PopMatters' 70 Best Albums of 2025 So Far

With their first two albums, Sports Team captured the frantic, visceral thrills of their live show but they instill a sense of suave order to third effort *Boys These Days*. This is a record where the English indie rockers—who formed in Cambridge in 2016 with a specialism in wry, anthemic observations of Middle Britain—get their groove on by channeling the dapper ’80s stylings of Bryan Ferry and Prefab Sprout. Seeking to make a more intricately crafted studio album without it being anything as dull as that sounds, the six-piece headed to Bergen, Norway to work with girl in red and CMAT producer Matias Tellez. The result is a record that melds the playful thrills and melodious joy of 2020’s *Deep Down Happy* and 2022 follow-up *Gulp!* with a sumptuous, soulful sound that takes in exuberant, sax-assisted indie pop (slick opener “I’m in Love (Subaru)”), Pulp-esque wistfulness (“Maybe When We’re 30”), rollicking fusions of Britpop and Morricone (“Bang Bang Bang”), and freewheeling, melody-heavy sing-alongs (“Condensation”). At their best, they sound like early-’80s Elton John as reworked by *In it for the Money*-era Supergrass. As with their earlier output, though, there is razor-sharp perception lurking within all the cheeky winks to camera, and themes such as the uncertain shift from teenager to adulthood, the weaponization of nostalgia, doom-scrolling, war, and influencers with dogs all crop up over the course of these 10 tracks. In *Boys These Days*, Sports Team have made a grown-up pop record without losing the sense of what made them so exciting in the first place.

At this point in his increasingly eclectic career, it seems preposterous to call Ty Segall a garage-rocker, the label that’s stuck to him ever since he blasted out of Laguna Beach in a flurry of fuzz and feedback back in the late 2000s. And while the 10-song/40-minute format of *Possession* may position it as a leaner counterpoint to 2024’s sprawling prog-folk-jazz odyssey *Three Bells*, its compact package belies the amount of structural complexity, textural detail, and melodic ingenuity that Segall crams into each of these tunes. It’s a record built on familiar reference points—acoustic Zeppelin riffs, Bowie/T. Rex pageantry, Plastic Ono Band groove—that’s always taking you to unexpected places, as songs like the strings-’n’-sax-swirled “Shoplifter” and the funky-glam workout “Fantastic Tomb” cycle through multiple sections and accrue more power each step of the way. But even as he plunders the history of British rock with surgical precision, Segall remains an unkempt West Coast punk at heart: He signs off with “Another California Song,” an acerbic Golden State anthem infused with equal amounts of California dreaming and dreading.

“I found a crouton underneath a futon,” singer Sebastian Murphy intones over a steady bass throb punctuated by flute accents on “Uno II,” one of the many clever and catchy tunes on the quasi-self-titled *viagr aboys*. “Mama said I couldn’t eat it ’cause all my teeth are gone.” Such is the delightfully absurdist world of Viagra Boys, a Swedish quasi-punk group with an American vocalist and an undying hunger for shrimp and shrimp-related products. The band’s fourth album doubles down on the self-deprecating, society-skewering antics and infectious grooves of 2022’s *Cave World* with gleeful abandon. Powered by slashing guitars and a droning chorus, “Man Made of Meat” offers historical perspective for modern complainers: “I don’t wanna pay for anything/Clothes and food and drugs for free/If it was 1970, I’d have a job at a factory.” Jet-propelled bass boogie “The Bog Body” doubles as a commentary on superficiality that plays out like an inversion of the Demi Moore body-horror flick *The Substance*, complete with a zombielike swamp woman. “Pyramid of Health” simultaneously apes and lampoons Marcy Playground’s grunge-esque ’90s hit “Sex and Candy” before veering into carnival music and electronic noise. Resurrecting a successful template from previous albums, Murphy cuts loose with a hilarious, possibly stream-of-consciousness rant over skronky free jazz on “Best in Show Pt. IV.” With breathy backing vocals and a chiming minor-key organ melody, “Medicine for Horses” is more plaintive, reflective, and—maybe—straight-faced. The same could be said of Murphy’s mournful, wavering vocal on closer “River King,” but who knows? Where Viagra Boys are concerned, it’s anyone’s guess.

A scan of her lyrics might suggest otherwise, but Willow Avalon first found her love for music while performing at the local Baptist church in her small Georgia hometown—hardly a natural habitat for hell-raisers of any kind. Instead, you hear that church choir influence in her voice, which splits the difference between Lainey Wilson’s warbling twang and Lana Del Rey’s dusky croon. Flourishes of soulful Southern gospel find their way, often sneakily, into most tracks on this debut album from Avalon, like the Parton-checking “Hey There, Dolly” with its down-home harmonies, and the feisty, quick-fire verses of the vice-laden “Something We Regret.” Lyrically, religious imagery tends more toward fire and brimstone, like on “Damned,” where Avalon likens a situationship to purgatory. Avalon is as confident and capable a songwriter as she is a vocalist, and this first full-length project from the young country up-and-comer is unusually assured. The more she raises hell, it seems, the higher her star rises.

For more than a decade, the musician born Nat Ćmiel has been exploring what it means to be a 21st-century human (or post-human): On 2022’s *Glitch Princess*, yeule probed the limits of the flesh by way of modulated vocals and decaying Danny L Harle beats; on 2023’s *softscars*, the artist who once identified as a cyborg tiptoed into the corporeal world, inspired by the fuzzy rock music of the late ’90s. Their fourth album, *Evangelic Girl Is a Gun*, takes their glitchy avant-pop even further out of the matrix, eschewing Auto-Tune entirely to showcase their vocals at their rawest and most visceral. Enchantingly abject vignettes about doomed love and ego death play out over sexy-sad soundscapes that draw from ’90s trip-hop and alt-rock, with production from Mura Masa, A. G. Cook, and Clams Casino. Imagine the most morose possible version of a Charli xcx song and you’ve got the title track, on which yeule purrs dispassionately: “Nosebleed on the Sunset Strip/He picks me up in a fast whip/He laces up my leather boots/He wears a blood-stained velvet suit.”