Antagonzine’s Best Albums of 2025

Edited by Cameron Cade

Across all mediums, 2025 has been a pretty remarkable year. It felt like everywhere you looked, a shift was occurring, at times nostalgic and often brand-spanking new. The music of 2025 was simply the most explicit example. Pop mainstays like Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift used 2025 as an opportunity to ride the line between the familiar and the new with their most recent releases. Lily Allen returned with the critically acclaimed West End Girl. Bad Bunny and Rosalía incorporated some national pride and pulled folk music traditions from their countries into albums that garnered mainstream success.  

It’s been a wild year for music, so we gathered some of the writers at Antagonzine to give their wildly different thoughts on which album was the Best Album of 2025…

LUX - Rosalía 

By Cameron Cade

There’s something about the internationality of Rosalía. Maybe, it’s better described as universality. Over her 4 LP’s, the Catalonian singer has voraciously reinvented her sound, clawing at the strings of genres all over the world. Each new evolution tied together with her Pop-Flamenco roots and her soaring, heart-stopping vocals. With this in mind, what greater move would there be to swing back from the hard-hitting Reggaeton of MOTOMAMI to a fusion of European operatic sounds and flamenco. 

When listening to LUX for the first time, it’s impossible to predict what’s coming next, including which language you are about to hear. As you jump from the soft indie-pop and string backed sounds of “Reliquia”, to the soaring orchestrated and Bjork featured, “Berghain” to the far more familiar (although still operatically influenced) flamenco-pop of “De Madruga”, you can’t help but wonder how these variations still come together to form a compelling whole. 

If Rosalía had something to prove about her capabilities as an artist, this album would have surely settled the score. LUX is a mature and insightful album with incredible replay value and for all the tracks that you could enjoy purely through the surface level composition, she desperately begs you to look closer at this personal and highly vulnerable album through her incredible vocal performances. You would be a fool not to oblige her request…

The Art of Loving - Olivia Dean

By Cara Macdonald

It’s hard to pick a favourite album for 2025, but one I found myself going back to a lot was The Art Of Loving by Olivia Dean. The singer-songwriter’s sophomore album is a reflective piece of work, looking back and growing from a past relationship and gaining a new confidence and learning to be independent. The album maintains a neutral tone throughout, with some songs going through the memories that are both positive and painful. Starting with “The Art of Loving (Intro)”, Dean sets the tone for an album centred on emotion, growth, and the reassurance of moving forward.

The Art of Loving showcases Dean’s capabilities to blend soulful vocals with a vibrant pop sound. She’s vulnerable on each track, emotion hidden behind an up-beat melody that screams confidence. Pop chart-topper “Man I Need” is a well-fitted outlier, where she’s forward in what she wants and telling someone to step up to be who she’s looking for. While tracks like “Let Alone The One You Love" looks back at the way she was treated and realises things weren’t equal - acting as the decisive moment where it was decided the relationship should end.

Dean’s vulnerability on this album reads like a diary, opening up raw emotions and revisiting old memories that come together to create The Art of Loving. After an album that deals with a range of emotions and relives past memories, the track “I’ve Seen It” acts as a gentle exhale to bring it to a close. Ending on a note of reassurance, reminding listeners that love, care, and affection can be found in many other forms.

Off With Her Head - BANKS

By Amy Alexander 

The American R&B singer, BANKS’, albums have always captured the effervescence of love, loss, and heartbreak, often in a futile-feeling yet freeing way. Off With Her Head is a new installment of the electric, R&B, and acoustic elements of her music. But there’s something more vulnerable this time around; BANKS’ songwriting, stronger now than before, captures her adventurousness and free-spirit. It’s the kind of music I often listen to at two in the morning when the world is quieter; BANKS has this ability to construct a universe of intertwined feelings and experiences that are deeply relatable. 

From start to finish, Off With Her Head is a disparate yet cohesive body of work, a mastery of the sentimental, ridiculing, mournful, and gentle aspects of loss, whether it be friendships tossed to the wayside, or the grief of a broken-down relationship. The song “Stay” is a stand-out track from the album; it perfectly captures the vulnerability of wanting closeness after a heated disagreement with a lover. The gentle melodies and repetition throughout emphasise her regret and wanting for connection, one of those seemingly universal feelings that BANKS conjures across the album.

BANKS has always had the conviction to make unconventional tracks and albums that don’t necessarily lend itself to just one genre and one sound. It always feels unpredictable and that’s what makes her stand out as an artist and a songwriter. The title track and closer “Off With Her Head”, a ballad that leans toward soul, funk, and synth, details the vastness of moving on from a relationship, akin to being in a guillotine, but also the bravery of being emotionally open. It’s a swing of an ending to what is a fascinating album, a plethora of depth explored. With BANKS, there’s something radically enthralling about her music, and I would encourage you to listen if you haven’t already! 

Mayhem – Lady Gaga

By Lara Sayess

There is something so satisfying about hearing Lady Gaga sound a little dangerous again. Mayhem isn’t just a neat “return to form,” but like Gaga is leaning back into that loud part of herself. This is the part of herself that made her pop music’s most thrilling wildcard to begin with. It’s big, it’s messy in the best way possible, and it rides the line between total spectacle and a sincerity that Lady Gaga masterfully pulls off without tipping into self-parody.

What I love most about Mayhem is how unpredictable it feels while still being so clearly and unmistakably Lady Gaga. One moment, you are deep in dance-pop that feels built for strobe lights; the next, she’s pulling everything back and letting her voice do what it’s always done best: make the drama feel real. Even at its most over-the-top, there is a sense that she is in control of the chaos. She has chosen every blow-up, every indulgent moment, every left turn, because she knows exactly how it is going to land. 

If 2025 has been a year of artists playing with nostalgia and reinvention, Mayhem is Gaga proving she can do both without watering anything down. It’s bold, it’s theatrical, and it has that rare replay value where you keep catching new details: a vocal run you missed, a production switch you didn’t’ clock or a lyric that hits harder the second/third/fortieth time. Gaga’s always been at her best when she’s fearless, and Mayhem feels like she is taking the leap, reminding everyone that pop can still feel huge, strange, and emotionally sharp all at once.

Addison - Addison Rae 

by Marie-Sofie Braune 

Summer feels like a lifetime away. Addison is a dip into the pool of nostalgia from that summer a lifetime away. Addison by Addison Rae makes me feel like I am safely submerged, listening to the world through a comfy filter.

It might be Addison taking heavy and heavenly inspiration from Britney Spears or it might be her just understanding our craving of early 2000s pop music that we haven’t experienced since pop’s genre death in 2013. No other pop princess has so closely connected me to that childhood dream of being a pop star. It captures that time of wearing your moms clothes on your tiny 9 year old body and trying the complimentary makeup that is glued to that magazine your parents got you from the store. 

My summer was spent moving from a small town in Germany to London, and starting my new life. It felt like all dreams and illusions are coming true. I remember running errands selling all my clothes on Vinted and listening to “In The Rain”, “Summer Forever” and “Headphones On”  

The Addison Rae lore, so to speak, has suggested she is cringe but this album embraces that early 2000s nostalgia that is inseparable from cringe. Addison Rae owns it and her cheerfulness is infectious. Addison feels mainstream but also niche, it’s difficult to not see it all as intentional. I’m living for it!