It's been another golden year for Irish music and there were a brace of breakthrough albums and curveballs from international acts. Here is our round-up of the best records of 2025
Top 5 Irish albums
Dove Ellis - Blizzard
Of course, the received wisdom for hot new acts is to release their much anticipated debut album in the new year to maximise attention in an otherwise quiet month. Leave it to enigmatic Galway singer Dove Ellis to slip out his debut just before Christmas when everyone is busy looking backwards and not to the future. A similar refusenik spirit informs Blizzard, a well named record if ever there as one. His tremulous, faltering vocals sound uncannily like a slightly more inconsolable Thom Yorke and many of these songs also share Radiohead's restless, lugubrious sense of depletion - only played by an avant garde folk band. He does shake himself out of his torpor on Jaundice - with its weird see-sawing sax and galloping drums, it sounds like an off-cut from some long-forgotten '70s trad album. At a mere 34 minutes, Blizzard is a brief calling card but it’s loaded with the promise of bigger and even more visionary things to come.
CMAT - Euro-Country
Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson located the sweet spot between trashy and classy on her hugely entertaining third album. Possessed of one of the most memorable voices in recent memory, this new set of songs packed a real emotional punch but didn't neglect her quirk quotient. Don’t let her OTT vaudevillian live show fool you either because underneath her hyperventilating stagecraft, lies a very fine songwriter. Tracks like When a Good Man Cries belies its country stylings to deliver a full-blown power ballad, The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station spirals into a brilliant alt-rock crescendo and there are torch songs aplenty too. Some commentators are even suggesting that "the Dunboyne Diana" had a hand in Bertie Ahern not entering the presidential race after the title track of Euro-Country became a bit of an anthem and rallying point for its lyric - "All the big boys/All the Berties/All the envelopes, yeah, they hurt me." .Anybody who rhymes "Bertie" with "hurt me" is ok in my book and how can she go wrong when she has songs with titles like Lord, Let That Tesla Crash?
For Those I Love - Carving The Stone
Four years ago, Dubliner David Balfe released his debut album, a heart-rending eulogy to his late best friend. It won the Choice Music Prize and marked Balfe out as a profound and powerful songwriter. On this dazzling second outing, he turns his gaze outward onto his native city and it’s a place he now struggles to recognise. With its assured club-centric sound and proud Dub accent, Carving The Stone is rebellion as an old school warehouse rave. Balfe describes and indicts a life far from the citadels of the new Dublin, where the young are locked out and far-right toxicity gnaws at their fears and sense of injustice. He also lambasts the tyranny and "techno-feudalism" of social media, and casual street and domestic violence. Along with A Lazarus Soul, Balfe has become an astute and acute chronicler of the new destruction of Dublin.
NewDad - Altar
For Galway act NewDad, it was a case of if it ain’t broke don’t fix it when it came to their second album. The band’s 2022 debut, Madra, was a surprise hit, a record bristling with meaty hooks and Julie Dawson’s beguiling waif-turned-feral vocals that won comparisons with early nineties acts like Curve and Slowdive. On Altar, they honed their vulnerable and menacing sound on more songs about obsession, addiction, and lust that amped up their goth core to grand effect.
Sprints - All That is Over
The Dublin fourpiece's foreboding punk pop sound crystallised on their ferocious second album. Fronted by uncompromising front woman Karla Chubb and with Daniel Fox of noise abolitionists Gilla Band on production duties, this is monolithic stuff, full pf tension, attack and catharsis. Tracks like the cavernous To The Bone recalls early PJ Harvey, Chubb's snarling state of us spoken-word address on Descartes is driven by discordant guitar, and Beg distils Sprints ‘rabid urgency to grand effect. Splendidly splenetic.
Top 5 international albums
Rosalía - LUX
Rosalía Vila Tobella was already a Grammy-garlanded star in her native Spain and all around the Latin world by the time the extraordinary LUX was released last November. But this was the album on everyone's lips - and in their ears - at year’s end. Where to begin with this musical polymath? LUX (meaning light in Latin) can be an exhausting listen, with each of its 15 tracks trying to outdo the one before for sheer ambition and a refusal to sit still. Embracing Eurovision-style excess, operatic bombast and electronica and taking in all manner of metaphysical themes, you’ll think you’re listening to several artists at once. It's sung in Spanish, Ukrainian, Catalan, Japanese, English, Hebrew, Chinese, and German but most of all the singular Rosalía is fluent in the lingua franca of pop.
Turnstile - NEVER ENOUGH
Hardcore purists might roll their eyes, but Never Enough landed with a satisfying crunch in 2025 with the rise to supremacy of Baltimore act Turnstile. Mixing ethereal soundscapes, guitar noodling and shredding with the hugely emotive vocals of Brendan Yates, they exuded ambition and vision on a fourth album that was to prove their commercial breakthrough. Swirling atmospherics offset the pummelling, piledriven force of tracks like Sole, while the epic Look Out For Me goes up and down the dials with ferocity and serene interludes. OK, maybe Never Enough is too damn sheened, too damn sophisto and maybe too damn melodic to be truly hardcore but just feel the weight and complexity of these songs. And, yes, we know I Care sounds like The Police.
Geese - Getting Killed
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The fourth album from still youthful Brooklyn act Geese sounds like a blear-eyed jamming session caught on tape after a weekend bender in 1974. It's a moody beast, shifting from tenderness to frazzled freak-outs, with front man Cameron Winter’s bruised vocals doing a pretty good Exile/Sticky Fingers Jagger drawl in places. Its combustible, chaotic and occasionally surreal stuff. Geese know how to pen an aching ballad as well as let their classic rock instincts run wild. If Geese are being heralded at Gen Z’s ultimate rock band then Gen Z must have access to some petty battered seventies country rock records and what Gram Parsons famously called cosmic American music.
Oliva Dean - The Art of Loving
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Here's one for all you lovers out there . . . Fast-rising British star Olvia Dean ended up on many people’s songs of the year Spotty playlist with Nice to Each Other, a sophisticated slice of urban soul with a lyric of universal appeal. There was plenty more where that came from on her extremely cool second album. It’s a sumptuous melange of bossa nova, seductive soul and folk that hit No 1 around the world (including Ireland) and established her as a wise chronicler of affairs of the heart backed with a band with all the right moves. It’s vintage, it’s modern, and almost impossibly smooth.
Lily Allen - West End Girl
The divorce or break-up album has been a mainstay in pop music for decades, raw confessionals in which the likes of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac and Marvin Gaye have laid bare alleged marital and romantic betrayals. But Lily Allen's surprise album, the cheekily titled West End Girl, was on another level. A savage take down of her husband of five years, actor David Harbour, it tackles his alleged infidelities with blithe wit and brittle sarcasm. Sure, Lily was never what you might call a trad wife and the actual songs were in danger of being overlooked in the search for tabloid tittle tattle but it also helped tracks like Madeline and Pussy Palace take on a life of their own. Always adept at wrapping harsh words and pithy putdowns in catchy pop songs, West End Girl, which was recorded in just eight days, sees the Londoner do her dirty laundry in public and come up smelling of roses.
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