Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal
46.
Cleo Reed: Cuntry
Cleo Reed doesn’t just make folk music; they embody it. Across Cuntry, their indignant yet hopeful second album, Reed calls upon their ancestors for strength in dealing with the inequities of 2025 while blending traditions and styles in the same butter churn. You can hear it in the bustling folktronica of “Salt n’ Lime” and “Americana,” the straightforward bluegrass of “Women at War,” the flecks of hip-hop sprinkled throughout “Strike!” and “No Borders.” Every genre on display, the album argues, is a product of the same Black folk tradition. The borders between them aren’t porous; they’re nonexistent. For Reed, all traditions were made to be subverted, and Cuntry reframes the heartland as a Black and queer-friendly soundscape inching toward a better tomorrow. –Dylan Green
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
45.
MIKE: Showbiz!
When MIKE doesn’t glide as a rapper, he is a sputtering engine: coughing, snorting, humph-ing and haw-ing, until somehow, as if summoned, the hardest shit ever comes spilling out of him. Long a beacon for the morbidly depressed, his gravelly baritone has shifted with age—not the croak of a lost teenager, but the lived-in voice of a legend who has survived to tell the tale. That grown-up commandeers Showbiz!, an album whose supernatural skill is offset by the humble human at its center. “I ain’t no prophet, nigga,” MIKE raps, and it’s a shame: He sure does sound like one. –Samuel Hyland
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
44.
Annahstasia: Tether
Tether could have been a classic of modern singer-songwriter fare. In its opening tracks, Annahstasia Enuke evokes the exacting poetics of Bill Callahan, the textural generosity of Bon Iver, and the singular vocals of Adrienne Lenker. It is so intimate that you can hear the corners of her lips peel apart as she sings her way through despair, her voice somehow commanding and wounded. But as Tether blooms, each petal is stranger than the last, from a duet of balletic soul with Obongjayar to the grand “Silk and Velvet,” a transcript of Annahstasia’s internal debate about self-care versus selling out that nears post-rock power. “Can you be a believer,” she sings to start the triumphant finale, “in all my possible possibilities?” Enuke languished for years in major-label limbo; Tether, an overdue debut, is a riveting testament to the possibilities that system almost squandered. –Grayson Haver Currin
