Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - The Bridge: Slate’s Music Club 2025

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia

Slate Podcasts

Music, Music History,

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 December 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Slate Music Club returns, in this special year-end edition of Hit Parade’s The Bridge! Host Chris Molanphy joins New York Times pop music critic Lindsay Zoladz, and Julianne Escobedo Shepherd of Hearing Things in a critics’ roundtable led by Slate’s own Carl Wilson. They discuss their favorite albums and singles, as well as the trends that shaped music in 2025.

Among this year’s big musical questions: Have we reached peak Bad Bunny yet? Did those animated Demon Hunters reinvent K-pop? Are Geese the saviors of rock, or just muppets with guitars? Is hip-hop ready to move on from Kendrick and Drake? Plus: Rosalia, Water for Your Eyes, Gaga, Wednesday—and of course, Taylor Swift.

Note: Slate Plus members can hear this special episode in full. Ad-supported listeners will hear the first half. Want to hear the whole discussion? Sign up for Slate Plus! Unlock monthly early-access episodes, bonus episodes of “The Bridge,” and ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Visit slate.com/hitparadeplus to get access wherever you listen.

Podcast production by Kevin Bendis.

Don’t miss the rest of this year’s Slate Music Club episode! Become a Slate Plus member! Join for monthly early-access episodes, bonus episodes of "The Bridge," and ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe directly from the Hit Parade show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/hitparadeplus to get access wherever you listen.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, everybody. This is Chris Malanfi, host of Hit Parade, Slate's podcast of Pop Chart History.
0:06.2	Welcome to The Bridge.
0:15.2	This is a special episode of Hit Parade The Bridge, a recap of 2025, The Year in Music, with my colleagues in the Slate
0:24.4	Music Club. We're making this show partially available to all hit parade listeners. Our Slate Plus
0:31.2	members get the whole show. What is the Slate Music Club? For more than two decades, Slate convened a panel of critics at the end of each year to discuss the year in music, the cultural trends that drove the musical zeitgeist, as well as our favorite albums and singles. We would share our thoughts in a series of written articles published just before the holidays. Starting last year, we turned the music club into a podcast conversation.
0:59.4	We've convened a panel of smart folks to talk about music in 2025.
1:04.4	So let me introduce our participants, all of whom have graced the bridge before,
1:09.4	and one joining us for the Slate Music Club for the first time.
1:13.2	First off, a return visitor, Julianne Escobedo Shepard.
1:17.2	Julianne is a writer, editor, and co-founder of Hearing Things, an independent worker-owned music
1:23.0	publication, and she is the author of the forthcoming book Vakera, about growing up Mexican-American in Wyoming
1:30.1	and the myth of the American West. Next, she's not new to the bridge, but she is new to
1:35.7	Music Club, Lindsay Zolads. Lindsay is a pop music critic at the New York Times, where she writes
1:41.7	about a variety of current music and curates the paper's
1:45.0	weekly newsletter, The Amplifier. I look forward to Lindsay telling me why I am wrong about geese.
1:51.6	And, as always, our host for this roundtable is Carl Wilson, Slate's chief music critic.
1:57.2	Carl is a freelance writer and editor based in Toronto. He's the author of Let's Talk
2:02.1	About Love, a journey to the end of taste, and he writes the substack newsletter, Critic. Without
2:08.2	further ado, I will turn it over to Carl. Thank you so much, Chris. It's an honor to have you
2:13.6	share this time on Hip Raid with us. So with no further ado to get us started, I want to go around
2:18.7	the table and ask each of you to name two of your favorite albums of the year. Julianne, let's start with you.
2:24.6	Okay. Well, two of my favorite albums this year were Cleo Reed's Country. Let us remember reads country.
	...

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