Chapter 1: What cultural trends defined the year 2025?
This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm Shamita Basu. Today, a look back at the year in culture. What did you watch or listen to this year that really moved you? It's a question worth asking at the end of every year as we take stock of what got us talking and thinking.
And when it comes to culture critics, there are two people whose takes I always love hearing, even if I don't agree with them, and sometimes especially if I haven't seen or heard the thing they're really excited about. It's a horror movie.
It's a musical.
It's a race movie.
It's a history movie. Like, it's all of these things all at once.
And it's a Michael B. Jordan movie. Hello.
That's Anne Helen Peterson and Sam Sanders. Anne's got this great Patreon newsletter and a podcast called Culture Study, and Sam hosts The Sam Sanders Show on KCRW. They've both been writing about pop culture for years. I asked them to stop by so we could chat about the best new releases this year in music, film, and TV.
We also asked you, our listeners, to tell us some of your favorite things that came out this year that you'd recommend.
I think this year has just been a really great year for music. The riffs, the sludgy abrasive guitars that repeat and mutate.
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Chapter 2: Which music releases stood out in 2025?
I need to check this out. Because it's funny. I heard a song of hers years ago and was like, that kid's got talent. And I never, like, researched it and dug in more. So it's the truth. Yeah. Okay.
What'd you like about it, Anne? So it's called I Want My Loved Ones to Go With Me. And it really evokes, like, this kind of mix of a sound that I really love, which is, like, Nico Case, Gillian Welsh. The second song on the album... is a duet with Fleet Foxes, which is exquisite.
By the look in your eye I can tell that you're no longer sleeping But we're still dreaming
And she just, she has that Cyrus talent. Like, she has a gorgeous voice. Yeah. And you can hear Miley in it, but also it's different. I just, I adore it, and I could listen to it on repeat.
Wow. Fun one. Sam, what about for you?
I was surprisingly blown away, not by Lizzo's return album, but by the weird Mean Girl rap mixtape she released a few weeks later when the return album flopped. It was an album in which she fully leaned into just being the villain. You know, she had that whole scandal over being potentially abusive to folks who worked for her.
And she tried to fight it, but then it just kind of went away but kind of didn't. But seeing her finally just say, I guess I am the villain felt very good. I long for a time when we had celebrities who weren't afraid to be mean.
Yeah.
And we got a little bit of that from Lizzo this year. And I liked it.
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Chapter 3: What were the most impactful movies of 2025?
Last pick, and this is obvious. He powered me through all of my runs this year. Bad Bunny. He can do no wrong. He's a pretty man. I love it. I love it.
Big year for Bad Bunny. I mean, let's stop and talk about that, right? I mean, just the residency, the shows, the statements, the celebrity sightings at all those residencies. Spotify Wrapped just announced that he is the most streamed artist globally for 2025 this year. Wow. For the fourth year running.
Yeah.
Which is huge.
It's incredible. I love that everything about Bad Bunny right now is just telling all of us that America is not the center of the world.
Yeah.
He didn't bring his residency to the States.
That's right. Purposefully. The mainland, actually.
He is a global artist who sings in Spanish and not English, and he's still number one.
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Chapter 4: How did TV shows resonate with audiences this year?
Everywhere. Yeah. Everywhere. And I will not sing it, but, like, as soon as you hear the refrain... And it's just soaring. But it's also, you know, like, I don't know, glorious, like celebratory. Everything that I don't feel, honestly, about like our moment. But I do think it's like trying to force it, right?
It is this performance of anthem.
When we asked you, our listeners, to send in your recommendations for your favorite things that came out this year, so many of you came ready to talk about music. We heard from a listener in Chicago who, like many of us, loved Lady Gaga's album Mayhem.
My name is Evan Curtis-Matigian. Top to bottom, it's such a phenomenal piece of work. Her tour, The Art of Personal Chaos, was, I think, the concert of the year. It was absolutely phenomenal.
Jonathan from Boston wanted to tell us about a band from the UK called Sleep Token and their new album, Even in Arcadia.
The reason I think this album is special is I think it brings people into heavy music who I never thought I would see with a rather genre-defying album, a broad narrative concept, and a unique take on metal music that is controversial but compelling.
Sergio from Southern California told us he's been loving the latest dance pop records.
My recommendation for an album that I really love is Rochelle Jordan's Through the Wall, an artist based from Canada who has been making music for over a decade. And in this album, she's just really proving just how incredible of an artist she is.
Now, along with music recommendations, a lot of you sent in TV recommendations, too. Jennifer from East Valley, California, said she was absolutely obsessed with Severance. I watched each episode every week.
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Chapter 5: What are the highlights of listener recommendations?
Gosh, it was a couple things. Sorry to put you on the spot. But, you know, in this series, you see how young the kids are. Yeah. I mean, the lead actor, I have to say, this young boy who won an award for his portrayal of this main character was phenomenal, but also so young. Can I ask you something?
Yes. Do you like me? I was here as a professional, Jamie. Don't you think like that, then. My job was to assess you as a professional. Not like that, not fancying you. Just as a person.
So young, and you're just like, oh, my God, to a parent's eyes or to any adult's eyes, you're like, this kid looks like he's a really little kid. But we've saddled them with so much, like, to navigate. And it just, yeah, it drove home this idea for me that, like, all of that starts so early. Yeah. And there's only so much you can control before, like, the whole world kind of comes to them. Wow.
That's what it made me think about. Sam, that's my short answer.
We're all dogging on Netflix, but they also produced The Diplomat, which is one of myā So fun! I think one of the best shows, like, the perfect amount of episodes. Also, I think commenting on, like, this idea thatā Just because a woman is in power doesn't mean that they're going to be good, right? Or what does even moral or good, what does that mean? What does competency look like?
What does a partnership of two very powerful people look like?
For 10 years, I let you act like I was a man with no moral compass. I did that for you. It was a kindness.
No, you offloaded it to me. You excused yourself because I was the conscience for both of us. I think it brings up so many great questions. And the acting is fantastic. Keri Russell is phenomenal. So I've really liked that. And also recently, I really like Task, which I've always really loved Mark Ruffalo. and would watch him do anything.
But this show takes some of like what you think about, oh, it's like another crime show set in like gritty, you know, outside of Philly, accents, motor gangs, like that sort of thing.
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Chapter 6: How did nostalgia influence pop culture in 2025?
And it's a Michael B. Jordan movie. So I have not seen it. I'm a bit of a, I'm like kind of a scaredy cat when it comes to horror movies.
No, no.
But obviously you're describing it's like everything else too. It's like so many genres, across so many genres. Sell it to me. Why should I watch it? I mean, Michael B. Jordan is a really good reason to watch it. I think he's excellent.
You get two Michael B. Jordans because he plays twins. So there's that.
Right.
There's this musical montage in the middle that like is an overview of like decades of music history in just a few minutes. It's incredible.
There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true. It can pierce the veil between life and death. Conjuring spirits from the past.
And it shouldn't work. It shouldn't. Like, there's so much going on. And while it was happening, I was saying to myself, this shouldn't work.
Yeah. And it did.
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Chapter 7: What role does monoculture play in today's entertainment?
that the creator of this film gets the rights to it back in 25 years. Hollywood is in a downward spiral. And you'd think they would look at a film like Sinners and say, yes, please, more of this. And they were like questioning it. It was so strange to me. So strange.
Right. Well, what does that tell you about the industry at large and what else we've seen be released this year?
None of the executives know what the hell they're doing. And we have reached this point. You know, I don't know.
Oh, I think there's just this incredible risk adversity. Yes. Right. Like it used to be that you would take a risk on 10 films and one of those films would be a breakout hit. And now because the middle has been completely cut out of the box office.
Mm hmm.
And stars are not functioning as like the IP the way that they used to. Like a bunch of big star movies that were just released over the course of the last month, month and a half did nothing at the box office. So the rules are broken. No one knows what they're doing. No one knows.
But in those situations, what people do is they make the most conservative moves possible instead of thinking of this as a moment for real experimentation, which like if you look at the history of cinema, if you look at something like the 1970s, like there was a ton of experimentation because the bottom had dropped out of like the traditional market.
There were a ton of flops, but also some of like it's one of the golden ages of American cinema. You don't have that happening now. I think most of that interesting experimentation is happening in television.
We have just a few minutes left, but I really I wanted to hit quickly on K-pop Demon Hunters, which has become such a phenomenon this year. If you have kids in your life, in your circles, they probably know all of the music to it. I somehow have absorbed some of the music to it just through osmosis of everyone consuming this so much. And I heard you say that you think the music is bad. Go.
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Chapter 8: What are the future predictions for art and culture?
That's interesting. I actually interviewed one of the songwriters who came from Broadway, and he talked to me about how you really had to work hard to make Broadway song structure work in K-pop song structure. It's hard to do. They pulled it off. So I admire it for that.
Yeah. For both of you, I mean, just looking back at the year, looking back at the mood, just where you two found yourselves psychologically and emotionally, what were you looking for in art? And what do you find yourself thinking about as we're heading into a new year? What are you looking for in the things that you spend your free time consuming?
I'm not looking for nostalgia, personally. Like, I don't need everything to reinvent the wheel or to be, like, the maximalization of all things all the time in order for it to be remarkable. But I do want it to maybe take a risk. And I think that's why Sinners sticks out to me. As like the highlight of my pop culture year is because it took a risk.
And even if it like doesn't succeed 100 percent on all fronts, to me, it is an enormously successful piece of art because it did something that so few artists are able to do, at least in like the mainstream right now. Sam, what about for you?
I think, and Helen knows this, I just long for monoculture. I long for things that we can consume together and talk about together.
Yes.
And it feels like we've seen this thing happen since the rise of Trump and the rise of streaming and pandemic lockdown and front-facing video. We have seen pop culture become less monoculture while national politics becomes the monoculture and the entertainment monoculture for the entire country.
Mm-hmm.
The only thing that I know all of my friends will be informed about on any given day is what Trump did. It's not going to be on some album or some TV show because increasingly our versions of the internet itself are different. The algorithm gives every individual person a different algorithm and a different front page of different things to like.
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