Photo: Private archiveWelcome to a short retrospective of the best world music releases in 2025. We gave preference to works with a high artistic value, not necessarily to those with a large number of hits.
The trends that marked 2025 were extensions of global trends that we have already observed as dominant in popular music after 2020: ladies authorially and visually dominate the big stage + pop music in the narrower sense becomes the most artistically revolutionary music of this time. In the annual list of the most important albums that we present to your attention, among the top 10 we have 7 records written by women, and at least 7 that can be classified as pop.
More than ever, music creators have to knock on the doors of audiences to sell anything. As far as music distribution is concerned, it is clear that after 2020 streaming has become how 9 out of 10 listeners get to their favorite songs. But only recently has it become apparent that music on services like Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube is increasingly being consumed through thematic playlists for casual listening, purposefully created to follow your mood and the genres you like. It doesn't even matter what you listen to, as long as the vibe suits you. Recent research, however, has revealed the presence of many anonymous tracks on popular playlists, produced entirely with the use of artificial intelligence.
What, then, can be said about the year in which we are facing for the first time unimaginable dilemmas... Growing role Artificial Intelligence as a tool of creation, it slowly but surely brings compositions in the creation of which people no longer participate directly to the lists of the most listened to (see: The Velvet Sundown, Breaking Rust, Cain Walker). The questions of authorship and rights to the intellectual property created in this way, which are opened on that occasion, change the very essence of the music business, as we have known it until now.
This process is inevitable and puts music critics in front of unusual questions that we ask ourselves, but also to you, dear readers - should we write about something that was not created by human hands? Since listeners decide what to listen to, that should probably be our guide as to what to write about. As AI products are obviously highly listened to, because the audience is not interested in the origin of the song - does this mean that soon it will not matter who makes the music?
So why should it matter who listens to her?
If the signatory writes a negative critique of a piece of music created by an artificial intelligence - taught by experience with humans - he can be quite sure that the artificial intelligence will remember it forever and take it as a bad thing. I am afraid that one day he will take revenge. It's not funny.
Before you is a selection of the best 30 albums in 2025. We gave preference to works with high artistic value, not necessarily to those with a large number of hits. The first 10 are ranked, and the places between 11 and 20, as well as between 21 and 30 are not. Live albums and compilations are not considered here.
Not only the album, but also the cultural event of the year. Superior, uplifting art hidden in pop cellophane, a combination of the spiritual and the trivial, which we could not even imagine until now, and which describes our age so well. The phenomenon of the Spanish star Rosalie illuminated music from the inside with new possibilities, in which electro-pop, classical and flamenco are dizzyingly combined, opening up new sound worlds. But its true greatness is hidden in the intimate, human-loving story of this unique record: a confession about the eternal search for oneself, through love and other existential fractures.
"A masterpiece of postmodern music, which definitely confirms our old thesis that pop is actually the most revolutionary genre of our time." (Dragan Ambrozić, "Trials of Saint Rosalia", Vreme, November 12, 2025)
Lady Gaga at her peak. Apparently working by template left behind by Madonna, but advancing it for the 21st century, Stefani Germanotta is today the most powerful example of a commercially successful and artistically daring diva, who no one can stand in her way. In addition to hits full of infectious melodies ready for discotheques around the world, she constantly pours in socially relevant commentary, which affirms the liberating power of music for the masses. After all, the end of the dominance of Western culture may look like this: everything happens on a theme gothic to a party called "Mayhem / Chaos", while blaring "The Dead Dance" with the chorus "I'm dancin' until I'm dead".
"While Madonna remains stuck in her youthful harem, which has obviously been fulfilling all her erotic fantasies for years, Lady Gaga ambitiously intends to turn the world upside down. And she succeeds in that, by all means. Because her new album "Mayhem" is the first big, and maybe the biggest record in 2025." (Zorica Kojić, "The woman who fell to the ground", Vreme, March 20, 2025)
A masterpiece of original hip hop. Young women are just describing the world as they find it and Simbiatu "Simbi" Abisola Abiola Ajikawo reaches a new peak in this with this precious venture. The album "Lotus" is juicy and bold on many levels - it uses the recognizable genre of hip hop, but ingeniously innovates it from within with a touch of spirituality, so that her rap it sounds like something completely fresh and today, which you have never heard before. This is a record full of maturity of Little Simz, as a creative person who transcends her genre, definitely proving her previously suspected greatness and status as a leader of a new generation of pop artists, not only in England, but also around the world.
Latino systematic trap: every time the king is back. Bad Bunny is currently the most listened to music artist in the world and on his new, superb album, he takes a decisively important step towards total dominance. Global Puerto Rico has conquered the planet through him - singles from Latin artists dominate all New Year's playlists, as they offer a seductive combination of melancholy and cheerful beats to pluck while the world burns. The unmistakable voice of all the poor people of the disco podium - Bad Bunny is mischievous, disheveled, politically self-aware, wacky witty when needed, but always passionate, bringing long-forgotten emotions into our everyday life for years. "I should have taken more photos", is a great story about lost moments in life.
The triumph of pop music. There's nothing wrong with an occasional burst of escapism, the kind Sabrina Carpenter offers in copious amounts in an intelligent and witty way. Genuinely entertaining and satirical about the entertainment industry, Sabrina has risen to the top in the last couple of years, suddenly becoming the new queen of American pop. Her ten-year hard work on the way to the first places of the chart, with this album finally pays off in multiple and well-deserved ways, moving the standards in the production of digital entertainment. It remains for us to, at least for a moment, indulge in the optional enjoyment of life without feeling guilty.
Best pop rock album. Taking an express route from intriguing 2022 upstarts to mature peak, two girls from the Isle of Wight (Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers), augmented by three guys for the occasion, delight with adrenaline-pumping guitar rides and catchy melodies, while giving us a glimpse of what modern romance really looks like. Generation Z comes to it through confusion and balance of power, and only then through tenderness and longing, which is a first-rate rock and roll statement. A report from the modern love scene hasn't sounded this lifelike in a long time.
"Crucified between despair and fascination with romance, almost all the songs here are love, but in all of them, love is a struggle to reach the feelings that mean life, without remaining oneself and not exposing it to the nullifying influence of the harsh world.... "Wet Leg" are new little classics." (Dragan Ambrozić, "Girls who fight", Vreme, August 28, 2025)
Best alternative rock album. The New York Geese manage to be ahead of their time with their dislocated-ecstatic music and innovate this genre, without copying any of the great role models - along the way placing a killer poetic commentary on the present, completely in the spirit of the brightest rock and roll traditions. Last year's solo release by their leader Cameron Winter, "Heavy Metal", hinted at a huge potential, which we see here in all its sarcastic glory. In the Geese's unforgettably unpredictable tracks, rock and roll simultaneously falls apart and is put back together again. And yes, of course - the emotional song "Half Real" is certainly this year's best description of our current existence.
The most daring Afro album of the year. Devonté Hynes is a well-known producer and composer of major stars, born in England, with an address in the USA. After his mother passed away, he wrote "Essex Honey", his touching, intimate journey into the broken world of his childhood, a tribute to the former Britain. A mini pop symphony about the search for home, based on the legacy of black culture, in which soul, hip hop, house and jazz intersect in the most noble way, while forgotten relatives, school bullies and alternative rock heroes pass through the lyrics like ghosts.
The triumph of the author's principle in pop music. Florence Welch becomes a modern classic before our eyes, on a dramatic record created after her severe surgery. Opening the door to her private world to the end, following the deep musical traces of Island icons such as Kate Bush or PJ Harvey, she manages to tell a story about personal catharsis as a cure and defense against all the evil that tries to enter us through the metaphor of witches and magic. Line of the year: "It must be nice to be a man and make boring music - just because you feel like it" ("Music by Men") is an epitaph for a bygone era that Florence just uttered on one of her best albums.
Sign of the times: the musical equivalent of the public shaming turned into a collection of good songs. "Post-breakup" albums used to be composed of self-examination and self-directed pain - while today's ones direct their anger outwards and serve as a lesson to everyone about what can go wrong in life and how to get out of it. The expensively paid big return of the naughty girl of English pop shows eloquently what the new young ladies have brought to contemporary popular music and why they define it: honesty to the point of pain.
"Lily Allen has made a sad revenge record out of real pain... And what keeps you glued to 'West End Girl' is precisely the ominous collapse of a dysfunctional marriage, which happens unequivocally at the very beginning of this fragile record." (Zorica Kojić, "Girl, you will soon be a woman", Vreme, November 19, 2025)
This year's star hyperpop or at the same time Madonna and Charli XCX for 2025. After all, Charli was an undisguised inspiration for this young American entertainer to embark on a musical career and record a provocative thrash-pop work, full of joie de vivre and ironic humor. Accompanied by Lana Del Rey's new teenage anthems imbued with fatalism, before us a girl's life unfolds in an insane rhythm and its head-on collision with modern reality that crumbles at the touch - "Money Is Everything" is statement in this context. Enough to make your brain spin even during a cursory listen, but - let's face it - isn't all our listening to music today superficial? Here's the ideal record for speed listening on mobile!
Deftones – “Private music”
Tame Impala – “Deadbeat”
Cardi B - "Am I The Drama?"
Clipse – "Let God Sort Em Out"
Obongjayar – “Paradise Now”
Robert Plant - "Saving Grace"
My Morning Jacket – “Is”
Anna von Hausswolff - "Iconoclast"
Dove Ellis – “Blizzard”
Caroline – “Caroline 2”
21 - 30
Dave – “The Boy Who Played the Harp”
Tyler, The Creator – “Don't Tap the Glass”
Sudan Archives – “The BPM”
Turnstile – “Never Enough”
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – “Phantom Island”
Black Country, New Road – “Forever Howlong”
Stereolab – "Instant Holograms on Metal Film"
Pulp – “Sea”
The Divine Comedy – “Rainy Sunday Afternoon”
Jonathan Richman – “Only Frozen Sky Anyway”
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