Recommendations of the Editorial team
In the age of streaming, re-releases are literally a volume business. Of the ten best archive collections and anniversary editions of 2025, five are box sets that total 37 CDs in their super deluxe versions. But they also appear in cheaper versions, and everything here has a story.
Full disclosure: I have contributed essays – with new research and interviews – to the Buckingham Nicks and Jimi Hendrix publications. But liner notes, like everything else I write, are journalism. I have also provided journalistic support for most of the artists and original albums represented here over the years. What follows are the ten best re-releases of 2025 for the music – and the stories – within them.
10. Sly and the Family Stone – “The First Family: Live at Winchester Cathedral 1967” (High Moon)
Before he blew up Woodstock, took soul into the future with “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” (1970), and fell into the black hole of drugs and paranoia that Questlove called “The Burden of Black Genius,” Sly Stone was a dance floor worker. He managed the Family Stone (pre-Sister Rose) during a 1966-67 residency at this Bay Area nightclub.
A surprisingly clear recording of an evening relies heavily on tried and tested cover versions (Otis Redding, Joe Tex, The Four Tops). But “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” a Stone original, is funky confidence – the same mojo that fueled the later hits until Stone, who died in June at 81, chose darkness.
9. Hüsker Dü – “1985: The Miracle Year” (Numero Group)
The speed demons from Minnesota were in impressive form and at the same time in transition – at the end of their indie punk purism at SST, shortly before the move to Warner Bros. – on these live dates. An ecstatic performance in January 1985 at First Avenue in Minneapolis as well as hot recordings from the fall tour.
Pace can trump coherence. Which, considering the thrill, is hardly a problem. However, five songs from Salt Lake City are a searing taste of the pop contours of Candy Apple Gray (1986), while an encore series of Byrds and Beatles covers showcases the Sixties garage classicism that has always been at the heart of the noise for a home crowd.
8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience – “Bold as Love” (Experience Hendrix/Legacy)
Largely recorded in a two-week sprint for a British Christmas release, Jimi Hendrix’s 1967 second album, Axis: Bold as Love, is best known to many as the work between Are You Experienced? and Electric Ladyland. But Axis shows the guitarist as focused and musical as rarely: 13 tracks of psychedelic luxury, with hit single precision and clear R&B roots.
The unprecedented appeal of this edition lies in the opening takes and evolving arrangements never heard outside of Olympic Studios, including “Wait Until Tomorrow” with heightened soul-stomp guitar, as well as an already luminous take two of Hendrix’s sublime ballad “Little Wing.”
7. John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band – “Power to the People” (Universal)
In 1972, this publication called John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s electric newspaper album “Some Time in New York City” “artistic suicide,” a post-Beatles nadir with “terrible” songs and “patronizing” activism. “Power to the People” is producer Sean Ono Lennon’s box set redemption for the honest anger and joy his parents felt during their first year as artists and immigrants in their adopted homeland.
New mixes of the LP sessions and the full release of the 1972 “One to One” benefit shows at Madison Square Garden – Lennon’s only full solo concerts – illuminate the powerful collaboration with Elephant’s Memory and the continuing spinning wheel of instant karma in these songs.
6. Bruce Springsteen – “Tracks II: The Lost Albums” (Columbia)
It was a neck-and-neck race. The bedroom outtakes and aborted electric sessions from Nebraska ’82. Or these seven previously unreleased albums from the following four decades? It’s all one big odyssey. Because “The LA Garage Sessions” maintains the solitude of “Nebraska” while the songwriting moves toward “Born in the USA” (a solo version of “My Hometown”).
The rock-hard country detour Somewhere “North of Nashville” (1995) is a rich first pass through the California symphonic expanse of “Western Stars” (2019). Inyo, on the other hand, is a wounded beauty for this moment. Ten studies on migration. Indigenous American Struggles. And beliefs from the late 1990s that now reflect a democracy that is even more in need of repair.