The 50 Best Rock Albums of 2025

Neil Young - Talkin To The Trees (Warners)

By turns homely and politically fired up, Talkin To The Trees finds Neil Young delivering incisive commentary on Donald Trump’s America just as comfortably as the complex nuances of his own family life. It’s not his best work (49 albums in, that would be asking a lot), but it is an oddly soothing, dulcet snapshot of the world in 2025, in all its complexities. Both widescreen and deeply personal.

Killer track: Big Change

Chrissie Hynde And Pals - Duets Special (Parlophone)

In addition to writing a bunch of classics for The Pretenders, Chrissie Hynde has also had hits with reinterpretations of songs by artists as diverse as Ray Davies, Jon And Vangelis, and Sonny And Cher. Duets Special expands that approach, with Hynde and pals including Debbie Harry, Shirely Manson, Julian Lennon and Rufus Wainwright collaborating on a collection of songs by or made famous by 10cc, Willie Nelson, Billy Paul and more into a mellow, cohesive album that’s an ideal after-hours listen.

Killer track: Sway (Rolling Stones) with Lucinda Williams

Buckcherry - Roar LiKe Thunder (Earache)

These Californian rockers enter their fourth decade sounding as fun, fresh and focused as ever on album eleven. And yet for all their sun-soaked songs about shagging and partying, Josh Todd has ample gravitas as a hard-rock singer. His sonorous, versatile vocals are still doing the business on tracks like Blackout and Let It Burn, where the riffs are riotous and the hooks are sharp.

Killer track: I Go Boom

Styx - Circling From Above (Alpha Dog 2T/UME)

Circling From Above is a concept album about obsolete technology clogging up the planet, and a continuation of the dazzling, more prog-orientated vibes that these Chicago-formed AOR veterans kick-started with 2017’s The Mission. New(ish) guy and producer Will Evankovich takes a starring role alongside the ageless, golden-voiced Tommy Shaw and fellow old hand James ‘JY’ Young. All this plus Everybody Raise A Glass, an effervescent toast to 70s Queen.

Killer track: It’s Clear

Bob Mould - Here We Go Crazy (BMG)

After 30 years, alt.rock heroes Sugar have just announced reunion shows and new music, to the joy of longtime fans. But on the evidence of Here We Go Crazy, you suspect frontman Bob Mould has been toying with the idea for some time. After the political fury of his previous album, Blue Hearts, this power-pop gem is as close as he’s come under his own name to the melodic majesty of Sugar. It’s rammed with snappy rock’n’roll bangers to quicken the pulse and remind the world what a skilled, special songwriter he is. “There’s not as much production enhancement as the prior records,” he told us. “It was trying to get back to basics with very straightforward songwriting.”

Killer track: Fur Mink Augurs

Amplifier - Gargantuan (Rockosmos)

Guitarist/singer Sel Balamir and drummer Matt Brobin stake a claim to being the biggest two-piece prog band in the world with their eighth full-length album, the aptly named Gargantuan. Leviathan riffs and colossal drum patterns build a wall of sound, with songs that range from brutal to reflective. Better still, the songs connect – like those on 2011’s epic The Octopus – and deliver heavy echoes of their much-loved 2004 debut.

Killer track: Cross Dissolve

Bush - I Beat Loneliness (Earmusic)

“I keep doing this because it’s the most fun. I mean, all I’m doing is having a laugh,” so frontman Gavin Rossdale told us earlier in the year. Yet “fun” and “a laugh” are probably the least likely words you’d use to describe Bush’s tenth album. But with songs such as Everyone Is Broken, Scars and Love Me Till The Pain Fades, it’s Bush exactly as you want Bush to be – atmospheric, introspective, anthemic and ultimately, at its heart, an uplifting and triumphant listen.

Killer track: 60 Ways To Forget People

Helloween - Giants & Monsters (Reigning Phoenix)

Two albums in and Helloween’s unexpected merging of past and present line-ups isn’t just holding fast, it’s getting better. Giants & Monsters brings the Germans’ power-metal pedigree into 2025, delivering a cheese-free modern take on the sound they helped forge 40 years ago. Like a seven-headed Teutonic Frankenstein’s monster, the experiment is working.

Killer track: This Is Tokyo

Pulp - More (Rough Trade)

2025 was the year the stars realigned for Britpop’s elder statesmen. Oasis’s return and Pulp’s not-so-secret set at Glastonbury helped lift the mood of the nation. To top it off, Pulp released their first album in 24 years - that planted one foot on the dance floor (Spike Island) while the other walked the complicated path of later life (Farmers Market).

Killer track: Spike Island

Luke Morley - Walking On Water (Left Hook)

While Songs From The Blue Room, Luke Morley’s second solo album in 22 years, felt a little like a product of Thunder’s enforced hiatus, this follow-up serves to both solidify and fine-tune its direction. As a consequence of touring, Morley is more confident as a singer, and with songwriting qualities identifiable as ever he now has a discernible path to follow.

Killer track: Always A Saturday Night

Ash - Ad Astra (Fierce Panda)

The Downpatrick band’s indomitable spirit - and an MO which, while invariably rooted in purest pop classicism, always reaches for rock’s future – has endured undented for 33 years and characterises a ninth album of all-too-rare depression-smashing joie de vivre. Forever contemporary, bafflingly ageless, Tim Wheeler’s spiced an on-brand set of bangers with a brace of Graham Coxon collaborations, a spine of whizzed-up ’n’ sizzling Weezer-esque sci-fi fizz-punk and a romp through Lord Kitchener’s Jump In The Line that’s sure to get your Beetlejuices flowing.

Killer track: Ad Astra

Die Spitz - Something To Consume (Third Man)

Earlier this year Classic Rock’s Paul Brannigan called Die Spitz “the best new band in the world”, and on the evidence of this album it’s difficult to argue. Something To Consume sounds like a record from four women who’ve grown up with brilliantly compiled playlists, rather than genre restrictions, and they’re happy to defiantly mix metal, grunge and snarling punk savagery as if it were the most natural thing in the world, all while swapping instruments willy-nilly. Never has fury sounded like so much fun.

Killer Track: Throw Yourself To The Sword

My Morning Jacket - Is (Ato)

Sometimes a change can do you good, and handing over the production keys to Brendan O’Brien (AC/DC, Pearl Jam, Springsteen) proved to be a change that allowed MMJ to deliver their most cohesive (and concise) album so far. Running the gamut from expansive, hypnotic opener Out In The Open to the squelchy riffery of Squid Ink, the Beatle-y country funk of Everyday Magic via the beautiful piano-led Time Waited, Is exudes a focused confidence that makes MMJ’s tenth time a charm.

Killer track: Time Waited

Suede - Antidepressants (BMG)

The release of Autofiction in 2022 represented a rebirth for Suede, as they leaned into a punk influence that uncovered their spikier side. It was a revelation. But Antidepressants ups the ante – it’s their best work in years. It’s got a darker palette than the band’s previous records, a reach into the gothic that speaks of a love of Magazine, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Joy Division and The Cure, although June Rain has all the lush, cinematic drama we’d expect. While many of Suede’s Britpop peers stagnate in nostalgia, Antidepressants is the sound of a band with their creative instincts firing on all cylinders.

Killer track: Disintegrate

Cardinal Black - Midnight At The Valencia (Jump In)

It seems redundant to state that musicians as talented as those in Cardinal Black evoke a feeling, but it’s an appropriate word for the Welsh band’s marvellous, soul-infused blues rock. Midnight At The Valencia, their second album, is even more accomplished than 2022’s January Came Close. Chris Buck’s guitar mastery is as much about the things he doesn’t do. On Morning Light his careful strums punctuate the space before a face-melting guitar solo erupts. With singer Tom Hollister’s imposingly rich cadence, closer Your Spark is similarly epic, gliding towards an even greater peak.

Killer track: Your Spark (Blows Me To Pieces)

Danko Jones - Leo Rising (Perception)

If Motörhead had been a power-pop band, they might’ve sounded like Danko Jones. How else could you describe the fusion of bubblegum choruses, rock’n’roll riffs and greasy motor oil that pervades in every track of the band’s twelfth studio album? Strictly speaking, Leo Rising is business as usual, but there’s a refreshing simplicity and earnestness to listening to a fresh platter of rock’n’roll songs that make you want to headbang, bounce and shake your ass. If it ain’t broke…

Killer Track: What You Need

Sparks - Mad! (Transgressive)

Twenty-eight albums in, brothers Ron and Russell Mael continue to make the kind of gloriously hyperactive art-rock they trademarked in their 70s heyday, only now with added invention and vaulting satirical wit. On latest album Mad!, Don’t Dog It flirts with their own brand of holy order (‘Shake it thusly on the Golden Path’), A Little Bit Of Light Banter brings respite from the heaviness of a regressive world, and Do Things My Own Way feels like a private manifesto. Very surprisingly too, Mad! is the highest-charting album of Sparks’ career.

Killer track: Do Things My Own Way

Eureka Machines - Everything (Wrath)

“Did you hear on the grapevine?” “Do you think it’s the last time?” “No!” Rumours of Eureka Machines’ impending demise have been exaggerated greatly, it seems. Granted, the rumours were fuelled by frontman Chris Catalyst forecasting as much last year. But thankfully they’re still here, and album number six from Yorkshire’s best-kept secret, a record brimming with sardonic Northern wit and buoyant anthems, exhibits the same irrepressible, infectious joy that made hem champion underdogs in the first place, and with it they’ve snatched victory from the jaws of defeat yet again.

Killer Track: Back In The Back Of Beyond

Biffy Clyro - Futique (Warners)

Pinballing from arena anthems to punk bluster, frantic prog flourishes to yachtrock groove, steely defiance to deep, heart-on-sleeve emotion, Futique is predictable only in its unpredictability. Biffy’s charttopping tenth album finds the Ayrshire trio deftly straddling a dewy-eyed nostalgia (the title is a compound of ‘future’ and ‘antique’, the concept of living fully in the moment in the knowledge that one day it will be a cherished memory), sweeping romance and ballsy bluster in a manner so breathtakingly precise it could be a circus trick, proving that Biffy Clyro are still firmly at the top of their game.

Killer track: True Believer

Inspector Cluzo - Less Is More (F. The Bass Player)

In a world of trendchasers and skin-deep priorities, this organic farmer duo from Gascony are a rare, refreshing breed. Funny, incisive and totally blazing as a live band, they live by the political and environmental ideals (and matching musical fire) of their songs. This time inspired by naturalist Henry David Thoreau and philosopher Guy Debord, they deliver arresting blends of blues, rock’n’roll and grungy introspection. Music full of raw, Clutch-esque heat, with an enormous heart and peppered with soulful moments.

Killer track: We Win Together, I’m Losing Alone

Ghost - Skeleta (Loma Vista)

Ghost have now been making albums for longer than Led Zeppelin did, and some people still seem sniffy about their rightful place at rock’s high table. A first American chart-topper probably won’t change that, but, hell, the cloth-eared aren’t Tobias Forge’s problem. Skeleta isn’t the best Ghost album, but its highlights – Satanized, Umbra, Lachryma, Peacefield – are right up there with his best songs, euphorically mixing bombast and beauty, melody and melancholy. Ghost’s upwards trajectory doesn’t look like changing direction any time soon.

Killer Track: Satanized

Cardiacs - LSD (Alphabet Business Concern)

The story of LSD’s inception is incredible. Cardiacs frontman Tim Smith began work on it in 2007, and when he died in 2020 he left behind half-done tracks and completed musical notation, and lyrics he’d worked on using an alphabet board after suffering a stroke in 2008. So when his brother Jim took on the task of completing it, it infused the resulting prog-psych explosion with such a sense of love, respect and responsibility that it’s impossible not to be moved even amid the mind-bending chaos of the music.

Killer Track: Woodeneye

Castle Rat - The Bestiary (King Volume)

Doom metal has had plenty of druids, priests and priestesses, even a prince, but in Castle Rat it finally found its queen. That’d be Riley Pinkerton’s Rat Queen, protagonist and narrator of the magical menagerie that makes up the New Yorkers’ second album. With menacing riffs, ethereal vocals and the kind of low-end that raises some primordial hackles before a predator attack, The Bestiary is as gloriously OTT as the high-fantasy camp the band have brought to life.

Killer Track: Wizard

Glenn Hughes - Chosen (Frontiers Music)

The incomparable singer’s fifteenth album is surprisingly heavy, more like his work with Black Country Communion than his previous solo record, 2016’s Resonate. Hughes’s bass lines, Soren Andersen’s guitar and the drumming all shunt Chosen to the rockier end of the frontman’s catalogue. It’s light on funk, but there’s real soul in lyrics that look back over his life and career. Closing track Into The Fade includes a spoken-word voiceover from Hughes promising: ‘I will see you again some time...’ Time will tell.

Killer track: In The Golden

Whiskey Myers - Whomp Whack Thunder (Wiggy Thump)

These Texans have spent much of the four years since releasing Tornillo on tour. This seventh album, their best yet, proves the benefits of that. Tales of the road inform most of the songs and the experience has honed their bluesy, sometimes countryfied rock’n’roll into a scalpel-sharp joy. Cody Cannon’s Bob Seger-like vocals, an in-no-hurry approach – plus generous side orders of slide guitar and female backing vocals – combine to let the six-piece channel, rather than merely copy, the Allmans and Skynyrd.

Killer track: I Got To Move

Masters Of Reality - The Archer (Mascot)

Desert rock swami Chris Goss returned with his band’s first album in 16 years, and the wait was worth it. The Archer shifts from lysergic blues to haunted balladry, Goss’s ghostly voice beaming in from whichever astral plane he’s currently residing on. The idea of any of this connecting with a wider audience is as laughable now as it has been for the past 40-odd years, but that otherness is what makes Masters Of Reality so special.

Killer track: Mr Tap’N’Go

FM - Brotherhood (Frontiers)

In a late-80s rock scene where image often superseded substance, FM built their reputation on the quality of their songs – an approach which sustained them through glam, thrash and grunge, until their first split, in 1995. Since re-forming in response to fan demand in 2007, they’ve consistently bolstered their catalogue with strong albums like Brotherhood, which finds them refining their songcraft and infusing their trademark combination of seductive AOR hooks, thrusting power chords and Steve Overland’s soulful vocals with winning hints of gospel and R&B.

Killer track – Do You Mean It

Wytch Hazel - V: Lamentations (Bad Omen)

Wytch Hazel’s fifth album solidified these tunic-clad crusaders as the Christian-metal band for people who hate the idea of Christian metal. Frontman Colin Hendra’s deep-rooted faith is still the engine that drives them, but their gloriously melodic songs of praise forgo proselytising for all-too-relatable themes of doubt and angst in the face of an unforgiving world, while The Citadel and The Demon Within evoke the golden age of classic metal without sounding like pastiche or period pieces.

Killer track: The Demon Within

Skunk Anansie - The Painful Truth (FLG)

It would be so easy for Skunk Anansie to reheat their 90s sound and rely on frontwoman Skin’s warrior-princess charisma to sell it. But if you didn’t glean their mission statement from this album’s opening track title An Artist Is An Artist, The Painful Truth soon announces a veteran band still making creative strides. From the electro swoosh of Shame to the robotic glitch of This Is Not Your Life and Lost And Found’s nu-blues, even the ‘alt.rock’ catch-all can no longer contain them.

Killer Track: Lost And Found

Halestorm - Everest (Atlantic)

Gifted and uninhibited, Lzzy Hale scales new heights on Everest. With sometime Slash and Greta Van Fleet producer Dave Cobb on hand to help birth gargantuan, lyrically forthright tracks written in the studio, she and her Halestorm bandmates leave lacklustre material such as 2015’s Into The Wild Life far behind. With its Heart-meets-Nina-Simone feel, Like A Woman Can has sass and substance, while the epic title track brings melodrama. Seems Lzzy’s 2024 stint fronting Skid Row recharged her batteries.

Killer track: Fallen Star

H.E.A.T - Welcome To The Future (EarMusic)

Masked marvels Ghost leaned into old-school hard rock on this year’s Skeleta, but fellow Swedes H.E.A.T have been doing this stuff just as brilliantly with a fraction of the recognition. Welcome To The Future presents a world where MTV still rules, guitar solos never went out of fashion and the greatness of a song can be measured in how many fists it gets pumping – and by god, do the likes of Bad Time For Love and the insanely brilliant Children Of The Storm get fists pumping. If this is the future, where do we sign up?

Killer track: Children Of The Storm

His Lordship - Bored Animal (His Lordship Partnership Ltd)

Pretenders guitarist James Walbourne and Chrissie Hynde drummer Kristoffer Sonne follow their debut album with more rampageous, overclocked rock’n’roll. A frequently turbulent ride, the music careens like a runaway mine cart, calamity mere seconds away, but the brilliance of the album lies in the absolute mastery of the musicians, who always appear to be in complete control of the chaos as it unfolds, whatever the danger. It’s a glorious noise, and you’ll end the album by wiping the sweat from your stylus.

Killer Track: I Fly Planes Into Hurricanes

Larkin Poe - Bloom (Tricki-Woo)

The Lovell sisters hit an utterly moreish stride here, stirring the hillcountry tones of their childhood into commanding cocktails of rock’n’roll and Americana. They listened to a lot of Blackberry Smoke, Sheryl Crow and The Black Crowes while making this record – with co-producer Tyler Bryant – and you can hear it in the sweet yet strutting likes of Bluephoria and East Love Pt I, along with the rocky, incisive feminism of Pearls. All complete with seamless vocal harmonies and juicy slide guitar. It came out in January and we’ve been revisiting it ever since.

Killer track: Easy Love Pt 1

The Wildhearts - Satanic Rites Of The Wildhearts (Snakefarm)

When challenged to make an album that shared DNA with The Wildhearts’ now-immortal full-length debut Earths Vs The Wildhearts, Ginger Wildheart was flummoxed. Should he? More importantly, could he? The answer to both those questions, as this album proves, is an emphatic ‘Yes’. The brilliantly titled Satanic Rites Of The Wildhearts sees the singer, guitarist and songwriter spill his pint over various issues, and is worth hearing even just for Kunce, which takes aim at wallies of all sorts – including those that use the term ‘hollibobs’.

Killer track: Scared Of Glass

Mirador - Mirador (Republic)

The Greta Van Fleet fan base whipped themselves into a frenzy over guitarist Jake Kiszka’s new band, which had been cooking quietly over the past few years with Ida Mae singer/fellow old world blues ’n’ folk guitar aficionado Chris Turpin. Their self-titled debut reflects how justified that excitement was. A rich, immersive feast of clever harmonies, primal fire and Zeppelin-esque mystique, Mirador finds the band (completed by ex-Graveltones drummer Mikey Sorbello, and session bassist Nick Pini) scaling the ‘new retro’ heights of Rival Sons and Jack White with serious class.

Killer track: Fortune’s Fate

Those Damn Crows - God Shaped Hole (Earache)

Those Damn Crows swung big with their fourth album and it paid off, giving them their first UK No.1. God Shaped Hole is a killer modern rock record that doesn’t hide its arena-sized ambitions. Dancing With The Enemy and Glass Heart are powered by gleaming riffs and Shane Greenhall’s assured roar, and there’s emotion, too, on The Night Train and Still. British rock hasn’t sounded this on top of its game for a long time.

Killer track: Glass Heart

Manic Street Preachers - Critical Thinking (Columbia)

From a socio-political standpoint, the Manics’ manifesto has failed: Planet Earth in 2025 was more of an amoral bin fire than at any point in the leftist band’s three-plus decades. Musically, though, the Welshmen are still kicking and scratching on this 15th album, and we can think of worse tunes to blast while the world burns than ABBA-with-overdrive lead single Decline & Fall. “Start with yourself,” Nicky Wire advised, regarding Critical Thinking’s subtext of self-improvement, “and maybe the rest will follow.”

Killer track: Decline & Fall

De’Wayne - June (Fearless)

Following raw, politically charged experiments with hip-hop, pop and rock on his 2021 debut Stains, Houston-turned-LA artiste De’Wayne moves into proper big-league territory on this wildcard hit of 2025. Packed with luxurious summer bangers – think sexy, silky Prince vibes and enormous sing-alongs, pulled off with the swagger of his mentor Lenny Kravitz – June shimmies through fat, groovy guitars (Lady Lady), sassy syncopation (Take A Picture) and disco killers (Love Raider) with the charisma of a legit superstar. Irresistible.

Killer track: Forever

Robert Plant with Suzi Dian - Saving Grace (Nonesuch)

Robert Plant is clearly enthused by collaborations these days. Following his work with Band Of Joy, Sensational Space Shifters and Alison Krauss, Saving Grace takes its title from the homegrown roots band he’s been playing with since before the pandemic, featuring singer Suzi Dian and guitarist/banjo player Matt Worley. This quietly spectacular set of minor-key covers – from Memphis Minnie to Moby Grape, Blind Willie Johnson to Sarah Siskind – is endlessly rewarding, particularly the fierce, eruptive version of Low’s Everybody’s Song.

Killer track: Everybody’s Song

Jethro Tull - Curious Ruminant (Insideoutmusic)

You wait 19 years for a Jethro Tull album, and three arrive (almost) at once. Curious Ruminant is the best of Tull’s late-career surge that began with 2022’s The Zealot Gene, and finds Ian Anderson confronting mortality head-on, urgency apparently driving him forward. Tull still sound like Tull, although fans of the original band would probably like more grunt, as the production is lightweight and sometimes fussy. The closing Interim Sleep, however, is poignant and rather beautiful in its simplicity.

Killer Track: Puppet And The Puppet Master

The Black Keys - No Rain, No Flowers (Easy Eye Sound)

The title of No Rain, No Flowers nods to all that ‘art-is-suffering’ stuff, but the songs the Black Keys scrubbed up in Dan Auerbach’s Nashville studio are defiant, vital and hooky as hell (helped along, no doubt, by pedigree hit writers Daniel Tashian, Scott Storch and Rick Nowells). The feral fuzzbox of Man On A Mission is the best entry point for long-term fans who wish these former blues brats were still thrashing away in the garage, but it’s the lighter moments that really bloom, like the Bee Gees-styled soul of Make You Mine, or A Little Too High’s postcard from Laurel Canyon.

Killer Track: A Little Too High

Creeper - Sanguivore II: Mistress Of Death (Spinefarm)

Sanguivore II is just as outrageously entertaining as its 2023 predecessor, leaning into the theatre of rock’n’roll with all the poker-faced brilliance of people who know that this stuff is far too important to take seriously. Where the first Sanguivore worshipped at the altar of Jim Steinman, this one skips forward a decade to the 1980s. Blood Magick (It’s A Ritual) is a midnight-black homage to Belinda Carlisle’s mighty Heaven Is A Place On Earth, while elsewhere synths, sax and Livin’ On A Prayer-style talk-box solos colour everything in with various shades of black. A scream, from start to finish.

Killer track: Blood Magick (It’s A Ritual)

Joe Bonamassa - Breakthrough (Provogue)

Bonamassa said he approached this record with the somewhat self-deprecating notion that the world doesn’t necessarily need another one, and it’s obvious how musically liberating that was. Shake This Ground is a charming, acoustic-driven Americana number, and the toe-tapping Still Walking With Me has more than a dash of country. But don’t fret, the raucous electric blues is still on display here: Trigger Finger is cocked and fully loaded. Similarly the quintessential Bonamassian epic, in the form of Broken Record. Like most great artists, Bonamassa never waits for things to stagnate before recalibrating the old palette.

Killer track: Broken Record

Joanne Shaw Taylor - Black & Gold (Journeyman)

In recent years, Shaw Taylor’s willingness to challenge herself with stylistic risks has fuelled a remarkable creative hot streak, and it catches fire on Black & Gold. After two albums that mixed soul elements into the blues bedrock, Black & Gold segues seamlessly between pop-rock, Americana (Hold Of My Heart) and the title track’s reggae lilt. And when she heads back into blues territory, it’s game over as her stinging, articulate guitar solos and smouldering vocals light up What Are You Gonna Do Now and Look What I’ve Become.

Killer track: I Gotta Stop Letting You Let Me Down

The Hives - The Hives Forever Forever The Hives (Pias)

When Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist first came high-kicking towards our TV screens screaming Hate To Say I Told You So in 2001, The Hives seemed like a fun, short-lived alternative to The Strokes. Yet while the latter became increasingly jaded over time, the Swedish garage rockers carried on having a ball and are still doing so right up to this day. Sure, they may stick to the same clattering fuzz-rock formula, but who are we to complain when songs like Enough Is Enough, Bad Call and the lacerating Legalize Living are delivered with such tyre-screeching intensity.

Killer track: Legalize Living

The Darkness - Dreams On Toast (Canary Dwarf/Cooking Vinyl)

Try Hot On My Tail (like Queen’s ’39 played by a cowpoke, with Brian May’s noble interstellar lyric traded for an ode to pre-coital flatulence). Try Rock And Roll Party Cowboy (a skewering of rawk culture whose mash-up of high/low culture rhymes ‘Tolstoy’, ‘pool boy’ and ‘bok choi’). Try the tearaway punk self-flagellation of I Hate Myself (complete with a video that finally answers the question: ‘What would Justin Hawkins look like if he spent his life savings at a back-alley plastic surgeon’?). And then try telling us the rock scene’s pre-eminent givers of joy aren’t at the top of their frivolous game, just when we needed them most.

Killer Track: Rock And Roll Party Cowboy

Cheap Trick - All Washed Up (BMG)

Even 21 studio albums in, even with 52 years on the clock, Cheap Trick are anything but a spent force, thanks to their never-ending supply of feel-good power-pop. Songs as simple and hooky as All Wrong, Long Gone and self-explanatory gem The Riff That Won’t Quit remind us that Cheap Trick have never tried to evolve, never tried to grow up, never worried about much more than the next hook. ‘Some days are better than others,’ sings Robin Zander, now 72, sounding youthful on the majestic Twelve Gates, but with Cheap Trick music playing the sun comes out and the day improves immeasurably.

Killer track: All Wrong, Long Gone

Mammoth - The End (BMG)

While Mammoth I and II were about proving Wolfgang Van Halen could make records, The End is about upping the ante. Opener One Of A Kind sets the scene in five epic, rousing minutes. I Really Wanna grooves like a funky Meshuggah, Happy is all Alice In Chains-laced grunge and heartache, while the likes of Better Off and Something New move through subtle yet searing shifts that hit hard and keep you guessing just enough. He's the frontrunner in a new generation of rock’n’rollers who refuse to compromise on their songs, and if you listen to one new modern hard rock record this year, make it this one.

Killer track: The End

Alice Cooper - The Revenge Of Alice Cooper (Earmusic)

If we’re being picky here, The Revenge could have done with a spot of pruning – but for sheer verve, audacity and hard-rock thrills, it’s one mighty comeback. The album’s highlights include opening track Black Mamba, with Alice at his most camp-sinister, while Wild Ones goes full turbo, the band burning down the years in some style. It’s enough to carry them through the speeding sci-fi of Intergalactic Vagabond Blues, in which Cooper is beguiled by a multi-limbed alien while cruising past Mars in his spaceship. He and the band also take more surprising detours, not least on Dennis Dunaway’s Blood On The Sun, a prog-psych gem that evokes the more expansive vistas of their formative years on Frank Zappa’s Straight label.

Killer track: Wild Ones

Classic Rock - Best Of 2025 Edition

The issue is The ultimate review of 2025: the best albums, the biggest events and the megastars who rocked our world. Including Albums Of The Year, Reissues Of The Year and our 2025 Playlist. Plus The Darkness, Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Cheap Trick, Jethro Tull, Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne & Black Sabbath, Halestorm, Guns N’ Roses and more.

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