The most acclaimed albums of 2025 make for impressively eclectic listening. Surveying them does not reveal much in the way of obvious musical trends. There’s very little similarity between Rosalía’s heady classical approach to pop on Lux and Lily Allen’s conversational disclosures on West End Girl. You could broadly group CMAT’s Euro-Country, Bon Iver’s Sable, Fable and the Tubs’ Cotton Crown together as alternative rock but they don’t sound anything like each other. And the year’s best-of lists are sprinkled with albums that brilliantly defy classification: Blood Orange’s Essex Honey leaps from old-fashioned indie to Prince-y funk; on Black British Music, Jim Legxacy sees no reason why UK rap can’t coexist with distorted guitars, pop R&B and acoustic bedroom pop.

But it’s hard not to notice how similar they are thematically: a large swathe of the Guardian’s albums of the year seem consumed by loss. There are straightforward explorations of failed relationships: for all its religious imagery, there’s a prosaic breakup at the heart of Rosalía’s Lux, while West End Girl’s lurid detailing of the collapse of Lily Allen’s marriage kept the tabloids in headlines for weeks. There are albums about more literal grief: a mother’s death informs Blood Orange’s Essex Honey and the Tubs’ Cotton Crown; Jim Legxacy references his late sister, while the brothers in august rap duo Clipse have seldom sounded as vulnerable as they do describing the deaths of their parents on their rightly heralded comeback Let God Sort ’Em Out. Euro-Country both memorialises a close friend on Lord, Let That Tesla Crash, while its title track examines the wave of suicides provoked by the Irish financial crisis of 2008.

Pulp’s triumphant comeback album More, meanwhile, makes a great deal of capital out of examining a lost past from the perspective of middle age, a point in life when you’ve “gone from all you can be to all that you once were”. You get a similar sense of time passing from Bon Iver’s Sable Fable: the album that Justin Vernon has claimed will be his last under that name spends a lot of time looking back and letting go. It isn’t entirely clear whether Anna von Hausswolff’s monumental Iconoclasts is mourning something personal, or the state of the world – “full of shit and full of evil” in one song’s estimation – but clearly something has changed dramatically, and not for the better: “The life we had has vaporised into the sky,” she sings on Stardust. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Death, collapsed relationships, the passing of youth and the inexorable passage of time: these are sombre themes that fit a quite spectacularly grim year. But in the broader context of what’s happening to music, these albums about loss are, oddly, cause for optimism. Among 2025’s panoply of reasons to be fearful for the future lurked the ongoing advance of AI: certainly, this was the year the technology really made an impact on popular music. In July came the Velvet Sundown, a gently psychedelic Americana band that amassed millions of streams and were eventually revealed to be “a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction and composed, voiced and visualised with the support of artificial intelligence”.

The same month, an AI-generated facsimile of a Brazilian disco track, Predator de Perereca by Blow Records, went viral on TikTok, amassing nearly 50m streams. In September, a US label reportedly paid $3m to sign Xavia Monet, an AI-generated R&B singer; Timbaland’s latest project is AI pop star TaTa Taktumi. By November, two AI-generated tracks had topped different US charts: Breaking Rust’s Walk My Walk made No 1 on the country digital song sales chart, while the equivalent gospel chart was topped by Solomon Ray’s Find Your Rest. The UK singles chart has also fallen victim. I Run by Haven began life with an AI-generated vocal seemingly designed to mimic that of R&B star Jorja Smith. It was banned by streaming services and removed from the UK chart after a week when record industry bodies issued takedown notices, but a new version with a re-recorded vocal was No 14 in the UK Top 40 at the time of writing.

This is all clearly the thin end of the wedge: there’s evidently plenty more to come. But if AI can make a fair copy of an old disco track, or a country record or a Jorja Smith song, the one thing it can’t do is experience the kind of human emotions that power the albums above. (The notion of an AI gospel track in particular seems to spectacularly miss the point.) These were not albums that people listened to just because they sounded nice, or had catchy hooks, but because they bought into the stories behind them, or felt moved by the feelings they expressed and the evident passion that had gone into making them, or saw their own lives reflected in the lyrics. They’re proof that music is about something more than just attractive tunes or big choruses purely designed to cash in on previous hits, that it’s not just “an alternative to silence”, a perfectly ghastly phrase apparently bandied about by streaming services as justification for filling their playlists with inoffensive slop. That feels like stating the blindingly obvious. It also feels like a point worth reiterating at this particular juncture in pop history.