My favorite art of 2025
Man… 2025.
2026 is somehow looking worse.
I’m not sure how that’s happening, but it sure is.
“Best Of” lists always have big flaws. There’s always things people leave off, big publications writing them often result in a Frankenstein of a dozen writer’s opinions coming together for a list without clear reasoning or voice, and ranking art as “best” is fraught. Even the lowest quality art has time and effort put into it, if not love. So don’t read this as a grand statement of something being the year’s artistic pinnacle, read it as what it is- someone saying, “Hey, I liked this.”
Gaming
Hollow Knight: Silksong
I never completed the first Hollow Knight. I reached an ending in the game, but not the true ending. I didn’t come close to 100%-ing the game. I enjoyed it quite a bit, the bleak atmosphere, distinct artistic direction, sound design, and compelling character design all have stuck with me, but it isn’t a game I’m particularly jumping to return to.
Silksong gripped me far tighter than its predecessor for a variety of reasons. The clearest to me is the main character. The Knight (the playable character in Hollow Knight) is meant to be a blank slate, a creature that does not express anything and has no distinguishing trait besides their mask. By contrast, Hornet (a rival in the first game and the playable character in Silksong) has a much clearer character in their design with her pronged mask and red cloak. Even more directly, while the Knight was silent, Hornet speaks, allowing for a much stronger input on the narrative's events.
This, before anything else, is what most separates the two games. The Knight was a small, voiceless bug in a large, open world. Hornet has a mission. The silly elements that were a relief from the dangers of the first game’s setting are now played off the deeply serious Hornet to great effect. Moreover, the input of Hornet makes the game’s serious beats and greater themes much clearer than the first.
Though I quite enjoyed Hollow Knight, I hardly recall the overarching narrative of the game, much less any specific plot points or relevant characters. Silksong’s cast is not only more memorable, they also feel much more directly connected to the game’s plot and themes surrounding destiny, fate, and sacrifice (sidenote: I hate when people describe something’s themes using big buzzwords like I just did- a theme is a statement, not just a big idea- but I’m a touch far removed from the game to come up with a concrete, defensible, unified thematic statement for the game. Sue me.). Though I mainly remember Hollow Knight’s cast through their sounds ( “Bap-a-nada”) Silksong gives its supporting cast memorable moments and satisfying arcs.
The last thing that separates Silksong from Hollow Knight is the level of polish. Team Cherry is a group of three people, and that small a team making a game this high quality is incredible- even considering the lengthy development time. The animations, small quirks of physics, and overall gamefeel are phenomenal. The game’s director said that the reason for the delays was because the team was simply having fun adding more and more to the game, and that joy shows. They’ve made the movement beautifully fluid, the platforming wonderfully precise, and combat flow with an incredible timing.
Yet this far removed from my playthrough, most of what sticks with me are complaints. The occasional nightmarish runbacks to bossfights, frustration with breakable walls that either lacked an indicator or were easily missable given the game’s massive map, and especially issues with controls. The most infamous element of this game are its po-gos, the jumps made from downward strikes in the air. In Hollow Knight, these attacks were a simple sweep below the knight, but in Silksong the default down-aerial is a diagonal strike that players had a hard time adjusting to. This is a symptom of the game’s control scheme, while platforming sections requiring po-gos were fairly challenging for people playing with a keyboard, if you chose to play with a controller as the game asks you faced a much more difficult challenge. The demand of moving from left to right, attacking with the movement joystick downwards, and then immediately returning to standard movement was a heavy challenge for many, resulting in a great deal of missed inputs and frustration.
Still, Hollow Knight Silksong earned its rapturous acclaim. The art direction in particular is incredible. The parallax used throughout the game makes every area feel deep, but never in a way that muddies the game’s most important elements in its two-dimensional plane. Silksong is a gorgeous game. From the palpable heat of the Deep Docks to the crunching desert in the Blasted Steps and Sands of Karak to the many-faceted opulence of The Citadel, each setting lives and breathes in an incredible fashion.
I’ve spoken so much on Silksong and yet I feel like I’ve said only a small bit of my full praise. I’ll leave it at this- this is a game that crashed online game stores with how popular its launch was. It lives up to that hype.
I also quite enjoyed Dwarf Fortress (whose siege update was a strong addition), Peak, and the most recent set of Teamfight Tactics. There were a lot of great games this year and I didn’t play most of them. If you want to hear more informed takes, read other gaming publications. Please don’t just read my work.
Movies
Sinners
I worked at Studio Movie Grill in Marietta, a dinner-and-a-movie place, and nearly every showing of Sinners from its debut was sold out for two months straight. I couldn’t believe it. All I had seen of the film was a promotional image of Michael B. Jordan on a reddish background in action movie attire. Was Ryan Coogler as a director that big a draw to mass audiences? Was it just that Michael B. Jordan is hot? Was the movie THAT good?
Yes. Yes it was that good.
I only got to see the movie well after the theaters were jam-packed, but I wish I could’ve been there with a full crowd to experience it alongside others. Sinners is a difficult movie to summarize, but it’s not focused on its plot. The focus is instead on the characters and their relationships. There’s Sammie, A.K.A. Preacher Boy (Miles Canton), someone eager to leave his religious father behind for his dangerous cousins, Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan). Sammie has a rare gift for blues music, but he’s a young man who hasn’t experienced the Blues.
I spoke in my history of popular music series about the Blues as an unavoidable element of the human condition (especially the Black American condition), and Sinners is about those Blues I refer to with a capital B. The Blues is life’s way of talking to you. The Blues is sex; it’s your body remembering a woman who thought you’d forgotten her, it’s seeing a former lover back in town and having emotions spill out uncontrollably, it’s the brashness of youth required to pursue a taken woman. The Blues is money; it’s taking deals with devils so you can follow your dreams, it’s skipping town to avoid a bad deal, it’s an old man still playing his piano so he can afford booze, it’s doing everything right and still coming out short on dough. The Blues is violence; it’s innocent men being lynched, it’s trauma, it’s having your culture commodified, it’s the best night of your life ending in a bloodbath. The Blues is life, and that’s what Sinners is about.
If that sounds too pretentious, it’s because it is (at least for you, hypothetical person who isn’t used to my theatre degree nonsense). While this movie has an incredible artistic and thematic depth, it’s also a crowd pleaser. The action is engaging, the horror elements are strong, the romance is steamy, the comedy lands, and the performances all around are fantastic.
People talk a lot about many different aspects of this movie, but one I feel is often ignored is the ending (for the sake of this, I treat the post-credits scene as an epilogue rather than the ending). Sammy, after a night where the sinful life of sex, drinking, and music ended with tragedy, arrives at church where his father asks him to give up his music in the name of god. It’s a powerful question. Coogler showed us Sammy’s gifts in one of modern cinema’s greatest scenes. He spent the rest of the film showing us how that gift is a double edged sword. After all the violence brought onto Sammy and his community, after so much death, is the Blues still worth it?
The film shows us Sammy’s answer with a smash cut to the future, where Sammy is an old man, still playing his music. No matter the struggles, life, and the freedom to live that life as you choose, is worth it.
Other solid movies I saw last year include Mickey 17, Superman, and The Fantastic Four. I didn’t see a lot of movies last year.
Music
The Birds Don’t Sing
Virginia duo Clipse came to prominence in the early-to-mid 2000s. This era is widely considered a weak moment in hip-hop, dominated by pop-rappers, songs with little more to offer than a ringtone’s worth of good music, and party songs that critics considered vapid and a trend away from rap’s ethos. There were highlights, though. Jay-Z, Outkast, Kanye West. Eminem, and the late legend MF DOOM were all making some of the greatest music of all time. Clipse didn’t have the grandiosity of Jay-Z, the ambition of Ye, the ability to grab attention of Em, or the oddball charisma of Outkast and DOOM. They were just… good.
In a time when hip-hop was becoming more glamorous and ambitious, Clipse brought things back to basics. They rapped about cars, money, guns, and drugs, and did it so well they even won over the snobs who were above all that.With their first two albums, Lord Willin’ and Hell Hath No Fury, Pusha T and Malice proved themselves to be some of hip-hop’s best artists. This was in no small part due to assistance from the hottest new producers around, Chad Hugo and Pharell Williams, better known as The Neptunes.
With their third album Til the Casket Drops flopping, the group broke up. Malice had a religious awakening, and largely left music behind, only occasionally making music under the name No Malice. Without his brother, Pusha T made his name solo through some incredible work with Kanye West, great solo albums like Daytona and It’s Almost Dry, and a beef with Drake that the Canadian arguably never recovered from. But then, after roughly fifteen years, No Malice decided it was time to drop the “No” and return to the studio with his brother.
Together, they made Let God Sort ‘Em Out, perhaps the greatest comeback in hip-hop history, and an album that opens with heartbreak. “The Birds Don’t Sing” follows the brothers learning of and reacting to the death of their parents. Hip-hop has many songs about parents, but they usually focus on how grateful the narrator is or how their parent(s) failed them. Here, the focus is on grief, both in a soul-wrenching manner and in an aching reality.
In Pusha T’s verse, he doesn’t focus on childhood but on the modern day. In his verse, Push contrasts his life of fame and excess with his mother’s humility as she faced the end of her life. Push was looking around at Ye and Elon Musk, checking his messages while his mother was looking around at her community, checking boxes. Malice has the second verse, and he delivers an all-time great verse. I struggle to go over any specific part, topic, or anything else because if I did I’d just write out the entire verse- what else could properly show how incredible this verse is? Every line either makes me go, “damn…” or brings me closer and closer to tears. In a verse filled with strong wordplay and imagery, the strongest lyric might be the simplest, “damn I had a dad,” or the heart-rending ending, “now you home.”
Cap it all with John Legend delivering a soaring, dramatic chorus and you have one of the greatest songs ever made. They played this song for the pope! If a hip-hop song with papal approval doesn’t entice you, I don’t know what will.
Let God Sort ‘Em Out
Oh yeah, there’s also a whole album after this song. It can’t all be this good, right? Wrong! It’s all this good! On my first listen I was aghast that they put a song so emotional as the opener, and truthfully I still am. The rest of the album is everything you’d expect from a Clipse album- all killer, no filler. Push and Malice both deliver verses jam-packed with wordplay, impressive turns-of-phrase, and vicious attitude.
On top of that, the album boasts incredible features from Kendrick Lamar and Tyler the Creator, both of whom deliver in spades. “Chains and Whips” has Kendrick go off on a beat menacing with organs, using plenty of assonance (those “g” sounds in “jenga,” “genius,” “gemini,” etc)
On “P.O.V.” Tyler delivers a verse littered with quotables (“I got deaf and blind bitches tryna see what it do,” “I need god to play the lead in my biopic,” etc.). Tyler apparently rewrote and/or rerecorded his verse over and over and over again because he’s a massive fan of Clipse and knew he had to deliver an all-timer. He most certainly did.
But the one element I haven’t talked about is Pharell. Though the Neptunes have disbanded, Pharrell remains as sharp a producer as ever. His beats were futuristic and pristine in the 00s, and they are here too, but there’s a grime that’s incredible. I don’t think you can listen to “M.T.B.T.T.F.” (which, incredibly, stands for “Mike Tyson Blow To The Face”) without nodding your head and mean-mugging. There’s also the somewhat airy “Ace Trumpets”, the sun-dried “F.I.C.O.”, and the incredible “So Be It,” which might just have the best beat of 2025.
With this album, Clipse proved that hip-hop doesn’t have to just be a young man’s game. However old its creators are, the album is cutting-edge, modern, and has the energy and ambition of a young man reaching for the crown. But Pusha T, Malice, and Pharell have been around for awhile. This is simply them returning to their rightful throne.
Here are some more albums worth checking out that I enjoyed but don’t have it in me to highlight more thoroughly.
Portrait of My Heart - Spellling
Spellling released an all-time favorite album of mine with The Turning Wheel. Though Portrait of my Heart is far-removed from that gorgeous art-pop masterwork, it’s a very good rock album.
Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party - Hayley Williams
Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams proves her incredible skill as a singer and songwriter. She delivers on the strong rockers you’d expect like “Kill Me,” and “Hard,” but also on the spacey “Dream Girl in Shibuya,” the Coldplay-ish “Parachutes,” and the SZA-aping “Good ‘Ol Days.” (Could any other singer do justice to this blatant a rip of their peer?) The most powerful song is the dramatic denouncement of Williams’ native South with “True Believer.” Here, Hayley Williams proves that rock still has its place in modern music, and that despite being around for two decades she still belongs as one of rock’s greatest frontmen.
Welcome To The Blue Sky - Momma
I was hipped to indie rockers Momma by Stereogum (a reminder to read and support independent media, especially in the music sphere), and boy am I glad I checked this one out. Loud, shoe-gaze guitars combine with Etta Friedman’s soft vocals to make an incredible atmosphere. In a pretty good year for indie rock, “I Want You (Fever)” might just be the strongest single, it’s certainly catchy enough to be. I absolutely adore the reversed guitars the song boasts. Mostly I’m just glad to hear the kind of rock music I could imagine on the radio, especially since it’s choosing to evoke Garbage rather than Blink-182 as so many others do. If you’re gonna listen to another single or two, I really recommend “Stay All Summer” and “Bottle Blonde.”
Getting Killed - Geese
I really loved Geese’s previous album, 3D Country (ESPECIALLY the singles), but I still don’t really understand Getting Killed. I have to respect the audacity to start your album with a song where you yell, “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAAAAAAAR!” And the many, many lengthy jams on the album are very interesting, but it never clicked in the way “3D Country,” “I See Myself,” and “Cowboy Nudes” did off their last album. Maybe you’ll get more from it than I did. You’ll at least like “Cobra,” that song rules.
Viagr aboys - Viagra Boys
Here’s another band that released an album I really loved not long ago but one I didn’t feel as much this year. I like Viagr aboys more than Getting Killed, but their previous album Cave World really blew me away. That being said, this album boasts some fantastic tracks delivering on Viagra Boys’ signature absurdity in spades. Sometimes that’s with the energy of “The Bog Body” and “Dirty Boys,” elsewhere with an almost-seriousness on “Medicine for Horses.” The highlight is the opener, “Man Made of Meat,” which boasts an incredible chorus, catchy riffs, some of the funniest lyrics in modern rock- “I’m standing outside the LL Bean/ I’m tryna get some free women’s sweaters, you know what I mean?” no, I sure don’t - and maybe the best music video of the year.
Don’t Tap the Glass - Tyler the Creator
This album sees Tyler making a quick, fun project while on tour. While some of the songs could have been fleshed out more or cut altogether, the album still features much of Tyler’s catchiest, most fun work.
Fancy That - Pinkpanthress
The moment Pinkpanthress makes songs long enough to build/get radio play she’ll be the greatest R&B artist working. She’s great.
Man’s Best Friend - Sabrina Carpenter
Sabrina Carpenter is charming, a great dancer, great singer, and delightful presence, yet somehow I cannot let her very deep into my heart. Still, my impression is that even if she never has an album that is capital-G Great, she’ll have more than enough solid hits to justify her place as a pop legend.
God Does Like Ugly - J.I.D.
J.I.D. has been blowing people away for nearly a decade now, he’s clearly an artist with talent equal to the best artists working, but something holds him back from joining the A-List. It might be hooks- however impressive his writing is his biggest hits are “Surround Sound” and “Dance Now” which are clearly above his other songs in that category- or it might be a lack of promotion, him making a less commercially popular style of hip-hop, or a dozen other things. Regardless, he delivered a solid album with God Does Like Ugly, with some very solid songs. The biggest highlight is “Community,” which boasts a fantastic clipse feature and a fantastic attention-grabbing lyric in, “I’ll put a bullet in Bob the fuckin’ builder.” Another favorite of mine is the closer “For Keeps,” which is the truly inspiring story of his own growth and craft.
There’s a lot more I could say or talk about, but my memory isn’t good enough to remember everything that happened last year and I didn’t keep up with things quite as much as I would’ve liked. That might just be me being hard on myself. If I introduced you to a work of art you loved through this list, that’s enough for me.
