In this segment, we round up the best albums released each month. From Bad Bunny to Kathryn Mohr, here are, in alphabetical order, the 11 best albums of January 2025.
Bad Bunny, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS
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That Bad Bunny would make an album that finds him reconnecting with the musical traditions of Puerto Rico, one that triumphantly doubles as a love letter to his motherland, is not exactly a surprise. But you barely have to scratch beneath the surface to acknowledge just how piercing, comprehensive, and ambitious of an effort Debí Tirar Más Fotos is – not only does it survey genres like salsa, plena, and música típica, but for those listening on YouTube, each of its accompanying 17 visualizers serves as a history lesson about Puerto Rican history. As musically rich as it is daring, the record also scans as one of Bad Bunny’s most personal, reeling from different kinds of loss, from cultural displacement to heartbreak. It’s way less of a detour than the global superstar reaching a new peak in predictably admirable fashion.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy, The Purple Bird
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Will Oldham isn’t used to working with outside producers, but his collaboration with David “Ferg” Ferguson has been a long time coming. He met the seasoned producer over twenty years ago while Johnny Clash was recording a cover of his classic Bonnie “Prince” Billy track, ‘I See a Darkness’; Ferguson engineered the record it appeared on, American III. Having maintained a deep friendship with Ferg, who even played at his wedding, Oldham cherishes the opportunity to finally make an album together, traveling down to Nashville and assembling a stellar cast of musicians and local heroes for the sessions that became The Purple Bird. The result is a countrified take on a Bonnie “Prince” Billy album, equal parts wry and wistful, but more hopeful than it once might have sounded: still seeing a darkness, perhaps – “the oceanic tumble of think,” as he puts it on ‘New Water’ – but learning to wash it away and rise to the morning light. It’s well worth the wait and trouble. Read the full track-by-track review.
Ela Minus, DÍA
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DÍA is no less self-reflective than Ela Minus’ breakout debut, 2020’s acts of rebellion, a record whose fragile, blurry intimacy was tied to a year of pandemic isolation. Though it revs up every strain of electronic music the producer and singer-songwriter, born Gabriela Jimeno, likes to toy with – from icy synthpop to sinewy ambient to brazen electroclash – the new album only vows to dig deeper. In hindsight – and by expanding the setting of her creative process to include not only her native Colombia but also the Mojave Desert, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Mexico City, and London – she grew warier of the blind optimism that spreads through the genre and sought to punch through the façade of her own project. “Writing DÍA I thought, ‘Wait, who am I really?’” she said. Definitive or not, the answer it provides is heartfelt, gritty, and self-affirming. Read the full track-by-track review.
Ethel Cain, Perverts
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It would be natural to view Perverts, the daring follow-up to Ethel Cain’s 2022 breakout Preacher’s Daughter, as a response to, and rejection of, everything about success that might register as noise, not least because it was accompanied by a Tumblr post entitled ‘The Consequence of Audience’. Preacher’s Daughter amassed a fervent following, and Perverts no doubt poses a challenge to the segment of Cain’s audience that has trouble engaging with the artist’s persona in the absence of unambiguous lore and soaring melodies. Yet the 90-minute project – promotional materials variously refer to it as a “body of work” or even an “EP,” so yes, technically not an album – does not feel like a departure so much as an opportunity for Hayden Anhedönia to home in on the esoteric darkness she holds a deep reverence for, the eerie dissonance and muffled silences that were seen tangential rather than core to her songwriting. Read the full review.
FKA twigs, EUSEXUA
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There’s no shame in describing the deepest of pleasures in simple language: “It feels nice,” FKA twigs declares on ‘Room of Fools’, a highlight off her third album EUSEXUA, while another track is called ‘Girl Feels Good’. But the pop iconoclast is as gifted at putting things succinctly as she is at nuanced expression of both body and soul, which is why she’s spent so much of the album’s rollout trying to describe the word she coined for it. The record may not be as loose as her 2022 mixtape CAPRISONGS, but certainly retains some of its clubby exuberance, as well as the spell-binding eroticism of LP1, in mapping that slippery state of being. That it’s a place worth exploring goes without saying. Read the full track-by-track review.
Kathryn Mohr, Waiting Room
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Though Kathryn Mohr‘s music remains insular in nature, every record she’s made since 2021’s As If has required some sort of separation from home: she laid down her 2022 EP, Holly, produced by Midwife’s Madeline Johnston, in rural Mexico, whose desert environment had a palpable influence on the music. Her latest effort and debut full-length, Waiting Room, was not only self-recorded but also conceived over the course of a month in eastern Iceland, as Mohr wove together songs in a windowless concrete room of a disused fish factory. The effect of the place is captured visually on the album cover and sonically through Mohr’s use of field recordings and imagistic writing, but the record only burrows further inward, at once liminal and confrontational, embodied and otherworldly. From the grungy, nightmarish exorcism of ‘Elevator’ to the ambient romance of the title track, it stirs the horror and tenderness out of big, empty spaces, be they physical or emotional. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Kathryn Mohr.
MIKE, Showbiz!
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The music MIKE instantly feels like an intimate dialogue, and Showbiz! is no exception. Between his richly lackadaisical delivery and hypnagogic use of samples, the looseness and fluidity of the New York rapper-producer’s approach keep the listener engaged but never more than arm’s length away. Yet what remains beyond grasp for MIKE, always at an odd distance, is the perfect sense of home, something he keeps searching for across the LP – though “home” is where he recorded all of it, in phases after stretches of touring. Similarly, he muses on the idea of breakout success more than simply lounging on it. “The prize isn’t much, but the price is abundant,” he raps on ‘Artist of the Century’, an apt summation of the whole project.
Mac Miller, Balloonerism
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Five years have gone by since the release of Mac Miller’s Circles, a profoundly gorgeous and hopeful record that’s become an example of how posthumous releases should be handled. It would be hard for the late Pittsburgh rapper’s second posthumous album to achieve the same reputation, and yet, far from a thoughtless cash grab, Balloonerism presents a collection of material – chunks of which fans have, one way or another, already been familiar with – in a careful and illuminating manner. Recorded between 2013 and 2014, during the same burst of creativity that produced Watching Movies With the Sound Off, Faces, and GO:OD AM, it dives into his struggles with mental health and substance abuse while also delighting in his versatile and spontaneous approach. Having made the leap from easygoing to darkly experimental hip-hop jams, where his career would go next was just one of the things in Miller’s mind. Balloonerism doesn’t just capture a moment in time but makes sure it doesn’t just float by, disorienting as it may be. Read the full track-by-track review.
jasmine.4.t., You Are the Morning
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During the pandemic, facing complications from myalgic encephalomyelitis and long COVID, Jasmine Cruickshank underwent heart surgery and was bed-bound for almost half a year. It was then that she decided to come out as trans, end her abusive marriage, and escape to Manchester, where she found – and was able to write through – her queer community. Backed by an all-trans band, jasmine.4.t. became the first UK signee to Phoebe Bridgers’ label Saddest Factory Records, and Bridgers, Dacus, and their boygenius bandmate Julien Baker all produced her remarkable debut full-length, You Are the Morning. Treading the line between intricate, tender-hearted folk and stormy indie rock, the album swoons with the rush of new love, spins catharsis out of the wildest lows, and reimagines the past into a light-filled future. It’s in the throes of hope and change, Cruickshank reminds us, that we see each other best. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with jasmine.4.t.
lots of hands, into a pretty room
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Since coming together in 2020, Billy Woodhouse and Elliot Dryden have been working on music remotely, weaving together ambient instrumentation and tender, lo-fi folk through 2021’s there’s someone in this room just like you and 2023’s fantasy. into a pretty room, their new album and debut for Fire Talk, is billed as lots of hands‘ first truly collaborative effort, with Dryden commuting through the northern English countryside to write and record in Woodhouse’s bedroom studio. Growth is an undercurrent more than the obvious throughline, as Woodhouse and Dryden spin old demos, new songs, and twinkling, glitched-out electronics into a record of almost ineffably hushed vulnerability and understated, muffled beauty. With Woodhouse producing and properly mixing the record, there’s a different kind of attention paid to the subtleties and cohesiveness of their songwriting, even as each moment it depicts seems to flit by like a whisper, or linger like a ghost – or both. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with lots of hands.
The Weather Station, Humanhood
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The Weather Station’s work has earned praised for its seamless elegance and fluidity, especially since Tamara Lindeman expanded the project’s folksy origins on 2021’s breakout Ignorance. But never has the Toronto-based singer-songwriter paid attention to the seams – the parts of life and art that, as she acknowledges on the closer ‘Sewing’, most people are willing to ignore – as she does on her visceral new album, Humanhood. Affording space to both the sophistipop grandeur of Ignorance and the free-flowing intimacy of its companion LP, 2022’s How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, Lindeman and her remarkable band trace the process of dissociation, laying out the broken pieces and the possibility of reintegrating them, the shakiness of truth and all the purpose it provides. Humanhood keeps moving like that, imperfect but enlightened, the music an “undulating thing,” as Lindeman puts it, “this blanket I seem to be making from pride and shame, beauty and guilt.” Read the full track-by-track review.
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