Best of 2025
If what you’re nostalgic for is the cornball humor of “Chattachoochee” and “John Deere Green” or the rah-rah girl power of “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” and “Guys Do it All the Time,” I suppose this nineties country revival has been satisfying. I love all of those records and regard them as classics, and Zach Top reminds me of Daryle Singletary every time I hear “I Never Lie,” which isn’t a bad memory to jog.
But I’m still chasing the impossible high of those nineties female artists who perfected the formula first introduced by Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. They were a bit older and hell of a lot wiser than most of their male counterparts, and they collectively made the best records ever produced in one era by women in country music.
As a teenager, their work sounded like letters from the future, giving guidance on what was to come as life got increasingly more complex. The bar was set so impossibly high that even generational vocal talents like Lari White and Shelby Lynne never made it beyond the B-list. And with singer-songwriters like Gretchen Peters, Kim Richey, and Matraca Berg providing sophisticated and empathetic material to singers as strong as Patty Loveless, Trisha Yearwood, and Pam Tillis, it felt like the genre would keep scaling to new heights.
That impossibly high bar has me still chasing that impossible high. Aside from Kane Brown, nobody from mainstream country in recent years has captivated me the way that those legendary artists did, until 2025 brought two singer-songwriter debuts that still feel impossible in their own right, but these two albums have me feeling like it’s 1995 all over again. – Kevin John Coyne
The Best Album of 2025
Trisha Yearwood
The Mirror
It’s not entirely without precedent for an artist primarily known as a singer to begin writing most of their material later on in their career. It’s been true of three of my own favorite artists whom I have written so much about over the years. Emmylou Harris did it once she became an Americana icon, Olivia Newton-John when her cancer recovery moved her into healing music, and the Chicks when their nationally broadcast crucifixion made it impossible for anyone else to tell their story.
But with all three of those acts, there were excellent songwriting moments present on their most commercially successful records, making it clear that they probably could write most of their material had superstardom not created so much demand on their time or given them access to such top drawer material.
But Trisha Yearwood was never a writer. She was just the best damn albums artist of her generation, and she did it by flawlessly singing perfectly curated material. She didn’t write a word on Hearts in Armor, Real Live Woman, or Heaven, Heartache and the Power of Love, and all three of those are indisputably among the best country albums ever recorded. I’d argue Thinkin’ About You belongs in there as well, especially the international version with “Two Days From Knowing” and “Jackie’s House.”
All of this is to say that of all the iconic nineties country legends, nobody needed to write their own material less than Trisha Yearwood. Yet on her first album of self-written material, she suddenly announces herself as one the best damn singer-songwriters I’ve ever heard.
The Mirror is every bit the peer of Yearwood’s classic albums listed above, but what makes it even more special is its emotional immediacy. Yearwood always felt like perfection held at a slight distance to me, her execution brilliant but her vulnerability still guarded. Those walls come down on The Mirror, and her songwriting is the way over.
Yearwood reveals the empathetic, intelligent, and deeply loving woman who picked all that great material, and by sharing her personal experiences for the first time, we learn so much about what shaped her into that person. “Fearless These Days” is breathtaking in its intimacy, with its line about her first wedding day still giving me chills on every repeated listen. “Goodbye Cruel World” and “Fragile Like a Bomb” are powerfully resilient, capturing how you have to keep some parts of you soft to keep the world from hardening your heart.
She’s also hilariously funny, with “Little Lady” and “The Shovel” leaving nothing but ashes in her wake as she tussles with the town gossip and her girlwatching partner respectively, displaying a sense of humor that was present on stage but didn’t surface often on her records.
What I love the most about The Mirror is it feels like those letters from the future are coming in the mail again, as Yearwood shares her own battle scars of love and loss of the eternal kind, as parents and friends don’t just grow more distant as we establish our own adult lives, but actually go away for good. “So Many Summers” captures that bittersweet concoction of grief and gratitude that can have you looking back on long ago memories through happy tears.
The Mirror is the return of an old friend after too many years away, but with hard earned stories to tell that reflect her own lived experiences while helping all of us middle-aged folks feel a little more seen. – Kevin John Coyne
Recommended Tracks: “The Mirror,” “Fearless These Days,” “So Many Summers,” “Goodnight Cruel World,” “The Wall or the Way Over”
The Other Best Album of 2025
Carter Faith
Cherry Valley
This year’s other so brilliant it seems impossible singer-songwriter debut is Cherry Valley, an instant classic from Carter Faith that matches Yearwood’s The Mirror in its clear-eyed feminism and incisively insightful songwriting.
What feels most truly impossible is that Faith is able to take up the unique and rarefied space that really only Pam Tillis was able to do successfully in the nineties: a Steel Magnolia country that is as fluent in old school honky-tonk and swing as it is in California country rock and sixties garage band pop.
Like Tillis before her, Faith can borrow the grace of the southern belle, but as soon as she opens her mouth to sing, she can’t hide that she’s the smartest and most talented girl in the room.
But also like Tillis before her, she reveals through her exposed nerve songwriting and achingly lonesome singing that she’s not up on that stage because she wants to show off her talent. She’s up there because the only way to heal her hurt is to sing her way through it.
Cherry Valley is as fully realized a debut album as I’ve ever heard, and it’s hard to even identify the highlights because it is so consistently excellent. I keep going back to “Sex, Drugs, and Country Music,” which has the most playful double entendres this side of “Shake the Sugar Tree” but also captures the transcendent beauty of this music I love so much in on perfectly executed line: “When I first heard pedal steel, I knew that God was real.”
The one-two punch of “Betty” and “Grudge” are wickedly funny and clever, with the latter decimating the “Bless your heart” crowd with the zinger, “If I was a good Christian woman, I’d probably forgive, but I’m pretty sure that even Jesus thinks that you’re a bitch.”
But it’s the one-two-three punch that follows – “Six String,” “If I Had Never Lost My Mind,” and “Misery Loves Company” – that make this an all-timer of an album. Three ballads in a row that pull no punches, the lady in each is as hard on herself as she is on her partner. Usually harder. And Faith’s stunning prowess as a vocalist makes her easy to empathize with even as she shows her darkest colors.
That five song run is the album’s peak, but it levels off at a still high plateau that is remarkably consistent and imminently replayable. In a year that Kane Brown, Tami Neilson, and Trisha Yearwood – three of my all time favorite artists – put out excellent albums that stand tall among their impressive catalogs, it is Carter Faith’s Cherry Valley that I keep going back to the most.
I never thought I’d feel this thrill of discovery again. A seminal artist has arrived. – Kevin John Coyne
Recommended Tracks: “Sex, Drugs, and Country Music,” “Six String,” “Grudge,” “So I Sing,” “If I Had Never Lost My Mind…”
The Rest of the Top Ten Albums of 2025
Kane Brown
The High Road
The High Road stands as the best example to date of how the road Brown travels elevates him above his mainstream peers. What’s striking is the way he sings about others as complete humans and shows genuine interest in their interior lives. As ever, Brown remains perhaps the most under-estimated and misunderstood artist of his commercial stature in the genre’s history.
As reactionary politics and a fierce anti-intellectualism get centered in the country mainstream, it’s legitimately important that one of the genre’s A-listers is someone who shows a sincere curiosity about other humans. Everyone he sings about on this album is a person described as having agency. That matters far more than does the need to edit a few filler tracks. Add that to his purposeful decisions to foreground both his racial identity and his mental health in his art and his public-facing statements, and it couldn’t be less of a surprise that an album of this depth and quality has caused his run of good fortune at country radio to cool off. – Jonathan Keefe
Recommended Tracks: “Fiddle in the Band,” “Backseat Driver,” “Stay,” “Things We Quit” (feat. Brad Paisley), “When You Forget”
Valerie June
Owls, Omens, & Oracles
A new career-best, and June has never put her inimitable voice to better or wider-ranging use than on Owls, Omens, & Oracles. The title invokes mysticism (shades of the iconic Log Lady’s “the owls are not what they seem” invocation from Twin Peaks), and the record trades in hard-won wisdoms.
These songs impress for the clarity with which June expresses a worldview that refuses to apologize for authentic, lived experiences. She’s searching for that (joy) joy and gets closer with every song. – Jonathan Keefe
Recommended Tracks: “Joy, Joy!” “Love Me Any Ole Way,” “My Life is a Country Song,” “Changed” (feat. Blind Boys of Alabama)
Tony Kamel
We’re All Gonna Live
Ten tremendous songs about shit-kickers who’ve had the shit kicked out of them but who nonetheless find purpose, connection, and even moments of joy in the fighting back. Kamel and Bruce Robison make a mighty racket that’s fitting for this hardscrabble triumph.
This works because Kamel’s writing is so firmly rooted in human experience and isn’t going for toxic positivity. The optimism of We’re All Gonna Live is in no way cautious; it throws caution to the wind. He knows things are hard– significantly more so for some than for others– but his narrators aren’t just punching back, they’re punching up. – Jonathan Keefe
Recommended Tracks: “Makin’ it Work,” “Damn Good Ride,” “A Father and a Daughter,” “Lying Through My Teeth”
The Kentucky Gentlemen
Rhinestone Revolution
A debut album that’s been a long time coming, and the Kentucky Gentlemen just nailed it. Every track on Rhinestone Revolution is a pop-country banger that reaffirms the value of pop-country as a form.
As expected from the singles they’ve released over the last several years, the POV on the songs here is unapologetically black, queer, and country. Of course, they sing the absolute fire out of all of it, too. In a better timeline, this sends a half-dozen tracks into the top 10 at radio or streaming; it’s what mainstream country ought to sound like in 2025. – Jonathan Keefe
Recommended Tracks: “To Kill Me,” “Country On My Mind,” “Country Hymn,” “Goldmine”
Tami Neilson
Neon Cowgirl
A travelogue about all the ways America can break a heart and, more significantly, about how to find the mettle and resolve to emerge stronger on the other side of that heartbreak. Neilson wisely sets this to a survey course in vintage American music styles.
There’s rockabilly, honky-tonk, Southern gospel, golden-era country, and stately cabaret pop, and every bit of it is of a piece with the overall aesthetic Neilson’s peerless catalogue. Here, she doesn’t just evoke the iconography of “Americana” in her lyrics– though that Neon Cowgirl looms large.
Instead, she demonstrates here, on a record that is often the twangiest of her career, a foundational understanding of what “Americana” can and should sound like. In that sense, the album is brilliant in the exact way Cowboy Carter is: Creation through reclamation as a means of finding peace. – Jonathan Keefe
Recommended Tracks: “Foolish Heart,” “Neon Cowgirl,” “Loneliness of Love,” “U-Haul Blues”
Original Soundtrack
The Devil & The Daylong Brothers
What could be more timely than a film about a generation of siblings fighting back against the realization that their father had long ago sold them to the literal Devil. As metaphors go, The Devil & The Daylong Brothers is perfectly on-the-nose without even trying to be. It’s a standout in another vital year for contemporary horror, and not just because it also happens to be a musical.
Sinners has racked up a slew of industry awards– no objections here– and The Devil & The Daylong Brothers is another 2025 film with a soundtrack that stands fully on its own merits. A triumph of thundering, go-for-broke Americana, folk tunes, the album reminds me in every way that matters of how the first listen to the Civil Wars’ “Barton Hollow” knocked me on my ass. These vocals and end-of-days narratives? Tremendous. – Jonathan Keefe
Recommended Tracks: “Til the Burning’s Through,” “Hell Is At Hand,” “I Been Wronged,” “Drowning Creek Blues”
Sam Stoane
Tales of the Dark West
A stunning introduction to a major new talent, Stoane’s Tales of the Dark West imagines an “& Western” inspired Ashley Monroe album as much for Stoane’s barbed wire-sharp, melancholy songwriting as for how her plaintive vocal timbre recalls Monroe’s. Right out of the chute, Stoane’s drawing favorable comparisons to a contemporary genre titan and fully holding her own.
The stripped-down production keeps the focus fully on Stoane’s considerable gifts throughout the album: Her economy of language and gift for a melody shine. There’s a romanticism to her version of the West in the way that there’s always a romanticism to this type of country, but Stoane’s savvy enough to see the shadows lurking in the periphery. – Jonathan Keefe
Recommended Tracks: “Tehachapi,” “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” “Cologne,” “Pretty Poppies,” “Dead Man’s Alley”
Turnpike Troubadours
The Price of Admission
The second album in the greatest active country band’s second act, The Price of Admission finds Turnpike Troubadours executing at such a high level that the album overcomes the work of a producer who doesn’t seem to know exactly what it is that makes them great. From the first bars of “On the Red River,” the album boats flat-out brilliant songwriting that is immediately impactful while also deepening on repeat listens.
Truly, it’s a testament to Turnpike’s generational talents that this album is still among both their and the year’s best in spite of Shooter Jennings’ complete inability to mix their sounds in ways that enhance rather than distract. – Jonathan Keefe
Recommended Tracks: “On the Red River,” “Be Here,” “Heaven Passing Through,” “Ruby Ann,” “Leaving Town (Woody Guthrie Festival)”
The Rest of the Top Forty Albums of 2025
Julien Baker & TORRES, Send a Prayer My Way
Frankie Ballard, The Messenger
Luke Bell, The King is Back
Shawn Camp, The Ghost of Sis Draper
Caitlin Cannon, Love Addict
Willi Carlisle, Winged Victory
Dylan Earl, Level-Headed Even Smile
Josiah Flores, Doin’ Fine
Ghost Hounds, Almost Home
Rhiannon Giddens & Justin Robinson, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow
SG Goodman, Planting by the Signs
Pug Johnson, El Cabron
Shawnee Kish, Chapter 1
Olive Klug, Lost Dog
Ned LeDoux, Safe Haven
Olivia Ellen Lloyd, Do It Myself
James McMurtry, The Black Dog & The Wandering Boy
Kip Moore, Solitary Tracks
Ken Pomeroy, Cruel Joke
Rebecca Porter, Roll with the Punches
Margo Price, Hard Headed Woman
Moe Reen, Scribbled Line
Amanda Shires, Nobody’s Girl
Nick Shoulders, Refugia Blues
Sunny Sweeney, Rhinestone Requiem
Jade Turner, Breathe
Various, It’s All Her Fault: A Tribute to Cindy Walker
Kelsey Waldon, Every Ghost
Justin Wells, Cynthiana
Dee White, Heart Talkin’
Honorable Mentions
Willow Avalon, Southern Belle Raisin’ Hell
Blaine Bailey, Indian Country
The Band Loula, Sweet Southern Summer
Terry Blade, Chicago Kinfolk
CMAT, Euro-Country
Abbie Callahan, Grossly Aware
Brandi Carlile, Returning to Myself
Clover County, Finer Things
Charley Crockett, Dollar A Day
Crowe Boys, Made to Wander
Jesse Daniel, Son of the San Lorenzo
Doohickeys, All Hat No Cattle
Andrew Duhon, The Parish Record
Jessica Willis Fisher, Blooming
I’m With Her, Wild and Clear and Blue
INK, Big Buskin’
Leslie Jordan, The Agonist
Raleigh Keegan, Appalachian High
Lola Kirke, Trailblazer
Jesse Lovelock, Jesse Lovelock & The Velvet Voices
Adam Mac, Spectacle
Josh Mitcham, A Few Cries & A Laugh
Kristina Murray, Little Blue
Hayden Pedigo, I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away
Cleo Reed, Cuntry
Ketch Secor, Stories the Crow Told Me
Southern Avenue, Family
Mavis Staples, Sad and Beautiful World
Anna Tivel, Animal Poem
Vandoliers, Life Behind Bars
Joshua Ray Walker, Stuff
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