#1 Anna von Hausswolff: ICONOCLASTS (Best Album of 2025)

~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

A lot of these songs are about love, in various ways, but I wanted the album to feel like a battle cry. It felt urgent to me to express a sense of wanting things to change and actually taking steps towards that change. 

Anna von Hausswolff to The Line of Best Fit 2025/10/27

The foolish hope of great eternal beauty
This shit breaks my heart

Facing Atlas

Of course, this is Anna von Hausswolff we’re talking about, so that line in Facing Atlas comes attached with that voice, that incredibly powerful and borderline counter-musical battering ram of an instrument, perhaps one of the only human talents on Earth that could ever hope to position itself among the maximalist sturm und drang of Von Hausswolf’s music and not be immediately crushed to pieces by the musical waves crashing all around it: “This shit breeeeea-a-ye-aaaaaaaaaayks ma heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar…!!”

I’m scaring my sister and my mom

2 Prince: Parade

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Yeah, I was completely baiting you when I said that this 1986 stone cold classic and eighth stop on our annual trawl through the most interesting back catalogue in 20th century pop might have been named the best album of 2025. It isn’t, and no Prince album on this journey ever will be named as the album of the year: While these annual lists can contain records from all kinds of points in recent and ancient musical history (this year’s list already has ancient texts dating all the way back from 2022), the #1 album always needs to have been released in the qualifying 12 month period. I’m not saying that my personal favourite ever Prince album would have been named #1 if it could, all I’m saying is that it couldn’t. It also means the competition announced on Christmas Day is still open! Nobody’s won it yet! Nobody’s entered it, admittedly, but I assume that’s because all my millions (and millions!) of readers are still just thinking really hard about it.

By 1986, it had essentially always been Prince and The Revolution. Ever since Prince needed a backing band to tour his recently released (and completely self-composed) debut album in 1979, that group (Dez Dickerson on guitar and backing vocals, Andre Cymone on bass guitar, Bobby Z on drums and percussion, Gayle Chapman on keyboards and, obviously, Matt “Dr.” Fink on keyboards) may not have had an official name yet, but they were the first building blocks of what would soon become by far and away Prince’s greatest ever collaborators. When Gayle Champman was replaced by  Lisa Coleman in 1980 and Brown Mark replaced Andre Cymone the year after, this thrillingly tight and unbelievably exciting live band were considered at least enough of a part of the Prince package to be given… a hidden backwards credit on the ‘1999‘ album cover.

Goodness will guide us if love is inside us?

3 FKA Twigs: EUSEXUA

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Yeah, that’s right, I’m going to start my post on the Scientifically Proven™ third greatest album of 2025 by slagging off Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ for the third fucking time.

Both Beyoncé’s 2022 critic stupefying event album and FKA Twigs’ third proper record were heavily influenced by dance music. Beyoncé referenced a lot of post 70’s black dance crazes – with close attention paid to early 90’s House music and Detroit’s best -while Twigs was enchanted with the techno music she heard when she relocated to Prague to – don’t laugh – film ‘The Crow‘.

I’m a dog for you

4 Rosalía: Lux

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OK, OK, OK, first of all, let’s chill out a bit, OK?

There have been people reacting to the (absolutely fucking incredible, but we’ll get to that shortly) fourth album by Rosalía like the Spanish singer had uncovered a completely new form of making music and ‘Lux’ represents a stylistic shift in the artform akin to Worcester Fragments being compiled in the 13th century. She’s doing music influenced by opera and with a full orchestra!! My mind is literally blown!! I’m dead!!!!!!

Я не шукаю помсти, помста шукає мене

5 Car Seat Headrest: The Scholars

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I’m sorry, am I actually losing my fucking my mind here? Is this some bizarrely specific psychotic hallucination that I’m suffering? Is everyone else suffering mass psychosis here?? Is it a mind virus or something? Did all you idiots catch it from TikTok? Everyone else seems to use that apart from me, so that might explain this apparent lunacy.

Hey, I don’t want to sound like I’m not open to debate: if you want to argue that I’ve actually been far too harsh on this modern rock masterpiece, and that it should rightfully be far closer to the number one spot. I hear you, I really do, and can only defend myself by arguing that there have been three albums released this year that are even greater pieces of genius. Also, erm, spoiler alert but there’s a Prince album to come and all. In the interests of BBC-like ‘Both Sides‘ bullshit, I will also listen to even the most insane and backward opinion that suggests that ‘The Scholars‘ would merely be a top ten album, probably delivered while the questioner dribbled out of the side of their mouth and softly pissed themselves. But to suggest anything lower than that is akin to suggesting that not only does man made global warming not exist, but it’s a huge conspiracy thought up by a still living Elvis Pressley as he controls the narrative from the same studio that he faked the moon landing based in the outer reaches of the flat Earth. I’m sorry, sir, but you are obviously an imbecile whose opinions are flimsier than drunk ape’s attempt at Jenga.

And yet, ‘The Scholars‘ received pretty good reviews and was barely mentioned when general discussions of the year’s best took place.

The fuck is wrong with you people??

I don’t feel good about it now and I won’t when I look back

6 Sudan Archives: THE BPM

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Hey did you read my Ethel Cain post yesterday? No? Well, then I’ve got bad news for you.

Hello, it’s me
Did you miss me?
Just take this piece
The best of me

DEAD

But quit living in the past, man!! Quiet those things in your memory holding on for dear life!! Less of the recalling of the sting of all the tears when Ethel was gone!! There is never redemption, any fool can regret yesterday!! We are very much talking, as Quentin Leo Cook was in 1999, about the here and now!!

Waking up to find your love’s not rea

7 Ethel Cain: Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

You’ll keep changing
I will stay the same
And turn the page
To find it blank
Except for my last name

Janie

Fucking hell, liberals, enough with the purity tests!!

[EDIT: Sorry, but I went to bed last night hating this post. I just feel it was all over the place, undecided on what to focus on, dipped its toes into saying something more important but wimped out of it when I was worried that it wouldn’t come across how I hoped it would, then the post just garbled about nothingness. I wanted to say things that were thought provoking and interesting, but just ended up with milk toast nothingness. I’ve left the final couple of paragraphs, plus the amazing lyrics, but the rest of this post can get to fuck. I’ll take another swing at the topic I chickened out of another time in the future. Fucking incredible album though]

LEGALIZE INCEST

8 Hallelujah the Hills: DECK

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Fucking hell, they actually did it.

In late 2022, Hallelujah the Hills announced an absolutely ludicrous idea: DECK. A 52 song project, with each song representing a playing card in a traditional… well… deck… Although it was announced in 2022, Ryan H. Walsh said that it was an idea that he first thought up the concept 20 years earlier, likely as some nonsense pie in the sky fantasy that would never likely be completed. It would be made up of four thirteen song albums, one for each suit. The diamonds suit would be the band’s a proper studio follow up to 2020’s ‘I’m You’ – the real diamonds in the rough. The club deck would be more punky and direct – clubbing you over the head, if you will. The hearts deck would be more slowed down and acoustic sad boi songs – that hit the listener straight in the heart…s. And then the deck of spades would be the project’s more experimental and looser songs – songs that… call a spade a spade…? Are influenced by David Spade…? Ah! A spade spade! For digging! So the spade suit would be the band digging into their creativity to express themselves more freely? Yeah, think that’s it.

Whatever, it doesn’t matter, this whole idea’s a fucking disaster.

Cauterizing wounds with lit cigarette

9 Nourished by Time: The Passionate Ones

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May they multiply you
May the river guide you
You won’t always be here
To be tricked and lied to
May you always have a fight
Be it wrong or be it right
Shed a raindrop when you cry
But beware of sedatives and passing time

9 2 5

Namy-namy-namy-namy-namy-namy-namy-namy-namy-namy-way we go! Yeah, I’ve got no idea what that sped up voice is saying. But I love it.

Oh, and this whole “May you always have a fight/Be it wrong or be it right”? Listen, I get it, that whole “If You Don’t Stand for Something, You’ll Fall for Anything” job? Yeah, all good. Only, don’t stand up for wrong things, yeah? I get where you’re coming from, and that not believing in anything just means you’ll allow yourself to be just swept up by the majority. And if you believe in the right things, we’d love to have you! But if you believe in the wrong thing, then maybe just pipe down and get on with your life, we’ve got this. And don’t “Fine people on both sides” me with this – there are people whose beliefs are literally scientific; there are people (the fascists) who always support capital because they’ve been told God wants them to; and then there’s people (the social fascists) who also support capital because they saw it on the fucking West Wing: Fight for what’s right, yeah?

“Beware of sedatives”? Well… I mean… what sedatives are we talking about, exactly…

If my heart should burst or break, it was overdue