LISTMANIA 2025: A TOP 20 LIST FROM WIL CIFER

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Dec 172025
 

(We present NCS writer Wil Cifer’s list of the Top 20 metal albums of 2025.)

Still waiting on the world to end, this slow-burning apocalypse is more like the awkward silent pauses in a David Lynch movie. And much like this unease, 2025 felt like an odd year in music to me, but in the fifth year of every decade, there is a shift, so that transition is being felt for sure. Not as death metal dominant as last year’s list, and more balanced genre-wise, really only one entry rides the line on what is metal, but it’s sonically heavy enough to belong here.

With my neuro-spicy brain, these kinds of lists can be a bit of an obsessive sticking point for me that can lead down a rabbit hole of procrastination until I feel it’s perfect. Though the funny thing is, perfect does not exist, so I chose between obsession and acceptance, and accepted the fact I would just go with the albums I listened to the most, since at the end of the day, if you only give an album a couple of spins it really matters little what the Anthony Fantano’s of the world think about it if it does not resonate with you and hook you in. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VOID MONUMENTS — “THE SIGN OF BLASPHEMY”

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Dec 172025
 

(written by Islander)

Occasionally in these premiere features we dive right into the music we’re showcasing, just for the pure hell of it, and then afterward come back and give you some details about who’s doing it and where the music comes from. This is one of those times.

The name of the death metal song you’re about to hear is “The Sign of Blasphemy“, and it’s as brazenly wicked at its core as that title signifies. It’s also vicious, poisonous, revelrous, frighteningly sinister, grimly oppressive, supernaturally chilling, furiously bone-smashing, and so well-written that it quickly drives its many fiendish hooks deep into a listener’s head. Continue reading »

THE BEST OF THE OUTSIDE: A 2025 LIST BY NEILL JAMESON

 LISTMANIA 2025  3 Responses »
Dec 172025
 


photo by Kassandra Carmona

(One of the perennial highlights of our year-end LISTMANIA series are the articles Neill Jameson (of Krieg) has contributed, and we’re very happy that he’s doing so again this year.)

If you’ve paid any attention over the last few years the first thing you’ll notice is my hair looks fucking wonderful, thank you. You’ll also notice this is my only list for the site this year. It’s actually my only list for any site besides my Substack, where the entirety of my list is, for better or worse. Since you asked, I’ve spent the better part of the year trying to carve that out as my main place where I drop the shit that falls out of my head. And what a year it’s been. Jesus Christ.

I don’t need to really tell the readers of this site why this year has been a motherfucker because I’m pretty sure the bulk of you didn’t vote for it. But it just seems like 2025, more than most, will not make too many “best years of my/your life” lists, whenever those get posted, April probably.

If we want to focus on whatever “positives” came out of this year, the main theme has been a massive flow of quality music, regardless of what genre you’re into. I don’t really remember a year starting so strongly and finishing with the same gusto, or zest if you will. I could have had a top 40 by fucking May. But the subtheme (minor to this year’s major? I haven’t slept in two days) is the amount of outsider records that came through the gates, artists who really stopped giving a fuck about convention and decided that rules were merely a suggestion, which can either be intoxicating or infuriating, especially if you have no patience for whimsy like me.

So for my contribution to the grand tradition of No Clean Singing lists which, frankly, are always outsider to the norms of the metal journalistic masses anyway, I wanted to focus on bands who colored outside the lines, either in their forms or in what expectations people may have had for them. 

And with that, let’s get cracking. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: BIZARREKULT — “BLIKKET HENNES”

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Dec 172025
 

(written by Islander)

The creation of music and its exposure to listeners is, as we all know, an inherently synergistic phenomenon. At least when the music is honest and authentic, the artist thinks something, feels something, is driven by the need to express those thoughts and emotions, maybe even as compulsively as the need to eat and drink. But the listener exposed to musical creations reacts based on their own thoughts, feelings, and histories. What they interpret, whether reflexively or through a thoughtful contemplation, is as much a function of themselves as it is the intention and spirit of the artist.

Bizarrekult is the black metal musical vehicle of Roman V., a native of Siberian Russia who moved to Norway roughly 20 years ago and then began recording music as a lone wolf, accompanying poetic verses he’d been writing since childhood. A demo emerged in 2006, followed by an early split with Theosophy, but then nothing surfaced until an EP in 2019 and then a first album in 2021, Vi overlevde (“We Survived”), followed by a second one, Den tapte krigen (“The Lost War”), in 2023.

Now a third one is on the way. Its title is Alt Som Finnes (“All There Is”), and it includes guest vocalists from Predatory Void, MØL, and Dødheimsgard. What inspired this one? Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DAIDALOS — “DIS”

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Dec 162025
 

(written by Islander)

The German symphonic black metal band Daidalos was founded in 2020 by Tobias Püschner, originally as a one-man project. For the band’s debut album, The Expedition (2022), Daidalos drew inspiration from a truly harrowing tale from history, the Arctic journey led by the British explorer Sir John Franklin in 1845, an expedition that ended in disaster as Franklin’s two ships (Erebus and Terror) became trapped in the ice, suffering for more than a year; both Franklin and the entire crew perished.

Daidalus now has a second album coming our way in February 2026. For this one the band took its inspiration not from history but from the realm of imagination, and specifically from one one of the greatest works of global literature, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.

But rather than simply retelling the epic through music, Püschner has crafted the new album (titled Dante) as a “reinterpretation” of the descent into Hell, one that “explores doubt, despair, and the hidden truths between faith and fear – a symphonic black metal audio drama, melancholic rather than evil.” Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MALIGNANT AURA — “BENEATH A CROWN OF ANGUISH”

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Dec 162025
 

(written by Islander)

About 3 1/2 years ago we premiered a jaw-dropping debut album named Abysmal Misfortune Is Draped Upon Me by the Australian death/doom band Malignant Aura. We called it “a towering and soul-shuddering success, one that’s just as capable of kicking your heart into over-drive as it is of dragging you into abyssal netherworlds where dread and grief endlessly reign.” And now Malignant Aura return, building upon the success of that debut with their second full-length, Where All of Worth Comes to Wither.

The new album is more concise than the debut — five songs and 46 minutes versus six songs and 53 minutes — but it surpasses expectations that the band’s compelling debut generated, which is no mean feat. We have a sign of that achievement through our premiere today of the album’s second single, “Beneath A Crown of Anguish“, in advance of the album’s collaborative release by Memento Mori, Grindhead Records, and Primitive Moth. Continue reading »

CLEARING THE SLATE PART IV: THE WILD, WILD, (w)REST

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Dec 162025
 

(This is the fourth and final Part of a series of record-review collections by DGR — collections of multiple reviews that are somewhat shorter by his standards than what you usually see from him — all of them intended to clear the slate in preparation for his year-end lists that will be coming soon.)

This started with the intention of me absolutely smashing out four of these and then diving head-first with wanton abandon into my year-end list collective. A final freeing of thoughts so that I could then look backward through the year and fry my brain one more time while rediscovering all of the music I had enjoyed since the beginning of 2025.

Then your pet gets sick and you wind up being told that she has three or four different things happening all at once and you now have a twice daily, six rotating medications regimen to stick to and things get sort of waylaid until you’re back to wavering on the precipice of stability and you can weasel a little time out to write something. That’s where I’m at now, I think. I should probably check on the cat again just to be safe.

Today’s final collective is a wild one, a combination of releases that kept getting back-burnered, opening and closing paragraphs rewritten multiple times, and discoveries that happened while perusing different label Bandcamp pages while writing the previous three entries in this series. In combination with my year-end list – which I do already have basically laid out albums-wise, just not written – these things have started to congeal into one mass of ideas that I’m not sure apply to each album. In order to prevent random wires being crossed I’ve somewhat sequestered this article from the year-end shenanigans, and as such, must finish this before the true descent into madness begins. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2025: BANDCAMP DAILY’S LIST OF THE BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 2025

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Dec 152025
 

(written by Islander)

Reading year-end lists that someone other than you made tend to provoke mixed feelings of validation, perplexity (which sometimes verges into anger), and discovery. The opportunity for discovery is the main reason we here at NCS devote so much space to our annual LISTMANIA extravaganza, even though we know those other feelings will also be in the mix of reactions. The list we’re re-publishing from Bandcamp Daily will probably be no different in any of these respects.

Bandcamp, of course, has become a vital platform for the digital release of music of all stripes (and physical merchandise as well) since its founding in 2007. Bandcamp used to release an annual compilation of performance statistics, but I haven’t found a similar report since the one they released for 2017. However, the main Bandcamp page today reports that “Fans have paid artists $1.63 billion using Bandcamp, and yesterday alone bought 71,170 records.”

Those are staggering totals, and some part of those enormous sums has been the result of Bandcamp’s laudable decision to continue the monthly tradition of “Bandcamp Fridays” that they began during the height of the pandemic. The last of those for 2025 occurred 10 days ago, but Bandcamp has already announced that they will continue this over the course of eight Fridays in 2026 (hoorah!). Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2025: STEREOGUM’S LIST OF THE 10 BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 2025

 LISTMANIA 2025  1 Response »
Dec 152025
 

(written by Islander)

For many years as part of our annual LISTMANIA orgy we’ve shared Stereogum’s YE list of the best metal releases. For all of those years (until now) it was assembled by the writers of Stereogum’s monthly Black Market column. In last year’s list it was announced (to my dismay) that the Black Market column would be ending, to be replaced by a column called Breaking the Oath written by Brad Sanders, who had been responsible for Bandcamp Daily’s metal column.

Sure enough, Breaking the Oath’s initial appearance at Stereogum occurred last January and has appeared monthly ever since. If you try to catch up on those columns now, you’ll need to pay Stereogum a subscription fee. Simply registering with an e-mail and password isn’t enough, as I discovered to my chagrin.

However, Brad Sanders has continued Stereogum’s tradition of publishing a list of the year’s best metal, and it’s not pay-walled. Interestingly, he has also continued to write the monthly metal column at Bandcamp Daily, another platform whose YE lists we’ve been sharing for some years, and will do again in our next post today. It shouldn’t shock anyone that today’s list and that one overlap… significantly. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ELEVATE THE VIRUS — “THE GROWTH OF DECAY”

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Dec 152025
 

(written by Islander)

Today we welcome to our site Elevate the Virus, a deathcore band from Saint John, New Brunswick, a place latitudinally close to our site’s Seattle-area HQ but roughly 3400 miles (5500 km) to the east of us. They formed up in 2012, and began making a name for themselves in the Maritime Provinces and elsewhere in Canada through their live performances, and eventually through a continuing sequence of releases starting in 2014.

The band’s latest release is a five-track EP named The Growth of Decay, which was discharged on November 13th. To help spread the word about it, what we bring you today is an official video for the EP’s title song. Continue reading »

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