Albums To Look Out For In 2025: A Guide To The Year’s Most Anticipated Releases

Sports Team: ‘Boys These Days’

Unmooring themselves from their scrappy Britpunk roots to navigate the choppy waters of yacht rock, Sports Team promise a loose and breezy affair with their third album, Boys These Days. Full of 80s synths inspired by Avalon-era Roxy Music, its lead single, I’m In Love (Subaru), finds the group travelling with the wind in their sails, twinning playful storytelling with a sleek, sophisti-pop sound. “Having been in London guitar world for quite a while, I began looking at people like Bryan Ferry and how it can be a bit more fun if you play around with characters,” lead singer Alex Rice told Rolling Stone UK. Often fêted for poking fun at modern culture, Sports Team could be about to deploy a masterstroke as they enrich their gnarly indie-rock guitar hooks with blasts of alto-sax.

Release date: 28 February 2024

What to expect: I’m In Love (Subaru)

The Horrors: ‘Night Life’

Readying their first album seven and a half years, The Horrors have promised fans that a “new chapter is beginning”. “We’re looking forward to taking you with us,” they said in a press statement announcing Night Life. “The Horrors are never-ending.” Expected to put a nocturnal twist on shoegazey instrumentals and neo-psychedelic post-punk, the band’s return couldn’t come at a better time, following as it does the commercial resurgence of The Cure. Might the spectre of goth-rock be re-awakening? Given the gloomy state of the world, a spot of The Horrors’ shadow play could offer us an antidote to our modern woes.

Release date: 21 March 2024

What to expect: The Silence That Remains

Albums To Look Out For In 2025: Rumoured Releases

Whether teased by the artists themselves or hinted at by those closest to them, these new albums are rumoured to be dropping sometime in 2025…

Cardi B: TBC (Second Studio Album)

With seven years having slipped by since the release of her debut album, Invasion of Privacy, US trap-rapper Cardi B could finally unleash her second album sometime in 2025. Though many fans were hoping it would have dropped by now, signs do suggest that it’s coming, with Cardi recently filing a trademark for “Defamation Of Character” (a possible album title?) and teasing fans on Instagram Live about the album’s artwork. “When I drop this cover, everything is going up that day,” she said. “Not the album, of course, but y’all gon’ see.”

Release date: TBC

What to expect: Enough (Miami)

Lady Gaga: ‘LG7’

Following a headline-grabbing turn as Harley Quinn in last year’s Batman spinoff, Joker: Folie À Deux, Lady Gaga is rumoured to be releasing a new album at some point in February 2025. “I have just been in the studio all the time, and I’m making a lot of music,” Gaga told drag artist Sasha Velour. “I’m excited for Monsters [her fans] to hear where I am now, and to be connecting on that level again.” With the album’s windswept lead single, Disease, blowing us away with infectious gusts of electro-pop and EDM, we can expect Lady Gaga’s seventh studio album to hit dance-pop fans with all the intensity of a Force 11 storm.

Release date: February 2025

What to expect: Disease

Mac Miller: ‘Balloonerism’

Ever since the untimely passing of rapper Mac Miller, in 2018, fans have been praying for a “lost album” of unreleased material to surface. Those calls were answered when Balloonerism was announced out of the blue via an animated teaser video premiered at Tyler, The Creator’s Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival, simply stating that the album will be coming “soon”. Recorded just prior to Miller’s 2014 mixtape, Faces, the collection will feature songs recorded by Miller when he was “cooking up very zany, otherworldly, weird creations” during a particularly experimental and creative period in his early career, the rapper’s manager, Quentin “C” Cuff, has said. “A lot of it was supposed to be Faces, and then Balloonerism’s its own thing,” Cuff explained in The Book Of Mac: Remembering Mac Miller. With Miller’s estate confirming the album’s authenticity, it’s heartening to discover that this long-rumoured project will finally see the light of day.

Release date: TBC

What to expect: Uber

Saweetie: ‘Pretty Bitch Music’

Ever since Best Friend, her 2021 single with Doja Cat, was nominated for a Grammy Award, Saweetie has been hotly tipped as hip-hop’s next lioness-in-waiting. However, her much-anticipated debut album – widely believed to be titled Pretty Bitch Music – has remained elusive, with multiple delays keeping fans on tenterhooks. “To me, music is sacred. It’s coming from your spirit,” Saweetie said in an interview with Allure magazine. “You can’t just go finish an album in a week. That’s why it’s taking me so long.” Online gossip suggests that the project could finally drop in 2025, while Saweetie has teased fans with her latest single, Is It The Way, and declared on X that the song “definitely sets the tone for the album”. Though a release date has yet to be confirmed, it’s possible that Pretty Bitch Music might just arrive sooner than we think.

Release date: TBC

What to expect: Is It The Day

In Case You Missed Them…

Catch-up with the albums that have already made their mark this year…

Victoria Canal: ‘Slowly, It Dawns’

After touring with Hozier and playing piano with Coldplay during their Glastonbury 2024 headline show, Victoria Canal will mark her greatest personal triumph yet with the release of Slowly, It Dawns. Born with one arm due to a congenital disability, Canal has already become an inspirational figure in indie-pop, mastering classical piano from an early age and majestically transcending her physical constraints. Her debut album, Slowly, It Dawns is said to channel this spirit of perseverance into a deeply emotional collection of songs. “Side A is full of pop bangers, loud and outward-facing,” Canal explained in an interview with Forbes, “while Side B is more reflective… like lying in the dark thinking about life.”

Release date: 17 January 2024

What to expect: Cake

FKA Twigs: ‘Eusexua’

The alt-R&B maverick FKA Twigs has spent years bucking trends like a neo-gothic bronco. Her techno-inspired third album, Eusexua, looks set to mix the arms-aloft energy of warehouse raves with left-field displays of soulful glitch-pop. “Eusexua is a state of being,” FKA Twigs explained of the album’s title. “A feeling of momentary transcendence often evoked by art, music, sex and unity.” Having spent the past decade defining her very own avant-garde fusion of art-pop, R&B and experimental electronica, FKA Twigs’ genre-bending mission to induce a state of boundary-pushing bliss means that Eusexua could well be her most daring work yet.

Release date: 24 January 2024

What to expect: Eusexua

Teddy Swims: ‘I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 2)’

Having already scored a UK Top 10 hit with its lead single, Bad Dreams, Teddy Swims’ second album, I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 2), will continue the US pop-soul singer’s cathartic quest for emotional closure. In an interview on The Kelly Clarkson Show, Swims suggested that making this album has been a remedial experience. “I hope that maybe the part two would have a little more healing,” he said. By making strides towards personal growth after wrestling with the turmoil of a romantic break-up, Swims seems ready to embark on another deeply personal chapter.

Release date: 24 January 2024

What to expect: Bad Dreams

Check out the musicians to watch in 2025.

Original article: 31 December 2024

Updated: 17 January 2025, 24 January 2025