January 2025 Roundups: The Best Albums of the Month
With releases from Mac Miller to FKA twigs, here are notable releases in January that stood out to us as the best albums of the month.
January 2025 might have been a slow start for the music industry—especially if you compare it to the electrifying kickoff we had last year—but that doesn’t mean there weren’t gems to uncover. While some heavy hitters chose to wait for the spring release schedule, we still found a handful of albums that demanded our attention. Across the board, these projects feel like little postcards from their creators, hinting at what lies ahead for the rest of the year. Even in quiet moments, music fans were rewarded with various styles and moods, from introspective lyrical roamings to dancefloor-ready rhythms.
From hip-hop’s simmering new statements to the electric hum of rock anthems—and even the pulse-racing undercurrents of techno—January was about quality over quantity. As we look back on these past few weeks, it’s clear that these releases, albeit fewer than we’re used to, still managed to set an intriguing tone for 2025, but since we got specific releases early, there were three records (released today) that managed to make our list, which you can say, the month closed out strong. Here’s a roundup of standout records that may not have clogged your playlist yet but definitely deserve a spot in your rotation.
Doseone & Steel Tipped Dove, All Portrait, No Chorus
By incorporating dreamlike loops and disconcerting rhythms, All Portrait, No Chorus offers a varied and stimulating suaveness that doesn’t sound like anything in hip-hop, especially in the underground (hi, Backwoodz). The sound, almost otherworldly, is enhanced by Dove’s haunting production textures. Doseone blends a half-spoken word, half-rap style, creating a surreal flow that’s initially challenging to grasp. The album, rich in metaphors and esoteric references, demands close attention and multiple listens to be fully appreciated. With carefully selected appearances from billy woods and Quelle Chris, the project adds a substantial dimension while focusing primarily on introspection and abstract storytelling. Though not easily accessible, this album rewards those drenched in its strange and complex sonic universe. — Phil
Mac Miller, Balloonerism
Mac Miller takes us along with him—elsewhere, far away, closer to the stars. In the American rapper’s second posthumous album, released six and a half years after his sudden passing, we’re treated to around fifteen songs that float through the air like helium balloons we’d never want to let go of. Bathed in melancholy and gentleness, Balloonerism unfolds in an almost hallucinatory atmosphere, otherworldly in nature, thanks to its experimentation and blending of jazz, soul, and dream pop influences with hip-hop. This is further enhanced by collaborations with artists such as Thundercat, SZA, and Ashley All Day. Standout tracks include “Stoned,” “Excelsior,” “Manakins,” “Rick’s Piano,” “Do You Have a Destination?,” and “5 Dollar Pony Rides,” each remarkable in its own way. However, the album is best experienced as a whole—a bubble in which Mac Miller evokes childhood and death. Simply put, Balloonerism is a balm for the soul. — Javon Bailey
Pink Siifu, Black’!Antique
You could almost imagine the album as a series of sonic postcards—looped, distorted, sometimes incomprehensible—mailed from deep within a crumbling infrastructure of beats, static, and memories. Like much of Pink Siifu’s work, Black’!Antique insists on challenging the neat categories that commonly frame “experimental hip-hop.” The hazy loops feel like half-remembered radio transmissions caught between stations—echoes of the past pulling toward a present that refuses to settle. Here, Siifu channels the heritage of Southern rap and experimental hip-hop and the visceral abrasion of industrial music. The result: a production ethos that embraces error and chaos as integral voices in the dialogue. Even amid the record’s most turbulent moments, pockets of intimate, smoke-filled calm exist. “Translation’!” drifts into a jazz-inflected introspection, with muffled horns and snare taps conjuring an after-hours vibe—simultaneously haunted and comforting. From distorted interludes and industrial crunch to moments of stark, jazz-tinged calm, the album is a meditation on how sound can become community, memory, and manifesto all at once. — Brandon O’Sullivan
Miles Cooke, Ceci N’est Pas un Portrait
With a lo-fi aesthetic reminiscent of RZA’s style, the album Ceci N’est Pas un Portrait by Miles Cooke stands out with an intimidating atmosphere, especially on the track “Sangria,” produced by Jeff Markey. Cooke demonstrates his resilience through songs that avoid the usual rap clichés, offering a complex depiction of modern survival. Contributions from Markey, Roper Williams, Foule Monk, and Cooke himself, particularly on tracks such as “Zugzwang,” add a philosophical dimension to the album. The track “The Devil Part Didn’t Change” highlights Cooker’s inner struggles in New York, steering them away from conventional aggressive reminders. Additionally, “oneiromancy” poetically addresses metaphorical threats, further enhancing the impact of Cooke’s work. — Harry Brown
Bad Bunny, Debí Tirar Más Fotos
Within Debí Tirar Más Fotos, Bad Bunny links longing to salsa in “Baile Inolvidable,” a six-minute track layering horns and sorrow. Students from el Libre de Música San Juan supply depth, blending heartbreak with a dance element. Historical colonization and hopes for sovereignty shape the album’s message, exposed by the bolero lullaby “Turista” and the bachata “Bokete,” where shaky infrastructure and American corporate impact emerge. A short film includes Jacobo Morales, referencing Puerto Rico’s cinematic heritage and foreseeing fewer Boricuas on the horizon. “Eoo,” a reggaetón selection, recalls the genre’s underground vibe, fusing retro beats with Tainy’s dynamic approach to highlight local fortitude. — Charlotte Rochel
Ela Minus, DÍA
A darkly swelling and receding soundscape, rustling and crawling in the leaves—but before the track starts to itch, a stuttering beat jolts into place after three minutes. What an opener: “Abrir monte”—Spanish for cutting through dense foliage—is a chord progression that came to Ela Minus in the deserts of northern Mexico as the guiding path for her second album, DÍA. This is not an album for a single night, much less a club night, but a deeply personal work that is skillfully balanced between club, pop, and experimental elements, featuring lavish sound design. The Colombian artist uses only hardware synthesizers—she must own an entire fleet of them. Additionally, she shredded all her original lyrics during the creative process, deeming them too superficial, and rewrote everything in search of existential depths. Techno euphoria made for throwing hands in the air coexists with barren soundscapes of dark sequencers. Ela Minus approached this album with meticulous thoughtfulness—thankfully, you’d never notice it. — Oliver I. Martin
FKA twigs, Eusexua
FKA twigs waited five long years before delivering a follow-up to the impeccable yet demanding Magdalene. Still rooted in electronic soundscapes, this time, she dives deep into the aesthetics of 1990s progressive house (inspired, she says, by Prague’s rave scene), even enlisting veteran composer and DJ Sasha for the ethereal title track that opens the album. Longtime collaborator Koreless remains involved, but his touch shines most in the album’s second half, which explores sexuality as a mirror of the soul and a sanctuary for her emotions. After a series of tracks celebrating the cathartic power of the dance floor (“Girl Feel Good,” “Perfect Stranger,” the robust “Room of Fools”), FKA twigs—her voice still as delicate and airy as ever—returns to her avant-garde instincts. This shift comes subtly with “Sticky” and “Keep It, Hold It” and more heavily with “Striptease.” Eusexua enthralls with its infectious hooks (“Childlike Things”) and refinement, as the artist offers her most sensual and accessible album. — Charlotte Rochel
Ghais Guevara, Goyard Ibn Said
Presenting an incisive look at life and the music industry, Ghais Guevara unveils his conceptual album Goyard Ibn Said. This two-act project follows Goyard, a North Philly rapper whose meteoric rise exposes the challenges of fame through a commanding soundscape blending trap, cloud rap, and Western classical music. From the opening tracks like “Introduction to Act 1” and “Leprosy,” the listener is thrust into the frenzy of a life filled with success and superficiality. Guevara’s voice, often layered with reverb as the narrative unfolds, mirrors Goyard’s torment and exhaustion. The track “Bystander Effect,” featuring ELUCID, heightens the album’s palpable tension, while “The Apple That Scarcely Fell,” with McKinley Dixon, explores themes of exploitation and downfall. Through this album, Guevara challenges and provokes reflection on the harsh reality behind the glamor of the rap world while offering hope and empathy to his tragic protagonist. — Brandon O’Sullivan
Ambrose Akinmusire, Honey from a Winter Stone
Sometimes, it starts with a place. For Ambrose Akinmusire, that place is Oakland, California: a city whose complexities—cultural, social, and sonic—have shaped not just who he is as a person but who he is as a musician. When Akinmusire released Origami Harvest in 2018, it was the clearest articulation yet of that wide musical embrace: a head-on collision of jazz improvisation, hip-hop verse, and modern classical strings. Now, with Honey from a Winter Stone, Akinmusire returns to that hybrid world with even greater confidence. He added vocalist Kokayi and synthesist Chiquitamagic to this already potent mix, creating a multi-genre tapestry where Mivos remains central and essential, not an afterthought. In these new pieces, Akinmusire grapples with issues he has named and claimed as personal: colorism, erasure, and the question of who has the right to speak for the Black community. It might look like jazz, hip-hop, and modern chamber music on paper, but, as with much of Akinmusire’s work, the reality exceeds any single category. — Nehemiah
The Weather Station, Humanhood
Tamara Lindeman could have had it all going perfectly. The outstanding album Ignorance with her band The Weather Station became a critic’s favorite in 2021, and the audience was not dwindling either, quite the opposite. A year later, How Is It That I Look at the Stars followed, an intimate work reduced to the bare musical essentials created during the same creative process as Ignorance. It is a magnificent album, indeed, and by no means just an appendage to its predecessor. However, not everything was perfect for the singer, who, according to her own statements, was confronted with a deep personal crisis and first had to find a way out. Music was ultimately a help, and thus, alongside producer Marcus Paquin, she returned to the studio. Humanhood, the seventh studio album by The Weather Station, arrived. The Canadian artist remains in focus here, but unlike the previous work, her musical accompaniment has not simply increased in number but has at least taken a step forward in perception. Despite all setbacks, doubts, and efforts, it comes across as effortlessly as ever. — Charlotte Rochel
Eddie Chacon, Lay Low
Eddie Chacon’s music is for late-night soul-searching, a half-lit corner of the mind where we sift through heartbreak and hope. Lay Low might be a departure from his earlier work, yet it carries the same unwavering spark—bold creativity, sincere introspection, and the disarming presence of an artist who holds nothing back. From the softly unnerving downtempo vibe of the title track itself to the slightly off-kilter instrumentals that frame love, loss, and tentative reinvention, Chacon embraces both the heartbreak and the potential for renewal. “Let You Go” surges with conflicting emotions—the desire to connect, the fear of finality—while John Carroll Kirby’s contribution to “Empire” carries the weight of a danceable but devastating groove. It all culminates in the looming sense that a romance is destined for the wreckage as Chacon channels heartbreak into a cathartic, thirty-minute crucible of sorrow, rage, and a flicker of hope. Lay Low is less a balm than an exorcism—of pain, regret, and what-ifs—demonstrating how music becomes a vessel for surviving the heaviest of blows. — Jamila W.
Rose Gray, Louder, Please
“Party people are the ones I wanna trust,” sings Rose Gray, and you instantly agree: who or what can you still trust given the messed-up state of the world? Let’s just go dancing! However, the North East Londoner, a self-declared fan of Blondie and The Beatles, is far less naïve than that opening line might suggest. She’s on a mission. Sugar Plum Fairy (her nickname) Gray embodies classic club and rave culture with every fiber of her being, understanding that healing can only happen together with friends on the dance floor. For someone who takes clubbing as seriously as she does, there’s little time for mundane things like studio work: nearly eight years passed between her first old-school soul-influenced single, “Morning Blues,” and the release of her debut album, Louder, Please. But there’s absolutely nothing to complain about. With these twelve tracks, the new year kicks off like a massive rave, full of Ibiza and techno vibes, uplifting Brit-house, and spacey trance. — Oliver I. Martin
Benjamin Booker, Lower
Benjamin Booker nearly vanished from widespread view, only to resurface years afterward as a featured vocalist on “Doves,” the nearly-nine-minute culminating track from underground rap duo Armand Hammer’s 2023 album We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, following the release of a pair of gritty garage-rock records during the mid-2010s. Lower, the first Benjamin Booker album in nearly eight years, is entirely produced by Kenny Segal, who ironically made the aforementioned AM song and “Baby Steps” off of billy woods’ Maps. Listeners can detect traces of the raw blues rock and the hip-hop production for which Benjamin and Kenny have each earned their reputations, but above all, one perceives them converging and devising an entirely new creature. Certain tracks are cloaked in layers of distortion, while earthy acoustic guitars drive others, yet they all embody a unified atmosphere: shadowy, overdriven, and flawlessly flawed. — Brandon O’Sullivan
Ethel Cain, Perverts
Perverts has generated a lot of buzz since its release on January 8th: some admit to being unsettled by what Ethel Cain offers with her second studio album. To those intrigued, consider this your warning: this is not an album you listen to for relaxation or escapism but rather to undergo a singular experience, perhaps the musical equivalent of a horror film. Tension and chaos. Anxiety and torment. Framed by gothic drone, slowcore, and dark ambient sounds, paired with the muffled voice of the American singer-songwriter, the atmosphere of Perverts pushes the listener to their limits—nearly to the point of suffocation, particularly with the agonizing slowness of each track. Drawing parallels between the turmoil of our era—climate disasters, wars, misogynistic rhetoric, and pervasive threats—and this profoundly unsettling work, the listening experience becomes almost prophetic. — Tai Lawson
MIKE, Showbiz!
If there’s an entry point for Showbiz!—a place to catch MIKE’s dual perspective on longing and gratitude—it arrives in “Then We Could Be Free.” A warm, drifting beat underscores a lyrical meditation on the passage of time and the preciousness of every fleeting instant. “While you have it, you should cherish that/You won’t get it back,” he raps in a voice that wavers between vulnerable admission and confident musing. He draws from personal loss—his mother’s passing, an ache that resonates through his discography, never fully healing yet shaping a vision of hope. He also calls upon the memories of a childhood spent among multiple cultures, where accents and social norms tangled into a single, uniquely MIKE worldview. Yet it signals a subtle shift from Pinball’s energetic, even urgent tone. Where MIKE once hurled his voice against punchy drums and relentless basslines, Showbiz! displays a gentler palette, as if leaving the stark corners of earlier releases to walk into the hazy light of self-assured calm. Production layers feel more measured; bursts of layered vocals surface like internal monologues overheard. His words stand out in sharper relief, which makes an artist unafraid of the spotlight yet aware of its fleeting nature. — Harry Brown
Charlie Bereal, Walk With the Father
Charlie Bereal has been in the game for twenty-five years, starting with his time in a group formed by Warryn Campbell, The Soul Seekers. Since then, he’s worked behind the scenes with numerous artists, including Kanye West, Brandy, JAY-Z, Missy Elliott, Aaliyah, and many others we’d love to see him collaborate with again. Nearly six years after his last project, 11-11-11, released under Karma Chief Records, Bereal has joined Snoop Dogg’s Death Row Records and unveiled his long-awaited debut LP, Walk With a Father. Even down to the album cover, this record embodies Curtis Mayfield to a tee (or even William Hart from The Delfonics), which could be a drawback for some, especially considering another artist on the same label, October London, has faced criticism for mimicking Marvin Gaye. However, the talent shines throughout, from “Hope” to “The Greatest” to the gorgeous “Wherever You Are.” Bereal’s effort sets a strong tone for R&B in 2025. — Brandon O’Sullivan