The 25 Best Albums of 2025 So Far

A ranking and review of the best this year has to offer!

See No. 100 - 76 here, No. 75 - 51 here, and No. 50 - 26 here!

#25: SEULGI, Accidentally On Purpose 
Accidentally On Purpose uses familiar imagery to tell a unique villain origin story. The unmistakably Batgirl-inspired getup and logo, plus the villains’ lair in which the teaser trailer is set, are attention-grabbers, but they are just the tip of this story’s iceberg, as demonstrated by the “Baby, Not Baby” music video. … The B-sides also show attempts to distance herself from the person who rebels and how those attempts can fail. … SEULGI’s attempts to sever parts of herself can only go so far, keeping her humanity intact. Beneath her wild antics is a hurt person whose pursuit of validation leads to “the dark side,” and while Accidentally On Purpose explores the concept of duality, it also digs deeper and considers why people become compelled to differentiate parts of themselves in the first place. Read more here!

#24: Sakurazaka46, Addiction (Complete Edition)
In “Go big or go home” fashion, Addiction (Complete Edition) compiles Sakurazaka46’s best and most electrifying songs from the past few years, separates them with new and dynamic interludes, and orders them in a way that represents the ups and downs of adolescence accurately.

Addiction (Complete Edition) is a compilation album at its best, magnifying the themes of its pre-released components and doing so in unique ways. Read more here!

#23: Ahn Dayoung, WHERE IS MY FRIEND? 
WHERE IS MY FRIEND?, like Finnegan’s Wake, is not a story about dreams as they are conventionally perceived. Instead, dreams are “collapsing,” “despairing,” and something from which people “cannot wake.” In other words, some dreams are secretly nightmares by another name. The reverse might also be true, and Ahn Dayoung’s belief in that is expressed throughout an album about a lifetime spent searching. … WHERE IS MY FRIEND? ambitiously emulates both structural and thematic characteristics of Finnegan’s Wake, traits that have made the novel, like life itself, so revered yet difficult to comprehend. Read more here! 

#22: Gen Hoshino, Gen 
The moral of Gen Hoshino’s story is summed up by a line on Gen’s opening track, “Create”: “The meaning of life is to play with life itself.” Gen Hoshino takes a mix-and-match approach, stacking and sorting instrumental and vocal layers like games of Jenga. … Language is treated as a living and pliable thing as much as sounds are. Gen Hoshino overlaps trilingual verses in “Memories” and includes trilingual lyrics in “2.” He also embraces the malleability of mood, with inconsistent sincerity - his voice is comically low in “Sayonara”! - and polish, with some songs utilizing analog more than digital sounds and others doing vice versa. Read more here!

#21: BIBI, EVE: ROMANCE
While many specifics are up to interpretation, this is the overall storyline of EVE: ROMANCE and its corresponding videos: Government-appointed mad scientists resurrect a man named Luca and a woman named Eve from the dead. Eve, played by BIBI, is now called “Eve-1.” It is notable that she is not described as a new Eve; she is not called “Eve-2.” If she were, that would imply that the first Eve differs from this one. The government does not want the old and new Eves to be their own women; they want a carbon copy of the money-making pop star who they were able to tout on a global platform prior to her death. The songs and music videos are about Eve-1 and Luca rediscovering and revisiting memories of their past lives, falling in love in the process.

Here is one theory as to which songs and videos are narrated by Eve and which are narrated by Eve-1… Read more here!

#20: ONEWE, WE : Dream Chaser 
WE : Dream Chaser involves the same themes as Planet Nine : ISOTROPY without being derivative. … The songs are about the elusive nature of memories and the desperation to preserve them. Much like trying to recall a dream’s vivid details upon awakening, catching memories is seen as always beyond one’s reach. The futile pursuit is likened to the fanciful thinking of storybooks, which explains ONEWE’s many Alice in Wonderland references. … While Planet Nine : ISOTROPY and WE : Dream Chaser weave common threads, the latter album does so in more intricate ways, incorporating new analogies into the band’s expanding embroidery. Read more here!

#19: [Alexandros], PROVOKE
This rock album is an emotionally unstable series of outbursts, with lyrics that read like unhinged poetry and instruments that are often escalatory, gathering the momentum of running down a hill. (This “quickly snowballing out of control” feeling is best captured by “Coffee Float.”) There is depth beneath the tantrums, though, as best summed up in “EVERYBODY KNOWS”: “Someday we’ll fade away / Everybody knows / In the end it’s another day… Let the words come out / Until it becomes real.” The song helps listeners see, “Oh, so that’s what this is all about!” [Alexandros] feel an urgency to spill their guts, turn their ideals into reality, and do both before it is too late. They cannot be hasty about turning days from ordinary into extraordinary, and their songs convey a frantic and deep-seated fear of opportunities going to waste... Read more here!

#18: MINNIE, HER
To say that the HER era is multidimensional is an understatement. A layered story that conflates as much as it contrasts, it unfolds through vocal changes, song lyrics, visuals, and subject-orientation shifts (constantly changing among first-person, second-person, and third-person forms). By design, every time a viewer and/or listener gains a sense of certainty in how to describe MINNIE, new reasons to doubt that description appear. The slippery story makes for fascinating social commentary on the nature of identity: who shapes it, who defines it, how malleable it is, and how many simultaneous forms it can take. Read more here!

#17: DOYOUNG, Soar
As DOYOUNG digs deeper into the thematic terrain of his first album, YOUTH, on Soar, he also expands his “wings” stylistically. Both albums share a preference for band-music influences and a mix of rock-influenced pop and balladry, but Soar adds extra improvisational-seeming twists, folksy-yet-modern touches, and string flourishes. Soar also goes further with its analogies, adding “wind” to the list of go-to metaphors while still mentioning the “lights” and “waves” from YOUTH. Those “lights” and “waves” have sustained his spirit, and Soar elaborates on why and how. Soar is also a natural sequel to YOUTH in how it continues framing music as a memory preserver… Read more here!

#16: BLUE ENCOUNT, Alliance of Quintetto 
Alliance of Quintetto is a satisfying soundtrack for an existential crisis! It stays relatable by pairing its many questions about the meaning of life with a source of motivation to keep searching for it. … It would be reductive to say these songs are about going from having zero self-worth to having some; the band tackles more emotional nuances than that. The ways they do so are just as strong instrumentally as they are lyrically. Like how some turbulent life phases are experienced as waves that come and go, while some turbulence feels sudden and instant, some songs use instruments and sound effects to craft periods of rising and falling action, while others are all-at-once outpourings. Read more here!

#15: SCANDAL, LOVE, SPARK, JOY! 
LOVE, SPARK, JOY! takes a creative approach to addressing attempts to find meaning where there is none. The rock songs portray the SCANDAL members as “strays” with neither “dreams” nor “worries worth talking about.” In “Terra Boy,” they simply toast “to the darkness.” In “Doukashiterutte” (“There’s Something Wrong”), they lament a “dark and sickly” world that feels even emptier since a specific person left it, as lively horns add a touch of humor to the pity party. With a staggered and colorful instrumental, “Soundly” reinforces the busyness that keeps them from “[making] sense of the past.” And “Oh, Pretty Woman,” with its in-character vocals and punchy percussion, memorably denies that polished people can be as happy as they look: “I don’t believe you… Are you lonely just like me?” What could easily have been a one-note, down-in-the-dumps EP is instead one with a visceral sense of yearning, perfectly punctuated by every cymbal crash and electronic guitar wail. SCANDAL’s ear for detail gives each song a unique color and demonstrates how to balance thematic consistency with variety.

#14: IVE, IVE EMPATHY
Newness mixed with nostalgia remains IVE’s winning formula. IVE EMPATHY includes unconventional analogies, like comparing a “FLU” to a problematic crush, and using boxing terminology in “TKO” to express confidence. The nostalgia comes from their spins on classics: “You Wanna Cry” is inspired by Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me),” and “ATTITUDE” borrows from “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega. The album finds additional strengths in what listeners are familiar with by staying true to IVE. Some members have writing credits on the album, they re-team up with Ryan Jhun for “REBEL HEART,” and empowerment remains a go-to message. As for the visual components of this era, they complement the music well and take its themes in odd but entertaining directions! Read more here! 

#13: ILLIT, bomb
This era solidifies ILLIT’s lovable brand of vintage-meets-modern whimsy, with hook-oriented songs, cute and innocent lyrics, and arts-and-crafts aesthetics (with crayon drawings in a teaser video and the “little monster” video text appearing as embroidered artwork). They also prove to have cross-cultural appeal: “Billyeoon Goyangi (Do the Dance)” gets its name from a Korean expression about feeling like an out-of-place cat, and they compare themselves to that cat while singing about crush-related jitters in French and over a French house instrumental. Besides the cat analogy, ILLIT use cute and childlike descriptions involving colors, a carnival, and “little monsters.” Examples of the first two include comparing crushing to the “pink thrill” of a theme park visit, pulling a “pink lever” that triggers feeling “jellyous” (slang for “jealous”), and envisioning a nighttime picnic with a “Purple sky” that is a “blueberry dream” in “bamsopoong.” As for “little monsters,” those take the form of gummy bears in the “little monster” video, and the group sings about “gobbling up” those stand-ins for their doubts and fears! Read more here!

#12: JENNIE, Ruby
Knowing that JENNIE has drawn inspiration from a Shakespearean comedy called As You Like It and the “All the World’s a Stage” monologue opens up Ruby to a much bigger world of interpretations! Here is one of them, an application that has its limitations but speaks to Ruby’s success at getting the audience to see the many sides of JENNIE in unexpected lights… 

Regardless of which life phases listeners and viewers see in which parts of the Ruby era, JENNIE adds uniqueness to a basic “personal evolution”-themed debut album premise. Read more here!

#11: i-dle, We are
In hindsight, (G)I-DLE was laying the groundwork for i-dle, talking that talk so i-dle would be ready to walk the walk. (G)I-DLE sang about being confident, while i-dle show more than they tell. Their confidence is more overt now, as proven by starting “Good Thing” with saying “Goodbye, baby!” and with SOYEON giving herself a major haircut in the music video. The other songs on We are have the same theme as “Good Thing”: a willingness to say and do things that are hard to take back. (G)I-DLE said they were willing to be themselves no matter the social costs. … i-dle now prove it.

Other aspects of We are that allow each i-dle member to shine: the genre-hopping, which lets different voices steal the show on different occasions; the members’ hands-on roles, with each one writing and/or producing at least one of the tracks; and each member making a scene in public in the “Good Thing” music video! i-dle are the ones with “We” in their album title (in contrast to (G)I-DLE’s “I” series of titles), yet their autonomy is more apparent than ever, showing how self-empowerment and sisterhood can be strengthened simultaneously. Read more here!

#10: RIIZE, ODYSSEY
ODYSSEY’s strength and staying power come from its smoothness. The streamlined sound and “going on a journey” story undergo subtle enough lane shifts to keep the drive interesting without encountering any annoyingly rocky roads! The album is full of classic crowd-pleaser material for boy band fans, from R&B-style slow songs to hip-hop-oriented ones, and the energetic and sentimental halves are neatly split up by the “Passage” interlude. But the delights that differentiate ODYSSEY are in the details: the mid-song key changes, the ways tracks relate as pairs (going from “Ember to Solar” to “Fly Up,” for instance, and prefacing “Midnight Mirage” with the sound of a ticking clock in “Passage”), the meaningful addition and subtraction (for example, the pre-journey introduction is a simple synth 2-step song, making the post-journey outro sound even fuller by comparison)... Plus, the songs’ corresponding videos check off many boxes… Read more here! 

#9: TenTwenty, Border=Border
With racing percussion and guitars, lightning-speed voices, and scattered cymbal crashes and sound effects topping each song off, TenTwenty put on quite a spectacle! But their “more is better” musical approach avoids coming across as contrived, thanks to their lyrical context. The foundational spiritual basis of Border=Border rests on two pillars. One is that all things are one; what goes around comes around. The other is that the impermanent, material things of this world are comparatively meaningless. … While staying surprisingly upbeat, TenTwenty apply Zen wisdom to their comparisons of abstract forces and contrasts of those with tangible things that, relatively speaking, do not matter. Read more here!

#8: ONE OK ROCK, DETOX
ONE OK ROCK want people to make no mistake: They “want to scream like a banshee” (“NASTY”), they are “sick of rolling with the punches” (“Tropical Therapy”), and they are “losing faith in everyone” (“Puppets Can’t Control You”). In addition to being distraught, a recurring theme in DETOX is distrust of those in power. … ONE OK ROCK’s music remains a dependable outlet for pent-up angst, a call to be skeptical of authority, reassurance that it’s okay not to be okay, and an attempt to channel righteous anger into a united front for those who have less power. DETOX bluntly assesses the state of society without sacrificing empathy towards those who feel hopeless. Read more here!

#7: WOOKI, ANTIBIRTH 
ANTIBIRTH constantly blurs the lines between antagonist and protagonist. … The chronological order of when he feels responsible and when he does not is complicated by the fact the album ends with “Prologue” and starts with “Epillogue,” the latter title acknowledging this story can be a tricky pill to swallow! Furthermore, the intro and outro mirror each other. Both are dark, haunting scene-setters that include the sound of a pen furiously scribbling on paper. Plus, the intro features the sound of a tape rewinding. One part of WOOKI’s narrative that is certain, though, is its climax: “Reborn.” ANTIBIRTH strikes a more melancholy note up until the opening seconds of “Reborn,” when a gunshot is swiftly followed by an ominous soundscape, then an EDM breakdown that transitions into the following faster, bolder, more electronic-focused tracks. ANTIBIRTH is not exactly a linear nor an inverted story, and its convolutions serve it well. Read more here!

#6: Kwon Jin Ah, The Dreamest
With stunning balladry and R&B-leaning pop songs alike, Kwon Jin Ah communicates love’s complexities and contradictions. The Dreamest has several recurring themes: trying to postpone the unpacking of messy emotions for tomorrow, recognizing on some level that a relationship will never go back to the way it was, and feeling pulled in opposite directions at the same time. … Tying together the descriptions of clumsiness, youth, and paths unknown is the sense of being out of her depth. Kwon Jin Ah cannot make up her mind, wanting to be held close to the same person who she wants to never see again and identifying the source of her laughter and her tears as being the same… Read more here!

#5: PoLin, Fragments of Becoming
With rich arrangements and piercing, palpable emotions, PoLin sings about his relentless desire to live life to the fullest. From the hooting-and-hollering-filled romp that is “Let Me Move On” to the devastating “Shattered Bliss,” which uses gospel influences to amplify its sense of biblical emotional proportions, the album is dramatic, delightful, and everything in between. The soundscapes might be full, but the lyrics are often succinct. PoLin has a knack for cutting to the emotional core, with insightful yet short statements that leave listeners deep in thought: “Living restlessly for the sake of mourning” (“Perfectly Loss”), “years are like thieves” (“Honey”), “Happiness and grievances are [both] souvenirs” (“Close Yet Apart”), “Fate is an appointment” (“How Are You”)... The best examples of so few words speaking so many volumes are in “Fragments of Becoming,” including “I took the risk of crying” and “There is nothing more comforting than repairing.” The last song circles back to that sentiment, celebrating how all of life’s beautiful messes that are addressed in the songs before it have led to seeing the world anew, with “Miracle Eyes.”

#4: indigo la End, MOLTING AND DANCING
With a natural ease and catchy hooks, this band delivers perfectly-paced pop and rock that insightfully explore what goes unseen yet deeply felt. Like their sound, their words thrive in thematic gray areas and the topic of transitions. Rather than indicate a desire to find solutions or cling to a simpler time, there is a radical acceptance of living each moment simply as it is. … They equally embrace life’s good and bad times by not wasting the present trying to predict the future. As they put it in “Change Of Heart,” “There’s never a premonition / The next page could be torn / And you’ll never know it.” They do not necessarily find bliss in the present, but it sure beats looking for it anywhere else! 

MOLTING AND DANCING shines because of how it praises “dancing” through all “molting” phases instead of waiting for them to maybe subside. The weighty nature of this theme is done justice through streamlined yet subtlety-filled instrumentals, equally well-handled lyricism, and messy relationships in the “Night Calm” music video. Read more here!

#3: David Tao, STUPID POP SONGS 
STUPID POP SONGS is a love letter to music when it does what it is meant to do: move, entertain, and provide soundtracks for not days but lifetimes. The album travels through time, tapping influences from seventies folk-rock (“From Dust to Dust”), to the electric piano style popular in 80’s and 90’s R&B (“Forever Penny”), to modern hip-hop (the style in which he covers Teresa Teng’s “A Thousand Words”). While the songs will entertain those of all ages and musical preferences, the album is a personal milestone. It is a creative rebirth for David Tao, being his first new album in over a decade, and a set of self-assigned challenges. For example, he tasked himself with making a song in a parallel set of major-key and minor-key melodies (“Always Here”), and he self-composed each Chinese instrument in a song for the first time (“Forever Penny”). Another shoutout-worthy track: “Moonchild,” a sparkling 80’s homage.

While David Tao shows respect for the “music” part of “music industry,” his music videos criticize the “industry” part. … While playing along with industry expectations, David Tao proves why those expectations are misguided. Modern music can be made without sacrificing quality, and he proves players like him are some of the best ones for unfair games. He cares enough to want to rebuild the game into something greater. David Tao applies genuine passion to his “stupid pop songs” and subversively gets his point across about music industry figures having the wrong definition of “worthy of success.” Read more here!

#2: Xdinary Heroes, Beautiful Mind
Beautiful Mind is a stellar addition to the band’s discography. From glitches to the uses of reverb to sound effects including alarms and a ticking clock, the songs match their ambitious and layered contexts with experimental choices and attention to detail. Each song is one-of-a-kind and defiant in sound and lyrics alike. 

The tracklist order is also excellent. They start with “FIGHT ME,” and like their action-packed music videos, it is climactic from the get-go! They close with another rousing one, “BBB (Bitter But Better),” which celebrates having “the real thing,” a fitting nod to the reality-making that their music explores.

The best percussion is in “Diamond” and best guitar-playing is in “George the Lobster,” but if one could only listen to one song from Beautiful Mind, it would need to be “Beautiful Life”... Read more here!

#1: SEVENTEEN, HAPPY BURSTDAY
In addition to songs that scream “That’s so SEVENTEEN!,” HAPPY BURSTDAY lets each individual show off what they contribute to the group. Each member has a solo song and uses it to demonstrate a unique approach and skillset, while also showing how they can work well in different combinations. … The new solo songs are as multidimensional as the visual components of SEVENTEEN’s world. The songs transport listeners into layered alternative worlds through 13-plus routes. … HAPPY BURSTDAY carries on the traditions of past SEVENTEEN eras, but it is so much more than a SEVENTEEN tribute. This era’s songs and videos alike emphasize how SEVENTEEN’s storytelling implodes the format of storytelling itself. There is not solely a first-person, second-person, or third-person messenger. There are no chapters or a specific climax; a plot twist could occur anytime, anywhere. There is no cut-and-dry genre categorization. And it rhymes with previous installments while never repeating them; its themes are dependable, while the ways of communicating those themes stay impossible to predict. SEVENTEEN’s answers as to what comes next are just guesses that remain as good as the audience’s, and they learn and relearn things about themselves and about their worlds in real time. The curtain never closes on SEVENTEEN’s movie, so the party thrown in its honor never has to end! Read more here!

Stay tuned for more “Best of 2025 So Far” lists!

View the Substack version of this piece here!