Year in Music 2025: Looking Across Nashville Music

It is quite a feat to keep track of plot developments in the ongoing story of this ever-changing thing we call “Nashville music” each year. Like every year, I owe a major debt of gratitude to a small army of freelance contributors and staff colleagues for their work across a broad spectrum in 2025 — and to you for reading our work. With that in mind, here is a highlight reel of happenings.

Rock ’n’ roll and its cousins keep contributing threads to the national and global conversation around local music. They also nourish multiple scenes around town, and have yielded another outstanding slate of releases. That includes the forward-leaning indie rock of Paramore leader Hayley Williams’ Grammy-nominated solo LP Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party (read more in our interview) and the pop-punk ferocity of Winona Fighter’s My Apologies to the Chef. It includes the nuanced folk rock of Suede & ’Lene’s Hymns for Lost Things and the full-on punk fury of Wesley & The Boys’ Rock & Roll Ruined My Life, the pop-schooled snarl of Annie DiRusso’s Super Pedestrian and the 800 or so projects Charly Ortiz-Martínez is involved in (including My Wall and Maanta Raay). Rocking songsmith Tristen released Unpopular Music (her first new LP since 2021), Zdan dropped the hard-charging So What!, The Features’ frontman Matt Pelham gave us his ripping solo debut Matt and the Watt Gives, and the list goes on.

Hip-hop is one of the newest musical traditions raising Nashville’s profile. Among other projects, members of rap collective Six One Trïbe put on their second annual 615 Day festival, Gee Slab proved himself a phenomenal storyteller yet again on Roots in the Dirt and Blvck Wizzle gathered a massive all-ages crew for his “Cashville Be Ballin” music video. Starlito, an elder statesman in the scene with a catalog more than 20 years deep, dropped three new projects — live record Starlito w/Brassville, studio album Regretfully and the revival of his collab with Memphis’ Don Trip on Step Brothers 4 Life — that prove quality and quantity aren’t mutually exclusive. 

Meanwhile, Jack Vinoy’s recurring songwriting event ca.mp3 kept making connections for rising songsmiths and producers, and Renaissance man Mike Floss carried on his work with advocacy group the Southern Movement Committee while germinating a new body of music built around honoring the legacy of Black music in Nashville. Daisha McBride had the EP of the season (perhaps the year) with So Much for Summer and its standout opener “Lunchroom,” as well as a track placed in a Downy Unstoppables commercial I have seen about 100 times on Hulu during Bob’s Burgers and Jeopardy!

Country music has been Music City’s biggest cultural export for decades. The Grand Ole Opry, a complex institution that continues to play a big role, has been celebrating its 100th anniversary all year (including the centennial of the debut WSM Barn Dance broadcast on Nov. 28). Our annual look at June’s CMA Fest, among the largest gatherings of country fans, noted the festival’s seeming aversion to controversy and anything that could be construed as related to “DEI” — in other words, representation of Black, brown and queer artists — in a sociopolitical climate influenced by the openly racist, sexist, transphobic and queerphobic rhetoric and policies of the second Trump administration. Beyond usual country and country-adjacent suspects like Morgan Wallen and Kid Rock embarrassing themselves, we got a little taste of Skynet Country, too. Breaking Rust and Cain Walker, two AI “artists,” made headlines in November for taking top slots on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart. They’re not the first AI artists to chart. They’re not getting added to radio (yet), but their success even on this less-mainstream chart raises a whole lot of questions.

At the same time, actual human artists from Nashville made some damned fine country music. To name a few: The Kentucky Gentlemen released their stunning long-in-the-works debut LP Rhinestone Revolution, Joshua Hedley delivered a Western-swing masterclass with All Hat, Kristina Murray dropped her heartfelt rocking LP Little Blue, and Margo Price dove headfirst back into outlaw country on Hard Headed Woman. Angie K had a strong run with her self-titled EP, and her fellow Country Latin Association co-founder Andrea Vasquez finished the year strong with her EP El Camino.

Many others in our panoply of scenes saw notable movement too. In the blues world, ace band Piper & the Hard Times pushed through singer Al “Piper” Green’s cancer diagnosis to put out Good Company in August, their follow-up to last year’s lauded Revelation. Legendary soul singer Charles “Wigg” Walker, at age 84, released This Love Is Gonna Last, a powerful tribute to his late wife Marva. Nashville Jazz Workshop tapped musician, educator and label head Jeff Coffin to put on two days of almost-all-local jazz in October, under the banner of the first Nashville Jazz Festival in more than 50 years. At the Nashville Symphony, longtime music director Giancarlo Guerrero took his final bow in that role, and he made a guest appearance in November. Also, longtime president and CEO Alan Valentine announced his retirement at the end of the 2025-2026 season. 

Thankfully, we have places like Brown’s Diner, much-loved and much-needed all-ages venue Drkmttr, Springwater, Betty’s, The 5 Spot, The Cobra and The East Room, where you can routinely see locals and touring acts whose only musical commonality might be that they want to do something creative that doesn’t sound like anyone else. That’s far from a complete list of venues. For example, improvisational music — some of which has close connections to jazz and some of which doesn’t — continues to brew in town with scenes building around spots like Urban Cowboy. Albums like William Tyler’s Time Indefinite (which took the No. 1 spot in our Top Local Albums Critics’ Poll) and the self-titled LPs from Shrunken Elvis and Echolalia didn’t come out of that particular scene, but would fit in.

A sad inevitability is that we’ll lose people who contributed a great deal to one or many scenes, whether they were widely known or not. Among the more famous locals who died in 2025 are songwriting legend Mac Gayden, Booker T. & the M.G.’s guitarist and longtime Nashvillian Steve Cropper, and East Nashville folk champion Todd Snider. You might not know of The 5 Spot’s co-owner Travis Collinsworth, Vinyl Tap co-owner Riley Corcoran Hedrick or songwriter and Bobby’s Idle Hour fixture Ray Sisk, but you’ve almost surely felt their positive impact. After this issue went to press, news went out that The Mavericks' Raul Malo died. We’ll have more on them and many others in our upcoming In Memoriam issue.

As in many years, some of the most impactful stories of 2025 come from the live-music and venue world, so let’s take a speed run through them. Nashville got two new venues this year: The Pinnacle, a 4,500-capacity space operated downtown by AEG (the distant-second main rival to ticketing and touring leviathan Live Nation), and Skinny Dennis, an East Nashville outpost of a successful New York honky-tonk. Opry Hospitality, while not a small firm by any stretch, won the Metro contract to operate Ascend Amphitheater for the next 10 years, beating a much larger competitor: the aforementioned Live Nation. One more Live Nation note: The firm announced plans to open its seeming competitor to The Pinnacle in fall 2026, in the shape of 4,400-cap room The Truth, located near LN’s local headquarters in Wedgewood-Houston. On the West Side, venue and arts space Random Sample moved into a bigger and better space near its original location; among happenings they’ve hosted so far was a residency for JayVe Montgomery’s rich historical project Lake Black Town. 

The Mouthhole, the genial and democratic house venue run by brothers Zac and Travis Caffrey and their pal Michael Sadler, closed for good after 12 years of shows. The Boro Bar and Grill, a venue near MTSU’s campus in Murfreesboro that hosted its share of current and future Nashville musicians over its 40-year run, also closed. A swath of buildings on Church Street that once housed a phalanx of LGBTQ clubs (including one that was home to Lucy’s Record Shop in the 1990s) was razed. For the second time in its 20-plus-year history, massive festival Bonnaroo was canceled because of weather.

However, movers and shakers on all levels persevere. Bonnaroo organizers tweaked the operation a bit and announced a return (with Skrillex, Kesha and many more) for June 11 through 14. Music Venue Alliance Nashville and Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp teamed up on a one-day festival called 615 Indie Live that brought more than 2,000 fans out to shows at more than a dozen venues, and it’s coming back Feb. 7. And after several years dormant, Ernest Tubb Record Shop reopened as a five-floor entertainment complex with special attention paid to the site’s history.

Year in Music 2025

Talking with rock star Hayley Williams, counting down our favorite local albums and more