Every new year brings the same question for music fans: what’s next? After a year that brought about some amazing albums, it reminded listeners that great art still rises to the top, even within an ...

As 2025 draws to a close, Metacritic has unveiled its annual rankings of the best albums of the year, highlighting a diverse and genre-spanning collection of critically acclaimed releases. From ...

The Acacia Strain – You Are Safe From God Here (Rise) For me, the best death metal feels like a location, a literal spatial world made accessible through music. There’s something about Ego Dissolution ...

In a year that had no rap songs in the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 40 for the first time since 1990, rap thrived in so many other ways. This list of the 25 best rap albums of 2025 includes grand ...

The number of albums released year upon year seems to grow exponentially, with self-released albums increasingly the norm. Much of the most interesting and courageous modern jazz is released on small, ...

It’s easy to pinpoint when trends in music begin: People rally around a specific band or album, a new scene forms around a shared sensibility, or a particular sound permeates the zeitgeist. It’s more ...

The top country albums of 2025 are so different from each other that it seems like the only thing they have in common is that they fall under the same umbrella genre. But there is one thing these ...

If 2024 was the year of the situationship album (and, yes, there are still plenty that dropped thereafter), then 2025 was the year we danced through the fire. The hypnotic, high-tempo momentum of this ...

If we needed any more proof that the album isn't dead, 2025 was it. On this episode, Stephen Thompson is joined by Ann Powers and Daoud Tyler-Ameen to run through 12 dazzling albums that stuck with ...

In 2025, bands had a lot to say about the state of the world, from La Dispute’s No One Was Driving the Car, which surveyed late-stage capitalism, and End It, who examined class structure through ...