Category: News

Tough as it is to define “emo” in 2025, “overlooked” feels like a much bigger challenge.

First off, “overlooked” to whom? On the one hand, the music critic community is more expansive than ever and no matter how seemingly obscure a genre or geographical region felt even two years ago, it’s probably being covered somewhere in depth and detail. If you know where to look, that is. On the other hand, that same fractionation somehow amplifies the consensus by the time year-end lists start to publish (at this rate, by mid-November in 2026). As everyone tends to their niche, a few big names emerge stronger than ever and at this point, it can feel like every indie band that isn’t Geese or Wednesday has been overlooked by comparison.

So I tried to keep the definition simple, if still overly personalized: It doesn’t matter if the following records were released on a major or major indie, if the artist was subject to rave reviews or profiles, if they released albums in the past that were very much not overlooked. If I saw them appear on any major year-end list, they’re probably out. If I saw them being bemoaned throughout the year as underrated or underappreciated, I left them out as well (i.e., Greet Death’s phenomenal Die In Love). But they can’t be too obscure either. Every album you’re about to see here has something in common with any indie album you’d see on a Most Overexposed list and could give you something that sounds fresh enough to sustain you in the netherworld where, at least musically, 2025 is no longer happening and 2026 has yet to fully exist.

Baths — Gut

Perhaps I’m operating off an outdated stereotype of music critics rather than the current iteration, but whenever I read someone talking about “the club” in their review, it strikes me as an abstraction rather than a physical place — a catch-all image of glamor and hedonism that skimps on the awkwardness and anxiety that come before, after and even the “during.” All of that stuff is handled by Will Wiesenfeld on Bath’s provocative fourth album Gut, a record that earns the usually facile “unapologetically queer” accolade in that it’s outright and explicitly about his sexual conquests — the cruising, the fleeting ecstasy, the humiliating hangovers in dingy basement apartments, the dread of still doing these things in your 30s when everyone else is settling down. Fifteen years after starting out as a post-Dilla chillwave project on Anticon., Gut is the latest remarkable evolution of Baths’ sound, welding contemporary post-punk influences (GIlla Band, Protomarytr) to the electro-pop template of 2017’s Romaplasm, a truly singular work from a singular artist.

Ben Bondy — XO Salt Lif3

First off, no relation to Spotify AI victim AA Bondy. Prior to XO Salt Lif3, this Berlin-based artist was primarily working in ambient, but similar to Claire Rousay, he’s transitioned to a sorta-emo thing. And by that, I mean there’s noodly, Midwest riffs, heart-on-sleeve lyrics, and drowsy vocals… with the occasional amapiano beat, as evidenced by the opening “Bend,” which makes me think of a more successful version of what Tame Impala was trying to do on songs like “Oblivion.” If this is a pivot and not an artistic cul-de-sac, I can’t wait to hear what’s next.

Clairaudience — Letters From Emptiness

Despite an unwieldy, evocative name, here’s a band that’s nearly impossible to find unless you know exactly what you’re looking for — Googling “clairaudience band new york” immediately brings up a long-running, Brooklyn-via-Melbourne four-piece who are inspired by a bunch of ’80s and ’90s indie pop faves like The Chills and Luna. Promising stuff, but not who we’re talking about here. “Clairaudience” is also a New York-based label that describes itself as “a seminal DIY experiment in recording underground music,” and judging from its Bandcamp, they veer more towards neo-soul and house. Somewhere in the middle of the first page is the Brooklyn band responsible for one of the most striking shoegaze releases of 2025. Amidst all of the Hum and Slowdive worship and the post-They Are Gutting A Body Of Water experimentalism, Clairaudience work in zero-gravity reveries that recast Kranky’s early aughts output as an untapped resource for a dronegaze future. Even better: the nine-minute epic “The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes,” one of the only examples of breakbeat-driven shoegaze that doesn’t sound like watered-down Curve.

Coatshek — Sound Bath

A running tally of Pitchfork’s best albums throughout 2025 featured Coatshek, with RIYLs including, but not limited to, “the erotics of liminal spaces” and “quoting Barthes as foreplay.” Pretty heady stuff for an entirely instrumental record, at least until you find out that it grew from a commission to make “mixes for an imaginary queer bathhouse.” Sheki Cicelsky instead created original material set to a tempo “optimal for sauna sex” (107 BPM, in case you’re wondering). That’s the hook and it’s essential to the album’s creation and narrative. And it can be appreciated as the best 1994 Warp album of 2025, ambient techno that recalls Aphex Twin and Autechre at their most plush. And so I’m left to wonder if Cicelsky would take it as a compliment of their versatility or an abject failure of artist intent that I’ve let Sound Bath wash over me as I cook, take the trolley, or relax after work.

Head North — Winner!

In 2017, Head North put out a great album (The Last Living Man Alive Ever In The History Of The World) that was a kinda meta-analysis concept record about being in a struggling emo band. And, as these things tend to happen, struggling emo bands from Buffalo don’t come out to the West Coast much and I sorta lost track of them when the album didn’t catch on outside of Twitter. That, and they released a grand total of one song over the next eight years. And, wouldn’t you know, when Head North finally returned this year with Winner!, it was a kinda meta-analysis concept record about living out your dreams when the dreams become smaller and sadder. Except this time, they’ve leaned into a “cosmic rock” where the latter part of their descriptor applies more to the mindset than the robust, hooky indie of “Evaporated” — far away enough from their earlier, SideOneDummy-esque material to justify me leaving it off the emo list.

Kitchen — Blue Heeler In Ugly Snowlight, Grey On Gray On Gray On White

Even as I have less time than ever to give a spin to an unfamiliar artist, I always respect both the unfamiliar artist who makes a 20-song, 77-minute behemoth and the people who recommend it to me. What self-belief on both accounts! Especially when the first song itself is 7 minutes and is the slowest, sparest thing on the whole album. Though Kitchen, the project of prolific Rochester-based artist James Keegan, had built up a cult audience prior to 2025 (explored in this admirably in-depth Stereogum profile), it’s perhaps the audacity of Blue Heeler In Ugly Snowlight, Grey On Gray On Gray On White, title and all, that allowed it to break through to a wider audience that was ready for something that jammed Duster, Microphones, and the entire Orchid Tapes catalog into one syllabus.

Nyxy Nyx — Cult Classics Vol. 1

When This is Lorelei released Holo Boy a few weeks back, I found myself newly appreciating its clearest antecedent, Car Seat Headrest’s Teens Of Style — with all due respect to artists who are constantly flooding their Bandcamp page with new music, sometimes a newbie just needs a place to start. The title of Cult Classics Vol. 1 implies that Nyxy Nyx have done something similar; featuring members of Midwife, Knifeplay, A Sunny Day In Glasgow (!), Luna Honey, and Sun Organ, this Philly collective had spent the past decade scattering sludgy slowcore and shimmering shoegaze over several dozen releases. But Cult Classics Vol. 1 is tongue-in-cheek, a reference to this being their first true “studio album” and, thus, the most accessible and focused collection yet, something meant to reach beyond those who already consider Nyxy Nyx a “supergroup.” No album of 2025 captured every band of the feel-bad rainbow quite like Cult Classics Vol. 1.

Real Lies — We Will Annihilate Our Enemies

Over the past decade, Real Lies established their reputation with fascinating, minor variations on the same idea — what if “Weak Become Heroes” was the only song The Streets ever made? Lest that sound overly narrow, there’s been something of a subgenre emerging in the wake of their 2014 single “North Circular,” aging blokes (or sampled versions thereof) speaking of their formative rave experiences over throwback rave beats. At least for me, a sheltered suburban American during the peak crossover of electronica, this stuff is irresistible; I think of my high school friends with whom I used to play GoldenEye 007 while listening to Tool all of a sudden started getting into Chemical Brothers, going to raves, and applying to University Of Vermont. Oh, to have followed their path for at least a couple months rather than working at Jewish summer camp!

And yet, We Will Annihilate Our Enemies initially slipped past me upon its release, as it did so many others; Perhaps their consistency worked against them a decade into the game. And it surely is a nostalgic work — there are multiple references to White Pony tattoos, in a surprising bit of transatlantic cultural exchange (full disclosure, I later discovered that vocalist Kevin Kharas edited an all-Deftones issue of Vice). But the difference this time is that Real Lies aren’t just doing a sprechgesang about anthems, they’re making their own; What else would you expect of songs called “Down And Out (Where E-Girls Dare)” or “I Could Join The Birds”? I hope this little subgenre lasts long enough for artists to make songs about the first time they heard Real Lies.

Tape Trash — EDEN

Remember Indiecast? If so, this trope should sound familiar: the cognitive dissonance that comes when music is tailored so close to your personal tastes that it’s actually repulsive at first. And with that, here’s the RIYL list for Tape Trash’s debut album EDEN: “Bloc Party, Japandroids, Jimmy Eat World, Mew.” Oh, and it’s on Tiny Engines, a label that at one time could claim The Hotelier, Mannequin Pussy, Wild Pink, Spirit Of The Beehive, Strange Ranger, and Peaer on their current roster and has continued to thrive in a post-emo revival landscape. Again, nothing could be more my shit and yet… I’m honestly at a loss trying to think of one Japandroids-influenced (or even Japandroids-esque) band that had staying power beyond its first impression (Steve already gave his Beach Slang post-mortem and, minus the drinks with Pulitzer Prize winners, it’d be pretty similar to mine).

Here’s the thing about EDEN: Yes, there are plenty of hot-wired guitar riffs that remind me of Bloc Party and Mew (or, specifically, the Mew song that featured Bloc Party) and whoa’s and emo sentimentality. But there’s an important, often overlooked semantic component to “RIYL” — this music will appeal to you if you like these bands, even if they don’t often sound much like them. And Tape Trash, above all else, captures the pent-up energy of their touchstones at their best, creating a record of dingy anthems that make for the best example of celebration rock (the genre, not the album) in 2025.

Teethe — Magic Of The Sale

As much as one can expect a slowcore band to be “next up,” Teethe seemed to have that juice — In the five years since their self-titled debut, the Denton band built up a word-of-mouth buzz, opened for Ethel Cain, and signed to Winspear, a label that has an enviable track record with soft-focus indie rock (Wishy, Slow Pulp, Winter). And Magic Of The Sale was up to the task, reminiscent of a subgenre I call “DreamWorks-core” after that brief period in the late ’90s when DIY heroes like Sparklehorse, Built To Spill, and Elliott Smith were making elaborate studio epics with major-label funny money. And yet, it lands here because it’s not like your favorite slowcore bands were making year-end lists in the ’90s either.

A couple weeks ago, Cardi B shared that’s she’s been on the treadmill preparing for her upcoming tour, which launches in February 2026. Now she has revealed just what her workload will look like in the coming weeks.

In a video shared today (December 29), Cardi starts with a message for some of her more combative followers, who she says have “been dragging me for three or four days.” She notes, “Y’all been a little bit too mean,” before continuing:

“2026 is in a couple of days. I have so much work to do once January starts that is stressing me out. I’m gonna be away from my baby, my babies, away from my personal life, away from my home. I have to rehearse for 10 to 12 hours a day for tour. There is so many elements of production that I’m missing for tour. I’m already super stressed out. I need my support system, my fans, to love me. I want y’all to come to my tour and enjoy yourself with me Don’t be dragging me. It’s enough, alright? It’s enough.”

Cardi concludes, “I love y’all. I want good for y’all, I want good for y’all. I want health, money, prosperity, happiness for this new year for y’all. Wish me the same thing, alright? Leave me alone, though. Sh*t, damn. Y’all scare me sometimes.”

Find Cardi’s upcoming tour dates below.

Cardi B’s 2026 Tour Dates: Little Miss Drama Tour

02/11/2026 — Palm Desert, CA @ Acrisure Arena at Greater Palm Springs
02/11/2026 — Thousand Palms, CA @ Acrisure Arena Parking
02/13/2026 — Paradise, NV @ T-Mobile Arena
02/15/2026 — Inglewood, CA @ Kia Forum
02/16/2026 — Inglewood, CA @ Kia Forum
02/19/2026 — Portland, OR @ Moda Center
02/21/2026 — Vancouver, BC @ Rogers Arena
02/22/2026 — Seattle, WA @ Climate Pledge Arena
02/25/2026 — Sacramento, CA @ Golden 1 Center
02/27/2026 — San Francisco, CA @ Chase Center
03/01/2026 — Phoenix, AZ @ Mortgage Matchup Center
03/04/2026 — Houston, TX @ Toyota Center
03/06/2026 — Austin, TX @ Moody Center
03/07/2026 — Dallas, TX @ American Airlines Center
03/09/2026 — Denver, CO @ Ball Arena
03/12/2026 — Minneapolis, MN @ Target Center
03/14/2026 — Indianapolis, IN @ Gainbridge Fieldhouse
03/15/2026 — Detroit, MI @ Little Caesars Arena
03/17/2026 — Kansas City, MO @ T-Mobile Center
03/19/2026 — Cincinnati, OH @ Heritage Bank Center
03/21/2026 — Chicago, IL @ United Center
03/25/2026 — New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden
03/26/2026 — New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden
03/28/2026 — Newark, NJ @ Prudential Center
03/30/2026 — Toronto, ON @ Scotiabank Arena
03/31/2026 — Hamilton, ON @ TD Coliseum
04/02/2026 — Boston, MA @ TD Garden
04/03/2026 — Hartford, CT @ PeoplesBank Arena
04/04/2026 — Baltimore, MD @ CFG Bank Arena
04/07/2026 — Philadelphia, PA @ Xfinity Mobile Arena
04/08/2026 — Washington, DC @ Capital One Arena
04/11/2026 — Raleigh, NC @ Lenovo Center
04/12/2026 — Charlotte, NC @ Spectrum Center
04/14/2026 — Sunrise, FL @ Amerant Bank Arena
04/17/2026 — Atlanta, GA @ State Farm Arena
04/18/2026 — Atlanta, GA @ State Farm Arena

Keeping up with music news and resources like Spotify’s giant and regularly updated New Music Friday playlist are great ways to keep your listening habits from getting stale. Sometimes, though, you need a deeper dive. That’s where Uproxx’s Baylee Lefton comes in as she routinely offers quick-hit lists of songs you need to add into your rotation this week.

She just delivered a fresh mix and it features tracks that have amazing guitar moments.

The set kicks off with a live rendition of Gary Clark Jr.’s “Our Love,” of which Baylee notes, “I saw Gary Clark Jr. in concert earlier this year and it was the most insane concert I’ve ever been to in my entire life.” Next is Rihanna’s “Skin” and Baylee says, “Guitar was absolutely cooking in this track.”

The playlist is rounded out by Harry Styles’ “She,” Led Zeppelin’s “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Big Love,” and UFO’s “Space Child.” So, all in all, it’s mix of some beloved classically guitar-based bands, but also some artists who aren’t traditionally associated with ripping six-strings but have come through on that front at least once.

Check out the video above and to listen to the full songs yourself, hit up the link in Lefton’s Instagram bio.

2025 was full of huge music stories: the Oasis reunion, AI music, Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show, and so on. As far as what was popping off on social media, that falls more in the pop sphere.

Per data collected on Wikipedia and accurate as of December 24, the most-like Instagram post from an American musician shared in 2025 comes from Taylor Swift, as her and Travis Kelce’s engagement announcement has over 37.6 million likes. Also on the list are photos from Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco’s wedding, which garnered 24.6 million likes.

The year’s most-liked post overall comes from Indian singer Kishore Mondal, a video of him singing the song “Jeene Laga Hoon.” Also at the top are an Insta360 video of a toddler walking, Lionel Messi’s visit to Camp Nou, Druvam Kalasamithi’s reel of a wedding entrance, and of course, Mary and Promise’s video of a dog doing chores.

Gomez recently spoke about Blanco’s hesitance to start dating her, saying, “We spoke for two hours and I asked him to hook me up with anybody that he knew that was cute, and he was like, ‘Oh, we do these things, like, dinner nights. You should come.’ And next thing you know, we’re dating. But, he was terrified in the beginning ’cause he was like, ‘It’s work and it’s complicated and people are going to get mad,’ and I’m like, ‘I don’t give a sh*t, kiss me.’”

When hearing their band name, it’s immediately clear that Viagra Boys are here to have a good time. They offered further evidence of that earlier this year with the title of their 2025 album, the more email-spam-filter-friendly Viagr Aboys. Silliness aside, though, Viagra Boys are also just pumping out the jams in a strong way, delivering a handful of well-received albums since their 2018 debut Street Worms.

As Uproxx’s Joypocalypse puts it in a new video, post-punk can be fun and humorous, and Viagra Boys do a great job at demonstrating this by not taking themselves too seriously.

She says:

“Very danceable and chaotic, Viagra Boys’ satire paired with the saxophones and the weird grooves bring something to the table that I didn’t know was missing. They also just have a very unique approach with their very over-the-top nature. It definitely presents in more than one way, one of them being their love for playing characters in their music, like conspiracy guys and macho idiots, showing you with these characters how ridiculous power obsession and toxic masculinity sound. They’re just really capable of bringing that humor, groove, and irony without losing their critique, which isn’t easy.”

Joy concludes, “Keeping that humor but also getting your point across is a talent, one that Viagra Boys definitely have.”

Check out the video above.

This year’s Best Friends Forever festival featured a reunited Texas Is The Reason and Knapsack, Burning Airlines, Rival Schools, Jawbreaker, Mineral’s final show, and a Jimmy Eat World headlining set that featured as many songs from Static Prevails as Bleed American; Even then, “Sweetness” and “The Middle” were tacked on last as a veritable encore, existing outside of the spirit of the preceding weekend where Jim Adkins reminisced about his days of dragging bass cabs up staircases and having slept on floors with everyone on the lineup over the age of 40. And yet, while I left Las Vegas inevitably overcome by nostalgia, it wasn’t for late-’90s emo, even as someone who is in the process of literally writing a book about late-’90s emo.

Rather, I found myself incapacitated with longing during otherwise perfectly enjoyable afternoon sets from Pity Sex and Tigers Jaw. Staring off wistfully into the middle distance, thinking, “Man, the mid-2010s were a time.” Whether or not you believe it was a peak time for emo music, it was unquestionably a peak time for emo music’s documentation. Even if it was reductive, the narrative helped: Emo was viewed not just as a repudiation of the previous era of Bamboozle and Warped Tour hegemony, but a counterbalance for indie rock getting a little too slick. Not just in terms of the stylish, synth-pop that was being championed as “indie” at the time, but the increasing lack of friction between pop artists and publications genuflecting for access. Bands like Tigers Jaw and Pity Sex may not have displaced the Vampire Weekends or Haims of the world, but they were at least part of the same dialogue, which had never been true for emo even during its supposed golden age.

Oh, how I long for the days of seeing a dozen modestly positive reviews for Run For Cover bands! I say this not even as a writer, just as a consumer of emo music. Sometimes I have no idea what’s actually making noise in the scene. Chalk it up to the continuing decimation of music publications or the prevailing form of emo not being of interest to more, ahem, refined critical tastes. Or, chalk it up to me not being willing to get in the trenches on TikTok or Reddit or X, or even able to figure out where these bands are being discussed with both intensity and intelligence. But if you were reliant on mainstream music publications to keep you up to speed on emo, it may as well not have existed at all in 2025. Hot Mulligan is on the same line of the Bonnaroo lineup as Wet Leg and Blood Orange and I saw barely anything written about their last album. I worried about whether some of the bands on this list were too obvious for inclusion and yet… can anything in this genre be accused of overexposure in 2025?

I feel like I say this every year and maybe it’s just confirmation bias: Though plenty of bands leveled up within the scene, I’m not sure I can point to any emo album from 2025 breaking containment, being the “token emo” (or even punk) album on year-end lists. If there are still publications willing to run Best Emo Album Of All Time lists in 2030, what will represent the 2020s? Are there modern classics that are being acknowledged in the underground or is this period similar to 1991-1993 or 2007-2009 which tend to get glossed over on past lists?

Or, are we overlooking the next Marietta? If I remember Best Friends Forever for anything, it won’t be Mineral’s farewell or Jimmy Eat World playing a song they did on a Jebediah split to thousands of people at a Las Vegas festival in 2025, but the absolutely bonkers reception I witnessed for a band that seemed to exist in the middle tier of whatever emo iceberg was being passed around in 2015. To make things clear, big fan of Marietta over here. Definitely got into some minor skirmishes upon saying that As It Were was a superior album to Summer Death. But I never once got the impression that they were viewed as scene leaders, and in the time since, I hadn’t heard them being name-dropped as massive influences on the newer wave of emo bands, or seeing Summer Death fetch Just Married-style prices on Discogs. Yet, based on the fevered reaction of the crowd, you’d think Title Fight or Modern Baseball had reunited (and, inevitably, the wishcasting began for a Best Friends Forever 2026 headlined by one of those two bands). I asked the bookers how this iteration of Best Friends Forever compared to the previous one and, despite leaning even more heavily into the ’90s, they said the crowd was noticeably younger this time around.

The point being that, even when emo bands break containment and are being canonized in real time, there’s still no guarantee we’ll “get it right” for the future. That’s what makes following emo so thrilling and frustrating: It’s a genre by the kids, for the kids, for the moment rather than posterity. So I might as well just admit that this list isn’t meant to capture a moment in time or even predict 2035’s 10-year retrospectives. Washed as it might seem, these are just the emo albums I enjoyed the most in 2025, presented in alphabetical order (and they are albums, so apologies to My Point Of View and Febuary and really, most of the screamo bands I enjoyed this year).

Algernon Cadwallader — Trying Not To Have A Thought

There’s an alternate universe where this album is emo’s answer to Clipse’s Let God Sort ‘Em Out: an unexpected reunion rubber-stamped by old heads who have their suspicions of the last decade or so confirmed, that sh*t was better back in my day. And yes, I’m a 45-year old telling you that Trying Not To Have A Thought is the best emo album of 2025, but it’s not because Algernon Cadwallader picked up right where they left off at Parrot Flies. Rather, it’s as if the original quartet kept Algernon Cadwallader going in secret for the past 15 years alongside their newer projects, slowly integrating the classic indie jangle of Dogs On Acid, the oblong rhythms of Hop Along, decades worth of political activism that went unheeded during the emo revival, and the production know-how Joe Reinhart honed with Joyce Manor and Modern Baseball. Peter Helmis has never sounded more in control of his voice (which means he knows how to lose control), the hooks are sharper, the lyrics more pointed, the jams are groovier, making good on their promise of “Joan Of Arc meets Pavement” — a once frankly inconceivable nexus between emo diehards and college rock snobs who have a lot more in common thanks to Algernon Cadwallader’s catalog. Trying Not To Have A Thought doesn’t just raise the bar for the bands Algernon influenced, it did so for indie rock as a whole in 2025. I’ll still call it the best emo album of the year even if I know that sells it short.

Anxious — Bambi

The one-off singles after Little Green House were too catchy, the guy from One Step Closer is no longer in the band, and the guy who was in a Broadway production of School Of Rock was now writing half the songs. Hell, Anxious was just too damn photogenic to limit their ceiling to “we have Title Fight at home” when “can someone make a Jimmy Eat World album?” has been an open question for the past six years. Of course, Anxious were going to “level up” into pure pop-rock on their sophomore album. But even if Bambi was inevitable, the level of craftsmanship in “Counting Sheep” and “Some Girls” still manage to stun, a perfect balance of emo sentimentality, harmonic complexity and the occasional scrim of New England angst to remind everyone why it’s on a Best Emo Albums list.

Aren’t We Amphibians — Parade! Parade!

In the scope of emo history, San Diego is probably the only city with a more deadly serious reputation than Washington D.C. — the birthplace of screamo, white belts and Spock haircuts and Drive Like Jehu. “Fun” bands working within this realm typically either make sasscore or sound like Blink-182. But it’s 2025 and even San Diego State has a handful of kids who are making Midwest emo TikTok stitches — someone’s gotta represent for them. Enter Aren’t We Amphibians, who began the year with 2025’s most impactful four-way split and held serve on their debut Parade! Parade!. It’s extremely hard to stand out in the crowded field of post-Gami Gang emo-pop, and it’s all the more impressive that AWA don’t have a specific quirk or gimmick; Rather, Parade! Parade! is all about balance, between goofiness and earnest ambition, skramz and pop, yearning for a Midwest basement scene and when San Diego feels like a grim holding cell.

Arm’s Length — There’s A Whole World Out There

I try not to let peer pressure shape this list, though it’s increasingly difficult to not anticipate “where’s so and so?” clogging up my mentions. That said, I think Arm’s Length would be the only band who would be offended by their omission — they just take emo that seriously. The Hotelier, La Dispute, Pianos Become The Teeth: these are the Beatles, Beach Boys, and Stones for this Canadian trio. Actually, let’s get more specific — “Your Deep Rest” is their “God Only Knows,” the epitome of what all songwriting should aspire to. That was also true of Arm’s Length’s 2022 debut Never Before Seen, Never Again Found and they’ve only grown more intense in their evangelism on its follow-up. Suicide, body dysmorphia, generational trauma, substance abuse, existential dread, and not a single moment of levity course throughout There’s A Whole World Out There, an album that speaks entirely in life-or-death stakes: “ROMANTICIZE THE F*CKING PAST FOR ONCE, YOU COULDN’T EVEN DIE IF YOU TRIED, FIRST OF THE FAMILY TO DIE OF OLD AGE.” These are the hooks and they’re all enormous and delivered with unshakeable conviction. It all teeters on the edge of being ridiculous because that’s where the action is for the kind of emo Arm’s Length are making, one that’s only over-dramatic or extra in retrospect and never in the moment to the person who relates to it even in the slightest.

First Day Back — Forward

The original iteration of Midwest emo couldn’t have happened without the financial advantages that came with the territory — a relatively cheap cost of living, readily accessible basements and VFW halls, massive land-grant university towns starved for live music and a lack of industry attention, and competition that allowed early awkward phases to happen in relative peace. But at their core, these bands were just made up of misfits from the neighborhood who found refuge from high school football in Fugazi. So it’s not all that shocking that the most convincing piece of second-wave Midwest emo in 2025 comes from a band out of Santa Cruz — in a city overrun by acid-fried psych rock, how stoked would you be to find three or four other 20-somethings willing to name a band after a Braid song? While the referentiality serves as the entry point, the title of First Day Back’s debut is just as important: Forward starts out with an off-key scream and the momentum never relents, its straight-to-tape immediacy evident even during the violin instrumentals. Now let’s just hope they didn’t internalize the part where legendary Midwest emo bands break up after their breakthrough album.

Good Luck — Big Dreams, Mister

Shortly after the release of Big Dreams, Mister, my colleague Nina Corcoran boasted of seeing Good Luck, “Playing at the back of a bar at midnight to a sold-out crowd of people grinning wildly and singing along.” Granted, said bar is a 100-cap room and unless you count Jeff Rosenstock’s social media accounts, that was really about it as far as mainstream coverage for Good Luck’s first album in 14 years. It’s just as well — though 2008’s Into Lake Griffy was beloved by many of the same people flipping out over Algernon Cadwallader’s similarly timed comeback, Good Luck was your favorite band’s favorite band, “underappreciated” if you only count the number of appreciators rather than the intensity of the love. And on Big Dreams, Mister, the Bloomington, Indiana trio take stock of what it means to keep soldiering on when the scene has dispersed, to heed the spark of creation as a pure labor of love and reaffirm their influence on any emo band that liked to teetered on the edge of jangle-pop and folk-punk. You could call this stuff “elder emo” if TikTok hadn’t already turned that term into the most embarrassing sh*t imaginable.

Home Is Where — Hunting Season

Here’s a freebie for anyone looking to get a jump on 2026 thinkpieces: In a couple of months, Pinegrove’s Cardinal celebrates its 10th anniversary. Beyond that band’s still inconceivable legacy as a flashpoint for late-2010s cancel culture and scene self-policing, it’s worth exploring whether emo’s relationship with country music has progressed all that much in the past decade. There’s no shortage of bands who are comfortable with throwing a banjo in the mix or a little geographically ambiguous twang, but how many sound truly country? I offer Home Is Where’s raucous third LP Hunting Season, which could pass for “Southern rock” if it wasn’t for the twisty, tappy guitar leads and surrealist imagery that makes it immediately identifiable as the product of the same band who made “Conjoined Long Distance Twins” and “Assisted Harakiri.” Now living as an exile from their home state, Bea McDonald offers her funniest and most frightening treatise on the duality of the Florida Thing — somehow both quintessentially American and a grotesque mutation, an overheated ecosystem that spawns both the lovable eccentrics that populate McDonald’s lyrics and the hatred that forced her out.

Key Vs. Locket — I Felt Like A Sketch

Is hyperpop the new emo? By that, I mean, “Is hyperpop the misunderstood genre that teenage artists make before they transition to more mature styles of music?” I realize it’s a small sample size and I’m by no means an authority to speak on larger trends in this world, but I couldn’t help but notice the likes of Jane Remover, Brakence, Quannnic, Quadeca, and Twikipedia being passed my way every time I’ve expressed feeling that emo was stuck in a major rut. Weren’t those all hyperpop acts? They were, and at some point, decided to get serious by making music that could be described in some way as “emo-esque,” if not emo itself. Imagine that! When I saw r/emo and Album Of The Year buzzing over Key Vs. Locket, I assumed it couldn’t have come out of nowhere, and indeed, the Brazil-to-Brooklyn artist is the same person behind Twikipedia’s equally buzzed-over 2024’s For The Rest Of Your Life. I Felt Like A Sketch jettisons the shoegaze/hyper-pop hybrid of its immediate predecessor but maintains the “anything goes” mindset of the highly online, smattering its well-thought out twinkles with chamber pop, ska, jazz, and bossa nova. It’s an album brimming with ideas and often thrilling execution, a glimpse of emo’s future if Key Vs. Locket doesn’t up and change their whole identity in a year.

Sport — In Waves

“The last thing we need to do is re-litigate the definition of ‘twinkle daddy,’” I dunno about that. If you’re reading (let alone writing) an emo album ranking list in 2025, that’s well within our wheelhouse. So let’s take it back to 2013 or so, when that term actually had some critical utility to describe a variant of the genre that had the requisite sparkly arpeggios alongside some burly, bearded vocals that wouldn’t be out of place opening for Hot Water Music. Crash Of Rhinos, Dikembe, Hightide Hotel, things of that nature. “Weed emo” or whatever you want to call the wave that started in 2016, pretty much wiped that stuff out and so of course the best revival of this sound had to come from a French act that last released an album in… 2016. Even if no less than 13 European labels are handling its distribution, Sport isn’t fooling anyone — In Waves is for the heads. But don’t mistake its throwback sound as complacent nostalgia. At once prettier and tougher than their previous albums (“this song is a tribute to Werner Herzog / there’s a man with vision” goes the intro of “Caveat,” straight #bars), In Waves brims with purpose, a labor of love from a band proudly out of time.

Weatherday — Hornet Disaster

“Sprawling,” “expansive” — throw these words into an emo album review and I’m almost guaranteed to check it out. Due to the genre’s predominant trends, I didn’t see them much this year, but here we have Weatherday’s 19-track, 76-minute behemoth of a second album trying to make up for the rest for their peers playing smallball. And really, what else could Sputnik do six years after Come In, which was putting up Barry Bonds numbers at Rate Your Music (i.e., going toe to toe with Car Seat Headrest, which I suppose is the Sammy Sosa of this metaphor)? As with Glass Beach’s Plastic Death and Your Arms Are My Cocoon’s self-titled last year, Hornet Disaster was a long-gestating sophomore bow not forged in the crucible of incessant touring or escalating commercial expectations or a stunning stylistic shift. Rather, it’s the work of an artist going inward while their musical palette broadens; In the case of Hornet Disaster, Weatherday transcends their origins as “internet music” and draws from the crackling immediacy of Guided By Voices (when the songs are short) and the world-building of early Microphones (when the songs are long), a truly immersive experience that marks a boundary around everything else until its dream logic is the law of the land.

Sabrina Carpenter superfans are already aware of “Such A Funny Way.” This summer, she released the song as a vinyl-only bonus track on Man’s Best Friend. In September, she briefly made the track available for digital download, writing at the time, “‘Such a Funny Way’ is a song i am so proud of. the sentiment is one i always thought could really be the end of Man’s Best Friend in another universe!”

Now, she has decided to re-purpose the song as a holiday gift for her fans: On Christmas Eve (December 24), she finally made the song available on streaming for the first time.

Announcing the release on Instagram, Carpenter wrote:

“to thank you for such a beautiful year …and to supply whoever needs a cathartic christmas crashout song… Man’s best friend bonus track edition with one of my favorites ‘Such a Funny Way’ is now officially available on streaming

i love you guys so much.
Thank you for caring for these songs the way i do and for such a special 2025!! I feel lucky to know there’s still so much good to come x.”

This comes shortly after her appearances on Late Night, first for an interview and later for a “day drinking” segment.

Listen to “Such A Funny Way” above.

Presents, food, friends, and family are what this next stretch of the calendar is all about. But for those hours in-between having to go out and turn on, the best films from 2025 are here for you, most of them available to stream, but a few calling you to the theater for buttery popcorn and the less damaging kind of holiday season drama.

While you may have seen a lot of these films throughout the year, we tip our cap if you’ve seen everything here. If you haven’t, though, consider this one last holiday season to-do list. Encapsulating an on-screen year of spirals, soul salvation, superheroes, and the supernatural, 2025 packs a punch with astonishing performances, visual spectacle, seering stories, and unsparing looks at our world in the past and present which are guaranteed to spur some conversations on the group chat and at the dinner table.

Give it a read and go out in search of entertainment and jaw dropping film.

28 Years Later

28 Years Later isn’t just another sequel in a long-running zombie franchise, it’s a meditation on survival, memory, and the damning effects of isolation. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland team up once again for this buzzed-about installment, but this time the apocalypse feels almost domestic, like something we’ve settled into after the initial shock of infection and societal collapse has worn off. The story’s set-up is pretty straightforward: a remote English island, a community clinging to tradition while keeping watch over a mainland gone feral. Alfie Williams’ Spike is a kid trying to grow up too fast, Aaron Taylor-Johnson is his problematic dad, and Jodie Comer plays his mom, a woman suffering from what’s hinted to be a brain tumor. Their quest for a cure – not to the bigger rage virus epidemic but to something more insidious and uncomfortably relatable – leads Spike and his mom to Ralph Fiennes’ Dr. Ian Kelson, a hermit who offers up some of the movie’s most poignant messaging on mortality, grief, and the interconnectedness of it all. For a zombie flick, it’s surprisingly and painfully human, which is why it snags a spot on this list. — Jessica Toomer

Avatar: Fire and Ash

Avatar: Fire And Ash has a lot going for it. I don’t want to get into spoiler territory listing off all the cool Tulkun shit and the other surprises, but if you take the universe James Cameron created even remotely seriously, there is a lot of payoff in the latest installment. And while some of the criticisms of this film hold water – most notably some repeated story beats from the second film that make it clear that they were originally supposed to be a single movie – there’s just no better action epics happening right now at this scale. Cameron continues to build out a deeply fascinating world and raising the stakes that when the final hour hits, it becomes the most effective blockbuster extravaganza of the year. — Philip Cosores

Blue Moon

The 9th collaboration between Ethan Hawke and filmmaker Richard Linklater is the most unique from the rest. In the film, Hawke is running on pure nervous energy as the balding, 5-foot-tall Lorenz Hart, the ultimately tragic first creative partner of legendary composer Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott). Hart is in love with a great many things: the sound of his own voice, the musicality of a sentence with perfectly chosen words, his young mentee Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), a good drink, and the act of keeping up appearances amongst friends and colleagues while skulking around Sardis after the premiere of Rodgers (and Hammerstein)’s Oklahoma. But underneath all that buzz and those fake smiles is an acid tongue and a man seemingly rooting for his longtime partner’s failure and return to their less commercial work together. Hawke really sums up the import of the film’s central story perfectly in a Daily Show interview, explaining the art vs. commerce battle for the soul of American theatrical audiences at a time of war when people were turning away from Hart’s beloved satire toward more sanitized and uplifting reflections – “nostalgia for a world that never existed,” as he says. A fight ongoing, it seems. — Jason Tabrys

Bugonia

Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons are startlingly good in Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest bleak and black comedy, playing a visionary CEO absent a soul and a conspiracy theorist whose brain has been melted by grief. The showdowns between their two characters, largely occurring in the basement where Stone’s character is being held until she admits she’s an alien, portray an intense duel as the CEO repeatedly runs into a wall when trying to mindfuck her captors. Yorgos being Yorgos, things get absolutely insane in the third act with a sharp turn toward the absurd that feels deeply satisfying. — Jason Tabrys

Eddington

Your being manipulated. [sic]
Ari Aster’s latest hilarious bit of nightmare fuel is about as divisive as movies come, but you also rarely see a film’s reputation flip as quickly as Eddington, which went from poor Cannes buzz to high placement on lists such as these. It’s understandable why the film turned people off, as it interrogates how both the left and right lost their minds a bit in 2020, and how systems of power use our differences as a smokescreen for long-tailed policy. But it’s also important to note that the film isn’t “both-sidesing” the political climate. In Aster’s own words, one side in the film is annoying and hypocritical, the other is literally murderous. Eddington is knife-sharp in its observations, packed with subtle jabs that sting if you can’t laugh at yourself, and then some not-so-subtle upper cuts that bang the points home. But the film also feels crucial, as we need filmmakers to examine what was a period of national trauma where even those with the best of intentions lost their way. It might be hard to watch, but this will prove to be valuable, lasting art. — Philip Cosores

Frankenstein

The world didn’t so much need another Frankenstein re-telling so much as it needed masterful macabre storyteller Guillermo del Toro to take hold of Mary Shelley’s story and add his signature talent for world-building, specificity, and creature creation. The result is a beautiful and heartbreaking epic about creators, creations, and obsession, powered by Oscar Isaac’s driven and debonair Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi’s tortured creature. Though the story has its thin points (specifically at the end) and deviations from the known tale, the whole is a triumph of gothic storytelling. It’s also an imperative watch for fans of del Toro’s past works, the Frankenstein story, and anyone in search of a new take on a story still shockingly relevant about those who would try to harness the power of a God without regard for the possible bloody consequences. — Jason Tabrys

Friendship

Tim Robinson’s creative 2025 centered on the idea of obsession, crossing into awkwardness. That’s true for The Chair Company (which landed on our best TV list) and this two-hander co-starring Paul Rudd as a cool neighbor guy who tries to back away slowly from the Robinson character’s friendship once things get a little too intense. Perfectly cast, the film is a cringe comedy goldmine that leans into the spiral, but it’s all tethered to reality by the much-mentioned male loneliness epidemic and the weird transitional place people sometimes find themselves in in their 30s and 40s as old friendships wither and wane, and new friendships prove challenging to unlock. As weird and scary as Robinson’s character is, especially at the end, it’s hard not to see the tragedy of someone desperate for connection whose brain is scrambled from a series of Ls largely brought on by his own behavior. — Jason Tabrys

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Another spin-out story, this one centered on Rose Byrne’s therapist character as she tries to navigate a life collapsing all around her (sometimes literally). Desperately in need of a break, Byrne’s character does her best to keep it all together while being yelled at, condescended to, antagonized, and ignored by her largely unseen husband (Christian Slater), sick daughter, daughter’s doctor, her own therapist (Conan O’Brien), and her patients. Among others. Written and directed by Mary Bronstein, this festival favorite is a heightened portrait of a woman juggling too many chainsaws in a shitstorm, striving for control and balance while constantly being held down by chaos and people’s flagging empathy. Is the film high profile enough to net Byrne an Oscar nomination for how she plays the resulting bottled frustration as it builds and builds? She absolutely deserves one. — Jason Tabrys

Is This Thing On

Sorry Ella McCay, but it turns out that the best James L. Brooks movie of the year was actually made by Bradley Cooper. And, while the takes are coming, it must be said that Cooper is now 3/3 as a filmmaker with a growing oeuvre of varied, fascinating work. Is This Thing On? is the most minor of his three films, but that’s part of what makes it so interesting, as he’s working directly with Will Arnett to tell a small, personal story that lacks the sweeping scope of this previous films. The weakest stuff is the actual standup (which is maybe part of the point?) but when the movie gets going, Cooper finds the beating heart of the familial drama and the exuberant laughter that connects the dots. He also delivers maybe the single funniest performance of the year. He really can do it all. — Philip Cosores

It Was Just An Accident

If you were to judge just from the logline – former Iranian political prisoners face what may be their torturer and must decide what to do with him – It Was Just An Accident sounds like a tough hang. And when you add in the situation with director Jafar Panahi, who is due to serve a year in prison when he returns from his awards campaign after having previously been banned from filmmaking due to his criticism of the regime, the film’s weight and importance extends beyond the confines of the actual runtime. All that said, It Was Just An Accident is also very funny and thoroughly entertaining, all while giving the very serious premise the attention it deserves. It’s a massive accomplishment that even becomes more impressive when considering the defiance that its creation represents. — Philip Cosores

KPop Demon Hunters

No one, not even the most devout Blackpink groupie (raises hand) saw the success of KPop Demon Hunters coming. A girl band with world-saving duties? Demon boy-band rivals? Mind-blowing 2D/3D hybrid animation synced to a nonstop playlist of bangers? (Okay fine, when you list it out like that, maybe we should’ve.) Directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, the movie follows Rumi, Mira, and Zoey, the latest incarnation of a K-Pop girl band tasked with keeping a demon apocalypse at bay. They’re funny, they’re fierce, they’re relatable as hell despite their supernatural duties – they just want oversized hoodies, piping hot ramyun, and couch, thank you very much. Meanwhile, their enemies are equal parts absurd and terrifying, and the film’s kinetic action fused with its relentless soundtrack raises the stakes of every performance-turned-beat-down. If this isn’t already your new obsession, consider yourself warned. — Jessica Toomer

Lurker

Lurker isn’t an entirely new tale – personal obsession leads someone down a dark pathway – but the world that the film operates in does feel particularly unexplored. In fact, updating tropes for the Instagram generation results in something quite telling about how fans and artists interact in the contemporary world, where constant metrics form an internal value and vision of self-worth that’s hard to shake. Lurker is vivid, confident storytelling from debut filmmaker Alex Russell that captures an intoxicating and frightening reality, with music from Kenny Beats, Dijon, and Rex Orange County to give the film its cool-kid authenticity. — Philip Cosores

Marty Supreme

When the Safdie Brothers unceremoniously ended their partnership after the success of Uncut Gems, there as strong feeling that Benny was the one with the real juice, as he quickly began working with artists like Christopher Nolan, Nathan Fielder, and Paul Thomas Anderson, growing his network as his ambition took him to more varied visions. But now that we’ve finally heard from Josh, it became instantly clear where the manic urgency of the brothers’ movies came from. Marty Supreme is a Safdie joint with the dial turned to 100, its scope bigger than ever before. With Timothée Chalamet on his generational shit, inspired casting decisions ranging from Tyler, The Creator to Abel Ferrara to the dude from Shark Tank, and an out-of-this-world score from 0PN mastermind Daniel Lopatin, Marty Supreme feels like the culmination of a style that can’t be confined to the gritty New York streets. It can globe-trot, as well. — Philip Cosores

No Other Choice

Every Park Chan-Wook film is an event and No Other Choice is no different. He’s been oscillating between Korean- and English-language productions in recent years, and this tale of a Korean paper employee who chooses unconventional methods in response to losing his job captures the moment of AI fears and economic uncertainty. But most of all, he’s just back to being his hilarious, dark, freaky self in the film, which includes terrific needle drops and some of the most unexpected dissolves conceivable. It remains to be seen if Director Park finally nets some serious awards recognition for his efforts, but the film is monstrously entertaining and expertly crafted regardless. — Philip Cosores

One Battle After Another

For those of us who started buying Paul Thomas Anderson stock in the ‘90s, we’re cashing out like gangbusters in 2025. One Battle After Another was a huge risk both on paper and in practice for Warner Brothers, giving an auteur like Anderson more than 100mm dollars to make a three-hour politically-charged epic. No one knew whether it would be a commercial or awards play, but it turns out, it was a play on all fronts. And maybe more important than the film’s rolling, twisty road to profitability or the amount of Oscars it wins (likely many) is the fact that WB funded a massive, lasting piece of art that will be discussed far longer than the platforms we currently debate its merits on. This is obviously a more nuanced conversation than a blurb can hold, but this is what movies are at their best. They provoke discussions about art vs commerce, race, politics, generational performances, adaptation, and marketing. And in this case, they also make for great memes and a Fortnite tie-in. — Philip Cosores

The Perfect Neighbor

Forget every other horror entry on this list because this Netflix doc (and film fest breakout) is the most terrifying movie you’ll watch this year. The Perfect Neighbor turns a familiar suburban nightmare into a tense, unflinching meditation on privilege, bias, and the thin blue line between annoyance and tragedy. Director Geeta Gandbhir reconstructs the real-life deadly dispute between Florida resident Susan Lorincz and her neighbor Ajike “AJ” Owens almost entirely through police bodycam and surveillance footage, creating a documentary that feels immediate, intimate, and horrifyingly inevitable. There are no interviews and no dramatizations as we bear witness to the escalating chaos of a neighborhood conflict amplified by systemic inequities and the weaponization of “self-defense” laws. What Gandbhir captures is both the microcosm of neighborly tension and the larger, brutal reality of race and power in America: a single call to 911 can carry consequences that no one can anticipate or understand. It’s the only true-crime film we’ve seen this year that forces its audience to really dig into their own assumptions and prejudices while watching powerless as a preventable tragedy unfolds. — Jessica Toomer

Sentimental Value

To the surprise of many, 2025 offered up two separate films about aging artists coming to terms with the familial sacrifices made in the name of career, and even centered them around film festival tributes. But while Jay Kelly ultimately sticks the landing after an uneven journey, I’ll take Sentimental Value and its internalized view of generational depression any day of the week. My hottest take is I even think this film is stronger than Joaquim Trier’s previous banger, The Worst Person In The World, in just that it substitutes twee sensibilities with more earned and understated emotional stakes. Plus, you have the blondest kid you’ve ever seen dropping Avatar quotes to clueless parents, some incredible jokes about Netflix, and a masterclass in physical media gifting for children. — Philip Cosores

Sinners

The ground is shifting underneath the theatrical release model, but the idea that we’re devoid of traditional movie stars comes undone when you look at Michael B. Jordan’s successes. Building on his childhood apprenticeship on peak TV stand-outs like The Wire and Friday Night Lights, Jordan has blossomed into a force, forming an incredibly potent partnership with director Ryan Coogler. From the powerful Fruitvale Station to the resurrection of the Rocky franchise by way of the Creed films and his role as Marvel’s last truly interesting on-screen villain in Black Panther, the two have found a rare level of creative synergy. With Sinners, Jordan gets a new showcase piece from Coogler, playing both sides of the Smokestack twins, gangsters who return from Chicago to Mississippi and open a juke joint in the 1930s. Jordan is mesmerizing as the tonally different twins, forced to deal with an unholy raid with vampires inhabiting friends, family, and strangers in the blood-soaked horror drama that refuses to relent. The rare piece of stand-alone, fresh IP capable of bringing in big numbers, the focus now turns to whether the Academy can give the film (and Jordan’s performance) the flowers it deserves as one of the year’s best. — Jason Tabrys

Sorry, Baby

We first saw Sorry, Baby at Sundance earlier this year and it immediately stood out as the kind of debut you start mentally slotting into year-end lists before the credits even roll. First-time director Eva Victor mans the camera with striking restraint, telling a story about sexual violence that refuses to fall into the trap of sensationalism. She also stars as Agnes, the film’s protagonist, an academic stalled in the wake of a sexual assault by her mentor who is quietly moving through a life that feels oddly misaligned. Told in wryly funny chapters named after babies, sandwiches, and impossible questions, the film maps the long, grinding aftermath of trauma. By refusing to depict the assault itself, Victor shifts attention to the consequences of sexual violence that people rarely talk about: the unsympathetic doctors, the institutional indifference, and the way a single moment can hijack the years that follow it. It’s an unsparing but deeply compassionate film, sharp in its dark humor and sensitive to its own pain. — Jessica Toomer

Superman

Before comic book movies were as ubiquitous as assholes, opinions, and assholes with opinions, there was Richard Donner’s Superman. Released in 1978, the film trafficked in the kind of comparatively lo-fi magic that used to trigger a suspension of disbelief when it came to men flying in capes and cheesy dialogue with “aw shucks” heroing. The world has changed a lot since then, and so has the way comic book movies reflect it back to us. There is, perhaps, good and bad to the rise of hyperrealism in these films, letting our brains go on cruise control when it comes to processing unbelievable sights while throwing so much at us – in terms of digital slop, heavy storytelling, twisty franchise-serving narratives, and expanded universe homework. James Gunn’s Superman is guilty of some of those things, but while it plays its part in laying the initial bricks for the new DCU’s cinematic universe, it also stands out as a thrilling, sometimes joyous, visually interesting, and not terribly complicated story of a conflicted but committed hero going up against a power-mad evil tech-genius zealot. At its core, Gunn’s Superman may not make you believe that a man can fly, but it might make you want to believe, cutting through a cynicism that has undercut the genre well into its bloat phase. — Jason Tabrys

Thunderbolts*

Thunderbolts* is Marvel at its most self-aware, and that’s a very good thing. This is a comic book story that’s been freed of its own pretentiousness. It knows it’s cobbling together B-list heroes and minor villains, putting them in ridiculous spandex, and tasking them with somehow saving the world when what they really need to be doing is seeking therapy. And because it knows all of this, it ramps up the explosions, goes cerebral with its action sequences, and litters its dialogue with snarky one-liners meant to kill time in its A24-esque promos. But just because it’s having fun at its own expense doesn’t mean it’s shallow. Director Jake Schreier is much more interested in character than spectacle here. Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova carries that emotional weight with dry humor and simmering frustration, while Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes flounders hilariously in the world of politics and paperwork. Wyatt Russell is a deadpan delight as John Walker, still processing what it means to be a “normal” human after years of super-soldier nonsense, and Lewis Pullman’s Bob turns apathy and instability into a ticking time bomb once his true nature emerges. What makes Thunderbolts* unexpectedly satisfying isn’t the choreographed action, it’s how much it clearly cares about the people inside the costume. — Jessica Toomer

Train Dreams

It’s been almost a year since Train Dreams premiered at Sundance and became the festival’s most discussed and acclaimed breakout. Clint Bentley’s spare, poetic, and deeply-felt adaptation of a Dennis Johnson novella – my favorite film of the year – was quickly swooped up by Netflix, leading to concern that it might get a quick content dump and never read the kind of screens that the film’s big trees and big feelings deserve. Well, the concern turned out to be relatively unfounded. Sure, most people will never see those towering pines make big crashes in a full, darkened room, but it did find its audience and has elbowed its way into deserved awards contention. It even created days worth of online debates about its merits, joining movies like May December and Marriage Story as indie films surprisingly faced with monoculture relevance via a Netflix release, both to the films’ benefits and detriments. All that’s to say that Train Dreams has impacted the year far more than most expected, and if that’s the way that one of the best film’s of 2025 finds its audience in the contemporary landscape, then so be it. — Philip Cosores

Weapons

Weapons’ premise reads like the kind of ghost story you’d trade over a camp fire: a class of elementary school kids waking at 2:17 a.m., slipping out of their homes, and vanishing into the dark. From there, Zach Cregger turns his follow-up to Barbarian into a slow, nasty excavation of suburban panic. Told in overlapping chapters, the film tracks how grief and fear fracture a town, turning a teacher into a suspect, neighbors into vigilantes, and youthful innocence into something more sinister. Julia Garner and Josh Brolin are both excellent, anchoring the film as a scapegoated educator and desperate father scouring surveillance footage and their own unreliable memories for answers. But it’s Amy Madigan’s Aunt Gladys that emerges as one of the year’s most unforgettable horror creations, complete with the awards chatter and pop culture influence to prove it. Ultimately, Weapons isn’t interested in easy scares, it’s interested in how communities turn on themselves, and it couldn’t care less about offering comforting answers to the questions it’s asking. — Jessica Toomer

Few formats drive fan engagement like a great music video. That was true in 2025 and it’ll be true in 2026, too. Looking at Warner Music Group’s top-performing videos of 2025 offers insight into both what the year in music looked like and how next year is shaping up.

Of the year’s top ten videos, two of them fall in the Latin music category, proving that the genre’s constellation of stars is a part of a cultural juggernaut that brands simply can’t afford to miss out on in 2026 and beyond.

The other major takeaway is just how much 2024 music dominated in 2025. It took over the music news cycle in early December, with reports that year-end rankings from platforms like Spotify and Apple Music were led by songs from the year prior. That was also true on YouTube, with hits like Rosé and Bruno Mars’ “APT.” and Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” topping the charts. This is worth keeping in mind, as beloved 2025 releases like Alex Warren’s No. 1 hit “Ordinary” are maintaining momentum and are primed to remain chart toppers well into 2026.

That timelessness is true for classic videos from legacy acts like The Eagles and Linkin Park, further illustrating that when it comes to taste, it’s not always just the latest that’s the greatest.

The bottom line: Warner artists defined music culture in 2025. Check out our year-end rankings for the best performing music videos on YouTube in 2025.

If this year taught us anything, it’s that fans have the final say on which artists, albums, and genres owned the culture in 2025. The conversations they were having on social media and in group chats mattered just as much as any critic-approved list.

As you can see from the chart below, artists under the Warner Music Umbrella drove massive audience interest, no matter the genre. But one stands out above the rest despite some in the establishment fretting over more outdated snapshots of the industry.

UPROXX Studios Senior Director, Editorial and Content Strategy Philip Cosores has a clear message when it comes to those claiming that the sky is falling when it comes to rap. “Rumors of hip-hop’s demise have been greatly exaggerated,” he says. “After news went viral that no rap songs were in the Billboard Top 40 for the first time in 35 years, many proclaimed the death of hip-hop. But on YouTube, the genre is still as dominant as ever, and a direct way to reach a massive audience.”

There’s a lot to get excited about when it comes to other major genres, as well, according to Cosores.

“Let’s also shout out the impressive numbers put up by pop artists — often the quickest way to reach young, female audiences — and rock, which is underscored by massive catalog longevity and younger artists like Twenty One Pilots. We expect these genres — along with the strengthening reach of R&B and country — to continue to drive music culture in 2026, with hip-hop due for a rebound in perception to match reality as it continues to dominate the platform.”

Let’s unpack that last point a little by looking at some of hip-hop’s most undeniably influential artists — is Pooh Shiesty and recent UPROXX Visionaries artist, Gunna. These two rappers are decisively shutting down the “hip-hop in decline” narrative. Pooh Shiesty landed the highest-charting solo song of his career with “FDO,” outranking holiday behemoths like Mariah Carey to deliver the kind of moment that reminds you how rap hurdles the mountain of classic holiday music with audiences in search of counter-programming. Gunna, meanwhile, took his Wun World Tour to the next level, selling out his North American leg while creating real community with his philanthropic Wunna Run Club stops.

Genre breakout NBA YoungBoy’s Make America Slime Again tour reportedly crossed $70M, sold 500,000+ tickets, and did it after five years off the road for the artist. Andscape’s David Dennis Jr. has described him as an artist who has “harnessed his vulnerability, myth-making, and authenticity to become a deity for teens and 20-somethings, who hang on his every word.” It’s all proof that the hip-hop genre (which being propelled by these and other WMG artists) is on a growth trajectory powered by an unbreakable connection with audiences.

Take a look at the full chart below.