NPR Music - The Best Albums of 2025

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

If we needed any more proof that the album isn't dead, 2025 was it. On this episode, Stephen Thompson is joined by Ann Powers and Daoud Tyler-Ameen to run through 12 dazzling albums that stuck with the NPR Music team this year. And for an even deeper exploration, check out the full lists of our critics' best albums of 2025 here.Artists and albums featured on this episode:- Rosalía, 'LUX'- Wednesday, 'Bleeds'- Nourished by Time, 'The Passionate Ones'- Daniel Caesar, 'Son of Spergy'- Dave, 'The Boy Who Played the Harp'- Clarice Jensen, 'In holiday clothing, out of the great darkness'- Gwenifer Raymond, 'Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark'- Kal Banx, 'RHODA'- Mary Halvorson, 'About Ghosts'- Annie DiRusso, 'Super Pedestrian'- Queralt Lahoz, '9:30 PM'- Patrick Watson, 'Uh Oh'Enjoy the show? Share it with a friend and leave us a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

A quick note before the show, this podcast contains explicit language. Happy Friday, everyone from NPR Music. It's New Music Friday. I'm Stephen Thompson, here with a very special episode of New Music Friday, where we run down some of the best albums of 2025. I'm here with two of my treasured colleagues and powers. Hello, Stephen. It is great to talk to you. Daoud Tyler Amin. Hi, Stephen. It is a joy to sit down with both of you. we are at the time of year when we go a little ham thinking about, I'm tired. Thinking about all the albums we talked about and wrote about in 2025,

all the stuff we celebrated the most, kind of going back and digging through our work, and just like remembering what we loved, revisiting it, re-deciding if we still love it, and then, of course, doing that most loving of processes, ranking things based on quality. List season. Loving or brew?

Let's be honest. Little of both. For me, it's like, you know, dropping the guillotine on stuff that I would like to include, but lists do have to have limits. Yeah, math is our enemy this time of year. Well, should we get into it? Let's get into it. Let's get into it.

We're going to do these kind of in no particular order, and we're just going to go around the horn a few times. We're not going to talk, obviously, about every album that NPR music picked as the best of 2025, because that would be a fool's errand. but we're going to talk about a bunch of them. And I just want to say, before we start doing this, just one quick thought, every time we publish a best of list, we'll post it to social media, and somebody immediately chimes in, I've never heard of any of these artists.

And it's often kind of delivered as a little bit of a self-own, like, oh, I'm so out of touch with the kids these days. But sometimes it feels like a complaint. Or like, oh, you're a bunch of hipsters. and you just love, we just love sharing the music we love. If I see a list of new music and somebody says it's great and I haven't heard of a bunch of it, that's a gift. Totally. Like, check it out.

These are wonderful discoveries. We hope you love them as much as we love them. And look, we didn't get to everything because it's impossible to get to everything. Let's kick things off with my favorite album of 2025. Rosalia, Rosalia's new album is called Lux. I think it's really my I think it's really easy with this particular album, you know, to be rattling off statistics.

You know, to be like, oh, she sings in more than a dozen languages. She works with the London Symphony Orchestra. You know, you start to list like her collaborators, Caroline Shaw and Bjork and Eve Toomer and just all these amazing artists. The fact that she's singing about female saints and, you know, it's this deep artistic and historical exercise. It's easy to lose sight of how just breathtakingly beautiful this record is. And what hooked me wasn't even necessarily this sense of like, I'm hearing this unbelievably bold and audacious piece of art. I just was sucked in, particularly when I got to the song Reliquia, just track two, where there's like a piano break in the song, and I just like completely involuntarily started crying.

Yeah. Like, and that is just like a raw, emotional experience that all that art and all that work and all that research and all that study still went into making something so completely accessible that is just. going directly for the center of your heart. That song has, there's an approach to string playing in that song that I think I would more readily associate with like sequenced samples, like it sounds like a 2000s Robin song in a way, which is wild because she did in fact have the London Symphony Orchestra on hand. It's like lots of moments like that where you start to think about like, I'm not 100% sure how this was done.

And probably the answer is somewhere in the middle between, you know, real time live instrumentation and things happening in the box. Yeah, I'm glad that you brought up the sheer beauty of it, Stephen, and doubt. I'm glad you brought up its connection to sequencing and to pop music. Because the one thing I want to say about this record is that, yes, it's high art, quote, unquote. But for me, I also hear, and this is absolutely a compliment, Celine Dion, Disney theme songs, like, you know, classic pop, orchestrated pop. Barbara Streisand.

So I think that the reason this album jumps out so much in a year when there was actually a lot of high concept albums and even several orchestrated albums. I'm thinking of Lido Pomeinta. Sure. This is a beautiful one called La Balza. I think this one stands out because it's pop in that way, because Rosalia has such a sense of how to please the ear. It's a beautiful record, really one that I'm going to keep coming back to for years and years. That is Rosalia. Her newest album is called Lux.

Well, Anne, you're going to kick us off on this next one. But the next up on our list, terrific, terrific rock record Wednesday, and their newest album bleeds. Catching up with the townies. Some have gone, but most of them surround you. Stephen, I was really hotly anticipating this album. It's hardly Wednesday's first album.

The North Carolina band, is in the hot middle of their career. Everything has come together for this group. Their main songwriter and singer Carly Hartzman is such an incredible storyteller. And I think on this album, this is the moment when the musicality completely matches her ambition as a writer.

The first thing I noticed about this record was, man, she is singing balls to the wall. Screening occasionally. Yeah, she even does like a total hardcore. track called Wasp. And she also does country tracks where she, you know, croons with the best of them. So the voice was what I noticed first. Then I noticed this instrumentation that goes from hardcore to country to punk to psychedelia. And then the storytelling really sunk in. And wow, I love the stories on this album. And do you feel like there's a definitive difference between this album and

Ratsaw God? Because that was the one where really it felt like a huge new swath of people was kind of coming online as Wednesday fans. And I'm sort of wondering, like, now that they have the eyeballs on them, what they chose to do with the attention. Yeah, that's a great question. You know, when the record came out, several members of our team who love this band, we were talking about that. You know, are people going to overlook this record because Ratsaw God was so acclaimed?

But they led with the single elderberry wine, which is a classic country rock with an unforgettable chorus, unforgettable story in that song. And I think doing that really showed that this is opening up beyond what they'd accomplished on Ratsal God in terms of craft, you know, both in the lyrics and in the songs. But everybody gets a long just fine because the champagne tastes like a... I loved Ratsaw God, and I think I liked this record even better. And what jumped out to me immediately, Anne, you kind of alluded to the... instrumentation and the genre blend and the storytelling. For me, it's just these little literary details. One thing that I just love so much about this band, as somebody who grew up in a very,

very small town, I grew up in a town of like 12, 1,300 people, is that small town life gets so endlessly glorified in our culture. There's a whole genre of songs that are just the glorification of small town life. But sometimes growing up, up in a small town just means doing whipits in the Burger King parking lot. Getting stoned in front of a Christmas tree on a bond made from a Pepsi bottle. Right.

Like a lot of it is just, a lot of it is just being a dirt bag. And like, and that's fine too. I don't mean to suggest that it's some, that that that represents some terrifying dark underbelly. That dark underbelly exists in small towns the way it does any place else.

But to me, these are details of small town life that really spoke to me as someone who grew up in a small town, has a real appreciation for it, but also understands that it's not the greatest thing on earth. And I heard details in this record that I hear almost nowhere else. And so that was so refreshing to me, even though, you know, I, Carly Hartsman and I grew up in completely different parts of the country. Yeah. Right. She's from North Carolina, and you're from Wisconsin. Yeah. So, but, you know, the other thing could, I just have one tiny more thing to say about that.

It is small town life, but it's a particular kind of small town like. You mentioned, you know, dirt bag, the international order of the dirt bag. It's really like the freaks, the bohemians, the weirdos, you know, the edge walkers. And I love Carly Hartsman for capturing their stories. And that's why I can relate to this album so much, even though, you know, I'm a few generations separated from Carly, but having grown up in a scene like that, I had a lot of, the same experiences myself. Yeah.

It's a great record. That is Wednesday. Their newest album is called Bleeds. Daoud, you're going to talk about our next record. I remember we talked about this one on the show. It's a great one. It's by Nourished By Time. The album is called The Passionate Ones.

Boy, how to distill this one. There's so much going on here. So Nourished by Time is the project of Marcus Brown, a Baltimoreian by birth, who kind of bounced around from L.A. to London, to New York, trying to figure out, like, just what his thing was going to be as he was nursing this project into existence. And then a couple of years ago kind of fell backwards into indie stardom. And his first project since then, again, with, you know, a new set of eyeballs on them, is this really dense work that is so 80s in certain ways and so contemporary in other ways.

The spirit of Prince is all through it. There's also, like, deliberate Michael Jackson references. There's a, you know, the song, It's Time has this line, I look myself in the mirror, can't say I feel any clearer. And to me, the thing that's maybe most striking about it is it is a great example of when effects and sort of the process of production become completely integrated into composition. There are songs where it's like that instrumental part does not make any sense without the delay part that's layered on top of it. My husband used a metaphor to describe this kind of music and this album as one of a group of R&B records. I'm going to say, it's like R&B put into a washing machine, you know, and tossed around. Totally. He cited a different household appliance, but I'm not going to go there.

But I'm just going to say, it really has that effect. The clothes are spinning around and the colors are always changing. Our colleague Sheldon Pierce profiled nourished by time earlier this year and actually used a very similar metaphor. He talked about a song sounding like Whitney Houston and New Order being left to simmer in a slow cooker. Well, I don't think it's an accident that we're reaching for all of these appliance metaphors because the theme of this album is labor, is work, you know, and is the work of making music also how hard it is for artists to survive and thrive and have lives.

Totally. Not quite a concept album in the traditional sense, but every song and sort of every choice made is infused with this idea of the relationship between work and art and work as art and also all of the ways in which all of your terrible day jobs inform the art that you make. Yeah, and it's really interesting. Like, we're in such a golden age of R&B, where it feels like so many artists working with that palette are finding ways to incorporate sounds of the past,

sounds of the present, sounds of the future, that are all kind of chopped up and swirled together. We've come up with a million different metaphors to try to describe the swirl here, but at the same time, as cool as the same, as this record sounds, as much as it's bringing in elements of synth pop and new jack swing, and you mentioned Prince and Michael Jackson, it also is a record that has something to say. He recorded his first album in his parents' basement during COVID, you know?

Like, he's somebody who has spent a lot of time in his music, not only perfecting the craft of this kind of era-less, genre-less R&B, but he's also thinking deeply about online isolation. and indoctrination, the epidemic of loneliness, all these things that we talk about when we ruminate on what has gone horribly wrong with society. All of that is swirled together in a record that still finds space for, like, dance pop jams. Totally.

That is nourished by time, the passionate ones. We've got a bunch more records we're going to talk about in the best music of 2025. But first, let's take a quick break. From NPR Music, it's New Music Friday. I'm Stephen Thompson here with Daoud Tyler Amin and Anne Powers, talking about some of the best albums of 2025 as chosen by the NPR Music staff. Next up, we've got Daniel Caesar.

His new album is called Son of Spurgy. So the Daniel Caesar record was a pick of a couple of our colleagues. Robin Hilton and Bobby Carter were both extremely. enthusiastic about this record, broke through in the mainstream in a big way, hit the Billboard Top 10. Again, you know, we were just talking about with Nourished by Time,

the way that artists are finding ways to splice lots of different genres into R&B music. Daniel Caesar really leaned into kind of his Bonnie Verre side on this record. Literally. Isn't Bonnie Verre on this record? Actually working with Justin Vernon,

Daniel Caesar himself, has worked not only with BoniVeer, but with Dijon, with Justin Bieber, kind of part of that deconstructed R&B sound that has become so enormously popular. Also want to give a shout-out to Mustafa, who co-wrote for the songs on this album,

Mustafa, who made Dunya last year, one of the, like, sleeper records of 2024, and I'm glad that he's still working. Oh, Mustafa, he, oh, God, he sings a guest focal on that Omar Apollo record that I feel like I was the biggest cheerleader for either last year or the year before, where Mustafa's voice comes in. That guy's voice makes everything it touches sound better.

But I think you're right, Stephen. R&B is in this odd place where you have the strain of like sort of beat-driven 90s, Atlanta, that style. There's the kind of old school soul revivalists and people want to tap into those sonics. And then the kind of like experimenters and alternative types that really took off in the 2010s and beyond. And there isn't really like a single, dominant strain, and it seems like people like Daniel Caesar and a lot of the really leading edge voices right now want to do it all. They don't want to choose between one of those.

I mean, I think there is a strain, and it's as big as the ocean. Frank Ocean, that's what I'm talking about. Well, I mean, Frank Ocean, okay, Frank Ocean is not on this record, but so many of the other artists who are playing around in this genre, you know, blending strain of R&B appear on this record. Blood Orange, you mentioned. Yeba is on this record. Samtha is on this record. You get a pretty good bit of one-stop shopping for a lot of different strains of R&B music.

And this one is really also cut with an undercurrent of a lot of gospel. I was going to say, the other guest artist here is perhaps the divine. God? It's definitely like it is a gospel. It's a reckoning with religion, definitely. Well, you get moments at the ends of tracks

where, like, he'll basically break character and have sort of like a sung hymn by a choir. It's all of these little interludes and sort of like hitting the note over and over again. This is what I'm wrestling with right now. That is Daniel Caesar. His newest album is Son of Spurgy, one of NPR Music's favorite albums of 2025. Next up, Anne, you're going to kick us off

with a record I just love. It is by the UK rapper Dave. It's called The Boy Who Played the Harp. Yeah, I sometimes wonder. What would I do in the next generation? In 1940 If I was enlisted to fight for the national In 1960 If I had to fight for the rights of my people And laid out my life on the line

So my grandkids could live a life That's peaceful Would I be on that? Would I be front line? That's what I'm thinking If I was alive in the 1912 And the Titanic and it was sinking Who am I saving?

Am I fighting women and children Or am I waiting? I wonder What would I do in the next generation Battle of Kibbalah If they captured me for the sake of my father Would I stand on my honour like Hussein did Well, Dave has been one of my favorite rappers for a while,

and he's ever made a bad record. He's definitely one of the kings of UK rap. But this album, I think, is his deepest inquiry into himself. Again, here we have. Maybe we're just living in a moment where there's a lot of introspection happening in our favorite records. I mean, you could even say the Rosalia record in a way, as showy and high concept as it is.

It's really a confrontation with the deepest parts of herself. And that's what happens on the boy who played the harp. Sheldon Pierce, also a huge champion of this artist. And he points out in his review that the title refers to the biblical story of David, but not the usual one referenced in rap songs, which is, of course, David slaying the giant Goliath. Instead, Dave is thinking about the moment when biblical David banishes the demons that are afflicting King Saul by playing music for him,

by playing his harp. And throughout this record, Dave is sort of looking at the responsibilities an artist has. What does he owe his public? What does he owe himself? His family, his loved ones. What has he done wrong?

Really, really taking a hard look at who he is and what he wants to do, moving forward. And all of this to this incredibly lush, deep, complex soundbed that is so, it just is so rich. You just want to stay in it. I never want to leave it.

I have to say, and this is undercutting things slightly, but one of my absolute favorite lines on this record isn't from Dave himself. It is on the song Chapter 16, which is a back and forth with the rapper Cano, one of Dave's sort of elders and progenitors in UK rap. And he is basically saying, what do I do with the success and the visibility that I've gotten? And they're going back and forth. And Cano has this line where he says all these SM7Bs aren't for us. That is the name.

of the microphone that is an industry standard for podcasts. I am speaking into one right now. Oh, that's crazy. That's crazy. Wow. It's just the idea that, like, there's an attention economy that has sort of ballooned up around us. And like the whole idea that like music could be this central part of, you know, art and entertainment, it's just like it's not a given anymore. There's so much else to compete with. I want to definitely add that Dave is not only thinking about the ethics of the attention, economy, but very fundamental values, including the treatment of women. There's an incredible song on this record called Fairchild. It's a duet, I guess you'd say, with a vocalist named Nicole Black.

It is an account of a woman being sexually assaulted from the point of view of a man who feels that, you know, is he responsible? He's a bystander in a sense. And then the woman herself. And what's amazing is that Dave starts the story. And then she comes in and continues the story. Then they are speaking together and they are confronting the larger culture in which women are constantly harassed, constantly objectified. And then we pull back and Dave himself is questioning himself. I have never heard a track in any genre like this before.

When I heard about the time she tried to make her home alone, she said, A archway, I go out of the car. It's quiet and I'm walking up this long hill. Faint sound. Cold chills. I swear I just heard a familiar voice. It's really interesting. Like Sheldon Pierce, our colleague, we've mentioned his name several times.

This is like the Sheldon Pierce Appreciation Hour. Yeah, it is. But look, Sheldon has been beating a drum for this record since it came out. And, you know, it came out a couple months ago. And I filed it away. I'm like, I trust Sheldon. I know this is going to be good. But Sheldon's already got it covered.

Right? Like we didn't get an advance in time to talk about it on this show. So it just kind of got filed away as something I'd been meaning to check out and something I knew I would like because I do trust Sheldon as a critic. But when I finally was forced to listen to it to prepare for this show, I was so angry at myself that I had already filed my top 10 list. Because this record is so freaking good. It is so lavishly, beautifully produced. God. his lyrics are amazing, so introspective, so insightful, so reflective. And you look at a list of his collaborators here, right? You get a sense of the sonic palette of this record. He's working with James Blake. He's working with Thames. He's working with Jim Legacy. But I just, you've already talked about, like, just how many of these songs are coming at you with a perspective and with a level of introspection and deep thought that I just,

I just wanted to wrap my arms around it. I loved this record. And kind of like the Rosalia record, I just filed it away as something I want to listen to just again and again and again for months and years to come. All right, that is Dave, the boy who played the harp, just to take the piss. And somehow we've had to deal with higher stakes than this.

You're the reason I take the risk. Had me on your tour team. I studied you since I was 14. I want to know. All right, that is Dave, the boy who played the harp, one of the best albums of 2025, as chosen by not only the NPR music staff, but really the universe. Next up, speaking of music that seems to emanate from the universe in such a wonderful way,

Claris Jensen, one of the most reliable instrumentalist on Earth. Her newest album is called In Holiday Clothing Out of the Great Darkness. So the place to start with this record is, I think, the first track, because this is a record. that I think teaches you how to listen to it in its opening seconds, you will immediately recognize the strains of box cello suite, number one, and she is not playing it 100% to the note, but she is letting you know, this is my starting point, and then almost immediately the sound starts to fold on top of itself,

and you start to understand, oh, okay, this is somebody who is proceeding from a classical cello tradition and then using a small amount, not a huge amount, but a small amount of technology to sort of bring that into the present day. Yeah, we were talking about this record, diode, and my first word out of my mouth was minimalism, and you're like, well, I don't know, I think it's really about the electronics. And it's not a minimalist work in the traditional sense,

but I think what you're getting at, there's kind of a, there's a lot of space. I think of, like, colors, like indigo or onyx, but, you know, with a little bit of light coming through. It's a nighttime record for me, for sure. And it does mirror the minimalist movement in its use of repetition, that way that it can choose a particular pulse or a particular drone and cause you to sort of see new colors and hear new rhythms just through the sheer force of hearing that part repeated over and over. Our colleague Tom Hisinga, who championed this record, calls Jensen an electronic sorcerer. And Stephen, weren't you saying like there's kind of a magic to it?

Oh, my gosh. I mean, first of all, you want to get me to live. listen to a piece of contemporary classical music, just tell me Clarice Jensen plays on it. You know, we had a stretch. She's turned up at the tiny desk a couple of times, once as like a co-headliner and once as a member of the Max Richter Orchestra. And oh my gosh, I mean, you talk about familiar pieces of classical music that get used everywhere. If you know the Max Richter Orchestra song on The Nature of Daylight that turns up in the-hamnet right now. It's in Hamnet. I got to say, once it turns up in Hamnet, it crossed over, like, maybe used a little too much in movies.

It is very prominently an arrival. It's in Shutter Island. A very, very familiar piece of kind of cinematic, very emotional music. Clarice Jensen is playing the cello on that song. Gosh, her tone, her command, her craft. I, you know, I keep a playlist of kind of head-filling instrumental music to listen to when I'm editing or when I'm writing, when I, you know, when I just want to, like, where I want to tune out distractions, but I don't want that music to become a distraction itself, but it's really filling my head and occupying the space that wants to be entertained while I work. Clarice Jensen, anything she touches goes immediately onto that list. And this record for me, I don't necessarily have a lot of deep thoughts about the techniques of it.

I just listen to it and I'm like, ah. It's just a beautiful sound bath that, you know, that of course at the same time has incredible amounts of command and craft. And I don't think you have to think about the technique. That's another thing that I like about it. It's not a process showcase. And those can be fun. You're aware that there's manipulation happening here, but I think you sort of accept it right away. And you just don't spend that much time thinking about how the music was made.

A testament to this album's accessibility might be that I learned from Tom. Heisinga, that she actually toured with My Chemical Romance and played some of the music from this record. So I think we can call this an emo record, huh? She is relevant to our collective and individual interests. Everything she touches, I want to hear it. That is Claris Jensen. Her latest album is called In Holiday Clothing Out of the Great Darkness. And I'm going to say, sort of like we discussed, you know, die hard as a Christmas movie.

This has holiday in the title. It does. It's a holiday record for sure. It's a holiday record. Listen to this instead of jingle bell rock. Make it so. Listen to this in the dark room where you retreat when you're sick of your family on Christmas Day. Oh, you could do so, so, so much worse.

All right, we've got a few more records we're going to talk about, but first we're going to take a quick break. From NPR Music, it's New Music Friday. I'm Stephen Thompson here with my dear colleagues, Anne Powers, and Daoud Tyler Amin, running down some of the best albums of 2025 as chosen by the NPR music staff. And, oh, this was a, this was such a great discovery for me, again, just from the process of preparing for this episode. Love this artist. The artist is Gwynifer Raymond. The album is called Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark. Well, no shock that Lars Gotrich

picked this record for our list because Lars is our resident, everything everywhere, all at once out there, music guy, right? Gwendofer Raymond is a... a unique human being. She is an acoustic guitarist, as we just heard. She's Welsh, but she lives in Brighton. She designs video games, and she has a PhD in astrophysics. Perfect deal. I believe you can hear that in her playing. This album is directly related to her scientific pursuits in that it was inspired by reading she's done in both science and science fiction. To me, the scientific concept that Gwinafer Raymond's playing evokes the most is fusion.

She blends so many different styles in this music. In the past, she's really relied a lot on drone. Here you hear her more like just recombining things so much. You know, there's a little ragtime, there's some blues, there's some flat out shredding, there's definitely what she calls Welsh primitive playing, there's the influence of people like John Fahey. It's all there. And then there's just the blistering speed with which she sometimes plays, which is absolutely.

It's like Olympic skiing. It just the flips. It's wild. There are moments on this record where I was so certain that there had to be some kind of auxiliary percussion, and I had to talk myself down from the ledge and realize that is probably just string noise hitting on the back gate. That's like how dexterous she's able to be and how fast she's able to play. Also, I read an interview where she talked about, like, getting into Mississippi John Hurt and and Skip James and just the idea of like falling in love with the solo musician as an institution

because of how little there is in between the performer and the audience and how much of the performance you are hearing. There's absolutely nothing to hide when you perform alone. And so the listening relationship becomes really intimate. I just have to just go off the path a minute and tell you about one of the best shows I saw this year was a anniversary show for the album World's Fair, which is the guitarist Julian Lodge's solo album. And I was in this packed blue room in here in Nashville. I was with a friend who's a guitarist. He's like, everyone in this room is a guitarist. And Julian just played that record and some other stuff solo for, I don't know, like two hours, right? And everyone was just fixated so intensely. And that energy was so insane.

And then at the end of it, everyone is going nuts, you know? And he just goes, I I love music. Music is the best. I love that feeling. I've had that feeling in a lot of tiny desk concerts. I've had that feeling at a lot of concerts where it's just like, I love music! But I mean, I think this point of like the solo instrumentalist and what I got from watching Julian Lodge do that, astounding feat, is that it's really tough to sustain

attention for so long with one instrument. And as you're saying, this record, it sounds like so much more than one instrument, you know? I mean, there's such muscle. Well, she always holds her guitar like she's about to whack you with it. Like she's one of Lannisters from Game of Thrones, you know? I mean, one thing you really hear here, and I mean this in the best and most musical way, is you really hear a sense of athleticism.

And I think that is remarkable in music that is also still extremely beautiful. You know, as you said, kind of at the top of this segment, this was a Lars Got Rich Pick. I was listening to it. I was like, oh, this is a Lars Got Rich Pick. And I immediately took to Slack and wrote to Lars and I wrote, are you the literal damn genius who brought Guinefer Raymond into the year-end discussion? This record is giving me life and it is very Lars coded. And he replied, he replied, I saw her on Friday night and I felt like witches were in the room. Oh, I love that. I really wanted to go to that show. That's too tired. Oh, man. I mean, Anytime you want to tip on like a solo guitarist, turn to Lars, you know.

He's turned me on to so many. Oh, he got me into Nathan Salisburg. Yeah, Nathan Salisbury. Who's one of my favorites. Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah, Orcutt. William Tyler, who made one of my top records of the year, time indefinite.

So many great people working in this world right now. That is Gwenefer Raymond. Her newest album is called Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark. What a discovery. Just love it. All right. Next up, the rapper Cal Banks, and his latest record is called Rhoda. This life will live and hear somebody to God is a grease.

These devils cannot fuck with me unless she get down on her knees. Before I lay me down, I pray this your nigga forever paid. A whole complaint I can't relate you. Shut the fuck's kick. Shut the fuck up, pole get this straight. Keep your piss or keep your faith. He make you wait, but never fuck. These hoes broke these niggas lame enough to drive a PSA.

About the ethos and call of fame, I guess we charge it to the guy. So for a lot of folks, this record is going to be an introduction to Cal Banks as a rapper because he has been known for the majority of his time working as a producer. He is one of the in-house producers for TDE, Top Dog Entertainment, the Los Angeles label that gave us the careers of Dochi, Kendrick Lamar, Siza, Schoolboy Q, and notably Isaiah Rashad. And that is, I think, where he really came into his own on an album called The House is Burning. he and Rashad, who are the sort of resident Southern boys on TDE, this very LA label, Isaiah Rashad is from Tennessee, Cal Banks is from Texas, and they were able to find a sort of, you know, kindred spirits in each other, but also sort of indulge in a kind of messy interiority that I think both of them really identified with. So you hear that very much on The House is Burning, and now

as his sort of solo showcase, and it is one heck of a showcase, something like 80 minutes long. Oh my God, 25 tracks, 81 minutes, something like that. You get Cal Banks at the boards and simultaneously stepping out from behind them. He's got a ton of features on this record, but a lot of the time, the voice that you hear is his. Is it corny to say it's courageous? It's kind of a courageous act to step out in front of the mic. I mean, yeah, it's rare to see it done with this level of, I keep coming, back to the word messy, and I know that it sounds backhanded, but I really don't mean it to be.

Like, this is something that is like, it is sprawling, it is vulnerable, it is, you know, this is a record that was made in the wake of losing his mother, and his mother is very much, you know, in the music, and there are voicemails from, you know, friends and, and colleagues of his sort of checking in on him. Like, it really is like, if you want to see the inside of my brain, this is it. Yeah, and sometimes you can, chart, you know, I mentioned this a little bit with the Daniel Caesar record where you can get a sense of where an artist is coming from by the company they keep. And that is definitely true in the features on this record. Pretty early on in this record, Pink Sifu pops up. And Pink Sifu is

one of the people you call on. If you want a certain kind of, I mean, you use the word messy and definitely intended it not as a pejorative, I would say chaotic. If you were, if you were looking for a chaotic sound, a sense that you really don't know what you're going to hear next. That's the kind of person you want to work with. And the features, you know, all over the place, you know, names you see popping up on records, you know, by many different people. But then also in the back half of the record, you have a couple tracks that feature Audrey Nuna, best known as one of the singing stars of one of the, the biggest pop breakthroughs of 2025, the soundtrack to K-pop Demon Hunters.

Wow, that's crazy. Which, let's be honest, was the album I listened to the most in 2025. So, you know, I just, I appreciated throwing so many different voices at the wall, throwing so many different production techniques against the wall, and still having something coherent to say. Dyer, you know, you mentioned that he's in mourning on this record, the loss of his mother. And I think that kind of chaos is very much, you know, the dissembling of a psyche under the pressure of grief. Something that we, I mean, I'm going to go back to Rosalia. that record is about heartbreak.

It is about a breakup and that kind of grief. Even the Wednesday album, it's called Bleeds for a reason. It is about her community, but it's also about the breakup of a relationship with Wednesday's guitarist, MJ Lenderman. Grief was big this year in our best records. Grief was big this year. We love it.

Big year for grief. Excellent year for grief. Who here loves grief? Some other highlights on the features roster, Maxo, not Maxo Cream, although he is also on this. record, which is wild. But for anybody who's confused, Maxo Karima is from Texas, Maxo is from L.A. And the song Spill featuring Maxo has this very sort of pots and pans beat. It almost

sounds like hitting a cardboard box at times, but it really matches the flow. Both of them are sort of rapping in this kind of broken shuffle that's very in line with the beat. What happens after your heart shatter? You staying and stuck on things that don't matter. Gathering pieces matching from what's remembered up. I feel in different from ways that wasn't decent of it. I get my time to grow from what I know. The slow burn they say, the flame black, the herb. I rather toss and turn about the way

for I strike a nerve. I never strike the with shook his shoulders when words ain't work. I had Joe here. Also, I really love the song IG featuring baby Tate, who is doing amazing character work. She is basically doing a kind of sexual negotiation based on the terms of what was or wasn't faithfully portrayed

online. Anyway, if you want more with Cal Banks after this, there's a really wonderful episode of the late lamented NPR video series, The Formula, where he and Isaiah Rashad break down a song from The House is Burning, and he talks about his sort of like intuitive relationship to production, and he says, I don't even know what a compressor does, man. It just, like, what matters to me is, is it tight? And I think that's the spirit of a lot of what we hear on Rota. That is awesome. That is Cal Banks. His newest album is called Rhoda, one of NPR Music's favorite albums of 2025. We've got one more record we want to talk about in depth. And boy, you know, we just talked about chaos. Next up, we have got Mary Halverson.

Her new album is called About Ghosts. Well, guitarist Mary Halverson is one of the greatest living jazz players. I'm just going to say it. She's truly a genius. And this album about ghosts features her group called Amarillis, which I've gotten to see at Big Ears Festival here in Tennessee a few times. But augmented with two new players, two saxophone players, Brian Settles

and Emmanuel Wilkins, both amazing players in their own right, just stunning. And what they bring to the group is, I don't know, it's like you add, it's a big group, okay? I'm trying to like count. I don't know. A lot of people, but you add two more and

suddenly it feels like, you know, the world, has just totally expanded. But to your point about chaos, Stephen, I think Mary is the opposite of chaos. She is about patterns, systems, expanding. I always think of like a spirograph or some kind of animation in which geometric shapes are changing and forming and reforming. And that's what I get from her compositions, you know. It's dazzling, it's transcendent, it's complicated, but it never feels anything but beautiful and engaging. And this record is so engaging. There's a song that I love on this called Even Tidal.

And that record is like a tide pool, you know. It's just a very watery track. I mean, I think it's hard to talk about this record without using the word fluid. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think that particular track, you can just see the luminous, you know, to bring up another record. that I loved Ichiko Aobah's record, luminousine creatures this year.

But you can just see the jellyfish. You can see the alien creatures in Mary Halverson's Tide Pool. That's interesting. You can see the jellyfish. That should be the sticker on the vinyl. I thought of that one is a little bit spaghetti Western, but now I'm coming over to your side. Okay, spaghetti Western now.

Now I'm getting a weird image of spaghetti in a pot, maybe. I don't know. Boiling and bubble. Well, don't you, but do you agree with me, though, that, like, it's all about the patterning and repattering? Totally, totally. And it's also, I mean, it's remarkable how much she lets the other members of her ensemble shine. Like, she is known for this really innovative, acrobatic guitar playing, and she's doing it all the time. But sometimes it is as a background or a texture element.

And you can just sort of, like, you know, take one headphone off and listen while a saxophone solo is playing and hear her doing all of that amazing, work, but she's not in the foreground. There's also a playfulness to her sound here where she keeps adding. She has such an additive mind. I was kind of reading about this record. I remember when we talked about it on this show, and like somebody gave her a pocket piano synthesizer, and she, like, wanted to incorporate that into a sound that is already so busy and so collaborative, and so finding ways to weave in patterns on top of patterns on top of patterns. It's so ambitious and so confident and just welcoming, right? Like this is somebody who is welcoming additions to her sound and like finding ways to

to use that additional material to enhance it. Well, I don't want to be gender essentialist ever, but I will say, you know, she as a woman band leader, you know, she does have that kind of generosity and, and like concern for equity in the band. That, you know, not so much like, oh, here, take your space and play a solo. It's more like come in and find your role in the composition. Like I read about the drummer, Thomas Fujiwara, and Mary says that she doesn't write drum parts. He comes in and she encourages him to kind of compose the drum parts himself and she calls him a co-composer on some tracks.

I think it's also worth noting. And Nate Shenan, who brought this record to my intention. Yeah, me too. Notes in writing about it that the trumpeter, Adam O'Farrell, the trombonist, Jacob Garchic, the vibraphonist, Patricia Brennan, are all in this band, and they all also released top 10 worthy records this year. So, I mean, she just puts together the most amazing players, too. I really, really would like to see her live sometime soon, because there are moments of the guitar performance.

here where I'm like, I don't know how she did this. There's parts where it sounds like a tape machine breaking down, where there's these sudden warps in pitch, and I don't know if it's effects or if it's all in the fingers. I just also got to say, she's like the coolest, most unflashy human, you know? She's just that genius who's like, I'm not going to show off, because why would I? I'm just, I'm so good without having to show off. That is Mary Halverson. Her newest album is about ghosts.

y'all we did it we got through all nine albums that we wanted to talk about in depth I still nevertheless was tasked with throwing together a really quick lightning round of a few of the others that the team really loved in 2025 including one of my very favorite records of 2025 by the great annie de rousseau we just published an extremely fun and funny and winning tiny desk concert from an artist who put out one of my favorite kind of just like big, fun, summery rock records. You know how 2024 was Brat Summer? I think 2025 for me was super pedestrian summer.

So super pedestrian by Annie DeRousseau was one of my very favorites of the year. Also wanted to mention the Spanish singer, Corot LaHose, who, you know, we talked about Rosalia, whose background is in kind of Flamenco and kind of marrying Flamenco to pop. Don't lose sight of Corot LaHose, who is doing kind of, Flamenco meets hip hop. Patrick Watson, a Canadian singer-songwriter, who has been an NPR music favorite for a very, very long time dating back to our early excursions into South by Southwest. You know, Patrick Watson, you know, went through a medical crisis where he kind of lost access to his singing voice, and which is a great, great loss, if you've ever heard Patrick Watson sing. and his newest album is called Uh-oh, kind of named for that crisis, in which he brings in a lot of collaborators to kind of, you know, give voice and texture to his compositions.

He is a wonderful artist, a longtime NPR music favorite, and the creator of one of the team's favorite albums of 2025. And that is our show for this week. Thank you so much. Anne Powers, Daoud Tyler Amin. It is a pleasure to have you join me. What a joy to talk about just a string of absolute knockouts across so many genres. Thanks, Stephen. And if our listeners want more, please go look at our list because each of us picked way more than one album.

There's many, many albums recommended in our year on list. And also, there's a wonderful playlist of 125 songs. for the year 2025. And if you can spare the price of a fancy latte, please subscribe to Dowd's and my podcast, which we fondly call old songs considered, in which we remind you that there's lots of music that came out in earlier years, you know,

all the way stretching back to the dawn of recorded music, and we love to talk about them. We got an episode coming out soon on holiday music. It's super fun. Yeah, and you get to that by subscribing to NPR Music Plus, as Anne said, it is not expensive. It unlocks bonus content. And you get access to Anne and Dowd's wonderful show about older music.

This is a project I'm so delighted to have you guys working on. Because as much as we're constantly focused, at least on New Music Friday, and talking about new music, there is this massive, massive, ever-growing universe of older music, so much of which is just sitting there waiting to be rediscovered. And of course, you know, a lot of the time you're talking, talking about older music that has never left us. And I think it's such a cool show.

Everybody should subscribe. If you listen to New Music Friday, if you listen to All Songs Considered, you should subscribe to NPR Music Plus to get Anne and Aoud two of my favorite minds. And not for nothing, favorite people. Oh, we love you too, Stephen. You are, you guys are both treasures.

If you enjoyed this week's show, we always appreciate a positive review on Apple or Spotify or whatever app you're listening to right now. This episode was produced by Noah Caldwell and edited by Otis Hart. The executive producer of NPR music is Soraya Mohamed. We'll be back next week when Robin Hilton and Sheldon Pierce talk about the listener picks for the best albums of 2025. Until then, take a moment to be well, reject the tyranny of Michael Boubley, and treat yourself to lots of great music.