eleven albums i loved in 2025
the music that stuck with me this year
My new album, Heirloom, featuring a piano concerto I wrote for my father, is now available via Bandcamp. I’m also on tour; my tour dates are here.
Earlier this year, I stopped streaming music. Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine, an essential exposé on Spotify and its cynical business practices, had something to do with my decision. But as I wrote earlier this fall, it wasn’t just the ethics of streaming that bothered me. It was also the realization that I’d become a terribly distracted listener: with 100 million or more songs beckoning to me—a mere flick of the finger away—I always had the nagging feeling that there was something else I might be listening to.
But in the six-ish months since I shut down my Tidal account, I’ve experienced a renaissance in my listening habits. It brings me back to my adolescence, to the glory days of Tower Records and evening walks down Massachusetts Avenue during my freshman year of college, a bag full of musical spoils swinging loosely at my side. I’d ride the elevator to my dorm room and giddily tear the plastic off whatever I was most excited about, pop a disc into my five-CD changer (1999, baby!) and sit on the sagging bed, poring over liner notes.
Today, vinyl and digital purchases have replaced the plastic jewel cases of yore, but the excitement I harbor for new albums—and my tendency to listen to them repeatedly—reminds me of how I listened as a teenager. What follows are eleven records I fell in love with this year. To be clear, this is not a “best of” list. Art is not hierarchical, and beyond that, I know that there are dozens if not hundreds of brilliant records that simply did not cross my desk. Everything that appears is available on Bandcamp, which, for now, is the most ethical platform as far as artist compensation goes. If you’re curious about an album, I encourage you to purchase it. And now, without further ado: here, in no particular order, are my picks for 2025.
Wednesday - Bleeds
Karly Hartzman is a freaky poet of the porch, the Pepsi can pipe, the middle school dance hall. Her language is vivid and brutally efficient: “Went to a party in the county / Stokin’ bonfires with leaf blowers / He got you in the back of his car / Just your sneakers and your drawers,” she sings on “Townies” in a voice that is aching, tremulous, even uncontrolled. But her intention never falters. From a dense cloud of guitar feedback and pulsing thwacks on a floor tom, Bleeds begins with an urgency that is relentless through its dozen songs. On the opening cut, “Reality TV Argument Bleeds,” intricate guitar counterpoint makes an otherwise raucous chorus genteel, while “Phish Pepsi” finds a snare drum shuffle underpinning a midnight Mixolydian chant (“Rode my bike drunk off of a Four Loko”). Hartzman has drunk up every tradition in her midst: it’s as if Gillian Welch had a lovechild with Steven Malkmus, Weezer, and your uncle’s favorite metal band. The offspring is a true original.
billy woods - GOLLIWOG
“It’s a dark road, but it ain’t no accidents/ No coincidences, it’s all praxis,” raps billy woods a few lines into his irresistible nightmare of an LP, GOLLIWOG. On the surface, those lines might describe strategic disinvestment in marginalized communities, but the couplet also sums up woods’ obsessive lyrical precision: nothing is left to chance in this epic that ties British colonialism and American imperialism to the tropes of the horror film genre. The album opens with a collage of found sounds: first, the whir of a film projector, then a series of eerie pitched sweeps, and finally a celesta whose plodding major chords are downright chilling—the rictus grin of a clown who’s about to murder you. If you scare easily, leave a light on while you listen.
Jason Moran - Go to Your North
The myth of the lone genius is among the the most enduring (and unhelpful) stories we tell about artists: a solitary figure goes into the studio or the writing hut to battle with the blank page and later emerges victorious, having single-handedly wrestled a masterpiece into the world. If ours is an era that reveres individualism at the expense of community, Jason Moran’s Go to Your North is an album that pushes back. It is, instead, an object lesson in communal effort.
To be sure, Moran is a singularly brilliant artist. But what is achieved here, in collaboration with the bassist and arranger Ole Morten Vågan and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, elevates ten of Moran’s tunes in gloriously unexpected ways. On the opener “Foot Under Foot,” horn backgrounds emerge like a thunderhead that appears suddenly in an otherwise halcyon sky. On “Skitter In,” a brash shout-chorus dissolves into an extraterrestrial duet for voice and electronics, with the band sampled (live?), chopped up and quite literally skittering. Meanwhile, the epic “Wind,” which closes the album, moves from delicate chamber music to unhinged free improvisation before settling into a valedictory groove. In the end, groove gives way to a sublime coda whose harmonies wouldn’t be out place in the chamber music of Olivier Messiaen or Morton Feldman.
Hand Habits - Blue Reminder
If you’ve ever wondered what the lovechild of LA’s Laurel Canyon scene and ‘70s AM radio might sound like, Hand Habits’ sixth studio album might be it. A creative vehicle for singer-songwriter Meg Duffy, who moonlights as the guitarist for Perfume Genius, Hand Habits’ latest effort is lousy with earworms and ear candy. On song after song, Duffy unleashes hooks that lodge pleasurably in the brain, while the drum and guitar tones are to die for—the latter thanks in no small part to the work of engineer-producer Joseph Lorge, whom readers of this newsletter may know as my longtime co-conspirator on projects like Book of Travelers and Magnificent Bird. As the record progresses, the safe-ish territory of traditional pop song architecture gives way to the weird, with cameos from saxophonist Joshua Johnson nudging the music toward the experimental scene typified by L.A. stalwarts like Jeff Parker and Anna Butterss. A great album for a drive up the coast.
Chris Thile - Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Volume 2
When Punch Brothers frontman Chris Thile recorded the first volume of his Bach compendium, it was, to be honest, a little bit too perfect. No one has a better (rhythmic) pocket than Thile, and he seemed to be gunning to prove that Bach could be played, for the most part, without leaving the grid. There were long stretches that were thrilling, and it was pristinely recorded, but I’ll confess to having spent little time with the album. More than a decade later, he’s returned with an approach that is spontaneous, free, and unbearably moving. The other night, I listened to the C Major Sonata with my family in our living room and cried, silently, for about twenty minutes straight. For listeners who’ve not read about the album — as I didn’t before giving it a spin — I encourage you to just put the damn thing on. It will shock you. In my estimation, this album documents an artist who has come into full maturity. Thile knows who he is, and has been able to convey effortlessly, through his playing and the environments in which he recorded, a kind of personal credo: that music can be at once a humble social act while achieving god-like profundity and technical prowess.
Carla Kihlstedt - 26 little deaths
Carla Kihlstedt is a musical titan of our time, or, as my pal Chris Thile would say, she is a “hero friend.” Equally fierce as a singer, violinist, and composer, she found inspiration for 26 little deaths in Edward Gorey’s celebrated alphabet book, The Gashlycrumb Tinies. But where Gorey’s book is unrelentingly macabre (each page features a couplet describing the ghastly death of a child), Carla’s songs — one for each page of the book — are full of light and wonder. As she articulated during a recent performance of the piece, it’s as much a work about curiosity and imagination as it is about death.
For this project, she farmed out about half of the orchestrations—the piece is scored for an ensemble of a dozen players—to close friends and collaborators, all of whom are splendid arrangers. But don’t let that fool you: Carla’s own gifts as an orchestrator are top shelf and on display throughout the album. The world is better for having a recording of this work—hailed earlier this year by Joshua Kosman as a masterpiece—by Milwaukee-based new music outfit, Present Music, which commissioned and premiered the piece.
Linda May Han Oh (featuring Ambrose Akinmusire and Tyshawn Sorey) - Strange Heavens
What I love most about this album is the opportunity to hear the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey in modes radically different than the ones most often on display in their own work. Both are formidable composers with highly distinctive voices, but where 2024’s impeccable Owl Song found Akinmusire searching for a meditative, even anti-virtuosic ideal, his work on Strange Heavens is highly combustible. Meanwhile, to listen to any of Sorey’s recent concert music, which brings ruthless discipline to the pursuit of stillness, and then hear him simply Lay The Shit Down on a track like “Noise Machinery” is pure joy. Oh has written tunes that are deceptively simple and wildly generous: they’re great vehicles for her collaborators, and it’s astonishing how much color and invention she’s able to draw from a chordless trio. And yeah, she grooves hard, too.
Joshua Burnside - Teeth of Time
With music journalism on life support, it’s harder than ever to find out about new music. I feel fortunate, then, that a buddy texted me about a month ago with a link to the Irish singer-songwriter Joshua Burnside’s latest album, Teeth of Time. While the songs keep one foot in the realm of traditional folk music, the other foot is wayward, giving rise to electronics, noise, and found sound. To wit, the LP opens with what I presume to be an archival recording of a 1980s ad for a water bed system, narrated by a man with a thick Boston accent. In the same tune (the title track, “Teeth of Time/Mountain”), it’s unclear whether the appearance of a fiddle is played or sampled—it’s like breakbeat meets trad music. Burnside’s voice is rich with texture; in vocal quality he reminds me a bit of his American counterpart, Sam Amidon, another singer who manages to balance a reverence for the past with a bold vision for the future of folk music.
Qasim Naqvi - endling
Call me old-fashioned, but I love acoustic music. When I hear the words “modular synthesis,” a little part of me dies inside. Enter Qasim Naqvi, who has effectively cured me of this reactionary tendency. Endling is 100% modular synthesis, no acoustic instruments need apply. But in Naqvi’s hands, the synthesizer sounds deeply human. This record, in fact, moved me to tears. It was only after I’d given it a first spin that I read about Naqvi’s programmatic intent. From the album description on Bandcamp:
An endling is the final member of a species.
When an endling dies, the species is extinct…In Naqvi’s own words, the album tells the story of the last human being on the planet – the endling – across its eight compositions.
It’s a testament to the emotional depth of the music that I understood his theme without prior explanation. Indeed, with this ravishing body of work, Naqvi mourns the self-destructive nature of humanity, contemplating its possible end, and also its eventual rebirth.
Deerhoof - Noble and Godlike in Ruin
Like Naqvi’s endling, Deerhoof’s twentieth studio album, Noble and Godlike in Ruin, is preoccupied with the end of humanity. “Love to all my beautiful savages,” Satomi Matsuzaki sings at the beginning of the album: a lament, a plea, a eulogy. As ever, Deerhoof’s songs live on a knife’s edge of pristine construction and visceral danger. In these tunes, harmony and rhythm are stable just long enough to create an expectation that the band then smashes to bits through sly chromaticism and sudden meter shifts. But as always, Deerhoof makes it all feel inevitable. In the closer “Immigrant Songs,” Matsuzaki is “dreaming of a melody that goes up / a song about love.” The track is gradually overwhelmed by noise, and the final three minutes of the album sound like nothing so much as the end of the world.
Ambrose Akinmusire - honey from a winter stone
What is the future of American music? If I had to put my eggs in one basket, I might choose the basket of Ambrose Akinmusire, a musician of endless poise, curiosity, and pathos. On honey from a winter stone, he continues his search for new forms, bringing together pianist Sam Harris, drummer Justin Brown, synth goddess Chiquitamagic, Mivos Quartet, and the m.c. Kokayi. One of the most remarkable things about the album is how little Akinmusire plays. As a result, every entrance of his trumpet feels like an event. And even once he joins the party, he delivers considered bon mots rather than hogging the spotlight with unending monologues. As always is the case with the trumpeter, color and timbre convey as much emotional information as do the notes themselves: there are creaks and croaks, yelps and whispers, long tones and stutters. But just as soon as Akinmusire announces his presence, he ghosts, leaving his brilliant collaborators to shine.
In a press release, Akinmusire said that “this album is about the fears and struggles I personally face, as well as those many Black men endure: colorism, erasure, and the question of who gets to speak for my community, and why.” At a time when so much political art feels ham-fisted or weighed down by ideology, like honey from a winter stone wears its politics with as much subtlety and complexity as does each bar of music. Akinmusire is on a quest for something, and it’s a pleasure to be an observer on that ride.
A few other albums I really dug this year: The Westerlies - Paradise, Jeff Tweedy - Twilight Override, Ted Hearne & The Crossing - Farming, Miguel Zenón Quartet - Vanguardia Subterránea, Chris Weisman - Lightly, Madison Cunningham - Ace, Geese - Getting Killed.
Finally, a little plea: I had originally intended to paywall this post, having realized that it’s tough to maintain the pace of publishing I’d like to achieve here without a bit more compensation for my labor. About 150 of the 5,000 folks who receive this newsletter have paid subscriptions. I realize that for some of you, spending money on a bi-weekly blog may be either unaffordable or a poor use of your disposable income. I totally get it. But if you’re a longtime reader with a little cash to burn, I’d be most grateful for your support. In the end, I decided not to put a paywall on this missive because I really want all of you to discover some of the music I heard this year. I hope you enjoy it.
I’m in San Antonio this week doing a program with the Philharmonic that includes Heirloom, featuring my dad; If love will not swing wide the gates, featuring clarinetist Anthony McGill; a few songs of mine (I’ll sing); and a ditty called Rhapsody in Blue by up-and-comer George Gershwin. Then it’s home to Portland for six weeks of writing and recording. I hope to see some of you on the East Coast in February, when I’ll have a lot going on. Til soon…
Can’t believe I’ve never come across Joshua Burnside before!! Thank you for putting this together.
Little love, lotta love