Best of 2025: Overall top 10

The new releases that defined my year in listening

New Jersey hardcore malcontents Deadguy made a stunning return in 2025, releasing a new album that rivaled their 30-year-old masterpiece, Fixation on a Co-Worker.

Welcome to part 2 of the annual DFSBP year-end roundup! See here for part 1, which covers my favorite jazz records of the year; here for part 3, featuring reissues and historical releases; and here for part 4, where I run down my favorite live shows of the year.

Below is my overall top 10 list. I loved (and enthusiastically recommend!) all the jazz records I listed in part 1, but none of them reappear here, mainly because my most avid engagement with jazz in 2025 was in person. Along with my usual heavy diet of back-catalog listening, the titles below are the recorded statements that defined my year.

Quick P.S. This marks the 21st (!) year that I’ve been compiling an annual top 10 — you can view all previously published year-end lists here, at the old DFSBP blog, as well as a list of all jazz-only top 10s here, dating back to 2005 and 2008, respectively.

Rolling Stone has just published its wonderfully diverse list of the 15 best metal albums of 2025, which I was happy to contribute to alongside various friends, former colleagues and fellow travelers. Three of the albums I blurbed there — by Deftones, Deadguy and Ghost, respectively — made it on to my overall top 10, so I wanted to link to that up front. (The Castle Rat and Coroner albums I wrote up there didn’t make the cut below but are nevertheless well worth your time!)

Without further ado, these are the 10 albums that hit me hardest this year, grabbing me again and again across compulsive repeat listens. (As always, where included, album-title links go to Bandcamp.)

1. Pile, Sunshine and Balance Beams (Sooper)
   I had been dimly aware of Pile before 2025, but this album was a trap door to obsession. I wrote here about the band’s stylistic slipperiness, and that impression has only deepened as I’ve spent more time with this utterly remarkable album. They simply don’t fit in anywhere. I could offer some genre-based shorthand (crushing post-hardcore meets crystalline art rock?), but I’m not sure it’s really of any use. The coherence and intrigue of these songs defies any attempt to reduce or contain them. I did not hear more sturdily constructed music this year: Refined and ferocious in turn, Sunshine and Balance Beams is a triumph. This in-studio performance of album highlight “Deep Clay,” which I’ve probably watched 100 times or more, is a good entry point:

2. Deftones, Private Music (Reprise/Warner)

   Like Pile, Deftones are another band I was oblivious to for years but immediately went all in on once I started paying attention (around a decade ago, with 2016’s Gore). The response to Private Music has been rapturous, suggesting some sort of return to form. That’s not exactly how I see it: Some fans were iffy on Gore, but I adored both that and 2020’s Ohms, so from where I was sitting, no course correction was needed. Anyway, Private Music is another outstanding album from one of the few legacy bands around that never seems to miss.

3. Propagandhi, At Peace (Epitaph)

   I keep an informal mental list of the Best Bands on Earth, the ones that, based on their live show, recorded output or ideally both, just keep delivering year after year (and in some cases, decade after decade). Along with the aforementioned Deftones and new additions Pile — and a bunch of others, including but not limited to Melvins, Queens of the Stone Age, Converge, Deerhoof, Obituary, Sheer Mag, Krallice, Crowbar and the Bad Plus— Propagandhi, the veteran Manitoba pop-punk–turned–technical-thrash outfit, have long ago earned tenure among this company. They have never made a bad album, but for me, their 21st-century output, now encompassing six LPs, from 2001’s Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes up through this latest one, ranks among the finest, most durable music that has been released by anyone during this time. Propagandhi do not half-ass anything, and as I described here, At Peace is another killer: technically staggering, emotionally devastating, ideologically fierce.

4. Deadguy, Near-Death Travel Services (Relapse)

   I’ve long since given up trying to figure out why, but I find some deep solace in music that sounds like a nervous breakdown. The sole full-length of Deadguy’s initial run, 1995’s Fixation on a Co-Worker, is an all-timer in that regard — a record that’s justly legendary for encapsulating collapse and seething catharsis. The big question surrounding this comeback album was: Could they still bring themselves and their listeners to the brink again after 30 long years? The answer, thankfully: Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Near-Death Travel Services is a sardonic and bilious blast, and is now neck-and-neck with Carcass’s Surgical Steel for the title of best reunion album I’ve ever heard.

5. Guided by Voices, Thick Rick and Delicious (GBV Inc)

   It’s a great time to be a GBV fan. As chronicled by my friend Morgan Enos on EXCITED ONES! — his essential Substack covering all things Robert Pollard — the band is in the midst of an inspired resurgence, churning out album after album of material that ranks with the best of Pollard’s staggeringly vast back catalog. I’m still catching up on releases from the past decade plus, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this might be my current favorite GBV album. Featuring gorgeously crunchy production from Travis Harrison (a college pal of mine who has gone on to become a brilliant and seasoned engineer), it just gives you everything you want from Robert Pollard — concise, fun, ingeniously hooky songs that cherry-pick the best of the past six decades or so of what the man himself now likes to call “The Six P’s”: power pop, psychedelic, prog and post-punk.

6. Wednesday, Bleeds (Dead Oceans)

   “Elderberry Wine” is one of those rare songs that feels, as soon as you hear it, like an instant standard — just so true and right and effortless and easy to love that it’s as if it’s been around forever. I loved the rest of this record too. The combination of Karly Hartzman’s lilting voice, her casually devastating lyrics, and the artful flow of her songwriting — which tends toward the mellow but occasionally rises to urgent and desperate peaks — adds up to an absolute emotional bullseye, and a perfect blend of contemporary and classic rock (not just ’70s but ’90s too) and country modes.

7. Ghost, Skeletá (Loma Vista)

   This one really snuck up on me. I’ve been an intermittent Ghost fan since the Opus Eponymous days, but some of the intervening albums haven’t grabbed me as much as the debut. But as I spun this one over and over while working on a Ghost-centric Times feature over the summer, I found myself growing hopelessly addicted to these songs. Tobias Forge’s craftsmanship is absolutely undeniable, and it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that he’s risen to such impressive heights this year (e.g., debuting at No. 1 and selling out MSG).

8. Jim White, Inner Day (Drag City)

   I wrote at some length here about the Jim White–aissance — one of the most welcome musical developments of the past few years. Amid collaborations with old friends — including the frankly thrilling resurgence of Dirty Three, who will tour the States in 2026 — he has launched an unexpected but most welcome solo venture. Crafted in close collaboration with producer Guy Picciotto, these records — last year’s All Hits: Memories and this year’s Inner Day — stake out a soundworld that’s unique and absolutely magnetic. I have no idea what to call this music — with its soothing synth textures set against percussion that combines the subtlety and elemental grace of windchimes sounding in the breeze with a free and abstract flow that seems untethered from rock, jazz or any other easily definable tradition. White has always been a shamanic presence within his various projects, but this record elevates and distills that magic into a truly transcendent expression.

   9. Bonnie Prince Billy, The Purple Bird (No Quarter)

   There’s a theme on this list of sustained excellence — the artists who go all in on a life’s work and just keep delivering year after year. As I’ve written about previously in this space, Will Oldham is a shining example of this caliber of creator — someone whose work has captivated me for around three decades. As with the GBV record above, which I’d wholeheartedly recommend to either a seasoned Robert Pollard fan or someone totally unfamiliar with his work, The Purple Bird is quintessential Will Oldham. His sui generis voice, his wise and wry lyrical perspective, his commitment to honoring and furthering a legacy of unflinching, sometimes harsh emotional truth in performance and songwriting — it’s all beautifully documented here, which is also a testament to the strength of his longstanding collaboration with veteran Nashville producer David “Ferg” Ferguson.

   10. Bob Mould, Here We Go Crazy (Granary Music / BMG)

   Bob Mould is not technically a band, but his tight-knit trio with Jason Narducy and Jon Wurster — heard on six excellent albums so far, dating back to 2012’s Silver Age — probably belongs on that aforementioned Best Bands on Earth list. As with Deftones, Propagandhi, et al., this guy just doesn’t seem to be capable of putting out a subpar record. Mould has experimented quite a bit over the years, but what I love about his recent output is its directness: He knows his lane — concise melodic rock songs marked by anthemic hooks and uncanny emotional conviction — and commands it completely. I’m as excited about next year’s Sugar reunion as the next middle-aged rocker, but let’s not forget that he’s been churning out Copper Blue–caliber songs every few years in the interim.