(We have now arrived at the third installment of DGR’s 2025 year-end list, counting down from No. 30 to No. 21, with the next two segments coming in the next two days ahead. That’s right, we’ve found no reason to spare Christmas Eve or Christmas Day from the continuing conflagration.)
Watching this list shrink down is invigorating at times. It is overwhelming at first and it has been that way every time, but much like things are with actual procrastination, actually knuckling down and pushing the car forward can do a lot for morale. The finish line slowly crawls its way into sight and to such a point that it no longer seems like a hallucination but an actual tangible thing.
Of course I say this as if I don’t enjoy this exercise every year as well, rolling backwards through the year and with the rose-tinted glasses on and blinders big enough to block an IMAX screen so that I can focus only on the music and not other bullshit. Then, as is always the case when you write these things, you’ll come across an album and be kicking yourself thinking you should’ve positioned it higher, things should be re-ordered, you reassure yourself again that the rankings really don’t matter and that a game of Whose Line Is It Anyway has more actual structure.
Yet here you are, trying to once again re-stack and rewrite things, like trying to have a bareknuckle boxing match in a train that has derailed and is sailing over a cliff. You have bigger problems at stake vis-a-vis said train now plummetting Earthward, but still, the fight is important as well. My high school English teacher would want to kill me for having never figured out how to prioritize this crap.
Our current collective remains considerably varied, though you could view it as a bridge between wider works. We’re past the more unfocused grab bags of the higher parts of the year-end list and into something slightly more concrete – not the type we get slammed into by some of these albums either – yet I would still say that this is mostly ranking by iteration. Don’t get lost in the minutae of trying to figure out how this worked out. I just found myself piling these on top of one another based on how passionate I was about them at one point or how much I felt they needed to be shared again. The year end is a chance for new eyes to glance upon them; after all, you can’t expect someone to read everything you post.
30 – Caustic Wound – Grinding Mechanism Of Torment
One of the few albums that came out this year that received the much-vaunted No Clean Singing accidental double-review. I’d like to think we’ve gotten pretty good at checking in with one another to see who is tackling what but on occassion we do slip, and in the case of Caustic Wound it was to their benefit, because Grinding Mechanism Of Torment received not one, but two reviews that we just slammed into the same article. At the very least it didn’t get posted twice.
The grind scene has all sorts of different shades to its sound and the crossbreeding with the crust-punk and hardcore kids has long been a fountain of youth for it. The appeal of a plug-and-play meltdown will always shine far brighter than a spotlight pressed against your face, it seems. We’ll be guaranteed to have bands whose main focus is in one direction with little room for compromise. For Caustic Wound that translated to a healthy block of death metal being added to the crust-punk and grind-stew for Grinding Mechanism Of Torment, for a sound that is just the sort of sloppy and wet most gross death metal bands aim for yet still just as much a straightforward assault on the senses that the grindcore groups prize like a golden idol. That’s not even touching on the subject matter Caustic Wound pull from for their newest release, either.
I am easily won over with a song title like “Technological Hell Future” and it helps that the song is one of the more killer ones amidst a tracklisting of abject violence. Elsewhere the titular “Grinding Mechanism Of Torment” is a descent into cave systems well below the Earth’s crust, especially on the vocal front. The three pack of super-grindy, super-sloppy songs in “Blackout, “The Bleed Rail”, and “Endless Grave” are as if Grinding Mechanism Of Torment is attempting to truly live up to its name, and the forty-nine second “Atom Blast” absolutely does.
“Sniper Nest” and “Horrible Earth Death” are the two highlights of the back of the disc and “Legacy Of Terror” means that out of all these recommendations, we’ve basically constructed a statue out of the middle of the album. Given that this is a combo death-and-grind record though, it’s easy to let Caustic Wound just rip past you multiple times. There are other more progressively minded bands out there that would have barely made it past the intro jerking-off session by the time Grinding Mechanism Of Torment calls it a day.
At this point though, it should probably be restated that not one, but two of us recommended listening to this release in our review feature in May. You’re likely to see this one pop up constantly in people’s year-end round ups, because it nails just how much of a mess things are currently, by both subject matter and sound.
29 – Hate – Bellum Regiis
As the gentleman on this website who is on the Hate coverage beat, at this point I have to admit that it is definitely a personal compulsion. For a lot of people, Hate albums are like clockwork, as consistent as ever, but also like a mountain, very slow to change and monolithic in form. You can pick your handful of favorite Hate albums and generally be pretty happy, you don’t need to dive crazy deep into their discography because, credit where credit is due, Adam found a sound for his band early on in their career and has stuck to it with a stubborness hereto unforetold.
That means that if you’re a wide-eyed fool like myself, then Hate albums rarely disappoint. Its just that some are better than others and you’re not sure which ones will land with you and which won’t. Some have a magic about them that is hard to describe and others can be eight songs of Hate doing what Hate do best: Big riffs with a lot of martial prowess, blastbeat tempo equivalent to machinegun fire, and a lot of heresy and mythological excavation.
Hate are a band that moves in increments and the recent embracing of local mythology has seen them craft themselves a rock-solid three-album arc of high-speed blackened death metal that up until this year’s release was last heard from in 2021’s Rugia. Maybe the band sensed the need for a little more change than usual or that it was time to shift continents again, because their 2025 offering Bellum Regiis does a double-act. It plays it as close to the chest as Hate have ever played it and then stuns on the opposite side of the spectrum with how much the band give way in adding to their sound.
When I reviewed this album I found myself touching on that fact early on, stating
Hate have stayed rigidly true to their formula, such that you could pull any album post-Anaclasis from their discography and use it as a guide into blackened death metal for anyone willing to take the plunge. Few have ever attempted the sort of fiery riff work that Hate build their music out of, and because of that there’s been little reason for the group to ever shift. Hate don’t do massive artistic evolution: the Hate you see now was a Hate set in stone a while ago, already concrete and recognizable. What Hate do now is to iterate on their sound, such that there’ve been a few distinct three-to-four album arcs over the course of their career.
But even in knowing that, I still found a lot to enjoy on Bellum Regiis and like many other Hate albums it did become a default when I just couldn’t think of anything else to propel me forward by sheer energy when I was dragging ass on a specific day. Opener “Bellum Regiis” is stunning, as it moves in grand fashion – and sounds a little bit like how Gaerea would open songs circa Mirage – and “The Vanguard” and its storming melodic line is undeniable. If I were Hate, I’d be resigned to the fact that “The Vanguard” is going to stick with them for a long time. “Rite Of Triglav” spilling into “Perun Rising” sound as if they could’ve been on Rugia prior, giving the album a blood-soaked throughline, and “Prophet Of Arkhen” yanks things back even further.
It’s a fun tour through Hate at times, and other times it is the same relentless and titanic blackened death metal we’ve come to expect from the band. Hate have a killer formula available to them and this latest iteration was just as good as the previous few have been.
28 – Lucifer’s Child – The Illuminant
Black metal as a genre has more forks in it than your average buffet. It’s a wide and expansive genre and there will be arguments until there are no words left to be said about what really constitutes a black metal album, what generation it is, at what altars it worships. The list of things to discuss goes on longer than you could possibly imagine, and I’ve always felt like a total goofball even attempting to make some sort of distinction within the genre as a whole.
When it came to the death and black metal divide, I fell into the death metal camp. I’ll fully own up to that because I’m a simpleton, but whenever I discuss black metal just know that I’m not doing so from the most concrete of foundations or any point of confidence. I only know what I’ve scratched the surface of and what I, as a sort of anthropologist outside, have noted among the many culturally recognized patterns that always seem to garner my interest.
I can, however, hazard a guess at saying that one of the more interesting divides when it comes to bands is the musical view as to what Satan is as an overarcing concept. Black metal is often meant to be infernal. It’s supposed to scare the daylights out of people. The pentagrams, dramaticism, showmanship, the insistence upon live performance as ritual, is both expression of art and bulwark against wider musical masses. Black metal fosters a sort of misdirected extremism that loans itself very well to its musical goals and wrapping it all back around, should a band choose to do so, an embodiment of Satan as artform.
Those from the Northern reaches went for the cold and distillate side of things, a nihilism found in the void and shrieking terror similar to the howling winds of a blizzard. The corpse paint could be treated as hunter’s camouflage. Other bands though, such as the wider Hellenic black metal movement, went for the more obvious approach – black metal is fire. They found their branch of the tree best served as one burnt to ash and it is one that is often scorchingly hot to listen to. Lucifer’s Child and their new album The Illuminant was a fantastic exposition in that regard.
The Illuminant is an evolutionary sound for the Lucifer’s Child heathens but one that also doesn’t seek to reinvent the wheel of black metal as a whole. Instead it executes upon a blueprint almost flawless for eight songs of auditory flame-spewing. The Illuminant is an album that turns the temperature way up during its eight songs, and drawing comparisons amidst the wailing ghouls of other branches of the black metal tree shows just how hot this album runs.
It is ferocious in its songwriting and demonstrates Lucifer’s Child in their most blade-sharp form yet. They rarely shift off of the pedestal that they place themselves upon with opener “Antichrist”, and often a song like that will have siblings throughout the album – in this case “The Serpent And The Rod” and “Righteous Flama”. “Ichor” in the middle of the disc is a fun song upon which the album turns, one of the few times in which Lucifer’s Child slow the affair down for a mournful march through ash-strewn wastes. Then, just as quickly you’re back in a wash of brimstone and hellfire with five-minute burners like “Curse” and “The Heavens Die”.
I crashed headfirst into this album in late May and am still listening to it constantly now. Given the wide breadth of the genre, you could argue every year is a good year for black metal so long as you dig, but for a single-brain-celled fool like myself, this year was especially strong due to releases like The Illuminant.
27 – Abduction – Existentialismus
British black metal group Abduction have been spoken of quite frequently around the No Clean Singing urinal . Our man on the street Andy Synn has been keeping up with the band since close to their foundation and has put in some work following Abduction’s twists and turns up until their current form. Granted, some of that nowadays may be due to sharing a particularly talented drummer among both their bands, but still, it can’t hurt having an inside track to a band that has managed take the challenge of misanthropic black metal and execute upon it with such dripping disdain that you’d fear to meet the crew during a regular day.
Anyone who can create something like the material present on Existentialismus can’t be leading a blisssfully happy existence. Not with that much venom coming off of the teeth. Abduction’s 2025 release made its appearance here as part of our obscurities column – coincedentally the same one that featured Kryptan’s Violence, Our Power from the upper reaches of this feature – and has been a presence haunting our halls since. Abduction are another group that aren’t seeking to reinvent the wheel much, but are instead working from a ghostly blueprint of mist-coated streets, mildew-covered walls, and a general dislike of humanity in its current form. Granted that’s not nearly the only subject matter of the much deeper philosophical-bent taking place on Existentialismus but it is a sound that is very recognizable.
Vocalist and project mainman A/V sprints across a lot of ground through Abduction’s twisted and warped view of the world. Smashing observation and philosophical lyrics together to paint a world view both affronted and depressed with the state of things as they are currently, and does this across six epic-length songs for nearly forty-six minutes of music. Needless to say, once you’ve cleared the initial hurdle of the snarling “A Legacy Of Sores”, Existentialismus has a tremendous amount on offer.
I have a hard time breaking this album apart, much like many other albums that exist as a wider suite of music, but if forced to separate things out, “Pyramidia Liberi”, “Razors Of Occam”, and “Vomiting At Baalbek” offer a very good spread – and yes, 60% – of the overall tracklisting. The drums get absolutely battered to hell and back multiple times and the guitar moans as each note is choked from it. Some of the riff work falls into black metal classic territory but others get so contorted that the most natural part of the whole thing comes from the gravel-scraped vocal work.
Existentialismus feels like an album that Abduction have been working their way towards the final grasping of a long sought-after artistic idol, and it was great witnessing such a evolutionary – if suitably mutated – step for the band this year.
26 – Rivers Of Nihil – Rivers Of Nihil
Is it weird that way earlier in this year-end clusterfuck I joked that I would always find moments of peace and levity to include in the overall listening? One, to show that I do have a cuddly and soft side, and Two, to help break things up from the many pillars of heavy metal I would be collapsing upon readers over the course of a week. Is it strange then, that as heavy as this album gets at times in its quest to be more than just your standard prog-rock and modern-day death amalgamation I still found myself considering the latest musical journey by Rivers Of Nihil to be one of my relaxation albums – even with songs like “Criminals” and “American Death” in the overall tracklisting? I’ve even seen the band do this album live all the way through by now and still found myself oddly at peace through all of the heavier and aggressive moments.
Given its high placement in this year-end catalog it may surprise folks to learn that I was not as overwhelmingly infatuated with Rivers Of Nihil’s self-titled release in the same way a lot of people were. I do, however, recognize the sort of inevitability of it and the integral nature of this album for the band because listening to it over and over again, as I did throughout the year, I came to the conclusion that Rivers Of Nihil was an album that needed to happen for the band.
The lead-up to the release of this one was turbulent for the band in terms of lineup, and in a way, this is almost a new group finding its footing again. Positions shifted, people exited and joined, and by the end of it we somehow landed on Rivers Of Nihil being a four-piece creature – five live, lest we leave out xaxophone player Patrick Corona in spite of the amount of work he does – and not entirely sure of what they wanted to be after the massive journey that was The Work.
Rivers Of Nihil sounds like an amalgamation of ideas and different paths being charted. There isn’t really one solid throughline for the group, and as a self-titled release it serves more as a launching point for the band than a redefinition of what they are. If anything, a lot of Rivers Of Nihil has the band insisting more that they aren’t just “one thing”, but a combination of many. Thus, you have weird-angled prog-metal explorations, heavy and straightforward deathcore-inflected songs, one hell of a pop ballad, expansive rock numbers, and three out of the four guys now tackling vocal efforts for harmonization purposes. Rivers Of Nihil spend just as much time showing what they are not on their self-titled as they do what they are.
The whole experience plays out like a collection of well-crafted and well-written singles again, with some obvious suites of music shining way brighter than others. Though to be fair, part of this may be coming from a place of thinking that pre-release single “Hellbirds” would’ve fit just fine alongside “American Death” and should’ve been along for the journey. An obvious three-pack lies in the center of the album in “Despair Church” through “House Of Light” that will likely capture many folk’s attention, and yet the band do shine when they’re just intensely heavy. “Criminals” is relentless, and the strange-contortions of “Dustman” manage to level it up far past goofily-ambitious experiment. “The Logical End” really should’ve been well…the logical end – if you’ll allow me to outright steal a phrase from our review – but the song itself alongside “Rivers Of Nihil” – from the album Rivers Of Nihil by the band Rivers Of Nihil – still makes for a freakishly strong ending pair.
Rivers Of Nihil wasn’t a perfect album by any means but it was very strong on its many different wandered paths, which is why I’ve listened to it so much, and yes, seen them do it live as part of the recent Ne Obliviscaris tour. As they continue their trek into more avante-garde paths, it may be just as exciting to see what Rivers Of Nihil‘s attention focuses toward next as much as it is enjoying their current 2025 offering.
25 – Black Rabbit – Chronolysis/Warren Of Necrosis
I mentioned it in my clearing the slate article in which Black Rabbit’s EP Chronolysis was first featured, but I do still intend to tackle their newest EP Warren Of Necrosis separate from all of this. I am, however, taking advantage of the fact that it is now out to include it here because the pairing makes for a fantastic full-length album if you want to treat it as such. I haven’t gotten the chance to dive into it as deep as I would’ve liked – though I am liking it quite a bit – so you could view its inclusion here also as a partial piggyback on the strength of the aforementioned May-released EP Chronolysis. Either way, if you’re unfamiliar with the name Black Rabbit despite our coverage of the Netherlands-based death metal crew since coming across their single “Taken By The Devil”, right now will be an awesome chance to get yourself up to date.
Black Rabbit are a band that I would argue are severely underrated and should be included in many of the discussions of the chainsaw death metal resurrection over the past few years. The group have a wonderful knack for mixing it with some of the tastiest thrash riffs out there to create EPs and albums’ worth of circle-pit glory that are impossible to shoot down. In the name of ouright fun-havin’, Black Rabbit should be on the tips of a lot of people’s tongues. I won’t say they need to be on many year-end lists like mine, given how vibrant the death metal scene has always been, but they should be right alongside it more than you’d think. Chronolysis alone is a strong five-song EP’s worth of headbanging and Warren Of Necrosis’ later addition of four more makes for a great year of releases from this crew.
I could take a mad swing at trying to parse out particular songs, and in that way we’d be building our own EP, after all this time saying that we could combine the two to construct an album. There are highlights across the two though: From Chronolysis you have “Paracusia”, “Pity The Mind of The Frail And Feeble”, and “Rancid Taste Of Horror”, and on the slightly slimmer Warren Of Necrosis side of things you have “Apprehension” and “Null And Void”. “Apprehension” is a noisy beast of a track that has some nasty, nasty bass tone mid-way through, a much more ferocious side of Black Rabbit that started to reveal itself near the end of Chronolysis, and “Null And Void” gets by on thundering march and to-battle style double bass rolls. Warren Of Necrosis is a groovier-EP than its predecessor but both combine rather well into the aforementioned endless whirlpool of bodies. Black Rabbit are a band built to summon such a thing and the two releases from them this year just send that point home as if fired from a cannon.
24 – Mastiff – For All The Dead Dreams
We weren’t going to escape year’s end without me bringing up the UK’s Mastiff one more time, given the chance. Mastiff released an absolutely killer – in both mood and quality – album in the form of Deprecipice last year and this year followed it up with an equally brutal and bludgeoning EP, For All The Dead Dreams. Focusing even more on the -core side of things than the prior album did, Mastiff unleashed a series of six devastating tracks that were capable of grabbing any person flying high in the clouds of joy by their ankles and dragging them back into the depths below. Much like New Zealand’s Blindfolded And Led To The Woods, Mastiff’s 2025 issuance was black and red dominant as well, and while both take different approaches to being emotionally tolling, the two found a monstrous spark of inspiration in the concept of utter annihilation.
I was able to catch up with the Mastiff crew around the time of their latest release to give it a proper review, and to be honest, this has continued to be a release that has its claws in me like few others – well, few as in the group I’ve been listing so far, but you understand what I mean. This isn’t an EP that is a total horror show but I definitely felt like I was walking away from it missing a few teeth after it closed out that first handful of listens.
For All The Dead Dreams continues Mastiff’s trend of blending some face-scarring sludge and doom alongside their more hardcore and black metal influences. The whole experience can be overwhelming at times, as Mastiff use much of this EP’s twenty minutes to throw their proverbial weight around. Songs are brutally violent here and when they aren’t head-on bar-room brawls, they’re murderous on the neck with how sharp some of the headbanging motions are. You can practically hear a “snap” coming at the top of each measure as Mastiff work their way to the next downswing in a song.
The opening three of “Soliloquy”, “Rotting Blossoms”, and “Decimated Graves” are worth punching a ticket for on their own, and to be honest would’ve made for a great enough three-song version of For All The Dead Dreams. They didn’t need to continue pounding the ground into a smooh surface by adding two more songs to the overall beatdown, but “A Story Behind Every Light” and “Corporeal” follow to make sure that no one leaves this place feeling good about themselves. Hell yeah there’s some gargantuanly dumb near-breakdown segments in a few of these songs but they fit perfectly alongside the heavier march or the equally large-groove that Mastiff are constructing their five towers of here.
For All The Dead Dreams is a fantastic addendum to last year’s mood-murder Deprecipice but also a fantastic standalone release as well.
23 – Castrator – Coronation Of The Grotesque
I know that death metal group Castrator went through some lineup changes in the time between their 2025 release Coronation Of The Grotesque and their previous album Defiled In Oblivion. As the guy who has somewhat accidentally found himself on the Castrator journalistic beat, I still did not expect the sudden leap toward speed and thrash in the way Coronation of The Grotesque did.
Castrator are a seasoned collective of musicians well-versed in the death metal scene and up to this point have been very good at releasing chunky blocks of classic-influenced death metal. Defiled In Oblivion was a product out of time in that way; it could’ve easily torn the faces off some of the ’90s heavyweights and was also just as suited to tear faces off now. Their followup album Coronation Of The Grotesque, however, is an entirely different beast. I can say with full confidence – in part because I reviewed the fuckin’ thing – that Coronation Of The Grotesque is a mean beast of an album.
Somewhere between releases the Castrator crew got the taste of blood by way of speed, sleaze, and thrash and they don’t let up on any of that here. Coronation Of The Grotesque was like having multiple swords thrown at you from across the room that first few go-arounds. That’s partially why the album stuck with me. It’s not a massive leap in artistic quality for the band but it feels like an attack launched from a new direction for the four-piece. Castrator have some songs that could melt the sclera from your eyes on their newest album, and the sinister atmospherics more than made this one a worthy followup to Defiled In Oblivion.
“Fragments Of Defiance” made a lasting impression as a crushing opener. Later on in the album the two-fer of “Blood Bind’s Curse” and the wrist-breaking evil of “Discordant Rumination” shock some life into the back-half of the disc. Just in time for a fun cover of “Metal Command” to send the good ship Coronation Of The Grotesque sinking into the briny deep. “Mortem Opeterie” and “Deviant Miscreant” are equally effective in that regard, being two of the way-more-death-metal leaning numbers in the ten on offer here.
Coronation Of The Grotesque knows in its black, fragmented heart that it is a death metal album but when we refer to something as being as caustic as they come, the overall sneering attitude that spreads like an infection throughout this disc is one of those elements we’re referring to. Coronation Of The Grotesque is a great wall-of-an-asskicking for almost forty minutes and one that I will crow about given any chance.
22 – Cytotoxin – Biographyte
Look, an album has to be good if it manages to lure my old compatriot Grover out of the danger posed by Ohio at any specific moment. German tech-death group Cytotoxin and their follow up to Nuklearth were certainly a valid enough reason, as he even graced this very site with a review of that new disc, Biographyte.
Biographyte is an album for those who listened to Nuklearth and thought to themselves, “yes, but what if it had been even crazier”, and well, give a band like Cytotoxin a challenge like that and they are more than willing to answer the call. Comprising forty-eight minutes across eleven songs – and even a two-minute instrumental in that mix! – Biographyte is a hair-raisingly fast album that jams so much into a collective of four-minute songs that airlines will probably charge extra to ship a box of the physical release of it given the sheer weight of the thing. The radiated themes continue ten-fold on Biographyte and the tech-death part of the band is cranked up well past redlining. Brutality becomes second nature as the band pillage their way across this release.
I imagine, given the sheer amount of music on offer from Cytotoxin’s new one, that we likely all have different “highlight” songs, so to speak. It’s the nature of the irradiated beast; eleven songs of tech-death at the speed at which Cytotoxin deliver things means that your first few experiences with it likely blew the skin from your bones ala Terminator 2. You can bet that I was deeply in love with songs like “Eventless Horizon” and “Bulloverdozed” based on just the song titles alone at first, but hearing them be unrelenting in their hostility during “Eventless Horizon” and then wonderfully contorted during the hyper-technical “Bulloverdozed” only hammered that point home. While “Hope Terminator” and its seemingly endless guitar sweeps was well known before Biographyte saw release, it still makes for a fucking great intro number, and closer “From Bitter Rivers” is a great conflagration to send the album out on, amplified by intro-segue “Revelation” right before it.
Biographyte is Cytotoxin’s rapid-fire battering ratcheted up to a completely new technical level. The radiation-worship of the band still gets a little overwhelming at times – seriously, almost fifty minutes is a fucking lot of Cytotoxin with very few breathers – but it’s not a knock against just how insane Biographyte can get a times. I was drawn to this album more often than not simply because I knew it would leave my jaw dropped by album’s end.
21 – Igorrr – Amen
Thankfully I did not have to review the newest release by French whatever-the-fuck band Igorrr when it came out, because after my first few listens to Amen I’m not even sure where I would’ve begin. Part of me is just thrilled that the current incarnation of the group is keeping Svart Crown mainman JB Le Bail in work but that’s not even close to how to approach a quarter of whatever is happening in Amen.
Gautier Serre has shown himself to be a master of slamming genres together into unholy amalgamations that somehow leap beyond description, if not make one’s eyes glaze over as you attempt to keep track of how many layers any particular song has. Thankfully, two of the music videos for Igorrr’s newest album just happen to be studio playthroughs so you can see just how much work goes into each song.
Previous Igorrr releases Savage Sinusoid and Spirituality And Distortion – the two that you’ll note are the ones in which this project really broke big, trend-chaser that I am – were my go-to releases at work when I just really wanted to fuck with people. How else are you going to cover as much ground as Gautier and his chosen pirate crew do within one song and try to describe any of it? Is it ballroom or baroque dance? Operatic? Excessive? Metal as hell? Middle-eastern folk? Electronic? Can we just list a band as being “A ton” and call it good? The mind boggles at times but the music is incredibly enjoyable. There are few bands more tailor-made for DGR’s Brand Of Bullshit(tm) quite like Igorrr is.
If we can take a seat for a moment, let’s be real. You’re going to see Igorrr pop up a lot throughout the year-end list collections. Not many across this site, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a subset of internet dork – such as myself – really lock in with this album this year. I’m not even the only one who enjoyed it here, as compatriot Gonzo tackled the project in September.
The only reason I don’t really have it ranked higher in spite of my constant listening to it is that I was somewhat surprised by how conventional it could be at times. There are actual songs here, which is a crazed prospect given that this is a release with a song called “ADHD” on it. Maybe Igorrr is getting slightly calmer in its age but I was expecting this thing to go completely batshit and what I got instead was a very, very, very fun fusion of death metal and a chef’s dozen of other genres. No one fuses them together quite like Igorrr does but Amen is actually something of a journey as opposed to just constantly having shit pelting you from left field.
It’s a matured “ADHD” at least, which is why I can be just as infatuated with songs like “Blastbeat Falafel”, “Infestis”, “Ancient Sun”, “Limbo”, “Daemoni”, drumfill of the year contender “Headbutt”, and the twelve-second grindcore blast of “2020”. To try and deep-dive all of the genre-spheres traipsed through and then smashed to dust within that collective of songs alone would have this summary reach essay length.
To keep it short, I loved all the guitar work and blast-heavy drumming. The off-kilter instrumentation, folk instruments, and that poor long-suffering-choir whose eyebrows were probably raised higher than most listeners, just served to amplify some of the musical wildcat thrashing here. It’s not the most metal album on this list for sure, but this may be the most “metal” that has worked its way into Igorrr’s sound just yet. Maybe you can even be like me in the near future and use Amen to fuck with the coworkers just as much as I do with Igorrr’s other albums.