Best Albums of the Year – The Most Essential, Boundary-Pushing, and Beautiful Releases of the Year

This year gave us a breathtaking spectrum of new music—genre-bending experiments, emotional confessionals, blockbuster returns, underground revelations, and long-awaited reinventions. From avant-pop to hardcore, from cosmic country to ambient techno, these albums stood out for their craft, ambition, replay value, and cultural impact.

For our December curated/classic albums for 2025 we will be picking albums from the Best of the Year List for you to enjoy.

Below is our full Albums of the Year List, capturing the 30 records that defined 2024/25 for the team at Runout Record Club.

🎶 ALBUM REVIEWS – THE LIST

CMAT – Euro-Country

CMAT continues her ascent as one of the UK’s most inventive songwriters with Euro-Country, a whip-smart, melody-packed album that blends Nashville warmth with Eurovision drama. It’s funny, heartbreaking, theatrical, and intimate all at once—proof that CMAT is reinventing modern country-pop in her own sparkling image.

Turnstile – Never Enough

Turnstile embrace an even more melodic, groove-oriented palette on Never Enough, without losing their hardcore DNA. Packed with radiant hooks, propulsive drumming, and bursts of emotional sincerity, this record continues the band’s mission to make punk feel widescreen, joyful, and alive.

Pale Blue Eyes – New Place

The Devon trio deliver shimmering motorik dream-pop on New Place, a radiant follow-up steeped in warmth and forward motion. With glowing synths, chiming guitars, and a rhythmic pulse recalling NEU! and Fujiya & Miyagi, the album captures the beauty of transition, grief, hope, and renewal.

Hayley Williams –

Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party

Williams returns with her most conceptual and daring solo work to date—an art-pop confessional set during one wildly toxic night out. Themes of identity, femininity, shame, and rebirth swirl around glitchy beats and spectral harmonies. It’s deeply personal, defiantly weird, and creatively fearless.

Clipse – Let God Sort Em’ Out

The legendary duo return in peak form: razor-sharp wordplay, icy minimalism, and the unmistakable chemistry between Pusha T and Malice. It’s as cold and uncompromising as their early work—but spiritually heavier, morally grappling, and unmistakably mature.

Bon Iver – Sable, Fable

Justin Vernon continues expanding Bon Iver into new emotional and sonic realms. Sable, Fable is lush, spectral, and experimental, stitching folk intimacy into glitchy electronics and chamber-pop arrangements. It’s a dreamlike album that feels like wandering through a memory you’ve never had.

Model/Actriz – Pirouette

The New York noise-dance provocateurs refine their sound into something sharper and more hypnotic. Pirouette is claustrophobic, erotic, and explosive: frantic percussion, serrated guitars, and Cole Haden’s performance-art-level intensity. A visceral and deeply original album.

Deftones – Private Music

A beautifully atmospheric entry in Deftones’ catalogue, Private Music sees the band leaning harder into shoegaze, trip-hop, and electronic textures while retaining their heavy emotional pull. It’s sensual, brooding, and immersive—another reinvention for one of alternative metal’s most enduring forces.

Maribou State – Hallucinating Love

Maribou State return with a lush, soulful electronic record that radiates warmth. Organic instrumentation merges with dusty samples, Balearic beats, and gorgeous vocal features. It’s their most groove-forward and emotionally resonant project to date—a euphoric summer dream.

Lady Gaga – MAYHEM

Gaga unleashes her most maximalist, theatrical, dance-floor-ready record in years. MAYHEM is campy, chaotic, and electrifying, blending industrial pop with glam influences and arena-sized hooks. It’s Gaga embracing her true artistic DNA: bold, bizarre, and absolutely undeniable.

Spiritbox – Tsunami Sea

Tsunami Sea cements Spiritbox as one of modern metal’s most thrilling bands. Courtney LaPlante’s vocals glide from delicate melodies to tidal-wave screams over djent grooves, electronic flourishes, and massive choruses. Heavy, cinematic, and emotionally devastating.

Steve Gunn – Daylight Daylight

Gunn delivers a luminous, folk-forward meditation filled with fingerpicked guitar, gentle psychedelia, and pastoral calm. Daylight Daylight feels like sunrise in album form—warm, spacious, rooted in tradition yet quietly exploratory.

Yellowcard – Better Days

Yellowcard’s emotional return channels nostalgia and renewal with equal force. Better Days blends soaring pop-punk hooks, dynamic strings, and grounded songwriting about adulthood, healing, and looking forward without forgetting where you came from.

Daniel Avery – Tremor

Avery returns with a shadowy, propulsive techno record full of industrial textures, foggy ambience, and hypnotic rhythms. Tremor is club music as cathedral—a haunting, physical journey through the darker edges of electronic sound.

Larry June, 2 Chainz & The Alchemist – Life Is Beautiful

A dream collaboration that actually exceeds expectations. June’s smooth charisma, 2 Chainz’s wit, and Alchemist’s dusty, luxurious production create a breezy, confident, effortlessly replayable hip-hop record.

JID – God Does Like Ugly

JID delivers his sharpest, most emotionally raw work yet. God Does Like Ugly blends rapid-fire bars with introspective storytelling, gospel influences, and inventive production. It’s a triumph of vulnerability and technical skill.

Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band –

New Threats From the Soul

A powerful Americana opus blending Springsteen grit, cosmic country twang, and bar-band sincerity. Davis writes with heart-on-sleeve honesty, turning everyday struggles into epic, dust-covered narratives.

Panda Bear – Sinister Grift

A woozy, kaleidoscopic psych-pop journey from the Animal Collective icon. Sinister Grift is full of warped harmonies, shimmering samples, and dreamlike loops—a playful yet emotionally intricate record that rewards repeat listens.

Oklou – choke enough

Oklou returns with a beautifully fractured, hyper-emotional electronic album. Whispered vocals, tactile sound design, and glitchy textures create a surreal, intimate world where digital and organic blur into one.

The Altons – Heartache in Room 14

Rich with soul, retro-pop, and lowrider rhythm & blues, Heartache in Room 14 feels like discovering a lost treasure from a 1960s jukebox. Gorgeous harmonies and heartbreak storytelling make this an instant classic.

saturdays at your place – these things happen

A raw, catchy, emotionally candid emo-indie gem. Packed with punchy guitars and diary-like lyrics, these things happen captures the feeling of being young, overwhelmed, and hopeful.

Nine Inch Nails – TRON: Ares (Original Soundtrack)

Reznor & Ross deliver another towering soundtrack—icy, dystopian, and pulse-raising. Blending synthwave with industrial ambience, the score expands the TRON universe with cinematic weight and emotional tension.

bdrmm – Microtonic

Hull’s shoegaze innovators continue evolving, exploring microtonal textures, ambient passages, and post-punk rhythms. Microtonic is immersive, experimental, and emotionally rich—a beautiful haze of sound.

Charley Crockett – Lonesome Drifter

A modern outlaw-country masterpiece. Crockett’s storytelling is timeless—equal parts hitchhiker poetry, dusty honky-tonk, and road-worn wisdom. Lonesome Drifter feels both classic and completely contemporary.

Ditz – Never Exhale

Brighton’s noise-punk heroes return with a blistering, cathartic record full of tension, fury, and precision. Never Exhale is sharp-edged, politically charged, and sonically unstoppable.

Darkside – Nothing

Darkside return with Nothing, their most meditative and texturally rich release to date. Dave Harrington’s fluid guitar work blends seamlessly with Nicolás Jaar’s smoky electronics, resulting in an album that feels like a deep exhale—minimal, hypnotic, and delicately psychedelic. It’s a record built on negative space, slow-burning grooves, and nocturnal tension, offering the most refined version of the duo’s alchemical sound.

The High & Mighty – Sound of Market

A triumphant underground hip-hop revival, Sound of Market finds The High & Mighty operating with renewed fire. The beats are dusty, sample-heavy, and fiercely East Coast, while the rhymes are sharp, clever, and steeped in the duo’s trademark irreverence. It’s a love letter to hip-hop’s golden age—but never once stuck in the past—proving they still have plenty to say and the technical chops to back it up.

PUP – Who Will Look After the Dogs?

PUP deliver another cathartic, melodic punk triumph with Who Will Look After the Dogs?, wielding their trademark blend of chaos, humour, and brutally honest self-reflection. The hooks are massive, the riffs frantic, and the lyrics painfully relatable. It’s the sound of spiralling anxiety wrapped in shout-along anthems—messy, human, and endlessly cathartic.

Mogwai – The Bad Fire

Post-rock titans Mogwai return with The Bad Fire, a densely atmospheric record where brooding electronics, soaring guitar crescendos, and cinematic ambience collide. It’s darker and more textural than their recent work, echoing shades of Ten Rapid and Hardcore Will Never Die. Mogwai once again prove their mastery of dynamics—quiet introspection erupting into jaw-dropping sonic immensity.

Sleep Theory – Afterglow

Afterglow is a huge leap forward for Sleep Theory—a polished, emotionally charged blend of alt-metal, R&B-infused vocals, and arena-ready hooks. Their genre-blurring approach feels fresh, modern, and radio-dominant, with massive choruses that still carry emotional weight. A breakthrough album from a band clearly on the rise.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Across genres and generations, this year's longlist proves one thing: music is more adventurous and emotionally rich than ever. Whether you’re looking for pop spectacle, boundary-pushing electronic sound, or raw guitar energy, these albums offer the year’s most compelling listening experiences.

Enjoy the festive period, all the best

RRC