25. Tristan Brusch “Born to Die”
Between glam, morality and pop, Tristan Brusch has settled into this song about transience and longing. “And there are exactly two things to learn on this earth: to love and to be loved.” Big feelings, big theater.
24. Ezra Furman “Sudden Storm”
Furman channels an inner turmoil that feels like a sudden wind, sounding like she’s fallen into a vat of psychedelic drugs. Would also have fit well on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” – right after “Fixing a Hole”.
23. FKA Twigs “Drums of Death”
The most advanced track on “Eurosexia”, but also the one that most convincingly implements the principle of the album: disassemble and deconstruct everything and then assemble it into a new Frankensteinian song monster.
22nd Wednesday “Elderberry Wine”
Karly Hartzman’s voice sounds as if she’s hesitantly turning each line between her fingers before releasing it. The countryesque melancholy unfolds tentatively as she tells of the memories that have lost their poison and bitterness – like the elderberry when it is made into wine. “Sweet song is a long con.”
21. Lorde “Hammer”
“Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man” – in its musical minimalism and lyrical exaltation, the fabulous opening song of Lorde’s new album “Virgin” actually anticipates everything. It doesn’t get any better after that.
20. Pulp “Spike Island”
Of course, the (self-)irony is evident in the choice of topic for the Pulp comeback single, which makes everything seem like a quote and prevents great emotions from even arising. But why should you be happy about a comeback when the band makes it clear that they consider any form of nostalgia to be an error of history? Jarvis Cocker also gives an answer to this in a very dialectical manner in “Spike Island”: “No-one will ever understand it,” he sings about the legend of Spike Island, “And no-one will ever have the last word / Because it’s not something you could ever say.”
19. Obongjayar “Sweet Danger”
This song brings together the entire sound world that Obongjayar builds on his dazzling album “Paradise Now” – the soul, the Afrobeats and the electronic minimalism – through which he wanders with his enormously versatile voice.
18. Blood Orange “The Field”
After his mother’s death, Devonté Hynes wrote this meditation on letting go, which he stages as an intricate soul track featuring the voices of Tariq Al-Sabir, Caroline Polachek and Daniel Caesar and the Spanish guitar from Durutti Column’s “Sing to Me”.
17. Alex G “Afterlife”
It’s no coincidence that the mandolin here sounds outrageously like “Losing My Religion”. Alex G is at a similar point in his career to REM in the early 1990s: a beloved, cult-revered indie act who signs on with a major record company.
16. Bad Bunny “NUEVAYOL”
“NUEVAYoL” bridges the salsa classic “Un Verano en Nueva York” with dembow rhythms and reggaeton vibes and celebrates Puerto Rican identity in the diaspora, especially the life of the Nuyorican community in New York. A fabulous track and great prologue for the album “Debí Tirar Más Photos”.
15. Geese “Au Pays du Cocaine”
Of course, Cameron Winter sometimes sounds like Kermit the Frog trying to be Jim Morrison (or vice versa), but the slightly off-key intonation fits the song’s title, which is a poor translation of “Het Luilekkerland” (“The Land of Cockaigne”), the title of a painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. And Geese actually play a paradisiacal little pop song with angelic guitars.
14. Robert Forster “Breakfast On The Train”
A short story in eight minutes with the best placement of the word “fuck” ever and the true line: “No two stories are the same but love can be a winning game.” Robert Forster has reinvented himself again with his Swedish band around Peter Morén – as a go-between between Bill Callahan and Raymond Carver. But of course all the qualities of the great Australian songwriter are in place here: the elegance, the laconicism, the humor. And we learn: “Over the volume of love we have no claim.”
13. Miley Cyrus “Easy Lover”
If Fleetwood Mac had made a disco album, it might have sounded like this track, which Cyrus wrote five years ago for her album “Plastic Hearts” with Michael Pollack, Ryan Tedder and Omer Fedi and later even offered to Beyoncé, who incomprehensibly spurned it.
12. Jeff Tweedy “Feel Free”
His triple album “Twilight Override” is his reaction to the dark times we live in, says Jeff Tweedy. “Because I can’t sing and be afraid at the same time.” The ultimate freedom lies in art, but perhaps we can reclaim other freedoms from this place. “Feel free, carry your torch in the street,” he sings. “Say you’re full when we know you’re empty / Feel free / Feel free to fall in love with the people you know / And fall harder for the people you don’t / Feel free.”
11. Perfume Genius “It’s a Mirror”
The opening track on the Perfume Genius album, “Glory,” sounds like the best REM song since at least “The Great Beyond.” “What do I get out of being established? / I still run and hide when a man’s at the door,” complains Mike Hadreas, seeming caught in the twilight between the inside and outside world.
10. Julien Baker & Torres “Sugar in the Tank”
The fabulous first single from Julien Baker and Torres’ collaborative album, “Send a Prayer My Way,” smuggles queerness into the conservative country genre. Proof that you can go pretty far with sugar in your tank.
9. Taylor Swift “Elizabeth Taylor”
The portrait of the ultimate showgirl on “The Life of a Showgirl” and at the same time a mirror in which Swift sees herself – and all set to the finest Max Martin/Shellback pop. “Be my NY when Hollywood hates me / You’re only as hot as your last hit, baby.”
8. PinkPantheress “Illegal”
“My name is Pink and I’m really glad to meet you,” PinkPantheress begins this fabulous track, and then it turns out she’s talking to her weed dealer: “You’re recommended to me by some people.” Then this addictive hybrid of bedroom pop, UK garage and diary entry unfolds to a sample from Underworld’s “Dark and Long”.
7. Van Morrison “Remembering Now”
In his 80th year, Van Morrison recorded a song that seems to sum up his entire art: The connection between yesterday and today in the moment of memory, this transcendent present, which William Blake called the “eternal now”, was for a long time the sun of Morrison’s work, around which everything else revolved, which drove the mystic to repeatedly lift the veil of the material world and show us a deeper reality behind it. In “Remembering Now” he returns to the streets of Belfast, where it all began. “It’s like you never left back where you started from / In the eternal now / Close your eyes / Feel the presence / In the landscape / Past and always present / Remembering now.” A cathedral should be built for this song.
6. Little Simz “Free”
“Lotus” is the self-confident declaration of independence from an artist who, despite numerous high-profile guests such as Sampha, Michael Kiwanuka, Moses Sumney and Obongjayar, is very much in tune with herself and at times reports on the earthy groove of her brilliant band from her own inner life almost like a diary. “Free” is a highlight of this new masterpiece. What is fear and what is love – and how can one be overcome with the other? asks Little Simz and leads us through the depths of her soul into neo-soul heaven.
5. Rosalia “Divinize”
Rosalía has never been interested in genre boundaries, but the way in which trap elements, classical and flamenco, the secular and the sacred come together, and how the lyrics oscillate between self-empowerment and spiritual transcendence, is a highlight even in the oeuvre of this world-walker.
4. Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band “New Threats From The Soul”
The song initially exudes the atmosphere of a new age store in Austin, Texas, but then Ryan Davis descends into the depths of the human soul for nine minutes to the soothing sound of his roadhouse band. The singer left the love of his life because he thought he could build a better life out of “bubblegum and driftwood” somewhere. But his longings dug a pit for him: “If you need me you know where to find me/ North of a puddle and west of a hole/ And what was once our home but is now just a house for all these/ New threats from the soul.” No one since the great David Berman has written texts that are so pointed, funny and at the same time deeply sad.
3. The hilarity of “When something beautiful dies”
The fabulous new album from Stella Sommer’s band project Die Heiterheit, “Black Magic”, is inspired by the American Songbook, by Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. The most beautiful song is inspired by an interrogator: When Sommer remembered “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'”, she heard the Las Vegas Elvis sing the line “It’s just the sound of something beautiful dying” (“Cause, baby, something beautiful’s dying”) and thought: But that doesn’t make a sound – and invented some of the most beautiful sounds of 2025.
2. John Southworth “You Found Your Flower”
The culmination of The Red Castle, a collection of meditations on time and transience written by Canadian songwriter John Southworth following the death of his father, the English singer Peter Shelleywrote. A song about pain and redemption, reminiscent of the great David Ackles in its melancholic beauty and the elegance of Andrew Downing’s arrangement.
1. The New Eve’s “Highway Man”
A rousing bass groove, a bratty guitar, a scratchy cello – you think of The Velvet Underground or the Raincoats. But there are four young prophetesses from Brighton, England, who call themselves The New Eves and who tell the story of Alfred Noyes’ romantic ballad “The Highway Man” about the murder of a beautiful innkeeper’s daughter. But from the perspective of the victim. They turn the tables: “She pulls the trigger/ Shoots them down one and one/ Always knew to keep a gun/ In a society /Where the authorities/ Are sickened.”