Good Lord, here we go again! I can barely believe it myself, another year in the can! But enough chit chat, because it is time for the 16th edition of INAUDIBLE’S end of year faves.
Let’s kick 2025 to the goddamn curb and jump right in, shall we?
TOP 21 ALBUMS of 2025
(click on artist and album title to sample some tunes)
K-LONE – sorry i thought you were someone else
Hot off the presses, this is a last minute addition to the list, but an essential one. K-LONE aka Josiah Gladwell releases his third full-length on Anthony Naples’ lauded Incensio imprint and serves up deep house with a healthy dash of minimal tech throwback. And if you know me, you can be doggone sure that’s gonna be a tasty recipe for success.
Production value has always been top notch on anything K-LONE touches, but this one is smooth as fuuuuck. On the more four to the floor tracks, I’m hearing Theorem and Detroit techno vibes, I’m hearing Akufen and Force Inc. underneath his wall of signature lush, and it gets better with each spin. Heady, moving, and apparently written as a grieving process after the loss of his dad, sorry i thought you were someone else, is arguably Gladwell’s best record yet.
Give it a try: “Sslip”
***
Kokoroko – Tuff Times Never Last (Brownswood)
I heard Kokoroko test out a lot of these songs when I saw them play The Howard Theater last year in D.C. Early live versions of “Sweetie”, “Three Piece Suit”, and “Closer To Me”, quickly showed a shift towards a more subdued, but no less smooth vibe, than their stellar debut Could We Be More, which melded Afrobeat, soul, funk, smooth jazz, and highlife into one singular steady shake your ass groove.
This shift may be in part because founding member and saxophonist, Cassie Kinoshi, left to focus on her work with SEED ensemble. She was replaced by the excellent trombonist Anoushka Nanguay, and I’d say the major change on Tuff Times Never Last, is the addition of more vocals between Nanguay and Sheila Maurice-Grey.
Whereas in the past vocals were sprinkled in here and there to accentuate their sound, now every song features vocals. It is definitely not a bad thing, it just took me sometime to situate myself in their new world. But whatever I thought was a lack at first was anything but, because this album is a grower and has some absolutely beautiful and lush moments.
Check out: “Closer To Me”
***
The Besnard Lakes are The Ghost Nation (Full Time Hobby)
The ever-consistent Bezzies return with their 7th full-length, The Besnard Lakes are The Ghost Nation, and it may be their best suite of songs yet. The Montreal five-piece got together for a week at Lost River Studio nestled up in the Laurentian mountains, and effortlessly popped out 45 minutes of pure sonic wonder.
In a catalogue full of heaters, you wouldn’t think it possible that they still had the best song of their careers up their sleeves, but in my opinion, “Chemin de la Baie” might just be it. It’s unreal. Jace’s dark angel falsetto hits a note that can break you. It is very hard for me to listen to that song without a strong ASMR tingle down my spine, and a welling of tears in my eyes. No joke. It’s such a dreamy rock song, and has already received the remix treatment from Swervedriver (although the OG version is def better).
There are no skips on Ghost Nation, and it’s an album that reveals its beauty with repeated full listens. Take the time and you will be rewarded. This band has been the dark horse for twenty years now, and show us again and again how unique they are. Always a fantastic live show and always subtly reinventing themselves. Merci, Bezzies!
***
Deftones – private music (Reprise Records)
Unexpected? More like unavoidable. Chino et al. return for their tenth Deftones record and handily show us why they remain so vital and relevant in the hard rock universe. The songs on private music are heavy and aggressive, but they’re also so beautifully melodic with infectious hooks, cool time signatures, and low-end grooves aplenty.
Teenage me was all about the hesh — Tool, Clutch, Paw, Orange 9mm, Monster Magnet, Quicksand, Rage, and of course, Deftones. I saw them play a tiny club (The Shelter in Detroit) right when their first album Adrenaline came out, and remember the mosh pit being absolutely terrifying. My skinny ass steered clear, but the bombastic energy of “7 Words” was insanely visceral and exciting.
Fast forward (ahem) 30+ years, and I still can’t seem to shake off all that teenage angst, so it’s fantastic that this band is still able to tap into that energy and have put together such a solid collection of tracks that will easily help you shave a few seconds off your 10k jog. In a year, where I was constantly in need of purging emotions at the gym, this was one of my most played albums while exercising for sure…
Oh, and the last 1:45 of “souvenir” features some of the best ambient wash I’ve heard all year, for 90 seconds it’s like I’m listening to Keith Fullerton Whitman’s classic album Playthroughs.
***
Black Milk and Fat Ray – Food From the Gods (Computer Ugly)
I totally slept on Detroit producer and rapper Black Milk, but was glad I was tipped off to this collab with Fat Ray, because it uncovered a stack of excellent earlier solo albums (Everybody Good? and Fever in particular), not to mention, Milk’s fledgling production work with Motor City legends Slum Village.
Food From the Gods highlights classic boom-bap and J-Dilla influenced beats, with Fat Ray’s gruff and gravel delivery. Milk’s production is immersive and immaculate. There are moments where Fat Ray has a touch of DOOM to his flow and there’s some definite rough edges, but Milk’s beats work well for him to spit to.
The album also features three of Detroit’s finest rappers: Danny Brown (in his low register the whole time), the criminally underrated Guilty Simpson, and the always hilarious Bruiser Wolf.
Check out: “Gotta Know”
***
Squid – Cowards (Warp Records)
UK art rock post-punk outfit, Squid, returned this year with their third album and have put out their most dynamic and accessible record yet. Even though their two earlier albums were hyped and acclaimed and released on one of my all-time fave labels, their music didn’t quite hit me until now.
Cowards is a rich album with dark themes and it reminds me a lot of Slint, but with groovier bass and moments of youthful, frenetic elation to push out the impending doom. Lead singer, Ollie Judge, definitely has a Brian McMahan circa The For Carnation vibe to his voice (with a touch of Stephen Malkmus for good indie rock measure). “Blood on the Boulders”, for example, is 100% a reinterpretation of Slint’s “Don, Aman”.
I was listening to Cowards on repeat for two months and had tickets to see their spring show at The Black Cat in D.C. but ended up missing it due to my mother’s illness, and after that I never went back to the album again. Perhaps it reminded me too much of that uncertain and difficult period of learning that my mother was dying and that it was going to happen way faster than anyone wanted. Who knows, but I think if I had seen them live it would have been absolutely fantastic and transformative. It may have even pushed this album to the top three of the year.
It wasn’t until seeing the album in my 2025 Most Listened list, that I went back and revisited it and remembered how goddamn good it is. But in the end, simply, I think what I like most about Squid is that they’re just a band of young friends who are trying to write cool music and constantly evolve. You can hear the budding creativity in every song on this record, and I have no doubt they’re are only going to continue going up from here.
***
billy woods – Golliwog (Backwoodz Studioz)
One half of lauded rap duo, Armand Hammer, billy woods follows up his last sterling solo effort, Maps with the bristling GOLLIWOG, a dark and cacophonous, yet ultimately poetic, tour de force of outsider hip hop.
To be honest, I wanted to put Armand Hammer’s Mercy here instead, because I find the way woods and ELUCID ebb and flow together remarkable, but GOLLIWOG’s somber themes were hyper-relevant as I listened to this record in the last weeks of my mother’s life, and the track “Lead Paint Test” with ELUCID and Cavalier was one that really hit me at that time with its theme of place, and the multitude of memories your childhood home can hold.
I saw woods play Union Stage in D.C. on The Golliwog Tour and the crowd was rapt. He essentially did a 90 minute best of setlist and I swear the dude standing behind me knew every single track word for mot for word. It was a great show, but in the end I preferred the Armand Hammer gig I saw in Montreal in 2024 for two reasons: one, I think ELUCID is incredibly underrated and I love his flow and delivery, and two, because so many tracks feature guest rappers, a solo woods show ends up feeling a bit snippety, and many times I found myself really wanting to hear the next verse instead of the song stopping halfway through.
Small grievance though, because billy woods is a rapper-poet who has been on a prolific run of 6 straight quality releases (2 solo, 2 with Kenny Segal, and 2 as Armand Hammer) in the last 3 years. He’s a great writer, and I’ll be just as stoked to read his memoir as listen to his music whenever the book drops.
***
Open Mike Eagle – Neighborhood Gods Unlimited (Auto Reverse)
Hell yeah, Mike, thank you for this one. If you have ever read this useless blog in the past, you know I love hip hop, but my end of year lists would probably trend more to the electronic side of the music spectrum. This year though, more than ever, I needed to be transported out of my thoughts and into someone else’s, and Open Mike Eagle, and Black Milk, and Oddisee, and woods and ELUCID, and my AOTY (no spoilers!), really helped me out in that respect. They let me hop on the treadmill, get lost in the beats and their world, and try to spit their lyrics with them.
And Open Mike Eagle had me constantly chuckling and feeling like I was just chatting with a friend who was trying to cheer me up and make me LOL with his creative turns of phrase, irreverent yet reverent subject matter, and butter smooth rhymes. Might be that we’re the same age, and have similar cultural touchstones, but I immediately felt a connection with him, from the opening track about conspiracies and the internet, “woke up knowing everything”, all the way to the somber Kenny Segal produced final track “unlimited skull voices”, about all of those friends and fam that are gone but never forgotten.
A tiny snippet of his lyrics that are seemingly always in my head: “I yell fuck that! even when I’m by myself / I hit the high notes, even when I’m by myself / I drink whiskey, even when I’m by myself / I do dance moves, even when I’m by myself / I tell lies, even when I’m by myself…”
Super good shit. Check it svp.
***
Cameron Winter – Heavy Metal (Partisan Records)
Cameron Winter, the $0 man, had a massive 2025. His band Geese have no doubt catapulted to the festival circuit with the acclaim of their third full-length, Getting Killed, but before all that, he quietly released this weirdo solo album, Heavy Metal.
I started getting into it around late March, but once I found out my mom was sick, I couldn’t listen without breaking down and I had to put it aside. Just the general mood of the piano in “Drinking Age” and “$0” is still enough to set me off, let alone the dark subject matter and deadpan lyrics like “dying and dying, you used up your dying day . . . you used up your grave”, were hitting a little to close to home.
So I shelved it and kept the steady stream of hip hop flowing in my ears … but, eventually at some point in the fall, I went back to it, and I’m glad I did, because it is a challenging yet rewarding album showcasing youthful abandon with a compulsive lo-fi-DIY-DGAF attitude that hums above the whole project. Heavy Metal is the perfect storm of a young musician who had a wellspring of ideas that he needed to get on tape ASAP before they flew away like some strange dream …
This has obviously been a challenging year for me, and also very surreal. In a lot of ways, I’ve probably felt the most spiritual I have since I was a child, closer to the idea of the afterlife or heaven or even magic lol. And there’s something extremely powerful when Winter convinces us, with a shit-eating grin, at the end of “$0” that God is real. It really struck a chord with me, as well as, the song’s truly lovely and extended piano outro. When asked about this in an interview with The Guardian, Winter nonchalantly replied something like, “every once in a while ya gotta give it up for the big guy, ya know?”
My mom was a devout Catholic, faithful till the very end, and I grew up going to church every Sunday, altar boy and all that. There was a bit of magic to church as a child, but of course, I questioned it, abandoned it, decided Nietzsche and Sartre were more on point with the whole God is dead, man creates himself rhetoric, and shunned the tired idea of organized religion. However, I never went full atheist. To me there was always still something, nebulous, but there somewhere.
And this year, that sentiment has grown. During the first few months after my mom’s death, I could feel her vibrating in every tree and bird and blade of grass every time I went outside, and Winter has helped push this feeling a bit further in some small way, and maybe even a bit closer to understanding my mom’s unwavering faith in the big guy. And that’s a hell of a thing for music to do, so thank you, heavy metal man, and get ready for the fame ride you’re about to blast off into. Cheers.
***
Blood Orange – Essex Honey (RCA)
Dev Hynes returns as Blood Orange with his first album since 2018 and dropped Essex Honey, a stunning long-player that helped me grieve the loss of my mom more than any other record this year. Could be in part, that Hynes wrote this album after the death of his own mother in 2023, but it could also be that this album is the work of a master artist who is able to blend so many disparate styles, genres, elements, and artists into an exciting and highly emotive sonic journey with complete ease.
Much of my personal grieving has been done at the YMCA this year. I found solace in cardio and listening to music and physically pushing myself. It was and is still not uncommon to see me crying on the stationary bike as I blast out a 10 mile ride as fast as my little legs can muster. I literally cried just today at the Y while listening to Essex Honey as inspiration for this mini-review. Sometimes it’s total ugly cry action, but I honestly do not even care, it’s one of the ways I have chosen to grieve and I need it. Music is such a trigger and this album has been a godsend.
For the first three months after my Mom died I could barely write more than a text message. I was a bit worried, but once the summer ended and the new school year started and I went back to work, I began listening to this album and writing again. I wrote a series of poems (a form I usually never mess with) about my mom that were extremely helpful when it came to processing and mourning and reminiscing, and Essex Honey was on repeat for the two months it took me to complete them.
It’s an album in the classic sense, best listened from start to finish, full of so many earwormy hooks and melodies it’s kind of crazy. There’s a laundry list of guest vocalists from Caroline Polachek to Lorde to Daniel Caesar to Zadie Smith to Brendan Yates from Turnstile to Tirzah and Eva Tolkin, and the list goes on. But in the end, it’s all simply a perfect mood board of Hynes’ eclectic sound and vision. Sweeping and grand, yet subtle and moving, Essex Honey, is so worthy of repeated listens. Check it.
***
Aesop Rock – Black Hole Superette (Rhymesayers)
I’ve been listening to Aesop Rock since the year 2000 and in 2025 I am finally giving The Impossible Kid his long-deserved flowers. Aesop Rock has quietly become one of the scene’s most respected and legendary rappers. He has the biggest unique vocabulary in his lyrics of any rapper out there, which isn’t even a flex at this point, it’s just the way he writes his rhymes. Aes is a storyteller first and a rapper second, an artist in the truest sense, he’s become a fantastic producer over the years, and with his tenth studio effort, Black Hole Superette, he’s released his most immersive record yet — both lyrically and from a production standpoint.
Aes has been on a whole ‘nother level since 2020, having put out 5 albums in the course of the last half decade (and two this year alone), with each one seeming to get a little closer to the heart of what he’s all about. When I first heard “Daylight” and “9-5ers Anthem” back in 2001, I was pretty sure I had heard hip hop’s peak. I was floored by the Blockhead beats, Aes’ flow, and straight for the gut existential subject matter. It was revelatory, I was 22 years old and it was everything I was looking for in music and life.
Flash forward 25 years and Aesop Rock is older, wiser, stubborn, more jaded, but overall his optimism wins out against the self-saboteur constantly chirping in his head. The main theme of Black Hole Superette is aging and memories and trying to look back with no judgement and accepting that we are just a speck of dust on a speck of dust, a tourist forever trying to make sense of our very messed up world.
Aesop Rock has shown that he can do this shit all by his lonesome, the rhymes, the feels, the beats, his own unique universe, but he cherry picks some key guests who all deliver their finest for him: Open Mike Eagle, Lupe Fiasco, Homeboy Sandman, Armand Hammer, and Hanni El Khatib, all help flesh out Aesop’s best album yet.
He ain’t anywhere near from calling it quits, so let’s see where he goes after he turns 50. Thanks Aes for keeping it steady for a quarter, let’s flip for another. Yessss!
***
VERY HONORABLE AUDIBLES (click on title to sample a track)
Oddisee – En Route EP (Mello Music Group)
Four effortless jams from the DMV darling, Oddisee. As I’ve said before, the man never quits hustling and is always improving his craft. His rich production and self-referential rhymes have become a style all his own. He tours relentlessly around the globe, so please go see him and his band Good Compny if they are in your neck of the woods. You won’t be disappointed.
Tortoise – Touch (International Anthem)
Chicago post-rock legends, Tortoise return with their first album in almost a decade. Early singles were really exciting but overall the album doesn’t hit any of their earlier heights. Still, they are one of my all-time fave groups and any new music is always most welcome. Don’t miss them on tour in 2026!
Armand Hammer & The Alchemist – Mercy (Backwoodz Studioz)
Armand Hammer team with The Alchemist for Mercy and recapture their earlier chemistry with ease. This is a much more melodic and less anxious Armand Hammer album compared to Diabetic Test Strips from two years prior, and it helps bookend billy woods’ big year on a high note.
***
Alex G – Headlights (RCA)
Indie hero Alex G jumps from the bedroom to the big leagues and puts out his shiniest set of tunes yet. Doesn’t hit me as hard as God Bless The Animals, but it was a steady grower over the course of the year.
***
Facta – GULP (Wisdom Teeth)
K-Lone’s partner and labelmate, Facta dropped this short but sweet set of easy dance-floor steppers in the summer. It’s so much fun to listen to and you can’t help but want to shake your big fat gyatttttt.
***
Water From Your Eyes – It’s A Beautiful Place (Matador)
The tireless indie superstars Rachel and Nate turn up the distortion and show us that they can literally try anything and it’ll still sound super cool.
***
Hayden Pedigo – I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away (Mexican Summer)
This one reminds me of William Tyler’s guitar based Americana stuff, and it was played often in the car on our summer road trip from DC to Montreal. I think simplicity is key here and the songs where Pedigo is not trying to show off are definitely the best ones on the album.
***
Steve Hauschildt – Aeropsia (Simul Records)
After a six-year hiatus, Steve Hauschildt returns with a gorgeous and sweeping suite of synth based ambience. Easy to drift off and float up and away…
***
Rochelle Jordan – Through The Wall (EMPIRE)
Deep in the pocket, smooth and groovy R&B jams from Kaytranada collaborator, Rochelle Jordan. She brims with confidence and swagger and the production is on point. Kitchen dance party, anyone?
Lord of the Isles – Signals Aligned (Dusk Delay)
The underrated and always consistent, Neil McDonald, returns under his Lord Of The Isles alias and drops an hour of peak ambient minimal inflected house. Good stuff I say.
***
All right then, dear friends! I listened to many more albums over the course of 2025, but these were the ones that hit the hardest. So, that’s a wrap! Let’s kick the Year of the Snake in a ditch and focus on what’s ahead…
Be kind, be vulnerable, be honest, try not to ever take anyone or anything for granted, keep sifting through the muck, and keep your ears wide open.
Love ya, ML.
***
INAUDIBLE 