Louder Than War contributors selected their favourite music books of 2025. With hundreds of books on music and culture each year, it’s always difficult to narrow down the list! We applaud all authors who published books in 2025 and encourage Louder Than War readers to explore our top reads of this year. There’s still time to put these great books on your gift list:
- Elizabeth Alker, Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop (Faber) BUY HERE
- Billy Bragg, Billy Bragg: A People’s History (Spenwood Books) BUY HERE
- Budgie, The Absence: Memoirs of a Banshee Drummer (White Rabbit) BUY HERE
- Keith Cameron, 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure: A History of Manic Street Preachers (White Rabbit) BUY HERE
- Audrey Golden, Shouting Out Loud: Lives of The Raincoats (White Rabbit) BUY HERE
- Jonathan Gould, Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene that Transformed Art (Mariner) BUY HERE
- Charlie Harper, An Anarchy of Demons (Earth Island Books) BUY HERE
- Liam Inscoe-Jones, Songs in the Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age (White Rabbit) BUY HERE
- Dylan Jones, 1975: The Year the World Forgot (Constable) BUY HERE
- Iain Key, All the Young Punks: A People’s History of The Clash (Spenwood Books) BUY HERE
- Jon King, To Hell with Poverty! (Constable) BUY HERE
- Dorothy Max Prior, Sex is No Emergency (Strange Attractor) BUY HERE
- Denis O’Regan, Bowie (ACC Art Books) BUY HERE
- Tanya Pearson, Pretend We’re Dead: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Women in Rock in the ‘90s (Hachette) BUY HERE
- Daniel Rachel, This Ain’t Rock ‘N’ Roll: Pop Music, the Swatika and the Third Reich (White Rabbit) BUY HERE
- Patti Smith, Bread of Angels (Bloomsbury) BUY HERE
- Debsey Wykes, Teenage Daydream: We Are the Girls Who Play in a Band (New Modern) BUY HERE
If you’re in the hunt for older reads, be sure to explore our Books of the Year 2024 and Books of the Year 2023. You just might have missed some gems!
A Plea From Louder Than War
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