Mija Milovic – Not Offended
There is a sense of deep knowing and calm to Not Offended, the lone song released this year by the Danish-Montenegrin musician (also an earlier graduate of the Copenhagen music school currently producing every interesting alternative pop star). To warmly droning organ that hangs like the last streak of sunlight above a darkening horizon, Milovic assures someone that they haven’t offended her – but her steady Teutonic tenderness, reminiscent of Molly Nilsson or Sophia Kennedy, suggests that their actions weren’t provocative so much as evasive. Strings flutter tentatively as she addresses this person who can’t look life in the eye right now. “I see you clearly,” Milovic sings, as the drums kick in and the strings become full-blooded: a reminder of the ease that letting go can offer. Laura Snapes
Al Olender – The Cyclone
In a year that saw the troubling rise of AI-generated slop music, there is something endlessly comforting about a song that can only have been written by a messy, complicated human. The first lines of Al Olender’s delightfully specific Cyclone, draw on a memory of driving to Queens to “try to get laid”, and from there the song takes our unwinding narrator to a Baltimore freeway, Planet Fitness bathroom, and, yes, the titular Coney Island attraction. It’s a well-trodden theme, though usually sung by classic dude troubadours such as Townes Van Zandt or Merle Haggard: no matter where she runs, she’s herself, and it’s a problem. But the song’s crescendo is one of the prettiest, and lasting, that I have heard in a while. After losing love (or maybe it was just some guy), the singer resolves to replace all of her glass with paper plates – “things I cannot break”. Alaina Demopoulos
Lisa Knapp and Gerry Diver – Long Lankin
The most transfixing song too few people heard in 2025 has actually been around for nearly 300 years. Long Lankin, an insanely violent traditional folk murder ballad, has been performed by musical ghouls since at least the 1750s. Far more recently, its dark soul has been conjured by trad stars as esteemed as Martin Carthy, Shirley Collins and Steeleye Span. Never, however, have I heard a version as bone-chilling as the one by the English folk star Lisa Knapp. (It appears on Hinterland, her first album co-credited to her longtime partner in music, life and, for all I know, crime, Gerry Diver). Knapp’s quavering soprano manages to sound, at once, pristine and menacing, a silky ghost of a thing equally skilled at seduction and threat. The clarity of her tone has a Sandy Denny purity, but her vibrato portends imminent danger, underscored by Diver’s creepy-crawly glockenspiel and Pete Flood’s spooky drums, which have the jazzy surprise of Terry Cox’s work with Pentangle. While the musicians orchestrate the shifting perspectives of the lyric, Knapp delivers a vocal so arresting, you won’t know whether to shudder or swoon. Jim Farber
MidnightRoba – Axis (feat Saul Williams)
Roba El-Essawy AKA MidnightRoba was the soulful voice of 90s British trip-hop band Attica Blues and has more recently been releasing music solo, including 2025’s self-released second album, Raise A Symphony – a call for “peace, love, justice, solidarity, righteousness, compassion, empathy and care”. Lead track Axis, produced by El-Essawy, is a maelstrom of splintered, IDM-style electronica, hypnotic interlocking loops, skittering, restless rushes of tabla and operatic vocals in tribute to the children who’ve been killed in Gaza and those grieving them. It features the guest incantations of poet, actor and activist Saul Williams, who has been nominated alongside New Age maestro Carlos Niño at the upcoming Grammys and with whom El-Essawy recently performed at the Pitchfork London festival. An anthem for screaming into the void when it feels like no one is listening. As Williams says on the track: “It’s beyond exhausting.” Kate Hutchinson
Cleyra – There’s Nothing Happening Between Us
There is a tiny handful of blurred or obscured pics of Cleyra out in the world and even less biographical info, beyond the fact they’re a producer from Bristol in the UK. Perhaps that’s all to the good, allowing for greater mystery and deeper immersion into their mist-wreathed music, which seems to drift through the walls of a multi-room nightclub like an ex-raver in purgatory. Their album-length EP remember this body? features five universally strong tracks, from the reggaeton-adjacent Conundrum to the post-R&B soundscape Just Can’t Live Without Ya and three flavours of techno in between, including the 17-minute There’s Nothing Happening Between Us. That long runtime allows for a proper trip, as 4/4 drums chart a course through a murky sea with explosions emanating from the deep, before surfacing into cleaner drum programming and alarm sounds, as if returning to consciousness in an unfamiliar ambulance. Then ambient techno carries you back into a stupor. Few other dance producers attempted anything quite so ambitious in a single track this year. Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Dom Innarella – Call Me
New York’s humble neighbor to the east in the form of New Jersey has produced plenty of Italian American singing talent. (Looking at you, Sinatra). Now, 14 year-old Dom Innarella prepares to take the stage. His smooth falsetto originally launched him into TikTok-viral fame with listeners comparing him to a young Justin Bieber. Now, his own version of Bieber fever may not be far behind. (Innarella-mania?) His past year was a big one, with the singer signing with Republic Records and releasing a series of throwback pop and R&B singles that harken back to Bieber’s early days. Aside from his breakout Bout Me and a recent cover of It’s Beginning To Look a Lot Like Christmas, Inarella’s acoustic and drum machine-driven Call Me reminds one of Usher’s glory days. No wonder why he’s earned kudos from the man himself, along with J Balvin and Teddy Swims. With a debut album on the horizon, the future could belong to another voice from the Garden state. Rob LeDonne
Jammy – Right Time
Jammy is an artist I first encountered back in 2017 with Margarita, a sad, post-summer ode to dreaming of a love that fades when the sun stops shining. It remains under-heard (a music video with fewer than 30,000 views, the Google search “jammy margarita” leading to recipes for a margarita with jam) but it’s a monster hit compared with his EP this year. The best track, Right Time, hasn’t even hit 60 views on YouTube (!) with a Spotify count not even notable enough to register (the artist himself only reaches under 3,000 listeners a month). It is therefore something of a public service for me to bring it to light, another mellow and lightly melancholic winner about a lost love, this time one who’s now in a new thankless relationship and maybe needs the help to get out? Or maybe he’s just fooling himself, a sense of delusion running through his back-and-forth, gently switching between cocksure and vulnerable. It’s too good to be kept a secret. Benjamin Lee
Anika – Walk Away
“The truth is I don’t really like myself / And the truth is I don’t really like anyone else” is an opening gambit so direct it almost dares you to flinch. But Walk Away never sinks into a confessional wallow; it keeps strutting forward as if refusing to grant despair the dignity of stillness. Annika Henderson’s voice arrives coolly detached, half-spoken, half-sung, floating above bright, jangling guitars whose breeziness feels deliberately mismatched to the venom in her words. That tension is the point. The Berlin-based hybrid artist – and former journalist – has always understood the power of saying things plainly, and Walk Away reads like column inches finally allowed to shout. It’s a four-and-a-half-minute anthem of irritation and self-loathing that somehow lands as liberating rather than bleak, its grunge-inflected pulse recalling the reckless candor of 90s alt-rock without leaning into nostalgia. The chorus doesn’t explode so much as sharpen, circling the same unsparing truths until they start to feel oddly cathartic. In an era of hyper-managed vulnerability, Walk Away is refreshingly unfiltered: a song that refuses both likability and apology, sounding all the better for it. Bryan Armen Graham