MUSIC MATTERS –
Dec. 11, 2025 – The hardest part of reducing an entire year of new music down to just 10 standout songs isn’t so much hitting the right balance of genres—say, weighing coke-rap disses against alt-country ballads about getting Reynolds-Woodcocked in a relationship—as it is sorting through the various contexts of singles we’ve heard over the past 12 months. Some tracks gain points for carrying an otherwise-unmemorable release, while others can be… hard to choose among the dozen other equally worthy songs on a likely-to-be modern classic’s track list (here’s further reading on 50 of those). That doesn’t even cover the singles that tease a momentous 2026 for a handful of artists gearing up for another album cycle.
As always, we did the best we could as we additionally struggled to balance the political against the type of music that makes us forget about all of that, if only for three minutes (well, it seems like the latter category won out this year). In doing so, we hope to strip away all of that context to re-present these songs under a new one: the 10 biggest musical highlights setting the stage for the second half of the decade.
