This past fall, for the first time since 1990, there wasn’t a single rap song in the Billboard Hot 100's top 40. Megan Thee Stallion briefly shifted the disappointing mark with a new single shortly afterwards, but that’s besides the point. There was plenty of good rap this year — you just needed the taste and imagination to discover it.
If you’re a borderline old head — or just an old head — Mass Appeal held you down with a series of new albums from Slick Rick, Mobb Deep, Ghostface Killah and more. If you wanted music that came out after the iPhone 2, there were Drake & PARTYNEXTDOOR, Lil Baby, Gunna, and other mainstream folks that have managed to remain superstars amid a shifting industry. Chance The Rapper returned, rejuvenated. Clipse pulled up with the most emotional album of their career. Wale had a halfcourt buzzer-beater album just a couple of weeks ago. billy woods AND Armand Hammer came through. So did Danny Brown. You get the idea.
Whether it was from the North, South or West — the realm of the washed or the too online — the best parts of hip-hop have been well-represented in 2K25. Now, it’s time to rank the best of them. Check out our top 10 rap albums of 2025 below.
As evidenced by Ian, there’s a pretty thin line between a genuine era revival and mediocre cosplay. Zukenee avoids crossing it with Slaytanic, a playful trap album that conjures the spirit of Zaytoven and oversized white tees past. Grafting jumpy chants and quirky medieval imagery onto waterbug piano keys, he spits like a Yung L.A. that just got really into Dungeons & Dragons. Or a less sinister Gucci Mane who's never even heard of "self-help." With sly cool and spurts of yelping exhilaration, Zukenee renders early aughts bando music with a conviction that sells it all to a new generation. Coated in layered vocals and jumpy synths that could soundtrack an Adrian Peterson high school highlight tape, "Stoopid Fool" has all the electricity to make the trap say "aye." Meanwhile, "Hindu" is woozy, narcotized gunplay talk sticky enough to make you murmur the chorus without even realizing it. Nods to swords and dragons can feel a little superficial, but it’s a fun twist that helps him avoid monotony. And, as low-stakes as the project can feel, the discordant melody of "In The Woods" evokes tender nostalgia for the bygone era that raised him.
G Herbo's been rapping his ass off nonstop for years now, so his latest album isn't the return to form or "back to basics" deal its "use my old name" title suggests. But let's just say that, if you love watching Herbo’'s Funk Flex freestyles and/or still remember hearing "Four Minutes Of Hell" for the first time, Lil Herb is exactly what it sounds like — and that's a good thing. Tracks like "Went Legit" and "Blitz" are bullet-riddled victory laps that will destroy your AirPods. And then, reflective tunes like "Longevity" see some of the most creatively rhymed stanzas of his career: "Ain't enough for me to go up sellin' drugs, I want a B/ In a trap, 17, I touch C, D, and E/ One of my brothers in a bing, just seen me on BET/ Dropped out of everything and I ain't get no GED/ Took myself off EBT, the crib look like a B&B." At a tidy 54 minutes, it's as thoughtful as it is tough. Lil Herb would be proud.
Mass Appeal’s Legend Has It Series has been up and down, but De La Soul's latest is most certainly up. Cabin In The Sky is both a tribute to the late Trugoy The Dove and an affirmation of De La's status as rap's ultimate everymen. The LP is a hearty hour and 11 minutes, but it's buoyed by a mix of guests (Killer Mike, Common, Nas) and beats that shift between deeply reflective and playful. "A Quick 16 For Mama" is even more sweet than it sounds, while the Nas-featuring "Run It Back" is the type bar session that makes you want to… run it back. With the passing of Trugoy, the crew itself can't actually do that — at least, not the way they want to. But, with dexterous, self-aware lyricism, creative production and spiritual buoyancy, Cabin In The Sky makes you appreciate them returning in all the ways they still can, plus the friends that will pop out to help them make the trip.
Don't Tap The Glass might have been low stakes, but it was still high art. Released less than a year after Chromakopia, the album sees Tyler, The Creator dancing through an eclectic mix of boogie, disco, funk and seemingly everything else that exists in the Black music continuum. Whether he's serving up industrial ("Stop Playing With Me") or gleaming funk, Tyler embeds the tracks with sticky choruses, pulsing charisma, and precision. Here, feathery Yebba vocals meet house beats and "Knuck If U Buck" samples ("I'll Take Care Of You") and psychedelic Indian music frames a Busta Rhymes classic. Simply put, "Sugar On My Tongue" and "Ring Ring Ring" slap. From start to finish, it was an LP far too inventive to be a throwaway.
When it comes down to it, El Cousteau is just cool. His beats are cool, his punchlines are cool, his fluctuating vocal tones are cool, and his sense of humor is cool. Shit, even his name sounds like it was made up by someone who just wanted a moniker that sounded really cool. And you know what? It does. At 28 minutes, Dirty Harry 2 is a svelte yet dense character study of the DMV's most electric stylist. With its flaring electric guitar and Cousteau's matter-of-fact threats, the Alchemist-produced "Menace To Society" feels like a supercut of Clint Eastwood's iciest one-liners. "Straight To It" sounds like a jittery apocalypse, with Cousteau using a frenzied delivery to flaunt some casually absurdist humor: "Seven missed phone calls, I'm the director of communications." The beats here are as sleek and distorted as his raps, and the way he oscillates between tonal and phonetic registers reminds me of 2015 Thugger — a performance technique that can turn any syllable into its own micro-excursion. The whole project is right, refined, and undeniably cool.
It’s hard to embody a title much more than Jim Legxacy did with black british music (2025). He slides between all multitudes of the Black Brit diaspora, handling afrobeat ("Sun") and jerk ("Stick") with equal dexterity. Adopting the sounds is one thing. But with his own adventurous production style, he’s succeeded in reimagining them, too. "Father" collapses the distance between grime and chipmunk soul. Meanwhile, "New David Bowie" is a mosaic of harpsichord, patois samples, and kinetic percussion that, when fused with his scatteredly precise rap, feels nirvanic. Swirled with unpretentious autobiographical songwriting and lithe vocals, it's a skillful microcosm of a musical ecosystem — and an artist with the broad shoulders to carry it.
Ironically, Mercy is merciless. A follow up to 2023's We Buy Diabetic Test Strips — and Armand Hammer's first album-length team-up with the Alchemist since 2021's Haram — the album is an unsparing look at our monotonously fraught existence. As is typical, they do so with esoteric imagery and production that can be as abrasive as it is engrossing. Tracks like "Laraaji" see the trio thriving on manic intensity, with Elucid and billy woods turning a blaring guitar into a pulpit. But their jaggedly poetic raps feel more like those overbearing religious guys on the street corner. Except these two are spitting the most incredible shit you've ever heard in your life, and Alc's the one-man band that makes it all too compelling for noise complaints. On other tracks like "Calypso" and "Super Nintendo," the two spitters shift from political commentators to time travelers, riding cryptic symbolism through images, sounds, and eternal truths.
I feel a little "Immortal Technique" saying this, but whenever I write about billy woods, I think "claustrophobic hieroglyphs." The stanzas are embroidered in layered meanings hard to decode in real time, and his frazzled yet coherent ramblings sound like he's trying to get his message out before he runs out of the air he needs to speak it. That exasperated despair is the subtext of GOLLIWOG, an album titled after a terrifying monster story he wrote when he was a kid. Appropriately, the LP feels like a horror flick. Paired with woods' imagistic writing, quivering strings and landlines become a Mike Myers theme for the most frightening kinds of reminiscences ("STAR87"). With its creeping organs, "BLK XMAS" is the score Tim Burton would've used for The Nightmare Before Christmas. In the hands of woods, even a love triangle can become genuinely scary, with lipstick becoming a bloodstained symbol of monstrous lust ("Misery"). He's discussing a lot of his typical themes, but the ominous soundscapes only make it all the creepier. By the time you're done with GOLLIWOG, that monster he made up doesn't feel so fictional.
I pity the fool who can't comprehend Playboi Carti. It must be like thinking cheese is gross, or not liking chocolate. Because from Whole Lotta Red on, he's established himself as probably the most important aesthete of the 2020s. Carti only reinforced that rep with MUSIC, an LP that melts Atlanta rap subgenres into something dystopian and unwieldy. There's a gleeful nihilism to it all. Murmuring "shawty gon’ let me crush" with a gothic choir repeating your words over a pixelated synth line? Sure. Rich Kidz sample? Throw it in there. Kendrick Lamar adlib? Why didn't I think of that one? Sprawling and overstuffed as it is, it's an electric feat of curation. Carti's sludgy vocals, animated enunciations, phonetically fun choruses, and quirky turns of phrase make it the best type of excess.
I'm not saying this is the best Earl Sweatshirt album… but it might be the best Earl Sweatshirt album. Released over the summer, Live Laugh Love pairs foggily psychedelic production with the slipperiest, most poetic bars of his career. For this one, Earl rearranges syllables and meanings like they're prepackaged puzzles where the spaces only become available at the last possible second. "What my nigga 'Tay Hicks say?/ I just paint pictures, you just chip in on a frame/ Zoomin' out of thick malaise in my cranium,” he spits on "gsw vs sac." Elsewhere on the album, he makes time to sort through his own evolution, reflecting on fatherhood and the understated valor in simply moving forward: "[We] flirt with danger, we hastily learn how to dance." The album isn’t even close to the naivete its title suggests. But, through densely human songwriting and production that frames Earl's disparate ideas in adventure, it's a powerful reminder of the courage required to attempt to live up to that phrase.
