The great paradox of our time is that technology has made unprecedented global connections the norm, yet many people have shut their minds, driven by fear or misinformation into their own insular communities and limited perceptions. Music is the antidote: Its very essence is connection, revelation, the irresistible embrace of rhythm and melody. This year I focused my listening on American artists speaking for mostly unheard people, and far-flung ones whose albums challenged me to keep exploring.
Wednesday, Bleeds
At some point I realized that all of the music I loved from the South (where I live) this year is sideways protest music speaking for the punks, hippies, anarchists, prodigals and weirdos whose lives defy every stereotype. No album revealed the South's bigger picture with more tenderness and rage than this career apex from Karly Hartzman and her boys.
Ken Pomeroy, Cruel Joke
Often this year I needed a voice that communicated like the quiet conscience of a world spinning toward disaster. I found it in the music of this 23-year-old Cherokee woman from Oklahoma who, after a decade as a regional prodigy, has finally made it to the national stage. The red-dirt melancholy in Pomeroy's songs is tempered by a hope that comes from her connections to her community and the natural world. She reminds me that a sad song is a way of softening, of opening up.
Cleo Reed, Cuntry
From Cowboy Carter country to Sinners blues, Black-rooted roots music is often swathed in romanticism and mystique; in truth, it reflects hard work, intergenerational disruption and a fierce refusal to be erased. New York-based multidisciplinary artist Reed focuses her gorgeously theatrical exploration of these sounds on its relationship to the hustle — to labor, resistance and insistence on being heard. Melding the essences of folk, rap, soul and electronica, Reed proves there's no country for young Black women that doesn't deserve to be challenged and claimed.
Oracle Sisters, Divinations
We all have our escape fantasies; this international band soundtracks mine. A Dane, an Irishman and a Finn meet at a Parisian cabaret and bond over their shared love of vintage power pop and psychedelia. The sound they make together sparkles like a cotton-candy cloud floating over a Scandinavian sea. Throw in some ABBA and some Strokes for fun. I love a great rock and roll remix.
Zeyne, AWDA
The most compelling Arabic pop — and there's a ton to explore — blends elements of hip-hop and electronic music with the rich and varied folkloric sources of its home regions. Zeyne, who grew up dancing in a traditional dabke troupe and (like Rosalia, an artist with a similarly ambitious vision) studied classical music before finding her voice in R&B, beautifully blends sources and sensibilities on this no-skips song suite intertwining heartbreak songs with those about exile and the mental unrest a disrupted life can cause. Awda is Arabic for "return"; this debut album is a breakthrough statement about the many kinds of exile that can afflict people.
CMAT, EURO-COUNTRY
I live in fear that the glorious moment when women who were just too much took over pop — last year, it seems so distant — will succumb to a building trad-wife backlash. But here is Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, a U.K. sensation poised for American superstardom, strutting in to save the day. CMAT understands the role of the redhead in the public imagination. At first listen she's all exclamation points, brashly sexy, disruptive and hilarious. But it's the depth and intelligence girding her comic sensibility that makes her a breakthrough artist worth cherishing, whether she's contemplating the post-colonial burdens of her native Ireland or the perils of dating in the selfie age.
William Tyler, Time Indefinite
If the internet gave us the world in the best and most dangerous ways, it also opened up the past. Guitarist and composer William Tyler prefers analog methods of excavation, but this collection of soft-glazed sound collages evokes the strange historical enjambments that occur — both in our own minds and within shared expression — as memories perpetually resurface and combine to form autobiography and history. Using found sound, in particular some reel-to-reel recordings he found in his grandfather's basement in Mississippi, Tyler builds glowing edifices stained with beauty and sadness. It's a Southern thing and a universal one. Wrestling with ghosts is a major occupation for Southerners like Tyler, but with Time Indefinite he offers a method for calling them out and making peace with them.
Jacob Alon, In Limerence
In a recent interview, the Scottish singer-songwriter Jacob Alon noted that as a queer person, "you don't consent to being a singular being." Their music reflects this state of multiplicity, of existing in "a continuum between spaces." Alon's lush and delicate songs, grounded in their extraordinary, Nick Drake-inspired fingerpicking, explore both the trauma and the potential of a life that spills beyond boundaries. Alon's lyrics can be bracing, even perverse, reflecting experiences of familial rejection, sordid encounters and self-loathing; tapping into mythology and pre-Raphaelite flights of fancy, they build a world where a unique child of multiplicity can thrive.
Anna Von Hausswolf, Iconoclasts
Sometimes all I wanted this year was a simple catharsis, a scream so loud it threatened to rend my clothes. The Swedish pipe organist and songwriter Anna Von Hausswolf gave me a complicated one with this, her most inviting and uncompromising album. Welcoming collaborators including the wildly adventurous saxophonist Otis Sandjö, fellow world-builder Ethel Cain and mentor Iggy Pop, Von Hausswolf expands her sound without losing one ounce of intensity. She has said that Iconoclasts is about "breaking out of something"; the force of these songs would lend courage to anyone who needs to shake off the fog of habitual thinking.
Yazz Ahmed, A Paradise in the Hold
British Bahraini trumpeter and bandleader Yazz Ahmed spent a decade mapping this road back to the homeland she left when she was nine. Archival research led her to shanties sung by the gulf country's pearl divers and boisterous wedding songs, including ones her grandfather sang at his own wedding. Writing lyrics and enlisting a group of vocalists for the first time, Ahmed refashions myths and rituals she already had to relearn as an expatriate, retaining their specificity while making them accessible to all. Paradise could have felt academic, but Ahmed leads her ensemble toward passionate intensity and release and, finally, joy: This music soars, dives, and leaps.
Read about more of NPR Music's favorite albums of 2025 and our list of the 125 best songs of 2025.
Graphic illustration by David Mascha for NPR.
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