The Last “Best Albums” List of 2025

For several years I’ve been meaning to start a newsletter, so here I am, starting one. Thanks for reading. This could be the first issue of many, or it could be the last issue of one.

This newsletter, which I’m naming Fell Asleep Watching Dragnet, paraphrasing a Beastie Boys lyric I like, currently has no central concept. This first installment contains three short lists of my favorite music I listened to in 2025. I meant to publish it in December but did not finish in time. Then, the other night, my friend Will sent me his belated list of his favorite albums of 2025, and I realized no one could stop me from finishing mine now.

Future installments may include more writing about music, and maybe books or movies, and maybe philosophy or food. There could also be some badly drawn cartoons. Consider subscribing if those things appeal to you.

For now, Fell Asleep Watching Dragnet is a free to read vanity project.

About these lists: The first one, which is the “main” list, aims to find balance between two criteria:

1. What did I listen to the most in 2025?
2. What did I like the most in 2025?

The answers to these questions are not always the same, but I think a good personal list should demonstrate some overlap between the two. The first list errs slightly toward the first criterion.

The second list is a few “honorable mentions,” usually albums I liked a lot when I heard them but for whatever reason didn’t return to that much. In some cases these are albums I expect to listen to more in the future, even if I didn’t spend much time with them in 2025.

The last list is a handful of older albums I first spent significant time with in 2025. I made this list because I don’t simply listen to music as it comes out and then discard it. I don’t see why an end-of-the-year list is an occasion to pretend I do.

All three lists are short because I did not listen to all or even a fraction of the interesting music released last year. I pay more attention to music than the average person, and I occasionally get paid a little bit of money to write about music, but there are other people who listen to way more than me. I don’t always deeply connect with more than a dozen or so new albums in a calendar year; if I made the list much longer, it would quickly go from a list of “favorites” to a list of everything I listened to.

I don’t love the sweeping year-end essay that tries to tie a rhetorical bow around a pile of disparate news items and cultural artifacts. I don’t think a year, of life or music, can be “about” something. But I do notice a couple modest trends in the things I listened to a lot last year. Several of these albums evoke hope in spite of struggle. I see this in Black Country, New Road’s reinvention following a key member’s departure and in the way anthemic and hooky indie rock songs keep poking through between cloudy dirges on Kitchen’s lengthily named album. The other trend is long-ish albums and, especially on my list of old music, more challenging music than I have been listening to in recent years. I’m maybe reacting against short attention span culture. The pervasive push toward shallow, illiterate, choice-less “engagement” in all corners of media bums me out, and getting into jazz and progressive rock feels removed from that kind of thing. (As does penning multi-thousand-word newsletters.)

Aside: I think I was also reacting a little bit against several successive years in which I kept getting into a succession of zippy Australian guitar bands until they all started to blur together. I love you, zippy Australian guitar bands, but in 2025 I needed a break.

Anyway, without further ado, here’s what I was listening to a very long time ago, in 2025:

My Top 5 Albums of ‘25

1. Forever Howlong – Black Country, New Road

Black Country, New Road rolled out a proudly cornball band photo alongside this album that provokes a very specific nostalgia in me for my arrival at college in the fall of 2012: Each band member is pictured in an individual square, instruments at hand. I went to a liberal arts school with a good music program, and that created a rare social hierarchy: In marked contrast to the rest of the world, many of the most popular and attractive people on campus were achingly sincere band and choir dorks. They weren’t “cool” in any conventional sense, and indeed their knowledge about classical or jazz or whatever often seemed accompanied, in a monkey’s paw sort of way, by comically bland taste in popular music. But their confident passion in their courses of study created its own “cool” in that academic context. Black Country, New Road’s gang of photogenic band geeks takes me right back. The photo's separation of the band members even evokes music students alone together in a warren of practice rooms.

There is a willingness to be boldly and knowingly hammy on this album that feels spiritually aligned with the quirky-charismatic music majors described above. It opens with a harpsichord, and it contains both a story-song about a lonesome knight and a slice-of-life song with the following lyrics: “I shall boil some beans / I should get my vitamin B / The last video I watched told me the pH of my gut microbiome was certainly causing my blues.” Naturally, the word “blues” is followed by a bluesy flute trill. Based on this brief description, you probably already know whether you will love or hate this album.

Forever Howlong completes an interesting metamorphosis for Black Country, New Road, from something of a distanced, prickly band greatly defined by the personality and lyrics of its primary male vocalist to a band defined by collectiveness, with three women sharing lead vocals and songwriting. The end result exudes a wonderful sense of communal warmth. It sounds like friendship, and not just because there’s a song called “Besties.”

They also still sound like the same band, kind of. They’ve evolved from weirdly klezmer-inflected post-punk to a distinctively muscular take on chamber pop. There’s allegedly a faction of the fanbase that doesn’t like the “new” Black Country, New Road, but I would argue the distance between this album and their earlier work isn’t necessarily greater than the distance traveled by any band making a leap forward. Radiohead shed and gained no key members between OK Computer and Kid A, for example, and Forever Howlong feels like less of a break with the past than that.

2. The Longer This Goes On – Forth Wanderers

I became a Forth Wanderers fan last summer, and this entry stands for last year’s album as well as the 2018 self-titled and 2014’s Tough Love, all of which I got into at once. For a while, Forth Wanderers were the music I put on when I wasn’t sure what I wanted to listen to, and I never regretted the default choice of one of those three albums.

Forth Wanderers’ musical home base is a kind of midtempo indie rock. That description might sound tepid, but hey: I like indie rock. On opener “To Know Me/To Love Me,” which is the new song most in line with their previous albums, I hear a little bit of Pavement, I hear a little bit of Mac DeMarco, and I hear a little bit of the verse groove of Weezer’s “Undone (The Sweater Song).”

The Longer This Goes On has a sense of musical adventurousness not so evident in the Wanderers’ previous work. They stretch out several times into something like pastiche. But their identity stays distinct even while they play with other genres. I think this is one mark of a great band—they can make a bunch of different kinds of songs and yet still sound like themselves. They mess with a joyously chintzy sort of jazz at the end of “Call You Back,” which their considerable instrumental chops make pretty convincing. On “7 Months,” they approach country, with one guitarist gesturing in the direction of a pedal steel sound, but they don’t go too far, and they land in a dreamy middle ground that goes nowhere near the caricatured country cosplay that has become pretty common across pop culture in recent years.

DeMarco’s 2 and Salad Days had a seismic impact on guitar tone for the decade after their release, even if a lot of bands watered down Mac’s seasick tape speed tricks into a simple command: “buy a chorus pedal.” Forth Wanderers don’t sound like they’ve spent that much time listening to “Ode to Viceroy,” but they were part of this loose phenomenon during their brief window of hype around the release of their self-titled album in 2018. Their sudden return this year, slightly warbly guitar tones intact, after that post-DeMarco wave has crested and receded, makes them feel pleasingly out-of-step. This is a very good album that reminds me more of the recent past than of anything so-called “happening” right now. And that’s with good reason, since the band who made it are themselves a cherished souvenir of the recent past they persist in recalling. Maybe that seems like a lotta words to call Forth Wanderers irrelevant without calling them irrelevant, but I think caring about “relevance” too much as an individual listener is kind of stupid. Good songs are good songs.

3. Through the Wall – Rochelle Jordan

Last fall, I had to buy a new car somewhat suddenly. It sucked. Car ownership is a prison. Why can’t we have high-speed rail? So many reasons—all bullshit.

Again: Needing to buy a car? Bad. Purchase made, however, I can admit the new car has a few perks. It’s a cobalt grey Honda, and the interior is black with occasional orange accent stitching. It feels sleek and modern. It’s actually a little too modern. I don’t like the big screen in the middle of the dashboard, but I appreciate that my car’s big screen is smaller than some other cars’ big screens. I don’t like how the brights switch on and off automatically at night, because over time that will make me worse at driving other, lower-tech cars, but I don’t mind that the seat warmers automatically turn on when it’s cold—and both automations spring from the same design impulse.

This Rochelle Jordan album sounds great in the new car. It’s confident, sexy music. I don’t listen to a lot of house music, but when I do, I latch onto the genre’s predilection for bold, jazzy piano and synth chords, and little rhythmic details. A good example is a recurrent little double snare hit on the last sixteenth note of beat three and the downbeat of beat four on “The Boy”—it makes me picture a dancer quickly stamping their feet in succession to land in a standing position.

This album feels aerodynamic, and I’ve been trying to pin down where that comes from. Part of it is the way the songs move from verse to chorus. “Never Enough” slides into its chorus with almost no shift in intensity; the vocal melody changes, and there is maybe a change to a new chord not present in the verses, but the effect is more like a vehicle shifting gears during smooth acceleration than a big moment of arrival, the way so many pop choruses are. Even the chorus is subordinate to the groove.

Through the Wall’s second-to-last song, “I’m Your Muse,” might be my favorite of the year. Every sound in it seems to have its high frequencies rolled off. There are no edges to it—muted drums, muted bass, muted synth, all bubbling up and sliding past each other. Jordan’s vocals are incantatory. The song seems to hover in place with the quality of a single blissful moment, extended.

This is a long album, 17 tracks in just under an hour, but there aren’t any obvious weak songs, so it doesn’t feel long. One of the early tracks, “Sum,” has a false ending where a gleefully canned club audience appears suddenly to chant “One! More! Time!” while the groove reconstructs itself. When the album ends, that chant echoes in my head.

4. Blue heeler in ugly snowlight, grey on gray on gray on white – kitchen

On “Coldest Beer in Town,” James Keegan boasts of finding the titular beer with whispered fervor, like folklore, or like a secret passed between friends. The song builds up and out from a voice-and-guitar beginning to a waltz—the drunkest time signature—with majestic layers of guitar and other instruments.

Like the Forth Wanderers album listed above, Blue heeler touches on many styles. Kitchen is a slowcore project, but this long album is defined as much by fairly loud, crunchy rock songs as despondent dirges. The overall effect of juxtaposing slow songs and slightly faster, rockier songs is hopeful to me, like sunlight breaking through clouds.

There are certainly slow songs on this album, like the opener, “Seaglass Wish,” which for much of its 7-minute runtime consists of only vocals and a skeletal acoustic guitar figure. But twice, it blooms into a lush arrangement of sizzling cymbals and something beautiful—maybe an accordion? Those blooming moments land partly because they flow out of uncomfortably sparse stretches.

There is a hesitant quality to the singing and playing across this album that shouldn’t be misconstrued for incompetence or amateurishness—this is a detailed and complex recording. It’s patient music—you can occasionally hear a hand tap the body of an acoustic guitar, the raspy impacts of brushes against drumheads. Keegan’s vocals are quiet, at times pitchy, but not unpleasant or amelodic. They are honest: Keegan makes the music he can make with the voice he has. His singing isn’t processed to sound better than it is. Although his voice isn’t that expressive in a technical sense, it does communicate depth of feeling.

The lyrics are often outstanding. Keegan is good at both poetic similes—"the sky looks just like a ghost's cloudy eye"—and almost country-ish idioms—“Days as long as this should have no night to follow / Days as long as this should have never dawned at all.”

Blue heeler’s sequencing rewards patience too. “Blue Healer,” the penultimate track, takes a voice-and-guitar arrangement somewhere virtuoso, using an insistent, hardly varying acoustic riff, a few atmospheric sounds, and simple dynamic shifts to create an ebbing and flowing, mantra-like tension. Its music echoes its refrain, “Time doesn’t heal, it just warps the way you feel,” which recurs cyclically but not predictably. The song rides these simple ingredients for 10 trancelike minutes and not one wasted second. Then the album concludes with “Grey on Gray on Gray on Gray on Gray on Gray,” its last and most anthemic piece of folk-rock.

5. Lonely People with Power – Deafheaven

There aren’t any Deafheaven albums I dislike, but 2021’s clean vocals experiment Infinite Granite was a minor creative success that I hoped wouldn’t represent a permanent shift for the band. It’s a good album, but it also has an undesirable “infomercial for guitar pedals” quality to me. Thankfully, on Lonely People with Power, Deafheaven did exactly what I, personally, hoped they’d do: They returned to their core atmospheric black metal with the lessons of Infinite Granite intact. Justin Meldal-Johnsen is retained as producer, so everything still sounds huge and spacey, but they dip back into New Bermuda’s trick of balancing ludicrously heavy and aggressive passages with unabashedly pretty ones. This time the distance between the extremes is even greater, with some of the harshest music they’ve ever released right next to clean, sleek, pop-shoegaze.

One of the things that didn’t quite work for me about Infinite Granite was the short songs. Throughout their career, typical Deafheaven tracks have developed over 8–15 minutes. Infinite Granite didn’t just throw in clean singing—it also shrank the band’s canvas from these long track lengths, a shift just as consequential. The band certainly showed they could write more conventional songs, but they sounded a little less exciting doing it. Lonely People with Power partially returns to long songs, but not quite as long as before—again, it seems like Deafheaven isolated a valuable lesson from experimentation and brought it back to their core sound in a thoughtful way. It’s as though they took a vacation from their sound on Infinite Granite, perhaps one with an undertone of spiritual questing, and they’ve now returned home fundamentally changed, with a new vantage point, a new understanding of how to do what they do.

Enough comparing this one to the last one, though: Although there are some standout tracks here, the real strength of Lonely People with Power is its exceptional and surprising sense of pace. I’m not sure I’ve heard any full-length quite like this one on a straight-through listen. It feels like a slow, steady climb up a mountain without a map, and toward the track list’s end, there are a multiple successive moments that feel like they must be the peak, only for the next track to climb even higher. This is especially pronounced with second-to-last-track “Winona,” which if it arrives on your first listen without you realizing where you’re at in the sequence, feels like the obvious final song and climax. But no—there’s one more, “The Marvelous Orange Tree,” which pulls off the very strange trick of being shorter than “Winona” while sounding even bigger, like Deafheaven snipped the lengthy climax off one of their classic long songs, isolated it, and turned into a song by itself. It is all arrival, for five and a half minutes, which shouldn’t work, but coming at the end of an hour-long album, it feels warranted, like the drawn-out final moments of a symphony.

Honorable Mentions

Thanks to the forces of time and boredom and curiosity, it’s likely I will continue to listen to music released in 2025 for years to come. You know—because one fundamental innovation of recorded music was freeing music from the bounds of time and physical proximity to musicians? If I were, hypothetically, to revisit my favorite albums of 2025 in a myopic and self-indulgent future newsletter, here are a few albums I might expect to move up in my retrospective estimation as I continue to listen to them in the future. You could place bets, if you’re into gambling on stupid shit.

Bleeds – Wednesday

I love Wednesday, and I think I probably love this album, but I just didn’t get around to listening to it that much last year. Sometimes that happens.

Lux – Rosalía

Realistically, Rosalía’s Lux might be better, in the creative-achievement sense, than any of the albums I put on the “real” list above, but it also dropped late in the year, and I gave it only one spellbound listen.

Sphere of Service – Rotary Club

This is a weird punk band from Reno obsessed with rotary and pay phones. I heard about them from an interview in Evan Minsker’s see/saw newsletter. This album is good, but more than that I think it’s just fun and cool that it exists. I respect the impulse to make a weird thing of doggedly limited appeal, always.

I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away – Hayden Pedigo

This album of instrumental acoustic guitar with little atmospheric accoutrements would be number 6 on the main list if it extended that far. I like the whole thing, but the string section's sudden appearance on “Houndstooth” is one of my standout musical moments of the year—gorgeous and surprising.

Old Albums of the Year

1. A Love Supreme – John Coltrane

Coltrane’s masterpiece sent me on a bit of a jazz excursion in the fourth quarter of 2025. There are two easily explainable things I like about this album: Elvin Jones’ drumming, which I wish I’d heard earlier in my life because I think it would have allowed me to feel a little more at home playing jazz, and the bold sax melodies Coltrane plays in the first two sections of A Love Supreme, “Acknowledgment” and “Resolution.” Judging the “quality” of a melody is pretty subjective, but if you can hear the main melody of “Resolution” and not think it’s surprising and beautiful, I don’t think we hear music the same way.

Other extra-musical things I like about this album are harder to explain. A Love Supreme has a reputation as a piece of far-out jazz that still manages to be accessible—but of course, that only makes sense if you find it accessible. It’s instrumental music we’re told depicts its author’s deep spiritual exploration, but this is even more subjective than melody: Do I hear Coltrane’s spiritual journey in the music because I knew the album’s reputation before listening, or do I hear it because it’s actually somehow there? This quality is so nebulous, but I buy in—I think the latter. And I appreciate that this music asks for that kind of buy-in. A Love Supreme demands to be approached with the kind of sincerity its creators brought to its creation; it asks us to come to it with the conviction that it can communicate spiritual awakening through pure sound, that music can save a person from despair, that music can serve as a conduit through which to commune with powers beyond our understanding. Coltrane said “I believe in all religions,” which I think is a silly thing to say every second I sit in silence; when I listen to A Love Supreme, I can briefly make-believe Coltrane was right, that all religious formulations thrum somehow at their centers with a deeper truth that admits no contradiction.

2. Red – King Crimson

This spring was “Spring Crimson” for me—I listened to every King Crimson album up through 1995’s Thrak. (The discography gets complicated after Thrak, full of live albums, bizarre experiments, and obnoxiously capitalized titles that I wasn’t interested in sorting through.) Red is the biggest jewel in the King’s crown to me. Progressive rock and heavy metal developed in the late ‘60s/’70s out of many of the same raw materials, but the streams didn’t cross much in the ‘70s. “Prog metal” became a thing later. Red, from 1974, is an exception—claustrophobic and menacing for much of its runtime, full of lurching grooves and clattering percussion. It’s not metal, but it is very heavy in a way ‘70s prog usually isn’t. You know what else ‘70s prog didn’t do? Sexy. But that’s what the yearning grit in John Wetton’s voice and Robert Fripp’s eerie fuzz tone guitar melody add up to on “Starless,” Red’s epic ballad closer. A flabbergasting song—Wetton sounds like the guy from The Blue Nile.

3. Greatest Hits / Stand! - Sly & the Family Stone

I’m calling this one a tie because there’s a lot of overlap between these two albums. I listened to a bunch of Sly & the Family Stone after Sly Stone’s death last year, filling in a personal blind spot. As it turns out, widely acknowledged genius Sly Stone was pretty good at what he did.

I was struck by Sly’s versatility on the late-60s body of work these records document: He and the Family Stone could do highly structured, melodic pop songs and endless funk jams with equal ease. “Somebody’s Watching You” and “Hot Fun in the Summertime” are as perfect of pop songs as any of the other many brilliant pop songwriters of the late ‘60s were writing, but hard-grooving jams like “Sex Machine” and “Don’t Call Me N––––, Whitey” place him in competition with improvisational rock and funk acts. And still other songs, like “Sing a Simple Song” and “You Can Make It If You Try,” manage to be both things at once: Repetitive funk vamps so intricate yet sturdy that they turn into well-oiled hook machines.

4. Ask the Ages – Sonny Sharrock

More evidence of my jazz autumn. I followed Elvin Jones’ drumming from John Coltrane to this, Sharrock’s final album, which a lot of folks seem to consider his best. Sharrock, Jones, and saxophonist Pharoah Sanders were all major figures in jazz in the 1960s, a confrontational and esoteric era for the genre, but Ask the Ages is pleasingly approachable. Most of the album’s compositions have catchy, melodic refrains. Sanders goes briefly into the screech/squeal register on a couple solos, but otherwise this album is a perfect jazz album for the curious rock fan: Sharrock favors a burly, thick guitar tone unusual for jazz but pretty familiar if you like, say, Thin Lizzy or Black Sabbath. The resulting mix of adventurous jazz and sludgy guitar has a real chocolate/peanut butter quality.

5. The Wham of that Memphis Man! – Lonnie Mack

Lonnie Mack is most remembered as a talented, distinctive guitarist—cited as an influence by folks like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Duane Allman. But he was also a truly great blue-eyed soul vocalist. Being a virtuoso in two areas arguably hindered Mack’s career by making him harder to market. His two regional hits, “Memphis” and “Wham,” were guitar instrumentals at the tail end of a brief period when guitar instrumentals were a viable route up the charts. This 1963 album compiles both of those hits alongside contemporaneous recordings, some showcasing Mack’s guitar and others his voice. The material is uniformly excellent, combining the simple exhilaration of the best early rock and roll with casually advanced playing that never comes at the expense of the music’s energy. But The Wham of That Memphis Man wasn’t successful at the time, and Mack went several years without another album.

The quality that made Lonnie Mack difficult to market in 1963 makes this album a wonderful discovery now. You can come to Mack having heard of him as a guitarist’s guitarist, only to be surprised by a top-tier blue-eyed soul vocalist. Or you might come for his innovative guitar licks and end up staying for his distinctive yet less-imitated tone—built on the vibrato of a Magnatone amplifier and constant, subtle whammy bar use. I can imagine a specific kind of hapless and impatient person putting the album on without any context, hearing “Wham!”, thinking the record will be all surf rock-adjacent guitar instrumentals, taking it off, and never hearing “Where There’s a Will,” the stirring, Sam Cooke-like ballad that immediately follows. But that person couldn’t be you or me.