2025 was a masterpiece of a year when it came to music. From alternative rock to rage-inspired digicore, there was no shortage of amazing albums. Here at WRVU, we’ve collected the best of the best after a rigorous voting process. If you weren’t tapped in last year, it’s okay. We’re here to help. Here are WRVU’s top ten albums of 2025, featuring reviews from across our staff. — Carter Vidale
10. Shallowater – ‘God’s Gonna Give You a Million Dollars’ (TIE)
After a bright start with 2024’s There is a Well, West Texas shoegaze (or in their own words, “dirtgaze”) band Shallowater refined their sound even further with God’s Gonna Give You a Million Dollars. Produced by Asheville legend Alex Farrar (known for collaborations with MJ Lenderman, Wednesday, Waxahatchee, and others), and featuring American primitivist guitarist Hayden Pedigo on the last track, “All My Love” (a crushing, poetic recounting of visiting a run-down house), the album is sure to please anyone looking for a tasteful synthesis of indie folk, alternative country, and massive shoegazy walls of sound. The highlight of the album is its penultimate track, “Ativan,” a song that accelerates endlessly without ever losing cohesion before crashing into a breakdown that listeners will be hard-pressed to forget.After a bright start with 2024’s There is a Well, West Texas shoegaze (or in their own words, “dirtgaze”) band Shallowater refined their sound even further with God’s Gonna Give You a Million Dollars. Produced by Asheville legend Alex Farrar (known for collaborations with MJ Lenderman, Wednesday, Waxahatchee, and others), and featuring American primitivist guitarist Hayden Pedigo on the last track, “All My Love” (a crushing, poetic recounting of visiting a run-down house), the album is sure to please anyone looking for a tasteful synthesis of indie folk, alternative country, and massive shoegazy walls of sound. The highlight of the album is its penultimate track, “Ativan,” a song that accelerates endlessly without ever losing cohesion before crashing into a breakdown that listeners will be hard-pressed to forget. — Sorin Caldararu
10. Jane Remover – ‘Revengeseekerz’ (TIE)
With hyperpop on the rise following Charli XCX and 2Hollis’ success over the past couple years, Dariacoreinventor Jane Remover is finally getting the recognition they deserve. Revengeseekerz was conceptualized while Jane was touring with rapper JPEGMafia in 2024 and released April 4 of this year. Dariacore is a subgenre of hyperpop characterized by highly manipulated samples from popular media. Revengseekererz features samples from Pokémon, Wii video games, Guitar Hero, and movies such as The End of Evangelion and The Craft. Jane explores a range of genres such as techno, rage, house, and more in this dense, highly personal project. — Zofia Sante Hunter
8. Rosalia – ‘LUX’
Rosalía’s newest album, LUX, is her most ambitious project to date. Building on the sensational success of her experimental pop release MOTOMAMI, she turns inward and backward, drawing inspiration from earlier phases of her career. The result is a blend of her soulful, emotionally charged vocals with dramatic orchestral arrangements and layered, artful production. LUX also serves as a reflection of Rosalía’s spirituality, romanticism, and feminine mystique; singing in 13 different languages, the Spanish artist reminds us that “through understanding the other, maybe you can understand yourself better, and you can learn how to love better. — Carolina Rodriguez
7. Oklou – ‘choke enough’
Finding an apt description for the year’s most unique pop release is challenging, so I’m relying on Ethel Cain’s succinct, yet perfect description for Oklou’s choke enough: “pop music for bugs.” Small, but ever so mighty, the debut album from French singer Oklou marries the natural and artificial into the most ethereal pop release of the year. Hushed vocals swim in harmony with undulating synths to create a melodic and glitched-out landscape characterized by tension. Equal parts icy and crystalline as it is warm and enveloping, choke enough is all about balance. This dichotomy is seen throughout the track list. The delicacy of songs like “thank you for recording” creates music so beautiful you could cry, whereas harder-hitting cuts like “harvest sky” beg to be danced to. Just make sure to watch out for the ladybug and crickets raving along with you under your feet. — Brennen Thomas
6. Turnstile – ‘NEVER ENOUGH’
While some may miss the more straight-ahead sound of the group’s earlier days, tracks like “BIRDS” and “SUNSHOWER” prove that Turnstile isn’t losing their edge on NEVER ENOUGH. “SEEIN’ STARS” in all of its synth-pop glory managed to find its way onto Elton John’s top songs of 2025, and “I CARE” sounds like it could soundtrack a Mario Kart stage. Their diversity is exactly what makes them so unique, but it also makes it harder and harder to place Turnstile within the confines of “hardcore.” Nevertheless, the spirit lives on in their live shows, with their free Baltimore show doubling as a fundraiser for Health Care for the Homeless, and fans still rushing the stage at major venues across the country. Regardless of genre debates, NEVER ENOUGH undeniably provided the perfect amount of anger and hope necessary to make it through 2025. — Sydney Spangler
5. FKA twigs – “EUSEXUA’
Adding “linguist” to her already multi-hyphenate title, FKA twigs coined a new term to contextualize her new album, EUSEXUA, to describe the transcendent feeling that overcomes someone in deep moments of passion. The album delivers that feeling on a metallic platter. Billed as an introspective record inspired by the Prague techno scene, EUSEXUA is a skittering, kinetic pop masterpiece. The album is chameleonic, with the eleven tracks seeing twigs inside of the techno scene that inspired the album (“Eusexua,” “Room of Fools”), contribute to the growing canon of trip-hop revival (“Girl Feels Good”), and make her hardest and slipperiest music to date (“Drums of Death,” “Striptease”). Twigs lyrically explores themes ranging from finding nirvana on the dance floor to all consuming horniness, with her seductive soprano providing the connective tissue to the body of work. So if your desire is to find yourself in losing yourself, EUSEXUA is your open invitation (just as long as you can find the club entrance). — Brennen Thomas
4. Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band – ‘New Threats From The Soul’
In July, Ryan Davis and co. returned with their sophomore effort, New Threats From The Soul, a record that celebrates not just the perfection of the band’s sound but also their commitment to experimentation and evolution beyond limits set by their predecessors. Davis’s songwriting is at once effortlessly meandering and meticulously calculated. By striking a perfect lyrical balance between stream-of-consciousness absurdism, laugh-out-loud wit, and aphoristic bluntness, his songs are sometimes impenetrable, sometimes universally relatable, and always delightful. Tonally, the record flows seamlessly from high-energy romps like the eponymous “New Threats From The Soul” and “Better If You Make Me” to more wistful meditations like “Mutilation Springs” and “Simple Joy.” Best of all, it sounds amazing! The orchestration is lush, the production is crisp, and Davis’s voice feels right at home in each track. This project is unlike any I’ve ever heard, and it is easily my favorite of 2025. — Jack Tabb
3. PinkPantheress – ‘Fancy That’
Released in early summer of this year, PinkPantheress’s mixtape Fancy That has solidified the relatively new artist’s status as a pop icon. Casually known as Pink, the 24-year old artist began self-producing in 2019 and released her first mixtape To Hell With It in 2021 which immediately garnered critical acclaim, debuting at #20 on the UK Albums chart. Fancy That is only Pink’s second mixtape and became highly anticipated after she released the lead single of the project, “Tonight” in April. The remix album Fancy Some More? came out in October, featuring several key electronic groups such as Basement Jaxx and Groove Armada and younger singers like Bladee and Oklou, showcasing Pink’s diverse range of musical references. — Zofia Sante Hunter
2. Geese – ‘Getting Killed’
If you’re interested in the indie rock scene, chances are you’ve heard of Geese. The burgeoning Brooklyn-born rockstars have been all over the news (and the country!) following the release of their fantastic third album, Getting Killed. Over the course of 45 minutes, the band builds on the lyrical style of frontman Cameron Winter’s solo project, Heavy Metal, while adding not only production from Kenny Beats but even a secret JPEGMafia feature. From exclamations of car bombs in the opening track “Trinidad” to yo-yo hangings in the frenetic outro “Long Island City Here I Come,” Geese doesn’t just put their foot in the door, but explodes across the threshold to stardom. — Carter Vidale
1. Wednesday – ‘Bleeds’
The words that make up Wednesday’s monumental record Bleeds have always been with frontwoman Karly Hartzman, and with the band’s sixth effort she solidifies her place as one of her generation’s greatest storytellers. Originally titled Carolina Girl, the heart of the album is built off of tales from Hartzman’s youth in Greensboro (“Townies”), call backs to Asheville denizens and previous band outings (“Gary’s II), and sometimes both as the ever-gorgeous now re-recorded “Phish Pepsi” and co. provide a keystone in connecting the mythos the band have been carefully building over the past near decade. Hartzman and Wednesday keep it delightfully weird and deeply vulnerable as they follow through with their promises in keeping their music as community focused as its personal influences, furthering Southern Rock, and providing WRVU with their album of the year. — Colin Vess