It’s December 29, 2025, and if you can believe it, we here at KRUI actually listened to music throughout the whole year! Within the relentless ever-changing year we experienced during 2025, we came back to music as our point to ground ourselves in art and to explore the endless innovations and creativity of music. Whether it’s singles or standouts, songs give us a glimpse into an artist, to experience their world within their piece of creation. From pop stars, to indie legends, to the fresh Bandcamp up-and-comers, we’ve picked out nine of our favorite songs released this past year to share and explore together.
Hayley Heyndrickx and Max Garcia Conover, ‘Song for Alicia’
Song for Alicia is a piece dedicated to Alicia Rodriguez, a Puerto Rican activist. While named after her, the song discusses a lot of various injustices done to her, but is ultimately more focused on the capitalist society of the United States of America. Haley Heynderickx and Max Garcia Conover started this song asking people to listen to his story if you, “have never believed in this kingdom of commerce we have lived in.” They call on people to listen to how people have been silenced and how the government can be bought out by those with money. They tell part of Alicia’s Story, about how she was arrested and her fight for independence. They sing of how she and other members of the FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña) group were abused in jail, and put into prison with “no trial or charge or conviction.” Max sings about various injustices that happen in Puerto Rico caused by American greed, saying to “just be patient while we burn your poets pages.” Beyond the moving lyrics, the song shows great sound with an amazing guitar backing the moving lyrics with amazing background vocals done by Haley. This song sounds beautiful and is written so well with lyrics painting this picture of freedom fighting, it is a very important song from this year.
-Will Clair
Ethel Cain, ‘Nettles’
In the summer, “Nettles” was released as a single to promote Ethel Cain’s new album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You and by my 9th listen I could easily declare it had become my favorite song. Six months later, I still feel the same way. This beautiful track offers a glimpse into the narrative of this album, the love story between the Ethel Cain persona and her first love, Willoughby Tucker, as they grapple with the hardship of the religious south in the 1980s from familial trauma, emotional turmoil and the fears that accompany a blossoming relationship. Ethel recounts a terrifying experience she imagined where her boyfriend is hit by shrapnel from a power plant explosion and is told that he has less than 24 hours left to live. The emotions in her voice and the depth of the anecdote almost make you forget this didn’t actually happen, but Ethel’s insecurities and fears keep her stuck in these fictitious scenarios where tragedy eventually reaches the two of them.
Nettles immerses the listener with folk Americana instruments like the banjo and the fiddle, immersing us in the rural south of the 80s. The song starts out with delicate, rhythmic beats and steadily builds until the sound reaches its climax with the second chorus and ending, accompanied by vocal inflections, soft snares, drums and pedal steel guitar.
Ethel is deeply scarred by her environment, having suffered at the hands of loved ones and peers, “they did to me what I wouldn’t do to anyone.” In response to her trauma, Ethel developed a defensive shell, which can cause her to harm without intention, akin to a nettle. Because of this, she thinks being loved is a terrible burden, “to love me is to suffer me.” But Willoughby loves her. And she is deadly afraid of losing this one person who looks at her with adoration, afraid of not having enough time with him. She is afraid of tragedy, afraid of injuries, afraid of harsh white lights of hospital rooms and whispered prayers begging God for a miracle. As their community continuously pulls them down, Ethel and Willoughby cling to each other in the hopes of finding solace in each other’s arms, dreaming of a new home with gardenias on the tiles, “where it makes no difference who held back from who.” Where they can look into each other’s eyes and just be.
-Clara Carrion
Invariance, ‘Saint’
Consisting of the musical minds behind Black MIDI, Tom Hesh, and Oliva Dean, the supergroup Invariances‘ debut album takes all my favorite elements of the UK’s Windmill and New London Jazz scenes and combines them for an experimental experience at the forefront of contemporary music. Specifically, the track Saint caught my attention, as it takes both music scenes’ eclectic sonic traits to their final conclusion.
The track combines the deconstructed post-minimalism approach of artists like Colin Stetson and the improvised jazz-rock instrumentation and lyrics of Soft Machine to create an eerie, droning atmosphere tinged with anxiety and swing. The vocalist, Kaidi Akinnibi, repeats the song’s string of lyrics louder and louder over 5 minutes until the track’s crescendo of sax (also performed by Kaidi) overtakes the song’s eerie progression with shouting horns and crashing symbols. While not a club banger, the song and the album Wish You Well, stood out more than any other amongst the chaff and offered an exciting glimpse of the experimental future of England’s music revival.
-Amman Hassan
Empty Parking Lot, ‘pictures of you by the cure’
Chronically online music fans may recognize the popular Instagram shitpost account, @midwest.merky for his emo-centered memes and Spotify playlists. Unfortunately, not enough people are aware of his myriad of musical projects, including the one man band Empty Parking Lot. I got the pleasure of seeing him and his other band, Breathing Techniques, live in Ames at the beginning of 2025. I got to listen to an hour of some of the most vulnerable and beautiful emo music of the last few years, with this track in particular being an incredible standout.
A clear homage to the classic track from The Cure, this also deals with heartbreak and obsession over a failed romance. Delving deep within his own insecurities that likely led to his downfall, “I’d rather stay home tonight, if that’s alright. It’s just that I’m so god damn scared of going outside and being looked at. I hate myself for wanting to stay home all of the time.” Combined with the swelling guitar’s and his painfully tragic vocal performance, you can really feel the emotional resonance that went into this song and that makes Empty Parking Lot such an exciting new voice in the current emo landscape.
-Tarik Krob
RAYE, ‘WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!’
This wasn’t the year I thought we were going to get a jazz revolution. But if I needed a reminder of anything this year, it’s that sometimes surprises can be good! RAYE’s upbeat, swinging, all-caps, instant classic, WHERE IS MY HUSBAND! blew me out of the water in the best way possible this year and introduced me to this artist who’s bringing full orchestra accompaniments back into the mainstream, thank god. As a longtime fan of big band, swing, classic jazz, and funk, I’m delighted to see an artist out there who can play with the classic elements of the genres so masterfully. RAYE slips a groovy baseline underneath layers of big, resonant brass, mixes jazz drums with scat-like backing vocals, and crafts a melody so catchy, I raise my eyebrow at anyone who doesn’t even consider dancing along. There’s so much passion for the craft hidden within this song’s layers. As one YouTube commenter under the music video aptly notes, you can tell this song was made by someone who loves to sing.
And that’s not even touching on on the song’s lyricism, which feels at once ubiquitous and uniquely 2025. Internet discourse has been dominated this year by conversations about boyfriends, husbands, and relationships. From what I’ve been hearing, the consensus is that, for a (straight) woman, having a husband is embarrassing, but also a necessity. You’re not supposed to want one because you’re an independent woman, but you’re supposed to have one because your life would be incomplete without your other half. It makes sense then, that this song doesn’t linger too long on who the husband of the song actually is—what kind of man RAYE wants in her life—but instead focuses mainly on RAYE’s struggles without one. This gives the song a unique angle on the timeless story of looking for love. Not having a man is not a life-or-death situation—it’s just annoying. She’s not lying hopelessly in wait for her prince to save her, he’s testing her patience by taking so long to show up. This makes the song even more universal, in it’s own way. Regardless of who you are, you’ve been annoyed with a man at some point in your life (at least I know I have), and RAYE is able to vocalize this universal frustration in her own unique and snappy way. In my eyes, she’s been able to hit that sweet spot of music-making with a song many can connect to, and all can enjoy.
-Bailey Vergara
Meels, ‘Willow Song’
There is not an up-and-coming artist I am more excited about than Meels, and her track, Willow Song is my favorite song of the year. Accompanied by a charming Muppet-inspired puppeteer music video, Willow Song immediately transports me into 1979—back to a time when country music was good, sorry, but it’s true! Emulating John Denver and Bob Dylan, Meels is an expert storyteller and songwriter.
Here’s my favorite verse in the song, grounded in tried-and-true storytelling with a 21st-century edge, “When you run to the river and you ask for a drink It may not concede in the way that you think. Its surrender is painful and it cuts mighty deep. At least the painkillers around here are cheap.”
On Meels’ Instagram, she posted a self-proclaimed, “Bob Dylan–Joan Baez-esque love story,” song she had written. Had it been released already, it would have been my pick for my favorite song of hers. I can’t wait to see what she does next. She is definitely one to watch.
-Becca Warfield
Jane Remover, ‘Dancing with your eyes closed’
Watching the artistic trajectory of Jane Remover has been an incredibly fulfilling experience- there is no doubt whatsoever about that. The progression from a no-name artist dropping loose singles on Soundcloud in the early days of the hyperpop scene to establishing a name as one of the go-to producers in the genre, becoming so embedded that fans could hardly go a project without hearing something that Jane’s hands had touched.
This, to the explosion of Teen Week, Frailty, Census Designated, and now in 2025… Jane’s proper mainstream EDM opus thus far, Revengeseekerz. As a longtime fan, I knew it was only a matter of time before Jane’s ear would translate to proper mainstream attention, as things had been trending that way for some time- but perhaps there was no better way of that happening than with the release of one of the singles for Revengeseekerz, titled Dancing with your eyes closed.
There is something unexplainable about much of Jane’s electronic dance compositions, an underlying bit of magic that is presented–a vitality, a heartbeat thumping at the speed of the BPM–a synthetic creche where the spirit resides, and inflates. While Revengeseekerz had its fingers in many pies, I find that once again, it is through dance that Jane Remover is most potent in her craft.
-Evan Raefield
Sabrina Carpenter, ‘House Tour’
Do you want the house tour? Probably not, but I do. Personally, this song haunted my every second online this year, and I had no issue with that whatsoever. My good buddy, William Clair, will argue with me to hell and back about this take, but Sabrina Carpenter is easily the single best pop girl in the game right now. The alternative nature of this radio station matters naught to me when it comes time for end of year reviews. Last year I wrote about Miss “Jesus was a Carpenter” herself’s album, the Short n’ Sweet Deluxe Edition, but this year I have a more fitting pick than Man’s Best Friend, so Will gets to live without rolling his eyes back in his now bald head.
Enough Will Shade, House Tour meant an absurd amount to me this year. As none of you dearest readers can probably relate, I went through my first experience with formal sorority recruitment this year, and this song stayed in the back of everyone’s mind the entire time. It was the entirety of TikTok and Instagram for girls who just wanted to show everyone their house–especially their sorority house, and ignore the actual innuendo purposes of the song. My friend Kaitie and I even painstakingly made a video with this song for almost 12 hours at our house talking to probably 40-50 girls. We were exhausted and all we wanted to do was feel cute and special again. House Tour is without a doubt my favorite track from Man’s Best Friend. Sabrina’s brand of being this subtly-misandristic, silly girl is so important to me. She has this sort of Miss Piggy/Turner Classic Movies heroine/pin-up doll energy to her that’s absolutely timeless and fresh compared to other stars at the moment. Her lyrics and sound match her aesthetic to a T. Twitter, as always, had a lot to say about Man’s Best Friend, especially when the contentious album cover and track list were dropped early, but it still held up for me and I think the actual content of the album was a lot better than the assumptions people were making purely from the crumbs of ideas that were originally out there. Do I think some criticism was valid? Yes, but I also think a lot of it was unfounded and completely wrong after the album released. On House Tour specifically, the production quality and mixing was just so funky and even after months I haven’t gotten tired of it. Not to mention how catchy and genuinely hilarious some points of the song are. I can’t help but think she might’ve gotten inspiration for the house-body metaphor from Monster House, which I definitely watched far too young. Overall, another great year for Sabrina and I can’t wait to see where she goes next.
-Lee Nienhaus
Deafheaven, ‘Incidental II (feat. Jae Matthews)’
Having to pick a single song of the year always leaves me absolutely wrecked. Incidental II doesn’t even count as a true song, it’s an interlude from the blackgaze legends, Deafheaven off their recent (generally good) album, Lonely People With Power. Have I betrayed my many other darlings of the year by picking this? Though it’s far from being my most highly listened track, this one song stands out to me as the one song that made me feel actually scared. It begins with soft mechanical groans, a crackling synth creeping on top and forming this mysterious gentle fog from which Jae Matthew’s rasping voice emerges. Breaking up the oppressive vocals of George Clarke, she sings this haunting melody enrapturing the listener within every quiet breath and movement of her voice. The groaning instrumentals suddenly drop out underneath us, and we’re left flailing with nothing to hold onto but Jae Matthews and a light guitar accompanying her. We’re lost, alone, but with this sinking nausea that something massive approaches.
It’s one thing for a song to make you dance, to make you feel good. But when a song makes me physically anxious, I pay attention. This is a song where every choice builds this tangible dread, this song could snap and explode at any point, and strains that point of nervous tension until it snaps. Out of the silence and sweet voice, thunder erupts. Oppression does not begin to define the noise that follows. It’s every ounce of sound that Deafheaven can rip out of themselves, as their brutal wave crashes down.
The recording is incredible, each tone is perfectly processed and layered into this sickly mix, but it doesn’t compare to seeing it performed live. I had the chance to see them recently at their show in Davenport, where they used this song as an interlude to separate half of their set. It was the most incredible sound I had truly ever heard, just an absolute oppression condensed into noise. Deafheaven continue to reinvent the possibilities and emotions of metal with this album, unexpectedly found most intensely in this interlude.
-Pauly
