Welcome to the latest installment of Five Albums, the weekly feature for paid Hearing Things subscribers in which we recommend a handful of new records that you need to hear. This week, we’re deviating from our normal format to follow up last week’s mid-year check-in of our 2025 faves—with five albums we consider some of the year’s most overhyped so far.
We’ve spent this year telling you about some of the best music out—over 150 albums’ worth of gold-standard recommendations, direct from the five of us to you. But you can’t like everything, and as music critics, we clearly do not! So we spent this week reflecting on five well-reviewed, well-received albums that we just didn't think were worth the hype. A comeback rap album that doesn’t quite fulfill its promise? A feted folk record seemingly constructed in a Grammy-printing factory? A celebrated young singer/rapper/producer whose work evokes the neck-veined agita of Incubus? We got ’em, we don't love ’em!
Next week, we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled weekly album recommendations—so don’t forget about our new trial subscriptions, in which you can get one month of Hearing Things FREE. Five Albums and Five Songs, our weekly song-recommendation newsletters, are accessible to paid subscribers only—here’s an opportunity to check out what you’ve been missing and consider supporting our fiercely independent music journalism.
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