Music critic and author Luke O’Neil has released his annual year-end list, showcasing his favorite tracks from 2025 with contributions from featured artists.
The Hell World 2025 edition features input from bands like Good June, Maura Weaver, Scarlet Street, Heet Deth, and Dead Gowns, who shared their own standout selections alongside O’Neil’s picks.
Drawing from a playlist of roughly 180 songs, O’Neil narrowed down his favorites to a curated list that reflects a shift in his musical taste this year—less emo, more alt-country and acoustic melancholy.
But when the raw emotion hits just right, genre becomes irrelevant.
What Other Artists Are Listening To
Walker Bristol of Good June highlighted Hyber’s “Waiting for Your Call” as a masterclass in forward momentum and emotional uplift.
They hit the trifecta, with a real crispness across songwriting, production, and their live set.
Bristol praised how the band transforms longing into an anthem, creating space for listeners to surrender to the sound before it ends and you’re desperate to hit repeat.
Maura Weaver chose MJ Lenderman and This is Lorelei’s “Dancing in the Club” after wrestling with several contenders. The production struck her as pristine yet raw, with Lenderman’s voice delivering both warmth and desperation.
The lyrics are goofy yet profoundly sad. Through Nate Amos’ auto-tuned stylings, you can still hear the country heartache.
Ben Seitz of Scarlet Street spotlighted La Dispute’s “No One Was Driving The Car” for its ability to tackle systemic issues with beauty and rage. He also called out Pretty Bitter’s Pleaser as a jaded DIY listener’s antidote—ambitious without feeling forced.
O’Neil’s Top 10 Tracks of 2025
10. Clifford – Sugar Pill
Boston’s Clifford closed their second album Golden Caravan with this spacious meditation on regret. Layered harmonies float over nearly five minutes of sublimely wounded sound.
It’s the rare closer that doesn’t exhaust—it expands.
9. Men I Trust – I Come with Mud
Montreal’s dreampop act delivered a hypnotic road trip song—gauzy, desolate, primal. Soft sunlight through car windows. A sound you could rest inside for hours.
8. Friendship – Tree of Heaven
Philly’s Friendship leaned into slowcore devastation on Caveman Wakes Up, channeling Jason Molina’s spirit through urban mundanity.
The bus I’m waiting on, so slow to appear. I have chilled on that stoop before, nothing is forgotten.
Songwriter Dan Wriggins put his Iowa Writers’ Workshop MFA to work crafting lines that trudge through gray mornings, concussed by loss but still burning with memory.
7. Ken Pomeroy – Wolf In Sheep’s Clothes
Cherokee artist Ken Pomeroy’s country folk has landed in Reservation Dogs and The Lowdown, and for good reason. This track opens up Oklahoma’s pastoral melancholy—a horizon you can hear.
6. Samia – Bovine Extraction
Part plaintive ballad, part searing indictment. Samia weaves Diet Dr. Pepper, Raymond Carver, and Degas into a meditation on wanting to vanish completely.
I’m playing with the desire to be an idea, to exist as an idea. I don’t want to have to contend with my humanness anymore.
The cattle mutilation reference works because its power lies in remaining unsolved—just like the narrator’s desire to transcend flesh and feeling.
5. aldn – push you away
Virginia artist Alden Robinson crafted a gorgeous experiment in wistful longing and synth-symphonic catharsis. Whether it’s digicore or hyperpop doesn’t matter—it’s devastating cinema for a generation raised on cameras.
The sentiment transcends genre and age brackets: convincing someone to stay when they’ve already emotionally left.
4. Alien Boy – Changes
Portland’s Alien Boy nailed what the ’90s actually sounded like—jangly American power-pop trying to sound like UK dream-pop, hooks infectious enough for MTV rotation.
Changes got me feeling fucked up. Got me freaking out like I’ll never go home again.
Singer Sonia Weber said change remains difficult even when necessary. There’s more and more ghosts the older I get.
This would’ve been an underground hit back then. It deserves to be one now, even without the star-making machinery that no longer exists.
3. MJ Lenderman – Dancing In the Club
O’Neil resisted including this track until the last minute, having spotlighted Lenderman and Wednesday repeatedly in previous years. But resistance proved futile.
The heart wants what it wants, especially when it cannot have it.
This cover of the 2024 This is Lorelei song strips away autotune and danceability, leaving Nate Amos’ words vulnerable and exposed. Simple piano, understated percussion, meandering guitar—all serving as delivery mechanism for wistful sentiment.
And I sang into my phone, I ate my dinner in the dark, and I fucked up my guitar while I was fucking up my heart. While I was singing Steely Dan, crying “Shake it” in the wind. Yeah, a loser never wins, and I’m a loser, always been.
It’s now the definitive version. Amos himself anticipated others singing it, and Lenderman—the patron saint of sad guitar uncles—delivered.
2. First Day Back – Gone On / Lines
After years of emo mostly missing the mark for O’Neil, Santa Cruz’s First Day Back reminded him what he wants from the genre. Named after a Braid song but activating Rainer Maria territory, their debut Forward captures what real emo requires.
The recording has to be a little fucked. The vocalist has to sound uncomfortable being there, even while laying their heart bare.
Recorded live in a living room, the album embodies punk’s central promise: that could be me up there. I could be you down there as well.
1. flyingfish – pitching stones
Sam Fishman, the Arizona teenager behind flyingfish, was roughly sixteen when this song dropped. His previous work leaned into TikTok-wave shoegaze, including viral hit “wonder if you care,” but something shifted with this track.
It sounds real now.
O’Neil called this his frontrunner for song of the year back in March. Nothing since has changed his mind. The guitars crunch and whirl but propel forward rather than gaze inward—something barely held together, careening toward a cliff.
It doesn’t fit neatly into shoegaze or emo, but it resurrects the feeling of discovering early Get Up Kids and Jimmy Eat World in the ’90s.
No one knows shit but what they know. No one knows anything but the pain that they have endured, whether it’s a brand new emotion or a decades-long gestational suffering. And music is our attempt to broadcast that from one soul to another.
The fact that Fishman is an actual kid matters somehow. Youth is both fetishized and dismissed in music—considered more authentic yet less experienced. But pain doesn’t wait for sufficient biography.
A person only knows what they know. This song makes O’Neil feel now what great songs made him feel then. He’s glad he still can.
Why Youth and Heartbreak Still Matter
O’Neil reflected on how youthful heartbreak fuels great art, putting older artists in happy marriages at a creative disadvantage. But eventually, the ultimate heartbreak crests on the horizon.
Time teaches the only lesson there is—to people too young to believe it.
The full list includes dozens more recommendations, from Wednesday’s “Townies” to Wet Leg’s “Catch These Fists,” spanning genres and moods. O’Neil’s 2025 selections prove that when music hits the right emotional frequency, labels and age become irrelevant.
What matters is feeling something—anything—in an increasingly numb world.