(This is Part I of a five-part year-end list from NCS writer DGR. We’ll have all the remaining Parts coming out day-by-day until hitting the next weekend.)
I’d like to think that every year I manage to keep some sort of schedule when it comes to writing out the end of year events for this website. Usually it’s Andy’s comprehensive autopsy of the year, followed by my bullshit, and then everyone else gets a shot in between. If I manage to time it just right this usually runs just before the holidays and lands just in time so that you could really ruin a Christmas gathering or two with your musical taste were you so determined. I failed in every regard on that front this year.
Life handed me a few raw ones that I am still dealing with and I’m not even sure I’ve completely cleaned off the heaping plate of horseshit I was served so generously last year. That and of course the overall world events so omnipresent that even if you’ve managed to live in a sort of blissful ignorance, the cavalcade of bullshit just seems to be wearing on everybody. Everybody is fucking tired, everyone feels like shit, and my few moments of joy seem to consist of being surrounded by the gaggle of chucklefucks that attend concerts and festivals that I get to talk to.
Every year for at least the past half a decade at this point has opened with me opining about some sort of pessimistic crap, but to be honest, if you ever see me run one of these lists with a semblance of “man, things were just swell this time around!”, you should probably get a wellness check performed on my behalf. At the very least you shouldn’t trust whatever I put for the top ten that year. Or any year, really. The sheer ego of stacking fifty plus albums and expecting people to read it should be disqualifying enough.
So that said, 2025 was a great year for heavy metal. It had a weird ebb and flow to it at times but some of that is also self-inflicted, given that I was effectively in absentia for two months this year because I was too busy gallavanting around the globe, expanding my horizons and going to places wherein the predominant language is “English”.
I build these lists by effectively running backward through the site, starting at the reviews segment and walking forward into the present day – which right now is something like forty pages back if you’re looking for our first freshly minted “2025” review – and usually about halfway through I start panicking that I might not have enough. This year was no different. and like every year the stack gets larger and out of control before the end of the whole affair; this year I legitimiately had close to seventy candidates to try and whittle down into this list.
I will not be attempting to do seventy entries on this thing. Fuck. You. But I am going to indulge myself and put two early recommendations in there for ones that were hovering on the bubble for so long that it felt like a war crime to leave them out. I highly recommend you check out these two releases even if I’m not slamming super-hard into them the same way I will everything else across this feature.
Thlipsis – Servants Of Apathy – Andy gave this one a good shout out in his year end EP collective and I’ll cosign it. It’s a short EP and worth the listen, it’s also caustic as hell.
Scalp – Not Worthy Of Human Compassion – This one is my fault. Scalp are a grind band of the meanest variety, hailing from Southern California and sounding like they hail from south of Hell. Not Worthy of Human Compassion is fiery and mean in all the best ways and is akin to being assaulted in audio form.
Now, before we begin we must dispense with the legalese. This part is important, please pay attention. This top 50 list is mine and mine alone and does not represent the overall opinion of No Clean Singing as a whole in any way, shape, or form. No Clean Singing does not run a site-wide end of the year list. These are all personal opinions.
I’m sorry. I know the badge of honor of being on a year-end list looks a lot better when it’s got the stamp of approval from the website as a whole. “On the year-end list of an incredibly verbose and slightly overweight guy in the Sacramento valley” doesn’t look nearly as good. But I figure I’d save us all the embarassment of having that be the undiscovered subtext by just getting that out front-and-center this year. I do this every year, of course, but it is something that needs to be re-stated anyway.
This is a collection of fifty albums, posted over five days, that I enjoy, and if I manage to time it just right to ruin someone’s holiday gatherings or party, then I consider it a job well done.
So, with that mess out of the way, let’s kick this fucker into gear because I have a fuckton of writing to do.
50 – Cthuluminati – Tentacula
The first few entries of one of these year-end lists is always so difficult to describe. I’ve spent years waffling over just how fungible – in between just how ridiculous – the top fifty albums of the year for me actually are. That high up in the rankings is a lot like arguing over being high up on mountain peaks; at a certain point your average lardass computer user layman is going to need oxygen to survive, and the main descriptor of where we are is always going to be “high”.
If you see your album sitting atop this list as the one to kick off the whole affair for the other forty-nine, it does not necessarily mean that I thought there were forty-nine albums better than yours, it just places you among – in my mind anyway – an excellent graduating class. I’ve often joked that up until the top five of this thing you could almost treat it as if it were forty other albums I particularly enjoyed, in different orders based on the phases of the moon and whether Mercury is in retrograde.
Now that I’ve gotten this exercise completed and fallen down about forty-six different pathways and stepped in two bear traps, why not choose an album that the initial act of describing felt like much the same way – the supremely bizarre, utterly fascinating, death, doom, and avante-garde metal explorations of Cthuluminati and their album Tentacula.
Even back in the time of my now somewhat traditional, not completely proud of, late as hell review of the album, I found myself stumbling over words to describe the journeying nature of Chthuluminati’s newest release. Tentacula is a concept album that the band described as such
Tentacula is the tale of a man who has lost everything, his family, his past, his sense of self. In his search for power, he strikes a deal with something beyond comprehension. But was it truly his choice, or was he merely another pawn in a much older game?
Cthuluminati then spend forty-six-and-a-half minutes exploring that story and all the haunted ideas that might spring from it. You have meditative openings, heavy roars within the second song, black and doom metal influences by song four, death sprinkled throughout, and sludge groove sprinkled over the top of it. Tentacula becomes a mixer for a whole realm’s worth of ideas, and where Cthuluminati excel is managing to tie it all together in such a way that the experience never feels as if it is dragging its feet. Tentacula ranked easily among the more artistic listens that managed to penetrate my brain this year and it is one that I take great joy in unleashing upon other people given the opportunity.
49 – Fleshbore – Painted Paradise
Every year for the past decade and a half has resulted in a veritable dragon’s hoard of releases when it comes to the tech-death genre. The democritization of music and the widespread popularity of youtube tutorials having a huge hand in this – back in my day we used Soulseek and pirated realmedia videos of Derek Roddy teaching us how to blastbeat goddamnit – has resulted in these amazing lineups of supremely talented young guns who continue to poke, push, and prod at the genre of death metal in ways otherwise unimaginable.
Mostly this has resulted in a whole lot of high-spreed melodeath by way of Black Dahlia Murder influence and a pile of shred stacked so tall it could tower over Olympus Mons. Even with all of this codified and essentially set in stone by this point, we still wind up with a good grouping of tech-death releases every year wherein bands stumble upon a vein of “something” that seems to make them stick out among the rest of the sharpened logos and “we read a book once” band names.
The second album from Indiana’s Fleshbore was one such release, striking our soil in the ass end of January – though my review’s opening line would have you believe it was February – and managing to stick it out quite well over the course of the year. It helps too that the Fleshbore crew have kept busy, as they also have members shared in the lineups of the recently reviewed Demon King and Unaligned.
Sensory overload being the name of the game in the tech-death genre, Fleshbore proved more than fit to answer the call on Painted Paradise. While I went on and on (and on….and on…and on…) in my aforementioned review of the album, it goes without saying that the sort of virtuostic nature of many tech-death bands out there these days is still well-present in Fleshbore as well. The massive wall of guitar being just one element of the band, Fleshbore make sure that the rhythm section get their time in the spotlight as well. As a result you have a multi-pronged and lethal approach for music to remain in your brain long after the album wraps up.
Songs like “Target Fixation” and “The Ancient Knowledge” remained go-tos throughout the year for their quicker no-bullshit all-pyrotechnics approach, and “The World” served fit to have me covered for longer numbers as well. That is assuming we weren’t just going for another spin on the album as a whole, because when it comes to releases like Painted Paradise you might as well, because you just press play and let the whole thing wash over you as the musical shiny-keys, endless pyrotechnics, and overwhelming precision of it stuns once again. One could only ever hope to be so agile in anything, much less music.
47- Car Bomb – Tiles Whisper Dreams
It goes without saying by this point – given our fawning coverage of the band – but Car Bomb are likely to always find a good home here at the No Clean Singing cardboard box. At least two of us at this site – and I’m not saying who – are responsible for it, but we have developed a taste for monstrous and angular groove among our many eccentricities when it comes to music and Car Bomb’s otherworldly combination of musical styles has more than sated that for some time.
Following up 2019’s Mordial was going to be a tall order in general, so that it has taken as long as it has for anything to come our way from the Car Bomb crew wasn’t all that shocking. The pattern for some decent-sized gaps for the group has already been established by this point at least. That followup emerging in the form of a three-song EP entitled Tiles Whisper Dreams on the other hand was a little more interesting, as Car Bomb, even among all of their odd-angles and various musical explorations, have never stuck as rigidly to a particular sound as you might’ve expected. That’s the benefit of the band’s ultra-prog and precision-heavy formula; even when you’re drawing comparisons from seemingly every corner on the map you can still somehow remain unpredictable – even across three songs.
Our review of the album appeared as part of a short but sweet collective near the end of July, finding it both addictive and dream-like. Like anything else with Car Bomb, it’s immensely difficult to describe on first go. You can go for the easy Meshuggah comparisons, given the band’s taste for stringed contortions and torture, but their influences on Tiles Whisper Dreams are much wider-reaching.
You can pick up on Car Bomb’s head-spinning tempo shifts that could have them fighting it out with the chaotic madness of Dillinger Escape Plan’s off-kilter shifting guises, as well as a bludgeoning “Here’s Johnny!” approach to songwriting that could come off as forceful even around the mathcore crowd. Then, with the spectre of Mordial ever-present, Car Bomb summon up clean singing for the brief moments of respite across the EP. This is a fight-scene that happens again and again across Tiles Whisper Dreams’ near-twelve minutes, and it’s hard not to be addicted to it. You sometimes listen to it because it seems like the band are going to break a guitar in half on opener “Blindsides” alone. If not there, it for sure didn’t survive the closing madness of the last thirty-seconds of “Paraxosym” following.
Tiles Whisper Dreams hits fast and harder than hell, which is why it was able to hang out among the immense pile of releases that landed in our lap in 2025. Its three songs of mathematical death found themselves just as memorable as some of the grand and sweeping epics other groups unleashed upon us this year.
46 – Kryptan – Violence, Our Power
Black metal being the guide, key, and Rosetta Stone to all things evil that it has been for as many years as it has been around will always be well-served with its many conjurations, rituals, and sub-genres. The summoning and demons, religious denial, and wailing of ghouls having become as commonplace as it is, I’ve found that the black metal groups over the years that I’ve come to enjoy are either increasingly introspective or the death metal guys who just happen to have a taste for corpsepaint in audio form.
Such hard oscillations mean that I am, at best, a paper flag in the wind when it comes to taste, and with just about as much rigidity as your average bacterial culture sample. Nothing though, even among all of the ominous atmospheres and unspoken horrors of the sinister, will ever top the impact on me this year that Kryptan had with just outright naming a song “I Hope They Die”. Sometimes your best effort is the one most simply put across, and boy oh boy, do those four words in a sequence send a message with little room for interpretation. I don’t think anyone could have understood what they needed more when it came to providing a title worthy of appearing on an album with a name like Violence, Our Power quite like that one did… and it’s basically the true introductory number to Kryptan’s 2025 full-length release.
The Norrman crew are pretty well known in the metal scene, having been long-time collaborators among Katatonia and October Tide. We’ve been not only following the larger groups they are/were a part of but also just about any other project they get their hands on. While Fredrik Norrman has kept busy with October Tide and his melancholic and moodier TheNighttimeProject, Mattias found time to pursue something more sinister sounding and brought October Tide and Moondark cohort/vocalist Alexander Högbom along for the ride, thus producing the fire-tinged black metal of Kryptan.
We had previously covered the self-titled debut EP many moons ago and thus our eyes would be on a follow-up album, which we touched base with in one of our mightily packed Obscurities columns. Violence, Our Power is not a release to be trifled with. It pulls from a lot of classic black metal staples as well as some of the mightier groove and stomp of more recent acts. It is a well-honed and blade-sharp album with the aforementioned “I Hope They Die” leading the charge. “Let Us End This” makes for a suitably world-ending closer and “Purge” and its buddy “The Miracle” inside writhe the guitar around like a pit of serpents. Were we more brave and willing to attempt to type Swedish, we’d probably be electing to list the other two songs on Violence, Our Power as well, but at that point we’d basically be saying “Hey, you should listen to this album”.
And to be fair, on a year-end list that is what we’re doing anyhow… fifty-plus times. So, “Hey, you should listen to this album”, it rules.
45 – Thy Disease – United We Fall
Your eyes decieve you not, my precious, precious children. You literally just read about this album a few weeks ago. However, I knew, I just knew, that I’d be kicking myself in the teeth if I didn’t include United We Fall in a year-end roundup of some sort because I can tell already this is going to be one of those albums that fucks up my listening habits not just for the end of this year but will probably carry over into that weird two-month hangover that is the early part of next year where you’re still playing catch up and also absorbing a lot of the early-January offerings.
I’ve still been absorbing so much of the album since then, and this Polish group’s ultra-precise death metal attack has found itself a real nice spot in the brainpan for the back half of the year. When I did the review collective that included United We Fall I had already figured I had a few candidates for my “late in the year additions” to this car fire but I hadn’t settled on who yet. A few days later – and many, many listens – and I’m comfy giving United We Fall that spot.
There’s definitely a few things in play on Thy Disease’s newest offering unto the void. The programmed and synth electronics that gave the band an industrial element have taken a backseat on United We Fall – a fun twist of fate, given that their Costumes Of Technocracy shares the same lineup and those things are incredibly prominent – in favor of a relentless and hammering beatdown in death metal form.
A little bit of the appeal for me has been in noticing that they’re playing in a similar sonic realm as Decapitated at times, and hell, if that band is still going to be in flux and or streamlining things even more to such a point that you can swing a Rob Flynn appearance then I’m perfectly okay with Thy Disease sliding right in and offering up songs like “Summoning Of War”, “Hollow Future”, “Regicide”, “The Arsonist”, and “From Above”.
Granted, that’s not to be overly reductive of course, but it seems like Poland as a whole has taste for these grand, imperial, and martial guitar riffs that are gigantic and punishing and it’s almost second nature for a lot of the crews over there to kick out something like this. When they polish it to a sheen that can be seen from space, though, and are as well-road-worn as Thy Disease are, there’s a calculated precision in the attack that is much harder to attain. United We Fall has all of that bundled up within it, and it makes for a redlining and white-knuckled thirty-three minutes of groove-heavy music.
44 – Matalobos – Phantasmagoria: Hexed Lands
I wasn’t going to let the year wind down without taking another opportunity to shout out Mexico’s Matalobos again and their album Phantasmagoria: Hexed Lands. Granted, this is another one where the time from review to year-end arhcive hasn’t been that long in the grand scheme of things, but the internet moves quick and you’ll take any oppurtinity to sound the trumpet in a band’s favor whenever you can.
2025 was a pretty good year for the melodramatic flavorings of Euro-doom and all its ilk; the particular strain that has slowly melded itself with death metal, melodeath, and goth into some unholy amalgamation that still doesn’t have a name worth attempting without it feeling like you’ve just bit into a four-years-expired military ration was one that was especially vibrant.
The old Peaceville crews represented well, and then elsewhere on the other sides of the Earth, the generationally inspired and the “wrong country, right groups” of the world also contributed tremendously. That you can have a band that dresses in all the finery of a Novembers Doom and Swallow The Sun, yet combine it with their own regional influences and aspirations to make something far more cinematic is surely worth highlighting. Because that is exactly what Matalobos did with Phantasmagoria: Hexed Lands. Taking heavy inspiration from Mexico’s folklore and cinematic history to create a concept album all their own is a tremendously ambitious task, but you’d probably be better off punching me in the jaw if I were to stare at you stone-faced and say that I didn’t find myself entranced with my many trips through Phantasmagoria: Hexed Lands.
There are of course many albums that I find myself feeling like I owe a debt to over the years for daring to listen to it without shouting about its name from the rooftops, but it felt good to finally get around to giving the guys proper coverage at the beginning of December. The album may have come out in February, but really, what is time anyway?
While I would love to repeatedly bang the drum of “you should listen to this whole album and witness how it evolves” – and will do so many, many, many more times across this feature – I can still recommend a few songs that especially stood out for me. “Below The Dam” is great as the album begins to unveil all its elements, and the ultra-dramatic back four of “Hasta El Viento Tiene Miedo”, “Where Witches Gather”, “The Alley”, and “Carmen, Buried Alive” are well worth the entry fee. That’s a solid-as-a-rock half an album right there, and there’s still five other songs well worth discovering. Phantasmagoria: Hexed Lands was a fantastic discovery in 2025 and one I was more than glad to help spread the word for.
43- Patristic – Catechesis
By this point it is safe to say I have some history with the Italian black metal group Patristic. I drunkenly stumbled into them earlier in their career back when they were a union of two musicians from Hideous Divinity and Bedsore and found their old-world theological ambitions and artistically overwhelming black metal to be something well worth keeping an eye out for. I spilled many a word over their Apologetica release around the time of its unleashing and wholeheartedly recommended the band’s suite-of-music approach for people to listen to.
Patristic have expanded into a full band since that time but kept to the musical suite approach when it comes to song titles, so that albums don’t sway from one song to song as they do entire movements, and as far as Patristic are concerned that number is going to remain at two. 2025 saw the release of their latest missive from the abyss, Catechesis and it is everything that Apologetica laid the groundwork for, just dialed up to fifty. It is the full album expansion, from three songs to six and now as three-member lineup, offering forty-one minutes of music across two suites: “A Vinculis Soluta” and the titular “Catechesis”.
We dove deep with this album back in July and found the band to be as overwhelming and punishing as ever. Patristic having expanded themselves into a full album allows plenty of room for musical exploraiton, and given guitarist Enrico Schettino’s taste for writing as if he was collapsing a cliff wall upon the listener, you’d better believe that the forty-one minutes available are as densely packed and as sinister as can get.
I will stand by how I described this album as being an immense journey to undertake until the end times themselves are upon us, and attempting to break this album down into particular songs is almost a fool’s errand. I know, I tried in the previously linked review. I appreciated just how much the Patristic crew were willing to flex their musical muscles – especially on the drumming front – during the “Catechesis” movement of the album, and I adored how “A Vinculsis Soluta” in both its parts is a musical flamethrower all its own.
Catechsis is an intense and volatile ride of an album but one that is so all-encompassing in its sound you can’t help but get washed away in it. If you havem’t given Patristic a chance to invade your earholes yet, this is a fantastic opportunity to do so.
43 – Bianca – Bianca
Welcome to the Italian avante-garde black metal power hour, because if you can have one release that counts Enrico Schettino among the lineup, why not aim for two? Bianca are of course an entirely different stylistic creature, but there is a definite through-line for this and the release just above this one that is hard to deny. There’s gotta be something in the water over there at the moment.
Bianca were admittedly a late addition to the year-end list on this end and not just because Avantegarde Music had the team pencilled in for a late-October release but also because while I immediately snapped the project up in my great dragnet of things to listen to – and what is more befitting the Halloween season than something as haunted as this? – I didn’t get around to fully appreciating it until after it had made an appearance in one of our Things you may have missed collections, which at that point basically assured me I had in fact been on to something by snapping up the album on the basis of artwork and lineup alone. I may lose the occasional argument with an eighty pound bag of Portland cement but I have my brilliant moments from time to time.
Debut releases like Bianca’s self-titled that are already so stunning are a pleasant surprise. It’s a simple thing to be so stunned by something such as that, but it is still one of my favorite musical events that will happen throughout the year. To hear a band already be about 85 to 90 percent of the way there on the first go is exciting, and their particular take on black metal, sludge, and doom is something well worth crowing about.
The four-piece union of Bianca use everything available to them over the course of near-forty-four minues, and although “The Dawn” is a gorgeous opener, it really does lure you into a false sense of security before the dark and dramatic atmospherics the band are about to drag you through. You’ll realize you really aren’t that “safe” after the first throat-tearing vocal screech rips its way through “Abysmal” halfway into the song. To walk away from this one and not find yourself at least intrigued would seem to be almost criminal, and sucker that I am, I was continually drawn into its loving(?) embrace over and over again.
Not necessarilly an album I could throw on at work and do the usual construction madness but one that I enjoyed throwing on quite a bit at home and letting the unholy genre-hybridization that Bianca get up to entrance me over and over again.
42 – The Man-Eating Tree – Night Verses
Colossally emotional sap that I am, you’d better believe I was going to find a few albums of peacefulness amidst the wider wall of utter punishment and turbulent waters that my year-end lists transmogrify into before things close out. Now, being an absolute paragon of virtue I do have to admit that part of my draw to The Man-Eating Tree – between this and The Old Dead Tree’s new, one talk about a hell of a year for horticulturalists – and their current formation after close to ten years between albums was the addition of former Ghost Brigade vocalist Manne Ikonen.
I know it’s mostly self-serving but I am a sucker for a marquee name. I may not be able to will Ghost Brigade back into existence but I can enjoy all of its various members’ projects afterward just as well. Everyone in the current incarnation of The Man-Eating Tree is basically new blood at this point, save for main man Janne Markus of Poisonblack fame as well. Just the two would make for a hell of a combination in any form, but he’s recruited quite the murderer’s row of Finnish names that I would have absolutely no hope of pronouncing anyhow in order to unleash their new album Night Verses, which arrived via Noble Demon way back in April.
Night Verses made its appearance in these hallowed halls in one of our many Obscurities collections that were posted throughout the year, riding alongside a more intense and moody collective of April releases. Mostly clean-sung, Night Verses is an album of many ghosts and past glories, an assemblage of parts well recognizable and well produced. The Man-Eating Tree are experts in this field and the newest album is just the latest doctorate’s thesis to add to the pile of acclaim that they have resting in a picture frame somewhere.
For fifty minutes, Night Verses serves as a guide through all things depressive and melancholy, with some beautiful guitar work and backing synth at times to add in a small factor of grandness when the atmosphere in a particular song isn’t cold enough. Are we summoning angels or frost-sprites? It can be hard to tell. The resulting product contains some absolutely lush songs anyway; the pairing of “Days Under The Dark” and “Seer” in the beginning is fantastic, whereas the longest songs “To The Sinking” and “Reflections” make their seven minutes and nine and a half minutes, respectively, disappear like nothing. They’re songs to get lost in and drift through in a dreamlike haze, even though the chilled relaxation comes more from a place of understated sadness than a place of calm.
Night Verses is atmospheric and melancholic in all the best ways, a new album in a classic style, and one that helped keep the calm amid a wider maelstrom of music in 2025.
41 – Revocation – New Gods, New Masters
I feel like every new Revocation album that comes out is a fantastic chance to reassess, reacquaint, and rediscover who exactly Revocation are in this day and age. One of the hardest working bands in metal, Revocation have been unleashing consistently good albums like clockwork since 2008 and have also managed to reinvent themselves nearly as many times as they have had full length releases. The Massachusetts-based workhorses and Metal Blade stalwarts have maintained a perpetual lock on the DGR year-end tire fire in some form or another simply by being consistently great, even among band-member and genre-changes.
Some albums have landed way harder than others with me – as is the case with previous release Netherheaven scoring very well – and others have earned a sort of grudging admiration. While David Davidson and crew may be at a different bus stop than me, it’s not a full two ships passing in the night scenario, I’m either going to catch up to them or I can at least recognize the street corner they’re standing on and understand why.
Their much more death metal tinged New Gods, New Masters may not have hit as hard with me as I would have liked, but I also won’t deny some of the music on this disc is almost unasaillable. Revocation stack guitar riffs like cords of firewood and that certainly didn’t change this time around. If my own musical tastes just hadn’t been so goddamned weird or out of sync with what they normally are – in 2025 even? who would’ve figured? – you would’ve likely spotted this four-pack’s new one way higher.
But, as with all good bet-hedging, that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the absolute hell of my time with New Gods, New Masters since its release in late September. The guest appearances across New Gods, New Masters were plenty of fun and it was interesting hearing Revocation contort themselves into new forms to traverse ground with some of the guest musicians. They didn’t go full chameleon act but the sort of squeezing through the wormhole that many bands and guest vocalists have to do made for a fun exercise, so when you call in reinforcements like Cattle Decapitation’s Travis Ryan – on “Confines Of Infinity” – or Jonny Davy of Job For A Cowboy – “Cronenberged” – or even Gorgut’s Luc Lemay for closer “Buried Epoch” you’re going to get some fun experimentation. That, and some good and gross bass tone, as all things should be.
“Data Corpse” and “Dystopian Vermin” make for fun forever-forward-plowing songs and “Despiritualized” right in the center of the disc is a suitable epic before the instrumental “The All Seeing” – which as a big fucking music dork, I appreciate quite a bit. It is a completely indulgent song in all the best ways, as if we were ever going to be worried about the talents of any particular lineup of Revocation at this point in the game.
We gave this one the full treatment around the time of its release in September if you want to get a deeper and well-written analysis by our own Andy Synn alongside my incoherent babbling about this release. The appeal for New Gods, New Masters on this end though was simple: It’s a death metal invocation for Revocation and even though it didn’t completely light my hair on fire I’ve still got quite a few patches now from where it managed to land a very targeted singe.
And that’ll be it for round one folks. If you’re new to this, welcome to the shitshow. If you’re still hanging on, welcome to the shitshow. I will see you all tomorrow with another collection of albums as we dive deeper in to the overall collective of music that I found especially entertaining over the course of 2025.