The music world refused to stand still in 2025. This wasn’t a year for playing it safe. Across the globe and all over the stylistic map, music kept mutating in the weirdest, wildest ways. The artists ...

Rosalía made an album invoking the saints, Lily Allen took us on a tragicomic trip through her domestic hell, Lady Gaga found the sweet spot between artpop and arena-ready funk, and Bad Bunny was just ...

We’re at the end of yet another year where commentators and fans speculated on the health of the rap world. In October, it was reported that, for the first time in 35 years, there were no rap songs in ...

Stream this list on Apple Music and Spotify. See The FADER's 50 best songs of 2025. In a chronically online, AI-slop-embedded hellscape, Don’t Tap the Glass is Tyler, the Creator’s surprise social ...

Earlier this year, my colleague and bud Kelefa Sanneh suggested that music critics, as a lot, have gone soft—becoming submissive, overly agreeable, and, in some cases, nearly servile. He’s right, of ...

The Korean pop outsider Effie and the Brooklyn indie-rock band Geese top our critics’ lists this year. By Jon Caramanica and Lindsay Zoladz Jon Caramanica Musicians know how to make music, and they ...

The best albums of 2025 spanned seismic rage rap, intricate guitar music, protest folk, spacey dream pop, and laptop twee. A virtuoso of experimental electronic music re-emerged, a Brooklyn band ...

Taylor Swift released an album so bad we won’t even talk about it. FKA twigs fucked around with EUSEXUA and found out… it got even better? Rosalía let her hair down from the Tower of Babel. Addison ...

Ahead of the special’s release on December 12, Vogue nabbed some time with Sherman in between SNL rehearsals to talk about successfully shooting her shot with John Waters and gender affirmation via a ...

In other words, 2025 had plenty of peaks and valleys. In our list of the year’s top albums, we try to capture these trends and tell the story of a music scene that is fractured, matching a cultural ...

If there's one question that professional music lovers hear most often, it's some variation on: "Heard any good albums lately?" We always have, of course, but when it came time to highlight the cream ...

Below the surface of the mainstream, music had a wonderful year—making the task of whittling down 2025’s best albums to a top-10 list maddeningly difficult—though you’d hardly know it from looking at ...