The music moments that stopped us in our tracks this year. 

Despite all the grim headlines – less local music being played on radio, less local music being streamed and the terrifying growth of AI artists – there’s also been a lot to celebrate in music this year. We could get bogged in how so many major touring artists decided to skip Aotearoa completely, but instead lets focus on a year that kicked off with Charli xcx turning Laneway brat green, and ended with Metallica seeing Eden Park fade to black. Elsewhere, musicians like Tiki Taane walked away from Spotify, Taylor Swift bought all her music back and celebrated with an album that kinda sucks, and Lorde performed in a YMCA toilet cubicle. 

Here are all the other music moments that stopped us in our tracks this year.

The Beths’ Straight Line Was a Lie

It didn’t take a lot to make me cry in 2025, but I really didn’t expect to be left in absolute tatters on my sunny dog walk while listening to The Beths’ fourth album Straight Line Was a Lie. Inspired by songwriter and lead singer Liz Stokes’ own battle with depression and debilitating writers block, the album is deeply personal, frequently devastating and, in classic Beths style, also full of propulsive, hooky songs. ‘No Joy’ feels like bashing your head against the wall while cackling like The Joker, and the title track loops you around and around in circles until you feel a sense of dizzy euphoria. The dynamic numbers are great for their sneak-up-on-you sadness, but it’s the slow, sparse vulnerability of ‘Mosquitos’ and ‘Mother, Pray For Me’ that will really take you out at the knees. “I issue a blanket apology to all listeners who cry during this album,” Liz Stokes told me in August. “If it’s any consolation, I cried a lot making it.” / Alex Casey

Lily Allen’s West End Girl

The release that stopped us bouncing through singles and reminded us of the pleasure of listening to an album from start to finish. Lily Allen takes misery and makes musical magic, chronicling the drawn-out breakdown of her marriage in the most raw and revealing way. A big concept album, with killer lyrics and hooky tunes, it put Allen – who hadn’t released an album for seven years – back on the music map in a major way. / Veronica Schmidt

Flying Nun feels reborn

At various points in its existence Flying Nun has felt like a cool uncle trading mostly on past glories. You seek them out at Christmas dinner, but more for their reminiscing than what they’re up to today. Not in 2025. The year started with Womb’s gorgeous, soft-focus pop, reached an early climax with Fazerdaze’s richly deserved AOTY win at the Aotearoa Music Awards for the stunning Soft Power – then just kept going. 

First Voom returned with a stunning set of charismatically shambling indie rock. Then Ringlets’ brilliant, bruising title-of-the-year-or-any-year, The Lord’s My German Shepherd, Time For Walkies (it’s a lyric; truthfully half their hyper-crafted lines would be killer titles). Then Jazmine Mary’s I Want to Rock and Roll, highlighted by their swelling, swooning ‘My Brilliance’. Then Dick Move. Then Soft Bait! It just didn’t stop. And while the catalogue releases were good, it felt like it was newer artists driving the schedule, maintaining its best qualities but very much on their own terms. It felt like a full blown revival. / Duncan Greive

The Others Way

My first time at The Others Way was such a good time I’m not sure it can be beaten. Though I intend to find out. Skipping up and down Karangahape Road catching live music is the stuff of the good life. There is nothing else like live music in my opinion: it’s secular church, basically. What I loved most about The Others Way is that it is embedded in the architecture of the city. Filling existing venue spaces with well-timetabled music and enabling pedestrian freedom for crowds intoxicated on communion and art-awe is the best of humanity in so many ways: what other species concocts such gatherings? / Claire Mabey

Marlon Williams’ Te Whare Tīwekaweka

Incredible that in the year of our lord 2025, Marlon Williams can still release his best-ever album. Te Whare Tīwekaweka is a really stunning collection of waiata which may seem on the surface like Williams is stepping out of his comfort zone, but actually he’s never sounded more grounded and himself. There are some career all-timers on here – ‘Me Uaua Kē’, ‘Kōrero Māori’, ‘Pōkaia Rā Te Marama’ – and the deep cuts, in their softer moments, vibe like a very warm embrace. A truly beautiful piece of work. / Lyric Waiwiri-Smith

Rosalía’s Lux

I’ve never prepped so hard to listen to an album.  I cleaned my house. I lit candles. I Mrs Dallowayed and bought the flowers myself. I lay down for two hours with no dumb phone in my lap to listen to it. I felt transformed.

Rosalía sings in 13 different languages on the album and opted for the operatic ‘Berghain’ as its first single. Songs like ‘Focu’Ranni’ or ‘Novia Robot’ defy categorisation. ‘La Perla’, a light and lovely waltz, unmasks Rosalía’s ex as an emotional terrorist. On ‘La Yugular’, she vocally spirals up as if trying to reach heaven with her voice. The whole thing is a precocious, avant garde flex and arguments are raging online about whether Lux, heavy with classical orchestral arrangements, is a “pop” album. At the simplest level, pop is just popular music. Lux is outrageously popular, and these arguments miss the point. Lux is a pop album because Rosalía has decided that this is what pop can sound like. When we’re being told AI can replicate everything, reducing music to a series of prompts, this album says “fuck that”. Steeped in religion and spirituality, the album has landed just as it feels like so many of us are seeking something more than the world we see in front of us. Björk sings on ‘Berghain’, telling us we can be saved by divine intervention and I really believe her. / Anna Rawhiti-Connell

Wet Leg’s Moisturizer

I wasn’t a huge fan of Wet Leg’s debut record, so it was a bit of a fluke that I listened to their new album Moisturiser and couldn’t turn it off for weeks. I love that it’s a record all about desperately adoring someone, whether that’s translated through singer Rhian Teasdale offering her partner to giddy up and take the reins on her pigtails, or screaming: “I’ve never been so deep in love!” It’s an excellent album to have playing while on an hour(s) long public transport trip spent wistfully looking out the window. / LWS

Geese mania

I love that the world has randomly gone crazy for a big loud indie band with a kind of weird sounding singer this year. If this happened when I was in my teens or even 20s my kneejerk response would have been to write Geese off as “overrated” (see: The Strokes mania circa 2001). Now I’m old and wise enough to just hop on the hype train and enjoy the ride… all the way to the Cameron Winter solo show in a church the night before Laneway. / Calum Henderson

Black British Music invents a whole new sonic world

Jim Legxacy’s second album and first for XL appears somewhat slight – not much more than a half hour, with many songs clocking around two minutes. But that belies what is one of the most fully realised and ambitious albums to come out of anywhere this year. He draws together a kaleidoscope of influences – afrobeats, ‘00s rap, dancehall, downbeat, anthemic pop – in ways that sound fresh and cohesive. 

The duration feels less like an acknowledgement of contemporary attention spans than a commitment to expressing an idea succinctly and moving the hell on. It unavoidably calls to mind Frank Ocean and peak Kanye, more in the deft way it combines its influences than in sound. There’s a nod to the crunch and sprawl of early TV on the Radio and the persistent vocal drops of prime mixtape culture, but it does all this while feeling like entirely its own thing. Listen to ‘Wayne Rooney 06’ or ‘Father’ and hear whole new worlds opening up. / DG

Georgia Knight was captivating

Whether you saw her clutching that autoharp for dear life at Others Way or The Tuning Fork, or stumbled upon her new album Beanpole, Knight is one of the year’s musical revelations. Who could have predicted that we all needed a record inspired by Babe (yes, the movie) and executed in the genre of trip-hop autoharp? / EG

Gagachella

I watched Lady Gaga’s jaw-dropping Coachella performance on my phone on the long drive home from a funeral, which feels almost too on the nose for the memento mori concerns of her Mayhem era and its overarching manifesto “dance or die”. Collaborating with our own Parris Goebel on this grandiose, operatic exploration through the two warring sides of herself, Lady Gaga won 2025 the second she started writhing around in that ghoul-infested sandpit. The performance became the blueprint for the Mayhem tour, which would see Gaga in an enormous red birdcage skirt containing dozens of writhing bodies for ‘Abracadabra’, climbing out of a giant skull for ‘Killah’, and holding a gazillion metre-long train of fabric high in the sky for ‘Paparazzi’. I witnessed it myself in Sydney last week and I am still absolutely aghast at the scenes. / AC

Clipse’s Let God Sort Em Out

Mind if a white boy speak a little Clipse? I feel like that’s the vibe most of my mates have been on this year with the return of rappers (and brothers) Pusha T and Malice’s rap duo, dropping one of the best albums of the year: Let God Sort Em Out. There are so many incredible bars on this project – “third passport, I ain’t seen enough”; “yellow diamonds look like pee-pee”; “wall for the love of 580’s and a mixed bitch having your baby”; “went from mason jars to crepe tartare’s”– which I’ve been repeating all year like gospel. And, of course, it wouldn’t be a Pusha T project if he wasn’t rapping about pushing P every other song. Long live braggadocio rap. / LWS

The 28 Years Later soundtrack by Young Fathers

2025’s best soundtrack, created for 2025’s best film, depending which song you start on this will send you into an existential anxiety attack (‘Boots’) or pull you out of a depressive episode (‘Lowly’, ‘Promised Land’). The latter is, I think, the most enlivening and uplifting song of the year. / EG

The AMAs brought the heat

Putting our most talented and outspoken creatives in big room with booze and a bunch of politicians is always going to be a tinderbox, but it felt like there was something particularly electric about the Aotearoa Music Awards this year. From Lorde saying “are we going to honour that Treaty or what?”, to Stan Walker’s staggering performance with Toitū te Tiriti storming the stage, to Don McGlashan calling Chris Bishop a “dickhead”, the awards brought the heat in more ways than one. Hori Shaw wore blood-spattered Crocs, Jesse Mulligan revealed he was in a death metal band called Vomit Socks, and Hans Puckett’s Callum Devlin unleashed a guttural scream (and again at the Silver Scrolls) that aptly summed up the mood of 2025. / AC