2025 has been a big year for music. New York indie band Geese had a spectacular international breakthrough with the release of their fourth album Getting Killed, TikTok star Addison Rae made her pop-star debut and Lily Allen came back on the scene with a vengeance.
But which albums stood out above all the rest? Well, Time Out’s editors and contributors have had their say. We just published our ranking of the year’s top records, picking out 25 of 2025’s highest-calibre releases.
Time Out’s album of the year for 2025 is... Choke Enough by Oklou. Contributing writer Chiara Wilkinson, who nominated the record, wrote: ‘For a long time, French musician Oklou was gatekept by the nerdy and the chronically online. Her debut mixtape Galore was beloved by various internet communities for its futuristic mish-mash of ambient pop textures and dreamy, airy synths.
‘Choke Enough feels like a softening, an intentional evolution of her classically-inflected, post-internet world-building that has led to Oklou’s stature growing immensely. There’s a distance to her sound throughout this record – it’s like walking in a haze, not quite seeing where you’re going but feeling your way anyway – and the result is something beautiful, confident and entirely Oklou’s own.’
If you’ve yet to listen to Oklou, start off with the standout track from the album ‘Blade Bird’, in which ‘Oklou’s computerised veil slips away, the lyrics raw and vulnerable, her vocals almost naked’.
Other albums we’ve loved this year came from the likes of Bad Bunny, JADE, Rosalía, MIKE, Lorde and John Glacier. Did any of your faves make the cut?
See Time Out’s full ranking of 2025’s best albums here.
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