(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!).
In the summer of 2016, the company launched Bandcamp Daily, an online music publication about artists on the platform. Bandcamp Daily regularly publishes articles of relevance to metalheads, though metal is of course only one of hundreds of music genres represented on Bandcamp.
Last week Bandcamp Daily once again published its list of the year’s Best Metal Albums, again under the byline of Brad Sanders, who has been writing the monthly metal column for Bandcamp for a while now. Beginning last January he also took over the monthly metal column at Stereogum, whose YE metal list we just published in the post preceding this one.
The 2025 Bandcamp Daily list again includes 12 un-ranked selections presented alphabetically by band name, accompanied by mini-reviews — and you can read those and listen to the music streams HERE. Not surprisingly, this list and the Stereogum list overlap significantly. Compared to the 10-album Stereogum list, this 12-album Bandcamp Daily list includes three albums that are here but not there — from Castrator, Coroner, and Vacuous.
If you do the math, however, you’ll realize that there’s one album on the Stereogum list that isn’t on this one: Deafheaven’s. I thought this was odd until I realized that Lonely People With Power isn’t currently available on Bandcamp, so there you go.
Ancient Death – Ego Dissolution
Castrator – Coronation of the Grotesque
Coroner – Dissonance Theory
Christian Mistress – Children of the Earth
Hedonist – SCAPULIMANCY
Lamp of Murmuur – The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy
Messa – The Spin
Rwake – The Return of Magik
Testament – Para Bellum
Trauma Bond – Summer Ends. Some Are Long Gone
Vacuous – In His Blood
Yellow Eyes – Confusion Gate