more than half a dozen times in the week after its release. “Stardust” is the standout for me, a track I can only describe as “maximalist” in both its vision and its execution. The album also includes two stunning duets—the gorgeous “The Whole Woman” with Iggy Pop, whose vulnerability and advancing age shine through in equal measure, and the achingly beautiful “The Aging Woman” with Ethel Cain.

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And that’s a wrap!! Please hop into the comments and let me know your thoughts.

• Were (m)any of these albums or artists brand new to you?

• Which of the albums that were new to you will you explore further?

• Are any of these albums on your list of favourites this year?

• What was your favourite of my ten standout tracks?

• What were your favourite albums of the year?