I grew up in a small town in central Nebraska, and as you might imagine, there weren't many opportunities to hear new music around those parts back in the '80s. Even when cable TV arrived in our town, the local cable company refused to carry MTV, because, well, sin. (It's true!) This meant my exposure to new music depended on shows like "Rock Over London" (the pop station in Kearney, KQ106, played it on Sunday nights) and the legendary "Night Flight" on the USA network, which introduced me to so much incredible music from Art of Noise to Laurie Anderson to Tom Tom Club. "Night Flight" is where I first saw the video for French violinist's Jean-Luc Ponty's "Individual Choice," which wowed my young brain with its hyperactive minor 7th synth chords and sped-up video. The album of the same name, released in 1983, must have been one of the first 10 or so albums I ever bought, and while some of it was a bit noodly for my taste, the electronic production still sounds fresh, 42 years later. The album also introduced me, in a way, to the idea of what we now call "mood and activity" music: on a French class trip to Europe in 1984, our bus was winding along twisting mountain roads in Switzerland, and a friend said she was feeling woozy with motion sickness. I gave her my walkman with the cassette of Individual Choice and said, "go listen to this, you'll feel better." As we pulled into our hotel she handed me the walkman and said "oh my gosh, thank you, that actually really helped." Of course, so much of what populates streaming services' "relaxation" playlists nowadays consists of low-effort synth pads and ocean sound effects, but the notion of music as a healing force still matters, I think.

It's hard for me to imagine UK-born, Berlin-based producer Barker hadn't heard Individual Choice before producing his 2019 album Utility, rightly acclaimed for a revolutionary "drum-free" approach to dance music. Philip Sherburne's rave review of that album connected it to similarly floaty productions from Actress and Objekt, imagining the listener "dissolving into the dancefloor." On Stochastic Drift, Barker takes a great leap forward, with a broader, freer approach that's both thrilling and, indeed, hypnotic and relaxing. Standout track "Difference and Repetition" wields brief moments of sharp-edged silence to propel it forward; the title track utilizes almost-natural-sounding skittering drums to end the album on an ecstatic note. I'm not sure I totally understand the mathematical concept of stochastic drift, but from what I gather it's something to do with how processes that feature random fluctuation still have deterministic trends. It's been a tough year for all sorts of reasons, but something about listening to this album reminds me that there is progress, momentum, even amidst chaos. That's healing music in the most profound and thrilling sense.

I'm Gen X, the real greatest generation, so let's keep the '80s references going, shall we, with a quick shout-out to the genius of Kate Bush. The 2022 viral popularity of "Running Up That Hill" was of course thanks to an actually-pretty-well-utilized placement in "Stranger Things," but a reassessment of Bush's work seemed inevitable in our post-pandemic, late-capitalist, cuckoo-bird world. In fact it seems more appropriate to say that Bush truly contains multitudes of geniuses, from her operatic voice to her literary lyrics to her inventive dance moves. As an audio nerd, it's her production skills that have always astounded me; I think about the slight imperfection she programmed into the drum pattern on "Cloudbusting" to make it more naturalistic, and the otherworldly, swooping tones she wrangled from the Fairlight synthesizer.

On DIA, Ela Minus channels Bush's ability to create strange, beguiling sounds: opening track "ABRIR MONTE" seems to evoke Bush directly with its haunting, digeridoo-esque drones. Many tracks on DIA drive towards a stomping dancefloor ecstasy, but even standout banger "QQQQ" still wields fluttering, exotic arpeggios and sizzling static in surprising ways.

I adored 2020's surprisingly-relevant-to-Pandemic-isolation "Dominique," but on DIA, Minus seems to reckon with even deeper anxieties and struggles: how to connect with others, how to make peace with failure, how to just be better. It's an appropriate 1-2 punch, these first two albums on my 2025 list: from Barker, finding our path amidst uncertainty, and from Ela Minus, the rave where we end up, and dance out all our dreams and fears.

Part of what I loved about Kaytra's 2016 album 99.9% was its sprawling variety; it reminded me, in its ambition (as well as hand-drawn purplish cover art) of Prince's 1999. 2025's AIN'T NO DAMN WAY couldn't be more different—it's just over half of 99.9%'s runtime (35 vs. 60 min) and there's no star-turning features or leftfield hits. It's just instrumental jam after instrumental jam, with a kind of breakdance-y strut in most of them (embodied by the kinetic but monochromatic cover art). Pitchfork called it "the sound of an artist casually strolling into his imperial phase," which, sure, crown Kaytra king 4eva, but as someone who will never stop singing the praises of J Dilla's Donuts, an album that's really just a collection of sketches, I don't think Great Albums have to always be double-vinyl Events with Epic Intentionality; sometimes they're just a platter of twelve intoxicating bangers that never left my turntable.

Anyway, back to me. I love doing bits that no-one gets, and one of my faves in my anti-comedy arsenal is to do a thing with similar artist names that riffs on a David Letterman joke from his horribly-received 1995 Oscar hosting monologue where he pretended to introduce Uma to Oprah. The two best ones I have come up with are "DJ Plant Texture, DJ Planet Express," and "Yune Pinku, Yulia Niko." Hold for laughs. Anyway, another obvious one is "Barry Can't Swim, Swimming Paul," and that one carries some sass, I admit, as I'm sick to death of Pasty Brit Dudes With Gizmos and Emotions and Oh So Much Talking. Okay, sure, emoter-in-chief Fred again.. has had some pretty banging output this year, and England sounds like a real bummer these days, but a lot of these guys are just mopey, whiney TikTokkers aping Mikey Streets without the wit or urgency. All this to say, it took me some work getting over these preconceptions to appreciate Loner.

It helped that the world conspired to convince me: everywhere I went, tracks from Loner kept worming their way into my heart; "Childhood" at a sunny pool party, "Kimpton" on the dance floor, "All My Friends" getting me verklempt on a flight to New York. Dammit, I admit it: it's a gorgeous, kaleidescopic album, and it makes me feel things. The Skinny got it right, calling it "fluent in mood, movement, and meaningful reflection."

More about me: I also love gonzo concept albums (see last year's Magdalena Bay). Norwegian Nora Schjelderup, aka Ora the Molecule, has come up with a charmer: Ora is, well, a little molecule who wants to become human, and her wish is granted, and there she goes exploring the world and figuring things out. Cute. It's goofy, like the disco-ball helmet she wears on the cover, and the mid-tempo Lindstrøm-esque electro-disco is jaunty and danceable. It's also easy to giggle at the deadpan, alien-on-earth lyrics: "You lost your big romance? / Nobody cares." So the depths of the emotions at play here really sneak up on you.

It turns out this album emerged from Schjelderup retreating to a cabin in the woods to process a period of grief and loss, and the idea of feeling reduced to almost nothing and re-learning how to be a person will seem familiar to anyone who's been there. It's all revealed on final track, "Becoming Ora": "Maybe tomorrow... it will all be/Somehow better." This isn't so much dance therapy as dance trickery—come let your guard down, play pretend and have a party, but by the end, we're gonna cry it out.

Working at alternative station LIVE 105 in San Francisco back in the year 2000 when Deftones released White Pony, I was deep in a Grandaddy/Radiohead uber-hipster zone, and probably unfairly grouped Deftones into the bro-rock that saturated the station at the time. I'll admit it took me a while to appreciate the grandeur of "Change," and to accurately understand Deftones as, sure, Sacramento nu-metal, but also inheritors of shoegaze and adventurous post-rock. Nowadays, Pony is rightly regarded as a masterpiece that reoriented American rock, and one of my all-time favorite albums.

Well, here they are, 25 years later, and it feels like two or three generations of hard music have come and gone even in the 5 years since their last album (hello, Sleep Token). So it's all the more astonishing that they've returned to redefine the genre again, with an album that feels freer than ever, from the Failure-esque triple time of "i think about you all the time," to 6-minute epic barnstormer "souvenir." The album title supposedly comes from a folder on Chino's computer where he kept the in-progress files, which for a time he considered too personal to release; appropriately, the album is both collosal and intimate.

The Ohio-born and now LA-based multi-hyphenate producer has grabbed the reins back from the Europeans on the "utilizing the building blocks of dance music to express ennui and uncertainty" front, drawing a fascinating throughline from the Chicago origins of house music to this very-2025 hyperspeed tension. While the cover depicts her as "Gadget Girl," a Bjork-esque futuristic automaton, her recording process for The BPM was based around the Roland 404, along with a string quartet, classic sounds all wielded in service of something defiantly "now."

Ugh, I'm ridiculous, I know. Is my #8 album of the year a tense, satirical electronic soundscape exploring the themes of Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which posits that in the surveillance economy, the consumer becomes the raw material from which the product—data—is mined? Doy. It helps that it comes from my favorite Québécois deadpan agitator with production help from Soulwax (with whom I think she's done her best work in the past) so, yeah, it's kinda guaranteed a slot on Party Ben's charty fun times.

But honestly, Davidson has never been more effective, evoking Laurie Anderson in her wry, laconic delivery, and the beats veer from Bauhaus-goth-strut to post-Dare indie sleaze. Pitchfork noted the irony of today's "anti-tech techno," and, sure, we live in a society, but wasn't there already a little bit of a sly wink in Kraftwerk's techno-about-technology agenda, 45+ years ago? To me, Davidson, like Kraftwerk, isn't a polemicist unaware that her technological paintbrush is itself enabled by global capitalism, but is in fact more of a social realist, using technology to talk about technology. The nature of our weird dystopia is that we're all constantly trained to unsee the insanity of what's right in front of us, and like the shockingly real cover photo (it's Atlantic City), all the true visionary has to do is frame it and ask us to look.

Oh, the Drake of it all. On the one hand, how is this dopey Canadian so central in everyone's lives; on the other, the whole deal gave us the song of 2024. While Kendrick's triumphant anthems utilized the brilliantly clear and straightforward production of DJ Mustard, it's exciting to see the return of Malice and Pusha T along with Pharrell on the board, delivering a sound that's not out of place in today's minimalist hip hop landscape but somehow just a little bit edgier and more surprising.

I don't love the John Legend feature, but I'll give it a pass since I could listen to the relentless horn sample on "Inglorious Bastards" on repeat for a week. Ultimately, though, as The Guardian put it, it's the lyrical dexterity on display that feels so refreshing, especially Pusha's relentless gymnastics: "Now I'm ten times the E.B.I.T.D.A./If you let the money talk who speaking up."

I was a fervent champion of Molina's profound, haunting 2017 album Halo, and I couldn't wait for her next project, which I assumed would soon catapult her to critical and popular acclaim. Well, eight years later, it took me a couple weeks to even find out she'd released a new album (why wasn't I notified?!) and at first glance it seems more slight, more acoustic than Halo's almost Krautrocky groove. But as always with an artist so profoundly idiosyncratic as Molina, patience is profoundly rewarded: the entrancing 6/8 time of "intringulado," the Let England Shake-esque surreal folk of "siestas ahi," and the 10-minute string-led epic album closer "rina sol." Listening to Juana Molina is a little like being transported to the Patagonian desert from Times Square: scary, sure; but stop, take a breath, and listen, and find yourself in the midst of a unique, transcendent vision.