AP’s top songs of 2025: ‘Lo que le pasó a Hawaii,’ ‘Abracadabra’ and more

NEW YORK (AP) – The Associated Press has selected the 10 best songs of the year, presented in no particular order.

Read on and then listen to all of the tracks on our Spotify playlist.

Selecting just one song from Bad Bunny’s pivotal 2025 album “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” is a fool’s errand. Most would likely select one of the ubiquitous, up-tempo hits: “DtMF,” “Baile Inolvidable,” “NuevaYol.” And they’d be just as right. But at its heart, this album is both Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio’s love letter to Puerto Rico and his fierce protection of it. Nowhere is that made more apparent than on “Lo que le pasó a Hawaii” (“What happened to Hawaii”), a rallying cry for Puerto Rico’s cultural autonomy in an era of neocolonialization. It begins with a somber Bad Bunny lamenting over the scrape of a güiro – a folkloric percussive instrument made of a hollow gourd. It sounds like inherited history and modernity all in one, a kind of political, timeless tune from an artist so accustomed to being the sound of the moment.

A triumphant return to form, Lady Gaga’s latest album “Mayhem” is an amalgamation of her past works. But where a return to roots for many veteran artists can play out like soft self-parody, Gaga stomps her Alexander McQueen heels on the gas pedal. Of the bunch, “Abracadabra” is a case study: maximalist electro-pop like an alternative universe “Bad Romance” with a Gesaffelstein sound. It’s familiar and evolved, Gaga’s robotic cadence delivered atop house piano and in an addictive hook. Her throaty call for magic – “Abra-ca-dabra” – is a one-woman masterclass in dance pop. It’s a little off-kilter and a whole lot addictive.

If 2024 was the year Chappell Roan broke out, 2025 was the year she broke the rules. Her first new single of the season, “The Giver,” was a sapphic Shania Twain-indebted ode to sensual satisfaction. In a phrase: It was country music courtesy the Midwest Princess. “The Subway,” a standard of her live show but previously not released, is something else entirely. It’s slow-burn dream-pop with Roan demonstrating her chameleonic properties by channeling both the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan and Alanis Morissette’s yodel in her vocal performance – details that ornament a lovely song that is unabashedly, wholeheartedly Roan.

The best country song of the year comes courtesy an indie rock band. North Carolina’s Wednesday knows a thing or two about evocative songwriting – their latest album, “Bleeds,” is a sharpening of those oft-mimicked and never-recreated tools. But where their tracks tend to blend different styles, “Elderberry Wine” is as close to classic country as they’ve come. Stripped of their familiar distortions, this is a lovely, fermented rumination on a relationship gone sour, stuffed with poetic wisdom. “Say I wanna have your baby / ‘Cause I freckle and you tan,” Wednesday’s leader, singer and songwriter Karly Hartzman sings in her enviable twang. “I find comfort that angels don’t give a damn.”

Fans of Frank Ocean, run – don’t walk – to press play on “Special,” the best single from dexter in the newsagent, the musical moniker of English soul singer Charmaine Ayoku. The song, like much of Ayoku’s discography, is breezy and transient – catchy and effervescent, like a vintage R&B cut but undeniably contemporary in its slow, romantic production. Maybe you heard it on TikTok, maybe this is your first introduction. Whatever the case, let it last.

The Pittsburgh band Feeble Little Horse first made waves in underground circles because of their undeniable noise-pop rock filtered through ambitious production choices and absurdist lyricism. “This Is Real,” the band’s first single since 2023’s celebrated “Girl With Fish” album, pushes the envelope further, working in computerized, hyperpop-esque electronics. It’s also one of their heaviest tracks to date, first delivered under singer Lydia Slocum’s sweet harmonies – and then, her biting screams. It sounds like the future.

There was a period in the early ’00s, for those with the unfortunate clarity to remember, that young people walked around with graphic T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “country + rap = crap.” Oh, how wrong they proved to be. For the last few years, contemporary country has capitalized on the hallmarks of hip-hop: trap hi-hats, elastic phrasing – and Southern rappers, too, have embraced the once-traditionalist genre. That comes to a head on BigXthaPlug and Bailey Zimmerman’s genre-meddling smash, “All the Way.” It’s the best of both worlds: BigXthaPlug’s easy intricacies and Zimmerman’s warm, raspy tone.

It is not about laundry. OK, so it kind of is – but not entirely. Kehlani is a master of sultry, matured R&B – but “Folded” marks a new peak for the singer, becoming their first Top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. And for good reason: “Folded” is felt deep in the heart. It opens with a crescendo of strings, then: Kehlani’s voice, analog pops and a slow-burn beat. “So, can you come pick up your clothes? / I have them folded / Meet me at the door while it’s still open,” she begs of a former love. “I know it’s getting cold out, but it’s not frozen.” Neither is this hit.

The future may very well be looking backward. Nostalgia is a driver of the current cultural zeitgeist; it’s that impulse that gave the world Doechii’s “Anxiety” – originally recorded in 2019, remade in 2025, and grounded in the 2013 Grammys’ record of the year pick, Gotye and Kimbra’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.” The sample is inextricable from the original’s pluckiness, but Doechii’s song is fully her own: The repetition of the production emphasizes the neurosis of her lyricism; its irregularity supports her idiosyncratic flow.

It’s a hit for a reason. Atlanta rapper Playboi Carti kept fans waiting five years for the release of his third studio album, “Music,” and the world of hip-hop has changed in immeasurable ways over the last half-decade. The same is true for Carti himself. On “Evil J0rdan,” say adios to “baby voice” Carti and welcome someone new. On the track, he has never sounded raspier, possessing a kind of exhausted, throaty flow atop an ominous beat. It sounds anxious, or like some kind of gothic unraveling – and it works.