Click here for a Spotify playlist with the songs mentioned in this newsletter.

Mic-Check exists to surface the music worth your time, the stuff that risks getting buried in the weekly churn. Our whole job is to make sure great music doesn’t slip through the cracks. Most of the time, we do a pretty good job. Sometimes, we don’t. Today’s issue is about the music from 2025 that did slip through the cracks.

Next week, we’ll share our writers’ personal favorites of the year before closing things out with our fifth annual year-in-review.

BIGGEST Songs of the Week 📈

Bad Bunny is one of the defining superstars of the modern digital age, not just because of his popularity, but because of how he achieved it. He went from posting songs on SoundCloud in the early 2010s to breaking out with “Diles” in 2016. Now, less than a decade after that breakout moment, he’s set to perform on the world’s biggest stage.

Despite the constant refrain that monoculture no longer exists, or that global superstars everyone can rally around are a thing of the past, Bad Bunny has broken those assumptions. In the age of streaming and social media, he’s become one of the rare artists whose reach feels truly universal.