What a year it’s been. We’ve have the president of the United States of America calling people names while desperately trying to distance himself from a list of wealthy people who were quite probably up to no good with a convicted sex offender who mysteriously died in custody.
We’ve had one billionaire so lonely that he had to have his artificial intelligence thing create a woman who said she loved him – another, taking a load of celebrities to the brink of space in a staggering vanity project that felt like a trial run for us plebs watching the rich and influential moving to Mars while we fight for water, Mad Max style.
Still, at least we got the Beatles Anthology to roll back the years with, and of course, a raft of amazing new records to prove that, no matter what the year is, there’s always great music being released.
With that, let us look at some of our favourites. We’ve intentionally not automatically gone for some of the big ticket albums because frankly, we know they’ll be well catered for elsewhere. Not only that, we suspect some publications will favour some huge celebrities in a bid to get extra traffic, so appease their editors and shareholders.
We don’t make any money from this, so fuck ’em.
More important than that though is the fact that the albums and songs below were actually the records we liked best. A lot of brilliant records being released now just don’t have the marketing power of major label releases, and they shouldn’t be penalised for that.
So here are our favourite bits of music that make up THEPOPCORPS BEST OF 2025
ALBUM OF THE YEAR
BICHE ‘B.I.C.H.E.’
We reviewed this album and correctly said that it was “an entirely mesmerising album” and “perfect”. Our love for it has only grown since we wrote those words and it has been in constant rotation ever since.
Everything that’s good about psychedelic rock, everything that’s great about early electronic records, library music, art-pop, post rock, French beat, garage – it’s all there in this sensational album. You get the feeling that the French don’t value their rock bands as much as they should, which is a shame given the wealth of music that comes from there. This is as good as anything Phoenix have released, as good as any Jacques Dutronc 45, as adventurous are French prog, as smart as Serge’s work with Vannier.
Of course, it’s so much more than lazily comparing it to other French music – we can hear the like of Tortoise, Can, Neu!, The United States of America, Delia Derbyshire, Boards of Canada, Tropicalia, ESG, and so much great stuff. It’s playful, inventive, melancholic, forward-thinking, and it is an absolutely essential album from anyone with good taste in music.
MOST LISTENED TO SONG OF 2025
FONTEYN – ‘HOLDIN’ ON’
Fonteyn’s melancholic power pop has been such a thrill to witness. The first song after the spellbinding ‘Trip The Light Fantastic’ LP, ‘Holdin’ On’ captured the magic of Wings-era Paul McCartney with Todd Rundgren and Karen Carpenter, which is not a bunch of names we say lightly.
If this is the signpost for a new album, then we’re very excited about the prospect of that any which way you look it. A prodigious talent that understands pop as well as any ABBA record does.
GLOBAL SMASH THAT DOESN’T NEED OUR HELP 2025
Bad Bunny’s ‘DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS’ is going to go down as an all-time classic, and you expect it’ll feature highly on a lot of End Of Year lists, despite running the risk of being forgotten about having been released an age ago on January 5th. Fat chance of that, given his plum gig doing the Super Bowl in February and delivering the kind of sharp consciousness and politic that puts you in mind of what it must’ve felt like to listen to ‘What’s Going On’ when it was new.
Marrying Fania funk with reggaeton, Bad Bunny managed to do the unthinkable and get people other than his young fans fawning over his music with praise. A real generational gem, this album put Puerto Rico firmly on the map with an act of defiance against the Authoritarian US, and honestly, activism hasn’t sounded this catchy in years. One in the eye for bastard colonialists, but very much one for the dancefloor too. Epic.
PSYCHEDELIC ALBUM OF 2025
MANDRAKE HANDSHAKE ‘EARTH SIZED WORLDS’
Psychedelic music can too easily fall into pretentious noodling or irritating whimsy, so you can imagine how hard we punched the air when Mandrake Handshake’s debut album kicked in with some proper hooks, danceable rhythms and real adventure in the studio.
This cheerful group have made our favourite psychedelic album in years, with super cosmic goings-on spiralling in all directions while remembering to write some actual songs. It’s a terrific achievement and is one of the most fully formed debuts we’ve heard in a long time. Great things await this lot.
BEST DANCEFLOOR ALBUM 2025
ROCHELLE JORDAN ‘THROUGH THE WALL’
Rochelle Jordan has been one of the modern greats for a while now, but with ‘Through The Wall’, it seems like everyone else is truly catching on to this fact. It is justified too, as this is a career best for Rochelle who has perfectly married the mid-tempo come-ons a la Aaliyah, with a version of house that’s the most sophisticated thing we’ve heard since primo Masters At Work. Seriously.
The whole album feels like downing a bottle of love potion, as it sweeps you away on seductive tales of carnal pleasures and grown-up feelings. If there’s any justice in the rotten world of music at the moment, this is the album that’ll make a genuine star of Rochelle, and thankfully, that’ll be entirely on her own terms. A magical album.
ELECTRONIC ALBUM OF 2025
BARKER ‘STOCHASTIC DRIFT’
It feels like a tough pitch, selling an album that kinda sounds like techno, but minus the brutalist kick drum – but that’s pretty much what Barker did with the hugely impressive ‘Stochastic Drift’ LP. The centrepiece of the album – ‘Reframing’ – is one of those tracks that manages to soothe and excite in equal measure… and somehow makes you feel nourished and actively smarter for having listened to it.
The detail that runs through this whole album is a marvel to behold, at times gleefully mechanical, while holding on to some organic euphoria that feels spontaneous amongst the regimented smarts. This is the best electronica album in a generation – the best since the heyday of Warp Records et al.
IS IT BALEARIC? NEW AGE? ALBUM OF 2025
ΣTELLA ‘ADAGIO’
First off, that letter is a ‘sigma’ and secondly, its appearance makes this a difficult artist to search for online. Thirdly, it is pronounced ‘Stella’, and fourth, none of this matters because ‘Adagio’ is one of the best albums released in 2025, even if we’re not exactly sure where it lies, genre-wise.
Maybe all of the above is for the best, because Greece’s Stella Chronopoulou melts between genres, at times sounding like Balearic gorgeousness, as well as New Age spirituality and bossa nova. It’s all very tropical and in good taste, and lends itself well to dancing around the house as it does on the sand with a tonne of other people.
This is the shortest LP on our list, running at under half-an-hour, but it’s perfect in every way and listening to it feels like actual nourishment, like a warm sea-breeze or eating your greens.
BUBBLEGUM ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2025
TCHOTCHKE ‘PLAYIN’ DUMB’
Sometimes an album is so good that you have to invent a new category for it, so you can rave about it, and that’s Tchotchke’s fabulous ‘Playin’ Dumb’. There’s a good number of people who may know the group for their association with the Lemon Twigs, but honestly, they deserve to be in their own lane, as they followed up their brilliant eponymous album with this year’s cut, proving that their talent was no fluke.
Loads of harmonies dipped in sugar, mixed with dead-eyed cynicism and snark, Tchotchke are of all the groups who have made eyes at ’60s girl groups and fizzy ’70s glam pop to really capture the spirit of it without sounding like some silly pastiche. The newest album has moments of popsike, baroque pop, Brill Building craft and bucketloads of humour to make for one of the most listenable albums of the year. Essential.
POP ALBUM OF 2025
PINKPANTHERESS ‘FANCY THAT’
This was a supremely tough-call, choosing between this and Jade ‘That’s Showbiz, Baby’. It was a real treat that the best two pop LPs of the year were so uniquely British. With PinkPantheress, the mix of DIY bedroom aesthetic colliding headlong with UK dance music – notably with the Underworld sampling ‘Illegal’ – saw Pink end up prime time US television and her own Tiny Desk concert, reimagining classic UK dance music for a modern, global pop audience.
Jade was a little different, but no less from these shores, mixing musical theatre, working men’s clubs and more, all wrapped up in British talent show ennui cut through blistering, ultra-modern UK dance and pop.
However, it was Pink’s album that pipped it, demanding repeated listens, all glitter pens and twirling it’s hair while meeting dealers and hooking up with people. There’s plenty of Y2K nostalgia to be had, but sincerely, it has all been pretty lame until ‘Fancy That’ came along. A hugely likeable star with a totally irresistible album.
R&B ALBUM OF 2025
AMAARAE ‘BLACK STAR’
Another tough call, what with Yaya Bey and Dijon releasing album of the year worthy cuts in 2025. However, what kept us dialled in with Amaarae is that there’s just no-one around that sounds quite like her, and on this LP, she manages to mix dance with pop, African music and low-rider bangers, with her future-proof R&B that is druggy, horny, and bursting with confidence.
The swings are big on ‘Black Star’ and they pretty much all land, pushing the envelope in a much more satisfying way than, say, Playboi Carti’s album. It’s experimental and weird and proud of it too. The highlights are plentiful, and while we like the classic feel of Yaya Bey’s album, and the leftfield Prince-iness of Dijon, this is the album we just couldn’t get enough of.
BEST AM RADIO SONG THAT’S PLAYING ON AN IMAGINARY ROAD TRIP 2025
OLIVIA DEAN – NICE TO EACH OTHER
Olivia Dean has done SNL and sold out a bunch of arenas, so maybe we should have put Tyler Ballgame’s ‘Got A New Car’ here. However, so likeable is Dean, that we just couldn’t resist including her ‘Nice To Each Other’ in this very specific category.
See, sometimes a song just gathers you up and puts in you in mind of driving with a friend, possibly with the roof down (whether you have a driver’s licence, friends, or a convertible, or not), singing your head off with wild abandon – and that’s what Olivia Dean has managed to do here. Equally Radio 1 as it is Radio 2, and we say that as a compliment.
AMBIENT ALBUM 2025
MALIBU ‘VANITIES’
There’s a certain localness to Malibu’s ‘Vanities’ that almost put it alongside the gothic horror of Ethel Cain’s newest album. While many ambient LPs are cosmic affairs, there’s something about this album that feels more cinematic – more like the fog rolling in on some small town while you disassociate on your bed.
While that all sounds horribly Tumblr of our, there’s something uniquely beguiling about this album. It’s as distracting as it is calming, which is unusual for something of this ilk – it’s hauntological, it’s refreshing, and it should be listened to in its entirety.
HIP HOP ALBUM OF 2025
CLIPSE ‘LET GOD SORT ‘EM OUT’
How did Clipse manage to make an album that sounded thoroughly modern AND Early ’00s throwback at the same time? Either way, ‘Let God Sort ‘Em Out’ was an absolute sensation from the word go. It was unexpected to see Pusha T and Malice getting back together, but then the clarion call of ‘this is culturally inappropriate’ happened and everyone rightfully lost their damned minds.
‘Chains & Whips’ was an instant classic, but through the rest of the album, we were met with an unbelievably strong run of tracks that many felt like they’d been around for years. King Push sounded as confident as ever, and Malice’s swagger and snarl was a welcome tonic as the pair took names and numbers of the pretenders, and showed everyone how it was done. One of music’s great comebacks, which cemented Clipse as one of the best to ever do it.
FOLKIE ALBUM 2025
O & THE MO ‘MAKE WAY FOR THE SUN’
We like it when folk albums remember that you can dance to them, and on ‘Make Way For The Sun’, we have a desert folk LP that does exactly that. There’s woozing synthesisers to cuddle up to the groovy guitars, and a dappled melodiousness that makes the whole album swoon overhead.
The title-track feels like one of those songs that you hear some ace DJ in a linen shirt play in an audiophile bar, and wonder where the hell they managed to grab a track like that. The whole thing is softer than a mouse’s ear, and we’ve had repeated listens feeling the hope and joy oozing out of the grooves.
HEAVY ALBUM OF 2025
TURNSTILE – ‘NEVER ENOUGH’
Turnstile haven’t been a properly underground band for a while now, but this year, they went stratospheric. They belong to the indie fans, pop fans and dance music nuts just as much as the hardcore kids. A series of massive shows and a hugely popular album under their belt, 2025 really was incredibly kind to the group who always felt like people who deserved their flowers.
Of all the heavy albums released this year, it was Turnstile’s that had the most light and shade, the most breadth and no-one really got close to them.
The Pop Corporation 
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