Dave, The Boy Who Played the Harp
There's a moment on "Chapter 16," one of the many exquisite set pieces from The Boy Who Played the Harp, where the grime luminary Kano dubs Dave "the rap messiah." It's lofty praise, not unwarranted, but Dave has chosen a different path: that of a musician turned anointed king, in the image of his biblical namesake. It is from that position that the decorated rapper delivers a searing self-assessment, one that doubles as criticism of hip-hop's star model and the surrounding culture that props up such figures. His is a lyricism not just of technical skill and booming authority but immense gravity, underscored by grand productions of piano, strings and acoustic guitar that exude grandeur and resplendence. The great irony is that Dave's skepticism of the crown makes him best fit to wear it at this moment: There is an underlying nobility in asking what it means to wield power, and how best to use such means to serve those you speak to and for.
Nourished by Time, The Passionate Ones
This warped, wonderful paean to dreamers bears years of accumulated labor, both manual and creative, while arguing that the former should never snuff out the latter. The project, run by the singer and producer Marcus Brown, is a long-running post-R&B experiment that has led to impressionistic music that is fiercely idiosyncratic in sound and perspective. The album feels like an incisive counter to the logic of language models and algorithms: not just because it is impossible to prompt-generate, though that is a key part of it, but also because it's a call to action for other artists to follow their impulses to the fringes of the pop sphere, so that they might realize a sound that captures who they are — and the work they've done — most fully.
Rosalía, LUX
While I applaud this audacious album's multilingual lyrics and operatic embellishments, and the petition both make for the LP as an artifact distinctly worth one's undivided attention, far more captivating to me is Rosalía's effort to redefine what pop is (again). Existing in a universe light-years from Motomami, LUX challenges pop's middlebrow classification with a high-concept symphonic record that treats theological texts like librettos. It is swelling and dramatic but also knotty and detailed. There is a waltz, and also Auto-Tune. She sings an aria, returns to flamenco, repurposes urbano. And she does so with a shrug, suggesting not simply how straightforward and intuitive the whole exercise is for her but how normal such endeavors should feel for us too.
Oklou, choke enough
This album seems to hold both whimsy and melancholy in equal measure. There are parts of it that feel completely impenetrable to me, owing primarily to its captivating but elliptical lyrics, and yet it also feels intimately, eerily, familiar. Sometimes in obvious ways: its overtures to Y2K pop, its bedroom feel and chiptuned texture, its hypnagogic spell, the muffled, polyphonic sense of nostalgia, like a carousel bobbing in the distance. But it is also the sense of disorientation, its self-proclaimed quest for meaning maddeningly out of reach. All those things, coupled with the French experimentalist's mellow disembodied voice, generate such a distinct mood that listening to it make me feel as if I have been wandering a labyrinthine fantasy, dazed, without egress.
Annahstasia, Tether
"The skin that I'm in / Is just a vessel / Barely holding," Annahstasia sings on "Slow," and by that point on Tether it goes without saying: Few albums have ever been more perfectly named, as the singer-songwriter searches for security, a talisman to moor her, to keep her spirit bound to something material. A pile of CDs, a California king; a still moon, a rising sun; a body of clay and dirt; silk and velvet — these are the objects (earthly and orbital) that ground her rustic folk songs, which are yearning and gorgeous. The longer the album goes on, the more it seems as if Annahstasia's voice itself is the tether; earthy and toasted, it is a nearly supernatural force, her soul given form and made manifest.
Bad Bunny, DeBí TiRAR MáS FOToS
One of the most moving listening experiences is when an artist renders something they are seeing so vividly and with such clarity that I begin to see it too. That is only part of the charm of DeBí TiRAR MáS FOToS, in which one of our most purposeful megastars tries to recreate the marvels of his home, Puerto Rico, and its traditional music from memory. The album is a powerful statement, made in a challenging political moment for the island, its people and its broader community; its songs assert not simply the majesty of the place but his intense connection to it. Just as compelling is its grasp on both novelty and orthodoxy, the interplay of reggaeton with forms like bomba, jíbaro, plena, and salsa like mixing polaroids in with hi-res snapshots.
FKA twigs, EUSEXUA
"Eusexua," a made-up word coined by FKA twigs, was given many definitions in the lead up to this album's release, but all boil down to a state of being so euphoric one transcends the human form — something twigs experienced in techno raves in cities like Prague. Much of the gifted auteur's catalog has been defined by a cerebral approach to dance music; here, she is all about the body, or, rather, the wonder of feeling released from its constraints, chasing the dancefloor as a boundless, head-clearing extrasensory expanse. There are no straight-on bangers to be found on EUSEXUA. Instead, this is dance-pop as shapeshifting chimera, which is fitting for a record hellbent on breaking free of form in hope of recreating a complete club ego death.
Jim Legxacy, black british music (2025)
If homeless n**** pop music constituted (and, subsequently, consecrated) an individualized microgenre of Jim Legxacy's making, one where grime, Afrobeats, drill and emo are all equally influential, then black british music (2025) dares to imagine how such a microgenre might pull all of modern U.K. pop through its eye. A singer, rapper and producer, Legxacy has a rare grasp on cultural memory, personal history and the ways in which both intersect and inspire our sense of place. As a result, the album is distinctly lived-in, in tune with both genealogy and the zeitgeist. More than that: It provides a compelling image of the Black musical diaspora with England at the center.
Sudan Archives, THE BPM
It took inventing and embodying a digital avatar called "gadget girl" for the multifaceted artist Brittany Parks to fully reconcile many parts of herself: gizmo-wielder and dance maven, classically trained and intuitively performed, markedly analog yet digitally restored, the IRL empath and the url eccentric. On THE BPM, she is not an android interfacing with machines; they are an extension of her. The beauty of the album is in its unburdening. As it shuffles house and techno, trap and R&B, electronic and manual, in pursuit of a personhood that can straddle the two overlapping realities in which we now live, it creates a hopeful vision of a technological age that allows for the possibility of reaching true self-integration.
Men I Trust, Equus Asinus
Equus Asinus conjures the sensations of recollection: It's clouded, indefinite and nonlinear, not entirely lucid. Yet it's spellbinding and familiar, even in its discontinuity. The songs plumb the folk and dreampop realms, building out a muted but sensuous little sound world illuminated by the incandescent vocals of singer Emma Proulx. Venture far enough into the fog and the lyrics reveal themselves, if only slightly, possessing a gothic splendor and an arcane philosophy — requiems in Bethlehem, crucifix and naves, old Psalms and dreams — but there are also pronounced touches of nature, like a monument overgrown with moss. Here the band levels up by an order of magnitude, the songcraft more elaborate but no less finely spun or intently romanticized.
Read about more of NPR Music's favorite albums of 2025 and our list of the 125 best songs of 2025.
Graphic illustration by David Mascha for NPR.
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