“Hell of a revelation, Seth!” Yeah, I mean, I’m sure there are ancient cave drawings covering that concept in detail, and even the Armond White of Neanderthals was like, “This? This is too on the nose. And boy, Saber-Toothed Toy Story sure does suck, too.” It’s not meant to be maudlin, either. You didn’t sign up for a memento mori in the form of an introduction to a stupid heavy metal list that contains, let me count here, at least 12 sicko albums that would extend my stay at a grippy-sock vacation spot if they were disclosed during intake.

And yet…is this the final album I’m ever going to listen to? I can’t stop thinking about it. It is the phantom buzz in my pocket when I don’t have my phone. It is the faint car alarm I hear in the distance. It’s the smell of smoke on my clothes after the bar. Whenever I play a record, it rings in my head like an imperceptible overtone. Is this the one?

2025 was a weird one. I felt like I was ping-ponging between extremes. My nook of the world started the year on fire and ended the year drenched in record rainfall — I hope you’re happy, James Taylor. The obituaries in between were brutal: Ozzy, Tompa, and Ace Frehley. David Lynch, D’Angelo, and Eddie Palmieri. Flaco Jiménez, Tom Lehrer, and Brian Wilson. Sly Stone, Roy Ayers, and David Johansen. Roberta Flack, Gwen McCrae, and Marianne Faithfull. Jimmy Cliff, Jellybean Johnson, and Jack DeJohnette. Hermeto Pascoal, Clem Burke, and Steve Cropper. It was like whole sections of a record store disappeared as we recalibrated to the fact that those discographies now have an end. In contrast, for some people close to me, this was one of the best years of their lives because their lives were just beginning: starting new jobs, getting engaged, buying homes, having kids. Granted, this is just life as the Fates defined it: beginnings and ends continuously comingling. It’s just that I don’t remember many years when the whiplash was this intense.

Naturally, the thing that will restore order is…another year-end feature. Sigh. This task has really inflamed my final-albumitis. Because, well, why do we do this? Why do we listen to new music? If there will be a final album, why do we trouble ourselves with a time-consuming pursuit that will inevitably yield many more disappointments than triumphs? Surely, we should spend our time with the favorites we’ve already accumulated, right? Right? RIGHT?

My all-time favorite composition is György Ligeti’s “Requiem.” I acknowledge the ridiculousness of that being a favorite for someone who owns Spastic Tumor albums. Although…it kind of makes sense? If you read any of the abstruse garbage I’ve written this year after Last Rites made the fatal error of calling me up to the big leagues, you knew from my first word that I am a full-on fancy pants art dork. But I can’t deny it. “Requiem” is me. And it is me to such an extent that I can’t really put into words what it does to me. I once told a person caught in the web of modern dating’s dreaded talking phase that, while I couldn’t explain why “Requiem”‘s ugliness was so beautiful, I derive a great deal of life force from that contradiction since it reveals something profound about how to engage with the mysteries of existence. Yes, I typed that right into Hinge, the same app where people answer “by asking me out” when provided with the prompt “the best way to ask me out is.” Thus ended the talking phase. I hope they’re well, wherever they are. Things would be easier if I liked worse music.

Despite my love of “Requiem,” I haven’t listened to it in, like, five years. There are some hang-ups and baggage of mine that factor into that. What if something I hold so dear doesn’t do it for me anymore? It sounds stupid, but those are real stakes for someone whose life revolves around music. I mean, when I was a kid, I used to think Big Wreck’s “That Song” was the pinnacle of human achievement. (Life was better when I liked worse music.) I grew past it as soon as I expanded my worldview, like when I heard Big Wreck’s “The Oaf.” But, yeah, there’s an irrational fear that if I no longer love what I loved, I am no longer who I thought I was…and that’s…terrifying to me now? I’m old. My knees hurt. Can’t I just settle on an identity already?

I think the real reason I haven’t listened to “Requiem” in a long time, though, is that my drive for listening to new releases has always been higher. Perhaps it’s the thrill of the hunt in a catering-brained culture that tries so hard to minimize the perceived pain of decision-making. Possibly, it’s a rebellious act of rebuffing unimaginative billionaires pumping money into AI engines of inauthenticity. Maybe it’s one of the final FOMO frontiers available to me, a chronically unworldly person who is still living on NG when everyone else is on NG+. But more than those reasons, I think there’s something intensely gratifying about being a citizen of the present.

Now, I don’t want to knock those who make a home in the history pages. That’s equally valid, and it’s a life well-spent, one probably well-spent putzing around in the Roman Empire. And like I can talk: I own a big, honking ultrasonic cleaner that vibrates the grime off the used vinyl I spend too much money on. I also concede that living in the now is often, and this is a graduate-level philosophical term, incredibly dumb. As Sam Miller said, we’re all bitterly arguing over the merits of works that future generations will regard as C-pluses.

All the same, here I am, still picking through the new album announcements in my inbox as I write this recap. I think the reason I’m compelled to do this runs deeper than the fact that I’m afflicted by whatever disease it is that makes you believe you own a lot of records except the ones you want. But unfortunately, like my affinity for “Requiem,” the explanation is not something I can easily put into words.

This is a trite thing to write, but we have to start somewhere: Do you also find that the spark of listening to new music is different from hearing old music for the first time? Am I insane? To me, something is undeniably exciting about music that wasn’t here yesterday and is now here today. Old music, no matter how it may shake your being and reform your soul, is eternal, yes, but also already experienced. New music is fresh. It’s a flower that hasn’t been plucked and pressed into a book by critical curators. Listening to it is like stepping onto freshly cooled magma and leaving the first footprints.

In addition, unlike some older music that requires a backstory to fully understand, new music doesn’t need the same plaque-in-a-museum history lesson to grasp some of its context. You’re living part of that context, bud. You are the metadata, my dude. Quite literally, this is your life, and by living it alongside the artists who make this music, you can connect with them over, at the very least, persisting on this planet at the same time.

Connection. There’s a paragraph in “Tales From an Attic,” a Sierra Bellows essay for the American Scholar, that has been bookmarked in my brain since it was published last year.

Someone told me once that sharing your life with a partner is consolation for only being allowed to live one life. That when you know someone else intimately, when you participate in the daily joy and sadness that person feels, it is as close as you can come to living more than one life. It seems to me that we need that consolation many times over, in many forms.

New music, to me, is one of those forms.

We lost our friend Warren Binder this year. I miss him. I wish I could tell him that. Listening to new music and subsequently collecting it were topics we frequently discussed. For example, instead of buying a shelf-bowing amount of records, we should probably limit ourselves to our top 10 every year. And then we’d laugh, because who were we kidding?

We also delved into the idea that music made up such a large part of our essence, the basis of our personhood, that some people would never truly understand us unless they listened to the music we loved. I distinctly remember us working through that idea at a Throw Rag show, a band whose biggest song on Spotify is titled “Space Hump Me.” Somber environment. My joke was that some well-meaning hospice nurse would learn that I like metal and usher me off this mortal coil with, like, Metallica’s Reload played through a broken Samsung Galaxy speaker. Me? Trying to avoid exploring feelings with a punchline? But there’s something so much more intimate and resonant in the way we, and most notably Warren, choose to use music to interact with those around us.

If the music I love is one sliver of the pie chart that defines me, listening to more of it helps me to better understand myself. In turn, listening to more music helps me to better relate to others. This act of understanding through music consumption won’t allow me to know the whole of a person — it won’t map the entirety of their interiority because I don’t think that’s possible — but it will let me know a piece of them. No matter how tiny that piece may be, it will allow me to connect with them, which is one strand in a growing network of connections: me, them, the artists making the music. We’re all bound together by this miracle of sound, this form of consolation that happens many times over.

I’d like to think that when we make music recommendations — real, selfless ones, not, “Hey, check out my demo” — we’re presenting a potential new connection. We’re saying, “Hey, this is a piece of me, maybe it’s a piece of you, too.” It’s an exchange not just of music but of lives — memories, desires, who we are, who we want to be. And if a connection is made, it will last. I’ll always think of Warren whenever I hear Throw Rag. He’ll just be…there. And, if that’s the case, must we have a final album? Because if we make enough connections, one of the albums we love — a piece of ourselves and, really, a recording of our lives — will be forever spinning within someone else.

THE GOOD STUFF

20. Glorious Depravity – Death Never Sleeps

It locked horns for weeks with Chaos Inception, but Glorious Depravity prevailed as the superlative straight-up spud of the year.

If you could bet on metal, certain shadily controlled syndicates would probably offer lines indicating it’d be tough for Glorious Depravity to best 2020’s Ageless Violence, both in terms of riffs (“Ocean of Scabs”) and song titles (“Incel Christ”). (Please don’t give Kalshi or DraftKings any ideas; although, I would be amused if Emmanuel Clase got good at guitar in order to tank upcoming albums.) But, hot damn, Death Never Sleeps edges out its predecessor. It does so early, too. Riffs: “Slaughter the Gerontocrats.” Song titles: “Slaughter the Gerontocrats.” The quintet achieves this level up by taking a page out of bands like Garoted’s playbook: go hard as hell, find the red line, and push far past it. Most of these songs from the all-star New York, New York, crew are in the methed-out Deicide mold, like if Legion blasted glass with a blow torch and GTA’d a Dodge Demon. But the delectable center of this amphetamine-laced Tootsie Pop is the beatdown riffs that imbue Death Never Sleeps with a Strong Island sort of ignorant toughness.

• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp

19. Effluence – Pianistic Dismemberment

A late-in-the-year three-way split with Tantric Bile and Steve Matthews Trio proved this LP wouldn’t be Effluence’s swansong, but there’s an air of finality to Pianistic Dismemberment, mainly because where else can the blast-it-all-to-bits band go from here? [Effluence will, in fact, go somewhere since a new album was announced and given a January 2026 release date.]

As the name implies, Pianistic Dismemberment trades in the guitar for a piano, and the result is as if Billy Joel, circa Attila, had a bad salvia trip in which he and Franz Liszt were jumped into Disgorge by Albert Ayler. “NO GUITARS ON THIS ALBUM…’ CAUSE PIANO ATE EM :[,” solo member Matt writes in the Bandcamp liner notes. Piano as a sarlacc pit. Sure, why not?

However, for all the miasmic music Effluence has glooped out over the years, be it the Encenathrakh attacks or free jazz ambushes, Pianistic Dismemberment is one of the most conventionally death metal albums in its oeuvre. Play the first half of this album on guitar, and we’d have the pleasure of ordering your record from the Brutal Mind distro without a jewel case. That is to say, despite the last half descending into something more in the wheelhouse of a Cecil Taylor obsessive, Pianistic Dismemberment is as “normal” as Effluence can get…although, to be clear, it’s a brutal death metal album played on piano.

Sarmat will always be Effluence’s shining statement, its artistic masterpiece, but Pianistic Dismemberment is why the band will always be remembered.

• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp

18. Siege Column – Sulphur Omega

Sometimes you just want to be evil. Siege Column has always sounded like a Deicide scion raised by a pack of ratty Celtic Frost records that learned to communicate through primitive Bolt Thrower riffs. There are gruff vocals, panic solos, battering-ram drums, and feral chugs that make you want to walk around like The Bushwhackers — a true metal of death operation, and something that will naturally repel grave-robbing, new-school OSDM wimps.

Sulphur Omega is the same Siege Column formula through and through, but it spikes that cocktail with an irresponsible number of injections of tren. The vocals rumble like a lowered portcullis. The solos wail like terrified horses. The drums thump like something that will light up your Nextdoor app with “gunshots????” queries. The chugs grind like The Wheel of Pain. Sulphur Omega will surely be charged as an accessory once you inevitably punch someone while listening to it. Not your fault; you just wanted to be evil. You can tell the judge that it’s the best death metal album with Joe Aversario’s name on it since Massive Retaliation’s Arms of the War God. Oh, and then drop the Nihil Verum Nisi Mors credo: “THIS IS THE NEW JERSEY METAL ATTACK! BORN IN EIGHTIES, DIE IN EIGHTIES!”

• Bandcamp

17. Christian Necromancy – The Pederast

A warning for our American readership: Since there’s an executive order on the books titled “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias,” friend, you are going on a list if you listen to this album. Your only hope is that, considering y’all now live under a pedoconocracy, maybe this album will get a pass. Because the tldr for Christian Necromancy’s debut is: Jesus H. Christ liked kids…a lot.

The anonymous members of Christian Necromancy aren’t just cosplaying as heavy metal Chris Hansens, either. They claim to have receipts: “This is not a work of fiction. Everything lyrically stated in these songs is based on historical fact, with only slight artistic embellishments,” argues a line in the Bandcamp notes. Finally, a black metal band tackling pederasty that isn’t Inquisition.

Anyway, similar to the recent axe-shunning exploits of its labelmates in Effluence, Christian Necromancy has forgone the electric guitar for a 10-string lyre. (Is anyone going to show up to NAMM next year? Is Sweetwater going to have to plunder a ren faire?) The result is as if Jute Gyte made its Goatlord, a rollickingly lofi affair that makes up for its sonic austerity with sheer nastiness. There are some real-deal riffs on this thing, but the big-picture appeal is just being battered by strident tones and assaultive blasts for 34 minutes. FFO Mastery, extremity, running from theocratic authorities.

• Bandcamp

16. Vörnir – Av Hädanfärd Krönt

In another time, Vörnir’s debut, Av Hädanfärd Krönt, would’ve been released by Fallen Empire on a limited pressing of, like, 13 records, leading me to scour Discogs for the next 10 years to obtain a copy. Instead, Vörnir’s debut, Av Hädanfärd Krönt, is released by Amor Fati Productions, and since shipping is $30, I’ll be scouring Discogs for the next 10 years to obtain a copy. See the difference?

Vörnir is an international supergroup for people who get down with a particular kind of grandiose avant-garde black metal. Hark, from whence cometh this discordant squall? It’s A. Woldaeg from Chaos Moon, H.V. Lyngdal from Wormlust, R from Ash Borer, and Swartadauþuz from a bunch of bands I’ll never have a hope of pronouncing. A session drummer named K.P, who has no other credits, which makes this album their rookie card, is there for good measure.

You don’t have to be familiar with that starting five to enjoy Vörnir. Like Leviathan’s better moments, Av Hädanfärd Krönt finds the right balance between the musically interesting and the mystical. Obviously, everyone involved can play — K.P, in particular, kicks their kit’s ass with a power that would pound Drumeo into dust.

That said, it doesn’t sound like Vörnir’s skills have pacified its ambition. You get some wildly inventive passages of absolute ensorcellment, the kind of stuff only a curious mind unsullied by a peek behind the curtain could churn out. Check out the way the sheets of cold guitar shimmer with a spine-shivering maelvolence, like watching the aurora borealis as you freeze to death. As your vision blurs, it’s almost like you can hear the faint wailing of a creature from beyond the veil, which is your next destination.

• Bandcamp

15. Hateful Abandon – Threat

“These have been our hardest years,” Tom Price and Martin Brindley, the two brains behind the UK’s Hateful Abandon, wrote in the Bandcamp notes for Threat, the duo’s first release in 11 years. Yeah, definitely concur, my guys. But Price and Brindley have some closer-to-home reasons for why that decade-plus sucked ass besides [waves hands at the world] everything.

“Tracks 4-8 rescued from the rubble. Extracted from a destroyed hard drive,” goes the spirit-crushing summation. Oof. I had to be kept away from sharp objects after a CMS crashed, wiping out an hour of music-writing dreck, so I can’t imagine what it felt like to have whole-ass songs imprisoned within inaccessible sectors.

However, by the grace of Saint Steve Gibson, those songs have been released from the ones and zeros purgatory. And the songs are great. The initial comparison is something like a more post-punky industrial band, like if Godflesh got an assist from early Killing Joke.

And then other elements start to surface. There’s a pre-A Sun That Never Sets Neurosisness to how these songs are constructed, this almost-tribal layering of rhythms, not to mention the way the legato synths seem to hang in the air like a Paulstretched string quartet. And every moment is shot through with a black metal bleakness, perhaps owing to Price and Brindley’s previous stops on the heavy metal carousel.

Threat produces an engaging effect on the listener, then. It’s hypnotic, yes, but it doesn’t wash over you. It isn’t anesthetizing. Instead, it wraps you up in a blanket of blackness, and you feel every PSI as it starts to squeeze.

• Bandcamp

14. Kostnatění – Přílišnost

I’ll call my shot: In 10 years, people will love this album once they figure out what to do with it.

Following 2023’s stunning Úpal, Kostnatění mastermind D.L. pulls the e-brake for Přílišnost (Excess), an album that drifts around a tight corner and zooms off into a new direction. Yes, vestiges of the prior US three-piece remain. There’s that adventurous shredding that’s like !.T.O.O.H.! or Lykathea Aflame collected many music culture stamps in their passports, diversifying their timbres and tonality. There’s also that irrepressible instinct to create something new, providing listeners with the same sense of wonder they felt when they first heard metal.

Again, Přílišnost reprises those core traits; it’s just that Kostnatění constantly shifts the context, hot swapping in new influences. Opener “Dokonalé křišťálové město (Perfect Crystal City)” is like Malokarpatan covering Aphex Twin’s “Come to Daddy,” an industrial machine-scream shot through with bruising breakbeats. …lol, I’m sorry, what? And yet, as the prior comparisons indicate, a certain blackened trueness also emanates from that song. That’s part of the fun of listening: hearing what fusions Kostnatění can cook up. There are a whole lot of spices swimming around in this stew, different flavor profiles mixing to create unexpected combinations, and it would be cruel to deny you the thrill by listing the ingredients.

But that’s not why Přílišnost will hold up until its inevitable reappraisal. I’ll explain its longevity like this: There’s a trend on social media I’ve grown to hate, that of people taking well-known songs and using AI to flip them into different genres. “Interstate Love Song” as a Stax single, that sort of nonsense. These exercises are all artless slop because they lack human ingenuity. When living music lovers come together to work out how to make their sometimes unconnected influences into whole-ass songs that sound good, it’s like opening up a wormhole of pure potential — who knows where it will lead? AI won’t allow itself to surprise, especially when we consider who is programming its taste. It will go only as far as the median of its corpus. The human creative process, though, is inherently unstable in a good way. Therein lies the magic. On one side, you have a predictive engine using its sycophantic training to aim for mediocre acceptance. On the other, you have the unpredictability of humans using their idiosyncratic influences to make something interesting. Přílišnost will last because it’s so clearly the work of weirdos with uncontainable imaginations who are trying to tame their ambitions, abilities, and aesthetics in the same way a crew of cowhands might wrangle a herd of stampeding cattle. The creation is as random as a game of Go. The result is singular. Hit me up in a decade and tell me I’m wrong.

• Bandcamp

13. Scimitar – Scimitarium I

First and foremost, Scimitar’s debut full-length, Scimitarium I, is fun in a way that should appeal to the modern tradster who wants to dig deeper than NWOTHM. The Denmark quintet is very Slough Feg-y. Trad leads scintillate like the sparks flying off steel during a sword fight, trad riffs gallop with the responsive readiness of a seasoned war horse. It feels very true; no one would ask it to leave the hall.

Ah, but everything is a bit more…frenzied, isn’t it? It’s as if Scimitar’s eyes keep rolling back into its head, and it’s possessed by something darker, stranger, more mischievous. It’s Slough Feg-y indeed, but a Slough Feg that has had its mind infiltrated by, like, Dispirit. Or maybe it’s a version of Hammers of Misfortune entranced by occult magick. Scimitarium I is hypnotized heavy metal that has heard the snap of the stick.

Right, there’s a wild-eyed witchiness at Scimitarium I‘s core, a cauldron-bubble sense of supernatural madness, a Bacchian descent into feverish revelry. This deliriousness adds a devilish dimension to Scimitar’s songwriting. The guitars spit out circular leads that twirl like Sufi whirling, the bass and drums boil with the urgency of a pot of water left unattended on a roaring stove, the layered vocals convene with the disorienting surrealness of disembodied voices squatting in your head.

Crucially, though, Scimitar’s unhinged inclinations don’t obscure its knack for epic-tale-weaving aural storytelling. Like any good trad-at-heart metaller, these songs go somewhere. They have a destination. They take the journey. Of course, as with any ardent partier, they may take the long way home. Then again, who hasn’t gone for a wander after the pub? Don’t deny yourself the fun.

• Bandcamp

12. Trauma Bond – Summer Ends. Some Are Long Gone

In my dotage, I’ve mellowed. I drive in the slow lane. I walk away instead of starting fights with rude people. I keep my cool when besieged by life’s many irritations.

Even so, one day at work, I couldn’t get a pesky Excel formula to work, so, reflexively, I lifted my keyboard above my head and smashed it on my desk. Keyboard shrapnel flew everywhere as if I triggered a high-yield bomb hidden within the ESC key. I knew I was making a bad decision as soon as I picked the keyboard up, but I couldn’t stop myself. It had to die. It had to be sacrificed. There I was, a 40-something professional surrounded by de-QWERTY-ifed aftermath of plastic bits. And the whole act felt…amazing. Energizing. Freeing. Later, with adrenaline still coursing through my veins, the custodian emptied my trash can and asked, “Are you OK?” Nope!

I get the feeling that the UK’s Trauma Bond is the same kind of nope, or, at the very least, these grindy, metalcore-y riffs are similarly energizing, freeing, and amazing. The duo has always shown up to the riff market with a basket of ripe ones, the kinds of crushing chugs and grooves that could make even the most pious nun want to crowdkill her convent. The duo always rips it up like the rent is due.

Those riffs are still present, but Summer Ends. Some Are Long Gone, Trauma Bond’s third album-ish, contains a much more varied yet cohesive narrative that dips its toe deeper into other styles. For one, a mechanized whirr is much more pronounced, a noisy nastiness that almost borders on death industrial. (If the duo ever wants to cut a power electronics tweener before starting work on the next album, I am down.) And there’s a greater emphasis on dynamics, a rise and fall, and fast and slow, that helps carry Summer Ends. Some Are Long Gone along with the ease of an intricately plotted movie. I mean, the nine-minute closer, “Dissonance,” probably qualifies as the best post-metal song I’ve heard in ages, a truly cathartic crescendo that pays off all the fast stuff.

Nevertheless, you’re here for the release. When I listen to Summer Ends. Some Are Long Gone, I look and feel like I’ve inhaled an entire bottle of ammonia. Put Trauma Bond on, find your metaphorical keyboard, and destroy it. Or, hell, destroy an actual keyboard. Just make sure you peel the tracking label off the back so IT can’t pin it on you. There’s absolutely no reason why I would know that information.

• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp

11. Deliquesce – Saviour / Enslaver

I didn’t get Saviour / Enslaver for a long time. It took many touch-and-goes for Deliquesce’s follow-up to the great Cursed With Malevolence to land. The reason for that, I think, is that Saviour / Enslaver is…a lot. It’s a lot. It’s very, very, very a lot.

The Australians take what worked on Cursed With Malevolence — the Suffocation-by-way-of-Disincarnate riffs, the constant churn of new sections, and the general toughguyiness that didn’t make that album stand out like a sore thumb on a label more known for hardcore bands — and multiply all of it by a high degree of difficulty. Accordingly, it sounds like the four-piece is throwing so much at you because, well, it is.

If Cursed With Malevolence was like running through an especially punishing American Gladiators gauntlet, Saviour / Enslaver is like getting turned into red mist by soldier of fortune dudes named Destroyer and Destructor operating tennis-ball-spewing heavy machine guns. On top of that, all of these songs are played with masterful precision, a 10,000-hour feel for the style. It’s kind of like watching, say, GinoMachino play Elden Ring, and being like, “Huh, did we even play the same game?” It makes sense that Deliquesce offers an official guitar and bass tab book on its Bandcamp. Death metal guitar nerds are going to pore over this album like it’s a map to El Dorado.

However, Saviour / Enslaver isn’t hobbled by the kind of clinicism that has ruined tech death, that sort of unctuous shredding aimed solely at other guitar influencers. Nerp, it has a pleasing warmth to it. You can sense these guys weren’t only sweating this stuff out but also enjoying every ounce of bodily fluid they lost. After all, this is such a wonderfully grimy ode to the kind of death metal that festered in Long Island basements, those subterranean spaces where spawns were bred.

So, if I have any advice, that warmth is the key during your first couple of plays of Saviour / Enslaver. It’ll be what gets you through the initial pelting of a lot. It’s like looking over at a smiling buddy similarly pinned behind a pad, a reassuring presence of gallows-born interconnection, before you learn to run between the tennis balls. Destroyer and Destructor await. It’s time to go over the top.

• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp

THE GOODER STUFF

10. Hypomanic Daydream – The Yearning

By 2022, Putrescine evolved into something fascinating. The San Diego band’s debut EP, 2019’s The One Reborn, named after a boss from Bloodborne, was solid, a decent spud of straighter death metal. What set it apart from similar Carcassian crews was co-vocalist Marie McAuliffe’s drum programming, which gave the songs a slightly more forward-thinking edge. The One Reborn was a spud, yes, but it had a hint of weirder eyes sprouting from its body.

Fast forward three years, and Putrescine was, uh, reborn, plopping its magnum opus, “In a Growing Sun,” onto a split with Adzes. Suddenly, the band was fusing death metal with far more avant-garde inclinations. The music was deeper, richer, and, well, weirder, paying off the promise of its early askewness. It was as if Thantifaxath messed around with Timeghoul while working on a doctoral thesis concerning experimental classical music.

But the dramatic shift in sound wasn’t off-putting in a way that art music can be. “In a Growing Sun” ferried through a Bermuda Triangle of fringier interests, but wasn’t fart-sniffy, wasn’t impressed by itself. Instead, it had a very human core provided by Marie McAuliffe’s emotionally resonant vocals, an audience stand-in holding open the door for bewildered listeners.

McAuliffe took that out-there energy with her to Hypomanic Daydream. At first, the new solo project sounded like it would follow the trails blazed by bands like OLD, Carbonized, and Disharmonic Orchestra, a uniquely progressive strain of omnicore that recalled an early ’90s sense of adventurism before then-burgeoning styles became more codified. Debut album Image introduced McAuliffe as Manic Dream Girl and introduced new elements, twisting those elements into something like Coroner or Voivod messing around with vocaloids — you know, just your usual death metal album that included a Paramore cover.

Then, like Putrescine, Hypomanic Daydream took the leap. The Yearning, a headspinningly eclectic record of disparate influences, sounds so much like the shape of something to come. And yet, it’s undeniably metal, taking recognizable touchstones and snapping them together into a metal mecha. Often, these tracks are like Eye-era King Diamond jettisoned his band for Atheist, and that new crew was Tron‘d into an early internet mainframe storing JRPG soundtracks.

The Yearning, like its ancestor, is also so very human. It’s no surprise that Big Feelings Metal advocate Brendan Sloan is in the credits for reamping and mastering. Even when a listener is caught up in a whirlwind of guest Quetzal Tirado’s bass clarinet(!) solos, there’s this emotional aspect that aims straight for the heart. The Yearning isn’t an exercise in genre mutation or weaving an RIO spirit into metal’s DNA. It lives, it breathes, it feels. It’s the real deal.

• Bandcamp

9. Sulfuric Cautery – Killing Spree

I am reporting to you live from the back of a DIY punk spot, waiting to see Sulfuric Cautery. Problem: power is out in this city block. The organizers left to rent a generator. I mean, what else is there to do? The grind must go on.

Fittingly, this drive to keep things moving appears to be a key trait of the Los Angeles duo. Sulfuric Cautery is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. It has certainly racked up the miles during that decade. The journey has taken it from Dayton, Ohio, to across the globe, gaining it a following as perhaps the preeminent American purveyor of hyper-blast turbo-ping goregrind. The oft-made comparison is, of course, Last Days of Humanity. Still, Sulfuric Cautery is more like a cross between Foetopsy and a punkier pummeling, in the same sense that orthodox grind derived its ferocity from punk and core.

Naturally, Sulfuric Cautery has — here’s that phrase again — kept it moving, steadily evolving over the years, especially after it relocated to LA and was reconfigured as a two-piece. Over the past couple years in whatever venue is available to play, a more technical, brutal death metal riff style has burbled forth from the pool of spilled guts. Sulfuric Cautery has fattened its blasting passages and increased the Richter-scale-registering shake of its slowdowns. (This has culminated in the straight-up BDM of Consummate Extripation, Sulfuric Cautery’s second LP of 2025, and a record that wasn’t yet released when our rankings went to press. Spoiler: it bangs.) Thus, Killing Spree is the band’s most exacting document, navigating a turn-on-the-dime rally course of gore-soaked sickness.

Even so, this is Sulfuric Cautery, so Killing Spree is very moist, very wet, and very gross, like dipping into a bubbling jacuzzi of rotten offal. That’s the thing: The band keeps it moving, but it retains its voice, its spirit, no matter the stop. It’s…uh…hold on, the lights are back on. Gotta run. We’ll talk more later.

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8. Psudoku – Psudoktrination

Somehow, 14 years have passed since Psudoku plopped out of a wormhole with its aptly titled prog grind manifesto, Space Grind. That one, a bouncy ripper from Norwegian gonzo specialist Cpt. Roger, who is also the grindsmith behind the equally wacky Brutal Blues, Parlamentarisk Sodomi, and BxSxRx, lays out the general Psudoku concept of applying grind tempos to, like, metalized Van der Graaf Generator riffs. Space Grind is a starship powered by spiky salvos of sprightly smartness. It’s also the best piece of music with a Stephen Hawking credit, mainly because Pink Floyd’s “Keep Talking” doesn’t have blast beats.

Subsequent transmissions from a place in deepest, darkest space (again, Norway) developed the prog side of the equation, eventually sling-shotting Psudoku much closer to the Zappa nebula. Pretty brain-spraining all things considered, and, well, great, but the tunes started losing some of the hyperdrive grind that played up the entertaining incongruity.

Psudoktrination returns Cpt. Roger to a tight orbit around the grind planetoid. It is mind-expanding in the same way that someone using the jaws of life to free your brain from your skull is mind-expanding. These circular riffs often sound like an aircraft violently spinning toward its doom. And yet, despite the high-Gs grind maneuvers that put you on the brink of G-LOC, Psudoktrination is still plenty prog. Like, the fact that this album can keep building and building without inducing blast fatigue has to be thanks to some advanced songwriting engineering. Ultimately, if you’re new to this whole thing, Psudoktrination will take a few spins to keep track of the path it’s plotting. But stick with it. There are few things like it in not only metal, but all of music.

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7. Dissona – Receptor

Oh, the number of times I’ve had to hear prog haters bemoan the style’s supposed lack of emotional maturity. You know the old saw: music theory over thoughtfulness, pubescent fantasies over stark reality, nerd-impressing clinical widdles over raw-nerve immediacy. Prog is a series of gilded, fanciful artifices. It’s a phase of pedantry that must be shed. It’s unworldly, superficial nonsense that knows little of matters of the heart.

This, ahem, prog-nostication is, of course, ridiculous. I feel bad for you, son, if you’ve never experienced introspection in Jim Matheos’s guitar or catharsis via John Arch’s vocals. (“Kindred Spirits,” for curious parties.) And, I mean, two of the main lyrical themes on Twisted into Form and Zero Hour’s Encyclopaedia Metallum pages are “feelings” and “emotions” respectively, and those two bands have busted more brains with math-breaking music than many this century.

Well, add Dissona to the list of prog-complaint dispellers. The feelings come quickly on Receptor, the quartet’s long-awaited fourth full-length. “Receptor” begins with a deep breath, a moment of relative quietude. Then the dam breaks, and in rushes a flood of prog ardor. “Weighing down/ On the innermost composure,” David Dubenic sings. And it’s like, OK, yes, this person has lived a life. This person has heard the flatline of ego death. This person’s passion is a pure mood for adults. Feelings!

Here’s the thing: Although undeniably powerful, Dissona doesn’t let the feelings overwhelm the music. It’s one of the band’s many canny balancing acts. Receptor is theatrical without boiling over into theater-kid overexuberance. Receptor is eclectic, utilizing many tones and timbres — including a punchy electronic section that stirred within me an unforetold desire to hear an industrial prog record — without losing cohesion. And Receptor showcases these musicians’ skills without detracting from the grand sweep of the music.

Right, that sweep. What impresses me most about Receptor is its ability to reclaim a sort of dramatic romanticism that found its way into a few releases in the early ’00s: Disillusion’s Back to Times of Splendor, Orphaned Land’s Mabool, Symbyosis’s On the Wings of Phoenix, that kind of thing. It’s a sense of wonder that got slayed by the next two decades of millennial cynicism. Dissona has that same quality, that sort of uninhibited grandness, something that makes it seem larger than just an album. It’s something you just feel. That’s undeniable.

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6. Umulamahri – Learning the Secrets of Acid

We open a portal to the Other Side. We see many things that challenge our understanding of the alternate universe we have stepped foot in: some great, some horrible, some so unlikely we can’t wrap our brains around them. The alternate Apple Music lets you shuffle by album. The alternate government has classed pizza as a Schedule I drug. The alternate Cleveland Guardians are the reigning three-time World Series winners. We check our watches: two more hours before we can return.

We buy concert tickets through Live Nation by Amazon, which costs $15 plus a $1,500 processing fee. God Forbid opens the show — apparently, it crossed over long before us and has continued its run as the support slot for every tour here, too. Then, the lights cut out.

A sub-bass hum shakes the room, causing those of weaker constitution to vomit. The curtains open, and there float three beholders. The trio plays. The din is indescribable. It’s as if Steve Tucker requisitioned Mortician, booted the drum machine for a flesh-and-blood kit destroyer blessed with an internal metronome of an atomic clock, and then forced everyone to down a bunch of DiPT. The music is punishing. No-wave-y synth bass crushes us like we’re a foolish billionaire steering a submarine with a video game controller. The music is disorienting. Rhythms clobber us from every direction like a symphony of Ernie Shavers haymakers synchronized to a Shackleton DJ set. The music is frightening. Guttural roars and throat-searing rasps trigger a lizard brain response of pervasive dread. OK. Wait. Now they’re actually covering Mortician, but it’s unlike the idiots we know. It’s twisted into a strange shape through the means of reverse mental torture.

We stand stunned. The more suggestible souls around us in the throes of mind control slowly shamble around the mosh pit. Other audience members frantically claw at their skin as if trying to release whatever incantation is eating their souls. Some jerk spills their beer on us because this, after all, is still a concert.

We check our watches: two minutes. We quickly walk to the bathroom. Someone standing over the sink offers us a line of pizza to snort. We decline. We pack ourselves into a stall and open the portal. We fall in.

Back on the ice of our Reiden Lake in our universe, we try to regain our bearings. “What even was that?” Suddenly, we feel a presence behind us. It is the beholders. Somehow, the band has come back with us. The beholders shapeshift into musicians we recognize: Baring Teeth’s Andrew Hawkins, Mithridatic’s Kévin Paradis, and one other we know so well. “Oh my, are you meant to be Doug Moore from Pyrrhon, Seputus, Weeping Sores, Scarcity, and Glorious Depravity?” The transformed beholder nods.

The three beholders turn to leave. As they’re walking away, we cry, “Wait, what is the name of this band?” The Hawkins-looking one, obviously the leader, turns around and says in a voice that is somehow clear and completely alien, “Umulamahri.” We look at each other, confused. We cry, “Wait, how do you even spell that?” But the beholders are gone and gone where we know not.

The next morning, we read in the paper that 15 music journalists have been ritualistically beheaded for mistakenly classifying full-lengths as EPs. No one witnessed these likely justified homicides, but tenants in neighboring apartments say they heard a sound through the wall. It was a strange voice whispering a word they had never heard before: “Umulamahhhhhhhriiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.” No one can spell it. No matter, there’s a better lead. Investigators find two pieces of evidence at the first scene: a duct-taped-together interdimensional device with God Forbid’s name scrawled on the handle, and a scrap of paper inscribed with a curious phrase. “Learning the Secrets of Acid?” a detective says. And then the walls start to melt.

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5. Putridity – Morbid Ataraxia

I need music to match the chaos in my brain. Morbid Ataraxia is that chaos.

Now, Putridity’s fourth full-length does have a grand design that reveals itself on multiple listens. It sounds like one of those “the entire [media property] but every time [x] does [y] it gets faster” videos when the speed multiplier is really cooking. And there’s kind of a brutal death metal recognizability to what the Italian rippers are ripping into: think a Suffocation album getting tortured by Brodequin. Plus, you know, this quintet isn’t stupid: I’m sure some expert YouTube reactor could break the songwriting down with scientific rigor and demonstrate how multiplex all of it is. I choose you, The Charismatic Voice.

But the true appeal of this stuff is simply a dizzying array of chugs, blasts, gutturals, and wee-woos spinning around your head like stinging sand in a dust devil. Mayhem, put more simply. It issues a simple instruction, too: You must submit.

It goes without saying, then, that Morbid Ataraxia is prime degenerate mutant music for degenerate mutants. To drive that home, during a rare breather, we’re treated to Divine’s oft-sampled “kill everyone now” stump speech. Despite that sample’s splatter metal ubiquity, it feels…uh…more earned here; there is, after all, a song titled “In Disgust They Shine.” My fellow debauchees, the state of the goo is icky.

Still, what continually draws me to Morbid Ataraxia, and Putridity in general, is not just the goo and not just the chaos, but the way that chaos can overcome your senses. I’m probably the only person on the planet who actually likes this artistic choice, but there’s an extremely brown noise drone connecting these tracks, including a very long, secret-track-esque extended whum. That thing is like a backdoor into my brain, some real Manchurian Candidate stuff, preparing me to thrash around like a real dumbass once the music hits. As soon as the closer, “Immersed in the Spell of Death,” transitions back into music again, I have been psychologically conditioned to fight a bear. I am that chaos. Bring me the bear.

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4. Unbirth – Asomatous Besmirchment

Asomatous Besmirchment ends with a sample of HAL 9000 slowly being drained of digital life. It’s a pretty appropriate way to close out this Italian brutal death metal band’s third full-length. Although, not in the way you might think.

Sure, these songs add up to 37 minutes of indefatigable ass-kicking, showcasing a machine-like ability to keep the rhythmic pistons pumping. And yet, if we visualize the drifting axes of modern BDM as a scatter plot, Asomatous Besmirchment falls into an interesting place.

Unbirth is neither gooey slop nor laser-precise tech. Its riffs neither showcase a slam simplicity nor a streets-ahead sophistication. It’s neither crushingly slow nor blazingly fast. No, it falls into the middle of all these trends.

That might not sound exciting to those craving either extreme. Still, Unbirth is so good at making its material engaging that Asomatous Besmirchment ends up this platonic ideal of a uniquely European type of BDM classicism. The FFO taxonomy is something like good-era Decapitated with a Disavowed engine swap. As you’d expect from that pairing, Unbirth isn’t that concerned with pushing brutal boundaries that will only get redistricted within the lifespan of a frail fruit fly.

That’s not to say Asomatous Besmirchment isn’t brutal — this will turn an unsuspecting preschool teacher’s head into brain chili. But the focus is more on memorability. There’s a hard-earned catchiness to all of these components that facilitates stick-to-your-ribs satiation. In a genre of bands that evaporate in your mouth like fuel-grade moonshine, Unbirth exhibits a long-lasting savoriness, something you want to continue to suck on.

And, like a five-star tasting menu, real thought and care went into these songs. That’s what sets Unbirth apart. I hate to keep bringing this up in a year-end list that is already so heavy on feeling feelings and handling humanity, but Asomatous Besmirchment sounds like people are playing it. It’s like how the weaponized earworminess of an everything-corrected modern pop song can’t really step to the timelessness of a Motown melody. There’s just something about real humans making real art that will always resonate. So, compared to theoretical riffists and calculator chasers, Unbirth has an advantage: it wants to be a real boy. The HAL 9000 sample fits, then, not because it’s a nod to the music’s mechanistic quality, but because it’s the sound of the machines surrendering.

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3. Kakothanasy – Metagonism

There’s a clarity to what Kakothanasy does. There’s no ‘battery of squelch cannons’ guitar tone. There’s no ‘blown-out speakers in a 1995 Toyota Trecel’ production. There’s no ‘dragging two cinder blocks together’ vocals. (That one is pretty cool, admittedly.) There’s nothing to hide behind.

So, Metagonism, the Swiss trio’s second full-length, is like playing on expert mode. There’s no room for error. Kakothanasy has to possess the raw skills to succeed. It does.

As the related-band credits — Exorbitant Prices Must Diminish, Grotesquerie, Anachronism, Cenotaph, and Focal Dystonia — attest, everyone in Kakothanasy is absurdly talented, including drummer Florent Duployer, who is in the running as the best brutal death metal drummer not named Lille Gruber. And there is something Defeated Sanity-esque to the way Kakothanasy moves, smash cutting between mainframe-melting tech sections and smackdown slams of the Suffocation variety. Lesser bands attempting to unify that dichotomy sound like a student driver learning to drive a stick shift — concussion-causing herks and jerks. Kakothanasy is smooth.

Yeah, smooth. I don’t know if you can call a band this brutish and bloodthirsty graceful, but Kakothanasy has a gymnast-like economy of motion that makes it sound so fluid. Like, it’s rare to get an album that is obviously so effortful sound so effortless. In turn, I’ve tried to replay this album to death, and I can’t tire of it. There’s no resistance, no drag, and thus no fatigue. It’s a testament to Kakothanasy’s clarity, not just sonically, but also its songwriting mastery. Johann Sebastian Bach wishes he composed this. That doofus never wrote a slam in his life.

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2. 夢遊病者 – РЛБ30011922

РЛБ30011922 seems to start in medias res. It’s not disorienting, though. It’s like a conversation starting back up after a librarian’s “shhh.” It’s a neat trick, a songwriting sleight of hand that must’ve taken eons to workshop to sound so straightforward. There you are, a minute in to this 37-minute, 10-part suite presented as an instrumental single track, and you feel like 夢遊病者 has already been laying the groundwork for a whole album. You just know it without knowing quite where РЛБ30011922 is going to go; it’s like how every eulogy is relatable, no matter the contents. This album is a complex work, one that, per the band’s admission, took nearly three years to make. You can tell. There is so much going on, so many details, so many elements you’ll never catch until your 20th spin. Nonetheless, that ineffable familiarity turns it into such an easy listen.

Over its career, these players from parts unknown have operated within the ruleless domains of dreams and hazy remembrances. 夢遊病者’s albums are kind of like déjà vu and jamais vu crashing together. There are recognizable components, idioms that we’ve probably even internalized passively: rock, jazz, metal, etc. But, like a particularly wild lucid dream, the way 夢遊病者 smears those components into each other feels so post-everything, avant-garde in the truest sense of the term.

That said, what makes the band remarkable is that it’s not really pushing the bounds of music so much as the feelings that music imparts. РЛБ30011922 operates according to the curious logic of memory, of what the brain retains and reconstructs, and what it renders in a space-saving fuzziness. 夢遊病者 is pretty clever in this regard.

As previously discussed, РЛБ30011922 cycles through so many styles: Laddio Bolocko skronks, PIL dub rhythms, Mono build-ups, Tortoise-style Can-isms, and far, far more. The metal is similarly varied: fractured trad, scudding clouds of post-black metal, funhouse mirror Thin Lizzy leads. 夢遊病者’s bag is deep.

But 夢遊病者 doesn’t approach its style forays literally. These sections aren’t direct references; they’re not tracks on a mixtape meant to make other music nerds pop. Instead, they’re almost like half-recalled scenes, flashes of buried sensations, the connective-tissue paragraphs in a bigger autobiography that you can’t quite quote. They’re the experiences that have been fermented and barrel-aged in the subconscious. They’re the makings of you that evade summation. They’re the background radiation of awareness.

As such, РЛБ30011922‘s structure plays with an intriguing contradiction. On the one hand, 夢遊病者 worked its ass off to make sure the album has a thrust, a driving forward momentum. It goes somewhere, which gives the appearance of linearity because that’s how we perceive the passage of time. On the other hand, РЛБ30011922 feels unstuck in time in the same way you can review memories in your head non-chronologically. Still, those memories all blend together into a greater whole. Your experience of them, of knowing you lived life on either side, provides an overarching sense of coherence. And 夢遊病者 achieves exactly that. Even its most clashing inclinations sound like they’re never out of place, never inapposite. The stylistic shifts, then, blur together as memories do, while the resulting musical sections possess a sequential logicality. Genius.

Here’s the other genius thing, though: Even though 夢遊病者’s sense of flow makes everything sound seamless, the sections can still stick out. Attentive listeners will discover all kinds of hooks. For instance, following an occult doom passage that might as well be a warped Pentagram record, РЛБ30011922 tosses in a section that will leave you flipping through your mental rolodex to guess the classic rock radio riff it’s alluding to. “Burnin’ For You”? “Carry on Wayward Son”? It always catches my ear and centers my attention. It’s like how canon events strip away the buffers that insulate us from reality, allowing us to momentarily become more aware of our surroundings. And that riff vibrates some held-dear memory of mine. It pings something deep within me. I feel something very specific. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. 夢遊病者 didn’t have my particular experience in mind, but it was aiming at a feeling shared by many people, a universal familiarity. 夢遊病者 is telling a story through feelings, one played by an instrument made of memories. It’s like the Chill Out for core emotions. The narrative — likely a memorial to someone very dear to them, an eternal aural elegy — is 夢遊病者’s. But the feelings? Those ring out in all of us.

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1. Weeping Sores – The Convalescence Agonies

While making Weeping Sores’s first album, 2019’s False Confessions, singer/guitarist Doug Moore injured his shoulder. “I was overtraining with heavy weights,” Moore told Invisible Oranges‘s Colin Dempsey. “Part of it was also that I was practicing a lot for that record and I never gave myself a break. If I wasn’t lifting, then I was playing guitar, and I was never letting that joint recover as much as it needed to, as it turned out. And that led to what is, was, and still is a degenerative condition in my rotator cuff tendons, which has been somewhat reconstituted into their prior form. But it’s not the same as it used to be.”

Lifting? Out. Farewell, dumb gym. Guitar? Farewell, old playing style. Moore had to relearn the instrument. “People who have traumatic brain injuries say they have to relearn how to walk,” he said. “And it’s not that their bodies have changed, it’s not that their legs are a different length or something, but they still have to reconstitute the muscle memory and the psychological instincts that allow them to perform that motion that accomplishes walking. [Relearning guitar] felt the same way. The way that I move and hold my shoulder in general was transformed by that injury. My life is different in a lot of ways, too. It holistically transformed me in the way that a temporary disability can.”

From the outside, Moore’s injury almost seems like a sliding doors moment, provided that, you know, Gwyneth Paltrow had her arm wrecked by the titular door. After all, it wasn’t just the guitar playing that got updated. “I think of that as being a before and after moment in my life where the injury led me to different habits, a different routine, a different career, a different way of thinking about myself, a different way of thinking about the world [that] had implications for my ideas about politics and relations with other people,” Moore explained. “It was a profound experience in a way that I think things that happen to you can be.”

And it is profound, an upending life event that goes far beyond the trivializing sports-injury-report-influenced framework sometimes applied to recovery, that there is a defined timetable with a forecasted end. Even for average Joes, those catastrophic-coverage-having castoffs who aren’t multi-million-dollar human investments protected by their multi-billion-dollar franchises, the idea that there is a “hurt” and then a “better” collapses time, minimizing the purgatorial interval in between. Recovery becomes a story. We assume the story moves linearly. We assume there will be a better. The anguish, the pain, the suffering that happens along the way is just the plotting of that story, or, more often, the plot occurring off-screen.

Actually living within the day-to-day of recovery is, of course, different. “In general, my sense of independence and self-efficacy were affected,” Moore remembered. “It was, frankly, a very painful process and one of the worst stretches of my life to go through. To have to spend so much time and energy and money reconstituting my ability to do things that I’d taken for granted for my entire adulthood.” That packs a psychological punch. That door doesn’t slide. An injury affects more than just the meat. Its invasive roots reach down to the soul. And that’s not something that necessarily goes away. Even if things get better and the roots recede, what did those roots leave behind? What pain remains? Who even are you when you come out the other side?

***

A few years ago, I was suddenly afflicted by chronic nosebleeds. These weren’t your usual rusty pipe dribblers. No, it was like the elevator door opening in The Shining. I’d be minding my business, and then a crime scene would pour out of my nose. Seriously, the amount of plasma that flowed forth could’ve cut the production cost of a proposed Dead Alive sequel in half.

Now, I’m not one to be squeamish. I’m not one to ask for help. But the seemingly hourly nosebleeds legitimately terrified me. So, I went to urgent care. I went to the doctor. I went to a specialist. For the unforgivable sin of trying to get better, all I got was this lousy cauterization, which turned my inner nostrils into shoe leather. No matter, the bleeding continued, so I went to more specialists. I swear to you that the last guy jammed an endoscope up my snorter and said, “Well, that sucks.” That sucks! That was the diagnosis! That was my sentence. The American health care system banged its gavel and said I just had to live with it.

The knock-on effects of living with it were severe. Panic attacks tormented me, consuming my thoughts and disabling my coping mechanisms. I was afraid to go out in public lest I Andrew WK in someone’s presence. When I had to face the world, I brought a fanny pack filled with what I grimly started referring to as “nose tools.” I looked ridiculous. Granted, I’m not exactly a hot commodity on my best days — my Hinge profile wouldn’t even threaten the uptime of a server running on an Atari 2600 — but my bag of weapons to hold the line in the snout wars was pretty much the death knell of my dating life. Worse, I stopped doing all the things that usually keep my mind off of dying alone. In fact, I didn’t do anything. I simply fused myself to my sofa like a barnacle on a hull, watched three-hour YouTube videos of mechanics trying to get barn-find cars up and running, and waited for my nose to bleed. Soon, after I stooped so low that I was watching golf influencer videos, I was like, “…is this it?” I couldn’t envision a future. Tomorrow started becoming an abstract concept. There was only a godawful present, one that made me increasingly tired of treading water in the middle of the sea of depression.

After a stretch of laborious recovery that felt like finally climbing out of a grave only to fall into another one, things got better. Thanks to an elaborate regimen that has kept the petroleum jelly industry afloat, the nosebleeds eventually abated to an acceptable level. The dark clouds cleared. The calendar started filling up. I had a life again, provided that a well-lived life can be measured by the number of brutal death metal albums one purchases.

Looking back, I’m embarrassed by the lack of resiliency and stoicism I thought I possessed — one little difference in my life, one hiccup in the expected, turned everything upside down. Optimistically, recovery instilled within me a sense of respect and gratitude for the miracle of general good health. The hold I have on what I consider even a blasé baseline is so tenuous; I have no right to it, no guarantees. One bad break, one itsy bitsy malady, and it’s a return trip to hell. Conversely, my glass-half-empty predisposition makes me wonder, “Did all of me come back from that first trip?” I still recoil when a Q-tip I’ve pulled out of my nose is spotted with blood. I still feel the mounting anxiety when the weather starts to cool. I think part of me is down in that hell. I’m forever stained by a glimpse of the bottom. And so, for a version of myself that I’ll never be again, the question posed during my darker days had been answered: That was, in fact, “it.”

***

A hurt emanates from deep within The Convalescence Agonies. Simply put, Weeping Sores’s music aches. Like the death/doom ideal, it evokes that kind of powerful pang that hollows out your heart. But Doug Moore and drummer Stephen Schwegler’s second full-length also deals in a more physical type of ache. The riffs and rhythms have a heavy gait, mirroring that inexpressible phantom force of bodily fatigue that continuously compresses you downward, making every facet of life more labored. Moore’s vocals and leads are bolts of pain shooting up and down limbs. The layers and harmonies played by celloist Annie Blythe and keyboardist Brendon Randall-Myers — two guests on this it-takes-an-NYC-village record — sometimes impart the numbness of damaged nerves. The Convalescence Agonies isn’t just hurt, it is the howl of an injured body.

But it’s also…beautiful? Weeping Sores does better than many of its miserable peers by varying its attack, preventing The Convalescence Agonies from getting mired in the idle stasis of real-world pain and depression. Esoteric’s Greg Chandler mastered this album, and his band is a pretty good point of comparison, not so much sonically, but in terms of its level of comfort with changing tempi and moods. Likewise, The Convalescence Agonies plumbs the depths while also ascending to reveries. It is fast; it is slow. It is brutal; it is beautiful. At a technical level, these welcome contrasts to the album’s larger themes make the music more kinetic and dynamic. In a spiritual sense, though, The Convalescence Agonies takes on the contours, the ups and downs, of a life.

Let’s stick with the technical for a moment. Naturally, given the membership, Weeping Sores’s musicianship is excellent. Between The Convalescence Agonies and Pyrrhon’s Exhaust, Schwegler is really on one right now. His drumming is always so fluid, enlivening every passage with a click-shunning authenticity that prods you, and really shepherds you, into remaining immersed in the music. Moore matches Schwegler by playing with such feel, seemingly animating each riff with relatable pathos. And the riff arsenal has been diversified. The unique ‘Warning playing Morbid Angel’ brand of hellish melancholy is still present, which puts it in the family tree of the death/doom old guard without being a blood relative. But the poles of Weeping Sores’s dualities have been pushed further apart.

Riffffffffsssssss. There are some nasty chugs on The Convalescence Agonies that belong to an older, more embryonic style acquainted with primordial darkness. Ah, but on the other end, there are also some really nimble picking that floats atop the rhythms. The expansion of extremes applies to the vocals, too. The primary mode of communication is a guttural rumble of thunder that will exceed the tolerance of weaklings. Ah, but there are also these mournful cries that are like a person down on their knees, beseeching a higher power to answer why they’re being assailed by misfortune. It’s so vulnerable. It’s another fold in this manifold album, one further diversified by key contributions from guests Lev Sloujitel (banjo on “Empty Vessel Hymn”) and Peter Lloyd (guitar on “Sprawl in the City of Sorrow”). Weeping Sores has dimensions.

One of those dimensions brings us back to the spiritual. To me, at a very base level, The Convalescence Agonies is almost like a surrogate for suffering. I feel like you can get something out of it even if you’ve lucked out and thus far cruised over life’s black ice; you can’t not empathize with it. But the way the album’s flow maps to rehabilitation, be it physical rehabilitation or desperately trying to rebound from existence’s many psychic slights, is so powerful. The Convalescence Agonies nails the exploration of the soul-annihilating depths of recovery — the onerous work of restoration occurring between the hurt and the better. This album is a friend forged in pain, one that knows how futile it can feel to pick up the pieces while coming to terms with the fact that some of those pieces can no longer be found. There’s catharsis in that. It can be a salve for those in the depths. And for those on the other side, it can be a brush that removes rust.

But it’s also…hopeful? Maybe I’m projecting, but it’s there for me. It’s this little whisper of hope that says, however quietly, “This is not it.” It makes the case for heeding the survival drive, even after the foundation of one’s mortality crumbles. Things have changed, and that’s fine. Things are hard, and that’s fine. Slowly but surely, those mantras move in and out like a tide, turning everything smooth.

There’s a part at the end of the closing track that I think about a lot:

Such is the body’s offering
Its seasons turn, relentless and swift
Its pain which teaches nothing
No lesson to learn; no wisdom, no gift
But the passion of transfiguration
With each convalescence
I am reborn, I cease to exist

How does “The Convalescence Agonies” cease to exist? With a duet between keyboards and cello, a hushed denouement after the album’s metallic crush. As Randall-Myers’s chords grow slightly more hopeful, Blythe’s legato starts to fleck away. It’s what remains and what doesn’t. It’s the hurt that never leaves the better. But it also answers a question with another question. “Is this it?” Well, is it?

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To, DoTS. Love, all of us.

The post Best of 2025: Seth Buttnam – All Bosses Rando No Hit Speedrun appeared first on Last Rites.

People tend to float through the tail end of the annual cycle, as if passing into The New Year gives one license to jettison their current struggles into a decommissioned past. I get it – hope springs eternal, and the sparkly promise of a more fortunate future can’t have any blemishes. That used to be me, knowingly overlooking personal failings while clinking a fluted glass to “Que Será, Será”. List season cut that honeymoon mighty short. Whatever will be, will be, yes sure, but what about whatever will was? Don’t you need to think about THAT?? The short answer is yes. The long answer is uh, well…

You want to hear about a personal failing? I didn’t listen to much new music this year. Not even enough to create a full and strapping list to match my colleagues. If that’s a shameful enough admission for you to tap out here, so be it. There are plenty of other lists out there, teeming with earned knowledge, just waiting for you to graze upon them. More learned minds, however, would say it’s not about the size of the list. It’s about the swaying of the braying. List season, above all, spurs recollection and refined analysis. The subjects must be properly arranged and the organizer must be properly deranged to adequately defend why this particular arrangement makes the most sense. I may lack the numbers but the derangement is there, oh boy is it ever.

Maybe next year I’ll write up a top 50. Wouldn’t that be something? Yeah, I’ll do 50. (takes a swig of champagne and with his toe, sweeps his dropped cocktail weenie off the balcony)

THE REDUCED YET FORMIDABLE REARGUARD (15-11)

15. Tower – Let There Be Dark

For whatever reason, 2025 was heavy on the regular old heavy! Tower stormed back in a shadowy n’ spooky way with Let There Be Dark, an altogether, well, darker set of tunes than their last full-length outing. What’s new? Sarabeth Linden adopts a cooler, more witchy tone overall, lending the proceedings a velvet curtained theatricality. The riffs never left, the rhythm section still stomps, the songwriting remains airtight and true. One of the leanest and meanest this year, no question.

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14. Nite – Cult of the Serpent Sun

Lean and mean brings us appropriately to our next sizzling hunk – Cult of the Serpent Sun. Purveyors of the Zero Bullshit Black and Heavy, Nite are back with album numero three-o, and if you claim to be a self-respecting heavy music connoisseur you shouldn’t need any more verbiage from me on the matter (you’re fiending for more? Click the review link below then check into a facility, will ya?). Nite bring every necessary appetizer, main and dessert to the function. If you leave hungry, that’s entirely on you, buddy.

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13. Umulamahri – Learning the Secrets of Acid

Every day I wake up and fist-bump the uncaring void of the universe that I get to live in a timeline where Learning the Secrets of Acid‘s cover art is viewable at my leisure. Seriously, what an exquisite and revolting concoction. Doubly lucky are we that the music contained therein is also exquisite and revolting! Doug Moore (in his first of three appearances here [would you sit down for a few months, my guy? Christ almighty.]) gargles in his gravely chasm while rotting, churning guitars pulverize the scenery. A Cronenbergian maelstrom of body horror and punishing power.

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12. Araphel – The Endchanter

Was that Nite record not black enough for you? Wouldn’t you know it there exists a bird of a more ebon feather? Italian trio Araphel are here to flex their black/heavy chops in a more sinister fashion. The Endchanter checks all the boxes of a Very Enjoyable Record – satisfying riffs, dry and evil croaks, audible, interesting bass lines? That last one was a wild card, I know. Yes, this is a more grim affair overall than Cult of the Serpent Sun but the underpinnings of trad metal harmony give it a swaying heft that it might otherwise lack. Throw this one on in the basement, crank some beers and let that lone light bulb hanging from a string toss some cool shadows.

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11. Vultures Vengeance – Dust Age

Not only was this a rather trad-heavy year but 2025 was a banner year for the old guitar. Vultures Vengeance were the tip of the spear in that regard – Dust Age is boiling over with SMOKING riffs. Crystalline leads and solos out the wazoo! I don’t even think I have a wazoo anymore, come to think of it. Along with the aforementioned Tower record, Dust Age is another example of a stellar and pure heavy metal album. While the rest of the list tends to teeter across different genre borders, Vultures Vengeance aim true and shoot straight. Guitar fans take heed, lend thy ears.

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THE TOP 10, MY FAVORITE 10 (10-1)

10. UNBIRTH – ASOMATOUS BESMIRCHMENT

Guitar fans take ears, lend thy heed – Unbirth are here and it’s the clobbering hour. Asomatous Besmirchment squeezes 5 tons of riffs into a 1-ton duffel. Imagine a sock full of quarters but the sock is your lower intestine and the quarters are tiny, dense wallopings. Further, imagine your delirious glee being pounded bloody into the pavement with it.

It’s one thing to buoy killer riffs end to end over a sea of blasts. It’s a whole OTHER thing for these riff strings to rise and fall with the contours of an actual, compelling song, and that’s what is so particularly impressive about this record. These Italian stallions have both the ridiculous chops and the sly brains to keep the songs constantly beckoning you back in for one more taste. I know for a fact that, to me, the prospect of an almost 6 minute brutal death metal song sounds like some too much icing-ass birthday cake – inviting at the outset, diabetically delicious for a few bites, then garishly overstaying its welcome. Take a listen to “Malignant Pregnancies” and tell me if that ain’t a filthy exception.

At under 38 minutes, Unbirth have crafted a very tidy, very fine pile of technical yet brutish death metal. Not since Onset of Putrefaction have I been so smitten by a record in this vein. That may speak to my ignorance of the genre more than anything, but the dexterous combining of world-class riffing with, dare I say, fun song structures is simply molto bene.

  (author eyeing up the next track in the queue)

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9. PHANTOM SPELL – HEATHER & HEARTH

I couldn’t possibly pen a sweeter or more discerning love letter to this album than our old pal Captain has – jam that link down there, see for yourself. Instead, I’ll tell you what this album did for me.

Heather & Hearth drills deep into the second theme (the first, of course, being “wow the riffs on this album, dang”) that runs through many of my top choices this year – escapism in one form or another. The first time I heard the chorus of “The Autumn Citadel” I was 17 again, dorkily engrossed in the hunt for the next artist and album to obsess over. That irrepressible feeling when you’re young and you find something you love; you can’t help but absorb its essence and peak around every corner, looking for secrets. Phantom Spell gave me that again.

Progressive rock is by nature a “flights of fancy” genre, for better or for worse. You don’t put on Yes or Emerson, Lake & Palmer for lean, gritty realism; you put them on because you want to be whisked into an airy realm of wiggly synths and extended, extraterrestrial diversions. Driving to work I would play Heather & Hearth and disassociate from traffic entirely, my mind getting lost in its analog warmth. The reviewer brain switched off and the enjoyer brain kicked on. This is a special album, fit for casual consumption but intended for rapt immersion.

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8. SPECIES – CHANGELINGS

Theme #1 returns with slot #8. Riffs, more of ’em. A whole dang doodle of ’em. And not just guitars! Bass riffs, too! What a world, what a humdinger of a world we share, huh?

My mind’s-eye image of Species is thus – three robed and bespectacled wizards huddle ’round each other within what appears to be an unfinished basement. The walls are lined with tomes of old, and interspersed between the shelves hang curling posters of sinister bands now long defunct. The three have been here a great while, conjuring strange tones, pounding out mystical rhythms, intoning in strange tongues, until, after many years of divination, they unlock the object of their sorcery – Changelings.

The standard blueprint of thrash is well-worn, familiar. You could catch a glimpse of it in your peripheral and still be able to draw it from memory. That’s what makes Species so exciting; you know what to expect as far as essential components, but you do NOT know how clever and off-kilter these cats are going to get with it. Even in the most “standard” sections, there’s something happening that colors the scenery and steals the eye, ahem, ear, be it an elegant little bass riff propping up the guitar or an unexpected harmonic transition. Species speak in an age-old language but in a dialect that’s ever so spicy.

Changelings is the “band’s band” album of the year, without a doubt.  The chemistry is red-hot and the songs are packed to the gills with interesting twists. To get pedantically visual, if we are assessing the Venn diagram of “natural band interplay” and “compositional shrewdness”, sir, I’m sorry but there’s only one circle here. I paid for two.

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7. CEA SERIN – THE WORLD OUTSIDE

Progressive metal in 2025 has lost me. At some point in the last 10-15 years, the genre moved in a direction with which I do not identify. The djent movement arrived, start-stop, irregular rhythms became de rigeur, impeccably-coifed clean vocalists soared their hearts out, and all the while I sat on the sidelines, wondering what happened to this little alcove I had so adored in my younger years.

The World Outside, like an attentive Little League coach, plucked me off the bench and shoved me back on the court. So many of the elements of progressive metal that I admire are present: complex, YET STILL FUNCTIONALLY MELODIC, rhythm guitar work, a narrative arc that works both lyrically and is illustrated by the musical pacing of the album, and of course solos, solos, solos. Flash abounds, yes, but it is in service to the whole.

Above all, I can tell Cea Serin imbue their compositions with a dose of much-needed humanity. This genre can be cold, sterile, machine-like in the way the DAW directs the action, like you’re listening to Skynet conduct and perform its own material. The World Outside is warm-blooded and powerful. I hope this is a harbinger of where progressive metal is headed, or perhaps to where it is returning.

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6. FLOATING – HESITATING LIGHTS

Hesitating Lights continually blipped on and off my radar this year. There was the initial “what…was that?” listen, followed by the “OK, I think I get it, but let’s go back in” round. After a handful or so more listens I settled on “I don’t know what this is and I WON’T know what this is but it rips. Case closed”.

Genre is atomizing at an unquantifiably quick rate. Aspiring and latent musicians worldwide now have access to both A) all of the music that’s ever been recorded, and B) an unprecedented ease of the DIY recording process. I shouldn’t be surprised Hesitating Lights exists; the reasons why are evident all around us. What I AM surprised by is how fucking deft the splicing of disparate sounds is. This is some very heavy yet very spindly material. It’s harsh, it’s catchy, it’s light, it’s dark. It’s Floating – slip into their dimension before the portal closes.

(The perennially handsome and sublimely knowledgeable Zach Duvall wrote more and gooder words regarding this one. Click the link below for some bona fide sashaying from a worldwide hoss.)

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5. GLORIOUS DEPRAVITY – DEATH NEVER SLEEPS

I, a perennial dumb dummy, said this about my number 5 pick back in (VERY pleased I could reuse the first fourteen words of this entry from last year) October for the full press review:

“This is not the kind of death metal that requires unending, whiplash variations to maintain interest. This IS the kind of death metal that will use every ounce of meat it has to rearrange your face into new and unanticipated forms.”

If that makes a boink of sense to you then why haven’t you checked this record out yet, hmm? I wrote that nonsense last Halloween for Death’s sake! (the self-plagiarism is over. It’s all over.)

Death Never Sleeps is the most fun record on this list, and DEFINITELY the most fun of the remaining entries. Oh, you asked for Moore, Doug? Here he is! Again! You want thunderous chugs and gnashing blasts? Right here, stupid! You want a 34-minute avalanche of no-bullshit, burly bruiser death metal? My tandem bike’s got two seats and I’m headed for that bloody chalice. You in? Ideally you’re in front since you’re bigger than me.

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4. ZEICRYDEUS – LA GRANDE HERESIE

Listening to La Grande Heresie reminded me of the first time I read Perdido Street Station by China Miéville – it was up to me, having now crept over the threshold into their universe, to orient myself to their strange, unfamiliar rules, and lo, what assailed my ears was kind in its enigmatic attack. Believe it, stranger, for the wonders of Zeicrydeus’ version of “thaumaturgy”, a kind of hybrid between physical science and magic, are a heavy music listener’s delight.

I bring in the idea of magic not just for its handy literary reference point, but for the fact that there truly is an enchanting power to La Grande Heresie. I’m well acquainted with the building blocks, yet the album’s eccentricities act as an uncanny valley, suspending disbelief enough for you to just glimpse the gleam of the ten thousand spears atop the bleeding mountains. When I wasn’t jamming Heather & Hearth this year, I likely had this album on to achieve a similar, but markedly more sinister, effect. The dull, throbbing rage of morning traffic can be tuned to the pitch of the timpani on “Dragonships on the Juurn (Open Wide the Gate of Zeicryde)”, and in a matter of moments you’re engulfed in triumphant, lacerating melodies from lead guitar and lead (no bullshit) bass alike, grinning ear to ear. La Grande Heresie was my extreme metal escape of 2025. Will it be yours in 2026? Queue it up tomorrow, you sure-to-be-hungover sap.

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3. OROMET – THE SINKING ISLE

Lone Watie wrote what might be this publication’s Paragraph of the Year regarding Oromet’s The Sinking Isle. His encapsulation of the magnitude of this work speaks for itself:

“It’s easy to imagine these guys in the mountains, sitting at the edge of a massive outcropping, legs dangling, minds drifting through the beauty beheld to the big questions and round again to what it all means right here right now, lyrics spawned by reflections on the futility of the rat race, riffs born from cloud shadow that makes even the surrounding peaks feel small. People transform in such moments, experience life-changing revelations, often humbling, sometimes daunting, perhaps exhilarating, in any case inspiring as a reminder of life’s great dualities. How fortunate for us that this particular pair of musicians have channeled their experiences into such wonderful art.”

It’s not easy to write a unique, entertaining and/or informative summary of a work of art. It’s especially difficult to act as said work’s sloppy seconds follow-up essay.  To be more grateful, however, it’s a blessing to have such inspiringly talented coworkers. Click the link below if you missed the full review of The Sinking Isle.

All I can say is I love this album. On the Saturday before Christmas this year, while one child was asleep and the other was out of the house, I spent a marvelous 43 minutes sitting in the front room, soaking in this record from beginning to end, feeling completely at peace. It was a grounding moment. Despite my ears and emotions being swept away in the rolling tide of the music, I was able to briefly recognize how lucky I was to even be there in the first place, absorbing this loud, colossal work of funeral doom in a comfortable room on a modest sound system, the windows keeping the cold at bay, waiting for the familial chaos to again come crashing in. The see-saw of serenity and pandemonium, “life’s great duality”, as it were.

In short, Oromet channel big feelings with big sounds. Hmm, I guess I could have just said that.

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2. WEEPING SORES – THE CONVALESCENCE AGONIES

Moore’s Law states that the number of albums that feature Doug Moore in some capacity doubles about every two years. While no one has proven this to be inarguable as fact, no one has also incorrectly attributed this meaning to the actual Moore’s Law. Given these parameters, we can only know two things to be certain:

1. This is the last entry on my list TO feature Doug Moore, and…
2. The Convalescence Agonies is a spectacular album.

The lore behind this sophomore Weeping Sores outing is available within an interview published by Invisible Oranges, should you choose to familiarize yourself. Full enjoyment of The Convalescence Agonies is not dependent on the lore, per se, but adds a great deal to its impact. This is music born of strife, of physical pain and mental anguish. It is a solemn reminder that behind every piece of music you consume is a person or persons channeling themselves into sound. What, then, becomes the output of a person in distress?

Carried by riffs run ragged and raw, The Convalescence Agonies presents like the reanimated corpse of an armored, fallen soldier, dragging its weapon ever forward in pursuit of past enemies. The production is dry, but because of that you can see and feel every moving part within. You can hear the pick drag heavily over the strings. The drums pound and crash as if they’re being recorded in the next room. Annie Blythe’s (her first of two appearances in this here article) cello mourns and sings alike, its tone naked and warm. Everything is utterly unconcealed.

*In 2025, there was no more complete of a personal statement in the world of heavy music than this one. Weeping Sores have transmogrified a prolonged season of weakness and suffering into a towering monument of extreme metal, mighty and declarative.

———————————————————————————————————————–

*The alternate ending to this entry was “I guess you could say Mr. Moore really Doug deep to make this one”, which would have worked as a goofy ending bookend with the beginning, but in the interest of not being an asshole(**) I decided against it.

————————————————————————————————————————**still including this confirms the author IS an asshole

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1. MESSA – THE SPIN

“…Messa are realizing the potential of their constituent pieces. Lead guitarist Alberto has always had the feel of a doomslinger with a closet love of jazz and blues. Sara has always been the moodring, coloring the proceedings to her whim. The rhythm section has always swung heavy, hands low, chin exposed and teeth bared. Together, they have spent three previous albums showing us their chops through one compositional trick or another: adding in new timbres, varying tempos and highlighting key players, but until now it has all felt in service of an experiment (decreasingly so, admittedly). The Spin is the abstract – the presentation of the experiment’s findings neatly packaged into one tight paragraph.”

The Spin ended up quite the darling around the old internet, huh? Back in April when I cheesed out my review, I wouldn’t have predicted it. I obviously loved it and obviously still do, but Messa really must be doing their best Sally Field at the 1985 Oscars about now.

In a year where I became fixated on either guitar heroics or escapist fantasy, The Spin embodies neither. It is a cherished work unto itself and has been the immovable object atop my list for nine months now. Messa took a bold sidestep into the unfamiliar, retained their “improvisation meets deliberateness” core and STILL managed to sound effortlessly confident in their new skin. Ain’t nobody out there lying – The Spin is outstanding. You should probably introduce yourself.

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I didn’t intend to sound so ungrateful in that introduction. Yes, list season is work but life is work, a realization that is hardening more and more each year. I’d much rather “work” ranking the unbelievable amount of new and bitchin’ music that’s lobbed at my head than do any other work which I’m contractually or socially obligated to perform.

What are you looking forward to in 2026? Are you looking forward at all? Do you need some encouragement in order to do so? May I?

• You are presumably a heavy metal fan in the year 2025. Next year will feature more of that, much more, and some will be exceptional. Some might brand itself upon you forever.
• Last Rites will still exist, barring force majeure. That’s fun!
• You could meet the love of your life. You could love the love of your life more than you currently do.
• You will be above ground, and by virtue of your being there you can see, hear, feel, smell, touch and breathe everything that makes our physical reality such a treat.

Until next time, friends.

(read on for some lighter recommendations. close your browser and burn your computer if you hate lighter recommendations.)

LIGHTEN UP FOR ONCE, SHEESH – 8 NONMETALLIC BLASTERS 

Life can’t be all stink faces and rage rampages. YOU need something to take the edge off. YOU need to relax.

In that spirit, here are 8 albums with which to do so, four of which are either very dark and decidedly unrelaxing OR so emotionally taxing that relaxation becomes an intellectual pursuit, impossible to manifest in your current condition. Anyways, happy tootin!

8. Djrum – Under Tangled Silence

Now, I certainly ain’t know nothing about this here fancy e-music, but boy does it tickle my head brain, I tell ya. A virtuosic exploration of piano, percussion, electronics, and a whole host of other unusual elements, Under Tangled Silence is about as hard to explain as it is a delight to listen to. If you’re a fan of piano plinks, percussive plonks or the ever-shifting nature of matter, a dialogue with Djrum will do ya good.

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7. Earl Sweatshirt – Live Laugh Love

I’ve been an Earl fan for most my adult life so any new release is reason to celebrate. Live Laugh Love continues the more relaxed leanings of Sick! and Voir Dire. While I believe my favorite era of his career has come to a close, Earl is undoubtedly the best rapper and lyricist he’s ever been. With age comes wisdom and a dash of mellowing – Live Laugh Love is a breezy, contemplative sojourn (if the cover doesn’t tip that off at all, sonny, you need an optometrist), one well worth delving into if you’re a hip-hop fan.

6. Rosalía – LUX

Motomami didn’t hook me like El Mal Querer did. In fact, Motomami was the point where I realized that perhaps the widely agreed-upon critical assessment of Rosalía was in error, at least insofar as what they liked about her output. With LUX, this trend has unfortunately continued, yet surprisingly this album is still very good and nice! LUX is a relative behemoth of a pop record, with a musical density unrivaled by any of her current contemporaries. Don’t go in expecting a verse-chorus-verse type deal, though – this is an unusual hybrid of latin music, classical and standard pop, and quite unlike anything I’ve ever heard. “Divinize” was one of my top 5 most listened to tracks this year. Check it out for that alone.

5. Clipse – Let God Sort Em Out

Clipse are back, ladies and fellas, and they’ve still got the goods. Cocaine, of course, but also a collection of rough n’ ready tunes! If it weren’t for the utter dominance of billy woods and crew in the remaining selections, this would have been my most-listened to hip-hop album of the year. Nothing fancy, just veteran bars from Pusha-T, the newly resurrected Malice and lethal, icy production from Pharrell. FFO cocaine, selling cocaine, making selling cocaine sound cool, rappers who enunciate, rappers who make enunciating sound cool.

4.  August Fanon & billy woods – gowillog

This one could have crept higher if I had given it more time. gowillog was a surprise release, a remix/reimagining of the also-released-this-year GOLLIWOG, and it’s a stunner in its own right. I’m totally unfamiliar with August Fanon’s output besides this release so I can’t offer any guidance in that regard, but if you enjoy Backwoodz Studio offerings in general I think this will be another stellar pickup for your library. Overall this is a less claustrophobic affair than GOLLIWOG but it glowers menacingly nonetheless, pitting woods’ inimitable world building against some more spacious, even occasionally pretty, beats. Double feature this after my number one pick for a real mindblow.

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3. Armand Hammer – Mercy

It seems like only yesterday I was championing We Buy Diabetic Test Strips. A scant 26 months later Armand Hammer return with Mercy, another collaboration with The Alchemist after 2021’s Haram. How billy woods can release two tremendous albums worth of lyrics is beyond me, but if this is the way he chooses to live I’ll happily bask in his afterglow. Mercy is a bit more restrained and contemplative than I’m used to from Armand Hammer. They haven’t lost their confrontational edge, nor their cutting commentary. It’s more like they are aging and fighting their battles on other, less chaotic fronts. Regardless of my assumptions of their intent, this is an essential hip-hop record in a year of many. Sick cover art too, huh? Dang.

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2. Annie Blythe & Brendon Randall-Myers – Only in the Dark

I believe our own Seth Buttnam is the hero responsible for alerting us other lowlives about this album. Two musicians, one playing a standard-issue orchestral instrument and one manipulating “electronics” are the sole makeup of Only in the Dark, though the outsized emotional toll it takes would lend itself to a much more expansive group. I don’t necessarily want to spoil any specifics of the music; preconceived notions or predicted passages would only lessen the significance of the material. If you can absorb this record in its entirety over headphones, from beginning to end and ideally free of distraction, then you’re ready. The first time I tried I wasn’t ready. Thank heavens I gave it a second shot.

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1. billy woods – GOLLIWOG

Another year, another billy woods release, another shoe-in for my number one non-metal album. It’s unfair at this point but maybe fairness isn’t real, and further maybe “fairness” is a ruse concocted by a shadowy upper caste, intended to give the gutterfolk some hope.

Maps was a jolly romp compared to GOLLIWOG. Where the former was globetrotting and introspective, the latter is almost maniacally one-note. Any escapism there is to be had is fleeting, used to illustrate whatever homegrown darkness billy is interested in examining. Lyrical density is a given – billy is as pure a poet as they come, after all – but what is most surprising about GOLLIWOG is how relentless it is. Initially I contended with it the same way I contended with Earl Sweatshirt’s Some Rap Songs; the first 2-3 complete listens were more a grappling match than a focused appreciation. Once the shock wore off it was easier to put it through the mental sieve and see what flecks of precious material came through.

I don’t know what to expect anymore when recommending billy’s material to people so for the most part I’ve stopped. To be as fart-sniffing as I possibly can – you either get it or you don’t. You love it or you never come back. Honestly, pitching this album is more difficult than pitching Unbirth. SO, finally, should you listen to it? Please fill out the below questionnaire:

1. Do you enjoy hip-hop (Y, N)? If you circled Y, continue to #2.
2. Are you partial to impressive lyrics (Y, N)? If you circled Y continue to #3.
3. Do you find the myriad of injustices and horrors present in modern American society to be hideous enough to warrant listening to a 52-minute allegorical treatise (Y, N)? If you circled Y, continue on and click the link below.

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Remember earlier when I said I’d do a list of 50 next year? I’d like to use this opportunity to publicly deny that claim.

Goodbye, and good luck!

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A long time ago, I took my kids on a trip and we stayed by a lake. We were out on that lake a lot and spent most of one day in the shallow area just off the shore (called the littoral zone, I’ve learned), my kids up to their waists and me lying prone and scooting myself along with my arms. My son found a terrific rock, which inspired my daughter to find a terrific rock of her own, and soon we were determined to find as many terrific rocks as we could.

Whenever one of us found a rock that piqued our interest, we’d confer with the others and a consensus was reached to keep the rock or toss it out into the lake so it wouldn’t be accidentally refound. Kept rocks had to be capital T terrific, but there were no specific rules about shape, size, or weight, or color, brilliance, or fanciness. All a rock required to be kept was that we agreed it was terrific and, in the end, it was nearly always interestingness that won the day. We ended up with a hundred or so rocks wrapped up in t-shirts like makeshift bindles, which we used to lug them back to the cabin.

I don’t think we’d made any plans to take the rocks home with us, but when it was time to pack for the return trip, the kids didn’t have to work real hard to convince me to load the whole pile into my luggage. And they have sat in our home ever since, resting in some nice decorative vases.

Most of the time, the rocks just sit there unnoticed. Once in a while, though, I’ll catch myself stopping and looking at them. This rock or that will grab my attention and some specific memory will struggle against time, sometimes flashing to a clear snapshot, sometimes brushing hazy silhouettes into a misty gray background before wisping away like blown smoke. Always, though, a general kind of whole body memory forms in that moment, an amalgamation of the sensory experiences and feelings of that day, all the joy and excitement of our shared adventure, and I love that so much.

Rarer, and magnitudes better, is when one or both of my kids stop at the rocks and look and remember. They recall and share details I’d forgotten or maybe never even noticed. They might remember a certain rock’s pattern and its discovery or discussion, or maybe just reflect warmly on “the best day.” We talk and go back together in a sort of symbiotic reminiscence.

There have been occasions, too, when we’ve had visitors who’ve noticed and asked about the rocks, sometimes because they seem unusual, but usually because they have their own memories of collecting rocks from a lake or river or along a trail. “I had a rock just like that,” and then a story about their own adventure. In those stories, we find connection, common experiences through which we can relate, regardless of any of that other shit that gets in the way of people relating. It doesn’t matter that our rocks aren’t exactly the same or that we remember them from different experiences.

Those rocks mean something very special to me that isn’t exactly like what they mean to my kids or to my friends and neighbors, but through them, each time we remember together, we find our relationships reflected and reinforced, and I think that’s pretty neat. In fact, if it weren’t for the memories, those rocks would mean nothing at all.

***

I listened to an awful lot of heavy metal music this year, same as every year. You’ll see that some of the albums listed here didn’t make many other lists, if any. Others will already be familiar, as they’ve garnered a good bit of discussion in the heavy metal world, including in the bustling Last Rites newsroom. In any case, I hope you find something to connect with. And maybe share something back in the comments.

Heavy Metal Favorites

20. UMULAMAHRI – LEARNING THE SECRETS OF ACID

A big part of what makes music and heavy metal specifically so much fun is the mystery. You can think you’ve heard it all before and still be leveled by some heretofore unimagined thing, even when you thought you’d deciphered all the signs. Umulamahri. Okay, Morbid Angel. And Umulamahri is: Andrew Hawkins – Guitar, Synth, Samples; Doug Moore – Lyrics & vocals; Kévin Paradis on drums. Hmmm, synths and samples, no bass, a different kind of death metal then. Learning The Secrets Of Acid. Ah, gonna be trippy, nice. That cover art. Oooooooh, it’s gonna be soooo trippy, and scary. Song titles like, “Rot Shall Rule the Oily Voids.” Nihilistic horror, got it. Lyrics like, Now that I have borne witness / I pray to be left behind, and the entirety of “Bursting With Life’s True Fruit.” Fuuuuuuu… but alright, I think I’m ready. Hit play.

Aaaaaand what the fuck is this?

It is awesome though.

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19. CHANGELING – CHANGELING

It’s hard to get me excited for much in the ol’ Progressive/Technical Death Metal realm these days, but Changeling did it by maximizing all the best aspects of the subgenre with an unbeatable mix of creativity and enthusiasm. It was my buddy Hotz’s review that pinged my radar with observations that this is like tech death for Devin Townsend fans and, “Despite the focus on firing a million notes at the listener, Changeling isn’t afraid of creating a vocal hook with some harsh cleans during a chorus that gives you something to grab onto.” And, objectively, he’s probably right to opine that it’s too long and a little over-indulgent, but when the worst thing about an awesome thing is too much of that thing, I’m all about getting down with that thing.

• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp

18. SACRED – FIRE TO ICE

In a subgenre that has come to be known for excess and overindulgence, Sacred created one of the best power metal albums of the year without any of that. Fire to Ice is great because it makes the most of the fundamental elements, from strong sound and rousing melody to fist-pumping riffs and sweet, sweet leads, and then blasts it to the starlit horizon with heroic epic spirit. That’s it. Just kickass power metal made the way they made it back when most of us were still just calling it heavy metal.

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17. SOMETIME IN FEBRUARY – WHERE MOUNTAINS HIDE

With so many of them out there, it’s pretty tough for an instrumental metal act to get my attention these days; frankly, so few stand out against the rest. As any lover of music can attest, though, the live setting is the great equalizer, genre saturation be damned. Sometime In February’s set at ProgPower USA this year proved the point, revealing they’ve got the chops to deliver heavy metal power with virtuosic grace, emotionally compelling and technically strong, and as cinematic as it is precise.

• Bandcamp

16. ANCIENT DEATH – EGO DISSOLUTION

Ego Dissolution is mostly mid tempo death metal that somehow feels like it’s whipping and cracking along, which comes down to strong writing and a rhythm section that’s particularly dialed in. Even when Derek Moniz picks up the bpm with bassist Jasmine Alexander, the battery shapes the energy to lurch and surge like hailstone waves. [And] there’s a number of ways that Ancient Death builds on the wonderfully vigorous foundation laid down by the rhythm section. First, Jerry Witunsky and Ray Brouwer (the bitchin guitarist, not The Dead Kid from Stand By Me; that was Ray Brower) bring a seemingly endless supply of killer death metal riffs and melody that absolutely brim with the spirit of epic and traditional heavy metal. Second, that spirit shines even more brightly in their leads and the way they make them.

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15. KATOAJA – WHAT WE WITNESS

The range of references conjured by What We Witness is so wide then as to emphasize the uniqueness of Katoaja’s voice even as it rings familiar in whatever sphere of the prog metal world lights up for a particular listener. Katoaja gets clever, for sure, but in service of songs that engage and envelop the willing listener and sometimes even manage to surprise. Sounds, textures, arrangements feel fully and seamlessly integrated so that the album flows effortlessly through the kind of rich and dynamic soundscape expected from progressive music; again, a modern design that honors the old school.

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14. STYGIAN RUIN – STYGIA II: ANCIENT AND ARCANE

Stygian Ruin doesn’t sound like much on paper: one-person project plying black metal laced with ambient music and run through lo-fi filters. Noting that this black metal has terrific riffs, this ambient means the dungeon synth variety, and that the songs are inspired by Robert E. Howard’s Conan lore helps, for sure, but still doesn’t do it justice. What makes it make sense to me is that listening to this music has the same kind of appeal as reading comic books done in the old newsprint style with basic colors and dots; it has the capacity to transport the observer to another universe, one made of equal parts escapist fantasy and nostalgia.

• Bandcamp

13. CKRAFT – UNCOMMON GROUNDS

Now it’s true that the very first thing to notice about Ckraft is the accordion and, as such, odds shoot through the roof that potential listeners will casually dismiss the band as a gimmick, especially when they see there’s also a tenor sax. But there’s a proper rock-and-roll backing band, too, that happens to specialize in the heavy metal variation as proficiently as they do the jazz fusion variation. Founder and accordionist extraordinaire Charles Kieny’s composition skills enable the construction of songs from a bin of pieces that just wouldn’t occur to most folks, including melodic and harmonic techniques derived from Gregorian chant. Pulled off competently as it is, that sort of integration is remarkable in itself, but these players make Kieny’s music with such natural passion that it transcends the crafting of it. Put most simply, the resulting output is something like Meshuggah meets Mahavishnu Orchestra, or King Crimson feat. Tosin Abasi. And of course, that is woefully inadequate. Please listen.

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12. WEEPING SORES – THE CONVALESCENCE AGONIES

The Convalescence Agonies is a special record. It occupies a strange place between death/doom and progressive rock that I’m not sure I’ve encountered anywhere else, which is saying something in 2025. In my network of music associations, the node that lights up brightest is Giant Squid, which is mostly (but not entirely) down to the cello, deftly written into the heaviness around it. At its core, though, The Convalescence Agonies is just a wonderful example of music as metaphor; the experience of injury and the ensuant healing process described through song as a sort of crucible. Though it’s surely at least somewhat unique for each listener, for me the drums draw out a baseline tension of bone-deep discomfort; riffs represent struggle, weighing down and pushing against; lead guitar as surging, searing bolts of pain; vocals personify agony, the existential questions of why and how; the cello plays woe, self-pity, and desperate longing for relief. And, critically, all of these at times reaching the remote light of fragile hope.

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11. SPECIES – CHANGELINGS

It’s almost a shoo in for me when a band makes an album that reminds me of a band(s) I love even when it doesn’t sound like it. Species reminds me of Voivod and Obliveon, which isn’t a real stretch for anyone passingly familiar with the proggy technical thrash these bands play. And bands like Watchtower where, even among all the technical twists and turns, bass and drums get as much spotlight as guitar and sometimes even more. But they also remind me of any number of eclectic prog bands, writing songs that cover wide inter-genre ground around that radiating technical thrash core, bringing in technique from whatever style is best suited to the song, from traditional metal to thrash and spacerock to folk. The result is a fully fledged tech thrash adventure of aliens and science gone awry that keeps the listener up front and center for the full 40 minutes.

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10. CHERCÁN – CHERCÁN

There’s not many albums I’ve listened to more this year than Chercán. It’s got a moodiness about it that initially says “modern prog,” suggesting bands like Soen and Klone and all that implies, but it ain’t that. Like many modern heavy prog bands from South America, Chile’s Chercán bring a full complement of regional and ethnic accoutrements to the stage to create a sound that sounds like nothing else, and then they take it to the next level by layering it all through a wonderfully dynamic fusion filter with smart use of keyboards, strings, an array of percussion, and active, integral saxophone. Chercán is dark and heavy, for sure, but the wide range of tone, texture, and style make it feel exotic, like a mysterious adventure. An immensely accomplished debut album of avant-garde heavy prog. (also, the little hero pictured here is a chercán, you’re welcome)

• Bandcamp

9. ROTHADÁS – TÖVISKERT… A KÍSÉRTÉS ÖRÖK ÉRZETE… LIDÉRCHARANG

Another surefire way to flip my bip is to perfectly match your music and album art. In the world of death/doom, I’m thinking of albums with active art like Asphyx’s Deathhammer and Never Cross the Dead by Hooded Menace, both bands being fair starting points for ideas about Hungary’s Rothadás. Rothadás is Hungarian for rot, and Töviskert… a kísértés örök érzete… lidércharang translates to Thorn Garden… the eternal feeling of temptation… a ghostly melody, which illuminates that weird little ritual in the cover art, and offers some insight to the band’s approach: ugly and scary and strangely beautiful in turns. This is the death/doom way, of course, and Rothadás doesn’t pretend to be inventing anything, but like all great death/doom, the payoff on Töviskert is immense every time it crests to barely contained cacophony, rumbling the world as if we’ve arrived at the inevitable end.

• Bandcamp

8. LUNAR – TEMPORA MUTANTUR

In Tempora Mutantur, Lunar offers their answer to one of the great disappointments of prog metal, which is that an effective blend of progressive rock and heavy metal is so very rare (this being categorically different from what has become Prog Metal). To be fair, of course it is, these subgenres of rock and roll having drifted so far apart over the years. But then again, there was a time when they occupied the same virtual space and this is where Lunar finds focus. Tempora Mutantur sounds like founder Alex Bosson wrote the songs with almost no thought to styles, assigning instruments later to the parts they’re best suited to (it is worth noting that Alex’s songs have always owed a heavy debt to Opeth and some of that remains here, though less). The core sound comes from guitar, synthesizers, bass, and drums, of course, but meticulous songwriting makes room for saxophone, trumpet, trombone, and tuba, harmonica, and cello, as well as some incredible vocal harmonies reminiscent of Gentle Giant and Haken. The result is a terrifically eclectic album that incorporates just about every mode of metal while critically leaving the classic progressive rock structure intact and celebrating its playful eccentricities.

• Bandcamp

7. REFLECTION – THE BATTLES I HAVE WON

Opening salvo, “Only The Swords Survive,” is an absolute burner, ripping out the gate with barbarous fire. It’s just a terrifically written song, built to be swift and feel deadly in the way the sword fells its foe. Now, metalheads everywhere have suffered the disappointment of an amazing opening track that’s followed by a slew of WTFs. The Battles I Have Won inflicts no such indignity. All nine songs across all 43 minutes of Battles are of top quality and reflect to varying degrees all of the best things about that opening track. Pavlantis is the primary songwriter and he manages impressive variety across the album in terms of style, from traditional metal to doom and power, each variation nonetheless imparting that rousing triumphant spirit of epic metal, especially remarkable given that no track exceeds five-and-a-half minutes.

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6. DISSONA – RECEPTOR

Ultimately, Receptor is a major win. This is dark, dynamic, progressive metal that defies the confines of what even that unconventional subgenre tends to impose. Through 11 songs over nearly an hour, countless variations on the core style even within songs, a diverse array of atmospheric embellishments, and all the ebbs and flows and twists and turns of first class musical storytelling, Receptor never loosens its grip. And Dissona achieves this with a clear confidence, making the most of their many and varied strengths, not the least of which is that uncompromising drive to make kick ass heavy metal.

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5. MAJESTICA – POWER TRAIN

Tommy Johansson is a rocker. Full stop. Rock and roll pulses through his veins. Yes, of course, I know he plays power metal but it’s the way he plays, in whatever band, that makes me notice he has the heart of a rock and roll star, absolutely dedicated to his craft and with an impossible vitality that just screams, “I live for this!” Way back in early January, I looked forward to the new album: Majestica’s is power metal that shines like silver sunlight, featuring Tommy’s warm, exuberant voice piercing gray clouds to tell fantastic tales of heavy metal warriors and their exploits, and paying tribute to their forebears. Tommy’s lead guitar generates as much positive energy and the band reflects it, too, down to the bass, which pulses like Polaris in the night sky. And even in their most ambitious moments they make it obvious that fun is always priority number one. and …for those of us who still embrace power metal that shines brightly and thaws our frosty cockles, “Power Train” bodes well for the rest of the journey. It’s nearly impossible to know just how an artist will perform against forecasts, especially those lofty expectations of the doting fan, but Majestica absolutely killed it in 2025. Unparalleled power metal joy.

• We Have The Power
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4. WIZARDS – БЕСКОНЕЧНЫЕ БЕЗДНЫ СКИТАНИЙ

It translates to Endless Abysses Of Wanderings and I can’t think of a more appropriate or enticing way to describe the music therein. Russia’s Wizards features Kostya of thrash sorcerers, Mystic Storm, on guitars, synths, and vocals, and Alexander on drums and other percussion. Their bandcamp genre cloud looks like this:

and their MA genre tags look like Symphonic/Doom/Heavy Metal/Ambient, which gives you everything you need to know what they sound like except no it doesn’t because they’re kind of all of that and none. Endless Abysses has both the production values and the acid-washed-denim-and-white-high-tops spirit of the gnarliest early NWOBHM but, of course, the songs are of the right here and now so it feels like Dying Victims Productions got Bill and Ted-ed back to 1983 and signed the neighborhood D&D party, who then promptly ensorcelled the entirety of the underground. It’s so convincing that I’m sitting here wondering if I might have just triggered a visit from the timecops.

• Bandcamp

3. OROMET – THE SINKING ISLE

Oromet makes songs on sophomore album, The Sinking Isle, about life and loss and dying and the impact of these on people and the world. As an ultra-niche form, most readers will already know what to expect from the music in the most basic sense: mostly a minimalist affair of big, slow, doom with deep, cavernous vocals howling about loss and its attendant misery, sometimes shaded with fragile hope. To make the new funeral doom album compelling, then, Oromet reached outside itself, careful not to step so far as to lose its identity. Aguilar and Hills widen the scope of The Sinking Isle beyond hope to wonder and awe of the impossible beauty of life in nature, from earth to cosmos. The deep symbolism of Oromet’s art is an echo of the band and its players and their lives. At just a little more than an hour from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Sacramento offers access to pristine places where one can immerse oneself in nature. The songs of The Sinking Isle resound with the emotion of that kind of experience, the grandeur of big sky and 10,000 foot vistas.

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2. ANCHORITE – REALM OF RUIN

Some others came close, but Realm Of Ruin is easily my most spun album of 2025. I don’t know if I just missed it, but there didn’t seem to be a ton of great epic doom this year, and yet I’m willing to bet that Anchorite’s sophomore album would have fared just as well if there had been. Off the top, Leo Stivala (of Malta’s peerless epic doom band, Forsaken) at the helm means top tier vocal melodies belted to the sky with heroic strength. The other members of the band also play (or have played) together in other projects and that shared history shines through in exquisitely tight performance across the full 54+ minutes. And with all due respect to the invaluable contributions of the battery, at the pinnacle of those performances lies a bevy of glorious, impassioned, magical leads, including one from the incomparable Michael Denner. Fold all that glory into eight immaculately constructed songs coursing through a variety of tempos and intensities, from plodding and ponderous to galloping-into-battle and you’ve got a most-spun album for most anybody calling themselves an epic doom devotee. Also, earworm of the year award to the title track’s irresistible chorus.

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1. PHANTOM SPELL – HEATHER & HEARTH

Way back in the olden days, when heavy metal was mostly just a clever way of describing some of that rock and roll music the kids listened to at their motorcycle clubs, musicians told long and adventurous stories with their songs. They broke the rules of radio to expand the palette with progressive rock and folk to paint scenes of epic journeys and heroic exploits, but also of love and romantic notions, as if realizing the absolute boon that modern electric music offered to recount anew those tales as old as time. Phantom Spell’s second album, Heather & Hearth harks back to those halcyon days of rock and roll fantasy and lore. These songs are so utterly authentic that it’s virtually impossible to avoid being swept up into not only the music but the stories they tell, with only the end of the record to bring the listener back. Hands down the most engrossing album of the year.

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Non-Metal Favorites

The non-metal music I spun the most this year is overwhelmingly characterized by gentleness. I don’t recall making a conscious choice to take a ride on the mild side but, looking back, it was obvious. There’s definitely energy and the essential tension of dynamic music, especially in the prog rock but, even there, the shapes tend to be rounded, the courses smooth. I don’t want to overthink it, but it makes sense in light of the harshness and callousness that have poisoned the air in modern times. It’s true that so much wonderful music takes effort, burns energy in the processing of it to build a lasting connection. Nothing wrong with that at all and, in fact, something I really value. Each of the albums below, on the other hand, presents itself freely and openly, adding energy like a visit with a kindly friend on an otherwise gloomy day.

Julian & Roman Wasserfuhr – Safe Place

There are moments on the Wasserfuhr brothers’ most recent album for ACT that make me feel like a small child. That is, they feel safe. The trio of piano, trumpet, cello (and sometimes sax), plays with a subtle whimsy, as if to suggest that gentle playfulness is the natural way. Safe Place is also deeply emotional, projecting the sort of raw honesty that lies behind eyes squeezed shut by an engrossing melody.

• Bandcamp

Benjamin Lackner – Spindrift

The cast assembled by Benjamin Lackner for this quintet (piano, trumpet, tenor, bass, drums) seems intimately attuned to the freedom gained from letting those around you have their space and to fill it as they see fit. When one allows that, one’s own voice more likely finds the comfortable flow to become a part, as opposed to an addition. And when we all do that, magic is made.

• ECM Records

Mathias Eick – Lullaby

The second album here to feature trumpeter, Mathias Eick (he’s on Spindrift, too), this time as leader. The quartet for Lullaby (trumpet, piano, bass, drums) plays so gently as to epitomize the titular song. And, like a lullaby, these songs are warm and embracing. No player extends themselves beyond the song, but rather each fills the space around the others, gently, to swathe the listener in restorative calm.

• ECM Records

Fulguromatic – Fulguromatic

Fulguromatic features a weird kind of kitchen sink prog rock, which is to say you’ll find a little bit of a lot of different things in here from classic prog to zeuhl. There’s a gentle but spirited jazz coursing through it all that imparts a sense of whimsy and levity. And yet still, in the context of chipper propulsive beats and oddly processed vocals, flute rock melodies make it feel like Canterbury’s strange cousin to krautrock. Flautrock? Anyway, maybe the most unique album I heard in 2025 and definitely the most surprisingly awesome.

• Bandcamp

Discipline – Breadcrumbs

Just a masterful reset for the Detroit neo-prog luminaries. Still symphonic in design and dynamic, just as reverent as forward-thinking, and brimming with melancholy cynicism as ever, now incorporating a delicate jazz/fusion latticework and tempered with quiet thoughtfulness to envelop the willing listener like a prismatic cocoon.

• Bandcamp

Malabriega – Frippada Andaluza

Eclectic prog folk from Andalusia, Spain, that ventures into uncharted waters as eagerly as it celebrates traditional regional sounds. Frippada Andaluza makes excellent use, for example, of post-rock atmosphere and crescendo dynamics while, at the same time, featuring Spanish guitar and cante flamenco vocal style at the forefront. These songs benefit most from outstanding songwriting, of course, but that reach from a traditionally grounded foundation to more contemporary stylings feels brave and special. Inspired me to explore Spanish prog rock more fully, for sure.

• Bandcamp

Lars Fredrik Frøislie – Gamle Mester/Quattro Racconti

Wobbler’s keyboardist gets a twofer in 2025. First, he does it all himself for the second time.

Gamle Mester is another love letter to the golden age of prog with that distinctive Norwegian flair and Lars’ passion for adventurous storytelling, a little grander this time and more polished.

Second, Quattro Racconti is his first solo album, Fire Fortellinger, rereleased, this time with vocals by Museo Rosenbach’s Stefano “Lupo” Galifi, as Lars had envisioned originally.

In each case: classic symphonic prog worship nonpareil.

• Bandcamp

Karfagen – Omni

There may be no busier artist in the prog world than Antony Kalugin. And I’m certain no one is more excited about the work they do. He absolutely beams when he shares his progress reports, pride in the product surpassed only by appreciation for his fans. All that love spills over in the 21st(!) Karfagen album, Omni, a deeply joyful symphonic prog adventure; perhaps his best work ever.

• Bandcamp

IQ – Dominion

UK neo-prog titans triumph yet again. The only surprise here is how this band (truckin’ now for 44 years!), keeps making albums that objectively do the same over again and yet intrigue and immerse as if they’ve broken pristine ground. I can’t explain it and don’t care to try.

• Bandcamp

Steven Wilson – The Overview

Ol’ Steven’s been at it a long time and traveled many paths in pursuit of his muse(s). The Overview finds him back where it all began, with a loving nod to the sounds and styles that first inspired his journey. Two side-long tracks that focus much more on the atmospheric (read: Floydian) and cinematic aspects of Wilson’s work than the rock and, more than anything else, just really feel like a nostalgic trip, very warm and personal.

• Official

Bjørn Riis – Fimbulvinter

I spent a lot of time with this album this year; it’s a great road trip record. The formula is relatively set for Bjørn now, with moody, atmospheric, heavy crossover prog the order of the day. And, as always (and unapologetically) there are echoes of Pink Floyd, though less here. The thing about Fimbulvinter is its absolute vulnerability. Riis’s honesty about common yet still stigmatized mental health struggles is poignantly conveyed through the music and made relatable through his lyrics.

• Bandcamp

Atomic Time – Subsounds

Music is full of great ideas on paper that flop on record. Subsounds is an amazing instance of when one of those actually works. While no words will adequately convey what’s happening here, it’s helpful to think of neo-prog songs with an atmospheric sort of spacerock style that flows through loooooooong stretches of supremely engineered ambient music, and a compositional approach that locks the listener into every niche, fold, and expanse along the way.

• Bandcamp

Thanks for being here, buddy. You’re the best.

The post Best of 2025: Lone Watie – Hey There. Look At These Nice Rocks. appeared first on Last Rites.

More than likely, you will agree with that sentiment when you finish reading this rather unhinged best-of list. My favorites below include an album where the guitars are replaced with piano, one where the bass is replaced with synthesizers, another that’s essentially free-jazz death metal, a couple of doomy sorts with cello, a grind album with saxophone, and a whole bunch of other nonsense to convince you I probably need a wellness check.

Normally, this upfront is reserved for pontificating about the previous 12 months to help weave a tale that ends here, where I try to identify a throughline. To be perfectly blunt, my brain is too close to flatlining for that. I have no justifiable complaint to levy. I live a good life. I’m just…tired. If you’re a regular here, you’ll notice I’m not including my usual roundup of non-2025 favorites or my rankings for video games I beat this year because I barely have it in me to do what is already below. So, let’s dispense with too much more blathering and get to the good stuff.

I do, however, still need a theme, he said, ignoring his previous statement and continuing to blather. As I started typing, my wandering mind went to food and how so often reviews lean into metaphors of the edible. Then I remembered that I really dislike the term mouthfeel. Did we all forget that the word “texture” exists and is perfectly acceptable to use? I’m not particularly interested in knowing how things feel in your mouth; that’s between you and your porno dentist. Anyhoo, my theme is brainfeel because we might as well let this happen. Each album on the full-length list will be accompanied by a descriptor for its brainfeel, aka what it’ll do to your noggin meat when you hit play.

Enjoy! Or don’t. I’m not your supervisor.

BRAIN TICKLERS (20-11)

20. BYONOISEGENERATOR – Subnormal Dives

Brainfeel: All the synapses firing at unsustainable rates

No reason not to kick this off with nonsense. BYONOISEGENERATOR plays a self-proclaimed genre of jazzgrind, and, quite frankly, that’s an apt descriptor. Subnormal Dives is nearly equal parts techy, blitzing grind and lovely jazz soundscapes. Don’t fret, though, Sh3la’s saxophone is also used for evil as it toots in at random moments or gets violently assaulted like any other instrument should be on a grind album. At nearly 40 minutes, it’s a bit of an endurance test, but chances are you haven’t heard anything else quite like this in 2025.

• Found Sounds & Frig You Friday
• Bandcamp

19. Crisis Actor – Long Live The New Flesh

Brainfeel: Like taking a Chuck Taylor to the dome

In opposition to the above, Crisis Actor plays a much more straightforward brand of grind across all 15 minutes of Long Live The New Flesh. In particular, this quintet wants everyone to remember grindcore’s punk roots. Shout-alongs, sped-up punk riffs, and short bursts of energy. This was tailor-made for playing in abandoned buildings right before running from the cops.

• Missing Pieces
• Bandcamp

18. Asymmetric Universe – A Memory And What Came After

Brainfeel: There’s a computer virus running through your sulci

Hi, hello, back to the weird we go. Asymmetric Universe is technically a duo that plays about 10 instruments each, but there are nine additional studio and guest musicians contributing everything from drum and guitar leads to trumpet, viola, and beyond. In practice, A Memory And What Came After is like a heavier Cloudkicker, focusing less on atmosphere and more on jamming and crunch. We have the tight off-kilter rhythm work of Animals As Leaders accompanied by searing leads, jazz breaks and moments that are downright funky. Anytime you think you have it figured out, no, you don’t.

• Bandcamp

17. Sulfuric Cautery – Killing Spree

Brainfeel: Seeing red again

Killing Spree is absolutely an album that’s trying to murder you. Playing this album is likely to cause profuse bleeding from every orifice in your head. What we have here is 22 minutes of relentless pinging snare violence, alligator gurgling, and barely legible guitar parts. Somehow, these lunatics even managed to string together a song that pushes close to nine minutes in the form of “Millions of Slobbering Rats Devouring Their Blasted Out Brains.” That’s not how this style is supposed to work. Oh yeah, Sulfuric Cautery also put out a demo, a split, and another full-length this year. Dayton, Ohio, hates your ears.

• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp

16. Abhorrent Expanse – Enter The Misanthropocene

Brainfeel: A full colony of fire ants gnawing through your dura mater

This album is fully improvised. That’s probably all many of you need to know to make a decision about whether or not this interests you. If you’re still here, you’re in for a good time, so long as your idea of a good time is chaotic death metal fused with erratic moments of drone, strangely plucked notes, uncomfortable space, and a myriad of instruments that I’m not even sure what they are. The Bandcamp page says they used sounds from a door hinge, for god’s sake. What makes this kind of music so engaging is that every listen will bring something fresh to the foreground that you didn’t notice previously. Sure, it’s chaotic, but it’s surprisingly digestible.

• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp

15. Dissona – Receptor

Brainfeel: All the moods

I was listening to this in the car with my wife, and she said, “This music is so moody.” Yes, yes it is. What makes that all the more impressive is that Dissona’s take on progressive metal strikes several, often competing, moods simultaneously without feeling incongruent. For my money, a big part of that is David Dubenic’s singing. He’ll sound vulnerable but powerful in one moment and then weave in a pleading pain that leads to a glimpse of rage and triumph the next. The accompanying music does much the same with a wealth of creativity. Was I expecting a dance club electronic break in the middle of “Incisor?” Hell no, but it totally works. That’s followed by an interlude track that sounds like someone is remixing a sonogram to create a soundtrack for an alien movie. Promptly following is the Big Drama of “It Will Drown,” which might just be my favorite song. Receptor has drilled deep into my brain and will be living there for a long time.

• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp

14. Uulliata Digir – Uulliata Digir

Brainfeel: Fight or Flight. We’re in danger

Uulliata Digir is the debut for a Polish sextet hellbent on creating the sonically terrifying. It may not seem that way at first when “Myrthys” starts. The song steadily repeats these clean but mildly haunting notes, and the drums start to pummel in an ominous manner. Michał Sosnowski’s voice comes across like he’s muttering a curse from across a sacrificial fire and then Julita Dąbrowska shows up. She sounds like she is slowly being possessed and the demon is starting to share its tale. Her ability to build up the song is incredible. A windswept noir story’s trumpet fades in to add to the tension and Sosnowski goes full-death metal. After the five-minute mark, Dąbrowska starts absolutely wailing before a calm resumes, but you know the storm is yet to come. How about some layered haunting chanting? Sure, I don’t need to sleep ever again. Then, halfway through the song, everything ratchets up by about 100% and the song explodes in a state of terror, with Dąbrowska’s vocals being particularly agonized. The whole album operates like an auditory exorcism. Uulliata Digir is not an easy listen, but it’s a damn memorable one.

• Bandcamp

13. Ancient Death – Ego Dissolution

Brainfeel: Frantic, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick tock (sorry)

Ancient Death knows well when to create space in their music, but even when it’s slowing down, it carries the electrifying energy that matches all the lightning frying eyeballs on the cover. It’s a pretty safe bet that you are a fan of guitar leads if you’re reading this and Ego Dissolution is chock full of really fun ones. Ancient Death plays a no-frills form of death metal, but they absolutely crush it. Considering almost every other album on here is weirder than tits on a frog, you should trust me on that last part.

• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp

12. Floating – Hesitating Lights

Brainfeel: Boosting that elasticity

Floating chose a good name for themselves. The 80s post-rock undercurrent to their music gives it a loose air under its death metal feet. There is a scoot and bop that makes for an odd but functional pairing with the hideousness of Hesitating Lights’ core genre. A song like “Grave Dog” hits with a hearty punch, but the middle of the track has bouncing bass that gives it a somber yet hopeful vibe. This album is like a warm embrace during a rainstorm from someone who’s also crying. There’s comfort in the gloom.

• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp

11. Type Armor Unit – Revolutions In Saecula

Brainfeel: An electric probe straight to the cerebral cortex

A one-man grind band creating a concept album about freedom fighters taking on technofascists certainly grabbed my attention. That classic sci-fi album cover might have you thinking this is some lost prog album from a one-and-done band in the 70s, but it’s actually blistering space grind in the vein of Gridlink. Blistering is the correct word choice because Type Armor Unit is relentless throughout these 29 minutes and layers in hideous noise effects to make your ears beg for a screwdriver that little bit extra.

• Last Rites Review
• Ampwall

BRAIN BUSTERS (10-1)

10. EFFLUENCE – PIANISTIC DISMEMBERMENT

Brainfeel: A stroke

This is unquestionably one of the most insane albums I have heard. Important clarification, not the most insane I’ve heard in 2025, but ever. There is only one person credited with performing on this album and he’s simply listed as Matt. Further credits say the pianos were played by Piano and “No guitars on this album…’cause Piano ate em.” What? Like, really, WHAT?!?

I would say the confusion is immediately cleared up upon spinning Pianistic Dismemberment, because it truly sounds like an eldritch-horror piano consuming a brutal death-metal band, but if that isn’t confusing to you, then I’ll be sure to visit you in the psych ward soon. The vocals are the deepest of Yautja gurgles, the drums are belligerent as hell, and the “guitar” lines sound like a video game car from the Sega Genesis era, except the Genesis is dying. This should be entirely unlistenable, and for all healthy people, it is.

• Best Of 2025 Team List
• Bandcamp

9. HYPOMANIC DAYDREAM – THE YEARNING

Brainfeel: Dissociating and talking to god only to find out he’s actually Mothra

We’re going two-for-two in this top-10 because Hypomanic Daydream is an equally cracked-out group to Effluence, but in a totally different way. The common thread here is one-person bands who have no one to keep their most maniacal ideas in check. Every detail of The Yearning, from music to art and beyond, was created by one person who goes by Manic Dream Girl. The starting point here is death metal with a bit of a thrash background forcefed through a progressive wood chipper that sprays your ears with synths, keys, atmospheric touches and even a bass clarinet in a couple of spots.

It won’t take you long to discover that what truly sets this album apart, beyond the quirkiness of some of the music, is actually the incredible vocal performance. Manic Deam Girl’s approach will be a barrier for many, but you won’t find a more varied voice. There are harsh screams, dynamic cleans, cutesy singing you would expect from a Japanese toy commercial, death metal growls and then there are these wailing high notes that sound like Geddy Lee getting his nuts kicked in.

This album is weird as shit and I love it.

• Best Of 2025 Team List
• Bandcamp

8. UMULAMAHRI – LEARNING THE SECRETS OF ACID

Brainfeel: Like there’s a small tank in your head grinding your thoughts under its treads and shooting holes in your cerebellum

Oh hey, look, another one-person band (essentially) that’s coming in out of left field with the weirdness. Ok, ultimately, Andrew Hawkins is the man in charge of writing the music while also playing guitars and synths. Umulamahri benefits from key hired guns: Kevin Paradis as session drummer and Doug Moore for lyrics and the most guttural, foul vocal performance of his career. Why did I say this has weirdness? Hawkins replaced the bass with synths because apparently, I can’t listen to anything normal this year. The thing is, it works incredibly well.

The synths have this hideous, low sound that gives everything an uncomfortable, mechanical feel, like steel cables being pulled apart. These aren’t your Stranger Things nostalgia synths; these are synths that were abandoned in the sewer at birth and spent their whole life gathering the strength to make it back to the surface to exact their revenge. The death metal accompanying them is absolutely pummeling. The drums sound massive and forceful with every hit. Even the more atmospheric segments are disgusting and wretched. I’m fairly confident that listening to this while actually on acid would be an extremely ill-advised decision.

• Last Rites Review 
• Bandcamp

7. MESSA – THE SPIN

Brainfeel: Inner tears of joy keeping that foie gras in your dome nice and moist

Close was Messa’s most ambitious album to date, so it might be a little surprising that the Italian quartet pivoted to a bit more straightforward release for album number four. The Spin does, however, continue the focus on gloom that’s a touch more gothic this time around, but sports plenty of light among the clouds. The band’s driving force remains Sara’s gorgeous, emotive voice. The Spin features some of the strongest vocal hooks of her career. Listen to “Fire On The Roof” and tell me that chorus doesn’t get stuck in your head on a loop for a week after. Putting that absolutely buoyant song right before the achingly beautiful lounge-singer-style first half of “Immolation” is such a great touch. They’ll probably need to write Ross Dolan an apology letter for letting a song with that title be so beautiful and not curse god, though.

This time around, Alberto’s guitar work is really the striking light at the end of the dark tunnel that keeps this album from getting too dour. In particular, his lead work is an absolute delight. Each time he starts dancing around the fretboard a bit more, the results are a rocking upbeat jolt of joy, yet every lead has its own character that so beautifully suits the rest of the song. He makes his guitar as emotionally affecting as Sara’s haunting voice. The Spin is a deeply rewarding listen that warrants multiple, well, spins.

• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp

6. BARREN PATH – GRIEVING

Brainfeel: Like you pulled your brain out and threw it into a bounce house full of fighting vipers

From the ashes of Gridlink rises the fiery phoenix that is Barren Path, featuring Takafumi Matsubara, Bryan Fajardo, Mauro Cordoba and Rory Kobzina. After the most recent collapse of Gridlink, these chaps pulled Maruta vocalist Mitchell Luna into the fold and a powerhouse 15-minute grind album that could easily sit alongside Gridlink’s original run was born.

While this shies away from the space-grind tilt of the last few Gridlink albums, it still amasses an unseemly number of dizzying riffs, flailing fills, and rabid ranting. Every release Matsubara puts his name to is an absolute killer, and Grieving is no different.

• Last Rites Review 
• Bandcamp

5. WEEPING SORES – THE CONVALESCENCE AGONIES

Brainfeel: Like it’s slowly circling the drain

Weeping Sore’s sophomore release took six years to see the light of day. It would be fair to think this was because the two full-time band members are also in Pyrrhon and several other projects, but the title The Convalscence Agonies likely hints at a bit more. Every note from this NYC duo feels deeply personal and intimate. We have five painstakingly crafted songs that scream, fight, relent, crash, revive, trudge and try everything they can to progress forward. The Convalescence Agonies is an album that sucks you down into the murk, tosses you around for 43 minutes to leave you gassed, but still manages to feel like a catharsis as those final keys and cello notes ring out at the end of the title track.

The songcraft here is a fantastic case study in pacing. Weeping Sores knows exactly when to ramp up the aggression to create more chaos and when it’s best to let a riff repeat to the point of getting borderline hypnotic. There are some diabolical riffs on display to boot. The secret weapon that takes this from a good record to a great one is Annie Blythe’s cello, even though she only appears on three songs. The musical voice of the strings often adds so much, even when they’re doing very little. The cello is at times the leading instrument and at others an incredibly subtle layer that adds great tension. It can be folksy as easily as it can be violent. Brendon Randall-Myers’ keyboards are similarly impactful, even when only popping in a few notes at a time. Again, listen to the title track to get all of the above in one shot. This is another album that reveals small decisions that make a big impact with repeated listens.

• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp

4. PHANTOM SPELL – HEATHER & HEARTH

Brain: Just vibing

Unfortunately, I am one of those dumb boobs who struggles to find much from the more “trad” forms of metal that can stick to the ribs. Kyle McNeill’s work with Phantom Spell and Seven Sisters is a giant exception. I ranked Phantom Spell’s 2022 debut as my #19 album for that year. Were I to revisit that list today, it would vault much higher. McNiell’s phenomenal guitar work and incredible vocal hooks during massive choruses are undeniable. As I fell more and more in love with Immortal’s Requiem over the past few years, I was curious to see what would be next. Well, the biggest shift is that Heather & Hearth largely moves away from those more traditional verse-chorus structures that created space for those big vocal hooks I loved so much.

So, how did this end up so high on my list if one of my favorite elements has been reduced? Because it turns out McNiell loves classic prog as much as I do. The title track and “The Autumns Citadel” are absolute jams. The guitars feel so exploratory throughout the album and giving the synths a more prominent role was a genius move. This is the kind of album you imagine Larian Studios would love to have been blasting when they were working on Baldur’s Gate 3. Heather & Hearth is nerd metal and it rules.

• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp

3. UNBIRTH – ASOMATOUS BESMIRCHMENT

Brainfeel: Being Marv in Home Alone 2, repeatedly getting hit in the head with bricks

Out of context, the sample from Stranger Things that opens Asomatous Besmirchment is such a perfect death metal intro. On my first listen, the second that intro finished and “Unresilient Congeries of Affliction” kicked in, I started laughing. Not because the song was somehow funny, but in a “holy shit, this is awesome” way. Every second that followed was worthy of that same reaction. Unbirth are gold medalists in guitar gymnastics without it coming across like some pick me, try hard bullshit being technical for the sake of showing off. The guitar work so perfectly blends angular slices with smooth rolling riffs that give every song a savage sense of urgency. They should probably reach out to Frank and see if they can borrow the Suffo Chop for their live shows.

The fact that Michele Sassano sounds like a demonic grizzly bear doesn’t hurt anything either.

• Best Of 2025 Team List
• Bandcamp

2. SCALP – NOT WORTHY OF HUMAN COMPASSION

Brainfeel: Your amygdala on fire

There is absolutely zero subtlety in the title of Scalp’s third album. Not Worthy Of Human Compassion is fuck you music built on pure, unmitigated hostility. Scalp writes with righteous indignation and a desire to start fist fights. By the time you get to the little breakdown at the end of “Egodeath,” you’ll have flipped every table and desk in a three-mile radius. The remaining 11 songs will have you wanting to go on a world tour to keep those efforts going. Scalp perfectly blends hardcore and grindcore, taking the most pissed off parts of both and putting a gritty, thick production on it.

Be careful where you listen to this album. Your brain will turn off and your body will innately go into fight mode. When you get to the part in “ShackleRot” where Cole Rodgers sneers out “YOU’RE NOT FUCKING WORTHY OF HUMAN COMPASSION” to transition into a ruthless breakdown, you might try to punch a hole through a tree. You’ve been warned.

• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp

1. GRAYCEON – THEN THE DARKNESS

Brainfeel: It okay, don’t be cry

If it weren’t for another album on my non-metal list (how’s that for a teaser?), I’d say Then The Darkness is the saddest album I listened to this year. Despite being a big fan of Jackie Perez Gratz’s work in Giant Squid, this band has somehow escaped me over the past two decades. Our good pal Dan wrote a phenomenal review of this album back in August (linked below) and it inspired me to give it a whirl.

I was not prepared.

Friends, Then The Darkness is not a casual listen. This album is an all-consuming devastation. Much like the Weeping Sores album above, every piece of this feels deeply intimate and like something the members had to create or it would kill them. The first scream from Perez Gratz on “Thousand Year Storm” sets an absolutely harrowing tone and her cello riffing over the guitar is at once gorgeous and intense. This year has convinced me that the cello is the most affecting stringed instrument on earth. It only makes sense that Perez Gratz’s voice is equally impactful. Sure, that opening scream is shattering intensity meters, but her clean singing is varied and powerful. The 20-minute centerpiece of “Mahsa” is her and the rest of the band firing on all cylinders. The song is slow, somber and beautiful in its sadness. The trick is, though, Grayceon’s sadness has fight in it. Like battling depression, Then The Darkness is a perpetual black cloud that’s made grey with potent moments of white light.

At nearly 80 minutes in length, Then The Darkness is not to be taken lightly (har har), but it is a bleak sojourn that justifies every single second it offers. Honestly, I still don’t think I’m prepared anytime I go to put this on. Albums that force you to stop in order to absorb them are special and Grayceon gave us a great one.

• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp

BRAIN TEASERS (THE BEST EPs AND DEMOS)

10. Slough Feg – Traveller Supplement 1: The Ephemeral Glades

Slough Feg doing 20ish minutes of Slough Feg things. A bevy of classic trad riffs, exciting guitar leads and the inimitable voice of Mike Scalzi soaring over top. What else do you really need?

• Best Of 2025 Team List
• Bandcamp

9. Palsied – Legendary Hatreds

“God hates me, that’s what it is.”

“Hate him back, it works for me.”

That’s how Legendary Hatreds starts. The perpetual crushing brutal death metal riffs that follow all feel like they’re taking a swing at the sky. Throw in some Chthonic vocalizations and a Hatebreed cover and we’re really boiling the holy water.

• Best Of 2025 Team List
• Bandcamp

8. Lucerne Hammer – Vermillion Pyre

Now, this is what black metal is supposed to sound like. Searing tremolos, haunted vocals, relentless blasting and just the right touch of atmosphere to feel like evil incarnate.

• Best Of 2025 Team list
• Bandcamp

7. Elder – Liminality/Dream State Return

The first of the two tracks here is classic psych rock with great riffs, open space, and just the right bit of jamming out. The second track leans more into prog with a bunch of synths and keys befitting its title. This is a great little record for lying on the floor in the dark after eating a gummy.

• Best of 2025 Team List
• Bandcamp

6. Suffering Hour – Impelling Rebirth

Suffering Hour perfectly blends death metal and black metal to make this a muscular and biting affair.  They’re just as comfortable bashing you in the head with a two-minute burner like “Anamnesis” as they are creating some space for atmosphere, like they do on the opening track.

• Bandcamp

5. Birth And Loss – Untitled EP

14 minutes of grind on the Barren Path album wasn’t enough for Takafumi Matsubara, so he released another 10 minutes on this EP. This is a more traditional type of grind, but Toshihiko Takahashi’s vocals are completely unhinged. If Matsubara could commit to having multiple releases every year moving forward, that would be greatly appreciated.

• Bandcamp

4. Spume – Xenomold Geomorphologies / Orgy of Corpses

Oh look, another super productive solo project! Spume is the vile creation of Oregon’s Finn Fairbairn. This mad lad released two EPs and a full-length this year. Every one of them is a backed-up septic system of sewer death metal of the lowest order (complimentary).

• Found Sound & Frig You Friday (for the full-length)
• Bandcamp

3. Auriferous Flame – The Duel

Ayloss is like Zeus firing lightning bolts into his riffs. Every guitar line is absolutely electric on The Duel. Whether it’s the unrelenting intensity of the opening track, the atmospheric gloom of “Nest of Serpents,” or the triumphant gallop of the title track, there’s plenty to sink your teeth into here.

• Best of 2025 Team List
• Bandcamp

2. Fluisteraars – De Kronieken Van Het Verdwenen Kasteel – III – Grunsfoort

Another phenomenal dose of Fluisteraars’ progressive black metal. I absolutely love the sounds of the drums on this release. They sound so natural and are played like Koops is fighting for his life. A release that feels introspective and triumphant in equal measure.

• Bandcamp

1. Primitive Rage – Visions Of Ecstasy

Much like Scalp earlier on this list, Primitive Rage exclusively plays fuck you music. This is eight minutes of wanting to beat someone to death with your bare hands and then beat up the corpse a second time because your anger management therapy didn’t work.

• Best of 2025 Team List 
• Bandcamp

BRAIN SOOTHERS (NON-METAL)

5. Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas – Totality

Totality is an album for spacing out and letting time pass you by. The primary mode here is ambient/electronic, but there’s plenty of jazz bubbling up to give you more to latch onto. The bass playing, in particular, keeps things exciting and gives you something to bop to amongst all the other sound effects.

• Bandcamp

4. Kamasi Washington – Lazarus Soundtrack

Kamasi Washington continues his campaign to be my favorite modern jazz musician. Even when contributing to an anime soundtrack, he creates a full album of absolute bangers. The opening track fittingly feels like his take on the Cowboy Bebop theme and the rest follows suit.

• Listening Options

3. Floating Points – Lazarus Soundtrack

The bass on this album is a force to be reckoned with. While this soundtrack is also a jazz album, there is a significant focus on electronics as well, creating an engaging and enthralling listen. There is also a fantastic variety among the tracks. The harp intro on “Ajar” feels whimsical, but then the drums come rolling in like they’re about to announce a chase sequence. Then the bass comes in, and it’s the sexiest bass line in the history of bass lines. If that bass doesn’t make your body move, your ears don’t work right. That’s only one of six songs, so there’s plenty more I won’t spoil for you.

• Listening Options

2. The Necks – Disquiet

I intentionally decided to listen to this album for the almost sole purpose of challenging myself. What’s so challenging about this ambient jazz album? Well, it’s three goddamn hours long with one track hitting 74 minutes on its own. Here’s the thing, though, the slow builds and sustained repetitions are actually really engaging. Yes, it’s ambient music, so you can easily have it on while you’re working or doing other things, but you can just as easily find yourself lost in it in a way where 30 minutes slip by without you noticing. Challenge accepted, The Necks!

• Bandcamp

1. Annie Blythe, Brendon Randall-Myers – Only In The Dark

Remember earlier when I said Grayceon got beat out for the saddest album of the year by a non-metal record? This is it, and it’s not just the saddest album of this year, but one of the saddest albums I’ve ever heard in my entire life. The first time I was listening to it, my wife walked in the room and said, “Are you alright? Are you crying?” I wasn’t, but goddamn if I wasn’t on the verge of it.

The two artists’ names may also be ringing a bell for you, as they contributed their instrumental skills to Weeping Sores’ newest album. A discovery that fully escaped me until I started working on this list. See, I told you my brain is smoothing out these days. Literally the first note is so achingly beautiful; it will immediately grab your attention and take your mind to its most somber state. Every pluck and bow of the cello feels like Blythe’s arms are carrying the weight of the world’s woes and struggling to perform. The occasional squeak of ugly notes is a reminder that we stumble, but stumbling is still movement forward. I am floored that a single instrument and some atmospheric electronics can be this powerful.

I’m not being facetious when I say that if you’re in a bad place mentally, this isn’t the album for you. But, if you need a good cry or a commiserating companion, this incredible album might just be the salve for your wound.

• Bandcamp

THE THANKFUL BRAIN

As always, I appreciate any and all of you who took the time to read this or any other article on our little site here. We all just do it for the love of the game and spotlighting the music we dig. Knowing some folks out there enjoy it is a cherry on top. I’m hoping good things for all of you in the year ahead and can’t wait to unearth some more great tunes with you then. Cheers to you wherever you are!

The post Best Of 2025: Spencer Hotz – Slowly Smoothing Brain Syndrome appeared first on Last Rites.

Of course, the phrase’s true intention is meant to underscore the importance of patience—famously emphasized by brands such as Guinness and Heinz—which, when combined with an active pursuit of ‘the good things in life’, has the power to benefit your existence to notably satisfying lengths. Rocket science, no?

Hi! It’s me, your fully uninvited motivational speaker who most definitely needs to practice what he preaches and absolutely does not live in a van down by the river. (Though that prospect is certainly possible, despite the fact that I currently do not own a van, and the closest river to me features homes scattered along its majestic shores that go for over a million dollars.)

A van down by the river

No, this isn’t some sort of manifestation workshop. I do not believe that if you wake up every morning and inform the universe LOUD AND PROUD that you plan on manifesting a Bugatti that you will eventually drive to your next family picnic in the same car Floyd Mayweather Jr. drives. I do, however, feel that good things eventually come to those who actively pursue good things, and perhaps more importantly, good things come to those who DO good things for others on a regular basis. Chase ‘good’ in all its conventions and goodness will become a contagious element in your life. That’s the juice.

But… But is it even realistic to look forward to a stretch where the greater population focuses more on ‘good’ in an effort to achieves some form of global happiness? When the hell were humans ever collectively happy? Were all them medieval fuckers happy eating potatoes 24 different ways while fretting over whether or not they’d be burned at the stake just for trusting medicine and science? Was the population truly happy amidst the ‘Decade of Decadence’, the very often glorified ‘80s? The sensible solution is to reduce the focus to your immediate sphere, then start a full scale attack on what’s hampering contentment.

For a number of people, happiness is largely tied to whichever era happened to usher in their childhood. Yes, that assumption comes from a place of privilege, which is far from ideal, but it does seem fairly accurate because childhood is so very often linked to our ‘carefree days’. In view of this, is adulthood largely to blame for human misery? YES, IT FUCKING IS. That’s when you have to go to work, that’s when you have to start paying taxes, that’s when you have to find some place you can’t really afford to call your own home, and that’s when the shit really starts to hit the fan. No, not at 18, but probably closer to, I dunno, 30, because being immature as a teen or even in your 20s is still largely forgiven. Once you hit 30, though, friend-o… “Happy birthday! Have you thought at all about how you want your remains to be dealt with when you’re dead?”

I’m clearly trying to make a point here, and that point is this: The key to happiness is fighting adulthood. Wait, what? That can’t be it. Well, actually, it kinda is. Being an adult opens the door to all manner of potentially adverse negativities—job stress, taxes, unending bills, humorless responsibilities, health matters, et al.—and many of us actively pursue even more habitual skepticism and gloom in what little free time remains. Why not fix that last bit by making a point of actively pursuing ‘goodness’ in all its conventions, even the smallest of sums. Seems like a no-brainer, but sometimes we all need a good shove back into the righteous battle for contentment. In the end, I suppose the Beastie Boys said it best: YOU GOTTA FIGHT… FOR YOUR RIGHT… TO PARTY.

Okay, here are a bunch of albums that added to the goodness of my 2025, presented to you in a similar way to how I did it last year. First up are my top five metal albums in an actual order, followed by 15 other heavy-hitters in a random order, and concluding with 25 great records from outside of the heavy heavies. I hope you find some common ground and / or some new things to enjoy. And hey, thanks for being a part of the goodness in my life. Please be sure to dap up your dogs, cats, pets of all shapes and sizes from me, and I’ll see you in 2026.

Warren / Deathofthesun, thanks for the heavy impact, my friend. Say hey to the Lords of Light.

1. VULTURES VENGEANCE – DUST AGE

I had this to say in my write-up for Dust Age back in February:

“Just last month I offered up Dust Age as one of my most anticipated albums of 2025, owed largely to the fact that the prior Vultures Vengeance album, The Knightlore, managed to gradually work its way up the mountainous heap of 2019 releases all the way to my two-spot, bested only by the equally excellent debut from Sweden’s Dimhav.

This puts me in a curious position, though, because now, with about a dozen listens under my belt, I am inclined to already concede that full-length number two from these fully leathered Italians eclipses their previous effort in ways that make me wonder… Am I now done for the year? Is this it? Close out 2025 and let any and all other players shoot for door prizes? Shuffle off and spend the remaining months listening to Paco de Lucía and D&D podcasts? It’s February, for hell’s sake.”

Well, sailors, nine months have since passed and here sits Vultures Vengeance atop the heap like some sort of leather-breeched emperor of the mountain. “You a kang? That’s nice, bish. I’m the emperor. Get thine ass behind me!” Or something a little less Rick James and more… Who is the current emperor of Italy? Andrea Bocelli? I’m an American and therefore have no idea what’s happening.

Dust Age hits the top shelf thanks largely to the way it manages to build on everything that made 2019’s The Knightlore so epic, plus it packs in an extra dose of POWER. But what really makes me happy about the release relates to the way Vultures Vengeance albums always manage to deliver the most RIDICULOUSLY GUITAR-FORWARD MELODIC EXPLOSION that also hurls us back to an age when metal acts with peculiar vocals ruled the school: Wayne-fronted Metal Church, Cirith Ungol, Trouble, et al. Again, some people will always find eccentric vocals like these as some sort of obstacle, while others—like me—treat their distinct presence as a most welcome boon. Shot through the heart, and Double V’s to blame!

Bandcamp
Last Rites review

2. PHANTOM SPELL – HEATHER & HEARTH

Here’s a handy snippet from the writeup I did for Heather & Hearth back in June:

“…the biggest shift in the Phantom Spell book for 2025: The folk element. This gives Heather & Hearth an even stronger medieval sense across the board when compared to Immortal’s Requiem, so think Mythical & Magical from Pagan Altar for the NWOBHM component, but continue to expect that distinct HOOK that put a band like Kansas and prog rock records like Leftoverture and Point of Know Return on so many people’s radars.”

That’s why its here, and that’s why Heather & Hearth scores so high on this list. I love it when music carries with it the ability to transport the listener to another time and place, and Phantom Spell’s unique take on classic progressive rock and the folkier end of the NWOBHM throughout Heather & Hearth comes within a whisker of literally packing your bloody bags for you as these songs flit and soar through the rolling hills and hedgerows of bygone English countryside. Don’t forget to bring your bycocket hat! I beg your pardon??

Bandcamp
Last Rites review

3. UNBIRTH – ASOMATOUS BESMIRCHMENT

{Listens to Asomatous Besmirchment one time}
–
Unbirth: “Hello, you dropped this.” {Hands listener their ass}

Asomatous Besmirchment begs the question, “Can someone literally have their ass handed to them from an all out riff blitz that’s brutal enough to level a defense comprised of the biggest and the bestest from the Monsters of the Midway, the Purple People Eaters and the Steel Curtain?” LISTEN AND FIND OUT.

Are you antique and leathered enough to remember when Dark Angel’s Time Does Not Heal came with a sticker on the cover that read “9 songs, 67 minutes, 246 riffs”? Well, Asomatous Besmirchment should come with a sticker that reads, “9 songs, 37 minutes, 246 Copies of Time Does Not Heal Flee in Terror.”

Something else I appreciate about this grand leveler of an album is how the guitars sound as if they’re strung so tightly they could literally explode at any moment. And when they do—AND THEY WILL—every eyeball within a ten mile radius better watch the flip out.

Be sure to look up the meaning of ‘Unbirth’ on urban dictionary when you’re in a very public place! And please listen to “Malignant Pregnancies” this instant.

Bandcamp

4. UMULAMAHRI – LEARNING THE SECRETS OF ACID

I have largely let my awareness of black metal fall to a very distant back burner. It wasn’t an intensely dramatic break-up, but rather one of those moments where the two parties suddenly realize they’ve grown too far apart to maintain a healthy relationship. We’re not exactly adversaries today, mind you, and I still treasure and revisit some of our best moments together, but most everything new I’ve encountered feels as if it pushes an energy that’s diametrically opposed to mine. Is it a general reduced interest in malevolently dark music in general? I don’t think so. But these days if I’m to be enveloped in a phonic sense of all-consuming darkness, I prefer it to feel more brutal, tangled, hoarse and, in the case of this dandy little blurb, congealed, which is precisely what flattens your face while spinning a record like Learning the Secrets of Acid.

How could this possibly be seen as a positive? Well, in my primitive and fuddled brain, having darkness such as this tied to a foundation of death metal as opposed to black metal maintains a hint of the former’s penchant for brutal merriment (who’s up for some blunt force castration?), and that’s something that’s largely verboten in the latter. So, yes, I guess despite the sheer darkness pushed by Learning the Secrets of Acid, there’s still a part of my brain that wonders if its grim tidings, while still delightfully risky, mostly warn of the dangers of quicksand. I don’t if any of this makes sense, but making sense is actually kind of overrated anyway.

Bandcamp
Last Rites review

5. SLEEPWALKER (夢遊病者) – РЛБ30011922

If someone were to protest the validity of РЛБ30011922 as a metal album right here and now, I would absolutely not strike them across the face with a heavy gauntlet as some sort of invitation to a lethal duel. The fact of the matter is, however, РЛБ30011922 absolutely is a metal album, even if its footprint often challenges the listener to think otherwise. The riffs thrown down here are a unique form of ‘muddy’ that at times reminds me of the Bay Area scene that produced bands such as Giant Squid, Grayceon or even Cardinal Wyrm, but then there’s also this curious improvisational element coloring the corners that leave me wondering if the best way to actually describe the album is… A gentler and more introverted version of Aluk Todolo? Sure, let’s just go with that.

In truth, РЛБ30011922’s biggest windfall has a lot less to do with pinning down its kindred spirit(s) and more to do with how well the single 37-minute track manages to capture and relay the spirit of… well, kin. More specifically, and outlined beautifully on the project’s bandcamp page, РЛБ30011922’s intention is to embody and celebrate the life of a recently passed loved one, and as such, the moods dip and twist through all manner of emotions across its relatively brief stay. The result is a rollercoaster of temperaments that ultimately surrenders a very unique celebration of life that will absolutely plate your heart in gold if you’ve experienced the full life cycle of someone near and dear to you. Just an absolute triumph.

Bandcamp

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15 OTHER METAL ALBUMS LOVED IN 2025, AN UNCOMPLICATED STACK:

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SHITBRAINS / EXORBITANT PRICES MUST DIMINISH – SPLIT

Key Words: You want hooks? Go to a bait shop; Please keep all hands, feet, arms, legs and heads inside the ride at all times; Grinding fury for all the kids that eat half a box of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs while watching Disney’s TaleSpin; Normally one side of a split triumphs over the other, but these two teams just love being around one another; GET BENT.

• Shitbrains Bandcamp
• EPMD Bandcamp

KAKOTHANASY – METAGONISM

Key words: Do you even riff, bro; Do you even tech, bro; Do you even slam a tech bro through a concrete wall, bro; Florent Duployer plays the drums like a bee is searching his keister for the queen; Play this album in a motherflippin’ cubicle and your co-workers will bring you banana bread; BUT BANANA BREAD AT FUCKING WORK, DUDE. HELL YEAH. HELL YEAH, BRO. HELL YEAH. BANANA BREAD, BRO. AT FUCKING WORK, DUDE. HELL YEAH; I was a-skeert to look up what ‘kakothanasy’ actually means, but it just translates to ‘evil death’. Fun!

• Bandcamp

HATEFUL ABANDOM – THREAT

Key words: Streetcleaner with an even stronger influence of Unknown Pleasures, Killing Joke and Swans; You can call it Gothflesh, but then people looking for the Cure influence might ruin their eyeliner; The soundtrack to finally arriving at your snazzy AirBnB, only to discover it’s actually a crawlspace underneath a BDSM club; The law offices of Broadrick & Green called—they’re interested in making you a partner.

• Bandcamp

EFFLUENCE – PIANISTIC DISMEMBERMENT

Key words: Pianooooooooooooooooooooooooo guitars on this brutal death metal album; Rolf the Dog trying to make a living by playing at honky tonks, but he ate a fuzzy ham sandwich from a dumpster before the show and is vomiting and crapping at the same time while trying to muscle through a 30 minute set of Ernest Tubb covers; Your piano teacher will teach you these songs if you slip some bath salts into their Virginia Slims while they’re on the can.

• Bandcamp
• Review

KÜENRING – IN SEARCH OF PARADISE

Key words: “Oh wow, man, that’s it. Wait a second, man. What do you think the teacher’s gonna look like this year?”; I realize a significant portion of the apposite populace prefers metal to serve as a soundtrack to fighting 100 silverbacks, but your heart chakra will high-five the shit out of you for taking a break from being interminably grim for 30 minutes in favor of cranking In Search of Paradise while shopping for bootleg Cannibal Corpse beach towels.

• Bandcamp
• Review

CORONER – DISSONANCE THEORY

Key words: You can’t teach old dogs new tricks, but most new tricks are dogshit anyway; Coroner? Do you even know’er?; “I Waited 32 Years For A New Coroner Record And All I Got Was This Really Kick-Ass New Coroner Record” t-shirts would honestly sell quite well; If it takes another 32 years for a new Coroner album, I will be old enough to listen to it with an actual coroner.

• Bandcamp
• Review

SPECIES – CHANGELINGS

Key words: Remember how you couldn’t help but think about the members of Rush having loads of fun together outside of their respective roles within the band? Species is the tech thrash equivalent of that; Fun thrash that’s not ‘pizza thrash’, but you’ll probably be so happy listening to it that you’ll order a pizza, because pizza is for good times; Please don’t spill bong water on the pizza; Species might like pineapple on their pizza because they think it’s totally reasonable to put funk on tech thrash.

• Bandcamp
• Review

CENTURY – SIGN OF THE STORM

Key words: An album tailor-made for anyone who’d line up to huff a rail of trad metal dust off a prop sword from the Sacred Heart tour; Century bangs, and I’m willing to bet the two members have bangs; If you want anything even remotely related to the modern age, do not entry; Is this what modern Dark Throne is trying to sound like?

• Bandcamp

VENATOR – PSYCHODROME

Key words: This is the most ‘Cleveland Metal circa 1986’ album to ever come out of Austria; Hell, this is the most ‘Cleveland Metal circa 1986’ album to ever come out of any bloody place that isn’t Cleveland, OH circa 1986; Seriously, go listen to Purgatory’s Tied to the Trax after listening to Psychodrome; Hi, I lived in Cleveland in 1986, and I love Venator’s Psychodrome.

• Bandcamp

A2Z – A2Z2

Key words: Hey, alligators don’t have zippers on their mouths! Oh, that’s your new Louis Vuitton handbag? My deepest apologies, Beyoncé. I mean, your ladyship; This A2Z album is a little heavier and darker compared to the last A-Z album; If Ray Alder ended up singing for a The Red Hot Chili Peppers, I would probably listen. (I just threw up in my mouth a little); Dad Prog enough that it should come with a shiny new pair of New Balance sneaks.

• Bandcamp
• Review

POWER SURGE – SHADOW’S WARNING

Key words: I would say Power Surge is doing a better job of Armored Sainting than the current variant of Armored Saint, but the current variant of Armored Saint is actually Armored Sainting better than Armored Saint has ever Armored Sainted, so let’s just say Power Surge is Armored Sainting in a way that makes Shadow’s Warning a necessity if you enjoy Armored Sainting your ass off; Armored Saint.

• Bandcamp
• Review

INCINERATED – EATEN RAW

Key words: May I have this dance? [climbs out of a sewage treatment plant’s dumpster]; This is a BIG FAT CHEAT, because Eaten Raw is actually a compilation of older Incinerated material that’s been remastered; However, this comp was released in 2025, I have listened to it approximately eleventy seven hundred tons of times, and I have to say something nice about it or I’ll get no dessert after supper; Hey, do you enjoy classic death grind that’s loud, lethal and penetrating enough to cause the polyps in your colon to pack up and move out on their own without the need of a proctologist? BOY DO I HAVE SOME GREAT NEWS FOR YOU.

• Bandcamp

TOWER – LET THERE BE DARK

Key words: In a perfect world, Jim Henson Studios would make a sequel to The Muppets Take Manhattan called MANHATTAN STRIKES BACK, and in this film Fozzie Bear is eventually walking the dark streets late at night, trying to cope with the fact that Scooter has been hospitalized as the result of an intense high-speed chase that ended in a wreck caused by Fozzie. The background music during this poignant scene is the track “And I Cry,” and it features fully muppetized versions of the band Tower blended into the night sky; Don’t worry, Scooter survives, but he’s changed, mannnnn.

• Bandcamp

ARAPHEL – THE ENDCHANTER / NITE – CULT OF THE SERPENT: TWO GREAT TASTES THAT TASTE GREAT TOGETHER

Araphel’s The Endchanter was one of those albums that flew under the LR radar until our great pal Konrad Kantor literally FORCED IT INTO OUR EARS. I was admittedly a bit slow on the uptake, but after spending some time with the record I mapped out a rough little chain of thought that proposed a perhaps odd comparison that was shared with the rest of the lads behind closed doors at LR HQ. Here are them words:

“Right. So things didn’t work out on my first two runs because I was doing something while listening, and I don’t think the album is at all intended to be relegated to the background. After a few more intentional spins, I think I can sum up Araphel and The Endchanter in one fairly simple (and perhaps contentious) made-up word:

NWNite

Does Araphel actually sound like Nite, though? Sorta yes and sorta no. For sure, they both could be featured in a ‘you got your heavy metal in my black metal / you got your black metal in my heavy metal’ commercial that concludes with two strangers on a sidewalk suddenly falling in love.

Furthermore, both bands clearly have a deep appreciation for Greek masters Necromantia and Italian barons Mortuary Drape (especially Araphel), and they additionally appear to value what Negative Plane has done for yanking what the Old Ones did through a more updated lens. Are there other more modern bands in this same sphere to draw comparisons to? I’m sure.

So, yeah, like their forebears, Araphel and Nite clearly love classic metal. Coroner might not be a band you expect to see brought into this conversation, but you can hear it in Nite’s Cult of the Serpent Sun, and Nite is equally as willing to tie a red handkerchief around Hoffman and Labrakis’ knees to summon the spirit of a guy like Chris Holmes. Hell, you can even hear riffs and quick stretches that sound similar to the Sirens / The Dungeons Are Calling era of Savatage on this new record. Very classic metal, but definitely a little more… marketable.

By comparison, Araphel isn’t terribly interested in conjuring visions of WASP or Criss Oliva, and they will never be interested in being fully commercialized. Their nods to classic heavy metal are more subtle, and they’re also darker. VERY GREEK. Yes, The Endchanter is still melodic as balls, but it doesn’t really beat you over the head with it in the way Nite does, which is both a benefit and perhaps a drawback to some.

Bottom line…

Araphel = NWNite
Nite = Century MediAraphel”

• Araphel Bandcamp
• Nite Bandcamp
• Nite review

25 WONDERFUL ALBUMS OUTSIDE OF METAL THAT WERE INSTRUMENTAL IN ADDING TO THE GOODNESS OF 2025:

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~ ROCK / PUNK ROCK / POST-PUNK ~

BILL FOX – RESONANCE

For fans of: Heartland lo-fi indie folk rock.

I’m not sure if having some measure of Cleveland, OH bolted to your heart is required to know who Bill Fox is these days (be sure to check out the garage power trio The Mice if you’re interested in extra credit), but know that Fox happens to be one of the more underrated singer-songwriters of the last 30 years. I realize that’s a pretty lofty statement, but get Shelter from the Smoke (1996) and Transit Byzantium (1998) under your belts and then come back and thank me for shining a light on two of the catchiest, most intimate indie folk rock records to ever drift out of the Midwest. Suffice to say, if artists such as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Elliot Smith, Jeff Buckley or Phil Elverum mean anything to you, Bill Fox should probably ping your radar.

Well, ol’ Bill pretty much dropped out of the music game for the better part of the last decade. Like, disappeared with nary a trace. But a 2007 article from a guy named Joe Hagan for The Believer hauled the folky fellow back into the conversation, leading to reissues and select live shows, and ultimately resulting in this, Bill Fox’s first bit of new music in 13 years. And what a return Resonance is. This is a record that sounds every bit as thoughtful and endearing as Fox’s previous work, and moreover it feels just as untouched by modern studio trickery. It’s Bill Fox music, pure and simple, and hopefully this time even more people hop in to enjoy it.

• Bandcamp

BOOTBLACKS – PARADISE

For fans of: Moderately gloomy yet mostly upbeat synth pop.

Was it just me, or did gothic music in 2025 have a pretty bad hair day. A bad hair year. Did goth music in 2025 have Axl Rose’s braided hair from when he suddenly decided to look like Bo Derek in 10… is the question I’m apparently asking you right now.

It wasn’t an outright shortage—I enjoyed releases from Panic Priest, WitchHands, Magic Wands and Carrellee—but Bootblacks’ return to the scene following a five year absence was handily my favorite release from the goth end of the music spectrum this year. Maybe I shoulda coulda dug deeper? Eh, maybe. But at this point I don’t see anything coming close to what gets laid down by Paradise, because Paradise very thankfully opts to embrace a different shade of the scene that largely sidesteps the now totally saturated gloomy death rock / darkwave obsession (hey, I still love that side of the fence as well, but it is THICK with mediocrity). Basically, if you miss the poppier end of the spectrum that was developed by new wave / synth pop champs such as the Thompson Twins, Duran Duran, ABC, Simple Minds and The Human League, you will want to jump on this record immediately. New grounds for Bootblacks, and they absolutely nailed it.

• Bandcamp

INDUSTRY – S/T

For fans of: Churling, grubby post punk that will aid in venting your frustrations with life & times that absolutely blow shit.

Full-length number two from these peeved Berliners does a wonderful job of sewing together bits and pieces from a number of classic belters in post punk and crust scene, but it also never fully lose sight of the benefits of delivering something that’s weirdly danceable. So, expect to hear nods to Amebix, Discharge and Killing Joke, but also The Sound (so underrated), Mission of Burma and The Fall to add a little extra spice. It’s basically the perfect album for two-stepping your pent up rage directly through a brick wall. Or, you know, something that won’t actually get you kicked out of the coffee shop. Check, please!

• Bandcamp

KALEIDOSCOPE – CITIES OF FEAR

For fans of: Pounding the world, like a battering ram.

This right’chere? This right’chere just so happens to be THE BEST PUNK RELEASE OF 2025. Kaleidoscope’s brand of bulldozing finds a curious way of feeling both slow and fast at the same time. Some might venture to say that equates to ‘mid-paced’, but that ain’t really it. Picture a tank that’s redlining to the point where speeds previously unreached are pushed to the point of detonation and you’re basically there. Crucifix and Final Conflict get thrown around as comparisons, which is appropriate, but Kaleidoscope’s NY roots also loom quite large, particularly in the way the flattening bass and drumming harken back to NYHC’s heyday. To me Cities of Fear hits like an ideal collision between the early releases from Killing Joke, Agnostic Front and Raw Power, plus a tasty dash of English Dog’s classic Forward into Battle. Tie in the fact that the album’s themes are properly charged as a ballistic missile aimed directly at the current socio-politico-cultural fuckery and you have… the best punk album of 2025!

• Bandcamp

STEREOLAB – INSTANT HOLOGRAMS ON METAL FILM

For fans of: Suddenly realizing you need new Stereolab music in your life.

You know, it almost feels as if the whole of Stereolab’s root works from the ‘90s and early aughts served as a windup to what they’ve managed to deliver with Instant Holograms On Metal Film. The band has always found eccentric and often charming ways to blend krautrock, alt-pop and electronic music, but it’s never sounded so applicable and comfortable as it sounds in 2025. Put another way, I’ve always been a pretty adventurous music appreciator, but I’ve never felt the need to pick up a Stereolab album until I ran into Instant Holograms on a whim, and I think that’s because, alongside the elements that have always been present, this record manages to fold in an extra slice of warm comfort that becomes increasingly essential as humans age. It’s still a very eclectic and eccentric little record, but just a little more approachable.

• Bandcamp

TERRAPLANA – NATURAL

For fans of: Shoegaze / dream pop that manages to stick out a hell of a lot more than the countless stacks of other shoegaze / dream pop acts currently thumping any and all faces from every single corner and alcove in the modern age.

So, what is it that sets Brazil’s Terraplana and Natural, their sophomore full-length, apart from the heaps and hordes of analogous contenders? I could take the easy way out and just equate it to far superior songwriting skills. As accurate as that may be, though, I think what really does the trick is the fact that Terraplana doesn’t really feel the need to DROWN EVERYTHING behind a wall of feedback / sounds of a massive industrial fan whirring. Instead, that wonderfully nostalgic indie dream pop world that flourished in the early ‘90s quickly springs to mind, conjuring some sort of amiable pileup between Lush, Pale Saints, Bettie Serveert, Throwing Muses and Blonde Redhead. The result is still dreamy and reflective, but bright with activity and a very clear appreciation for melody.

• Bandcamp

~ AMBIENT / ELECTRONIC / DRONE ~

GLÅSBIRD – GLACIAL DRIFT

For fans of: Um, glacial music—literally and figuratively.

If the above doesn’t exactly sound like the most appealing endorsement, perhaps consider the album’s rather slick (sweet glacier joke, bruh) concept: Mapping the history of ambient / minimal music across a timeline that begins with classical and meanders all the way up to current electro techniques, and doing so by furthermore exploring the effects of global warming by drawing inspiration from a series of photographs taken in the Swiss Alps that date back to 1938. So, you listen, you relax, you observe, you think, and you enjoy! Still grumpy? Well, in your ear with a can of beer, you delightful ol’ sorehead. Pack a sweater!

• Bandcamp

KARA-LIS COVERDALE – FROM WHERE YOU CAME

For fans of: Nocturnal ambience that’s soft as a chin feather from a Tawny owl.

What I really love about From Where You Came is how Kara-Lis Coverdale manages to soften sounds so effortlessly without losing sight of a totally charming hook. Like, there’s a lot going on here, with everything from woodwinds, brass instruments, keyboards, various stringed instruments, modular synths, etc. all twirling and mingling, but it’s all filtered through this delightfully gauzy lens that results in something that ultimately feels… animatedly tranquil? Active ambient at its best, basically. Also, Coverdale has released two more albums for 2025 after an 8 year respite, but I’ve had From Where You Came on repeat so much that I haven’t yet had a chance to explore what comes next.

• Bandcamp

LAWRENCE ENGLISH – EVEN THE HORIZON KNOWS ITS BOUNDS

For fans of: “Liquid architecture.”

More specifically, this release is intended as a soundscape complement to a new building added to the Art Gallery Of New South Wales. The Naala Badu (translation: ‘seeing water’) structure “blends seamlessly into Sydney’s landscape, intertwining life, architecture and landscape with intention,” and Even the Horizon Knows Its Bounds provides an ideal ambient companion to that purpose in that longtime composer / curator / native Australian Lawrence English in turn blends contributions from a huge stack of highly respected experimental music soundscapers who share English’s awareness of how, in his own words, “sound haunts architecture.” Chris Abrahams of The Necks provides the gossamer piano, and other contributors include Swans guitarist Norman Westburg, minimalist composer Chuck Johnson, sound designer Dean Hurley, ambient experimentalist Claire Rousay, and the great Jim O’Rourke.

• Bandcamp

LOSCIL – LAKE FIRE

For fans of: Folding the infinite amount of good and bad thoughts that bludgeon our brains on a daily basis into a pulsing piece of ambient music that smooths out all that hectic electricity into a manageable calm.

Just looking at the title and album cover for Lake Fire makes it clear that Scott Morgan / loscil intended to underscore the significance of the recent wildfire upsurges. But also woven into that strategy is an ode to the consequence of managing to age well enough to hit your 50s. Opening salvo “Arrhythmia” is a nod to exactly that, for example, and if you’re interested in finding out more about what makes Lake Fire click, I urge you to check out the interview Morgan did this year with CKCU FM 93.1 in Ottawa, Ontario. Suffice to say, when life throws its limitless challenges our direction, we need to find multiple ways to calm those storms. Loscil and Lake Fire are ready and willing to aid in that endeavor.

• Bandcamp

OREN AMBARCHI, JOHAN BERTHLING & ANDREAS WERLIIN – GHOSTING III

For fans of: Well, obviously the first two Ghosted releases from this dynamic trio, but also anyone interested in a something that pushes a curious ‘repeated rhythmic mantra’ across a song the way a band like, say, Lungfish does, except the whole mood feels a LOT more 3am.

This third venture maintains a very similar drum / bass / modular guitar approach to drifty, droning, jazzy, krauty, improvisational fusion, but it balances the active and quiet elements to greater limits compared to parts I and II. If I’m honest, I will admit III takes its rightful place in the third spot, but that’s largely due to the exemplary status of the first two. That being said, the opening “Yek” here is the best song the project has done to date.

• Bandcamp

PATRICIA WOLF – HRAFNAMYND

For fans of: Birds? I swear it’ll make sense. Well, maybe.

Hrafnamynd is the soundtrack for a documentary of the same name that examines filmmaker Edward Pack Davee’s time spent growing up in Iceland, but it doubles as an exploration of the island nation’s curious raven population, including a talking raven named Krummi. (That should honestly be enough to draw interest.) Before even being aware of the backstory, however, birds quickly jumped to mind amidst initial spins. The totally amazing Lyrebird from Australia, to be more specific, because dotting Patricia Wolf’s notably active ambient are all these curious blips, bloinks and pulses that conjure images of Lyrebirds mimicking virtually any sound they encounter in their environment. I mean, ravens apparently mimic sounds around them as well, so this appears to have been intentional. Anywho, hop in and you will be, quoth the raven, forevermore grateful for the invitation.

• Bandcamp

THE NECKS – DISQUIET

For fans of: Needing to hear something compelling and adventurous, but not too overbearing… for 3 hours straight.

I’ve been singing the praises of The Necks for what feels like a decade, but this all day sucker right here glints like the crown jewel atop the band’s already impressive discography. If you’re still new to The Necks game, this is how I once attempted to explain their general approach to music: Improvisational, experimental drone jazz electronics custom built for transcendental meditation. And hey, guess what? Still holds true for 2025. Where Disquiet differs the most from its predecessors is that it… well, it does all of that in excess, and it does it a little slower, which might lead one to believe it would be nigh impossible for this release to NOT outstay its welcome. It does not. In fact, I think there’s only been one or two occasions where I’ve NOT opted to play all 3 hours of Disquiet uninterrupted, which seems positively bananas. But then, Disquiet works quite well as a deliberate OR casual listen, which only goes to show them Necks definitely got the knack.

• Bandcamp

~ CLASSICAL / MODERN CLASSICAL ~

ANNIE BLYTHE, BRENDON RANDALL-MEYERS – ONLY IN THE DARK

For fans of: Having your soul dashed against a sea cliff, only to eventually witness it rise up Up and UP into the firmament in a grand declaration of triumph.

You will not find a release in 2025 that’s more emotionally draining and rewarding in equal measures than Only in the Dark. Yes, I realize that could be construed as a big ol’ slice of hyperbole, but give this walloper a patient ear and you too will bear the worthwhile risk of falling ‘neath those mighty bulldozer tracks.

How exactly does Only in the Dark manage such a feat? Well, firstly, I would remark that one really should commit to the full 50-minute ride in order to experience the full effect. Beyond that, the deciding factor lies in the fact that both players here happen to be neurodivergent, and this release is intended to provide a notably raw window into what a neurodiverse life might entail. Do neurodivergent people feel and express emotions on a deeper level than those who are not? Why, yes. Yes, that appears to be the case. And being able to express those deeply entrenched sentiments by setting them loose into the universe in the likeness of a cello and accompanying electronic elements that weave, climb, dive, soar and crumble like this HAS to be incredibly cathartic not only for Blythe and Randall-Meyers, but for anyone with the determination to allow this record to slay them time and time again. The one-two punch of “On fire, quietly” and “The way they wept” is as mighty as an arrow shot directly into your heart from Artemis herself.

• Bandcamp

~ JAZZ / JAZZ-ADJACENT ~

ADAM BEN EZRA – HEAVY DROPS

For fans of: Not just bass, but DOUBLE bass. TRIPLE DOUBLE BASS. FOURPLE DOUBLE bass!!

My favorite thing concerning Heavy Drops is the way the record manages to deliver a fairly stripped down form of jazz that’s pinpoint-focused on bass and drum interplay with just a dash of ancillary embellishment, but the outcome still feels super adventurous across its full 40-minutes. It’s cheerful as hell, too—to the point where you will not be able to help but bob your head as these songs shake, strut and splash across the brainpan. Bottom line: Heavy Drops will absolutely bump that trunk.

• Bandcamp

BÉLA FLECK, EDMAR CASTEÑEDA & ANTONIO SÁNCHEZ – BEATrio

For fans of: Thinking that a banjo, harp and drums belong together without somehow sounding like the upshot fell out of something’s ass.

Béla Fleck is of course the master of ushering the banjo into unfamiliar territory and challenging its status as the second least favorite thing a husband could bring home after a boat, and this time he’s paired up with a Colombian “virtuoso harpist” Edmar Castañeda and five-time Grammy winning drummer Antonio Sánchez from Mexico City. The result: I… I really don’t have much of a clue as to how a release like BEATrio should be categorized. ‘Latin jazz’ is certainly there, but that seems like a pretty lazy tag, considering all that’s going on here. Maybe we should just go with ‘music for when you need a pick-me-up / positive shot in the arm’.

• SAMPLE

BRANDEE YOUNGER – GADABOUT SEASON

For fans of: Harp music that doesn’t force the listener to think only about elevators or angels hovering around in Heaven.

Harpist Brandee Younger clearly fits pretty comfortably within the jazz realm, but she also does a wonderful job of blurring those lines by incorporating bits of R&B, classical and hip hop into a thoroughly lavish fabric that’s probably easiest to describe as… Soul? Or good for the soul? Music from the soul that uplifts the soul? Sure, all of that. Is it easy to imagine Rakim dropping PMA bars on the song “Breaking Point?” You bet. Could Maxwell gliiiiiiiide on in during “Reflection Eternal?” Absolutely. The only true requirement here: The understanding that you will walk away from Gadabout Season in a(n even) better mood than when you walked in.

• Bandcamp

BRANDON WOODY – FOR THE LOVE OF IT ALL

For fans of: Baltimore.

Well, any major city, really. But having spent (not enough) time wandering the streets of Baltimore and feeling its unique kinship with another of my favorite US cities, Oakland, CA, and taking into consideration the fact that trumpeter Brandon Woody is Baltimore born & raised and plays with a band (Upendo) comprised of players / friends he’s known since middle school, I can’t help but think of Baltimore every time I spin For the Love of it All. Hot, cool, vibrant, familiar, stony, syncopated, funky, comfortable, flighty, and vibrant as the day is long, For the Love of it All is everything Baltimore happens to be for a fellow like me. How can I not want to return time and time again?

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DINO SALUZZI, JACOB YOUNG, JOSE MARIA SALUZZI – EL VIEJO CAMINANTE

For fans of: The Argentinian countryside, even if it just lives in your mind.

El Viejo Caminante is the sort of album you might expect to hear while eating empanadas and sipping Fernet at some tiny two-seater that looks out onto a grassy plain where a few gauchos are ambling off towards the mountains. If that sounds a little too corny, understand that I’ve long since lost the ability to gauge such things. Basically, if your hectic life could really use the sounds of gentle guitars plinking their way around a squeezebox (bandoneon) played by a delightful old-timer, then El Viejo Caminante is extremely ready to get tagged in for some serious heart healing.

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ELI WINTER – A TRICK OF THE LIGHT

For fans of: Not knowing what the hell to call this style of music other than maybe… ‘Expericana’?

I’m not sure if Eli Winter is aware of fellow Chicago-based genre bafflers Tortoise, but the spirit of that band’s willingness to blender jazz and different forms of rock into something rather indefinable lives quite large within the wide open sprawl of A Trick of the Light. When attempting to detail this record to friends, I described it as “some sort three-point convergence between Charles Lloyd & The Marvels, The Necks and [insert alt-country band],” and I don’t think I can come up with a better way of expanding on that today. The opening 16-plus minute salvo “Arabian Nightingale” is one of my very favorite songs of 2025.

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JEREMY PELT – WOVEN

For fans of: Jazz you might hear while sipping Aldebaran whiskey or prune juice in a booth at Ten Forward. Oh, your nerdism isn’t deep-seated enough to recognize a Star Trek: The Next Generation reference? Well, pardon the prunes off of me.

Now, before you head off thinking this thing will sound as if all the instruments are played by six-armed aliens with eyes the size of saucers, understand that Next Gen fully embraced traditionalism and futurism equally when it came time for the crew to wind down [sultry Riker trombone solo], and that’s something Woven does a great job of reflecting across its 50 minutes. Sure, you get loads of classic jazz centered around Pelt’s stylish, largely relaxed trumpet play as the crux, but it’s chilled even further and modernized by touches of modular synth and an overall vibe that urges the listener to step into the future.

Prune juice… WARRIOR’S drink.

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OLGA AMELCHENKO – HOWLING SILENCE

For fans of: Unfairly judging books by their cover.

This is going to sound absolutely terrible and perhaps unforgivable, but when I first saw the album cover for Howling Silence and a picture of Olga Amelchenko, I assumed the record would sound much softer and more cautious than it actually is. And while there are definitely softer edges up and down the record, the overall impression here demonstrates that Amelchenko has a deep appreciation for spirited spontaneity, and she likewise encourages it from the people who play alongside her. The result is an adventurous 47 minutes that’s not too far from something I’d expect from someone like, say, Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, but instead of New Orleans as an inspiration, Amelchenko draws from the Paris scene.

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THOMAS MARRIOTT – SCREEN TIME

For fans of: Reimagined film and TV scores rendered by a jazz quartet.

I think the easiest selling point here for anyone who visits Last Rites is the fact that one of the songs offered up on Screen Time is “Goodbye,” the, um, ‘love theme’ (???) from the movie Predator. How the hell did Thomas Marriott even think to consider this? There’s only one answer: He’s a massive fan of the film Predator, and therefore an immediate friend to the site (whether he likes it or not.) Also on the docket WITH PREDATOR: tunes from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, You Only Live Twice, et al. You know, because that totally makes sense.

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YAZMIN LACEY – TEAL DREAMS

For fans of: Feeling fucking fantastic.

I don’t think you could point to another artist in the modern age who’s more capable of pulling me out of a funk IMMEDIATELY than Yazmin Lacey, and she doubles down on that blessing via her sophomore effort, Teal Dreams. Here, Lacey once again blenders a number of styles already explored by way of her excellent 2023 debut—R&B, pop, jazz, reggae, hip hop, etc.—and even when the results are touched with the thinnest veneer of sadness, it still holds this unique wistful sense that’s a hundred miles away from outright misery. Is “Ain’t I Good for You” the best pop song of 2025? I’m probably not versed enough in that realm to properly weigh in, but if that song had hit the radio in the early ‘90s I would’ve swooooooned and… yeah, actually listened to the radio.

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~ RAP ~

BILLY WOODS – GOLLIWOG

For fans of: Poetic urgency.

I appreciate rap for a wealth of reasons, but the way it serves as a definitive conduit to what it’s actually like living as a Black human being in the world today is, in my opinion, its most vital trait. Sure, that’s hardly exclusive to this particular corner of the music realm, but rap’s proclivity for merging a sense of urgency, energy and the message into one vital and compact package offers such an immediate and candid window that it can’t help but vault to the foreground. Taking this into account, an album like Golliwog hits like a brick, something that isn’t all that surprising when you take into account its creator and the times in which we are currently living… er, enduring. Golliwog paints a grim picture, and it is heavy, both thematically and in the way these poems / songs drill the listener into the dirt with somber bars, sporadic rhythms and stacks of gloomy samples. The whole journey boils with this sense of critical urgency, even when the motion is crawling through the weeds like a warrior dragging guts, and we are present not only as observers, but students.

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/2025

The post Best Of 2025: Captain – Ain’t We Lucky We Got ‘Em, Good Times! appeared first on Last Rites.

Did we fumble? Sure, there’s about as much stylistic distance between our top two albums as possible, but that’s hardly a fumble. Last Rites has always been a little scattershot when it comes to sussing out what blows our collective hair back, and our 2025 list provides a solid snapshot of our shared eccentricity. Trad metal and progressive hard rock dusty enough to give Miss Manners the vapors for a week? Come on in! Belchingly brutal noisegrind marbled with rodent blubber more your raison dêtre? Pull up a chair, Porky! By golly, the all you can eat smorgasbord of clashing chow found below is kooky enough that you might think we were trying to put Golden Corral out of business. (We are not. Pappy needs his Fridee salisbury steak.)

Where we absolutely 100% for sure fumbled the ball, however, is by, um… not even writing about our 2025 champ. Like, whaaa?? The blame for that blunder can only be aimed at the fact that we never actually received a promo. In fact, the first bit of chatter concerning said album didn’t really hit the LR break room until a full month after its release.

June 20th at 10:23am // (album cover gets posted by Captain (Hey! That’s me!))
June 20th at 10:28am // Captain: “Whoa, the riff 3:50 into ‘Malignant Pregnancies…’
June 20th at 10:42am // Captain: “I will tell you what, I am not turning off [album] so far.”

/TIME PASSES/

June 25th at 8:23pm // Seth Butnam listens to the album and subsequently discovers the true meaning behind the name of the band. (No spoilers here, maties, but it ain’t particularly pretty, which therefore makes it even more awesome.)

From there, the record snowballs and rolls into something larger, Larger and even LARGER, and by October it appears as if 90% of LR has been fully flattened by its outrageous potency. And now, here we are, spotlighting our fumble at the finish line without a shred of shame. WE ARE HUMAN, HEAR US ROOAAAARRRRrrrrrrrr for a coach’s challenge. Our knee was totally down.

Okay, as has recently become custom, we now take a quick moment to compare our conclusions with some of our peers in an effort to see if we’re anywhere close to playing in the same sandbox. The short answer remains: mostly NOPE.

Decibel: 4 releases in common (one more than last year!)
Metal Hammer: 1 (4 last year)
Treble: 4 (2 last year)
Consequence of Sound: ZERO (4 last year)
Pop Matters: 4 (4 last year)
The Quietus: 3 (2 last year)
Metal Injection: 3
Metalstorm: 3
Stereogum: 1 (1 last year)

What can we take away from this? Kinda looks like Last Rites remains firmly planted up our own ass, which is just a snazzy way of saying we continue to be less concerned with the releases that drift closer to the mainstream compared to our peers. Is that a flaw? Eh, depending on how and why you land here, maybe? But not really. [WINK WINK / falls down the stairs]

That being said, if we only take into account the nine sites that have managed to drag their lists to the surface so far, we have A TIE for the top spot across the board in 2025, and those two winners are………..

Coroner’s Dissonance Theory: 7 out of 9 lists. That’s a very deserving honor, as it has become exceedingly rare for ancient thrashers (sorry, boys) to rekindle the fires effectively in the modern age. (A tip of the hat is also owed to Testament in that regard). Hell, a number of us doubted we’d ever witness another Coroner release in this lifetime, so getting something as enjoyable as Dissonance Theory after a 32 year gap? Pretty flipping remarkable, and totally deserving of high praise.

Messa’s The Spin: also 7 out of 9 lists. This one is less of a surprise, thanks to the fact that the Messa collective has found its way into Best Of conversations for the last seven years or so. 2018’s Feast for Water netted very high marks, 2022’s Close reached even higher, and now the moderately more goth The Spin has a lot of people wondering if Messa has actually reached their first true peak. Hey, upward trajectories are obviously great.

As always, our deepest gratitude is owed to YOU for still caring enough to visit Last Rites. This all wouldn’t mean very much if no one but us read our scribbles, and we speak right from the heart when we say THANK YOU for continued support. Here’s to hoping we’ll see you again in 2026, a year that just so happens to mark the 25th anniversary of the site’s existence under the shared MetalReview / Last Rites banner. Kind of a big deal! I mean, it’s no quantum computing breakthrough, but who really cares about that sort of garbage anyway.

One last thing to address before dipping into the goods. This year’s List Season is respectfully dedicated to our fallen brother, Deathofthesun / Warren Binder. There’s a lot of folks in the metal community and beyond who are feeling his loss in a very big way, and we sure are gonna miss him. See you on the other side, homeslice. [CAPTAIN]

25. TRAUMA BOND –
SUMMER ENDS, SOME ARE LONG GONE

“Occupying primarily a grindcore ground, this duo’s sound spreads its tendrils outward into post-punk, Godflesh-esque dystopian industrialized harshness, hardcore punk… It’s a bleak and ugly world that Trauma Bond inhabits, and that’s entirely the point. From the martial whispered chanting of ‘Brushed By The Storm’ to the squalling epic cacophony of ‘Dissonance,’ Summer Ends is 28 minutes of cathartic harshness..” [ANDREW EDMUNDS]

• Last Rites Missing Pieces Review
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24. SCIMITAR – SCIMITARIUM I

Scimitar plays a kind of smoky, goth-tinged form of epic trad metal that ought to remind listeners of greats like In Solitude and even Hammers of Misfortune, and yet, also not. This is a band clearly doing Their Own Thing, even if many of the ingredients – spiraling lead guitars, bombastic drums, shuffling rhythms, bits of neoclassicism, and touches of extreme styles like blasts and dissonance – are sourced from throughout the ages. But the band plays with an almost reckless abandon (especially the drummer), as if they’re intent on creating a slightly manic atmosphere for their crazy talented singer. Vocalist Shaam Larein already has a great solo career, and here she brings her wailing Souxsie-isms and mystical dynamism to a full band situation. The result of this pairing is nothing short of magic, making Scimitarium I one of the coolest debuts of the year. [ZACH DUVALL]

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23. FLOATING – HESITATING LIGHTS

“One of the more interesting tricks Floating pulls off here is exactly how they integrate the two main sides of their sound. Sometimes they intentionally separate them, offering passages of clean, sparse guitar lines straight out of the Joy Division playbook before exploding into sections of Gorgutsy dissonant riffing and (admittedly somewhat restrained) blasts… …But more often those elements are combined, resulting in that oh-so-effective vibe that can’t help but act as the initial hook into this record.” [ZACH DUVALL]

• Last Rites Review
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22. ZEICRYDEUS – LA GRANDE HERESIE

“Advertised as a band for fans of Rotting Christ, Varathron, Mortuary Drape, Running Wild, and Manowar, how could this not be a staple in the 2025 Last Rites camp?… …There are various corners of the metal buffet to feast upon here. I encourage you to indulge sooner rather than later. Despite not giving this one a proper cover, I can assure you at least a few of us will be talking about this one for the remainder of the year. Superb album.” [BLIZZARD OF JOZZSH]

• Last Rites Missing Pieces Review
• Bandcamp

21. HYPOMANIC DAYDREAM – THE YEARNING

By 2022, San Diego’s Putrescine had evolved into something fascinating, plopping its magnum opus, “In a Growing Sun,” onto a split with Adzes. Suddenly, the once-OSDM-y band was fusing creaky Carcassian wetness with far more avant-garde inclinations. It was, like, if Thantifaxath messed around with Timeghoul while working on a graduate thesis concerning experimental classical music. But the dramatic shift in sound wasn’t off-putting in a way that art music can be. “In a Growing Sun” ferried through a Bermuda Triangle of fringier interests, but wasn’t fart-sniffy, wasn’t impressed by itself. Instead, it had a very human core provided by Marie McAuliffe’s emotionally resonant vocals, an audience surrogate who held the door open for bewildered listeners. McAuliffe took that out-there energy with her to Hypomanic Daydream. At first, the new solo project sounded like it would follow the trails blazed by bands like OLD, Carbonized, and Disharmonic Orchestra, a uniquely progressive strain of no-genre metal that recalled an early ’90s sense of adventurism before then-burgeoning styles became more codified. Debut album Image introduced new elements, twisting sections into something like Coroner or Voivod messing around with vocaloids — you know, just your usual death metal album that included a Paramore cover. And then, like Putrescine, Hypomanic Daydream took the leap. The Yearning, a headspinningly eclectic record of disparate influences, sounds so much like the shape of something to come. And yet, it’s still undeniably metal, taking recognizable touchstones and welding them together into a metal mecha. Often, these tracks sound like Eye-era King Diamond jettisoned his band for Atheist, and that new crew was Tron’d into an early internet mainframe storing JRPG soundtracks. The Yearning is also so very human, too. It’s no surprise that Big Feelings Metal advocate Brendan Sloan is in the credits for reamping and mastering. Even when a listener is caught up in a whirlwind of guest Quetzal Tirado’s bass clarinet(!) solos, there’s this emotional aspect that aims straight for the heart. The Yearning isn’t an academic exercise in genre fuckery or weaving an RIO spirit into metal’s DNA. It lives, it breathes, it feels. [SETH BUTTNAM]

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20. TYPE: ARMOR UNIT –
REVOLUTIONS IN SAECULA

“Sonically, the clear antecedents to Type: Armor Unit are the expected ones given that ‘spacegrind’ tag, the likes of Discordance Axis, Antigama, Gridlink. Those are grinders whose aggression is both visceral and cerebral, with riffs that twist and skronk between tempo shifts from fast to faster and beyond, and Type: Armor Unit does all of that, with dashes of post-ish drift (‘Portal’) and electronic squee to add to the spaciness. But for all those futuristic trimming, Revolutions In Saecula never loses sight of its primary objective, which is to grind, and so grind it does, and well.” [ANDREW EDMUNDS]

• Last Rites Blast Rites Review
• Ampwall

19. EFFLUENCE – PIANISTIC DISMEMBERMENT

“Play this album at the same time as another album and you might not tell the difference. Is that a negative feature? It is if you’re a WIMP, because whatever album gets played whilst Pianistic Dismemberment gets air time is an album that’s seen its last days on this toilet earth, and the death blow will not be for the faint of heart. Play any or all of these songs as your first dance with a blushing bride and your firstborn will surely burst from the womb with monster truck tires instead of limbs.” [CAPTAIN]

• Last Rites Missing Pieces Review
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18. BARREN PATH – GRIEVING

“We’ve got one of the most creative guitarists in the history of the style… and one of the most accomplished grindcore drummers of the new millennium (himself a drum god, credit where it’s due)… and with them, the remainder of the instrumental line-up of one of the most interesting grind bands in a quarter century, and top it off with the vocalist from several supremely underrated outfits…” [ANDREW EDMUNDS]

• Last Rites Review
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17. OROMET – THE SINKING ISLE

“Oromet shares spiritual pace with Agalloch and Wolves In The Throne Room, where multiple guitars draw light in the darkness of doom to emulate starlit skies and the reflected sunlight of snowy trees… …More directly, these songs fit with the exemplary notion of funeral doom, connecting with Skepticism and Mournful Congregation fundamentally and, more distinctly, with those whose doom rings through with regality and epic scope, like Vouna and especially While Heaven Wept.” [LONE WATIE]

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16. GRAYCEON – THEN THE DARKNESS

“This is an album that speaks – sometimes directly in its lyrics, at other times obliquely in its moods and instrumental gestures – of betrayals, disappointments, deep roiling wells of anger and pain. It is dark, wrathful, venomous – it’s also, at 79 minutes, exhausting… …Then the Darkness is the paradoxically comforting sound of three friends figuring out just what the hell three people can do in this world, and if it turns out all we can do is bring a little somber beauty and righteous fury into our own corner? Then by god, that’s what we do.” [DAN OBSTKRIEG]

• Last Rites Review
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15. DELIQUESCE – SAVIOUR / ENSLAVER

“Saviour / Enslaver is an absolute beast of a death metal album–brutal, crushingly heavy, blindingly technical, deceptively varied, and brimming with far more personality than you typically get from this corner of the style. It should be a no-brainer for fans of Suffocation, Defeated Sanity, and their ilk, but really, let’s not hold back here: if you like death metal, do yourself a major solid and get your head cratered in by Deliquesce.” [ZACH DUVALL]

• Last Rites Review
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14. ARAPHEL – THE ENDCHANTER

Araphel’s rapid ascent in 2025 is equal parts surprising and unsurprising. The band’s 2024 EP, Old Comet Transition, was, after all, not all that different from the riff-heavy black metal mysticism of The Endchanter. However, where the former was in part a victim of its short form, the latter benefits from the breathing room a longplayer affords; with sufficient space and time, the atmosphere intensifies and the riffs become the structural building blocks with which these more orthodox endeavors thrive. The wider appeal here, of course, is the latter element; though Araphel’s sound is steeped in the atmosphere endemic to the Greek black metal tradition, there’s no denying that The Endchanter owes its infectiousness to the almighty riff. And the album accomplishes more in its rough 38 minutes than most do at twice the length. [CHRIS C]

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13. CORONER – DISSONANCE THEORY

“In some ways, Dissonance Theory feels like a combination of Mental Vortex and Grin, but in many others it is its own album, continuing Coroner’s tradition of never quite releasing the same record twice. It also sounds like it could have come out 30 years ago as a direct follow-up to Grin, compressing time and sounding like the band picked up right where they left off, both in sound and thankfully also in quality.” [ZACH DUVALL]

• Last Rites Review
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12. SULFURIC CAUTERY – KILLING SPREE

“The arrangements are more intricate than the full-on poundings of previous releases. At nearly nine minutes, closing track ‘Millions Of Slobbering Rats Devouring Their Blasted Out Brains’ is almost progressive, longer than most grindcore EPs on its own. More importantly than the technicality, though, is that Sulfuric Cautery continues to deliver a positively primal pummeling, twenty-one songs in twenty two-minutes. Sandwiched between the likes of ‘Disemboweled With Shit Stuck In Their Mouths’ and ‘Slobbering Rats,’ there’s much to love about the absolutely savage ‘Murder Suicide,’ the curiously titled ‘Bourgeois Historiography,’ and the almost (by relative standards) groovy title track.” [ANDREW EDMUNDS]

• Last Rites Blast Rites Review
• Bandcamp

11. MESSA – THE SPIN

“Time will tell, as it always does, if Close has truly been usurped, but at this very moment my heart believes The Spin to be Messa’s magnum opus. They have somehow adopted a lingua franca between their past and probable future selves, creating a sound that harmonizes with the elder parishioners while charting the chord changes ahead of the hymnal. Unexpected news can be one of life’s great joys or cruelest punishments. In that spirit I can delightedly tell you that this growth is benign.” [ISAAC HAMS]

• Last Rites Review
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10. 夢遊病者 (SLEEPWALKER) – РЛБ30011922

2025 has been a wonderful year for instrumental albums. While other personal favorites like Abhorrent Expanse and BarrSheaDahl leaned more into the realm of brain-damaging free jazz shotgunned through a death metal filter, 夢遊病者 (Sleepwalker)’s single-track album is a 37-minute sojourn through many musical flavors and stories. The band states that РЛБ30011922 is intended to represent a life lived from first breath to the final bit of dirt being tossed on your grave. It would be rather difficult to argue against that sentiment, but to these admittedly silly ears, its sounds and transformation bring to mind the experience of a road trip; not just any road trip, but one that spans a great distance and time, covering varied landscapes met with every kind of weather.

A passage can be the sonic equivalent of rolling through the nighttime desert with your hand out the window, enjoying a cool breeze on your face, while the next can stir memories of a sudden rain splashing on the windshield seemingly from nowhere. The song will take on dark, ominous tones that feel like driving toward a pitch-black cloud, leaving you unsure whether to continue toward what may be a tornado. Its notes can get erratic, like hitting a patch of black ice and spinning out. 夢遊病者 can stir toward dizzying heights where the oxygen begins to thin as easily as they can create a lush soundscape that feels alive and comforting, like an evergreen forest.

РЛБ30011922 is an album made for nighttime drives, camping, surfing, hiking, nostalgic bonfires, forward-looking star gazes, chatting with friends, remembering what it’s like to be alone, the brightest day, the darkest midnight, and all the other moments that make a trip a memorable journey. [SPENCER HOTZ]

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9. VULTURES VENGEANCE – DUST AGE

“The adventurous heroes out there who appreciate galloping heavy metal with loads of guitar sorcery will absolutely find suitable reward with Dust Age, though, as will existing fans and devotees of classics such as Omen, Manilla Road, Medieval Steel and Cirith Ungol. And as for how things might shake out over the next ten months? I refuse to give that another thought for at least six months. One thing I’m sure of as of today: Dust Age will be in the fight with all arms swinging when that time eventually comes.” [CAPTAIN]

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8. PARADISE LOST – ASCENSION

“More than anything, Ascension further hammers down the impression that Paradise Lost could keep doing this well into their elder years. After all, this is a band that already sounded old when they were teenagers. Why not keep playing grizzled, grumpy, and sad music for decades more? As long as they’re still able to write at this level and find tiny ways to keep twisting their formula, the goods will keep coming.” [ZACH DUVALL]

• Last Rites Review
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7. UMULAMAHRI – LEARNING THE SECRETS OF ACID

“Umulamahri, a band whose name is derived from a Morbid Angel tune that’s clearly about Wilt Chamberlain laying waste to the New York Knicks on March 2nd, 1962 (“You’ll perish within the hands / of the storm that means your end” [Euro-step / easy two]), has very suddenly appeared as if from nowhere to deliver a very curious—AND YES, TRIPPY—take on death metal that sounds a bit like modern Gorguts colliding with Chaos Echoes and being slammed through a table by a classic New Standard Elite hearthrob. WHEW, what a sentence.” [CAPTAIN]

• Last Rites Review
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6. DISSONA – RECEPTOR

“Listeners will notice hints of Leprous, Anubis Gate, and Zero Hour, but also probably any number of other prog metal, death metal, and traditional metal bands, not to mention artists from jazz, electronic and ambient, and classical backgrounds. Most importantly, while all these influences are there and identifiable in discrete moments, the culmination of their impact on Dissona’s developmental process is a sound all their own and a wonderful instantiation of the band’s name, a portmanteau of the words ‘dissonant’ and ‘persona’.” [LONE WATIE]

• Last Rites Review
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5. KAKOTHANASY – METAGONISM

Ah, technical brutal death metal, oftentimes one of the most confounding and rewarding sub-sub-genres of our beloved heavy metal universe… Pulling from the crushing heaviness of Suffocation and the what-the-fuck-was-that twisted riffery of Defeated Sanity, Switzerland’s Kakothanasay is a perfect example of that dichotomy on Metagonism, their second full-length in slightly over a decade of existence. Riffs spiral around one another, twisting and turning and then settling into chunky muted beatdowns; rhythms shift endlessly, blasting to grooving to all points in between; the vocals are indistinct grunts, another rhythmic element and never quite the focus, bolstering those riffs and rhythms. The formula is fairly straightforward – as much as technical brutal death metal could be – but the execution is impeccable, from the off-kilter riffing of “Ephemeral Demise Macro-Episodes Merging in Successive Epiphenomenal Conglomerates” to the bulldozer gait of “Methanized Autocatalytic Clash Culminated Into Ascetic Abolishment.” (Oh, yeah, and the song titles are something else, too.) One of the heaviest and smartest records of the year, Metagonism exists on a plane both immediate (“oh, damn, this is heavy as hell”) and intricate (“I’ve listened to this thing thirty times and I’m just now noticing the drum fill here…”), and all of that is immensely rewarding, which is exactly how technical brutal death metal should be. [ANDREW EDMUNDS]

• Bandcamp

4. SPECIES – CHANGELINGS

“…the band’s ultimate advantage relates to the manner in which the three players play off one another so pleasantly, imaginatively and seamlessly. You hear everyone pretty much at all times here as they wander, jump and fly around together, and Changelings continues to uphold that ‘live in the studio’ feel that heightens the organic sense of connection between each player… …it’s quite nice to experience progressive technical thrash that never manages to come across as overly showy or self-aggrandizing. Bottom line, Changelings is just FUN thrash that’s not at all ‘pizza thrash’, and that’s crucial to the album’s success.” [CAPTAIN]

• Last Rites Review
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3. WEEPING SORES –
THE CONVALESCENCE AGONIES

“Don’t go to Weeping Sores because you like sludge or death doom and are looking to be ground into dust. Go to this New York duo when you’re ready for introspection among agony; or seeking unique elements fighting against tried and true formulas; or when you need cold commiseration alone at the end of a shit week. Your best listening experience will be one personal to you, so regardless of what that turns out to be, just listen to this album at some point this year.” [SPENCER HOTZ]

• Last Rites Review
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2. PHANTOM SPELL – HEATHER & HEARTH

“…Heather & Hearth manages to eclipse its predecessor, simply because it finds new ways to reach that next step higher: It’s proggier, the new folk element suits the songwriting perfectly, it feels heavier (possibly due to the way that folk offsets the galloping), and I think McNeill has grown as a singer. Simply put, Heather & Hearth is an absolute stunner, and it’s a shoo-in as an adversary that will clash TO THE DEATH with the latest Vulture’s Vengeance and Reflection albums for Favorite Traditional Metal Album of the Year.” [CAPTAIN]

• Last Rites Review
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1. UNBIRTH – ASOMATOUS BESMIRCHMENT

Death metal can sound like all sorts of intended bodily harm. Some death metal wants to hit you with rocks. Some death metal wants to crush you under a tank tread. Some death metal wants to slosh you around the inside of a cement mixer filled with acid. But on Asomatous Besmirchment, Italy’s Unbirth just wants to cut you with knives. If you’re the kind of sicko who loves to hear electric guitars doing awesome things, Unbirth has written you a prescription for insanely great riffs played in and out and all around the corners of insanely great songs. Unbirth shares with Suffocation (surely one of the most key influences here) a knack for dazzling the listener with technicality and pummeling them with brutality while never fully committing to one pole or another of the death metal palette. What we’re left with, then, is riffs that scythe and stutter and leap and shuck and jive and hammer and slice, slice, slice. It’s a red-lined, razor-sharp, unrelenting album that can work on the level of letting it obliterate and overwhelm your senses, and that can work on the level of dissecting and appreciating just how smart and – yes – sophisticated it is, even as it plucks a serrated blade from your freshly aerated abdomen. Surprise! Now your organs live on the outside. [DAN OBSTKRIEG]

• Bandcamp

The post Best Of 2025 – Last Rites Combined Staff Top 25 appeared first on Last Rites.

As has become tradition, Captain handled the pre-fest on the first Friday of December with the latest installment of We Have The Power. If you haven’t already, get your titty missiles loaded up and head on over there for an enthusiastic rundown of 2025’s best power metal and a reminder of what real glory sounds like.

Here, now, we begin the celebration in earnest with a discussion of the year’s best heavy metal album cover art. Why start with art? Partly because the music is what it’s really all about and so you save the best for last, which is where we put the best albums list.

And yet, cover art is just so very important. Besides (usually) being the first thing you experience of an album, whether it’s a .jpeg on your streaming platform or an LP in the record store, the art is (probably) the first thing you think of when an album is brought to mind. Yeah, after a second or so, there’s surely an image of the artist(s) in your mind’s eye or a riff or chorus in your mind’s ear, but more often than not, it’s that album art that presents itself first. When a buddy mentions Black Sabbath, what jumps immediately to mind? That iconic cloaked figure in front of the mill, right? Then The Riff. How about when you’re reminded of Don’t Break The Oath? The Devil pointing at you from the flames, of course. In the Nightside Eclipse? Orcs on the march to Minas Morgul! The Mantle? That stoic elk in winter gray. Posthumous Humiliation? Well…

The music of course, is the thing, but the cover art is the gateway to the music, attracting, intriguing, even seducing and then, for better or worse, shaping preconceptions and therefore the listening experience. The actual listening experience, in turn, has the power to reshape perception of the album art, especially when lyrics, liner notes, and supplementary art get involved. The very best album art comes from artists who not only understand this as purveyors, but also appreciate it as consumers. These are those who fully immerse themselves in the process to create a multifaceted work of art in which the listener may be immersed, with the potential to make lifelong memories from profound experiences.

And, also, sometimes cover art is just cool.

Below, in the second of many lists celebrating the best of Heavy Metal Things in 2025, you can read about the cover art that most moved the Last Rites Crew this year.

Whether you’re inclined to give high fives all around or expose us as charlatans, we hope you’ll share some thoughts on your favorite art of the year, as well. [LONE WATIE]

JEAN FREDERICK DEMERS

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Phantom Spell’s Heather & Hearth might be one of the most beautiful albums of 2025. Throw in Jean deMers’ palette of purples, pinks and blues, and the result is near perfection. The prog rock-heavy second full-length from Kyle McNeill showcases somewhat of an evolution for the project. While there are, without a doubt, similarities to Immortal’s Requiem, McNeill leans even more so into his Kansas-ness with tons of tranquil solos, dreamy synths and triumphant vocals, all culminating in a medieval fever dream that sounds both nostalgic and fresh.

Circling back around to deMers’ cover art, there’s something about it that captures the essence of just that — nostalgia. While, sadly, I wasn’t around for the prog rock golden age 40 years ago, the part of me that yearns for that era found a piece of it in Heather & Hearth, much of which was initially sparked by the album cover. What McNeill finds in the soothing guitar leads, mid-paced riffs and keys, deMers finds in his simplistic sketch of a poor skeletal soul resting in front of a tattered castle, seemingly confronting the trials and tribulations of past battles. And while there’s undoubtedly little soothing about claymores clashing, there is in the comedown at night in front of the campfire. That’s what you’ll find here. The melancholy yet hope that echoes from the speakers in reverb and acoustic guitars is addicting and unshakeable. deMers perfectly captures that, and the stories told around said burning embers.

Visually and sonically, Heather & Hearth is one of 2025’s masterworks. [BLIZZARD OF JOZZSH]

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ROY DE RAT

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Wait, M.C. Escher was assimilated? That’s obviously a Borg cube there, or something like it, but some of those lines don’t compute. Many appear to be in the midst of drawing; transparent lines in the same space as opaque; some abutting where there should be an intersection and some running right through their vertices instead of terminating there. Planar arrangements are definitely there but they don’t quite follow the rules, either.

It’s hard to know for sure, but the tapered beams of light suggest multidirectional or multidimensional movement which, together with the incompleteness of the structure, might mean we’ve caught the thing in mid-transport from some other timespace, bringing with it whatever cosmic toxicity turns everything around it phosphor green.

And just look at the damage it’s doing! Still arriving and already ripping this sector of space apart. Into what though? Those strange emanations appear to be the organic detritus of disintegrating planets. Are these plumes of waste being dispelled from the structure? Or is the structure assimilating by absorption?

Whatever’s happening there, it seems like the only logical explanation for this art is that the ruthless cybernetic operatives of Kakothanasy grabbed their old pal and graphic artist, Cäme Roy de Rat, bolted him to the floor, blasted “Ephemeral Demise Macro-Episodes Merging in Successive Epiphenomenal Conglomerates” into his earholes for six days, and said, “Make it look like that.”

Fuckin’ nailed it. [LONE WATIE]

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MARIE MCAULIFFE

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I follow a bunch of fine art accounts on Instagram. You know the type: these deep dives into classical paintings that take great pains to explain every nuance in a work. “As you can surely tell, the way the scruffy dog in the background is looking up is obviously an allusion to how the peasant class reacted to the Western Schism,” that kind of thing. The reels are cool. Anything that democratizes art and re-establishes it as something to be enjoyed by all, rather than strictly an investment tool for the ultra-rich, is a good thing.

But, and this might just be a byproduct of trying to surf the undertow-like waves of the various social media algorithms, it also often positions art as these visual riddles to solve. Here’s what this means, here’s why that is, here’s the context behind all of it; distill, demystify, decode. I love art history, don’t get me wrong. And I think all of that info can enrich a work, often elevating it higher in one’s estimation. That said… I kind of want to feel art first without needing to know whether I got the test questions right. That’s why I’ve always been drawn to more abstract styles. I have been transformed into a puddle of tears while standing in the presence of a Rothko. Friends, I’ve gotten lost within Fangor’s circles. Rauschenberg’s Black Paintings? That’s my shit. I’ve accepted that I am 100 percent an abstract art bitch.

Anyway, this is all a long wind-up to say what Manic Dream Girl, the big brain behind Hypomanic Daydream, has created for The Yearning is my shit. Yes, it’s great in an art school sense: It’s spatially well-balanced, there’s a playful amount of depth, and the complementary colors nail that classic Color Wheel balance. However, first and foremost, I feel this. What might make some think of, like, Kandinsky tackling the end of The Substance, I feel the deep desire to unify the internal self with the external visual. Yo, this yearns. Holy hell, does it yearn. Look at how our main character, a fragmented figure, reaches toward the large eye with one hand while simultaneously threatening it with an arrow-tipped appendage with the other. Is that speaking to a desire to be noticed while also harboring a deep-seated fear of being perceived? I don’t know! But that’s kind of the point: You don’t have to know. You could go anywhere with The Yearning‘s cover, applying whatever themes you think fit, which is appropriate for an album that plays like an impressionistic work, one rife with seemingly disparate details that unify into this stunning whole when you take a step back. More importantly, like the album it adorns, the art for The Yearning is ready and able to go anywhere. But you start by feeling it. And damn it, I do. [SETH BUTTNAM]

• Hypomanic Daydream Facebook

TED NASMITH

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I’d love to sit here and tell you I’m immune to modern technology’s deleterious effect on the human attention span, but alas, they got me. I’d ADORE the possibility of telling you I don’t judge books by their cover, but good people of Earth, I’m just a bodybrain with eyeorbs that like what they like. The act of scrolling Bandcamp for new music combines both of these unfortunate truths into a twitchy, judgy affair, and it’s a miracle I’ve latched onto anything at all. Many believe the technocratic takeover of the limbic system to be a harbinger of the fall of man, the apocalyptic slide of human civilization into the yawning chasm of idle pleasures and callous abandonment of charity. Enter The Sinking Isle, an aptly titled mountain of funeral doom with a cover that seduced my eyes before my ears.

Californian funeral doom duo Oromet once again utilized artwork by Ted Nasmith, a prolific illustrator of fantasy, to adorn this sophomore outing. The piece is entitled “Ships of the Faithful” and it depicts in brutal majesty the fleeing of the last Numenorians from their doomed home. The fall of Numenor is directly akin to many allegorical tales of man’s destruction, of hubris and vanity ending in fiery death. Thematically, The Sinking Isle is just so, yet the music also mirrors the bright pockets of roiling flame and the desperate, shipwrecked sorrow. In their largest moments, Oromet wields a power that feels like it could split mountains.

Funeral doom is so often more evocative internally than externally – the “lack” of musical material can cause the mind to fill in the visual blanks. The colossal mass of tone, of feeling, carries the spirit where it may. In a way, Oromet cheated. They managed to precisely depict the intended destination of the listener. The Sinking Isle looks like the unstoppable force and sounds like the immovable object – two great concepts that taste great together! Since I can’t in good conscience end a funeral doom blurb with an exclamation point, please give Oromet your cochlear attention and/or dollars, give Ted Nasmith your visual attention and/or dollars and for the love of Isildur, continue on your merry way. [ISAAC HAMS]

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GRUESOMEGRAPHX

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Personally, I enjoy it when death metal art opts for bright cartoony colors and styles to deliver gross shit. You could probably sneak this onto the Kindergarten art wall and the average passerby would pay it no mind. One might look at it from a distance and think, “Another delightful, messy drawing from that kid Sid who loves his toys so much!”

Get a little closer, though, and you’ll realize ol’ Barftholomew there looks like someone who ate three-day-old Quiznos at 6 am after a bender. The closer you look, the more foul things you’ll notice. There’s a beached whale amidst its vile sludge, corpses, a dog thing (maybe), and, hell, there are even tentacles coming out of the toilet.

What really sells this particular bile blasterpiece is that the artist was able to hire the baby sun from Teletubbies to pose in the upper corner. Clearly, the poor chap has fallen on hard times and spent many a moon (get it?) in a heroine den, leaving Pete Hegseth hoping he’ll take a boat ride, but it’s nice to see him still getting work. Before he says bye-bye, let’s give him and GruesomeGraphx a bit of tubby toast and a big hug for giving us such delightful filth!  [SPENCER HOTZ]

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BRAD MOORE

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You know it, you love it, you can almost smell it: it’s another beautiful Brad Moore abomination. Hamilton, Ontario death metal bruisers Last Retch tapped Moore for the cover of their second album, the compact and lovingly destructive Abject Cruelty. Although the art style here is still 100% recognizably his, Moore’s ghastly purples and pinks here underscore a more overtly gore-splattered approach, albeit one that still leans heavily into that uncanny sense of things being juuuuust a few degrees shy of normal. Foregrounded in the lower right is a sheared off face still sporting its full head of hair, and then taking the upward-left diagonal is some kind of decomposing architectural tusked beast-woman with a skeletal pelvis twisted like some mockery of the yin-yang. It’s ugly yet fascinating, with each tiny lurid detail drawing the eye closer even as the overall scene settles into cosmic repulsion. It’s great! [DAN OBSTKRIEG]

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ADAM BURKE

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GraveRipper’s From Welkin to Tundra is as cold as it is rabid. The Indianapolis-based black thrash ‘n’ rollers returned earlier this year with their second full-length, again calling the one and only Adam Burke to conjure the visuals. If you’re somehow unfamiliar with the name, you’ve undoubtedly seen some of his works for bands like Hellripper, REZN, Artificial Brain, Eternal Champion, Fer de Lance, Gatecreeper, etc.

Burke’s eerie painting of a desolate fortress is the perfect cover for an album reliant on capturing the freezing atmosphere of ‘90s Norwegian black metal, which GraveRipper leans heavily into on their second opus. Just as the legendary Immortal captured the coldness on their releases, Burke and GraveRipper do so here, and that’s precisely why it landed on my year-end list. Nothing quite captures the essence like a palette of blues and fantasy Impressionism.

There’s also duality in Burke’s two works for GraveRipper. Their first, Seasons Dreaming Death, is a fire-blazing release, sporting red and black and being the more thrash-heavy album. The blue-focus on album No. 2 marches in a similar fashion to something like Metallica’s Ride the Lightning to Kill ‘Em All. Not in a musical sense, but in, obviously, the color scheme, and darker atmosphere.

Killer album and equally killer artwork. [BLIZZARD OF JOZZSH]

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RYAN LESSER

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There are so many ways to appreciate the art that Ryan Lesser contributed for Slomatics’ latest sludge slab, Atomicult, but let’s start with perhaps the most obvious question: Is this cover a sequel to the art of In the Court of the Crimson King? From the colors to the clear anguish to even the imperfections of the teeth, it’s hard to escape the comparisons, and there might even be a narrative connection (if you squint and have fun with it, at least). On King Crimson’s debut, our subject is clearly horrified, as if some impending doom is zeroing in on him. On Lesser’s piece, then, it’s like that something caught up to him and he’s been possessed by some cosmic force. And now he sees all. All of the universe is now laid bare before him, and it’s not exactly something he can handle. He’s not Zaphod Beeblebrox, after all.

But beyond that fun little “What if?” about the piece, Lesser’s artwork is gorgeous. He possesses an illustrative style that ought to remind viewers of the great Moebius and his acolytes (such as the artists behind the incredible TV show Scavengers Reign–watch it). Colors are bold (the hues of the planets are wonderful touches); there’s a sense of movement even in the still image (you can almost feel the corners of his eyes quivering); and the cover has a deep surrealism that still seems grounded in a form of reality that perhaps we can’t quite grasp. Sure, it’s an image of a pink guy with a lot of weird skin tags or budding antennae (or something) who seemingly has the universe streaming from his eyes (not to mention some delightful black goo), but like even the strangest of Moebius’ pieces, it’s oddly believable, in its own way. It all adds up to a work of art that is as stunning as it is ludicrously fun. [ZACH DUVALL]

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PÅHL SUNDSTRÖM

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The sonic impact of Hesitating Lights is felt primarily through its deft weaving of disparate genres. Post-punk jangles and driving rhythms collide with full-throated roars and greasy swipes of distortion. One might call it an album of harmonious AND opposing forces. Though, if you saw the album cover before even hearing a note, you’d have a mighty inkling that that was indeed the case.

According to one Encyclopedia Metallum (THE Metal Archives – have you been? Gorgeous in the fall.), cover artist Påhl Sundström has only worked on a handful of releases since 2014 in a visual art capacity, which is a shame! I’d love to see the feller keep up the output in 2026. Hesitating Lights has the kind of cover I could gawk at all day and not come to the same conclusion twice. Most importantly, though, within this greater discussion, if I had to pick a soundtrack for staring down this art, it would be Hesitating Lights, and if I had to pick a work of art to exemplify a soundtrack, I’d pick this piece.

A dijon yellow background (or foreground?), a vaguely humanoid figure slashed through and practically dripping, an alien blend of perfect 90 degree angles and aimless fissures. The retrofuturistic bent is kind of comforting, like the colors of your favorite 80’s scifi flick on a basement CRTV, and yet the coloration and variations in shading keep a bit of nausea in your belly. This ain’t your typical death metal spread of horror/gore/violence. This feels like it hints at all those concepts but doesn’t quite latch onto any individual theme. There is a lurking menace to this art, the cover whispers, but you’ll have to peer into the swirling strange to uncover it. [ISAAC HAMS]

FLESHFLIES

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Way, way back in the early ‘90s, I took a massive stack of ankient Metal Maniacs mags and cut out what seemed like a thousand pictures of bands and album covers for a huge collage project. It was a formidable task, but definitely a labor of love, and the end result eventually went up in my college dorm for all to ‘enjoy’.

What I remember the most about that giant slab of patchwork hideousness today is the fact that if you stood just the right distance away, an area that included the Jump in the Fire demon, the Obituary logo, King Diamond in a wheelchair, and several other seemingly incongruous frights ended up looking a bit like Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man—the iconic image with his arms raised. That’s always struck me as something to be really admired about the collage art medium: the way images can be put together to form other compelling images, often aimed at challenging the viewer’s perspective. To add a bit of a modern spin on things, it’s kind of funny to think about how collage art manages to pull from (often) arbitrary images that already exist to create something new, legit and totally gripping, whereas AI art attempts to do similarly and FAILS miserably. In the end, the human aspect must maintain dominion in order for the upshot to remain valid and effective / affective.

Take the artwork ornamenting Learning the Secrets of Acid, for example. I’m fairly certain we’re not yet at a point on our doomed timeline where some stable diffusion system could haul the titles of this record into its processor and spit out an image as glorious and entrancing as what we see above. A talented human artist (in this case, Anne / fleshflies) is required to strike that perfect balance between still clearly seeing an original image but also recognizing how our happily rotting friend with the ALL SEEING EYES molts into an inviting landscape without fully losing some semblance of that human form. That individual IS absolutely “ruling the oily voids” that surround their resting place, just as I can see how the natural landscape exploding from their lower half could be interpreted as “life’s true fruit.” Is this the actual leaked photo of Heaven? Oddly enough, and I swear I ain’t trippin’, that doesn’t so bad. Pretty sure I see the sort of smile one can certainly attribute to contentment. [CAPTAIN]

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TONI RAUKOLA

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“If everyone had a 12-gauge/ And a surfboard, too/ You’d see them shooting and surfing/ From here to Malibu.” Yes, those are lyrics from “Skeet Surfing,” a number one hit for Nick Rivers in the fictional universe of Top Secret!, the most underrated movie to come from the vaunted brains belonging to the Spoof Team 6 squad of Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker. And yes, that career-highlight pic of a stuntman firing a shotgun is a cropped still from the “Skeet Surfing”-scored opening sequence of that 1984-released spy flick parody.

So, fine, for the insufferable nerds in the back, I guess it’s worth recognizing the provenance of that image. But, divorced from its context, it’s also the perfect exoskeleton for Demonic Death Judge’s Absolutely Launched. The starring surfer on the album cover is, in fact, absolutely launching it. You can’t deny it. And that indisputable launching sets the tone for a filthy stoner rock record that opens with a similarly tone-setting track titled “’90’s Violence.” After a career of going in an increasingly proggier direction, Demonic Death Judge decided 2025 was right to release the dumbest album of its career, a winningly stupid muscle car record that sounds like it’s aggressively blown off its tits thanks to an in-cabin fuel leak. Yes, Absolutely Launched ain’t safe in a way that feels comedically surreal, a record that barrels forth with the unceasing, unsafe, and unthinking propulsion of a runaway semi carrying loaded semi-automatics. What better way to convey that than, let’s review the tape here, a guy discharging a large gun while perched atop a surfboard. Nailed it. Leave it to a Finnish band to make the most American-looking album on this list. Kelly Slater, the country depends on you to respond. Maybe for the next Fu Manchu album, you’ll fire a bazooka from a boogie board. [SETH BUTTNAM]

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IZABELA GRABDA

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Have you ever taken acid, watched Alien, and then gone to a Salvador Dali exhibit? Me neither, but I bet it would end up looking something like the gorgeous nightmare that Izabela Grabda created for Uulliata Digir’s debut album. The bronze, silver, and greyish-blue hues give the piece a mechanical and architectural feel, but the swirling, blending, bending, and morphing breathe life that says, “I WILL shed this artificial coil!”

If you did happen to take that acid, I would strongly encourage you to hit play on the album and simply stare at this cover for the next 38 minutes and 34 seconds. I imagine with the intense, bizarre music and howling wails of Julita Dąbrowska, every passing note will give this cover more and terrifying life. Each curve hides a new surprise equally as harrowing as each song’s next note. What’s really in here? A ladder? A moth wing? A vacuum? A tornado? A butthole? Who’s to say? Imbibe, listen, stare, and see what you find. [SPENCER HOTZ]

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DAVE KING

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In my review earlier this year, I wrote: “So yes, this entire album is an experimental collision of free jazz and avant-garde metal, but Abhorrent Expanse never feel like they want to teach you a bunch of weird chords or impress you with an audio bibliography of punishing, deep-cut citations. The vignettes they build themselves into across this wonderful album are eerie, disquieting, noisy, unpredictable, ghostly, thunderous, and honestly really just a lot of fun. Dave King’s incredible cover artwork for Enter the Misanthropocene is actually a perfect microcosm of the music: It depicts a musical score displayed sideways, with thick, aggressive streaks of oil pastels, fingerprints smudged and smeared as if exorcising some irrepressible compulsion. Whether those painterly interventions are making the music beautiful or making the music illegible is in the eye of the beholder.” All these months later, I realize that I’ve always assumed the cover was a mixed media piece, with an actual paper score taped to a canvas and then painted over. But the more I stare at it, the less I’m sure. Is it a photograph? Is it entirely a painting on flat canvas with exquisitely rendered depth? Far from a failure, that indeterminacy bleeds back to the music as well, to this exquisite pairing of improvisational music and visual arts. I don’t know what’s happening, yet I’m compelled to return. [DAN OBSTKRIEG]

EZRA HARKIN

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I DINNINT HAVE TO TAKE PIANO LESSONS WHEN I WAS A KID BUT I DID HAFTA PLAY THE SAXOPHONE BECAUSE MY DAD PLAYED THE SAXOPHONE AND MY DAD IS AWESOME AND I WANTED TO DO SOMETHING LIKE HE DID WHEN I WAS A KID SO I PLAYED THE SAXOPHONE LIKE HE DID. PRETTY SOON I GAVE UP THE SAXOPHONE THO BECAUSE I DID IT FOR SCHOOL AND THE MARCHING BAND UNIFORMS WERE SHIT AND REAL REAL UNCOMFORTABLE AND I DINNINT WANTA LOOK LIKE A DANG SQUARE SO I QUIT. THE OTHER THING WAS I WAS REALLY INTO HEAVY METAL SO WHAT I REALLY WANTED WAS A GUITAR THAT LOOKED LIKE THE ONE THE GUY IN LOUDNESS PLAYED BUT INSTEAD OF THAT GUITAR I GOT A GUITAR THAT LOOKED LIKE SOMETHING KENNY LOGGINS WOULD PLAY. I GOT A GUITAR TEACHER AND HE COMBED HIS FLIPPIN BEARD BEFORE EVERY ONE OF OUR LESSONS AND THAT FREAKED ME OUT. LIKE COMB YOUR SHIT BEFORE YOU SEE ME YOU PINHEAD. CAN YOU TEACH ME HOW TO PLAY ENDLESS PAIN INSTEAD OF SMOKE ON THE FUCKING WATER. ANYWAY I MAYBE WOULDA PLAYED THE PIANO IF THE PIANO COULD COME TO LIFE WITH TENTACLES TO DESTROY MY BEARD COMBING GUITAR TEACHER. [CAPTAIN]

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DAN SEAGRAVE

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Are you fucking serious, Dan Seagrave? After more than 35 years in the game – not to mention covers for the likes of Altars of Madness and Effigy of the Forgotten and Left Hand Path and The Erosion of Sanity and Transcend the Rubicon and Penetralia and about 500 other of your classic favorites – Seagrave shouldn’t still be able to achieve that “wow” factor, right? But here we are, and there is the Death Never Sleeps art, pulling off exactly what it needs to do: providing supremely kickass old school death metal art for a supremely kickass slab of old school death metal in Glorious Depravity’s sophomore effort.

Even by Seagrave’s normally extremely detailed standards this is one loaded piece of art. From the foreground demon beetle creatures – which of course appear to be harvesting humans – all the way to the structures in the distance, everything has impeccable detail, not to mention a sense of scale and depth, really showing off the artist’s layered painting technique (his Instagram videos provide a great insight into his process). The simple gray and red color palette is effective in communicating both the age of everything – technology that is very old, very advanced, and very alien – plus a strange sense of power. Oh, and not to mention the blood. Blood. Blood. And possibly bits of sick. It’s creepy, a little terrifying, and oddly inviting.

Inviting because, in the pre-web days before people could hear every album before making a purchase decision, the Death Never Sleeps art would have been the kind of impossibly rad thing you used to see on the shelf that made you have to have a record. That Seagrave can still capture that vibe all these decades later is a testament to both his talents and his inseparable connection to death metal. [ZACH DUVALL]

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