The year's best albums

2025 felt like a year when popular music was in transition with many of the big stars either choosing not to release an album or dropping proper clangers (looking at you, Taylor Swift).

- Bhanuj Kappal

Katyayini Gargi's (aka Skulk) 'Skin' album cover.

Hip-hop, once an utterly dominant force on music charts, also had an off year. The space thus ceded allowed for some innovative and ambitious records to occupy centre-stage. Here are 10 records that really stuck with me.

Some of Indian hip-hop's heavy hitters released new albums in 2025—Divine, KRSNA, Karan Aujla—but the standout rap record of the year came from a little-known Bhojpuri rapper from the Bihar-Jharkhand region. On Natya Alaapika, he fuses boom bap, jazz, lo-fi electronica and Bhojpuri folk music into a global sound that's rooted in his Purvanchal heritage. At its best, Natya Alaapika is a fascinating, incisive exploration of the human condition.

"Mind-blowing" is such an overused adjective in music criticism, but listening to the self-titled debut album by Los Thuthanaka really feels like your brain is being abraded by its mix of gloriously unmixed walls of noise, flurries of lo-fi synths, and chopped-up Bolivian rhythms. Bolivian-American siblings Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton carve their way through sounds and geographies—psychedelia, live-electronica, glitchy hip-hop, Andean folk-music, hyperpop, IDM—with total abandon, twisting and warping everything they touch with the flamboyance of a true trickster god. It all sounds like something from a deranged, apocalyptic future, but each track here is also deeply rooted in centuries of folk music tradition.