The Worst Albums of 2025

Another year, another dilemma where I liked way too much music. How I am supposed to be a hater if there’s so much peak coming out? Thank you, then, to these albums for reminding me of my ethos, my je ne sais quoi. Here are the worst albums of 2025. But first, some honorable mentions:

Alex G - Headlights

Nah my goat washed 😭 Just like Beach Music, which is still his worst album to date, Alex takes all his worst impulses and crams them in here, going away from his greatest strengths in melodic guitar music. “Afterlife” is easily one of the worst songs of the year, never thought I’d see it.

Malibu - Vanities

When I was a kid, Target sold these weird “world music” album packs that you could listen to which were mostly ambient music for like yoga or tai chi or whatever. It was in essence, nothing music, and that is what this album is.

Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist - Alfredo 2

Alfredo 1 is so good, up there with the best Gibbs project, and this one just comes across as bland and unremarkable, very AI Freddie Gibbs. I hope he doesn’t start coasting after finally being acknowledged a great rapper.

Taylor Swift - The Life Of A Showgirl

De facto #1, but I have embargoed any future Taylor releases from being expounded upon in further detail. She finally got her reckoning for putting out such dogshit thankfully.

EDIT: Turnstile - Never Enough

Wow this was so bad I forgot to include it. Ah well, it would’ve been around #3-4. You can read my review of this warmed-over garbage here.

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10. Djrum - Under Tangled Silence

So a lot of critics hate on Jacob Collier for being technically brilliant and soulless, where’s the energy for this?

9: Jens Lekman - Songs for Other People’s Weddings

Man Jens Lekman is so good I didn’t want to do him like this. IDK how he got it in his head that this prescription commercial music for a book about weddings was the move, but this is a painful listen.

8. Yasmine Handan - I Remember I Forget

Same kind of weird oriental fixation with this record as with last year’s Dunya by Mustafa, where the relative unfamiliarity Westerners have with Arabic imbue it with an unearned depth. Grief, loss, and tragedy are all incredibly powerful thematic sentiments, but when they’re tempered by dismal coffee shop trip-hop any measure of gravity is completely removed.

7. Clipse - Let God Sort Em Out

If people were fuming at Alphonse Pierre for a 6.5 they’re gonna love this one. First new Clipse in almost 20 years. VA’s finest, absolute legends, shittalkers extraordinaire, and they release this vanilla shit? Where’s the swag of Lord Willin’ and Hell Hath No Fury? It’s all so granite countertop soulless. Let’s collectively blame Pharrell for this for stiffing Chad Hugo.

6. bar italia - Some Like It Hot

A band under the Dean Blunt umbrella is catnip to me, and I quite liked tracey denim. To go from that to landfill rock revival is a nauseating choice, and one I suspect was to get out of the crypto-Blunt posture the band had been pegged under. All around, a record I was not expecting to sound like this and to be as bad as it is.

5. Audrey Hobert - Who’s the Clown?

OK so you know how gauche Taylor Swift is right? Yeah, but what if we did the same thing as her but we’re actually more in the know about how quirky and messy we are so it’s like slightly more relatable then when Taylor does it since she’s a billionaire? The music is still the same dogshit? Perfect, ship it.

4. Smerz - big city life

This is an article I should actually get around to writing, but one of the things that is so insufferable about “alt-pop/art pop” is craft can be disregarded wholly in favor of aesthetic. In my pan of one 2023’s worst albums Desire I Want To Turn Into You by Caroline Polachek I described it as “technically brilliant and thoroughly sexless.” big city life has the inverse problem where it is technically unremarkable and thoroughly affectated, begging you to be seduced by its cool girl aesthetic. Therefore, if you find this Inga Copeland meets indie sleaze pastiche exhausting and not charming, there is simply nothing here.

3. Hayley Williams - Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party

I feel as though it is my duty to eradicate the Hayley Williams nostalgia project dead in its tracks. The 80s pop retread was bad enough but hearing her do Swiftian turn is going to give me hemorrhoids. If that woman just became a banker like her mother the positive rhizomatic effects of her influence disappearing would be utopian in nature. We’d probably have nuclear fusion by now.

2. Wednesday - Bleeds

This was actually going to be lower on the list until I relistened out of posterity and I’m truly stunned at how bad this album is. Every topline and melody dissipates and fizzles in a miasma—in a way where I’ve gone front to back 3 times on bleeds and could not tell you a single memorable moment. Karly Hartzmann’s warble is unfathomably grating; vocal complaints in rock come off as trite, yes, but that particular affect hits like a bad talent show voice and it happens so often. I think what sealed this spot for me is when she picked Blonder Tongue Audio Baton as her Pitchfork perfect 10, even showing her tattoo. Please don’t shout Swirlies out when your music is this ass I swear to god.

1. DJ Koze - Music Can Hear Us

I went longer on this earlier in the year, but here’s the short version: in a year where everyone wore out the phrase “spiritually Israeli,” this was the most spiritually Israeli thing to come out all year.

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Thanks for reading. I’ll be back next month with my best of the year, of which there was plenty. If you like my work and have means to support me, my ko-fi is below.