The 55 Best Indie Rock Albums of 2025

The Toronto punk boys in Pup are veterans by now, going strong on their fifth album, Who Will Look After the Dogs? Twelve years past their frantic, funny debut, Pup, they still crash through their tunes with frantic guitar overdrive, as Stefan Babcock’s snotty one-liners break out into brotherly dude-unison sing-alongs. But Pup are taking on tough adult emotions these days. Babcock speaks for us all when he asks the philosophical question: “Always feeding on the rotting corpse of goodwill and what’s left of humanity/What the fuck is wrong with me?” —Rob Sheffield

Will Toledo of Car Seat Headrest serves up the band’s epic latest album with the tongue-in-cheek claim that The Scholars is “translated and adapted from an unfinished and unpublished poem written by my great-great-great-great-grandfather, the Archbishop Guillermo Guadalupe del Toledo,” and he’s taken this project seriously enough to give his opera a libretto. The good news for the common listener is that as far as albums with librettos go, this one is surprisingly easy to bang your way through — sort of like a Guided by Voices LP expanded to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway scale. —Jon Dolan

Destroyer has the ability to transport you to another world — smoky street corners, shadowed cafes, some nighttime realm where everything feels slinky and sad and timeless. The band’s 14th studio album, Dan’s Boogie, is no exception, often evoking a broken-down cabaret. It’s telling that the title is so straight-forward, named for frontman Dan Bejar. It’s a quintessential Destroyer record, with even Bejar himself calling it “the most Destroyer-y sounding Destroyer record in a long time.” And there’s no problem with that — Bejar’s world is easy to linger in.–Brenna Erhlich

Mei Semones is a Berkeley School of Music graduate whose debut album matches mathy musicality with rich melodic craft. Semones and her ace band mix indie-rock, jazz, and singer-songwriter pop in constantly shifting songs that elide expectations without feeling fussy. In fact, it’s all quite breezy. Semones, who sings in English and Japanese, pilots songs like the subtly explosive “I Can Do What I Want” and the lovely bossa nova bop “Dumb Feeling” with her warm singing and proudly introspective lyrics. The result is as bright and abstract as the album cover. —J.D.

The Drive By Truckers mastermind sits down at the piano and pours his nightmares into his masterfully surreal horror show Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams, his fourth and finest solo album, full of his brilliant storytelling. “A Werewolf and a Girl” is a bleak lovers’ rendezvous with spooky vocals from Lydia Lunch, asking “What’s a broken girl to do?” Hood teams up with Wednesday and Waxahatchee—just two of the Southern indie upstarts who worship the ground this man stomps on. It ends with the creepiest song ever written about Pinocchio. A line for the times: “Heaven has the pace of a slow news day.”–R.S.

This NYC trio has been rocking out long enough to know exactly how to get what they want. Their fourth album polishes their sound up to a higher gloss and a harder edge, maximizing the gritty glamor of uptempo anthems like “Nothing Romantic” and “Champagne Taste.” Ballads like “Shooting Star” and “Look What You’ve Done To Me” sparkle more brightly, too, with some of singer Julia Cumming’s most deeply felt performances to date. A decade ago, Sunflower Bean drew attention for their youthful energy, but these days they’re sounding like confident stars at the height of their powers. —Simon Vozick-Levinson

When a bunch of scrappy guitar-jangle punchers name themselves after a Guided By Voices song — the eighth best song on GBV’s best album — they’re setting the bar high. Even more so when they name their album Talulah’s Tape, inspired by the legendary Eighties Brit indie sensations Talulah Gosh, Amelia Fletcher’s third-best band. It’s a nonstop rush of infectious Midwest power-pop, with mastermind Kellen Baker pouring his miserable heart into high-speed minor-chord pastries, with the crucial harmonies of tambourine girl Susie Slaughter. “Fall Away” makes you dream of Bacharach/David reborn in the cheap amps of an Indianapolis guitar band.–R.S.

The cover image on the second album from Welsh band the Tubs is a picture of singer-guitarist Owen Williams as an infant, being breastfed in a graveyard by his mother, the author and musician Charlotte Greig. In 2014, Greig died by suicide, and that loss informs Cotton Crown. “Sometimes all I see is an empty space,” Williams sings. The band’s buoyant jangle-pop sound recalls the way the Smiths used chiming guitars and taut tunes as a balm against oppressive sadness, making this album both heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time.–J.D.

Florist’s Emily Sprague continues to amaze as one of the most stubbornly original indie-rock poets around. The fifth Florist record is playful, with a child-like sense of whimsy, as you might expect from an album called Jellywish, as Sprague sings her ballads full of wonder at the natural world. But as you might not necessarily expect, it’s full of pain and loss, with delicate acoustic guitar and piano. “Moon, Sea, Devil” sums up the album in a two-minute lullaby, with Sprague confessing, “The earth is small, but I’m lost in it.”–R.S.

Sharon Van Etten tries a different musical role here: one of the band. She even names the album after her new quartet, Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory. It’s her most groove-oriented music, the first time she’s composed by jamming with other musicians. Attachment Theory goes deeper into the synth-heavy sound she dove into with 2019’s Remind Me Tomorrow. It’s propulsive, with extremely Vince Clarke electro burbles driving the beat. Yet it still has her signature indie torch-ballad candor, the style she perfected a decade ago with her masterwork Are We There. —R.S.

Shirley Manson wrote the lyrics to Garbage’s eighth album while recovering from two hip surgeries, so a line like “Isn’t life just so fantastic with our bodies working still?,” on “Love to Give,” cuts extra deep. Most impressive is how she and her bandmates turned her self-affirmations into catchy mantras with melodies that stand up with Garbage’s best work. The best song comes last: “The Day That I Met God,” a cinematic ballad about Manson finding God in “everyone I’d ever loved,” but also, funnily, the pain killer tramadol. The music is stunning and Manson’s performance is chilling. Kory Grow

The noise-rock bubble bath of the year. You don’t “listen” to Water Damage so much as you consent to enter an ambient space wherein you get mauled by a dozen or so hairy Austin lunatics with the motto, “Maximum repetition, minimal deviation.” Four tracks, all around the 20-minute mark, tons of guitar, tons of drums, heavy thunder-thud riff-pound devotionals with plenty of quiet spaces until the noise kicks in and elevates you into a trance state, with a little help from art-rock eminence grise David Grubbs on guitar. Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream, heavy on the “down.”–R.S.

On Songs for Other People’s Weddings, indie-schmaltz maestro Jens Lekman imagines he’s a wedding singer and it’s funnier than any Adam Sandler movie. The best song, “A Tuxedo Sewn for Two,” describes two grooms wearing a giant monkey-suit-for-two, all while referencing the Spice Girls’ “2 Become One,” Aristophanes, The Human Centipede, and “99 Luftballons” in five hilarious minutes. Other highlights include him saying “Blink twice if you need help” when interviewing fiancées on “Speak to Me in Music,” and a tale of a quarreling couple recording each other snoring (“Two Little Pigs”).–K.G.

Big Thief’s latest was a divisive left-turn for some, with its big budget sound, drone-heavy side two, and cheery love song in which Adrienne Lenker sings the phrase “happy with you” no less than 44 times. But underneath the surface of Double Infinity exists far more than initially meets the eye. Behind a newly expansive wall of percussion, tape loops, and backup vocals, Lenker meditates on the beauty of aging (“Incomprehensible”), and finding lasting love (“Los Angeles,” “How Could I Have Known”). It’s a moving document of a band still finding new ways to reinvent themselves after a decade as a band.–Jonathan Bernstein

After earning a can’t-miss reputation with three years of dynamite live shows for his 2022 debut, I Looked Out, Vermont rocker Greg Freeman turns up the studio fidelity and makes good on all that word-of-mouth buzz. You can hear the details more clearly now, with pedal steel, woodwind, brass, and tack piano arrangements courtesy of a wrecking crew of Burlington pals, but the ragged glory in his songs remains undimmed. As he hollers hard truths and sideways poetry (“Why’s heartache outside, doing pushups in the street?”), Freeman’s is a voice that holds your attention close. —S.V.L.

No one expected another Ivy album after the tragic death of cofounder Adam Schlesinger in the early days of the 2020 pandemic, least of all his grieving bandmates. But singer Dominique Durand and multi-instrumentalist Andy Chase, working with longtime touring bandmate Bruce Driscoll, pulled off the near-impossible after finding a lost cache of unfinished songs they’d written with Schlesinger in a storage unit. It’s a joy to hear the sophisticated downtown vibe and unerring melodic instincts of cult classics like 1997’s Apartment Life called back into action like no time has passed. —S.V.L.

Rebecca Schiffman is a songwriter who’s been on the scene for a couple decades already, a New York hipster kid relocated to L.A. But she gets deep into grown-up problems on Before the Future. It’s a sly, candid sleeper of an album, where Schiffman sets out her life like a box of snapshots, while narrating the details in her dry, matter-of-fact deadpan voice. She sings about raising a toddler in “Little Mr. Civility”—one of the year’s funniest and warmest parenthood. But the title tune mourns a teenage friend who used to put Jawbreaker songs on mix tapes for her.–R.S.

The first album in over five years from Seattle indie-rock band Great Grandpa isn’t just their most fully-realized (though it’s also that), it’s also a genuine band record. The quintet collide influences — glitchy industrial electronic flourishes, lonesome country & western instrumentation, ornate chamber pop — and tinker with all sorts of pop-rock conventions. Hidden in plain sight, amid the off-kilter impressionism and untraditional arrangements, is the band’s innate sense of melody. They can turn a nonsense six-word refrain like “it’s closer when I see you, damn” into something profound. —J. Bernstein

It’s time to start talking about Friendship’s Dan Wriggins in the same terms as literary indie-rock greats like David Berman, Vic Chesnutt, and Bill Callahan. The Philadelphia band’s rangy Americana-rock is the perfect backing for his gruff, barely hinged singing. But it’s his lyrics that make their fifth album so addictive; Wriggins (who recently got his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop) can turn random everyday stuff like an annoying new roommate or a song sent from a friend or a quick trip to the bodega into spools of wry, raw-boned discovery.–J.D.

Benjamin Booker garnered wide acclaim for two previous records rooted in furious blues-punk, and expansive in their nods to glam rock, soul, and gospel. Lower, Booker’s first since 2017, still showcased his incisive songwriting, but it sounded nothing like his past work in the most exhilarating way. Booker and producer Kenny Segal (best known for his work with rapper Billy Woods) split the difference between the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy and Mobb Deep’s Hell on Earth. Lower is blown-out, messy, and jarring, but balances its chaos with calm, and visceral energy with esoteric feelings. It’s music that challenges you in the most rewarding ways.–Jon Blistein

The London threesome in Saint Etienne go out with a bang on their final album International, full of the brilliantly eccentric left-field pop they’ve been crafting for nearly four decades. They play around with Motown, postpunk, Abba, and techno, with guests ranging from Orbital to Doves to the Chemical Brothers, but with their own unique flair for cleverly sophisticated tunes. It ranks in their pantheon next to Nineties gems like Good Humor and Tiger Bay. Pick hit: Sarah Cracknell singing the bittersweet farewell “The Last Time.”–R.S.

A brilliant avant-pop artist who’s also become an in demand producer for artists like Wilco and St. Vincent, Walsh-born, California-based singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon comes up with something opaquely alluring and genuinely moving on her seventh album. Singing in a warmly stentorian voice over tracks that can often feel like a surrealist version of sad, synth-y Eighties rock, Le Bon cuts through the dreamy drift of her music with lyrics that deal with heartbreak, jealousy, loss, and regret in movingly real teams. The result is abstract music that truly hits home.–J.D.

On the Weather Station’s widely acclaimed 2021 album, Ignorance, singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman focused many of her lyrics on the impending doom of climate change. This time out the challenges are closer to home. With her seventh album, Lindeman gets dangerously close to making the 2020s version of Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark that so many modern indie artists dream of coming up with. It’s an album that beautifully mixes pop, folk, rock, jazz, and ambient music, taking on moments of personal crisis, transition, and catharsis with engrossing poetic resolve. —J.D.

On Pirouette, Model/Actriz follow up their excellent debut, Dogsbody, with an album that feels entirely unaffected by expectations. The Brooklyn-based noise rockers play with new sounds throughout, starting off with a jackhammering opening stretch in which every instrument is treated like a disobedient drum, before collapsing into melodic reveries only hinted at on their first LP. But the biggest evolution may come from the wildly charismatic frontman Cole Haden, whose impressionistic lyrics have become more diaristic, recalling childhood Cinderella fantasies with kinky, curdling rage. —Clayton Purdom

Pictoria Vark is the spoonerism alias of the young singer-songwriter Victoria Park, who turned heads with her 2022 debut album, The Parts I Dread. She aims even higher on her excellent Nothing Sticks — it’s the perfect springtime road trip indie-rock album you didn’t realize you deserved, full of soft-spoken guitar haze and emotional travelogues. The album unfolds like the journal of a wandering young heart who rambles from town to town, from feeling to feeling, but without feeling connected anywhere. As she sings in the witty “San Diego,” “I’m wherever I go.” —R.S.

Any moment is an excellent one for new music from the long-running retro-avant pop band Stereolab, but Instant Holograms on Metal Film, their first full-length since 2010’s Not Music, is particularly well-timed. Blending gliding grooves, wowing-and-fluttering synthesizers, and lyrics that elegantly pine for more, Stereolab’s music blisses out without tuning out. Precisely crafted pop gems like the vibey “Transmuted Matter,” an abstracted love song with a wordless breakdown, flow into hypnotic instrumentals like the whirling “Electrified Teenybop!” and stretched-out jams like the forceful “Melodie Is a Wound.” —Maura Johnston

Nineties shoegaze sounds never get old, and Will Anderson of Hotline TNT channels them brilliantly on Raspberry Moon. Hotline TNT began a solo recording project but has blossomed into a full band with Anderson’s songwriting gifts as their main selling point. He’s a Brooklyn resident with Midwestern roots, and like Minnesota greats Husker Du before him, he’s able to balance noise and melody in songs like “Julia’s War” and “Letter to Heaven,” distortion-stacked songs you can hum around the house. Heck, the album’s title might even be a Prince reference — this is a band that doesn’t mind thinking big.–J.D.

The first solo album from Tunde Adebimpe — of indie-prog titans TV on the Radio as well as the Star Wars multiverse — offers an extreme closeup of the human condition, using his mighty howl to tie its wild explorations of genre together. He defies the constraints of “the age of tenderness and rage” on the churning “Magnetic,” strips down and opens up on “ILY,” or charges up the tear-in-the-beer lament “God Knows.” Throughout, Adebimpe’s physical voice is a beacon, leading the way as he lets listeners know that he can see the world for what it is — and embraces the possibilities beyond it anyway. —M.J.

This highly buzzed SoCal six-piece might sound like a chill alt-country band at first, but they’re far less predictable than that. (Is it any wonder that they’re often compared, favorably, to forefathers like Wilco and Pavement?) On “Sweet Time,” two of the band’s three guitarists face off with dueling slick-pickin’ solos; “Sandcastle Molds” blooms with jittery rhythms and flashes of dissonance. The songs on Moneyball are full of similarly inventive twists that make the back-porch ballads even sweeter — and leave you to wonder where Dutch Interior will swerve next. —S.V.L.

On Bloodless, indie singer-songwriter Samia digs deeper than ever and delivers a meditation on modern womanhood that’s both eerie and unflinching in its honesty. She dismantles belief systems and reassembles her identity with a ferocity that’s both unsparing and blissful. Whether she’s making metaphors to cattle mutilation (“Bovince Excision”) or writing odes to Sid Vicious (“Hole in a Wall”), each song spins and swirls to create something that feels like a major leap from an already must-hear artist. —Maya Georgi

“I’m thinking about breaking your heart someday soon,” Lucy Dacus confesses in “Limerence,” one of the highlights from her fourth album. On Forever Is a Feeling, she aims for adult-specific love songs, rather than the coming-of-age and coming-out tales that made her name. “If the devil’s in the details, then God is in the gap in your teeth,” she sings in “For Keeps.” In the jubilant title song, she takes a romantically charged road trip over sped-up piano. These songs take place in the middle of long-running messy relationships — some desperately romantic, some just painful. —R.S.

For her second album as Blondshell, L.A. singer-songwriter Sabrina Teitelbaum is figuring out how much of her life story she wants to tell the world — how much she needs to tell — and how much to hide away for herself. On her acclaimed 2023 self-titled debut, she was really letting it all hang out in searing, confessional indie rock. But on If You Asked for a Picture, Teitelbaum’s more ambivalent, more questioning, reckoning with her painful past, from childhood misery to dysfunctional young-adult romance. These are the songs of an artist who wants to figure out who she is by singing about it. —R.S.

You might know Kai Slater as the lead singer and guitarist in the Chicago art-punk trio Lifeguard, who made one of this year’s best and noisiest debuts — but that’s not all he’s got in his bag of DIY tricks. In his off days from touring with that band, Slater rigged up a tape-deck studio in his bedroom and poured all his sunniest Sixties-pop hooks into this stunningly catchy solo record. Play it loud, let the paisley visions sweep you away, and start getting excited for what this extraordinarily creative artist dreams up next. —S.V.L.

In celebrating Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band’s second album, New Threats From the Soul, there’s an impulse to just quote the best lyrics. Yes, the record sounds amazing, filled with sprawling country rock odysseys. But Davis’ lyrics define these songs. He can do staggering one-liners and mesmerizing tongue-twisters. But what’s made him one of the best songwriters of his generation remains his ability to render life’s most complex feelings in the most wonderful ways. “I thought that I could make a better life with bubblegum and driftwood,” he sings on the title-track. Regret and hubris have never sounded so beautiful.–J. Blistein

Bar Italia rose out of the London rock underground with their own seductive guitar buzz, three criminally cool types at home in the dark. Their terrific new Some Like It Hot is even cockier, steamier, more insistent — one of the year’s kickiest indie-rock thrillers. They’re definitely not shy about showing off their moody rock influences — a little Slowdive, a lot of the Cure, plenty of the Velvets and Spacemen 3 and Sonic Youth. All over Some Like It Hot, they mix up post punk, Britpop, shoegaze, and psychedelia with their own melodramatic flair. —R.S.

In the six years since Hannah Cohen released an album, she relocated from New York City to the Catskills. Earthstar Mountain is a dazzling love letter to her new home. The album navigates loss (“Mountain”), family drama (the Sly and the Family Stone-inspired “Draggin’”), and obscure 1960s Italian thrillers (the Ennio Morricone cover “Una Spiaggia”), and it features her upstate pals Clairo and Sufjan Stevens. “I think that’s what the Catskills are: this open door for people to take in the beauty of this place,” Cohen told RS. “Everyone who comes here wants other people to experience the magic that we feel here.” —Angie Martoccio

They Are Gutting a Body of Water have been one of the most crucial American shoegaze bands over the past decade. Douglas Dulgarian began making noise as TAGABOW in 2017, playing house shows and releasing early cassettes like 2017’s Sweater Curse. Their new LOTTO is their most intensely emotional noise yet, a showdown with addiction and disease and death. It’s an exorcism of an album — heavier than heaven, hotter than hell, bold as love. Yet, even on a record with this much bleakness and terror, They Are Gutting a Body of Water make a beautifully uplifting noise. —R.S.

Here We Go Crazy wanders the same landscape of tumultuous noise and roiling emotions Bob Mould has been navigating since he co-founded Hüsker Dü in 1979. Gems like “Hard to Get” and “Neanderthal” nail a quintessential Mould-ian mix of pounding aggression, oceanic guitar buzz, and teaming melody. “When Your Heart Is Broken” rockets to the top of his canon, right up there with the Dü’s “Makes No Sense at All” in its ability to mix effortless anthemic tunefulness with a harried feelings-first urgency.  The sense of constant growth and accrued wisdom in these songs makes them sink in. —J.D.

Momma delivered their fantastic Welcome to My Blue Sky just in time for a whole new summer of grunge. On their last album, they sang about riding around listening to “Gold Soundz”; it didn’t take long before they were opening for Pavement, and this album is twice as great. “Ohio All the Time” is a bittersweet but damn-near-perfect guitar vignette about two kids getting lost on the road in the Midwest, trying to figure out if they’re in love, yet neither one brave enough to speak up. Welcome to My Blue Sky is totally brash, always loud, always effusive, and usually funny even when their lives are falling apart, which is constantly. —R.S.

The Hold Steady frontman has an impressive solo catalog, but Always Been is its pinnacle. Over 11 songs, Craig Finn delivers tales of faithless preachers (“Bethany”), broken homes (“Crumbs”), and relationships that should have ended long ago (“Luke & Leanna”) in his infamously idiosyncratic talk-sing style. But what distinguishes Always Been from Finn’s other solo projects is its clear California piano-rock roots. Even the album cover drives it home, with Finn re-creating the photo from Randy Newman’s 1977 LP, Little Criminals. —J.H.

Atlanta singer-songwriter Becca Harvey’s Sweetness is a deeply observed relationship autopsy set to blue, buzzy guitars. On “I Just Do!” she gives us a crushed-out, grunge-pop masterpiece, while pretty subdued songs like “In My Eyes” and “Windows” see her work through love’s murky middle stages, and she closes it out strumming farewell on “I Think I Did.” Working in the tradition of classics like Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear and Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights, she delivers a post-breakup banger. —J.D.

The Baltimore hardcore band’s much-anticipated follow-up to their massive 2021 LP, Glow On, is like a mysterious gallery — not so much a collection of tracks but a series of impressions that are more about a feeling than a message. “Dull,” produced in part by hyperpop innovator A.G. Cook, sounds like a boxing match, while the standout “Sunshower” is like a temper tantrum in a rainstorm, and the Eighties-tinged “Seein’ Stars” undulates like a late-night club track with almost indistinguishable additional vocals from Hynes and Hayley Williams. It’s a haunting collection that’s worth repeat visits. —B.E.

It’s been almost a quarter century since Pulp’s last album, but the Sheffield, England, band is back. On More, Jarvis Cocker still embodies a raffish, witty cool that inspires varying degrees of aspirationalism and envy. Songs like the triumphant “Got to Have Love” possess a slow-burning grandeur that is made to send festival crowds into a frenzy, even as their arrangements feel more homespun than the orchestral flourishes of the band’s Nineties work. The results should give their generational cohort a glimpse of how getting older can be a chance to grab brilliance once again. —M.J.

U.K. indie rockers Wet Leg came out of nowhere in 2021 to become bona fide international superstars. On their second album, they prove they’ve been partying harder, traveling faster, caring less, and meeting sexier idiots. If you thought they might catch a case of sophomore-slump neurosis after their self-titled debut, you guessed wrong. Moisturizer keeps everything fast and frisky, ranging from crushed-out bliss (“I’ll be your Shakira, whenever, wherever”) to breakup rage (“You are washed-up, irrelevant, and standing in my light”). But wherever Wet Leg go, they make you want to tag along. —R.S.

The New York experimental duo’s second album since signing with Matador Records is a brilliantly disorienting trip. Is it an ambient daydream, a nu metal shredfest, a dance party at the end of the world? Hell yeah, baby, to all of the above and much more. Producer and multi-instrumentalist Nate Amos, coming off a major 2024 breakthrough with his singer-songwriter project This Is Lorelei, brings some of that magic back to the mothership for an album full of tasty licks, juicy riffs, and honest-to-god guitar solos; vocalist Rachel Brown brings the surrealist patter to match. —Simon Vozick-Levinson

Alex Giannascoli was one of the first and finest acts to break through in the 2010s by posting his home-recorded music straight to Bandcamp, and his tried-and-true methods haven’t stopped yielding uncannily compelling results. On his first album for a major label, his ability to create a sound that feels at once magical and lived-in remains remarkable, like whole histories of folk and rock music are expressing themselves through this one chill guy. Whether you’ve been riding with him for years or you’re thinking of joining up today, Headlights is an album that won’t make you regret that choice. —S.V.L.

The first release by Snocaps — Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield and twin sister Allison Crutchfield of Swearin’  — feels like a classic indie-rock record. “Brand New City” takes flight like vintage Guided by Voices, “Cherry Hard Candy” is a mid-tempo chugger that spits clipped couplets breathlessly, and “Avalanche” lands partway between the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the La’s “There She Goes.”  Blood harmonies alone would be reason enough to cheer this surprise debut, but the push and pull of styles here between two artists makes Snocaps such an especially compelling outfit. —Will Hermes

Michelle Zauner’s fourth record may thrum with melancholy, but it’s way more than just “sad girl music.” For Melancholy Brunettes is an evolution of everything she’s done before — merging imagery both mythic and mundane with A-class instrumentation. Zauner grapples with the fickle nature of the muse — whether you’re a long-ago poet or a small-town strummer; see “Orlando in Love,” a Greek legend of a track that tells the tale of the titular poet and the sirens that drag him down. This LP is a folk tale, a small-town barroom yarn, a gothic novel, and a ghost story, all in one. —B.E.

Justin Vernon’s lyrics have often led to him being considered a melancholy, lovesick songwriter. The nine tracks on his first album in five years see him finally relenting to lightness. “Time heals and then it repeats,” he sings, acknowledging the regenerative nature of all things. There’s a sense of transcendence running through the LP, with most songs resolving in a major key, carried by propulsive percussion and a whole lot of pedal steel and leaning into triumphant anthemic pop melodies. It’s the work of a man at his most hopeful and open, palms upturned, ready and willing to come up for air. —Leah Lu

Geese frontman Cameron Winter released his sleeper debut in late 2024, about nine months before his band’s excellent Getting Killed became one of the year’s breakout rock albums. On Heavy Metal, he shows a Harry Nilsson-esque knack for coaxing the weird from the poignant, and vice versa. The Seventies pop-rock palette clatters as it grooves, wobbles as it swoons, while Winter flexes his baritone from strung out and weary to high-wire alive. He courts destruction and love, disillusionment and transcendence, with awe, sincerity, incredulity, and suspicion. —J. Blistein