NPR Music - The Best Songs of 2025

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

When the dust settles on 2025, what songs will remain in heavy rotation? We look back at a dizzying amount of music and share some of our picks for the best tracks of the year.What you'll hear in this episode is an incredibly incomplete list that obviously just scratches the surface of all the incredible music that came out this year. For a more comprehensive breakdown of what we loved in 2025, check out NPR Music’s list of the 125 best songs. Artists and songs featured on this episode:1. Dijon: “Yamaha,” from ‘Baby’2. Nourished By Time: “Max Potential,” from ‘The Passionate Ones’3. Patrick Watson: “Peter and the Wolf,” from ‘Uh Oh’4. FKA twigs: “Room of Fools,” from ‘EUSEXUA’5. PinkPantheress: “Stateside,” from ‘Fancy That’6. Asher White: “Beers with my name on them,” from ‘8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living’7. Wednesday: “Townies,” from ‘Bleeds’8. Gabriel Jacoby: “the one,” from ‘gutta child’9. Olafur Arnalds & Talos: “We Didn’t Know We Were Ready (feat. Niamh Regan & Ye Vagabonds),” from ‘A Dawning’Enjoy the show? Share it with a friend and leave us a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Questions, comments, suggestions or feedback of any kind always welcome: [e-mail] 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

This is quite something. This is the first time we've ever done the show in the room where we're all in the same room. We're all together. Yeah. Hazel Sills, down from New York. Yeah, I'm here in the flesh. You've docked at the mothership. I'm not AI.

I know that was a concern for all of you, but I'm real. And then Sheldon Pierce, you're here. Yes, I am. This is the All Songs Considered. Look at the year's best songs. The Best Songs of 2025. This will be a stunningly incomplete list. if you check out the NPR website,

you will find a much more comprehensive picture of everything that we love this year. There are, what is there, 125 songs? I'd argue there are probably more great songs than that. Do you think? And we couldn't even find them on the list this year. Someone sounds a little salty.

That's a hot take, Sheldon. Don't even look at our list. Oh, man, you know. You won't find what you like on that list. It's great. Great advertising. Yeah. It's a mix of stuff picked by the BNPR music team, our stations.

On this episode, we're just going to share some of our favorites from that big, long list. And it's an unranked list, right? It's not like there's a very clear number one song on that list. Do you all have a number one song, like a personal number one song? I don't think so. Songs are always tougher for me. There's just so many. There's too much.

Yeah, I feel like as the year goes on, there will be certain months or moments where I have one favorite song and then it'll sort of transition out and then I have a new favorite song so when the year ends it's really hard for me to say like oh this one song dominated my year and I feel like there's just a number of songs out this year that I could say oh that's that's top for me yeah but like I just didn't feel like there were a lot of obvious standalone singles like oh what a year but I see that that's where we disagree I always feel like that I'm always like you feel like it's that way every year every year I don't I don't think there's there's probably more in years past than this

in terms of like consensus singles, especially on our team. But I think generally for me, I tend to lean towards weirder songs in general that most people are like, why would you pick that one? I know. I was going to bring that up with you actually.

I was like, I wanted to be like, why did you pick you know? Believe me, I know what you're going to play and that thought was never far from my mind. That's going through this. Where should we start here? Hazel, why don't you do one of your picks?

Yeah, so I want to play a song from one of my favorite albums of the year. The album is called Baby, and it's by an artist named Dijon, who I was not super invested in, feel like I always heard about him, and this album really hooked me, but there's one song on it that I think is essentially perfect, and the song is titled Yamaha. So much prints all over this. all over the whole record, really. Yeah.

I think of this song as being, like, a song for lover boys. Like, it is, it's just, it's so soft and earnest, and I just, it's like a song that's about being in love, but it's also a song about how much you love the feeling of being in love.

And I just feel Dijon's energy so strongly in this track. And I just love everything about it. I love that little sample that's like, whoa, whoa. It's like he put his own hype man in the song in a way that I love. Yeah, I've just, this song from this album was just like a total standout for me. Yeah, I mean, there is just such a brightness, a sunniness to this song that honestly, it feels reflective of the direction that R&B is going.

For a long time, it's been subsumed in the dark rooms in the club. And earnestness does feel like the word, this is like old school, like, bare chested, like professing. I love you, baby. Like, I love you. It's very much, and to your point about Prince, it's kind of like a power pop ballad wrapped in Prince, like swag and sensuality. No, I'm sorry, now.

I can't get the, a bare chested D-John out of my mind, like, or maybe just like a vest. Nothing else. Or like a very, like, silk, long-slee shirt from like a 90-R-B video with like a fan, powerful thing. With only one button, the bottom button. But yeah, yeah, yeah. I just like it musically.

It's like so much music we heard this year. It just sort of refuses to be any one thing. Yeah. And just all the different shifts in it. And yeah, it gets really warped and kind of weird at times. And a great record. So Yamaha Dijon, you think Dijon isn't popping? Like I kind of thought this was like huge this year.

I think Dijon has had a really incredible year. He worked on Justin Bieber's most recent album, Swag. He worked on the Bonnie Vair album this year. just nominated for a Grammy for, you know, best producer non-classical. And so, but I think his solo stuff, more people need to come around to it. But I feel like he's on the come up for sure as an artist and as a producer for other people. Well, that album, baby, came out August 15th, and that was the song Yamaha. Sheldon, where do you want to go from there? I want to go to an artist that I know Hazel and I are really into. It feels like even in the moment when this song came out,

Hazel and I, we were like, this is the first step to something great. And then we heard the album, Hazel, I know it's your favorite of the year. It's like my second pick. It's by the artist, nourished by time, and it's called Max Potential. It's kind of funny that we're playing this after Dijon, because they're both very similar in a lot of ways, both from Maryland, both kind of post-R-N-B sensations, and both, like, very earnest lover boy types. I think the key difference is Marcus Brown, who is the artist behind Nourge by Time, is very much focused on trying to find love amid the constant stress of working your 9 to 5 job. And this song is, he's like sort of swept back into it.

The outside world is falling away. He talks about her being paranoid. He's going insane, but he's like, at least if I go insane, I'll be loved by you. Yeah, I mean, so much of this album, and it's why it's my favorite album of the year, is it's really a record about how to live your life and not be crushed by the world that we live in. Your job, your wage work, the state of the world, which can feel chaotic and, you know, overwhelming at times. And his argument on this album and also in this song a little bit is like, passion is really all that you have. I think for me, I just haven't gotten past his voice yet.

It's such a distinctive voice. And I think he either love it or you don't. And Pace Magazine's number one album of the year, too, Hazel. Yeah. A lot of people. I assume when I start seeing this kind of pickup and from the team and elsewhere, I've got to conclude it's a me problem. And I just haven't figured it out yet.

No, Robin, you don't have to love everything. Yeah, you don't have to love it. Well, here's the thing. I was thinking, you know, like, I used to hate Bob Dylan's voice. I used to like, I could not listen to Dylan. And then, like, something just clicked at one point. Yeah, sometimes it just takes some time. You've got to be worn down.

And there's it. And there's a lot, I mean, there's a lot of really interesting things going on and nourished by Times music. It's not like, you know, I can completely dismiss it. But so the passionate ones. That was another August release came out a week after the Dijon one. It came out on August 22nd. Well, I want to go to Patrick Watson. Patrick Watson had an absolutely stunning record this year called Uh-oh.

And it's got an incredible story behind it. If you don't know it, or if you haven't listened to his music much, his voice is very much at the center of his. music. It's one of the reasons why his songs sound as magical and wondrous as they do. He has the most beautiful falsetto. A few years ago at the end of 2022, right after he did this live show, he suffered a vocal chord hemorrhage. And he was told that he may never speak again, let alone sing. And for months, he couldn't. And he started working on this new album called Uh-oh, collaborating with a bunch of other singers, but along the way, his voice, just by sheer luck, came back. And I think when you listen to this new album, I mean, you can't believe that he ever lost it to begin with,

because he sounds so good. The whole album is stunning. But my favorite song, and the one that really features his voice, is called Peter and the Wolf. I could live in that world of sound for the rest of my life. It's just, they're like twisted little fairy tales to me, just the way they sound, his voice, the narratives. I don't know, the word I keep coming back to is magical. Yeah. Very spooky, you know, it sounds like I'm in a haunted music

box, which I feel like is a sound. I say I'm like, I love music that sounds like that. But there's so many layers to this song, just the way the little like twinkling synths and the way that he warps his voice is so interesting. Yeah, it really is this little

dark universe. He said that this song sort of really came together on a nighttime walk in New Orleans. He said that city is surrounded by ghosts when you're out there. And he could hear the bassy low end of this car that was driving in the distance. And it made him think of the car as being the wolf in this situation. And I think when you put that all together, you get sort of like the eerie fog that seems to be hanging over this.

There's something off in the distance you can't clearly make out. the darkness is setting in, but there's a sense that you're not alone. There's like a spectral presence on the back of this song. But it's not just that you're not alone. It's that something's coming for you. Something's after you. You can feel the presence of something else. You just can't make sense of what it is.

It's a song that like literally creeps up on you, like the way that it builds. And then suddenly you're like enveloped by the sound. I did not think that I would have Patrick Watson this year on my best of the year. but man, this album, the whole album is just breathtaking. It is absolutely stunning. It's called Uh-oh, and it came out on September 26th. Hazel, we're back to you. So I want to play a song from another one of my favorite albums of the year.

Usexuala by the artist FK. Twigs. I've played this song on the show before. It's called Room of Fools. I actually kind of like it as, Hazel, we're back to you, and we just hear that. I'm malfunctioning. This is totally York from her debut. Yes.

I called her a daughter of Bjork, I feel like last time I talked about her in the show. What's the Bjork song where she... I don't know. She's in a club and then she goes into the bathroom and she's still going... More to life than this? Yeah.

Yeah, I love this song so much. And I think it's because... And I've said this on the show before. FK Twigs is such an experimental, you know, cerebral artist, the way that she approaches her music. And I hear such freedom from Twigs in this song. Like, she is a performer. She's a professional dancer.

But in this song, she is down on the dance floor with a crowd of anonymous people dancing and experiencing the music just like, you know, the people. The one that's been drawing me in is we make something together. We were talking recently about people being a bit too concerned about the way that stuff, like, system sound at venues. Like, sometimes you just go there to feel the vibrational mass. I'm not thinking about the acoustics when I'm dancing. You're there to be there with people as a community. If it's overmodulated.

No, no, no, no. It's about, and to me, like, the idea of making something together, the thing that this song sort of encompasses and to Hazel's point, it is significantly less cerebral than a lot of the stuff that she's done. Yeah. It's very like literally, you could think of her as like often like looking into the club in a lot of her songs and here she is like amongst. Yeah, it's in the body. Yeah. She's roving amongst the crowd. She's feeling the music. Yeah, I mean, everything she does to me is just so wildly inventive. I'm always going to show up for it. You know, like maybe I don't want to go on the dance floor, but she makes it sound so compelling.

I mean, that's the other thing. I'm tired. But even saying that, it's like, this is like, you can listen to this in your headphones, too. It's like her music is always so outside the box that even her ventures onto the dance floor are still as experimental as the stuff that a lot of people work on. Yeah, 100%. So, Usects, one of those albums that came out right at the top of the year, it came out on January 24th. And it stayed with you, Hazel, through the whole year. It really did.

Yeah. Which is like nearly impossible to do. That's something else we were talking about in the year and review. Like how many amazing albums we loved when they came out and like three weeks later, the next thing comes up and like, are we still listening to it? Right. When we get to the end of the year. Sheldon, what do you want to follow that with?

I'm going to keep it in sort of dancey space. I'm going to do another song that we did on the show for the mid-year show, bringing it back. it's by Pink Panthers it's called State Side I'm freezing outside I feel my skin tight my car is inside but I look up at you

I tracked your paint right the one you're in tonight tell me when is the next time I'll run in here I take it back If you go to the club Will you call me? I got you

Let me know This song to me feels like such a key crossing of the threshold old moment. I wrote about this on our list on NPR.org. Pink Panther started as a U.R. pop star, right? She was very online. She was a TikTok sensation, one of the first to sort of break through. And I think of this song as being like the full moment where she is out in the open. Yeah, I feel like the song this year that a lot of people associate with this album is illegal,

which just got nominated for a Grammy. State Side is just, it's such a complex song for her catalog and it has this really, you know, great production by the Dare, who I'm not typically a fan of, but I think he is such a good match for her love and affinity of like British dance music and pop music. And it just, it has that signature pink pantherist theme of sounding a little cute and sweet, but if you really listen to the lyrics a little bit more, it's kind of sinister. She might, she's in love with this person, but she also is, she's definitely stalking them. So yeah, it's just This is a real big song for me this year

Yeah Yeah, it was a grower for that very reason That it is like the like It can just feel good And you can just sort of take it at surface level But the more you listen to it And the longer you spend time with it Yeah, the kind of creepier it gets

The stranger it gets It's very restless Yeah And that was a theme I kept coming back to Time and time again Throughout this year It's just like

how restless so much of the music is that we're listening to. We live in a very unsettled age, and the music is really reflecting that. I hear that in particular, and the next thing that I want to play, which is the Asher White, a cut from the Asher White record. The album is called Eight Tips for Full Catastrophe Living, which, I mean, shortlist for album title of the year, eight tips for full catastrophe living. It's like music for Generation ADHD or just, cultural whiplash, societal whiplash, everything that we've been living through the past year, you hear it all on this song called Bears with My Name on them. So we're only playing partial cuts here. And because this goes through a lot of changes,

I want to just skip ahead here to a little breakdown. And then maybe one more section here, even a little later. If there was a soundtrack of my brain at any given moment this year, this was the sound of it. And it's such a rewarding listen to me. It's just consistently rewarding. It just keeps giving, keeps surprising you. If you're looking for this kind of music, like unsettled music, your music that refuses to be one thing, this was one of my favorite picks of the year. Yeah, I'll be honest, when the song starts, I was like, I don't know if this is for me.

That kind of, like, Tweed, jump. gaunty opening, this kind of like, almost like jazz hands, musical theater opening. But, you know, you stay with it and you're like, oh, this is unraveling. Honestly, it just feels like it short circuits, like right in the middle. It's like, oh, it has a song that it is. And then that song completely breaks down into this other thing that is really, really interesting. It takes you in so many different directions. such a sort of eclectic listen, such a surprising listening experience.

I think what has really drawn me to this music is too often artists feel sort of compelled to be overly prescriptive about what their music is and what it should mean, and like they are compelled to sort of wear that meaning on their sleeves in their songs. This is a song you have to sort of really wrestle with, and even at the end, I don't know what it's supposed to be telling me. I feel like I can project some kind of intrigue onto it. It really does feel like a breakdown, like, in the most literal sense. To your point about what it sounds like in your mind, it's like just a complete unraveling of the psyche that is really sort of enjoyable.

I'm not saying my psyche is completely unraveling. Are you? Are you sure? Well, I don't know. Tell me. This is a safe space. No one's going to hear this. No, I'm curious because you said that you, this is what the inside of your brain sounds like. What does that mean to you when you're like, oh. Okay, yeah, I'm sure. Okay, sincerely, I can tell you, it feels all the time for me like my brain is going in 500 different directions all at the same time, and it's doing it at a thousand miles an hour.

So it's hyperactivity. Hyperactivity for sure, yeah. And, you know, a complete lack of focus and just, you know, it's very hard for me to, if I were capable of making music like this, this is the kind of music that I, would come out of me. So eight tips for full catastrophe living came out on September 12th. Well, I know we all have one more song that we want to play. And I was, so that would be like nine cuts. I was thinking it'd be good if we did a nice even 10 if there was just something we could all agree on. But that sort of is very indicative of the year, I think. That, you know, I really thought there would be a lot of unanimous votes across the board for a lot of different things. And I've been

seeing people's lists coming in, not just on the NPR music team, but different sites and different number ones, different top tens across the board. Yeah. It's kind of exciting. Like, I think we did, there was a chunk of years, you know, four or five years ago where it felt like every music website's list, you know, had the same number one and number one album, number one song. And I feel like we're breaking out of that. Or maybe that maybe music is just so much better now. And I don't know. I, I can't speak for other sites. We have changed processes internally. True.

I think have made this kind of thing more likely. I think if we had done previous lists the way that we did the list this year, we would have had more diffusive lists in the past as well. But like I just keep looking at different sites thinking, all right, let's see Rosalia. I do think. And it's like, no. Generally, generally there has been a fracturing of taste, I think. and one that I think will continue to happen

as we have less sort of monoculture artists. What is your final pick here for this episode, knowing that there are many, many more songs that you could pick? Hazel, what do you want to play as your last song? Well, I want to play a little bit of indie rock. Have you heard of that? Indy Rock.

A little of something called indie rock. Have I ever? I want to play a song from an album that honestly, it was hard. to pick a favorite song from it. There were so many great songs from this album that I could have put on this podcast.

It's the album Bleeds by the band Wednesday. And the song I want to play from it is Townies. Catching up with the townies. Some have gone. Them surround. Met you in. You know, this is kind of a song about ghosts. It's about, you know, people from your hometown

that just stick around. And even when they die, their memories are like embedded into your experiences when you go back. And that is such like a touchstone of Carly Hartzman's songwriting in Wednesday. She is someone who is in her late 20s, but I hear her music and I hear someone who has lived a full life and has stories to tell and is putting all of that into her songwriting. And yeah, this song is just a perfect little Wednesday track. This sort of highlights the struggle that I have with songs every year. I'm like, is this the best song from this record? I mean, I might have maybe gone with Elderberry Wine.

I think you would have gone with a different song than that. Well, wound up here by Holden On was my pick from this album. But, you know, we made the list and Townies really came out on top. And, you know, I'm just happy to rep any song from this album. And that's why I'm like, you know, sometimes albums is the answer to me. Yeah, for sure. Wednesday, I mean, we wrote Anne Powers, the Great Ann Powers, wrote about how this was the best rock album of the year. But if you only listen to Elderberry Wine, I'm not sure that you would conclude that it was the best rock album of the year.

And that was like, I like townies myself. This is the cut I would go with. I think it's not just about ghosts from your hometown. I think it's about the cruelties and the horrors of small town living where everyone knows your stuff, everyone knows your business. Yeah, you can't escape your history. Yeah, and I feel like that was kind of a theme I heard coming up in a lot of songs that we played on the show this year too. I mean, just most recently we had like Ken Pomeroy's Stranger, S.G. Goodman, Snapping Turtle, the song that S.G. Goodman did? Where there's sounds like, wow, you really start getting into the stories and they're really, really painful.

There's a lot of stuff going on in this Wednesday cut that is pretty disturbing if you sit with it for very long. Yeah. So it bleeds is the album, and that came out on September 19th. Sheldon, what do you want to do for your last one? gonna do a song that we played on the show. This was the one out of the blue discovery this year for me that just stuck with me. It's from a new artist named Gabriel Jacoby. It's called The One. There are not a lot of times where you sort of just stumble onto an artist who has just started who feels almost fully formed upon arrival. I just listened to this song on a whim,

then went to this dude's YouTube channel. He had six songs at the time. He has since released a great EP that this song is on. It's called Gutted Child. But this one, to me, it really sort of encapsulates what is great about his music. Distinctly funky, sort of, Hazel and I were talking about it yesterday.

Like, representative of a certain kind of 90s R&B sound, but also like sort of pushing forward in a specific direction. It's just so full-bodied. It's so smooth but so raw still. It's just like, it really

gets me going every time I hear it. Yeah, it's such a fun feeling. And I felt this when I saw this song on your list and I was like, who, I'm sorry, who is this? And I listened and I was like, whoa, I didn't realize there were young people making music that sounds like this anymore. Like, truly like funky music and not in a cringe way. Not in like a silk sonic way. Like a Bruno Moore's way. Yeah. Like, you know, yeah, we mentioned like late 90s R&B, but I also hear, you know, like 70s funk music. But it also... Slice stone.

Yeah, but it also at the same time, it feels very much like, I don't know, how old is he? He's 25. Yeah, he's young. So he's baby. But I still feels very much like of his generation

where it's like, there's not a big story to this song. Right. There's not, you're not listened to this song for the lyrics. You're listening to this song to move. Yeah, I don't know what it is. It's a bit of a next factor because,

um, in a lot of ways he, he is just, retreading stuff that's been done many, many times before, but there's I don't know, there's a depth and authenticity to this that feels, to your point, Sheldon, like, we could already be talking about

his deep back catalog now, you know? There's a lot of soul and funk like pastiche. A lot of people literally trying to recreate an experience that happened. It just feels like this is his lived experience. It's not costume. It's not like his point. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He is this. This is in him. And it feels like there is like almost a spiritual thing happening where he's like channeling funk grates of the past. But he does have a very distinct voice. It's like everything he could be comes into focus when you hear a song like this. So God our child just came out in November on November 14th. I think that was, we just had that one single when we played it on the show.

We're like, what? Where's you going here? The Holy G's great, too. Yeah. So that came out on November 14th. Like I said, we're just barely even scratching the surface on this episode of even our own personal lists, let alone all the other lists out there. Again, you'll find a much longer, more complete list online, 125 songs picked by the music team in our stations. You can hear full versions of these songs and all the songs on that big long list and a playlist that we put together.

You can find that on Spotify and Apple. also have a whole bunch more end-of-the-year stuff coming this month. But I want to play one more song to take us out here. It is kind of a total mood shift, but I feel like it's a good one to go out on because it has such a beautiful message. The song itself is so beautiful and very uplifting, I think. It's a song by Oliver Arnold's and Talos called We Didn't Know We Were Ready.

Olofer Arnold's, a pianist composer from Iceland. Talas was a singer and electronic artist from Ireland. He and Oliver Arnold's collaborated on this song with Eve Agabonds and the singer Neve Reagan at a festival that I think was in September of 2023. And then just a few months later, Talos was diagnosed with cancer. And he ended up passing away in August of 2024. Then Oliver Arnold's and all of their friends all got together to make this posthumous recording.

And it's all particularly moving because the song itself is just about how fleeting life is. and how unpredictable it is and fragile it is. But it is also, I think, just so beautiful and uplifting. What is really moving about this song is there's a moment where the entire sort of choir of voices comes together. They all start singing the refrain. We didn't know we were ready. And it almost feels like they are comforting and consoling one another in the wake of this loss. Yeah, I just love the simplicity of its message.

Like, you are ready. Another way to say it, I think, is that you're stronger than you think is part of the message here. But yeah, the community, the sense of community, everyone coming together. It's just so angelic and celestial and just really, really beautiful. Again, Olafer Arnold's and Talos, we didn't know we were ready. Hazel Sills, Sheldon Pierce, thanks always for a great hang and for a great year. Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's so great to be here.

And for NPR music, I'm Robin Hilton. It's all songs considered. into stone before the peace that breaks a door how did we doubt the evening sun we didn't know answers said break the grass what if the dreams are right what if the silence said before the peace that break how did we doubt the