(We have reached the second installment of DGR’s 2025 year-end list, counting down from No. 40 to No. 31, with the next three segments coming in the next three days ahead.)
Right as I finished typing the last sentence of the previous entry for this feature it occurred to me that I had not gone onto my usual musings for how this list functions and where the true rankings actually lie. I’ll do so here, otherwise I’ll feel guilty for people actually thinking that I somehow have a nuanced enough opinion that I can actually rank this many albums against one another.
Truthfully, I can at best do a top fifteen and maybe a top twenty. The rest of these inclusions are as fluid and fungible as can get. I’ve joked before and I’ll do so again and again as my memory gets worse due to age but you could almost view this as a top fifteen albums and then thirty-five other really, really, really good releases worth listening to.
If you want to feel better about yourself, you could almost look at this as a fifty-way tie for first place. It’ll help assuage some of those aforementioned guilty feelings on my end at least. This also serves as an explainer for how the opening salvos from this list every year manage to sound as eclectic and wide-reaching as they are. Not as eclectic as a lot of people around here, but if you’d gone from album to album on the last edition you’d have gotten hit with metal bouncing all over the place, from death, to grind, to black metal, to moody-as-can-get sad boy rock, to melodramatic doom, and further down the line. This chunk of the list won’t be too different in that regard.
We’re still bouncing all over the place like an overly excited particle as we explore the world of heavy metal. We’ll get artsy, we’ll get grind-ey, we’ll even explore catchy, we’ll get doomed out, we’ll get groovy, and we’ll get our skulls smashed in more than once. Metal continued to have a lot on offer in 2025 and many of the entries here hail from projects that were once “new” and are really coming into their own, paired up with long-time veterans and groups returning after long absences.
Then the last two are two extreme yet different approaches to a big fuckin’ wall of sound.
40 – Rotten Sound – Mass Extinction
We’ll kick things off with something suitably shorter, as would befit one of my personal favorite grind bands out there these days. Rotten Sound are a well-known name around here and I’ll admit that – like many others – it’s probably my fault. I happen to enjoy the Finns’ combination of grind and hardcore into a blastbeat fueled unleashing of madness and will happily absorb any offerings I can from the group.
They’ve stuck to a pattern of full album and then follow-up EP releases for a decade-plus now and the recent release of Mass Exctinction means that we’re in an EP release year for the band. Mass Exctinction follows up – and is built out of extra tracks from – their 2023 album Apoclaypse. I dove deeper into the whopping near-ten-minutes of music on offer for Mass Extinction right around the time of its release in one of the few examples of yours truly actually being somewhat timely this year.
The slimmed-down three-piece stayed true to form on Mass Extinction and I won’t feed you garbage here, I still enjoyed it just the same. There’s isn’t a song here over two minutes long and a few couldn’t give a rat’s ass about sailing over the one-minute mark. This is all cathartic release and explosive pyrotechnics. It’ll probably take longer to read the next few entries in my year-end list here than it will to give this one a listen, but only one of these is likely to leave a smoking hole in your desk where your computer used to be.
39 – Baest – Colossal
We have written about Denmark’s Baest a lot. The buzzsaw guitar worship of the band has been in the spotlight for a while now and Baest are very good at executing it. We’ve covered nearly all of their releases at one point or another and seeing them make the jump to major-label status has been fun. That said, you may think you’re familiar with Baest based upon our coverage of their previous albums, but I assurre you right now, if you have not listened to or been aware of Baest’s Colossal before and you think you’ll get by on previous reputation, you may not be prepared for what is about to emerge from your speakers.
What a hell of a fuckin’ left turn this album turned out to be. If you want to see someone else come to a similar conclusion, Andy tackled this alhum around the time of its August release. Even then, I hadn’t gotten the chance to really run through the halls of Colossal, so seeing Andy’s initial take was the first convincing step into diving into this album.
I’ve made light of this before but over the years I’ve developed a habit of not listening too much to pre-release singles, especially for bands that I’ve been following for some time. Baest are one of those groups that I’ve been following, so admittedly, I too wasn’t prepared for the sort of antics that the crew were going to get up to on their newest album. I’m convinced there’s something in the old man brain that develops which becomes the signal for “I don’t like change” that has been difficult for me to get over, so I instinctively have a hard time getting into first releases from a new album. I’ve found its better to just fucking rip the bandage off and take the whole album all in one go.
Doing that with Colossal had me cackling like a fool by the end of it, not because it’s a case of “I don’t know what I expected” but more “I don’t think I expected what I got”. Baest are still, at their heart, a death and thrash metal band, a little less self-serious than most but perfectly equippped to unleash the bass-snare thumping drum-beat that is international shorthand for “run in circles, you moron”. There’s still plenty of that across Colossal but what kept catching me on the back foot was the band’s taste for ’80s arena-rock guitar riffs working their way into the mix.
There’s a solid handful of songs here that are basically built for “fun” more so than heaviness. They’re classic-rock guitar riffs fed through the buzzsaw tone, and to be honest, I had a blast with it once I figured out the sort of shenanigans Baest were up to here. I don’t know if there was some newfound freedom discovered by the band between the release of Colossal and their previous album Necro Sapiens or if they were just struck by this mischevious sense that they needed to throw people for a loop. Either way, Colossal and its glorious mix of old and new proved to be a hell of a lot of fun this year, and while it didn’t re-invent the wheel or smash it into dust, it still did a great job of keeping the good times rolling.
38 – Novembers Doom – Major Arcana
Now let’s drag everyone’s mood back down a bit with the handsome gentlemen of Chicago’s Novembers Doom.
After a long, multi-decade career, November’s Doom are pillars of the doom community. Distinctly flavored with a lot of goth and Europe by way of being of that region’s melodramatic doom explosion as well, Novembers Doom have been releasing consistently great albums since the mid-’90s, yet over the last decade-plus have settled on a more death metal inflected sound that has been doing the group wonders, giving them a strong hand of great albums that are hard to deny.
Since the site’s existence we – well, mostly me – have been cheering for albums like Aphotic and Bled White but the releases of Hamartia and Nephilim Grove really signaled that Novembers Doom were ascending to a whole other plane of existence when it came to their music. Their 2025 release Major Arcana, though a bit of a lateral as opposed to a completely forward step, has only continued that trend. The conceptual exploration by way of Novembers Doom’s brand of stage play is hard to deny, as they drift and stomp from song to song, resulting in nearly an hour’s worth of tremendous music. I had deeper thoughts on the album when I reviewed it around the time of its release in mid-September, so I can take this chance to just be a spectacular idiot about it here and recommend some standout songs.
“June” makes for a fantastic opener on the way to the six and a half minutes of the titular “Major Arcana”, whereas “Mercy” is a great song halfway between doom and death metal ballad, and both “The Dance” and “The Fool” make for a solid mid-point of the disc, elevated by the garagantuan eight minutes of “Bleed Static”. Now if you’ve been following, save for a mention of the song “Ravenous” at track three, I’ve honestly just recommended the first half of the album to you.
Major Arcana is an album that draws you in and mesmerizes you at times and it is surprising just how effectively Novembers Doom can suddenly morph into being a pummeling death metal band at the drop of a hat. You think you’re going to forever be drowning in a murk of despair and misery and then all of a sudden Novembers Doom will summon a hammering guitar riff that you can’t help but headbang along to. The low-end and rhythm segment especially get quite a bit of spotlight as Paul Kuhr bellows his way through those particular parts, and while it would be easy to describe Major Arcana as oscillating between those two modes, the music revealed is a little more complicated.
Novembers Doom craft these songs with an expert’s hand and although it isn’t quite as dramatic a step forward as previous album Nephilim Grove had shown itself to be, Major Arcana certainly showed that Novembers Doom hadn’t spent that intervening time just resting on their laurels.
37 – Wretched – Decay
Wretched’s Decay came out over two months ago at this point and yet still remains fresh in my mind. Even among the battering of late-in-the-year releases and end-of-year lists collapsing upon me like the waves of an angry ocean I stil find myself wandering back to Decay and what is accomplished for the now four-piece North Carolina crew. In a sense that is a true accomplishment for the album all on its own and maybe one of the stronger hallmarks of an actual piece of art, in that while I may not be in a state of euphoria with the album every time I am listening to it, it tends to creep its way back into my thoughts when I have free time.
It’s a wild proposition coming from the Wretched camp when it comes to Decay, a prequel concept album to a disc released close to a decade and a half ago – if not more, as math is difficult at a coffee-fueled three in the morning – coming out long after the group’s prior album Cannibal, while both slimming down the lineup and seeing the return of vocalist Billy Powers after a decade-plus away from the band. We’re basically a high school girlfriend reunion and TV talk show away from this being Days Of Our Lives level of complicated.
On top of all of this, Wretched do the same thing that The Agony Scene did with their return-from-silence album, which is to unleash something so different and somewhat at odds with what the band had been prior, while also containing some of the meanest material they have put out up to this point. Now, I hope you understand somewhat what I meant when I was saying that Decay was an album that kept dancing on the edge of my thought processes when I reviewed this album. You can’t help but not be interested in what is going on here.
Decay is such a varied album in comparison to many of Wretched’s previous works, spread out among an hour of music and bouncing among five or six different genre moods. You have absolutely snarling and vitality-filled songs like “Malus Incarnate” alongside sludgier crawlers like opener “Decay”, and that’s not to dismiss the many other pathways that Wretched tread here. There’s an amazingly indulgent twenty-minute block of instrumental work on Decay laying at about two-thirds of the way into the album that, depending on how my medication is working that day, is either the most incredible thing to focus in on or the biggest momentum-stopper every performed in recorded history.
Those two songs are hypnotic in their own right and technically impressive as can be, but wow, when it seems like Decay has settled into this misanthropic and violence-fueled crawl forward as its chosen propulsion mechanism, you get a sprawling journey through gemstone-encrusted mountains to offset things before Wretched get affairs back in order on “Lights” and “The Golden Tide”. I will say that some of my appreciation comes from not just songs like “The Royal Blood” but also how Wretched don’t compromise at all when it comes to Decay. This feels like an album written for them just as much as it is for us, with inspiration spilling out the sides of it and as challenging as could possibly be made.
36 – Dawn Of Ouroboros – Bioluminescence
I spend a lot of time in my writing musing about how bands are on the precipice of being “almost there” or “being onto something”. The vagaries being used are in place not because I’m a fancy representative of a record company searching for product but because so many groups seem to have a sort of crystalized goal that they’re aiming toward, and when you listen to their music you can hear them reaching for it every time.
Part of their purpose, it seems, is to acheive said form, and at that point they will have given true purpose to the project they are dedicating their time to. It feels like evolution beyond a base artistic outlet, and so when you listen to so much music it is exciting hearing groups working their way toward “almost there”. Being excited to hear them achieve that evolution is a lot like being a fan of a sports team on the sidelines, cheering them on through multiple album releases. It must be amazing to know when you’ve finally landed the one you were aiming to do, or in the case of Dawn Of Ouroboros’ newest release Bioluminescence, settling on something instead of the multi-legged, many-armed form they had been questing with on previous releases.
The Bay Area dwelling collective of Dawn Of Ouroboros have worked very hard since their first release and have rarely settled down; that shows in their music as well, as they’ve traversed so many different genre-lines within the immensely crowded world of post-black metal and shoegaze hybrids that listening to their albums can often reflect a sort of distracted musical focus. Dawn Of Ouroboros have a ton of ideas to play with, and each album for them has been a refining of their processes. They’ve had many an epic-length song that has had more twists and turns than a back country road in the mountains. and the multitude of aforementioned ideas in place each time made for a fascinating experience each album.
Dawn Of Ouroboros are a band I’ve enjoyed shouting about since their foundation for that reason, because I had the sense that they were slowly working their way from “almost” to actually being “there”, and you have no idea how exciting it was to hear Bioluminescence those first few times, if not just because it seemed like they had finally settled on being something. The energy of youth found its focused path. and as a result you have an album that is beautifully lush in its texture and far more melodically minded than they had been in the past.
There’s still a truckload worth of ambition at play here but the ideas are more targeted than before and less outwardly explosive in any direction just to get them out there. The songs on Bioluminescence actually flowed, and it made the whole experience enjoyable from beginning to end. I felt that I couldn’t help but do two things with Bioluminescecne – outside of chiseling into my skull how to spell it properly – and that was listen to it constantly and recommend it whenever I could. I’m doing both here.
Don’t believe me? Some dork wrote about it all the way back in August.
35 – Daughter Chaos – Noble Rot
I am not above admitting I am a sucker for the melodeath genre and any of its releases that come out each year. I know it is not the en vogue genre and hasn’t been for some time but it has long been my source of comfort food and heavy but not oppresively so music. Perfect for working and as the soundtrack to daily life. The genre has produced some fantastic albums over the years and many of the long-running stalwarts are still killer to see live, so even if it is not among the “cool kids” these days, I still find myself enjoying most of the offerings from it and am more than happy to write about it here.
If nothing else, I figure it’ll offset some of the truly abyssal and dungeon-dwelling stuff that we have a habit of premiering on the site. See my equilibrium thesis that I put forth in my recent clearing the slate article. The universe will find its equilibrium and I’ll do my part in contributing here.
Daughter Chaos have been an exciting band for me to watch. The New York based group were born out of the dissolution of the most recent Armageddon lineup – well most recent as of 2018 – and have been hellbent on continuing down the pathway that group was charting for their Captivity And Devourment album, carving out their own slice of the melodeath pie and making the genre all their own. Five years removed from the release of their first self-titled EP we have their first album Noble Rot and it feels good to say that Daughter Chaos continue to be an exciting band to follow because Noble Rot is a hell of a proper melodeath disc.
I was gracious enough to let Andy tackle reviewing this one and thankfully my benevolence paid off because it seemed that he too enjoyed Noble Rot quite a bit. Sara Abrams and Andrew Pevny deserve commendation for how they tackled this disc because just listening to it, you’d never guess that Noble Rot was only the second release from this band. They already sound professional and like they could fight it out with some of the big names among the genre, even if the lineup right now is just the two of them. The titular “Noble Rot” is a great song and has some solid brethren in songs like “The Vault Of Time”, “Beast Heart”, “Immortality And The Worm”, and “Sun Gate”.
Yes, a few of them to play the melodeath card a little close to the chest but I can’t fault the Daughter Chaos crew for executing upon an established blueprint. They’re good at it and don’t seem like the type to innovate for the sake of innovation. They can kill with a classic – and sometimes very recognizable – guitar riff just as good as anyone else can. Noble Rot is an album that has a great collective of melodeath songs in it with only a few suffering from becoming a little faceless at times. The forty-one minutes of music on offer here have been a highlight since Noble Rot came out in early April, and if the Daughter Chaos name is unfamiliar to you, now is a great chance to rectify that situation.
34 – Cantu Ignis – The Fathomless Dominion
It took long enough but I had figured at some point we would hit a singularity with heavy metal and tech-death in particular that was going to result in a melodeath-inspired tech-death album. Whether by happenstance or the specific tastes of Longmont, Colorado based group Cantu Ignis, they’ve managed to execute that exact thing with their newest release The Fathomless Dominion.
It only took me a few months after its release, otherwise I never would’ve guessed why I kept zeroing in on the idea that The Fathomless Dominion for all its incredible guitar shred and high-speed hair-raising vocals was a melodeath disc until I sat down and was able to seriously write about it, and only then did I figure out why. On top of Cantu Ignis’ more melodically flavored guitar writing style – less Necrophagist, more Dark Tranquillity – it was the omnipresent synth that had entwined its way through the six songs on The Fathomless Dominion that kept bringing that idea back to the forefront. Maybe, just maybe, we had accidentally found ourselves at a strange Venn diagram that had resulted in a tech-death album by way of melodeath tastes courtesy of the bombastic nature of groups like Wintersun.
I dedicated a lot of words to The Fathomless Dominion and its guest musicians during my previously linked-to review, but to sum up events, The Fathomless Dominion is six lengthy songs, as packed to the gills with guitar-shred as you can get, opening up the gates for both Andy Gillion and Ben Ellis to appear on different songs, and as quick-tempoed as the band could muster. The weight of The Fathomless Dominion consists of some very dense five-minute and six-minute songs, but opener “Survey The Sun” is a grand act at over eight minutes.
Cantu Ignis are of the class of tech-death bands wherein every song is a dense treasure pile to dig through and one that you’ll seriously have to prep for, because once you kick that first rock down the hill, it is going to keep rolling and rolling and rolling. Cantu Ignis deliver their music in a breathless style and there is a peace to be found in just how constant it is. Jon Ryan had a skyscraper filled with ideas available to him for this release and The Fathomless Dominion seems to use almost every one of them. Even at just six songs it’ll have felt like you’ve gone twelve rounds with a full album by the time it is done.
The Fathomless Dominion was an impressive early-in-the-year release and it held its position well throughout the year, taking on all sorts of challengers to achieve a spot on this here year-end collection.
33 – Disarmonia Mundi – The Dormant Stranger
I fear I may have accidentally created a melodeath block in my album-ordering this time around. Ah, well, nevertheless…
I don’t know what it was for Italian bands this year to settle on returning after ten years of being away but there being more than one this year meant something was in the air, there just had to be. Melodeath studio project Disarmonia Mundi were one such band, settling on 2025 as the release year for their new album The Dormant Stranger, ten years after Cold Inferno. While the gap of time was certainly large – and one that had long gone past the point of being painful to just accept – you wouldn’t be able to tell, as moment one of The Dormant Stranger sounds as if the band never actually went anywhere.
The formula splits the difference across all Disarmonia Mundi releases and results in an album that is both new and something of a tour through the various eras that the band has had, even reuniting the crew with vocalist Bjorn “Spreed” Strid popping up on a few songs. In a way, its an “All things in their place, all things as they should be” sort of album. It is Disarmonia Mundi playing to all of their strengths. Wonderful guitar leads, catchy as hell choruses, and some impressively high screaming courtesy of vocalist Claudio Ravinale. In a year that has seen quite a few melodeath bands release albums that are throwbacks to the early-aughts era of the genre, why not bring back a band that basically embodied it?
I caught up with this album in mid-April and rather enjoyed my time with it. I’ve always appreciated Disarmonia Mundi’s take on melodeath and have been especially fond of 2009’s The Isolation Game. Their newest release basically running ripshit through the entirety of their career is an event to behold, as the band have packed fifty-five minutes’ worth of music across eleven songs. That is, to put it politely, a ton of melodeath two-step and guitar riffs to wrap your head around.
Across the whole of The Dormant Stranger I found myself going back to “Illusion of Control” and “Warhound” quite a bit, whereas the opening salvo of “Adrift Among Insignificant Strangers”, “Oathbreaker”. and “Shadows Of A World Painted Red” made for a great three-hit combo. “Crossroads To Eternity” has some fun swaying guitar to it as well as an overbearing if not catchy as hell opening synth line. It’s a little cartoonish at first but damned if I didn’t go back to it constantly anyway, because the song quickly finds its feet and sounds like it could’ve fallen out of the band’s Mind Tricks album without blinking twice.
The Dormant Stranger had a lot of music on offer and feels as if Disarmonia Mundi have done so to make up for the ten years of silence between albums. This is truly one of those releases that sounds as if the band recorded a bunch of music like they were never going to record music again. For being as densely packed as it is, The Dormant Stranger was still a very favored release for me and one that melodeath fans should give a listen to if they haven’t checked it out already.
32 – Blindfolded And Led To The Woods – The Hardest Thing About Being God Is No One Believes Me
This is one of those entries that is still fresh on the mind due to it having just been covered for the site. New Zealand’s Blindfolded And Led To The Woods released a monstrous new album in the form of The Hardest Thing About Being God Is No One Believes Me and somehow managed to create a release that was as dense and oppresive, yet somehow longer, than previous album Rejecting Obliteration.
The Hardest Part About Being God Is No One Believes Me saw the crew flexing all of their artistic muscles upon its early-October release and made it pretty clear by the end of opening song “Arrows Of Golden Light” that it had no interest in being friends with anyone. Over the course of eight and a half minutes Blindfolded And Led To The Woods lay the groundwork for the album as a whole, and while track times level out a bit until closer “Coalescence”, the mood doesn’t lighten in any sense. It remains heavy and violent for nearly its entire time, and its conceptual approach makes a point of showing that there are no happy endings for the imagined protagonist that makes up its red and black dominant cover art. I included this album alongside three other equally oppresive – for different approaches and reasons – albums in my big end of year slate clearing but still found plenty of time to describe this album as like having your face buried in the mud at the bottom of a lake.
Even for its impressively long opening song, there’s still a few quick bursts of violence that are equally worthy of taking the throne this year.”Compulsion” and “Cafune” still break things up enough to show that Blindfolded And Led To The Woods are capable of unfurling hell in music form, and “Snow Angel” makes you think that you’re getting a breather with its short run time, but instead the band unleash the stealth grind song of the year. “Black Orchids” and “Totem” journey deep into the realms of dissonance and horrifically bent guitar, and a song like “600 Milligrams” feels like listening to someone lose their mind over the course of four and a half minutes, not that the tortured synth line that kicks off the whole affair is any hint as to where that song is going. It’s a terrifying listen at times and that’s before you hit the aforementioned seven and a half minute closer.
Blindfolded And Led To The Woods are on as chaotic a bent as they could acheive for this album, and they somehow grab hold of the omnidirectional violent energy being let out into the world and cram it into a small enough box that it could be released as a new album. One of the things that makes The Hardest Thing About Being God Is That No One Believes Me interesting is that the album always seems like it is on the egde of completely losing control of itself. I know that it’s an abrubt change of pace from the guitar shred and pretty synthesizer lines of the previous entries on this album list, but this is one that you owe it to yourself to get completely bulldozed by.
31 – Cryptopsy – An Insatiable Violence
Speaking of albums likely to run over you again and again, though, how impressive was it that Cryptopsy have managed to unleash an album like An Insatiable Violence on such a quick turnaround time from the release of As Gomorrah Burns and have this release be just as heavy and maniacal as that one was?
For any other band this would be a certifiable act of insanity but for Cryptopsy, now deep into their career, this has just become the modus operandi. Unleash Flo Mounier on a drum kit, let Matt McGachy lose his mind behind a microphone, and make guitarist and bassist Christian Donaldson and Olivier Pinard work way too goddamned hard to keep the machine rolling alongside of it. By the end of two or three songs from any of the recent Cryptopsy albums you can’t help but feel exhausted and all you’ve done is sit down and listen to the thing. An Insatiable Violence is just Cryptopsy operating on the near-lethal level that they’ve been on since The Book Of Suffering began to hone the band into its current songwriting form.
Thankfully, I did not have to review this one because I’m sure even now my mind would be somewhat boggled by what Cryptopsy have released here. That honor went to Andy this time and he did a thorough examination here so I can take the easy route of just typing “album good” over and over again. Since An Insatiable Violence saw release in June, it has been a constant companion for some of the tougher work-shifts of the week. At times you need something that is just an intense and overwhelming amount of energy to propel you through things, and by the end of “Until There’s Nothing Left” it seems like Cryptopsy have already burned out a star or two.
I found myself constantly spinning “Dead Eyes Replete” for some the higher screams that took place in that song, and the constant bombing runs taking place during “Embrace The Nihility” in between its groove-heavy sections really kept the back half of the album alive. An Insatiable Violence is only eight songs but goddamn if the album doesn’t feel like it has battered the absolute life out of you by the time it wraps up thirty-three minutes from its start. It is basically wall-to-wall insanity, wherein every member of the band is equally important as the other, because they are executing on such a high level that it just plays out like the natural order of things.
An Insatiable Violence was a hell of a bomb to launch halfway through the year and one that made an equally explosive impression to hang on by the time of year-end events.