Julianne's Favorite Music of 2025
The big-idea music that inspired me most this year, from Afro-Colombian orchestral pop to epic folk about the state of labor to, of course, Bad Bunny.
Much of my fave music this year was full of big ideas that inspired deeper thinking—the way Bad Bunny’s tremendous Debí Tirar Mas Fotos could surface an entire Puerto Rican music history in his smooth millennial way, how Cleo Reed distills the state of work and other sociopolitical conditions in the U.S. into a suite of epic folk bangers, how Cain Culto can rap about both dick and Palestine in a single verse and make it make sense. The political environment in the U.S. this year—and how it reverberated across the world—was inextricable from the music I enjoyed. These are albums and songs that made me actually feel something when the easiest alternative was to dissociate from the chaos. All of these artists confirmed there’s still good out there, gave me hope, instilled love, or offered just a little bit of dumb fun during a drought of all those things.
And one of the best things about making an independent music and culture site with your friends is that, if you love an album that much, you can just… interview the person who made it, without having to justify to some CEO why you didn’t just blog 1000 stories about Taylor Swift at a football game instead. (Not having “traffic goals” is one of the single most liberating things about working at Hearing Things.) So you’ll see that I spoke to a lot of these folks on my list, deeply curious about their processes and ways of thinking about the world; those conversations are linked therein.
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