2025 in Music and Words

Toasting the year that was

I hope you are all in the middle of enjoying a restful and restorative holiday season. The days between Christmas and New Year’s are unique and are one of the best gifts this time of the year offers.

I may be late to the game but I wanted to close out the year with my thoughts on the albums that most moved me in 2025 as well as some reflections on my writing here and the state of my newsletter.

My deepest thanks to everyone here for your support of my work and I hope to have some new surprises and delights for you in 2026 starting on January 13 when I will next be in touch.

Happy New Year everyone!

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2025 in Music and Words
By: Robert C. Gilbert

Twenty twenty-five was the first year in my life I really tried to pay attention to new music. I’m 47. Growing up, and long after that, what I was listening to and discovering, and what was being released, were out of synch. I never felt that I was missing out of anything. There is enough old music to find—if one hasn’t heard it, it’s technically new music no matter when it was recorded—to last several lifetimes. And that was fine when I was a somewhat crazed music fan and record collector but tougher to justify when I am also trying to make it as a music writer and critic.

In 2024, I began to wrestle with contemporary music and started writing an ongoing series of round-ups of new and upcoming albums that caught my ear, starting with jazz and branching out from there. This year, I got more serious, keeping a log of everything I heard and writing six essays chronicling the good new stuff (read them here, here, here, here, here and here). Overall, I heard 507 new albums in 2025; the pace steady from the beginning of the year until around mid-November when thoughts increasingly turned to the sounds of the season.

It’s said that Downbeat received about that number of records in 1959. These days, that amount of LPs is but a sliver of the new music being made and released so my thoughts about what stuck most with me over the year is but a small impression of the sounds of the past 365 days.

Looking back at the albums I wrote about this year, here are the ones that stood out the most.

Tenor saxophonist Jon Irabagon’s Server Farm (Irabbagast Records) was one of the most sprawling and ambitious albums that came across my desk in 2025. It confronted the spectre of artificial intelligence and in five compositions, built a narrative that shifted from authenticity to artificiality. The band was first-rate: in addition to Irabagon’s regular band-mates: keyboardist Matt Mitchell, bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Dan Weiss, there were the dueling guitars of Miles Okazaki and Wendy Eisenberg. The result was enthralling with the performances constantly shifting in texture and tempo.

One of the big surprises of 2025 was that it brought two excellent, yet very different, salutes to Thelonious Monk. Tenor saxophonist Xhosa Cole’s On a Modern Genius (Vol. 1) (Stoney Lane Recordings) interpreted the master’s music with restlessness. Recorded live in 2023 in Birmingham, England, the presence of tap dancer Liberty Styles on four of the album’s seven tracks added to its boldness.

Danya Stephens’s Monk’d (Contagious Music) had two twists: the first was that instead of tenor, Stephens played bass and the second was that the program focused, though not exclusively, on the nooks and crannies of the Monk songbook—think ‘Humph,’ ‘Coming on the Hudson’ and ‘Stuffy Turkey.’ But what was even more interesting was how Stephens and crew: tenor saxophonist Stephen Riley, pianist Ethan Iverson and drummer Eric McPherson echoed the bumptious bounce of Monk’s early-sixties quartet of Charlie Rouse, John Ore and Frankie Dunlop without ever being captive to it.

Throughout the year, I got the occasional email from a musician pitching his or her music to me. I appreciated this gesture and always gave a fair hearing to what was sent me. None of the albums that came my way through this method knocked me out as much as New York singer-songwriter Lili Añel’s You Have a Visitor (self-released), a call back to the days of Janis Ian, Norma Tanega and (especially) Phoebe Snow. But what really made me take notice was ‘Saw the Light,’ propelled by a looping bass line by Samuel Nobles and an evocation of the gritty side of New York with Añel dispensing truths like Gil Scott-Heron.

Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and keyboardist Vijay Iyer teamed up for Defiant Life (ECM), a stark and often alluring work on being angry about the state of the world. That might suggest Defiant Life was aggressive. It wasn’t. Instead, it was ambient, atmospheric and full of space, the kind of album to play over and over again.

Distinctive singers were a consistent source of pleasure. Tyreek McDole’s velvety sound brought to mind Kevin Mahogany and McDole’s debut recording, Open Up Your Senses (Artwork), was wide-ranging, offering deep interpretations of not-overdone standards like ‘Under a Blanket of Blue,’ bringing new energy to the totemic ‘The Creator Has a Master Plan’ and, speaking of Monk, caressing Mike Ferro’s lyrics to ‘Ugly Beauty.’

I loved Allan Harris’ The Poetry of Jazz: Live at the Blue LLama (Blue LLama Recordings) which mixed poetry with song, both well-suited to Harris’ voice: full of warmth, gentle yet rich. I was also touched by Raquel Marina’s Kind Words (self-released). Her sound on the album was unconventional, often hovering around a note rather than landing on it, but I found her album one of the most uplifting and pure things I heard all year.

Taylor Rae’s The Void (Missing Piece Records) was an addictive synthesis of pop, rock, soul and country. Jack Splithoff’s Far From Here (Virgin) evoked the Yacht rock sound of old without feeling dated in any way. Reed Turchi’s World on Fire (Xenon) went all the way back to the low-fi days of blues and folk. Cory Hanson’s I Love People (Drag City) persuasively argued that the age of tuneful singer-songwriter whose view is askew remains alive and well.

The New Eves, a female quartet out of the United Kingdom, personified an edge that was foremost in 2025. Their debut, The New Eves Is Rising (Transgressive Records), had a palpable menace that always seemed around the corner.

I also deeply admired producer Michael Simard’s project, Motivation, which paid tribute to the music of the seventies that existed in the liminal space between jazz, soul and funk. The 21-person aggregation’s debut recording, Take It to the Sky (self-released), was a bold statement, resisting the easy tribute—there are only deep cuts here—and was the kind of recording that barely made a dent but one I loved sharing and spreading the word about.

Two jazz releases from 2025 illustrated the music’s wide range of expression. Drummer Joe Farnsworth offered The Big Room (Smoke Sessions Records) which seemed as if it escaped from the Blue Note vault circa 1964, so strong did the spirit of the label pleasantly haunt the recording. It also didn’t hurt that the band Farnsworth assembled resembled the kind of heavy-hitter units that Blue Note was beloved for. Joining the drummer were trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, alto saxophonist Sarah Hanahan, vibraphonist Joel Ross (the X-factor here), pianist Emmet Cohen, bassist Yasushi Nakamara. It all added up to a modern classic.

Vibraphonist Patricia Brennan circled the outer edges of the music. Her presence on a recording is always a sign to take notice (and, to that end, how I wish I had been able to get deeper into guitarist Mary Halvorson’s latest, About Ghosts, on which Brennan appeared). Brennan’s Of the Near and Far (Pyroclastic Records) was one of the most fantastical listens 2025 offered. Fueled by her interest in astrology, the compositions she wrote for the recording had a spaciousness and etherealness that often inspired awe, especially the closer, ‘When You Stare Into the Abyss.’

The decision to write about an album comes down to first, whether I like it and second, whether I can write about it in a way that has something interesting to offer about its contents. Glancing back at my list of all the albums I heard this year, there are some that I didn’t write about for whatever reason but still liked a whole lot.

• The Weather Station, Humanhood (Fat Possum)

• Anna B Savage, You & i are Earth (City Slang)

• Gary Louris, Dark Country (Thirty Tigers)

• ARTEMIS, ARBORESQUE (Blue Note)

• Rumer, In Session (self-released)

• Foxwarren, 2 (Arts & Crafts)

• Beatie Wolfe & Brian Eno, Luminal (Verve)

• Pasquale Grasso, Fervency (Sony Masterworks)

• Colin Hancock’s Jazz Hounds with Catherine Russell, Cat & the Hounds (Turtle Bay Records)

• Wet Leg, moisturizer (Domino Recording)

• Alexa Tarantino, The Roar and the Whisper (Blue Engine Records)

• The Beaches, No Hard Feelings (AWAL Recordings)

• Trio of Bloom, Trio of Bloom (Pyroclastic Records)

Two albums I heard late in the year that I would have written about if I had done a seventh round-up of new music would have been bassist Rich Brown’s NYAEBA (Whirlwind Records), out since the end of September and a rhythmic, ambient and complex album that took me to far-off places. Vocalist Whitney Ross-Barris’ Curtains of Light (self-released), released at the end of October, was the kind of cross-genre music that never fails to surprise and delight. The opening cut, ‘Bourgeois Reverie,’ was full of brass and had a shuffle too, and powers what follows on the album.

The one composition I dug most this year was ‘The Files’ by the current iteration of the SFJazz Collective. It was a composition by the vibraphonist Warren Wolf and appeared on the Collective’s latest album, Collective Imagery (SF Jazz), a collaboration with San Francisco’s deYoung Museum and was inspired by artist Sadie Barnette’s FBI Drawing: Legal Ritual. The artwork consists of five collages which include excerpts from her father’s FBI files—he was both a Vietnam War veteran and a member of the Black Panthers—situated around by graphite-pencil drawings. Wolf used a spoken-word narrative to weave around a multi-part composition that included a deeply evocative homage to the sounds of Shaft and Superfly that spotlighted Wolf on marimba as well as David Sánchez on flute and Chris Potter on tenor saxophone.

No lyric seem to capture the increased surrealness of reality in 2025 than what singer-songwriter Emily Hines wrote for ‘UFO,’ part of her excellent debut album, These Days (Keeled Scales), in which she envisioned, “Jesus will come ridin’ in on a UFO / Jesus will come crashin’ with his alien buddies / Jesus will come in the nick of time and take us up.”

This year, I published 36 editions of Listening Sessions. My most popular essay was The Rambunctious CTI of 1970: Freddie Hubbard, Joe Farrell & Stanley Turrentine which looked at three adventurous albums released on Creed Taylor’s label.

Other essays this year I am particularly proud of included my attempt to memorialize Gene Hackman by focusing on The French Connection—his breakout role—and Don Ellis, who composed the picture’s haunting soundtrack. A few continued my interest in going deep on artists that usually don’t receive such treatment. I wrote at length this year on both Johnny Rivers and Porter Wagoner in the late sixties, the sole album by jazz-rock powerhouse Air—I loved having wordsworthesq aboard for it—as well as Mac Davis’ debut, Song Painter.

I also tried to say something new about music that’s already been written about ad nauseum. I think my essays honouring Brian Wilson and connecting Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with The Notorious Byrd Brothers came off well. The essay I had most fun writing this year was, no surprise, my travelogue of a week-and-a-half spent in New York.

While my attempt to go paid has seen me not paywall anything since May, I’ll try to focus next year on creating and acting on a paid-subscriber strategy that offers real, added value to the work I do here. Still, I began this year with 15 paid subscribers and will end the year with 18. I am forever appreciative of the support! Overall, my subscriber base continues to grow and in 2025, it went from 2,012 to 2,635 (as of December 28)—a 31% increase.

That I am able to do what I am doing is thanks to all of you who find what I do worth supporting and, most importantly, worth reading. That’s not something I will ever take for granted. I feel immense gratitude to be able to keep on going here. Thank you to you all! Here’s to 2026: may the New Year be good to us all!