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.