Best of 2025: Hallelujah! Hallelujah! For the Rest of Our Lives
- “All of the Worlds”–Emma Louise & Flume (DUMB)
- “Girl Feels Good”–FKA twigs (EUSEXUA)
- “Space Between Us”–Franc Moody (Chewing the Fat)
- “Rewild”–Lyra Pramuk (Hymnal)
- “Say My Name”–NOVELISTS (CODA)
- “Best Life Now”–Sachal Vasandani (Best Life Now)
- “man in the mirror”–MIKE (Showbiz!)
- “D’amor traficante”–Ralphie Choo (D’amor traficante single)
- “Piece 2 at 77bpm”–Stephen Vitiello, Brendan Canty, & Hahn Rowe (Second)
- “Provide Me Your Name”–Getdown Services (Primordial Slot Machine EP)
- “Window”–The Weather Station (Humanhood)
- “conversation with shiv (liquid k song)”–Caroline Rose (year of the slug)
- “The Spell”–Mammoth (The End)
- “Not in Surrender”–Obongjayar (Paradise Now)
- “The Most”–Tunde Adebimpe (Thee Black Boltz)
- “Pyramid of Health”–Viagra Boys (viagr aboys)
- “Walking Through Fire”–The Darkness (Dreams on Toast)
- “Hope You’re Laughing”–B. Carnes (True North)
- “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti”–ROSALÍA (LUX)
This mix is also available to stream on Mixcloud, Spotify, and Apple Music. (Please note, however, that the Caroline Rose song “conversation with shiv [liquid k song]” will only be featured in the Mixcloud file. As a Bandcamp exclusive, it is not available for streaming on Spotify or Apple Music.)
1. “All of the Worlds”–Emma Louise & Flume
There’s really nothing significant or sentimental about this one, tbh!! I’m just kicking things off with ~A VIBE~. I love all the weird effects on this one–the way the sound pulses in time with the beat and the borderline annoying tones at the end that keep going up in pitch til they’re ready to make your ears bleed.
2. “Girl Feels Good”–FKA twigs
This is the best Madonna song I’ve heard in a long, long time.
3. “Space Between Us”–Franc Moody
Brian was on a dance music kick earlier this year, so he actually brought Franc Moody’s incredible album Chewing the Fat to my attention. To me, they’re like the perfect overlap between LCD Soundsystem and Junior Boys, while also somehow being way less self-consciously arty than either. The whole album stayed on repeat a lot this spring.
4. “Rewild”–Lyra Pramuk
“Rewild” is the opening track on Pramuk’s album Hymnal, and once those deep bass string parts kick in, I was HOOKED. It’s absolutely one of my favorite albums of the year. I took a long walk through Rogers Park listening to it on a foggy early summer evening, and the ecstatic quality of the music made me feel deeply connected to the flow of life all around me.
5. “Say My Name”–NOVELISTS
The performances from every member of the band on this track are SO incredible and incredibly exuberant that it’s easy not to realize how bleak the lyrics really are. The vocal is obviously instantly captivating (check out this acoustic performance to hear Camille Contreras’s voice in a more stripped-down context), and Florestan Durand’s guitar solo is one of the finest examples I can think of where a player has managed to take Robert Fripp’s influence and legacy and actually move it forward for the current generation. (Oh, and by the way, they’re friggin’ French!!)
6. “Best Life Now”–Sachal Vasandani
Speaking of taking a sound and refreshing it for a new era, I just love the Bill Withers vibe Sachal Vasandani is cultivating here. Another dark song lyrically that’s offset by the plushness of the melody and arrangement.
7. “man in the mirror”–MIKE
“I ain’t rushing for a thing, I’m a third gearer.”
8. “D’amor traficante”–Ralphie Choo
The sonic journey this short track traverses is incredible. For me, though, it’s all leading up to the point where the deep bass comes in kind of out of nowhere at 2:18.
9. “Piece 2 at 77bpm”–Stephen Vitiello, Brendan Canty, & Hahn Rowe
I know, I know, Brendan Canty was the drummer for Fugazi. And yes, Brian often talks in hushed and worshipful tones about how revelatory it was to see him behind the kit with Bob Mould in like 2005/2006. But personally, I will love him forever for producing Ted Leo’s album The Tyranny of Distance. So anyway, when Bandcamp’s algorithm intuited that I might be interested in hearing Vitiello, Canty, and Rowe’s album Second when it came out earlier this summer, I was an incredibly easy sell on it. Apple Music’s stats tell me “Piece 2 at 77bpm” is the individual track I’ve listened to most in 2025.
10. “Provide Me Your Name”–Getdown Services
What’s not to love here? I’m obsessed with the fact that the premise is like a basic acting exercise where both people are pursuing the truth of their own worldview without giving an inch to the other character. I love the accents, the oddball turns of phrase (“I’m eating a sandwich!” “You’re being really weird.” “I don’t think you do!” “Sharp??”), and the fact that this was definitely not what I was expecting to hear at the beginning of this EP.
11. “Window”–The Weather Station
I wish I could remember how I stumbled upon Richard Williams’s blog The Blue Moment. It feels like a relic from a very different iteration of the web, when folks weren’t locking their content down behind subscription models and other paywalls to attempt to monetize their writing, when expertise and enthusiasm and niche interests could be shared freely and regularly. Anyhow, it’s thanks to his glowing review of The Weather Station’s mid-March concert in London that the band showed up on my radar at all. Given that front person Tamara Lindeman is Canadian, it’s easy to make both Joni Mitchell and Sarah McLachlan comparisons, but she more than earns her place in the Venn diagram overlap between those two vocal powerhouses. Her delivery is heartfelt but unfussy, her tone is clear and pure without being precious, and she’s assembled an absolutely incredible band to fill out the rest of her sonic world. (Sax player Karen Ng’s own recent album Backwards Blue is likewise recommended for its audacious and ambitious abstraction.)
12. “conversation with shiv (liquid k song)”–Caroline Rose
Caroline Rose’s album year of the slug sort of picked up for me where Liz Lawrence’s Peanuts left off and was made all the more remarkable for Rose’s refusal to have it up on Apple Music or Spotify at all. (As mentioned above, the digital version is exclusive to Bandcamp.) It’s another strong contender for my favorite album of the year. The dirtbag details in their exquisitely rendered story songs never get old and are perhaps most vividly (hilariously, unexpectedly, painfully) on display in this song. The punchline at the end is a killer.
13. “The Spell”–Mammoth
The End, the album this song comes from, completely knocks me out for so many reasons. But the big one that always makes me shake my head in wonder is that, in this era when everyone’s attention spans are totally fried, the overall runtime actually feels too short. I really want to believe that Wolfgang, in all his brilliance, sequenced it this way intentionally. He could have easily padded the track listing out with one more song but somehow knew that by keeping it lean and mean (only 39 minutes!), the album’s relative brevity would actually invite the listener to loop back to the first song and dig back into the full thing again. Which is exactly what I find myself doing every time I get to the end of The End, like, “Wait, that’s it? But I wasn’t ready to be done listening to it yet!” Absolutely brilliant.
Wolf is working at the top of his game here, it probably goes without saying. We finally got a chance to see Mammoth play live at the House of Blues here in Chicago on the night before Thanksgiving. At a certain point, the thought crossed my mind: This is the smallest venue we will ever see him perform in. He’s only going to get more stratospherically successful from here on out, and he 100 percent deserves it.
14. “Not in Surrender”–Obongjayar
If you’re like me and sort of still haven’t gotten over that string of Terence Trent D’Arby’s huge hits from 1987, I invite you to enjoy Obongjayar’s album Paradise Now. It’s got an absurdly wide-ranging but masterfully assured mix of sounds and styles. I easily could have included “Holy Mountain” or “Instant Animal” on this playlist, though I think it was the ferocious ecstasy of his and his band’s performance of “Not in Surrender” on Later…with Jools Holland that finally sealed the decision for me.
15. “The Most”–Tunde Adebimpe
Thee Black Boltz was another one of my big-time fave albums of this year. Super engaging and incredibly easy to listen to straight through. Of all the tunes on the album that I could have chosen to include on this year’s mix (“Ate the Moon”! “Somebody New”! “Streetlight Nuevo”!), I feel like it’s the car crash sound effect in the middle of this one that pushed it over the top for me.
16. “Pyramid of Health”–Viagra Boys
When I put Viagra Boys’ “Sports” and “Best in Show” on my best-of mix for 2019, there’s really no way I could have foreseen that not only I would still be paying attention to them six years later but that I also would come to consider them some of our most astute satirists of contemporary trash culture. I am consistently delighted by their intelligence, their humor, and their willingness to take a swing at the truly stupid state of the world we’re all currently inhabiting while also never implying that they’re somehow above any of it. “Pyramid of Health” hit my funny bone extra hard this year, though, after my having been adjacent to the world of psychedelics for a bit and having seen firsthand so much fever-pitch certainty that we’re all only a few trips away from global peace and harmony.
17. “Walking Through Fire”–The Darkness
And now we come to the tear-jerker portion of the mix. And yes, that’s emphatically including this goofy AC/DC-by-way-of-Queen rocker. I just love the profound earnestness popping through the moments of self-deprecation on this one. The big “I can’t help falling in love with rock and roll!” line in the chorus really does capture what it feels like to maintain a commitment to playing in a band once you’re well past the age when anyone finds it cute or charming. The life is expensive and draining and thankless and utterly lacking in either glamor or dignity–yet it’s impossible not to love once it’s in your blood.
18. “Hope You’re Laughing”–B. Carnes
Brian had to give a paper at a small academic conference in Springfield, Illinois, earlier this summer, so I tagged along with him for a quick overnight trip. Once the academic portion of the first day was complete, we zoomed off campus to try to get to Dumb Records before they closed. We figured that, in the spirit of adventure, as long as we got ourselves to the cool little indie record shop, there would most likely be plenty of other fun stuff to do in the vicinity. Well, the joke was on us because the area was pretty much a ghost town by the time we got there. But the record store itself (including their big, bright green elephant mascot out front) was fantastic.
Brian has recently been reassembling his cassette collection, so we made sure to take a close look through their racks of tapes while we were there. And as it happens, when I drifted over to the section of the store featuring new releases by local artists, I was drawn straight to B. Carnes’s True North, since it was the only one available on tape. We took a chance on it, and I’m so glad we did. The whole short album is wonderful, and this song in particular immediately grabbed us with its stunning portrait of the contours of grief.
19. “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti”–ROSALÍA
The less said about this one the better, I think. Just listen, and be moved.
Other favorite songs and albums from 2025
Bartees Strange’s Horror; Chance the Rapper’s “Burn Ya Block” and “Letters”; Destroyer’s “Sun Meet Snow”; Traxman’s “Kill Da DJ”; TOKiMONSTA & Cakes de Killa’s “Switch It”; Spoon’s “Chateau Blues”; Nine Inch Nails’s “As Alive as You Need Me to Be”; Indigo De Souza’s “Heartthrob”; Ami Taf Ra’s The Prophet and the Madman; Hamilton Leithauser’s This Side of the Island; Clipse’s “Chains & Whips”; The Divine Comedy’s “Can’t Let Go”; Nala Sinephro’s Endlessness; Scotty McCreery’s “Bottle Rockets”; Armand Hammer & The Alchemist’s Mercy; Yungblud’s cover of “Changes” for the big Black Sabbath farewell concert; and of course, Lily Allen’s West End Girl.
BONUS TRACK!
Click here to stream a mix of Brian’s favorite songs via Apple Music.
Queen of Peaches 