Best of 2025, Pt. 3 - Albums and EPs
Lots of albums, but not many words about any one of them (sorry not sorry)
I did not have it in me to write up any albums this year after all, which is a shame because it’s a particularly good year to throw a few off-the-beaten-track albums into the mix for consideration with a bit of word oomph behind them.
This was the hardest year I can remember to sort out which songs or albums were my favorites, despite it being almost trivially easy to find amazing stuff from pretty much any part of a globe I chose to throw a strand of spaghetti at. And I’m still getting great recommendations, mostly from friends and familiar polls and year-end chat on social media.
Meanwhile, I continue to find the few remaining publications that concern themselves with year-end extravaganzas pretty dispiriting. I’ve started to use a simple heuristic to even engage with a year-end list from a major publication—what would this list look like if you only included work that was not in English? This is not really a fair heuristic, since there is obviously tons of amazing music in English, and “the words are in English” (if there even are words) doesn’t really tell you that much about the artist who made the music or what kind of music it is.
But just for thought experiment’s sake, I wanted to see which (and how many) not-in-English albums were getting mentions. I went through the list of the current top 200 albums on Rob Mitchum’s (no, the other one) aggregate of year-end lists and pared it down to the not-in-English albums.1 (This is based on a quick skim so I may have missed some.)
Rosalía - Lux (#2, 21 placements)
Bad Bunny - Debí Tirar Más Fotos (#9, 16 placements)
Stereolab - Instant Holograms on Metal Film (#46, 6 placements)
Lucrecia Dalt - A Danger to Ourselves (#91, 4 placements)
Ela Minus - Día (#100, 4 placements)
Eiko Ishibashi - Antigone (#106, 3 placements)
DJ Haram - Beside Myself (#115, 3 placements)
Titanic - Hagen (#120, 3 placements)
Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslave Saienko - Hildegard (#139, 2 placements)
Silvana Estrada - Vendrán Suaves Lluvias (#140, 2 placements)
Ichiko Aoba - Luminescent Creatures (#145, 3 placements)
Karol G - Tropicoqueta (#180, 2 placements)
DJ K - Radio Libertadora! (#186, 2 placements)
That’s 13 out of 200, or 7%. If you include instrumental albums by not-in-English artists—or if you assume I missed a few, which you probably should—you could probably nudge it up another percentage point or two.
I mean, it’s not nothing. You can’t just asterisk away two of the biggest artists of the year in the top ten, or pretend that Stereolab doesn’t count, as I initially did. And this method doesn’t tell you anything about the makeup of individual lists. The problem may be that everything is pretty spread out, with this affecting not-in-English work disproportionately in the aggregate.
But I did figure out that if you exclude Rosalía/Bad Bunny/Stereolab, those other 10 albums are mostly clustered in the same publications’ lists. Only 11 publications (out of 29 publications included so far) account for all of the lower-ranked nominations in the top 200.2
I’ve probably gone on about this stuff enough for now: final A-pop series plug of the year and maybe ever, tell your friends! Lord knows there doesn’t need to be any more opining on the subject of critics’ lists. God bless ‘em for staying alive. To put a more positive gloss on it, isolating the not-in-English albums in this way gave me a few new leads or reminders to re-listen—hey, I probably underrated the Ichiko Aoba album!
I just wonder what I’m hearing that everyone else isn’t? It seems impossible to imagine myself building a list of songs or albums that isn’t a large proportion, if not an outright majority, of music in languages other than English. And it’s not because I think this is some noble goal: there are plenty of regions and scenes where some level of monolingualism should be more or less expected. But if you fancy yourself something of a generalist, or at least un-specialist, it’s just where a lot of the best music seems to be.
Examining the critic picks at the very least has reaffirmed what I do want to be doing here, which is finding as much music as I can and sharing it. But mostly that has meant finding and sharing songs. So where does that leave my Relationship to the Album As a Format? Many years ago, I wrote about albums as an “attentional strategy” — a way of focusing on music that didn’t make me feel so at sea in an ocean of songs I couldn’t track or organize. But at some point I learned how to swim in this particular sea, which means I no longer view albums in quite the same way.
Music in general is not like many of the struggling mass media forms of the 20th century—television, narrative film, journalism—which are having a tough time with whatever changes have been happening in attention and distribution. But perhaps the album is like those forms, just not exactly in the way that people have been hand-wringing about for the last 25 years since “Your Hard Drive” was named album of the year in SPIN. Like those other forms, it hasn’t died, but is maybe retreating into a somewhat niche art space. So albums specifically might be more like opera, even as music in general is more like writing.
I have a relatively well developed appreciation for the form of a good album, so I will likely continue to follow the form like a 21st century opera-goer. But I also seem to have less to say about albums generally. At some level, albums are and always have been snapshots and song collections. But I often don’t have much to say about a collection of good songs beyond “this is a collection of good songs” (which is fine, and makes for many excellent albums). For albums I tend to write more about, I’m usually after something else, a sort of long-form movement or story or idea to hook on to.
The albums that I found myself wanting to write about the most this year are ones I didn’t really like, but wanted to: I started writing a post about tenuous connections between Lily Allen’s West End Girl, Allie X’s Happiness Is Going to Get You, and Madilyn Mei’s A Thousand Songs About It All: Act I, only to find as I started that I didn’t want to listen to any of the albums all the way through again. None of them appear on my lists below.
Instead, I saved myself a bit of effort this week by writing very brief comments about a few albums that I liked that I saw almost no other mention of in year-ends over on Bluesky. So far only one of the albums from that thread has received a placement on the year-end aggregator — British new wave freaks Cardiacs (“what if Sparks were Mr. Bungle”) were placed at #30 on the site Louder Than War’s list.
Albums: Under-the-radar-ish
Chini.png: Via Lo Orozco
“Chilean art-pop wins the Núria Graham deceptive complexity award.”Marilina Bertoldi: Para Quien Trabajas Vol. I
“Argentine rock album of the year, kitchen sink post-punk, a lot of fun.”SANAM: Sametou Sawtan
“Avant psych and/or psych avant from a v cool Beirut band”KIWI: sama
“Polish singer-songwriter, swoops and swells without leaving the bedroom”Irmãs de Pau: Gambiarra Chic, Pt. 2
“Brazilian-funk-spiked pop with the best anti-ICE song of the year (if you squint…different “ice” but close enough)”TAMIW: Farewell Party
“Wrote that one song ‘suggests Willow covering “The National Anthem” by Radiohead,’ which is very me-coded”Gen Hoshino: Gen
“Eclectic Japanese pop album with a few left-field collabs”Alemán: De Vuelta a las Andadas
“Mexican rapper with a shaggy party album overstuffed with rap, pop, reggaeton, and otherwise unspecified bangers of all kinds. Bonus(?): the most tasteless album cover of the year”Salin: Rammana
“Thai-Canadian jazz drummer/composer with a throwback Afropop album”Cardiacs: LSD
“The band I described recently as ‘painful acupressure for ADHD stress relief’ are back after 25 years sounding…like that.”Virna Lindt: Danube
“But maybe you needed a 40-year hiatus instead? Here’s espionage thriller pop by self-described ‘Hitchcock blonde’ Swedish new waver Virna Lindt”’Lori Goldston: Open Space
Sometimes an album does what it says on the tin: “I recorded Open Space with in a single continuous take: my cello, an amp, and a distortion pedal.”Vĩ: a-Soft Warning: Live from Glasgow back Home
Vietnamese pop experimentalist, fka Vũ Hà Anh, is worth gathering in full (click through to Bandcamp for various singles and EPs; this is the closest to a 2025 LP).Anderson Neiff: I.E.A.A.N.
“Baile funk album block! Decent albs/EPs this year from d.silvestre, DJ K, and DJ Arana, but these are my top three. First, some bright brega funk.”Dj Aguilar: Direto do Alto Vol 1
“All-around funk sampler of the ‘DJ & Friends’ variety.”MC BF & DJ YUZAK: Bebeto e Romário
“My surprise funk album of the year, smooths out its sound with phonk and sustains the full album length that way.”V/A: Não Estragou Nada
“Príncipe batida isn’t primarily an album medium, but this massive hodgepodge of unreleased work by some of the big producers in the scene is probably as close as they’ve gotten to a [aughts indie dork voice] DFA Compilation #2”Lella Fadda: MAGNÜN (deluxe version)
“Fantastic Egyptian art-rap, something like my #3-4 of the year.”SIMONA: Astuta
“Finally, will stump for the two highest-ranking Spanish-language albums on my list and call it a day for this particular thread. First: Spanish semi-avant-pop that’s better when it leans out from the art.”Juana Rozas: Tanya
“And finally, the one I’ve recommended a bunch this year already and might be my album of the year depending on how it fares in my next few weeks of album-revisiting”
Albums: The Rest!
I did not ultimately put Tanya first. I decided that Monaleo’s Who Did the Body can remain in the top spot, even though every middling to negative review I’ve read about the album I also agree with. (That’s how you know it’s a keeper.) I wrote about the album already in this post.
Instead, I’ll present the remaining albums on my list that I did not share above, available on my ongoing yearly lists. The ranking isn’t super relevant, but for the record my #1-2-3 is Monaleo, Juana Rozas, and a mid-December release of a budots supergroup album: DJ Love, DJ Danz, & DJ Ericnem’s Budots World: 3-Hit Combo!
In parentheses, the placement these albums have on the year-end aggregate at press time (or N/A for no placement).
ALT BLK ERA: Rave Immortal (N/A)
Ano: Bone Born Bomb (N/A)
Bambi: Trap or Die (N/A)
BunnaB: Bunna Summa (Ice Cream Summer Deluxe) (N/A)
Deep Sea Diver: Billboard Heart (N/A)
Disiniblud: s/t (N/A)
DJ Love, DJ Danz, & DJ Ericnem: Budots World: 3-Hit Combo! (N/A)
GOON: Dream 3 (N/A)
JADE: That’s Showbiz Baby (#45)
JAZZWRLD & Thukuthela: The Most Wanted (N/A)
Lil Wayne: Tha Carter VI (N/A)
Maggie Lindemann: I Feel Everything (N/A)
Logic1000: DJ-Kicks (N/A)
MARINA: Princess of Power (N/A)
Mellow & Sleazy, Tman Xpress: Midnight in Diepkloof (N/A)
Monaleo: Who Did the Body (#429)
Ashley Monroe: Tennessee Lightning (N/A)
Addison Rae: Addison (#18)
Mei Semones: Animaru (N/A)
Soyuz: Krok (N/A)
TiaCorine: Corinian (N/A)
Titanic: Hagen (#120)
Yeule: Evangelic Girl Is a Gun (N/A)
EPs
There was also a lot of action in my EP list this year. The line between album and EP is blurry these days, but these are ones that seemed undeniably EP-like.
ADÉLA: The Provocateur
Worthy Slovakian competitor in a Netflix talent competition lost to Katseye but blows the Katseye oeuvre out of the water in hooks and provocation.Bb trickz: 80’z
For a time my album of the year before a “demotion” to this category, a rapid tour through avant beats and charmingly disaffected raps.Big Wett: Risk It
Ultimately goofier than it is filthy, but it’s close!Rebecca Black: SALVATION
She has become the emblematic A-pop striver, understands that it’s all niche and small, but you still have to work extremely hard, which is why she should absolutely take over all of Addison Rae’s material.horsegiirL: v.i.p. - very important pony
Better than Horsegirl, but only because the album is 10 minutes shorter.Van Hunt: A Heart Full of Questions
Yes, I liked that Van Hunt album from 20 years ago so much that I sat through all of this EP twice even though it sounds like tossed-off demos of half-remembered song ideas.KIIRAS: Kill Ma Bo$$
This strains the definition of an EP—it’s really just a single plus remixes. That’s how much I like the title track.Anish Kumar & Baalti: Stunt Doubles Pt. 2
Was pleased that this project, a Golden Beatology goldmine of Bollywood sampled into dance music, has been chopped into two EPs rather than released as an album.Le Sserafim: HOT
Not sure when this group, who a few years ago I’d pegged as fairly unremarkable, decided to follow weird muses into art-pop territory along with their more straightforward pop, but it really works for them.Liv del Estal: tue moi
Had no idea what this even was until I saw it on my list again, but it’s great! What if Frou Frou was actually French?Morgenshtern: Alisher
Have been interested in Russian rapper Morgenshtern since 2020 when he was, well, a rapper. He has since moved on to rock and singer-songwriter material. The more shamelessly Damon Albarn-ish the alt-rock hooks the better, so the highlight is “Povod.” (Nyah nyah.)NMIXX: Fe3O4: FORWARD
I guess this is the K-pop album of the year? NMIXX is frustrating because their album from the year doesn’t have the best songs from the EP and the EP doesn’t have the best songs from the album. But only the EP has “High Horse” on it.SAILORR: Sincerity
Really like SAILORR, whose conversational R&B is equally charming and menacing (“hey, Pookie!” might be my favorite two-second moment in a song this year, per Hannah Jocelyn’s annual prompt). This is also exactly the right dosage of her and happens to have her best songs.Elle Teresa: Yukako
Second name on my EP list I didn’t recognize, but the cover is familiar. Japanese rapper who I think I kept liking after putting one of these songs on a mix back in April.xiangyu & Gimgigam: 遠慮のかたまり
No album-length collection of one of my favorites of the year (Japanese pop by way of gqom and other global dance styles) and couldn’t justify this 7-song 23-minute collection on the main albums list.
My stuff
You probably don’t need more albums to listen to, but here’s a final reminder that I also made some of my own stuff, too. To me, mash-up albums are more like music criticism than music production, but it is an area where I do tend to enjoy the stuff I make, which I can’t say of my any other creative music endeavor I attempt.
I have one official mixtape of Taylor Swift mash-ups, a sort of audio essay that sets Taylor Swift melodies to melodic rap beats. The reviews are in: “This is cursed, but I listened to the whole thing” and “Holy shit though. This is Grey Album level.”
But wait! I also made one unofficial mixtape of Taylor Swift songs set to…pretty much everything else, based on my observation last year that her last album seemed like a mixtape minus the unauthorized samples.
Hence: THE TORTURED POETS MIXTAPE. (Does Charlie Puth appear? Maybe!)
That’s it! If you have any more words about these (or other) albums yourself, feel free share them here. Next week I’ll whittle down some songs. Then I’ll be back with at least one and maybe two(!) post-script mixes based on the many songs from the year I’ve found from other people’s lists this month.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
This excludes instrumental albums that might plausibly fall into the category “not in English,” of which I noted four or five.
Crack had the most picks with 6, followed by Wire, Quietus, Pitchfork, and Treble with 3, then Paste, Rolling Stone, No Rip Cord, and Line of Best Fit with 2. Earmilk and Complex each had 1.
I was curious if, for those pubs with one pick on the list, it was their only not-in-English album on their own list. I don’t want to understate the extent to which all albums have more spread out votes. Earmilk, in addition to Rosalía and Bad Bunny, also had Marina Satti’s Pop TOO (!). Complex named Fuerza Regida along with Rosalí, Bad Bunny, and Karol G.