2025 in music: The five best international albums of the year

1. Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You

By Ethel Cain (Daughters of Cain)

Ethel Cain’s second album of 2025 blends Lana Del Rey-style sadcore pop with beautifully lush and menacing soundscapes, resulting in a record that unfolds in an avalanche of angst and melancholy. There aren’t many singalong moments, but when they do arrive, such as on the sugar-rush single Fuck Me Eyes, they go off like firecrackers at a prayer meeting. Read the full review

2. Iconoclasts

By Anna Von Hausswolff (Year0001)

The Gothenburg songwriter earned her reputation with a series of albums hammered out on haunting church organs (to the occasional horror of the devout). For her sixth LP she switches things up wonderfully, with forays into free jazz, Dead Can Dance-style goth pop and the occasional orchestral fade-out (spruced up with contributions from Iggy Pop and Ethel Cain).

3. Bleeds

By Wednesday (Dead Oceans)

Old-school 1990s indie rock receives a thrilling 21st-century makeover from the North Carolina four-piece. The music sounds perpetually on the brink of collapse yet always just about holds together. When Wednesday are blasting at full volume, every day is a good day.

4. Death Ego at a Bachelorette Party

By Hayley Williams (Post Atlantic)

Celebrating the end of her decades-long relationship with Atlantic Records, the Paramore singer Hayley Williams makes the most of her new life as an independent artist with this brilliantly dark and sprawling album, which pings from ethereal pop to cathartic indie, all of it held together by her darkly expressive voice. Nor do the lyrics pull their punches. On Ice in My OJ, she looks back on her years as a major-label entertainer and comments flensingly on “the dumb motherf**kers that I made rich”.

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5. Land’s End Eternal

By Cole Pulice (Leaving Records)

The latest solo album from Cole Pulice, who’s perhaps best known as Bon Iver’s saxophone player, feels like a fragmented dream that you can’t quite clear from the recesses of your brain. Wonderfully soothing yet sprinkled with ominous undertones, it’s powered by Pulice’s signature signal-processed saxophone, which feeds the human voice into a synthesiser. But if technology is an enabling tool, the feeling of the record is pure, naturalistic bliss.