Guest Best of, music, Pop Music, Uncategorized

Peace in the Madness: The Openhearted Music of Summer 2025

The assumption that we are collectively going through an ordeal in dystopian, difficult, or downright ugly times has penetrated everyday discourse. “We’re witnessing a time of transition, tension, and fear,” began a local yoga studio’s recent promotional email, which then encouraged readers, “Even in times like these, we can still choose how we meet the moment”–presumably by attempting to breathe mindfully while contorting one’s limbs.

I chose back in June to make sure I remained present and engaged with this inglorious moment by listening exclusively to newly released music. I did this until late August. The experience was not just pleasurable, but also surprisingly moving and reassuring. Significantly, much summer 2025 music does not, for the most part, directly comment on the dismal world at large; nor do many artists indulge in summertime escapism. Instead, on these recent releases, many musicians reach out to probe their intimate relationships or contemplate their relation to the natural world; others turn inward to engage in creative self-reflection and self-reinvention. Most of these artists do not shy away from earnestness, self-revelation, and vulnerability at a time when  cynicism or retreat would be easy defaults.

What follows is a ranking of forty summer albums, with analysis of the best releases and interspersed comments on prevalent trends. The majority–twenty-six of forty–of records listed are good to excellent to sublime.[1] Despite the length of the list, it in no way represents an exhaustive evaluation of summer releases, and it does not cover albums released before June 6 or after August 29. Albums are ranked according to their placement in four tiers–the best, runners-up, pretty good, and disappointing/overrated.

Tier 1: The best of summer baker’s dozen, in alphabetical order:

  1. Allo Darlin, Bright Nights
  2. Black Honey, Soak
  3. Forth Wanderers, The Longer This Goes On
  4. Frankie Cosmos, Different Talking
  5. Hotline TNT, Raspberry Moon
  6. Matthew Herbert and Momoko Gill, Clay
  7. Ada Lea, when I paint my masterpiece
  8. Lord Huron, The Cosmic Selector, Vol. 1
  9. Lorde, Virgin
  10. No Joy, Bugland
  11. Addison Rae, Addison
  12. Water From Your Eyes, It’s a Beautiful Place
  13. Wet Leg, Moisturizer

Tier 2: Runners-up baker’s dozen, alphabetical:

  1. Barry Can’t Swim, Loner
  2. The Beths, Straight Line was a Lie
  3. CMAT, Euro-Country
  4. Indigo de Souza, Precipice
  5. Dijon, Baby
  6. Greg Freeman, Burnover
  7. HAIM, I Quit
  8. The Hives, The Hives Forever
  9. Billie Marten, Dog Eared
  10. Nourished by Time, The Passionate Ones
  11. Laura Stevenson, Late Great
  12. Superchunk, Songs in the Key of Yikes
  13. Winter, Adult Romantix

Tier 3: Pointless to rate: Pretty good albums that will appeal to fans of the artist/style but probably not win over many others:

  1. Alex G., Headlights
  2. Deftones, private music
  3. Laura Jane Grace, Adventure Club
  4. Conan Gray, Wishbone
  5. Kesha, Period
  6. Rene Rapp, Bite Me
  7. Royel Otis, Hickey
  8. Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts, Talkin’ to the Trees

Category 4: Disappointing and overrated. Why listen to x when you can listen to y, a superior version of x?

  1. x=Madonna, Veronica Electronica : y=Madonna, Ray of Light
  2. Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band, New Threats from the Soul  : Joe Ely, Silver Jews
  3. Ethel Cain, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You : Lana Del Rey
  4. Wisp, If Not Winter : Hotline TNT (see above)
  5. Marissa Nadler, New Radiations : Mazzy Star, Neko Case
  6. Wolf Alice, The Clearing : Black Honey (see above)

 The first release on the not-recommended list, Madonna’s Veronica Electronica, comprises dark, ominous remixes of songs from the singer’s 1998 milestone album Ray of Light. Music for trancing, not dancing, the record probably should have been titled The Maculate Collection. While it may be appropriate to this historical moment that the album updates the ardent, openhearted sounds of Ray of Light by turning the record into a series of electronic dirges, it’s a dull, depressing listening experience, raising the question: If Veronica Electronica does not edify in summer 2025, what does?

One of the answers came in June from later-generation superstar Lorde. The New Zealander, who now resides in New York City, released her fourth album, Virgin, an exercise in self-reinvention, an homage to her mother, and a cathartic kiss-off to sub-optimal relationships. Less cluttered than the production on the singer’s highly-regarded Melodrama, Virgin‘s more economical sound creates space for Lorde’s vocals, which she executes with a keen sense of drama.

Lorde also displays a knack for expressing refreshing countercultural ideas onVirgin and its collateral material.On the album opener, “Hammer,” she refers to the dreaded 2025 zeitgeist as “the madness”; then, in one of the summer’s touchstone quotes, she suggests that the times demand humility and equanimity: “I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers, there’s peace in the madness over our heads, let it carry me on.”

Even the music videos released with Virgin contain timely, upbeat, warm-weather antidotes to quiet desperation or outrage. The R-rated video for “Hammer” depicts Nature Girl Lorde running through a field, dipping her head in a lake off a dock, and dancing at a party in a barn. In the “What Was That” video, City Girl Lorde makes her way through Manhattan on foot and bicycle to Washington Square, where she is greeted by a throng. New York police threatened to shut down the event due to dubious crowd-control issues. The singer and her fans naturally took this as an opportunity to thumb their noses at authority, surely a worthwhile gesture in the summer of 2025. 

While Lorde’s fourth record represents a mid-career high point for the Kiwi singer at the ripe old age of 28, Addison is the captivating album by 24-year-old Addison Rae, who first gained viral fame gyrating in Tik Tok videos. Addison is an outlier among the top thirteen; it is Rae’s full-length debut, and her self-presentation is less a frank personal reflection than a survey of curated influencer personas.

Addison has garnered plenty of “Never in a million years would I have believed I would be playlisting the music of a Tik Tok influencer, yet here I am” reviews. (Haters have hated it, too, of course.) Rae and her co-producers have alchemized a blockbuster by combining arresting hooks with the 1990s production styles of dance-pop stars such as Janet Jackson and the trip-hop sound of artists like Tricky and Massive Attack, resulting in an instant “trip-pop” classic. In a breathy, reedy voice, which contrasts nicely with the cavernous production, Rae sings and coos about globetrotting, riches, the border between love and lust, and other topics of interest to your average debutante.

Addison stands as the sole debut[2] among top releases, with most others from artists who have several previous albums. Thus, with no pre-planning, this exercise has become in part a tribute to the mid-career musician, and, by extension, has led to a comforting realization that, even in difficult times, veteran artists are finding ways to further their music and perfect their sound.

Formed in 2009, Montreal’s No Joy has evolved into the solo project of band visionary Jasmine White-Glutz. Bugland is a concept album about the value of connecting to all parts of nature, whether beautiful or…bugly. The record’s minimalist lyrics are lucid and interesting, but the real attraction is the music. White-Glutz and Canadian producer-musician Fire-Toolz (Angel Marcoid) collaborated to produce a scintillating hybrid of rock, shoegaze, and nu metal, with White-Glutz’s searching vocals meshing tunefully with the instrumentation. Bugland features the most fully realized, excitingly unique sound of any album on this list.

when i paint my masterpiece is the third full-length album by another Montreal artist, indie folk-rock singer Ada Lea (stage name for Alexandra Levy). Because she is an accomplished painter, Levy’s promotional material describes her as a “renaissance woman.” If there were any doubts about this, she put them to rest by taking a six-month crash course in figure skating and then performing a beautiful on-ice routine for the video accompanying “something in the wind.” The new album’s title refers to Lea’s visual art, and it pays homage to the song of the same name by Bob Dylan, who is also the subject of the witty, deadpan “Bob Dylan’s 115th Haircut,” which is built around the line “Bob Dylan could not have written this song, not even if he wanted to, not even just for fun.” An impressively varied collection of songs, when i paint my masterpiece also contains more serious reflections about love, loss, and finding meaning in quotidian events.

 The eight bands (and to think that some have claimed the era of bands is over)in the top 13 are all seasoned groups that have learned to skillfully inhabit their own sound. This is true even in the cases where the ensembles had not played together or released albums for years. Bright Nights, Australian-British band Allo Darlin’’s fourth album and first in eleven years, brims with heartfelt songs for loved ones. The quartet enhances its delicate indie pop with undulating, dramatic melodies that recall traditional British folk music. Highlights include “Northern Waters,” which can be read as an homage to Bjork’s 1996 classic “Hyperballad.” The song tells of a pregnant woman, Elisa, who leaves her house to go for a swim at 2 am. As in “Hyperballad,” the woman steps away while her family is sleeping as a way of finding space to contemplate her love for them. Singer Elizabeth Morris concludes the song with some of summer 2025’s sweetest declarations:

Back in the warm house she once again closes the door

Her love is still dreaming her eldest child sleeps like a stone

I’ll sail these cold northern waters just to bring you home

Play your mandolin for me, the sweetness of music is minе

And I will love you til the end of time

On first listen, Frankie Cosmos’s sixth album, Different Talking, may feel slight. Eventually, however, leader Greta Kline’s gentle, hypnotic melodies and deliberate intonation and the band’s precise playing insinuate themselves firmly in the brain. Although all songs clock in between one and a half and three minutes, several are powerfully heartrending. The album opener, “Pressed Flower,” for example, conveys, in less than two minutes, the ambivalence of being in a relationship with excessive intimacy. “You pressed into me like a flower amongst words, done growing and willing to be preserved,” the narrator sings, bemoaning the ex’s stagnation. But then she confesses, “I like the way the tears fill up your eyes,” acknowledging her part in the entanglement.

Three albums earn top-thirteen status with brash, confident rock that echoes classic grunge and noise bands such as Hole, Nirvana, and Husker Du, filtered through the newer groups’ considerable ability to fashion their own ambience. Among the most remarkable is The Longer this Goes On, Forth Wanderers’ first record since 2018. The New Jersey band broke up shortly after that album’s release, due largely to singer/lyricist Ava Trilling’s performance anxiety. Three years later, Trilling, who had quit music and opened a wine bar in Brooklyn, and group co-founder Ben Guterl reunited and began writing songs. The Longer This Goes On is actually one of the shortest albums reviewed, but excellent from start to finish. “Seven Months” is a rollicking single, the video for which creatively and humorously examines performance anxiety (and by suggestion the objectification of woman performers) by at first showing a stack of televisions showing different parts of Trilling’s body from head-to-toe. By the end of the video, Trilling the whole person has taken the stage, where she is showered with bras, underwear, and boas thrown by the audience. On the rest of The Longer This Goes On, the reunited band excels on both rave-ups and slow grinders. The primary difference-maker, however, is Trilling’s singing, which somehow reconciles bored-teen detachment with expressiveness. Even after years away from music, she has re-established herself as one of indie rock’s most gripping vocalists.

British quartet Black Honey’s Soak is similar to the Forth Wanderers record in its Hole/Garbage-influenced sound, though its emphasis on soaring melodies is straight out of Britpop. Vocalist Izzy Baxter Phillips sounds a bit like a cross between Garbage’s Shirley Manson and Ellie Rowsell of Wolf Alice. One commenter on Reddit suggested Soak is a great alternative for those disappointed by the new Wolf Alice record, The Clearing, and I have to agree. If Black Honey’s fourth album hits like it deserves to, fans will be singing along with its tracks at Glastonbury for years to come.

Perhaps the greatest strength of the third vigorously-rocking release in the top thirteen, Hotline TNT’s Raspberry Moon, a portfolio of diverse songs about women in songwriter Will Anderson’s life, is that it demonstrates how well a live feel can be reproduced in the studio. The New York City band borrows from classic shoegaze, yet has developed its own lush, melodic approach to the genre, less ethereal than My Bloody Valentine, more concise than Slowdive, and warmer than The Jesus and Mary Chain. The album’s densely layered guitars and Anderson’s appealing, intimate voice create a stirring wall of sound that could be mistaken for either a large-venue live performance or an intimate garage rehearsal.

Like the Frankie Cosmos release, LA-based Lord Huron’s The Cosmic Selector, Vol. 1 may underwhelm at first, with its surfeit of woe-is-me songs and a potentially gimmicky spoken-word cameo by Hollywood star Kristen Stewart. Yet leader Ben Schneider’s excellent vocals carry the album, and the record features evocative, atmospheric production of the band’s sound, a mixture of Beach House, the Shins, and Gram Parsons. Lord Huron’s fifth release eventually sinks in as a concept album about alienation, loss, and the urge to escape to the margins of society. It focuses on the experiences of those deemed “losers” by the titular “cosmic selector.” In this context, the downbeat lyrics make sense, and the track featuring Stewart, “Who Laughs Last,” emerges as the album’s centerpiece.

Wet Leg’s viral 2021 “Chaise Lounge” video, in which singers Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers cheekily embody the song’s deadpan, goofy eroticism while galavanting near their home on England’s Isle of Wight, may have created the impression that Wet Leg was a duo, and possibly a novelty act breaking through as a one-hit wonder. Two full-length albums later, it is clear Wet Leg is a band, and an irresistible one at that. On the excellent Moisturizer, along with Addison one of the few albums in the top thirteen fueled by hedonism and youthful, we’re-just-messin’-with-ya playfulness, the ensemble sails through fast-paced post-punk, providing an addictive undertow to the clever lyrics sung by Teasdale and Chambers.

The last two albums in the highest-rated baker’s dozen represent successful experiments. British duo Matthew Herbert and Momoko Gill’s Clay is an exquisite jazz-pop hybrid featuring some challenging time signatures, which Gill, who also plays drums, navigates intuitively and harmoniously to thrilling effect. On In a Beautiful Place, their fifth album, Chicago duo Water From Your Eyes draws from a catalog of off-kilter musical ideas and New Order-style guitar and drum lines to concoct idiosyncratic yet appealing rock songs. Vocally, Rachel Brown resembles the winner of a spoken-word open mike, as she sings and mutters her way through lyrics dealing with the paradox of feeling sadness and dread while living in the titular “Beautiful Place.”

The thirteen Tier 2 albums are all well-worth checking out, and only slightly less highly ranked than summer’s best. Five are outliers in relation to the dominant, heartfelt summer vibe: Irish singer CMAT (short for Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) swings for the fences on Euro-Country, which features cinematic storylines, amusing lyrics, and a Nashville-meets-Adele sound. On Burnover, Vermont’s Greg Freeman channels Pavement’s Steven Malkmus, MJ Lenderman, and other bards of minor-key America. North Carolina’s Superchunk and Sweden’s The Hives continue to sustain, as both have for more than three decades, literate pop-punk and Detroit-style garage rock, respectively. Scottish DJ Barry Can’t Swim’s Loner recalls yet another 1990s artist, Moby. Sampling Kali Uchis and a range of African diaspora musicians, Loner, much like Moby’s hit album Play, consists of dance music and spirited club, soul, and gospel numbers.

Late Great, I Quit, and Adult Romantix, like so many others on the list, reflect on past romantic relationships. Laura Stevenson’s seventh record is destined to become a landmark breakup album. On Late Great, the upstate New Yorker’s Juliana Hatfield-esque voice is controlled yet melodious, and the album succeeds largely because Stevenson’s vocal restraint coalesces with the part-mournful, part-jaunty music to convey acceptance of the gutwrenching situations described in the lyrics. HAIM’s fourth album offers sardonic commentary on relationships along with the band’s customary pop hooks and effortlessly terrific vocals. In a more wistful vein, Brazilian-American Samira Winter’s seventh album, Adult Romantix, offers primarily fond, nostalgic memories of the love connections of her youth.

Baltimore musical alchemists Nourished by Time and Dijon are both artists who combine R&B, hip hop, and rock genres like painters mix colors. On The Passionate Ones, NBT combines immediately accessible and relatable tracks with more out-there material, producing an album that invites and rewards close listening. Like others reviewed, Dijon utilizes his closest intimates as creative muses, fervently covering topics such as parenthood and enduringly sensual relationships with long-time lovers. To a greater extent than NBT, Dijon musically quotes Black genre-bending predecessors like Prince and Frank Ocean, but only as building blocks for his own dreamily soulful sound.

The remaining runners-up resonate strongly with other artists who have used their recent music to ponder life’s vicissitudes or explore their interactions with loved ones, community, and nature. New Zealand power-pop band The Beths’ album name itself, Straight Line was a Lie, refers to life’s inevitable detours and difficulties. Band singer-songwriter Liz Stokes reflects on how past family trauma has affected her mother, herself, and their relationship on “Mother, Pray for Me.” Seemingly digging in the same inspirational compost as No Joy, Stokes sings, in “Mosquitoes,” of the swarms of insects that appeared after a disastrous 2023 flood near her home and eventually reoriented her relationship with nature. “Lay me here, on the stone,” she sings, acknowledging that she is just one of an all-but-infinite number of beings, ”I’m only here to feed mosquitoes, only skin, only blood, a little less now than there was.”

On the summer’s best folk album, Billie Marten’s Dog Eared, the English singer utilizes a similar species-role-reversal concept on the fiddle-driven “Swing,” singing, “I talk to trees cuz they’re staring at me, all the time.” Similarly, “You and I Both” recounts a conversation between the narrator and an animal or perhaps nature itself. Ecological themes have appeared regularly in the original, lilting music of Marten who, though just 26, now has released five full-length albums, with Dog Eared arriving as one of her finest. 

Asheville, North Carolina’s Indigo de Souza is well known for her courageously self-revealing indie pop and her existential preoccupations, so it is no surprise Precipice, on “Be Like the Water,” urges, “Say what you need to, you know you’re dying,” which amounts to a one-sentence artist’s statement. Several critics have rated the album as less successful than de Souza’s previous work, and that assessment may be accurate; still, at several points on the record the singer uses her trademark on-the-edge-of-its-breaking-point voice and candid lyrics to deliver some of the most emotionally immediate tracks of the summer.

I won’t say much about the Tier 3 albums–after all, I referred to them as “pointless to rate”–except to contrast the Kesha and Rene Rapp releases with those in the top 26. Period and Bite Me are not bad records, but they rely too much on hackneyed empowerment and bad-ass-bitch tropes. These approaches seem like empty bombast at a time when artists who acknowledge and explore their vulnerability during difficult times come across as more convincing and, yes, powerful. The empowerment motifs also feel gratuitous in the context of a best-of list on which about 70 percent of the albums feature women as leaders or vocalists.

 To summarize the five albums besides Veronica Electronica that are on the not-recommended list: I don’t understand all the love for Ryan Davis and Ethel Cain, whose summer releases are lengthy, long-winded, and a slog for listeners. Wisp’s If Not Winter consists of forgettable, rudimentary shoegaze. On New Radiations, Marissa Nadler’s moody, gothic dream folk suffers in comparison to the music of Hope Sandoval, Bon Iver, and similar artists. Finally and regrettably, Wolf Alice, whose catalog includes My Love is Cool, one of the best rock albums of the 2010s, and two other enjoyable full-length releases, have produced their first sub-par album, the uneven, 1970s-radio-rock-influenced The Clearing.

Returning to the initial review, the turgid, impassive Madonna remix album puzzles and frustrates by stripping the sentiment from the singer’s invigorating Ray of Light album of 1998, an artistic choice that contrasts with those of the many searchingly personal, musically incandescent, or just plain fun summer 2025 releases. Veronica Electronica, by counterexample, reminds us of an electropop classic from the 1990s, an era mined with notable frequency by many musicians reviewed, who borrow from Belle and Sebastian-style delicate pop, grunge, shoegaze, trip-hop, Janet-and-Britney pop, Mobyesque sampling, and Pavement-style “slacker rock.”

In these dystopian times, are musicians feeling nostalgic for the Clinton era? Hardly. In reality, they are choosing to “meet the moment,” as the yoga studio puts it, by honing their sound and contemplating their place in the community or ecosystem. They are resisting marginalization and alienation, not by mounting direct attacks on the forces of depersonalization, but by intimately sharing innermost thoughts and life experiences, especially those involving loved ones. In indie-pop-rock-etc., summer 2025 may not have been a summer of love, but it was a time of expressing and re-evaluating love, and, perhaps most of all, it was a summer of humanization.

A former college professor, F.M. Kensley is a freelance writer who works in the non-profit sector.

[1] In a recent piece memorializing a time when music writers were “crankier than the average listener,” The New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh lamented that “music criticism [has] lost its edge.” Sorry, Mr. Sanneh, this is only a minimally cranky column. Only the last six albums below are given a rating of “not recommended.”

[2] Clay is the debut collaboration by Herbert and Gill, two highly accomplished musicians.