2025 proved that a bad year for the world doesn’t have to be a bad year for music. While democracy was dying, the pop girls were thriving. A few artists dominated the year for me, so I thought I’d use this space to talk about each of them.
PinkPantheress was the biggest grower for me this year. I’d given her early hits a chance and always thought they were fine, but I was past the point of checking on her when Stateside caught my eye on YouTube. Huh, she’s better than I remembered. And then came Illegal, and I was hooked. I don’t think any song has played in my head more times this year. I loved the rest of her album, her dedication to authentic Y2K style, and her fun, nerdy personality. More pop stars should casually win a chess grand slam mid-album campaign.
Another artist who levelled up this year was Jade. Her best single was, of course, released last year, but she kept us fed with poptasticness throughout 2025, including one of the year’s best albums. Her love of pop music and the joy with which she approaches carving out her own space in the pop landscape has made it so easy to will her on, and so delightful to see her doing well. After her fantastic performance at the Brits this year, I’m ready for her to be the big winner and standout performer of the 2026 edition.
While they only made one appearance each in the top 25, Katseye and Addison Rae both made a big impact on my year, turning careers that once looked shaky into incredibly well deserved hype. Addison’s ethereal mid-tempo Headphones On was an instant obsession and one of my most played tracks of the year. Meanwhile, Gnarly was a showcase in exactly why other attempts to launch new girlbands haven’t caught fire recently: at no point in its creation was anyone concerned about whether it sounds like a girlband song. The best girlband breakthrough singles redefine what a girlband should sound like (think Sound of the Underground, Freak Like Me and many more), and Gnarly deserves a place in that pantheon.
Chappell Roan had an interesting year: 2024 was of course her breakthrough while 2025 was relatively quiet, but since I’d been obsessed with her album in 2023 I was itching for new music. There was a general consensus that The Giver and The Subway were disappointing, but I felt the opposite. I loved that she entirely disregarded pressure to pump out another Pink Pony Club or Hot To Go (as much as I love those songs too). The Giver is the pinnacle of pop-country while subverting all its heteronorms, while The Subway builds majestically from thoughtful dream-pop to wailing anthem. She is a supreme songwriting talent and I cannot wait for her next album, whenever it may come.
Finally we have to talk about our lord and saviour, Lady Gaga. When pop stars reach the ‘middle age’ of their career (10+ years in but not quite in the Hall of Fame just yet), they typically try to reinvent themselves and conquer new sounds – the path that Madonna and Kylie paved. But that doesn’t work for everyone, often leading to a scrambled return to what fans originally loved about them, the phenomenon we all now know as “reheating your own nachos.” We had a disastrous example of this in 2024 with Katy Perry’s Women’s World, but in 2025 we saw an absolute masterclass from Gaga. Mayhem was an impersonation of her own peak, with songs that were just as good as the originals.
Mayhem was definitely my album of 2025, and Abracadabra was an easy choice for my single of the year. It revved me up for a 2-hour presentation at work. I organised nights out entirely for the purpose of hearing Abracadabra in the wild. I love it as much now as on first listen, and there has been *a lot* of listens in-between. Turns out reheated nachos can be really good if the original nachos were some of the best ever made.
Here’s my top 25 in full: