NPR’s 2025 List Includes Patrick Watson and Mary Halvorson

NPR’s 2025 Best Albums list includes Mary Halvorson‘s About Ghosts, out via Nonesuch, and Patrick Watson‘s Uh Oh, from Secret City Records. The full list is here.

WRTI‘s Nate Chinen writes, “It usually only takes an instant to recognize the sound Mary Halvorson gets out of her hollow-body guitar: percussive but pliable, with the odd subversive wobble. Her voice as a composer and orchestrator is no less unmistakable, as she proves on About Ghosts, a thinking person’s thrill ride… Modern jazz is forever evolving — and so are those in active dialogue with that tradition, as Halvorson and her intrepid colleagues keep reminding us.”

Of Uh Oh, Robin Hilton writes, “as with much of Watson’s collected works, uh oh sounds like a treasury of mythical fables or fairytales for grownups. But in this case, these sometimes terrifying tales end happily ever after, with the return of Watson’s voice, and a newfound appreciation for life.”