The best 50ish songs of 2025
Music is so good
It's music's biggest night! Welcome to the Hell World 2025 best of the year thing. Down below you'll find my picks for my (?) number of favorite songs of the year. If you'd like to listen to the big playlist of 180ish good new songs you can find it here. The short list of my favorite 60ish songs can be found here.
You can also read the 2024, 2023 and 2022 editions if you'd like to for some reason.
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And if you like what you read check out my new book We Had It Coming.
Like last year I asked a bunch of bands that put out one of my favorite songs of the year to chime in with a few of their own favorite songs or albums. Please be sure to check out:
Good June (ft: Cape Crush) – Better in the Morning
Maura Weaver – Cool Imagination
Scarlet Street – CORPORATE MEMPHIS
Heet Deth – Laundromat
Lily Seabird – Trash Mountain (1pm)
Dead Gowns – See People
After that stick around for whatever number of songs I ended up writing about plus the best music writing in Hell World from 2025.
Walker Bristol of Good June
Hyber – Waiting for Your Call
We’ve always looked up to our friends in Hyber. They hit the trifecta, with a real crispness across songwriting, production, and their live set. For me, their instrumental tone brings to mind bands like Movements and Flyleaf, but elevated by an infectious optimism. Waiting for Your Call is about longing, yet it’s anthemic. By lyrics alone, maybe it could’ve been a ballad. Instead, they lift us out of the loneliness of sitting and staring at the phone (or the news, or the world) with a refrain to shout along to. That’s the Hyber show: they’re almost always smiling even when you know there’s been pain underpinning each song, and they invite you in, and you can’t help but give yourself over to it.
No section in Waiting for Your Call lingers. There’s always something new, and there’s always forward momentum. When I last saw them perform it live, they opened with a track of the chiptune version of the song teasing the intro riff before the band kicked in in full, and it felt huge. But it’s the ending sequence that really grabs hold: a new counter melody introducing kick drum triplets and closing with a gorgeous vocal chord. Maybe that’s the moment you surrender to the song, then it’s over, and you want to jump right back in.
Maura Weaver
MJ Lenderman/This is Lorelei – Dancing in the Club
It was hard picking just one favorite song this year! I teetered between this, Taxes by Geese, Break Right by Hotline TNT, and Holo Boy, This is Lorelei’s second single off of their album that just came out. I’ve been an MJ Lenderman and Water From Your Eyes fan for a while, but I had never checked out This is Lorelei. As an MJ tune, the first listen floored me. The production is pristine but not combed to death, the rawness of Lenderman’s voice is so warm, desperate, yet natural. I loved it immediately, and then I read the lyrics:
And I know it's only cards
But love, I feel your heart in spades
While you were dancing in the club
I gave my diamonds all away
It took me a few listens to appreciate how goofy yet profoundly sad they are. I immediately dug into the OG version and loved it. Through Nate Amos' auto-tuned The Postal Service stylings, you can still hear the country heartache. The Magnetic Fields are one of my favorite bands and in my opinion, Stephin Merritt and Nate Amos are in the same Venn diagram — they both take an expansive, yet classic approach to songwriting that is impossible to catalog. They slyly fuck with country, pop, and electronica, yet you still feel the Brill Building blues crackling through the humor and pulling at your heart. A cover might not usually top my year end list, but TIL’s idiosyncrasy filtered through MJ’s warmth made for a perfect combo. Plus, I got super into Box for Buddy, Box for Star after this, and it ended up being my most listened to album of the year!
Ben Seitz of Scarlet Street
La Dispute – No One Was Driving The Car
This album really felt on our wavelength. It tackles a lot of complex, systemic topics effortlessly and they’ve never sounded so good sonically. It’s such a beautiful, angry, cathartic album to listen to for me. It vents so many frustrations with the world and how little control we have over our daily lives due to those who seize power.
Pretty Bitter – Pleaser
This album was incredibly refreshing to hear. I’ve been so jaded about a lot of DIY music lately and this just brought me right back in. Genuinely one of the best albums in the past several years, let alone this year, super ambitious but also sounds effortless. I can hear so many influences but it doesn’t sound like anything that’s come before.
Action/Adventure – Ever After
A/A makes guilty pleasure music without needing to feel guilty ever. It’s advanced pop punk and they’re a masterclass in it. Love how heavy they got on this record.
The World Is A Beautiful Place And I Am No Longer Afraid To Die – Dreams of Being Dust
Much like Pleaser did, this one gave me hope, but in a totally different way; the angst, the passion, the anger at that state of the world. It felt like the music scene had a pulse for the first time in years when this came out. This shade looks so good on TWIABP and I’m so happy this album was made, it was so necessary.
Pool Kids – Easier Said Than Done
This album does so much right to scratch a whole bunch of itches. I think Pool Kids shine best when they write in urgent, minor key, and they must have realized that themselves. They took what worked on their S/T and turned it up to 10. Just four astoundingly talented individuals.
Laila Eskin of Heet Death
Boko Yout – GUSTO
Our favorite album of the year is, GUSTO by Boko Yout. It's an album that pushes a lot of boundaries genre-wise, but still keeps a killer groove! This album was so good and very inspiring for us to hear, especially while we're writing. It's got moves, riffs, good sangin, weirdo energy!
Geneviève Beaudoin of Dead Gowns
Blood Orange (ft. The Durutti Column, Tariq Al-Sabir, Caroline Polachek & Daniel Caesar) – The Field
This entire record, Essex Honey, is my AOTY. It’s the percussion, the collaboration, the scene setting. I spent a good portion of the year driving, and this song – this full record – feels right for that sort of road-steady consciousness. When Caroline Polacheck sings “Sing it to me, in the heat of the sun” – I lose it. What a perfect coupling of lyric and melody.
Haley Heynderickx / Max García Conover – to each their dot
Their second record, What of Our Nature, is an LP of contemporary protest folk inspired by the legacy of Woody Guthrie. The sincerity, the alienation, the reality of this collection is palpable. Every song is captivating, to each their dot is just one example. Max García Conover is a Maine-based artist, and when I first saw him perform, it made me want to do this thing [music]. Haley Heynderickx has a perspective and voice that both grounds and astounds me. It’s a powerful collaboration.
Friendship – Tree of Heaven
Dan Wriggin’s lyrics grab you with both the power and the quiet. The nonchalance and the wonder. And this song has a perfect guitar riff. I go back and forth between dancing to this tune and feeling a wave of jealousy in my abdomen that I didn’t write it first. Friendship is an excellent band.
Lily Seabird
Lily Talmers – It Is Cyclical, Missing You
My favorite song of 2025 is the title track of Lily Talmers record It Is Cyclical, Missing You that came out in January (technically this song was a single dropped in November or December in 2024, but I didn’t hear it until the record came out).
Truly one of the most beautiful songs ever for me. When I first heard it I was sitting on an airplane coming back home. Everything is cyclical in this song; the story that’s being told is imitated in the musical structure of the song. It makes me feel the same feeling I felt when I was 19 playing Circle Game by Joni Mitchell for a friend on her 20th birthday. It's similar to that track, only in that they both are a meditation on life’s cyclical nature and the passage of time, encapsulating all the emotions that come with it.
It’s the lyrics to this song that move me the most. I’ll leave you with some verses to read:
Caught like a child chasing your brother’s hand
In the parking lot after you’d played in the sand
Knowing that he don’t wanna play games anymore
Knowing that he is tired as you are, but more than that
He is afraid of his duty to you
And he won’t catch your eye, so you’re running to lose
Darling stay here a while–it is cyclical, missing you
Reaching out, wishing to move you
Ok here's my top ten then a bunch more honorable mentions after that down below.
10. Clifford – Sugar Pill
culturefist
On Golden Caravan, the second album from Boston's Clifford, the band isn't afraid to make a lot of noise. From whirling shoegaze guitars to shouty, hooky indie pop. But it's the album's closer, Sugar Pill, that comes the closest to perfection for me. Slowly spreading itself over the course nearly five minutes, the song's spacious instrumentation leaves room for layers of sublimely wounded harmonizing and contemplative poetic observations about regret to shine.
9. Men I Trust – I Come with Mud
A gauzy and hypnotic road trip through desolate wide open roads from the prolific Montreal dreampop act. Soft sun glints through windows. You could fall asleep inside of this sound. You could rest inside of here for a long time. You could dream of somewhere else. But the lyrics conjure something bigger, something more primal.
8. Friendship – Tree of Life
There are still hints of the brighter Americana stylings of the Philly band's previous, also excellent, 2022 Love the Stranger on this year's Caveman Wakes Up, but this track showcases the decidedly more somber tone they're working within now. There have been no shortage of bands cropping up of late harkening back to the slowcore devastation rock of Jason Molina and the more the merrier I say. Not merry exactly but you know what I mean. Tree of Heaven embodies a similar tone, trudging through the desolation of the urban mundane, with songwriter and poet Dan Wriggins putting his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop to good use.
"The bus I'm waiting on, so slow to appear," he sings. "I have chilled on that stoop before, nothing is forgotten."
I'm picturing a gray morning walking through familiar city blocks in a daze, concussed by loss, a tiny spark burning inside for what once was.
7. Ken Pomeroy – Wolf In Sheep’s Clothes
It’s no wonder the country folk of the young Cherokee artist Ken Pomeroy has been showing up in films and television shows so much of late – Sterlin Harjo’s outstanding Reservation Dogs and The Lowdown, in which she also plays a role, in particular. This song opens up the pastoral melancholy of her Oklahoman home, a horizon that you can hear.
The horses are gone
You showed me how to leave them
Planting flowers in the front lawn
Talking circles around
A wolf that’s wearing sheep’s clothes
Telling him you know he’s just a dog
Trying to get you
Just a dog trying to get you
Just a dog trying to get you
6. Samia - Bovine Extraction
It’s a plaintive acoustic ballad, a searing indictment, a catalogue of disparate imagery and ideas – Diet Dr. Pepper, Raymond Carver, The Princess and the Pea, the paintings of Degas – and a heartrending meditation on the desire to disappear and to empty oneself out that revolves around the titular phenomenon when cattle are found dead in a field mysteriously drained of all their blood.
“I'm playing with the desire to be an idea, to exist as an idea,” Samia said of the song. “I just love that with cattle mutilation, the meaning and the magnitude of it relies on remaining unsolved. So yeah, I'm just saying, like, I don't want to have to contend with my humanness anymore. I don't want to have to be reduced to my humanness. I want to be anything.”
5. aldn - push you away
I never really got around to figuring out what digicore or hyperpop actually are, although they tell me both genres apply to Virginia artist Alden Robinson, aka aldn. Doesn’t matter to me anyway, this is a gorgeous, deftly layered experiment in wistful longing and exultant synth-symphonic catharsis. Cinematic soundscapes for a generation that’s grown up being filmed every moment of their lives. The sentiment in the lyrics is universal for any age however:
Cause I can't convince you to stay
And I can't convince you to want me
So maybe I'll push you away
It's so, so lonely in the city at this time of year
4. Alien Boy - Changes
No one will ever shut up about what the 90s are actually supposed to have sounded like, or what the current 2020s version of the 90s actually sounds like, but I am telling you that this, in fact, is what the 90s sounded like. Jangly American power-pop college rock bands trying to sound like 80s UK dream-pop bands, and all hoping to write a song concise enough and a hook infectious enough to land on MTV or the radio. On their third LP Portland, Oregon’s Alien Boy, knowing that there’s nothing resembling the star-making industry that existed back then anymore, decided to write the damn song anyway, stacking guitar upon guitar, chorus upon reverb, and cutting through it all with clear and clean saccharine vocals. It would have been an underground hit back then and it should be one today.
“Changes got me feeling fucked up,” as the song goes. “Got me freaking out like I'll never go home again.”
“Change is always hard for me, even when I know I need it,” singer and guitarist Sonia Weber said of the song. “There’s more and more ghosts the older I get. This song’s for trying to acknowledge the ghosts and grieving an old life.”
An old life, for example, when a song like this would have been everywhere. Man, I’m really going through something here today. Let's move on. Maybe it all gets better.
3. MJ Lenderman - Dancing In the Club
I had been telling myself the lie that I was not going to include this one on my list up until about five minutes ago when I put it on for roughly the 500th time in the past few months. Befitting the song – about a loser, always been, giving himself advice that he knows he won’t take – I ended up doing the thing I didn’t want to do anyway.
My reticence wasn’t because I’m not absolutely enamored with this version of the 2024 This is Lorelei song – covers are eligible on my lists if they’re transformative and, more importantly, beautiful enough, which this is – it’s just that Lenderman and/or Wednesday have featured heavily in every best of list for years on end now, including my very own, and they certainly don’t need the much vaunted Hell World bump from me.
Fuck it. The heart wants what it wants. Especially when it cannot have it.
The original, from last year’s Box For Buddy, Box For Star, didn’t quite land with me at first as much as it did for everyone else with similar taste as mine, but like the best covers this one was a retroactive key that unlocked it and the rest of Nate Amos’ music for me. The very best outcome for a cover!
Then again, this is nevertheless now the definitive version of the song. I don’t think Amos would mind hearing that too much.
“More so than any other song I’ve written this one was dreamt up for others to sing, so it was pretty freaky watching it fall into place with someone like Jake handling lead vocals,” he said around the time of the release of the expanded version of Box.
As you probably know if you follow me I absolutely adore MJ, the patron saint of sad guitar uncles and the young people in waiting to become them. I genuinely think he is The Real Deal. The best one doing it right now. I especially love all of the covers he's done solo or with Wednesday. (I almost want to say their covers of Women Without Whiskey and Perfect have supplanted the originals in my mind the past few years, which this cover of Dancing In the Club has surely done as well). There’s almost nothing that I’ve heard him perform thus far that is not [Dan Flashes voice] my exact style. Although surprisingly I didn’t take a shine to his cover of Just Be Simple on the Run For Cover I Will Swim to You Jason Molina tribute from this year. Could be I’m too precious and protective of Molina, or could be Lenderman’s trademark laconic delivery doesn't translate well into the expected shattered hopeful sadness of Molina's voice.
There are sad guys and then there are sad guys.
Either way he pulled this one off in spades, if you’ll forgive the deck of cards pun, which you’ll have to do if you want to enjoy this song as much as it deserves.
It’s an interesting interpolation of the original, stripping out the autotune and the intended contrast between the forlorn lyrics and the (more appropriate for the club) danceable vibe. It turns it all into, well, an MJ Lenderman song. One that you cannot dance to.
Drained of the protective distancing layers of production artifice the ache and loss in Amos’ words are given more room to shine here. No, nothing much happens. There’s a bit of simple and plaintive piano and acoustic undergirding the understated percussive shuffle of the song’s structure, a meandering guitar line following along throughout, a tinny circular riff that pops in and out. Otherwise it’s a simple unwavering four chord walk that serves largely as a delivery mechanism for its wistful sentiment.
It doesn’t matter that it’s all mostly static before it fades out. The narrator is too. Paralyzed by a change he hasn’t yet processed.
I know it’s not uncommon for people to anticipate their favorite lyric shortly arriving in any beloved song, but this one has so many to choose from they serve as the load-bearing signposts for the progression rather than any changing parts or dynamic shifts. I could’ve picked a couple others but this is the one that gets me and the one that gets me.
And I sang into my phone
I ate my dinner in the dark
And I fucked up my guitar
While I was fucking up my heart
While I was singing Steely Dan
Crying "Shake it" in the wind
Yeah, a loser never wins
And I'm a loser, always been.
2. First Day Back - Gone On / Lines
First Day Back
Long time readers of the music issues of Hell World may note a bit less emo on this year’s playlist compared to every single other year of my life. In large part that’s because, like everyone else, I’ve transferred most of my holdings into alt-country and maudlin girls with acoustic guitars. More than that though I just haven’t been hearing it – and you know it when you hear it – from so many of these younger finger-tapping ass bands reaching back to the 1990s for inspiration in a generationally recursive loop.
It only took about 30 seconds of listening to Forward, the debut record from the Santa Cruz band First Day Back, to remember what it is that I want out of emo in the first place though. They’re named after a Braid song – and there’s plenty of that in here – but more to the point they activate the part of my heart typically occupied by Rainer Maria, who I’ve often said, only half-jokingly, along with The Anniversary, are the only “real emo bands.” Here’s the thing about emo: It kind of has to sound like shit (complimentary) to hit right. The recording has to be a little fucked. The vocalist has to sound uncomfortable being there, even as they’re laying their hearts bare.
That could be me up there is part of punk’s entire deal. I could be you down there as well.
This album, recorded live in a living room, captures all of that. I could have picked almost any song from it as one of my favorites of the year but start with these two before you fall in love too.
1. flyingfish - pitching stones
Youth has always been fetishized by the music industry, but our relationship with the music made by young people is a complicated and often unfair thing. On the one hand the angst of youth is typically received by listeners, and critics for that matter, as more authentic, more raw and visceral. More exciting. The very fact of any given artist’s very short biography imbues their songs with the flush of the new. New love. New loss. New everything. I remember feeling like that we think. At its best it makes you feel that way right now. A sort of time machine for the heart.
On the other hand it can also all be easily dismissed as the sophomoric pining of kids who don’t know shit. Who haven’t lived. Who haven't yet known real pain.
Like I said it’s an unfair thing. Life is unfair. Another thing young people might not have learned yet.
The thing is no one knows shit but what they know. No one knows anything but the pain that they have endured, whether it’s a brand new emotion or a decades-long gestational suffering. And music is our attempt to broadcast that from one soul to another.
When I usually refer to “the kids” these days in music that could mean someone as old as, I don’t know, thirty. But that’s not what I mean when I tell you that Sam Fishman, aka flyingfish, is an actual kid – sixteen or so years old when this song was released. I don’t know why that matters to me but it does. The Arizona teenager has been releasing music for a few years now. Most of it the type of TikTok-wave shoegaze that has exploded of late and launched ten thousand shitty imitators all hoping to go massively viral in the background of the goofball panopticon like his 2023 track wonder if you care did. His first song ever. Most of the handful of other songs he’s released since then are in that vein, bedroom laptop shoegaze, and they sound fine and nice and all, but with pitching stones something shifted. It sounds real now.
I heard this song for the first time when it came out back in March and immediately called it my frontrunner for song of the year. Nothing else I’ve heard since then has come close to changing that impression. It has grabbed a hold of me. I could listen to it ten times in a row and in fact I am doing so right now.
I don’t know if this is still shoegaze. The guitars – this time sounding like they were played by an actual band – certainly crunch and whirl like shoegaze and “shoegaze” guitars are supposed to, but here they are tangibly propulsive. It all feels like it’s careening toward a cliff. Something barely being held together. I don’t know if this is emo either but it makes me feel like I felt first listening to early Get Up Kids and Jimmy Eat World back in the 90s. It doesn’t really matter what genre it is. A person only knows what they know. I remember feeling then what this song makes me feel like now. I’m glad I still can.
I’m reminded of this short piece from my new book We Had It Coming.
How to write
So much of our great art is born of youthful heartbreak which is unfair because it puts you at a disadvantage creatively not to mention marketing-wise if you’re aging in a happy marriage. One of the main things we’re supposed to want.
Eventually the last and ultimate heartbreak starts to crest on the horizon though and the creative impulse is refreshed.
Time to be taught and to try to teach the only lesson there is to people too young to believe it.
More music writing in Hell World this year!
Rax King on Garth Hudson and The Last Waltz
Luke O’Neil
David Roth on Rob Zombie
Luke O’Neil
On Niko Stratis' book The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman
Luke O’Neil
A dozen or so writers on their favorite Lana Del Rey songs
Luke O’Neil
If you missed previous editions of the top 5 series check out the pieces on David Berman, Jason Molina, The Cure, Elliott Smith, R.E.M., Chris Cornell and Weezer.
Dave Wedge on Ozzy
Luke O’Neil
Erin Osmon on Jason Molina and the new Magnolia & Johnson Electric Co. band
Luke O’Neil
On the life and writing of the great music writer Kaleb Horton
Luke O’Neil
Christopher Harris on Geese
Luke O’Neil
Sean T. Collins on Kneecap
Luke O’Neil
On the life and work of the recently passed Boston alt-weekly publisher Jeff Lawrence who gave me my start in music journalism
Luke O’Neil