MOJO’s must-have records of the year.

Admittedly, we do get excited about MOJO’s essential review of the year each time December rolls around, but 2025 really has proved to be a vintage one when it comes to new releases. Alongside highlights by returning ‘90s heroes Suede, Pulp and Stereolab, we’ve been thrilled by soon-to-be-classics being laid down by the likes of Cameron Winter and Geese, The Tubs, Horsegirl, Emma-Jean Thackray and CMAT, while MOJO legends Robert Plant, Mavis Staples and Van Morrison have all served up some of the finest work of their long and storied careers.

How to pick just 50 was a tall order, but we polled MOJO’s world-class team of writers and genre experts* to deliver what we believe is the definitive list of 2025’s best new albums. Want to tell us something you think we missed? You can always get in touch at [email protected]. Until next year…

50.

MARGO PRICE

Hard Headed Woman

(LOMA VISTA)

Never one to be constrained by genre, Price’s recent work had moved away from Nashville’s cultural city limits, with 2023’s Strays a heady kind of mushroom-powered soft rock. Her fifth solo album, though, was an exuberant rapprochement with country, right down to the Waylon Jennings song and cowboy hat on the cover. As with 2016 debut Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, it suited her perfectly: a fine, unfettered talent ultimately most at home causing trouble at the honky-tonk.

Standout track: Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down

49.

SALIF KEITA
So Kono

(NØ FØRMAT!)

The ‘Golden Voice Of Africa’ had formally closed his career at a Mali gig in 2018. Still, as he told MOJO 377, “A musician is never in retirement” – hence this gorgeous comeback. Where once Keita’s albums were lush, So Kono was an intimate session of reworked old and new songs, with his acoustic guitar backed only by ngoni and calabash. The ideal showcase, it transpired, for the extraordinary flight, range and delicacy of the 76-year-old’s voice.

Standout track: Kanté Manfila

48.

LEMONHEADS

Love Chant

(FIRE)

For too long, it had been depressingly easy to categorise Evan Dando as a great talent squandered. 2025, though, brought a sober reckoning with his past in the shape of a meaty memoir, plus his first album of new songs in 19 years. Extremely good songs, too, recorded in São Paulo, that mixed the old scrappy joie de vivre with hard-won wisdom. Among the guests – Juliana Hatfield, J Mascis and key songwriting foil Tom Morgan, as you’d hope.

Standout track: Togetherness Is All I’m After

47.

GREENTEA PENG

Tell Dem It’s Sunny

(AWAL)

“I am not who I was yesterday,” sang Aria ‘Greentea Peng’ Wells on her second album, an impression corroborated when she told MOJO 377 she’d given up spliffs after a “beautiful relationship” of 17 years. That said, Tell Dem It’s Sunny still sounded exquisitely smoked, a millennial update of trip-hop that presented Wells as an intoxicating hybrid of Amy Winehouse, Erykah Badu and Tricky, firmly rooted in South London.

Standout track: Green

46.

CAMERON WINTER

Heavy Metal

(PARTISAN)

A breakout 12 months for the young New Yorker climaxed with the exceptional fourth album by his band, Geese, after it had begun in the dog days of 2024 with this solo debut. Heavy Metal revealed a rock’n’roll classicist with a razorblade croon, as much Tom Waits as Thom Yorke, and a precocious songwriting talent. “A glorious, emotive voice with brilliant, blistering words, a racked and wondrous thing,” gushed fanboy Nick Cave.

Standout track: Drinking Age

45.

BILLY NOMATES

Metalhorse

(INVADA)

A longtime Stranglers devotee, Tor ‘Billy Nomates’ Maries told MOJO 379 how Golden Brown transformed for her “what punk was and could be. You don’t always need a thrashing guitar”. It was an imperative that pulsed through the third Nomates album, as she confronted grief and health challenges with a sound that imbued windswept ’80s AOR with punk spirit. Also useful: a guest spot from Hugh Cornwell himself, on Dark Horse Friend.

Standout track: Plans

44.

SVEN WUNDER
Daybreak

(PIANO PIANO)

Cratediggers looking for lost library music albums and soundtracks would be well advised to spend some time in the new release racks and hunt down Stockholm’s Sven Wunder. After homages to Turkish psych and Japanese jazz, Daybreak found him summoning the spirits of Morricone, Barry and Axelrod: expansively orchestrated, meticulously realised scores to imaginary movies that were way too classy to be mere pastiche – and provided rich new pickings for breaks hunters.

Standout track: Daybreak

43.

BC CAMPLIGHT
A Sober Conversation

(BELLA UNION)

A baroque pop auteur who fit snugly into a triumvirate with labelmates John Grant and Father John Misty, Brian Christinzio also shared their ability to make simultaneously wry, accessible and moving music about personal trauma. His seventh album pivoted on how he was abused in his teens by an adult at summer camp – and how he would speak to that abuser three decades on: “I don’t want to hate anything anymore.”

Standout track: Where You Taking My Baby?

42.

STEVEN WILSON

The Overview

(FICTION)

Hard to imagine how Steven Wilson finds the time to make his own records, given his ubiquity as remixer of classic rock (this year: Jethro Tull, Simple Minds, Yes…). This eighth solo album, notably, sounded like it should’ve required a full year’s monomaniacal focus to complete: a cosmic prog extravaganza (with lyrical help from XTC’s Andy Partridge) that positioned Wilson as fitting successor to another of his star mixing clients, Pink Floyd.

Standout track: The Overview

41.

SHARON VAN ETTEN & THE ATTACHMENT THEORY

Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory

(JAGJAGUWAR)

If Van Etten’s last two solo albums were clear signifiers of her synth-goth cravings, this first set with her newly promoted backing band was the full raven-black shebang. The Attachment Theory effectively left Van Etten’s indie-folk roots in the dust, amping up the drama through even the album’s more ethereal moments. And for additional crespuscular bona fides, The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst wrote the biography that accompanied the album for journalists.

Standout track: Idiot Box

40.

PANDA BEAR

Sinister Grift

(DOMINO)

Noah ‘Panda Bear’ Lennox reworked Reset, his 2022 collaboration with Sonic Boom, so assiduously and frequently that he ended up releasing mariachi versions of the songs. This eighth solo album, then, proved an actual reset, his Beach Boys timbre and looping melodic sense crystallising into ravishing, incrementally melancholic avant-pop. A stealth sequel, too, to Animal Collective’s Isn’t It Now (2023), with extensive contributions from Lennox’s three longtime bandmates.

Standout track: Left In The Cold

39.

JONATHAN RICHMAN

Only Frozen Sky Anyway

(BLUE ARROW)

“When I make my transition/I want you to know I only changed position,” Richman sang on his first album in four years, a characteristically jaunty reckoning with mortality. The past was memorialised, discreetly, so Modern Lovers compadre Jerry Harrison co-produced, and guitarist Tommy Dunbar returned after playing on 1975’s Roadrunner. But the quixotic charm, the way of reimagining how songs could work (here: Night Fever) still sounded idiosyncratic and fresh.

Standout track: But We May Try Weird Stuff

38.

LOADED HONEY

Love Made Trees

(AWAL)

The London production outfit Jungle had long been attuned to how retro soul, disco and funk could feed into contemporary dance pop. But this spin-off from two-thirds of Jungle – J Lloyd and Lydia Kitto – flipped the paradigm, giving precedence to fastidiously reimagined, downtempo-trending rare grooves that hit the sweet spot between Philly Soul and The Avalanches. Listen out, too, for Kitto’s rapturous channelling of the young Michael Jackson.

Standout track: Don’t Speak

37.

NATURAL INFORMATION SOCIETY/ BITCHIN BAJAS

Totality

(DRAG CITY)

A kosmische jazz summit, Totality reunited two mainstays of Chicago’s experimental scene for the first time since 2015’s Autoimaginary. Over four gracefully unravelling tracks, the collective fused jazz, minimalism, Krautrock, New Age, raga and more into a vibrational, far from intimidating whole. Want more? This year’s other albums by Natural Information Society (Perseverance Flow) and Bitchin Bajas (Inland See) proved that both bands were every bit as potent alone as they were together.

Standout track: Clock No Clock

36.

EMMA POLLOCK

Begging The Night To Take Hold

(CHEMIKAL UNDERGROUND)

In a year of headllne-grabbing comebacks, Emma Pollock’s first album in nine years may have slipped under most radars. Begging The Night To Take Hold was, though, only the fourth Pollock album since her initial band, The Delgados, split in 2005, and a powerful reassertion of her status as one of the UK’s most undervalued singer-songwriters: one who could navigate the complexities of midlife while dropping allusions to Mary Queen Of Scots.

Standout track: Black Magnetic

35.

BONNIE ‘PRINCE’ BILLY

The Purple Bird

(DOMINO)

“A phenomenal coming together of different forces,” is how Will Oldham described his latest Bonnie Billy album in MOJO 377. The Purple Bird was his deepest engagement with Nashville royalty in a 30+ year career, as his ornery way with tradition was mediated by a troupe of country vets led by Johnny Cash alum “Ferg” Ferguson. A great entry point for those previously daunted by Oldham’s vast and weird catalogue.

Standout track: Boise, Idaho

34.

BON IVER

SABLE, fABLE

(JAGJAGUWAR)

1.90.0-EKKHO3FYEZE275FNGJZYZHGRAI.0.1-1

Justin Vernon’s fifth Bon Iver album – his first in six years – was very much a game of two halves. Sable stripped back much of the electronic fidgeting of latterday Bon Iver records, recalling the acoustic woodshedding of his debut. Fable, meanwhile, re-upped much of that processing for a digi-soul masterclass, albeit one where the emotional heft and directness of his songwriting still took precedence over obfuscation.

Standout track: There’s A Rhythmn

33.

JASON ISBELL

Foxes in the Snow

(SOUTHEASTERN RECORDS)

The divorce of Americana royalty Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires provided source material for both artists on their 2025 solo albums: a compelling if sometimes unnerving opportunity to hear opposing sides of the story. Isbell’s take was MOJO’s pick, an entirely solo, acoustic set recorded in five days at Electric Lady Studios in New York, and foregrounding a craft and rawness that placed it very near the top of Isbell’s considerable catalogue.

Standout track: Open And Close

32.

GEESE

Getting Killed

(PARTISAN)

Cameron Winter again, this time with his old schoolfriends, now matured into possibly the US’s most exciting newish indie-rock group. Winter’s astonishing voice and agile songwriting again impressed, but he was matched by the band’s funky and wired flexing, so that Getting Killed frequently sounded like a mythic Stones/Magic Band/Talking Heads mash-up. A great, fraught 21st Century New York record: “I have been fucking destroyed by this city tonight!”

Standout track: Getting Killed

31.

MANIC STREET PREACHERS

Critical Thinking

(COLUMBIA)

Ten out of 12 tracks from Critical Thinking made the cut for Keith Cameron’s selection of Manics tracks in MOJO’s Book Of The Year, 168 Songs Of Hatred And Failure – a strong indicator of the consistent quality of this, the band’s 15th album. The rousing anthems recalled the band’s ’80s antecedents as much as their mid-’90s commercial peak; the elegantly jangly Dear Stephen, meanwhile, provided a timely grappling with the ongoing complexities of being a Smiths fan.

Standout track: Decline And Fall

30.

ST ETIENNE

International

(HEAVENLY)

A bittersweet moment for a certain class of pop connoisseur, as the 12th album by the Cracknell/Stanley/Wiggs triumvirate was also announced as their swansong. International suitably reasserted the band’s strengths – the delicate balance between shiny dancefloor epiphany and rueful English melancholy – with some key co-writers and guests: Depeche Mode/Yazoo’s Vince Clarke, Chemical Brother Tom Rowlands, Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll and, on the knowingly titled The Go Betweens, a guest vocal from Haircut 100’s Nick Heyward.

Standout track: The Go Betweens

29.

JACOB ALON

In Limerence

(ISLAND)

In the year Sufjan Stevens released a tenth anniversary edition of his Carrie & Lowell, a Scottish newcomer found a beguiling way to rechannel that record’s indie-folk fragility. Alon’s touch was featherlight, and their queer tales of love and hurt at once ethereal and visceral: note one song (Liquid Gold 25) named after a bottle of amyl; another (Confession) a tender coming-of-age tale contextualised by Alon’s admission, “Now I’m snorting cocaine.”

Standout track: Zathura

28.

CATE LE BON

Michelangelo Dying

(MEXICAN SUMMER)

The Welsh maverick’s parallel career as super-producer took a relative backseat in 2025 (Horsegirl’s Phonetics On And On; Dry Cleaning’s forthcoming Secret Love) in favour of her own charmed, often uncanny music. Her seventh album was an allusive, typically off-kilter breakup album, made in Hydra, Cardiff, London, LA and Joshua Tree, with the gauzy airs of the early Cocteau Twins.  Oddly funny, too: “And now I’m older than Lady Diana/Holding out my arms/Starting a fight.”

Standout track: Love Unrehearsed

27.

DAVID BYRNE
Who Is The Sky?
(MATADOR)

“You can surrender to despair, happiness, anger and frustration. But that doesn’t help anything,” Byrne told MOJO 384. “You have to persevere, to believe that things can be changed.” That vigorous optimism powered his first album in seven years, embracing contemporary pop (via Harry Styles producer Kid Harpoon) while recruiting a quirky avant-garde chamber orchestra as backing band. No Talking Heads reunion, but the spirit of 1988’s Naked was palpable.

Standout track: Everybody Laughs

26.

HORSEGIRL

Phonetics On And On

(MATADOR)

If the Chicago trio’s promising 2022 debut was a fuzzy, post-Sonic Youth throwback, its sequel was a different kind of beast. Phonetics On And On found Horsegirl (with producer Cate Le Bon) stripping their sound back to bare bones, to something more reminiscent of brittle minimalists like The Raincoats, Young Marble Giants and The Feelies. An album that started with a perfect echo of Roadrunner and then, remarkably, only got better.

Standout track: 2468

25.

VAN MORRISON

Remembering Now

(EXILE/VIRGIN)

After albums focusing on skiffle, rock’n’roll covers and duet versions of his back catalogue, Morrison’s 47th album (!) saw his still staggering voice back on the deep stuff – a heroic re-engagement with the mystic, with the muse William Blake and what he calls on page 54 “transcending the mundane”. Side Two, remarkably, held perhaps his best run of music in over 35 years, meditative, transported extemporisations that stood comparison with his very finest work.

Standout track: Stretching Out

24.

MOGWAI

The Bad Fire

(ROCK ACTION)

Britpoppers weren’t the only 1990s vets back in the spotlight this year. The broad church of post-rock was revisited too, with Chicago maestros Tortoise releasing their first album in nine years, and the more consistent, substantially more widescreen Mogwai back with their 11th. The Bad Fire was a reliably excellent blend of grandeur, gothic currents, motorik pulses, post-hardcore, judiciously applied noise and, of course, droll humour (best song title: Fanzine Made Of Flesh).

Standout track: Hammer Room

23.

MIDLAKE

A Bridge To Far

(BELLA UNION)

Not a typo, by the way: that’s To Far rather than Too Far, for extra cosmic heft. Like David Byrne’s Who Is The Sky?, Midlake’s sixth privileged hope in adversity, albeit rendered in dappled rather than Technicolor tones. Hence the misty reconstructions of California soft rock and Pentangle-shaped folk-rock, and a creamy consistency that made it their best album since 2006 landmark The Trials of Van Occupanther.

Standout track: Eyes Full Of Animal

22.

EDDIE CHACON

Lay Low

(STONES THROW)

Chacon’s third solo album in the last five years meant that the singer’s second act was now more substantial than his first – back in the ’90s, as half of Charles & Eddie. Lay Low continued with Chacon’s latter-day taste for hauntological soul, all digital minimalism and hushed tones. But there was added richness and emotion over the woozy Sly Stonedrum machines, as Chacon leaned into ’70s harmonies to hymn his late mother.

Standout track: End Of The World

21.

BAXTER DURY

Allbarone

(HEAVENLY)

Nothing quite so spiritually elevated from Ian Dury’s boy, who had the arch self-knowledge to refer to himself “a mockney nepo Jane Austen in a male form” in MOJO 383. Dury’s ninth located him on a particularly sticky dancefloor, observing West London’s least salubrious with the sort of corrosive wit that made him close kin to Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson. A 35-minute masterclass in creative swearing, too: “International fuck omelette,” anyone?

Standout track: Return Of The Sharp Heads

20.

CASS MCCOMBS

Interior Live Oak

(DOMINO)

“The unreliable narrator’s unreliable narrator,” is how MOJO’s reviewer described the Californian singer-songwriter, now onto his 12th album of covertly excellent songcraft. A reunion with his earliest collaborators in San Francisco, Interior Live Oak was as sprawling, subtle and hard to pin down as much of McCombs’ work; 16 songs that variously placed him in the company of Grant McLennan, Elliott Smith and Bill Callahan, held together by their subtle, steadily engrossing consistency.

Standout track: Peace

19.

MARK PRITCHARD/THOM YORKE

Tall Tales

(WARP)

Radiohead’s first tour in seven years inevitably overshadowed their extra-curricular work in 2025, as Colin Greenwood continued shifts in The Bad Seeds and brother Jonny scored another Paul Thomas Anderson movie. Thom Yorke, meanwhile, hooked up with ’90s-vintage electronica maven Pritchard (once half of Global Communications) for an album that occupied a comparable place of alienation, dread and cutting-edge sound design as Kid A.

Standout track: The Spirit

18.

EMMA-JEAN THACKRAY

Weirdo

(BROWNSWOOD)

It was a quieter year for new British jazz breakouts, but singer/multi-instrumentalist Emma-Jean Thackray brilliantly illustrated how the scene was diversifying. While 2021’s Yellow showcased Thackray’s spiritual jazz chops, Weirdo put her voice front and centre, on a set of self-played jazz-funk that began as a study of neurodiversity and mental health before tragically, but cathartically, expanding into a meditation on the sudden death in 2023 of her partner.

Standout track: Maybe Nowhere

17.

JEFF TWEEDY

Twilight Override

(DBPM)

A regular theme of 2025 albums was how musicians could respond to, or even function in, challenging times. The Wilco frontman’s strategy was, typically, to write even more songs: “Creativity eats darkness,” he told MOJO 382. Tweedy’s fifth solo album, consequently, was his White Album – a triple, with not one of its 30 songs a filler. Intimate, funny, profound, understated, it sounded like Tweedy’s finest work away from the day job.

Standout track: Lou Reed Was My Babysitter

16.

ROBERT PLANT WITH SUZI DYAN

Saving Grace

(Nonesuch)

Talking to MOJO 383, Robert Plant revealed he’d turned down a Tony Iommi invite to Black Sabbath’s farewell show, because “I found these other places that are so rich”. Saving Grace was the latest evidence of his rewarding path away from superstar orthodoxy: a Black Country roots session where his blues, folk and indie tastes were complemented by a new vocal foil, former music teacher Suzi Dyan, in the Alison Krauss/Patty Griffin/Sandy Denny role.

Standout track: Gospel Plow

15.

MAVIS STAPLES

Sad And Beautiful World

(ANTI-)

Jeff Tweedy had helped the gospel-soul great find new musical directions and settings on 2010’s You Are Not Alone, but this 15th solo album was plausibly the best of her 21st century phase. The indie-rock connections extended this time to Bon Iver, Waxahatchee and MJ Lenderman, with Sparklehorse and Kevin Morby songs in the repertoire. But it was Staples’ vision and endurance that dominated; at 86, still a necessarily indefatigable torchbearer for Civil Rights.

Standout track: Human Mind

14.

RICH(ARD) DAWSON
End Of The Middle

(DOMINO)

Shortening his name to Rich, for his eighth solo album, signalled the Newcastle seer’s intimate music was only becoming more relatable. Spare guitars and domestic narratives did not materially deflect from the underlying weirdness of Dawson’s work, however. His songs still wandered away from their folk beginnings to prog abstrusion; his lyrics zeroed in on the everyday uncanny, with a headless stationmaster haunting “an associate research analyst”.

Standout track: The Question

13.

LITTLE SIMZ

Lotus

(AWAL)

“I am an electric black girl,” asserted the London rapper on her sixth album. “I’m not the one to test/I can’t take disrespect.” Here, emphatically, was the proof – an album simmering with rage and betrayal, made in the wake of a split from her longtime producer, Inflo, over financial conflict (another disgruntled Inflo client, Michael Kiwanuka, guested). Business disputes, though, have rarely fuelled such passionate, compelling – and funky – music.

Standout track: Lion

12.

ALAN SPARHAWK WITH TRAMPLED BY TURTLES

Alan Sparhawk With Trampled By Turtles

(SUB POP)

“Grief constantly manifests in new ways, and constantly requires new methods to address it,” wrote MOJO’s reviewer. The Low frontman had first responded to his wife Mimi Parker’s death with the heavily processed electronics of 2024’s White Roses, My God. Its rapid follow-up, though, matched his raw tones with a Duluth bluegrass band for a radically rootsier, Harvest-like set, where shared music-making provided a rousing communal response to loss.

Standout track: Not Broken

11.

PAUL WELLER

Find El Dorado

(PARLOPHONE)

Weller confided to MOJO in 2024 he was making a covers LP – provisionally called Small Town Melancholia – which would give him a break from the all-consuming pressure of songwriting. Find El Dorado, as it was eventually titled, revelled in that freedom, foregrounding the Guv’nor’s vast enthusiasms as he tackled The Bee Gees, the Flying Burritos, Ray Davies and suitably deeper cuts, with an early ’70s sepia ambience that reflected the melancholia of the original title.

Standout track: One Last Cold Kiss

10.

WET LEG

Moisturizer

(DOMINO)

Following a hit the size of Chaise Longue has rarely been easy, and the Isle Of Wight’s Wet Leg didn’t always seem entirely committed to the project: “Maybe we could start a band/As some kinda joke,” sang Rhian Teasdale on the final track of this effortlessly punchy second album. But Moisturizer was fiercer and more muscular, still funny but less whimsical, and with a glut of killer alt-rock anthems.  A band energetically reconciled to the long game.

Standout track: CPR

9.

ADRIAN SHERWOOD

The Collapse Of Everything

(ON-U SOUND)

Sherwood’s ominous bassbin rumble has been a subterranean constant in British music for over 40 years, via his On-U Sound imprint. His first solo album in 13 years, The Collapse Of Everything worked as the ideal way for latecomers to find a way into his world of extreme dub science: elegantly zoned-out instrumentals – incorporating Ethio-jazz and Morricone twang – that, as MOJO noted, summoned melancholy rather than Armageddon dread.

Standout track: Dub Inspector

8.

THE TUBS
Cotton Crown

(TROUBLE IN MIND)

“It’s quite fun for me to dredge up my most embarrassing or selfish moments,” Tubs frontman Owen Williams admitted in MOJO 376. The second Tubs album was emotionally visceral, too, with a full-pelt intensity – think Hüsker Dü meets Richard Thompson – that made them instant MOJO favourites. Also essential from 2025: Tubs twin band Ex-Vöid’s In Love, where Williams ceded most of the frontperson duties to Lan McArdle, tonally Linda Thompson to his Richard.

Standout track: Freak Mode

7.

ROBERT FORSTER
Strawberries

(TAPETE)

If 2023’s The Candle And The Flame documented Forster and family creatively responding to his wife Karin Bäumler’s cancer diagnosis, solo album number nine was less overtly personal; an album of fictions and innovations, recorded in Sweden with producer Peter Morén (of Peter, Björn & John). Cue, then, tales of noisy sex and gay crushes, uninhibited yelps and jazz-punk skronk; a songwriting craftsman investigating new territory without ever compromising his authentic voice.

Standout track: Breakfast On The Train

6.

STEREOLAB

Instant Holograms On Metal Film

(DUOPHONIC)

Six years of reunion touring laid the groundwork for the 11th Stereolab album, and their first since 2010. From the title down, Instant Holograms… illustrated how Lætitia Sadier, Tim Gane and co could still deploy so many elaborate musical and lyrical concepts with such stainless avant-pop ease. Recorded by Bitchin Bajas’ Cooper Crain, and an album to stand comparison with key ‘Lab work like 1999’s Cobra And Phases Group…

Standout track: Immortal Hands

5.

ANNIE AND THE CALDWELLS

Can’t Lose My (Soul)

(LUAKA BOP)

Next to most of 2025’s comeback kids, Annie Caldwell took even longer to return to the musical fray – 50 years since she debuted as part of The Staples Jr Singers. Caldwell’s faith, energy and musical gifts hadn’t diminished in the intervening half century, though, as this debut from her multi-generation family band became a gospel-soul crossover sensation. And as their ecstatic longform jams suggested, Caldwells gigs were even more transporting – for unbelievers, too.

Standout track: I Made It

4.

BIG THIEF

Double Infinity

(4AD)

It can be hard to remember that Big Thief have only existed for a decade, so swiftly did they become serious players in US indie rock. This sixth album was their first as a trio, but their sound and communal vibes expanded rather than contracted, the mantric folk-rock grooves and hippy trim – guest ululations from Laraaji – adding further cosmic depth and grandeur to Adrianne Lenker’s ineffably human, poetically vivid voice and lyrics.

Standout track: Los Angeles

3.

CMAT

Euro-Country

(AWAL)

“This is making no sense to the average listener,” Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson – aka CMAT – claimed halfway through The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station. But part of the genius of CMAT’s third album was the infectious energy and sharp tunes with which she universalised her internal dialogues and parochial references. Irish indie country-pop was the jump-off point; credible, funny and emotionally astute superstardom was the inevitable – and totally deserved – final destination.

Standout track: The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station

2.

SUEDE
Antidepressants

(BMG)

Relatively old hands at the Britpop reunion business, having reformed in 2010, Suede’s fifth album of their second act made clear the band were still going from strength to strength. Antidepressants built on the reset of 2022’s Autofiction, its soundworld closer to the band’s ’80s adolescences rather than their ’90s success: pounding, post-punk anthems with blood ties to The Cult, Killing Joke, Magazine and PiL. Windswept romantics forever!

Standout track: Dancing With The Europeans

1.

PULP

More

(ROUGH TRADE)

When Jarvis Cocker rhymed “vicars” with “knickers” a couple of songs after dropping a reference to Ingmar Bergman into the end of comeback single Spike Island, it was apparent that at least one of Pulp’s idiosyncratic missions – loosely, to make existential crisis out of bedroom farce, or bedroom farce out of existential crisis – remained intact.

The band’s first new album in 24 years. More_,_ of course, also presented a more reflective Pulp – it being 30 years since they headlined Glastonbury at their Common People peak, and 27 since the harrowing morning-after comedown of This Is Hardcore. But there was also a vibrational energy coursing through the album, exemplified by the dancefloor epiphany of Got To Have Love, and Cocker’s warning that “When love disappears/ Life disappears/ & you sit on your backside/ For 25 years.”

Speaking to MOJO 379, in the band’s first interview in over two decades, Cocker insisted that More hadn’t been “conceived as our big full stop”. Indeed, much like The Ballad Of Darren from their old Britpop compadres Blur (MOJO’s album of 2023, incidentally), it was one of those rare reunion records: one that transcends nostalgia to actually enhance a band’s legacy.

Standout track: Spike Island

The MOJO Review Of 2025!

Get the new issue of MOJO to read the full list of the 75 best albums of the year, 2025’s best reissues, music books and films, and the pick of the best genre records selected by our specialist experts. Plus! A CD featuring the year’s best tracks! More info and to order a copy HERE!

*This list was voted for by MOJO’s writers, reviewers and genre experts including: John Aizlewood, Martin Aston, Mike Barnes, Mark Blake, Glyn Brown, Jenny Bulley, John Bungey, Keith Cameron, Chris Catchpole, Stevie Chick, Andy Cowan, Grayson Haver Currin, Max Décharné, Tom Doyle, Danny Eccleston, David Fricke, Andy Fyfe, Pat Gilbert, John Harris, Ian Harrison, David Hutcheon, Will Hodgkinson, Jim Irvin, David Katz, Ted Kessler, Andrew Male, James McNair, Bob Mehr, John Mulvey, Lucy O’Brien, Mark Paytress, Andrew Perry, Jon Savage, Victoria Segal, Michael Simmons, Sylvie Simmons, Mat Snow, Ben Thompson, Kieron Tyler, Charles Waring, Roy Wilkinson, Lois Wilson, Jim Wirth, Stephen Worthy.