The Best Songs of 2025 So Far

Time​ Magazine

8 hours ago

The biggest music story of 2025 remains, as it has for many years, the very fact of how music is discovered, as streaming monoliths and social-media algorithms continually overtake what we hear and what it sounds like. When TikTok virality and playlist automation saturate listeners' attention, artistic sameness threatens to rule the day—but independent artists on their own unique paths are still with us. Let this list, which mostly eschews household names, be an antidote to that crisis, surveying 2025's most notable releases thus far across pop, rock, electronic, rap, and Latin music.
Wednesday, 'Elderberry Wine'
The North Carolina band Wednesday, led by Karly Hartzman since forming in 2017, fuses the blistering edges of shoegaze and the twangy ache of country (shall we call it rootgaze?) into a vessel for vivid, gnarled storytelling, filled with literary detail. This heartbreaker from Wednesday's sixth full-length, due in September, is the most finely-wrought tune yet from the group, which includes the ascendant MJ Lenderman on guitar. (His cover of This Is Lorelei's 'Dancing in the Club' is another of the year's best releases so far.) The titular metaphor refers to a healing herb that becomes toxic in the wrong dosage, much as love requires the right proportions to find harmony.
Jenny Hval, 'To be a rose'
Ten years ago this month, the Norwegian auteur Jenny Hval released her fifth album, Apocalypse, girl, cementing her stature as a modern art-pop luminary. Also a novelist, Hval makes records that brim with presence, intelligence, and the suspended elegance of Laurie Anderson or Suzanne Vega. Like some of her best songs—'That Battle Is Over' and 'American Coffee' among them—'To be a rose,' from May's Iris Silver Mist, is an electroacoustic musical bildungsroman. It seems to braid two abstracted narratives, hers and her mother's, both in pursuit of beauty, swelling to exalted synth chords and referencing Gertrude Stein for good measure.
Nourished by Time, 'Max Potential'
On Marcus Brown's 2023 debut, recorded in his parents' basement during the pandemic, the Baltimore songwriter and producer, known as Nourished by Time, fused meticulously arranged club anthems with DIY textures—favoring maximal emotional impact. 'Max Potential,' the dizzying jam of a lead single from his forthcoming The Passionate Ones, is the apotheosis of his project to date. 'If I'm gonna go insane/ At least I'm loved by you,' Brown sings, stretching each syllable into a titanic hook that charts a euphoric new horizon.
Marie Davidson, 'Sexy Clown'
Montreal electronic producer and poet Marie Davidson writes spoken-word accompaniments that cut through the icy facades of club culture, staring listeners in the eye. Drawing inspiration from Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, this electroclash banger from City of Clowns sounds like a person's digital footprint lost in a fun-house maze—like life itself in the algorithmic echo chamber of targeted advertising and calculated self-promotion. 'Sexy Clown' taunts the entire system: 'Can you feel the cutting edge/ Of my dying tenderness?' goes Davidson's earnest sing-song chorus, an invitation to log off in service of your truest self.
Perfume Genius, 'It's a Mirror'
For 15 years as Perfume Genius, Mike Hadreas has built one of the most consistently arresting catalogs in independent music. That streak continues with Glory, the singer and songwriter's latest collaboration with his partner Alan Wyffels and producer Blake Mills. Inside of an expressive indie-rock sound as precise, stylish, and grounded as mid-century architecture, album opener 'It's a Mirror' finds Hadreas sounding at home, even as he reckons lyrically with how to steel oneself in face of the world and the mirror alike. Mills, a longtime associate of Fiona Apple, knows this territory well: the pointed self-analysis of an extremely sensitive person.
Turnstile, 'Never Enough'
With 2021's Glow On, the Baltimore rock quintet Turnstile became not only the biggest band to emerge from the global hardcore scene in recent years, but one of the biggest bands to emerge from this supercharged strain of punk ever. Post-pandemic restlessness was just one feature of the perfect storm that catapulted Turnstile and their legendary, highly participatory live shows into the pop-cultural zeitgeist. 'At the right place, at the right time/ And still you sink into the floor,' Brendan Yates sings on the bracingly honest title track of Turnstile's hugely anticipated followup, a reminder that at the heart of Turnstile's whirlwind moment is unified, shared experience.
Spellling, 'Alibi'
The Bay Area artist Tia Cabral made her name first as a homespun R&B sorcerer, then, on 2021's The Turning Wheel, as an heir to the widescreen synth-pop idiosyncrasies of Kate Bush and the vocal audacity of Minnie Riperton. She's taken her most unexpected pivot yet on this epic kiss-off from Portrait of My Heart, with visceral riffs and overdriven melodies evoking the high-wire emo theatrics that infiltrated MTV during the 33-year-old's own teenage years. With contributions from Turnstile guitarist Pat McCrory, 'Alibi' enacts its line-in-the-sand sentiment of post-breakup clarity: 'Yeah I won't take you back this time!' she sing-screams with abandon, finding a new side of herself instead.
Lana Del Rey, 'Henry Come On'
Aside from flecking her lyrics with the occasional 'giddy-up' and 'hey y'all,' there's nothing especially down-home about the sound of this lead single from Lana Del Rey's next album, which is purported to be a country turn from the California fatalist whose best-loved LP included a psych sprawler titled 'Venice Bitch.' This would-be cowgirl is all Lana, chronicling her destiny alongside a tormented man with a torchy deadpan. 'Yesterday I heard God say/ I was born to the one,' she croons, 'Who holds the hands of the man/ Who flies too close to the sun.'
Saba & No ID, 'How to Impress God'
On this brash mini-anthem of anti-materialism, two generations of Chicago-bred rap royalty link up for a conversation with the creator, too, determining what really matters. Jewels, cars, clothes? Hard no's. Album streams? Try again. Packed arenas get a disenchanted 'Woo.' Tucked into the second half of Saba and No ID's collaborative album, 'How to Impress God' is a flash of casual brilliance from Saba's searing pen. When he finally gives voice to God, self-acceptance is the message: 'Don't you know I gave you keys before you had a piano?/ Don't you know you enough?' (Paging Turnstile.)
Bad Bunny, 'DtMF'
Música urbana supernova Bad Bunny has called DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, from January—the title translates to 'I Should Have Taken More Pictures'—his 'most Puerto Rican album ever,' even as recent years found him moving away from home. 'When you are far, sometimes you can see better, you can appreciate more,' he told the New York Times. This focused celebration of traditional Puerto Rican rhythms plays out stirringly on his chart-topping title track, a plena whose live instrumentation and joyfully communal hook are like a cinéma-vérité bridge between generations, on the world's stage (and, yes, TikTok).