Our Favorite Albums, 2025

Our favorite albums of the year, as voted on by Tone Glow's writers

Edited still from WINDWARD (Sharon Lockhart, 2025)

“Tone Glow is officially over,” I emailed all our writers this past May. “I feel like we kinda already all knew this,” someone replied. I didn’t feel the need to make a post about it on Substack because Tone Glow would keep running in some capacity: interviews, film programming, year end lists. The decision was a long belated one, as my capacity for running the writers panel (i.e. finding promos, disseminating files, editing blurbs, formatting posts) essentially vanished. Really, it’s a miracle those even ran as long as they did post-lockdown given each one took several hours to complete. This, on top of film programming and doing interviews—which take anywhere from 4 to 12 hours to conduct, transcribe, edit, and format—began to eat into all my free time.

It’s funny, though, that this announcement came approximately five minutes after talking with one of our former writers—a woman in her early 20s who had a stint in music writing, interviewed her favorite band for Tone Glow, and has now pivoted to theater, joining the Dramatists Guild in the process (she’s already staged her first show). This sort of career change was true for another former Tone Glow writer who became a professional video game critic. I was inspired by the commitment to a new passion, which I’d felt with my own film programming, and needed to figure out what Tone Glow would look like moving forward.

It’s fair to say that it probably looks the same for a lot of our readers, even if there are no more writers panels (we did one at the beginning of the year). Still, as difficult as it was to bring certain things to an end, it was true that I also felt my “purpose” for Tone Glow’s writers had run its course—many now write for other publications, two have written books, others stopped writing entirely, some have found other passions. I felt emotional in the same way that I do at the end of every school year. The nice thing is that these are all my friends, and we can still do a year end list; wherever we are in life, I can still hound them to send me some favorite albums.

So dramatic introductory text aside, here are our favorite albums of the year. 34 of us contributed this time around, and we managed to have 34 overlapping albums. On two separate posts, you’ll also see individual lists and reflections. It feels very much like our list, as do all our reflections. See you in the new year, whatever that may look like. —Joshua Minsoo Kim

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Tone Glow’s Favorite Albums of 2025

The below list is Tone Glow’s Favorite Albums of 2025 as determined by our contributors’ individual lists. Every album below received at least 2 votes.

Received Twelve Votes

• Los Thuthanaka - Los Thuthanaka (self-released)

Received Six Votes

• Eliana Glass - E (Shelter Press)

Received Five Votes

• Ichiko Aoba - Luminescent Creatures (Hermine / Psychic Hotline)

• Vanessa Rossetto - Pictures of the Warm South (Erstwhile)

Received Four Votes

• Barker - Stochastic Drift (Smalltown Supersound)

• Djrum - Under Tangled Silence (Houndstooth)

Received Three Votes

• Bad Bunny - DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (Rimas Entertainment)

• Chuck Roth - watergh0st songs (Palilalia)

• Chuquimamani-Condori - Edits (self-released)

• Dijon - Baby (R&R / Warner)

• Earl Sweatshirt - Live Laugh Love (Tan Cressida / Warner)

• ju sei - 申 (Mousu) (Basic Function)

• Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force - Khadim (Ndagga)

• Molasses - Ring of Fire (self-released)

• Oklou - choke enough (True Panther)

• Titanic - HAGEN (Unheard of Hope)

Received Two Votes

• 2hollis - star (Interscope)

• Amina Claudine Myers - Solace of the Mind (Red Hook)

• billy woods - GOLLIWOG (Backwoodz Studioz)

• caroline - caroline 2 (Rough Trade)

• Carrier - Rhythm Immortal (Modern Love)

• DJ Elmoe - Battle Zone (Planet Mu)

• Éliane Radigue - Asymptote Versatile (1963-64) (Amgen)

• Ellen Arkbro - Nightclouds (Blank Forms)

• Ellen Fullman & The Living Earth Show - Elemental View (Room40)

• Erika de Casier - Lifetime (Independent Jeep Music)

• Geese - Getting Killed (Partisan / Play It Again Sam)

• LanPage - ten pages (self-released)

• Lelo - New Detroit (10K Projects)

• Ninajirachi – I Love My Computer (NLV)

• Peterparker69 - yo, (self-released)

• Rafael Toral - Traveling Light (Drag City)

• Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band - New Threats from the Soul (Sophomore Lounge / Tough Love)

• Weirs - Diamond Grove (Dear Life)

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Read our Individual Lists & Reflections

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