This year brought a strong set of releases from major league pop artists, from rising newcomers to household names. Lady Gaga struck out first with Mayhem, a return to the darkly glittering, avant-garde goth aesthetic of her early years, twinning it with a clubby mix that echoes Daft Punk, Prince and Yazoo. 

Lorde reappeared with Virgin, replacing the mellowness of 2021’s Solar Power with angsty, brutally honest songs heavy on degraded electronics. There were also chart-conquering new albums from Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift, Rosalía and the UK’s Olivia Dean, whose The Art Of Loving offered a set of warm, naturalistic songs with a cinematic sweep and ’70s soul feel. 

Lily Allen, meanwhile, staged an impressive comeback with West End Girl. An unflinchingly candid break-up record that sparked a social-media wildfire, it’s also a set of smart, adult-pop songs flecked with R&B, 2-step and Latin-pop. Irish star CMAT dazzled with Euro-Country, its demonstrative, country-pop songs showing off her writing flair as well as her wry humour and emotional depth, while Self Esteem’s A Complicated Woman pulled in myriad orchestral players and a choir to imbue complex feelings with anthemic power. 

Striking a very different pop note were Pulp, back from recording silence after 24 years with their aptly titled Number One, More, and Suede, who delivered Antidepressants. Both are triumphs – and not just for bands in their middle age. The former hit the spot with disco-fied songs which are poignant and joyful in equal measure, the latter with reflections on the neurotic nature of modern life carried by an edgy, post-punk style and monster riffs. 

Looking beyond the pop world, 2025 delivered countless rewards across the genre spectrum. In the rap corner, Little Simz’ sixth album, Lotus, alchemised self-doubt and feelings of personal betrayal, as well as financial and legal troubles, into dark and righteously eloquent tracks, while Am I The Drama? saw Grammy winner Cardi B back after seven years with a revenge-soaked set ripe with her usual outrageousness. 

Danny Brown’s Stardust proved his worries about making an album sober for the first time were unfounded and allowed him to really let his hyper-pop tendencies fly. With his third full-length, The Boy Who Played The Harp, Dave again leaned into the thoughtful narrative style that’s become his USP, though its setting is strikingly understated, as you’d maybe expect of someone contemplating big life decisions in their late ’20s.

Different again are Clipse’s Let God Sort Em Out, the duo’s first album since 2009, which welcomed producer Pharrell back on board and features plenty of pop bounce accordingly, and Cabin In The Sky, from De La Soul. The Daisy Age giants’ latest release was also their first since the death of founding member Trugoy The Dove, whose vocals add poignancy to their characteristically sunny, colour-saturated sound. 

Alt-country, Americana and folk were superbly represented by SG Goodman, whose Planting By The Signs is an alluringly understated set of songs rooted in US small-town life, with echoes of Karen Dalton, and Cass McCombs. His Interior Live Oak is a batch of deeply reflective, sheerly lovely songs that veer between countified pop and classic soul. Double Infinity saw cosmically inclined folk-rockers Big Thief coping with the departure of their founding bass player by bringing in a load of new musicians for improv recording sessions, including New Age pioneer Laraaji, whilst Bonnie “Prince” Billy drew heavily on Nashville’s talent pool to deliver The Purple Bird, a set that nods to country giants like Merle Haggard. Kentucky singer/songwriter Joan Shelley’s Real Warmth offered country-folk songs with a luminous beauty and airy, modern feel, while Rhiannon Giddens reunion with former Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate Justin Robinson, What Did The Blackbird Say To The Crow, delivered a set of North Carolina, back-porch music played on banjo and fiddle. 

Inside the increasingly elastic borders of jazz there were standout releases from West Coast saxophonist Cole Pulice (the shimmering and sorrowful Land’s End Eternal), Chicago’s Natural Information Society (who brought us three albums of mesmeric, inner-space travel – Meditation, Momentum and Manifestation), SML (How You Been, which unleashes euphoric and almost ravey, mutant improv) and fusionist Makaya McCraven (whose four collective EPs Off The Record represent a masterstroke of post-production). 

As we’ve come to expect, the last few months of 2025 also saw artists dropping juicy teasers for albums due out in the first quarter of 2026. Gorillaz track ‘The Happy Dictator’, from The Mountain (due in March), is a perky synth bop featuring US pop eccentrics Sparks. 

Garage-pop trio The Cribs delivered the bittersweet surge of ‘A Point Too Hard To Make’, from the forthcoming Selling A Vibe (January). And on a very different tip, Bill Callahan previewed My Days Of 58 (February) with ‘The Man I’m Supposed To Be’, a moody and artful, alt-country number with saxophone undernotes and gritty guitar. 

LA-based crooner Tyler Ballgame, meanwhile, delivered the acoustic, Lennon-ish pop of ‘I Believe In Love’ from his debut album, For The First Time, Again (late January). Fine practitioners of countrified Southern soul and eloquent tellers of stories about hard-luck lives The Delines teased their upcoming release The Set Up (March) with ‘Dilaudid Diane’, while London’s improv-loving fusionists Nubiyan Twist chose the groovy, horns-punctuated ‘Azimuth’ to announce the forthcoming Chasing Shadows (coming in March). Last but not least, quintessentially English pop veterans Squeeze issued the swaggering ‘Trixies, Pt 2’, from Trixies (also March), whose (unreleased) songs themed around a fictional nightclub date from the core members’ teenage years. 

We’ll be back with more New Music highlights in 2026. For now, you can see all of our 2025 articles and playlists, created for the dCS Edit, here.