Best Albums of September 2025

The highest-rated albums released in September 2025, ranked by critical consensus from professional music critics.

September 2025 arrives as a pointed, unpredictable month in new music - Best Albums of September 2025 collects a run of releases that mix veteran restorations, adventurous jazz, and sharp indie statements. Critics framed the month as both retrospective and forward-looking, with several high-scoring projects demanding repeated listens.

Standout releases included Donny McCaslin's Lullaby For The Lost, which topped the consensus at 90.0 from its initial review, and veteran vibraphonist Mulatu Astatke's Mulatu Plays Mulatu, also at 90.0 across three reviews. Equally arresting was Geese's Getting Killed, a critical favorite at 87.07 from 15 reviews that pushed the month's indie-rock conversation. The consensus suggests a balance between archival projects like David Bowie's I Can't Give Everything Away (2002 - 2016) [Box Set] (87.33, three reviews) and risk-taking contemporary records such as Lucrecia Dalt's A Danger To Ourselves (86.25).

September's releases emphasize genre diversity - jazz, post-punk, experimental electronic, and curated reissues - and set a rich context for the ranked list below. Scroll on for the month's top albums, their aggregated scores, and why critics singled these records out as September's most compelling new music.