The Skinny's Albums of 2025

#10: Big Thief – Double Infinity

The present moment is a bridge between two infinities: the forever of the past and the forever of the future. The title track of Big Thief’s new album Double Infinity finds singer Adrianne Lenker standing between ‘what is forming, what is fading’.

The New York band’s 2022 record exploded their lo-fi folk-rock into a sprawling collage of whimsical imagination. Double Infinity, by contrast, is deep, earthy and thorny, enveloping the listener in its thicket of wiry, twisting guitar and flickering tape loops. The trio are joined by ambient musician Laraaji whose rhapsodic vocals and glinting zither are threaded through the project. Each song feels worn, lived-in. Words is folksy and frazzled, frayed guitar tangling around skipping percussion. ‘Let gravity be my sculptor, let the wind do my hair’, sings Lenker, contemplating ageing on Incomprehensible. Wistful Los Angeles never fully indulges either nostalgia or regret but looks forwards with steadfast hope: ‘I’ll follow you forever, even without looking’.

Many songs are simple country-folk singalongs at heart. How Could I Have Known is achingly romantic, exploring how one moment can contain an eternity. And within the molten guitar of Grandmother, Lenker finds an imperfect way to contain the double infinities swirling around her: ‘gonna turn it all into rock and roll’. [Zoë White]

Double Infinity was released on 5 September via 4AD
bigthief.net

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#9: Lorde – Virgin

The music world held its breath in anticipation of Virgin, and since its summer release, it's proven to exceed even the highest of expectations, offering a potent reminder that Lorde is – and consistently has been – an artist of vulnerability, passion and constant reinvention. Her music has always been an effective window into her psyche and perception of self, allowing listeners to feel a deep connection and affinity with her. On Virgin, her fourth album, Lorde grapples with and explores these numerous facets of herself.

She navigates her relationship with femininity, desire and passion on GRWM and Man of the Year, in which she blurs the lines of gender and questions what it means to be a woman. On Favourite Daughter and David she illustrates how her relationships with others influences her sense of self, explored through the lenses of self-worth, idolisation and sacrifice. Sonically, the tracks are alive and charged, Lorde’s raw vocals working in harmony with enthralling electronic sections to create an album full of intensity and feeling.

For Lorde, music has always represented a tapestry of evolution. Virgin is yet another milestone in this trajectory, undoubtedly emphasising her skillful, authentic artistry as she's created one of this year’s most striking and profound records. [Sophia Goddard]

Virgin was released on 27 Jun via EMI
lorde.co.nz

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#8: Jacob Alon – In Limerence

Freshly announced as the first Scottish winner of the BBC Introducing Artist of the Year Award, Fife singer-songwriter Jacob Alon joins an impressive list of previous winners like Arlo Parks, Self Esteem and Olivia Dean, and it seems like they are well on the way to major headliner status themselves. All of this hype would be for nought, of course, if the songs didn’t stand on their own. In Limerence is a stunning debut packed with gorgeous folk-indebted tunes exploring the singer’s youth in Fife, forbidden love and heartache.

Liquid Gold 25 explores emotionless Grindr hookups with lyrics that are surprisingly tender and expressive, while the feather-light Fairy in a Bottle showcases gorgeous guitar playing and haunting vocals reminiscent of Nick Drake or Rufus Wainwright. For years Alon has matured on the Scottish folk scene and these years of careful study coupled with rare insight and perspective means that whether writing about youthful infatuation or heartbreak and disappointment, these gentle, impeccably rendered songs are as timelessly expressive as they are sharply sketched. As a debut album, In Limerence is a remarkable introduction, but best of all, you get the sense that it’s just the first tantalising hint of what Alon is capable of. [Max Sefton]

In Limerence was released on 30 May via Island/EMI
jacobalon.scot

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#7: Lily Allen – West End Girl

West End Girl opens like a fairytale. A newlywed Lily Allen skips up the stairs of a Brooklyn brownstone, is offered the lead in a play, and shares the news with her celebrity husband. Mid-song, a voicemail detour introduces the record’s real narrative: that husband sucks beyond belief. From there, Allen carefully picks through the wreckage of her marriage like an air crash investigator. Sleepwalking maps a night of mental waterboarding: the guilty party talking and justifying while their blindsided partner drifts into catatonia. Tennis sits in a more domestic place, emphasising the family life that was tossed aside. Madeleine introduces the story’s other woman (one of many!!) over country-inflected guitars and irresistible gunshot percussion.

The record’s narrative comes alive in small details. Pussy Palace’s 'Stuck on the F, there’s a problem on the line' places us in the scene with her. Allen has spent the past seven years flirting with other careers (acting, fashion, podcasting) and even considering musical retirement. West End Girl isn’t merely a love letter to the album format or one of the most precise and devastating breakup records in years, it's a necessary reminder of what happens when a great songwriter gets back in the office. [Tara Hepburn]

West End Girl was released on 24 Oct via BMG
lilyallenmusic.com

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#6: Wet Leg – moisturizer

On their second album moisturizer, Wet Leg returned stranger and more self-assured than ever. The Isle of Wight outfit lean into a fuller and scrappier band dynamic this time, with a thrilling leap from their mischievous debut into something more emotionally unhinged and thornier, but also warmer and charismatic. Recorded with their full five-piece band lineup (Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers joined by guitarist Josh Mobaraki, bassist Ellis Durand, drummer Henry Holmes), the band’s animated ferocity lands tighter arrangements and production that carry the sound as if listening to them live.

The result is a punchier and meatier record, expansive with a snarling, almost confrontational edge. Lyrically, moisturizer is an exploration of obsession, desire and self-discovery. Teasdale reveals a more deeply personal side, embracing her queer identity and writing love songs that feel less like detached satire, and read more as full-throated confessions. The words still fizz with their trademark surreal humour and deadpan digs, but there is definitely a new undercurrent of self-reckoning. If their debut announced Wet Leg as unexpected disruptors, moisturizer cements them as artists with staying power. As the uncannily bizarre album cover suggests, it seems that they've taken a confident and chaotic step forward. [Rhea Hagiwara]

moisturizer was released on 11 Jul via Domino
wetlegband.com

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#5: billy woods – GOLLIWOG

billy woods hot-wired the English language, made his horrorcore masterpiece, and took us on a whirlwind joyride that still astonishes on every play. GOLLIWOG is not a casual listen, is not for having on in the background. It’s the vital antithesis of the tedious artificially-generated muzak you’ve been reading about and hopefully staying well away from. It’s a headphones album, full of detail both sonic and lyrical, by turns a phantasmagorical tour through a world of rabid dogs, rag dolls and snakes devouring their own tails, and a response to the horrors perpetrated by colonial powers, the lingering scars and generational trauma passed on.

Production is handled by a conveyor belt of talent including Conductor Williams, Kenny Segal, The Alchemist, El-P, DJ Haram, and yet GOLLIWOG is a remarkably cohesive listen, bound by the vision, energy and intelligence of its chief creator. The genesis of this album is a short story that woods wrote as a nine-year-old about the titular 'Golliwog'. His mother told him it was ‘derivative and needed work’, which if anything shows the importance of honest feedback. woods also found time to release another Armand Hammer album (Mercy) this year. He’s one of the best artists on the planet right now, long live his golden age. [Craig Angus]

GOLLIWOG was released on 9 May via Backwoodz Studioz
billywoods.bandcamp.com

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#4: Rosalía – LUX

Unfolding across four movements alongside the London Symphony Orchestra, LUX is given additional heft by Pulitzer-winner Caroline Shaw and Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. Rather than leaning on electronic gossamer, LUX is carved from raw instrumental texture: ornamentation functions as architecture with choral punches worthy of Philip Glass. Reliquia moves from Michael Riesman-like clarity into a Justice-esque coda, one of the album’s few flashes of pop voltage. Elsewhere, La Rumba del Perdón reminds us that Rosalía can still summon an earworm with unnerving ease. 

Her voice sits exposed in this soundscape; its production startlingly dry. She moves between crystalline soprano, flamenco melisma, whispered invocation and full-throated declaration; a performance both disciplined and impulsive, all-at-once intimate yet monumental such that it raises hairs on arms.

The choir on Berghain, the orchestral surge of La Yugular, the volatile percussion of Dios Es Un Stalker: each collaborator is granted space, yet Rosalía yields none of her own gravity. Singing across more than a dozen languages, many not her own, she navigates idioms she does not fully inhabit, informed by saints, mystics and literary forebears. Catalytically, LUX becomes both a generational myth and a personal testament, an orchestral autobiography in which Rosalía asserts herself as performer and visionary in equal measure. [Rhys Morgan]

LUX was released on 7 Nov via Columbia
rosalia.com

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#3: Oklou – choke enough

Oklou’s choke enough is pop music for the internal, for the daydreamer, for opening every window on a hot day but not venturing outside. On ict, Marylou Mayniel sings of escapism – 'Strawberry dancer, vanilla summer, driver pull over, ice cream truck' – but it’s streaked with colour and idealised in a way that reality rarely is now. These songs whisper and gurgle, barely raising their heads from the subaquatic near-beatless netherworld they live in. It’s Y2K pop, tinged with the scent of nostalgic Eurotrance echoed from the walls of a Kos nightclub, transcribed through the internet, and stripped for parts. When the production feels built on fleeting memories, it perfectly matches the sentiment of burrowing into yourself.

choke enough lives on the edge between acceptance as a shut-in and embracing freedom, between existing within the lines and transcending them. Or as Oklou would put it, 'Is the endless still unbound, or am I just different now?' But even she gets bored looking inside herself forever – if there’s an open window, at some point you have to jump through it. On blade bird, she accepts – and wills you to accept – that living out in the world is what we’re made for. [Tony Inglis]

choke enough was released on 7 Feb via True Panther Sounds
oklou.com

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#2: Geese – Getting Killed 

When Cameron Winter released his debut solo album Heavy Metal this time last year, it's fair to say that no one could have predicted what would happen next. The young, brown-eyed New Yorker’s cult-like mystique hosts beguiling shades of Dylan, and now he and his band Geese have been bestowed from fans and critics alike as the buzziest band around.

Winter is Geese’s guiding light. But on Getting Killed, the four-piece’s fourth album, everyone excels. 100 Horses exemplifies this best via Max Bassin’s thundering drums, Emily Green’s freewheeling guitar, Dominic DiGesu’s punchy basslines and Winter’s distinctly brooding vocals. Etched with biblical motifs throughout, lyrically, it’s an album that doesn’t shy away from existential themes such as deteriorating relationships (Cobra; Au Pays du Cocaine), non-conformity (Taxes) and isolation (Husbands) all framed within the context of the inescapable modern day.

Typically nonchalant yet undeniably talented, Geese are reshaping the rock canon while still bowing to their peers of old. It’s no wonder that they are being hailed as Gen Z’s version of The Strokes. Getting Killed is not only a tour de force from the unshackled Brooklyn band – its cultural relevance will be highlighted for years to come. [Jamie Wilde]

Getting Killed was released on 26 Sep via Play It Again Sam
geeseband.com

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#1: CMAT – EURO-COUNTRY

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that you have to leave a place to write about it – James Joyce famously had to depart from Ireland to give us Ulysses and 100 years later, CMAT had to leave to give us EURO-COUNTRY.

There is a cultural cachet in being Irish at the moment and with that comes a temptation to portray the place as a faultless utopia, unblemished by all the pitfalls of being British, somewhere one doesn’t have to be embarrassed to be from. Luckily, CMAT doesn’t fall into this trap on EURO-COUNTRY, from shout-outs to some of the less glamorous parts of the country (no offence Ballybrack, Finglas or Blanchardstown Shopping Centre), to cutting take-downs of the government post-economic crash. She even uses Irish to ask if she’d be beautiful bald.

What is distinctly Irish, though, is her particular brand of humour, taking heartbreak, confusion and isolation and undercutting it all with a cheeky dick joke, a lyric about bingo wings and Doritos, a song called Jamie Oliver Petrol Station. It’s the work of a songwriter who is not only in her stride, but one who doesn’t care if you don’t get it. References to niche Irish towns, her accent, figures of Irish myth and Kerry Katona, it is a lesson in not shying away from specificity, something that feels refreshing in a world of algorithm-driven music, and lowest common denominators; 'This is making no sense to the average listener!' she gleefully croons on the aforementioned Jamie Oliver Petrol Station.

Aside from skewering a certain type of Oirishness, all manner of topics are covered here – misogyny and beauty standards, the loneliness of living under capitalism, the horror of losing a friend – delivered with tunes so jaunty they’ll make you want to join the local line dancing club and hooks so infectious they have TikTok dances. 

Sitting like a jewel in the crown is the excellently titled Lord, Let That Tesla Crash. A ballad for a late friend, it's a shining example of CMAT’s deft balance of humour and pathos and her best song yet. Plaintive without being cloying, heart-wrenchingly honest, and at times silly, as grief can sometimes be. 'I heard death comes in threes / I misheard it being from Dublin / I thought deaths in the trees / Which makes sense cause they’re the saddest cunts of plants'. I mean, it has to be said, not even Joyce thought to call trees cunts. [Emilie Roberts]

EURO-COUNTRY was released on 29 Aug via CMATBaby / AWAL
cmatbaby.com

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The Skinny's Albums of 2025: 1-20

1) CMAT – EURO-COUNTRY
2) Geese – Getting Killed
3) Oklou – choke enough
4) Rosalia – LUX
5) billy woods – GOLLIWOG
6) Wet Leg – moisturiser
7) Lily Allen – West End Girl
8) Jacob Alon – In Limerence
9) Lorde – Virgin
10) Big Thief – Double Infinity
11) Hayley Williams – Ego Death at a Batchelorette Party
12) Dijon – Baby
13) Wednesday – Bleeds
14) Sam Fender – People Watching
15) Turnstile – Never Enough
16) Blood Orange – Essex Honey
17) Panda Bear – Sinister Grift
18) Djrum – Under Tangled Silence
19) Alex G – Headlights
20) Deftones – Private Music