The music world refused to stand still in 2025. This wasn’t a year for playing it safe. Across the globe and all over the stylistic map, music kept mutating in the weirdest, wildest ways. The artists ...

Rosalía made an album invoking the saints, Lily Allen took us on a tragicomic trip through her domestic hell, Lady Gaga found the sweet spot between artpop and arena-ready funk, and Bad Bunny was just ...

We’re at the end of yet another year where commentators and fans speculated on the health of the rap world. In October, it was reported that, for the first time in 35 years, there were no rap songs in ...

Nearly 50 years after its release, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours isn't just the best selling classic rock album of 2025, it's the 25th-best selling record of the year overall. Of course, the very top of the ...

Three rock albums made Billboard's list of the 50 Best Albums of 2025 and one of them actually cracked the Top 10. This particular list consisted of staff picks and there are 30 writers credited on ...

Our staff's favorite dance albums from the year that was. Once again and as always, the dance albums released in 2025 served as a reminder of the genre’s vastness. But while on the surface bass might ...

I joined Paste in 2023 and, in my tenure as editor, this year’s AOTY list is my favorite by far. The publication has been doling out these rankings since 2002, affixing an “Album of the Year” ribbon ...

This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here. Piling on, stripping down, looking back, pushing ahead: Musicians found all sorts of uses for the album form this ...

Stream this list on Apple Music and Spotify. See The FADER's 50 best songs of 2025. In a chronically online, AI-slop-embedded hellscape, Don’t Tap the Glass is Tyler, the Creator’s surprise social ...

One band absolutely dominated the hardcore conversation this year, and they did it by working way, way harder than anyone else. Affable Boston bruisers Haywire spent 2025 playing sweaty, cathartic, ...

The Korean pop outsider Effie and the Brooklyn indie-rock band Geese top our critics’ lists this year. By Jon Caramanica and Lindsay Zoladz Jon Caramanica Musicians know how to make music, and they ...

In other words, 2025 had plenty of peaks and valleys. In our list of the year’s top albums, we try to capture these trends and tell the story of a music scene that is fractured, matching a cultural ...