Dan Hinze

Favorite music of 2025

Jan 02, 2026

One thing I've struggled with in the streaming age is having a much more fragmented sense of the art I've consumed, even when it's art I've enjoyed immensely. It just doesn't seem to have the same stickiness. As such, I've relied on things such as Last.fm scrobbles to get a handle on what I've listened to the most this year. This turned out to be even more helpful than before. Since leaving Spotify for Qobuz, Last.fm's data reporting has been a great substitute for Spotify's wrapped feature. On top of Last.fm integrating with most streaming services, there are also lots of tools for tracking other places I'm regularly playing music. For what I care to track, this mostly ends up being Bandcamp's web player and iTunes local files played in the Apple Music desktop app. I took a first stab at my favorites of the year from memory, and if we're going purely by number of plays, it lined up pretty well with what I thought they were! Part of that was probably helped by recency bias, since my top 3 albums were all released in the final quarter of the year.

Here are my rapid-fire top 5 and honorable mentions, based on memory and a quick scan of what tracks had been saved to my monthly favorite playlists (links provided for anything that's on Bandcamp):

Favs

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Honorable mention

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The only album not present in the Last.fm results was Oren Ambarchi's Ghosted III, which, after expanding the data from just my top 25 albums to the top 49, ended up being 30th in my results, just barely outside the top 25. Here's the top 25 albums for 2025, based on Last.fm scrobbles:

Grid of 25 album covers representing my most-played albums of 2025, based on data from Last.fm scrobbles

  1. Geese - Getting Killed
  2. SML - How You Been
  3. Tortoise - Touch
  4. Kaytranada - AIN'T NO DAMN WAY
  5. Gregory Uhlmann, Josh Johnson, and Sam Wilkes - Uhlmann, Johnson, Wilkes
  6. Djrum - Under Tangled Silence
  7. Pino Palladino and Blake Mills - That Wasn't A Dream
  8. Total Blue - Total Blue
  9. Khruangbin - The Universe Smiles Upon You II
  10. Sam Wilkes - Public Records Performance
  11. Glenn Gould - The Goldberg Variations (1955 version)
  12. Hayden Pedigo - I'll Be Waving As You Drive Away
  13. SUN SPEAK - Probiotic Orchestrations
  14. Bon Iver - Sable, Fable
  15. Cameron Winter - Heavy Metal
  16. Barker - Stochastic Drift
  17. Oneohtrix Point Never - Tranquilizer
  18. Resavoir - Horizon
  19. Sault - 5
  20. Shrunken Elvis - Shrunken Elvis
  21. Tyler, The Creator - DON'T TAP THE GLASS
  22. Rosalía - LUX
  23. Body Meπa - Prayer in Dub
  24. Aaron Parks - By All Means
  25. Purelink - Faith

As much as I enjoy reflecting on my own listening each year, I like reading other people's year-end lists even more. For me, they function less as a comparison point (the breadth of my listening is nowhere near the hours some people dedicate in pursuit of hearing as much as possible) and more as an avenue for music discovery. Here are a few lists that I found some good recommendations from:

"The Best Albums of 2025" - Philip Sherburne

Futurism Restated is one of my favorite weekly-ish music newsletters. This one is paywalled, but I highly recommended giving it a trial run and subscribing. It's the best $5 a month that I spend on music recommendations. Philip's recommendations are already very attuned to my tastes, and his newsletter has helped shape them further.

The linked list has a top 30, plus 45 more albums evenly divided into categories of "drifting" (mostly ambient), "dancing", and "songing" (song-based) music.

"The 25 Best Ambient Albums of 2025" - Stephan Kunze

Ambient music has become my preferred type of background sound when I'm working, but in the past few years, it's become something I've turned to in more active listening periods, as well. The fact this has coincided with a relative explosion of the genre in recent years has certainly helped. I also attribute some of this to the curation of Big Ears Music Festival, which I've attended the past 3 years. In addition to having a lineup already tailored to my interests, it's assisted in broadening my listening.

"eleven albums i loved in 2025" - Gabriel Kahane

A friend once described Gabriel Kahane as "Sufjan Stevens if he had gone to music school", and that characterization has stuck with me. His album The Ambassador remains a favorite album of mine, and he always writes so eloquently about music. This alerted me to a few things to give a closer listen: