January 10, 2026

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic communes with some of the most celebrated albums of the last year, and has a revelation about the rewards they offer devoted fans.

Geese performs in Brooklyn in November 2025

Griffin Lotz/Getty Images

Hello fellow music devotees,

The first full week of 2026 has been difficult to process, so I hope you’ll forgive me for spending one last hour here trying to grasp something about 2025. Over the holiday, I should have been checking out advances of music for the new year, but instead I listened to only three albums: Heavy Metal by Cameron Winter, Getting Killed by Geese and Lux by Rosalía. I’ve come to treasure all three as ambitious, immersive leaps, but since I’m one to respond to others’ instant enthusiasm with caution, it took me a while to fully warm to them. Thinking about the instant popularity of these albums, which in many ways ended up defining the year, I had a revelation that I’ll try to articulate here: It has to do with how we self-identified music freaks embrace certain works as a way of defining both our own passions and our connections with others.

Going into 2025’s end game, my closest NPR Music nerd pals and I began to think there’d be no consensus about what defined this time. I still think there really isn’t. The field is too wide, and music’s role in the disorienting public life we’re all sharing feels somewhat obscured. But in the fall, two things happened that made me realize what people were craving, at least. Geese released Getting Killed, became the scruffiest stars of TikTok and even made Wordle, leading to a holiday season that Sirius XMU even dubbed “The Twelve Days of Geesemas.” And Rosalía rolled out Lux, her orchestral song suite about the spiritual experience of heartbreak, so expertly that it was instantly declared a masterwork. (I mean instantly. Like, after what had to be one or two listens, for most who adore her.)

I have a bad habit of recoiling from what feels like groupthink — a bad habit, I say, because sometimes a big shared YES is actually the right response. After listening a lot and looking back at the ecstatic early days of these albums’ reception, I know my initial resistance was a mistake. Not because they’re both perfect, but because these two albums gave serious music fans a chance to fully enact a major shift that I think’s been building for a while, one that ties into other big conversations, like the debate over Taylor Swift’s values and observations about the daggers-out dismantling of the concept of poptimism. The pop mainstream, as an ideal of coalition-building across the lines of identity and affinities, is out. Influencers are corny and suspect. Working at your art is the move. This all reflects a step away from consensus as the dominant fascination within mainstream culture, and toward communion as an experience that smaller yet still significant streams of fans are actively seeking.

The frontrunners of 2025 gained a startling amount of attention as part of this trend. Lux and Getting Killed are sensational albums — and right now I’ll throw in Geese main guy Cameron Winter’s solo album Heavy Metal, which came out in late 2024 and spent 10 months bubbling up before being fully feted as an indie game-changer alongside his band’s breakthrough — ostentatiously ambitious and successful in hitting the marks their makers set. One is a tightly structured song cycle; the other a volatile challenge to songcraft’s established rules. But it was really the way they reached fans that made them stand out so drastically.

The remarkably well-executed Lux release cycle — a killer single and video for the statement of purpose “Berghain,” select interviews with only the cream of music media, listening parties that carefully mixed glitz with gravitas — cast Rosalía’s foray into operatic fusion as an intervention, a passionately serious counterbalance to the consumer-friendly stuff topping most charts. When the BBC’s Jack Saunders suggested during an interview that people could just play Lux in the background, Rosalía shook her finger at him, saying that while people would experience it in different ways, it was a “journey” and should command their full attention. She wants active engagement, the full sit-down. The BBC posted the excerpt on TikTok with the title “Rosalía Tells Us How to Listen to Lux.”

Rosalía led her fans toward a fairly traditional experience of music appreciation, but on her own terms, in settings where coloratura vocals in many languages serve lyrics communicating hip-hop swagger and profane desire. Geese, and especially their charismatic frontman, Cameron Winter, took a more subversive approach. Armed with a killer backstory (teen prodigies with Brooklyn bohemian bona-fides grow into their sound as Winter awakens to his place in rock history), supportive friends like last year’s indie hero MJ Lenderman and the lingering impact of that eccentrically lovable Winter solo album, Geese flew into the hypestream with live shows staged to look like riots or refusals and a prankster persona inferring their suspicion of the very fame they also happily welcomed. A clip of them performing in the middle of a crowded Brooklyn street, like messiahs about to be swallowed by their fans, complements those of Winter’s recent solo Carnegie Hall show, where he chose to keep his back to the crowd while also being filmed in close-up by celebrity directors Benny Safdie and Paul Thomas Anderson.

Winter’s interviews abound with trickster deflections — he loves to invent Geese hangers-on with names like Ezekiel and Santiago — but also with passionate exegeses on legends ranging from Albert Ayler to William Carlos Williams, which reinforce the endless comparisons to such greats that his admirers offer. As the comparisons to elder rock icons have piled up, Geese released a stream of covers that reinforce the band’s nascent canonicity while also poking fun at it. They’ve pivoted from The Stooges to one-hit wonders New Radicals, from Nick Drake to Four Non Blondes. Loving Geese properly requires not worrying about whether they’re joking or not.

This is where communion and its distinction from consensus comes in. In the recent past, the albums that have defined each year have represented a desire to redefine the mainstream, or at very least, make a strong stance toward more diverse representation. Think of Brat by Charli XCX, The Record by Boygenius or Beyoncé’s Renaissance. Those albums all expressed powerful points of view that made fans feel seen on a grand scale; their rollouts made me think of political campaigns. People loved these albums for clear, definable, honorable reasons. They were grateful to the artists who made them. I heard something different from champions of Lux and Getting Killed — a whole lot of whoa, how did she do this and wow, why do I love this? Instead of joining armies to help promote their favorites, fans are gathering in clusters to celebrate music they don’t necessarily need to share with skeptics. The small wave of mild dissenters often seem more dismayed at their failure to join in than eager to argue against it.

I wasn’t sure about how to talk about this shift from the kind of fandom that felt externally oriented — organized, in a sense, to change pop’s game — to one that was so insular, until I came across an essay by the novelist and essayist Ranbir Sidhu about the painter Anselm Kiefer. I love that German maximalist’s massive, thickly layered constructions, which, in Sidhu’s words, “entangle history, myth, story, memory, and time in the physicality of the work itself.” I could stand in front of one of these paintings (this one, for example) for hours. In his essay, Sidhu relates exactly that kind of experience, which he shared with a stranger, at Gogosian, Kiefer’s New York gallery. Staring at the canvas titled “Cosenza,” he noticed that a woman was doing the same a few feet away from him. They shared this space for a half hour, neither speaking nor acknowledging others passing through. For Sidhu, the experience began to feel “like a mushroom trip,” then as if “time collapsed” — “the linear world around me disappeared.” He understood that his accidental companion was feeling the same thing. Finally they nodded to each other; “I fell back to earth,” he writes, “and again was simply standing in a white-painted room looking at a painting of an island.” This miracle left Sidhu with “an intense, almost explosive happiness.”

This is what I mean by communion. It’s mysterious and highly individual, yet enhanced by an awareness that someone alongside you is having a similar (but not identical!) experience. Many would call it spiritual. Sidhu relates it to alchemy, “as surfaces become sites for magical transformation.” I prefer the Catholic metaphor because it applies well to music. Like the wafer taken at the altar, music actually enters your body; it palpably changes you. In a live setting or during a shared listening session where the sound is turned up, it’s evident that others, too, are feeling that shift. Communion, with an artwork and then with others experiencing the same thing, is a mystery — it’s not quantifiable and sets out no clear agenda beyond the wonder of the experience itself.

Lux and Getting Killed both encourage this experience of abiding with music rather than championing it or even trying to fully figure it out. Several reviewers have invoked religious states that unravel speech, like glossolalia, as akin to Rosalía’s mosaics of both languages and musical styles on Lux. On Getting Killed, Geese similarly overdoes everything, trampling through rock history without feeling the need to settle. The “guess the inspiration” game is a fun one for Geese fans to play as they hear Dylan/The Stooges/Beefheart/Patti Smith/The Strokes/Sparklehorse/Van Morrison/add your favorite here in their jams. As in Kiefer’s paintings, the tangled layers form a new primal story: tradition bloodily bringing the future to life.

With so much to absorb and nothing to firmly grasp, these albums train the listener away from simple readings and toward something more mystical. Reviews of these albums revel in that welcome vulnerability. In The New York Times, Lindsay Zoladz wrote about “the bizarro magic that oozes out of this record” before throwing up her hands and telling people to just go listen to Geese themselves. Amanda Petrusich, in The New Yorker, described seeing the band live: “I felt, briefly, as if something inside me was dissolving.” Lux caused related startling shifts in listeners. “I don’t cry to music, ever,” wrote Samuel Maude in Elle. “I cried during ‘Mio Cristo.’ ” Craig Jenkins of Vulture described the album as “stunning,” one that can “knock you down.”

I think this is just what people are craving as we move into a year that’s already reinforcing the feeling that tried-and-true methods of establishing consensus can’t meet the moment. Consensus-oriented fandom is competitive and outwardly directed. Communion-based fandom is more coded, even secretive, based in mutual understanding that’s not always easy to articulate. On some level, this is the return of snobbishness, of expecting fans to work to comprehend what they love. I think it also represents a longing among listeners to reestablish a definition of greatness that’s separate from external markers like stream counts and chart positions, one that depends on each listener’s private immersion in an artist’s work. Instead of working to solidify consensus, the community supporting artists like Geese or Rosalía in her Lux era is in it for personal reasons and might even be surprised when it grows.

Consensus was the right mode for the height of social media, when the power in music culture shifted toward fans who’d never before been fully acknowledged as tastemakers — young women, queer people, BIPOC audiences. Those fans entered the picture with their own priorities; they wanted to be seen, and used their enthusiasm as a form of self-validation.

I think many people are beginning to grow tired of engaging with music in this externalized way. They’re recognizing the limits of consumerism as an avenue for enacting real social change. Having lost their faith in consensus, fans are turning toward experiences that feel unique and even a bit cloistered; they want to be immersed in something instead of lifting it up for all to see. Maybe they’ve grown a bit cynical, suspecting that as good as it feels, the symbolic empowerment a stadium-filling pop star can offer has a discouragingly limited shelf-life. Maybe it’s actually a lunge for something more — an encounter that rearranges your head and your heart so thoroughly that such rational goals just don’t matter, at least for the moment. A turn toward the part of you that can’t be mined for data. In the moment of communion, it’s always unclear just what emotions will surface, what new possibilities will present themselves. I think — and hope — that as this year moves forward, music offers more opportunities to experience that.

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Here are some things I’ve been communing with this week

Oscar nominations are coming soon, and as usual I’m thinking about alternative categories. I’d like one for the best final scene in a feature film — so many good ones this year. Can someone do a mashup of Timothée Chalamet’s tears at the end of Marty Supreme and Rose Byrne’s deep breathing in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You? In the meantime, here is an interview with Byrne that touches on how breath work influenced her stunning performance.
Speaking of awards season contenders, I love this playlist that Hannah Claire Baker and her friends came up with to complement the wonderful Sentimental Value.
If you enjoy Joachim Trier’s melancholy exegeses of middle-class alienation, you’ll probably also love the work of Atom Egoyan, whose films are being featured on Criterion Channel this month. I’d never seen his short film Calendar before; a meditation on the nature of home disguised as a divorce story, it features the filmmaker himself in a starring role (alongside his wife, the utterly enchanting Arsinée Khanjian) and stunning scenes of Armenian sacred sites as its backdrop.
Nepo babies abound, but sometimes a kid really earns her inheritance. Storey Littleton has been performing with her parents Dan and Elizabeth (cofounders of the legendary indie band Ida) since childhood, but this single from her upcoming debut album At a Diner shows she’s fully developed her own sound. Love the Shangri-La’s shout out at the beginning.
New Year, new me? I dunno, but I’m trying to keep it moving with Reps to the Rhythm and listening to the mellow grooves of Japanese psych-rock hero Shintaro Sakamoto, whose new album Yoo-Hoo drops later this month. Here’s a tasty in-studio performance of his song “Is There a Place For You There?” from KCRW.

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