Grief inspired so much of the year’s best music – and that’s something AI won’t ever feel

As AI generated ever more pop slop, reflective songwriting by artists from Clipse to CMAT drew its power from its very humanityThe most acclaimed albums of 2025 make for impressively eclectic listening. Surveying them does not reveal much in the way of obvious musical trends. There’s very little similarity between Rosalía’s heady classical approach to pop on Lux and Lily Allen’s conversational disclosures on West End Girl. You could broadly group CMAT’s Euro-Country, Bon Iver’s Sable, Fable and the Tubs’ Cotton Crown together as alternative rock but they don’t sound anything like each other. And the year’s best-of lists are sprinkled with albums that brilliantly defy classification: Blood Orange’s Essex Honey leaps from old-fashioned indie to Prince-y funk; on Black British Music, Jim Legxacy sees no reason why UK rap can’t coexist with distorted guitars, pop R&B and acoustic bedroom pop.But it’s hard not to notice how similar they are thematically: a large swathe of the Guardian’s albums of the year seem consumed by loss. There are straightforward explorations of failed relationships: for all its religious imagery, there’s a prosaic breakup at the heart of Rosalía’s Lux, while West End Girl’s lurid detailing of the collapse of Lily Allen’s marriage kept the tabloids in headlines for weeks. There are albums about more literal grief: a mother’s death informs Blood Orange’s Essex Honey and the Tubs’ Cotton Crown; Jim Legxacy references his late sister, while the brothers in august rap duo Clipse have seldom sounded as vulnerable as they do describing the deaths of their parents on their rightly heralded comeback Let God Sort ’Em Out. Euro-Country both memorialises a close friend on Lord, Let That Tesla Crash, while its title track examines the wave of suicides provoked by the Irish financial crisis of 2008. Continue reading...