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Continuing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2025 . #2 :  EURO-COUNTRY - CMAT Despite its fraught creation, CMAT’s third album sounds like the supremely assured work of a songwriter whose powers have reached a new peak. It is, by turns, poignant, moving, furiously angry, uproariously funny and packed with incredible tunes. It strides confidently away from the country-infused style she minted on her 2022 debut If My Wife New I’d Be Dead – into territory that variously touches on jazz (Janis Joplining), raging alt-rock (The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station), soul-kissed pop (Running/Planning; Take a Sexy Picture of Me) – without in any way losing the essence of what made her successful in the first place. The 24th album I've previously heard and when I met this as a new entry (in the same week I met Sabrina Carpenter and Blood Orange  which also made this list), I described it as "interestingly cryptic" so it will be intriguing to see what I make of it on a seco...

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2025 . #3 :  Essex Honey - Blood Orange Dev Hynes’ fifth album as Blood Orange felt uniquely keyed into the fragmented, distracted headspace that comes after someone passes, in his case, his mother. Essex Honey’s restive nature was summed up in its painful opening lines, which you could read as the dying’s acceptance of death starkly contrasting the living’s ability to meet them on those terms: “In your grace, I looked for some meaning,” Hynes sings on Look at You. “But I found none, and I still search for a truth.” That search is wide-reaching: The Field refashions the Durutti Column’s Sing to Me as a racing hymnal made for the stereo of a Ford Escort. There are tough little Robert Rental-style post-punk gems in The Train (Kings Cross) and Countryside that bristle with frustration. Vivid Light is a plainly soulful duet with Zadie Smith; Life, featuring Tirzah’s unmistakable vocals, basks in languid, flute-dappled funk. T...

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 26/12/25 : I Barely Know Her - Sombr Christmas week gives us some odd albums - last year we had Lana del Rey's album from '12, which hasn't left the chart all year. I'm pleased to say we're somewhat more up to date this year with an album that came out in August - I met it as a new entry  and was somewhat nonplussed by it, but I have mentioned it a couple of times since because it's just not gone away, which is somewhat unusual. So let's see what I make of it on a second listen (this trick totally failed to convince me of the virtues of Addison Rae earlier today). Well, well, well - Sombr at least intrigues on second listen. I'd struggle to describe it - it's kinda poppy indie with a woozy vibe to it, but it feels like it has depths to it and I reckon the more you listen to it, the more you pick up on. Intriguing indeed - I'd love to tell you more but that's all I got for the time ...

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2025 . #4 :  Addison - Addison Rae Once derided as a former TikTok dancer who made ill-fated attempts to break beyond the platform, Addison Rae’s fortunes changed last summer when Charli xcx invited her to collaborate on a remix, washing away the sticky juvenilia of her social media fame. Her debut album offered up dreamy synthpop that was weirder and more interesting than expected. Opener New York begins sounding floaty and fizzy, but ends in a pummelling explosion of chaos; High Fashion and Times Like These were an experimental hallucination of trip-hop and R&B. The fact that Arca remixed Aquamarine says it all. The pleasures Rae sang about, however, were far simpler. The gauzy, romantic Summer Forever distils the vibe: how fun it is, to be “young, dumb and cute / Nothing to lose”; the record’s mix of hedonism and nostalgia, its proud anti-lore depthlessness and hunger for sensation feel like extremely 2025 techniqu...

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2025 . #5 :  Mayhem - Lady Gaga With the absolute integrity that has become his trademark, Bad Bunny shone his inestimable spotlight back on his roots in Puerto Rico for his sixth album, singing of sacrifice, colonial oppression and the importance of preserving tradition. He’s an incredible conduit, synthesising the past – salsa, bolero, perreo – with the present, bringing local artists including RaiNao and Lorén Aldarondo along for the ride. As if it needed stressing, Debí … also underscored his own legacy, and his incredible range: heartbroken that life must one day end on Baile Inolvidable; lovelorn in the rave on Perfumito Nuevo; seemingly cast in moonlight on the heavy Bokete. The 21st album I've previously heard and the seventh I've written up - I remembered I'd enjoyed it but I'd not been back to in the intervening months. I also didn't revisit the write-up before I relistened to the album, so I was...

Starting my trip up Empire's   top 20 films of 2025 #20 :     Warfare After imagining a brutal US conflict in last year’s Civil War, Alex Garland continues in military mode – this time seeking the truth, or as close to the truth as subjective recollection can provide. Warfare is an exercise in memory-as-movie, aiming to recreate a real-life battle fought by Ray Mendoza (who co-directs with Garland, portrayed in the drama by D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai) and his platoon in the Iraq War. There’s a stripping back of narrative beats and movie-movie theatrics, then, in favour of hard, bloody, painful reality – every moment drawn from the memories of the real events that Mendoza and his men experienced. With a stellar ensemble – Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Michael Gandolfini and Joseph Quinn among them – and deeply immersive filmmaking, Garland and Mendoza deliver an unforgettable 95 minutes that’s hard to shake. I imagine Alex Garland (only our second visit with the lad, a...