With Something Good, the arts and culture newsletter from The Conversation, we aim to cut through the noise and recommend the very best in new releases every fortnight. And what a soundtrack this year’s newsletters have had. From Lily Allen’s devastating breakup album West End Girl to Rosalía’s genre-defying LUX, these are the best albums of 2025 according to our academic experts.

Yazmin Lacey’s second album, Teal Dreams, builds on her well-received multi-genre debut, Voice Notes (2023). Featuring a more confident and developed sound, this album is a rich blending of roots and soul. The Londoner’s vocal delivery spans a range of emotional registers, exploring themes of growth and renewal throughout.

There are beautiful, melodic moments aplenty. From the slow-burn build of Grace to the sassy swagger of Crutch, all reward repeated listening.

On Ribbons, Lacey addresses personal loss, expressing feelings of change and longing, declaring she’s “not the same Yazmin”, “misses your big ideas” and wants “to talk about love and fear”.

Meanwhile her 2024 collaboration with Ezra Collective, God Gave Me Feet For Dancing, continues with the grooviness of Ain’t I Good For You. The song and album serve as an open invitation to dive in and enjoy the reflective beauty Lacey offers.

Hussein Boon is chair of the Black Music Research Unit

The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy is one of 2025’s most striking extreme-metal releases. Not just because it blends black metal with psychedelic tones reminiscent of David Bowie, but because it plays with the genre’s emotional architecture in unusually vulnerable ways.

Under the swirling tremolo and gothic theatrics sits an affective register closer to yearning than nihilism. The album leans into a kind of decadent, romantic masculinity, accentuated by the complete anonymity of the band’s members, and refusal to confirm to normative maleness in the genre.

For researchers like me who study men and masculinities, it’s a compelling artifact: a reminder that subcultural performance is never just noise, but a way of working through desire, fantasy and the uneasy labour of feeling.

In a music scene often caricatured as hostile or hypermasculine, The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy offers a glimpse of what happens when intensity becomes a mode of introspection rather than domination.

Chris Waugh is a lecturer in Criminology & Sociology

For anyone unfamiliar with Rosalía’s journey from flamenco experimentalist to global pop innovator, LUX might seem like a bold leap – yet its seeds were always there. A heartfelt offering of avant-garde classical pop, sung across 13 languages, this record feels both operatic and immediate, expansive yet relatable.

What’s most impressive is the album’s sheer conceptual depth, weaving together romance, divinity and gender without ever feeling academic or inaccessible. Drawing on historic figures such as the German Benedictine abbess and philosopher Hildegard von Bingen (1089-1179) and Taoist master Sun Bu’er........

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