The worst part about limiting your year-end lists is what ends up getting left off. The strays you keep telling yourself, “I’ll find a spot for this,” and suddenly there are no more spots remaining. Whoops. You put together an initial list. Then you re-write the list a bunch more times. Some songs fall off and are replaced. Others move down or up in placement, mostly because you listened to the song again and it was better or slightly worse than you remember. What’s ended up here is a best effort proposition. If I listen back to these 100 songs in a year or five years, will I still want to rank them the same way? Probably not. Time and distance can play funny tricks with your memory, along with where you are in life at the time.
What I will say is that the top 10 songs on this list have been the same since the very first iteration. None of these have moved or changed position since I started this process in early December. That’s as great of an endorsement I can give to them. They impressed, inspired, and gave me goosebumps from the first time I heard them all the way through today. Before we dive in, let me explain some of the peculiarities of the list-making process. First and foremost, every artist on this list only appears once, though guest features do not count towards that total. I think only Earl Sweatshirt hits that exception this year. The goal is to spread the love around to as many artists as possible, so I tried my best to pick the one song from an album (or standalone single) that was both the strongest and most culturally impactful. Secondly, in order to qualify for this list, the song must have been officially released at some point in 2025. Apologies to Cameron Winter, whose album Heavy Metal and incredible single “Love Takes Miles” both came out in December 2024 and won’t be included here. I should make an exception since I was too buried in last year’s “best of” listmaking to give Winter’s record the attention it deserved, but rules are rules. Lastly, while these songs are ranked, the subjective nature of this list really means that about anything after #25 could be considered fluid. It might benefit you to listen through these songs on one of the playlists linked below, and even better if you hit the shuffle button just to see where that gets you. Everything on here is great, so you can’t go wrong!
My #1 song of 2025 might not be “big” or “anthemic” in a traditional sense, but it moves and speaks at a pace that feels right for this moment in time. You could turn it on and hit repeat for hours and it would feel like the most natural thing in the world. It’s a horny song about being horny, yet it also doesn’t feel very sexy or sexual, if that makes sense. In my mind, it’s the musical equivalent of going to a high school dance with somebody you like but don’t know extremely well, and it’s awkward even though your hormones are raging out of control. How does that earn the title of “Song of the Year”. Sometimes magic defies an easy explanation.
Okay, I think that about covers everything I wanted to say. Please enjoy these songs, especially if you haven’t heard them before! I hope you get introduced to a new favorite, because that’s pretty much the whole reason I make these lists in the first place. A Spotify playlist featuring all 100 songs is embedded at the very bottom of the list. You can also use the following links to listen via Spotify or YouTube. What am I missing? Let me know on social media! All the best to you and yours heading into 2026!
Selecting and ranking 100 songs as the “Best of” any given year is a fool’s errand. There’s simply too much music to choose from and the notion that any of these lists can truly encapsulate what it was like to listen to music in 2020 inevitably leaves some important things out or places too much importance on certain artists or genres. In the end it’s all subjective anyway, and what captures one person’s imagination might leave another in the cold. Plus, with so much music available there’s no way you can listen to everything. I know I’ve discovered plenty of songs and artists weeks, months, or years later, only to wish I had known about them sooner so they could’ve been included in a year-end roundup. It’s the way life goes sometimes. But that’s also the benefit of any list like this! For anyone to tell you these are songs that meant something to them in 2020 automatically elevates those tracks above your standard fare. If you’re looking to put your music listening in focus, a list like this can help to some degree. 