December 9, 2025/1608 words/8 min read
Albums I Kept Coming Back to This Year
Music that stuck with me in a year when almost nothing did.
I got so excited about writing this post that I ended up wiring a quick component just to have a nicer way of showing the album art. Try hovering or tapping the album art!
I finally figured out why lofi music stopped doing anything for me. It used to help me focus, mainly by softening the edges of long days and making work feel a little less mechanical. Recently it just turned into background fog. Too safe, too smooth, too interchangeable! After a while it feels like listening to the inside of a productivity app. You can't even tell when a song ends and another one starts. Meh.
Sometime in spring I went back to real albums. Mostly metal, but also things far outside that orbit. Between work sessions, late evenings and train rides, I found a handful of records that stayed in rotation long enough to be worth speaking about. These are five albums released in 2025, in no particular order, that I want to name before the year ends.
The reactions I've read to Sleep Token usually fall into the same buckets. Too polished, too dramatic, too pop, too not-metal! It feels like there's always a purity test running in the background, and I have no interest in it. I failed the purity test immediately and bought their record.
Even in Arcadia became the album I put on when I needed to work but didn't want to disappear into beige noise again. It hits a very specific balance for me. The songs are melodic enough to be memorable, heavy enough to feel like real music and smooth enough that my brain can slip past them when I'm deep in a task. That mix is rare! The album can sit in the background without dissolving into fuzz. Its different moods still feel like they come from the same person. Some tracks are closer to pop, some lean into metalcore, and a few wander into almost R&B territory. On first listen it can feel inconsistent, like that playlist you use to dump unsorted songs into. After a few full runs it locks in and the variety becomes part of the comfort. I know there will be big choruses and dramatic drops and a few quieter moments that feel like coming up for air.
A couple of songs feel like variations on the same idea, and sometimes the production is so "glossy" that it flattens the emotional impact. There are points where I wish it sounded a bit uglier and less compressed. A bit more human, I guess? But the overall effect still works on me. If I look back at the hours I spent this year in deep-focus mode, AirPods Max on, noise cancellation on, hoodie up, the world muted, Even in Arcadia is probably what I was listening to.
Katatonia have this wild grip on me that I've stopped trying to explain logically. They've been with me through so many versions of my life that they now feel like a companion who always shows up in the exact emotional temperature I'm already in. They're my default setting for nights when I'm not trying to be cheered up but also refuse to drown in my own thoughts.
Nightmares as Extensions of the Waking State feels like Katatonia settling into their own skin, faults and all. This is the first album without founding guitarist Anders Nyström. What I hear is Jonas Renkse still steering the ship into the same dark waters with the same steady hand. They stick to playing the emotional tune they built over decades, and it seems to be more than enough.
What I love most is the confidence in their pacing. There's no hurry, no need to frontload the chorus. The songs flow at a pace that would be career suicide for a younger band. They know exactly how much space to give a phrase, how long to let a solo ring. That's what decades of making sad music and refining it instead of beating a dead horse sound like. And yeah, sure, not every track is a knockout. A couple of tracks might blend together in that way Katatonia albums sometimes do, where you look at your phone and realize you're three songs further along than you thought. You can also hear the shape of the record before it fully reveals itself. That's part of its charm. I no longer expect Katatonia to surprise me or blow my mind, and that's fine.
This year, that reliability feels like a gift, especially when my brain is cluttered with too much news, too many tabs and general modern-life noise. An album that holds its tone without trying to impress me is a relief. Katatonia hit me in the part of the chest that only they and Woods of Ypres know how to reach.
Cwfen were the one real surprise this year. I had never heard the name before (it's apparently pronounced "coven") and expected nothing from them. Then I found an album that felt like it had been waiting for me. Thanks, Apple Music, for a rare win from your otherwise weak-at-best recommendation engine.
Sorrows is their debut, which to me is staggering given how confident it sounds. It mixes doom metal with goth, gaze, post-punk and something almost ritualistic. The guitars are heavy and slow, wrapped in a hazy vibe that keeps everything from turning into a mess. Agnes Alder's vocals float, scratch and disappear again, and the whole thing moves and breathes in an odd but beautiful way.
The emotional impact caught me way off guard! Some moments feel like memories someone shares with you. There are long and surprisingly patient builds, followed by sudden flashes of intensity and a pullback into something fragile. It hits the part of my brain that doom metal usually can't reach without exhausting me. It's also flawed in ways I weirdly enjoy. A couple of tracks feel too stretched, some transitions don't land, and there are times when you can tell they're still figuring out what Cwfen should be. They feel like growing pains.
Sorrows was the discovery on this list. It made me excited about the idea that there are still bands out there I've never heard of who can rearrange how a genre feels in my head. That's a rare feeling and I'm holding onto it!
Paradise Lost are firmly in their "old man yells at cloud" era, and I mean that as a compliment! Ascension is their seventeenth album, their first new material in five years since Obsidian, and it doesn't sound like a band trying to keep up with anyone. Like Katatonia, they've lived with their own themes for long enough that there's no anxiety left around them.
What sticks with me about this album is the emotional weight underneath it all. It feels like a long, tense silence before you're finally allowed to speak at a normal volume. The riffs are heavy without being suffocating. The melodies lean into goth without collapsing into annoyance, and Greg Mackintosh's guitar leads are so far up in the mix it's almost absurd. It works because that's always been the band's signature. The whole thing feels like a conversation with their younger selves from the Symbol of Life era, in the same tone they've spent decades perfecting.
There are spots where it drifts away and a couple of songs that blur together if I'm not paying attention. Twelve tracks is just on the edge of too much for one sitting. But then a chorus lands just right, or a small melodic turn suddenly hits, and I remember why I keep reaching for it. It stayed with me!
Like Sleep Token but turned up to eleven, Taylor Swift's work lives inside a constant debate zone now. Every release arrives with arguments already locked in. Too pop! Not pop enough! Too aware! Not aware enough!
The Life of a Showgirl is a good album in a strange space between the genuine and the theatre. Taylor Swift reunites with Max Martin and Shellback for soft pop and soft rock, and at twelve tracks and forty-one minutes it's one of her most compact records. Its scope is the problem! Some songs are built for giant stadiums while others feel small and almost unguarded, like she forgot to put the diva mask back on. I live for those little slips because they feel like catching someone mid-thought. Those moments hold the album up for me and make it human. There's a tired lyric here, a clumsy phrase there, a melody that shows a bit of vulnerability. They're not everywhere, but when they appear, they hit that familiar nerve that reminds you why people care about her in the first place.
The album is still messy, though, which is surprising given its runtime. A few tracks wander, and some ideas feel undercooked. The effort to polish everything sometimes scrubs away the actual meaning. The stadium anthems and intimate confessions sit next to each other without much connective tissue, and the tonal whiplash doesn't work.
Still, I kept returning to it! I don't sit down and listen front to back as I do with her best records, but it works great as background music for cooking, cleaning, doing the dishes and watering plants. A few songs landed right away. A few I tend to skip without guilt.
Being a long-time fan means accepting that not every album has to be a statement. Some can be another chapter in her life. This one feels slightly chaotic but super reflective of where she is right now, and that was enough to keep it in the rotation.