The best albums of 2025 so far

Conjuring up images of glistening bodies and disorienting strobes, EUSEXUA is an ode to the dancefloor in all of its sweaty, euphoric glory. Inspired by Twigs’s time in Prague’s club scene, her third full album feels like a re-energising for the artist via a renewed pop injection into her signature electronic weirdness. Leaning deep into the leftfield, there’s ‘Drums of Death’, all syncopated, jagged percussion and delayed vocals creating a textural soundscape like a scratched CD that refuses to stop skipping. Then there’s the wildly different ‘Childlike Things’ featuring North West – a goofy nod to J-pop – while the title track ‘Eusexua’ is all euphoric builds and soothing vocals powered by Eurotrancey synths and a fuzzy, distant thumping, as though you’re hearing bass through the floor of the club toilets. The whole thing is, of course, anchored with Twigs’s masterful voice: delicate, consuming and angelic. This album is a bold, fully-realised piece of artistry from a musician who continues to surprise. 

Every MIKE release reveals new dimensions to the US rapper; 2023’s Burning Desire (one of Time Out’s best albums of that year) was flat-out jubilant and triumphant, last year’s Pinball shimmered with glamour, and Showbiz! revels in spirituality more than any previous MIKE release. Beats built of silky soul, warm jazz and electronic psychedelia combine with sampled passages of reflection and MIKE rapping about existence, wisdom, family, friendship, introspective complexities and so much more. Showbiz! may be MIKE’s most demanding release, in that the craft of its beats and lyrics is so dense and intricate, but it rewards that attention mightily.

It’s been a while since I’ve been as addicted to an album as I am to Bad Bunny’s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (which, in English, translates to I Should Have Taken More Photos). The rapper blends everything from trap to traditional salsa and bolero influences, and it culminates in a sprawling, thoughtful love letter to his home of Puerto Rico. The energy peaks in passionate, noisy tracks like ‘EoO’ and ‘WELTiTA’, but eases in ‘TURiSTA’ and ‘DtMF’ with strumming guitars, withdrawn, sombre vocals and nostalgic declarations about ex partners and his home island’s struggles via tourism and the political climate.

For a long time, French musician Oklou was gatekept by the nerdier side of the chronically online, her debut mixtape Galore a futuristic mish-mash of ambient pop textures and dreamy, airy synths. Choke Enough feels like a softening – a real statement of maturity in her classically-inflicted post-internet world-building. There are some real stand-out tracks here: ‘Take Me By The Hand’ is all glittery, melodic bleeps and digitised downtempo vocals, while, in ‘Blade Bird’, the computerised cover comes off, her lyrics vulnerable and her vocals almost naked. There’s a distance to her sound throughout this record – it’s like walking in a haze, not quite seeing where you’re going, but feeling your way anyway – and the result is something beautiful, confident, and truly unique.

Across a career touching three decades, Lady Gaga has dabbled in music styles from jazz to rock, via Academy Award-winning soundtrack fare. But it’s her fiancé Michael Polansky who has been credited with encouraging Mother Monster to solely focus on her fiery pop roots. Gaga took the direction for her latest album Mayhem, bursting back into the zeitgeist with the infectiously twisted anthem ‘Disease’ and pop behemoth ‘Abracadabra’. The latter bites at the heels of her Born This Way pinnacle, whereas album track ‘Vanish Into You’ has shades of 2009 classic ‘Bad Romance’. Prince’s purple hues are an obvious influence on ‘Killah’, while on ‘Zombieboy’ Gaga powers up her freak-pop sensibilities – a nod to the late model/artist Zombie Boy who featured in her 2011 music video for ‘Born This Way’. There’s even space for a theatrical power ballad on ‘The Beast’ where Gaga flexes the might of her voice. Much like the fiancé who inspired Gaga to create an album fuelled by her love for pop, this one’s a keeper.

Taking onboard a cavalcade of country inspiration – yet still sounding every bit as familiar and homespun as his previous folksy offerings – Will Oldham aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s 13th album is sweetly tender and elegantly dark. ‘London May’ has a ponderous gothic energy (unsurprising, as it was first written for horror film Night Of The Bastard and is named after the drummer/bassist in Glenn Danzig’s post-Misfits band Samhain), while the jaunty ‘Tonight with the Dogs I'm Sleeping’ was co-written the legendary John Prine’s son Tommy. ‘Boise, Idaho’ might be one of the loveliest things Oldham has ever penned – and with a career spanning over 30 years, that’s something of a triumph.

A first listen of Amor de encava may leave you scratching your head a little. What are all these blaring sounds, arranged in such eclectic cacophony? Why is there a weird, booming wrestling announcer, and who exactly are Weed420? The latter question is easier to answer – Weed420 is a collective of Venezuelan producers/artists – the others not so much. The liner notes can be vaguely translated to ‘an album about a van, a nostalgic encavero [a type of bus] and Venezuelan loneliness’, and it’s feasibly meant to listen like a bus ride, but several tracks in and the specifics start not to matter. Amor de encava is a technical achievement, but it also makes you want to dance, to be sentimental and pensive, to feel all manner of things. 

Pink Siifu obliterates genre boundaries like no one else in contemporary hip-hop, his discography like an eclectic collage ranging from slick, big-beat trap to ear-battering power electronics. Black’!Antique brings more sounds than ever before into a single Siifu release: 80 minutes or so of harsh industrial, thumping trap, softly-spliced soul and so much more. But Black’!Antique isn’t just impressive in its scope and how it captures Pink Siifu’s range better than ever. Siifu masterfully subsumes all those genres into a statement that is as weighty and gritty as it is hallucinatory and tender, and his best record yet.

As though reaching out from another dimension, John Glacier confidently delivers a debut album inspired by the hum of city living. It’s a narrative we’re all familiar with: the craving for tranquility away from sirens and overcrowded public transport and parks littered with cigarette butts. She is an otherworldly storyteller, manipulating alien glitches to soundtrack her deadpan vocals, yet we’re connected to her by the underlying theme of this record. The hustle never stops, but when Glacier raps ‘You best believe it, I’m the hottest in the game’ over sparkling rave-ready beat of Emotions, you’re immediately transported to nights spent dancing on your mates’ kitchens at house parties, where everything is carefree – even if just for a moment.

Religious trauma, broken familial relationships and suffocating romantic ties: Preacher’s Daughter, the 2022 debut album by Ethel Cain, dealt with heavy themes, but offered moments of catharsis. Perverts, in contrast, leans unrelentingly into the dark. The first time I heard the album opener, I had to turn it off, so anxiety-inducing were its oppressive drones, buckling interpolation of a hymn and creeping near-silences. But persevere and you’re rewarded with exquisite vocals emerging from the wall of sound on songs like ‘Punish’, ‘Vacilator’ and ‘Amber Waves’. Repeated listening reveals depth after inky depth: it’s hard to imagine we’ll hear another album with this level of conviction in 2025.