Welcome to the third and final part of Song Bar favourite albums of 2025. Another year of many interesting and varied releases. See also the recent Part One, and Part Two. As usual, unlike many other publications, there is no countdown nor describing these necessarily as “best” albums of the year. But they are chosen from a variety of criteria – not merely from the quality of the songwriting, as well as originality, even oddity, but also to a certain extent popularity – by how much they have been viewed since publication. All the albums detailed below are shown in the collage of covers above.
There is also always the aim to bring a broad spectrum of genres, as well as giving space for small records as well as large ones. Naturally these choices are also a matter of subjective taste, but please enjoy them by clicking on each headline link to explore more in detail, where you will find a selection of videos as well as the album in a choice of embedded streaming formats. It is hoped that this will encourage further explorations, purchases, sharing your discoveries, and even supporting music artists by going to see them play live.
Most of these albums were released the late summer, autumn and winter. After browsing, feel free to add more of your favourites in comments below. The albums are listed in no particular, preferential order.
ROSALÍA: LUX
Grandiose, dramatic, passionate, with extraordinary soaring vocals, melodies and string arrangements, multi-lingual lyrics, the London Symphony Orchestra and with guests including Björk, the Catalan superstar’s fourth LP is a fabulous extravaganza, broadly themed around female saints through history, religion, sex and violence
Dove Ellis: Blizzard
An extraordinarily mature, passionate, poetic, and outstandingly powerful debut by the Manchester-based Galway-born singer-songwriter, whose soaring delivery has instant echoes of Jeff Buckley and lyrics that go above and beyond
Haley Heynderickx and Max García Conover: What of Our Nature
Beautiful, precise, poignant and poetic new folk numbers inspired by the life and music style of Woody Guthrie as the Portland, Oregon and New Yorker, now Portland, Maine-based singer-songwriters bring a delicious duet album, alternating and sharing songs covering a variety of forever topical social issues
Allie X: Happiness Is Going To Get You
A hugely entertaining, witty, droll, inventive, chamber and synth-pop fourth LP with a goth twist by the charismatic and theatrical Canadian artist Alexandra Hughes, who brings paradox and dark themes through sounds that include string quartet, harpsichord, classical and pure pop piano with killer lyrics
Celeste: Woman of Faces
The outstanding British singer returns, a long four years after her acclaimed debut Not Your Muse, with a classy, passionate set of nine, simmering, smoky, rippling dramatic, timeless numbers in which her vocal prowess is magnificently on show on songs playing on the theme of self and identity
anaiis: Devotion & The Black Divine
The third LP by the London-based French-Senegalese singer-songwriter of resonantly beautiful, dynamic, sensual soul, gospel, R&B and experimental and chamber pop, with themes of new motherhood, uncertainty, religion, self-love and acceptance
Sorry: COSPLAY
Consistently excellent singles before and heralding this brilliantly odd, clever third album by the London indie band all cement their reputation for a truly original sound filled with a variety of styles, captured in the experimental title of their third LP following 2022’s Anywhere But Here
Juana Molina: DOGA
A wondrously mesmeric, clever and quirky eighth album of experimental pop by the Argentinian singer, musician and comedian composed largely of analogue synths, originally from improvisations and recorded over several years in her home studio surrounded by her pets
Hannah Frances: Nested In Tangles
Following her acclaimed 2024 album Keeper of the Shepherd, the Vermont-based composer, vocalist, guitarist, and poet returns with a truly entrancing, beautiful wild garden of tumbling polyrhythmic experimental folk-jazz-prog, packed with complex stories and emotions grown through finger-picked guitar, wind, brass and string arrangements
Geese: Getting Killed
Dramatic and swaggeringly different - a crazed cauldron of anger, tenderness, the strangely eccentric, surreal and psychedelic, the Brooklyn band’s latest is an experimental odyssey of garage riffs to Ukrainian choir samples, frenzied drumming and prog riffing, with lullabies to explosive mayhem topped by wonderfully weird, wailing and yearning vocals of Cameron Winter
Cate Le Bon: Michelangelo Dying
The acclaimed Welsh artist returns with her distinctive vocal and highly influential, rich, warm, strange, otherworldly, experimental sound - woozy, dreamy, pedal-effect saxophones, guitars and more on bittersweet, superb album that evolved this way to to an all-consuming private heartbreak
Stealing Sheep: GLO (Girl Life Online)
Always bringing effervescently quirky, original and experimental work, this is an especially vibrant, fizzing, percussive, witty and superb LP – and surely the very best yet by the excellent Liverpool electro-pop trio of Emily Lansley, Luciana Mercer, and Rebecca Hawley
Gwenifer Raymond: Last Night I Heard The Dog Star Bark
A truly evocative and extraordinarily skilled instrumental album by the Wales-born steel string folk guitarist and banjoist whose finger-picking weaves intricate aural stories inspired by tales from occult folk horror, space, science fiction, and the tangled undergrowth of various landscapes
Baxter Dury - Allbarone
Alongside his usual droll, witty wordsmithery and distinctive dark, deep-voiced spoken delivery, the Londoner and son of Ian also brings a slightly different, more boisterous style of satirical and nihilistic misery with a collection of supremely catchy, danceable numbers in this ninth LP, produced Paul Epworth
Junior Brother: The End
Superbly strange, spectral, unearthly, raw, and striking, using traditional Irish instruments with twist, and a vocal delivery that’s idiosyncratic, passionate and primal, the County Kerry singer-songwriter Ronan Kealy’s new boundary-pushing alternative folk release distils the ancient and eerie folklore through a modern mangle
Big Thief: Double Infinity
Brooklyn’s Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek and James Krivchenia return with a beautiful sixth album, joined by guest musicians including Laraaji on zither and percussion, with nine poetic, profound and elevating folk-rock numbers, all with exquisite, bustling, interwoven elegance
David Byrne: Who Is The Sky?
With his first since 2018’s acclaimed American Utopia and its performance film, the ex-Talking Heads frontman’s new LP is an antidote to dark times - brilliantly joyous, optimistic, catchy, variously eccentric and profound, accompanied by Brooklyn’s Ghost Train Orchestra and guests including St Vincent, Paramore’s Hayley Williams and The Smile drummer Tom Skinner
CMAT: EURO-COUNTRY
“I waited for love with a cricket bat …” Packed with witty, offbeat and super-sharp, candidly personal lyrics, soaring, gorgeous vocals and melodies, all with an eccentric turns, the charismatic Dublin country-pop star and songwriter Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson brings home her third, and best LP yet
Water From Your Eyes: It's A Beautiful Place
Indie Brooklyn-based duo Nate Amos and Rachel Brown unleash a highly original fusion of experimental art-rock, pop, and shoegaze, mixing musical dynamism with the vocally deadpan abstract through thematic portal of otherworldly science fiction
Wolf Alice: The Clearing
Still riding high on awards and big sales, the London rock band’s fourth LP, following 2021’s Blue Weekend, explores a wider breadth of styles into more piano-based pop and 70s rock, with songs broadly about self-acceptance, wellbeing, contemplating identity and some stylistic echoes of Fleetwood Mac and ELO
Laufey: A Matter of Time
Witty, classy, and with oodles of charm, humour and her exquisitely pure delivery with sublime vocal control, the Icelandic-Chinese singer-songwriter Lín Bing Jónsdóttir turns back the clock with timeless, gorgeous brand new numbers that capture a bygone era of smooth sophisticated jazz, and sumptuously scored musicals all about matters of the heart
Cass McCombs: Interior Live Oak
Named after a tree species native to Northern California, the American singer-songwriter’s landmark 74-minute double LP, and his 11th solo studio release, is one of his finest, packed with tear-jerking, vivid ballads of gentle pace, profundity, beauty and catchy country-folk-rock grooves
Marissa Nadler: New Radiations
Exquisitely delicate, dark and beautiful as onyx or obsidian, a dream-like, haunting 10th studio LP by the Nashville singer-songwriter across gothic folk whispering soundscapes of meticulous guitar finger-picking, Hammond organ and synths, and lyrics variously inhabiting characters from an airborne Cessna, to a spaceship, a getaway car, and alternate dimensions
Ethel Cain: Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You
With the sort of title you might expect to find on a Lana del Rey album, the new album by Tallahassee’s Hayden Silas Anhedönia, now 27, under the Ethel Cain moniker, is a lengthy, slow, moody, meandering, cinematic released of dark Americana, ambient and southern gothic, capturing a full spectrum of the lingering, sometimes overwhelming, flooding insecure emotions about being in love with the titular fictional character
Ada Lea: When I Paint My Masterpiece
Sharing its title with a Bob Dylan song, this third album of 16 tracks of experimental folk and Americana by the Montreal singer-songwriter aka Alexandra Levy comes with a free-flowing acoustic brush of the imagination, a rich seam of art and literary reference, and lyrics of the dream-like psychedelic with notes of optimism and plainspoken wisdom
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