Uncut’s Top 50 new albums of 2025

50 WET LEG
Moisturizer
DOMINO
After the breakout success of their debut, what did Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers do for an encore? Plenty, as it transpired. Emboldened by new love and an expanded five-piece lineup, they created fierce and confident stand-out tracks “Catch These Fists” and “CPR”, while less subversive moments provided shade and contours.

49 BLOOD ORANGE
Essex Honey
RCA/DOMINO
Nostalgia has always been a crucial flavour in Dev Hynes’ work as Blood Orange, but never so specifically as on this conflicted hymn to the county where he grew up. His portfolio of dreamy ’80s pop moves was used to invoke grief and disillusionment as much as comfort and joy, with overt nods to influences such as The Durutti Column and The Replacements.

48 KASSI VALAZZA
From Newman Street
LOOSE
Accordingly for an album written in both Portland and New Orleans, this was a peripatetic affair. Filled with wanderlust, emotional upheaval and an existential tussle between familiar comforts and lure of the horizon, From Newman Street sounded like a millennial update to Hejira in which Valazza’s own internal struggles took centre stage, framed by some of her most accomplished songwriting.

47 EDWYN COLLINS
Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation
AED
The Orange Juice originator may have retired from touring with a series of emotional farewell shows around the country, but hopefully he’ll continue to make records as bold and moving as this one. Naturally, his lyrics were more direct than in days of yore, revealing unexpected reserves of sadness and regret – but never for too long: “Sometimes it brings me down/The pain inside/But I’m OK/Sound as a pound”.

46 CATE LE BON
Michelangelo Dying
MEXICAN SUMMER
The Welsh songwriter and in-demand producer’s seventh was that well-worn thing, a break-up record. Yet Le Bon is never one to follow the obvious route: these were translucent, thoughtful songs of love, loss and recovery draped in otherworldly sonic finery: vaporous DX7s, chorused bass, guitar and saxophone – and, on “Ride”, the unmistakable vocals of John Cale, a fellow traveller in the world of fiercely experimental pop.

45 THE WATERBOYS
Life, Death And Dennis Hopper
SUN RECORDS
Mike Scott and co’s tribute to a Hollywood rebel was a freewheeling concept album that made wider points about open-minded artistry, the outsider spirit and loosened corporate leashes. Mind-boggling and often brilliant, it featured a slew of top-tier cameos from Springsteen to Fiona Apple to Steve Earle. A companion piece, Rips From The Cutting Room Floor, arrives in December.

44 ANNIE & THE CALDWELLS
Can’t Lose My (Soul)
LUAKA BOP
The heartwarming story of the debut album from this Mississippi gospel family band, 40 years in the making, was matched by the restorative power of their music: urgent, uplifting disco-soul, driven by the extraordinary vocal entreaties of Annie Caldwell alongside various siblings, daughters and goddaughters.

43 MARGO PRICE
Hard Headed Woman
LOMA VISTA
While 2023’s Strays and Strays II were beguiling trips into psychedelic country rock, Hard Headed Woman returned Price to her classic country roots – complete with George Jones and Waylon Jennings covers, a Rodney Crowell co-write and even a posthumous credit for Kris Kristofferson. But it’s a testament to Price’s own songwriting skills that the weary ballads (“Close To You”) and honky-tonk barnstormers (“Losing Streak”) sounded very much like modern standards.

42 BONNIE ‘PRINCE’ BILLY
The Purple Bird
DOMINO
For his ‘Nashville record’, Will Oldham summoned up the requisite heartworn harmonies, seasoned musicianship and hangdog yarns, but his idiosyncratic expression was never eclipsed. Tender fingerpicking, bar-room laments and relationship blues all figured, while freewheeling songs like “Tonight With The Dogs I’m Sleeping” kept Oldham’s touch light and knowingly affectionate. As he sang over an acoustic hillbilly chug, “Come on in, the water’s fine”.

41 JOAN SHELLEY
Real Warmth
NO QUARTER
Like many records in our poll this year – Jeff Tweedy’s Twilight Override or Alan Sparhawk’s With Trampled By Turtles – Real Warmth offered graceful and heartfelt compassion in a chaotic world. Recorded in Toronto with The Weather Station crew, these were luminous, impeccably judged country-folk songs, steeped in motherhood and elemental wonder, bridging airy modernism (“Field Guide To Wild Life”) and traditional balladry (“The Orchard”).

40 THE TUBS
Cotton Crown
TROUBLE IN MIND
A record as exuberant as it was unsettled, Cotton Crown made good on the promise of the Welsh-Londoners’ debut, 2023’s Dead Meat. Superficially a DIY indie band with folky inflections, behind their spry, super-tight backing, the angsty lyrics of frontman Owen Williams contained deeper, personal revelations. His many other projects this year included In Love Again, an equally splendid album recorded as Ex-Vöid with his former Joanna Gruesome bandmate Lan McArdle.

39 RHIANNON GIDDENS & JUSTIN ROBINSON
What Did The Blackbird Say To The Crow
NONESUCH
These two former Carolina Chocolate Drops reunited to pay tribute to their late mentor, the Piedmont fiddler and black string-band pioneer Joe Thompson. Much of the album was recorded outdoors amid bird calls and rustling wind, lending this vigorous and virtuosic old-time music a stark, earthy immediacy.

38 THE DELINES
Mr Luck & Ms Doom
DECOR
Quite possibly the best album yet from Willy Vlautin and Amy Boone’s country-soul crusaders, each song unfolding like a mini-movie as their put-upon protagonists clung to life against considerable odds. The exquisite arrangements, distinguished by swooning horns and Hammond organ, were the icing on the cake.

37 EIKO ISHIBASHI
Antigone
DRAG CITY
Since her last song album back in 2018, Ishibashi’s star has risen with two exquisite soundtracks for Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car and Evil Does Not Exist. Produced by Jim O’Rourke, Antigone was a fine return to (marginally) more conventional waters. Mixing the gorgeous arrangements of her soundtrack work with jazzy torch-song melancholy, plus a healthy dose of electronics and field recordings, this was a record as cinematic and disquieting as its cover art.

36 THESE NEW PURITANS
Crooked Wing
DOMINO
A typically ambitious effort from Essex mystics Jack and George Barnett, who commandeered various churches across Europe for their intense investigations of the sublime. At the album’s heart was an extraordinary duet with Caroline Polachek, a doomed lovesong written from the perspective of two cranes on a building site.

35 MATT BERNINGER
Get Sunk
BOOK/CONCORD
Our onstage Q&A with The National’s lugubrious frontman was one of many highlights from this year’s End Of The Road festival. Berninger also released a pretty good sophomore solo album. Moving on from the depression and writer’s block that informed the most recent National records, he sought to reframe his midlife melancholia via childhood reveries and a new location, often with surprisingly warm and uplifting results.

34 VAN MORRISON
Remembering Now
EXILE/VIRGIN
“Back to writing love songs”, declared Morrison on his 47th album, to widespread relief. As it happened, Remembering Now was stuffed with classic Van tropes – songs about the weather, songs about Ireland, songs about songs, joyous melodies scatted in unison with the horns – all performed with a vivacity that suggests he’ll be raving on for a good while yet.

33 DEAN WAREHAM
That’s The Price Of Loving Me
CARPARK
Dean Wareham reunited with Galaxie 500 producer Kramer for his fourth solo album, but continued to push things forward. Much as with Bryan Ferry’s finest work, the best songs here – from the waltzing, Gainsbourg-inspired “We’re Not Finished Yet” to the Velvets-go-highlife of “Bourgeois Manqué” – seemed to have appeared fully formed, burnished by the freeform guitar and bass work of Wareham and Britta Phillips.

32 THE WEATHER STATION
Humanhood
FAT POSSUM
Written after a period of dissociation and despair, Tamara Lindeman’s seventh album as The Weather Station was effectively a search for meaning in chaos, undertaken with the kind of grace and intelligence we’ve come to expect from her. Improvised with her band during sessions in Toronto, Humanhood brought lush, becalmed backing to Lindeman’s existential questioning. “When you get shattered into a million pieces”, she asked on “Irreversible Damage”, “what can you do?”

31 PATTERSON HOOD
Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams
ATO
Hood’s sporadic solo career has traditionally been an outlet for songs deemed not rowdy enough for Drive-By Truckers, hence the compassionate character studies that figure here, like “The Pool House” (about a suicide) or “Miss Coldirons’ Oldsmobile” (about an old family friend). Pushing into new sonic territory and joined by a stellar supporting cast including Waxahatchee, Wednesday and Lydia Loveless, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams was Hood at his most ambitious.

30 BITCHIN BAJAS
Inland See
DRAG CITY
The latest transmission from the sonic cosmos inhabited by Chicago’s Cooper Crain, Dan Quinlivan and Rob Frye was a relatively compact set of krautrocking synth and drum-machine explorations. With the trio’s music gradually swapping droning atmosphere for something more melodic and rhythmic, the side-long Berlin School epic “Graut” was a propulsive masterpiece, recorded in gorgeous, roomy hi-fi at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio. Quite the trip.

29 GEESE
Getting Killed
PARTISAN
It’s been a while since an indie guitar band have generated this much hype, and there are Strokesian parallels to be drawn with these laconic, privately educated New Yorkers. But Geese’s fourth album was a more joyously unpredictable beast, smartly deconstructing classic rock poses in the manner of Grinderman or Jack White at his most mischievous.

28 SAINT ETIENNE
International
HEAVENLY
“Moments like these/ They don’t last forever/ Turn them to memories …” Yes, this was the year St Et sadly called it quits, but they bowed out in style with the poppiest, sparkliest album in their beloved catalogue. An impressively modern affair from this most nostalgic of bands, though they couldn’t resist scattering it with subtle melodic echoes of their greatest hits.

27 PAUL WELLER
Finding El Dorado
PARLOPHONE
Weller’s second covers album was, as its name implied, a journey into his musical DNA. But the source material – by Ray Davies, Richie Havens, Felix Pappalardi, Robin Gibb and the Incredible String Band’s Clive Palmer among others – was satisfyingly digressive, less caught up with canon and all the more revealing for it. Who knew, for instance, the impact that the theme from Adam Faith’s Budgie would have on a certain teenage mod?

26 CHRIS ECKMAN
The Land We Knew The Best
GLITTERHOUSE
Since disbanding The Walkabouts in 2015, Eckman’s most significant contribution to these charts has been as co-founder of the excellent Glitterbeat label, rather than as an artist in his own right. But his seventh solo album was a timely reminder of his songwriting prowess, his wracked, windswept Americana now infused with the subtle folk flavours of his adopted Slovenian homeland.

25 HORSEGIRL
Phonetics On And On
MATADOR
If the Chicago trio’s 2022 debut album introduced a promising young group in thrall to vintage influences – Yo La Tengo, Stereolab, et al – this year’s follow-up saw them finding their own voice. Cate Le Bon’s production brought skeletal, eccentric angles that recalled The Raincoats and The Feelies, but the sharp-edged songs were the stars, from the propulsive ballad “Julie” to the ragged New Orderisms of “Switch Over”.

24 EMMA-JEAN THACKRAY
Weirdo
BROWNSWOOD
From the depths of grief emerged this remarkable album, its disarmingly raw lyrical confessions met by lush, radiant jazz-funk. Playing everything on the record herself – outdoing even her hero, Stevie Wonder – Thackray reminded us once again of music’s healing power.

23 JAMES HOLDEN & WACŁAW ZIMPEL
The Universe Will Take Care Of You
BORDER COMMUNITY
Following 2020’s “Long Weekend” EP, these two sonic sorcerers reunited for a mesmeric full- length release. Their tireless quest for transcendence took them both out of their comfort zones, with modular synth boffin Holden doubling up on violin, and woodwind wrangler Zimpel playing everything from lap steel to Alghoza twin flute. Don’t bend, ascend!

22 TORTOISE
Touch
INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM/NONESUCH
Slow and steady wins the race. After almost a decade away, the post-rock progenitors returned to a scene where the dividing lines between indie, jazz and experimental music have become pleasingly blurred, just as they always promised. And yet Tortoise retained the capacity to surprise: witness the spaghetti space-glam of “Vexations” or the psychedelic techno throb of “Elka”.

21 PERFUME GENIUS
Glory
MATADOR
For his seventh studio album, Mike Hadreas claimed to have made his most “directly confessional” record, stripping back the theatrical art-pop of his more recent output and returning to his indie roots, recruiting the likes of Jim Keltner, Blake Mills and Meg Duffy along the way. Glory certainly had shades of Elliott Smith or R.E.M., but Hadreas’s interrogations of anxiety, grief and loss were the product of his own haunted songcraft.

20 JASON ISBELL
Foxes In The Snow
SOUTHEASTERN
Isbell’s first acoustic album was also his most daring. Partly rooted in his break-up with Amanda Shires, it explored sad endings and new beginnings with nothing except his trusty 1940 Martin 0-17 and age-roughened voice. The solitary setting only made the songs more vulnerable – especially “True Believer” and “Wind Behind The Rain”, written for his brother’s wedding.

19 BAXTER DURY
Allbarone
HEAVENLY
High on the success of his thumping Fred Again collab, Baxter Dury whacked on the Paco Rabanne and hit the clubs. But amid Allbarone’s precision-tooled beats, there was a litany of schadenfreude and regret, “Ozempic hips” and tears on the dancefloor: “There’s a bitter light on the Piccadilly line/Everyone could see where I was crying…”

18 ROBERT FORSTER
Strawberries
TAPETE
Forster’s last outing, The Candle And The Flame, was written between the rounds of chemotherapy his partner Karin Bäumler was undergoing at the time. By contrast, Strawberries was a playful collection of character-driven vignettes, starring disaffected rock stars and amorous former schoolfriends. “Foolish I Know” was suitably wistful, but the album’s prevailing mood was one of hope and possibility, full of “joyful moments of bliss”.

17 BIG THIEF
Double Infinity
4AD
After the cross-country gallivanting of Dragon New Warm Mountain… , Big Thief’s sixth album had the feel of a homecoming party, with a host of musical friends invited to make merry in their New York studio. Key among them was ambient legend Laraaji, who brought a sense of space – both sonically and spirituality – to these nostalgic, optimistic songs.

16 ALAN SPARHAWK
With Trampled By Turtles
SUB POP
After last year’s electronic White Roses, My God , Alan Sparhawk’s second post-Low album marked a return to acoustic instruments and tender ensemble playing. There was a submerged, brokenhearted core to White Roses… , but the nine songs here brought that pain out into the light. The mighty “Not Broken”, featuring vocals from daughter Hollis, mourned the past while opening up to the future.

15 MODERN NATURE
The Heat Warps
BELLA UNION
After three records that increasingly explored free jazz, modern classical and folk to the point where rhythm itself was almost jettisoned in the radical mêlée, Jack Cooper and co took a sidestep here, applying their delicate, organic touch to the guitar music that first inspired them. This was indie rock, but filtered through the prism of their previous work to create something quite brilliant.

14 CAROLINE
Caroline 2
ROUGH TRADE
This south London octet don’t make life easy for themselves, splicing post-rock with choral folk, fragility with noise, and digital FX with field recordings from their local cemetery. Yet from out of this good-natured tangle of contradictions emerged a succession of heartbreaking, skyscraping melodies that made Caroline 2 a uniquely uplifting experience.

13 WILLIAM TYLER
Time Indefinite
PSYCHIC HOTLINE
Since 2019’s Goes West, the Nashville guitarist has broadened his horizons with ambient works, collaborations and soundtracks, while battling addiction and mental health issues. His fifth album was the stunning result, a drifting, transcendent set of soundscapes incorporating guitar, tape loops, synths, strings and field recordings. “Star Of Hope” was its affecting centrepiece, pairing Tyler’s fingerpicking with a choir sampled from an AM radio haze.

12 SG GOODMAN
Planting By The Signs
THIRTY TIGERS
Raised on her family’s farm close to the Mississippi, SG Goodman writes songs that rarely stray far from her roots. This, her third solo LP, continued to explore the tensions between local tradition and modern living in rural west Kentucky, digging deep into themes of loss, love and reconciliation. The Flannery O’Connor-like “Snapping Turtle” and picaresque “Heaven Sent” were highlights, while fellow Kentuckian Will Oldham appeared on spooked confessional “Nature’s Child”.

11 LITTLE SIMZ
Lotus
AWAL
A busy year for London rapper Simbiatu Ajikawo, who curated the annual Meltdown Festival at the Southbank as well as releasing this, her sixth studio album. Exploring themes of resilience and honesty – from her legal dispute with former producer Inflo (“Thief”) to the pressures of family life (“Blood”) – Simz’s restless soul-searching was soundtracked by everything from Afrobeat to acid soul.

10 ROBERT PLANT WITH SUZI DIAN
Saving Grace
NONESUCH
Plant has been performing with his Midlands-based band Saving Grace for a good few years now, and their debut album was a stunning demonstration of their abilities. Comprising 10 covers – of traditional tunes, ’60s folk-rock gems and modern songwriters – it spanned the apocalyptic tumult of Low’s “Everybody’s Song” and the bittersweet beauty of Moby Grape’s “It’s A Beautiful Day Today”. While never overshadowing his bandmates, Plant has rarely sounded better.

9 BON IVER
Sable, Fable
JAGJAGUWAR
On the strength of last autumn’s pared-back “SABLE” EP, you could be forgiven for thinking that Justin Vernon was returning to the folky and forlorn terrain of his Bon Iver debut, For Emma, Forever Ago . As it transpired, those songs were the starting point for an album of two halves – one rueful and sparse, the other joyful and immediate – that found Vernon sloughing off anxieties, and perhaps even the Bon Iver character itself. “Get tall and walk away”, as he sang on “There’s A Rhythm”.

8 JEFF TWEEDY
Twilight Override
dBpm
Between masterminding Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born boxset, touring, and recording impeccably chosen covers for his Starship Casual Substack, Tweedy somehow found time to release a 30-song triple album. A collaborative effort with his sons Spencer and Sammy along with assorted compadres including James Elkington, Twilight Override was predictably expansive, moving cordially between moods and styles – from folk to indie to ’70s rock – as Tweedy offered succour in troubled times.

7 CASS McCOMBS
Interior Live Oak
DOMINO
After 2022’s brief Heartmind, here was the motherlode of McCombs’ pandemic songwriting haul: 16 songs totalling 74 minutes, and not a wasted moment among them. Breezily co-produced by early collaborator Jason Quever, Interior Live Oak was almost a definitive showcase of McCombs’ diverse skills, with folk, Americana and soul folded together to soundtrack the mythic losers, dreamers and seers of these stunning tales.

6 RYAN DAVIS & THE ROADHOUSE BAND
New Threats From The Soul
SOPHOMORE LOUNGE/ TOUGH LOVE
“Like daffodils dyin’ in a theme-park pint glass… ” Ignominy has rarely sounded so glorious as on this breakthrough album from Ryan Davis and his band of Louisville freak-rock lifers, their tragicomic tales of everyday disaster unravelling elegantly over rousing country rock with wild experimental flourishes. A revelation.

5 RICHARD DAWSON
End Of The Middle
WEIRD WORLD
Stepping back from the futuristic VR settings and 40-minute songs of 2022’s The Ruby Cord, Richard Dawson’s eighth album was a hushed, intimate marvel. Musically inspired by Neil Young at his sparsest, End Of The Middle floated on a cloud of the softest drums and occasional free-jazz clarinet; all the better to show off the power of these nine songs – snapshots of a family over decades – that were as evocative as the most powerful short stories.

4 WEDNESDAY
Bleeds
DEAD OCEANS
The breakup of chief songwriter Karly Hartzman and guitarist MJ Lenderman midway through the making of Bleeds brought additional intensity to their sweet’n’sour alt.rock squalls and messy portraits of lives hitting the buffers. In the midst of this compelling chaos, they still managed to craft perfect country- rock pearls like “Elderberry Wine”. It all added up to the sound of a band seizing their moment.

3 SUEDE
Antidepressants
BMG
An amazing thing happened at Suede’s triumphant Southbank takeover in September: the big choruses of their new, pummelling post-punk opus – with its nods to Magazine and even Simple Minds – were greeted with as much if not more hysteria than their ’90s classics. And there were a lot of big choruses here, all hollered with gusto by the seemingly ageless Brett Anderson.

2 STEREOLAB
Instant Holograms On Metal Film
DUOPHONIC UHF DISKS/WARP
The ’Lab’s first album in 15 years was pretty much business as usual – though when your usual business is this good, that’s cause for major celebration. The contributions of a couple of Bitchin Bajas helped broaden the musical palette, while Laetitia Sadier’s lyrics calmly dissected contemporary evils, offering crucial advice on how we can resist and overcome. Not only a great album, but an important one.

1 PULP
More
ROUGH TRADE
Speaking to Uncut earlier this year, Jarvis Cocker admitted that “being in a band does something strange to your sense of time”. He was reflecting on the pleasing symmetries between 2025 and another annus mirabilis for Pulp, 1995. Both years were capped by No 1 albums and Glastonbury triumphs – but on More, rather than simply try to recapture their elusive 20th-century magic, Cocker sounded fully invested in the business of being middle- aged.

“One last sunset, one last blaze of glory”, he sang on “Grown Ups”. Or as he put it on “Slow Jam”, “You’ve gone from all you that could be/To all that you once were”. In much the same way that Blur’s The Ballad Of Darren in 2023 felt like an unvarnished reckoning with ageing, More found new skin for Cocker’s old ceremonies.

Accordingly, the missed romantic opportunities of “Tina” were lent additional pathos because the older you get, the fewer they are: “There is no alternative”, he counselled. Similarly, “Background Noise” – “I walked out of the house, it began to rain/I got on a train, started thinking about being single again ” – was as stark as anything Cocker’s written, without a crack to let the light in.

Naturally, there was plenty of humour as well – witness vintage throwaway lines like “I haven’t got an agenda/I haven’t even got a gender” on “My Sex” – and even a furious disco stomper, “Got To Have Love”. But there was also maturity, not least on heart-rending ballad “The Hymn To The North”, where a parent asks their adolescent child as they row off on their adventures into adulthood, that they “please stay in sight of the mainland”. More than just a late-career victory lap, this was Pulp’s midlife masterpiece.

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