Sadness has inspired much of the year’s best music — and that’s something an AI will never feel | culture

TThe Most Popular Albums of 2025 is an impressively selective listen. Scanning them doesn’t reveal much about obvious musical trends. There’s very little resemblance between Rosalía’s classic, heady pop style on Lux and Lily Allen’s conversational revelations in West End Girl. You could lump the Euro-country music of CMAT, Bon Iver’s Sable, Fable, and Cotton Crown together as alternative rock, but they don’t sound alike. And the year’s best lists are filled with albums that deftly defy categorization: Blood Orange’s Essex Honey leaps from old-fashioned indie to Prince-y funk; At Black British Music, Jim Legxacy sees no reason why UK rap can’t coexist with distorted guitars, R&B and bedroom acoustic pop.

But it’s hard not to notice how similar they are thematically: a whole lot of this year’s Guardian albums seem consumed by loss. There are straightforward explorations of failed relationships: for all its religious imagery, there’s a hackneyed detachment at the heart of Rosalía’s Lux, while West End Girl’s harrowing details of the collapse of Lily Allen’s marriage kept the tabloids in the headlines for weeks. There are albums about more literal grief: Death of a Mother informs Essex Honey from Blood Orange and Cotton Crown from The Tubs; Jim Legxacy references his late sister, while the brothers in popular rap duo Clipse rarely sound as vulnerable as they do when describing their parents’ deaths on their heralded return of Let God Sort ‘Em Out. The Euro-Country single pays tribute to a close friend of Lord’s, Let That Tesla Crash, while its title track addresses the wave of suicides sparked by the 2008 Irish financial crisis.

Pulp’s triumphant comeback album More, meanwhile, makes a great deal of capital from examining the lost past through the lens of midlife, a stage in life when “you go from everything you could be to everything you once were.” You can get a similar sense of time passing from Bon Iver’s Sable Fable: an album that Justin Vernon claimed would be his last under that name spends a lot of time looking back and letting go. It’s not entirely clear whether Anna von Haussolf’s massive iconoclasm is mourning something personal, or the state of the world — “full of filth and full of evil” in one song’s assessment — but it’s clear that something has changed dramatically, and not for the better: “The life we ​​lived in the sky has evaporated,” she sings on Stardust. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Death, broken relationships, the passing of youth and the inexorable passage of time: these are bleak themes befitting a startlingly bleak year. But in the broader context of what’s happening to music, these albums about loss are, in a strange way, reason for optimism. Among the host of reasons to be fearful of the future in 2025 is the continuing progress in artificial intelligence: certainly, this was the year the technology made a real impact on popular music. In July, Velvet Sundown, a gently psychedelic American band, amassed millions of streams and was eventually revealed as “a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction and composed, sounded and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence”.

In the same month, an AI replica of a Brazilian disco track, titled Predator de Perereca by Blow Records, went viral on TikTok, where it garnered nearly 50 million views. In September, a US label reportedly paid $3 million to sign Xavia Monet, an R&B singer created by artificial intelligence; Timbaland’s latest project is AI-powered pop star TaTa Taktumi. By November, two AI-generated tracks had topped various US charts: Breaking Rust’s “Walk My Walk” topped the country’s digital song sales chart, while Solomon Rae’s “Find Your Rest” topped the equivalent gospel chart. The UK Singles Chart has also fallen victim. I Run by Haven began life with an AI-generated voice that seemed designed to mimic the voice of R&B star Jorja Smith. It was banned by streaming services and removed from the UK chart a week later when recording industry bodies issued takedown notices, but the new version with re-recorded audio was number 14 in the UK Top 40 at the time of writing.

This is all clearly the exact end of the wedge: there is clearly a lot more to come. But if an AI can create a fair copy of an old disco track, a country record, or a Jorja Smith song, one thing it can’t do is experience the kind of human emotions that underpin the aforementioned albums. (The idea of ​​an AI-powered gospel piece in particular seems to miss the mark spectacularly.) These were albums that people listened to not just because they sounded pretty, or were catchy, but because they bought into the stories behind them, or felt moved by the feelings they expressed and the palpable emotion that went into making them, or saw their own lives reflected in the lyrics. It’s proof that music is about something more than just catchy riffs or big choruses designed solely to capitalize on past hits, and that it’s not just an “alternative to silence,” a seemingly utterly terrible phrase being bandied about by streaming services as a justification for filling their playlists with inoffensive content. This sounds like stating the blindingly obvious. It also seems like a point worth repeating at this particular point in pop history.