My No. 1 album of 2025: Nourished by Time's The Passionate Ones
"We don't have to be so average," Marcus Brown of Nourished by Time sings on "It's Time." "And I say that with love." But what does it mean to be average? On his excellent album The Passionate Ones, it means to be complacent — to submit to your masters, to abandon your dreams, to throw your hands up at a dismal future as it comes barrelling toward you like a freight train, as if to say, "What can be done?" Inspired by the artist's own experiences pursuing music in between the toil of wage work, The Passionate Ones is an album that makes the case, with love, that you can't let life's daily grind crush you. It's a sneakily political album, its anti-war, anti-police brutality and class-conscious messaging cloaked in an upbeat meld of synth-driven '80s R&B and Brown's singular voice, which can animate even the most heartbreaking sentiments with a magnetic resilience. "I need a girl to cause a little civil unrest," he sings on the frenzied "BABY BABY," contorting what sounds like a long lost freestyle track into a protest anthem. This is pop music for the apocalypse — not for submission, but for survival.
The Rest Of Hazel Cills' Top 10
- Lyra Pramuk, Hymnal
- FKA twigs, EUSEXUA
- Wednesday, Bleeds
- Horsegirl, Phonetics On and On
- Disiniblud, Disiniblud
- Maria Somerville, Luster
- Dijon, Baby
- yeule, Evangelic Girl is a Gun
- PinkPantheress, Fancy That
Read about more of NPR Music's favorite albums of 2025 and our list of the 125 best songs of 2025.
Graphic illustration by David Mascha for NPR.
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