July 5, 2025

by Ann Powers

Our critic returns to your inbox with a mid-year update and a playlist.

British funk veterans Cymande. (Credit: Dean Chalkley)

Hello summer babes,

I’ve missed you. For the past few weeks I’ve been behaving like a time bandit, slipping across the time-space continuum — truthfully, the backroads of New England — and nabbing some happiness to hoard before returning to the exhausting whiplash of regular life in 2025. (I went on a bit of news fast, too.) I feel grateful that I had the chance to switch into vacation mode, but doing so meant I missed one annual ritual that I treasure, and I’m here to reclaim it. For culture critics, the mid-year mark allows for a moment of taking stock that’s less pressured than the one that comes at year’s end. Mid-year best lists have proliferated in the clickbait era, and they tend to be more diverse and blessedly provisional than the Big Statements that close out another round of the culture production cycle.

Looking over the lists I missed while vagabonding, I was happy to see plenty of more obscure picks alongside the names that feel destined to dominate in December. FKA Twigs, Bon Iver, Lorde and Bad Bunny may already have secured their spots in many top 10s, but lesser-known contenders like the Kentucky soothsayer S.G. Goodman and Japanese composer Eiko Ishibashi are showing up strong. A few nice surprises, like the frequent appearance of Erika de Casier’s fourth album Lifetime, show me that tastemakers aren’t giving up on musicians a couple of years out from their initial breakthroughs, and other picks are happy discoveries — thanks, Exclaim, for informing me that there’s a Canadian mixed-gender screamo band called Emma Goldman. I encourage you to poke around in this list aggregator; there’s a lot to love there. And check out my colleagues’ discussion at All Songs Considered; Hazel, Sheldon and Robin came up with a great mix of songs from the year’s first half.

I like the looseness of mid-year lists partly because it alleviates my own perfectionist anxieties, which always affect my breathing as the holidays commence. I dread the frantic hours of catching up and trying to form some kind of summary argument about an arbitrary time period, knowing that it doesn’t matter that much (who remembers these efforts come the following spring?) doesn’t stanch my compulsion to “get it right.” In summer, I worry less. My choices may not seem reasonable in six months, but they feel good now; they come together not to form an argument but to proffer an invitation. That’s especially true this year, when I’ve been cultivating beginner’s mind when seeking new music, going more global and gravitating toward scenes (Arabic hip-hop, for example) in which I have zero expertise.

The late-breaking list of my favorite songs of 2025 that you’ll find below reflects my commitment to not insisting that I know what’s best, something that feels necessary at a time when the din of people shouting opinions over each other has reached utter cacophony in the online world where I spend my work days. What I’m offering here is an invitation, not an argument: Try something new, or something purely for enjoyment, abandoning any concerns about whether it captures some zeitgeist that’s always limited and at least partially constructed anyway. I hope you find some sounds to love as we travel together from Cairo to Paris to Rio, with stops near my place in Nashville and possibly in outer space. Nothing is ranked; read the map any way you like. Steal a little time and do a little exploring on your own, and let me know what your mid-year favorites are, too.

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Ann's mid-year song list

Brad Mehldau, “Between the Bars”
I’m starting near home, with an interpretation of one longtime favorite by another. Elliott Smith’s ballad of booze-fueled codependency lives rent free in my head, but pianist Mehldau’s delicate, loving explorations of its harmonics helped me hear it anew. From his beautiful new Ride Into the Sun, a panegyric to the late singer-songwriter.

Oracle Sisters, “Blue Left Hand”
This song from Paris’s most stylish retro-futurist rock band is what the Bee Gees would have sounded like if they’d held on to the trippiness they abandoned after Mr. Natural, but still let the funk in. A fairy tale for our times.

Thiago Amud with Chico Buarque, “Cidade Possessa”
Singer and composer Amud enlisted Chico Buarque, the legendary polymath and subversive samba master, for this joyfully frantic ode to Carnaval.

Hannah Cohen, “Earthstar”
Cohen is one of several women reimagining psychedelia as a more pastoral and emotionally forthright space for contemplation, and this title track from her all-around gorgeous new album creates a cosmic frame for considering the waxing and waning of long-term love.

Ambrose Akinmusire, “MYanx.”
In this nearly 10-minute long excursion from trumpeter and composer Akinmusire confronting the realities of Black mental health in anxious times, the brain is a vast and ever-changing landscape. Drummer Justin Brown leads with intensity, a dynamic string section veers from cacophony to lyricism and back, and the rapper Kokayi offers improvised verse that both clarifies and intensifies things. Akinmusire’s trumpet is the ego trying to stay afloat within the wilds.

Joy Crookes, “Carmen”
This London-based soul stylist has a certain archness in her voice that embodies poise and a healthy perspective — necessary ingredients in this playful but biting examination of how racist beauty standards can drive women of color to distraction. The “Benny and the Jets” piano adds a vintage vibe that says Crookes is coming for Amy Winehouse’s crown.

MIKE, “Man in the Mirror”
Mike is an intercontinental rapper, born in New Jersey but spending his youth in London, where grime’s grittiness shaped his sensibility; he now lives in New York and has found kindred spirits in American rap slackers like Earl Sweatshirt. This casual tour de force uses an English funk-fusion sample to meditate on a complicated American namesake, Michael Jackson, and the unsettled realities of an artist’s life.

Uzi Freyja, “Medusa”
Riding the force of a massive sonic explosion from French synth wave producer Carbon Killer, Cameroon-born French rapper Freyja holds onto a myth relentlessly and makes it her own. “They made me bad, now they regret it!” she spits, deploying lines like so many poison snakes.

Marwan Moussa, “Bosakber”
The Cario-based Egyptian-German rapper Moussa, who’s also lived in Rome and Los Angeles, is one of the most beloved rappers in the Levant — a Drake figure with better bars. He’s not resting on his laurels, though, as The Man Who Lost His Heart, a five-disc (!) exploration of grief after the loss of his mother, proves. “Bosakber” marks the most intense moment of rage in that journey — a churning mix of Sufi rhythms, oud riffs and electronic swirls that take Moussa to the depths of his pain and confusion.

Kin’Gongolo Kiniata, “Kingongolo”
When the Congolese street band Konono No. 1 introduced its wild sound made on instruments built from scrap heaps in 2004, they seemed a bit like a novelty. This young group from Kinshasa proves that its impact wasn’t a fluke. This breakneck breakdown inspired by the sound made by oil vendors’ cans and bottles banging in the streets shows the enduring power of claiming beauty and power in late capitalism’s junkyards.

Beharie, “Everybody Tells Me To Let Go”
Growing up in Norway with a Jamaican dad, Beharie was told his family was the only one in the whole country with that last name. The quiet outsiderness that permeates his gentle songs of queer desire and longing sets them apart from indie pop’s legion of whispered testimonials. Sade vibes.

Terrenoire, “un chien sur la port”
Born in Spain but raised in the post-industrial French town of Saint-Etienne, brothers Raphäel and Théo Herrerias recast the chanson tradition within rapturous electronic settings. This long swell of a song taps into existentialist legacies in an unmoored soul’s lament: “I run like milk on the fire, I run like a dog on the port.”

Yazz Ahmed, “Though My Eyes Go To Sleep, My Heart Does Not Forget You”
The British-Bahraini trumpeter Yazz Ahmed is a world builder. Her fourth album A Paradise in the Hold raises visions of the island country of her childhood via wedding songs and the laments of its fabled pearl divers. This is one of her undersea excursions, a lover’s lament in which a foamy undertow of electronics and handclap percussion propel and disrupt the cries of singer Alba Nacinovich as a lover living in fear of the tide’s pull.

Annahstasia, “Take Care of Me”
Every year brings a voice that towers above the others, it seems, and in 2025 it’s the canyon-sized call of Annahstasia Enuke, its bell-like resonance somehow closing a circle that ties Odetta to Anohni. Her whole debut album is sublime, but this exquisitely vulnerable self-portrait shows off her remarkable range.

Jobi Riccio, “Wildfire Season”
A Colorado native, rising Americana star Riccio brings their whole heart to this demand for change inspired by her home region’s recent devastating fires. Neil Young would approve of its cutting guitar lines and Riccio’s blunt declaration of rebellion against the corrupt human forces ravaging the mountainside.

Ken Pomeroy, “Stranger”
Nobody’s writing a better opening couplet to a song this year: “The wind keeps on hitting me like my mother used to / Unlike her, I feel it doesn’t want to.” Phew. Only 22, Oklahoma-based Pomeroy, a member of the Cherokee nation, has been writing and performing since grade school, and it shows in the absolute clarity and calm of her voice and songwriting. I hate it when people compare young women songwriters to Lucinda Williams — too easy! too impossible! — but here’s one who actually earns that gold belt.

Kashus Culpepper with Sierra Ferrell, “Broken Wing”
It’s as tough as ever for a non-white singer-songwriter to break into country music’s upper echelons, but I’m putting bets on Kashus Culpepper right now. The man has the range and power of a soul belter, but as this delicate rondelay with Americana’s sweetheart shows, he’s just as good at the quiet side.

Courting, “Namcy”
In the year of Pulp’s triumphant comeback, here’s a Liverpool band ready to pick up Jarvis Cocker’s dangling-cigarette torch. A rubberband-snapping hit of adolescent infatuation, “Namcy” captures the skittishly masculine angst of a Peter Pan running from a dead end in the suburbs with all the fervor that a common person can muster.

Cymande, “Coltrane”
A reborn version of one of England’s most-sampled funk bands featuring original members Steve Scipio on bass and Patrick Patterson on drums has produced a singularly life-affirming album centered on this transcendent paean to music’s powers. Thanks, Cymande, for reminding me that music can always be a haven, “the message creation sent.”

Gen Hoshino featuring Lee Young Ji, “2”
Massive J-pop star Hoshino could have stuck with his stadium-packing, sentimental pop sound on his sixth album; instead he dips into global collaboration and accentuates his love of candy-coated hip hop. This bright duet with South Korean rapper Lee has that satisfyingly jazzy boom-bap throwback sound and a sunny sexiness that’s utterly charming.

John Glacier, “Emotions”
I love a rapper who sounds like she’s opening up her head for me to explore. John Glacier’s music originates from her bedroom experiments in Hackney, where she grew up; her monotonal vocal style and non-linear rhymes feel private, almost unformed at times. Yet within a tight framework of cloudy rap beats, Glacier exhibits great command. Her extraterrestrial persona honors art-making as a way of maintaining mystery rather than exposing oneself: “I’m a glacier,” she intones, “that’s why I look so deadly.”

Brittany Howard, “Pale Pale Moon”
Here’s a familiar name, transporting to a new point in history. Collaborating with soundtrack composer Ludwig Göranson for the show-stopping number in Ryan Coogler’s vampire masterpiece Sinners, Alabama’s finest genre-buster Howard came up with a supernatural blues howler that the Wolf himself would have loved. Actor Jayme Lawson slays it in the film itself, but it’s Howard’s version that plumbs the depths of witchy resistance conveyed through this great American art form.

Carter Faith, “Sex, Drugs and Country Music”
Yet another blonde renaissance is happening in Nashville right now, with newcomers like Elizabeth Nichols and Tanner Adell offering sharp critiques of feminine stereotypes from the inside. Carter Faith is part of that camp, but her tremolo voice and decadent tendencies set her apart. This swinging ballad goes straight to the Valley of the Dolls without apology.

Folk Bitch Trio, “Moth Song”
All I want in folk is for someone to live up to the fearless, funny legacy of The Roches. Melbourne’s Folk Bitch Trio get close, in their own way. The sound is more indie-rock inflected, there’s a fearlessness in the group’s tilted harmonies and in the strange turns of its storytelling, as in this half-confession, half-hallucination grounded in complicated heartbreak.

Wednesday, “Elderberry Wine”
I’m closing my list with a song from what’s bound to be one of the year’s most-praised albums, the sixth album from the North Carolina band Wednesday. It’s hard to not be parasocial about this sweet slice of heartache, coming from Karly Hartzman in the wake of her breakup with now non-touring band member M.J. Lenderman (and his own immense success with last year’s Manning Fireworks), but “Elderberry Wine” says much more than “we’re through.” Ruminating on crossed ambitions and the irresistible, stifling allure of the familiar, “Elderberry Wine” goes deep so casually, it feels like a best friend’s unsolicited but devastating insight into the most undertended part of your heart.

So that’s a lot of listening for y’all! Hope you enjoyed the journey. Here’s a bonus track, a song that’s so epic, it deserves its own spot: Alabama folk raconteur Abe Partridge’s latest slice of cultural analysis and political resistance dipped in hokum: “The Talkin’ Never Stare into the Eyes of a Chicken Blues.”

Listen to Ann's playlist

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