Best Albums for 2025

Here at Gone Gazing, we know a thing or two because we’ve heard a thing or two. We’ve already told you all the best albums and best songs of 2024 – now time to tell you all the best music FOR 2025. These releases highlight what’s to come in the year ahead – new sounds to shock and awe, old tracks ready to thaw. We think these albums are worth a listen in the new year, so check them out before Pitchfork tells you to!

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*Ribbit* please come in come in! Pull up a toadstool or lily pad and make yourselves right at home. In fact, you’re just in time, for tonight’s program has yet to begin.

Mayhaps you’re already familiar with dungeon synth, the homebrewed genre of electronic music that invokes lo-fi sounds in early fantasy PC gaming, but are you familiar with the next big thing in cozy at-home enjoyment? Prepare yourselves distinguished gentletoads, for a lovely concert in frog synth.

The Slumbering Sounds of the Frog Fellowship is the finest example of this new direction in “amphibient” music. In good company with comfy synth peers such as Tales Under the Oak, Frog Synth Coven and The Shakespearean Frog, the amphibious conductor Max Grody outdoes himself once again with the clammiest production in polliwog entertainment to date.

Croak The Slumbering Sounds II after your New Year’s parties; on the tandem bike with your best frog; or in the mud bath at the slurry bog. Wherever you listen, “music to croak by” will be a hit in 2025, warts and all. – AB

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Baltimore shoegaze legends Beach House will celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Depression Cherry in August 2025. Their fifth album marked a return to their roots, relying on drum machines and simpler arrangements to build beautiful, dream-like soundscapes, contrasting with their heavy-hitting Bloom from a few years before. The result is a tight masterclass in dream pop responsible for reviving interest in shoegaze in the last ten years, especially thanks to the massive virality of “Space Song.” Don’t overlook the rest for that intergalactic trip, though – this album is dreamy heat front to back. Beach House is an essential bridge between early pioneers of the genre to today’s upstarts, and Depression Cherry stands as an extraordinary entry in the shoegaze canon. – TM

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This year saw the resurgence of one woodwind’s popularity; the flute, owing to jazz releases from André 3000, Shabaka and Clairo (jazz? no. flute? yes!) for enhancing its brand. What could be next? In 2025 anticipate the un-anticipatable with the fame restored to yet another exceptional woodwind; the “berrante!”

Get familiar with the sound of the traditional Brazilian cattle breeding horn through the works of prolific, multi-instrumentalist composer Hermeto Pascoal (poised above with his berrante). Remastered in 2022, Planetario da Gavea is a famous 1981 live performance from the musician and his “grupo.” The berrante can be heard beginning here on “Paz Amor e Esperança / Homônimo Sintróvio” and looming throughout.

Pascoal also released a beautiful tribute record this year dedicated to his late-wife, Ilza. – AB

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LCD Soundsystem roared back to life in 2024 with a packed schedule of tour dates, a twelve night NYC residency, and the new track “x-ray eyes” – their first bit of new material since their 2017 album that everybody forgot about. A hastily deleted Primavera Sound biography for their upcoming headline appearance also promised a new album to come in 2025 – big news for people that are losing their edge.

With a potential release on the horizon, take it way back to 2005 with their self-titled debut album, turning 20 this year. Featuring the dance rock classic “Daft Punk is Playing at My House,” the filthy nasty disgusting riffs of “Tribulations,” and the vapid complaints of cultural regurgitation on “Movement.” Its the perfect soundtrack for the indie sleaze revival, and for the think piece arguing that indie sleaze was never real, and for the Tiktoks summarizing the think piece that you’ll watch to lie about reading the article. – TM

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With an influx of English names rising on charts, billing in the U.S. and infiltrating our own end of year list, we thought to reconnect with our neighbors across the water and explore what being British is really about.

And who would make for a better source than the always truthful, impenetrable London musician Dean Blunt, and his online hip-hop collective Babyfather, who’ve released the singles “bluey vuitton” and “teddy boi freestyle” this year in support of the Third British Invasion.

Returning to the last major work by Babyfather will give us a narrative glimpse into the lives of our English contemporaries and take us back to 2016 with BBF Hosted by DJ Escrow. Right off the bat, “Stealth Intro” opens with a baroque recital on the clavichord set to a background of police sirens and overdubbed by the looping statement: “this makes me proud to be British.”

What a glimpse! Up next: Bruce Springsteen. – AB

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Bruce Springsteen has a new biopic in the works starring none other than Mr. Biceps himself, Jeremy Allen White. The upcoming Deliver Me From Nowhere is based off the book Deliver Me From Nowhere whose name is based off the last line in “State Trooper” where Springsteen says – you guessed it – “deliver me from nowhere.”

Carmy is set to muddle around The Boss’ hometown of Colts Neck, New Jersey, depicting the creation of his 1982 masterpiece Nebraska (aptly named, Bruce). The album is a DIY folk recording, a collection of acoustic tracks that marks a sharp turn in the Springsteen discography with the E-Street Band and subsequent Born in The USA. Walking us through childhood memories and letting us peer through the eyes of criminals, Nebraska is harsh, brutal, and authentic (what living in New Jersey does to a mfer). Nebraska is also the perfect setting for Jeremy Allen White to play another character that only wears white t-shirts and jeans – count me in! – TM

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No, not that country album by New York-based award-winning singer/songwriter Lana Del Rey. Chemtrails Over the Country Club may not be a country album in layman terms but it is canonized as LDR’s most folk-leaning, country-flirting record to date by online forums, and it populates second after last year’s cover of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” when searching “lana del rey cou–” on streaming apps.

Chemtrails is a dazzling foray into the artist’s relations with friends and family members, fraught with an Americana love affair that somehow Americanizes her sound more. Since an announcement at the beginning of the year, claiming her recently retitled record The Right Person Will Stay will be “going country,” there hasn’t been much in terms of the direction she will be taking her newest novelesque release.

The Right Person Will Stay is slated to be released on May 21^st to high anticipation for a culminating kismet of vibes from Southern Gothic’s CEO. In the meantime, revisit an underrated chronicle in Lana Del Rey’s library. – AB

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Picture this: its December 4th, 2024. You’ve spent the last week tweeting about Spotify Wrapped being sooooo late, and finally the biggest day of your year is here. You can’t wait to see what random American town has the same music taste as you, and what antidepressants you should be taking based on your listening time (just make sure you excluded the Hamilton soundtrack from your taste profile). All that’s left is to scroll through six slides of data visualizations even the worst Deloitte summer analyst could’ve pulled together. You get to your top five artists of 2024 and… its the same five from 2023. And 2022. and 2021. and 2020 (except Phoebe Bridgers, of course, she was everywhere). and 2019, and so on.

Its time to branch out! Listen to something new! Read up on the latest music news delivered weekly to your inbox at gonegazing.com! But if all that is too intimidating for you, and you just can’t abandon your comfort artists, well I’ve got a solution – listen to the same people, but in different bands.

That new Strokes record ain’t coming anytime soon, and the silent gaps of Room On Fire are getting stale. Give machinegum a spin, or that first Voidz record (not the new one, good lord). Feeling nostalgic for Rostam-era Vampire Weekend? Check out his collabs with Hamilton Leithauser or Wes Miles. Trade out the wistful dreampop of Deerhunter for the wistful dreampop of Atlas Sound. Pixies and Sonic Youth are out, Kim Deal and Kim Gordon are in. There are four whole dudes worth of solo music in Animal Collective (spoiler alert for the last album on this list).

Chances are your favs have been at it for a minute, so deep dive on the side projects and solo records before begging for a Title Fight reunion. – TM

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Coasting off the successful musical career of an artist who could care less about a film made about him, comes Hollywood’s latest lottery-picked person of interest film A Complete Unknown. And here we come, coasting off the successes of the artist and aforementioned biopic, providing readers with a brief listening guide to seek shelter from the ensuing Dylan-storm.

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was the beginning of the end of the folksinger’s peace with the musical world (if that ever existed). Released in 1963, a year following his self-titled and two years preceding Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, it is the most formative glimpse into Bob Dylan’s writing tradition that continues to this day.

A Complete Unknown follows Dylan from 1961 to 1965 and capitalizes off the high drama and reactionary response to the artist challenging conventions of the time. Speaking about The Free Wheelin’, the 21-year-old (and still-acoustic) artist commented: “All I’m doing is saying what’s on my mind the best way I know how … whatever else you say about me, everything I do and sing and write comes out of me.”

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is the timeless testimonial that started it all. Hopefully in your listening / relistening you find a pertinent moment that, at the very least, stands out to you and may further contextualize the legacy of the artist’s music into 2025 and beyond. And if not, don’t think twice about it, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” either way. – AB

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Panda Bear’s upcoming record Sinister Grift is scheduled to release in February 2025, and touring kicked off this year featuring a full band for the first time in his solo career. Out of all the albums in his decades deep catalogue, Tomboy stands with the most to gain from this new live arrangement, and should be the starting point for anyone prepping to listen to the new album.

From the initial run of tour dates in late 2024, Tomboy tracks have made up most of the set lists following the unreleased Sinister Grift songs. Originally conceived as his guitar record, Tomboy bridges the gap between his 60s pop influences to the chillwave indie sounds he pioneered, and should experience a welcome comeback with the new live band performances.

While the main release produced by early shoegaze legend Sonic Boom is available on all platforms, the less accessible fan project Tomboiled is also worth a listen (an MP3 can be downloaded here). Combining live recordings and singles mixes to fill in transitions between the remixed tracks, Tomboiled is a lively alternate arrangement that injects the maximalist production of Person Pitch into the Tomboy bones. The final work feels like a concert, with crowd noises and Panda Bear’s improvisation highlighted in the remix; a prelude to how the songs will feel on the Sinister Grift tour. – TM

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2025, will you think about me? I could wait a year, but I shouldn’t wait three. Vote Kanye 2028, everybody.