Our staff's favorite albums from the year that was. Is pop now officially an albums-driven genre? The year 2025 made a strong argument for the answer being “yes.” Acclaimed sets from rising stars like ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

There are many throughlines in the list you’re about to scroll through: triumphant comebacks, showstopping debuts, thrill-seeking left-turns and emotional documents of grief and pain. But what stays ...

War. Peace. War. A moon landing. An assassination. Stranger Things. Ozzy’s farewell. 100 men vs. a gorilla. Coldplay’s kiss cam. Six-seven. Labubus. A jeans ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

So this is the future? Judging by mainstream music in 2025, humankind is not in a particularly creative place. The year’s main storylines included the rise of AI slop and cartoon K-pop. A number of ...

Taylor Swift released an album so bad we won’t even talk about it. FKA twigs fucked around with EUSEXUA and found out… it got even better? Rosalía let her hair down from the Tower of Babel. Addison ...