There are many throughlines in the list you\u2019re about to scroll through: triumphant comebacks, showstopping debuts, thrill-seeking left-turns and emotional documents of grief and pain. But what stays with me, after weeks of working on our end-of-year lists, is the element of surprise \u2013 your longtime fave\u2019s capacity to catch you off guard, years into their career, or the possibility you could fall instantly in love with an album by an artist you\u2019d never heard of. And isn\u2019t that why we love music? Here\u2019s hoping you find something new and exciting in this list: NME\u2019s 50 best albums of 2025.<\/p>\n
Karen Gwee, Managing Editor (Music)<\/p>\n
Words by: Alex Flood, Andrew Trendell, Ben Jolley, Daniel Peters, David James Young, Gary Ryan, Georgia Evans, Hollie Geraghty, Joe Goggins, Jordan Bassett, Karen Gwee, Kayleigh Watson, Kyann-Sian Williams, Laura Molloy, Lisa Wright, Mika Chen, Nick Levine, Poppy Burton, Rhian Daly, Rishi Shah, Spencer Hughes, Surej Singh, Tom Morgan and Ziwei Puah<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are many throughlines in the list you\u2019re about to scroll through: triumphant comebacks, showstopping debuts, thrill-seeking left-turns…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169631,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-169630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169630\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}