This time of year, I don’t have to look at the calendar to know what time it is. I can already feel it in my bones. The urge to eat pumpkin pie and start making my year-end albums list tells me all I need to know.
I have been doing both things for most of my life. I’m not sure if either is good for me, and yet I persist. When it comes to the second thing, I also start thinking about what other music critics are going to put on their lists. And then I go into prognostication mode about annual critical consensus.
A lot of albums come out in any given year. It’s impossible to say how many — somewhere between 98 and a million, I suppose. But anyone who reads year-end lists knows that a certain coterie of records pop up, time and again, with a select few routinely showing up at the top. (Or the bottom, as most of these lists unfold in descending order, for the sake of showmanship.) Last year, you didn’t have to be an expert to predict that Charli XCX was going to come out ahead. Charli, after all, saucily declared the presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris be “brat,” a prescient move for sure, as we are all now living under the Kamala Harris administration. (That’s my assumption, I haven’t followed politics closely this year.)
In 2025, there is no clear-cut frontrunner. This makes the year more interesting, of course, which is good. But it is also makes writing this column more difficult, which I resent. Thanks for nothing, President Harris!
Here is how I see the field of potential “Album Of The Year, According To Critical Consensus” candidates shaking out, listed from most to least likely to get the nod.
1. Rosalía — Lux
Pro: For much of my career as a music critic, the stock reference people would make when they wanted to rag on “music critic music” was to the era’s most recognizable “arty and intellectual” indie (or indie-adjacent) act. In the 2000s, it was inevitably Radiohead. In the 2010s, it was Bon Iver, The National, or anyone else who spent time in a recording studio with at least one Dessner brother. But by the 2020s, this joke was terribly out-of-date and inaccurate. This decade, the stand-in for “music critic music” might as well be Rosalía. Her 2022 album Motomami has a staggering Metacritic score of 94, an extremely high integer typically reserved for box sets that compile previously unreleased outtakes by respected legacy artists like Jesus Christ, Mohammed, and Buddha. Her 2025 effort, somehow, has an even better score, logging in at 97. It helps that Lux is a big artistic swing, with nods to classical music and opera.
Con: Forget the Metacritic score — do people really like this more than Motomami? I have no idea, though I don’t think it will matter much in the end. This is the closest thing to a lock this year.
2. Bad Bunny — Debí Tirar Más Fotos
Pro: Despite what you might have read in a “state of music criticism” thinkpiece, music critics in 2025 are not automatically rubber-stamping every big-ticket pop record as a masterpiece. (The bitchier notices written about this year’s Taylor Swift album/data dump bear that out.) It is true, however, that at least one big-ticket pop record always seems to do really well on year-end lists. And that record this year will likely be by Bad Bunny, perennially one of the most-streamed artists in the world. Plus, he’s playing the Super Bowl this year, which might inspire some scribes to give his record an extra nudge.
Con: Debí Tirar Más Fotos came out a long time ago, way back on January 5, which might as well be 1983 as far as insect-brained music critics are concerned. Probably won’t hurt him a ton, but it certainly doesn’t help.
3. Geese — Getting Killed
Pro: The indie album of the year! According to me! And probably all the other writers who still care about guitar music. Getting Killed occupies the same spot that MJ Lenderman’s Manning Works had last year, as the “guitar music indie album” with the highest enthusiasm quotient among supporters in the media. If you like Getting Killed, you love Getting Killed. You love Getting Killed so much that it makes agnostics hate Getting Killed. So be it. My advice to Geese, as borrowed from a great philosopher: Let your haters be your waiters at the table of success.
Con: Remember what I just said about “arty and intellectual” indie music? Also, there’s a decent chance the Geese vote will be split by writers who instead go with Cameron Winter’s solo album Heavy Metal, as a make-up call for missing it after its December 2024 release. They are free to do what they want, but for the record, I’ll just say: This is blatant disregard for the calendar and, in terms of the space-time continuum, totally unacceptable.
4. Dijon — Baby
Pro: As my Indiecast co-host Ian Cohen likes to say, the north star for modern music critics (aside from Rosalía) is somewhat left-of-center R&B, with “weird” or “experimental” overtones. This record feels like 2025’s version of that. It sounds a bit like a Bon Iver record, only without a bearded Wisconsinite at the center. For critics, that’s like catnip to an Abyssinian. Plus, he was great in one of the best scenes — the “hairless Mexican” one — from One Battle After Another.
Con: Baby is a really cool record that deserves the attention it has gotten. But it might not have a high enough profile to compete in this field.
5. Hayley Williams — Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party
Pro: Think about your favorite band from the aughts. Zero in on their most famous member. Nine times out of ten, that person is less critically acclaimed now than they were then. Hayley Williams is the one out of ten. Paramore had some supporters in the 2000s, and that legion grew in the press in the 2010s. But in the 2020s, Hayley Williams is like Neil Young or Tom Petty in the ’90s, as the reverent notices for Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party have borne out. This is weird to say about a person who is only turning 37 in December, but Williams feels like a respected elder at this point for a certain generation of musicians.
Con: But what about other generations? Hayley Williams polls great with millennials, but Gen-Xers and (younger) zoomers might not have any idea this record exists.
6. FKA Twigs — Eusexua
Pro: It’s a really good record, for one. And it was made by an artist who’s always in the mix for this sort of thing. She is a modern paragon of the “somewhat left-of-center R&B” lane. She might be more famous than popular — Dijon has more monthly Spotify listeners, which doesn’t feel correct but is nonetheless true — though that is actually an advantage here. Her album came out in January, but she just put out a second record, which will remind critics that Eusexua exists without threatening to displace it.
Con: A prevailing trend for 2025 is that releases by 2010s era indie stars were generally underwhelming and, in many cases, swiftly memory-holed. That doesn’t really apply to FKA Twigs, but she might end being collateral damage if writers want to turn the page on that decade.
7. Oklou — Choke Enough
Pro: This French producer and singer has been putting out EPs and mixtapes since the mid-2010s, but Choke Enough is her first proper album. The long build-up to the full-fledged LP statement has set up this electronic artist for a proper coronation. The smartest music writers you’ve heard of under the age of 30 will no doubt be giving this record a lot of love over the next several weeks.
Con: But what about the oldsters drooling into their keyboards? They might not hop the bandwagon until 2026.
8. Wednesday — Bleeds
Pro: A brilliant critic recently called them “a definitive band of the 2020s,” for the ways that they straddle two of indie’s most important subgenres, shoegaze and alt-country. On Bleeds, Wednesday built on that reputation with subtly beefed-up production and refined songwriting that balances Karly Hartzman’s keen eye for lurid small-town detail with more personal expressions of romantic loss. In less music critic-sounding terms: They kept on rockin.’
Con: Similar to the Rosalía question: Is this an improvement over the last record, Rat Saw God, the consensus choice for best indie album of 2023? If it’s not, it’s hard to see Bleeds topping any of the records I’ve already named. It will be acclaimed, but not the most acclaimed.