Firebird’s Top 20 Albums of 2025.

The top 20 albums of 2025, as voted by Firebird’s staff.

Throughout December 2025, Firebird conducted its fifth annual Album of the Year poll. Staff members ranked their personal top ten albums of the year on a ballot. Conglomerate results were then tabulated using a points-based system that assigned ten points to each voter’s first choice, nine points to their second choice, and so on. As is the nature of democracy, our list is a popularity contest, so Firebird has given its members the opportunity to feature their individual lists in a separate article where you can find the hidden gems that didn’t get enough buzz for the list proper.

2025 was the best year for music in the decade thus far, with newcomers making a name for themselves, rising stars cementing themselves as mainstays, and the old guard revitalizing their sounds for the contemporary scene. While lacking a dominant, zeitgeist-defining project like last year’s BRAT, discrepant favoritism promoted a healthy variety in the bulk of the ballots. Our winner, PinkPantheress’ mixtape Fancy That was far and away our pop album of the year, with lead single “Illegal” trending on TikTok in mid-July and November remix tape Fancy Some More? keeping the brisk runtime fresh in Firebird staff’s minds (especially “Stateside” with Zara Larsson, who had her biggest year since 2017). The biggest breakout of the year was Geese, who followed up 2023’s 3D Country and lead singer Cameron Winter’s solo endeavor Heavy Metal (caught between years; would’ve undoubtedly placed highly on a re-ranked 2024 ballot) with Getting Killed, the most over-discussed project of the year in the blogosphere. As a constituent of said scene, Firebird was nigh obligated to rank Winter and Company’s Brooklyn braying as our favorite rock record. EUSEXUA by FKA Twigs rounded out our top three; the dynamic, dissociative, Noéesque rave-scholar bodiless ballads resonated with the edgier amongst our popheads.

Two debut albums infiltrated the top ten: Oklou’s choke enough and Ninajirachi’s I Love My Computer. The former is an alien, warping take on Y2K pop tropes, with credits for ex-PC Music producers A.G. Cook and Danny L Harle; the latter a catchy, glitchy electro-house render of intimacy and digispace intertwined. Jane Remover’s Revengeseekerz offered the hyperstimulating last gasp of digicore-meets-Opium (save Lucy Bedroque, a notable voteless snub), stuffed with Palkia screams, UI sound effects from across the web, and resamples of her old tracks. Needless to say, Firebird was in love with our computers this year. I predict a rising advent of computer-themed music across genres proliferating in lists to come.

On Let God Sort Em Out, Clipse spit their signature lean, mean, coke-slinging bars over 808s that would’ve boggled minds in ‘09 when they dropped their last project. Despite the recent exposure of their presence in the Epstein files and the hideous KAWS cover, brothers Pusha T and Malice captivated us with their culturally inappropriate verbal brimstone. Suspiciously and to my personal chagrin, rap was otherwise absent from the final list. I suspect our hip-hop heads stood divided amongst Earl Sweatshirt, Freddie Gibbs, and Jim Legxacy.

All in all, the music of 2025 processed Y2K nostalgia or digital isolation or whatever the hell Ethel Cain was feeling through a hundred filters. Drama and stakes were the name of the game. Few years past featured so many projects with legible theses. Personally, I welcome this change and implore our staff to listen to caroline 2.

— Levi Simon, Executive Editor

20. Bad Bunny — DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS

There was no escaping DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS in 2025. Released on the fifth day of the year, Bad Bunny’s album immediately made waves—the cover alone is an emotional gut punch. Even as a non-Spanish speaker, Benito’s message is unmistakable. He candidly expresses the raw emotions of missing a home that is rapidly changing. DTMF is a beautiful homage to Latin music and to his home, Puerto Rico. He confronts weighty issues facing Puerto Ricans, including gentrification and independence from the U.S. The album’s political undertones have resonated widely, making it emblematic of diaspora struggles in 2025. DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS is deeply thoughtful while still retaining the high-energy fun of reggaeton. Its perspective and call to action make it hard to deny as the most important album of 2025.

— Neha Modak, Social Media Manager

19. Black Country, New Road — Forever Howlong

Black Country, New Road’s Forever Howlong is how to reinvent yourself after releasing a culture-defining sophomore album… and swiftly losing your lead singer following its release. Alongside the band’s newfound multivocalism, Howlong flings you into a storybook filled with stories of knights, cavalries, and UFOs. Howlong has some of the most infectious hooks I’ve heard, along with a brilliant use of bright, pastel instrumentation tied together by unconventional song structure and BCNR’s signature ensemble sound.

— James Wachsmuth, Writer

18. Ethel Cain — Perverts

Ethel Cain brought drone music to the forefront this year, blending it with slowcore, dark ambient, ‘80s post-industrial, and folk on Perverts. With this release being at the top of the year, it surely set the tone. Cain never fails to create such vivid imagery, wrapping you right into a film. Perverts felt like a slow ascension into a Robert Eggers movie. Sultry, atmospheric, and unnerving. Don’t catch yourself alone in a forest while listening, but do find yourself alone in your room entering the world of Perverts.

— Taylor Pate, Creative Director

17. Oneohtrix Point Never — Tranquilizer

Supposedly about the ephemeral nature of memory and the archive, Tranquilizer was composed using a now-deleted cache of samples Daniel Lopatin found on the Internet Archive. Like his earlier albums—including Replica, Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, and Eccojams (released under the pseudonym Chuck Person)—the album is mostly a collage of readymades manipulated into almost-obscurity. As in those albums, Lopatin manages to breathe new life into old, dead samples, and re-animate a sonic amalgamation. However, unlike his previous works, Tranquilizer has no discernible introspective bend: instead, we have a front-row seat to see an artist flush with ideas and seemingly enjoying his own performance as much as we do.

— Morgan Glennie, Writer

16. Ethel Cain — Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You

Ethel Cain fans waited three years with bated breath and crossed hearts to sink their teeth into more of the poor preacher's daughter's story and Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You, did not disappoint. Masterfully blending Preacher's Daughter's open hearted ballads with Perverts' instrumental contemplation, the albums' focus on a shorter moment in titular character Ethel Cain's life, allows Hayden Anhedönia (artist behind the Ethel Cain project) to explore themes of love, loss, family, and fate, in slower contemplation. The album marks a growing maturity and nuance of Anhedönia's sound both in production and lyrically, and laid bare lines such as "I never meant to hurt you / But somehow I knew I would" and "Love is not enough in this world" hit straight to the heart when paired with Anhedönia's whispering soprano, soft drums, and yearning synths. Like a long American road trip winding through the lush swamps of the south to the open plains of the midwest and finally the dry valleys of the Rockies, Ethel Cain delivers a timeless contemplation on young love and irreconcilable mistakes.

— Mimi Mikhailov, Writer

15. Daniel Caesar — Son of Spergy

There could not be a title more apt in describing the journey of this album other than Son of Spergy, Daniel Caesar’s fourth studio album. If Never Enough diverged from the self-reckoning of Freudian, Son of Spergy returns to it with full force and cements Daniel Caesar as the confessional R&B artist of our generation. In tracks like “Root of All Evil” and “Who Knows”, Daniel Caesar wrestles with his faults, sparing no expense to the anxiety and hedonism that underlines him. However, despite the heaviness of these confessions, Caesar makes sure to end this journey with forgiveness and reconciliation within himself, in closing with “Sins Of The Father”. In doing so, Caesar once again masterfully displays how R&B is used at its best, which is the musical canvas to bare and forgive one’s soul. So, if there is one album that highlights the process of revealing and understanding the entire amalgamation of oneself, it has to be this one.

— Sarah Nagarkatti, Writer

14. Quadeca - Vanisher, Horizon Scraper

Obsessed with pursuing the horizon, a young sailor casts himself offshore on an ambitious voyage. As he travels, he uses the ocean as a conduit for examining his life, seeing his own lack of purpose reflected in the vastness of it. He finds solace in surrendering himself to the swells of nature, recognizing that only through this vulnerability will he find the peace he desperately craves. Seated under the fluttering flag of his ship, he strums the beautiful melodies found on “MONDAY” and “FORGONE,” which temporarily replace the saltwater in soothing his anguish.

But, stranded alone at sea, isolation eventually takes its toll. In a paranoid hallucination, he encounters a Filipino serpentine sea monster called “THE GREAT BAKUNAWA”. Terrified, he hurls himself from his ship and sinks into the brine, leaving his music blaring behind him as he seals his own mortality. On “CASPER,” the biting production recreates his struggle as he claws his way to the surface, gasping for air, only for the current to pull him back down, wresting from him his tortured life. Swallowed by the waves, he makes peace with his approaching death, confident that leaving behind the “hell on Earth he knows” will finally grant him the ataraxis he once pursued through the horizon.

Paired with an equally arresting film, Quadeca's Vanisher, Horizon Scraper stands out to me as one of the artistic highlights from 2025. I would strongly encourage anyone with a penchant for thematic/character albums to give it a listen.

— Samuel Wain, Writer

13. Lorde — Virgin

Virgin stood out from the first note, evolved and fresh but still clearly Lorde. The album takes you through a charismatic journey in its sound, but Lorde’s lyrics are really where this project shines. Even if not everyone feels they relate to it, the album is so impressively cohesive that if you resonate with one song, the whole project will reverberate through your heart. Virgin told the world that Lorde’s fearless spirit, which first captured the world’s attention twelve years ago, has grown truly formidable.

— Kaden Kaden, Writer

12. Dijon - Baby

If Absolutely is the aching, homespun devotion that accompanies the discovery of love, Baby is the indiscernible storm of intimacy that takes hold when you find a love that endures. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Dijon said, “This album isn’t about perfection — it’s about capturing feeling, instinct, life itself, with all its raw edges and contradictions.” Naturally, he’s right. The album finds its sincerity by foregrounding its own construction, leaving its exposed edges bare, as if each emotion had erupted from Dijon’s psyche with such force that it shattered whatever filter you expected him to have in place. It’s a collage of golden-age hip-hop samples, distorted drums, staticky riffs, and R&B-soaked layers of Dijon’s boiling passion, all communicating the fever of an ordinary yet transformational love — the “mania of domesticity.” With Baby, Dijon pushes the envelope, operating in an experimental R&B league of his own by deconstructing intimacy into fragments of passion whose fight for prominence across the album’s twelve bouts produced the most cathartic listening experience of my year.

— Jake Harvey, Editor-in-Chief

11. Sabrina Carpenter — Man’s Best Friend

On Man’s Best Friend, Sabrina Carpenter displays her mastery of balancing cheeky innuendos with moments of raw, real emotion. With infectious melodies, ABBA-coded rhythms, and a hint of country twang, the album is a cohesive, playful and pointed take on the chaos, charms and consequences of dating men.

— Margaux Manuelle, Writer

10. Addison Rae - Addison

In an era where pop albums often feel over-explained or over-intellectualized, Addison succeeds precisely because Addison Rae resists that impulse. Entirely female-produced and tightly woven together, Rae wears her ’90s trip-hop and Y2K influences on her sleeve without ever sounding dated. What truly makes this project stand out, however, is Rae’s ability to tap into the early-to-mid-20s experience. Throughout the album, she consistently revisits themes of being misunderstood and not having everything figured out. On “Headphones On” specifically, Rae finds comfort in uncertainty rather than trying to resolve it, which is exactly what makes the record feel so relatable. Because of this, Addison stands as a masterfully crafted debut and proof that Rae has earned her seat at the pop girlie table.

— Joseph Mooney, Former Editor-in-Chief

9. Rosalía — LUX

In Rosalía’s world, musical and geographical boundaries are destined for transcendence. On the heels of 2018’s virtuosic El Mal Querer and 2022’s electric MOTOMAMI, LUX proves that the Spanish pop star is doing it like no other. Summoning the epic presence of the London Symphony Orchestra, this record contains incendiary tales of romantic treachery, allusions to fallen saints, and curious mentions of lead teddy bears…and that’s just a taste of LUX’s (literally) infinite thematic scope. Within the broader pop music landscape, it also represents Rosalía’s relentless commitment to breaking new ground—a sentiment captured perfectly by the Patti Smith sample closing out the spellbinding “La Yugular”: “Break on through the other side/…/One door isn't enough/A million doors aren't enough.” After listening to this record, it’s tempting to declare that the sky’s the limit for Rosalía. But even that might not be enough.

— Alia Smith, Former Managing Editor

8. Olivia Dean — The Art of Loving

According to Olivia Dean, love is easy and impossible and everything in between. In The Art of Loving, the British singer-songwriter explores closeness without constraint and the simultaneous freedom, joy, and pain that accompanies falling in (or out of) love. Dean’s rich and velvety vocal tone, soul-imbued melodies, and unguarded lyrics repeatedly encapsulate the vulnerability of navigating relationships and treating love as a practicable act, crafted with mistakes in mind, rather than a feat to be accomplished with perfection.

— Meghan Howson, Managing Editor

7. Ninajirachi — I Love My Computer

I Love My Computer is an unhealthy addiction. It is the visceral, inarticulable nostalgia that people my age feel for Zedd’s “Clarity.” It is virtuality embodied. It is a constant stream of dopamine hits. It is a cultural exchange between us and the machines that surround us. It is hearing “Language” by Porter Robinson for the first time again. It is stylish. It is intense. It is intimate. It is absolutely fucking insane.

— David Hall, Editor

6. Jane Remover — Revengeseekerz

Armed with video game audio samples and massive synth layers, Jane Remover creates an unforgettable record with Revengeseekerz. The album is jam-packed with overstimulating basses and hard-distorted drums that command the listener’s full attention. Though it is most commonly described as a blend of hyperpop and rage rap, Revengeseekerz expands beyond the associations of either genre and solidifies Remover as a prominent producer in the 2020s electronic scene.

— Jina Jeon, Editor

5. Clipse — Let God Sort Em Out

When Clipse debuted more than 20 years ago, came with the one-two punch of Lord Willin’ and Hell Hath No Fury, pairing premium coke-rap bars with the inventive production of The Neptunes to craft two of the greatest albums of the aughts. After their 2009 album Til the Casket Drops floundered and the brotherly duo of Pusha T and Malice announced they would be focusing on their solo careers, Clipse went dormant for a decade. In the meantime, Pusha T achieved prominence of his own through a string of excellent solo albums in collaboration with Kanye West. Popular demand for a new project from Clipse didn’t wane, though, so when the duo appeared on Kanye’s Jesus is King and Malice featured on Pusha’s 2022 album It’s Almost Dry, it began to look increasingly likely a new project was coming. That project, Let God Sort Em Out, doesn’t pick up where Clipse left off. Instead, it finds them in a more mature place, having lived decades since they began making music. The opening track, “The Birds Don’t Sing,” sees the brothers reckoning with the death of their parents with candor not commonly found in hip-hop. That isn’t to say that they aren’t still bringing it; the album is packed to the brim with intricate bars, catchy hooks, memorable features, and some of Pharrell’s best production to date. It’s clear that Clipse is doing better than ever, exhibiting flow and confidence unmatched by anyone else in the game.

— Alex Malm, Editor

4. Oklou - choke enough

French artist Oklou’s debut album is like stepping into a calm foggy electro-pop-twilight universe. Choke enough trades spectacle for ambiance; it doesn’t chase immediacy, it is quietly confident, inviting the listener into the haze. With the grimy techno-vapor of Serial Experiments Lain and Y2K pop influences in tow, Oklou synthesizes proximity to emotion, but “choking up” before you can feel.

— Alexandra Moxey, Outreach Director

3. FKA Twigs — Euseuxua

I fully believe FKA Twigs is an alien. An alien I’d happily be abducted by if it meant listening to her third studio album Eusexua for the rest of my life. This album is nothing short of spellbinding, blurring the lines between body, sound, and sensation. At the end of the title track’s music video, we learn that “Eusexua is a practice. Eusexua is a state of being. Eusexua is the pinnacle of human experience.” Whether you’re captivated by the rhythmic glitching and carnal lyrics of “Drums of Death” or the sensual vulnerability of “Striptease,” you are sure to embody, experience, and understand eusexua as you listen to this album.

— Jordyn Smith, Writer

2. Geese - Getting Killed

There are few bands that have so quickly captured the hearts of indie boys everywhere like Geese has. In just a few years, the Brooklyn collective has somehow produced music that weaves together manic post-punk and resonant emotional balladry. Their latest effort, Getting Killed, channels the anxiety of change, identity and human connection. From the drunken staggering of the record’s fiery opener “Trinidad,” to the futile, self-deceiving exhortation of “Au Pays du Cocaine,” Geese stretches the perimeter of rock-and-roll to encompass many of its subgenres, all working in harmony to complement Cameron Winter’s cannonball voice and the thought-provoking poetry he caterwauls. When Winter’s solo album came out a year ago, I believed that his unique vocal timbre and lyricism spelled the arrival of the next Bob Dylan, and Getting Killed does little to stand in the way of that claim.

— Luca Bigler, Writer

1. PinkPantheress — Fancy That

PinkPantheress has come a long way from bedroom drum ‘n bass. The dance-pop candy coating over Fancy That sharpens Vicky Walker’s half-tartan half-Cyberdog formula without obscuring the liquid, playful voice and instinct for infectious melody that initially launched her to virality. Coy circumspection mediates flirtation, compressing rave kinetics into tight, diaristic pop songs built for headphones, group chats, and late-night replay. Firebird’s album (mixtape) of the year is punchy, sticky, forward-thinking pop music that earns its charm by wearing sweetness with intent.