Hablo Ennui: December 2025

Monday, December 22, 2025

My top albums of 2025

In a year like this, with so much turmoil coming from the current presidential administration, and so much other stuff going on in my life, music was more of a comfort than ever. As is my wont, I listened to hundreds of full albums this year. I did my usually fussing over this list, making one big decision near my self-imposed deadline. I was going to rank Fancy That by Pinkpantheress pretty highly. But I eventually dropped it entirely. It’s a nine-track mix tape that last only 20 minutes, and as great as it is, that really can’t be considered an album. The other thing to deal with is albums that were released on streaming this year, but won’t have physical editions until next year. For the most part, I won’t rank a record without a physical edition, but sometimes I will burn a digital copy to CD. I did that with Silvana Estrada, but not with Snocaps, I guess because the former impressed me more (not that the Snocaps was bad – I liked it). Finally, the usual caveats: 1) as you go down the list, the rankings are pretty incremental, and once you get into the thirties, the albums are fairly equal in quality, 2) there are at least a few dozen albums not listed that are on par with the bottom 25 or so, and, 3) even with all I listen to, I can’t listen to everything, so I don’t have, for example, Geese on here because I never got around to listening to it.