These are the tracks I enjoyed and found interesting in 2025—rap, techno and other. Despite the relentless, draining discourses of AI generated music and the barrage of useful participants who urge us to 'embrace' it (the commercially shrewd operators + AI-like creators + early adopter commentariat arts persons that have always sought ladders and lifeboats of portfolio diversification from a difficult game), and despite increasingly fractured modes of promoting and releasing serving to position further creative cheapening of music in life and culture, artists have made interesting work this year and shaken off the torpor of the start of the