The Retrographer, Issue 133 (1 0 0 2 0 2 5)

The top 100 songs of 2025, plus best-of lists, great videos, and more.

Author

Charlie Kaplan
December 31, 2025

LISTEN TO THIS PLAYLIST ON SPOTIFY AND YOUTUBE

When he was a newborn, my son often woke very early in the morning before the sun had risen. My wife and I alternated wake-ups; one of us sleeping in while the other padded to his room in a robe and scooped the wailing loaf from his crib, changed him, and took him to the couch for a bottle. In those mornings before locomotion changed everything, I’d often sit with him in silence broken only by the sound of the bottle and the waking street outside. Just as often I’d cue Phil Cook’s Appalachia Borealis, an album that came out a little more than two months after Leo was born. 

Appalachia Borealis is 30 minutes of solo piano music. When it is quiet, it is prayerful and luminous; when it is energetic, it gallops and lopes like a wild herd. It taps into a world of culture and music that defined the turn of the last century and beyond, when black Americans came north for freedom, when immigrants came over the oceans for a better world, when easterners drove west to build new lives for themselves. Music captured by Aaron Copland in his Appalachian Spring and Rodeo, George Gershwin with his Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris, Thelonius Monk with Solo Monk. This music was a conversation not just between composers or cultures, but often between man and nature, or mankind and its own dreams. It was music my own father loved, I believe because he heard redeeming hopefulness in it. Hope that our way of life could absorb the homeless and tempest-tost and prevail over our foibles and depredations. I wish he could’ve heard the late, great Allen Toussaint’s 2016 American Tunes, credal Americanism rendered as the joyous spiritual communal of New Orleans. I wish he could’ve heard Appalachia Borealis too, sitting with us on that couch one early morning.

Music is a tincture of the past. It captures in amber the ineffable experience of the present and leaves it there fragrantly for some future revisit. Even now, just months on, Appalachia Borealis becomes a boulder in my chest when it plays, reminding me of the passage of time and beauty of a bleary-eyed morning nursing the future.

LISTEN TO THIS PLAYLIST ON SPOTIFY AND YOUTUBE

TOP TEN SONGS OF 2025

  1. “Talking to Myself” – Julian Cubillos

  2. “Ladybug” – Great Grandpa

  3. “Eldeberry Wine” – Wednesday

  4. “Ordinary Silence” – The Bird Calls

  5. “Man I Need” – Olivia Dean

  6. “exhaust” – Earl Sweatshirt

  7. “Mirtazapine” – Hayley Williams

  8. “Tirtha Yatra” – Tyler Childers

  9. “Draggin” – Hannah Cohen

  10. “Resilient” – Chronixx

TOP TEN ALBUMS OF 2025

  1. Appalachia Borealis – Phil Cook

  2. Live Laugh Love – Earl Sweatshirt

  3. You’re No Island – Andrew Daly Frank

  4. Getting Killed – Geese

  5. Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party – Hayley Williams

  6. Belong – Jay Som

  7. LA Garage Sessions '83 – Bruce Springsteen

  8. Patience, Moonbeam – Great Grandpa

  9. August – Scree

  10. God Does Like Ugly – JID

IMPORTANT REMINDERS

TEN OLDER ALBUMS THAT MEANT SOMETHING TO ME IN 2025

  1. Ahmad’s Blues – Ahmad Jamal

  2. Al Green Is Blues – Al Green

  3. Classic Western Swing – Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys

  4. The Asch Recordings: Vols 1-4 – Woody Guthrie

  5. Fat Albert Rotunda – Herbie Hancock

  6. Songs in the Key of Life – Stevie Wonder

  7. Glenn Gould plays Bach: 6 Partitas BWV 825-830; Chromatic Fantasy BWV 903; Italian Concerto BWV 971; The Art of the Fugue BWV 1080 (excerpts); Preludes, Fugues & Fantasies– Johann Sebastian Bach, Glenn Gould

  8. Glenn Gould plays Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier Books I & II, BWV 846-893 – Johann Sebastian Bach, Glenn Gould

  9. Bach: Unaccompanied Cello Suites – Yo-Yo Ma, Johann Sebastian Bach

  10. Six Evolutions – Bach: Cello Suites – Yo-Yo Ma, Johann Sebastian Bach

AMAZING VIDEOS I WATCHED IN 2025

AND FINALLY: A METICULOUSLY-SEQUENCED PLAYLIST OF MY TOP SONGS OF 2025 | LISTEN TO THIS PLAYLIST ON SPOTIFY AND YOUTUBE

  • “Appalachia Borealis”, Phil Cook

  • “Another Baby!” Dijon

  • “Everything is Peaceful Love”, Bon Iver

  • “Man I Need”, Olivia Dean

  • “Relationships”, HAIM

  • “300 dreams”, After

  • “Headphones On”, Addison Rae

  • “Pitbull 2”, Couch Prints

  • “Talking to Myself”, Julian Cubillos

  • “Manchild”, Sabrina Carpenter

  • “Ladybug”, Great Grandpa

  • “Afterlife”, Alex G

  • “Life in a Jar”, Safe Mind

  • “Over and Over”, Wishy

  • “Ensalada”, Freddie Gibbs, The Alchemist, and Anderson .Paak

  • “Sucka Free”, Tyler, The Creator

  • “Drop A”, Jay Som

  • “I Come With Mud”, Jay Som

  • “Dust”, Snuggle

  • “Disappearing Man”, Hayler Williams

  • “Blind Spot”, Bruce Springsteen

  • “NEVER ENOUGH”, Turnstile

  • “Playing Classics”, Water From Your Eyes

  • “Girl Feels Good”, FKA twigs

  • “Coping Mechanism”, Car Culture and Physical Therapy

  • “Rock”, Jules Evens and Ivan Cunningham

  • “Garbage Dream House”, No Joy

  • “All the Way Down (unplugged)”, Kelela

  • “From”, Bon Iver

  • “LIE DOWN..”, Saya Gray

  • “SWEET SPOT”, Justin Bieber and Sexyy Red

  • “Roll the dice”, Smerz

  • “So Be It”, Clipse

  • “Perfect Ceelbrity”, Lady Gaga

  • “Draggin”, Hannah Cohen

  • “El Paso to Denver”, Charley Crockett

  • “Tirtha Yatra”, Tyler Childers

  • “Photography Class”, Gabriel Bernini

  • “Eldeberry Wine”, Wednesday

  • “SF & GG”, This Is Lorelei

  • “Dreaming”, Adeline Hotel

  • “Next To You”, Erykah Badu and the Alchemist

  • “Grandmother”, Big Thief and Laraaji

  • “Stonefly”, Maria Somerville

  • “la paradoja”, Juana Molina

  • “Knockin”, Mac DeMarco

  • “JJ Mart”, JJ World

  • “Memories”, Vulfpeck

  • “Only the Singer”, Domestic Drafts

  • “exhaust”, Earl Sweatshirt

  • “Gallic Shrug”, Greg Freeman

  • “Offer”, Jackie West

  • “Islands of Men”, Geese

  • “Coast”, Snocaps

  • “Mirtazapine”, Hayley Williams

  • “Reality TV Argument Bleeds”, Wednesday

  • “If You Know Me”, Hudson Freeman

  • “Trenton”, Parts Work

  • “Gz”, JID

  • “M.T.B.T.T.F.”, Clipse

  • “California Games”, Armand Hammer, The Alchemist, and Earl Sweatshirt

  • “Julia’s War”, Hotline TNT

  • “Amber”, Léna Bartels

  • “POP OUT”, Playboi Carti

  • “Bascinet”, Preservation and Gabe ‘Nandez

  • “Junior”, Great Grandpa

  • “Yamaha”, Dijon

  • “By the End of the Night”, Amber Mark

  • “Max Potential”, Nourished by Time

  • “Two Thieves”, Erika de Casier

  • “Sandpearl”, Moon Mullins

  • “Marvis”, Gregory Uhlmann, Josh Johnson, and Sam Wilkes

  • “The Phoenix”, Navy Blue

  • “Earth 1”, Unknown Mortal Orchestra

  • “Contour”, Pino Palladino and Blake Mills

  • “a FEW songs”, Saba, No ID, Love Mansuy, Ogi, and Smino

  • “Resilient”, Chronixx

  • “Moon”, Weaving

  • “Panj”, Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, and Andreas Werliin

  • “River That Flows Two Ways”, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma

  • “What the hip hop hell is this?”, JPEGMAFIA

  • “Digital Society”, Kyle M

  • “June Guitar”, Alex G

  • “To The Sandals”, Dove Ellis

  • “blade bird”, Oklou

  • “hot shower winter morning”, Pigeon Pit

  • “Tell me I never knew that”, caroline and Caroline Polachek

  • “Ordinary Silence”, The Bird Calls

  • “Long Pond Lily”, Hayden Pedigo

  • “Take Two”, Madison Cunningham

  • “Nearly There”, Steve Gunn

  • “Reliquia”, ROSALÍA

  • “Villain”, Annahstasia

  • “Lover You Should’ve Come OVer”, Katy Pinke and Will Graefe

  • “Please, Stop The Violence in Hip Hop”, Juicy J, Endea Owens, and Black Thought

  • “Me Me Me”, Scree

  • “Public Records Performance”, Sam Wilkes, Will Graefe, Craig Weinrib, and Aidan Lombard

  • “Carnets”, Laurie Torres

MONTHLY

#100 March, 2023 | The Feelies, “The Good Earth”

#99 February, 2023 | Judee Sill, “Judee Sill”

#98 January, 2023 | Pink Floyd, “Meddle”

#96 November, 2022 | RIP TOM PETTY

#95 October, 2022 | Cannonball Adderley, “Cannonball Adderley's Fiddler on the Roof”

#94 September, 2022 | Sheryl Crow, “Tuesday Night Music Club”

#93 August, 2022 | D’Angelo, “Live at the Jazz Cafe, London”

#92 July, 2022 | Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “Southern Accents”

#91 June, 2022 | George Harrison, “Living in the Material World”

#90 May, 2022 | The Wild Tchoupitoulas, “The Wild Tchoupitoulas”

#89 April, 2022 | Joni Mitchell, “Taming the Tiger”

#88 March, 2022 | Young Thug, “Barter 6”

#87 February, 2022 | Stephane Grappelli and Stuff Smith, “Violins No End”

#86 January, 2022 | Nas, “God’s Son”

#84 November, 2021 | Milt Jackson with the Thelonious Monk Quintet, “Wizard of the Vibes”

#83 October, 2021 | For Against, “Coalesced”

#82 September, 2021 | Pat Metheny, “Bright Size Life”

#81 August, 2021 | The Chicks, “Fly”

#80 July, 2021 | Allen Toussaint, “Southern Nights”

#79 June, 2021 | Novos Baianos, “Acabou Chorare”

#78 May, 2021 | One Direction, “Four”

#77 April, 2021 | Bob Dylan, “New Morning”

#76 March, 2021 | Ty Dolla $ign, “Free TC”

#75 February, 2021 | Ghostface Killah, “Fishscale”

#74 January, 2021 | Minnie Riperton, “Minnie”

#72 November, 2020 | Sufjan Stevens, “Seven Swans”

#71 October, 2020 | Common, “Resurrection”

#70 September, 2020 | Herbie Hancock, “Thrust”

#68 July, 2020 | Cam’ron, “Purple Haze”

#67 June, 2020 | Jorge Ben, “A Tabua de Esmeralda”

#66 May, 2020 | The Meters, “Rejuvenation”

#65 April, 2020 | Eddie Kendricks, “People… Hold On”

#64 March, 2020 | Thelonious Monk, “Solo Monk”

#63 February, 2020 | Cat Power, “Moon Pix”

#62 January, 2020 | Yusef Lateef, “Eastern Sounds”

#59 November, 2019 | Frank Sinatra, “In The Wee Small Hours”

#58 October, 2019 | Steely Dan, “Gaucho”

#57 September, 2019 | Bonnie Raitt, “Streetlights”

#56 August, 2019 | Daft Punk, “Alive 2007”

#55 July, 2019 | John Coltrane, “Interstellar Space”

#54 June, 2019 | Big Pun, “Capital Punishment”

#53 May, 2019 | Paul Simon, “Rhythm of the Saints”

#52 April, 2019 | Dirty Projectors, “Rise Above”

#51 March, 2019 | Kate Bush, “The Sensual World”

#50 February, 2019 | Sonny Rollins, “Next Album”

#49 January, 2019 | Sade, “Diamond Life”

#47 November, 2018 | Curtis Mayfield, “There’s No Place Like America Today”

#46 October, 2018 | The Blue Nile, “Hats”

#45 September, 2018 | Lucinda Williams, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road”

#44 August, 2018 | Aretha Franklin, “Amazing Grace”

#43 July, 2018 | Teddy Pendergrass, “TP”

#42 June, 2018 | Dennis Wilson, “Pacific Ocean Blue”

#41 May, 2018 | Bobby Brown, “Don’t Be Cruel”

#40 April, 2018 | Amy Winehouse, “Back to Black”

#39 March, 2018 | Q-Tip, “Kamaal the Abstract”

#38 February, 2018 | Miles Davis, “In a Silent Way”

#37 January, 2018 | Beck, “Sea Change”

#35 November, 2017 | Slum Village, “Fan-tas-tic Vol. 1”

#34 October, 2017 | Steely Dan, “Two Against Nature”

#33 September, 2017 | Baaba Maal and Mansour Seck, “Djam Leeli”

#32 August, 2017 | Billy Joel, “The Stranger”

#31 July, 2017 | Big Daddy Kane, “Long Live the Kane”

#30 June, 2017 | Janet Jackson, “Control”

#29 May, 2017 | Steely Dan, “Aja”

#28 April, 2017 | The O’Jays, “Back Stabbers”

#27 March, 2017 | Wire, “154”

#26 February, 2017 | Professor Longhair, “New Orleans Piano”

#25 January, 2017 | Elvis Costello, “Live at the El Mocambo”

#23 November, 2016 | Erykah Badu, “Mama’s Gun”

#22 October, 2016 | Donald Fagan, “The Nightfly”

#21 September, 2016 | Aretha Franklin, “Young, Gifted, and Black”

#20 August, 2016 | The Dave Matthews Band, “Under the Table and Dreaming”

#19 July, 2016 | Clams Casino, “Instrumental Mixtape II”

#18 June, 2016 | James Brown, “Love, Power, Peace”

#17 May, 2016 | Ali Farka Toure & Ry Cooder, “Talking Timbuktu”

#16 April, 2016 | RIP PRINCE

#15 March, 2016 | Prince, “Prince”

#14 February, 2016 | Big L, “Lifestyles Ov Da Poor & Dangerous”

#13 January, 2016 | Bill Evans, “Live at the Village Vanguard”

#11 November, 2015 | Donny Hathaway, “Live”

#10 October, 2015 | Paul McCartney, “McCartney”

#9 September, 2015 | Talk Talk, “Laughing Stock”

#8 August, 2015 | B.B. King, “Live at Cook County Jail”

#7 July, 2015 | Miles Davis, “Filles de Kilimanjaro”

#6 June, 2015 | Joni Mitchell, “Hejira”

#5 May, 2015 | Kanye West, “The College Dropout”

#4 April, 2015 | MF DOOM, “Operation: Doomsday”

#3 March, 2015 | Bruce Springsteen, “The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle”

#2 February, 2015 | Eric B. and Rakim, “Paid in Full”

#1 January, 2015 | Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, “L.A.M.F.”

 

ANNUAL

 

DECENNIAL

 

THEMED