Television in 2025 was, admittedly, not as consistently strong as viewers have come to expect. As mergers continue to threaten quality, authentically prestige television still exists—and in enough abundance that, just three weeks into the new year, it’s worth taking stock of what rose to the top for us at Under the Radar.
The list is a mixed bag, which is very much a good thing. We love our Apple TV+ and our HBO Max. From dystopian dramas and bleak dramas to darkly comedic entries, sci-fi extremes, and procedurals turned on their heads, there’s plenty here to get stuck into. Below is our Top 20, with a handful of honorable mentions bringing up the rear. —Lily Moayeri (Under the Radar’s television editor)
Looking back on 2025, the general consensus seems to be that it was a helluva year—both globally and closer to home. Fires in Los Angeles, wars in Gaza and Ukraine, ICE raids, and the daily barrage of astonishing things President Trump says and does. And that’s before you factor in the losses: David Lynch, Sly Stone, Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, Diane Keaton, Brian Wilson, Rob Reiner, Val Kilmer, Marianne Faithfull, Ozzy Osbourne, D’Angelo, and Jane Goodall all died, some quite tragically. You don’t need a full accounting of why 2025 felt like a particularly heavy year—you lived through it too.
I’d love to counter all that by saying 2025 was an unambiguously great year for music—but that wouldn’t be entirely true either. There were plenty of really good albums, yet many of our writers echoed the same feeling: it didn’t quite reach the heights of 2024 (when our list was topped by Magdalena Bay, Nilüfer Yanya, The Cure, Fontaines D.C., Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, and Cassandra Jenkins). Most of my favorite albums this year came from artists I already loved, but their 2025 releases weren’t necessarily my favorite albums by those artists. Pulp’s More was a phenomenal comeback, but it still doesn’t touch the heights of their ’90s heyday (then again, few bands ever reach the level of Different Class or “Common People”). Wolf Alice’s The Clearing was one of the albums I returned to most, even if I wouldn’t call it their very best. I didn’t love the new albums by Wet Leg, Japanese Breakfast, or Hatchie quite as much as their previous records, though all three still made my list.
There were surprises, too. Alex G—an artist I’d been mixed on in the past—released his strongest album yet with Headlights, his major-label debut. For my 12-year-old daughter Rose, Headlights was the #1 album of 2025, which probably helped deepen my own appreciation for it. Lily Allen also returned with a disarmingly honest album that brutally dissected her failing marriage.
Of course, our Top 100 Albums list isn’t decided by me alone. Throughout the year, we highlighted the best albums of each month, which formed a master nominations list. From there, we added a few more records, and each writer submitted a ballot of their 50 favorite albums, awarding 50 points to their #1 pick, down to one point for #50. Twenty-one writers and editors participated, including Wendy and me. As the publishers and founders of Under the Radar, our ballots were given slightly more weight. This year’s #1 album emerged as a clear consensus pick, appearing on 16 ballots and finishing 146 points ahead of #2. Our writers usually write blurbs on the first 50 to 60 albums on the list, but this year we did write-ups on the first 67 albums (my middle schooler can explain why we ended up with that number).
I’ve been fairly doom-and-gloom about 2025 so far, but there’s still a lot here worth celebrating. We’ve selected 100 albums—plus a handful of honorable mentions—that we believe deserve your time and attention. An old friend of mine, and occasional Under the Radar contributor, recently admitted he might not have heard a single album from 2025; he felt completely disconnected from new music. Knowing his tastes, I pointed him toward the latest album by Hannah Cohen (which appears in our Top 100), sent him a few YouTube clips, and he was immediately hooked. If nothing else, this list is proof that even in a year that often felt exhausting and dispiriting, great music was still being made—and it’s still out there waiting to be discovered. By Mark Redfern (Under the Radar’s Senior Editor/Co-Publisher)
Although, the artist’s complete removal from the process can make a documentary spin into tabloid territory. There’s a lot of scandal on tap. Fallen Idols: Nick and Aaron Carter (Max) is the traumatic story of mental illness and sexual assault. While the latter is horrifying, the litigation is still underway. Why are the survivors on film talking about their experiences? Speaking of survivors, IMPACT x Nightline: Diddy’s Downfall (Hulu) is equally horrific and a far more disgusting explanation of the recent uncovering of Sean Combs’ abusive, and illegal actions during his entire time in the spotlight. Secret Life of Diddy: A Special Edition of 20/20 (Hulu) covers the exact same ground with many of the same talking heads journalists and individuals. On the positive side of hip hop, Tale of the Tape(Tubi) explores the world of mixtapes, the skill involved in making them, their impact on the culture and the legends of that scene. While the homemade quality of this short but deep unpacking is charming, it only speaks to people in that space and doesn’t go far in educating the uninitiated.
A brave director with a strong grasp on storytelling can create a compelling product that draws you in, whether or not you are interested in the artist or topic. But it feels like there is a positive correlation between the number of music documentaries released and how many of them aren’t worth pressing play on. Here are seven from the second half of 2024 that are worth watching and three not so much.—By Lily Moayeri
Under the Radar tends to handle our best albums of the year lists differently than most other music publications. Whereas competitors are in a hurry to get their list up before anyone else, in late November and early December, we prefer to take our time with it and spend the last two months of the year considering and reconsidering as many of the previous year’s albums as possible. We also always aim for a Top 100 (plus honorable mentions), when compared to a standard Top 50 elsewhere. We try to go with our honest feelings, keeping it to the LPs we genuinely loved regardless of trends. Artists that have long fallen out of favor, replaced by new critical darlings, still potentially have a place on our Top 100 if they released a worthy new release. And we also lean heavily towards indie rock music, which is mainly what we cover. You wouldn’t expect a hip-hop magazine to feature a slew of country albums on their best albums list, so don’t get your hopes up for a lot of metal, hip-hop, and chart-topping pop albums on our Top 100. Finally, our list is presented from the number one album on down, rather than the countdown approach that the majority of websites seem to favor.
This year it started with a list of 80 albums I most wanted our writers to consider, added into a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Then other writers and editors added in additional albums they felt were worth considering for an initial nomination list we all voted on, with writers also able to add in even more albums as the voting continued. Eventually 263 albums were considered this year. Contributors had to pick their personal Top 50, with their number one album getting 50 points, their number two getting 49 points, and so on from there.
For an album to make the Top 100 it had to fit two criteria. Firstly, at least three or four different writers or editors had to vote for it, ideally four or more (most of the albums in our Top 30 were picked by 10 or more, with the Top 3 each being picked by 17 different voters). Secondly, it had to be an album we covered in some capacity in 2024, be it via a news item or items, an appearance on Songs of the Week, an album review, or an interview. The honorable mentions section features some albums that our writers liked that we didn’t cover this year, along with LPs that simply didn’t get enough votes but that I still liked. The votes by my co-publisher/wife Wendy and I were weighted slightly more than anyone else’s and we had the final say on what the number one album was (after all, it’s our magazine). I also had the final say on which albums made the Top 100 and I tweaked the exact order here and there, but mostly these are the same results as the raw vote by our writers, accounting for the stipulations I just mentioned. Then our writers penned fresh blurbs on each of the albums in the Top 60.
Musically speaking, in 2024 mainstream culture is stuck in a nostalgia trap and has been for several years. Fueled by Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and easy access to all recorded music, newer songs and albums on the charts are routinely crowded out by music from the past.
The Billboard Hot 100 Top 5 in America this week consists of the exact same songs as this week last year, almost in the same order: Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You”(1994) at number one, followed by Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (1958), Wham!’s “Last Christmas” (1984), Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock” (1957), and Burl Ives’ “A Holly Jolly Christmas” (1964). This week last year “Last Christmas” and “Jingle Bell Rock” were flipped. In fact, it was also the same Top 5 in 2022 (in a slightly different order again). You have to go back to December 2021 for a much different Christmas Top 5.
When looking at this week’s Billboard 200 album charts, beyond the expected older Christmas albums (by the likes of such long-dead elder statesmen as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, and Gene Autry) it’s littered with non-holiday full-lengths years or decades old, including The Beatles’ Abbey Road (1969), Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors (1977), AC/DC’s Back in Black (1980), Queen’s Greatest Hits (1981), Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1982), Metallica’s Metallica (1991), Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991), ABBA’s Gold: Greatest Hits (1992), Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory (2000), Daft Punk’s Discovery (2001), Creed’s Greatest Hits (2004,) Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die (2012), Arctic Monkeys’ AM (2013), Nickleback’s The Best of Nickelback Volume 1 (2013), Tame Impala’s Currents (2015), and a whopping 10 different albums by Taylor Swift traversing many release years.
The two songs most likely to get kids excited at the monthly dances at my daughter’s middle school? Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” from 1987 and, alas, Los Del Río’s “Macarena (Bayside Boys Mix)” from 1995. I have plenty of friends who mainly listen to music from the ’80s and ’90s and others who were once die-hard audiophiles but stopped paying attention to new music in the late 2000s or early 2010s.
As an Under the Radar reader, you’re probably more tuned into new music than most and hopefully know full well that there is a multitude of amazing new music released every year, even if it doesn’t reach the larger public consciousness. Our Top 100 Albums of 2024 runs the gamut from debut albums by exciting new artists to the first LP in 16 years from a legendary group and everything in between. 2024 was another difficult year in terms of events both domestic and international and the outlook for 2025 is decidedly uncertain, due to November’s election results and continued conflicts worldwide. Hopefully you’ll find respite from such concerns in some of the albums on our list and not just the familiar sounds of decades ago.
