JChal’s 2025 Albums of the Year

I know it's February already... and it's a long read, so without any further delay, let's get this underway:

Most of you will know I’ve got an indie/rock, heavy rock-leaning pair of ears and a natural allergy to anything too radio-friendly. But every now and then, an album cuts through on craft, feeling, or sheer bloody poppiness. But aside from rock, I love a bit of jazz, a little folk, a lot of soul, and clever, edgy hip-hop: so you’ll find a mix of vibes below.

2025 delivered some absolute weapons: smart records, emotional records, loud records, quiet records … and yes, a few that genuinely surprised me.

Now this isn’t Mojo, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, NYT, The Guardian or the Grammy's.

This is a year’s worth of listening in analog, digital, and sometimes live and in person.

When I was finishing off my final edit tonight, it felt like I was building something really special with this list. On reflection, this feels like a map of my year in sound 🎧

So as it’s my list… I do what I want! In no particular order, ladies and gentleman, audiophiles and everyone else, I present JChal's 2025 Albums of the Year (and if you want the "Standouts" scroll to the end!):

Lorde - Virgin

Kiwi pop Queen, Ella's (Lorde) fourth full-length is a sharp left turn inward: synth-driven, emotionally jagged, deliberately exposed. Where Melodrama was theatrical release, Virgin is the moment after the comedown, the self-interrogation, the city heat still clinging to your skin at 2am when the party’s over but your thoughts aren’t.

The production gives her space to sit inside her own head, to bruise rather than burst. It’s restrained in a way that takes confidence, trusting that feeling doesn’t need volume to land. No grand gestures, no sugar coating just a young artist sounding older, braver, and more comfortable telling the truth quietly.

Pulp - More

This isn’t a nostalgia lap, it’s a late-career flex, plain and simple. Jarvis Cocker is still razor-sharp, still funny, still devastatingly observant, but now writing from a place of age, self-awareness, and lived-in truth rather than youthful provocation.

After 24 years away, Pulp return sounding wiser, warmer, and somehow even more relevant. The songs carry humour, embarrassment, tenderness, regret, all the things you collect when life actually happens. Proof that growing older doesn’t dull perspective; it deepens it, softens it, and sharpens it in entirely new places.

Olivia Dean - The Art of Loving

This album feels like sunlight through a window you didn’t realise was open. Warm, soulful, sophisticated, deeply comforting. Olivia Dean understands restraint: how to leave space in a song, how to let silence do some of the talking, and because of that, everything glows.

I was lucky enough to see her a couple of times before the bigger stages arrived, back when it still felt like you were discovering something private. Now the world’s catching up, and rightly so. This record feels like the beginning of a long, graceful journey.

Doves - Constellations: Songs for the Lonely

Being a Manchester lad myself, I've strong roots with the Doves boys. So having them release a new album alongside a “best of” in 2025, provided a quietly emotional year for the lads from Wilmslow.

This is orchestral dusk-rock at its most affecting: wide skies, slow builds, melodies that feel like memories rather than hooks. Songs unfold gently, never in a hurry, pulling you sideways into reflection. It’s equal parts comfort and ache - like silk and gravel at the same time. Music for long drives, long thoughts, and the kind of loneliness that isn’t always sad.

Geese - Getting Killed

Unhinged in the best way possible. Art-school theory colliding head-on with punk muscle: jittery rhythms, feral vocals, guitars that feel permanently caffeinated. It thumps, threatens, struts but never quite sits still long enough to be understood properly.

Rock music that feels dangerous again. Somewhere between chaos and control, intelligence and instinct. People say Radiohead… sure, but if they’d grown up in New York, slept on floors, and learned how to fight their instruments before learning how to tune them.

Mutemath - Forever Phase

Paul Meany doing what Paul Meany does best: turning feeling into circuitry. Forever Phase is electric, precise, and slightly disorienting in the most addictive way. Grooves twist, synths shimmer, nothing quite resolves when you expect it to.

It’s headphone music. Gym music. Walking-home-too-late music. The kind of record that meets you wherever your head happens to be that day. Complex without being cold. Technical without losing its pulse. Deeply human beneath all the wires.

Erika de Casier - Lifetime

I’d heard some of her earlier work, but walking into a Melbourne record store and hearing this playing on the shop’s turntable stopped me mid-step. Cool, chic, quietly devastating.

Lifetime whispers where others shout:  immaculate production, hushed vocals, songs unfolding like late-night confessions you weren’t meant to overhear. R&B-pop as atmosphere. As mood. As emotional architecture. Nothing wasted. Nothing accidental. The kind of album that makes the world feel briefly slower and more elegant.

David Gray - Dear Life

This record feels worn-in, like a letter written somewhere between destinations and never fully sealed. Poetic, reflective, unhurried. Songs that don’t rush you, that understand the importance of breathing room.

Gray sounds comfortable in his skin now, and that quiet confidence runs through every track. Seeing him perform these songs at the State Theatre last year only deepened the connection, music that feels less like performance and more like

LS Dunes - Violet Static

Controlled chaos done right. Riffs scrape your insides, melodies fight for oxygen, every track feels like it’s wrestling with its own heartbeat.

Aggressive without being blunt. Emotional without being indulgent. There’s discipline in the noise, intention in the mess. If you don’t know them yet, this album is the introduction you deserve - and the correction you probably need.

Jason Isbell - Foxes in the Alley

Still the sharpest pen in the room, and it’s not particularly close. Isbell writes the kind of lyrics that don’t announce themselves, they just quietly rearrange the furniture in your chest. Every line opens a door, every chord points somewhere honest, even when the destination hurts a little.

This is storytelling as quiet devastation: small moments made enormous, ordinary lives treated with dignity. Put it on with a cold drink in your hand on a warm evening, just as the light starts to soften, and for forty minutes the world feels slower, kinder, and briefly… workable again.

Sam Fender - People Watching

Big heart. Bigger hooks. Songs built for stadiums but written like letters you never quite sent. Fender has that rare gift of making personal anxiety feel communal: your problems suddenly sound better when 40,000 people are shouting them back at you.

Socially aware without being preachy. Emotional without collapsing into melodrama. It’s Springsteen from England, sure, but sometimes with even more emotional exposure, more trembling in the voice, more blood on the page. Proper modern rock songwriting. The kind that reminds you why this genre still matters.

Hayley Williams - Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party

Unfiltered. Jagged. Joyful. This record feels like pages torn from a diary, soaked in wine, set on fire, then carefully reassembled into songs. It’s messy in the way real growth is messy: awkward, funny, vulnerable, occasionally unhinged, always honest.

A sidestep from Paramore, yes, but also a huge step forward into her own strange, brilliant emotional geography. Hayley sounds freer here, less concerned with legacy, more interested in telling the truth. Cannot wait to see this one played loud, sweaty, and cathartic down under.

Dijon - Baby

This album doesn’t knock on the door, it lets itself into your living room and sits uncomfortably close on the couch. Voice-note vulnerability turned into art. Half-sung confessions, half-thought thoughts, all of it feeling dangerously sincere.

It’s stripped-back, delicate, emotionally invasive in that way only the best records are. The kind that makes you feel like you’re eavesdropping on something private. Beautiful, awkward, human.

Lily Allen - West End Girl

Witty, wistful, quietly tender. The sharp tongue is still there - she just doesn’t need to sharpen it on everything anymore. There’s humour, yes, but also acceptance, regret, warmth, and perspective.

This isn’t a return to her early chaos; it’s a reframing of it. Same intelligence, same voice, just lived-in now. The sound of someone who’s survived herself.

Earl Sweatshirt - Live Love Laugh

Dense. Inward. Intentionally uncomfortable. This is not music for casual listening - it’s music for when you’re prepared to sit with your own thoughts a little too long.

The beats feel unfinished on purpose, the lyrics half-buried in shadow. Nothing reveals itself quickly, and that’s the point. Not comfort food: slow-burning nourishment for people who don’t need things explained.

Bon Iver - SABLE, fABLE

This record doesn’t really play so much as it floats. Sound dissolving into emotion. Structure melting into feeling.

Fragments of melody, breath, static, harmony, grief, hope - all bleeding into each other until you stop trying to separate them. Challenging. Beautiful. The kind of album that changes shape depending on what mood you bring into it.

Audrey Hobert - Who’s the Clown?

Best known as Gracie Abrams’ best friend and co-writer… now fully stepping out on her own.

Smart pop with a smirk.

Sharp hooks, self-awareness, enough bite to keep it interesting. Fun without being disposable.

Keep an eye out for her shows in 2026!

The Standouts

Jon Bellion - Father Figure

Father Figure is Bellion at his most emotionally grounded and musically assured. Where earlier records sometimes felt like a brilliant mind sprinting ahead of its own feelings, this album slows the pace just enough to let the weight land. The production is still intricate layered drums, clever vocal stacking, left-field sonic choices - but everything is in service of something deeper: responsibility, legacy, and what it means to show up for other people.

Lyrically, Bellion sounds older and calmer, less interested in proving cleverness and more interested in telling the truth cleanly. There’s a warmth here that feels earned rather than engineered - songs that wrestle with masculinity, creativity, faith, and fear without ever turning preachy. It’s a record about growing up without selling out, about learning that ambition doesn’t disappear when love enters the frame - it just changes shape.

This is Bellion’s most complete album. Not the flashiest, not the loudest, but the one that feels like it will last.

Mavis Staples - Sad and Beautiful World

There’s a quiet, resolute power to Sad and Beautiful World that only Mavis Staples can carry. This isn’t sadness as despair or defeat - it’s sadness as reflection, as memory, as truth spoken gently but without blinking. Her voice, weathered yet luminous, holds decades of lived experience and moral clarity, never once sounding fragile or tired. Every note feels earned, like it has travelled a long way to reach you.

The album unfolds at an unhurried pace, allowing songs the space to breathe and meanings to settle. Staples doesn’t rush her listener or overstate her case. Instead, she leans into restraint: letting silences speak, letting warmth replace urgency. Themes of loss, resilience, faith, and love surface naturally, woven into melodies that feel less like declarations and more like conversations you didn’t realise you needed.

What’s striking is how Sad and Beautiful World avoids sermonising despite its spiritual depth. Staples offers reassurance rather than instruction, comfort rather than correction. When she sings, it doesn’t feel like performance or nostalgia, it feels like presence. Like someone sitting beside you, steady hand on the shoulder, saying: I’ve been here. You’ll get through this. There’s wisdom here, but also humility, a rare balance that few artists ever achieve.

In a year crowded with clever concepts and bold statements, Sad and Beautiful World stands apart by doing the opposite. It doesn’t shout, posture, or demand attention. It earns it quietly, patiently, song by song. This is grace captured on record, a reminder that beauty and sorrow often coexist, and that sometimes the most powerful music doesn’t chase relevance. It simply tells the truth and lets it resonate.

Museum of Light - Diviner

This one crept up on me - then refused to leave.

Diviner feels like standing alone in a cathedral after midnight: reverb everywhere, shadows moving, something ancient breathing through modern machines. It sits somewhere between post-rock, ambient gospel, and slow-burn electronic soul. Music that doesn’t demand your attention - it draws it.

The record moves patiently, trusting silence as much as sound. Swells of synth and guitar rise like weather systems. Vocals drift in and out like thoughts you’re not ready to say out loud. There’s grief here. Awe. A strange kind of peace.

It’s not built for playlists. It’s built for long walks, night drives, moments when you don’t need answers - just space.

One of the most quietly powerful records of the year: spiritual, cinematic, and quietly devastating.

*full disclosure: the Museum of Light gang do have a single out currently (the long dark) that I appear on, but the song is NOT on this album, nor does it have any bearing on this review or rating: https://open.spotify.com/album/2Wf2B5Xvc2CbuEcliJYxTT or https://music.apple.com/us/album/long-dark-single/1796325183

Deftones -Private Music

“We’ve been waiting here patiently locked in this state, clocking our time,” Chino Moreno snarls on My Mind Is A Mountain, and it lands less like a lyric than a mission statement. Five years on from the bruising, emotionally pummelling Ohms, Private Music feels like a band not just returning, but arriving, fully aware of who they are, what they represent, and why they still matter. In the years between, Deftones have shed a bassist, explored side projects, played the biggest shows of their career, and somehow become a TikTok-era discovery without bending an inch. That last part might sound absurd, but this record explains it perfectly.

Rather than coasting on the untouchable legacy of Around the Fur or White Pony, Deftones continue to operate as one of the most reliable and forward-thinking bands in rock. The secret is in the way Private Music refuses to be boxed in. Metal is present, sure but it’s only one colour on a much broader palette. Moreno’s soulful, often seductive croon glides over hip-hop-leaning rhythms, trip-hop atmospherics, perversely danceable drums, and riffs that feel architectural rather than blunt. This is genre-fluid music for tribeless times, heavy without

Reuniting with producer Nick Raskulinecz brings the focus back to the core. Locked Club struts. Ecdysis turns synth-goth into apocalypse. cXz opens a pit in spacetime.

And then there’s intimacy, I Think About You All The Time, one of their most beautiful love songs ever written.

From Milk of the Madonna to Departing the Body, this is a fever dream: spiritual, violent, tender, human.

Beauty and brutality, perfectly balanced. I cannot wait to see the boys play in Australia, later in 2026.

My album of the year for sure.