I had to re-read how I introduced this feature the past few years to make sure I didn’t repeat myself. But, here we are again at the start of a new year and it’s the best time to recap our favorite albums of 2025. Below you’ll find the contributor best of 2025 list with blurbs written by the staff talking about why we loved these albums. Each album title links to a streaming page so you can check out anything you may have missed. There’s also a playlist featuring a song from every album on this list, and a few staff members have shared their individual lists and some commentary in their blogs.
The final list is the combination of ten contributors and represents what each of these individuals liked most over the past year. It’s really that simple. So, before commenting something negative or mean, please think about the people behind the lists and the time spent putting together something that’s supposed to be fun and represent what the contributors to this website enjoyed the most over the past twelve months.
As always, thanks for spending 2025 with us, and I hope you find something new to check out and love.
Note: Check the bottom of this post for links to individual contributor lists.
Top Albums of 2025
1. Deftones – Private Music
I’ve been writing for AbsolutePunk.net/chorus.fm for over twenty years now. And in that time span, Deftones have released five records and only two of them made our list (Koi No Yokan was #22 in 2012) and Ohms clocked in at 13 in 2020. So when the Sacramento-bred quintet’s 10th album private music showed up at #1 on our 2025 list, as someone who registered on AP.net in 2004 with the username “The White Pony,” I got on my Meek Mill shit immediately. As lifelong fan of Deftones, their recent trajectory into the pop culture zeitgeist is fascinating to me. Whether it’s because TikTok discovered “Cherry Waves” during the height of the shoegaze revival (despite the band not being overtly that) or a new generation discovering the greatness of songs like “My Own Summer (Shove It)” and “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)” (seriously Target and Urban Outfitters are stocking multiple copies of Around The Fur in their vinyl section in 2025, it led to the band selling out NBA arenas this past spring without a new album to support. That’s fucking insane, especially for a band that originated in the late 80s, peaked in the early 2000s, and have had turmoil as an unofficial sixth member for most the last two decades.
2020’s Ohms served as as the entry point for a lot of new fans starving for something new during the pandemic and Deftones have steadily built up that aura without doing much in the five years since. So when the band started teasing what would be private music in late summer, it stood to wonder how they would capitalize on their newfound popularity or even if they would. Maybe a more dedicated dip into that shoegaze sound? Would they become a legacy band and play the well-tread hits? Plainly speaking, was the music going to be good?
Duh, of course it was always going to be good – the worst thing you could even say about a Deftones record is “yeah, it’s pretty good” (ahem Gore). But what makes private music extraordinary and the best record of 2025 is that it’s a showcase of a band in total control of their sound, their aura, and their craft. Oh, and also they have Chino Moreno and other bands don’t. The ugly tension between prettiness and heaviness has always been a staple of Deftones music and it’s done here in exhilarating fashion (“locked club” and “cXz”). They also dropped a fucking fire rap-metal track in “cut hands” for the ‘heads out here while still giving fans who loved “Sextape” from 2010’s Diamond Eyes a new slice of dreamy shoegaze in “i think about you all the time.” Moreno at the apex of his vocal powers on “souvenir” and “milk of the madonna” in between songs like “infinite source” and “departing the body” that showcase the perfect collision of Frank Delgado’s opulent keyboard and sample work amidst Stephen Carpenter’s latest and greatest crushing nine-string guitar riffs.
Deftones have always had an instantly recognizable sound for the past few decades but lately they’ve discovered how to effortlessly blend it with new experiments, challenges, and frameworks while avoiding the pitfalls that may have hampered some ideas in the past.
private music is the type of record every band strives for by album #10. This is the most in control the band has ever been with their sound – a sound that’s been often imitated (more than ever now) yet never replicated. private music delivers on the fresh hype and more, a true blessing to get a record of this caliber in 2025. – Drew Beringer
2. Hayley Williams – Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party
There’s a certain mystique to the approach that Hayley Williams took on her third solo album. From the free release of the first 17 songs via a mysterious website, to multiple fans creating various playlists to guess the official tracklisting, there were plenty of buzzworthy things going on in Ms. Williams’ camp. The crisp songwriting is evident from the Paramore frontwoman, and the record continues down the path of self-recovery, much like her previous two solo albums. What sets Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party apart from its predecessors in Hayley Williams’ discography is the vast number of stylistic choices, vocal cadence changes, and the professional production has all the makings of a massive LP. While Williams showcases her vulnerability of tracks like “Whim” where she croons “I want to be in love” on the chorus, she also leaves room for a confident swagger on “Good Ol’ Days” where she sings, “You could call me Ms. Paramore.” While Hayley Williams is best known for her work in Paramore, this album shows that she’s more than capable of letting her own star burn bright on her most accomplished solo effort to date. – Adam Grundy
3. Thrice – Horizons/West
It’s no secret that Thrice have been a favorite of not just this community, but the scene at large, for nearly 25 years at this point. It’s also no surprise that after a handful of masterpieces released in the mid-late 2000s, the band seemed ready to rest, reflect, and begin releasing music more strictly on their own terms. Some releases, like 2016’s To Be Everywhere is To Be Nowhere, successfully captured the band’s best habits and felt like a confident, albeit safe, victory lap, while others, such as 2021’s Horizons/East, saw the band still striving to find their footing in new, experimental, and occasionally even proggy or psychedelic ground.
It is such a delight, then, to report that Horizons/West finds the band operating at their most exciting, muscular, and boldest in nearly 15 years. The term “career-spanning” may get thrown around a bit too much in music-writer circles, but it’s hard to find a better term for an album that contain both the riffy, electronic-tinged lead single “Gnash,” as well as pure, energetic throwbacks like “Holding On.” Vocally, Dustin Kensrue has never sounded better, and the band’s rhythm section has never felt tighter, but what truly separates Thrice from other veteran scene acts is the quality of the songwriting. Look no further than the final one-two punch of “Vesper Light” and “Unitive West,” the former pairing Kensrue’s beautiful falsetto with atmospheric verses and a vicious chorus riff while the latter opts to close the album on a borderline-ambient note. These songs are not just late-career highlights; they are new instant classics from a band that has been around for two and a half decades, proof that Thrice still deserve to be topping lists like this, and a damn good argument for why they should continue. – Aaron Mook
4. Anxious – Bambi
It’s a bit hard to believe that Connecticut emo band Anxious are only on their second studio album with Bambi since the material that comes pouring out of the speakers is filled with slick hooks, great musicianship, and incredible songwriting. One of the first early standouts in a crowded 2025, Bambi solidified Anxious as major players in the emo/punk scene and led to prominent placements on tours like the fall stint with Hot Mulligan and Arm’s Length. Songs like “Some Girls” and “Counting Sheep” are rich in 90’s Alt Rock radio sensibilities, and allow for Anxious to connect with wider audiences for the foreseeable future. If their debut record of Little Green House was Anxious announcing that they had arrived, Bambi is the album that makes the statement that they’re in it for the long haul. – Adam Grundy
5. Turnstile – Never Enough
Following up the massive success of GLOW ON seemed like an impossible feat. Yet somehow TURNSTILE delivered another killer album with NEVER ENOUGH. It builds on the sounds and themes of GLOW ONmaking it feel like a companion record in many ways. Here, they continue pushing the boundaries of hardcore by weaving in ambient and electronic soundscapes into their sound. They also experiment with disco-pop on the infectious “SEEIN’ STARS,” become lounge lizards on “CEILING,” and channel Black Sabbath on the gritty “SLOWDIVE.” Meanwhile ragers like “DULL” and “BIRDS” proves that the Baltimore rockers haven’t completely abandoned their hardcore roots.
Longtime fans may miss “the old TURNSTILE,” but their ever-evolving sound makes them one of rock’s most exciting bands. On NEVER ENOUGH, the band continues to push the boundaries of their sound. They take the core of hardcore to places you could never imagine making them exciting and fresh. With their last two records, the band has shown they can’t be pigeonholed. They’re going to do whatever the hell they want. They just hope you join them on their journey. – Ashley Perez
6. The Starting Line – Eternal Youth
“Didn’t have to think twice / came down to not second guessing those hunches.” For years, a new album from The Starting Line has felt like more of a “when” than an “if”. Given the time lapsed, the implication that expanding their brief catalogue came with zero hesitation almost feels silly – but to be fair, can you ever truly question something so clearly inevitable? The eagerness bursting from album opener “I See How It Is” feels like the light bulb moment where everything falls into congruence. With Eternal Youth, The Starting Line manage to recapture their signature essence without forcing a zombified version of the band they were 18 years ago – it’s a statement, a portrayal of who they are today. That conviction has always been part of their appeal: once famously biting at a record label executive who soullessly pleaded for the band to “do it like you did it before”, then following that album with an exhausted confession of how little they had in common with the versions of themselves that wrote 2002’s Say it Like You Mean It. With the help of time and a seasoned perspective, The Starting Line have much less eating at them these days, but lose none of their vitality in a refined outlook. In fact, the clarity explored throughout this album and its conception advocates fiercely for anyone that may call this their most invigorated work yet. Joining Will Yip at the esteemed Studio 4, the band opted for an organic approach to recording – natural tones completely dry from effects, the elimination of any supplemental instrumentation, and as Ken Vasoli will proudly insist, absolutely no vocal pitch correction. It’s all a very far cry from the comfort of major label budgets, once dishing out the treasures of our youth as if they were on a factory line – but an earnest attempt by The Starting Line to assimilate the DIY ethos of influences like Lifetime and Title Fight. The fist pumping “Circulate” evokes the ritual of a buzzing undercurrent at a local rock show, playing like a love letter to the mainstays of underground music, and the weight they carry in reshaping stagnant scenes. Passing around a joint after a Murphy’s Law show while insisting “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is the the best song of all time may feel like punk rock Madlibs, but come on, you know you’ve been there. It’s this image that speaks most to the central theme of Eternal Youth. Breaking down your ego and simply falling in love with the influences that make you. Allowing that gratitude to shape you, mold you into something that only you can be. Embracing mindfulness as the key to unlock humility, but never losing the glint in your eye. It’s a cruelty of life that we’re even allowed to lose that spark. But if you don’t let the rift between discovery and complacency become wide enough to consume you, you just might achieve eternal youth. – Trevor Graham
7. Yellowcard – Better Days
Bands break up and get back together all the time these days, to the point where most have stopped calling it “breaking up” and started calling it “going on hiatus.” But I really, truly thought Yellowcard were done after their 2016 self-titled album. This band had already cheated death once, after their late-2000s hiatus gave way to a fruitful second wind in the 2010s, and everything about Yellowcard felt tailored to be a goodbye. Even when Yellowcard came back to mount a tour two years ago, I figured it would be a one-off – and the same goes for Childhood Eyes, a solid EP from 2023 that also sounds a little bit like a band shaking off the rust. But there’s nothing rusty about Better Days, and there’s nothing about it that feels like a tentative one-off either. On their first full-length album in nine years, Yellowcard sound completely and utterly reinvigorated. Maybe a global pandemic made the guys realize how much they loved music and one another. Maybe having some new blood in the mix – mostly thanks to Blink-182’s Travis Barker, who produces and plays drums – helps recalibrate the machine in an effective way. Maybe my own nostalgia is doing a whole lot of work here. Whatever the reason, there were few music moments this year that I found as thrilling as hearing the first two pre-release tracks – “Better Days” and “Honestly I” – for the first time and realizing I could turn my expectations up to 11. Ferocious pop-punk anthems like “Love Letters Lost” and “Skin Scraped” are maybe even better, bringing back a version of this band that we haven’t heard since before they started drifting toward more experimental textures on 2014’s Lift a Sail. Best of all is “Bedroom Posters,” a song that captures how it feels to hear this band playing songs like it’s 2003 all over again: “Tear down my bedroom posters/Don’t say those days are over.” If you ever need a reminder that the bands you loved when you were young can still be vital when you’re old, Yellowcard have delivered it. – Craig Manning
8. Moving Mountains – Pruning of the Lower Limbs
There was an undeniable electricity on this forum the day Moving Mountains’ grave site began to rumble. After all, the ballad of the under appreciated emo band is a familiar tune around these parts. Despite what the nostalgia culture attributed to this scene would have you believe, sometimes an artist that once burned bright with lasting potential fades away and truly never returns. Following 10 years since new music, two more since a proper LP, and with no indication they’d be an exception to the rule, Moving Mountains came bursting from the ground with a new album in hand on just two weeks notice. Pruning The Lower Limbs is the band in full lockstep with the momentum that radiated through their earlier works, picking up as though they want to convince us that they never actually left. A seismic display of post rock excellence, met with tender midwest emo leanings that yearn to wrap you like your favorite flannel on the first day autumn lovingly bathes you in her crisp air. When Gregory Dunn asks “Why’d you leave? / Did the world revolve around in spite of me?”, he accidentally speaks validation to the footprint this band once left on our continuously fluid scene, highlighting a uniquely enduring emotion that only they are in a position to gift. The mammoth outro found in “Houses” is a shrine to the sound they’ve spent years of their lives honing, just before Nicholas Pizzolato aims to plant your jaw firmly on the floor with the bombshell forbidden beat introducing “Snow On Norris Street”. Set for the layup by a breathtakingly impenetrable production job, he proudly succeeds. Elsewhere, the band continues their penchant for a well placed string section, adding a familiar flavor to songs like the whirlwind “All Here”, as well as “Wedding Clothes” – an anthem of adoration that sings us out of the album, evoking memories of the first time “Abby Normal” had listeners drawing a connection to The Goo Goo Dolls. Like many good things in this day and age, the future for Moving Mountains is slightly unclear – but what a treat this album was to 2025. If it takes another 12 years to return with the torch, may we at least rest easy with knowledge that Pruning The Lower Limbs will keep us decorated in good company. – Trevor Graham
9. Coheed & Cambria – Vaxis – Act III: The Father of Make Believe
There are very few bands who make it two decades into their career and still sound genuinely inspired, let alone energized. Coheed and Cambria are one of them. Alongside peers like Thrice, they’ve built one of the most consistently solid catalogs of the last twenty years, and yet somehow, they’ve also found a new gear late in the game.
Their latest release feels like a natural continuation of the creative resurgence that began with Vaxis II: A Window of the Waking Mind. The production is sleek without feeling over-polished, the songwriting confident without feeling safe, and the band sounds like the old pros they are. It carries a similar sonic DNA to its predecessor with big hooks, layered arrangements, and a sense of momentum, while still carving out its own identity. If Vaxis II reignited interest in what Coheed could still be, this album proves that wasn’t a fluke.
What stands out most is how reinvigorated the band feels. It’s too early to definitively rank it within their sprawling catalog, but it’s already clear this era belongs in the same conversation as their best work. Coheed and Cambria sound like a band firing on all cylinders again — and for a group with this much history, that’s no small thing. – Jason Tate
10. Spiritbox – Tsunami Sea
I first discovered Spiritbox when they were announced as an opener for Underoath. Within seconds of starting up Eternal Blue, I was enamored in a way with new music that I hadn’t felt in a very long time. Courtney LaPlante’s vocal abilities, shifting between soaring cleans to absolutely gnarly growls, were intoxicating. They immediately felt like a band you couldn’t wait to tell people “I saw them back when.”
Tsunami Sea was a confident leap forward for every facet of this band. After dropping two EPs most bands would be jealous of creating (2022’s industrial Rotoscope and 2023’s menacing The Fear of Fear), they combined all of their influences and styles into a cohesive juggernaut that went to the top of my rotation on release day and never wavered.
I’d be remiss to not mention my personal song of the year, “Keep Sweet.” This is a band firing confidently at all cylinders knowing exactly who they are, what they want to be, and how they want to sound. It’s a cry against the volatility of the time we live in and the ways we protect ourselves against the insanity.
“Perfect Soul” could dominate the airwaves in the same way “Bring Me To Life,” a more than spiritual foremother to this band, did two decades ago if we were in the radio era. “No Loss No Love” joins the band’s “Holy Roller” and “Cellar Door” in songs that could make you sprint through a wall. It’s an album maximalized at every turn with extreme care. It just sounds fantastic in the chaos and the calm. Everything I have come to love about music can be found in this album. I’m so excited to see where this band goes next. I’m sure they’re only continuing up from here. – Garrett Lemons
11. Dijon – Baby
It’d be a challenge to overstate the incredible year Dijon Duenas had. If tracing his career path from the modest bedroom pop musings of Ahbi//Dijon to his 2021 breakout LP as a solo artist wasn’t a steep enough incline, his trajectory in 2025 looked more like an elevator shaft. It was no surprise to see him pop up as a guest and collaborator on Bon Iver’s inspired new album – after touring together in 2022, it has been said that Justin Vernon came away with the understanding that Dijon represented something of the future in music. High compliments from one of the most borrowed-from artists of a generation, and weighted by a genuine aptitude for spotting a star in the making. Duenas was then handpicked to collaborate on what became probably the most well received Justin Bieber album in a decade, robing the pop music titan in the same soulful glow that has earned cuts like “The Dress” and “Talk Down” a place on indie playlists worldwide over the last 5 years. With not so much as a whisper about new music of his own, it would have been reasonable to chalk these accomplishments up to nothing else but a quiet stepping stone in Dijon’s career – but with that resignation, Baby left a crater on pop culture with a week’s length of warning. A pastiche (compliment) of soul, R&B, funk and pop music that transcends any certain time or place. An album that magnifies the dichotomy of his songwriting, so densely layered that it blurs the line between a thirst for precision and a commitment to improvised studio magic. A dose of passionate proficiency to wash down a pill of insouciance. To say Dijon is a singular artist is not to ignore the direct lineage that can be drawn back through the crystal clear influences which Baby would not exist without – D’Angelo and Prince, to name a particular couple who’s breath can be felt stirring the very life of these songs. All the same, when you get lost in the grimy industrial groove of “FIRE!”, or find yourself involuntarily belting along to the arresting chorus of the album’s prized stunner, “Yamaha”, it is equally apparent that Dijon is far more than the sum of his parts. As he went on in 2025 to sell out a nationwide headlining tour in seconds, to deliver two immediately iconic performances on Saturday Night Live, and to grace the silver screen in a smash Paul Thomas Anderson action hit (sporting a familiar green vest from a certain album cover), it is clear that we are being confronted with an artist rightfully claiming a title of his own. – Trevor Graham
12. Greet Death – Die in Love
The inveterate attitude fueling Die In Love often reflects the exact morbidity you’d expect when listening to a band called Greet Death. When Harper Boyhtari pulls “Love is so much losing / how does anybody cope?” wistfully from the eaves of her anxiety, it feels like she is making a mission statement for the album, and in a way, the band’s entire career. “Emptiness is everywhere / so hold each other close”. Doesn’t get more “does what it says on the box” than that, ya know? Despite being commonly relegated to the rapidly expanding, increasingly shapeless web of shoegaze since the dawn of their discography, this album finds the band doubling down on their sonic diversity – dealing out shades of gloomy post punk and slowcore, raucous doom rock, and the melodic tendencies of long lost 90s indie pop to complement whichever angle is being taken on the thematic heart of obliteration. “Motherfucker” sees the band exploding into a fuzzy tornado of reverberating sound fit for an end credits sequence as Logan Gaval grapples with the ambiguity of purpose, and the looming threat of questioning your own significance. Meanwhile, the actual album closer plays lush with acoustic guitars and a much more saccharine sentiment. It’s one of many tracks on Die In Love that highlights just how much Greet Death have improved as songwriters and melody crafters. “Once you’re gone you’re never coming back”, Boyhtari softly declares, before a proposal of affectionate optimism. “So if you go, then will you leave a sign for me? / If it’s you first, will you love me when you leave?”. In times when the light at the end of the tunnel feels like nothing more than an aspirational rumor, this is an album that chooses to acknowledge fate without embracing it. Instead, looking it dead in the eye and standing in defiance. Sure, death is terrifying. But if you know it’s coming, then what other choice do you have but to live? – Trevor Graham
13. Momma – Welcome to My Blue Sky
There’s been no shortage of bands influenced by ‘90s alternative rock popping off in the past 5-10 years, but what most of them fail to remember, in their haste to recapture the fuzz, buzz, and scuzz of bands like Nirvana and The Smashing Pumpkins, is that those groups paired their abrasive edges with really, really catchy pop hooks. Momma, a female-fronted band from Calabasas, New York, seemed to forget that fact, too, on the band’s previous album – 2022’s stylish-but-substance-thin Household Name. But three years is a long time in the indie rock world, and it’s proven to be long enough for Momma to find their melodic muscle. These songs still have that distinct “basement in the ‘90s” feel that the tracks on Household Name had, but now, they come equipped with choruses worthy of the bands they’re cribbing all their moves from. Lead single “I Want You (Fever)” got stuck in my head more than any of this year’s big pop singles did, and tracks like “Bottle Blonde” and “Stay All Summer” serve up similarly sticky earworms. 20 or 30 years ago, an album like this would have earned Momma the keys to the kingdom: radio play, space in the MTV rotation, a massive budget to make an audacious, pristine-sounding follow-up packed with huge, catchy rock songs. We’re not living in that era anymore, and it’s a shame, because a band like this deserves all the resources to chase down immortality. – Craig Manning
14. Audrey Hobert – Who’s the Clown?
There was something exciting happening on last year’s Gracie Abrams LP, The Secret of Us, and it wasn’t the duet with Taylor Swift. When Abrams broke through in 2023 with her album Good Riddance, she did so with a set of songs that sounded like Swift cosplay, circa evermore. The reason wasn’t hard to see: Abrams made that album with The National’s Aaron Dessner, and every single song on it was cowritten with him. Some of that piano-looped, whisper-sung sound carried over to The Secret of Us, but the best songs on that record – lead single “Risk,” album tracks “Blowing Smoke” and “Let It Happen,” and deluxe edition monster hit “That’s So True” – had a livewire energy and a stream-of-consciousness lyrical style that felt almost alarmingly different from where Abrams had been just a year before. If you were wondering what spurred that change, check the liner notes and you’ll see a common thread: Audrey Hobert, the 26-year-old television writer turned songwriter who helped pen all four songs. It turns out Hobert was bringing a whole lot of the wordy, nervy, insecure energy that made those Secret of Us highlights so great, because that’s also the house style of Who’s the Clown, her debut album. These songs are so full of life that you can almost see them broadcasting on a TV screen in your head. True to her roots, Hobert even writes some of the songs about TV – tracks that use shows like Sex and the City (“This isn’t Sex and the City/Nobody sees me and knows of my column/Nobody sees me at all is the problem”) and Friends (“But now I’m never lonely, not since I met Joey/But when I turn the lights off, Joey doesn’t hold me”) as clever sounding boards for Hobert’s modern twentysomething angst. That pairing, between the cleverness and the malaise, speaks to one of the most potent and frustrating truths about young adulthood, which is the glaring mismatch between your expectations for what life should be like and what it actually turns out to be. On “Chateau,” Hobert sings about reaching the rarified air of an exclusive industry party at the famed Chateau Marmont, only to find that, well…it kind of sucks (“Can’t lie, but I’m thinking, like, high school was better than this”). Who’s the Clown serves up a lot of that – songs that can make you laugh while also eliciting an ache somewhere deep inside of you – and it does it while also being insanely catchy (see “Sue Me” or “Don’t Go Back to His Ass”). If there was a “future of pop” breakthrough artist in 2025, Audrey Hobert was it. – Craig Manning
15. Arm’s Length – There’s a Whole World Out There
There’s a Whole World Out There feels like the moment Arm’s Length fully steps into their own. As an album it sounds bigger, heavier, and more emotionally expansive than anything they’ve done before. Each song carries weight, not just in volume or scope, but in the way the band commits to feeling everything. An album built to feel massive without losing the intimacy.
I think there a distinctly early-2000s emo DNA running through the record. It’s that kind of sweeping, cathartic energy that the AbsolutePunk era would’ve embraced instantly. These songs feel designed for the cliched late-night drives, but rather than sounding recycled, the album translates that era’s emotional intensity into something modern and fully realized. It understands what made that wave of music resonate, and it builds on it instead of chasing it.
To me, There’s a Whole World Out There feels like a genuine level-up. Arm’s Length isn’t just refining their sound, they’re expanding it and proving they can write songs that feel both personal and anthemic. Raw and confident. In 2025, the album lands as a reminder that emo, and everything under that wide umbrella, at its best, is about sincerity and the willingness to go all in. – Jason Tate
16. Silverstein – Antibloom
The first of the two albums released by Silverstein in 2025, Antibloom signified that the band had plenty left in the tank as they also celebrated a comprehensive world tour recognizing their 25 years of existence. The concise, but hard-hitting eight-song LP featured key singles like “Don’t Let Me Get Too Low” and “Skin & Bones” that both grapple with the concept of mortality and the vulnerable fact that everything we’ve worked for in this life can be taken from us in an instant. The band tried out new styles on tracks like “A Little Fight” that didn’t even need a chorus to make a lasting impact on the listener. By the time you reach the cliffhanger of “Cherry Coke” that further laments on the impact of personal loss as Shane Told admits, “So call the doctor, call the cops / I was alright, but now I’m not”, you’ve likely reached the same conclusion that I did: Silverstein are here to stay. -Adam Grundy
17. Taylor Acorn – Poster Child
It’s undeniable that Taylor Acorn is playing the nostalgia card. A dead-ringer for early Avril Lavigne, Acorn’s music slots more effortlessly alongside early-2000s pop-punk and emo records than most of the new albums being made by the surviving bands from that era. I’d wager that, if I were to throw songs like “Hangman” and “Poster Child” onto a playlist of songs from the When We Were Young cadre of bands, I’d be able to trick a lot of people into thinking they came out in 2004. But Acorn, who only turned 10 in 2004, clearly just loved this music while growing up, and learned a whole lot about how to structure a song from listening to the radio just as emo and pop-punk bands were getting their pop glow-up moment. As a result, she’s almost preternaturally gifted at making songs that push all your emotional buttons at the same time, in just the right ways. The gut-punch lyricism; the big, earworm choruses; the powerful, dramatic vocal delivery; the crunchy guitars produced just right for modern rock radio, circa 2000. Acorn has gone on record saying that, before she found pop-punk, she was a fan of slick radio rock bands like Matchbox Twenty and Vertical Horizon, as well as harder-edged radio darlings like Evanescence. Regardless of whether you liked all those bands in the moment, there was a craft and punch to what each of them did that yielded arguably the last gasp of rock music dominance in the mainstream. Acorn wants that moment back, and so she makes songs that grab you by the heart and the throat right away, just like “Push” and “I’m Still Here” and “My Immortal” did. Personally, I’m particularly fond of “Home Videos” (“I wish I could go back/To headphones, backseat of the car/When the worst thing you could break/Was just a window or an arm,” Acorn sings, in one of the year’s best choruses), but Acorn has more tools in her kit than nostalgia. She’s equally good at writing songs about pulse-pounding, stomach-dropping thrills of falling in love (“Theme Park”) or the sharp sting of betrayal at the hands of someone you trusted (“Blood on Your Hands”) or the simple, worn-out pain of being the person who cares more (“Cheap Dopamine”). – Craig Manning
18. Motion City Soundtrack – The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World
Along with the new Yellowcard album, the latest from Motion City Soundtrack whipped me back in time to 2005, when I’d relish trips to the mall solely so I could pop in at FYE or Hot Topic and grab the albums at the top of my “need to hear” list. I still remember the way that CDs like Ocean Avenue, Lights & Sounds, and Commit This to Memory looked on those shelves, and just thinking about that image makes me nostalgic for the old ways of music consumption. Well, The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World actually sounds the way that image looks in my head: It sounds like freshman-year-of-high-school crushes and anxieties, like looking in my wallet and seeing I was down to my last $20, like browsing the shelves for what seemed like hours on end to make sure I made the right decision on how to spend my precious cash. With Better Days, Yellowcard understood the elements of their DNA that listeners were yearning for: the pounding drums, the big-ass choruses full of sunshine, the wistful flickers of violin. Motion City Soundtrack, who had been away for even longer (their last album, Panic Stations, arrived a decade ago) return similarly to the elements that were the bread and butter of their songwriting. This band, always excellent at walking the tightrope between punk rock aggression and sticky-sweet power pop melody, nail the combination here like they’ve never been gone – and absolutely slather it in the zippy synthesizers that were always their version of the Yellowcard violin. While The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World may sound like 2005, though, the lyrics speak to the 20 years that have elapsed since then. These songs are surprisingly existential, even while sounding like the pop-punk jams you played on your way to first-hour calculus. “Why don’t you say what you’re going through?” frontman Justin Pierre sings on “Melancholia,” a question that hits damn hard coming from a torchbearer for a genre where everyone used to say what they were going through. The questions continue on “Things Like This”: “Where did the time go?” Pierre sings; “Is it too late to start again?” Thankfully, for Motion City Soundtrack – and for a whole lot of other 2000s acts that have come back from the dead in recent years – the answer is no. It’s never too late. – Craig Manning
19. Rosalía – LUX
What can I say about Lux that every publication on earth hasn’t already said? Rosalía’s fourth album is ambitious out of necessity, including backing from the London Symphony Orchestra, a list of producers including Guy Manuel de Homem-Christo and Pharrell Williams, and lyrics in 14 different languages. Firing off a laundry list of requirements like this could feel like a gimmick, but Lux is the furthest thing, providing a perfect complement for Rosalía’s gorgeous voice soaring over the strings, keys, and horns alike. After her success in various subgenres, Rosalía could have said or done anything. Instead, it feels like she’s listening alongside us, taking in every moment and relaying whatever visceral thought enters as she hears each note. Sometimes she’s telling stories about the saints that influenced the faith she grew up under, sometimes she’s talking about herself and her own loves, and sometimes she may even just be talking. But Rosalia’s raw heart is felt in every moment of expression regardless of the subject matter. I get the feeling she’s as big of a fan as we are. – Dustin Harkins
20. Deafheaven – Lonely People With Power
Four years ago, Deafheaven went full-on shoegaze with Infinite Granite – a divisive record that expanded the black metal titans sound into lusher, quieter moments. Truly a love or hate album, but without it Lonely People With Power wouldn’t exist. One could argue that Lonely is the second part of a two-part act. The band’s sixth album is darker, deeper, and meaner, with tracks like “Doberman,” Heathen,” and “Revelator” unleashing some of Deafheaven’s heaviest material yet. And yet some of the more introspective and luscious moments are revealed into the blackened proto-punk of “Body Behavior” and the escalating “Amethyst.” It’s a staggering work of art that encompasses all the best of the band’s discography – a powerful reminder that Deafheaven is more than just a fancy type font. – Drew Beringer
21. Tyler, the Creator – Don’t Tap the Glass
Tyler, the Creator’s surprise 2025 release, DON’T TAP THE GLASS, has been discussed in reference to many genres, including rap and “hip-house,” but none more prevalent than dance. It’s worth noting, then, that DON’T TAP THE GLASS is intended to be a dance record the same way that 2019’s IGOR was intended to be a pop album. In addition to the album’s titular “rule,” Tyler gives two other instructions on the Pharrell-featuring opening track, “Big Poe”: “Number one, body movement/No sitting still (dance, bro)/Number two, speak only in glory/Leave your baggage at home (none of that deep shit).” And just like that, Tyler shears back the artful concept of last year’s Chromakopia, which thoughtfully explored his relationship to his peers, similarity to his parents, and desire for a family of his own; instead, he delivers 29-minutes of nonstop 80s and 90s-influenced house, disco, and Miami bass music. It’s infectious, horny, and like any other piece of Tyler’s prolific career so far, designed to keep us guessing.
22. Have Mercy – The Loneliest Place I’ve Ever Been
The Maryland emo band, Have Mercy, have been crafting solid tunes for the better part of a decade and a half, but they broke out in a big way in 2025 with The Loneliest Place I’ve Ever Been. “August 17” deals with the concept of losing a loved one that they wished they had spent more time with before their passing, while the steady beat of “Little Pieces” accentuated the band’s ability to convey relatable topics like addiction and recovery with grace and poise. The album is very balanced, as it picks its spots for memorable moments in the listening experience, while it also wraps a tangled lyrical web around anyone who takes the time to put their ears on it. Have Mercy’s band chemistry is at an all-time high and they delivered one of my favorite records this year. - Adam Grundy
23. AFI – Silver Bleeds the Black Sun…
Throughout their career spanning three decades, AFI have taught fans to expect the unexpected. On their 12th album, they fully embrace the post-punk, dark wave sound they teased on previous releases. Silver Suns Bleeds Black…is a full-on homage to the post-punk and goth rock icons like Peter Murphy, Joy Division, and Sisters of Mercy. And it’s their best album in years.
They don’t do anything new with the genre, but they adapt to it well. Every song is a certified banger. “Marguerite” is the next goth club anthem, “Behing the Clock” is brooding and mysterious, “Blasphemy & Excess” is their take on Love & Rockets, and “Spear of Truth” is haunting. Yet, there are still nods to the band’s punk rock days, like the fiery “Nooneunderground.” Silver Bleeds the Black Sun…is the album AFI’s been wanting to make for years. And it proves how this far into their career, they remain hellbent on reinventing and challenging themselves. – Ashley Perez
24. Kelsea Ballerini – Mount Pleasant
“Who is the next Taylor Swift?” This question has plagued Maren Morris, Kacey Musgraves, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, and every other “up next” pop/country girl since “Love Story” started a generational run. It’s an unfair question to all of these amazing artists, and to Taylor herself, but it’s also a question we as fans and critics ask because who doesn’t love finding that hidden gem before the explosion.
In many ways, Kelsea Ballerini wasn’t a hidden gem going into 2023’s masterpiece of an EP, Rolling Up The Welcome Mat, or 2024’s (and Chorus’s album of the year) Patterns. But since her pop-country beginnings, she has undeniably matured into one of the most exciting and vulnerable songwriters of this decade. We don’t know who the Taylor Swift of Speak Now and Red would’ve become had she never gone on into full blown pop or gained galactic superstar status, but Ballerini gives us an insightful idea of what could’ve been. On this year’s surprise EP, Mount Pleasant, Ballerini finds herself at a crossroads.
In a year where The Life of a Showgirl, which I do love, was supposed to pull back the curtain, Mount Pleasant strips that curtain down and burns it in a 15 minute blaze. It’s a stunning, gut punch of a release. Kelsea Ballerini may not be in the realm of the average Chorus reader, but she absolutely should be. “I Sit in Parks” reflects on life’s milestones and our internal checklists and desires in a way that wouldn’t have been out of place thematically on The Greatest Generation. “People Pleaser” and “Emerald City” address insecurities that you feel that you can connect with, regardless of upbringing or status. Ballerini is asking questions of the world and life she’s living that, if like me in your thirties, you’ve been asking yourself, too. I’ve already used this word before, but the vulnerability of “The Revisionist” or “Check On Your Friends” elevates this collection of songs beyond just another pop-country release. – Garrett Lemons
25. Silverstein – Pink Moon
The second of two ambitious records that Silverstein released in ‘25, Pink Moon, goes even further down the rabbit hole of the concept of mortality. The gripping opener of “I Love You But I Have To Let You Go” largely relies on a piano, electric guitar, and vocalist Shane Told’s emotional delivery to help set the tone for the rest of the material that follows. “Negative Space” is when Silverstein reaches a great groove as Told admits, “We’re oil and water, and the portrait never fits the frame” on the pre-chorus, while the band rallies around his every lyric. The band also dive deeper into our current reality and the dangers of AI in the music industry (“Drain The Blood”), while still keeping focus on the two-album concept of mortality (“Widowmaker”). Pink Moon leads the listener on a thrilling journey through the vast and empty desert where Silverstein recorded the material, and leaves them with an all-time closer in “Dying Game” that plays out with the same impact as MCR’s “Famous Last Words.” Wherever Silverstein takes their music next is sure to be filled with even more twists and turns to keep their rabid fanbase guessing on what the band will try next. – Adam Grundy
26. Bon Iver – Sable, Fable
There was a magic trick to what Justin Vernon did in the fall of 2024, when he released a four-song EP called Sable. That collection seemed to act as if the previous two Bon Iver albums – 2016’s electronic-heavy 22, A Million and 2019’s more arena-rock-leaning I,I – never existed. Instead, it wound back the clock to when Bon Iver was centered around an acoustic guitar and hushed songs of heartbreak. The result was electrifying, a back-to-basics move that most fans of the famously mercurial Vernon probably never expected. Even less expected, though, was the other side of the coin, which arrived when Vernon dropped the full-length Sable, Fable this past April. Though it begins with the four songs that made up the EP, presented in the same sequence as before, Sable, Fable is not a blown-out feature-length version of the EP’s woodsy return-to-form. Instead, the Fable half of the collection turns the wheel toward bright, hopeful, soulful pop music. My buddy Blake Morgan, who provides backing vocals on this album, described it to me as “windows-down music” – not something I ever had on my Bon Iver bingo card, but an apt descriptor nonetheless. On tracks like “Everything Is Peaceful Love,” “Day One,” “If I Could Only Wait,” and the gorgeously dusky “There’s a Rhythmn,” Vernon pens the purest pop songs of his career – and makes it sound effortless. – Craig Manning
27. Underoath – The Place After This One
When I think of bands that I’ve grown up with, Underoath—from Tampa just like me—is always at the top of my list. Part of growing up is developing and expanding your identity. As time passes, you learn more about who you are, what you believe, and what you want to be. Music is no different. Underoath may be one of the biggest “victims” of the nostalgia era. I can’t imagine how hard it is to create under the genre-defining shadows of They’re Only Chasing Safety and Define The Great Line. But throughout the years and the four albums in between those two and now, when you hear an Underoath song, you know it’s an Underoath song despite each song’s unique traits. That’s something always worth celebrating.
And yet, I find myself falling prey to the comparison game often with Underoath. The Place After This One is my least favorite of the “reunion” (can we still call them that after almost ten years of being back together?) albums. I don’t want Underoath to recreate my high school favorites, but lyrically, Place retreads territories from Erase Me and Voyeurist, but without career highs like “No Frame” or “Thorn.” I find myself craving hearing them say something new.
But, I won’t lie, it’s also absolutely the best sounding. At times, this album careens into moments straight off a mid-2000s The Chariot album. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that those moments, such as multiple instances during “Generation No Surrender” when there’s just a little more chaos, are the absolute pinnacle of the album. “And Then There Was Nothing” is one of the crispest songs in their entire discography (and my favorite on the album). What Chris Dudley is doing atmospherically, especially on a song like “Teeth” (which is immense live), cannot be understated. Spencer, Tim, and Aaron remain at the pinnacle in the genre for what they do. I’ll always love this band and look forward to hearing what they bring to us next. – Garrett Lemons
28. Wednesday – Bleeds
Taken at face value, the term “countrygaze” sounds completely made up by music bloggers and forum posters with nothing better to do with their time. (We certainly wouldn’t know anything about that.) But if there’s one band that’s going to make you a believer, it’s Wednesday. 2023’s incredible Rat Saw God felt like not only a breakthrough for the grungy Americana band, but a landmark of rock music in a time where that generally broad genre descriptor seems to have lost a lot of relevance. In that sense, Bleeds feels like a true companion to its predecessor, solidifying the band’s cohesive but fluid sound and frontwoman Karly Hartzman’s idiosyncratic songwriting (“We watched a Phisch concert and Human Centipede/Two things I now wish I had never seen.”).
And after years of jock and pop-rock representing the genre, who better to steer original rock music back into the zeitgeist than a band so capable of bending alt-country, shoegaze, and 90s noise-rock into something that feels so fresh and vital? When it sounds as effortless as it does on songs like “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)” and “Pick Up That Knife,” it makes you think the kids might be alright after all. – Aaron Mook
29. Clipse – Let God Sort Em Out
On “Freedom,” Pusha T rapped, “Music’s been nothing more than a self-made prison.” Later on the same song, Malice delivered, “I’ve seen the error of my ways over time, never to return…” The writing was on the wall as soon as Til The Casket Drops was released, so for Clipse to return in full force felt like a pipe dream. Somehow, Malice returned, and we were graced with Let God Sort Em Out. Entirely produced by Pharrell (often positively, sometimes negatively), Clipse sounds perfectly at home throughout the album, mostly sticking to what they know best – Pusha T delivering his ever-frequent faux-luxury criticisms and responses to his critics, and Malice discussing his drug dealing past and how much has changed since he found his faith – but occasionally straying into new territory, such as the passing of their parents on “The Birds Don’t Sing.” On a technical level, Clipse are able to fire off simple yet interesting flows throughout, including a double rhyme scheme throughout “F.I.C.O.” that never loses its fire despite persisting for both verses. It says a lot that in a year filled with engaging hip-hop albums, Clipse were the ones to take over as if they never left, as if they weren’t both around 50 years old, as if they were still sending 18 wheelers across the country. – Dustin Harkins
30. Jennie – Ruby
As the final member of Blackpink to release a solo album independent of their YG label, all eyes were on Jennie, the oft-criticized leader of the group, and Ruby shows they may have been saving the best for last all along. The album is loaded with features from superstars like Dua Lipa and Doechii, but Jennie is the pop-star throughout, delivering frequent bravado laced with moments of vulnerability and challenges to the conservative South Korean status quo that has hovered over Kpop for the duration of its existence. While Rosé was so easy to love when she took over the world with Rosie and its smash hit “APT.” with Bruno Mars, Ruby feels as bombastic, beautiful, sultry, occasionally dark, and rough around the edges as Jennie is, expected to be versatile enough to “do it all,” and per usual, Jennie delivers. – Dustin Harkins
The Playlist
You can find a playlist with one song from every album on this list on Apple Music and Spotify.
The Contributors
Some contributors have shared their individual best of 2025 lists:
The Nerd Stat Stuff
Our final compiled list was put together using our ranking algorithm. There were 10 contributors and 188 unique albums across all of the lists. In total, 56 albums out of the 188 were on more than one list, with the number one album appearing on 7 of the 10 lists.