Albums I Kept Coming Back To This Year

December 9, 2025 · 1952 words · 10 min read

Music that actually stuck with me in a year when almost nothing did.

I got so excited about writing this post that I ended up building 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 though 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 (it's a taste I never quite shook from my younger years), 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 matter. This isn't a top five or a countdown, it's five albums released in 2025, in no particular order, that I want to name before the year ends.

Sleep Token are one of those bands everyone seems to have an opinion about. Among the ones I've read: Too polished! Too dramatic! Too pop! Too not-metal! It feels like there's always a purity test running in the background, I have no interest in that. Personally, I failed the purity test immediately and just liked the 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! Most music either demands attention or dissolves completely into background fuzz. Here it feels like witnessing different moods of the same individual. It does have a few tracks that are closer to pop, then some that 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.

It's also not perfect. A couple of songs feel like variations on the same idea, and sometimes the production is so "glossy" that it just 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. The best compliment I can give it is this: If I look back at the hours I spent this year in full deep focus mode, AirPods Max on, noise cancellation on, hoodie up, the world fully muted, Even in Arcadia is probably what I was listening to.

Katatonia have this strange grip on me that I've stopped trying to explain logically. They've been with me through so many versions of my life that at this point they feel less like a band and more 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 fully into their own skin, faults and all. This is the first album without founding guitarist Anders Nyström, and I know that matters to a lot of people. For me, what I hear is Jonas Renkse still steering the ship into the same dark waters with the same steady hand. Despite their age, they're not chasing a new identity or polishing old ideas, playing the emotional tune they built over decades seems to be more than enough, and they move through their gloom with a comfort you could only get from living with your regrets long enough that they stop startling you. Sappy comparison, I know, but I swear it rings true!

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, how to leave you alone with yourself for just a second longer than is comfortable. That's experience! That's the result of making sad music for decades and somehow refining it instead of beating a dead horse. And yeah, sure, not every track is a knockout. A track or two might blend into each other 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 fine, I guess it's part of its charm. Not every album needs to surprise you or blow your mind, and Katatonia would probably never do that to me again.

And this year, that reliability feels like a gift, especially when my brain is cluttered with too much news, too many tabs and just general modern life noise. Having an album that simply held its tone without trying to impress me is a relief. Call it maturity, call it confidence, call it the comfort of a band that knows exactly who it is. Whatever the label I'd slap on them, they hit me in that part of the chest only Katatonia and Woods of Ypres know how to reach.

Cwfen were the one genuine surprise this year, I had never heard the name before (it's apparently pronounced "coven"), never expected anything from them, and suddenly I was sitting there with an album that felt like it had been waiting for me to find it. Thanks Apple Music, rare win for their otherwise weak-at-best recommendation engine.

Sorrows is their debut, which to me is staggering given how confident it sounds. It's doom metal, but it's not just doom. It's goth, not silly goth, as I like to call it. It drifts into gaze, then into post punk and somehow also into something almost ritualistic. The guitars are heavy and slow, but they're also wrapped in this hazy vibe that keeps everything from turning into a mess. Agnes Alder's vocals float, then scratch, then disappear again and the whole thing moves and breathes in an odd, but beautiful way.

And the emotional impact caught me way off guard! There are moments on this album that feel less like songs and more like memories someone shares with you. There are long and surprisingly patient builds, then sudden flashes of intensity, and then a pull back into something that feels fragile. It hits the part of my brain that doom metal usually can't reach without exhausting me. It's also quite flawed, which I weirdly enjoy. There are a couple of tracks feel too stretched, some transitions don't quite land, and there are times where you can tell they're still figuring out what Cwfen should be. But it's the kind of imperfection that suggests strong growth, rather than a dead end.

If the other albums on this list were companions of mine, Sorrows feels like a discovery. 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. Quite similarly to Katatonia, it's a band that has lived with its own themes for long enough that there's no anxiety left around them.

What sticks with me about this album is the emotional weight that sits underneath all of it, it feels almost like going through a long tension of silence before you're finally allowed to speak at a normal volume. The riffs are heavy and they achieve that 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, but 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, spoken in their same tone, the one that took decades to perfect.

There are spots where it drifts away, there are a couple of songs that blur together if I'm not paying attention, and 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, her 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!

From where I'm sitting, The Life of a Showgirl is a good album in a strange space between the genuine and the theatre. It's soft pop and soft rock reuniting with Max Martin and Shellback, and at twelve tracks and forty-one minutes it's actually one of her most compact records. The problem isn't length though, it's scope! Some songs are very clearly built for giant stadiums while others feel small and almost unguarded, like she forgot to put the diva mask back on. I love and live for those little slips, they feel like catching someone mid-thought. And those moments are what hold the album up for me, they 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, some ideas feel undercooked, it's what you get with effort to polish everything. Sometimes it scrubs away the actual meaning. When it tries to be something for everyone with the stadium anthems and the intimate confessions sitting right next to each other, that tonal whiplash doesn't work.

And yet I kept returning to it! Not like her best records, where I sit down and listen front to back, but it seems to great as mostly background music for cooking, cleaning, doing the dishes, watering plants. A few songs landed right away. A few I tend to skip without guilt.

And being a long-time fan means accepting that not every album has to be a statement. Some can just be another chapter in her life, it feels slightly chaotic but super reflective about where she is right now. Showgirl feels like that to me, and that was enough for it to stay in the rotation.

These five records stayed with me across the year through work, commutes, restless evenings and those strange in-between moments where you're not doing anything important but you're very much alive. I listened to plenty of other albums too, but these are the ones that held on tightly enough that I needed to talk about them.