Well, I know that we’re almost a 12th finished with 2025 (the sooner the better, I say.) But I wanted to make sure I honored some of the best albums of this past year before we plunge headlong into whatever the year has in store for us. We can’t forget our past, no matter how much fascist governments and the complicit media would like us to be disoriented and hopeless.
10. Will Hoge — Tenderhearted Boys
I just had a chance to listen to Will Hoge’s set on Mountain Stage, and his presence was just as warm, playful, and sincere as this album. As I wrote, I’m a latecomer to Hoge’s music but it’s impressive how comfortably he can sit between Music Row and the piercing truths we come to expect of Americana. As I wrote earlier, “Change is within our grasp, if we choose to reach out. And that is how we can create a world in which tenderhearted boys thrive.”
9. Brittany Howard — What Now?
I want this album to receive its flowers at the Grammys, and I was disappointed not to see it on more year-end lists. It’s a beautiful cacophony of noise, meditation, joyousness, and fierce expression from one of our best living rockers. Brittany Howard outdid herself with this one — a distillation of her lifeforce that few artists achieve.
8. Sam Gleaves — Honest
I reviewed this one over on Rainbow Rodeo, but I wanted to give it special attention here. Sam Gleaves is a wonderful combination of tenderness and backbone, and Honest is his most personal album yet. It’s been sticking with me since I’ve listened to it the first time. As I wrote over there, “Honest is not an album about bearing one’s soul so much as it is an invitation into Gleaves’ life. These songs are observational, as gentle as they are righteous.”
7. Joy Oladokun — Observations From a Crowded Room
This is another one I wrote up on Rainbow Rodeo. The album is a piercing analysis of where Oladokun and where she’s going — particularly, resisting commodification in the music industry in a society that already commodifies and summarily destroys Black people’s lived experience. If Proof of Life was a joyous celebration of survival, Crowded Room takes a sober look at the toll that can sometimes take.
6. Anna Tivel — Living Thing
I loved Living Thing, a beautiful reach from Anna Tivel. There’s no doubting Tivel’s lyrical prowess, but it felt she’d gotten a little too comfortable in her niche. But Tivel is too good to allow that for herself, and Living Thing finds her exploring instrumentation and sounds outside of her traditional folk milieu. It adds a lot; Tivel’s voice is arresting and unique, and something about situating it within electronic elements makes it stand out all the more.
5. Kim Deal — Nobody Loves You More
As I said earlier, Kim Deal isn’t a bass player. She’s the bass player. Effortlessly cool and impossibly efficient, nobody does it better than her. Her debut solo album, Nobody Loves You More, feels like the ultimate artist’s statement, as if she’s saying “hang on — let me show you what I can do.” I guess the theme of this year’s list is who flexed the hardest — and Deal surely did with her command of the various sounds she employed on this album.
4. Carolyn Kendrick — Each Machine
Carolyn Kendrick assembled a collection of traditional and original folk songs that reckon with the almighty battle between good and evil — and, with interludes that include sound clips from the Satanic Panic all the way up to Trump’s first term, Kendrick shows us just how important these old songs are now. If the past was a time of poor people dying before their time, well…our world is still just as violent, if you do the hard work of peeling the layers away. Each Machine is urgent and necessary and more urgent than ever.
3. Moira Smiley — The Rhizome Project
Putting this album on the list was a no-brainer. There’s no shortage of re-imaginings of traditional folk songs, but with The Rhizome Project, composer Moira Smiley takes songs roots music fans are quite familiar with and transforms them into immersive soundscapes. These are the songs that inspired Smiley to live a life in music, and her interpretations breathe new life into music that can often feel quaint. Smiley’s compositions are ghostly, giving them an ancient feel, but the spare arrangements also make them into something sharp and brand new.
2. Hurray For the Riff Raff — The Past Is Still Alive
Alynda Lee Segarra’s exploration of grief, nostalgia, and how it all ties into toxic narratives about American history is a stunning masterpiece. The Past Is Still Alive should be a marker for this decade of Americana: fluid musicianship with vulnerable lyrics that never veer into self-pity or an uncomfortable confession. Segarra is in control of their narrative, laced with humor as much as it is sadness. It’ll make you want to call your loved ones — a reminder that this is what we need in the coming times.
1. Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin — symbiont
As I wrote on No Depression, Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin (Odanak First Nation) have worked nothing less than a miracle on symbiont. This album is haunting and urgent and dire and beautiful. The album situates us in the midst of an alien invasion — or maybe they’re our ancestors? — guiding us away from the hellfire we have wrought thanks to climate change. The way is lined by their wisdom, with Blount and Obomsawin reinventing Black and indigenous folk songs to give them prescience today.