Best music: Sabrina Carpenter and Addison Rae soar in the year of pop

In my mind, there’s no better metaphor for 2025 than the fact that one of the year’s biggest albums – and one of pop’s only true breakouts – wasn’t by a “real” artist. The soundtrack to KPop Demon Hunters – a Netflix film about a K-pop group that fights demons through their music – spent nine weeks at No. 1 on the Aria charts this year, longer than anyone not named Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter, with its lead single, “Golden”, and 10 weeks atop the singles chart. While the songs from KPop Demon Hunters are written and recorded by real artists, “Golden” feels unnervingly and unerringly fake – a pop song that’s perfectly smooth and perfectly forgettable, for a year in which culture felt overwhelmingly flat and focus-tested.

Perhaps because of that, I gravitated toward music this year that felt idiosyncratic and handmade, and inspired deep, thorough listening. Few albums this year felt more like the product of a singular, specific vision than Man’s Best Friend, the seventh album by Sabrina Carpenter. Although hardly as big a hit as Short n’ Sweet, the 2024 album that catapulted Carpenter to global fame after years in the trenches as a middling post-Disney star, Man’s Best Friend felt like a true creative arrival for Carpenter. It’s strangely old-fashioned in a lot of ways: almost every sound on the record is produced by a live instrument and every song feels tightly stitched, written and rewritten and restructured until it hits with military efficiency. The palette is a strange hybrid of ’70s pop and soft rock. The key references I hear are Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk and late period ABBA, when that band’s two central couples were deep in the throes of divorce and Benny and Björn were writing wounded, lacerating songs about loneliness and heartbreak. For all her peppiness, Carpenter presents a shockingly fatalistic view of love on Man’s Best Friend: she writes about relationships with forensic, reportorial insight and always seems to conclude that love just ain’t worth the struggle. The depth of her production makes that poison pill a little harder to swallow.

Also floating through pop like a Gen Z Carrie Bradshaw this year: PinkPantheress, the young British producer who broke out during the pandemic with intimate vocal-led flips of classic British dance tracks. Her second mixtape, Fancy That, is a bullish rebuke of her “wallflower” tag: it’s brash and dense, often braiding together dozens of recognisable samples at once without ever sounding like anyone other than PinkPantheress. Pink’s funny, frank lyrics are a perfect counterpoint to all that busyness – the whole album feels like you’ve met someone hilarious at a party and are just sitting listening to them hold court for hours. Except the whole thing is only, like, 20 minutes.

It was a good year for pop breakouts. Audrey Hobert felt like a true breath of fresh air with her album Who’s the Clown?, which seems confessional and lazy at first listen but is actually one of the most meticulously written records I heard all year – a surrealist storm of crazy images, heightened emotions and bizarre non sequiturs. In that sense, it’s a little similar to Addison Rae’s Addison, which also seems a little airheaded until you dig in and consider the breadth of her references. Rae was a TikTok star and now basically makes avant-pop. Her album specifically draws from Madonna’s transformative mid ’90s and early-2000s output while also sounding a lot like an early 2010s chillwave album. It’s joyous and arch at the same time, a totally strange and brilliant mix.

If there’s a throughline that covers all these albums, it’s that they incorporate electronic sounds without feeling generic or too slick. The same is true of Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos, a breathtaking masterwork that seamlessly bridges the gap between contemporary reggaeton and traditional Puerto Rican music. Working with some of Puerto Rico’s brightest young musicians, Bad Bunny made a record that speaks to the sociopolitical struggles of the island while celebrating its past and future. The result is one of the most gripping albums of the year, a pop record that refuses to sacrifice craft or politics in the name of the party. In a year defined by fakery, nothing felt more real.