The Huck List: 2025

A quarter of the way into a new century, it’s easy to feel like the world, and the forces that prop it up, are on increasingly brittle ground. The climate crisis is intensifying, with natural disasters of record-breaking severity hitting across the world. Shortening attention spans and generative AI are taking us further from reality, while the far right continues to make tracks across nations.

But it’s why we need remarkable people, doing remarkable things, more than ever. Musicians rewriting genres, artists evoking new possibilities, sporting figures breaking through adversity, photographers capturing details that the naked eyes miss. Since Huck was founded in 2006, as a counterpoint to the commercial and mainstream, we’ve focused on those who inspire, create, and do things in their own way against the odds.

With the tides getting stronger, it’s never been more important to paddle against the flow. Introducing The 2025 Huck List: a rolling collection of our favourite changemakers and creative pioneers who define our year.

Since striking out on her own as a teenager and immersing herself in Durban’s underground music scene, Moonchild Sanelly has exploded to become a truly global pop star.

Her music, usually sung in both English and Xhosa, is unapologetically sex positive and liberation-focused, drawing upon anything from R&B, trap, hip-hop, kwaito, gqom and amapiano in a distinctive cocktail she calls “future ghetto funk”. But she also cares about the world around her, only hiring women and LGBTQ+ folk to assemble a team that she calls “The Avengers”.

Ahead of her new album Full Moon, we caught up with her in our monthly newsletter interview series. Read it here.

Having once been held up as a symbol of Russian youth activism and rebellion, experimental duo and self-described “audiovisual terrorists” IC3PEAK are now living in exile, having left Russia following their home country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago.

Their latest album, Coming Home, is their most intimate, introverted record yet, and explores their new reality amid displacement. Huck caught up with Nick and Nastya to hear about the record, their journey so far, and searching for home in foreign lands. Read the full profile here.

Having been a solo artist throughout her career, Sharon Van Etten chose to open her process to collaboration and release a band album, as a means of feeling more connected through art and music in a hyper-connected age when it has never felt easier to feel alone.

Read the full interview here.

A trailblazer who has been a key driver of the global explosion of Spanish language music, reggaeton superstar Bad Bunny has turned his sights on spotlighting the Puerto Rican cause and fight for independence.

We spoke to him as he topped the Billboard 200 earlier this year. Read the full profile here.