scaryblog

     So, having got to the end of The Guardian's Top 50 albums of 2025, how have they done this year?   Overall, I think it was a pretty decent quality level without too many absolute stunners or stinkers. I was introduced to 25   new albums (a pleasing 50%, down from 31 last year) with eight having already been written up (down from ten last year), although there were six further albums which charted at #2 or #3 but were unlucky not to get a write-up. Best 15 I'm not 100% convinced that this year deserves a top 15, but it's what I went for last year and when I picked my initial list of definitelys and maybes, it came to 15 - so I just stopped there rather than doing any more thinking.  #46 - The Tubs #44 - Sabrina Carpenter #42 - Erika de Casier #38 - Ethel Cain #32 - Perfume Genius #30 - Oklou #25 - Wednesday #22 - Little Simz #16 - Pulp #13 - Suede #11 - Jade #7 - Lily Allen #5 - Lady Gaga #2 - CMAT #1 - Rosalia The only ones I hadn't p...

Completing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2025 . #1 :  LUX - Rosalia With its lyrics in 13 languages and references to dozens of historical female saints, the fact that Lux manages to transcend scholarly chin-stroking and dry Wiki deep dives is near miraculous, and the credit is solely Rosalía’s. While this isn’t her first album to alchemise the past and present – see 2018’s second album El Mal Querer and its heady flamenco-R&B hybrid – the stakes are far higher on Lux, and the balancing act more pronounced. What elevates it, apart from its multi-layered melodies, rich compositions and engrained drama, is the playfulness at its heart. Like Björk during her effortless 90s peak, there’s a sense of wonderment to Rosalía’s voice that sweeps you up into its tornado. Even when she’s tearing your heart in two, as on La Yugular’s blossoming balladry, or the ascension to heaven on the closing Magnolias, you want to be right there with her. The 25th album I've previous...

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 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...

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2025 . #8 :  DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS - Bad Bunny 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 eighteenth album we've heard and when we met this as a new entry back in January, I generously declared there to be nothing wrong with it, but I was mystified by its success. And, having revisited it, I can assure you th...

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...