Albums of the Year 2025

When we take stock of the events of any given year, we discover that our judgements are shaped not by what has occurred, but by the way in which we have been compelled to interpret it. The process of reflection is never a transparent window into the past, but rather a re-construction of reason out of the debris of experience, as an attempt to distinguish the essential from the ephemeral. There is, of course, a perennial temptation to value according to familiar hierarchies, to relegate what cannot be comprehended easily to already known categories. Yet, the real task of art critique is the confrontation of the uncomfortable, in resistance of the easy consolations of convention. While doing so, resulting verdicts are rarely uniformly agreeable, but always uncompromisingly authentic. Inside everyone's little mental pond of twilight, suddenly a music list makes sense.

To paraphrase F.H. Bradley’ take on metaphysics, music reviewing is the finding of bad reasons for what sounds we like upon instinct. The mind has a capacity for creation as it has for criticism. Both thrive even amid disorder, and both are often intense expressions of lucidity and courage to tackle the vicissitudes of the human condition with a strong distaste for facile interpretations. Musicians, listeners and writers alike remain ever engaged to this broader enterprise of insistence to be forcefully heard, each from their own end. It has been found to be obsessively useful to arrange the year’s more remarkable utterances into a numbered sequence. Numbers confer to authority, and impose discipline upon memory, a brain itch that desperately needs to be satisfied in all of our minds.

Presented is an archive of extreme metal records that stood out to me due to severity of intention, range of view, and above all, repeatability. They were selected among ~1400 checked releases, from which I have a considerably larger pool of suggestions, apart from the top picks. Way easier was to determine the worst album of 2025, the new Behemoth. As I might have mentioned before, beneath the apparent layer of hostility always lies coherence that rewards attention, as these works are not a product of pointless anger, but highly ordered responses to otherwise intolerable conditions. The rusted radio tower has buckled under its own feedback, still screaming in frequencies long after it has hit the ground. Under the shelter of distortion, the voice - raw, stripped of all civility - is the last honest instrument. Another drop in the blackened continuum, another statement of refusal to pretiffy the end times. The list that follows does not pretend to universal validity… No, in fact, it does. See you in court.

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Top 10 metal albums of 2025

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 10. Martröð - Draumsýnir Eldsins

 

It's like a fever dream to finally see a full length album from this project. Well aware of the debut EP, Transmutation of Wounds (2016), and the inconceivable all-star line up it contained, it seems that just Alex Poole (Krieg / Chaos Moon) and H.V. Lyngdal (Wormlust) are enough to create a fiery gem of Icelandic dissonant riffwork, and layered, psychotropic atmosphere. The opener "Sköpunin" and especially its epic cello ending, is a clear highlight. Since several bands from the bleak North have been on hibernation lately, a like-minded work of this caliber was kinda necessary for us at this point in time.

 

Gateway to veiled knowledge

 

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9. Scarab - Burn After Listening

 

More often than I would like to admit, I’m late to the party, in case I even show up. I came across several metallic hardcore / metalcore bands the last few years that impressed me (and would have made it to my lists), with the first Scarab EPs being on top. A short but raw, punchy, 13-minute blast of a debut full-length album from them arrived right on time, with a title that proposes impermanence and a tempo that advances rapidly, leaving little residue upon impact. Ultra heavy grooves, dry lyrics and an unbreakable FU attitude - what else should there be? 

 

I am the bullet with perfect aim

 

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8. Caustic Wound - Grinding Mechanism of Torment

 

Efficiency both in duration and effect governs the second Caustic Wound (side hustle by members of Mortiferum) album after an amazing debut in 2020. As any foundational deathgrind record presents itself, each component is reduced to its most abrasive function, assembled with the logic of machinery rather than composition. Pressure is constantly applied until resistance fails, and the tracks are surprisingly memorable for their kind. It concludes perfectly with the maniacal "Spider Nest" and then a lecture on doom / death metal with the seven-minute long "Into Cold Dead Universe", which eventually falls into a cyclone of noise.

 

A life turned into ballistic shield

 

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7. Sanguisugabogg - Hideous Aftermath

The band's absence of introspection is in itself a way of thinking, and this album finally clicked with me compared to the previous ones. Apart from the straightforward, chunky tracks, there's a bunch of amazing musicians featured all over the place, and they do offer their own characteristic flare to their respective moments, adding a lot of variety to the record. Slight experimentation can be found on the industrial-paced "Repulsive Demise", yet my favorites were the opening and closing pieces, "Rotted Entanglement" and "Paid In Flesh".

 

Flesh spasms unceasing

 

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6. Whitechapel - Hymns in Dissonance

 

Vintage Whitechapel from the golden era, coupled with the maturity that comes with age and the technical expansion they have acquired after a series of more exploratory albums from 2014 to 2021. I apologize if you're gritting your teeth looking at such an entry this high in the list, but it's pure bliss to my ears listening to this band at this form. Muscular and with a massive sound, tapping on filthy lyricism and Bozeman's vocals at the most demonic they've ever been, Hymns in Dissonance's explosive character deserves everything it strives for. 

The universe beckons to sleep 

 

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5. Blood Monolith - The Calling of Fire

 

A chaotic collage where organic and mechanical contours blur into one another. The imagery feels like an X-ray of a fractured psyche: familiar shapes — hints of faces, architectural forms, mechanical elements — jut and merge in a landscape that resists singular explanation. Behind this phantasmagorical cover stands a firmly direct, overly efficient, and well balanced death metal album that somehow got better every time I listened to it this year. Band members are a bunch of sweethearts too, if you look at their other projects...

 

Resolute we stand in the eyes of avarice 

 

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4. Darvaza - We Are Him

 

The band has not lost focus since releasing the very first EPs, continued with the same temperament on the debut full-length album Ascending Into Perdition (2022), and its engagement with black metal's adversarial roots deepens on the newest work, We Are Him. The album channels classicist formulas with disciplined songcraft, balancing raw force with parts of expansive atmosphere, while vocalist Wraath's expressive delivery truly makes a difference. The first half of the record aims for more immediate impact than the sprawling latter half, yet it's all beautifully composed, and the repetition of form basically asserts the band's presence.

 

Slaying heaven

 

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3. Putridity - Morbid Ataraxia

The paradox at the heart of Morbid Ataraxia is the implication of calm achieved through excess, and the emotional neutrality that emerges not from absence of intensity, but from its complete saturation. Putridity's grotesque return is simply a logical outcome of Putrid Ciccio's sustained inquiry pushed beyond customary limits, the same limits he has broken before with brutal death metal masterpieces like Ignominious Atonement in 2015. Precision is achieved even with these inhuman patterns and  spasmodic riff bursts that snap forward with exaggerated savagery. Another inevitable genre highlight.

 

The symbols of life are pierced and defiled

 

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2. Teitanblood - From the Visceral Abyss

 

The soundscape of this band is so fascinating, that every time I listen to a new album, I am overwhelmed as if I've never heard of them before. Even at its buildup moments, Teitanblood's pronouncements are stripped of mediation and are presented as immediate consequence. Their logic is always biological, concerned with impulse, pressure and release, all under the veil of crushing black / death / war metal alchemy. From the Visceral Abyss establishes itself with the indifference of a natural phenomenon, and articulates the band's worldview possibly in the clearest way they've ever done. Not as good as Death (2014), but still way ahead of the pack.

 

In the vernacular tongue of the deep

 

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1. Volahn - Popol Vuh

 

It's been more than a decade since Volahn's Aq’Ab’Al (2014), their last masterpiece of pre-Columbian black metal cosmology. Released on the days of Mexico and Guatemala’s independence celebrations, and drawing inspiration from foundational textual archives of the Kʼich'eʼ people way before the Mayans, latest record Popol Vuh is a sonic colossus nothing short of revelatory. Epic in the grandest and most ancient sense, combining indigenous instrumentation with relentless dissonant guitar lines and vocal howls of a different dimension, the record took me by storm even while knowing well what the project is capable of, and what has already been achieved. Crepúsculo Negro rightfully wins it this year.

Thousands of membranous wings

 

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FULL 30 ALBUM LIST - CLICK TO EXPAND

• 30. Killing of a Sacred Deer - Visage of a Mangled Body
• 29. Hell - Submersus
• 28. VoidCeremony - Abditum
• 27. Malthusian - The Summoning Bell
• 26. Blackbraid - Blackbraid III
• 25. Sulfuric Cautery - Consummate Extirpation
• 24. One of Nine - Dawn of the Iron Shadow
• 23. Scalp - Not Worthy of Human Compassion
• 22. Fauna - Ochre & Ash
• 21. Primitive Man - Observance
• 20. Escarnium - Inexorable Entropy
• 19. Type: Armor Unit - Revolutions In Saecula
• 18. Burden of Despair - Confutatis
• 17. Phrenelith - Ashen Womb
• 16. Kakothanasy - Metagonism
• 15. Compulsed - Amalgamated Anguish
• 13. Anatomize - Systematic Torture
• 12. Vile Apparition - Malignity
• 11. Barren Path - Grieving
• 10. Martröð - Draumsýnir Eldsins
• 9. Scarab - Burn After Listening
• 8. Caustic Wound - Grinding Mechanism of Torment
• 7. Sanguisugabogg - Hideous Aftermath
• 6. Whitechapel - Hymns in Dissonance
• 5. Darvaza - We Are Him
• 4. Blood Monolith - The Calling of Fire
• 3. Putridity - Morbid Ataraxia
• 2. Teitanblood - From the Visceral Abyss
• 1. Volahn - Popol Vuh 

Top 12 EPs of 2025

 

12. Soul Hater - Astral Malefactor

death metal, hardcore

listen

 

11. Skelethal - Transmogrification

death metal

listen

 

10. Fluisteraars - Grunsfoort

post-black metal

listen

 

9. Dripped - Utopia of Euphoric Envisionment

brutal death metal

listen

 

8. Panopticon - The Poppies Bloom for No King

atmospheric black metal

listen

 

7. Suffering Hour - Impelling Rebirth

avant-garde death / black metal 

listen

 

6. Disfiguring the Goddess - Galapagos

slam / brutal death metal, electronic

listen

 

5. Omnicidal Instinct - Catharsis in Blight

brutal death metal

listen

4. Crown Magnetar - Punishment

deathcore

listen

 

3. Profanatica - Wreathed In Dead Angels

black metal

listen

 

2. DEATHFUCKINGWOUND - Void MMXXV

black / death metal

listen

1. Imprecation - Vomitum Tempestas

death metal

listen

 

Dead and Dripping - Nefarious Scintillations (2025) Review

One can't help but wonder what the hell of a direction death metal could possibly take in 2025 to not sound regurgitated, yet the strikes of brilliance seem to land on spot way too frequently to ignore lately. Artists with some of the most anamorphic takes on the genre have taken a toll on our attention and stamina the last few years, one of them being (glory to Cryptopsy's legendary track with the same name) Dead and Dripping from New Jersey - a project fixated on songwriting debauchery, yet with blistering inspiration and unquestionable skill in chopping up whatever characteristic you think you like in this music. There's already a series of three full length albums between 2020 and 2023 for you to get an idea about what kind of hazy, polluted swamp you're stepping into, and right after that I'll be here to salt the wound with fourth and scarily distorted fourth record, Nefarious Scintillations.

Trying to point down certain specific riffs, tempos or sequences that you like in this maze of claustrophobic havoc that immediately bursts into motion with the opening track "Nefariously Scintillating through Vacant Galactic Reservoirs", is a task that's laughably impossible. Imagine taking the work ethic of Defeated Sanity and drenching it into the poison of Demilich (what a legacy this band has proven to have left behind after all), then slashing the musical horror that arises with a flair of tech-death as in Suffocation, all delivered on a psychotomimetic rage and a sound straight from a hallucinatory experience of an altered reality. I'm still in the process of absorbing Kakothanasy's new album right before the end of the year, and here comes another equally unfathomable but instantly extraordinary release, from just one guy (only member is Evan Daniele) no less?

A ceaseless riffing barrage always works against the listener's sanity. At its slower moments, the album works its way through with more patience, and the more expressed guitar lines swell and stress on how otherworldly Dead and Dripping aim to sound here. It mostly works, and it's a challenge. My favorite moments are the mindblowing two-minute "Sickeningly Vague Anatomical Silhouettes", the insane acoustic guitar intro of the last track "An Utterly Tenantless World of Aeons-Long Death" and the general guitar lines in "Horrifying Glimpses Into Inconceivably Demented Cityscapes", and "Swollen Torsos Adorned with Pustulating Hexagonal Crania". Really, try listening to these all at once. If there's one issue that can be more difficult to put up with on Nefarious Scintillations, it's the Demilich / almost Inquisition level of caricature froggy vocals.

The fans of these vocals are superfans, and the rest stand on the opposite side, but I can't decide where I wanna be on the matter. As impressed I am with the music, it's a persistent need from inside that makes me want to listen to vocalists with the growl of a thousand mythic giants, and I somehow feel like it always fits to the track better like that, but it's probably not the case for Nefarious Scintillations. Dead and Dripping does well with these choices and the record has so much effort and content in it, that it's just worth it whoever you are, and wherever you may reside. As far as I'm concerned, the foreseeable future is paved with many re-listens and possible notes, just to make sure I've noticed all there's to notice, i.e. a losing battle. Endless creativity, blackened rifts, cerebral eulogies and everything nefarious and trippy, in the scariest sense of the word. That's Evan's world.

Release: November 28th, 2025 // Transcending Obscurity Records
Rating: 4 out of 5

Noise Trail Immersion - Symbology of Shelter (2018) Review

The swarm of equations that operate inside Noise Trail Immersion's mechanized dorsal nexus for once in 2018 collapsed into a single violent solution, firmly grounded on two rather volatile branches: pressurized mathcore, and geometric dissonant black metal. The result was the nightmare of a musical and existential crisis under the name Symbology of Shelter, a record that demolished structure and ritualized implosion with a sort of acuteness only individuals allergic to convenience can muster. With an emphasis on spacious negativity, Deathspell-esque chaos and punchy blackened hardcore, the band played with tension like a deranged man with a scalpel, as riffs either burst or wait, drums pivot between frenetic off-axis blasts and metronomic beats that crack the floorboards.

The spirals formed by the dominating guitar work rip traditional lead / rhythm logic to shreds, notes hang like loose exposed wires sparking against concrete, and melody is treated as a chemical with unknown outcome upon contact. Buildup is handled well, as shown, e.g. by the more restrained, almost atmospheric post-metal sections of "The Empty Earth I" and "The Empty Earth II", but all hell breaks loose in their shorter pieces, like the "Repulsion and Escapism" series or "Acrimonious". The self-titled track offers a particular clarity of manic desperation towards the end, while the whole of Symbology of Shelter brought lines of bands like Ulcerate, Serpent Column and Plebeian Grandstand together, yet their -core touch shines genuinely throughout.

Strangled transmissions from someone clawing at the inside of a cell. Our Great Depression, is our minds.

Conceiving a new dimension

 

Release: November 2nd, 2018 // Moment of Collapse Records
Rating: 4 out of 5 

Abysmal Descent - Dismal Thoughts (2025) Review

Here's a record dug out of a cold, subterranean seam where the light is poor and the riffs are venomous, honed straight from the guttered hush of the Belgian underground and by members affiliated with numerous fine projects (previously known as Dehuman, now members of Putrid Offal, Echo Solar Void and Neptunian Maximalism). The bleak, expressionist vision where human form dissolves into shadow and texture on the cover, alongside a neatly-designed and Grave Miasma-esque band logo, is already enough to invite notice, but the music lives up to the commanded focus too. Abysmal Descent's debut stands as a formidable slab of old-school death metal, with some ounces of doom and inspired by the genre's founding titans, while flowing naturally alongside its modern torchbearers.

The influence doesn't stop on the logo, but the band remains distinct from its pack. Dismal Thoughts sits in a sweet, ominous place, with a production that provides clarity while retaining atmosphere, and influences that are clear without being slavish. The record's sound and sharp riffing reminds a lot of the two Cruciamentum albums, as the band's compositional instincts are of the same rotten nature. Spirits of old from Incantation and the perplexed structures of mid-era Morbid Angel, with some of the ritualistic groove of Immolation under a microscope of more recent technology is what makes Dismal Thoughts effective, and directed to certain sets of ears. The production provides clarity without undermining atmosphere, as Abysmal Descent sweeps through mental ruin with a death metal avalanche that, however, doesn't seek innovation.

All tracks are long in duration (six to seven minutes) and frequently roll on middle-paced tempos, but either then or when the band accelerates, guitar lines are always dominant. Vocals range from cavernous roars to rasping declamations, having a front and center personality along the instrumentation. With an one-minute introduction and the opening of "Labyrinth of Distress", things take time to set in. "Death Rope" is a faster piece and one of the heaviest of the album, as the faster / slower sections are in a constant tango on "Dismal Thoughts", "Obscured Visions" and "Imaginal Horror", where most Abysmal Descent's creative framework is unfolded. The slow build in the first minutes of "Fragmented Soul" reminded me of "Promulgation of the Fall" by Dead Congregation, even though here the track erupts way faster.

On "Abyss of Despair", the band stresses more on melancholic melodicism that approaches doom / death metal, with a moment of growling vocals on top of clean guitar riffs that goes closer to funeral doom metal even. This piece has, in my opinion, the clearest influences from traditional doom in the entirety of the record, and connects nicely with the final "Imaginal Horror". Overall and in one sentence, here lies old-school death metal. If you're familiar with any of the aforementioned names, or additional bands from the roster of Nuclear Winter Records like Excarnated Entity, Sarcophagum and Mortual, this one is right for you. Dismal Thoughts is a rigorous statement inside an already explored idiom, but the band surely knows its purpose in it.

Shadows loom ever closer 

Release: October 31st, 2025 // Nuclear Winter Records
Rating: 4 out of 5 

Barren Path - Grieving (2025) Review

In a sense, Barren Path's Grieving is indeed a debut album. However, one will feel a tensely familiar cataclysm once the needle drops, as such musical debauchery can be conceived and reproduced by only a few individuals on Earth... Or maybe even just one: Takafumi Matsubara. Alongside him is also the infamous gang behind now defunct Gridlink, and the new addition of Mitchell Luna (Maruta, Noisear, Shock Withdrawal) on vocals. You guessed right, modern technical grindcore's deadliest tacticians once again channel their collective fury into a work that's clean-cut as it is merciless, with twelve tracks and barely a quarter of an hour total duration of precision-feral mayhem.

Brevity remains a virtue here. In its compact and tight presentation, Grieving is extremely packed with terrifically moving ideas, going down as a deliberate but masterful tantrum of noise. The violence is directed and quantified, the tempos are cleaved, and the blastbeats constantly dance with cross-sectional riffing. Barren Path moves in confidence and delivers with exceptional clarity, something that is sometimes amiss in grindcore albums, yet this is not your everyday collective we're talking about. There's an unexpressed connection to the clan of No One Knows What the Dead Think and Gridlink, but Grieving isn't nostalgic. The record slices in both ways, provoking internal entropy as well as external terror.

Musically, the band glances slightly more towards old-school death and crossover thrash metal instead of the distinctive cybergrind overload that Matsubara has spewed in the past. Yet, the technical, chaotic edge is fully maintained throughout, and recognized basically immediately when the opener "Whimpering Echo" flares up at mind-blowing speeds. "The snare tone is meaty" and the material is relentless but articulate, with all the micro-fills, pauses and twists perfectly calibrated for maximum impact. As exhilarating as the music feels, it also comes out intelligent, full of nerve and mechanical precision. Barren Path slash and hack towards the ultimate purpose to perfect this form of existential manic-grind, and they almost succeed with Grieving. 

Tracks like "Relinquish", "Subversion Record", "No Geneva", and "The Unreliable Narrator" (if you liked the latest Wormrot album, here we are again) are hallmarks of this sound. The melodic tremolo picking in "Lunar Tear" and the furious fret board maltreatment a la Brain Drill on "The Insufferable Weight" are exquisite, while even the noisy atmospheric respite in "Celestial Bleeding" adds some sort of a strange tenderness, like a moment of negative space among highly ferocious tracks. "Horizonless" is wonderfully connected to the last piece "In the End… The Gift is Death", where the band delivers a final delivers a concluding blast of melodic-death laced grind. I'm not the biggest fan of low-volume spoken vocals like on "Isolation Wound", but the riff in the back is so formidable, you might not even notice.

Despite the overall musical massacre, you would wonder why Grieving, a grind record, might leave you feeling mournful. To me, Barren Path examine alienation and dissolution without failing to keep a self-awareness under the constant duress caused by their creation. It's extremity as an existential spectacle, through brutal techgrind of the highest order from a set of musicians known for their non-stop hustle, (r)evolution and refinement as their own act of defiance. Despite its hostile side, the record's underlying vulnerability was an instant win for me, but what instantly catches the ear, is of course the trademark Matsubara inspiration. They have survived, and they keep morphing into scarier and scarier entities.

To be atoned a flat world

Release: October 31st, 2025 // Willowtip Records
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 

Bongripper - Empty (2024) Review

Doom-sludge titans Bongripper from Chicago have always dwelt in the low end. With their eighth full length album Empty, the band keeps ripping boundaries of repetition to shreds, expressing themselves through immense instrumental doom metal weight at levels of meditative heaviness that almost no one can replicate. Four tracks (two of them above 20 minutes in duration) and a total of more than an hour of crushing doom in the purest form, at which you'll either surrender to or wholly pass by. 

From the outset, Empty reeks of riff-devotion: detuned guitars, distortion thick as molasses and drums slow-rolling like glaciers in motion. The album has a constant, overwhelmingly dominating hypnotic nature, standing out due to the band's everlasting patience for the long haul. Melodies ruminated upon and stretched to uneasy forms, twisted into murky drone / sludge before returning to clearer doom metal stomps, all delivered with lumbering brute force. 

Opener piece "Nothing" features the slowest build-up and features some interested, distorted Sleep worship towards its last five minutes. Mid-tempo dirges that flirt with crunchy tremolos and ghostly leads appear both at the very end of that track and in the one that follows, "Remains". On "Forever", the band takes a more atmospheric approach that hints at post-doom grandeur rather than blacksmith hammering, reminding of YOB but still quite distinctly played as a Bongripper jam.

The final, self-titled track consolidates Empty's themes of doomy repetition with subtle yet substantial variations, but includes a cathartic release of a blast-beat induced black metal section, that breaks free from the drag of the rest of the rest of the record. At that moment, it brought 2010's Satan Worshipping Doom to mind, as they did something similar on a track on that album, yet I have to admit that I am not sure if it's a more frequent stratagem by the band or if it just appears these two times.

No sound is reinvented on Empty, but that's not what Bongripper are about. The band takes its time on how long to hold notes, when to pull the rug out, and how to compose the most direct, low-tuned and heavy doom metal possible, with neat influences from sludge, drone and stoner. It takes time, and it needs time. The formula might be a bit too comfortable by now, the terrain too familiar, but in this genre, this mastering of atmosphere is what counts. If it's your first time, welcome to the underbelly of doom. [4 out of 5]

Nothing remains forever empty