The 50 best albums of 2025 🏆

Critical Role Rolls for Reinvention with Campaign 4

This week's best new music features Ratboys' jangly late-night drive, a 10-minute remix of Water From Your Eyes' catchiest song, and a skronky hypnosis tape courtesy of Victoryland.

A decade later and still her most recent release, But You Caint Use My Phone filters the early streaming and retail mixtape era through Erykah Badu's own wooly, warped vision.

No Album Left Behind: On Clams Casino, Brian Dunne explores how the pressure points of class and social mobility shape the dreams we pursue in the first place, and the choices that people make when things don’t work out the way they planned.

R.I.P. Steve Cropper: Booker T. & the M.G.’s guitarist dead at 84

Sabrina Carpenter to White House: Keep my songs out of your damn mouth, as pop star labels immigration video "evil and disgusting." #SabrinaCarpenter #DonaldTrump #ICE

Released on this day in 1965, Rubber Soul waved goodbye to Beatlemania, dared the Beach Boys to kill their surfer darlings, and turned the Beatles into the innovative pop heroes we’ve always remembered them as.

For @PasteMagazine’s No Album Left Behind series, I wrote about @t6mikee’s Showbiz!, the record I spent the most time with this year https://t.co/p3pTypII2L

One for the Geeseheads and the Graceheads

Geese’s Getting Killed tour ended where it started: with a band and a city daring each other to live up to the myth.

No Album Left Behind: A bastion of New York’s rap underground, MIKE’s seventh album embodies the communal spirit of his work more powerfully than ever.

Netflix renews Dave Letterman to keep talking to whoever he wants, when he wants

Randy Newman’s seventh album comes full of sardonic contradictions, synthy transmissions, and colossal pop symphonies.

These are the 25 greatest albums of 1995, featuring debuts, superstar-breakouts, legacy-defining releases, and career-saving pivots from the likes of Emmylou Harris, Mobb Deep, Guided by Voices, Yo La Tengo, Pulp, and more.

Johnny Cash’s estate suing Coca-Cola over impersonation

another year another last waltz essay

As The Last Waltz lives on, its rendition of “Helpless” remains eternal

Notes on “It Makes No Difference,” the emotional ballast of The Last Waltz

My Bloody Valentine join No Music For Genocide boycott