New Music Friday: The best albums out Dec. 5

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4.4 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

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Summary

Dove Ellis. Melody's Echo Chamber. Editors' Tom Smith. Erin Wolf of Radio Milwaukee joins Stephen Thompson to discuss those albums and more on our last episode of New Music Friday this year.

The Starting 5:

Dove Ellis, Blizzard

Melody's Echo Chamber, Unclouded

Tom Smith, There Is Nothing In The Dark That Isn’t There In The Light

TEED, Always With Me

Voices from the Lake, II

The Lightning Round:

HTRK, String of Hearts (Songs of HTRK)

Ben Marc, Who Cares Wins

Isobel Waller-Bridge, Objects

Mother Soki, Fantasy EP

Prins Thomas, Thomas Moen Hermansen

See our long list of albums out December 5 and sample dozens of them via our New Music Friday playlist on npr.org.

Credits:

Host: Stephen Thompson

Guest: Erin Wolf, Radio Milwaukee

Audio Producer: Noah Caldwell

Digital Producer: Elle Mannion

Editor: Otis Hart

Executive Producer: Suraya Mohamed

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This message comes from Bayer.
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0:15.8	Science Delivers.com
0:17.4	Swore I would take to my grave the fact I changed my flight.com.
0:32.0	Happy Friday, everyone from NPR Music.
0:33.4	It's New Music Friday.
0:37.3	I'm Stephen Thompson here with Aaron Wolfe from Radio Milwaukee. Welcome back to the show, Aaron.
0:38.6	Thanks, Stephen. Nice to be here. It is a pleasure to have you from my home state of Wisconsin.
0:45.6	I wanted to mention up front, you're hearing Annie DeRuso. Annie DeRuso this week just today
0:50.9	released a deluxe edition of her album Super Pedestrian, which we talked about on this show months and months ago when it originally came out.
0:59.6	It has gone on to become one of my very, very, very favorite albums of 2025.
1:05.3	And this is, appropriately enough, list season, NPR Music.
1:10.3	Next week we'll be publishing our best albums and best songs of 2025. It is always an exciting ordeal.
1:18.4	Erin, I wanted to ask you, what is your favorite album of the year? Well, here at Radio Milwaukee, we did a thing called Essential Albums of 2025,
1:28.7	which you can find at RadioMwaukee.org.
1:31.0	And I picked Saya Gray's Saya as my essential album.
1:36.1	That's a great record.
1:37.4	She's so magical.
1:38.4	And I feel like she really stepped into her groove with this record.
1:41.5	You love me differently. I loved you all the soul. her groove with this record.
	...

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