Overstreet’s Favorite Recordings of 2025: introduction and honorable mentions

If only with candles and stars
Broken light from dreams like ours
We will still find our way through to love . . .
— Sam Phillips, “Candles and Stars”

By the age of 13, I was a devoted listener to Rick Dees’ Weekly Top 40. Every week, I’d turn the delicate dial on my silver Soundesign bookshelf stereo and jot down the top 10 on lined notebook paper as the trending songs were revealed, and I would follow that with a list of the songs that I, personally, was most excited about. (Are any 13-year-olds out there tracking such things today?)

At the end of the year, it felt like a party on paper, a celebration of things I loved, and a formal acknowledgment of just how much my world had expanded. But it also felt like turning a page to a new blank page full of promise, my hopes and dreams kindled by the surprises and joys that I’d discovered in the previous year.

I find that this ritual still has that effect for me after several decades of practice. And it’s become something more. As I found my way to writing for readers beyond myself, this work became purposeful: Point them to bright lights in the darkness. These discoveries have blessed me. Perhaps they will bless others. It has also become an invitation, a way of striking up conversations with new friends who have made meaningful discoveries of their own, and a way of getting to know old friends even better, and to walk alongside them in the treasure hunts of their own journeys.

After a year as chaotic, punishing, and exhausting as 2025 — one after which the stresses and the disruptions have continued at such a feverish pitch that I’ve postponed my annual rituals — it feels good to finally sit down and claim, if only for a few minutes, something that feels familiar, something that connects me across the years to that curious and enthusiastic young adventurer attending to his AM/FM radio with a pen and paper, tuning in to signals from a bigger, better world full of beauty and revelation that he wanted to be a part of.

Maybe the most important aspect of this work for me today is that it focuses my attention on the creativity of others in a way that kindles my own. I want to feel creative, and I don’t these days. I want to be inspired to dream up my own works of art, and I’m not. Maybe if I immerse myself in these familiar questions — “Which records and movies moved you most? And why?” — I will feel that deep restlessness again, that urgent impulse to join the communion of visionaries, and to bear witness to the cosmos of poetry, prophecy, and wonder that only I can reach, that only I can give to the world.

The Usual Disclaimer and Complaint

As a prelude to making this year’s record of records, I should acknowledge, as always, that I know that this is a highly subjective exercise, and that I do not presume — as so many music reviewers and journals presume — to declare anything as “the best.”

I write these lists to show my gratitude for the dreamers who made the world a better place this year, and because I hope that these stars, stars that helped me sail through another year of rough waters, might brighten these dark days for you as well. I hope you’ll find at least a few new favorites among these highlights of my treasure hunting.

Lists are always such a difficult science. I’m always dissatisfied when I find that, due to an abundance of goodness and the injustice of math, I can’t fit 50 albums into a list of 30 favorites. So, in this post, I’ll share the Honorable Mentions, the titles that it feels wrong to leave off of a final, formal list.

Highly Recommended Honorable Mentions

And these first few are records that, if you ask me tomorrow, I might have changed my mind and added them to the top 30 after all:

My Morning Jacket’s record Is was — well, Is — a reliable spirit lifter, especially with that run of three strong opening tracks: “Out in the Open” (which accelerates in a way that reminds me of U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name”), “Half a Lifetime,” and “Everyday Magic.” This was one of the first records to get my attention and compel me to press PLAY repeatedly this year. When it arrived, I was sure it was a Top Tenner. Maybe my favorite My Morning Jacket record?

Rhiannon Giddens reunited with Justin Robinson of Carolina Chocolate Drops and released a treasury of folk music from the front porches of the American south: What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow.

That was another concert that brought light and hope during dark times for Anne and me. I was tempted by the tour shirt emblazoned with the history lesson that Giddens is passionate about teaching us: “The Banjo: Woke Since the 1600s.” Here’s “Hook and Line.”

tUnE-yArDs’ Better Dreaming is a blast, as playful as we’ve come to expect from them, and cathartic in its fury against the forces who would strip colors from the rainbow of human diversity. I love the summons to resilience in “Heartbreak” and the promise of a jubilee celebration beyond these dark days in “Limelight.” The whole album blazes like a lighthouse beacon, guiding us to get through, one way or another, and become, as the closing track makes clear, “Sanctuary” for one another. “We are not the weight we carry,” Garbus reminds us.

There were times this year that I thought the unexpected collaboration of Julien Baker and Torres would land in my top 10 of the year. They work really well together, queer icons joining forces to push back against a high tide of trouble with poetry, storytelling, and style. Baker is so much more than just one third of Boygenius; she’s a solo artist who seems inspired by the promise of collaboration. And in Torres (Mackenzie Ruth Scott), she finds a kindred spirit whose creativity was similarly forged in the furnace of evangelical culture. I hope you spend quality time with Send a Prayer My Way. Check out “Tuesday” and “Sugar in the Tank.”

Baker’s Boygenius partner, in both senses of the word, released Forever is a Feeling, an album that must have been inspired, in part, by their more-than-bandmates relationship. It didn’t shake the earth for me the way Historian and Home Video did, but it was great to hear Lucy Dacus express so much joy in spite of the fact that the world is a hostile environment for loves like hers. Sounds like she’s making up for “Lost Time.”

Speaking of queer artists whose lights are bringing hope and affirmation for those being hunted and harmed, I found some glimmers of hope in these records:

Ezra Furman followed up her magnificent All of Us Flames with Goodbye Small Head, making painful, personal art from her sufferings through the phases of transition, and the record stands as a defiant, courageous rage against the machine of fearmongering about our trans family members. I’m moved by “A World of Love and Care.”

Furman wasn’t alone in doing so. I was delighted to discover Jasmine Cruikshank, a.k.a. jasmine.4.t, and her album You Are the Morning, which featured Phoebe Bridgers on the track with the most intriguing title: “Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation.”

Rosalía’s Lux deserves all of the rave reviews it’s received for artistic ambition, beauty, and inspired stylistic fusion. Drawing on Christian imagery and vocabularies, Rosalía takes her pledges of romantic devotion and sexual ecstasy to heights that would make Madonna blush. I rolled my eyes when that lyrical tactic became trendy in the ’80s — and remember when Gregorian chant was trending in the ’90s because people decided it was sexy, a precursor to the “hot priest” memes of the 2010s? It’s a recurring phenomenon that’s not nearly as innovative or daring as artists seem to think it is. (I mean, a class on John Donne’s poetry in my undergrad studies showed me that it’s more interesting to consider what happens when we flip that paradigm, and find in the poetry of sexual intimacy another language for the magnitude of God’s love for God’s creation. Indeed, that’s a thread that runs through the whole Bible.) Still, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard pledges of whole-hearted, whole-bodied devotion as dizzying as the heights that Rosalía hits here. Just listen to “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti” for one of the most thrilling vocal performances of the decade.

I just wish Rosalía’s record’s more caustic edges didn’t make me flag it as NSFW — and NSFH (Not Safe For Home, given how the caustic F-bombs disrupt just about anything happening there). It’s one of those OITC records for me: Only in the Car.

Souvenirs of Spectacular Shows

The year served up plenty of studio albums to keep me busy, but it gave us a generous side of live albums too. I find that live albums rarely sound good in my car, where I spend the most time with music. And they are difficult to track when I’m grading papers or writing. So I only listened to a few. One of them impressed me so much, you’re going to find it in my top 10 when I publish it. Two more kept me coming back for multiple listens: Nick Cave’s Live God and Peter Gabriel’s In the Big Room.

Cave’s is important to me because it captures a tour I won’t forget. (I saw Cave with Anne and my friend Kirk, who is a wizard of securing tickets.) The sequence of “Conversion,” “Bright Horses,” and “Joy” is fantastic. And while Cave lost his place in his performance of “Into My Arms” at the close of the show I saw, he nails it here.

Gabriel’s album invites us into a show from all the way back in 2003, one full of favorites from across the art-rock master’s career; it’s an intimate show, one that gave the ensemble time to craft some rich soundscapes anchored by Tony Levin’s legendary bass mastery. I’m high on the performance of “Digging in the Dirt” here.

And Bruce Springsteen released a live EP, Land of Hope & Dreams, featuring strong live performances of “My City or Ruins” and — but, perhaps more importantly, he invested his considerable global influence to preach the truth about how Trump and the GOP are waging war on law, order, and human decency, obliterating the pillars of our democracy. You can hear him raging about this present darkness to a global audience here, letting them know that there are still many Americans who believe in “liberty and justice for all,” even though the federal government is now a conspiracy meant to dismantle those ideals. I hope we’ll see many, many musicians following Springsteen’s lead in 2026. If they don’t realize that their futures as artists depend on it, not to mention the capacity of the world to push back against authoritarian madmen, they’re short-sighted (to say the least).

Sixpence None the Richer released a live album too — Live at Gruene Hall — and I'm grateful to have that souvenir of a tour that provided my heart with an shot of hope and inspiration straight to the heart in 2015. That will be fun to play from time to time, just to recapture how good it felt to be at The Crocodile with Leigh Nash, Steve Hindalong, Matt Slocum, and the rest, with a crowd of longtime fans. “We are Love” is a rousing expression of faith and determination that I need on a regular basis, and one of those songs that I play for people who think Sixpence is just a one-hit wonder for sentimental, swooning teenagers.

Giants Still Making Memorable Noise

Gabriel, Cave, Springsteen, and Sixpence are all giants on the landscape of my lifetime of listening. So are several more of the artists who released new records this year. And while the work they’re doing may not dazzle me like their earlier records, they still reward my attention.

• Suzanne Vega released Flying With Angels (my favorite track: “Alley”);
• The Cure released a kaleidoscopic display of new mixes from last year’s major release Songs of a Lost World, and some of them might strike you as improvements on the originals (here’s Daniel Avery’s take on “Drone: Nodrone”);
• Elbow released an EP follow-up to last year’s Audio Vertigo called Audio Vertigo Echo (featuring “Adrianna Again”) even as they gave Anne and I the best Seattle concert of our year.
• Earning points for quantity, even if the quality wasn’t comparable to his finest work? Jeff Tweedy of Wilco released a triple album called Twilight Override, that included “One Tiny Flower,” which recaptures the precipice-of-chaos ambitions of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sound.
• Sharon Van Etten was back, but this time backed up by her first official band, The Attachment Unit, and it was a strong record, if not quite the major leap that I might have been hoping for. My favorite track was the big single: “Afterlife.”
• Michelle Zauner — that is, Japanese Breakfast — released what is clearly a passion project, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), and it featured highlights like “Picture Window.”
• One giant who continues to blaze new trails, often in collaboration, is Thom Yorke, whose signature end-of-days laments played well with Mark Pritchard on Tall Tales, a venture through a Lynchian landscape of propulsive rhythms and twitchy electronics. Hear the whole thing here.
• I’ve only begun to listen closely to The Mountain Goats’ new one, Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan. But the concert promoting it was a blast, and the performance of “Cold at Night” was a memorable highlight.

• It was good to hear that Sarah McLachlan still sounds fantastic on an impressive return called Better Broken. The climactic track, “If This is the End,” is an epic number with a children’s choir, one that dares to point us beyond the darkness to hope in the Great Beyond: “So let’s drink to the earth that will wear a new tapestry / Rainbows of sinew and bone / All of our struggles, our ego and avarice / Fall at the end of the road / Here’s to the sky . . . .”

Am I Still Susceptible to Blockbuster Pop Stars?

This was the year that I was surprised to enjoy and repeatedly play albums by pop divas who I’ve tried mightily to appreciate in the past. While Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl seemed to frustrate a lot of her fans, I was delighted to find myself cranking up the first three tracks of the album, including “The Fate of Ophelia.” It’s not as exceptional as Folklore, the only record in her discography that has brought me back for sustained attention, but this convinces me to keep checking in. Even more surprising, I can now say I have a Lady Gaga record I could happily go on listening to through 2026: Mayhem. Featuring “Abracadabra,” the album is a magic trick of ’80s power pop, a genre that still has a hold on me that’s about more than mere nostalgia.

Ascending Talents: these artists are making me pay closer attention to their game

Artists who caught my attention for the first time with impressive records, even if they didn’t land in my top 25, include Ethel Cain (two albums: Perverts and Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You); Billy Woods (Golliwog, a horror-movie soundscape of compelling and personal testimonies); and Matt Berry — yes, that Matt Berry, of What We Do in the Shadows fame — put out an amusingly tongue-in-cheek art-rock record called Heard Noises with some support from Eric D. Johnson of Fruit Bats and Bonny Light Horseman. (The track “Why On Fire?” had me laughing and singing along on my way to work in the morning.) Oracle Sisters released Divinations, a disco-inclined pop record, and Deep Sea Diver (Billboard Heart) proved they’re still a force to be reckoned with — and both made me want to work at my standing desk so I could move to the music. I’ve enjoyed Sam Amidon for a while now, but his record Salt River is a fascinating journey of experimental folk, and I’ll be paying closer attention going forward. Perhaps the biggest surprise to me, given my suspicion and cynicism about TV stars who decide they should also be pop stars, I really like this record The Crux by Djo — Stranger Things’s Joe Keery. That first single, “Lonesome is a State of Mind” is a fantastic earworm. In a year when I found myself more grateful than ever for records by Tracy Chapman, I heard echoes of her style and spirit in Annahstasia’s outstanding, sensual debut Tether that made me a “Believer.”

One Song Wonder

Lucius’s “Gold Rush” was one of four or five songs I went back to almost every week this year. I sure wish the rest of that self-titled record had felt as inspired as that.

Instrumental Records with No Expiration Date

Finally, I’m always looking for instrumental records that will serve as inspiration for my creative writing in the future, and I found some promising new work:

• Steve Gunn’s album, appropriately titled Music for Writers, enhanced many hours in my office this year.
• So did Cassandra Jenkins’s surprise instrumental follow-up to her outstanding 2024 record My Light, My Destroyer, appropriately titled My Light, My Massage Parlor.
• The self-titled debut from Disiniblud was a dreamy and fantastical soundtrack for fairy tale movies yet to be made. The cover art was a good clue about the kind of adventure awaiting listeners — it featured a glimpse of Falkor from The Neverending Story.
• The great Nels Cline teamed up with Marcus Gilmore and Craig Taborn to give us the jazzy Trio of Bloom, an improvisational fireworks show veering between abrasive and melodic extremes.
• At the end of the year, Hayden Pedigo’s I'll Be Waving as You Drive Away became a surprise source of calm and encouragement that reminds of Bruce Cockburn instrumentals. That’s a real keeper.

To be continued . . .

Stay tuned. As soon as I have any time to do so, I’ll serve up Part Two of my year-end music celebration: Overstreet’s Favorite Recordings of 2025, #30–#16.