From a folk murder ballad to an impassioned call for peace, Guardian writers pick their favourite lesser-heard tracks of the year
The pick of 2025’s film, music, art, TV, stage and games, chosen by Guardian critics and writers
There is a sense of deep knowing and calm to Not Offended, the lone song released this year by the Danish-Montenegrin musician (also an earlier graduate of the Copenhagen music school currently producing every interesting alternative pop star). To warmly droning organ that hangs like the last streak of sunlight above a darkening horizon, Milovic assures someone that they haven’t offended her – but her steady Teutonic tenderness, reminiscent of Molly Nilsson or Sophia Kennedy, suggests that their actions weren’t provocative so much as evasive. Strings flutter tentatively as she addresses this person who can’t look life in the eye right now. “I see you clearly,” Milovic sings, as the drums kick in and the strings become full-blooded: a reminder of the ease that letting go can offer. Laura Snapes
In a year that saw the troubling rise of AI-generated slop music, there is something endlessly comforting about a song that can only have been written by a messy, complicated human. The first lines of Al Olender’s delightfully specific Cyclone, draw on a memory of driving to Queens to “try to get laid”, and from there the song takes our unwinding narrator to a Baltimore freeway, Planet Fitness bathroom, and, yes, the titular Coney Island attraction. It’s a well-trodden theme, though usually sung by classic dude troubadours such as Townes Van Zandt or Merle Haggard: no matter where she runs, she’s herself, and it’s a problem. But the song’s crescendo is one of the prettiest, and lasting, that I have heard in a while. After losing love (or maybe it was just some guy), the singer resolves to replace all of her glass with paper plates – “things I cannot break”. Alaina Demopoulos
