Across the next two weeks, we’ll be revealing the list bit by glorious bit. Just the albums that made our hearts race, our brains fizz and our year make a tiny bit more sense. From the cult favourites to the big hitters, this is 2025 as we heard it: brilliant, unpredictable, occasionally unhinged, and absolutely worth celebrating.
100-81 | 80-61 | 60-41 | 40-21 | 20-11 | 10-6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1
40. Japanese Breakfast – For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)
Melancholy is a funny thing. It can come in waves or it can be an all encompassing presence that infects everything. For Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast channelling that sense of sadness into creative magic is the spirit that informs her exquisite fourth album, ‘For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)’. Quieter and more refined than her previous work it features a gorgeous tapestry of instruments woven together with Zauner’s heart-stopping songs. It’s a dreamy escapist paradise from a supremely gifted songwriter lifting every facet of her craft to a new level. MY
39. Blood Orange – Essex Honey
On ‘Essex Honey’, Dev Hynes blends R&B softness, jazz brushstrokes and faint echoes of UK club culture into songs that don’t try to resolve their contradictions. Instead, they sit in the glow. ‘The Field’ builds itself from a heartbeat pulse, coaxing small synth phrases into something widescreen. ‘Relax and Run’ feels like drifting through streetlights, Hynes’ voice used as texture as much as message. The record’s strength is subtlety – a refusal to force the moment, choosing instead to linger in mood and motion. ‘Essex Honey’ doesn’t chase impact; it trusts you to lean closer. DH
38. Sprints – All That Is Over
Sprints didn’t need to add volume with ‘All That Is Over’; instead, they sharpened their aim. For their second album, the Dublin foursome traded cacophony for control. The result is lean, pressurised and built to carry meaning, not just noise. ‘Abandon’ slow-burns the fuse, ‘Descartes’ barrels forward, while ‘Need’ bites at the backhanded compliment. What the record, though, is intent. These are songs about identity and power, written with enough clarity to cut and enough patience to land. Sprints keep the punch of ‘Letter To Self’, but the hits here are placed with precision. ‘All That Is Over’ feels less like catharsis and more like a band taking command. SA
37. Jim Legxacy – Black British Music (2025)
iceover that frequently interjects between tracks on Jim Legxacy’s incendiary mixtape ‘Black British Music’ that intones in grand terms “Somebody tell that bastard to turn that mediocre bullshit off we’re listening to Jim Legxacy now.” Following this staggering release everyone really should heed that advice. The mixtape is a conceptual journey of what UK rap is, where it has been and, most importantly, where it can go as Jim Legxacy mashes genres and sounds together from alt rock on ‘06’ Wayne Rooney’ to the delicately beautiful bedroom pop of ‘Dexter’s phonecall’ featuring rising star Dexter In The Newsagent. The UK rap album of the year. MY
36. King Princess – Girl Violence
“Why does nobody mention that girls can be violent?”, Mikaela Straus posits in a lyric which became the central thesis of her third record. Exploring the peaks and troughs of sapphic love, the sweaty nights in clubs and the gloomy next mornings, it sees Mikaela Straus take control of her own story as she returns to the chaos of New York City. Jolting from tales of crushing unrequited love, into the sultry, heady tones of eminently X-Rated single ‘RIP KP’, ‘Girl Violence’ represents truthfully the trials of navigating dating in the modern age. Played out over a soundscape that frolics at the edges of alt-pop and blues-rock, all tied together by her addictively raspy vocal, Mikaela proves that third time really is the charm. CP
35. Scowl – Are We All Angels
‘Are We All Angels’ finds Scowl testing every boundary they’ve ever bumped up against. Instead of choosing between hardcore ferocity and their more melodic instincts, they smash the walls down and walk through. Kat Moss pushes her voice into new corners – snarling, singing, speaking, bending lines into shapes that feel both impulsive and deliberate. The guitars pivot from serrated punches to grunge-laced hooks without apology, and the rhythm section holds everything together with the kind of muscle that only comes from relentless touring. hat ties the album together is intention: a sense that Scowl aren’t leaving their scene behind but expanding what it can hold. AW
34. Self Esteem – A Complicated Woman
The final album in Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s trilogy of albums as Self Esteem completes her evolution from indie band member to actual genuinely big proper pop star. ‘A Complicated Woman’ is a tour de force on a grand scale. Theatrical in scope and cavernous in ambition it is full of all the deep emotion and witty wordplay that has characterised her career as Self Esteem. Rebecca has a lot to stay and crams almost everything in. Sometimes she’s gleefully happy like on the resounding anthem ‘Cheers To Me’ and sometimes she’s desperately sad like on the heartstopping opener ‘I Do And I Don’t Care’. Throughout it all though she’s never nothing short of compelling. MY
33. Heartworms – Glutton For Punishment
‘Glutton For Punishment’ feels like the opening scene of a dark, stylish thriller. Built from history and a poet’s eye for unsettling detail, it pulls you into Jojo Orme’s world before you’ve even noticed the door close behind you. Heartworms operates on her own axis, meticulously drawing from gothic literature, military history, warped romance and modern dread. ‘Just To Ask A Dance’ dives into infatuation, ‘Smugglers Adventure’ picks at old family wounds, and ‘Warplane’ and ‘Extraordinary Wings’ take aim at humanity’s recurring appetite for conflict. It’s theatrical and purposefully hard to pin down. It’s a striking beginning, and one that hints she’s nowhere near the limits of what this project can become. FN
32. Shame – Cutthroat
“It’s not ‘poor me’ anymore, it’s ‘fuck you’” is how Shame frontman Charlie Steen summed up new album ‘Cutthroat’. It’s a pretty good tagline for the band’s leanest, fastest, most accomplished effort thus far. Lead single ‘Cutthroat’ sees Steen in full mock-American form, spitting lyrics about naked women falling out of the sky with the kind of snarling irony that’s become the band’s trademark. Further in, horizons expand. Lampião is a South-America-infused tale of a Brazilian bandit while closer ‘Axis of Evil’ is the most electro-adjacent thing Shame have ever made. Firing on all cylinders for the fourth album running, Shame continue to be one of the best bands to ever emerge from a South London pub. JH
31. Water From Your Eyes – It’s a Beautiful Place
’It’s a Beautiful Place’ feels like a whole pocket universe folding in on itself. Water From Your Eyes lean into guitars more than on ‘Everyone’s Crushed’, but that hardly makes this a straightforward “rock record”. Instead, the Brooklyn duo treat riffs, drum programming and ambient sketches as moving parts in a bigger collage about time, dinosaurs, space and the tiny human lives stuck in the middle. It’s dense, funny, a bit unnerving and secretly quite hopeful – a knotty art-pop puzzle that still somehow lands with immediacy. DH
30. Black Country, New Road – Forever Howlong
When former frontman Isaac Wood left Black Country, New Road, fans worried that it spelled the end for one of Britain’s foremost art-pop bands. If ‘Live from Bush Hall’ proved that the band were going to be just fine, ‘Forever Howlong’ cemented their status as one of the most unique and sizzingly exciting acts in British music. Sinking into winding narratives, multi-vocal performances and an expansive sonic palette that warps and bends around classic 1960s references, the six-piece unearthed a newfound confidence supported by virtuoso-level instrumentation and an undying determination to push the envelope. CP
29. Royel Otis – Hickey
Given the success of their debut ‘Pratts & Pain’ and inexplicably viral cover of Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s seminal floor-filler ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’, there was every chance that the pressure would tell and the nonchalant, laidback vibe that made the duo so addictive, would evaporate. ‘hickey’ proves the opposite. A little slice of Sydney sunshine, it uses slacker-pop guitar, fuzzy drum beats and enough reverb and echo on the vocal to create moments understated yet just out of reach – but in the best way. It proves that you don’t always have to do something off-the-wall, something quirky – sometimes simply making good old fashioned fun music is enough. CP
28. Lambrini Girls – Who Let The Dogs Out
Where so many of the punks of yesteryear have caved to the nonsense of anti-woke takes and moral panic, Lambrini Girls have made it their mission to do the opposite. Openly writing about queer romance in ‘No Homo’, embedded societal misogyny in ‘Company Culture’, and the success of the ‘Filthy Rice Nepo Baby’ while ordinary people see their communities decimated (‘You’re Not From Around Here’), they prove that punk and woke have always gone hand-in-hand. Messy and manic, but equally important and impressive, ‘Who Let The Dogs Out’ is the Wilhelm scream we wish we could let out on a daily basis. CP
27. Welly – Big In The Suburbs
Here at Dork, we’ve always said there aren’t enough songs about decaying suburban high streets and cutting the grass. Enter Welly, who this year answered our clarion call with a shiny britpop-flecked debut album which is as idiosyncratic as it is fun. Writing about new towns and roundabouts with the kind of sympathetic sarcasm that can only come from having grown up somewhere naff, ‘Big in the Suburbs’ fills a genuinely underserved niche in British music. What does it feel like to have a large cappuccino in Costa Coffee in Milton Keynes? Load up this album, press play, and prepare to find out. JH
26. Dijon – Baby
In the year that D’Angelo died it feels fitting to recognise Dijon for carrying on the legacy as R&B’s premier sonic auteur on his staggering second album ‘Baby’. This is music that is both futuristic and nostalgic in equal measure. It contains little of the stereotypical lushness that you might find in soul music and is instead abrasive and unyielding. When the moments of melodic joy escape like on the stunning ‘Yamaha’ it feels like blessed salvation. Dijon has a fearless vision to reshape things in his own image. Taking echoes from the past like the obvious antecedent of Prince and warping it into something beguilingly fresh and unique no one else in the world is making music quite like Dijon. MY
25. Viagra Boys – viagr aboys
”Look at me, it’s ten degrees / And I’m outside harvesting clams” is not the kind of lyric you’d expect to find on a five star album. But then Viagra Boys have never been a typical band, trading off of surrealist lyrics and in-jokes about shrimp in a way which has them playing Alexandra Palace early next year. Viagr aboys takes the band’s formula and twists it a few times to make sure things don’t get stale. Songs about clam-harvesting are contrasted with more serious explorations of mental health and even a love song. Admittedly it’s a love song which includes lines about eating Chinese food which ‘tastes like sour meat’, but then it wouldn’t be a Viagra Boys track without at least a little bit of weird seeping in at the edges, would it? JH
24. Blondshell – If You Asked For A Picture
When Sabrina Teitelbaum entered the scene with Blondshell’s self-titled debut, she endeared herself to fans across the world with her blunt honesty, heartfelt vulnerability, and knack for a catchy chorus. On ‘If You Asked For A Picture’, she doubled-down on what she does best, placing tales of feminine power and yearning for connection over soaring vocal performances, crunchy grunge guitar lines and enough gut-wrenching catharsis to make all the pain worthwhile. We all know that the kids (by kids, we mean people in their early-thirties) long for the 90s. Blondshell’s unwavering commitment to powerful, gritty alt-pop proves why. CP
23. Pulp – More
”Heritage band announce new album” isn’t exactly a phrase that sends a ripple of excitement through the world of music, but with ‘More’, Pulp have done the impossible – they’ve made a new album which is… actually very good? Take lead single ‘Spike Island’ as an example. It’s the band at their absolute best, wryly self-observant without descending too deep into irony, all backed up with an instrumental which shows an evolution in the band’s sound. When Pulp reformed for the second time, they sold out massive venues and received rapturous acclaim for their live show. Making a new album risked jeopardising that straightforward positivity, but in the case of ‘More’, it was a risk which was very much worth taking. JH
22. Bon Iver – SABLE, fABLE
‘Sable, fABLE’ brings Bon Iver back to the quiet rooms and snowy windowsills that shaped Justin Vernon’s earliest work, but with a maturity that softens the experimentation rather than erasing it. The album folds the atmospheric sketches of the ‘Sable’ EP into new songs that glow with pedal steel, soft electronics and slow-turning harmonies. Instead of chasing the fractured forms of ‘22, A Million’, Vernon lets the songs move with natural breath, leaving glitches and folk elements to coexist without pushing for spectacle. ‘Sable, fABLE’ feels like a long exhale after years of intensity – a record that trusts simplicity, honours complexity and finds something luminous in the middle. AW
21. Sam Fender – People Watching
Sam Fender pulls his focus back from the anthemic sweep of ‘Seventeen Going Under’ into something more focused on ‘People Watching’. The songs build from finely drawn character studies: bar regulars, old friends, the ghosts of childhood streets. Chiming guitars and brass flourishes give the arrangements a familiar shine, but the writing feels calmer, more deliberate. Collaborators including Markus Dravs and Adam Granduciel steer the production towards warmth, giving Fender’s voice space to crack, steady and lift. ‘People Watching’ feels like someone looking outward to understand what’s shifting inside – a quiet evolution disguised by big-room confidence. SA
Tune in for Dork’s albums of the year 2025: 20-11 tomorrow, Thursday 4th December.
Leave a Reply