The Best Of 2025: Abridged Highlights

With a few scant hours left in this dreadful year, I've pulled the trigger on my year-end mix. This is the single-CD version, with 25 killer tracks from '25. As is standard practice, the abridged mix is the preferred car-friendly draft, so it leans heavily on upbeat, catchy stuff. I'll circle back and create the 2-cd deluxe edition soon enough, and that one will pick up some of slightly-less-immediate but still great tracks. (You can see the lengthy running list I've been maintaining over here; given that it's currently some 80 tracks long (and may grow once I read a few more music critics' year-end lists), it'll be tough to edit down to two 80-minute CDs.)

Here's the abridged highlights disc on Spotify: