2025 Best Albums Update: Mid-Year 2025
Ranking scheme:
0 – Almost everything here sucks
1 – Most songs pretty bad, maybe a couple songs that are good
2 – The time simply passed, never enough to stand out good or bad
3 – Mostly meh but with some highlights
4 – Has a good chunk of songs I like
5 – Majority of this is really good
6 – Everything here is really good
7 – Just about everything here is fantastic
8 – Everything here is incredibly compelling
Note: I think all of these are incredible albums, and someone else making distinctions on “Spencer only thought everything here was really good instead of everything here is fantastic” is so hair splitting it doesn't make sense. Just enjoy all the great music. Everything in the main list I have listened to front to back multiple times and loved it each time. I keep my numbers just because it's mine. I link songs I think show the albums and their sounds well. Give them a listen, and give the whole album a spin if you like them. There are some seriously good songs in here with some incredible verses even in the extras.
EUSEXUA – FKA Twigs: 7
Dance Music / EDM
Absolutely incredible album. It is raw, and incredibly sexual in a way that isn't just sexy, but to quote one of the songs, is more craving and rabid. It is a truly primal sexual album that gets really intimate with the nightlife and raw experience of being out there in a certain kind of way. The soundscape and album cover complement it well, being a glamorous yet clearly grimy and off-kilter experience. I have listened to FKA Twigs before this, and it was never able to quite suck me in anywhere near as much as this album did. Maybe it's just my current phase of life or maybe it's the absolute quality of the album, but I cannot stop listening to all of these songs.
Drums of Death SOTY
From The Private Collections of Saba and No ID – Saba, No ID: 7
Hip Hop / Jazz Rap
This was an album that I really liked on the first listen, having multiple songs stuck in my head. The production is fantastic, the flows are great, and it's another great addition to my love of rapper-producer collab albums. There is plenty of internal reflection, vulnerability, and interesting lyricism here, but it also seems to draw heavily on other rappers specifically. There are moments in the songs where I thought there was a feature, or I recognized flows as a 1-to-1 copy of moments from other great songs. Usually, this might be something I would dislike, but on an album this deliberate, this creative, and this wonderfully crafted. Instead of coming across as stealing flows, it feels like it gives credit to other great songs, and made me feel like it accepted that artists can creatively use other flows. Originally, I gave this a 6, which is an amazing score, but then I heard it at Nana's house with a high-quality surround sound system. This production bounces around you, echoes back and forth, and adds to the intensity so much with how it is able to cut through what I expect, a great song, and give me what is truly a larger listening experience that is so much more than the sum of its parts, which were already fantastic.
Hurry Up Tomorrow – The Weeknd: 6
Synth Pop / RnB
I wasn't expecting to love a Weeknd release like I did this one. It is very long, running an hour and a half, but there aren't really any lowlights to note, which is incredible. The album's consistency is fantastic and the highs are fantastic, and often across the record, he gets incredibly personal beyond what I expect for an artist of this magnitude. The album in my opinion could use a little more sonic diversity over such a runtime, but as he seems to be retiring his performer name, I'm glad to see him go out with a bang as well as an expansive project.
Satisfied Soul – Brother Ali, Ant: 6
Jazz Rap / Lyrical Rap
I admit, I might just be a real sucker for this specific style of rapping and production. This album caught me off guard. I saw it in a post, wrote it down, and then came back to it at a later date just because I like rapper-producer collab albums as I find it grants a good vision with a consistent sound opportunity to shine. That happened here. I opened it, noticed it was a guy with albinism, looked it up, saw a white rapper, prepared myself for whatever I would get, and then got blown away. It reminds me quite a lot of Miles by Blu and Exile but is so clearly distinct from it. Nice stories, nice rapping, fantastic and bright production, and a realness to the rapping that really made it connect with me. From start to back I'm engaged and enjoying myself. From what I gather, some of this might have been recorded on his phone too, but that's just a word I saw somewhere. This is the type of album I can really feel on my own time but also not hesitate to play for other people too, which is rare for music I really love. My only complaint is that the first leg of the album, while good, isn't quite as strong as the later songs.
A City Drowned in God's Black Tears – Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals: 6 w/ love
Aggressive Rap / Opera / Anti-Nazi Edgy
This is an insane album. It starts off going all in on anti-Israel bars with an abrasive and aggressive style, moves to a song opening by hoping a piece of shit died a painful death over a heavenly beat, into an opera cut, into more aggressive songs with bars about consent and squirting? This scratches a certain itch in being extremely edgy but also extremely progressive. It has the edge, the anger, the feeling that you shouldn't be saying that, but if I get to the actual bars, it's really just spot on through and through. I know there was the whole “dirtbag left” thing or whatever, but I think it's really nice to get a release of anger or something while listening to some songs that hit on points about things you're also pissed off about. I love the hard cuts. I love the soft cuts, and I have listened to this album a ton. My only negative with this album is that I just don't really care for the last song which is really long. It has no major flaws, just isn't for me, but if you really like that song too more power to you.
GOLLIWOG – Billy Woods: 6
This was a really interesting album. Billy Woods I find does incredibly well when over weirder, more experimental beats, and this album is full of horror-themed beats, which is a style I loved from him before on one of my favourite albums out there, Aethiopes, and he did incredible work again here. Having multiple different producers I thought gave it an interesting experience of getting what felt like different artists takes on what type of dark or scary beat Billy might like, and Billy then collaborating with each one. Billy continues to drop incredibly concise and abstract bars in a way you can only really know if you listen to Billy Woods, but more impressively he does so incredibly well so consistently with such a fast turnaround time. I did find I enjoyed the beats that stuck to the horror more to be more interesting, and as I mentioned Aethiopes before, listening to this album really made me want to listen to that album more, and I think it also hit me at a time where I realized I was listening to way too much Billy Woods overall. That made it an incredible album that I really enjoyed, but couldn't quite get into as much as I would have liked, or maybe as much as the album deserves. I will revisit this album and it's not unlikely that the score might even go up.
Viagr Aboys – Viagra Boys: 8
I absolutely love this album. Start to back. Usually, even for albums I love there are songs I might like less or more or something like that, but for this album, every time a song starts I'm like “Of fuck yeah I get to listen to this again” and it's been every listen of nonstop listening. It's concise enough to deliver on concepts and themes, abstract enough to hit a good weirdness feeling, gross enough to scratch that gross punk itch, clean enough to remain super catchy, punchy enough to be hard-hitting, and gentle enough to be emotional when it's right. I feel like I pick up exactly what he's putting down every single time anything happens. Every song is an earworm for me. God it just rocks.
Others
I have listened to 30-odd albums so far and it's been a great year of music listening. Here are some more albums with little blurbs and a demo song. If you like the genre or the song, I really enjoyed all these albums too, so give them a shot!
Life is Beautiful – 2Chains, Larry June, The Alchemist: 5
Luxury Rap
2Chains links up with some of the best Alc production since Alfredo, one of my favourite albums of all time. I think 2Chains moving towards a more luxurious sound instead of trap beats was a great decision, and his charisma really shines.
Dear Psilocybin – Zelooperz Real Bad Man: 5
Hip Hop / Rap
Real Bad Man is back with his slick, low-key, yet still interesting production and once again evolving and taking it to a new level. The beats here are super interesting while retaining the almost empty space they occupy, and someone as eccentric as Zeloopers is an amazing pairing with him for an album. They do work well together, but often Zelooperz comes across as nearly comatose in his delivery, where I think a more exciting performance more akin to his performance on Wildstyle with The Alchemist would have made the project significantly more interesting, even with retaining the same subject matter and lyrics.
12 – Westside Gunn: 5
Griselda / Rap
Westside Gunn does his thing with another album that is fun, has great production, hard bars, and is overall solid. While it is great front to back, I do really feel like this doesn't differentiate itself from his last album very much at all, and is very soon after. Listening to it, I really did feel like I had just listened to something very much like it, but this one has a far less compelling cover.
Infinity – Smif'N'Wessun: 5
Oldhead Rap
If you're an old head this is the album for you, and I really liked it a lot on first listen. It's good old-school rapping with solid beats that feel old-school while still feeling fresh and having modern mastering. It's safe to say that these guys have still got it and in a big way. I've been saying for a while now that the older guys have a honed craft and a little more wisdom that makes their music so good, and I like that a lot. I think there could have been more interesting longer-form storytelling, but we take good music when it's given to us. Oldheads, check this out.
Timbo Progression – Timbaland: 6 (EP)
Afrobeats / Hip hop
This album sounds pretty great, though is pretty samey. Timbaland being an advocate for AI makes me wonder if some of this sameyness is the fact that it is AI. Still sounds great. It is short and I did very much enjoy the listening experience, so I will rate it fairly well. I will note that I will rate it as an EP, which means I don't expect the full-scale project scope that I would of an album. It's a fun little piece with some very digestible Afro beats.
Black Samson The Bastard Swordsman – Wu-Tang Clan and Mathematics: 5
WuTang / Oldhead Rap
This was a really good WuTang album that I think is probably everything a fan would hope for. The beats were clean and fun, and the rapping was really good. I think having Mathematics come in on production made it have a much more modern sound which really helped the group as a whole achieve a better project. Some may have issues with AI used in transitions, and others may have issues with a bunch of reused verses, but I'll say that this is a much greater album that had my enjoyment slightly hampered by some external factors. If you're going in fresh and just want to hear some really great songs from some certified unc rappers, you're in for a treat.
Conversational Pieces – Boldy James: 5
Boldy has been dropping so insanely often and while it hasn't been bad, it hasn't been near great either. This is a return to form for him, and I think really highlights the issue he has where he needs to pick some more interesting beats if he wants to make a good project. His rapping is consistently pretty damn great, but the use of an interesting beat makes this album just so refreshing. Some of the songs here are absolutely astoundingly good.
Potluck – Bruiser Wolf: 5
Oldhead Rap / Punchline Rap
Bruiser Wolf managed to step up his game with this one, and I was already a big fan of his last. Still incredibly charismatic and funny, still in his own lane making some of the most fun rap I get to listen to. While his previous album had maybe some more personal cuts, he comes through with an incredibly consistent album full of incredible production and songs littered front to back with fun punchlines. Even the cover just manages to perfectly fit his style, and hopefully, I get to see him live again with this one.