Why hello here, it looks like it’s time for yet another best of list.

You can subscribe to my newsletter if you’re interested in a weekly rundown of the music and other entertainment I consume, and the staff compiled best of 2025 list can be found here.

I spent a huge amount of time and emotional energy in 2025 going back through the back pages of my own music listening history. The My Life In 35 Songs series, which I launched in March and wrapped on my 35th birthday in November, provided space on this website every week for me to gush about the music that shaped who I am. It was a massive commitment, and it left little time for any other type of music writing. But it also served as a stirring reminder of how important a good song or a great album can be. For those of us on this website, music doesn’t stop being formative or emotionally resonant just because we got beyond those teenage years of self-discovery and first-time experiences. On the contrary, if you give yourself over to it, music can continue to be a true companion for your entire life.

With that thought in mind, I dove into compiling my best-of-the-year list for 2025 with as much enthusiasm and excitement as I’ve ever brought to a year-end list before. My Life In 35 Songs felt freeing and invigorating because the structure of it gave me permission to be 100 percent honest – not only about the music I’ve loved, but also about life experiences that had previously felt too raw or too private to share. I wanted to bring that energy to this list – to try to tune out any kind of popular consensus and zero in on the albums that felt vital to me. The resulting list has a bunch of albums you’ll surely recognize, but also a few I haven’t seen on a single other list so far. Just like My Life In 35 Songs, it feels true to who I am and to the life I lived this year.

That life was as confounding as ever in 2025 – a year that saw America go fascist, that saw seemingly every industry embrace the scourge of generative AI, and that saw me bristling against a growing number of indicators that I am simply not that young anymore. Along the way, though, I found a lot of records that did make me feel young again, or that gave me hope and light amidst the growing darkness. Here are a few dozen of them.

Here we are again sharing yet another best of list. We’ve been here before. You know the drill.

You can subscribe to my newsletter if you’re interested in a weekly rundown of the music and other entertainment I consume, and the staff compiled best of 2024 list can be found here.

Everything kind of felt like it was falling apart in 2024, and I’m not just saying that because we decided it was a good idea to send a self-proclaimed wannabe dictator back to the White House again. Genuinely, it felt like everywhere I turned this year, some piece of the society I was told would always hold fast was sputtering, whether it was social media outlets, or search engines, or mail services or, yes, the music industry.

While this year brought a whole slew of new pop stars to the table, it also deepened the divide between the industry haves and have-nots and started an insane conversation about the place artificial intelligence has in the creative process. The pop charts got stuck in boring holding patterns for months at a time, supporting my growing assumption that the 2020s will go down as a decade with startling few legitimately iconic hits. And of course, 2024 saw the album as an art form repeatedly pushed to its absolute breaking point. Seriously, how many big-deal releases from this year could have been A-grade statements if they’d only traded their bloat and interminable runtimes for something more manageable and streamlined?

Amidst the chaos – of the world and this industry – I found myself gravitating to albums that seemed like little shelters in the storm. My favorite album of the year, for instance, is a release that didn’t seem to generate even a modicum of discourse on social media, but I loved it in spite of that fact, or maybe because of it. A lot of the major artists represented on my list, meanwhile, are those who have been more or less left behind by mainstream tastemakers – the broken toys of an industry so obsessed with fetishizing youth and finding the “next big thing” that it routinely overlooks stellar mid-career and late-career work. While my list does make space for more than a few dominant artists of the moment, you can mostly find me out here with the misfits, the sideliners, and past-their-primers. This year, those were my people, and I’m excited to tell you why.

Another year has come and gone, but the music remains. 2024 was filled with more great music, and in this article, I’ll not only be outlining my Top 30 albums of the year, but also my favorite EPs, songs (with a playlist), concerts, books, entertainment, and interviews I conducted. I want to thank everyone who took the time to visit this site this year, and I hope everyone had a very happy holiday season!

Well, it’s that time of the year again. I’ve been putting together a list of my favorite albums of the year since at least 2005, and 2023 was one of the most jam-packed I can remember. Not only did I listen to more music than ever before, but I found the quality of new releases week-to-week to be engaging and exciting. Discovering new gems and being more than impressed with the output from old favorites.

You can subscribe to my newsletter if you’re interested in a weekly rundown of the music and other entertainment I consume, and the staff compiled best of 2023 list can be found here.