My professional life involves a lot of writing and editing. Over the last decade, the rigors of that kind of creative work have pushed my musical tastes around in ways that at first felt uncomfortable, but today feel like sustenance. I love all kinds of music, but listening to a lot of beat-less ambient music, techno/electronica, chamber music, and jazz made me feel like I was betraying the rock and roll, the groovy jams, the lyrical hip hop, and indie rock that had fed me since college.
But the more I listened – the more I dug into the infinite spectrum of music that gets lumped into terms like “ambient,” “jazz,” or (gasp) “spa music” – the more I realized that this kind of music is the modern equivalent of what Mozart and Chopin, Debussy and Bach, the Gregorian chanters and the cave people beating on whatever was available were trying to achieve. Pure music. Bliss. Cosmic revelation. An invitation (in the reassuring words of Baba Ram Dass) to relax, quiet your mind, open your heart, and breathe.
It helps that the best of it is just plain gorgeous. And it’s the perfect thing to listen to when you need a little creativity shot in the arm. The music on this list lets me tap instantly into the coveted flow state that creatives dream about (shout out to the incredible Flow State Newsletter that turned me on to so much good music over the last several years). It’s instantaneous, and this music has made me a better writer. A better artist and musician. Heck, a better person.
Part of that is due to a fairly regular routine of meditation that I’ve done for the last four years. Talking about meditation is a little like talking about fight club, right? There’s a thin line that quickly crosses into pretentious, haughty, or just plain goofy. But meditation is really just being quiet, and the music on this list is the perfect invitation to do just that: Sit. Listen to the music. Listen to yourself. Stop thinking and just feel. These albums are gateways to the meditative state, and reader: I’m here for it. I think you could be too.
As with my Albums of the Year 2025 (Vocals) list, I’m not going to link to each individual album. But I did make a mega playlist with these albums in order. If you need a little inspiration, a little quiet, a little moment with yourself, then put it on random and let the roulette wheel of fate deliver you to the revelations. I’ve also put together a playlist including one track from each of my favorite albums – a sampler of sorts that’s a bit easier to digest.
I’ll note, too, that writing about ambient music can get tiresome, but I’ve tried my best with my top five of 2025. Afterward, I’ll drop back a bit and give you the best of the rest. As always, it’s better to just listen and let the words fall away.
Walt McClements, On a Painted Ocean
For most of the year, I thought a different album on this list would be my favorite. When I heard the first five tracks of On a Painted Ocean, a new contender entered the ring. As track blends to track, McClements’s melancholic accordion rises out of the depths like a leviathan creature, displacing all the water around it in spray and foam. We’re there on the ship, some kind of ship. Or maybe we’re in the air, floating in the clouds? Music like this draws pictures in your head. A creaking schooner? A life raft? The Titanic? Are we washing up on the shore after a storm-tossed shipwreck? Adrift at sea with an empty canteen? Those first five tracks dragged me down into a state of deep profundity, and all my other favorites became runner’s up. I was sure this was the best ambient album I’d heard all year.
And then came Track 6, oddly named “Parade.” Out of the wash of sound came voices, a casual conversation in progress between two people about what to do if you’re dealing with a person who’s overdosing, complete with off the cuff instructions about how to administer nasal Narcan. I shifted in my seat, ripped out of the hypnotizing ambiance. I grimaced and quickly turned it off. How could such a beautiful ambient album break its mesmerizing buoyancy with – jeeze, c’mon! – people talking!?!? I removed On a Painted Ocean from my maybe list and relegated it to nope.
But something pulled me back. Those first five tracks were like sirens and I was out of beeswax. I gave it another chance. I even considered making a full-album playlist and leaving off “Parade.” How could I recommend this album that required such pretzel bending? How could someone make such a beautiful, transcendent album and mar it with such a strange, disorienting track?
I decided, against my better judgement, that research was required. I turned to the internet, searching for a reason why McClements had bothered. Was it an album dedicated to someone he’d lost? Was it a statement about the opioid crisis? What was going on? I learned that the male voice – the one asking the questions – is McClements himself. I listened closer, parsing the words, hearing the other voice calmly talk about “rescue breathing” – literally the act of breathing life back into someone who is close to death, which is often (but not always) done in conjunction with CPR.
And there it was, the crux of this whole thing. On a Painted Ocean is a musical life vest, a PFD for our turbulent times, adrift on an ocean with every direction as good as any other. It’s gorgeous, profound, and infused with a sense of wonder at what the hell are we even doing here?
What are we humans but sailors, alone, together, pulling each other out of the sea, breathing life into each other with every word, every note, every smile, every human connection. Water, water everywhere. But we can drink it in and maybe pour a glass for next sailor to come along this path.
Uhlmann, Johnson, Wilkes, (Self Titled)
This is the album that held a grip on me all year – the album I would have had in the top slot if it weren’t for Walt McClements and his strange, deeply profound accordion album*. An ambient supergroup of sorts, with Chicago stalwart Sam Wilkes holding down the low end with his melodic lead-line bass, Gregory Uhlmann providing slinky guitar spaghetti, and Josh Johnson’s warped, chopped, and looped sax adding washes of color. But it’s all color, actually. Brilliant, bright, mellow, and mild. These are masterful musicians coming together to make micro-dose ambient jams. They come and go and leave me wanting more. When I saw the trio live at Constellation in Chicago in August, I secretly hoped they’d let these songs breathe. They did, sort of, but not in the 20-minute improvisation that I’ll admit I wanted to hear.
But that’s how this music is – it gives you what you need, and leaves you wanting more. I’ll admit, too, that the album came to me at just the right time and place. I listened to this album intently while living for nine weeks a stone’s throw from Yellowstone National Park, and the second track, “Fumarole,” was the auditory manifestation of the steaming little mini-volcanoes that dot that primordial landscape. These songs bubble and pop, steam and vent and erupt quietly. They create new worlds, shifting like the land that we think, mistakenly, is all too solid.
* I love this genre if only for the fact that I can write the phrase “deeply profound accordion album” with a straight face
John Also Bennet, Στον Ελαιώνα / Ston Elaióna
I don’t know anything about John Also Bennet. As mentioned above, I try hard to avoid reading too much about the music I’m listening to, fearing that it will somehow unmask something beautiful and reveal an ugly underside. Maybe that’s not fair, but this is an album that rewards you with the less you know. It’s weird and wonderful, with equally wonderful track titles like “A Handful of Olives” (a standout track on a standout album), “Gecko Pads,” and “Oracle.” And like descending into the cave to meet the divine, it rewards with visions of what might be.
Barker, Stochastic Drift
It’s techno. It’s electronica. It’s ambient and dance-y and man, oh, man, it never stops evolving. It’s mathematical and somehow organic, and by the end it moves so far from where it started. We’re lucky to be taken along for the ride. Sometimes, you can imagine dancing, sweaty in the club. Other times you’re out in a field gazing at the clouds. The stochastic drift of the title is a reference to how randomness affects repetition, how things that seem solid and rhythmic tend to break down and change. And that’s what this does, with acupuncture-needle precision, track by track. I love everything about it, and hope to have more – and more and more and more – from the Berlin-based musician.
Pavel Milyakov and Lucas Dupuy, HEAL
Come for the “Five Flutes of Doom” and stay for strange amalgam of drone and world-music pan flutes. It’s vapor-thin, like a skein of gauze pulled across a face you can’t quite see. In a world that needs healing, maybe this is the balm: To sit, relax, breathe, and let the pulse of the planet welcome us home.
The Best of the Rest
Almost an Island, Almost an Island
Elijah Fox, Ambient Works for the Highways of Los Angeles
Benôit Pioluard, Stanza IV
Hayes Bradley, Recommence (I/VII) and Recommence (VIII/XIV)
Dmitry Evgrafov, Research Center
Greg Foat, 6 Days in Leysin
Emily Sprague, Cloud Time
Funcionário, horizonte
Sofie Birch and Antonina Nowacka, Hiraeth
Oneohtrix Point Never, Tranquilizer
58928012 and Ambiotik, Ordered Chaos
Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko, Гільдеґарда