10. Cold Specks – Light for the Midnight (Mute)
Cold Specks returns to the spotlight after a seven-year hiatus, and Light for the Midnight showcases an artist thirsty for the spotlight. Compared to I Predict a Graceful Expulsion and Neuroplasticity, Cold Specks‘ newest release is mournful, suggesting that the climate has utterly changed the artist in the intervening years. “I have been cheap dreaming, cheap dreaming,” she ruefully sings; “Dreaming away.”
The sadness hangs over Light for the Midnight, a record coated in self-doubt, yearning, resolution, and re-imagining. As albums go, Cold Specks’ fourth one jumps from funereal slow waltzes (“Lovely Little Bones”, “Curse Away”) to speedier, solipsistic-laden gospel (“How It Feels”, “Venus in Pisces”). – Eoghan Lyng
9. Blood Orange – Essex Honey (RCA)
Dev Hynes’ mother died unexpectedly in 2023, and the subsequent grief, grappling, reassessment, and re-centering all inform Essex Honey, his first album in seven years. Hynes’ music has always been personal and colored with different degrees of melancholy, but Essex Honey is his most tender, nakedly emotional work. Orchestral flourishes waft in and out of beautiful, mournful songs that never really seem to begin or end, woven together by found sounds and snippets of conversation, including a recording of Hynes’ late mother.
The cosmopolitan élan of Hynes’ past work gives way to a more subtle, cozy feel, but Hynes still has a producer’s ear for arresting details and arrangements. “The Field”, his reworking of a 1990s track by another mournful one-man band, the Durutti Column, is pure genius. Like the rest of Essex Honey, it shows just how therapeutic music can be for both the creator and the listener. – John Bergstrom
8. Mourning [A] BLKstar – Flowers for the Living (Don Giovanni)
Mourning [A] BLKstar are an Afrofuturist collective from Cleveland, weaving a fascinating tapestry of jazz, soul, hip-hop, and experimental music to investigate the shifting shape of Black music and culture in the 21st century. Obviously, this will include far too much pain, hardship, injustice, and inequality. A lot of media reduces the Black experience to suffering, flattening the beauty, strength, and complexity into just more trauma porn.
They also give voice to Black joy and excellence on Flowers for the Living without succumbing to saccharine corniness. Lyrically, thematically, it’s incredibly positive, powerful, and uplifting. Musically, it’s got shadows as well as light, delivering a rich, nuanced album that lives and breathes, dancing and singing as well as shouting and occasionally throwing stones. – J. Simpson
7. Irma Thomas and Galactic – Audience with the Queen (Tchuop-Zilla)
Two New Orleans legends, soul singer Irma Thomas and funk band Galactic, joined forces in 2025. The resulting album, Audience with the Queen, is stellar. It opens in a meditative mode with “How Glad I Am” (popularized by pop/jazz vocalist Nancy Wilson in 1964). Immediately thereafter, though, it explodes with a statement of purpose anthem, “Where I Belong”, Thomas declaring, “I still got a love affair / With music in the air.”
Audience with the Queen doesn’t directly tackle specific political and social concerns, but Galactic and Thomas confront the current state of the union, particularly on “Lady Liberty”. Thomas remains hopeful, though, noting in another track that “Love’s Gonna Find a Way Again”. The record finds Irma Thomas and Galactic inviting all of us to have a funky good time. Now more than ever, that’s an invitation to treasure. – Rich Wilhelm
6. Annie & the Caldwells – Can’t Lose My (Soul)
Can’t Lose My (Soul) has been described in the press as a debut album that took 40 years to arrive, and the group’s bio states that it was “20 years in the making”. Regardless of how many decades one considers having fed into this very special release, the most consequential effect of time passing is that it allowed even more family members to join the band. Annie & the Caldwells, led by singer Annie Caldwell, also features her husband, daughters, sons, and a goddaughter.
Can’t Lose My (Soul) might be classified as the product of a “disco-soul” group, but the title track seems equally influenced by gospel and even the blues. The backing singers repeat “My soul” dozens of times as Annie sings about being spiritually delivered. The other songs here alternate between up- and down-tempo tracks that cover plenty of troubles and blessings, and a final, prayerful song begins “40 years ago”, when this album started gestating. The lives experienced in the interim are evident throughout the running time, but the final impression is that the soul is ageless. – Thomas Britt
5. Mike Farris – The Sound of Muscle Shoals (Fame Records)
The voice had always been there, but it leaped out in its new setting, with Mike Farris putting out a series of underappreciated (even if award-winning) albums that respected the past while finding new space. After six years away, he returns now with The Sound of Muscle Shoals, possibly the most properly titled album of the year (and that’s undoubtedly a good thing).
Farris has long blended styles, never shying away from swampy soul, so recording an album at FAME Studios makes complete sense. Some of the region’s top studio musicians – including guitarist Will McFarlane, bassist Jimbo Hart, and keyboardist Clayton Ivey – join him in giving the record the authentic Muscle Shoals aesthetic. Each song grooves with a throwback song, but Farris’ writing and delivery prevent the album from drifting into retro obsession. You can hear touches of Curtis Mayfield or Wilson Pickett, but you mostly hear Mike Farris. – Justin Cober-Lake
4. Mavis Staples – Sad and Beautiful World (Anti-)
Mavis Staples’ Sad and Beautiful World was a late 2025 release, just arriving in November. Still, it instantly established itself as one of the best albums of the year, and yet another in a string of stellar records Staples has released over the last 25 years. The blistering guitar work of both Buddy Guy and Derek Trucks fuels the opening track, the urgent “Chicago”, a Tom Waits/Kathleen Brennan cover. While nothing else on Sad and Beautiful World rocks as hard as “Chicago”, the album is filled with deeply soulful songs that often touch on the sadness and beauty of being human in 2025.
Despite the record’s serious nature, it’s uplifting, most clearly on its closing track, a cover of Eddie Hinton’s “Everybody Needs Love”. Sad and Beautiful World isn’t merely a great album. It’s a state-of-the-world address. It is a profoundly spiritual and necessary work of art that also happens to be a beautiful listening experience. – Rich Wilhelm
3. Sudan Archives – The BPM (Stones Throw)
The artistic leap that Brittney Parks made between her 2019 debut album “Athena” and 2022’s “Natural Brown Prom Queen” was gigantic, moving beyond pure violin-accented R&B into a sound that was stranger, more joyful, and more buoyant. With this year’s The BPM, she catapults herself even further, fully soaking her muse in a digital sound bath to create a monster of an electronic album that refuses to fit into any single pre-made category.
While there is still ample orchestral drama to be found (the slow string draws on “David & Goliath” collide with loud sirens to create a nervy, haunting climax), her ur-intent is to create a raw and dynamic new dance sound, which is unapologetically indebted to Detroit and Chicago house music, all overseen by her new persona of “Gadget Girl”. Yet in opener “Dead”, waves of chopped, cascading synths are joined by her soulful backing-vocal runs, pushing her sound into a bold new direction while remaining fundamentally identifiable as a Sudan Archives record.
The nervy tom-splash one-two beat of “The Nature of Power” belies a darker, more sinister kind of dance record, where self-described narcissists stare into each other’s eyes as the world around them is slaughtered in a techno-apocalypse. The BPM extensively explores our moral relationship between humanity and technology, sometimes flirting with the line between them and sometimes slicing it open to watch it bleed. Dynamic, rife with tiny, non-repeating details, and with a beating heart at its overclocked center, The BPM shows that Sudan Archives has shed all genre labels to become a genre unto herself. AI could never. – Evan Sawdey
2. keiyaA – hooke’s law (XL)
Five years have passed since keiyaA’s 2020 debut, Forever, Ya Girl. Her new release takes the name of hooke’s law as its title, but it is not clear why. Her experimental R&B style densely mixes electronic elements with vocal strangeness, performance art, and the kitchen sink into a sophisticated yawp. The music can be painful and ugly to listen to, and often is, as well as seductive and ingratiating.
keiyaA‘s music is difficult to appreciate in traditional ways. The 19 tracks range from the serious to the silly, often in the same song and even the same sentence. There’s lots of sex and violence, life and death, confusion and contentment, all wrapped in exotic sonic cloth.
Much of hooke’s law is a cry for help from the voice within. keiyaA says she would do anything to see god or find a purpose. Even suicide is an option. She’s not ready to do that. Misery is still a better option than nothingness. Like a spring, she is resilient. The tension she feels makes her stronger, and she has not broken yet. – Steve Horowitz
1. Curtis Harding – Departures & Arrivals: The Adventures of Captain Curt (Anti-)
Over the course of three albums, Curtis Harding established himself as a musical presence who refused to fully fit into any one category. Retro soul was clearly there from the start, but Harding also drew on indie rock and classic singer/songwriter sensibilities. With 2025’s Departures & Arrivals: The Adventures of Captain Curt, Harding pulled his influences together to create his most cohesive album yet.
Opening with “There She Goes”, which would have sounded on the 1970s-era Isley Brothers album of your choice, Departures & Arrivals works its way through many moods and styles, as the songs collectively tell a story of travel, romance, responsibility, and empowerment. The music ranges from bittersweet balladry to dancefloor bangers, resulting in an album that fans of both retro and current soul, as well as adventurous pop, ought to love. – Rich Wilhelm