Mojo Presents The Best of 2025 offers a carefully curated snapshot of a year that feels both restless and creatively rich. Compiled by the editors of MOJO, the CD brings together a diverse selection of tracks that reflect the magazine’s long-standing taste for depth, craft, and personality over hype.
Rather than chasing chart trends, the compilation highlights artists who shape the musical conversation in quieter but more lasting ways.
The tracklist moves fluidly between established names and emerging voices, blending indie, rock, folk, soul, and alternative textures into a cohesive listening experience. It plays less like a random playlist and more like a guided tour through the year’s most compelling sounds.
In an age dominated by algorithms…
Category: indie-folk
Black Sea Dahu crafts music that feels like standing in a storm – raw, exposed, and profoundly alive. Led by Janine Cathrein, whose voice carries sorrow and resilience in the same breath, the Swiss band blurs the lines between folk, pop, and rock, creating a sound that is both vulnerable and ferocious.
Their latest single, One Day Will Be All I Have, stands as a luminous reflection on grief and courage in the aftermath of personal loss. The song opens a space where sorrow and hope intertwine, framed by cinematic, emotionally charged arrangements.
The single sets the tone for the band’s new album, Everything – a record born from grief, speaking to death, self-reckoning, the act of…
A lot can change during the fraught time between when a musician finishes recording an album and when it’s released, often months later, per a label’s schedule. For Mirah, everything changed. In the summer of 2018, two weeks before her sixth album, Understanding, came out, the indie rock songwriter lost her beloved father. Four months after that, she gave birth to a son. A year after that, she attempted to resume life as a touring musician, only for the pandemic to nix her plans and intensify her postpartum anxiety.
All this heavy stuff — death, birth, grief, joy, “the whole turn of the earth,” as she sings on “The Beginning of Time” — beats inside the impossibly tender heart of Dedication, Mirah’s first album in seven years, a lifetime of change.
My Days of 58 is the eighth Bill Callahan album, his first since 2022. The twelve tunes here open uncanny depths of expression as Bill continues to blaze one of the most original songwriting-and-performance trails out there. With My Days of 58, he applies the living, breathing energies of his live shows to the studio process, sharpening his slice-of-life portraiture to cut deeper than ever before.
The core musicians featured on My Days of 58 is the group that toured for 2022’s Reality: guitarist Matt Kinsey, saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi and drummer Jim White, whose synergy was evident in 2024’s live Resuscitate!. This showed Bill, as he puts it, “that they could handle anything I threw at them,” adding:
“Improv/unpredictability/the unknown is the…
Like so many 20 year olds before him, Zion Battle found something transcendent in Joshua Tree National Park. Since age 16, Battle had been working towards becoming a musician, studying for a time at CalArts and New York’s The New School. Then, in 2024, he left behind his academic training to begin making music as Katzin, exploring a more intimate sound shaped by a healthy love for the bedroom dream pop of early Orchid Tapes releases and the fuzz of 1990s indie rock. He linked with friend and producer Max Morgen, and the duo temporarily decamped to California and set up a makeshift DIY studio near Joshua Tree to fine-tune Katzin’s debut.
The bright and sweet Buckaroo radiates sincerity. Battle’s biggest strength is his…
On their 2013 debut and 2015’s Then Came the Morning, The Lone Bellow sounded like the new darlings of the Americana movement, blending blues, country, bluegrass, and roots rock with energy, smarts, and unpretentious sophistication. With 2020’s Half Moon Light and 2022’s Love Songs for Losers, they shifted gears, adopting more ambitious production and aiming for a sound that was more strongly informed by indie rock and adult alternative acts.
Clearly this is a group with no fear of changing lanes, and for 2026’s What a Time to Be Alive, the Lone Bellow take another detour, only this time they’ve split the difference between their rootsy and indie inclinations. The recording of the album was unexpectedly eventful — the band’s…
There isn’t a shortage of post-punk-leaning indie bands coming out of Ireland – whether it’s Fontaines or The Murder Capital, or, more recently, Basht or Gurriers. Cork-based Cardinals are the latest to stake a claim in the scene. And while they certainly draw on the blunt bleakness of their predecessors, accordion flourishes add folky warmth to their otherwise sombre sound.
Masquerade unfolds in two halves. The first half features forlorn ballads: the propulsive melancholy of the title track, the swinging accordion of ‘I Like You’, and the baroque folk of ‘She Makes Me Real’. Each track holds its own but teeters on the edge of flight, as if waiting for a cue to take off.
However, the second ‘I Like You’ becomes ‘Over at Last’ (or, the midpoint that marks…
It has been a while since we last heard of Greg Weeks, seven years to be exact, but the experimental folk solo artist and a founding member of Espers is back and with his latest solo effort, If the Sun Dies proves that he still has something substantial to say with his music.
Actually, that seven-year hiatus was not Weeks’ first break from music, since in the first decade of the century he was actively involved with Espers, had a number of solo records, ran a studio and a record label. Yet when the economic crisis hit in 2008, Weeks shut the studio and the record label, recorded no music, devoting his time to teaching and family. At some point, his musical inspirations revived, he decided to re-open both the studio and the record label, with this album…
Sometimes a record just lands at exactly the right time. “I think too much, I’m all out of f****s, the world’s on fire, I’m just getting drunk,” sings Ellur on the opening track of her debut album At Home in My Mind.
Later, “God help me now” is the eponymous refrain. Whether it’s a cry for help, a shout of despair or a statement of acceptance is up for debate, but it’s very well tuned with the zeitgeist. This is the sound of an artist truly finding her feet in the world, and echoing that world back to us.
With the first song, the album begins to reveal itself with a careful, hazy charm. A few bars of sonorous synths and muffled bass, then Ellur’s voice remaining in a low register and warmly inflecting her Yorkshire roots. A sudden…
Geography may have a lot to do with why Swirl, the full-length debut album from Flora Hibberd, successfully checks so many boxes. Hibberd is British but currently based in Paris, and Swirl was recorded in, of all places, Eau Claire, Wisconsin. This unique confluence of locations may contribute to the record’s worldly sound and ability to meld various styles and approaches seamlessly while still maintaining a unique voice.
First things first: Hibberd, who sings and plays guitar and keyboards on the record, also wrote all of the songs, and they sound like the result of someone who’s soaked up encyclopedias full of pop, rock, and folk music. The compositions are exquisite, engaging, and mature. With the aid of longtime collaborator Victor Claass…
With Live Archive Vol. 1: Going to Princeton 10/20/24, The Mountain Goats open the doors to what feels less like a conventional live album and more like a curated moment in their long-running relationship with their audience. Recorded at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, the set captures John Darnielle and company in sharp, confident form—relaxed enough to let songs breathe, but focused enough to give each one its emotional weight. The sound is clear and unforced, preserving the intimacy that has always defined the band’s best live performances.
The 21-song setlist spans multiple eras, moving effortlessly from deep cuts like “Idylls of the King” and “Raja Vocative” to live staples such as “This Year,” “No Children,” and “Heretic Pride.”
The fact that the London-based singer-songwriter Alice Costelloe, the great-great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, is, on her debut album Move On with the Year, probing into her unconscious to conjure up memories of her estranged father might seem too on the nose or a send-up.
Don’t worry, it isn’t either. Instead, it’s a gallant portrayal of a child of a parent battling substance abuse — in other words, it’s an indie pop record with a subject matter barely acknowledged, let alone expressed with such finesse and stoicism. Yet, despite the heaviness of its themes, you could be floating.
The post-war English poet Philip Larkin wrote, in his customary sardonic tone, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean…
Kiss Big is an album about the end of a long-term relationship (classic, really) and the disorienting aftermath of losing the person you built a life around. It explores feeling untethered from them, yourself, who you thought you were and the world. As well as how, with time, everything rearranges and restarts. The cyclical nature of love and endings. The way we keep beginning again, regardless of how we say we won’t.
Ailbhe Reddy is a Dublin-born songwriter whose music captures the quiet intensity of life’s in-between moments. Her third album Kiss Big is a breakup record – but not in the traditional sense. It explores what happens after the fallout: the numbness, the confusion, the brief flashes of clarity. How identity slips, rearranges…
Toad the Wet Sprocket has issued some intriguing anthologies over the years, including P.S. (A Toad Retrospective) and In Light Syrup, but it’s arguable that none are so fascinating as Rings: The Acoustic Sessions.
Anyone surprised by the appearance of this unorthodox album hasn’t been following the band closely over the years. Originally emerging in the late ’80s and achieving some measurable success in the next decade before its dissolution, the quartet subsequently regrouped frequently over the ensuing years on both the stage and the studio. A formal reunion in 2010 only reaffirmed the DIY idiosyncrasies the quartet worked so assiduously to establish at the outset of their existence, first independently, then on Columbia Records.
James Walsh’s It’s All Happening is a masterclass in quiet intensity. The Starsailor frontman has always had a knack for turning fragile and thoughtful moments into rousing anthems for the band. With his latest solo offering, he strips everything back to raw emotion – stripped of spectacle, It’s All Happening is Walsh at his most intimate: tender, precise, and quietly electrifying.
Every track feels lived-in, the kind of songs that could only come from someone with James’ songwriting pedigree. Following 2023’s Coming Good, Walsh continues his reflective solo journey, exploring love, heartbreak, and the empowering triumphs of self-discovery.
Written, produced, and performed by James, the album flourishes in its restraint.
This latest full-length from Edinburgh’s Siobhan Wilson touches on many themes including, but not limited to, friendships, wanderlust and the cosmos, but if there’s a relationship that’s key to the record, it’s Wilson’s own with the electric guitar. Known previously for a more folky, pastoral sound, Wilson has clearly come to understand the power that amplification can provide, especially when used minimally. Thaw is loosely conceptual – side A inspired by summer, and side B by winter – but in truth, its mood shifts continually. Opener Starlove is somewhere at the junction between grunge and shoegaze, while Snowflakes, thick with atmosphere, is straight out of Twin Peaks.
Some songs you might categorise as guitar-pop, including the charming ‘On Est Bien’,…
Has the singer-songwriter categorization, as a genre, lost its meaning? If you think of it solely in the sense of its origins (a solo artist with an acoustic instrument, such as an acoustic guitar or piano), it surely has. In response to this, many modern artists categorized as singer-songwriters defy the genre’s original definition. They achieve this by incorporating diverse musical elements and combining them with a wide array of instrumentation and arrangements.
Listening to Kira Metcalf’s latest album, Lessons in Majestic Humiliation, you can conclude that she is sticking to both the old and new concepts of the singer-songwriter genre musically. At the same time, lyrically, she sees no boundaries, with darker overtones leading the way.
What is a watch bird? In Jane Weaver’s telling, it’s a remarkable creature that can travel long distances, seek out the lost, and weather great storms. This album, too, is of sweeping scope: it dances through eras and splashes through genres with abandon. Fifteen years on from its first release, and now in an expanded edition, The Fallen By Watch Bird remains as chimerical as it ever was.
Inspired by the nightmares for children that 1970s popular culture enjoyed churning out, The Fallen By Watch Bird recreates the sensation of ancient fables told through a flickering cathode ray. Weaver’s previous albums had been folk-oriented, and this influence is still palpable, but now she merges these impulses with spacerock, prog and psychedelia. Never quite analogue,…