It’s that time of year again, and we’re excited to share a list of our contributors’ top albums of 2025. Some of the artists are new on the scene; others have been in the game for 30+ years. Some are blasting apart the calcified boundaries of the concert hall; others redefining the limits of musical experimentalism. All of them highlight the dynamism, uniqueness, and diversity of contemporary music — and what we gain when we give new music a chance to stretch our ears. Take a listen, and we hope you discover something new to love! – Amanda Cook and A. Kori Hill
A Room with Many Doors: Day — Darian Donovan Thomas
Darian Donovan Thomas’ A Room With Many Doors: Day (New Amsterdam) is a glistening glitchpop record full of multitracked delay lines, Kate Bush reverb, and pulsing dance beats. On this mirror-prequel to his 2024 album A Room With Many Doors: Night, Thomas sings; plays strings, synths, and guitar; and produces every corner of its fluid and joyful landscapes. It often feels as though he is singing at very close range; his songs are beautiful, bruised, and intricately-built, shaped by an honesty that never turns performative.
Throughout the album, there’s a nostalgic shimmer reminiscent of late-90s and early-2000s artists like mùm, The Books, and Sufjan Stevens. Even when sharing painfully intimate details, Thomas’ voice remains clear, never slipping into a whisper aesthetic. Even at his most despairing, as in “Testing Center” (a disarmingly unguarded song about queerness, religion, and the existential dread of HIV), there’s beauty, tunefulness, and self-compassion in the writing. On A Room With Many Doors: Day, the songs don’t wallow; they observe. – Gemma Peacocke
American Mirror — Sphinx Virtuosi
In anticipation of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, journalists and scholars across the United States have been offering up retrospectives and visions for the next 250 years. If you’re looking for a musician’s take, the timing of Sphinx Virtuosi’s American Mirror (Deutsche Grammophon) could not be more apt. The album features seven works by a diverse collection of American composers written within the past 30 years, each weaving in heritage, tradition, or culture.
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Sinfonietta No. 2 “Generations” deconstructs American folk and pop tunes, turning them into tributes to his ancestors and descendants. Hané by Diné composer Juantio Becenti is a mix of gloomy low strings and dissonant melodies. Meanwhile, Quenton Blache’s Habari Gani makes for a bright, upbeat opener with a syncopated feel and bold finish. Additional works by Derrick Skye, Curtis Stewart, and Andrea Casarrubios are not just reflections on America’s past, but a glimpse of where we’re headed. – Dalanie Harris
Conversation No. 1/Collecting Rocks from the Places We’ve Been — Katie Porter
Bass clarinetist and composer Katie Porter often explores the myriad sonorities of her instrument, and Conversation No. 1 / Collecting Rocks from the Places We’ve Been (Relative Pitch Records) is no exception. With tracks merely delineated by time stamps, the album weaves through ambient drones and textured clarinet sounds with only brief pauses between ideas. The subtle introduction of distortions range from lightly jagged vibrato to multiphonics that oscillate between pure tones.
We are gradually warmed by Porter’s movement between registers and able to analyze the wave of her sound; dark sustains of the bass clarinet’s lower register fold into points of tension and grit created by the overpressure and sharper ends of multiphonics. The result is an ethereal album that succinctly presents both clear and distorted versions of the clarinet, preserving its sweetness while introducing a brash quality to our ears. – Michelle Hromin
Environments — Rafiq Bhatia
In contrast with his earlier, more jazz-aligned work, guitarist and composer Rafiq Bhatia’s Environments moves deeper into a unique, evolving dreamworld churning with electronic textures and ambient drones. On his fourth ANTI- Records release, he is joined by Riley Mulherkar on trumpet and Son Lux bandmate Ian Chang on drums, who combine in a group improvisation across eight essentially seamless tracks.
Bhatia’s soundworld is a kind of industrial noir, and evocative track titles like “At Midnight On A Black Sand Beach, The Raging Tides Begin To Speak,” “Glimmers In The Ocean Deep,” and “Volcano △” suggest a mysterious narrative. This music is not gentle; it’s big, and at times aggressive and chaotic. It moves like crashing surf, expands across space like dazzling lightning followed by awesome thunder, and inspires many spins to get to the bottom of its truly mystical depths. – Christian Kriegeskotte
Delicious — Alex Paxton
Alex Paxton’s Delicious (New Amsterdam) is multicoloured, excessive, and vibrant. The latest album from the British composer and trombonist sounds freewheeling, as if improvised, but is actually scrupulously notated. Paxton’s music needs performers of crazy fearless dedication, and he has them in the Explore Ensemble, Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain, GBSR Duo, and Dreammusics Ensemble. These instrumentalists combine their skilled classical technique with la-la-la-ing vocals and toy instruments including the kazoo and slide whistle.
Paxton once taught music to very young children, and his music captures the high energy, short attention span, and lack of inhibition of a small child. If you like music that’s fun (you do, don’t you?), you’ll be dancing around the room like no one’s watching. Is this album delicious? It’s like having a whole box of chocolates to yourself. Perfect listening for the festive season, then. – Caroline Potter
Los Thuthanaka — Los Thuthanaka
Nothing on earth sounds like Los Thuthanaka, the self-titled simulacrum of Indigenous Aymaran siblings Chuquimamani-Condori (aka Elysia Crampton; aka DJ E) and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton. The album is a maximalist honoring of their queer ancestral heritage with Andean dance forms, barrages of chopped and slowed DJ tags, dulcetly distorted guitars, trance-y repetition, and preservation of maternal tongues all mashed together. It’s anticolonialist music at its core, embracing traditional imagery, healing methods, and complete discernment of nonlinear time.
The essential parts of each siblings’ musical voices radiate on the album – the heartfelt nature of Chuquimia Crampton’s blown-out guitar ballads marry DJ E’s vibrant sonic collages with unmastered sacral power. While every song is the best song, “Parrandita ‘Sariri Tunupa’” just edges out the rest with its mesmerizing walls of lustrous sound. Los Thuthanaka have one hand in history and a foot on the gas pedal, speeding light years into the future. It’s art that makes you envious of those with the privilege of hearing it for the first time. – Yaz Lancaster
Nilam — ganavya
Multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and composer ganavya merges celebration with the sacred in her work, letting you see an unshielded view of the human experience through her poetic mind’s eye. Along with her band (which, on special occasions, includes her parents), ganavya radiates an open inviting energy on the stage. Her performances feel like she has brought you and the whole audience into her living room — for those two hours, you’re all family.
ganavya channels this intimate, thoughtful softness on Nilam. The album embraces you in the hazy warm aura of “Song for Sad Times,” the gradual release of gravity in “Not a Burden,” and the slow smoldering of “Pasayadan” before ending with “Sees Fire,” a continual ache between earthy drone and pointillistic pizzicato. A candescent compendium harvested in just a few days of unexpected studio time in between tours, Nilam reminds us: there is remarkable magnetism in focused, unhurried gentleness. – Stephanie Ann Boyd
Orchestral Works — Errollyn Wallen and the BBC Concert Orchestra
Over her 30-year career, composer Errollyn Wallen, CBE, has always fully leveraged the instrumental, technical, and timbral powers of the orchestra — and her new portrait album performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra and soloists celebrates her mastery at a new height. Orchestral Works (Resonus Records) features two of her earlier compositions — The World’s Weather (1999) and Mighty River (2007) — but the rest are recent pieces from 2018-2023. Resolute hope is a through-line in Wallen’s work. Moments of darkness or drama don’t end in despair; they become more contemplative as her voice grows.
Dances for Orchestra (2023) is the clear highlight, showing off the breadth of her orchestral technique in a robust, 12-movement suite. Contrastingly, her theatrical solo cello work, Postcard for Magdalena (2020), reminds listeners that she is equally expressive with one instrument as she is with 60. The album captures the composer’s joy in writing her music and the orchestra’s infectious high spirits playing it. – Kathleen McGowan
Solace of the Mind — Amina Claudine Myers
Amina Claudine Myers has a virtuosic ability to unearth the spiritual quality of music. Throughout the New York-based artist’s six-decade career, she has made pensive music rooted in jazz and gospel and has been a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
Her 12th solo record, Solace of the Mind presents pared down piano interpretations performed with stillness and few frills. She approaches the instrument with immense patience, allowing each note to ring until it can’t any longer; her music grows from silence into ardent reverberance at a glacial pace. Solace of the Mind is ultimately an album of both interiority and celebration — of an artist’s immense and meaningful practice, and the power sound has to invite us to access the indefinable rhythms of life. – Vanessa Ague
Unfolding — Jessica Moss
Dedicated to “a free Palestine in our lifetime,” Jessica Moss’ sixth solo album is by far her most introspective, and perhaps paradoxically her most urgent. The violinist, vocalist, and composer came onto the scene as a co-founder of Black Ox Orkestar, a decidedly non-nationalist Klezmer group, and is also a member of Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra. Her music has never been afraid to take its time, but Unfolding is somehow cutting and incisive as it leans even harder into her minimalist ambient roots.
Produced by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh of Jerusalem In My Heart, the album weaves string drones, field recordings, whispers of percussion, and faintly amplified and distorted harmonies across its 40-minute run time. The standout track, “until all are free,” primarily features Moss’ own layered vocals as an emotional and poignant end to the album. Throughout, the beautiful and deeply fragile soundscape creates a sense of heartbreak in a hostile world, making this one of Moss’ best works to date. – Clover Nahabedian
Yanga — Gabriela Ortiz and the Los Angeles Philharmonic
Gabriela Ortiz embraces and transforms Afro-Latin musical traditions in an authentic and ingenious way. Her music is intense, inspiring, and bold, unapologetically addressing injustices old and new, and celebrating the revolutionary — like the eponymous hero of her latest album, Yanga.The three-time GRAMMY-nominated recording is the second portrait album of Ortiz’s music from the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Yanga evolves from an ethereal soundscape into a ferocious and triumphant celebration of freedom. With a libretto by the Spanish playwright and critic Santiago Martín Bermúdez, the work’s dramatic arc is stunningly depicted through pulsating rhythms and vocals that are at first hauntingly sustained, then drivingly percussive. The album also includes Ortiz’s captivating cello concerto, Dzonot (masterfully performed by Alisa Weilerstein) and her ethereal and effervescent Seis piezas a Violeta for string orchestra and piano (featuring soloist Joanne Pearce Martin). Together, the three works form a compelling snapshot of one of our generation’s most unique and noteworthy composers. – Lauren Ishida
I CARE IF YOU LISTEN is an editorially-independent program of the American Composers Forum, and is made possible thanks to generous donor and institutional support. You can support the work of ICIYL with a tax-deductible gift to ACF. For more on ACF, visit composersforum.org.
