The Top 25 Tracks of 2025
Against the endless onslaught of trending TikTok sounds and Instagram dumps blaring music out loud, standalone tracks feel more fleeting and scrollable than ever. Amid this overload of ephemeral sounds, it is all the more impressive when a track succeeds in rising above the noise to command attention, lingering long after the social media trend cycle has moved on to the next thing.
Moments that truly resonate have always been more visceral than any algorithm can account for. They happen on the dancefloor, in the festival field; they take you out of yourself, inviting deeper listening and reflection. If albums map the terrain of a year in music, tracks are the landmarks: signals of the shifts happening just beneath the surface.
Left-field surprises captured the energy of new scenes linking up in real time while major pop artists struck out into sublime new terrain. Anthemic hardcore lit the match that fired up festival crowds across the summer while experimental producers stretched sound design into stranger territory and shaped the currents moving club music forward.
These tracks stayed with us, cracked something open, or shifted the landscape simply by existing, whether as quiet revelations or shared highs on the dancefloor. The emotional peaks sometimes felt personal, but they were often noticed on a bigger scale, too – like the drop in Turnstile’s Birds blowing the roof off every room it’s played in.
Each song also opens a doorway into something bigger: a rabbit hole of sounds, influences and scenes to be explored. In a time when more listeners than ever are stepping away from streaming, music that encourages discovery and the broadening of personal tastes is more vital than ever.
Here are the tracks that defined 2025, in ways big and small, according to Crack Magazine.
Wet Leg
Mangetout
Domino
Wet Leg, those Isle of Wight outliers who never looked totally comfortable being the centre of attention, returned in 2025 with the kind of confidence that comes from owning your weirdness. Mangetout, a standout from their bristling second album, Moisturizer, is Wet Leg’s ultimate anti-love song. Don’t be hoodwinked by Rhian Teasdale’s cooing affectations: she serves sardonic sass straight to the jugular of her hapless target, the “bottom feeder”, saying: “You wanna fuck me, I know most people do,” but “I really hope you’re gonna get out soon.” Brutal? Oh, for Teasdale, it’s earned. The track sizzles with sharp wordplay – the humble mangetout, her ‘magic beans’ casually handed to the loser, or a phonetic pun, man-get-out – and lands with twanging riffs, chugging guitars and peak burn-book lyrics. In under four minutes, Wet Leg prove they can sting, seduce and mock you all at once.
Amelia Fearon
Verraco, MC Yallah
Sobe, Sobe
XL
Colombian TraTraTrax co-founder Verraco’s collaboration with electronic rapper and Nyege Nyege label/festival affiliate MC Yallah from this spring’s Basic Maneuvers EP is an exercise in the atmospheric. Threaded between smooth multilingual boasts delivered by Yallah, the production on Sobe, Sobe (literally “rub rub”) floats, rattles, sputters and clanks. At times, it breaks apart language in a storm of drum machine and fuzzed-out bass. The soundscape almost grinds against the more ethereal beat at the heart of the song, threatening to implode before coming right back to the transcendental vibe that carries it along. “I’ve got the desire/ Meaning I’ll never retire,” Yallah raps, confident and playful, as the beat unfurls. Consider this a balm for any scars the year may have left – and an invitation to get your lick back.
E.R. Pulgar
Fonzo, Roaming Data
CTX
Method 808
Is there anything better than a good wobbler? From jungle to garage, dubstep and beyond, the UK underground has been obsessed with low-slung, oscillating basslines for more than 30 years, and the infatuation shows no sign of fading any time soon. Dance music trends come and go like the seasons, but as sure as winter turns to spring, the underground will find new ways to make the bass go vroom again. This year, the prize for the gnarliest wobble goes – perhaps unsurprisingly – to a pair of producers operating out of Bristol. CTX delivers a bassline like a pit of vipers, writhing and contorting in a constant state of flux – and that is more or less all there is to it. No frills, no hidden agenda, just a mammoth, warping bassline that has been reliably upending dancefloors worldwide.
Oscar Henson
CMAT
Euro-Country
CMATBaby / AWAL
The title track from Irish songwriter Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson’s latest album, Euro-Country, is a powerful, offbeat spellbinder. Unpicking complex feelings towards her homeland, this pensive, country-pop epic grieves an earlier time. As twinkling synths gleam, CMAT sings of a post-Celtic Tiger Ireland – her words, initially in Irish and building to a Lana-like crescendo, nipping at the country’s boom-and-bust fate since joining the EU in the 90s and the 2008 economic crash, turbulence that continues to rock the country to this day. If anything, the track’s complexities aren’t buried. Backing vocals nod to the lingering impact of decisions made by Ireland’s leaders, with €€€s in their eyes, which left the country so vulnerable. “Everything that I thought I could be/ He cut it in half.” Euro-Country’s frank, melancholic charm flips the story of economic depression into a melody you can hum along to. It’s unconventional, and entirely CMAT.
Zee Raza-Sheikh
Magdalena Bay
Second Sleep
Mom + Pop
Magdalena Bay, the theatrical, multigenre pop duo who thrive on maximalism, delight in pulling cunning, chaotic tricks from their sleeves. This track – released earlier in the year as a double A-side alongside Star Eyes – opens with a dreamy synth before brilliantly bursting into a jolting jazz verse. Just when you think it’s safe to catch your breath, silky R&B grooves shimmy in with Mica Tenenbaum’s sugar-sweet vocals, before they launch you straight back into a prog-shaped stratosphere. It’s a vertiginous five-minute rollercoaster, weird and dizzying by design but thrilling in every way that matters. Every note gleams with 70s golden-era production, sliding into yacht-rock smoothness in verses that would make Steely Dan grin. Second Sleep somehow manages to tick every genre box on the list, while remaining addictively listenable and ridiculously fun.
Amelia Fearon
Cleyra
There’s Nothing Happening Between Us
Timedance
In today’s attention-deficient era, where short-form vertical video rules algorithms and hip-hop tracks barely scratch the two-minute mark, it’s refreshing to see someone zag wildly in the other direction. This 16-minute-and-54-second exploration by Bristol underground standout Cleyra – released via Batu’s Timedance – is exactly that, entering territory usually reserved for the Ricardo Villaloboses of this world. But rather than adhering rigidly to the minimalism the Chilean is most associated with, Cleyra transplants this experimental mindset into their own sonic orbit. Given seemingly infinite space to meander, There’s Nothing Happening Between Us breathes, bends and breaks down between meditative four-to-the-floor techno, hazy ambient, industrial and IDM. Meanwhile, the sound design oscillates between intense claustrophobia and the sublime – the perfect soundtrack to spiral into a dystopian future.
Isaac Muk
Decius
Nutrition Position (Type I)
Decius Trax
In which Lias Saoudi’s rave and disco project with Paranoid London’s Quinn Whalley and Trashmouth Records’ Liam and Luke May continue their more-acid-than-Gerald foray into agreeably mindless, jugular-targeted dancefloor weapons with their spin-off series of super-squelchy Decius Trax EPs. Their recent second album, Decius Vol II (Splendour and Obedience), was a euphoric, artful triumph of afters-friendly, Hi-NRG existentialism, but the joyful abandon with which they dispatch these sweatbox side hustles is infectious. This steel-plated zinger of metallic basslines and jacking four-to-the-floor kicks, taken from their most recent EP VI release, comes hot on the heels of late-2025 vinyl drops of volumes II to IV – the latter of which includes the band’s live scorcher Dumb Dumb. None of this is subtle or clever, but that’s entirely the point.
Chris Parkin
Moin feat. Sophia Al-Maria, Ben Vince
See
AD 93
Instrumental trio Moin have been quietly honing their moody, post-rock experimentalism since 2021’s stellar debut album, Moot! On 2024’s third record, You Never End, the group began incorporating the impressionistic spoken word of writer Sophia Al-Maria and this year’s slippery, rhythmically propulsive single See features a repeat collaboration, expanding on the artists’ use of vocals as both percussive texture and conveyors of meaning. Powerhouse drummer Valentina Magaletti drives the track with her militaristic snare rolls and pinging cymbals before featured composer Ben Vince adds electronically processed saxophones, threading interweaving, off-kilter melody beneath Al-Maria’s evocative, cryptically looping lines: “To name something is to know something and to know something is to know I know nothing and that’s what I really want/ See?” Sparse, expertly layered and enigmatically emotive, See is an expanded Moin building on their subtly evocative soundworld.
Ammar Kalia
Chappell Roan
The Subway
KRA International / Island
If there’s still any doubt about Chappell Roan’s star power, just ask the tourism board in Saskatchewan. On The Subway, Roan fantasises about moving to the Canadian province to escape a devastating breakup, a reference that prompted the Saskatchewan tourism board’s website and social media to be inundated in the week following its release. The tongue-in-cheek humour buried in lovelorn yearning that inspired it is a hallmark of Roan’s songwriting. She told Vogue that its release was delayed because she found it “too painful”, but online her powerhouse cry of “she’s got away” has soundtracked countless uplifting stories of moving on. Awash with dreampop guitars, dramatic violin and percussion juddering like a train, her soaring vocals mine the moments in early-stage heartbreak when even smelling their perfume is enough to send you spiralling. Despite its melancholy introspection, The Subway is a soundtrack for coming out the other side – a moment of pure cathartic release.
Sophie Lou Wilson
Wata Igarashi, Polygonia
Cross Passage
Reclaim Your City
The meeting of these two electronic heavyweights – Munich-based purveyor of trippy techno Polygonia and the similarly minded Japanese producer Wata Igarashi – was a club-crossover highlight this year, traversing dance music’s more hallucinatory textures. Sitting at the midpoint between experimental sound design and club weaponry, Cross Passage manages to satisfy both of these disciplines by reclaiming a key element lost in techno’s recent predisposition to high BPMs and pop samples: tension. The track winds and surges, never quite climaxing as such, building towards a place that is nowhere and everywhere at once. The hypnosis of the key hook tethers the piece, yet on multiple listens, worlds of sound emerge beneath its immediate sonic surface.
Thomas Frost
Fine
I Could
Escho
Last summer, Danish singer-songwriter Fine emerged as one of Copenhagen’s most underrated new voices with her debut album, Rocky Top Ballads. A graduate of the Rhythmic Music Conservatory, which counts her Coined bandmate Astrid Sonne among its alumni, she has since found her own space within a scene so buzzy that music journalists spotlighting the city’s emerging talent effectively became a meme in 2025. As her first release since that album, I Could pulls its influences into new shapes, drawing from shimmering dreampop and 90s US college rock, with grunge-fuzzed tremolo guitars quivering over a swaggering bassline from Lola Hammerich. Fine’s vocals hover coolly above the arrangement: “Tonight is the only time I could make it/ I could come up to your place, babe.” Lyrically sparse yet loaded with subtext, Fine’s writing favours atmosphere and hazy imagery over narrative clarity – an approach that feels refreshing in an era dominated by hyperspecific pop confessionals.
Rosie Byers
Beatrice Dillon
Basho
Portraits GRM
ChatGPT, simplify Nishida Kitarō’s complicated (at least to me) philosophy of basho so I can confidently write about how the brilliant track of the same name by avant-club producer Beatrice Dillon embodies the idea. Please. Of course. It’s not a physical place but an abstract space where things exist, relate and make sense. It’s also a place where opposites can coexist. Would you like me to write a review of the track? I see! I think that’s probably enough to help me convey how Dillon employs her own similarly open-ended mindset – as hinted at on 2020’s Workaround – to create a very basho 20-minute track of hyperbright, rhythmic, ping-ponging pointillist clusters that never repeat or resolve, and which harness tensions between a frankly wild variety of sounds and styles, like footwork, fractured techno, Japanese city pop and icy Trevor Jackson electro, without ever sounding like any of them. But thanks anyway.
Chris Parkin
Oli XL, Chanel Beads
Love and Pop
Warp
This collaboration between Stockholm producer Oli XL and Chanel Beads feels like a dream half-corrupted by static. Sharing its name with Hideaki Anno’s 1998 coming-of-age classic – and echoing the film’s handheld, lo-fi aesthetic in its video – the track leans into a kind of enjoyably warped digital intimacy, where affection arrives blurred or half-processed. Oli’s scratchy, glitchy hijinks – think bright folktronica, skittish IDM and Dilla wonkiness – warp and twist the New York band’s sad romance and playful lyrics, flipping a sped-up sample from Chanel Beads’ Idea June from cloud-soft vocal into something approaching a proper pop hook. With longing, desirous lyrics – “I heard that you’re bad now/ I think I’m glued onto your back now” – set against warped, erratic beats, this is a love song rendered through shimmering scraps of signal.
Hollie Hilton
Jawnino
LivFlare (Broadway Market)
True Panther
The myth of Jawnino is beginning to eclipse the man himself, and LivFlare (Broadway Market) only thickens the fog around him. Here, the London rapper bottles the mood of the city in winter, delivering an atmospheric vignette as elusive as it is vivid. LivFlare… plays like a love letter to late-night London: chipmunked vocals drifting over a buzzing, minimal bassline. Jawnino’s writing remains his sharpest tool, packing entire stories into a handful of bars, while producers Tony Seltzer and Laron give the track its cold, crystalline edge. The visuals, courtesy of Frost County, mirror that rawness, capturing the buzz of Broadway Market and the city at large. Jawnino’s pull is magnetic – he sketches worlds in half-breaths, letting the atmosphere do the heavy lifting. The whispers that emerged around his name last year are only going to get louder now.
Sik Frydas
Facta
Jets
Wisdom Teeth
When Facta – who you’ll probably know as K-Lone’s Wisdom Teeth co-pilot – first arrived on our dance music scene over a decade ago, he turned heads with a leftfield yet clubby take on post-dubstep and the bass music emerging out of Bristol. Naturally, his style has evolved, pulling in everything from house, UKG and minimal to dembow and drum ’n’ bass, and his 2025 album GULP hones this long-forged palette into a sharp, distinct sound. Standout track Jets is the most dancefloor-ready of the seven, opening with a fuzzy pad that melts into a subtle, shuffling groove, pitching up somewhere between 2-step and turn-of-the-millennium tech house. Its bassline growls and synth line twinkles, creating a heater with the space and heft to move a White Isle superclub, while retaining the detail and drive to shake basement raves.
Isaac Muk
Model/Actriz
Cinderella
True Panther / Dirty Hit
Genres that deal in excess – industrial, say, or glam – have long doubled as playgrounds for homoeroticism, transgression and queerness. Model/Actriz are close studies of this venerable tradition: Cinderella sees Cole Haden excavate a childhood memory of a doomed Disney-themed party and frame it as a confession over brooding, muscular dance-punk. Like so much of Model/Actriz’s second album, Pirouette, Cinderella struts a line between restraint and release. Here, that tension is created through the melding of sparse production – the scratchy guitar, the throbbing bassline – with Haden’s playful, deadpan come-ons (“Astonishing! Utterly divine!”) and the slippages into almost bracing vulnerability (“The way you speak it makes me want to cry”). A game of cat-and-mouse between ego and id, Cinderella’s payoff lands about halfway through, with a simple, human declaration: “OK! I’ll share this!”
Louise Brailey
Addison Rae
Headphones On
Columbia
Headphones On sounds like a lost late-90s radio hit, echoing Janet Jackson and Madonna deep cuts, with a breathy spoken-word bridge that channels Britney’s In the Zone. Rae has never shied away from referencing pop’s greats, nor from wanting to join their ranks. The mantra-like song reads like an inner monologue as she reaches for their world, romanticising her reality and daydreaming her worries away – whether it’s her parents’ unhappy marriage or fears of being eclipsed by a new It Girl on the block. “Addison gets it. She gets us,” one comment reads on its video, depicting a pink-haired Rae riding an imaginary horse through Reykjavík’s stark landscapes as she escapes into her own world after a shift at the supermarket. After proving this year that she really can reinvent herself as a pop star, Headphones On casts her as a vessel for her own fantasy – and her listeners’ too.
Rosie Byers
Tracey
Sex Life
AD 93
From the moment the spliced-up vocal rushes in on Tracey’s Sex Life, there is nowhere to hide. The London duo’s breakout track is propulsive and confrontational, sprinting through its two-and-a-half-minute runtime at full speed, leaving dancefloors gasping for air. The brutally frank opening refrain, “All I wanna do is fuck,” is immediately swallowed by glitchy dubstep with a deep, wobbling bassline, an urgent, repetitive siren heightening the track’s sense of uneasy tension, while Jersey club-infused textures add subtle contrast. Songs about sex are nothing new, but on Sex Life, there is no sexual healing in sight. Rather than soft sensuality or brazen self-assurance, the atmosphere is jarring and dissociative – until, that is, grime MC Riko Dan bursts in with his raw bravado and rapid-fire flow, injecting the cold main verse with carnal lust. Compulsion or desire? As always, it’s complex.
Sophie Lou Wilson
Alex G
Afterlife
RCA
At 32, Alex Giannascoli has well and truly aged out of the wunderkind bracket. It makes sense, then, that the former bard of Bandcamp chose to kick off his major label career with a single contemplating shifting identities and second chances. “We were mean and 17,” he recalls, squinting back at a youth spent “rolling in the tiger grass” over the sun-drenched shimmer of mandolin and snares. Later, he reflects, “Once I was a mockingbird,” before asserting, “I’m your man/ I can bring you back again.” In the ecstatic post-chorus, he speaks of being reborn, selecting Celtic synths and vaporous vocal harmonies to communicate his spiritual enlightenment. Hopeful yet warmly nostalgic, Afterlife is ultimately a compelling introduction to Giannascoli’s second chapter.
Gemma Samways
Jasmín
Bite the Hand
Hessle Audio
Ever since Hessle Audio released their first record 18 years ago, the crew has had a knack for burning mostly unknown, precocious talent directly into the core of dance music’s consciousness. Think Bruce, Anz, Ploy, Toumba, Shanti Celeste, Objekt, James Blake… the list goes on. Fitting, then, that their 50th recording is helmed by yet another fast-rising star – Amsterdam’s Jasmín. In classic Hessle style, Bite the Hand is difficult to genre-fy, leaning on intricate percussion to set the tempo until an unmistakably massive, almost disrespectfully gully bassline evokes the glory days of dubstep. Over the course of the track, variations are layered and elongated – wobbling, purring, meowing and roaring – until it all gradually falls back to the same percussion that opened it minutes before.
Isaac Muk
Kinlaw & Franco Franco
Pitstop 2024
Drowned by Locals
Ever get the feeling that our billionaire techno-corporate overlords and the black bricks in our pockets are engineering our thoughts and feelings? So do Bristol duo Kinlaw & Franco Franco. “The machine looms – it watches you from within/ The finger points, but the face is missing,” they casually yelp in Italian over dazed new jack swing. Pitstop 2024 may worry about screen time becoming a substitute for reality, but there’s also resignation – even Franco Franco admits he, too, is a daily commuter to his online spaces, “out of pure habit”. There’s plenty of art concerning this topic that can feel very r/Im14andthisisdeep, but the plainspoken turns of phrases here not only connect more honestly – they hauntingly show how normalised it’s all become.
Nathan Evans
Dean Blunt, Elias Rønnenfelt
Tears on His Rings and Chains
World Music
Elias Rønnenfelt’s woozy Tears on His Rings and Chains unfurls with a disarmingly gentle acoustic guitar intro. The soft-paced ballad, elegantly produced by Dean Blunt and Vegyn, feels like slipping into sleep, its stripped-back, cinematic rhythm lulling the listener into a place of safety. With his Bowie-esque vocals, Rønnenfelt darkly mulls over a fraying relationship: “It’s just a thing/ How we co-exist/ A joint pair of wings,” he drawls, his spiky reflections against tender instrumentation both zingy and effortless. The track’s finesse comes as no surprise after Blunt, Rønnenfelt and Vegyn teamed up earlier in the year for Lucre, a mesmerising experimental EP. Together again here, the trio share more of their magic chemistry. As the song closes, Rønnenfelt washes the scene out like movie credits, as if knowing their time is up, with a soothing refrain of “yeah, yeah, yeahs”.
Zee Raza-Sheikh
Fakemink, Ecco2K, Mechatok
MAKKA
EtnaVeraVela
This year, Fakemink levelled up. His once lo-fi world now feels expansive, filled with his newfound star power and the unmistakable glow of MAKKA. Swerving between indie euphoria and cloud-rap mystique, the track lands with a hook from Drain Gang’s Ecco2k, his voice drifting through the mix like smoke, while Fakemink rides the beat with bratty swagger and bright-eyed braggadocio. The production, courtesy of Mechatok and Deer Park, is absolutely electric: motorised percussion, wiry guitar lines and pulsing synths create a sense of motion that Fakemink matches bar for bar. At 20, he’s outgrowing his underground beginnings – and he knows it. With lines about high-end fashion and the dizzying thrill of his ascent (“Really smokin’ flavours in Bottega, got my bag up”), he captures the thrill of the moment. MAKKA feels like the perfect anthem for this generation’s underground – a little reckless, a little nostalgic and completely rooted in the now.
Sik Frydas
Turnstile
Birds
Roadrunner
2025 cemented what we’ve already known for quite some time: there is simply no other band doing it like Turnstile, who have taken their mega-catchy brand of anthemic hardcore and dynamite-blasted their own niche in rock music. The term ‘post-hardcore’ means a lot of things to a lot of people, but with Birds, Turnstile push the envelope with a closed fist covered in brass knuckles. Cramming three mini-suites into just under two-and-a-half minutes, Birds shifts from ear-tingling ambient synth drone to a breakneck moshpit kick-off, before ending with a half-speed floorboard-stomping finale. Frontman Brendan Yates’ ecstatic vocals remain Turnstile’s secret sauce, leading the track through its tidal wave of searing guitars and whirlwind drums. The song sounds both dirty and clean at the same time, like sharp bleach slowly eroding through polished concrete. Turnstile are a band that has made it their mission to gleefully devour everything in their path, and we should be so lucky to see their hunger never be satiated.
Cameron Cook
Rosalía
Berghain
Columbia
Rosalía has never been one to stick to the confines of genre. Ever since the release of her 2017 debut album Los Ángeles, the Spanish singer has variously applied an earworming melodic pop sensibility to everything from flamenco folk, R&B storytelling and hip-hop swing on 2018’s breakout record El Mal Querer, to bass-driven reggaeton and dembow rhythms on 2022’s Motomami. In an era of cyclical algorithmic slop, the Rosalía sound is one of attention-grabbing surprises.
Nowhere is this capacity to startle more apparent than on her 2025 single Berghain. Featuring frenetic orchestral strings, dramatic choral harmonies, thunderous timpani, signature yearning vocals from Björk, gritty exclamations from Yves Tumor and leaping coloratura vocals from Rosalía herself, the track runs at just under three minutes but listens like the baroque drama of a symphonic odyssey.
Much more than just classical strings embellishing and adding emotion to a radio-friendly pop track, Berghain enthralls because of its slippery nature, sitting somewhere between Vivaldi’s string arpeggiations, an operatic aria and avant-garde pop. It’s a high-wire act, one that reflects the tension of the track itself, forever on the verge of collapsing under the weight of its own grandiosity. The opening strings, played by the London Symphony Orchestra, immediately create a cinematic sense of scene-setting – an 18th-century period drama – before the Catalan choir, Escolanía de Montserrat, deliver histrionic German lyrics (“Seine Liebe ist meine Liebe/ Sein Blut ist mein Blut,” translated as “His love is my love/ His blood is my blood”). Rosalía’s piercing soprano then puts us in the frame of a requiem, with a dramatic D minor key mirroring the harmonic DNA of Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, before Björk’s “divine intervention” vocals transport us to her own world of avant-pop experimentation. Finally, Yves Tumor’s quoting of the Mike Tyson line “I’ll fuck you till you love me” heralds the arrival of pulsing techno kick drums that emulate the cavernous club of the track’s title.
It’s an almost overwhelming amount of orchestration in such little space. Without following a typical verse-chorus song structure, it might seem easy to become lost in the song’s veering movements. Yet, it’s Rosalía’s distinctive voice that is both the anchor and the emotive key to the track’s power. Effortlessly descending from a soaring, operatic tone to plaintive Spanish-language lyrics on heartbreak and loss, her vocals guide the listener on this dramatic journey through what seems like a catastrophic breakup (likely the 2023 end of her engagement to Puerto Rican producer Rauw Alejandro).
In 2025, a year that saw pop dominated by Olivia Dean’s play-it-safe crooning, Taylor Swift’s lacklustre confessional The Life of a Showgirl and Sabrina Carpenter’s conventional songwriting thematics on Manchild, Berghain plays like a delightful outlier. In its leaning towards classical high art, it has more in common with Björk’s late-90s experimentalism than the radio fodder passing for pop in 2025, while its multilingual lyrics are a riposte to the constant attention given to native-English-language music.
And yet, Berghain isn’t a niche pursuit. At the time of writing, the track is running close to 50 million streams, making it undeniably pop by simple virtue of its mass appeal. It’s our song of the year because of the sheer power of its confident maximalism, for having the virtuosity to freewheel through classical and non-classical genre boundaries, and for helping to challenge exactly what we mean by popstars and the music they make today. In an era that can feel terrifyingly dominated by the growth values of streaming services and the capital accumulation of AI, there is hope in listeners flocking to Rosalía’s distinctly human search for emotion and difference.
Ammar Kalia