The Best Albums of 2025

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4.3 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

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Summary

If we needed any more proof that the album isn't dead, 2025 was it. On this episode, Stephen Thompson is joined by Ann Powers and Daoud Tyler-Ameen to run through 12 dazzling albums that stuck with the NPR Music team this year. And for an even deeper exploration, check out the full lists of our critics' best albums of 2025 here.

Artists and albums featured on this episode:

- Rosalía, 'LUX'
- Wednesday, 'Bleeds'
- Nourished by Time, 'The Passionate Ones'
- Daniel Caesar, 'Son of Spergy'
- Dave, 'The Boy Who Played the Harp'
- Clarice Jensen, 'In holiday clothing, out of the great darkness'
- Gwenifer Raymond, 'Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark'
- Kal Banx, 'RHODA'
- Mary Halvorson, 'About Ghosts'
- Annie DiRusso, 'Super Pedestrian'
- Queralt Lahoz, '9:30 PM'
- Patrick Watson, 'Uh Oh'

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Transcript

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0:00.0	A quick note before the show, this podcast contains explicit language.
0:09.5	Happy Friday, everyone from NPR Music. It's New Music Friday. I'm Stephen Thompson,
0:14.8	here with a very special episode of New Music Friday, where we run down some of the best albums of 2025.
0:22.6	I'm here with two of my treasured colleagues, Ann Powers.
0:27.0	Hello, Stephen.
0:28.3	It is great to talk to you.
0:30.1	Daoud Tyler Amin.
0:31.4	Hi, Stephen.
0:32.2	It is a joy to sit down with both of you.
0:35.3	We are at the time of year when we go a little ham thinking about, thinking, yeah, thinking
0:42.0	about all the albums we talked about and wrote about in 2025, all the stuff we celebrated
0:48.1	the most, kind of going back and digging through our work and just like remembering what
0:52.7	we loved, revisiting it,
0:54.5	re-deciding if we still love it, and then of course doing that most loving of processes
1:00.6	ranking things based on quality.
1:03.1	List season.
1:04.0	Loving or brutal, let's be honest.
1:06.6	Little of both.
1:07.3	For me, it's like, you know, dropping the guillotine on stuff that I would like to include, but lists do have to have limits. Yeah, math is our enemy this time of year. Well, should we get into it? Let's get into it. Let's get into it. We're going to do these kind of in no particular order, and we're just going to go around the horn a few times. We're not going to talk obviously about every album that NPR music picked as the best of 2025 because that would be a fool's
1:33.4	errand. But we're going to talk about a bunch of them. And I just want to say before we start doing
1:37.8	this, just one quick thought. Every time we publish a best of list, we'll post it to social media, and somebody immediately
1:47.3	chimes in, I've never heard of any of these artists.
	...

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