The 20 Best U.K. & Ireland Songs of 2025: Staff Picks

That this song spawned a dance playfully dubbed the ‘Woke Macarena’ speaks volumes to the humour CMAT’s music carries. The jig which gesticulates the roles the Irish singer-songwriter plays for attention (“I did the butcher/ I did the baker/ I did the home and family maker/ I did school girl fantasies”) was spawned on TikTok and quickly became a key moment of audience participation at a storming festival run this summer. The song, too, was worthy of a moment in the sun, reflecting on facing down online trolls and body shamers with both zingers and vulnerability. – THOMAS SMITH

Every element of Dave’s “Chapter 16” landed like a songwriting bullseye. Bringing two generations of U.K. rap together, the track (which featured grime icon Kano), flowed back-and-forth like a conversation over dinner with a friend, with illuminating insights on religion, relationships, and the mechanics of the music industry illuminated through quotable bars and the musicality of pair’s delivery. It sounded intensely beautiful in its own simplicity. – SOPHIE WILLIAMS

The heated, fractious mood of Dave’s third LP The Boy Who Played the Harp came into full focus on the eight minute-long “My 27th Birthday,” his most vulnerable track to date. Powered by a captivatingly desperate delivery, here, the rapper unpacks his life choices as though he’s been hit by a sudden bolt of clarity, reckoning with his wealth’s hypocrisies, faith, the burden of fame and societal failings – with neither pain nor hope ever quite winning out. – S.W.

On “Sympathy Magic,” Florence Welch tapped into an uncanny state of bliss. Oscillating between fluttering strings and clattering percussion, meeting in the middle around Welch’s roving vocal performance, here, her riffing high notes go into freefall, giving everything a breathy weightlessness that intensifies the track’s motif of perseverance. “So c’mon, I can take it/ Give me everything you got,” she cries out, emphatically. – S.W.

How do you follow up a maximalist blast out of the punk left field loved by everyone from Gen Z moshers to pop royalty? “It’s Amazing to Be Young,” the first release from Fontaines D.C. since their career-elevating 2024 LP Romance, features a chorus delirious enough to be the mood-boosting musical equivalent of a sun-warmed cocktail. Bright, woozy and imbued with wonder, it boasts one of the year’s most unforgettable refrains and landed within the U.K. top 40, a new chart peak for the band. – S.W.

Released in mid-June, this standalone single was a highly sought-after moment for ravers across the globe. “Into Dust” had been dropped in the British producer and DJ’s live sets for years, and features one of his most inventive – and heartrending – samples from Mazzy Star’s “Into You.” The eventual result was Four Tet at his best: ethereal, banging, and packed full of emotion. – T.S.

This was the genre-fluid artist’s poppiest moment by far – and also, in a catalogue full of tender moments, his most powerfully humane. Fusing a modern take on chipmunk soul with R&B, “Father” is intricately rhythmic, with Legxacy making startled octave jumps to express the pain of grieving an absent parent. Yet its quiet, determined beauty reminds us that one can still make something meaningful out of difficult circumstances. – S.W.

With this barnstorming ballad, the “Messy” songwriter dispelled any remnants of a potential one-hit-wonder reputation, showing again that heartbreak is singularly, powerfully tangible in her unselfconscious delivery. The chorus arrives like a wrecking ball, with stabbing piano lines leaving emotional mess everywhere. But the cascading melody twirls through it all unperturbed, creating Young’s most ambitious pop statement to date. – S.W.

The headlines around Lily Allen’s phenomenal West End Girl may have largely focused on the divorce drama tidbits found in scathing album tracks “Madeline” or “Pussy Palace,” but it was the irrepressible “4Chan Stan” that quietly stands out as a melodic gem. The gulf between the perkiness of the arrangement and the torpor of the lyrics feels impressively vast, with Allen singing of emotional cruelty over an instrumental that recalls Daft Punk’s “Veridis Quo.” – S.W.

For Julie Dawson, lead songwriter of Irish band NewDad, growing up means shedding naivety and focusing on making plans for the future. These two thematic threads were rendered acutely throughout “Everything I Wanted,” which saw Dawson confront a nagging desire to return to her hometown of Galway from London, atop a gently feverish guitar line that maintained a glimmering mirage of hope and possibility. – S.W.

One of the breakthrough songwriter’s four U.K. top 10 hits in 2025, “Nice to Each Other” was given an extra fillip by a burst of TikTok virality, but its success was sealed by the sheer harmony of the track itself. A sense of contentment is evoked through its featherweight production, which is soul-pop at its most elegant and luxuriating: the bass a warm throb, the layered harmonies like a gentle breeze on a summer’s evening. – S.W.

Ironically, PinkPantheress’ full-on embracement of the British dance music she grew up on – notably Basement Jaxx – ended up making her name over in the U.S. Go figure. “Stateside” takes her to the other side of the Atlantic where she toys with the idea of a long-distance romance with a cute “American boy” across a spritely beat. Speaking to her fans, she called it the “best” track on the Fancy That? mixtape, and a spicy remix with Zara Larsson only helped shimmy things along. – T.S.

This sweeping, impossibly beautiful track lifted from Pulp’s More (their first studio album in 24 years), is like a number from a lost production of Follies, turning a tale of fragmented memories into a surrealist depiction of the apocalypse. Unearthing relationship truths that often feel impossible to articulate, it contains a whole universe of emotion; you could easily argue that the rest of the record radiates outward from “Farmers Market.” – S.W.

The 28-year-old opened her massive Glastonbury slot back in June with the live debut of this newly-released song, showing the confidence she holds in the quality of this composition. “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!” is her classic sound refined and perfected, fusing a contemporary energy with a retro, vintage feel that doesn’t feel fusty. It’s hung around the top of the singles chart in the U.K. and is still climbing in the U.S., appearing poised to become her signature tune. – T.S.

Delivered like a state-of-the-nation address and furnished with a gargantuan arrangement, the “TV Dinner” epitomized Fender’s own candor about the trials of the music industry. Beyond one illuminating profile, the songwriter hasn’t engaged much with the press throughout the People Watching campaign, yet some deeply compelling insight into the journey towards album three could instead be found here. – S.W.

First performed in June at Fender’s London Stadium show to 80,000 fans, the addition of Olivia Dean – his labelmate and supporting act at the show – to the People Watching single proved that a rising tide lifts all boats. The track, a spritely indie-rock tune tainted with heartbreak and regret, gave Fender his highest-charting single in the U.K., with Dean’s vocal chops in the live arena put on full display. – T.S.

The emergence of Skye Newman has been one of the freshest U.K. pop launches in recent memory. The south Londoner’s disarming debut single “Hairdresser” formally introduced an electric new talent, a smoky, R&B-flecked takedown of an absent friend delivered with a nonchalant curled lip. Its lyrics about protecting one’s peace and setting boundaries surely chimed with plenty of tear-stained new year resolutions. – S.W.

2025 was almost predestined to be a hard year for The Last Dinner Party. Off the back of 2024’s stratospheric Prelude to Ecstasy – which topped the charts with the biggest opening week for a debut by a band in the U.K. since 2015 – releasing a follow-up was never going to be easy. “Inferno” is a dispatch from the eye of the storm: it sounds grand and ruined, wracked and comforting, furious and hopeful, adding new shades to the band’s already kaleidoscopic palette. – S.W.

There is perhaps no greater crime in Wet Leg’s world than a man who acts like a waste of space. Several tracks on the British band’s Grammy-nominated LP Moisturizer take various vibe-killers and egomaniacs to task, but it’s the exquisitely taut “Mangetout” (try reading that title as three three-letter syllables) that trumps the lot. With bags and bags of melody, despite the track’s biting lyrics, musically it feels lit by a glowing, steadfast softness: music to shake it out to. – S.W.

London rockers Wolf Alice had one of its most widely beloved songs yet with this swooning, graceful ode to growing older and moving from past regrets. “Sick of second-guessing my behaviour / And what I want to be / Just let me lie here on the sofa,” is a lyric that clearly spoke to thousands of people, with the track becoming a standout moment on the band’s recent U.K. arena run – the biggest shows of its career to date. – S.W.