Sellin' my soul to a psycho - they say I'm so lucky

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's 50 best albums of 2025.

#11 : That's Showbiz Baby! - Jade

Pop’s trickiest manoeuvre is crossing the divide from successful group to solo career. After departing Little Mix, Jade Thirlwall didn’t so much jump it as pirouette across: her multi-part debut solo single Angel of My Dreams was completely nuts, impossible to ignore and spent 20 weeks on the UK chart. Could a whole album match up? From trashy ballroom house (It Girl) to disco-funk (Fantasy, Headache), Robyn-esque sad bangers (Plastic Box, Self Saboteur) and waltz-time ballads (Natural at Disaster), she certainly has the range, not to mention smart and sweary lyrics – rhyming Edward Enninful with experimental is a neat encapsulation of what moves her. It’s her voice that really sets it all apart, though: as you’d expect of a talent show graduate turned longtime pop star, it remains stunning on a technical level, but Thirlwall also brings a whole West End musical’s worth of emotion.

The sixteenth album (and sixth in a row) I've previously heard on the list - when I met it as a new entry I said it reminded me of ABBA and Rina Sawayama and it didn't always work, but it was anything but boring (unlike the Ed Sheeran album I was forced to endure that week). And a relisten very much confirms that - and I also think I enjoyed it more on a second listen. I'm still not convinced it's better than Perrie's solo offering but it's certainly doesn't lack ambition.

This managed seven weeks on the chart, with it debuting at #3. The Wikipedia entry is massive (350 milliPeppers) and it goes into all sorts of details about things that no-one needs to know about, but there are interesting names that have got involved including Jax Jones, Raye, Tove Lo, Jordan Stephens (from Rizzlekicks), MNEK and Ncuti Gatwa. Critically, the album was generally well received but there were some complaints about the variability of the track quality - it's appeared on a load of year-end lists though. Commercially, it's done pretty well across Europe making the top twenty in most places.

#10 : Golliwog - Billy Woods

“The English language is violence, I hot-wired it / I got a hold of the master’s tools and got dialled in,” Billy Woods announces at the outset of a rap masterpiece that works both as stunning poetry on the page and thrilling music out of loudspeakers. With intensely vivid lyrics, he picks his way through psychic wreckage wrought by racism, poverty, war and more, menaced by horrible dreams (“Didn’t want the doctor to turn, I knew it’d be something awful on the ultrasound”) and dispensing jaded wisdom: “Amputation how you survive / Can’t get away if you don’t leave something behind.” And then there’s Misery, a vivid romcom about a polyamorous and possibly vampiric lover. Frantz Fanon, Cecil Rhodes, Miles Davis and “Black Thanos” are among the other figures populating these strange, heat-sick tracks, helmed by a diverse and stellar range of production talent including the Alchemist, DJ Haram and Kenny Segal.

An album I haven't previously heard (actually the last one on the list) - the excitement! Also, to my surprise, I have previously met Billy and didn't mind him although it wasn't really my sort of thing.

And we're very much there again - it's intelligent wordy rap over some unusual backing tracks. Definitely not my sort of thing, but pleasantly listenable for the genre. I suspect it says a lot about the general African American experience, but I'm not the person to attempt to unpick that - and that's all I've got for you!

This scraped into the minor charts, with #10 on the Album Downloads chart being its best performance. The Wikipedia entry tells us it's his ninth solo album and he's done another fifteen with various collaborators - all since '03, so he's been busy! Critically it was very well received - apparently it's a challenging listen, but I have to admit that kinda passed me by. Commercially, it did manage to properly chart in Germany, reaching the dizzy heights of #89.

#9 : Getting Killed - Geese

The ways that love unravels us and knits us back together are explored on the outrageously accomplished and wise fourth album from the New York garage rock band, who are still in their early 20s. They originally formed as kids at a Brooklyn music school which partly explains the depth of their connection, but there’s something bigger at work: how to explain the way a tiny chord change can carry so much emotional weight, or how these songs can groove so tightly at the waist while their arms flail this way and that. Cameron Winter’s lyrics and vocals are peerless, too, done in a reedy head voice that’s also somehow soulful. He’s trying to live his life on a higher frequency than the rest of us, but so often he’s having his heart broken, “getting killed by a pretty good life”, or hemmed in by his circumstances: “I was a sailor, and now I’m a boat / I was a car, and now I’m the road,” he glumly pouts on Bow Down.

And we're back to albums I've previously heard (seventeen now) and when I met it as a new entry I declared it to be a "bloody awful racket" and only of use to play to a wife to see her reaction when I needed some entertainment. So I will not be revisiting this - I like the album cover though.

This has managed three weeks on the chart - one week in October, when it debuted at #26 and two weeks in December, with it currently standing at #32, so people have obviously been using it to get into the Christmas spirit. The Wikipedia entry tells us it's their fourth album, but the first after founding member Foster Hudson left for academia, which is pleasingly un-rock-and-roll. The recording process sounds like a complete nightmare with the band arriving with twenty unfinished demos which they jammed with in thirty minute sessions and bits of these were then used for the album. They also spent one session selecting a single handclap sample from a folder of roughly 7,000 options - man, I would not want to work with these people! But critically it was very well received and it's made quite a few year-end lists, including #1 in The New Yorker and Stereogum. It's also been more successful commercially than I was expecting, getting to #22 in Ireland and #96 in the US.

I really don't need to think very long before declaring Jade the winner - I feel if I listened to this more then it would grow on me further. I also have to direct you to watch her (and others) in The Assembly if you've not seen it - one of the tough questions she get's asked is "Im a big fan of Little Mix, so I’d just like to ask - who’s your dentist?" It's a lovely watch with everyone involved emerging with great credit.

#14-12 - Another easy winner