No Finer Steiner presents...

My 28 favorite—and therefore inarguably the best—albums of 2025

The Life of A Showgirl Music Critic isn’t always easy. Thank you to my editor and best friend Cassidy for your patience with my writing and also with me. Thank you to my friends for your help always. In the words of Addison Rae, “Music is wow; ugh music is so good; music speaks; I love music.”

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Here are my 28 favorites albums of 2025:

28. Lorde — Virgin

“When you’re holding a hammer/Everything looks like a nail,” Lorde tells us on “Hammer,” setting the stakes for her fourth album. “Don’t you want to just smash it all?” the album seems to ask us. On Virgin, the mirror, the bathroom scale, and the weight of pop stardom are all equally deserving of her sledgehammer, but the destruction never comes. Its songs are scrappy and unpolished. They incline to a cataclysm that doesn’t arrives.

Whether she likes it or not, every album Lorde makes is about growing up. Perhaps that’s the blessing and curse of starting your pop star career as a teen ingénue: no matter what you’re writing about, it’ll always be interpreted as a time capsule from a certain age. After the stoned and absent-minded satires of Solar Power, Lorde wakes up on Virgin. It’s a coming-of-age album about becoming both more and less certain of yourself, one that finally embraces, rather than resists, the messiness.

27. Playboi Carti — MUSIC

Over-baked and under-delivered, MUSIC will not go down as another Playboi Carti instant-classic like Die Lit or Whole Lotta Red. It’s bloated, rehashes old ideas, and the Travis Scott guest verses are so embarrassing they make Astroworld’s lyrics look like Joni Mitchell’s Blue. And yet… And yet! Carti at his worst is still twice the performer that his peers are. MUSIC is pure unfiltered energy—a total lack of restraint. Sure, that means we get some duds. But Carti embraces every manic impulse that comes his way: RapCaviar-ready The Weeknd features alongside the brutality of “POP OUT” and “OPM BABI.” The unpredictability is the point. The shock is in its scale. Music is a mess, but it’s a glorious one.

26. Yawning Portal — Anywhere

For good reason, Yawning Portal named themselves after a Dungeons and Dragons expansion pack. The electronic duo make ethereal, extraterrestrial music, equal parts hypnagogic pop and Kingdom Hearts soundtrack. On Anywhere, they test the limits of their spectral sound. Sometimes, they stretch it into landscapes, like on the ambient “In Orion” and “In Iowa.” On “Video,” they compact it down into a pop song. “Magical Girl” is pure fantasEDM, a technicolor raver for their ethereal world. Anywhere bends time, accelerating and slowing it down like true magicians.

25. Erika de Casier — Lifetime

Erika de Casier’s fourth album is a chilly set of trip-hop, but the coldest thing here is her attitude. On Lifetime, de Casier has no space for delusional men or hard-to-get playboys. She stays calm and collected while she fends them off effortlessly. “You don’t even try,” de Casier coos on “December,” turning that toss-off into a lilting hook. de Casier’s music has always toyed with space; on Essentials and Sensational, her vocals echo into cavernous songs. But Lifetime is truly zero-gravity. Not even the stupidest boys can bring her down.

24. Cory Hanson — I Love People

Cory Hanson is enamored with the West Coast: its music, its symbols, its promises. Outside of his work with Wand—the psych-rock group he fronts—Hanson’s solo albums try out different flavors of the same California Dream. 2021’s Pale Horse Rider is a desert-born, acid-induced hallucination straight from Morrison Hotel. On 2023’s Western Cum, Hanson plays the LA rock-star, shredding like Guns ‘N Roses. For I Love People, he put down the electric guitar in exchange for strings and horns. It’s his old-school Hollywood record: glamorous, lush, and melancholy.

Don’t mistake Hanson’s grinning mug on the album cover for an optimistic perspective. I Love People details the broken-dreams and fucked-up characters from a different side of Tinseltown. It’s his first album to abandon his Californian myths in favor of a grimier, bleaker perspective. Hanson says he loves people, but don’t believe him.

23. FKA twigs — EUSEXUA Afterglow

FKA twigs isn’t just your favorite artist. She’s your Alien Superstar-Club Rat-Ethereal Goddess-Guided Meditation Instructor that’ll slip you K on the low. Party with her Saturday night, and then be sure to prescribe to “The Eleven” on Sunday, her “self-healing practice where you use physical cues and vocalization to commit to change.” At least, this was the version of Twigs behind EUSEXUA, the first of her two studio albums from this year. Barf.

Less concerned with trying to find meaning in “a room of fools,” Afterglow focuses on actual sensations: head-highs in the club, cheap hotel afterparties, sushi so good you might have to do a little vogue about it. Twigs returns to the free-flowing mode of Caprisongs. She’s coy on “Touch A Girl,” sensual on “HARD,” delirious on “Piece Of Mine.” EUSEXUA was desperate to explain what her made-up word meant. Afterglow is an album made by someone who’s actually feeling it.

22. KeiyaA — hooke’s law

“You confessed from the start/I can’t possess your heart,” KeiyaA recounts on “make good.” Though her voice is steady, she sounds frustrated—stuck in a surface-level relationship with a lover. If KeiyaA can’t possess this person’s heart, she can certainly do what she wants with her own: possess it, break it, smash it open for all to see. Hooke’s law is an album-long excavation of her heart—its bouts of joy, sensuality, grief, and rage. Musically, the album is unbound; she bends old-school R&B, free-form jazz, abstract electronics into an hour-long flow-state. Hooke’s law is messy and all-encompassing. Such is the nature of her heart.

21. Danny Brown — Stardust

Thank god for Danny Brown, who gives Big Rap a healthy kick in the teeth and beats every “washed” allegation following 2023’s sleepy Quaranta. On Stardust, Brown collaborates with Backlight favorites and post-COVID hyperpop stars. Despite that guest-list, Stardust is by no means experimental. Brown has no interest in pushing the boundaries. Instead, he gets each of his collaborators to do what they do best: a true pop star performance from Underscores, a fierce verse from ISSBROKIE, Quadeca’s comfort music for recovering Brockhampton fans. It’s an A-Level primer of new-Gen brain-rot.

Stardust’s real magic comes from Brown’s sheer enthusiasm, an attitude that’s refreshing and even wholesome. The dude sounds thrilled to play host to the artists that excite him. Stardust is an album from someone who treats the role of artist and the role of fan with equal importance. Over ten years after Old, Danny is still curious, still making bold music. These kids keep him young.

20. Water From Your Eyes — It’s A Beautiful Place

“Making indie rock is like, a funny thing to do,” Nate Amos told NME. For a band whose catalog ranges from abstract ambient to new wave to art pop, Water From Your Eyes can be easily boiled down to that sentiment. Do what’s funny; make good music by choosing the most unexpected options; never let them know your next move. It’s A Beautiful Place applies that ethos to gritty math-rock and tinny chamber-pop. It’s the duo’s most built-out album to date. They shred hard on “Life Signs” and hit the dance-floor on “Playing Classics.” Still, it oozes with the duo’s typical mischievousness. Making indie music is funny; doesn’t mean it shouldn’t rock.

19. Addison Rae — Addison

This year, I’ve written piece after piece unpacking the wider implications of all this (gestures to her). What does it all mean? The implications could be disastrous! Are pop-stars just purveyors of taste? Are we all that gullible to good marketing? What does this say about the role of performance? What does Addison Rae, newly anointed gay icon, mean for The Wider Culture? I ask breathlessly.

And then, none of that matters when I listen to the feather-light “Summer Forever” or the deliriously camp “Money Is Everything.” Hype House alumnus and inspiration for The Kid Laroi’s hit single “Addison Rae” Addison Rae put out one of the best pop albums of the year. It’s breezy and sunny, like Born to Die-era Lana if she was actually Born to Giggle. In a year where every mainstream pop album came loaded with celebrity gossip, lore, and marriage proposals, Addison’s simplicity is its strength. It’s the album equivalent of a Starburst. Who cares if it’s only 0.2% “real fruit” when the sugar high hits this good?

18. End It — Wrong Side of Heaven

Every year, I form an attachment to a single hardcore album that becomes my Comfort Punk Record (CPR). It’s not exactly a cool way to approach the genre, but at least I’m being honest. 2025’s CPR is End It’s Wrong Side of Heaven, an album that collates everything I look for in hardcore into a twenty-minute, iron-clad smack. For me, the best hardcore strikes a balance between heftiness and groove. It’s brutal enough to barrel you into the mosh-pit, but it maintains a rhythmic legibility. Wrong Side Of Heaven sustains that balance, careening towards half-time breakdowns on “Cloutbusting” or building to massive crowd-chants on “Empire’s Demise.” It’s as comforting as punk can get.

17. zayALLCAPS — art Pop * pop ART

zayALLCAPS’s art Pop * pop Art runs like a janky car on fresh pavement: things go smoothly until they don’t. The album swerves with sudden-stops and malfunctions as zayALLCAPS shifts gears. The beat on “MTV’s Pimp My Ride” bugs out, auto-tuned vocals on “SATURN” hop across octaves, “Friendz U Can Kiss” cuts out mid-flow until Zay yells “Fuck!” and gets the thing going like a jumpstart. These moments are like GarageBand typos he left in because they sounded cool. Art Pop * pop Art is palm tree-lined synth-funk, and its malfunctions keep it unpredictable.

16. Marie Davidson — City of Clowns

Marie Davidson poses suggestively in front of a glass building, the type of complex a tech company would call their “workplace campus.” She spreads open her big black coat to show off her leg and leather knee-high boots. City of Clowns sexifies the sterile, data-driven environments of big corporations. The album’s techno is harsh and steely, the sound of a corporate analyst dolled up for a Berghain DJ set. At times, City of Clowns is almost too poignant (“I don’t want your cash, no/What I want is you/Data, baby!” she taunts on “Demolition,” an unfriendly reminder of the constant tech surveillance that defines life in 2025). But Davidson makes space for ecstasy inside a malfunctioning economy. She’s never all business.

15. Esther Rose — Want

It’s a shame the country music industry is as vitriolic as it is. It’s not just because of the racism, misogyny, and homophobia (though, that’s like, really bad). All of that is even more frustrating because the lyrical frankness of great country music can offer a rare glimpse of clarity in an overstimulating world. Sometimes, country music is the only music that makes things make any sense.

At least we have our outsiders. On Esther Rose’s steadfast and measured Want, she writes about ketamine therapy, evil boyfriends, and the chronic pit of dissatisfaction that consumes us all. Her perspective is like a balm – plaintive, focused, and clear-eyed – paired with songs unbothered by the confinements of radio country. “Want Pt. 2” ends the album with some elder advice. Rose sings, “Gina says, ‘Your heart will keep breaking until it stays open.’” Want is the kind of album that pries your heart open.

14. Shallowater — God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars

Look around Big Indie in 2025, and you’ll find a whole lot of regionalism. Everyone is repping and making albums about where they’re from. Wednesday are inextricable from the American South; Geese’s poetic irony is deeply New York; Ratboys have a Midwestern humility and earnestness. And for Texas, there’s Shallowater. The trio make aching and crackly indie rock. The songs are long and all-encompassing, with guitar lines that shimmer in the dry heat. Unlike their slowcore peers, Shallowater’s music doesn’t move at a glacial pace. God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars is reactive. At the right moment, they’ll combust, like the Billy Corgan-indebted guitars that engulf “Ativan” or the road-trip cruise control of the title track. Shallowater makes songs that stretch the expanse of their home state.

13. Amaarae — BLACK STAR

On 2023’s Fountain Baby (which real No Finer Steiner-heads remember earned the coveted designation of 2023’s AOTY), Amaarae eased us in. On the steamy intro track “All My Love,” she allowed us to dip a toe into the album before “Angels in Tibet” trampled in. She gives us no such luxury on BLACK STAR. Amaarae busts the door of this record down. “Turn out the lights/Seen me a bitch/Turnt out the d*ke,” she announces on “Stuck Up.” Getting really drunk! Drugs! Gay sex! We are so back. Black Star is a no holds-barred party record, energized by uppers and unconcerned with subtlety.

With BLACK STAR, Amaarae, quite literally, centers herself in Ghanaian culture. On the cover, she’s dressed in black latex as the titular Black Star of Ghana’s flag. But even more than its national pride, this is a gay-pride kinda album. Earlier this year, I wrote a piece calling her the “Gay Travis Scott.” She’s cocky like the boys, smacking her lips in equal parts from lip gloss smears and cocaine gums. The way Amaarae sings about sex—absent the softness you’ll find on “sapphic queer” Spotify playlists or the Ken-doll smoothness tempering gay pop stars—feels revolutionary.

12. Lucy Bedroque — Unmusique

Vampires beget vampires, I guess. After Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red came out in 2020, the popularity of rage rap exploded and inspired a wave of imitators. All those artists—whether they’re directly affiliated with Carti or not—also aped his aesthetics. We got a whole lotta vamps and princes of darkness.

What sets Lucy Bedroque and Unmusique apart from the pack is he actually seems to be having a good time. On “Speakers Never Learn,” he crinkles a sea-shanty-esque melody into distortion. The beat on “Made in Italy” ticks like a clock going too fast. “I only got one goal/To make Unmusique for you,” he promises on the title track. While contemporaries like Ken Carson and Destroy Lonely haunt their albums like scary clowns at an evil carnival, Lucy is simply at a carnival, spinning on the carousel with glee. The ride couldn’t be more fun.

11. Geese — Getting Killed

When Cameron Winter yells, belly-deep, “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR” in the chorus of “Trinidad,” is it a scream of discovery? Or, is it a warning? Is he plotting something destructive and reckless? Shouting about the bomb in his car as a threat to others? Or, is he just the unluckiest guy in town, stepping inside his Sedan to discover the tick of a time bomb? Not unlike Tim Robinson’s The Chair Company, Getting Killed explores the fine line between intentional harm and a long series of unhappy accidents. Winter sings at the intersection of apocalypse and awkwardness. No wonder Getting Killed inspired such Geese-mania this year. It’s a contemporary kind of terror.

Though Cameron Winter and the cult of personality around him dominated 2025’s Geese discourse (“Geiscourse”), Getting Killed is drummer Max Bassin’s album. He soars across its elongated jams, slamming into the toms with his whole body on “Taxes,” feeding the rumble on the title track’s beat switch. It’s his drumming that makes Getting Killed a truly great rock record and gives it the high-wire kineticism of a car bomb.

10. Sudan Archives — THE BPM

To be honest, a Sudan Archives dance record didn’t sound appealing on paper. While her peers went full Alien Superstar—making dance albums that are electronic, idiosyncratic, and otherworldly—Sudan Archives’ Brittney Park stayed on Earth. Even with its ambition and scope, 2022’s Natural Brown Prom Queen is a personal and handmade album.

Turns out, my worries were unfounded. The BPM does have a bigger palette, with 808s, sleek piano chords, and bass synths that buzz alongside Park’s signature violin-playing. But Sudan Archives doesn’t use dance music to make herself alien. She uses it to ground herself, to make herself more familiar and human. Every element of The BPM is right within reach: hand-claps, breaths and harmonies. Snaps, homemade house-beats, and layers of strings. Like everything Sudan Archives does, The BPM is both immense and brilliantly close to home.

9. Ninajirachi — I Love My Computer

In 2025, there are few reasons to love your computer. Computers lie, they manipulate, they deceive. But hey, computers gave us Ninajirachi’s life-affirming, heart-on-its-sleeve, endorphin high of a debut. Of course, Ninajirachi isn’t really talking about her MacBook Pro. I Love My Computer’s schoolyard chants and gleaming synths are homages to the artists and music that inspired her: A.G. Cook, SOPHIE, Pokémon soundtracks, and Porter Robinson’s optimist EDM. The feeling that elevates I Love My Computer from simply well-made EDM bangers to its stratospheric heights is Nina Wilson’s love for music itself. Absent any cynicism and joyful to the core, I Love My Computer is the greatest love story of the year.

8. PinkPantheress — Fancy That

It’s a good thing Vickie Walker introduces herself on the first beat of Fancy That. This is a brand-new PinkPantheress, with more character, more humor, more samples, more British-ness, and more confidence than ever before. If her prior work was the soundtrack to a “private bedroom dance routine” as she puts on the phenomenal “Stars,” Fancy That ushers us to the club, IRL. It’s a portal to a different era of dance-floor: the marble keys of “Tonight,” the Basement Jaxx-indebted “Girl Like Me,” the 8-bit tinniness of “Stars.” Pink’s alchemic sampling turns what’s old into gold. With her irresistible, Disney Channel Original Movie-esque charisma, PinkPantheress comes to us on Fancy That as a true pop star. We should be really glad to meet her as well.

7. Nourished By Time — The Passionate Ones

It’s no surprise Nourished By Time’s Marcus Brown is a Stevie Wonder acolyte (who isn’t?). Brown’s instant-classic The Passionate Ones is a descendant of Innervisions. They’re both “political” albums, though not because of any trite sloganeering or messages more concerned with unity than constructive change. The two albums understand what the daily grind does to a soul—the way meaningless work can sap the color from a life.

On The Passionate Ones, Marcus Brown shakes off the strangeness of routines. He writes about expensive palm readings, “freaking the 9 to 5,” and joining a cult—anything to reverse the numbness. “Make music, young fella!” a sample interrupts on “BABY BABY” as the song snaps into a groove. That’s Brown’s answer; by making music—and creating passion—he forces himself out of the banality. In music, there’s an escape. For Marcus Brown and for us, The Passionate Ones offers an out.

6. Wednesday — Bleeds

Everyone sounds like Wednesday. In the two years since Rat Saw God, indie rock playlists and KEXP recommendations exploded with country, shoegaze, or “countrygaze,” the label applied to the anodyne bands that split the difference. But the defining quality that makes Hartzman’s music special is not the pedal steel, nor the loud-quiet burst of grunge guitars in her choruses. It’s her writing, her fine-tuned sensitivity to the world.

While lesser songwriters zero in on a single feeling or observation, Hartzman lets things spill out. She embraces the blur between the personal and the communal, the individual and the world that they live in. Gossiping townie-talk slips into mourning; a wasp inside the house becomes an evil premonition; a sip of the best champagne is no better than cheap elderberry wine. Karly Hartzman lets it bleed.

5. Rochelle Jordan — Through The Wall

I hate music biopics on principle. But if there’s ever to be a movie for the Queen of Disco, Donna Summer, Rochelle Jordan should be frontrunner to star (and I’m not the only one who thinks so). Like Donna at her best, RoJo knows that good dance albums are like good clubs: immersive, opulent, and unafraid to get sweaty. She feels love; she brings the hot stuff.

Through The Wall feels like a breakthrough, but it didn’t come from out of nowhere. It’s the fruits of Jordan’s decade-long focus and her unwavering commitment to dance music. There are no detours into balladry or shortcuts to ecstasy here. Instead, it uses its hour-long runtime to go deeper and deeper, to “take up space,” as she reminds us on “Bite the Bait.” Rochelle Jordan pushed through the wall, and she found release.

4. Florry — Sounds like…

Do not call Florry “female MJ Lenderman” (or, my personal moniker for them, M-Gay Lenderman). The “If you like Lenderman, you’ll like Florry” recommendation is certainly tempting—both are exemplary proponents of the twang sweeping Big Indie; both probably love Neil Young; Florry even opened for Lenderman, and they covered a Bob Dylan song (sometimes, people do exactly what you think they’re going to do). But front-woman Francie Medosch hates it.

Florry’s third album Sounds like emphasizes the differences: where Lenderman wallows, Medosch barrels through. They’re both a beer-swiggin’ kind of band, but Manning Fireworks is the comedown, the drunken realizations, and next-day shame hangovers. Sounds like is the free drinks on the house, the pre-game, the buzz. Even in the album’s most tender moments, Sounds like gleams with sunlight. The guitars savor every note, like on the sustained solos of “Truck Flipped Over ‘19” or the squelchy jam on “Dip Myself in Like an Ice Cream Cone.” Medosch belts and scratches like Mick Jagger. She relishes her rasp, breaking open the imperfections for all to see. While Lenderman’s voice mumbles and quivers in his delivery, Florry is unshakeable.

3. Smerz — Big city life

Is life in all big cities the same? Is every twenty-six year old from Brooklyn to Berlin to Beijing feeling the same way? Based on Big city life, Smerz’s Copenhagen certainly parallels my New York City. The album’s droll pop is a highlight reel of 2020’s twentysomething life: the pregame swagger and trendy outfits (“Big big shoes and a shirt that says ‘Feisty’”), the conversations at parties (“I heard the trip was great/Ha-ha-ha”), the romance, the mundanity, the wistfulness. Even “What” – 26 seconds of wordless vaudeville piano – captures the familiar twenty-six year-old experience of feeling like a clown.

But don’t confuse Smerz’s deadpan for apathy, or their spacey-ness for vacancy. Big city life is brimming with heart. Though it’s made by two straight women, Big city life makes me think of a quote from the book Gay Bar: “If my experiences in gay bars have been disappointing, what I wouldn’t want to lose is the expectation of a better night,” Jeremy Atherton Lin writes. Any night could be the night; the one that satisfies the implacable longing, the night that explains why you put on the cool shirt in your closet and left the apartment in the first place.

The cool-girl detachment of Big city life is just a mask—Smerz is emphatically optimistic. They’re out there, looking in empty streets and crowded house parties for a feeling or explanation that makes big city life make sense. This album makes you feel like there could really be an answer.

2. Oklou — Choke Enough

These days, I adhere to Steven Hyden’s School of Music Criticism, who argues that good music critics have a sense of humor and levity. He wrote, “It’s hard enough to get people to read album reviews. Do we really have to punish and brutalize the precious few who do?” Whenever I review music, whether it’s for Paste or for this humble Substack, I fight my natural tendency towards Flowery, Academic, Literary, and Dependent Clause-Laden writing.

So, dear reader, please allow me a single moment of indulgence because I can’t find any other way to write about Oklou’s Choke Enough.

There’s a moment on “ict” that is pure magic and exemplary of Choke Enough’s time-bending hypnotism. The first half of the song is a swirl of trumpets, synths, and Marylou Mayniel’s wordless melodies. The notes hang in the air like glimmering specks of dust. “Strawberry dancer/vanilla summer/Driver, pull over/Ice cream truck,” she sings as the tiniest little beat races along to keep up. “So I go faster/Faster than I’ve ever gone.” And then, just when you realize you’re swept away in the song’s golden summer, the bass disappears. The floor drops out from under you. A whistle melody descends down an arpeggio like leaves falling off a tree. The sugar-high of the summer passes by, leaving the song hollow and cold. It is lush and gorgeous and completely devastating; as good a proof as any that, when wielded correctly, the switch from major to minor chord is the most powerful tool in music (or maybe ever?).

Choke Enough is full of moments like this. It shows rather than tells; transports instead of asserts. It’s quiet but assured, baroque but decidedly modern; astral but earthbound; synthetic but brimming with aliveness. It’s lyrical music for a brutalist world. It demands a Flowery blurb.

1. Jane Remover — Revengeseekerz

At the old age of 22, Jane Remover is obsessed with death. Revengeseekerz is full of it. Sometimes, Jane is doing the killing (“You wanna take what I own?/Bitches getting burned,” or the vicious “Explosive bitch, blow his head off”). Other times, she treats death like something pesky (“I can’t lie you bored the life out of me,” “Grim reaper on my ass”). She spends much of Revengeseekerz fantasizing about ways to kill a rival. On “Fadeoutz–” one of the few songs on the album that doesn’t sound like it’s actively trying to kill you–death haunts her: “Forgive me if I feel myself tonight/I’m in pain-in just to stay alive.”

Revengeseekerz is many things: rage rap, explosive EDM, “hyperpop,” obscenely loud, painful on the ears, addictive, horny, degenerate. Jane’s molten-hot violence is the thread holding it all together. She churns through disparate emotions so quickly they might as well be simultaneous. Self-pity and inflated ego; independence and loneliness; unbotheredness and competitiveness. Jane follows every impulse as they come. Revengeseekerz is the sound of a person constantly destroying and remaking themselves.

Yes, the album’s blown out 808s, broken-car rumbles, and mutilated screams sure sound like destruction. But the fire she wields is pure, too. There’s tenderness in Revengeseekerz’s mayhem, just as there’s venom in its most vulnerable moments.

Of course, the making and destroying of selves is a pretty queer pattern: old selves, closeted selves, performed selves for unfamiliar environments are all built and broken down just to survive. “Two can play, but two’s a crowd/So there’s two of me, I’m cloning out,” she warns on opener “TWICE REMOVED.” Jane doesn’t center her queerness on Revengeseekerz (“I’m just me,” she wrote plainly on Instagram in response to a fan calling her a trans role model). But still, the feeling of liberation shines through as she gathers all those old selves and torches them. “Me and them, so different/But I’m a shapeshifter ...I’m a new kind of bitch, off kilter,” she brags on “Experimental Skin.”

And if you take no particular interest in queer identity theory, good thing this album fucking rips. Jane makes music with a kind of destructive glee. She pushes things right to the brim and kicks you off the cliff with a grin. “Professional Vengeance” is pop-punk in hell paired with an Aphex Twin screamo outro. The drop on “Dreamflasher” smacks with the density and force of concrete. Only Danny Brown could match her freak on “Psychoboost” which culminates in a brutal, grinding finale. It’s gnarly stuff, truly deformed in the eyes of Pop.

In an album laden with images of death, the scariest thing here is Jane’s bottomless talent. I’m not one to care about how many people it took to make an album. But Revengeseekerz’s writing, production, and mixing is all her, a direct pipeline of hellfire from artist to audience. It simply couldn’t be anyone else. With each new album, she becomes increasingly self-referential, pulling from a library of distinctly-Jane motifs: vocal lines from Census Designated, warbling keys from “Magic I Want U.” Revengeseekerz is her third full-length, and certainly her best, but it follows a string of loosies from 2024 so good that Revengeseekerz feels like only one of many possible masterpieces for Jane Remover. For the creator of an album this apocalyptic and grim, she makes the future seem bright. Armed with a fiery sword and scalding fury, anyone standing against Jane Remover is bound to lose.

Thanks for reading, folks. Subscribe for free if you’re new. See you in a few days for the best songs of the year.