Our Favorite Albums, 2025: Individual Contributor Lists & Reflections, Part 1

Tone Glow writers reflect on 2025 through albums, songs, and more

Dec 31, 2025

Edited still from *WINDWARD* (Sharon Lockhart, 2025)

Each of our writers was asked to submit a list of their 10 favorite albums from this year. They also had the option to list their 10 favorite songs and to create another list of any 10 things of their choosing. Below, find reflections and individual lists from our contributors, listed in alphabetical order by last name.

Our Favorite Albums, 2025

Individual Lists & Reflections, Part 2

Vanessa Ague

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’m horrible at figuring out directions. I’m the person twirling around in aimless circles on street corners. I can barely tell left from right; before I had a half-sleeve tattoo on one of my arms it was pretty much impossible. Nevertheless, I’m inside the Utrecht Centraal train station at six in the morning and I know exactly where I’m going. I’ve never been to The Netherlands, let alone another continent by myself for more than a day or two. But look! I’ve read the website ten times and I know it all.

I pace down the hall as the sun starts to rise, just peeking over the horizon, a shot of glistening pink shimmering through a glass prism. I hear my luggage wheels spin next to me, jolting as they glide over every subtle crack on the floor. I purchase a ticket with some spare Euros I have in my wallet, print it out, and put it in my pocket for safe-keeping, a token I’ll paste into a scrapbook when I want to relive the time I got on the right train in Utrecht all by myself. I start walking again. I spot Platform Eight. I gingerly step onto the escalator and see a train pulling into the station, a tall blue and yellow vehicle with two floors full of commuters on their way to work on Monday morning. I board and watch the city lights disappear into endless fields of cows and trenches dug for irrigation. I slowly, painfully realize I have ended up in a rural part of the country that is miles away from the Amsterdam airport. The train stops and I rush off, revealing myself to be a dumb American to the lovely train conductor. She tells me where to go and wishes me luck. I run to another platform and hop on some other magical train that gets me back to Utrecht Centraal in 18 minutes, where I get another chance to do it right. I take it.

That about sums up my 2025. This year, I tried to let go of perfectionism, untangling myself from my obsessive fear of making an irreversible mistake. In turn, I allowed myself to live, even if that means getting on the wrong train and adding an extra few hours to the flight home. Hey, I got to see more of the world!

Top 10 Albums of 2025

Amina Claudine Myers - Solace of the Mind (Red Hook)
Los Thuthanaka - Los Thuthanaka (self-released)
Titanic - Hagen (Unheard Of Hope)
Water Damage - Instruments (12XU)
Ellen Arkbro - Nightclouds (Blank Forms)
Raven Chacon - Voiceless Mass (New World)
Catherine Lamb x Ghost Ensemble - interius/exterius (Greyfade)
Orcutt/Shelley/Miller - Orcutt/Shelley/Miller (Silver Current)
Ellen Fullman & The Living Earth Show - Elemental View (Room40)
Rafael Toral - Traveling Light (Drag City)

11 Shows I Loved This Year (by date)

1/15: Lee Ranaldo & Leila Bordreuil / Holland Andrews & Yuniya Edi Kwon / Ryan Sawyer Shaker Ensemble at Union Pool
1/31: Ellen Fullman & Theresa Wong at Roulette
2/22: Bakudi Scream / Fatboi Sharif / Medium. / Centennial Gardens at Trans-Pecos
3/25: أحمد [Ahmed] US Debut at Roulette
4/30: Sarah Hennies & Tristan Kasten-Krause at ISSUE Project Room
5/16: DJ E country set at Elsewhere Hall
6/18: Zosha Warpeha & Henry Birdsey at ISSUE Project Room
8/3: Loren Connors & Lee Ranaldo / Sam Weinberg Trio / Bill Nace & Samara Lubelski at Pianos
11/9: Earth at LPR
12/3: William Winant / Nava Dunkelman / Bill Nace at The Stone
12/9: Los Thuthanaka at Xanadu

H.D. Angel

This year, at the age of 22, I worked on unlearning a pernicious belief I’ve held, on some level, for my entire life: the idea that other people make up the “real world”, with real preoccupations, relationships and beliefs, while my own concerns are inauthentic, frivolous, deluded, or otherwise “not real”. I have a long way to go, and it’s a confusing, vertiginous process, closer to swimming out of a whirlpool than riding through a series of peaks and valleys. But I feel more present in society, more like a self-contained agent in my day-to-day life, and nearer to a coherent sense of personhood than I ever have before.

This puts me in an ambivalent position as I write my fourth consecutive end-of-year reflection for Tone Glow. I’m more confident than ever in assenting to the long-term pessimism about recorded music that often populates these roundups—it’s all over, none of this matters, etc.—while also more aware than ever of how myopic my earlier participation in that despair could often be. I started writing publicly online in high school, so I was commiserating with old, jaded folks about the collapse of late-capitalist cultural production before I ever had the chance to get my hands dirty with it independently, or to have many of the life experiences that give it shape and function.

I had an eclectic musical upbringing, but I originally decided to get “into music” as a dedicated hobby to close that perceived gap between myself and the real world. I cared about different scenes, different audiences, and their historical development. I wanted to know what other people liked and their motivations for liking it, since I didn’t feel like I had much of a worldview of my own. Now, through writing, college radio, meeting online friends IRL, and my general social world, my own scrapped-together perspective on music feels newly embodied and consequential. These days, other people sometimes look to me for the kind of authority, direction and epistemic validation that I used to seek in others—and, now on the other end of that dynamic, I realize how much I was underestimating my own perspective before.

It’s humbling, and frequently uncomfortable, to discover latent responsibilities to myself and those around me that emerge as I try to wallow less in self-doubt. It’s especially frustrating to finally get out of my own self-absorbed head and find that my world is still myopic and circumscribed by larger forces in so many ways, that my earlier cynicism wasn’t exactly misplaced. But living in reality is always better than the alternative. When I rise to the occasion, it’s rewarding to be able to make other people feel like they’re a part of something, to allow them participation in shared experience. (And it makes music way more fulfilling, too – I’ve had more fun exploring both new and old releases this year than in the past few.)

I want to do more of this work, around music and in general, in the coming year. Apropos of this, I’d like to urgently redouble my organizing commitments, and be careful to distinguish spaces that are just ‘scenes’ or ‘cliques’ from ones with a more collective direction. I’m still not sure how to balance my love of popular music and the culture industry, and their exploitative scaffolding of the existing world, with striving for the kind of world I want to see; the inert, hand-wringing posture that many people in artistic spaces adopt, lamenting how tainted everything is without actually changing any of their behavior, isn’t going to cut it. But, for better or for worse, I’m starting from somewhere.

10 Albums

AKAI SOLO - No Control, No Glory (self-released)
Eliana Glass - E (Shelter Press)
Chuquimamani-Condori - Edits (self-released)
Various Artists - The Sound of Love International 007: Moxie (Love International)
Molasses - Ring of Fire (self-released)
Barker - Stochastic Drift (Smalltown Supersound)
Lelo - New Detroit (10K Projects)
Yetsuby - 4EVA (Pink Oyster)
Weirs - Diamond Grove (Dear Life)
quinn - lowlife (self-released)

10 Songs

Tems - “Big Daddy” (RCA)
svn4vr - “sick day” (icsu)
Mereba - “Phone Me” (Secretly Canadian)
Black Eyes - “Burn” (Dischord)
Lil Tony Official - “Let’s Get Into It” (UMG)
Lil M.U. - “Top of Cars” (Maya Unique Productions)
Tweet - “Toot Toot” (SoNo Recording Group)
seiji oda & Young Bari - “MOBBY MIYAZAKI” (uknowme!)
Monaleo - “We On Dat” (Stomp Down)
Avalon Emerson & Priori - “You’re My World” (Dead Oceans)

15 Old Albums

Lalah Hathaway - Self Portrait (Concord, 2008)
Rachelle Ferrell - individuality (can I be me?) (Capitol, 2000)
Teena Marie - Wild and Peaceful (Motown, 1979)
Karizma - Collection 1999-2011 (R2, 2011)
John Martyn - Solid Air (Island, 1973)
Leroy Jenkins’ Sting - Urban Blues (Black Saint, 1984)
Newcleus - Jam on Revenge (Jam-On, 1984/2025 Reissue)
Andreas Vollenweider - Caverna magica (...Under the Tree - In the Cave...) (CBS, 1983)
Djavan - Djavan (CBS, 1989)
Syzygys - Complete Studio Recordings (Tzadik, 2003)
People like Us and Wobbly - Music for the Fire (Illegal Art, 2010)
Toto Bissainthe avec Marie-Claude Benoît et Mariann Mathéus - chante Haiti (Arion, 1989)
Sir E.U. x Dolo Percussion - 11-9-19 (self-released, 2020)
Kilo Ali - Organized Bass (1997, Interscope)
Luomo - Vocalcity (Force Tracks, 2000)

María Barrios

Favorite Albums of 2025

Addison Rae - Addison (Columbia)
Bad Bunny - DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (Rimas Entertainment)
Black Eyes - Hostile Design (Dischord)
Cameron Winter - Heavy Metal (Partisan / Play It Again Sam)
Debit - Desaceleradas (Modern Love)
Ichiko Aoba - Luminescent Creatures (Hermine / Psychic Hotline)
Los Thuthanaka - Los Thuthanaka (self-released)
Mohinder Kaur Bhamra - Punjabi Disco (Naya Beat)
Nick León - A Tropical Entropy (TraTraTrax)
Ninajirachi - I Love My Computer (NLV Records)

Favorite Songs of 2025

Smerz - “You got time and I got money” (Escho)

One Show in 2025

Tone Glow Presents “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” & Aaron Dilloway at Anthology Film Archives in New York. I know it might be gauche to list a show I helped organize, but… for this one I’m going to make an exception

Billdifferen

Oof man, what a weird year this has been. 2025 has probably been the first year in a long while where I was completely tapped out of music for an extended period of time. It felt like being sent away to this shitty summer camp where I couldn’t leave and only make macaroni necklaces (fix myself and go through weird life transitional things). Coming back to it all felt like learning a new skill or something all over again; Some of us music listeners are fucking maniacs and I mean that in the nicest way possible. Just so much passion is required to do this shit, and I’m so grateful to be surrounded by the folks at Tone Glow to keep that drive going. Hoping 2026 is much better for us all.