(Around our generally putrid, poisonous, and devastatingly dark halls Christmas isn’t a special day, certainly not a day we honor by going silent. Like on every other holiday, and all the days in between, we commemorate it noisily. And to do that today we present the fourth installment of DGR’s five-part year-end list countdown, with the top 10 in line for tomorrow.)
I think that if we have timed this out correctly and things work out properly this entry is going to be that one that runs on Christmas Day, in which case “haha, holy shit”. Talk about a hell of a tour to have to walk through when you’re having your family gatherings – or if you’re a lounger like me, enjoying some now day-old leftovers or whatever chinese food you could score.
While I pored over this year-end list again and again to make sure that only the finest releases made the cut I found that I had created – save one moment of reserved beauty – quite the dense block of both suffocating death metal, blindingly violent black metal, excessive on all fronts metal, and outright depressing metal. This is the segment I’ve often joked is the one that could be most folks’ critical list because there’s a lot of names on here you may have crossed paths with on other sites. For some reason, this always lands about my top twenty with my final ten being some obscura gathering of death and grind bands for people to roll their eyes to and give me a good “how dare he” with some of the nominations. I know for sure I’ve got one on this segment that’ll likely get my car spraypainted.
If, however, this entry does wind up running on the holidays – and likely one of the only posts – then enjoy your time with your family if you’ve got em and appreciate them, if not, tell them to pound sand and hit the play button here. The music will always be here, either way.
20 – Abigail Williams – A Void Within Existence
Even though the core of their sound is planted firmly in explorations of black metal, Abigail Williams’ expansive near-twenty year career has resulted in every release sounding different from the others. Driven by project owner and multi-talented musician Ken Sorceron, the band have traversed the worlds of symphonic, depressive, traditional, sludge, and a handful of other more hard-to-define blends as the inspiration strikes him. Partnered up with equally talented musicians over the years, Abigail Williams has built an impressive collection of releases that to this day will never fully hint at what may be coming next for the group.
Every release being so different means that the first time you listen to a new release, you’ll recognize the voice but you’ll never get a full sequel album. In fact, the closest Abigail Williams got to a truly consistent throughline would’ve been the run from Becoming, to The Accuser, to Walk Beyond The Dark. It is that insistence in never repeating themselves that keeps Abigail Williams interesting as a project, though, because you can never fully know where Ken’s mind will land on the path to a new release.
I say this mostly because I knew A Void Within Existence was going to be a snarling beast of an album but I was not prepared for how weaponized that acidity was going to be. A Void Within Existence is still black metal at its core but there’s an overarching sludge influence on many of the songs. And perhaps the time in Vale Of Pnath – they do basically share lineups now – has started to cross-breed into his solo work as well, because Abigal Williams’ latest can be a death metal blastbeast as well.
All of this makes for one of the more dynamic Abigail Wiliams releases in some time, one that could likely catch some people by surprise. Andy covered this one near its release and found it intense as could be, while tracing elements all the way back through the wider Abigail Williams catalog. What stuck with me so much was that while A Void Within Existence was exploring its themes of isolation, it was remarkable just how outwardly explosive it could be at times.
The first few songs put recording drummer Mike Heller to work in a way that turns him into an earth-boring machine. It was also interesting to me that as the album continued on, its last three songs got progressively longer; the first four stay within the four-to-six minute range but once you blearily walk into “Talk To Sleep” territory you’re looking at songs moving from seven to nine minutes respectively. Over half of the album’s forty-five minute run time comes from those last three journeys.
A Void Within Existence is a vivid album, and much like the last few Abigail Williams releases, feels like something the project has been working toward for a long time now. Each album from Ken and his Abigail Williams collective has felt like a concrete work closing off a font of ideas, something that has been built up to, and A Void Within Existence is an excellent completion of this specific arc.
19 – Werewolves – The Ugliest Of All
A couple years back, I did a joking article in which I made a list ranking all of my year-end lists. There was much fun to be had, and a mountainous pile of shit to give myself over some of my choices – and albums overlooked that have become favorites since then – as well as a curiosity in poring over the various patterns that have developed in how my year tends to go.
Whether I like it or not, some do emerge, and I cannot claim to be a holy paladin in the sense that I am completely unbiased and could rank things with the efficiency of your common calculator program. So, you may note as you descend through the ranks in the year-end pile just how hostile and violent many of the releases here are, as if I had no room in my life for post-rock or meditative music at certain points during 2025.
I’ll spoil the answer for you: much of that is due to the last three months of the year. Not the release tsunami that happens at about that time so people can play off of gift giving season and recency bias, but more the music that accompanies said gift-giving season as it starts to infect the airwaves and work. There comes a need to just scour one’s brain completely clean of it and its incessant repetition.
Have I repeated this very thesis in other year-end lists and reviews? Yep. Given time, I could track down the years for you. Given time, I could also point to the exact same band serving the exact same purpose around the exact same time every year, the ever-consistent maddening musical experiment of “how long can they get away with this” that is the boar-headed bullshit of Werewolves.
Up until this year I thought I’d done a good job keeping up with Australia’s purveyors of bugfuck deathgrind, but alas, this year I did not actually have to tag along on the annual expidition from the Werewolves crew. That doesn’t mean I didn’t still listen to it a ton but at one point I was taking a bit of pride in at least having a different opening approach to each Werewolves review even when it became clear that the band themselves weren’t going to have a different opening approach to well… anything. The DeathMetal EP year really threw me for a fucking loop, though. The whole Werewolves experiment was described as ten albums in ten years and since we’re on album six now, we’re officially over the hump.
The Ugliest Of All is the latest in this collection of batch-recorded blast-furnaces disguised as albums, and like others before it, it’s a high-speed beating all its own for basically a ball-hair over a half-hour. Their tongue in cheek and tongue removed from face songwriting style still resulted in some great songs with equally great song titles such as “Skullbattering” and “The Enshittification”, and elsewhere in the lineup I enjoyed the titular closing song as well as “Slaves To The Blast” and opener “Fools Of The Trade”.
Blessedly, the band have even laid back on the media samples a bit so I don’t have to go sprinting for my speaker at work when the inevitable “Australian dude yells a bunch of offensive garbage” moment of the album comes on. Its not quite Killwhitneydead territory but it has become a trademark for the band that at least once I’m going to be sprinting through the trenches World War I style to turn the speaker down a bit before some guy yells “Cunt!” at work.
The benefit of working around heavy machinery at all times is that most people can’t tell the difference between what Werewolves are playing and the forklift two aisles over anyway. The detriment is I can’t wear headphones, on account of there being a forklift two aisles over, and yes, I have seen them hit the rafters in the building and blow the sprinkler line so the rule isn’t without fair cause. At the very least I’m not the dude who got his foot ran over.
So yes, once again Werewolves find themselves in a similar spot as they did the previous year, and the year before that, and before that. They’re not going to make any attempt to change and frankly neither am I. All things in their proper places, then.
18 – Fragda – Glorification Of Witchery
The exercise of bands differentiating themselves in deathcore these days can often be just as interesting to watch as it is the material from the bands themselves. Recognizing that the genre is way past saturation as been a challenge a lot of bands have had to deal with, and how they intend to break out from the pack is what keeps things worth watching. In the case of Hungarian group Fragda the answer was by fusing the genre with black metal and death metal in such a way that anything touching it could melt to sludge.
Since the release of their album Damnation Is Inevitable, Fragda have carved themselves into one of the most vicious deathcore bands out there, in such a way that the -core that is left in their sound is in service of something more annihilation-obsessed. Fragda sound gigantic on their new album Glorification Of Witchery and their quest to do something much larger with the blackened deathcore genre continues here. The genre itself has seen a massive burst of activity as deathcore bands have sought new playgrounds to wreck that are heavier and heavier, and over the last five-to-six years many of them have settled on symphonic black metal by way of Dimmu Borgir as a sort of inspiration. Though I often wonder if sometimes it’s because these bands really, really like high-screaming, and by adding a blackened tint to your backing atmospherics, you’re giving yourself opportunity galore to do so.
Fragda are different in that regard, in that they’ve somehow figured out that a minimalist approach will make them sound that much heavier. Every movement Fragda make on Glorification of Witchery hits with the force of a car crash. They took a mastery of the low-and-slow beatdown approach of the last few years and exponentially cranked it up on this newest album. We covered it in much more detail back in May but needless to say there has been plenty of reason for me to return to the world of Glorification Of Witchery since then.
The ten songs that’ve been rammed into the bounds of the album are the type that leave impact craters behind, and when you have a handful of them – “Realm Of Chaos And Old Night”, “Phantom Flesh” and “Behind The Event Horizon” especially – clearing or getting damned close to the six-minute mark, you know you’re in for a world-ender of a musical fight. “Skinwalker” and “Limbo” both do a great job as early album refreshers of what Fragda are aiming for, and each song just seems like one further step into an abyssal void, filled only with thundering drums, warped keyboard lines, and hellacious vocal work.
My only issue with it is that when it does run a little long, it’s at the expense of some passages playing out like never-ending breakdowns, but those were so few and far between that even the slightest iteration on an upcoming groove would easily win back, as if my memory was completely wiped. Glorification Of Witchery is an album for those who enjoy hearing a band sound angry and absolutely mean it, and Fragda find themselves in pretty good company here on this segment of my year-end parade.
17 – Nite – Cult Of The Serpent Sun
I have a few reasons for including Nite on the year-end list, outside of a general Marge Simpson-esque “I just think Cult Of The Serpent Sun is neat!” I am at heart still a Bay Area child even though I have long since accepted the fact that I am now deep in the wastes of the Nor-Cal valley, and as such, I enjoy seeing a band like Nite succeed. I’ve been lucky enough to see them live as well, and even though it doesn’t fully come across in photographs, Nite are rockstars and a hell of a lot of fun to witness.
The second part, especially, is a sticking point when it comes to Nite because I think they’ve been building on the promise of them being rock stars when it comes to their combination of black metal and hard rock, for the gloriously nebulous tag of black and roll. It’s been a combination that over the course of their three albums that they’ve been honing into something so sharp it could cut a mountain in half by looking at it.
Third, I think Cult Of The Serpent Sun is that album they’ve been working toward making because it is the best combination and realization of their promised sound so far. Even though the “blackened” side of things gets sidelined a little bit here in favor of some hefty arena-rock worship, sometimes that’s just what you need. A big album full of big riffs and a big stomping rhythm section. Sometimes, you just wanna rock and that’s what Nite are doing for a big block of Cult Of The Serpent Sun.
Now here’s where I get to drag my foot in the dirt in front of me and do the “gee, golly mister” routine, because my internal-site-search-fu is failing me tremendously. We posted a few times about Cult Of The Serpent Sun in the lead up to its March release this year, but I’ll be damned, I’m not sure we ever gave this one the full writeup treatment and yet here I am, rocking out to it whenever I’m given the chance. For all my pretense and deep diving into obscure music and weird oddities, I still find myself a sucker for a song with a good groove and beefy drum segments to it.
Cult Of The Serpent Sun is eight songs of just that. You only have to listen to “Crow (Fear The Night)” once and your eyes will be opened as to why they chose it as a lead-off single. “Carry On” rides into glory with some of the best out there – plus that first guitar part before the chorus, hot damn – and the simply titled “Skull” has enough caveman groove to it that you can’t help but smile, even though the aura of the album overall remains suitably evil.
Nite are one of the few bands out there that do a fantastic job treading on a few different genre lines, bringing back the classic and trad-metal riffs of yore and combining them with a blackened snarl that could just as easily have them coated in muck, though I’d worry about the leather jacket status after that. Don’t miss out on Cult Of The Serpent Sun, there is both glory and zen to be found in the arena-rock black metal approach and Nite are nailing it with this one.
16 – …And Oceans – The Regeneration Itinerary
Every two and a half to three years I get to do this same exercise with …And Oceans. I’m overjoyed to do it because that means I’ve gotten another great album from the Finnish black metal collective, but it also means that I get to spend a good block of my writing going over just how fucking weird they are. Are they electronic and industrial? Is it fully black metal? How avante-garde does the new one get?
My own review of their newest album The Regeneration Itinerary probably spent more time stumbling over this periodic …And Oceans conundrum than I did actually parsing out specific songs. I mean c’mon, even the most hardened of us out there would feel like they have to go into some depth explaining a band when midway through a song that is as vicious as opener “Inertae” is, there is all of a sudden a goth-club worthy rave break before …And Oceans return to burn the back half of the song to the ground. I appreciated it in some way because it laid out early on a disc just how experimental …And Oceans can get for those who are new to the experience – two and a half minutes in until your first “what the fuck was that” moment has to be a record for the guys – but The Regeneraton Itinerary is an album that is practically constructed out of moments like that.
…And Oceans have evolved to deal purely in excess. There hasn’t been a moment yet on any of their releases since their return on Cosmic World Mother where it has seemed like …And Oceans looked at where a song was going and went, “Hey, what if we rein it in a bit?”. If anything, you could treat The Regeneration Itinerary as just the latest maneuver in a real fucked-up game of industrial black metal chicken that is going to result in us head-on crashing into one another at some point. I’m already starting to feel like I’m walking away from one as I work my way through their albums as is.
If you want specific songs to jump around to, I could highly recommend “Copper Blood, Titanium Scars”, “The Discord Static”, “The Ways Of Sulphur”. and “Chromium Lungs, Bronze Optics”. You could just listen to the whole album as well and see which song causes you to turn your head so fast that you leave the room with a neck-ache. All of these are valid approaches.
The Regeneration Itinerary continued …And Oceans’ hot streak of challenging me to meet the band on their terms for a third album in a row, and at this point I’ve become a sucker for the abuse. If you’re questing for some overwhelming-on-all-fronts black metal with some equally bizarre electronics and industrial work spread throughout it, the latest in the long-running career for …And Oceans will treat you just fine.
15 – Dissocia – To Lift The Veil
Daniel R. Flys is proving to be quite the prolific musician over the past few years. He’s joined both Persefone and Eternal Storm and has somehow found time in between both bands to launch a different project as well, one that carries a lot of the ideas of both of those bands as well as mixing in a few of his own. More meditative than one might expect, Dissocia and their album To Lift The Veil – on which Daniel is joined by drummer Gabriel Valcázar – provide quite the bountiful meal of progressive metal with a heavy melodeath tinge.
Built out of many a layered synth line, violin guest appearancess, and guitar lines that float, flutter, yet somehow also exist in another ethereal realm entirely, To Lift The Veil tours a lot of ground in the personal philosophical and spiritual world. One has to guess that although they stand separate on their own as projects, the ideas shared between Persefone, Eternal Storm, and Dissocia make for one hell of a musical throughline.
It took what the kids might refer to as “forever and a day” for me to get around to reviewing Dissocia’s To Lift The Veil but rest assurred that when it comes down to it I’ve really enjoyed getting lost in this album whenever I get the opportunity. The old axes about constantly discovering new things in each song are at play here, because To Lift The Veil is chock-full of inspiration, and the way that Dissocia synthesize it all together is something to behold. It’s to be expected when you have a half of your album leaping over the six-minute-plus mark in the songs with the grace of an olympian athlete. Barring the shorter “Evasion” between them, the last two songs could easily total up to almost sixteen minutes of music on their own.
There were plenty of highlights throughout To Lift The Veil’s forty-one minutes as well. “Samsara” and “Existentialist” are both great numbers. The two longer songs “The Lucifer Effect” and “Out Of Slumber” both run through multiple musical valleys before closing out as well. To Lift The Veil has that sort of dreamlike quality many progressive acts aim for, and this is just the first volley from the project. Dissocia put out a fantastic debut in 2025 and To Lift The Veil is a musical trip well worth undertaking.
14 – ChestCrush – Soul Extractor
Hey, remember how just one album ago everything was beautiful, dreamlike, introspective, and meditative? Yeah? Well fuck that. ChestCrush’s newest release whose name translates to Soul Extractor – and I will henceforth be referring to it as such because if I were to attempt either pronouncing or spelling it in its original Greek I would likely offend the country enough that they would declare war on my house – is the exact opposite.
Chestcrush deal in disdain, distaste, and rage at humanity and few bands out there do “angry at the world” quite like ChestCrush do. The now multinational act unleashed Soul Extractor upon the world in April of this year, and let me assure you I wasn’t about to let the year go by without talking about it. Soul Extractor is the sort of album that sticks with you long after it is over; the constant bludgeoning over the head of just how disgusting the world is – much in the same way Abduction tackled it, though this one is way heavier on the DEATH metal side of things – will leave you with a headache for days after.
Songs here are dark and deep, bellowing from an abyss of absolute hatred and there’s zero respite to be found within any of it. The song titles alone acheive a “ah, they’ve sent us a poet!” status, but the music on offer from ChestCrush currently is really what helps this album stick. It’s why I can wholeheartedly recommend that people listen to a song entitled “Every Single Word That Comes Out Of Your Filthy Hole Is An Infectious Lie Spreading Disease”.
Touring the album that first few times, I found plenty of stuff to enjoy on Soul Extrator. The song “Total Rejection” alone earned a paragraph of text, describing the song thusly:
“Total Rejection” carries with it a storm cloud that dumps a year’s worth of misery in four minutes. It is constructed mostly around a brutal-death-metal chug but the grinding buzzsaw influence is undeniable as the song descends into rapid-noise at times and then quickly reconstructs itself as a fortress of double-bass rolls during its chorus. It may have the benefit of being the most easily understood headbanging-wise across the whole album, which may lend it to being one of the more constantly played. Taken as a whole by this point in the album you’ve already been worn down to dust, which may be what ChestCrush were aiming for anyway.
That’s not to discount the more straightforward violence of a song like “As The Damned Writhe In Eternal Woe”, which is like seven minutes of suffocating under a weight being pressed upon you, or the exceedingly overactive “Hang Them! Torch Them!”. Like I mentioned before, there’s nothing that ChestCrush are doing here that could be described as “friendly” in any sense. This is just one destructive pummeling after another. Soul Extrator is also one of the highlights of the year for that reason, for being so uncompromising or unreasonable and leaning so heavily on brutality that it leaps well beyond one genre line and into a realm of pure, unaldulerated disgust.
13 – Paradise Lost – Ascension
I wonder if somehow I am at odds with the wider Paradise Lost fandom because I really, really like their 2025 offering Ascension, but if you look into the wider world of the internet it seems like opinions are much more varied. My review of their latest found that Paradise Lost seem to have a neutral ground they always return to whenever they get lost in the artistic weeds, and that new reset always seems to work out for them. I even found myself fawning over the fact that Ascension is the liveliest the band have sounded in a long while, even with the Greg’s lead guitar so up in your face in the mix that he could practically be sitting nose-to-nose with you.
I am a Paradise Lost fanboy though, and although not every album has hit super-hard with me I’ve felt the last four or so have been on a steady track of good-to-great. I still get a little bit of a blood rush remembering when “Beneath Broken Earth” was first revealed and that was ten years ago. I even like all of the clean sung and alt-rock stuff they’ve done over the years, and the much-wider Paradise Lost cinematic universe that includes Host, their re-recordings, and even High Parasite has meant that I have been eating especially well as of late. Ascension just so happens to be one of the finer meals that have been served in my direction yet.
What I have found in my many, many listens of Ascension though, is that this is a release that is very frontloaded with its strongest songs. It is an album that is great song stacked on top of great song up until the impactful “Lay A Wreath Upon The World” five songs in. That’s not to discredit the back half of this album either, as I found myself enjoying the “Deceivers” and “The Precipice” pairing, and I think “A Life Unknown” makes for a great closer.
Ascension is just one of those releases that finds a steady groove of strong songwriting and then stays there for its entire run time. It is twelve songs of really goddamned good Paradise Lost material that is more focused and less wandering than they’ve been in previous albums. Ascension does get close to running a little samey at times but it always manages to pick up the tempo or change the entire dynamic of a following song right at the point every time. Rarely did I find a listening session of Ascension feel like it was dragging outside of the intended dour mood that the handsome gentlemen of Paradise Lost are trying to create.
A band like Paradise Lost can maintain a long-running career by just being consistent and playing to what they know best, but occasionally releasing albums like Ascension onto the heavy metal world is what makes them a pillar of the Euro-doom scene today.
12 – Retromorphosis – Psalmus Mortis
Like many people my draw to Retromorphosis was the fact that most of the lineup had been involved in tech-death group Spawn of Possession and that their album Psalmus Mortis could be treated as a spiritual followup to that band. There was a period in time in which Spawn Of Possession were basically your tech-death band’s favorite tech-death band, and like a lot of your band’s favorite band scenarios, they had some albums in their collection that were truly special despite them never breaking massive in a way they should’ve.
Considering just how much they’ve wielded an unspoken influence over the scene as a whole – and their cross-over appeal to true death metal fans – Spawn Of Possession were clearly charting some wild territory for themselves. I could stack Incurso up against a variety of classics and I truly think that album would hold its own against many challengers. So, needless to say, yes it was a pretty self-serving and super-reductive reason to be drawn to an album like Psalmus Mortis but hot shit wasn’t I excited when I found out that the disc was basically everything I was hoping for. Andy put forth a pretty good history of the group and how it all tied together with their debut album in his review.
The best part of Psalmus Mortis is that for all of its modern production – it sounds great and the bass tone in opening song “Obscure Exordium” is wonderfully gross – it still remains as angular as what Spawn Of Possession were creating toward the end of the band’s lifespan. Retromorphosis are a band that already knows it has established bona fides on multiple fronts and decides to just let loose for forty-two minutes. The way the guitar just peels out into its first solo in “Vanished” is great, and from there the band just tear their way through tech-death trope after tech-death trope, bending and mutating everything into their own style. Guitars parts seem to flash into and out of existence and KC Howard has to somehow make everything sound cohesive on the drum kit to stitch everything together.
It’s just as much mad scientist experimentation as it is technical songwriting. I adore the strange contortions of “Aunt Christie’s Will” and the equally bent-to-near-broken “The Tree” deeper in. “Retromorphosis” as a song could almost serve as a separate spotlight demonstration for each of the band’s constituent parts and that song then leads into the nine-minute mountain climb of “Machine”.
It may not be as flashy and approachable as a lot of tech-death out there but Retromorphosis are already putting on a show that they’ve clearly struck a solid vein of tech-death all their own and could easily mine it for some time without anybody questioning them. It’s a strong debut from a stacked to the point of unfairness collective of musicians. If you have not given Psalmus Mortis a chance despite all the people that’ve been yelling from the hills about it since February, you need to change that.
11 – Aversions Crown – A Voice From The Outer Dark
This is probably going to be the entry that gets me pilloried this year. There’s usually one oddball pick that at some point is going to result in my house being egged, and I imagine ranking Australian deathcore crew Aversion’s Crown so much higher than many of these releases is going to be it.
If you’re less discerning about your genres like I am, each year is bountiful on all sorts of fronts and that includes things ranging from industrial to deathcore to limitless bounds of heavy metal as squeezed through the black hole filter as can get. That means I have no aversion to deathcore in any way, and to be honest with you, when you grow up in a town that isn’t a massive metropolis it is likely that for a while the only shows you got to see live were a lot of -core and punk rock shows, the more artistic underground favoring bigger cities, because that is the most stable way for them to keep going due to concentrated population.
Thus, I have a taste for it anyway, and somehow through my years trawling the underground metal trenches I’ve taken deathcore not to be the heaviest of heavy genres of the world, but my more easily approachable pop music. The simplified song structures in favor of brutality and the easily understood format loans itself toward shutting your brain off in favor of embracing massive groove and testosterone-fueled swagger.
It’s probably a sign I haven’t matured mentally past twelve, but needless to say when you view something like deathcore as your relaxation time, you’re going to have an album or EP that quickly launches itself into your “default” listening choice. Aversions Crown ascended to that status this year with their three-song EP A Voice From The Outer Dark, and in a way, me placing it here is acknowledging just how goddamned much I’ve listened to this release since it came out in early-August.
It’s easy to do that, given that A Voice From The Outer Dark is a little over twelve-and-a-half-minutes, and the Aversions Crown formula condensed into three songs as something of a comeback statement after years of silence works in their favor. Every groove and drum hit feels more vital than ever before because it feels like they have something to prove. When you’re once again doing the frontman shuffle and have watched numerous bands performing similar to what you were finding successful, it’s hard not to imagine that Aversions Crown were going to come back hungrier than ever.
A Voice From The Outer Dark distills so much of the Aversions Crown formula down to three songs that it quickly became a shock to the system for me throughout the year, whether it be the gigantic groove of opener “A Voice From The Outer Dark”, the rabid-dog vocal delivery at times of “Deathbed Lamentations” – after of course, the seething “what now when all is said and done…” opening lines – or the final firebombing of “Castigation Choir”. Aversions Crown sound massive here and if they can take these three songs and keep those ideas as varied for a future album – not to mention maintain lineup stability – then we may be looking toward an absolutely murderous release from the crew.