the elected
a tour of your global streamer’s favorites
Rosalía and Geese and Wednesday and Dijon — maybe in a perfect world, someone’s anyway, these artists are overrun with expensive framed records and little statuettes. But I doubt the valiant cataloguers of the scientific BEST music of 2025 bemoan Bad Bunny’s sales or Grammy victories. We’ll never let them come for him, and he’s been fighting the good fight on every battlefield; his fun, multihued, meticulously crafted albums are among pop’s best, a truth to which record-setting numbers speak. Surely, Bunny would elevate corook and Amaarae and Tyler Childers (Zach Bryan just won’t suffice) in a heartbeat if we’d hand him the world. For a long time pop stars have been excellent imaginary candidates for presidents. Let the genre-/gender-swapping Puerto Rican speak for us and lead our charge for a bit: he’s funny, he’s sexy, he’s really good.
Godspeed to those who try to track it all in these days of teeming streams. I sure don’t have my own firsthand data for what music worked best in 2025 — a year which, let’s not forget, seemed determined to prove the futility of effort itself. In this season of the list, we have a handful based on sales, like Billboard’s, or Luminate’s*. Avoiding one for today’s writing prompt lets me off the hook for multiple Morgan Wallen albums; I was leaning toward the other, which includes multiple Stray Kids albums, but I never took to the Kids (who always seemed a little pushy about how ‘hard’ they were) the way my ex-wife did. Ergo, since I habitually visit Spotify when I check in with the charts, it’d make the most sense to use the same global mechanism that charts Today’s Top Hits. So here’s my quickie pop report for last year’s top albums — the people’s long players.
I really love modern pop. We mostly use machines to assemble it, and I love how we do it, how we weave all those sounds together over beats, how we make new magic out of old tricks, how ideas are bleeding across borders into openminded openhearted open pairs of ears. I love the strength and wit and political spark of the femme singers, and that we don’t seem to be letting total assholes in these days when it comes to the pop men. I love how pop country is, how complicated as opposed to just rancid a guy like Morgan Wallen is, the way our rappers are complicated. I love how we never let things like Fleetwood Mac or ABBA go, how modern pop resists dating itself at every turn. I love things on every one of the following ten records beloved by your fellow citizens of the globe. And I love you so much, reader, I have given you, yuck, GRADES this time.
I’ve also included massive pictures of the albums, because you only live once, y’know.
10 — Bad Bunny, Un Verano Sin Ti — A
Reviews of our reigning King of Pop’s albums are usually lists of genres, where they could just as easily be lists of adjectives: trippy, sleepy, unremitting, melodic, horny. That said, he is a devoted eclectic; it keeps Bunny interested when, like Drake, his pet subject appears to be the depression in which a pattern of hedonistic choices results. This one probably has world-historic staying power over #s 3 and 5 because its reach is bigger — its stylistic palette more diverse, its music more consciously functional. But all of his albums are good in part because he’s a joy to listen to, that low-simmer voice giving an expert swagger and charm, and also “that glottal thing” my therapist pointed out, that desperate sensual gasp, dotting the vocal tracks like lipstick traces. Coast to coast, it’s now the go-to soundtrack to whatever’s going down under the boardwalk.
9 — Kendrick Lamar, GNX — A
I’ve never quite gotten over the “sore winner” thing; hearing him float like a butterfly eviscerating Goliath is a lot more satisfying than hearing him insist, scowling, that he was born for that brass ring. I’m not sure if anyone so funny has ever been this much of a sobersides? But a commitment to hard work and the whole truth translates here and there into the kind of wisdom that jolts you awake. And even a victory-lap quickie is gonna come overflowing with concept from Mr. Morale — not just the history-hyped pop inflections peaking with “luther”, a coup we never needed him to pull off to know he was a genius, but the way it dramatizes the vengeance that powers it, interrogates its uses spiritually as it plays with them musically, ginned up for a future we’re gonna need to fight through when even K-Dot’s aware (“luther”, “gloria”) all you need is love.
8 — Morgan Wallen, I’m the Problem — B+
Too many of these too many songs (which sound great, turning as they do on Wallen’s husky, craggly croon and dependable beats stolen from hip-hop) push rather than pick at that Trump line MW probably doesn’t buy hook or sinker: you’re the problem, now I can drink off the pain from a better starting place. His sturdy music is laced tastefully with atmospherics; it can be beautiful (“Just in Case”), and he’s cute leaning into pop, too (“Kick Myself”). But he’ll never be a third as likable as Lil Wayne, and he needs to downsize his ambitions. He could sell songs — God knows he’s got wares to spare — to people who could handle them with more personality and less professionalism, the Jackson Browne problem. As I avoided the effort of sitting through multiple Wallens, for all I know the others are livelier and try more things. But let’s be clear: this is good.
7 — Alex Warren, You’ll Be Alright, Kid — C-
Not if I can help it. I see I summoned Noah Kahan back from the sticks, right in front of Little Lord Stompclap here on the last Billboard 200. This guy is surely AI, for how little he grasps the concept of the ruffled feather. Jelly Roll helps High School Musical Jack Harlow out on the stompclappiest track, and seconds in you want to drown them both in melted-down Waterboys records. Is this how people felt about James Taylor in 1970? You really want to know what’d happen if you just, like, flicked his nose. Like, he’s there mooing his bullshit balladry and ho! you pull his hat over his ears and twist alternating nipples, while your accomplice yoinks off his Converse and starts biting. Yeah, OK, his “Getaway Car” beats Taylor Swift’s and is worthy of Hozier — he can steamroll some. But most of it should be lost in an avalanche with Gary Lightbody.
6 — Lady Gaga, Mayhem — A-
We could use a little righteous mayhem right now. And why I loved The Fame Monster, the greatest thing she’ll ever do unless The Fame counts, was exactly what it was proud of: its sense of disruption. Ra ra ro ma ma was rousing and unsettling and completely unprecedented, and abracadabra amoroonana is just asking us to be excited about the same thing we were before because it’d be cool if Lady Gaga were vanguard again. So I put off learning the easy guess, which is that she wears a dark fun pop album as chicly as flank steak, and what she’s clad in this time around is exactly what she always likes to deny us. That it’s corny isn’t sad, it’s crucial — LG knows that she’s a secure enough institution to stop wrestling like Bowie with how high her art is. This isn’t Gaga’s Let’s Dance, it’s like a Blackout with the icon at the helm, an icon who’s feeling herself again.
5 — Sabrina Carpenter, Short n’ Sweet — A-
She was never going to be this moment’s hero, given her gayest company, and in her uncomplicated domination and that way she has an out for everything she dares, it’s been tempting to reckon her a little regressive. She is insofar as she’s not trying to do anything new musically, just harness old modes for spiffier models; she is not a step forward for society from Ariana Grande. But she really does serve her purpose in the changing discourse — a gay-energy straight girlie who takes no shit and turns every heteronormative trope into a dayglo cartoon is definitely part of who we want on the front lines. The tracks are delicious confections, but the lyrics burst with great ideas and are where to really appreciate her. It’s only when she gets boygenius-serious that she gets wispy, this skinny blonde white chick caressing a giant cone of cotton candy.
4 — SZA, SOS Deluxe: LANA — A-
“Side chick music”, nailed one of Madison’s friends, and sure, maybe even definitively. But there’s a lot of fantastic side chick music, and nothing has ever sounded like SZA, who’s carved out a radio dreamscape all her own. Like Stevie Nicks, her originality is regularly underrated, and like Stevie Nicks, she gets away with more than she should for someone so suspicious of form. This drifts around in the ether more than it ought to, overdosing on that Blonde effect that unites and enriches her entire body of work. But it’s got “30 for 30”, and a handful of other off-kilter classics (“BMF”!) in the same tradition as “Kill Bill” and “Snooze”, and at times its harder-than-ever commitment to the ambience of it all makes this just a straight-up nicer listening experience than her previous two magnum opi. Maybe if we encourage her more, she’ll focus it up a little.
3 — Billie Eilish, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT — A
How loud is the absence of one particular pop star on this list for you? One whose ‘25 entry, which I really don’t need to write about anymore, very much made those other top ten sales lists? Alas: Big Swifty didn’t strike globe-dotting Spotters’ fancies. Thus we’re left with space for the greatest pop star save Doechii, the one who knows exactly what she’s doing every time out, the one it makes sense to just give Oscars to. Brother Finneas’ music somehow accommodates lush orchestration and easy-rolling country-pop, by the same strange knack and intellect with which his avatar lets you know she thought through every decision you can hear here. King of restraint, she sets records for how few muscles she engages lighting up oceans of hot/bothered eros (“Lunch”) or crushed devotion (“Birds of a Feather”). There’s a lip-licking lot going on on this one.
2 — soundtrack from the Netflix film, KPop Demon Hunters — B+
A movie that deserved its astronomical success still whiffed it, in a way. However you slice it, it’s missing what I can only call the Pixar thing — that sleight-of-storytelling-hand or perfect performance or simple twist of world that makes it all resonate all of a sudden on exactly the level you really hope a movie takes you to when you’ve bothered to pay to see it. We care about these characters: pry your leads from the melodramatic clichés, give the other two HUNTR/Xers full-size arcs, and respect the intelligence of KPop fans, no matter how much valuable income they willingly spend on the same CD to get the one photo card. That Thing You Do! proved you need a real one to sell a fake band; “Golden” mines all of that underexplored emotional territory. The others (hey there TWICE) are hard to resist, but all surface, excluding the Jokers’ “오솔길 Path”.
1 — Bad Bunny, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS — A
He’s always gotten credit for exploring different styles, but here he really cares about saying something about his culture, and nestles like fingers in a mitt in styles people his age have no business slipping into. Its passages of authentic instrumentation flesh out familiar merits in his ever-tender vocals, and underscore an outward focus which chips at the main problem if there is one with his work to date: an inward focus, which sometimes weakens and makes you hang on through his music. Of course, it wouldn’t be Bad Bunny if it was all one thing, and he’s as melodic as ever, as inquisitive as ever, as interested in the intersection of putting on a show, saying something, and chasing an impulse as ever. It’s a stroke from an artist who’ll explore it all further, forging even more interesting worlds out of all the international sources he’ll so savvily steal from.
#s 10 and 9 on the year-end singles list are both about women with scuffed hearts, and the urge to protect someone else their lover crossed paths with — the award-winning “Wildflower”, a master class of pacing, and “That’s So True”, which immortalizes the phrase “your dumb face” in the only way it ever needs to be sung in a pop song. Then there’s the evergreen “luther”, a chemistry landmark (they’re 30 for 30), the “Let it Go”-level achievement “Golden” (Ejae’s triumph), garbage classic “back to friends” (what’s artier, all caps or all lowercase?), and at #5, big bad Bunny’s thesis statement “DtMF”, one of his new one’s wonderful ones. Then “Ordinary”, a case for Alex Warren’s exile, and “APT.”, a better one for why Bruno Mars can stay than the sleepy #1, “Die With a Smile”. #2 is Billie’s “Birds of a Feather” (sorry Billie, I know these are all caps), an A+.
*slated title: “everything is luminated”. there, now I can let that one go