December 7, 2025

by Ann Powers

This week, with NPR Music’s coverage of the best music of the year just around the corner, our critic and other members of the team look back on moments from 2025 that speak to the intimacy that sharing music can create.

Outkast at Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony

Theo Wargo/Getty Images

Hello memory bankers,

What will music lovers remember about 2025 in a decade or even a few years, when enough time has passed to let us wax nostalgic about what now feels like a blur? We journalists treasure our status as first-draft recorders of history, but as someone who loves a rewrite, I know that only distance will offer genuine clarity. In the year-end discussions we’ve been having at NPR Music, we’ve been noting that this year’s “big” stories often felt a little deflated, like landmarks half-buried under the brush of cultural acceleration. One reason, I think, is that they’re actually too momentous to fully grasp. Major cultural backlashes, equally gigantic technological (and thus cultural) shifts: Who can take it all in?

Our ace reporter Isabella Gomez Sarmiento is the one I follow to stay up to date on the biggest music news, from the battles between artists and streaming services to Taylor Swift’s repurchase of her masters to the revival of protest music via TikTok to the sad, long saga of the Sean Combs trial. Each of these developments does impact my life as a woman, a citizen and a listener, in ways that can feel glancing or profound. Yet even for the most in-touch music nerd, the most lasting memories of music are all about listening, feeling and sharing.

One reason people still enjoy year-end lists like the ones my team will be rolling out next week is that they’re comfortably narrow-cast: You love Geese or you think they’re infinitesimal next to Rosalía, and staging that argument feels more manageable and fun than trying to measure the tidal waves those ongoing stories represent. In times of incomprehensible change, “I love this” gains currency as a rallying cry.

Relatedly, what makes a music lover’s year may not have even registered in the larger record. This became evident when I asked some of my colleagues to share the musical moments that affected them most powerfully this year. Every person who responded focused on human interaction, something that happened spontaneously and without fanfare. Most chose live performances; a few opted for a speech or an exchange among fans. Rodney Carmichael, our great hip-hop scribe, singled out a moment that pointed to “great things starting in little rooms.” Even when the setting was less intimate — a stadium instead of a basement — my colleagues gravitated toward exchanges originating intimately, one hand reaching out toward another, one voice channeling the contents of the heart.

My choice for the list fits this description. One warm September evening as Nashville bustled with the sounds of the hundreds of official showcasing artists at Americanafest, a few came together in the sanctuary of a Methodist church a few miles past the din. They filled their plates with potluck food and found a seat in the upholstered chairs arranged in a semi-circle. This was the Yallidarity Social, where queer, BIPOC and progressive comedians and singer-songwriters were united by a mission: to speak their minds fully and find community in a space where solidarity, not music-industry buzz, determined the mood. Co-hosted by the folk singers Lizzie No and Nathan Evans Fox, the event attracted mostly other artists and community organizers, the people who are working to keep daily life manageable for people who don’t fit within either the bustling economic growth or the prevailing stereotypes of the South.

When No’s place in the songwriters’ round came up, they stood at the microphone and introduced “No Mercy,” which they had originally written as a “prayer for the trans community” in honor of the late queer country musician Patrick Haggerty, who’d been a mentor to so many before his death in 2022. No offered this hymn for those who’d come together seeking shelter from the barrage of real bad news, pseudo-events and hateful rhetoric gushing like sludge across our consciousness every day. The guitarist Will Greene offered gentle accompaniment as No sang themselves into a lineage that stretches from antebellum plantation fields to Birmingham streets in the 1960s to the confrontations of today. “Let me touch the hem of your garment,” they sang. “Say the word, let me be free. I have no more strength for the battle…” Their voice held history, and so much pain. This was music as an opening: to a broader awareness, to mutual aid, to the flow of loving tears that everyone in that room shed at No’s courageous act.

Such a small, quiet occurrence — would it make a history book? Only if those present decide to write themselves into a record that always extends far beyond what’s deemed official. Music is the pen, the ink, the paper. Some technologies are always with us as long as we can open our mouths.

Here are other moments that stood out for NPR Music team members this year:

Tom Huizenga, classical producer

Gala season opening concerts for symphony orchestras tend to be ho-hum affairs where a star performer plays a popular concerto surrounded by other audience-friendly pieces. And so it was at the National Symphony Orchestra’s gala show in September. Yuja Wang was the A-list soloist who played Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Her performance was great. But then came her solo encore. It blew my mind — and the roof off of the beleaguered Kennedy Center. Wang played a little-known arrangement of the scherzo movement from Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony arranged by a long-forgotten virtuoso named Samuil Feinberg. Her fingers were a blur through a fusillade of notes — some pounding, others whispering, hands criss-crossed on the keyboard — all at blistering speed, building to a head rush of a climax as the main melody thundered in. The audience erupted with joy and disbelief. That moment gave me hope in humanity — to be in community with a couple thousand others, witnessing true greatness in a hall fighting for its artistic life.

Hazel Cills, editor

After over a year of watching her perform on festival livestreams and social media videos, I finally saw Chappell Roan live during her three-night run at Forest Hills Stadium earlier this year. Reader, the hype is real — the girl can sing. (Even with a migraine, as she told the crowd!) But one part of the show I won’t forget is when Roan performed a ripping rendition of Heart’s “Barracuda” with that band’s own Nancy Wilson shredding on guitar. Girls rock!

Lars Gotrich, Tiny Desk producer and editor

GWAR is musical theatre that just so happens to be a heavy metal band of intergalactic warriors. And for this year's tour, these brilliant scumdogs brought back the character Gor-Gor, a crack-addicted T-Rex that wreaks absolute havoc. It's honestly one of the most ridiculous and impressive things I've ever seen onstage. But there's an image from Baltimore show's absurd plotline that will never leave me: Blöthar the Berserker, GWAR's main howler, unfurling and waving an upside down American flag over foreboding guitar shred. GWAR has always skewered (and impaled, beheaded, sodomized) politicians of every ideology — a collective catharsis for the audience as they're sprayed in (fake) blood. But this felt different: a signal of distress, a patriotic act, a rare moment of mourning that let humanity peek through the prosthetic pus and boils.

Isabella Gomez Sarmiento, reporter

On the last night of Bad Bunny’s historic residency in San Juan, I happened to be grabbing dinner with friends at Casa Adela, a Puerto Rican institution on Manhattan’s Loisaida Avenue. A small television in the corner of the restaurant was playing a livestream of the concert. When Bad Bunny took the stage, the kitchen staff — the hardworking Nuyorican elders the singer paid homage to in the opening track of his record-breaking album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS — gathered around the TV, hands over their hearts and tears in their eyes. I’d already listened to the album countless times by that night. But nothing compared to watching an older generation, a thousand miles away from their island, beaming with pride at the performance: a musical snapshot of Puerto Rico’s complicated history, its vibrant culture and its unwavering commitment to fight for its future.

Rodney Carmichael, correspondent

Rico Wade’s momma’s house made it all the way to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Andre wept. And the whole entire filthy nasty Dirty South caught a Stankonia-sized lump in our throat. Something about the delayed acceptance, and eventual dominance, of rap hailing from below the Mason-Dixon made OutKast’s recent induction something like Southern hip-hop’s glorified homecoming. We took that journey personally. Because I don’t know a single soul from around my way who didn’t commit to memory every lyric to Goodie Mob’s Soul Food while imagining themselves an extended member of the mighty Dungeon Family. So that was all of us onstage at OutKast’s recent induction, standing behind them as Big thanked Dre and Dre thanked their faith in great things starting in little rooms. Theirs was a dank basement with red-clay walls that created so much condensation the moisture would make Ray Murray’s beat machine occasionally go haywire, they once told music journalist Roni Sarig. (Amen to the holy ghost in the machine.) When Dre also paid homage to the mother and younger sisters of DF co-founder Rico Wade, for enduring all their Organized noisiness till the wee hours, even on school nights, I thought about all those uncredited sacrifices, often made by women, so hip-hop could be great. Then I thought about Atlanta’s rap community. Deluged by death, RICO trials and tribulation, it’s easy to chalk the last couple of years up as a net loss. But we also gained an ancestor in Rico Wade and got our first family enshrined. That’s what you call everlasting.

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And a few more than momentary pleasure as we ease toward the holidays

Vanessa Carlton is the rare former teen phenom whose music has just grown more interesting and powerful over time. Her latest single, “Animal,” is the first from her upcoming album Veils. I could see Jennifer Lawrence dancing wildly, the way she does in Die My Love, to this.
Upon the publication of the first biography of one of the greatest novelists of the past half-century, Denis Johnson — and the success of Train Dreams, an adaptation of one of his last published works — all I can say is, read his masterpiece, the story collection, Jesus’ Son. Read it again if you’ve read it already, you ridiculous people.
Docs on a couple of big, essential music personalities are featured on the Criterion Channel this month — Scott Walker: 30th Century Man and Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami.
Do you like memorable music videos? Old timey music? Adorable raccoon puppets? Meels is for you. She’s also doing a series in our National Parks!

NPR Classical

Holiday music for the active lifestyle...

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If you want to know what happens when I put on a synth pop playlist at the gym, check out the latest episode of the pod we’re fondly calling Old Songs Considered. Daoud Tyler-Ameen and I do that funny little New Wave shoulder-dance to New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle,” discuss its many versions, and make the case for its supremacy in a genre full of squiggly bangers. Find it here, as part of NPR Music+.

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