Top Five Alt-Americana Albums of 2025 for the Lost, Wounded and Haunted

My top five albums of 2025 fall under the category of alt-Americana; not the heartland, nor the coasts, nor the tourist towns and amusement parks. These are the voices that come from the fringes and hang onto the edges of every state in this great nation: Skullcrusher, Julien Baker & TORRES, Marissa Nadler, Sarah Mary Chadwick and Utah’s own Melissa Chilinski. All five of these records kick up the dirt in this 250-year old country. They each contain multitudes: mountain music, country, vaudeville, honky-tonk, ragtime jazz and mystical folk. These records will haunt you, kick you in the gut, slap your face, make you cry and lift you up.

Julien Baker & TORRES
Send a Prayer My Way
Matador Records
Street: 04.18.2025
Julien Baker & TORRES = Willie Nelson + Merle Haggard

Julien Baker & TORRES are the “Pancho and Lefty“ for a new generation. Their new album Send a Prayer My Way is a country album like our grandparents listened to on those old record players built into stereo systems that looked like furniture — playing albums that were the soundtrack of late night mistakes and hard mornings of cigarettes, coffee and breakfast. Baker and TORRES deliver just that: “I lost my nerve / So I searched the corner bar / I lost my faith / So I went wishin’ on a lone star / I lost my woman / So I went swimmin’ in a river of Four Roses / Next thing I knew I was horizontal and my friends / were fishing me out of the bottom of a bottle.” Very few country artists today can write a pure and honest lyric like that. On this album Baker & TORRES have many aces up their sleeve, and they play every one of them. Send a Prayer My Way is country gold. Chef’s kiss!

Marissa Nadler
New Radiations
Sacred Bones Records
Street: 08.15.2025
Marissa Nadler = Weyes Blood + Emma Ruth Rundle

Marissa Nadler’s album New Radiations is built heavily with a fog of dark, gothic folk that hides hints of love and hope gently swirling around inside. New Radiations is not of this earth; it’s cosmic. Nadler floats from satellite to satellite, station to station with haunting songs about loneliness and isolation stuck in an endless sky like science fiction. “Cause everything dies, it’s just the way,” Nadler sings on “It Hits Harder”, “Look for the light starting to break / It hits harder / It hits harder / It hits harder from up here, babe.” Nadler continues to drive this theme home on “Sad Satellite”: “When I mistook you for the sky / Some kind of second sight / Traveled through time just to say goodnight / Like a sad satellite.” New Radiations is a gloomy, minimalistic, slow-burn space odyssey with Nadler drifting further and further away. Like David Bowie‘s Major Tom.

Melissa Chilinski
Melissa Chilinski
Self-Released
Street 05.17.2024
Melissa Chilinski = Gillian Welch + Madeleine Peyroux + Norah Jones

Melissa Chilinski is an institution in the state of Utah. You can hear her echo through the pines, thunder through a desert storm and whisper down the canyon. Chilinski is the rose of Hot House West and the Trash Moon Collective and the mad jester of The Cosmic Hootenanny. On her self-titled album Chilinski effortlessly combines elements of Appalachian music, bluegrass, country and Americana like Gillian Welch, adding soft touches like Madeleine Peyroux and Norah Jones. In the end, Chilinski paves her own way, turning the timeless into something beautiful and brand new. I reviewed this record for SLUG in May and this record is just as beautiful leaning into winter as it was shedding spring and grasping for summer. Get up, get off your couch, get out and see her live. She will transform you.

Sarah Mary Chadwick
Take Me Out to a Bar / What Am I Gatsby?
Kill Rock Stars
Street: 04.04.2025
Sarah Mary Chadwick = Hoagy Charmichael + Tom Waits + Patti Smith

On her new album Take Me Out To a Bar / What Am I, Gatsby? New Zealand-born Sarah Mary Chadwick doesn’t waste time — she punches you in the face. Chadwick comes at you with a janky 147-year-old organ with strategic microphones placed around to make every song sound like she is performing in your living room. Chadwick murders every song with an unsettling, uncomfortable grace that falls between Tom Waits‘ vaudevillian dramatics and Patti Smith‘s Horse-era confessional poetry. On the track, “I’m Not Clinging To Life,” Chadwick sings: “I have lots of fun things / Planned to make up for how / He mistreated me badly / From birth until now.” Chadwick leaves grenades like this throughout the album that are impossible to avoid. Like Easter eggs that are louder than bombs with a spark casting a light that never goes out. Take Me To The Bar / What Am I, Gatsby? is a sad, suffocating good time. For any lost generation.

Skullcrusher
And Your Song is Like a Circle
Dirty Hit
Street: 10.17.2025
Skullcrusher = Chelsea Wolfe + Sinéad O’Connor

Skullcrusher sounds like a black metal band made up of all dudes who play live shows with their shirts off sporting tattoos and beer guts. It’s not. Skullcrusher is the solo project of Helen Ballentine, and her new album And Your Song is Like a Circle delivers dreary, slightly psychedelic folk that sends shivers down your spine yet warms you up like a favorite blanket in the winter time. Ballantine sounds like a much quieter, less angry Sinéad O’Connor and a less White-Witch-spooky Chelsea Wolfe. “My body raised out of the pain / Out of a knot that comes unraveling” Ballentine sings on the sadly beautiful “Maelstrom.” “Born from a death / Born from the lack of love / The lacking of a family.” Skullcrusher crushes. Ballentine’s And Your Song is Like a Circle is a haunting, soft sigh of a record that is hushed and quiet in a slow roll David Lynch Black Lodge sort of way.

Read more year-end Top Fives here:

Top Five Indie-ish Albums of 2025 for the Saddest Clown at the Political Protest
Top Five Soundtracks of 2024 for Being Where You Already…