Daily Newsletter, December 19, 2025

2025’s most rapturously well-received albums were also some of the most challenging. From the thrills and spills of Lily Allen’s divorce album, West End Girl to FKA twigs “love letter to the dancefloor,” Eusexua, this year has been a memorable one for the music industry. Rosalía gave us something to worship in the form of her remarkable debut, Lux, and PinkPantheress took over TikTok once again with her third album, Fancy That. The Independent’s music journalists Roisin O'Connor, Hannah Ewens and Ellie Muir crown their best albums of 2025.

Here is Radio X's pick of the finest albums of the past 12 months... from the return of Florence + The Machine and Pulp to new material from Sam Fender, Wet Leg and Wolf Alice.

Pictured above is award-winning Chilean singer and songwriter Mon Laferte who offers a sophisticated brand of Latin music that melds indie and roots rock, blues, bolero, cumbia,…

Paste Magazine is your source for the best music, movies, TV, comedy, videogames, books, comics, craft beer, politics and more. Discover your favorite albums and films.

Selecting the biggest, the greatest, or the smashing albums can be a tricky business, but these are the 14 compilations you must own.

These are the anthems that defined a generation.

Storms, sitars and a "snarling bag of tigers" – the Stones' songwriting secrets revealed!

From rain-soaked concerts to last-minute substitutions and happy accidents, rock history is full of chance moments that changed everything

At the peak of their pop fame, The Monkees enlisted the help of Jack Nicholson for their big screen debut which yielded mixed blessings for their future.

The Blue Nile’s Hats is filled with lovesick people and nocturnal places, existing in a perpetual state of starless nights and slanted rainfall. The album evokes a liminal metropolis bathed in the amber glow of sodium-vapor street lamps, where lonely souls wander down moonlit alleyways in search of something that has already left them long ago. It is here, where traffic lights blink for no one and smoke curls around sewer lids, that Hats stakes its home. It sustains this atmosphere from beginning to end — each song a jigsaw puzzle piece that forms a mosaic of romance and sorrow.

This playlist pays tribute to all the great musicians we lost in 2025, including Brian Wilson, Ozzy Osbourne, Michael Hurley, Angie Stone, and more