Ten Essential Political Albums From 2025
Don’t buy into the doomerism about music. From Sam Fender and billy woods to Stereolab and Lambrini Girls, artists are using their music to capture the anger and unrest of our era.
Don’t listen to the musical “doomers.” There’s still tons of great music being made that engages with the madness of the 2020s. (Lambrini Girls, photo by Oli Scarff / AFP via Getty Images)
Like other areas of culture today, music fandom is beset by intense doomerism. A 2024 YouGov poll showed Americans think we’re living in one of the worst musical decades since the 1930s, revealing a breakdown in our sense of shared cultural experience.
That discontent is surely exacerbated by hyperbolic “poptimist” cheerleading and the increasing difficulty of making a living as a boundary-pushing musician — not to mention pervasive worries that art is in the process of being replaced by AI slop.
Even so, I don’t buy into the cultural malaise. While great artists don’t always get the attention they deserve, I still find it difficult to keep up with how many great records come out each year — even in the 2020s. I’m especially encouraged by musicians who are using their art to speak to the broader political unrest of our time — from punk and hip hop to post-hardcore and folk music.
In the end, this might not be our Summer of Love, where a distinctive style perfectly captures a generation’s sound and the fury. But 2025 saw dozens of politically potent and musically rich albums that give me hope for our cultural future.
As alternative culture continues to grow, there is still great new music to discover — and reason to advocate for cultural progress. As Hotline TNT frontman Will Anderson put it, “A cooler world is possible.”
Here are ten essential 2025 albums by artists who agree.
Sam Fender, People Watching (Polydor)
People Watching, the third album from English singer-songwriter Sam Fender, is the Born in the U.S.A. our moment desperately needed. A heart-wrenching expression of working class pain, Fender’s record documents the unemployment, addiction, and other ills that plague England’s once-flourishing towns. He’s the perfect person to tell the story: Fender flunked out of his A-Levels and struggled to support his sick mother while living in a black mold–ridden flat. His songs capture his experiences and observances of other people, perfectly chronicling the despair of those who feel abandoned by the Left and Right.
Listen: Chin Up, Crumbling Empire
billy woods, GOLLIWOG (Backwoodz Studioz)
It almost feels wrong to slap the word “political” onto GOLLIWOG, the latest project from Armand Hammer member and anonymous experimental rapper billy woods. The album is as much a polemical statement as it is a hazy, deconstructed horror movie, weaving a range of literary and cinematic references into a dreamlike narrative. Among other things, he cites Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Poltergeist, and Mariana Enriquez’s story collection Things We Lost in the Fire. Even so, woods spins the album’s namesake — a doll-like racial caricature first created by the cartoonist and author Florence Kate Upton — into a nightmarish meditation on race, class, and American identity.
Listen: Corinthians, Lead Paint Test
Ghais Guevara, Goyard Ibn Said (Fat Possum)
A concept album capturing the excesses of hip hop stardom, Goyard Ibn Said was the first of two large projects dropped this year by Philadelphia rapper Ghais Guevara. After introducing himself to the world with the 2021 mixtape BlackBolshevik, Guevara has continued to use music to deliver detailed potent hip hop without pulling his political punches. (His debut features titles like “Shaun King Isn’t Seeing Heaven” and “I’m Tryna Sweet Chin Music Adrian Zenz”). While Goyard Ibn Said matches the rage and vision of his other releases, it also uses his most diverse musical palette, from the crystalline rhythmic tessellations undergirding “Leprosy” to the baroque accompaniment of “The Apple That Scarcely Fell.”
Lambrini Girls, Who Let the Dogs Out (City Slang)
Lambrini Girls, the Brighton-based duo of Phoebe Lunny and Selin Macieira-Boşgelmez, use their lyrics to tackle issues like homophobia, sexism, and unrestrained capitalist inequality. What makes their eleven-track, twenty-nine-minute scorch-fest debut stand out is how they juxtapose righteous punk angst with wit and humor. Just listen to “C-ntology 101,” which earned a remix from Peaches, the OG of riotously hilarious feminist fury. Despite being partisans of the short-fast-and-loud school of rock, the pair do all sorts of creative things with minimalist materials. “Obviously, we’re a really outspoken political band and that’s kind of at the core of our identity,” says Macieira-Boşgelmez, “but I think sometimes people forget that we’re first and foremost musicians.”
Listen: Love, C-ntology 101
Backxwash, Only Dust Remains (Ugly Hag)
Zambia-born, Montreal-based musician Backxwash (Ashanti Mutinta) draws from a staggering range of styles across her projects, from horrorcore and metal to post-rock and chamber music. On her self-released 2025 album Only Dust Remains, the avowed “angry trans woman rapper” reigns in a touch of the ferocious metallic brutality of past releases to make space for lush chorales and sitar grooves. Even so, subtle drones and harsh textures linger as haunting traces in the musical substructure of her songs. Mutinta uses these elements to build toward soaring finales, lending gravitas to her exploration of social themes from gender identity to conflict in the Middle East.
Listen: 9th Heaven, Dissociation
Stereolab, Instant Holograms on Metal Film (Warp/Duophonic UHF Disks)
“The numbing is not working anymore,” begins Stereolab’s first full-length album since 2010’s Not Music. It’s a perfect sentiment to reintroduce the UK-based avant-socialist polemicists, who return with a timely critique of our age of manipulation, ignorance, and hate. Throughout the record, the band’s distinctive brand of baroque krautrock often lends a sinister edge to lyrical descriptions of our “dying modernity.” And yet, while discontent is delicately woven into the band’s minimalist lyrics, the record is punctuated by a surprisingly hopeful tone — particularly as Lætitia Sadier sings of the “matrice cosmique” (“cosmic matrix”) that connects us to the universe.
Listen: Immortal Hands, Transmuted Matter
clipping., Dead Channel Sky (Sub Pop)
Experimental hip-hop group clipping. didn’t initially strive to make a faux-futuristic “hacker techno” album. But an invitation to contribute to a video game soundtrack provided a new direction for the horrorcore trio, comprised of rapper Daveed Diggs and producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes. The resulting project, named in reference to William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, is a spiraling depiction of “a broken, imperfect, f-cked-up techno-dystopia.” To construct their musical world, the group drew not only from ’90s electronica but also early hip hop, Derek Bailey, pirate radio, and ’80s computer music — the soundscape of an imaginary dystopian future that still haunts our memories.
Listen: Run It, Ask What Happened
Deerhoof, Noble and Godlike in Ruin (Joyful Noise)
Noble and Godlike in Ruin, the twentieth album from San Francisco noise rock veterans Deerhoof, takes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and warps it into a staggering thirty-three-minute psych-rock freakout about our modern world. “I don’t actually think today’s environment is more turbulent than the rest of history,” says drummer Greg Saunier, “But I do think it is particularly well designed to make you go insane.” If the music is any indication, they embraced the insanity. Things get weird in all kinds of ways, from singer Satomi Matsuzaki’s ode to savages, aliens, and animals to her unhinged laughter at the proliferation of atomic weapons — think Flipper’s “Ha Ha Ha” updated for the glitchy technological hellscape we’ve unleashed on ourselves.
Listen: Sparrow Sparrow, Under Rats
FBC, Assaltos e Batidas (Xeque Mate Estúdios)
FBC, the musical alias of Fabricio Soares Teixeira, takes classic boom bap rap and demonstrates its enduring relevance to modern-day Brazil. It’s an easy case to make, that iconic combo of darkly lethal samples and driving beats sounding as timely as ever behind his depictions of stickups, shootouts, police raids, and other social degradations. (In the record’s title, “Batidas” has a double meaning, both “beats” and “raids”). Rather than simply dwell in misery — the quietistic realism that often accompanies depictions of social blight — FBC provides a materialist explanation for the world’s problems and warns his people no longer have anything to lose but their chains.
Listen: Quem Sabe Onde Está Jimmy Hoffa?, A Cosmologia Cororativista do Senhor Arthur Jansen
Maruja, Pain to Power (Music for Nations)
It’s a rare artist that can successfully combine the carefully orchestrated textures of post-hardcore with the anarchic spirit of free jazz. But Manchester’s Maruja does just that on their debut album, Pain to Power. Dichotomies like this match the band’s dialectical worldview with their distinctive blend of lush melody and raw aggression, allowing them to meditate on the complex interplay of love and hate. Toward this end, the group constructs at times sprawling symphonic meditations on the atrocities of our age and yet insists on the power of hope, asking how injustice can ultimately give rise to solidarity.
Listen: Look Down on Us, Saoirse