Valentina Magaletti drummed for her life, Sarz got hips swinging and Daniel Avery got slinky and serpentine: our writers pick their favourite unsung LPs from 2025
• The 50 best albums of 2025
• More on the best culture of 2025

Towards the end of Tether, there is a song called Silk and Velvet; its sound is characteristic of Annahstasia’s debut album. Fingerpicked acoustic guitar and her extraordinary vocals – husky, expressive, elegant – are front and centre. The arrangement is subtle but not drearily tasteful: arching noise that could be feedback or a distorted pedal steel guitar, which gradually swells into something climactic before dying away. The lyrics, meanwhile, concern themselves with selling out: “Maybe I’m an analyst, an antisocial bitch,” she sings. “Who sells her dreams for money.”

Strange folk, lost pop, disco oddities and, um, Dido – here are the forgotten tracks that became this year’s most replayed revelations
• The 50 best albums of 2025
• More on the best culture of 2025

I grew up listening to the Mamas and the Papas’ hits but had never heard their albums before this year. I had no idea anything as creepy as Mansions lurked within their sunny oeuvre. Its sound is ominous, its mood one of stoned paranoia, its subject rich hippies sequestered in the titular luxury homes, haunted by the sensation that the flower-power dream is going wrong.

It’s celebrity catnip, but beyond the headlines this is also a tale of family dysfunction. At this time of year, so many people know about that

There is not one saga I have been more invested in this year than the Beckham family feud. In case you are not as shamelessly showbiz-pilled as I am, this is a drama that parses like something between the parable of the prodigal son and Catherine de Medici’s tension with her daughter-in-law Mary, Queen of Scots.

It seems that, after years of a trying in-law dynamic, relations between the Beckham family and their first-born, Brooklyn, and his wife, the heiress Nicola Peltz, have soured. Brooklyn has been repeatedly and conspicuously absent from all the family group shots on Instagram and, most notably, mum Victoria’s Netflix documentary, and dad David’s 50th birthday celebrations and knighthood ceremony (and if you know how long Dave’s been auditioning for that honour, you’ll know that this was the biggest indicator of catastrophe).