Albums of the Year 2025: #20

From the very beginning, fans have fallen in love with Jensen McRae for the sharp, evocative, and clear-eyed songwriting. McRae's songwriting is vulnerable, yes, but it’s also powerful for not holding back.

Now, I Don’t Know How But They Found Me! delivers McRae’s evolution from a promising young artist to a bona fide songwriter and star. "The most profound choices of my life,” says McRae, “have often felt like things I did before I was ready to do, and I had to grow into them."

I Don’t Know How But They Found Me! is about what follows when you have withstood what you thought might crush you. It’s about meeting your limits and learning what you’re capable of. “I connected with the idea that I could've easily collapsed beneath the weight of what happened to me, but I didn't. I didn't even know it,” she says, “but I was bulletproof the whole time."

Born and raised in LA, Jensen McRae has studied and made music for most of her life. She attended Grammy Camp in high school and graduated from USC’s Thornton School of Music with a degree in Popular Music.

McRae’s debut album, Are You Happy Now?, was written mostly when she was just 21, and was the first step in developing her now-devoted fanbase. Are You Happy Now? navigates identity from its deepest foundations – life as a young, bi-racial Black and Jewish woman – to its most personal musings – do I trust you, do I trust myself.

Jensen McRae’s trust in herself has borne out on multiple occasions, most recently and maybe most famously in the form of "Massachusetts". I Don’t Know How But They Found Me! takes McRae’s now-considerable powers and hardwires them for mass appeal.

Stealth single “Savannah” is one for the yearners. The pulsing, country-adjacent song immediately brings the best of Phoebe Bridgers to mind, with McRae singing in an acrobatic whisper over a feather-light acoustic guitar.

Meanwhile, “Let Me Be Wrong” is a bona fide anthem, a “buoyant ode to rejecting perfectionism.” Built once again on a simple vocal and acoustic guitar, “Let Me Be Wrong” builds step over step in its defiance; guitars layer, drums pick up the pace, and McRae makes space for everyone’s mistakes.

When McRae growls “fuck those girls got everything” it’s a punch of both power and vulnerability, begging to be shouted in unison by the biggest possible crowd. The unusual title of her second album? Taken from a line in McRae's favorite film, Back to the Future. A key protagonist survives a hail of bullets, and the image resonated with McRae. “I really connected with the idea that I could've easily collapsed beneath the weight of what happened to me, but I didn't. I didn't even know it,” McRae says, “but I was bulletproof the whole time."