The Best Songs of 2025

After the overall rankings and reviews, it's time to make room for individual paths. In these playlists you won't necessarily find the year's "winners", but the sonic journeys that filled our days: tracks that redefined a genre, chance discoveries or old favorites that never let us down. It's a messy, sincere map of what left a mark on our 2025, offered not as absolute truth but as an invitation to explore new horizons. We hope they intrigue you as much as they bewitched us!

Gabriele Benzing

There must be a leak somewhere in the plumbing of the world we've built. The water keeps rising, and staying afloat gets harder and harder. "We try to keep our heads above water", sing King Hüsky, nodding to the bittersweet flavor of early-2000s indie rock. We're in the middle of the shipwreck, like the characters of the latest concept album from Mountain Goats: chased by apocalyptic paranoia, doomscrolling through our own lives. We're the sheriffs of "Eddington", we're the beekeepers of "Bugonia": maybe it's time for the flood, or maybe it's just fear taking our breath away the moment we open our eyes.
Meanwhile reality sits right there in front of us, almost without our noticing. "I went out looking for a real thing", whispers Alex G, trying to conjure the ghost of Elliott Smith. "Didn't notice it was hanging by the door". Reality isn't the summary of our biography, nor is it the sum of our convictions: what we truly are, we discover only by abandoning what we think we are. "There is a kindness in the loss of who I thought I'd be", confesses, over the breath of an electric piano, the ode to defeat by Jens Kuross. We are what doesn't break when everything seems lost: "It's not broken, I'm not angry", and the wounded voice of Alan Sparhawk embraces his daughter's calm one. We're the hermit-woodsman of "Train Dreams" – "connected to it all". We try to fix the plumbing.

Marco Bercella

Michele Corrado

There are so many musical genres and scenes, both global and national, that one can follow these days, and so many treasures that each of these worlds holds, that every passing year it becomes harder to put together a playlist that's both concise and satisfying.
The only way to tackle a mission like this is to set strict rules for yourself. In my case, otherwise I'd never stop, a few years ago I told myself "okay, 2023, only 23 songs". That's how an erratic, uninhibited string of tracks was born, one that couldn't care less about genres or boundaries, only about beauty and sheer, ravishing impact. 
2025 is about to draw to a close, so here are the 25 tracks that captivated me most this year. 

Valerio D’Onofrio

Giuliano Delli Paoli
 
Certainly a chaotic year, hard to pin down in terms of genres, geographies and variations, confirming a global period that's most likely one of transition. Yet wonders keep popping up in the most unexpected places, courtesy of musicians submerged by time or by the swamps. It's the year of long-awaited comebacks, of renewed country escapes or pop sophistication from the other side of the world. A year that's surreal at times, yet dense with songs and records that are, in their own way, significant. 

Claudio Fabretti

2025 was the golden year of Italian music. I rarely recall so many beautiful, important albums as the ones we heard from Andrea Laszlo De Simone, Carmen Consoli, Nero Kane, La Niña, Massimo Silverio, but also Sanremo's own Lucio Corsi, plus Castelli, Dalila Kayros, Nowhere, Gaia Banfi, Deca and many others. My playlist tries to bring back some of their most memorable songs, alongside the usual international overview, from Anna von Hausswolff, ever more the sovereign of the dark realm, to revelations of the year like Oklou, Maruja, Rún, Sophia Djebel Rose and long-awaited, most welcome returns like those of Swans, These New Puritans, Pulp and Stereolab.

Alberto Farinone

Never before this year have female voices so thoroughly dominated my listening. Some looked back to the Seventies – from the soft-rock turn of Ellie Rowsell's Wolf Alice to the new wave echoes of Last Dinner Party and Sharon Van Etten – while others dug deep into the Nineties: the languid lo-fi of Horsegirl, the college rock of Momma, the return of riot grrrl courtesy of Die Spitz, or the singer-songwriter rock with a touch à-la Cranberries of Blondshell. Other female rockers grafted a distinct country streak onto their sound (from Wednesday to the more erratic HAIM), while others chose to reach even further back in time, like debutantes New Eves, with their punk-folk pagan-horror imagery.
There was no shortage of promising debuts (including the EP from young Irish act Florence Road) and welcome confirmations, like Wet Leg, grappling with the ever-treacherous second-album test. Among the most representative records of 2025, one cannot fail to mention at least Turnstile, with their most ambitious yet most accessible work to date, and New York's own Geese, increasingly acclaimed by international critics. If instead you're a retro-obsessive in love with Beatles and Big Star, do yourself a favor and listen to Sharp Pins, the solo project of Kai Slater. And speaking of nostalgia, aficionados of britpop can also count themselves satisfied, pampered by the solid returns of Suede and Pulp.

Fabio Ferrara

Four hours of varied listening to accompany moments on the move (trips, commutes) or the long waits that, after all, are the dimension in which I tend to use playlists. 
To open, I wanted the freshness of Peki Momes and the originality of Mohinder Kaur Bhamra, two tracks that sum up the spirit of the selection well: curiosity, variety and a balance between lightness and character.
The protagonists of 2025 are all here, like Geese, Maruja, Sam Fender, Sharon Van Etten, Viagra Boys and many others, but alongside them there's also room for small surprises and more personal discoveries.
The songs are grouped by resonance, following thin threads of tone, rhythm and atmosphere rather than genre or origin. To close, as every year, a roundup of Italian music, particularly fortunate this season.

Stefano Fiori

It was a year marked by nostalgia for the Nineties (and thus for my adolescence), no doubt due to the return of so many illustrious britpop names but also to the vaguely trip-hop sounds, from Jamie Woon to Lily Allen by way of FKA Twigs (here in her most striking impersonation of Kate Bush). On top of that, 2025 gave me two of the most beautiful and dizzying middle-eights heard in a pop song in a long while (Rosalìa and Miley Cyrus).

Fabio Guastalla

Vassilios Karagiannis

You got a front row seat and I, I got a taste to the glamorous life.
A strange 2025 for a 2026 that would really like to be a bit more glamorous.

Claudio Lancia

This year I organized my work-in-progress playlist into thematic chapters of five tracks each. Roughly speaking, the chapter titles could be as follows:
1-5 – five different ways of being pop, female edition
6-10 – pissed-off girls playing rock music
11-15 – post-hardcore and thereabouts
16-20 – electro euphoria pt. 1
21-26 – post-post-post-punk (I slipped in an extra one here)
27-30 – rock & pop with female voices pt.1
31-35 – rock & pop with female voices pt. 2
36-40 – britpop & modern classics
41-45 – urban & nu-soul
46-51 – indie zone pt. 1
51-55 – indie zone pt. 2
56-60 – alt-country with an intruder…
61-65 – electro women
66-70 – industrial & experimental
71-75 – pop ladies pt. 1
76-80 – electro euphoria pt. 2
81-85 – Hispanic delights
86-90 – dream & gaze
91-95 – songwriter
96-100 – pop ladies pt. 2
101-105 – kids with electric guitars.
Closing out the selection are five jazz instant classics and one obligatory bonus track, a tribute to the memory of Nell Smith, in case you don't know her story…

Gianfranco Marmoro

In a year full of excellent confirmations, disappointments and explosive debuts, there's room for 30 songs and one excellent promise for the new year, tucked away in the playlist's opening track. Happy 2026!

Daniel Moor

Federico Romagnoli

Songs from the albums I listened to most this year, all reviewed by OndaRock (the refined folk of Ukraine's Zgarda, the labyrinthine jazz-rock of Japan's Betcover!!, the sociopolitical songwriting of American Jesse Welles and the introspective indie pop of his fellow countryman Sombr, the blend of acid jazz and rap from Argentine duo Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso, the atmospheric hip-hop of Wos, also from Buenos Aires, and the electronic world music of France's Ko Shin Moon, from whom I picked their collaboration with the greatest contemporary Turkish songwriter, Mabel Matiz), plus loose tracks from other artists I follow, who have also often been covered on these pages in the past (the standard-bearers of Ukrainian progressive pop Ziferblat, the giant of Argentine rock Charly García, who duets with Sting, Japanese pop legend Yumi Matsutoya, and a few major names from the Korean alternative scene such as Aleph, 4bout and, above all, Silica Gel). There are also a couple of Italian acts, who need no introduction. All told, that's about fifteen tracks, just to give you an idea.

Marco Sgrignoli

Songs and instrumental tracks: a two-part playlist to represent the two souls of the listening that accompanied me through 2025. On one side, riffs and choruses that get stuck in your head and stop you from doing anything other than humming them: Petey and his synth-heartland rock, the impossibly polished yacht rock grooves of Young Gun Silver Fox, the liberating emo-pop of Anxious; on the other, the more discreet developments, able to stay in the background and add new colours to the everyday activities that fill our days (the high point in this respect being the shimmering ambient-techno geometries of Aleksi Perälä).
Of course the divide isn't so clean: there are songs, like those of Bon Iver and Richard Sallis, where mood is everything, and tracks that, even without words, instantly grab your attention with zigzagging melodies and rhythmic interplay – take for instance the frantic nu jazz of Varra and Jameszoo. There's border-crossing hip-hop (the discovery of the year being Italy's own Esseforte) and there's prog (so much prog!), where naturally the choruses and riffs keep changing, surprising, multiplying.
Above all, far from the dictates of hype, 2025 was for me a musically rich, varied, deeply satisfying year: I hope that with this playlist my enthusiasm can prove contagious for others too.

Francesco Inglima

Martina Vetrugno

Ride the wave of great music

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04/03/2026