Top Five Albums of 2025 for Mesmerizing Busy Minds 

There are two flavors of quieting my noisy brain: a high-octane dazzle or a sedate, steady purr. Either way, I spent a lot of time in 2025 looking for music that would move me to move on, scratch my brain just so and trigger an emotional unclogging. Frets handled and fears faced. I just wanted to move forward, and these five albums gave me the freights and grooves I needed most.  

Logic 1000
DJ-Kicks: Logic 1000
!K7 Music
Street: 03.28.2025
Logic 1000 = Oklou + Youandewan

Something I realized this year is I love music that is simultaneously calming and invigorating. Logic 1000’s DJ-KICKS album balances the two into a perfect mix that I found myself running to as easily as I slept to. DJ-KICKS is a long-running series of DJ mixes that began in 1995 by Berlin-based label !K7 Music. As of November, there are 87 albums in the series, comprising over 1,000 tracks and hundreds of contributors. Logic 1000’s album was my introduction to the artist Samantha Poulter, and her album combines works from some of my favorites from this year — like Oklou, Astrid Sonne and james K — with original tracks that cement the album’s ethos as a downtempo medley. “Lurk” by Oklou and Casey MQ opens the album with Oklou’s identifiable soft electronica to begin the deliberate tightrope act between soothing and energizing. “under the sun, beneath the rainfall” by Logic 1000 carries it further: A refrain of synths drizzles over a booming bassline, while vocal samples whisper together. Some tracks, like “Dab Heretic” by Big Ever, slow the album down to an ambient pace, like pulsing raincloud swells over bright and gloomy wheatfields. It is an immaculate album and one I found fit perfectly into the melancholy crevices of my happy life. 

Amos Roddy
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector (Original Game Soundtrack)
Jump Over the Age
Street: 01.31.2025
Amos Roddy = Andrew Prahlow x Ben Prunty

It’s a classic tale: The follow-up album didn’t click at first. For the original Citizen Sleeper, Amos Roddy had created a percussive and piano-forward ambient world peppered with standout crescendos small and loud. That first album had become a favorite, and so, naturally, the follow up wasn’t matching up on my first few listens. I suppose I was looking for Roddy to do the same thing again. And, to be fair, he did! The soundtrack to sci-fi role-playing game Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is still a sparkling undergirding for the series’ writing, which focuses on the player character’s relationship with their deteriorating and changing body. The story is a variation on the structure of the first game, and so the soundtrack too takes a slightly different tack: Roddy is more languid here, creating fewer loud moments and far more quiet ones, relying on resolving repetition over creating big crescendos. I found it harder to appreciate at first, but with several listens I started to hear what the difference brought. Tracks like “Hollow Core” emphasize a larger sense of space than before: looming synths overlay soft, wood block-like percussion, dipping into the original soundtrack’s penchant for swell. “A Different Sun” is single-worthy and assembles the game’s signature piano-forward melodies in a machine of clattering whacks. Listening to the soundtrack in-game, it’s melancholy. Standalone, it glitters, a coruscating jewel of an ambient album in its own right.  

Oli XL
Lick The Lens — Pt. 1
Warp Records
Street: 08.27.2025
Oli XL = Meat Computer – Blaydee x (james K) 

Lick The Lens sounds like a Nokia phone tastes. The half-portion, seven-song EP from Oli XL bounces with turn-of-the-century, pay-as-you-go QWERTY phone plasticity. You’ve never heard this before, but you’ve seen the way we think of Y2K now: butterfly crops, flared ends, cat-ear knits, low-rise jeans! Bespoke electronics and translucent casing. This is music for a calcified memory of the millennium, with all the conceptual sauce of a Dreamcast web browser, which is to say it’s cool as fuck. Oli XL collaborates with several artists — including james K, Ecco2K and Chanel Beads — to produce the EP’s rich texture of bassy, dial-up-ringtone cum, and each track interprets the aesthetic in its own way. “HOODIE MUSIC” is the album’s middle, its slow high point that pares the noise back to an almost R&B crisp: “Should I miss my flight? / Think she’s the one / My friends think I’m dumb / Haven’t felt the sun on my face for a while / Man, I’m too volatile.” These songs handle little-big loves, the struggle to play it cool in the face of an earth-shattering crush. Catching feelings across big changes, midriff out. 

Shanti Celeste
Romance
Method 808 x Peach Discs
Street: 05.16.2025
Shanti Celeste = Doss x POLIÇA

I had never heard of her until this fall, but Shanti Celeste is apparently a household name in the European club scene. The London-based, Chilean DJ last released Tangerine in 2019, a bright house and techno record, straight instrumentals. That was surprising to me because Romance leads with Celeste trying out pop vocals, which glide effortlessly over luxurious deep house and techno. It’s groovy, a bit confessional and, well, romantic: This is a dance pop album about love — for others, for lovers, for love itself and you yourself, subject and vessel. Sometimes it’s expectedly sexy, and sometimes it’s surprisingly sweet. In “Note to Self,” Celeste sings to herself over a soft techno beat: “Don’t you ever forget / You are worthy of everything you get / Don’t you ever forget / When you feel lost, I’ll be your warm embrace.” On my favorite track, “Watching,” over a thrumming woodblock she sings about seeing yourself fall in love and be loved: “Watching you, wanting me / watching me, wanting you / teasing me, haunting you / pleasing me, wanting you.” Romance ends up a bold dance record for its unexpected blend of vulnerable pop confidence and infectious house beats that guide love home. 

Moin
Belly Up
AD 93
Street: 05.09.2025
Moin = Astrid Sonne x ML Buch

When I first heard Belly Up it felt like someone had ripped it out of my throat. I heard it on a Monday, and by Saturday I was listening to it on vinyl. By far the most electrifying thing I heard this year, Belly Up is a whirlwind of percussion and saxophone and lyrical mantras. It’s all there in the lead track, “See,” as drums create a marching rhythm while saxophones scrape and scale back and forth as if over a washboard, and suddenly Sophia Al-Maria speaks: “To name something is to know something and to know something is to know I know nothing and that’s what I really want / See? / To obliterate the edge of my understanding and the way that things oughta be / See?” A droning synth looms as she repeats the words, mechanically, as though they were a liberating prayer. “I’m Really Flagging (or I Trusted U)” doubles the percussive rhythm and creates another staircase of saxophone on top of voice samples of a kid yelling, “I trusted you!” It’s a technique that Moin will often employ across its albums to give the music a sort of jarring, grounding jolt, snapping the music from esoteric noise into something that lives with you. Moin’s music works while feeling like it shouldn’t. It’s dark and tragic. It feels liberating and radical, like a structure that resists — a lattice, something new. Even so, Belly Up is a fun and experimental EP that isn’t afraid to make you uncomfortable. Its willingness to “go there” leaves me feeling refreshed and entirely entranced, ready for what may come.

Read more Year-End Top 5s:
Top Five Albums for the Sad Girl Psyche
Top Five Albums of 2025 to Immerse Yourself in Winter Darkness