20
Little Simz – Flood ft Obongjayar and Moonchild Sanelly
Over a pared-back post-punk beat, Simz details her life’s “genius plan”, namely “being free as I can”. The first half is spent detailing the roadblocks she’s faced in her quest, marching through them like a Marvel hero. Then, as if throwing her arm round a young apprentice’s shoulder as she walks, she lays out her six-point plan for greatness with koans of wisdom such as: “Never eat with the hyenas / ‘Cause they will look at you as bones.” If her rap career ever falters – and it looks exceedingly unlikely to on this form – she could write a brilliant leadership training book. Ben Beaumont-Thomas
19
Bad Bunny – Nuevayol
The opening track from Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos is named after New York, but co…
20
Little Simz – Flood ft Obongjayar and Moonchild Sanelly
Over a pared-back post-punk beat, Simz details her life’s “genius plan”, namely “being free as I can”. The first half is spent detailing the roadblocks she’s faced in her quest, marching through them like a Marvel hero. Then, as if throwing her arm round a young apprentice’s shoulder as she walks, she lays out her six-point plan for greatness with koans of wisdom such as: “Never eat with the hyenas / ‘Cause they will look at you as bones.” If her rap career ever falters – and it looks exceedingly unlikely to on this form – she could write a brilliant leadership training book. Ben Beaumont-Thomas
19
Bad Bunny – Nuevayol
The opening track from Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos is named after New York, but contains a whole world. It encompasses the displacement, identity and resistance of the Puerto Rican people; the sample of El Gran Colombo’s 1975 salsa hit Un Verano en Nueva York celebrates the cultural innovations of diverse Latin communities mingling in mid-20th-century NYC; there’s puckish Dominican dembow; the longing for home – and its heat – of PR poet Virgilio Davila’s early 1900s work Nostalgia. (The must-see video adds even more layers of beauty and defiance.) For Bad Bunny’s domestic and diasporic audience, it’s a rallying cry, particularly in a year when he refused to play the US to avoid his fans being seized by ICE, and faced a racist backlash to his upcoming Super Bowl headline set. For anyone else, it’s an invitation to get on his level, to learn, pay homage, knock back un shot de cañita and dance. And why wouldn’t you? Laura Snapes
18
Wednesday – Elderberry Wine
Wednesday. Photograph: Graham Tolbert
Miles from their usual crush of hay-bale southern punk and screaming, the North Carolina band returned with this disarmingly pretty tear-catcher. But beneath all the twang and sway lay a fairly devastating account of the distance elapsed between two people – from knowing the niche things that make someone cry, like fairground rides and TV ads, to driving them to the airport in silence and simply wanting to give up on life – and their pained attempts to keep bobbing along like everything’s OK, like life still tastes the same. LS
17
Raye – Where Is My Husband!
Raye. Photograph: Erik Pendzich/Shutterstock
It’s a scenario that you can imagine Aretha or Erma Franklin singing so well, though not at quite so high a tempo: a woman, having presumably been told by her well-meaning mates that Mr Right is out there somewhere, gets irate as she wonders where exactly he might be. From the foot-stamping mock petulance of the title downwards, it’s all delivered so knowingly by Raye as she gabbles her way through this screwball caper against a backdrop of Ronson-esque horns. BBT
16
Wet Leg – Catch These Fists
It took all of two seconds of this comeback to obliterate any worries that Wet Leg might be a one-album wonder: Catch These Fists crashes in like a boot through a door, its riff lurching past the splintered frame. Then in saunters Rhian Teasdale, as good a rock star as the UK has right now: “You should be careful, do you catch my drift?” It turns out all this aggression is a flash-forward. Teasdale then sketches out the ketamine-fuelled night out leading up to a showdown with a man who propositions her: “I just threw up in my mouth / When he just tried to ask me out.” The detail that the bozo in question drinks Strongbow Dark Fruit is perfectly observed. BBT
15
Geese – Taxes
The lead single from the precocious New York rockers’ album Getting Killed is one of the many examples of frontman Cameron Winter somehow accruing a lifetime of heartbroken wisdom in just 23 years. Taxes become a metaphor for the stuff we bitterly hold on to but have to give away, whether an apology or a moment of closure. He then howls: “Doctor, doctor, heal yourself … I will break my own heart from now on” – so funny for its ludicrous level of hurt, and yet so true to the way love can turn any of us into lost, lashing-out teenagers. BBT
14
Aya – Off to the Esso
Aya. Photograph: Dee Iskrzynska
Galloping on the back of a pranged-out donk beat, UK electronic experimentalist Aya is, by her own admission, having a mad one: “A blizzard when the lizard den got pickled then – I’m sizzled, sozzled hen!” She conjures the skull-clattering experience of being too drunk on public transport at an indeterminate morning hour with new associates you’ve somehow made. An inner (and possibly outer) monologue burns like a fuse through her mind as she hurtles towards the next day’s horrible daylight: just one of many dizzying stories from one of Britain’s best lyricists. BBT
13
Olivia Dean – Man I Need
“Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?”, writer Chanté Joseph wondered in a viral Vogue piece – a modern conundrum that Olivia Dean has expertly articulated in her singles this year. Nice to Each Other had the singalong moment “I don’t want a boyfriend!” as she pondered alternative ways to be partnered, while Man I Need was even better, and an even bigger hit: her first UK No 1. The lyrics are exasperated as she has to coax and cajole a dithering doofus into carrying her away – but Dean’s giddy singing, sweeping this way and that on soft surges of adrenaline, suggests she’s loving the chase. BBT
12
Blood Orange – The Field (ft the Durutti Column, Tariq Al-Sabir, Caroline Polachek and Daniel Caesar)
To describe the constituent parts of The Field may make it sound fragmented: there’s an interpolation of the sweet Spanish guitar from Vini Reilly’s 1998 song Sing to Me, with the vocals by Polachek, Dev Hynes and Daniel Caesar; an original verse sung by Tariq Al-Sabir; a spritely breakbeat; sharp, severe rips of cello. Yet Hynes makes it hang together exquisitely, like a spider’s web somehow bearing the weight of too many raindrops. Written after the death of his mother, it also shimmers with the heightened feeling of existing in a world that looks the same but is irrevocably changed. LS
11
CMAT – The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station / Take a Sexy Picture of Me / When a Good Man Cries
CMAT. Photograph: Sarah Doyle
In her true breakthrough year, the Irish singer-songwriter was so popular with our voters that she had three entries in the Top 20 (combined here). Together they show the breadth of her talents: like a light entertainer who appeals to kids and grandparents alike while hymning the horrors of confronting one’s self-worth. Take a Sexy Picture of Me made a TikTok craze out of a multilayered examination of body image; Jamie Oliver catches a stray as CMAT has an existential freakout after seeing his massive face on a poster; and When a Good Man Cries is a slow fiddle-fringed do-si-do that nods to her love of country, telling a rich, racked story of a breakup as she wonders: am I the baddie? BBT
10
Smerz – You Got Time and I Got Money
The ironic distance on Smerz’s great second album Big City Life, with its savage assessments of a scene’s parties and fashions, put off some listeners: it’s hard not to wonder what scathing take the Norwegian duo might have on your cooked outfit and drink of choice. But their exacting eye made them gripping company – and the sincerity of their discernment was born out in this woozy, ardently romantic ballad about how transformative it feels for true love to exceed all expectations. The looping hook “put your hands around my body / I am yours and your only” feels as though it should have existed since the heyday of girl groups, coupled with strings that sound like Bitter Sweet Symphony given the Disintegration Loops treatment. LS
9
Alex G – Afterlife
“We were mean and 17 / Make it like a dream, she said / We were clean, like kerosene …” The rhyme schemes in this wondrous song stretch out to meet the easy stride of its mandolin backing: it’s as if a two-pint buzz on a summer’s day was made into music. And as the US indie darling (though now on a major label) sings the chorus “as the light came, big and bright / I began another life”, you’re reminded anew of the second-to-second business of being alive, and how we can mark out the path we walk on. BBT
8
Lily Allen – Pussy Palace
Lily Allen. Photograph: Charlie Denis
Every single detail of Lily Allen’s possibly-fictional-quite-possibly-not discovery of a cheating husband’s sex den – “Duane Reade bag with the handles tied / Sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside” – cuts like a savage little knife with a pearly handle. Utterly grim but spellbindingly beautiful, its synths as prettily detailed as they are cosmically atmospheric, Pussy Palace may be the apex of Allen’s trademark for mingling sweet and tongue-curlingly sour. LS
7
Pulp – Spike Island
This was the single that heralded the first Pulp album since 2001, and the band matched the sense of occasion with an anthem. Like so many of their hits, it has a disco rhythm that’s done with real affection rather than ironic affectation, and while Jarvis Cocker might not quite have Barry Gibb’s pipes, he’s so good when he lets his voice soar. “I was born to perform, it’s a calling / I exist to do this shouting and pointing,” he sings, exulting in Pulp’s return, as well as pre-emptively batting away any suggestions they’re past it: “No one will ever have the last word / Because it’s not something you could ever say / So swivel!” BBT
6
Jade – Plastic Box
It’s been 84 years since Robyn released new music – actually, seven, now concluded by the Swede’s great comeback Dopamine, which came out after we voted. But until then, aficionados of cry-as-you-dance pop were well fed by this stomping synth weepie from Jade’s (largely much wilder) debut album. Her account of feeling irrationally insecure about your relationship compared with what your partner may have had with their ex is crushingly well observed – as is her honesty about torturing yourself over it by obsessively reading their old love letters. LS
5
Addison Rae – Headphones On
Addison Rae. Photograph: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic
If you’re gonna make a song about music’s ability to tranquillise pain, it has to live up to that premise itself. Headphones On nails the brief: it’s a perfect closed loop to get lost in, an absent-minded Möbius strip of glassy chillout, a perfectly Britney-like sugary-sad vocal that goes to the kind of emotional truths she was denied – “Wish my mum and dad could’ve been in love / Guess some things weren’t meant to last for ever” – and a searching sense of awe skimmed from the outer atmosphere of Madonna’s Ray of Light. The weightlessness of it seems entirely the point, untethering the year’s finest new pop star from her earthly concerns. LS
4
Lady Gaga – Abracadabra
After her Bruno Mars duet Die With a Smile put her firmly back in the centre of the pop cultural firmament after some years drifting to its edges, Gaga used her 2025 album Mayhem to consolidate that position by giving everyone what they most love about her. There are double helpings on the big, brilliant single Abracadabra: two Gagas in the video (one good, one evil) and two house beats made for a gay club at peak sweatiness (one piano, one acid). There are even two choruses, both of them using the nonsense syllables that defined her biggest hit Bad Romance – the type of thing a particularly hammy musical theatre star would do for their vocal warm-up exercises. It all adds up to double the fun. BBT
3
Chappell Roan – The Subway
Chappell Roan. Photograph: Allison Dinner/EPA
The better Chappell Roan gets, the crazier it is to think that pop’s best showgirl was once signed and dropped and had to claw her way back to supremacy. This year alone, her electrifying gift for subverting pastiche proved she can turn her hand to basically anything. After the winking country hoedown of The Giver in spring, she returned in summer with a pivot: a lovelorn Celtic pop epic in thrall to the Cranberries, their own Dolores O’Riordan as well as Sinéad O’Connor, reprising those torchbearers’ snarling, choral rage to rue the impossibility of shaking off heartbreak’s haunting. Roan has made clear that she won’t be back with a second album until she’s good and ready – maybe it’ll even take five years to write, she told Vogue. Thank God for The Subway’s endless replay factor. LS
2
PinkPantheress – Illegal
“Hey, ooh, is this illegal?” Pink flutters at the outset of a song about meeting a new weed dealer – sounding less put off by the prospect than enticed by it. Several tokes later and they’re both getting high around the corner; next they’re chatting on her bed and tempting fate. Paranoia and shame quickly join the overwhelming rush of sensations, exemplified in a sped-up sample of the floodlit synths from Underworld’s Dark & Long (Dark Train) that throbs with all the disorientation and delight of a THC-addled brain struggling to get a hold of itself. By the end, Pink’s heart is rushing and she’s short for breath – but the song’s sugary allure makes clear that this is no cautionary tale. Try it, why don’t you. LS
1
Rosalía – Berghain
Rosalía: Berghain – video
There’s no more boring debate than arguing over whether a piece of music conforms to the traditions of a particular genre. All that hot air and high dudgeon lavished on Berghain and whether the dramatic thrusts of the London Symphony Orchestra constitute classical music or Rosalía’s coloratura is or isn’t opera – who cares? These petty concerns pale in comparison to marvelling at what the Catalan visionary is up to by smashing all this grandeur together, coupled with lyrics in German and Spanish, Björk offering “divine intervention”, Yves Tumor reprising Mike Tyson’s “I’ll fuck you till you love me” rant, and references to a 12th-century German abbess for good measure. The towering, gothic Berghain subsumes the listener in the same way the doomed relationship Rosalía sings about is swallowing her: being overwhelmed by a lover’s fear, anger, love and blood, dissolving like sugar in hot coffee when he’s around. In the song’s sheer scale and virtuosity, she steals some power back for herself – leaving us in turn trembling with awe at her one-of-one magnitude. LS