Rankstravaganza: My 30 Favorite Songs of 2025
This time a year ago, I had a few theories as to why my annual list was dominated by Pop Music With a Capital P. One was that 2024 was just an exceptionally good year for music, and modern pop in particular. That seems to have coalesced into the general consensus on 2024.
Meanwhile the consensus on 2025 has more or less congealed into, “What the heck happened?” Albums flopped. Charts filled up with prior years’ songs. People were so baffled by the lack of a clear feel-good hit that Stereogum’s readers named a sad alt-country ballad the Song of the Summer.
For me, the story of 2025 was falling further and further into the singularity that is #MusicSky. I participated in even more polls and challenges on Bluesky dot com. I got introduced to so much great music that I have a backlog of *checks notes* 261 songs (!) that I fully I intend to download and add to my old-man-who-refuses-to-stream collection of digital music files living on a hard drive. Only a handful of these are new releases, but the fact remains: I am drowning in a sea of fantastic music recommendations.
And looking at my Top 30 tunes, this year is a bit more balanced. There are pop megastars, indie darlings, legacy acts I’ve loved for decades, and deep underground unknowns. There are songs of the political moment and mindlessly enjoyable fluff. There are not as many East Bay musicians this time, which is a bummer. And I need to branch out and explore more of what’s happening outside the Anglosphere. I’ll get to that as soon as I go through that 261-song backlog and the 10 additional tracks that have come to my attention while I was typing this paragraph.
Per usual, I’ve got playlists for your listening convenience in Spotify form below and YouTube Music form here.
30. “Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down,” Margo Price
The best advice of the year came via a traditional outlaw-country twanger full of playful wordplay. While on the surface level the lyrics are about Price’s struggles with the country music industry, there’s no question it has broader appeal in 2025 … something Price herself acknowledged when she performed it on Jimmy Kimmel Live (one day before ABC briefly pulled the show off the air) and added the line: “Keep all those fascists underground.” The Boomer folkies were singing this song at my town’s No Kings rally in October, and it’s essential that we lift them up and support them.
29. “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station,” CMAT
Irish singer-songwriter Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson was one of the fresh new faces I was introduced to during the #PeoplesPop24 year-end music poll a year ago, and this song has certainly captured even more people’s attention. It’s an intrepid vocal performance supported by a krautrock groove, loads of existential doubt, and an unforgettable hook. Speaking as your average U.S. listener who had to remind himself who Oliver is and what a petrol station is, and look up what they have to do with each other, fighting the urge to be a bitter crank makes perfect sense to me.
28. “Catch These Fists,” Wet Leg
I promise not every song on this list is going to be an expression of female frustration, exasperation, and/or pugnaciousness, though this won’t be the last, either. Might show up at No. 1 even. Anyway, this is an unrestrainable wildcat of song. Yah. Yah. Yah.
27. “Niamos! (Chandrilian Club Mix),” Nicholas Britell
Film composer Britell understood the assignment for Andor Season 2: Write an EDM banger that hints at a creeping despair under a sheen of euphoria that a mom at an alien wedding might conceivably dance to if she drank enough. (As an aside: What a performance by Genevieve O’Reilly as Mon Mothma. Not easy to communicate that many layers of emotion with no dialogue. Watch the full, unembeddable scene here. ) Other mixes of “Niamos!” turned up in seasons 1 and 2, the idea being that the song is an inescapable, galaxy-spanning pop smash during the franchise’s nascent-fascism timeframe. Niamos was introduced as a luxury resort planet, so the Earth equivalent of this song would be a party track where the only lyrics are “Ibiza!”
26. “Bloom Baby Bloom,” Wolf Alice
This little rock ‘n’ roll tune goes hard and takes a lot of unexpected twists and turns along the way, including, but not limited to:
- A pentatonic piano line to kick things off
- Outta nowhere harsh vocals on the pre-chorus pulling back into melodic sweetness on the chorus
- Electric guitar trill break!
- The fact that it’s not titled “Boom Baby Boom,” as everyone in my family thought for a month or so
25. “Mandingo,” Wu-Tang x Mathematics
Look, I’m a simple man. I want my Wu-Tang to reference ’70s exploitation and kung fu movies; feature killer rhymes from the likes of Raekwon, Method Man & Cappadonna; and to have an unstoppable RZA-(co)produced beat.
24. “That Was Juarez, This Is Alpine,” Robbie Fulks
Fulks transforms a travelogue—an early-morning snapshot from a train trip through South Texas with his grandson—into a poetic, breezy, folk-rock microcosm of everything right and wrong with America 2025. Check these lyrics:
Through the desert we're sailing The salesman still railing At the blue-pilled, the brown-skinned, the poor Only the steward has a smile and a kind word Give her a dollar and close the door Come sit by me now, we’ll climb on the cloud And drift off to some storybook time With regrets to our fine fellow men These are our people, but they are not our kind
When I keep saying that Fulks is one of our greatest living songwriters, this is what I’m talking about.
Here is what Fulks himself had to say about the song:
The subjects are terribly abstract on their face: personal destinies tied to points of origin, blue v. red social dis-ease in the US, privilege, immigration, historical trauma. I’m not certain how well it turned out, but since one line leads to the next, it’s hummable … .
23. “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter,” Jeff Tweedy
Track 1, Disc 3 from Tweedy’s new solo album. It doesn’t sound all that sonically different from Wilco but has a lovely, loose, freewheeling energy about it. It was a real treat to see Tweedy perform this live at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass with his sons (plus a couple other Chicago-area ringers), complete with the blasé “look out” before the guitar riff and crazed snarl after each “DEAD DON’T DIE” chant. Tweedy said he wrote this during the pandemic, thinking about how much he missed all the things he hates about being in the audience for live music.
22. “Fantastic Tomb,” Ty Segall
If you count his various side projects, Segall has released TEN albums so far this decade. The. Man. Can’t. Be. Stopped. “Surely,” you say, “he is bound to run out of exquisitely crafted melodic garage-rock soon.” WRONG!
21. “Opalite,” Taylor Swift
Ophelia who? This ought to be The Hit, if you ask me. Is it a bit silly and pretentious to say onyx night and opalite sky when you can just say black night and golden sunrise? Sure. Look, I don’t need to explain myself to you for enjoying a catchy-as-hell song.
20. “Beat The Charge,” Bruiser Wolf
That delivery tho! Even as someone who remains somewhat ignorant about the full landscape of hip-hop, I feel fairly confident saying no one has ever rapped quite like Detroit’s Bruiser Wolf. Iconoclastic, witty, refreshing, and, above all else, GOOFY. Hip-hop needs talented goofballs.
19. “Gold Rush,” Lucius
The funky bass line is nice, but the L.A. indie-pop band’s strength & focus has always been the harmonies of dual vocalists Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe, and boy do they knock it out of the park on this one. Truly a sugar rush.
18. “Best Laid Plans,” The Beths
It’s always tough to zero in on a single standout track from the Kiwi indie rockers, given that their albums always have about nine to 10 incredible guitar-pop nuggets. This is my favorite from their latest, though. It’s a combination of a) an incredible bridge; b) being a perfect closing track, as it sums up the album’s themes; and c) GLISSANDO GUITAR EFFECT. Pretty sure it’s a guitar. It’s a guitar when they play it live. Regardless, GLISSANDO.
17. “Sit Down,” Chris Church
Church is from a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and has been doing the singer-songwriter thing since for 30 years. This year was the first I ran across him, though. This track is some polished, propulsive pop-rock. I hear Posies or Sloan, but he’s clearly got a wide range of influences. (Not the last time you’re gonna see Posies mentioned in this countdown, by the way.)
16. “My Full Name,” Madison Cunningham
I’ve started noticing Cunningham everywhere. She keeps turning up as a featured guest vocalist. In fact, she might turn up later on this list. This is her first solo single since she won the Grammy for Best Folk Album. An absolutely gorgeous ballad with a gorgeous string arrangement to match.
15. “Salome,” The Ophelias
This one is for fans of feminist revisionist biblical allusions. Salome, I’m sure you all remember from the Gospel of Mark, was the dancing princess who requested John the Baptist’s head on a platter. The Cincinnati band utilizes the lore of her name—as artists and composers have for centuries—to craft a dark, dangerous & “archtypal” alt-rock anthem (produced by Julien Baker).
14. “Gut Feelings,” Debbii Dawson
Dawson has become a favorite in our ABBA-loving household (for reasons that are immediately obvious to just about anyone who listens to her stuff). She released several singles this year; this one rose to the top for me. Me and the family will just be over here, patiently waiting for an album.
13. “Winter in LA,” Japanese Breakfast
Of all the worthy options on Michelle Zauner’s fourth album, this melancholy pop-folk confessional sprung straight from the Laurel Canyon psyche gets my endorsement. It’s the best Aimee Mann song Aimee Mann never wrote.
12. “Let Me Go,” Deep Sea Diver [feat. Madison Cunningham]
See? I told you Cunningham would be back. Her contribution is a big part of why—among several dark, female-led alt-rock contenders on my list (see: Wolf Alice, Wet Leg, The Ophelias)—this one rose to the top and nearly made the Top 10 overall. All credit due to Deep Sea Diver singer-songwriter Jessica Dobson, but for me it’s all about the harmonies and the way their vocals split, land on slightly dissonant notes, then come back together in unison. It’s a dramatic vocal arrangement that requires confident singers.
11. “Will It To Be Real,” Kevin Nichols
Sometime in the last four years, Nichols relocated to L.A. from Oakland (which is how/why I discovered him). But he’s still tuning down his guitar and making grungy, melodic alt-rock. This is one of two songs on my list that have so few plays that Spotify doesn’t even bother to quantify them. But if you’re at all an acolyte of the soft-loud-soft-loud aesthetic, you really should be playing this.
10. “Born Again,” Lisa [feat. Doja Cat & Raye]
My initial, ignorant reaction was: “You can’t go by a single name if it’s something as common as ‘Lisa.’ That only works if you’re a Madonna or Cher or Prince.” But then I was informed this is Lisa of Blankpink fame, and I was like: “Ah! Well that’s surely allowed.” Anyway, I’m fully supportive of this international effort to make disco bang again.
9. “A Stone Only Rolls Downhill,” OK Go
I was tempted to post the official audio version to emphasize how I think this smooth downer jam stands on its own without a high-concept video, and how the lyrics have something to say about the regressive disaster that is 2025, but fuck it—it’s OK Go. The video is trippy and mind-blowing and cool as hell.
8. “Heathcliff,” Snocaps
Considering that the Crutchfield sisters dropped their surprise album with less than nine weeks left in the year, it’s pretty impressive that this track ascended to the Top 10 in my play-based rankings. And, look, I’ve enjoyed Katie’s foray into Americana as much as anyone, but it turns out I missed old-school Waxahatchee indie rock. Allison’s contributions (especially this singalong) just take it to the next level. And MJ Lenderman‘s rudimentary drumming, too, I guess?
7. “Living Lo-Fi,” Cheekface
The catchiest, most sardonic band this side of They Might Be Giants to pick up the absurdist-pop torch and wave it around wildly. I think the L.A. trio’s superpower, aside from the unbridled irreverence, lies in singer-songwriter Greg Katz’s mastery of poetic meter. There’s some primal prosody in the string of trochees that is, “Are you using frozen food as medical first aid?” America’s Local Band is surely a bit much for certain people, but for the rest of you nerds I can’t recommend it highly enough.
6. “The Subway,” Chappell Roan
While certainly more subtle than “Good Luck Babe,” this is yet another data point that Roan knows exactly how build to an emotional climax with bravura vocals. She reportedly was reluctant to record a studio version of this, believing that it was better for her to just continue performing it live. I’m glad that she changed her mind, and glad to see that it seems to be picking up some momentum heading into the end of the year.
5. “Go Anywhere,” Sally Green [feat. Kurupt]
Bump that funk and get yo freak on with some perfectly executed, pure nostalgic ’80s R&B. Green is an independent Oakland artist who also plays saxophone apparently? Can confirm: Her whole album is just this good.
I’m pleasantly surprised by how popular this track is. It’s not like it’s broken through to any sort of mainstream success, but It has somehow racked up more than 1 million plays on both YouTube and Spotify, which is like double many of the Respected Indie Rock tracks on this list.
4. “End of the World,” Miley Cyrus
I say this as a longtime Miley skeptic, but this is a delightful entry in the growing catalog of 2020s downer-pop, with just a hint of 1970s flavoring thrown in for good measure. I don’t love the lyrics about “throw a party like McCartney with some help from my friends” (whither Ringo?), but I love pretty much everything else about it.
3. “Long After Midnight,” Flock Of Dimes
Way back when, Wye Oak used to get tagged as alt-country, which always seemed a stretch—though perhaps rooted in a kernel of truth. The aching pedal steel on this, from Jenn Wasner’s latest solo outing, makes that truth a bit more apparent.
This track comes early in what is clearly a highly personal folk-rock concept album about co-dependency. Over the course of the album, she gradually comes to terms with her own hero complex.
2. “Landslide,” Electric Rime
The other track on this list that Spotify doesn’t even give a total playcount for? The other Posies-influenced act? In both cases, we’ve arrived. I’m not even sure where or how I ran across the Ukranian quartet, but I was immediately taken with this galvanic alt-rock offering. This band started work on an EP weeks before the invasion and finally released it this year. The English lyrics are at times a bit clunky but also capture the heartbreak and fear that comes with living in the shadow of war, the general sense that the world is teetering on the edge, and the hope that there’s still a chance things can turn around.
1. “Manchild,” Sabrina Carpenter
It happened again, didn’t it? Once again, my favorite song of the year is a genuine hit with genuine radio airplay by a genuine female pop superstar. And once again, I really can’t fully blame this on having a near-teen daughter in the house. I would have listened to this song anyway.
While this treads much of the same sonic ground as “Please Please Please” and leans even harder into the “What Would Dolly Do?” playbook, there are far worse instincts that Carpenter could follow. It’s a funny and biting satire of 21st century gender dynamics. And the music video is a bizarre, expertly edited, absolute blast that admittedly enhanced my appreciation for the song. And when all that comes together in one 3 1/2-minute package, what’s an aging music-enthusiast dad to do? I swear, the song chose me.
