The Best Albums of the Year so far
Today is the middle day of the year, so here are the Loud And Quiet Top 20 albums released so far in 2025
Loud And Quiet has never put together a midway AOTY list before. Don’t they ruin the surprise of end-of-year lists? Aren’t people living for that kind of climax right now? How we’ve preserved that high here is by a.) not preferentially numbering our 20 favourite albums of the year so far, and b.) by asking 10 L&Q writers to select their favourite 2 records from the first half of 2025. Fortunately, the entire team has excellent and varied taste.
We hope you find something new and rediscover a release or two that slipped by in the week that Donald Trump Swiss Toni’d a Cybertruck, or when Katy Perry checked to see if no one can hear you being ridiculed in space. It’s been a noisy 6 months.
*Note: If you’d like to listen to the embedded albums all within this post, you can do that by viewing this post in your browser rather than you email inbox, at loudandquiet.substack.com or in the Substack app.