Our 2025 year-end protection ends with the highest 10 albums of the yr as voted on by the AllMusic neighborhood. Respondents from all all over the world made their decisions, and we’re excited to share the highest 10 outcomes as voted by you, the AllMusic reader. Thanks once more for studying and supporting AllMusic in 2025, and we look ahead to bringing you extra opinions and options in 2026.
“She sings right here in 13 languages, weaves in components from jungle, hip-hop, and traditional Italian arias, and makes use of an orchestra as a illustration of her personal intrusive ideas….But with an auteur’s hand, this Frankenstein-like mission appears completely easy — pure, even, as if these items had been at all times meant to be. The result’s an album so expansive that the perimeters are nearly completely out of sight. Fearless, maximalist, and laden with emotion, Lux is a piece worthy of each the Heavens and the Earth.” (Learn the Assessment)
“After they confront Extra‘s midlife crises, Pulp come into their very own. Cocker’s magnetism as a storyteller is at a peak — he is nonetheless revealing the sleaze in posh environment and the romance throughout the mundane with unerring intention, and if his characters are a bit completely different 20 years later, they’re nonetheless true to kind. …He and the remainder of the band could also be older, however they by no means sound as weary as they did on This Is Hardcore and We Love Life. This time, they do certainly get it proper — Extra is traditional Pulp, aged to close perfection.” (Learn the Assessment)
“Plant’s latest band, Saving Grace, is perhaps his most informal and cooperative but. After assembly banjoist Matt Worley at his native pub, the 2 put collectively a crew of regional folks musicians together with singer/accordionist Suzi Dian; Suzi’s husband, drummer Oli Jefferson; guitarist Tony Kelsey; and cellist Barney Morse-Brown. Billed as Robert Plant with Suzi Dian, Saving Grace is much less of a solo document than it’s the sound of a brand new collective studying its strengths. Like most of Plant’s tasks, their sound is basically knowledgeable by American traditions — blues, folks, nation, gospel — and steeped in a little bit of U.Ok. Midlands mystique.” (Learn the Assessment)
“A cheery outlook has by no means been Tweedy’s stock-in-trade, however the undertow of his writing has been a troubled response to a world going mad, and within the essay that accompanies his 2025 album, Twilight Override, he sums up the tenor of American life as ‘a bottomless basket of rock bottoms.’ So what to do? In Tweedy’s case, the reply is to make music, a number of it, and Twilight Override is an epic-scale response to prevailing malaise.” (Learn the Assessment)
“The third studio album from the shape-shifting, Brooklyn-based experimental rock band, Getting Killed finds Geese at their most chaotic, delivering an assured but jarring set of no-wave-tinged art-rock missives which are as unnerving as they’re festering with earworm hooks and biting humor. Gen Z’s superpower lies in its cultural immediacy — an unlimited rolodex of influences able to be summoned, ingested, dismissed, or argued over within the blink of a watch.” (Learn the Assessment)
“Traditionally, Pompeii falls at a big hinge level in Pink Floyd’s profession. By the point they arrange among the many abandoned ruins of the traditional Roman amphitheater outdoors Naples, they had been in some ways nonetheless an undefined entity. Their output after Syd Barrett’s 1968 departure was exploratory, typically thrillingly so, however that they had but to seek out the sense of cohesion and polish that will mark their catalog from Darkish Aspect ahead. And that is a giant a part of Pompeii‘s appeal, each on display and disc.” (Learn the Assessment)
“Foxes within the Snow offers Isbell an opportunity to point out off his talents as a vocalist and guitarist with no distraction; it seems he is each bit as adept with an acoustic as he’s with an electrical, and he shares his tales with a grasp’s contact. Jason Isbell is a singer and songwriter who is rarely afraid to do the work to make his music one thing particular, and even when he is performing in stripped-down vogue, he delivers nice songs and the dedication to make them particular. Anybody who questions that hasn’t heard Foxes within the Snow.” (Learn the Assessment)
“If listeners thought Ohms was the top of what Deftones may obtain of their late-era surge, right here comes Personal Music to run circles round that notion. Excellent from again to entrance, this tenth set from the alt-metal veterans is a lean, imply stunner. Going two for 2 within the 2020s to date, Deftones preserve their place as one of many biggest bands of their technology. Throw on a pair of headphones and get misplaced with Personal Music.” (Learn the Assessment)
“Whereas Double Infinity is an album extra more likely to wash over listeners than stick, its collaborative, impromptu spirit has infectious qualities of its personal, and it is attention-grabbing to listen to that the band expanded outward as an alternative shrinking with the primary departure of a member.” (Learn the Assessment)
“Buddy Man stands his floor as a blues journeyman and icon on 2025’s Ain’t Executed With the Blues. His twentieth studio album, it arrives simply because the legendary, Lousiana-born guitarist and singer celebrates his 89th birthday. It additionally comes on the heels of his shock look in director Ryan Coogler’s hit vampire action-drama Sinners; a task that constructed crucially on Man’s storied blues fame and which he additionally underscores on Ain’t Executed With the Blues.” (Learn the Assessment)
Due to everybody who solid their votes, and we look ahead to extra nice music in 2026.
