Here, five writers with roots and homes across the continent and diaspora sift through a wide world of sounds for some of the ...

What a year for music — great songs came out of anywhere, in every style and every genre. These are my 25 favorite songs of 2025, though some gems will appear over on my albums list, to avoid ...

Latin music has never been harder to categorize, and in 2025, a treasure trove of traditional rhythms came to the pop-culture forefront, hybridized with cutting-edge production from the realms of ...

So there was no official song of summer. So let’s move beyond the biggest hits and check out the 10 songs we kept coming back to this year. The singer-songwriter who has worked with Miley Cyrus, ...

Year-end season is normally all about positivity—publications pick their favorite albums and songs from the previous 12 months, and then we all argue over placements and omissions. “Where’s __?” is an ...

It was another banner year for country artists in 2025. In addition to Moroney and Langley, there was a new class of artists all of whom experienced their first major flushes of success, including ...

Every year, we’re told that hip-hop is in crisis. But if you ask us, it feels like there’s too much heat to keep up with. What’s lost on the chart-watchers lamenting rap’s mainstream lull is that the ...

Every year, the bounty of pop music grows more and more (my apologies to the 2,637 songs in my inbox as of time of writing that I haven't gotten to yet, out of you don't want to know how many).

90 tracks! Five hours! Remix the year in pop however you wish. By Lindsay Zoladz The longest Amplifier playlist of the year is finally here: five hours, 90 tracks, each of which was chosen as a 2025 ...

In 2024, the song of the year was so undeniable and inescapable that we don’t even have to bother naming it. This year, the landscape is much trickier. Twenty twenty-five hasn’t produced a ...

NPR Music's list of the best 25 songs represent the upper echelon of our staff and stations' favorite discoveries from the past 12 months. For those who want to dive deeper, please check out our ...

To make a list is immediately to begin second-guessing it. This year that’s especially true below the Top 10, in my list of 20 runner-up albums, for which I had double that many candidates I could ...