"There's a lot of grief across the best albums of this year. It's unsurprising: 2025 has felt like a definitive and dismal break with government accountability, protections for marginalised people and holding back the encroachment of AI in creative and intellectual fields, to cherrypick just a few horrors. Anna von Hausswolff and Rosalia reached for transcendence from these earthly disappointments. Bad Bunny and KeiyaA countered colonial abuse and neglect with writhing resistance anthems."
"Dev Hynes' fifth album as Blood Orange felt uniquely keyed into the fragmented, distracted headspace that comes after someone passes, in his case, his mother. Essex Honey's restive nature was summed up in its painful opening lines, which you could read as the dying's acceptance of death starkly contrasting the living's ability to meet them on those terms: In your grace, I looked for some meaning, Hynes sings on Look at You. But I found none, and I still search for a truth."
Grief permeates many of 2025’s most acclaimed albums, emerging from political failures, cultural shifts, and intimate bereavements. Artists respond in diverse ways: Anna von Hausswolff and Rosalía pursue transcendence, Bad Bunny and KeiyaA deliver writhing resistance anthems confronting colonial abuse, and Lily Allen and Cate Le Bon grapple with disillusionment over mis-sold romantic ideals. Several records mourn specific losses, with Dev Hynes’ Blood Orange album channeling the fragmented, distracted headspace after his mother's death. Blood Orange combines hymnal refashionings, post-punk agitation, soulful duets, and sudden rhythmic shifts to mirror emotional dislocation and an ongoing search for meaning.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]