Best of 2025
Where to begin?
That’s the question I’ve found myself asking repeatedly throughout 2025, every time I’ve tried to make sense of some new atrocity or grotesque new development, whether drawn from the world at large or from the realm of country music.
We’ve brought back the R-slur? Where even to begin with that?
Someone let Megan Moroney sing live again? How does this keep happening?
The bullets were inscribed with a furry meme? What?
My mother is sending Jesse Welles videos in a family group text? What kind of fresh hell is this?
I say that not to make light of actual injustices or to draw any kind of false equivalences. Instead, it’s a matter of finding myself, now in my mid-40s and a full 20 years into writing published criticism, struggling to make sense of it all when it just hits different. 2025 was a year without a single overarching theme– reactionary “Try That In A Small Town” grievances and Know Your Place Aggression were still there, for sure, and the tree that was already on fire was still fully ablaze. But there wasn’t a clear throughline to latch onto to tie it all together in a neat package, so where to begin?
Then, last week, the brilliant tech journalist Sarah Jeong published a reflection on the year’s political violence that distilled this inability to make sense of it all. Writing for The Verge, Jeong noted:
“You do not bring a persuasive argument to a gunfight.”
Indeed, the need to bring some kind of rhetorical clarity to the past year in country music is futile, and Jeong’s statement captured for me why that’s the case. Culturally, there has been a vocal movement to vilify the very concept of empathy, which has long been what we’ve championed here as the foundation for the finest and most important country music. And many of the genre’s biggest mainstream acts– and not just a subset of past-their-prime artists looking to cash in on a grift, as we’ve seen in past years– have spent the year aligning themselves with the political class who’ve made those very arguments.
The “& Western” part of the genre is steeped in the iconography of gunfights and outlaws, so the metaphor sticks its landing in this case. And there’s a grim logic to approaching an attack on empathy– on the value of finding connection in shared experiences and a belief that humans are better, together, in every way that matters– as an act of violence.
As I alluded to in my A Separate Peace essay earlier this year, I recognize that there’s not a persuasive argument that will dissuade anyone from embracing Morgan Wallen’s petulant, unapologetic crusade against personal growth. Hell, tastemakers like Pitchfork and The New York Times have cited his offerings as the best country music of 2025. Nor is there a rational counterargument to the boorishness of professional shitposter Gavin Adcock or to the tradwife-coded personae of Lauren Watkins or Emily Ann Roberts. Those who’ve decided to make A-listers out of minimal talents like Moroney and Bailey Zimmerman aren’t going to rethink those decisions based on an analysis of how the southern collegiate Greek system they personify exists to uphold white supremacy and the elite class.
These are but attempts at bringing a persuasive argument to a gunfight.
So the mission for 2026 is two-fold. It’s essential to continue to maintain a finely-tuned bullshit detector to be able to name things for what they are with accuracy and reliability, and to do so without regard for whether that makes people uncomfortable. Over the last year, for instance, nothing has brought us more negativity on social media than pointing out that Jesse Welles is not the second coming of Woody Guthrie and is, instead, South Park with an aughts hipster haircut.
More important, though, is that we continue to highlight the ways that country music is not and has never been a monolith, no matter how tightly Music Row might be attempting to circle its wagons. And that, in doing so, we soundly reject the notion that empathy is somehow a sign of weakness. Despite what the Wallen and Moroney apologists might think, the best country music of 2025 leaned hard into empathy as the basis of profound storytelling, and it did so across doggedly traditional and progressive takes on the genre’s form.
Our 2025 best-of, then, isn’t about persuasive arguments: It’s about showcasing exactly how much ammunition is available for the fight ahead. It’s where to begin for 2026. Saddle up, y’all.
…about the world at large and your mother, jonathan: this is the “latest comments” thread next to your preamble on january 4, 2026:
Tom on Every No. 1 Single of the 2000s: Toby Keith, “American Soldier”
Tom P on Every No. 1 Single of the Seventies: Charlie Rich, “Behind Closed Doors”
Tom P on Every No. 1 Single of the 2000s: Toby Keith, “American Soldier”
Joanne on Every No. 1 Single of the Seventies: Charlie Rich, “Behind Closed Doors”
Sam S on Every No. 1 Single of the Seventies: Charlie Rich, “Behind Closed Doors”
Bobby on Every No. 1 Single of the Seventies: Donna Fargo, “Superman”
MarkMinnesota on Every No. 1 Single of the Seventies: Charley Pride, ”A Shoulder to Cry On”
MarkMinnesota on Every No. 1 Single of the Seventies: Donna Fargo, “Superman”
those song titles sound at lot like some of last weekend’s news headlines or soundbites from mar a lago. your mum may just have had a notion of what bizarre and grotesque times we are living in right now (not least thanks to some of the american voters and their appetite for the weird, i may add). and i’m not merely referring to jesse welles’ hairstyle or maduro travelling to nyc wearing shower slippers and a rabbit hat with absolutely no prayer finding a friendly shoulder. i don’t even want to imagine what the late great karl lagerfeld would have said about that outfit. he was already quite some time ago of the opinion that people wearing sweat pants in public “have lost control over their life”.
more to the country topic, morgan wallen (accidently) had a point when claiming “i’m not the problem”. he even was rather spot on, if his arguably questionable personal point of view would be applied to country music at large in 2025. it was a stellar year for albums, however, also one in which the genre carefully tried to stay within its traditional boundaries and limits. who in his right mind would want to risk his lucchese boots for shower slippers in today’s climate?
looking forward to country universe’s 2025 album ranking – and greetings to your mum: wicked sense of today’s grotesque era that we’ve entered as well as of classic 70’s rockstar hairdos.
I’m imagining that Welles’ shtick scans differently outside of the US, where, depending on which of his 8163849 tracks has gone viral on any given week, he’s passed around in breathless terms by either the Joe Rogan Bros– his stint on Rogan’s podcast is the source of this piece’s banner image– or by every Normie Resistance Liberal.
Neither group is thinking at all about how he’s playing them like a fiddle.
Hell, tastemakers like Pitchfork and The New York Times have cited his offerings as the best country music of 2025.
Well, now, THAT is…fascinating. I can’t really speak for Pitchfork, but it’s been my impression that the people of the political persuasion championing the likes of Morgan Wallen and the like distrust at least a few traditional/mainstream/legacy media outlets such as the NYT, seeing them as too left-leaning. I would be very, very interested to see their reactions to the paper spotlighting Morgan Wallen’s album as the best of 2025. Something tells me it’d be somewhat akin to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect in reverse, i.e., ”Yeah, they got that right. But they’re WRONG on EVERYTHING ELSE.”
(As an aside, it ain’t been real fun as a conservative country music fan seeing the likes of him, Gavin Adcock, and others championed by those who are, shall we say, closer to my political bent. Like, bruh, just because an artist shares your political beliefs doesn’t elevate or even validate their ”art” if you have any taste at all.)
Also, great characterization of Gavin Adcock. I once described him as ”Reddit edgelord personality” come to life, but “professional shitposter” is just as accurate, if not more so.
Wallen was cited in year-end features by Pitchfork (one of just five country / country-adjacent songs in their list of the 100 best songs of the year), New York Times (Jon Caramanica, for better or worse, always has questionable taste in mainstream country), and the New Yorker (where the usually reliable Amanda Petrusich insists that Wallen’s popularity translates into artistic merit, in a wholly unconvincing argument). Among other ostensibly left-leaning outlets. It’s not just the Whiskey Riffs of the world going to bat for him.
“Reddit edgelord personality” is also spot-on. He’s barely had a presence for a year, and I’m already beyond sick of Adcock’s bullshit.
I have to say all of that is…quite unfortunate. And I’m not quite sure what to make of it. It all strikes me as ”how do you do, fellow country fans?” But I will say I thought it was pretty funny how Pitchfork hung their entire blurb on one line in the song. I was just over here thinking, “hey, let me introduce you to the Turnpike Troubadours song ‘On the Red River’…”
I was over Gavin Adcock about the time he started ragging on Charley Crockett for what Crockett was doing on the NYC subways, as if Crockett was the first artist to ever do one kind of music before switching to another. And then Aaron Watson had to jump in, which I thought was pretty disappointing for a dude who allegedly knows his country music history. Has he not ever heard of Conway Twitty or Dan Seals?
And it’s not as if Gavin Adcock’s music is really anything to write home about in the first place. He’s a Wish.com or Temu William Clark Green at best.
I am back in the saddle again and ready to ride into 2026!