Dean's List: 2025

The 61 best albums of the past year (or so)

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1. Margaret Glaspy: The Golden Heart Protector (ATO)
2. CMAT: Euro-Country (AWAL)
3. Bruce Springsteen: Land of Hope & Dreams (Columbia)
4. Body Type: Expired Candy (Poison City)
5. S.G. Goodman: Planting by the Signs (Slough Gates/Thirty Tigers)
6. Rhett Miller: A Lifetime of Riding by Night (ATO)
7. The Mekons: Horror (Fire)
8. Lily Allen: West End Girl (BMG)
9. Haim: I Quit (Columbia)
10. Jason Isbell: Foxes in the Snow (Southeastern)
11. Jeff Evans Porkestra: When Pigs Dance (self-released)
12. Big Thief: Double Infinity (4AD)
13. Margo Price: Hard Headed Woman (Loma Vista)
14. Buck 65: Keep Moving (Handsmade)
15. Robert Forster: Strawberries (Tapete)
16. Public Enemy: Black Sky Over the Projects: Apartment 2025 (Enemy)
17. James McMurtry: The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy (New West)
18. The Kasambwe Brothers: The Kasambwe Brothers (MASS MoCA)
19. Dingonek Street Band: Primal Economics (Accurate '18): Led by well-schooled trumpeter Bobby Spellman, who released it in 2018 to acclaim if not renown, this no-vocals avant-second-line album is still available from Amazon and let's hope less Trumpy vendors. I've enjoyed it every time it distinguished itself from other uncommercial ventures I don't have the heart to add to what I laughably call the sell pile. There's plenty of wise-ass in a second line where three different saxophonists say "Me? Arty? Sure I have chops but not so's they stop me from fooling around." Special thanks to Josiah Reibstein for playing bass on his tuba. A-
20. Todd Snider: High, Lonesome and Then Some (Thirty Tigers/Aimless)
21. Lambrini Girls: Who Let the Dogs Out (City Slang)
22. Sabrina Carpenter: Man's Best Friend (Island)
23. Ale Hop & Titi Bakorta: Mapambazuko (Nyege Nyege Tapes): The delicate textures of this polyrhythmic collab between arty-cum-experimental Peruvian electronica gal Hop and peripatetic-cum-adventurous Congolese soukousish guitar guy Bakorta has what for me is almost an MJQ vibe, which is to worry that it's short on texture not to say body not to say blood and guts. But for just that reason it's also audacious and delightful. There's considerable sprezzatura here, light-hearted in the face of a future even grimmer than the one that's right now sticking its tongue out at you and me. A-
24. Jubal Lee Young: Squirrels (Reconstruction)
25. Jax: Dear Joe, (Atlantic): Just 28, she not only sounds girlish and cynical at the same time but makes as clear as her commitment to maintaining an unprecedented balance of mean jokes, lovelorn plaints, and next-level feminism that coexists with a comic, catchy, credible autobiography for art's sake. The girlish part is embodied by a soprano so pure you'll be surprised how worldly-wise it turns out to be and even more surprised that its wisdom comes with yucks that provide both an edge to and a respite from her cynicism. Which damn right is earned. It can be brittle and/or thin, I admit. But it's also utterly original. And it closes with one called "Victoria's Secret," which is that "She's an old man in Ohio/Making money off of girls like me." A-
26. Danny Brown: Stardust (Warp)
27. Marshall Allen: New Dawn (Mexican Summer): Kentucky-born World War II Buffalo Soldier, 17th Division Special Service Band member, and postwar Paris Conservatory student Allen joined Sun Ra's band and collective on saxophone in 1958 while also occasionally backing pioneer Afropopularizer Babatunde Olatunje on a kora he built himself. A few years after Sun Ra died at 79 in 1993, Allen took over the band while residing in the Arkestral Institute of Sun Ra in Philadelphia. And eventually, on May 25, 2024, he just flat-out turned 100, whereupon Cologne-based arts acivist Jan Lankisch thought it only proper for him to celebrate by making an album that was hardly his first. Cute, right? Who could cavil about that? Only this isn't just a birthday present. It's a lively, varied, congenial big band experiment of the first order, the kind of avant-entertainment Sun Ra aimed for in principle but too often failed to finish off in practice. In notes you'll have to read with a magnifying glass, Knoell Scott resorts more than once to the words "cosmic" and "celestial." But to me this music embodies how wonderful as opposed to wondrous unmitigated mortality can be. A
28. Tyler Childers: Snipe Hunter (Hickman Holler/RCA)
29. Amanda Shires: Nobody's Girl (ATO)
30. Wednesday: Bleeds (Dead Oceans)
31. Craig Finn: Always Been (Tamarac)
32. Adrianne Lenker: Live at Revolution Hall (4AD)
33. Ms. Ezra Furman: Goodbye Small Head (Bella Union)
34. Girl Scout: Headache (Human Garbage)
35. Common/Pete Rock: The Auditorium Vol. 1 (Loma Vista)
36. Chuck D Presents Enemy Radio: Radio Armageddon (Def Jam)
37. Amadou & Mariam: La Vie Est Belle (Because): Not counting none other than Youssou N'Dour, the now 70- and 65-year old "blind couple of Mali" gathered more international plaudits than any Afropop act of their generation. Their most prestigious honor was nabbing Welcome to Mali's 2010 Contemporary World Music Grammy nomination, when they were somehow outpaced by, oy, Bela Fleck. But to say that I own five of their earlier albums isn't to claim I play them much—their rhythms are more reliable than uplifting. Yet when this two-LP compilation that includes many songs I already own showed up in the mail, multiple replays came easily enough, which isn't to assume an all-new album can't be in their future. Upful, varied, and well-practiced, with a big tone and a fondness for decorative distortion, their vie remains sufficiently belle to argue convincingly that they needn't slow to a stop quite yet. A-
38. FACS: Wish Defense (Trouble in Mind): Their all-caps name adapted from the U.K. Factory label's numbering system, their renowned producer the late Steve Albini of Nirvana, PJ Harvey, and his own Big Black fame, this spare, loud, foursquare Chicago trio makes New Order sound like the Beatles and hence also makes them sound relatively conventional. Of course, a lot of the music we love fits that description. But their sixth album's irresistibly propulsive yet verging-on-abstract purity could make anybody who ever loved New Order consider putting it on repeat, reading along with the lyrics, or both. So I did the latter—once. Not that they're offensive the way Albini liked to be—there are even hints of empathy and conscience. But the next time I play it, and I expect to, it will be to lift myself from a mild existential funk—anything bigger much less warmer would appear to be beyond them. And they're docked a notch for their back-cover snapshot of an apparently male human being's legs straining tippy-toe on a wooden chair toward a ceiling from which hangs, one can only assume, a noose. A-
39. Mahotella Queens: Buya Buya Come Back (Umsakazo)
40. Helene Cronin: Maybe New Mexico (self-released): A well-put-together middle-aged woman who's won some local festival prizes, Cronin is so unassuming in her electric-folk way that you may not notice the lyrical acuteness of an album where the second song goes: "Oh the one who's more in love/Is at the mercy of/The one who doesn't feel it as strong/And that's how the power lines are drawn." Or how about "I want to leave this place better than I found it/Take a breaks my heart and wrap my arms around it/I wanna put a little good out into the world/Shine a little light in the dark/I want to leave my maker's mark"? You may think those sentiments are corny, but in part that's because they're true, and seldom have said truisms been put so acutely or originally. So if you're still unimpressed maybe that's because you're an asshole. A-
41. Patterson Hood: Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams (ATO): I found the head Drive By Trucker's quasi-autobiographical songwriting here so varied and indeed interesting that I dipped back two decades to reaccess his 2004 solo debut Killers and Stars, which I assayed in 120 B plus/A minus words for Blender but never gave it its own review in the Consumer Guide. Not bad, right, only the new one's even better. From Hurricane Helene wrecking North Carolina in the opener to the plane-crash funeral at the close, quite a few of these retrospectives tend dark. But the truly serious part is how much detail suffuses Hood's tales of eros gone wrong and pool-house suicide and Oldsmobiles that get ten miles a gallon and classy Christmas parties over an eight-year-old's head. Extra thanks to Wednesday for chipping in when appropriate. A
42. The Delines: Mr. Luck and Ms. Doom (El Cortez)
43. Bill Scorzari: Sidereal Days (Day 1) (self-released)
44. Manu Chao: Viva Tu (Because): The French-Spanish Chao never goes out of style around our house, where his gentle 2007 Radiolina proved such a multicultural easy-listening standard that 2008's Baionarena escaped my notice and his first album in the subsequent 16 years got stuck in the not-quite-enough-of-the-same-thing slot. Only then I bore down and realized that Chao had switched gears sonically. Where before his gentle gestalt was so soft-edged it could make critical praisewords out of adjectives like hazy and muzzy, here the lyrics sound alert and enunciated insofar as an English speaker can tell—"Viva Tu," that must mean keep living or thereabouts, and it's followed by one whose title comes in the aforementioned English: "Heaven's Bad Day," as in "There is no devil to visit my heavens today." Tempos are somewhat speedier, too, and if that makes it more rock and roll let's hope not. We've got plenty of that and not too much Manu Chao at all. Just the thing to blot the noise out of your mind for a spell. A-
45. Billy Woods: Golliwog (Backwoodz Studioz)
46. Lucy Dacus: Forever Is a Feeling (Geffen)
47. Kadef: Kadef (RR Gems)
48. Willi Carlisle: Winged Victory (Signature Sounds)
49. Corook: Committed to a Bit (Atlantic)
50. Grace Potter: Medicine (Hollywood)
51. Peter Stampfel, Friends & Daughters: Song Shards (Jalopy)
52. Funkrust Brass Band: Make a Little Spark (self-released): Having never seen one of the live shows this Brooklyn-based brass band's fanbase kvells about, I assume their hyperactive, densely populated, quite findable "Terminus" video is a suitable introduction to their all-white, sexually integrated, determinedly eccentric Balkan-New Orleans hybrid with a fictional post-apocalypse backstory. Their latest and richest recording, while well-executed and then some, is goofier and more playful than "Terminus," although half a dozen viewings in I can't claim to have caught myself humming it on the way to the grocery store. Still, this album establishes them as a worthy, ambitious, and imaginative project. I'd go see them play in a minute if it wasn't too far away on the subway. A-
53. Jenny Hval: Iris Silver Mist (4AD)
54. Jeffrey Lewis: The EVEN MORE Freewheelin' Jeffrey Lewis (Vintage Voltage)
55. Sudan Archives: The BPM (Stones Throw)
56. Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts: Talkin to the Trees (Reprise)
57. Wet Leg: Moisturizer (Domino)
58. GloRilla: Glorious (CMG/Interscope): From "These niggas tryin' to get me pregnant/I need to tie my tubes" to "I ain't goin' for all that rough me up and grab me by the neck," this sex object signifies as a subject. She sees herself as a conscious combatant in the war of the genders who's in it for both pleasure and autonomy and is committed enough to her own goodness to enlist the Reverend Kirk Franklin in her life quest and hint that "Stop playing with that girl" is more likely out of concern for said female than desire for the male she sees is on the make. Limited though the world she inhabits may seem, she gets quite a few distinct songs out of it. A-
59. PinkPantheress: Fancy That (Warner)
60. Smerz: Big City Life (Escho)
61. Skrillex: F*ck U Skrillex U Think Ur Andy Warhol but Ur Not!! <3 (Atlantic/Owsla)

And It Don't Stop, May 7, 2026

2024

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