Listening to more music—more of what I loved, more new stuff, more genres, more everything—was a primary goal for 2025. Despite the somewhat small list here, I heard so many new, cool albums.

Our instincts always tend towards trying to fit things into a narrative, and a year ending gives us a convenient container.

Not easier. Convenient.

It would be tempting to say that this was a year I retreated into comfort, especially given that my four favorites were from established artists that I discovered at around the same time in my life, whose work has gotten me through good and very bad times. And that has a bit of truth to it—my life was upended, by choice, in a way that will permanently alter the course of my life. Being transgender is a permanent state for me, whether or not I continue to transition (I imagine I will, the fact that almost all of my problems were solved after my first dose of Estrogen is signal enough that I made the right choice). The familiar was a balm, yes, but there was also a sense of forward motion, pushing ahead into new territory, or more expressively rendering ideas from the past.

A trait these albums share is confidence. All are self-assured in the best way, refining core competencies and adding exciting new nuance to their sounds.

All were instrumental to my survival.

---

Lady Gaga, MAYHEM

Gaga returns with her seventh canonical album (spare me your quibbles), a gift for the faithful and admonishment to those who lost the faith.

ARTPOP landed with a (rather unfair) wet thump, Joanne was rightfully regarded as a dud (though not without its moments: “Diamond Heart” is pure glam swagger, and “A-Yo” is a fizzy little ditty). And, possibly given extremely understandable context, nobody talks about Chromatica.

But, after the demonstration of acting chops, the aforementioned dance-pop album, and a tie-in release to one of the weirdest “superhero” sequels of all time, MAYHEM arrives as a reminder of her dominance. There’s horny industrial dance, there’s sleek gothic dance, there’s synthetic Max Martin-derived pop dance, anthemic bangers, disco, glam, and even an ill-advised Joanne-style ballad at the end. Anybody who wants one era or another of Stefani Germanotta can get it, and more besides.

“Bountiful” is a great word to describe it. The lyrical occupations remain the same (fucking, love, being sexy, love and sex being good/bad/fatal/life-giving, fame, The Fame (2008)), they’re functional-to-good, better than they need to be in a pop album. But lyrics in a pop song, if you’re not Taylor Swift or Bruce Springsteen, are what you bolt onto your melody.

And this album has MELODIES. VOCALS. MUSIC that is PLEASURABLE and PLEASING and GROOVING and DISTINCT. A cornucopia of sonic delights, held together with tightly performed vocals, Gaga showcasing mastery over several of her antecedents (which I will not name).

Before transition, I was lukewarm, but with the clarity of HRT, and the attendant loss of dysphoric static, it’s much easier to see the nuance. This is not the “next Gaga”, as it has been so many times in the past—this is the Gaga for All Seasons, the eternal Mother Monster. Retrenchment without loss of vigor, a cutting back of the accumulation of expectation, delivering a crystalline collection of hook-laden pop songs, a patchwork collage rearranged so specifically and with such panache that it cannot be mistaken for anyone else’s work.

At its best, Gaga’s music is made of everything else. The singularity resides not in the total individuality of the piece, but rather what the particular synthesis achieves.

According to Gaga herself, the process of making the album tracks along the same lines of recursion without repetition, of “reassembling a shattered mirror”: recognizing “… if you can’t put the pieces back together perfectly, you can create something beautiful..in its own new way.”

But there is something unsaid: reassembly can leave pieces out.

My coming out was a process of shattering and reassembly itself, in the most profound way. Admitting the truth that been there all along brought clarity, but it also complicated life in ways I was aware of, but was unprepared to personally experience.

Hormones.

Wardrobes.

Employment.

My name.

My body.

My marriage.

My family.

The rush of joy that comes from speaking the truth into existence is fleeting, giving way to the painful realities of simply getting through your day.

A romance novel-in-progress concerns a trans woman only a few months into her HRT. As part of my prewriting ritual, I work on backstory. Ingrid was—is—her name, suggested to me by my wife. There is light, but it demands we give it the oxygen it needs to survive.

---

Ingrid, 2025

“You speak about these things like you want to be proud, rather than actually being proud. Like you’re convincing yourself. This past year you’ve been on a roll—job, love, music, all of that stuff—but you keep coming around to feeling empty or unfulfilled.” Elizabeth pauses.

I nod.

“I’m not here to punish you, Alfred, or make you feel bad about yourself. A lot of our work has centered on checking boxes, fulfilling a script. Your life is about achieving goals, and you’ve done it now.”

I smile. She continues.

“I want to be very delicate and careful with my language.” She sees it but won’t name it. She’s the first one to do that. I know what she’s talking about, but I won’t admit it. Not yet.

“You’ve been circling a recurring deviation from your plan, Alfred. It’s a topic—“

“Ingrid.” The name is a song I’ve known forever, but refused to sing until now. It’s strained and clumsy, but it’s mine.

“Come again?” She’s attempting to stay neutral, but I can see the smile creeping across her face.

“Please call me Ingrid.

“That’s who I am.”

I call the only trans woman I know socially. She was the recording engineer from my recital. She did live sound, even got an accompanist and a string quartet. We’d stayed cordial since then.

“Foxx Friedman Recording Studio, how may I direct your call?” A chipper voice answers.

“Um, oh no, sorry, I meant to call—“

There’s a tussle on the other end of the line, a whine, and a huff. “You’re no fun,” she says, with much less gusto.

“Oh my god, Sarah, please. I’m so sorry, my wife is just like that, sometimes,” Foxx says.

“It’s alright,” I reply. “This is, um, Alfred, but I’m not Alfred anymore, I’m Ingrid.”

The line goes quiet, and I’m afraid I lost the signal.

“Congratulations! That’s a big deal. Did you need anything right now?” Her voice was animated, energetic. She was being honest.

“Um, what do I now?” I ask, realizing how lost I am.

“Okay, here we go. Do you have a therapist?”

“She’s the first person I told.”

“Awesome. If you need a letter for hormones or anything, she’s got you covered. Next: Find an endocrinologist. They’re the hormone people.”

“Alright.” Would I need a referral?

“Next part is less fun: tell the people you want to know, and who needs to know. They’re not always the same.”

I was afraid of that. My eyes are watering without difficulty.

“I know, Ingrid. I know. Clarity hurts. Did you need us to come by?”

“What?”

“You’re a friend now. And you’re not the first. We, uh, we seem to have that vibe. We can hang out, just be around, if you want.”

“Oh, wow, um,” I blurt, then a happy and sad sob, “that’s so nice, but…” I idly fidget with my engagement ring, “I gotta tell a few folks first.”

“We can make it work. I know it.” Alexis’ voice gets super high when she lies. “We’ll have time to prepare, we can start researching things, so you know what you’re getting into, and then we can go to therapy so we can figure out whether or—“

“What? What do you mean?” I ask. I already know, but I want her to say it.

“It’s going to be okay, we’ll get through this. We always do.”

“Alexis,” I begin, trying to tamp down the anger, “Alexis. This is me. Not a phase, not a bit, not some kind of experiment. This is what I’ve been running from. This is the thing our plan was built to avoid.”

“And then it fucking happened!” She screams, standing up from the couch, fists clenched. “I give you every chance, every out, and you keep me around! And now I get to tell everyone that my sweet, beautiful Alfred isn’t Alfred…and he’s…she’s…why?”

I reach for her, and she recoils. Yeah. Figured that would happen. “Because if I don’t I’m dead.”

We know. We know Richie is hanging over us. He returned to the family, drank, and then died on a backroad in North Texas after falling asleep at wheel. The family said it was “regrettable” and “avoidable”, but not why, or how.

“Yeah,” she says. “I just…okay. Right.” Alexis walks off, closes the bedroom, locks the door.

The address auto-populates. I hope against hope that it still works.

“You were right. I’m sorry.” She won’t remember.

From: lizettedeveraux@mailmail.fr

That is wonderful to hear, Ingrid :)

Now, let me know if you are ever in town. The girls who return to me make the best lovers >:)

---

Bon Iver, SABLE, fABLE

Justin Vernon’s music is full of left turns. He follows up his breakthrough For Emma, Forever Ago with the Blood Bank EP, a quartet of spare, gorgeous songs, anchored by the miniature masterpiece of longing in its title track, then two guest spots on Twisted Fantasy (we need to admit that he was the true revelation on “Monster”). 2011 brought Bon Iver, Bon Iver, as close to a perfectly orchestrated chamber pop album if there ever was one, to the synthetic textures of 22, A Million and i,i, and collaborating with Taylor Swift. A steady upward trajectory where art met ambition.

Faith and belief seem to be a big part of my list. I had written off this album when I heard “S P E Y S I D E”, a sleepy strummed folk song with a few sublime seconds surrounded by a lot of nothing. I’ll admit my reaction was maybe a bit premature, but can you blame me? I had not heard the good word since 2019, when I bounced hard of i,i (what I affectionately call My Gender Year, when my dysphoria was both at its most severe but also the most actively managed)(and which I have since returned to, and folks…it’s good). I held his features in TSwift’s songs close, that sweet falsetto hitting with the same force it did when I heard “Skinny Love” for the first time.

So Pitchfork dropped a good review, and because I am a mark for P4k scores, I bought the fucking album. The first four tracks have grown on me in time, and the album has to be taken with all of these tracks together, but they can be trying. “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS” and the aforementioned [not doing it—ed. (Which is just me)] have their moments, but “AWARDS SEASON” gives us some primo yearning, along with a fucking gorgeous blooming of horns and keys, only to taper off into silence…

And then slowly blooms once more into textures defined by warmth and light, two qualities that I’d never truly associated with the group. It builds, crashes, and drifts into a sustained tone, bending down…

Into the hardest left turn I have ever heard from Justin Vernon. What, you may ask, would cause such a reaction? Did the album dissolve into ambient noise? Esoteric experimental prog? Metal?

No. Wilder than that.

He crashed into pop.

Bon Iver was never challenging, but previous albums could withhold their greatest pleasures behind the flourishes: For Emma’s lo-fi desolation, 2011’s production decisions obscuring vocals in the mix, and the jagged abstraction of 22 and i,i. They had melody and structure, but I’d never call those middle three albums “pop”.

But “Everything Is Peaceful Love” switches up the game entirely, a lax, laid-back bed of synths and clicky drums, a clear verse with vocals right up front. And it just gets more melodic, more beautiful, and more generous from there.

Arrangements are pared back, melodies and hooks and harmonies pushed forward, culminating in “Day One” a sweet and luminous gospel song, highlighting his facility with white-boy soul (which you would have already known about if you cared about “Monster”), joined by Dijon and Flock of Dimes for one of two (!!) features. It’s thrilling to hear Vernon take a such a huge swing, and even more so when it’s so successful.

Vernon’s lyrics maintain an air of cryptic melancholy, emotions referred to but never named completely, always erring towards evocative imagery to tell the story. Fires and trees and waves, sham summers and massive bodies of water, rhythms and memories and cars and snow.

But the album itself finds its peak, its combination old and new, in its penultimate song, “If Only I Could Wait”, featuring Danielle Haim.

I never quite found the words to describe this song adequately—it was part of the soundtrack of the change from Jeff to Charli—but maybe it’s because the pleasures of this song are so simple: washes of synths and strings, an aching and melancholy vocal, a contrapuntal pre-chorus (panned hard in stereo), the voices coming together in harmony for that final chorus. But beneath, there’s a warmth in it, wrapped in that desolate melancholy; lyrics of desire and resignation, to reach and need, knowing having won’t work. The pain of something that can’t change. I decided against that. Every time I listen, that comes back to me. Sentimentality comes easier, these days.

“There’s A Rhythm”, the final song, isn’t a grand finale. It is purely mid-00’s adult R&B balladry, delivered with characteristic restraint. But again, Vernon’s voice leads, carrying the journey of going back and forth on whether to move out or move on.

The song ends without answering its question, choosing instead to actually dissolve into a hazy, free-tempo recitative of the piano line, drifting into silence.

---

The question of the journey being worth the pain and uncertainty was a keen discomfort in the fall and early winter. I had the HRT pills in hand, taking them would change my life, inarguably for the better, but to do so would be to admit to my own brokenness. To admit that I had protected myself from a truth that needed to be said, that I had repeatedly said ‘no’ a thousand times before I even considered a ‘yes’.

And in those two weeks between my egg crack and beginning medical transition, I felt like I could just put the toothpaste back in the tube. Maybe say I had a nervous breakdown or an episode of mental static that pushed me to be dangerously impulsive. Say, “hey, sorry, this wasn’t a huge deal, I think I was just really jacked up emotionally, please disregard what I said!” But I knew that wouldn’t be true. The static had been my entire life, the impulsive drive my need to finally out myself, to force myself into a position that would render me unable to take anything back.

And I had to admit to myself that HRT wasn’t a failure, a sign that all of my rationalizing and joking—I always said, “It’s a no until it’s a yes”— never worked. They did work. They allowed me to survive until the no became a yes.

I’ve lived moments where everything that I knew about myself was either clarified or excised. I willingly chose ego death because to do otherwise would be to damn myself to misery for the rest of my probably pretty short life. There’s a rhythm, a pulsing beat that I could finally hear, music underneath the pain and the fear, a song that I’d always known that I hadn’t been able to fully understand until the moment I took my first dose.

It’s funny. My entire expectation for transition, my overarching goal, was to not feel like I wanted to kill myself all the time. As soon as that first dose of Spironolactone and Estradiol hit my system, I solved my most profound problem. I had no more expectations or plans after that.

Now what?

---

Hayley Williams, Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party

What is life in the aftermath? How do we continue to live in the wake of change? Who are we after the dust is settled?

Williams attempts to answer that question with a confident, “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Over the course of 18 (!!!) songs, the longest on this list [20 by press time—ed. (Me)], the Paramore frontwoman and queen of Hot Topic Emo deliberately constructs a musical slideshow carousel, shifting genres, textures, lyrical concerns, themes, and vocal affectation again and again. It is a shot across the bow, maybe at critical respectability (which always feels like a mirage anyways—Paramore, like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, was always a cut above their peers of the era) or an announcement of range, or maybe just a sign that she’s not beholden to capital quite as tightly as before. Whatever the reason, it works.

Every song makes me think of different names, bands—not as points against the album as derivative, but in the same way Gaga works: a sense of stealing and assuming ownership, rather than rote imitation. There is nothing of the crunch and sneer of early Paramore, pulling instead from mid-00’s adult contemporary, new wave, 90’s alt-rock, and the harsher end of post-hardcore (highlight “Mirtazapine”, an ode to the anti-depressant of the same name, recalls Title Fight or Rival Schools in its crashing drums and guitar contortions).

What’s striking here is the shift in temporality within its lyrics. Whereas Paramore has always been far more concerned with the present and the immediate, a constant navigation of the world as it happens, Ego Death opts to look backwards, to survey a life lived, one that can start after decades of restriction. She is caustic (“A lot of dumb motherfuckers that I made rich”, referencing her TWENTY YEAR contract, from which she was only recently released), resigned (“carrying my mother’s mother’s torment”), lonely and lost, and sometimes heartbroken. “Disappearing Man”, “Love Me Different”, “Parachute”, and “Whim” all directly grapple with love lost, as betrayal, vanishing, and resentment. It is all much more mature, hotter to the touch than Paramore’s posed and detached This Is Why from 2023.

Ego Death feels alive, infused with a desire to actually take time and learn from the past, rather than live inside it forever.

This was another album that grew on me the more I listened. It is not immediately appealing: it is long, and its intensity is lower than her work with Paramore. But again, I keep coming back to confidence and generosity. There’s SO MUCH of an album here, and it is so well-executed that it demands attention.

Looking back can be constructive, if you know what you want and what you’re doing.

---

Anecdotally, there is a phenomenon experienced by many trans people, where we attempt, in one way or another, to throw ourselves fully into our assigned gender, as a way to alleviate or deny our dysphoria. One might call it damaging or counterintuitive, and one would be right! Being transgender, while liberating, is an admittance of pain. Admitting that you have lied: to yourself, others, the world. Admitting that you require intervention to fundamentally live with yourself.

From 2020, when I felt my dysphoria quiet to a whisper, until mid 2025, I started to step away from femininity. I decided that I didn’t need makeup or dresses or anything like that anymore, and I could live as a boy as long as I worked out and got in really good shape and didn’t shave and wore the most shapeless clothing I could find and and and and—

Finally tell myself that I was a girl, or something approximate to one, and to the degree that I would need medical intervention to save my life.

And staying alive is kind of the point, so the process began.

Several processes begin, actually. Grief for our past. Relief over the truth. Pain from the wait. Joy for the future.

And reflection that transforms not just who we will become, but who we were. A gradual realization that we were always ourselves. That we weren’t broken—not in the ways we thought. Our identities weren’t a cruel joke or a burden, even when they felt like it. They were just truths waiting for their chance to be believed.

Fiction can be reparative, or at least a thing that can sort out our feelings. I try not to rewrite myself into happy endings—that doesn’t suit my overall mission of “honesty above beauty”—but I do try to complicate my past, as a way of reassuring myself that even if I had an idea, I wouldn’t be able to fix anything.

To wit: Annie Wilde, the main character of another novel-in-progress, in another backstory exercise, encountering a queerness that exists beyond her modest horizons.

---

Annie, 2005

Three weeks before my audition, as I finish a rehearsal performance.

“You must strip away all of the things that…the things…your darkness,” Lizette says, tapping her forehead with her index finger, her habit when she’s attempting to find a thought. “Your…eh…nuit du coeur. Night of the heart.”

That’s Lizette Devereaux, Dr. Skiffer’s extremely beautiful, extremely French friend, a vocal performance doctoral candidate. Apparently, she needed a vacation from the “talentless Francs who conflate being French with being an artist” to nurture “the unwitting masters of the middle country.” We’re in Austin, Texas, far far FAR from the Midwest, but I don’t turn down the free lessons.

She’s French, she’s taller than me, and she is different. Her voice is high and pinched, and I’ve never heard her sing. She stoops and hunches, almost like she’s hiding the figure I can see under her Stevie Nicks tangle of lace and fringe. It’s tough, large.

Her face is…uncannily girl-like. I think that’s the word. Mom wanted me to stop saying weird all the time. And I like it. Dad told me what it meant when I showed him an X-Men comic.

It’s too perfect, like it was sculpted. And what if it was? People get plastic surgery all the time.

“That hurts. It makes me cry.” The words feel small and stupid.

“But that is the thing that makes it real,” she says. “When we let our mind touch our soul, connect the outside to our hearts—we understand. Amy,” she says to her pianist, “Do you have “Lonely House”?”

Amy thumbs through her binder. “Yep. Right here.”

“God forgive me,” Lizette mutters, making the cross with her hand, “for I must sing in English. I pray that this does not remove my name from the Book of Life.”

The chords warble in, a jazzy chromatic motion, and then…”at night, when everything is quiet, this old house seems to breathe a sigh…” in the clearest, more pure, most fucking AMAZING—

Tenor?

—VOICE I’ve ever heard. It’s full of power, yearning, sadness, but also grace, masculine but not male. That it? Yeah. Her voice with her face, it’s not confusing.

It’s Lizette.

“The night/FOR ME/Is not romantic!” She booms, taking the top note of “ME” like it was nothing, “unhook the stars and take them down…”

When she concludes, I stand rooted to the spot, mouth agape. Amy is a little shocked, too.

“Do you understand what I mean? To put your heart into the words, the music?”

I nod.

“So Sally: she doubts, she longs, but she is defiant, hides her fear in strength. Maybe you know that,” she continues, and she reaches up to undo her scarf, hands delicate and pale but unmistakably powerful…

Like my dad’s.

They’re beautiful, like her.

Lizette notices my noticing. She smiles. “I live in spaces between, Belle. I know longing.” She throws a glance Amy’s way. Her eyes go wide, then she turns red and looks away.

“Sing once more, but do not worry about the notes. Find that feeling, whatever is at the bottom of your heart, the pain you hide.

“Do not sing as if you long to hide. Sing as if you long to be seen.”

---

Lizette is one of my favorite recurring characters. Her transness is unapologetic, her character is magnetic, and she commands without being condescending, preachy, or a Special Lesson. She is a truth made of possibility, and a reminder that my own perception lagged way behind where I am now. High school aged Jeff, upon meeting Lizette, would not quite understand why he found her alluring, only that he did, and it would make him burn with shame and desire, with recognition coming far later.

Age and recognition are the twin pillars of my transition. Neither holds up the change without the other, and denying the importance of either is to deny how my life was shaped and contorted by ideas that were, for a very long time, merely the background radiation of existence.

With the benefit of being nearly 40 years old, I can see them for what they were: bigotry and ignorance masquerading as “conventional wisdom”.

---

Motion City Soundtrack, The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World

It seems to me that, no matter what kind of art you make—genre, medium, style, level of fame or obscurity—your work eventually becomes about your age. Specifically, getting older and what the fuck it means.

Stefani Germanotta is 39. Justin Vernon is 44. Hayley Williams is 37.

Justin Courtney Pierre is 49.

Of all the artists in this list, Motion City Soundtrack was the one I found first. Their 2005 release, Commit This To Memory, was purchased almost immediately after I heard “Everything Is Alright”, with a Patrick Stump guest vocal in the bridge. I was hooked, and Pierre’s ironic-but-emotionally-wounded earnestness stuck with me.

Pierre is sober, having battled alcoholism in the past, and periods of sobriety and relapse surface again and again in MCS’s work. He is brutally honest in his self-assessment, with some of their best early work coming directly from the tension created between tight and melodic pop-punk and lyrics pulled from the worst experiences of addiction (“This Is For Real”, a brutal relapse anthem from Even If It Kills Me, remains their peppiest and darkest song).

As a 19-year-old only just becoming aware of how trauma and self-destruction were inextricably linked—I am a victim and survivor of intimate parter violence, who abused me in ways I’d rather not talk about—it felt a little over my head. Life continued on, though, and I got older while that album took its place in my personal fossil record.

It is my repeated listens of MCS’s second and third albums that form the context of this new work, their first new full-length album as a band in a decade, partially recorded at Electrical Audio, the recording studio of the late, great Steve Albini. I didn’t know what I was going to get, but I wouldn’t miss an opportunity to experience a favorite band continue to make music.

I’d say that this album is the least flashy of my favorites, showcasing not a stunning multifaceted gallery of delights, but something more mature, and harder to pull off: a deepening of sound, ambition coming in the actual technical construction of the music, a dedication to density that sits just underneath the surface-level hooks.

“Some Wear a Dark Heart”, became the anthem of my early transition, for a very simple reason: “One of these days/I’ll break and it will all come tumbling out”…”I’m dying to tell you/that nothing is quite what it seems”.

Synchronicity, serendipity, coincidence, whichever word you want to use.

Elsewhere, Pierre sings of being confused at parties, a youth filled with weed and shitty bands fronted by your friends, how much it sucks to get older.

But harmonies are richer, guitar lines move with more fluidity. There’s a greater willingness to play around a little more. The tempos are slower, the hooks more melodic, the anxiety shifting from the pressures of early adulthood and substance abuse to the more resigned pressures of middle age: being misunderstood, toxic partners (“She Is Afraid” is a heartbreakingly simple illustration of cycles of abuse), a general confusion that sets in when you realize you know a lot less than you assumed.

And that’s life, isn’t it? “Things Like This”, the penultimate track, makes this plain, and I’d quote the entire lyric sheet to prove my point. The life I had before transition wasn’t a lie, nor was it the truth. But saying to myself, “Why couldn’t it be me,” offered a third path: that what happened to me was real life, but I wasn’t living it as the person I was meant to be. Decades locked into a single way of being, fearing I was doomed to live in misery and self-destruction, wiped away in an instant.

But it didn’t change the years spent in that pain, so how do I even—

“Get yourself together, man/you can’t miss what you never had”

Indeed.

---

I wouldn’t do anything differently. All those years spent under threat, trapped inside the hell dysphoria creates, were the volcanic mantle exerting pressure on the carbon of my soul, pressing it, compressing it so tightly that it had no choice but to become a diamond.

Yes, I spent years hating myself. Years repeating self-harm cycles that didn’t feel like self-harm because they didn’t involve cutting. Decades slowly attempting to negate myself entirely, but never had the courage to follow through.

But they were the years I met my wife. When I found a partner that accepted me as I was. That gave me space and time to grow, to discover who I was beneath the sadness and self-hatred. A woman who was brave and honest with me when it mattered.

I’d never trade early clarity for that. My life is here, at this moment, in the light of these choices.

To paraphrase Gandalf, I arrived precisely when I intended to.