#sherelle

Sherelle

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian

DOB: 3 September 1993

Ethnicity: Black British

There's a classic Jewish joke that has been repeated every Passover since time immemorial: "they tried to kill us, they didn't., let's eat."

That's how I feel about these intros to this annual list. The world had a bad year, but music was still good. Let's eat.

Here is a list of my favorite songs of 2025, the ones that stood out from the morass and made me lean forward in my metaphorical chair. Scroll down to the bottom for my Spotify playlist. Hope you find something you love!

And now, without further ado...

MY FAVORITE SONGS OF 2025

25. Young Dro & Zaytoven - “Ballin” ft. Trouble: 2025’s rap scene was heavily saturated with tributes to mid-00s Atlanta music, from BunnaB's candy-colored “Bunna Summa” to the block party vibes of Metro Boomin’s A Futuristic Summa to the thug motivational anthems emerging out of the “New Dallas.” It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that some of 2025's best music in this style came from the veterans of that original era. “Ballin’,” from Young Dro and Zaytoven’s 10 Piece Hot, is a glorious bit of ATL rap comfort food, a collaboration between the city’s chief trap sound architect and one of its most colorful characters that hits just as hard as it would have in 2006. Dro is one of Southern rap’s great enunciators, and on "Ballin'," he bounces off Zay’s effortlessly funky keys with his guttural drawl. It is lovely to hear the late, great Trouble on the hook, his laid-back demeanor an ice cold complement to Dro’s fire-breathing.

24. Khadija Al Hanafi - “Always Treat U RiTE”: Tunisian DJ Khadija Al Hanafi doesn’t mess around, eschewing the usual swells and builds of club music in favor of instantly-gratifying blasts of euphoria. “Always Treat U RiTE,” from her 2025 album !OK!, sounds like a 2-step classic played at 1.5x speed, gliding by with bouncing piano chords and an irresistible chipmunk soul chorus. The bite-sized banger is over in two minutes, practically begging you to play it over and over.

23. Westerman - “Nevermind”: Westerman built his reputation with immersive soundscapes and sharp sophisti-pop songwriting, crafting sonic worlds that evoke “masculine men feeling things” classics like The Blue Nile’s Hats and David Sylvain’s Secrets Of The Beehive. The majority of “Nevermind,” my favorite song from his 2025 album A Jackal’s Wedding, does away with expansive arrangements, shining the spotlight on the man and his acoustic guitar. The song’s lyrics are composed of half-finished sentences, gently muttered as if he regrets opening his mouth at all. Still, the approach makes room for stark imagery (“She fingered the muddy ground/And sold me all the luck she's finding”) and the ballad is all the more powerful for leaving space for what he could have said, but did not. "What I said, though I forgot, I meant it," he sighs, “Never mind.”

22. Mexiko Dro - “No Date”: As a producer, Mexiko Dro helped define the sound of ‘10s internet rap, the ubiquitous “plugg” producer tag of his Beat Pluggz giving the name to a genre that blended drugged out rhymes with blissful soundscapes and thudding low-end. As a rapper, Dro drops all those pretensions, assembling blue-collar trap bangers by stacking growled hustle-hard mantras atop one another. “No Date” begins like a spaceship taking off, but Dro’s concerns are grounded in his day-to-day reality. He makes it clear that he treats this rap shit as a job first, and an avenue to fame dead last:“Money first, complete the work, n****, then I dip,” he spits, later adding “I ain't doin' all that punk-ass shit to go viral.” It’s an anthem for those happiest in the trenches, building brick by brick without taking any shortcuts.

21. Deer park & Ivy Knight - “Pharmacy”: I was unfortunately disappointed by this year’s Bar Italia album, but, thankfully, Deer Park and Ivy Knight were there to supply my required dose of murky, conversational indie rock for late nights. Trading verses atop a snaking, reverb-drenched guitar line, the two artists spin a twisted yarn on "Pharmacy," telling a tale that recalls Grimm-like folklore, featuring arrows piercing eyes, misshapen faces and heads, and figures that morph into ethereal beings under the neon lights of motel signs.

20. Shallipopi - “Laho”: Nigerian artist Shallipopi’s simmering, menacing “Laho” was my Afrobeats banger of the year. It has the kind of groove that summons spirits, with dramatic string section stabs, insistent log drums, and an incantatory chorus. The kind of song that makes you feel like something bad is gonna happen to you if you don’t immediately report to the dancefloor. There are remixes out there with Burna Boy and Rauw Alejandro, but I most often return to the haunting original.

19. NBA YoungBoy - “Shot Callin”: It has been true for a long time, but after this year, no sane person can deny it: NBA YoungBoy is the most popular rapper of his generation. After breaking out at age 17, YB struggled to overcome legal problems, which left him in house arrest, unable to tour, but with nothing to do but record as much music as humanly possible. In 2025, YoungBoy finally embarked upon that tour, selling out dozens of dates and moving grown men–who have been waiting years to sing along with their idol in the flesh–to tears.  This year brought us “Shot Callin,” YoungBoy’s first solo mainstream hit. It was on the radio and everything. “Shot Callin’” isn’t more polished or gentler than your typical YB song, but it is an extremely well-executed version of the artist’s usual neck-snapping Dirty South sound. Producers Tayo, TrillGotJuice, and Cheese supply an instrumental that evokes the swampy funk of Baton Rouge great Mouse On Da Track, with a seasick swinging groove and accented minor key pianos. YB throws his entire soul into his vocal performance, his consonants crackling like pop rocks: “Bitch, I'm real American made, run with Chargers like Vin Diesel/Bitch, I come from Medicaid, diamonds all on me like some measles.” Tell LiAngelo Ball this is how real Louisiana music sounds.

18. Ringlets - “I Was On That Roof Once”: Auckland, NZ’s Ringlets proudly continue the Kiwi nation’s rich lineage of boundlessly clever jangle-pop bands. “I Was On That Roof Once” is as silly as it is dynamic, rising and falling over its four minute runtime with circular guitar riffs and a stankface-inducing behind-the-beat drum groove. The group pack a notebook full of puns and bon mots into the lyrics without ever losing scan: “The Lord is my German Shepherd/TIME FOR WALKIES,” they chant to open the song, and only escalate from there, writing a chorus that uses words that I am not sure I have ever heard in any song before: “prapañca,” “fountainhead,” “aphorisms,” “balderdash” (as in “spewing aphorisms rolled in glitter balderdash”) and the immortal phrase, “I am foaming from the algae that’s inhabited my gob.” It sounds like a lot but the band skillfully makes it digestible, packing in enough musical ideas to keep the mood buoyant, and adding a shout-along wordless chorus for good measure.

17. snuggle - “Driving Me Crazy”: Copenhagen appears to have a bottomless supply of alt-pop geniuses roaming the streets, drinking at the Espresso shops, crossing The Bridge from The Bridge, and doing whatever else the Danish do. Snuggle, the duo of Andrea Thuesen Johansen and Vilhelm Tiburtz, is one of my favorite new acts from that fertile scene. They specialize in synthesizing bubblegum pop out of 90s alt sounds, putting their own spin on that familiar milieu with dreamy arrangements and hazy ambience. “Driving Me Crazy” combines a Smashing Pumpkins guitar line, a trip-hop bassline, and Moby-esque synth strings into an irresistible confection, with a brightness that masks the deep pain hidden within: “That’s how you live/That’s how you live/Drink to forget/Drink to forgive.”

16. Rauw Alejandro - “Caribeño” ft. Saso: Rauw Alejandro has long been one of Latin music’s great pop experimenters, using his angelic tenor as a Trojan horse to sneak some wild sounds onto the radio. “Caribeño” is a mutating banger, oscillating from Tropigoth to skittering pop to reggaeton and back. Bronx-born Dominican artist Saso is an ideal partner-in-crime, his motormouthed flow providing necessary grit to counteract Rauw’s supernatural sweetness.

15. Neko Case - “Wreck”: Music, and American culture at large, is terminally obsessed with youth and being young. There’s a whole generation of kids (or at least a loud, and very online segment of that generation) who are convinced that life ends at 25. As a 35-year-old, I promise there is plenty of life to live once you pass the quarter-century mark. I am glad to report that Neko Case, one of our* greatest living singer-songwriters, isn’t bogged down by that miserable perspective. “Wreck,” her best song in years, is an effervescent tribute to finding love after 50, proving that songs of experience can be just as romantic as songs of innocence. “Do I blaze freckles onto your face?,” she asks, “I bet, I bet, I bet I do,” as strings crescendo and harps imitate a fluttering heartbeat. *Maybe all the time she spent with Canadian indie rockers The New Pornographers explains her more rational outlook on aging

14. The New Eves - “Rivers Run Red”: British group The New Eves’s brand of folk punk has an intensity that would be scary if it weren’t so much fun. “Rivers Run Red” is a perfect example of what they do well: music for slamdancing around a maypole. Kicking off with a primal guitar-and-flute groove, “Rivers Run Red” escalates into a feverish, incantatory trance, with otherworldly harmonies girding the rhythm section’s forward motion until you’re ready to burn a wicker man with Nicolas Cage inside it.

13. Myaap - “Fairy”: YOP YOP! Myaap (pronounced like “Mya P”) is a boundless font of positive energy, able to turn any instrumental into a Milwaukee party jam. The instrumental for “Fairy”, which comes courtesy of producer christiangetbizzy, is as mystical as the title implies, with a triple-meter harp floating over, and fighting against the familiar Milwaukee lowend hand claps to create a fascinating rhythmic push-pull. Inspired by the beat’s mystical nature, Myaap speaks in tongues, stringing together ad-libs into a full verse before she starts directing dance floor traffic. “Big Myaap, I just look little,” she declares.

12. Verraco - “sobe sobe” ft. MC Yallah: It seems like an unlikely, cross-continental collaboration between a Colombian producer and a Kenyan emcee, but “sobe sobe” couldn’t feel more natural. Verraco layers pounding percussion under dreamy synth soundscapes, leaving plenty of space for MC Yallah to lay into the track with her life-affirming, multi-lingual bars (in addition to her usual, Kiswahili, Luganda, English, and Luo, Yallah throws in a little bit of Spanish as a salute to her producer). Yallah is the only vocalist, but “sobe sobe” is a true duet, as she drops out halfway through to let Verraco’s glitches and breaks do the talking.

11. Laurie Torres - “Intérieurs”: A hypnotic piano melody. An understated jazz beat. Put them both together and you have “Intérieurs,” a wonderful little composition by Montreal multi-instrumentalist Laurie Torres, fully entrancing for all of its 94 seconds. If you need a little more than just a piano melody to get you going, the great Jeremiah Chiu (of SML and solo fame) remixed the song, creating a new world within the song’s melody with glowing synth pads, percolating marimbas, and swirling woodwind arpeggios.

10. Cameron Winter - “Drinking Age”: During the streaming age, many listeners have come to prize “frictionlessness” above all else in their music experience. The services encourage users to create free-flowing playlists, automatically play “similar songs” after those playlists end, and organize songs into mood-based playlists, discouraging active listening and encouraging curation of background vibes. It shouldn’t be surprising, in this environment, that an artist like Cameron Winter is controversial, his distinctive baritone and non-linear songwriting appealing to some, and repulsing others. As someone who relates to David Berman’s famous lyric, “all my favorite singers couldn’t sing,” I have never been afraid to embrace a weird voice, but I will admit I didn’t buy into the Cameron Winter/Geese hype at first. “Why is he singing like that?” I thought, as did many others, but I understand the value of having an easily-recognizable, and imitable, voice: just ask Neil Young, or Tom Waits, or, sure, Bob Dylan. Winter is obviously not a songwriter on that level, but he definitely has some juice. “Drinking Age,” and particularly his piano performance of the song on Jimmy Kimmel Live, was the song that made me a believer. At first, it’s hard to take note of what Cameron is singing, but easy to appreciate how he’s singing it, with dramatic elongated vowels that evoke a hound howling at the moon. It is a deceptively skeletal lyric, with very few words and a lot of syllables (many of which are nonsense sounds like “brrbrrhrrrbb”), a eulogy mourning the now-22-year-old singer-songwriter’s youth, and all the possibility it implies. “From now on,” he croons, “this is who I’m gonna be.” He looks in the mirror and does see his childhood fantasies reflected back: “I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be a piece of sh*t.” Say what you want about Cameron Winter, but one must acknowledge that his music is anything but streaming-age wallpaper. He forces you to lean in, pay attention, and, finally, to be a critic. Do you like what you hear?

9. S.G. Goodman - “Snapping Turtle”: Kentucky artist S.G. Goodman is a writer’s writer, unearthing the essence of her Appalachian home with vignettes that would make Flannery O’Connor proud. The centerpiece of her album Planting By The Signs, Goodman’s “Snapping Turtle” compares the downtrodden creature, beaten to near death by teenagers with sticks before the narrator’s intervention, to Leanna, a small town girl whose life ground her down in a similar fashion. Over a simmering country-fried slow burn, Goodman delivers lines that contain worlds (“Grew up hard on bottled land Where only crops should grow”), regretting that she couldn’t “play god” and stop Leanne from meeting her fate, like she could for the titular reptile. ”Small towns where my mind get stuck,” she repeats, lamenting the fate of those like Leanne, who deserved much more than their lot in life.

8. These New Puritans - “Bells”: British chamber pop warhorses These New Puritans have been among the indie scene’s most underrated acts since their 2006 debut. They traffic in grand, sweeping majesty, and at their best, their songs make you feel like you are ascending to a higher plane of existence. Their 2025 epic “Bells” is certainly the band at their best. “Bells” is arranged as a series of arpeggios, which swirl on top of one another, reaching for the skies like a waterspout. Both haunting and dreamlike, "Bells" taps into a latent spirituality by digging into the infinite cosmos that exist within each human being: “The sea is wide and the sea is long/the silent conductor of a distant song/And if you know it and even if you don’t/sing it out from down below”

7. Stereolab - “Transmuted Matter”: Legendary Marxist avant-pop wizards Stereolab came back in 2025 like they never left. It was a nice surprise, but it wasn’t a shock. They’ve been in top form on several recent tours, lead singer Laetitia Sadier recorded an excellent solo album last year, and guitarist/co-songwriter Tim Gane continues to push music forward with his outfit, the Caverns of Anti-Matter. Also unsurprising: some of the music on their new album, Instant Holograms on Metal Film, is as strong as anything they released in their heyday. “Transmuted Matter” recalls the frictionless funk of the band’s late period (Dots & Loops, Cobra Starship..., etc.), complete with the liquid basslines and memorable synth melodies for which they are known. Sadier’s mantras are as oblique as ever, but instead of offering ideological polemic, she preaches the importance of getting in touch with one’s true self, to “see through the eye of the heart.” For once, she is able to overlook society's many ills and tap into a deeper essence that our corporate overlords can’t take from us, no matter how hard they try. 

6. Dijon - “Yamaha”: Sometimes you hear a song and you know you will never forget the melody as long as you live. Dijon’s loping melody for “Yamaha” is one of those, maneuvering around suspended chords in a gentle lilt toward euphoria. Dijon complements his outstanding melody with memorable sonic flourishes, including a “Darling Nikki”-esque choral intro, and crushed vocal samples that interject like ad-libs. By the outro, Dijon has fully immersed us into his world of domestic tranquility, where familiarity has not led to loss of passion or infatuation.

5. Thirteendegreesº - “Da Problem Solva”: Chicago rapper Thirteendegreesº has a frankly unacceptable amount of nostalgia for an era that really wasn’t that long ago. He frequently invokes Tumblr–that’s right, the website you’re reading this on–as if it only exists as some kind of childhood memory, rather than the bustling platform we all know it to be. So yes, Thirteen is deeply inspired by the internet rap of 2013, mixing the candy-coated soundscapes of Chicago bop with the see-sawing melodies of 1017 Thug. But as he says, “everything comes from somewhere,” and his take on the rap of not-so-long-ago is genuinely fresh, especially “Da Problem Solva,” my favorite rap song of the year. “Da Problem Solva” is built around an incredible flip of Stevie V’s hip-house hit “Dirty Cash (Money Talks)” (courtesy of producer Gyant) that chops, screws, and stretches the original’s earnest vocals and bright synths into a taffy-like brew. Thirteen effortlessly slides between the vocal samples, stacking outlandish punchlines in cascading cadences, approaching levels of out-of-pocket absurdity reached by his heroes like Young Thug and Chief Keef: “Why'd I caught her on Hinge?,” he cries.

4. SHERELLE - “SPEED (ENDURANCE)”: I didn’t get out to the club much this year (I’d bring my 18-month if I could, I promise) but UK artist SHERELLE’s “SPEED (ENDURANCE)” is my club anthem of the year. It’s a feverish mix of cross-Atlantic sounds, blending footwork, DnB, and Jersey club into a supersonic heatrock that steams ahead at 160 BPM. As the title implies, the song is an endurance test: can you keep up with the furious tempo for 5 and a half minutes without collapsing like a flapper at a dance marathon? Probably not, but it is fun to try.

3. Nourished by Time - “When The War Is Over”: All Marcus Brown of Nourished By Time needs to devastate you is a few plaintive piano chords, a freestyle beat, and his off-kilter baritone. “When The War Is Over” is most powerful for what is left unsaid, as Brown looks for love to help him make a meaningful time in this slowly dying world. In a way, it’s a sequel to last year’s “Hell Of A Ride,”; Brown abandons that song’s devil-may-care attitude after finding a love that makes it worth weathering the storm.

2. Panda Bear - “Anywhere But Here”: Brian Wilson’s ghost hung over my 2025 listening like a raincloud on a summer’s day. For about a month after his passing, I fell into a Wilson hole, listening to everything The Beach Boys ever did, in a fruitless attempt to understand his harmonic genius. Wilson’s influence is incalculable, but one way he has notably manifested is as the patron saint of Indie Pop. Noah Lennox, aka Panda Bear, erstwhile of Animal Collective, has always been one Brian’s most devoted acolytes. He shares the great songwriter’s ability to view complex topics through a child’s eyes, and to refract those perspectives through his quietly psychedelic music. More inspired by the Louvin Brothers and Everly Brothers than the Wilson Brothers, “Anywhere But Here” is one of Lennox’s finest songs, perfect for dreaming your life away on a remote coastline and watching the sun set. Drenched in reverb and evoking the tape delay effects of Jamaican dub, “Anywhere But Here” drifts by like a Cirrus cloud, the naivete of its refrain contrasting the philosophical heft of the Portuguese spoken word passages, which reflect upon our human responsibility to treat others well. “I guess I'll wait until/The voices inside my mind/Are out of time,” he sings, “And in a place close by I'll occupy/Until its end.

1. PinkPantheress - “Illegal”: Ultimately, there was only one choice for my number one song of the year. Picking “Illegal” feels, well, against the rules, like saying your favorite food is cotton candy. PinkPantheress’s fun-sized masterpiece is more nourishing than that carnival staple, but it hits similar pleasure centers of the brain. Let’s start with the sample, which hails from Underworld’s epic 1994 anthem “Dark & Long,” arriving nearly 8 minutes into the song. Pink milks those two chords for all they’re worth, sinuously winding between the contours of the 2-step beat with her flirtatious banter, packing more hooks into the song’s two-and-a-half minutes than many songwriters can cobble together in an entire career: the heavy breathing, the 8-bit treble synths, the surreal unreality of the opening lines (“You were recommended to me by some people” - what??), the canned “wow” sound effect that hits before the outro, and the inconspicuous camera flash noise that ends the song. It’s perfect pop in a year where we all needed a bit of bubblegum. 

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Thanks for reading, hope you found something you love!

Here's the full playlist:

And here is the rest of my list, from 26-100:

not for me i dont think, you can feasibly dance to it so....

Dark, loud, intense, the club is an environment that invites tremendous focus. Focus on the music, of course, but also on enjoyment, and that’s where Sherelle rules. It’s also where I look forward to hearing the best of With a Vengeance’sjungle throbs, pattering footwork and attention-demanding energy.