Rather than putting any chat in the polling thread …
… this thread is for any discussion around your 2025 albums of the year.
If you want to see what happened last year, the 2024 polling thread was here:
And the results thread hosted by @Severed799 were here:
It’s been a great year for new music with May and October in particular being ridiculously strong months for new releases, so I’m looking forward to see where the collective hive mind lands. Have fun all!
My favourite thread of the year!!
Thanks for doing this!
Got a big two out in front of the rest, then a lot of others vying for the rest of the top 10. Will try to do a full ranked 50 again, enjoyed that in the last few years
The Divorce album has been an especially big climber the last few months
This is going to be rough trying to choose a top five, been a particularly great year it feels.
My list is currently 108 albums long. Oh yeah.
Good year imho
I seem to have discovered a lot more stuff this year (thanks streaming!). I’ve gone early with my top 5 in the other thread but honourable mentions to the Lemonheads and The Loft with impressive returns, Alan Sparhawk and Trampled by Turtles, Frankie Cosmos, Damien Jurado and Tony Molina.
I’ve got a very definite solid number 1. Haven’t really taken stock of everything else yet and worked out where to place it. Also still got loads of repeat listens to catch up fully with stuff from October & November.
Thank you so much for doing this. It’s always a highlight of the year and I always discover some great records I somehow missed (and feels easier to totally miss some really special records in the deluge)
I think this is the first time Deftones have released a new album and not made it into my top 10 - just didn’t click with it. And I think it might be me as there are a lot of records this year by artists I love that didn’t really do it for me. I think my brain is far too broken by the rise of fascism and the climate breakdown to listen to a lot of music that feels sort of hollow rather than escapist.
This has also been a year of burnout and little time to breath easily. It’s been a year of trying to find my feet and the records that have really been there for me are a few years old (like Mannequin Pussy)
It’s also been a year of nostalgia with DiS turning 25 and thinking a lot about the century so far and continuing to plot a few bigger ideas
Got a list that I’ve been adding to all year, barring Blackhaine putting out his new album this year, Space Afrika finally stopping faffing doing scores for art spaces in Hamburg, Frank Ocean just doing something/anything my top 5 are somewhere in this
Oneohtrix Point Never - Tranquilizer
Anna von Hausswolff - ICONOCLAST
ROSALÍA - LUX
Armand Hammer & The Alchemist - Mercy
Richic Culver - I Trust Pain
Jennifer Walton - Daughters
Sudan Archive - The BPM
Rat Heart - Dancin’ In The Streets
feeo - Goodness
Geese - Getting Killed
Joanne Robertson - Blurr
Wednesday - Bleeds
Kieran Hebden + William Tyler - 41 Longfield Street Late 80’s
M. T. Hadley- Make Room For Happiness
james K - Friend
Nourished By Time - The Passionate Ones
Dijon - Baby
Tyler, The Creator - DON’T TAP THE GLASS
Jim Legxacy - black british music (2025)
DJ Haram - Beside Myself
Clipse - Let God Sort Em Out
S.G. Goodman - Planting By The Signs
LINTD - DOGTOOTH. And Other Such Tales Of The Macabre
Addison Rae - Addison
Pulp - More
Horsegirl - Phonetice On And On
caroline - caroline 2
smerz - Big City Life
Michael J. Blood x Samizdat - 2
Nazar - Demilitarize
aya - hexed
Rainy Miller - Joseph, What Have You Done?
Real Lies - We Will Annihilate Our Enemies
Barker - Stochastic Drift
YHWH Nailgun - 45 Pounds
Los Thuthanaka - Los Thuthanaka
Benefits - Constant Noise
Panda Bear - Sinister Grift
DARKSIDE - Nothing
Michael J. Blood - Spaces In Between
Oklou - choke enough
Ethel Cain - Perverts
Some of them will be piss easy to get rid of, being held up by one incredible song (Defense - Panda Bear w/ Cindy Lee and I’ll Take Care Of You - Tyler, The Creator) or annoying the fuck out of me with unnecessary interludes (Ethel Cain - Perverts sorry but genuine silence rather than ambient noise and the Four Tet + William Tyler record is ruined by 2 pointless bit that total 3 minutes).
Been a good year, but it has definitely come in bursts of really good records within what feels like 2 weeks then nothing for 2 months then another glut.
Honestly don’t think I even saw any of yours written down before.
No idea what I heard this year from 2025 that I liked outside of three off-hand, none of which I’m sure could make a top 5.
Unless there’s anything of worth released in December, my top 5 is pretty much cemented and has been for a while now.
Am I allowed to vote for Imaginal Disk because I accidentally only started listening to it this year?
I’ve been adding my 2025 listens chronologically to a RYM list, which is sitting at 133 items right now. It includes EPs and maybe a few comps, so those will be easy to omit along with the obvious albums that didn’t impress. The time has come, though, to start shuffling things into place.
2025 was the year I found this place (thanks to Sean’s year end list) and aptly proceeded to drown myself in music. A year of intensive overlistening (lastfm says 40k tracks from 6k artists) that noticeably warped my taste. I’ve been on a similar journey before, moving from indie rock/electronic stuff in the early oughts to free jazz/improv and EAI by around 2010 before largely abandoning serious music listening with parenthood. But I was fairly speedrunning it this time and was delighted to find many more acts comfortable touching both ends of that spectrum. There seems to be a swelling of genre melt in this era and it hits just right for me.
Also a year of killing my darlings; nearly all my most loved acts were previously unknown to me. There was some disappointment in old favorites failing to connect, but it was nothing compared to the joy of repeatedly stumbling upon gems that immediately felt crafted just for me. What a lovely journey.
Many thanks to all here and especially my fellow sickos in the new music threads! It’d have been a much quieter year without you all.
Disappointing year for me. Almost everything from my Top 25 last year would have made it into my Top 5 had it been released this year.
(Also, just issuing my annual plea as a spreadsheet guy who had to navigate hell in his old job - I am begging people to carefully read the instructions in the voting thread. I’m already dying internally on @woweezowee’s behalf.)
On this point, I noticed @woweezowee seemed to suggest a colon delimiter between artist and album, whereas everyone posting has used a dash In what is generally the forum standard format:
[Artist] - [Title]
Unless that really doesn’t work for your methods @woweezowee is it worth asking everyone to just stick to that format?
My number one album has been locked in for months.
My long list is currently 65 albums (out of 134 listened to so far according to my spreadsheet) with a couple more I know of to come in December. Cutting it down to 50 is going to be tough this year! In terms of the top end, the two contenders for the top both only came out in the last couple of months (days in one case!), up to then nothing had really stood out from the (albeit very good) crowd.