As 2025 draws to a close, and the Nonesuch Journal takes a bit of a hiatus till the start of what we hope will be a happy, healthy new year, it's time for a look back and remember all of the great and diverse music made by Nonesuch artists over the past year. Many Nonesuch artists and their recent Nonesuch releases have made year's best lists and are up for Grammy Awards. Several of those artists stopped by to share some of their favorite Nonesuch albums for the Nonesuch Selects video series. Here, in words and music and in chronological order, is a look back at the year in Nonesuch music, in gratitude.
As 2025 draws to a close, and the Nonesuch Journal takes a bit of a hiatus till the start of what we hope will be a happy, healthy new year, it's time for a look back and remember all of the great and diverse music made by Nonesuch artists over the past year. Many Nonesuch artists and their recent Nonesuch releases have made year's best lists and are up for Grammy Awards. Several of those artists stopped by to share some of their favorite Nonesuch albums for the Nonesuch Selects video series. Here, in words and music and in chronological order, is a look back at the year in Nonesuch music, in gratitude:
JANUARY
Ambrose Akinmusire
honey from a winter stone
The year began with the January 31 release of Ambrose Akinmusire's album honey from a winter stone, which the composer and trumpeter called a “self-portrait.” The album features improvisational vocalist Kokayi, pianist Sam Harris, Chiquitamagic on synthesizer, drummer Justin Brown, and the Mivos Quartet. “For arguably the most technically gifted trumpeter of his generation, a lot of Ambrose Akinmusire’s breakthroughs actually come from letting go of standards and structures," says the New York Times. "Lately Akinmusire has been making some of the most intimate, spellbinding music of his career.” Grammy Award Nominee for Best Alternative Jazz Album.
Akinmusire has been nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Jazz Album for honey from a winter stone, which has also made year's best lists from NPR's Nate Chinen, The Wire, Mojo, DownBeat, Jazzwise, Echoes, Record Collector, and Pandora.
FEBRUARY
Wilco
A Ghost Is Born (Deluxe Edition)
On February 7, Wilco celebrated its 2004 Grammy-winning album A Ghost Is Born with the release of deluxe editions—9-LP + 4-CD and 9-CD versions—as well as a 2-CD expanded edition and the return of the original album to vinyl. The deluxe edition includes the original album, alternates, outtakes, and demos, charting the making of the album, plus the complete 2004 concert recording from Boston’s Wang Center and the band’s “fundamentals” workshop sessions. The deluxe box includes 65 previously unreleased music tracks as well as a 48-page hardcover book with previously unpublished photos and a new liner note by Grammy-winning writer Bob Mehr.
Bob Mehr has been nominated for another Grammy Award for Best Album Notes for A Ghost Is Born (Deluxe Edition), which landed on year's best lists of New York Times, Mojo, Uncut, Rolling Stone, and Record Collector.
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Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly
BALADA PARA LA CORPORATOCRACIA (Andy Moor Remix)
The following week, the Amsterdam-based duo of Bolivian-born singer/instrumentalist Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti and Chicago ex-pat jazz drummer Frank Rosaly released a remix of "BALADA PARA LA CORPORATOCRACIA," from their debut album, MESTIZX, made by Andy Moor, of the Dutch anarcho-punk band The Ex. "Andy has so much experience with communal music from around the globe ... but he’s also lived the life of a musical activist, which is apparent in everything he does," Ferragutti & Rosaly say. "We didn’t think 'BALADA PARA LA CORPORATOCRACIA' could get any filthier, but he proved us wrong!"
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Hurray for the Riff Raff
"Pyramid Scheme"
On February 20, Hurray for the Riff Raff released the single “Pyramid Scheme,” which amplifies the spirit of resilience and rebellion of their acclaimed 2024 album The Past Is Still Alive. Armed with poetic prowess and personal truths, the song conveys a pervasive contempt for the dark side of the Internet and the alienating, undermining effects it has on artists and outsiders. Nods to Billy the Kid, Calamity Jane, Darby Crash, and Frida Kahlo are wrapped in melodies and arrangements that are equal parts scrappy and saccharine, backed by Phil Cook on organ, Yan Westerlund on drums, Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy on electric guitar, and The Past Is Still Alive producer Brad Cook on bass.
MARCH
The twenty-seven disc box set Steve Reich Collected Works was released on March 14. It features music recorded during Steve Reich's forty years on the label—six decades of his compositions, including first recordings of his two latest works, Jacob’s Ladder and Traveler’s Prayer—plus two extensive booklets with new essays by Robert Hurwitz, Michael Tilson Thomas, Russell Hartenberger, Judith Sherman, and Nico Muhly, and a comprehensive listener’s guide by Timo Andres. Nonesuch made its first record with Steve Reich in 1985; he was signed exclusively to the label that year. Collected Works includes twenty-four discs of Nonesuch recordings and three from other labels.
Steve Reich Collected Works has made year's best reissues lists from New York Times, Uncut, The Times, The Wire, and WRTI.
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On March 27, Tortoise released the single "Oganesson," the band's first new offering since 2016, on International Anthem / Nonesuch Records, and a foreshadow of a larger body of work to come later in the year. The track was released just as the band performed both new music and classics from their thirty-year catalog at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee.
“Oganesson” made Pitchfork and Treble's lists of the 100 Best Songs of 2025.
APRIL
Dirty Projectors, David Longstreth, and s t a r g a z e
Song of the Earth
David Longstreth’s Song of the Earth, a song cycle for orchestra and voices, was released on April 4. The piece is performed on the record by Longstreth with his band Dirty Projectors—Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, Olga Bell—and the Berlin-based chamber orchestra s t a r g a z e. The album also features Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), Steve Lacy, Patrick Shiroishi, Anastasia Coope, Tim Bernardes, Ayoni, Portraits of Tracy, and the author David Wallace-Wells. Longstreth says that while Song of the Earth—his biggest-yet foray into the field of concert music—"is not a ‘climate change opera,’” he wanted to “find something beyond sadness: beauty spiked with damage. Acknowledgement flecked with hope, irony, humor, rage.”
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Also on April 4, Caroline Shaw released the song "Taproot," from the motion picture Julie Keeps Quiet, a film by Leonardo Van Dijl.
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Rhiannon Giddens & Justin Robinson
What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow
Rhiannon Giddens reunites with her former Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate Justin Robinson on What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, released on April 14. Produced by Giddens and Joseph "joebass" DeJarnette, the album features Giddens on banjo and Robinson on fiddle, playing eighteen of their favorite North Carolina tunes. Many were learned from their late mentor, legendary North Carolina Piedmont musician Joe Thompson; one is from another musical hero, the late Etta Baker. Giddens and Robinson recorded outdoors at Thompson’s and Baker’s North Carolina homes, as well as the former plantation Mill Prong House, accompanied by the sounds of nature, including two different broods of cicadas, which had not emerged simultaneously since 1803, creating a true once-in-a-lifetime soundscape.
What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow has been nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Folk Album and made the year's best lists of Uncut, Qobuz, Songlines, Magnet, Folk Alley, and WFUV.
MAY
Lady on the Bike—the debut album from cinematic electro-pop duo Ringdown, featuring Danni Lee Parpan and Pulitzer and Grammy winner Caroline Shaw—was released on May 9. The album celebrates the feeling of possibility in myriad forms: the possibility of love; the possibility of creating connection and community in a world trying to pull those things apart; the possibility of making music in new ways. The songs were collaboratively written and recorded by the duo. New Body Electric members Leah Vautar and Aaron K Peterson perform on and help produce several songs; Sō Percussion is featured on a new version of Ringdown’s previously released single “Ghost.”
JUNE
About Ghosts, released on June 13, features eight new compositions by guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson, performed with her sextet Amaryllis, the improvisatory band featured on her critically praised albums Amaryllis, Belladonna, and Cloudward: Patricia Brennan (vibraphone), Nick Dunston (bass), Tomas Fujiwara (drums), Jacob Garchik (trombone), and Adam O’Farrill (trumpet). Saxophonists Immanuel Wilkins and Brian Settles join the ensemble on five tunes, and Halvorson adds Pocket Piano synthesizer overdubs on a number of tracks. The album was produced and mixed by Deerhoof's John Dieterich.
About Ghosts has landed on many year's best lists, including NPR, Slate, The Quietus, The Wire, Mojo, Jazzwise, Stereogum, Presto, PopMatters, Libération, and Qobuz.
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Collaborators and friends from Tortoise's lengthy and illustrious career give their unique takes on the band's 2025 single “Oganesson" on Oganesson (Remixes), released June 24: poet and activist Saul Williams, renowned mastering engineer Heba Kadry, The Black Keys' Patrick Carney, indie heavyweights Broken Social Scene, and percussionist, producer, and composer Makaya McCraven.
JULY
Steve Reich
Jacob's Ladder / Traveler's Prayer
This first recording of Steve Reich's Jacob's Ladder, performed by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Jaap van Zweden, and Synergy Vocals, was made during its October 2023 world premiere at Lincoln Center's David Geffen Hall. “Lovely and refreshing," says the New York Classical Review. "Superb." The first recording of Traveler's Prayer (2020), performed by Colin Currie Group and Synergy Vocals, was made at Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall, also in 2023. "The tone of its score, from first note to last, is sustained sublimity," says the Los Angeles Times.
Jacob's Ladder / Traveler's Prayer landed on year’s best lists from Gramophone, Qobuz, and Presto.
AUGUST
Molly Tuttle
So Long Little Miss Sunshine
Grammy Award–winning singer, songwriter, and guitarist Molly Tuttle's new solo album, So Long Little Miss Sunshine, was released on August 15. Recorded in Nashville with producer Jay Joyce, it marks a sonic departure from her recent work. The album of eleven originals and one cover (Icona Pop and Charli xcx’s “I Love It”) is a hybrid of pop, country, rock, and flat-picking, plus a murder ballad. Her virtuoso guitar work takes center stage on this album more than ever, and for the first time, she introduces her banjo playing into two of her recordings.
Molly Tuttle has been nominated for two Grammy Awards this year: Best Americana Album for So Long Little Miss Sunshine and Best Americana Performance for the album track "That's Gonna Leave a Mark." She made year's best lists from Billboard, Mojo, PopMatters, Guitar World, WFUV, and WMNF.
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Pianist and composer Brad Mehldau closed out the month with the August 29 release of Ride into the Sun, a songbook record of music by the late singer, songwriter, and guitarist Elliott Smith. It features performances by singer/guitarist Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear, singer/mandolinist Chris Thile, bassists Felix Moseholm and John Davis, drummer Matt Chamberlain, and a chamber orchestra led by Dan Coleman. The album's ten Elliott Smith songs are complemented by four Mehldau compositions inspired by him and interpretations of Big Star’s “Thirteen,” which Smith also covered, and “Sunday” by Nick Drake, whom Mehldau sees "in some ways as sort of Smith’s visionary grandfather.”
Ride into the Sun has been nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Jazz Album and has made year's best lists from Mojo, Jazzwise, Record Collector, PopMatters, and Presto.
SEPTEMBER
Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Oh Snap, released September 19, comprises 12 very personal songs by the singer/composer (plus a cover of a verse from the Commodores’ 1977 hit “Brick House”) mostly recorded outside of a traditional studio environment. The songs showcase her genre-spanning tastes and influences from her 1990s childhood in Miami—from boy bands to grunge to classical to folk—and include party tracks with beats, samba grooves, and quiet folk songs. The album features longtime collaborators Sullivan Fortner, Yasushi Nakamura, and Kyle Poole, plus cameos from singers June McDoom and Kate Davis.
Oh Snap made year’s best lists from Slate and Jazzwise.
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Jonny Greenwood
One Battle After Another [Soundtrack]
Jonny Greenwood's score to Paul Thomas Anderson's film One Battle After Another, released digitally on September 26 and on CD and vinyl November 14, features 18 new compositions performed by London Contemporary Orchestra, with conductor Hugh Tieppo-Brunt. Greenwood contributed piano, guitar, bass, percussion, and ondes Martenot. The film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and Benicio Del Toro, and Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, and Chase Infiniti, is Greenwood's sixth Nonesuch-released Anderson film score. "Paul Thomas Anderson fans are well accustomed to how instrumental Jonny Greenwood's music is to the auteur’s body of work," Indiewire says of their collaborations: "Greenwood's original scores expertly capture Anderson's tones."
One Battle After Another has earned nine Golden Globe Awards nominations and fourteen Critics Choice Awards nominations, including Best Score from both for Jonny Greenwood, and has been named the year's best picture by the New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta Film Critics, among others. The soundtrack is also included among the year's best per the New York Times and Slate.
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Robert Plant & Saving Grace
Saving Grace
Robert Plant's Saving Grace, his first album with a new band of distinguished players, was also released on September 26. What he calls “a song book of the lost and found," its genesis was during lockdown, when Plant’s customary wandering was all but forbidden. It was in the English countryside that he connected closely to this diverse group of musicians—vocalist Suzi Dian, drummer Oli Jefferson, guitarist Tony Kelsey, banjo and string player Matt Worley, cellist Barney Morse-Brown—who had a shared lean towards his corners of evocative song. Produced by Plant and the band and recorded over six years in the Cotswolds and on the Welsh Borders, Saving Grace features songs by Memphis Minnie, Bob Mosley (Moby Grape), Blind Willie Johnson, The Low Anthem, Martha Scanlan, Sarah Siskind, and Low.
Saving Grace has made year’s best lists from Mojo, Uncut, Record Collector, Guitar World, and Glide.
OCTOBER
Gabriel Kahane, Jeffrey Kahane, The Knights
Heirloom
Gabriel Kahane's Heirloom was released October 10. The album features a concerto for piano and chamber orchestra by the same name, written by the composer/singer/songwriter for his father, the conductor and pianist Jeffrey Kahane. The Brooklyn-based orchestral collective The Knights also perform on the record. "Heirloom is an aural family scrapbook," Gabriel Kahane says, "exploring, in its three movements, a series of inheritances." The album also features “Where are the Arms,” the title track from Kahane’s sophomore LP, in a new orchestral arrangement performed by the composer (vocals, guitar, electronics) with the Knights.
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Various Artists
After the Hunt [Soundtrack]
The soundtrack to Luca Guadagnino’s film After the Hunt, released digitally on October 10 with the CD following November 14, features the score by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross, a selection of works by the composer John Adams, and music by Ambitious Lovers, Julius Eastman, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Everything But The Girl and others. After the Hunt, which stars Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny, marks the fourth film Reznor and Ross have scored for Guadagnino.
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Makaya McCraven
Off the Record / Four EPs
Drummer, producer, and sonic collagist Makaya McCraven released four distinct yet interconnected EPs—Techno Logic, The People’s Mixtape, Hidden Out!, and PopUp Shop—on October 31 and their two-disc compilation, Off the Record, on October 17. Built from live, improvised performances, the music is later reshaped by McCraven via extensive editing, overdubs, and post-production at his home studio. Each EP is drawn from moments of pure improvisation, recorded live in performance, shaped as much by the room and audience as by the musicians themselves, including Ben LaMar Gay and Theon Cross (Techno Logic); Junius Paul, Marquis Hill, Joel Ross, and Jeremiah Chiu (The People’s Mixtape); Paul, Jeff Parker, and Josh Johnson (Hidden Out!); and Parker, Justefan, and Benjamin J. Shepherd (PopUp Shop).
The EPs and compilation have made year’s best lists from Mojo, The Line of Best Fit, and Treble.
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Tortoise released Touch, its first new album since 2016, on October 24. The groundbreaking group harnesses its collectivist songwriting approach to reconnect, recenter, and reinvigorate their sound for what is perhaps their most diverse release to date. While there are still excursions into the dusky, elegantly gnarled jazz ambience, Touch is perhaps most remarkable for the post-everything icons' unapologetic embrace of grand gesture. Re-engineered Krautrock, hand-cranked techno rave-ups, and pointillist spaghetti Western fanfares are all imbued with Tortoise's signature internal logic.
Touch made year’s best lists from Mojo, Uncut, The Wire, and Qobuz.
NOVEMBER
Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway feat. Ketch Secor
Fairytale of New York
Just ahead of the holidays, Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway featuring Ketch Secor offered their take on The Pogues' 1987 holiday classic with Kirsty MacColl, "Fairytale of New York," on November 4.
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Chris Thile
Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 2
On Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 2, released November 7, Chris Thile performs Bach's Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004; Sonata No. 3 in C major, BWV 1005; and Partita No. 3 in E major, BWV 1006. For his second recording of Bach Violin Sonatas and Partitas, 12 years after the first volume, the mandolin virtuoso opted for a more personal approach, allowing himself to take liberties with the scores, which he recorded in multiple, somewhat untraditional, locations of personal significance. “My mentor, Edgar Meyer, has shown me ... you practice Bach ... because it makes your life better," Thile says. "Because it makes the world around you seem like a better, happier place. Because communing with something that beautiful, made by a human being, continuing to be made and enjoyed by so many human beings, makes you proud to be human ... I love practicing Bach, and I wanted to try and share how that ongoing process feels and sounds to me."
Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 2 made Gramophone and Boston Globe's list of the Best Classical Albums of 2025.
DECEMBER
After a nearly five-decade career as one of his generation’s defining rock bassists, time and space have finally allowed Flea to work with a dream band of modern jazz visionaries, returning to his first instrument and musical love, the trumpet, for a new album to be released in 2026 on Nonesuch. His original song “A Plea" is a preview. Written and performed by Flea, “A Plea” urges listeners to “build a bridge, shine a light, make something beautiful and see somebody, give it to somebody.” Featuring Flea on electric bass, vocals, and trumpet, the ensemble also includes double bassist Anna Butterss and guitarist Jeff Parker, as well as drummer Deantoni Parks, percussionist Mauro Refosco, alto flutist Rickey Washington, and trombonist Vikram Devasthali. Chris Warren joins on vocals, as does the song’s producer Josh Johnson, who also plays alto saxophone.
AND SO, THE YEAR IN NONESUCH MUSIC
The above playlist can also be found on our Playlists page, along with our holiday playlist and many others we hope you'll enjoy.
There is, of course, more great music to come in 2026. Songs have been released and pre-orders are already available for Carolina Chocolate Drops' Genuine Negro Jig (15th Anniversary Edition), out January; Neba Solo and Benego Diakité's A Djinn and a Hunter Went Walking, due February 13; and Sarah Kirkland Snider's Forward Into Light, performed by Metropolis Ensemble, due February 27.
Happy Holidays from everyone at Nonesuch Records!
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