Music books of 2025 pull back the curtain on pop’s most storied decades

A new wave of music writing in 2025 leans into detail-rich biographies and historical reconstructions, offering readers a chance to revisit familiar figures and moments with fresh context. A cross-section of widely anticipated titles surveys the Beatles era, the 1980s, Oasis’s punked-up rise, Elvis Presley’s management drama, and John Williams’s enduring influence on film music. Each book aims to illuminate not just the artist, but the era that shaped their work, often drawing on archival interviews, studio lore, and the minutiae that fans crave.

Into The Groove: The 1980s – The Ultimate Decade in Music History by Justin Lewis (Elliott & Thompson) is a compact, fact-dense overview that revels in the trivia and cultural crosscurrents that defined a decade. The author assembles a panorama of pop’s most recognizable moments while delving into lesser-known details that shaped the period’s soundscape. The book is 272 pages long and priced at £16.99, offering a brisk tour that nonetheless rewards repeat reading for the sharper, more surprising connections. Among the tidbits Lewis gathers are origin stories for long-running categories in music coverage—for example, why Q Magazine got its name, a nod to cueing up a CD in the early days of the format. The book also revisits the original name of the Pogues, Pogue Mahone, quoting its Gaelic translation as a reminder that behind every iconic band there are stories as idiosyncratic as the music itself. Lewis also threads in cross-era references—like Ronnie Scott’s saxophone solo on Beatles tracks and Phil Collins’s I Missed Again—so readers can see how later acts texture the 1980s’ legacy. The piece also situates the decade within a broader cultural arc, noting a 1989 Kilroy Silk episode about acid house that now reads with a new layer of irony in hindsight and places a young Keir Starmer within the crowd of partygoers on screen.

John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie (Faber) examines the relationship at the heart of the world’s most famous band with a blend of biography, anecdote, and literary storytelling. More than half a century after the Beatles’ breakup, and nearly 70 since John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met, Leslie’s book treats their collaboration as a living, evolving dialogue. The narrative highlights small but telling moments—on a Paris holiday in 1961, the duo could not afford to ascend the Eiffel Tower and instead lay on the grass to stare up at it; John passed his driving test the same day he recorded Ticket to Ride; and the famous long final chord on A Day in the Life involved the ensemble lifting piano keys to maximize their impact. The book also traces the cadence of their friendship through a final phone call that, in the telling, becomes a window into how they still thought of each other after so many upheavals. Leslie’s approach is to illuminate how two individuals, through push and pull, carried forward a musical conversation that would shape pop history for decades.

Live Forever: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Oasis by John Robb (HarperNorth) turns the lens on one of the defining acts of the 1990s with a biography that blends a catalog of memorable moments with a granular account of how the band navigated the music business. The narrative opens with a chaotic first foreign gig in Holland—an early chapter that features a notorious scene of Liam Gallagher and the group’s entourage and riffs on their early improvisations in smoky rooms and glitzy casinos. The book recounts a famous moment when Noel Gallagher rang the record company boss to report the night’s events and was warned with a blunt, cynical compliment that only added to the band’s mythos. Robb’s account continues with the much-remembered detail that Oasis’s Definitely Maybe cover was chosen in part because the photographer had seen an exhibit of Egyptian mummies, a quirky anecdote that signals the album’s larger-than-life, mythic status. The biography treats Oasis as a phenomenon whose creative peaks and public missteps are inseparable from their sustained cultural impact, offering readers a compelling case study in how a band can both define a decade and endure in memory long after the music stops.

The Colonel and The King by Peter Guralnick (White Rabbit) offers a deep dive into Elvis Presley’s lifelong collaboration with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Guralnick, known for his meticulous approach to Elvis’s life, presents the relationship as central to both the musician’s ascent and the challenges that complicated his later years. Parker’s background—arriving as a Dutch immigrant with a self-styled authority—becomes a through line for understanding Presley’s career decisions, financial entanglements, and the pressures that shaped a star who remains a touchstone of American popular culture. The book does not shy away from darker dimensions of the partnership—the gambler’s instincts, the high-stakes gambles, and the personal toll of fame. As with the best biography, the narrative seeks to capture the emotional economy of Presley’s life: the music that defined him and the inner circle that framed and sometimes constrained that music’s reach. The thread running through Guralnick’s work underscores Elvis’s enduring complexity and the way Parker’s influence helped sculpt a cultural icon while complicating the legacy that fans continue to celebrate.

John Williams: A Composer’s Life by Tim Greiving (Oxford University Press) looks beyond the conductor’s podium to map the evolution of film music through the lens of the man who helped define some of cinema’s most enduring tunes. The biography recounts pivotal early moments—like the moment in 1977 when Star Wars premiered, and George Lucas’s response to the initial deathly silence surrounding the collaboration on the score. It recounts how the film’s music helped restore Lucas’s confidence and how a composer’s choices can shape a director’s perception of a project. Greiving’s narrative expands to cover the scope of Williams’s career, from Jaws to E.T. and beyond, tracing the tonal decisions and thematic motifs that have become sonic signposts in popular culture. The book also shares insights about the interplay between storytelling and music, including how Williams’s scores have become inseparable from the visual world they accompany, and how subsequent generations continue to react to his work as new films land in the canon of modern cinema.

Taken together, these volumes reveal how the culture and business of music have evolved across multiple eras. They trace a through line from the era-defining pop of the 1980s through the Britpop revolution and the enduring appeal of Elvis’s era, all the way to the late-20th-century and early-21st-century film score tradition championed by John Williams. Each author approaches their subject with a commitment to detail: scene-setting anecdotes, receipts of the era’s productions, and a careful eye for context that helps readers understand not only what happened, but why it mattered.

The books share a common goal: to give readers access to the layered histories that sit behind beloved songs, iconic performances, and soundtrack moments that shaped the way audiences hear music today. They invite fans to reexamine familiar milestones and to discover new angles on the artists who created them. For readers who have followed these figures for years, the books offer fresh perspectives and new data points; for newcomers, they provide a guided entry into decades of music culture through the lens of biographies, histories, and fully realized narratives. The breadth of subjects—from the studio to the stage, from the study of careers to the listening rooms of fans—demonstrates why music writing in 2025 remains a vibrant field, one that treats artists not as isolated geniuses but as part of a dynamic, imperfect ecosystem that continues to evolve with each new generation of listeners.