2025 album(s) of the year
I now pronounce...
...an album of the year post clumsily written around the theme of marriage.
There hasn't been a single favourite album this year. I'm at a stage in my life where music means an awful lot but the battle against nostalgia is increasingly tough. I crave the comfort of the known, the stuff I liked as a carefree teenager, the pop hits of yesteryear. Since moving last year all my records and CDs are in a part of the house where they get more attention than ever, but rather than using it as an excuse to play New Stuff I'm just spinning eighties and nineties singles bought for a quid in Oxfam and having A Really Lovely Time, thanks. New music has to be really good to find me now.
I find myself to be a creature of habit and of comfort: music still excites, and music is sometimes still novel, but more often than not it's a long-term cozy companion.
There's no single standout record for me this year. Let's highlight five good ones instead.
Jens Lekman - Songs For Other People's Weddings
Jens has been writing catchy, sample-forward indiepop tunes about being hopelessly heartbroken or alone for the past twenty years. I know what I'm getting with a Jens album - his 2017 album was my favourite of that year - but I wasn't quite ready for this eighty-minute sprawling tale of him being a globetrotting wedding singer, meeting someone special, losing her to her job, following her like a lost puppy, being rejected, and coming to terms with having loved and lost.
Until the album accompanied me on a long autumnal walk I was ready to dismiss it as bloated and indulgent. Instead it made me weirdly optimistic.
Jens never catches a break, is always enamoured with the world, a sketcher of painful moments, a writer of spectacular pop. This might be an album about singing at other peoples' weddings while being alone but Jens is the truest writer about love that we possibly have.
Something old
Win - Uh! Tears Baby (A Trash Icon)
If this album was released in 2025 it would undoubtedly be my record of the year without question. A mid-eighties synth-heavy album of pop hits with lyrics about lyrics, music about music, a throbbing desire to be a massive hit but hating the idea of being a massive hit, it's the cynical fun record with that big glossy production style you never knew existed.
Reaching the giddy heights of number 51 in the album charts when it came out in 1987, the album was quietly but excitedly re-released last year on a small label with a limited pressing and arrived on my doorstep as part of a bundle of other stuff. The other records are long forgotten; this one gets spun week after week. I can't imagine that this album isn't a classic, isn't as well known as ABC or The Human League or Tears For Fears.
There's a moment during Un-American Broadcasting where a big mess of chorus and spoken work and Speak & Spell sample all plays simultaneously which puts the biggest grin on my face. The whole album is, truly, the kinda sorta thing that just makes you wanna move.
Something new
Wet Leg - Moisturizer
The Difficult Second Album After A Much Lauded Initial Release. Often ruined under the weight of expectation.
Wet Leg's debut was good but scrappy, showing promise rather than a completely realised vision. Rather than being overwhelmed after their initial success they've created a record that picks fights: points at groping barflies and batters them with glee; makes pop culture references that make sense to them and do not care if others know what Dark Fruits are or can understand the Doris Day Pyjama Party/Calamity Jane dichotomy; proudly sings about sex and love and the relationship between the two; courts controversy while ending the album with a song about a couple just being at home again. They are proud, they are happy, they are confident, and I love them. More please.
Something borrowed
The Reflex - Patreon revisions
Why battle nostalgia?
There's a theory amongst historians that the 1900s were a "short century": the start of World War One in 1914 created global cultural shockwaves that only ceased at the end of the Cold War around 1991. Cultural theorists point out that during this period of time new music genres regularly appeared - Big Band, Jazz, Rock and Roll, Pop, Metal, Electronica, Techno - and since the close of the short century we've just had refinements of existing genres: a Korean flavour of pop, a twitchy version of rock, etc.
A cynic may say that the best songs, the songs typifying each genre, have also been written. I don't agree, but I like going back and listening to Big Hits From Yesteryear and appreciating that we don't always need new. We just need good.
This is why I like what The Reflex does. He takes good existing music and somehow makes them new, rediscovered, makes you re-engage with them.
It's such a simple conceit. Take a classic song by Ella Fitzgerald or Michael Jackson or Stevie Wonder or 10cc or Talking Heads or Dee-Lite, get the original elements of that song like the drums, the backing vocals, the rhythm guitar, and rearrange those elements to create a new mix of that song that shows how beautiful, how magisterial that song has always been. Create a never tedious ten minute version of a three minute pop song that brings the hidden bassline to the front of the mix, or downplays the prominent piano line so the melody played on guitar gets a chance to shine.
There are hundreds of Reflex revisions of existing tracks now. All are a joy.
Something blue
CMAT - Euro-Country
If you're feeling a little fed up that the biggest selling chart hits are by another person who looks as happy as a catwalk model who sings sloppily and slurringly about terrible lovers over some beats, CMAT's third album will warm your heart.
Here, Ciara will sing you a catchy, almost country-ish pop song about the collapse of the Irish economy in 2007, about her irrational distain for Jamie Oliver as a brand, about being nine years old and feeling the need to be some pre-pubescent notion of "sexy". She'll pull you in with a hilarious song title - Lord, Let That Tesla Crash - only to devastate you when it transpires to be about a very close friend with the biggest heart who died too young.
I guess Euro-Country probably is my album of the year. Ciara's a phenomenon, a songwriter of such evident skill and humour and joy who writes beautifully and honestly about the messiness of being. Good music is about more than just boy-meets-girl. Good music doesn't have to be po-faced. Good music is passionate and caring and honest. Ciara reminds us of this, gladly and humbly tells us about the good times and the bad.