2025 Saving Country Music Album of the Year Nominees

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It’s time again to engage in the exercise to determine what will be crowned the Album of the Year. The point of this exercise is not to devolve music into a competition. It is to stimulate a lively conversation about what we all believe is the best album, using our differing perspectives to inform each other about the music that has spoken deeply to us over the year so that we might discover something we otherwise might have missed.

This is why your feedback isn’t just encouraged, it will be considered in the final calculations. So if you have an opinion, please leave it below in the comments, including your list of top albums if you wish. However, this is not a straight up and down vote. Your opinion will count, but it will count even more if you put the effort out to convince us all why one album deserves to be considered above the others.

If you think an album has been unfairly omitted, utilize the comments section to inform us. But please understand that upcoming, there will be an Essential Albums List that will be much broader, and might include your favorites, including the “Most Essential Albums” that were right on the bubble of being considered for Album of the Year (see bottom).

…and before you comment, also remember the proper etiquette for approaching end-of-year lists.

This is just the very beginning of the end-of-year assessments at Saving Country Music. Song of the Year, Single of the Year, Artist of the Year, and many other end-of-year considerations are forthcoming, as are more album reviews from 2025 as we close out the year.

Sam Stoane – Tales of the Dark West


Treat yourself to a true expression of country and Western music, with an emphasis on the Western, carried to the innermost caverns of your heart by the evocative tones of Sam Stoane who awakens dormant emotions inside of you as she deftly delivers inspired songs and Western tales fit for premier acclaim.

It’s hard to not get giddy when you stumble upon a performer like this who clearly holds such promise in helping to shepherd something as obscure and undervalued as Western music to new and younger audiences. Sam Stoane does this by making the music feel cool, present, current, and fresh, while at the same time adhering to the rigid confines of the Western art form, and doing so with such love, reverence, passion, and conviction. (read review)

Lance Roark – Bad Reputation


Bad Reputation is just one of those albums you cue up, listen to straight through, and then re-rack again. There’s not a snoozer in the bunch, and each song hits you as immediately infectious, but durable in its long-term appeal. Similar to his 2024 EP Tenkiller, there is a lot of rock in Roark’s sound, which comes expected in the Red Dirt realm, if not required. But what helps set this album off and yet ground it to the country roots is the spirited fiddle that makes an appearance on most tracks.

 Bad Reputation presents a range of textures and emotions, including the final acoustic song “Stay,” which sells you on Lance Roark the singer and songwriter, if no other song could. From high energy, anthemic rock songs, to sincere country ballads, Roark was patient in officially presenting his debut album to the planet, forging his own sound, finding the unique contours of his voice, and making his case for being Red Dirt’s next star. (read review)

Colter Wall – Memories and Empties


We can now officially crown Colter Wall as a master craftsman of both types of music—country and Western. Memories and Empties isn’t just Colter Wall’s first stab at a dedicated country album. It’s really his greatest and most purposeful effort at songwriting in his career, not just from including so many original songs instead of traditionals and covers, but in the way Colter clearly wanted to express himself in a different manner, yet in accordance with the traditions of the traditional country genre.

The reason Colter Wall has become so wildly successful with Western music is because he doesn’t just play the music, he champions it. He embraces it. He sells its virtues to the audience. That’s what Colter does for traditional country songs on Memories and Empties. Like we’ve seen from other artists lately, this album is Colter Wall proclaiming “This is country music.” (read review)

Luke Bell – The King Is Back


Legends never die, and good music never goes out of style. Luke Bell knew this instinctively, drawing inspiration directly from the old greats, and mining the past to compose his songs, and the sounds that enveloped them. Making music that sounds like it was from decades before is not always just an exercise in nostalgia or retro hipsterism. It’s an indemnity against the fickleness of current trends. Blue jeans will never go out of style. Neither will the classic country songs of Luke Bell.

The King Is Back is not just a dump of posthumous tracks. It’s a complete work of the Luke Bell legacy that feels vital to the country music catalog, completing the picture of Luke Bell the artist, and hopefully, bolstering his legacy that has already outlived him, not dissimilar to other contributors such as Blaze Foley whose lives and careers were also cut short, but live on today as vital as any. (read review)

Kelsey Waldon – Every Ghost


The pride of Monkey’s Eyebrow, Kentucky, and a certified Kentucky Colonel, you don’t get much more Kentucky or much more country than Kelsey Waldon, down to the Bill Monroe tilt of her hat. Uncompromising as she is genuine, Waldon has always leaned into her Kentucky roots, and made music her way. But it’s never been more her way than on her new album Every Ghost that she produced herself.

Kelsey Waldon has also never been more Outlaw in tone and texture. From grooving in half time, to the pounding bass drum and 2-tone bass guitar lines, this album puts you right back in the bell bottom ’70s in the best of ways. Instead of recording with studio musicians, she chose to go with her own touring backing band, The Muleskinners. That road-tested, groove-worn sound comes through in the results, leaving you wanting much more after the ninth track.

There might be ample daylight between the popularity of Waldon and her fellow Kentucky contemporaries such as Sturgill, Tyler, and Stapleton. But she’s the one that’s kept it the most country as she continues to work to refine herself and her music in pursuit of the more perfect country song. (read review)

Turnpike Troubadours – The Price of Admission


Just like every Turnpike Troubadours song, album, and era does, patient listening pays off as the depth of the lyricism slowly reveals itself, and the melodies nestle into the comfy recesses of your gray matter. The fact that a Troubadours song doesn’t always reel you in automatically is what also graces it with the gift of longevity. This is why no matter how old a Turnpike song is, in the right moment and frame of mind, it can still impart to you that first time feeling.

Maybe most important to note, The Price of Admission is a surprisingly twangy and country affair. This isn’t relevant to all the tracks. But multiple times when listening, you’re surprised at just how honky tonk the sound is. Hot steel guitar solos from Hammerin’ Hank Early burst through the mix, while Ryan Engleman explores the more woody, earthen tones of his Telecaster.

Where their previous, return album A Cat in the Rain might have been a little too blended and sedate, and might have needed a newer song or two near the end, The Price of Admission feels like the more full-bodied effort with bolder textures that will burrow beneath beneath your skin until it infects your bones in extended releases of joy. (read review)

Olivia Ellen Lloyd – Do It Myself


Some albums you simply enjoy. Then other albums you listen to, and you feel like you’re living inside of them, and subsequently, they live inside of you. You carry their sentiment and melodies with you throughout the day. The stories impact you like they’re your own. You become emotionally invested in the moments, and the outcomes. They’re more than albums. They’re collections of emotional catalysts that you call upon because their potency is uncommon.

Olivia Ellen Lloyd’s Do It Myself is one of those albums. If you’re one of the souls it captures, it’s an album you’re destined to return to all year, and in subsequent years to come. It’s one of those albums that you measure all of the other albums against as the year unfolds. You could consider it a breakup record, but it’s a bit more textured and varied than that. It’s definitely a heartbreaker, but it’s not fair to characterize it as a downer. It’s leaves you too fulfilled for that. (read review)

Joe Stamm Band – Little Crosses


We all can recite their names forwards and backwards, and do often whenever friends, family, and co-workers ask us to recite our top recommendations from the little “independent” country scene we won’t shut up about. It’s Tyler Childers, The Turnpike Troubadours, Cody Jinks, Sturgill Simpson, Jason Isbell, Sierra Ferrell, Charley Crockett, Charles Wesley Godwin, and a few others.

What do they have that The Joe Stamm Band lack, making them somehow secondary? The answer is nothing. There’s nothing this band gives up to the top names in independent country and Americana. The songs and songwriting, the stellar catalog of albums, and the blistering live performances, they don’t give an inch of ground up to anyone. Little Crosses is no exception. (read review)

Sunny Sweeney – Rhinestone Requiem


Pour this out over rocks or take it straight. Find some skins and roll it up. Crush it and line it up on the back of a CD case. Cook it up in a spoon and load it up in a needle. However you take it, go hard into Sunny Sweeney’s Rhinestone Requiem, and forgo the moderation. It just might cause you to suffer a honky tonk relapse. But it’s so worth it.

Sorry to be triggering to any teetotalers out there, but Rhinestone Requiem is Sunny Sweeney in her most purified form. Time and pressure, endless touring and multiple divorces, it’s all conspired to forge Sunny Sweeney into a genuine honky tonk maven.

You could regard Sunny Sweeney as a veteran of the game. But listening through Rhinestone Requiem, the boldness of its audio flavors, and the passion brought to the songwriting, it gives you a sense that her career is just now in its peak. She’s making some of the most compelling country music of her career, and songs that will withstand the test of time because classic country like this is timeless. (read review)

Honorable Mention / Most Essential Album Nominees

With so many excellent albums being released, it’s always difficult to know where to draw the line at what is the “top” of the year, especially when you have so many albums sitting right on the bubble. That is why at the very end of the year, Saving Country Music will publish a much more extensive “Essential Albums List.” Crowning that list will be the “Most Essential” albums that were inches away from becoming Album of the Year nominees. In 2025, these “Most Essential” albums will include (but might not be limited to):

  • Juliet McConkey – Southern Front
  • Jake Worthington – When I Write The Song
  • Brennen Leigh – Don’t You Ever Give Up On Love
  • Jesse Lovelock and the Velvet Voices – Self-Titled
  • Margo Price – Hard Headed Woman
  • Cole Chaney – In The Shadow of the Mountain
  • James McMurtry – The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy
  • Charley Crockett – Dollar a Day

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© 2025 Saving Country Music

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