(written by Islander)
We all made it through Christmas week more or less intact, not just those of us who toil here at NCS but you too, or you wouldn’t be reading this. Taking some deep breaths, we now look ahead to the final five days of 2025. We have a few more year-end lists to share from friends of our site, although I think one or two of those won’t appear until on or after New Year’s Day. And somewhere around the first day of 2026 I’ll start rolling out the last part of our year-end LISTMANIA celebration, the only one I’m responsible for — our list of 2025’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs.
In the meantime, here’s one last 2025 edition of SEEN AND HEARD, and tomorrow I hope to bring you the year’s last edition of SHADES OF BLACK (it’s more hope than promise because there’s a mid-morning start on Sunday to an NFL football game that will rivet my attention; one does not live by metal alone).
As usually happens, the flood of new music diminished during Christmas week, although there was plenty of actual flooding out here on the U.S. West Coast. However, the diminished music stream still included some very good offerings, on top of what had breached the levees in the weeks before that. As you try to recover from the week just ended and begin peering ahead toward 2026 with some combination of fear, loathing, and maybe glimmers of hope, I hope you’ll enjoy what follows.
JUODVARNIS (Lithuania)
I didn’t jump on board the Juodvarnis train until their third album, 2020’s Nerimo Dienos, but I’ve easily stayed on board through the handful of singles they’ve released since then. Now, a fourth album is peering at us from the horizon, a record named Tėkmės that will include the two most recent of those singles and five more new songs, one of which debuted with a video this past week.
The name of the newest song is “Laikui Varvant“. In listening to it I got flashes of Cult of Luna, Borknagar, Gojira, and Heaven Shall Burn. You’ll probably pick up different traces, because I’,m not great at drawing band comparisons, but dropping those names might at least give you some extra inducement to listen.
Here, Juodvarnis harness together many of their stirring strengths, like charging horses before a chariot — gut-punching and head-rattling percussion; bone-bruising bass-level heaviness; riffing that’s ominously bleak, contorted with angst, and fiercely boiling; and a shifting vocal performance that seamlessly veers from high-flown melodic singing to ravaging snarls and explosive screams.
It’s an emotionally dark song, even in the soaring singing. But it sure does seize attention. Here’s the band’s statement about the song:
“The world we live in is constantly speeding up. Minutes pass like seconds, days turn into hours, and years flip from one to the next like pages of a fast-read novel.‘Laikui Varvant’ is a reflection of this feeling. When so much chaos and shit surrounds us, a person can feel hopeless, as if existing without purpose. With this song and its accompanying video, we want to take you to a place where time does not exist — and perhaps, even if only for a moment, dim that heavy feeling inside together.”
Tėkmės is due for release on January 23rd.
Given the geographic distance involved, the odds of me ever seeing Juodvarnis in the flesh on stage are somewhere between slim and none. A sad state of affairs, because the well-made video for “Laikui Varvant” adds to other video evidence that they know how to put on a gripping show.
(Thanks to Rennie of starkweather for making me aware of this one.)
https://juodvarnis.bandcamp.com/track/laikui-varvant
https://www.facebook.com/juodvarnis.band
https://www.instagram.com/juodvarnis_band
ANGERSEED (Hungary)
The Hungarian “Old-School Technical Death Metal” band Angerseed are scheduled to release their second album Rapture is Mine… Glory is Ours in January. It arrives a long nine years after the band’s debut, The Proclamation. Being unfamiliar with Angerseed, I didn’t really know what to expect before hitting Play on the new album’s first advance track, “Redefine My Universe“. As my pal DGR is fond of saying when listening to something as explosive as this song, it blew my hair back.
Fueled by a powerful and piercing production, the song immediately surges, propelled by vivid drum-gallops and wild riffing that viciously churns, maniacally skitters, and convulses like seizures. The deep and gritty guttural vocals are also wild and commanding, the kind of monstrous braying and roaring that sounds imperiously malicious.
The band also switch things up as they go — bringing in stomping grooves that will give you neck-ache; introducing miserably writhing and frantically swirling guitar-leads; causing the guitars to both moan and ring like preternatural chimes; slowing and accelerating without warning. They prove their technical proficiency for sure, but they also create lots of hooks, as well as an overarching aura of evil and horror.
Rapture is Mine… Glory is Ours will be released on CD on January 10th via a collaboration between Pest Records and Metal Ör Die Records.
https://pestrecords.bandcamp.com/album/angerseed-rapture-is-mine-glory-is-ours
https://www.facebook.com/Angerseed
https://angerseedofficial.bandcamp.com
MAGNACULT (Netherlands)
“‘Final Decision‘ portrays an intense inner conflict: the struggle between belief and rejection, shame and redemption. As the song unfolds, paralysis gives way to clarity. Inner demons are confronted and cast out, pain is abandoned, and resolve takes hold. What begins in fear ends in guidance – a journey toward a higher truth and spiritual liberation.”
That’s the PR intro to a new song and video from the long-running Dutch band MagnaCult. It’s off their latest album Lucis (Latin for “light” or “enlightenment”), which was released on December 20th (I haven’t yet heard the rest of it yet).
This particular song is a heavy-grooved beast, heavy enough to loosen your guts and fracture your spine, though the bass performance is notably nimble and nuanced as well as slugging. The deathly vocals are authentically rabid and cruel, though the vocalist also fanatically chants in ways that seem like something out of the East.
The riffing also sounds exotic, generating vividly sinister pulsations and fiery flurries as well as jackhammer-jolts. Equally exotic, the soloing swirls and screams like some crazed spirit.
https://magnacult.eu/
https://www.facebook.com/MagnaCult
https://www.instagram.com/magnacult/
SKULLD (Italy)
In my head, the next song, “Mother Death”, fit extremely well as a follow-on to that Magnacult song, mainly because it’s a groovesome thing, though it’s different in almost every other way.
As the riffing wails, the music sounds dismal and morbid, and as it jitters and jolts it sounds vicious. The pacing and drum patterns are in constant flux, appropriately augmenting the episodes of frenzied violence, of disease running wild, and of suppurating degradation, while the hardcore-styled yells and screams and the death-metal bellows kick up the song’s intensity even more.
The band also slip in a couple of quick, bone-gnawing bass solos, some vividly squirming guitar solos, and enough swarming and skittering fretwork to scare off any nearby hordes of hungry roaches and ants.
“Mother Death” is from Skulld’s new album Abyss Calls to Abyss, which will be out on January 30th via Time To Kill Records.
https://ffm.to/skulld-mother-death
https://skulldband.bandcamp.com/album/abyss-call-to-abyss
https://timetokillrecords.com/en-us/collections/skulld-abyss-calls-to-abyss
https://www.facebook.com/skulldbanditaly/
https://www.instagram.com/skulldband
GAMO GRIND (Nepal)
We’re about to take a whiplash-inducing turn from the path of today’s collection so far. What’s next is a debut EP named Jiudo Chetana (Living Consciousness) that was released by Lower Class Kids Records a couple of weeks ago on cassette tape (it was digitally released by GCBT Records last April). The authors of this six-track wrecking machine are a trio from Godawari, Nepal, who named themselves Gamo Grind.
In true grindcore tradition, the songs are short, fast, and ferocious. And those aren’t the only grind tropes that Gamo Grind have embraced — they’re not trying to reinvent any wheels, but their musical riots are viscerally explosive and ruinously destructive.
The riffing is scathing in tone and murderous in implementation; the drumming vividly fires like automatic weapons, gallops like wild mustangs, and spins heads in off-kilter combos; the vocals are about as unhinged and possessed as anything else you’ve heard this year, just utterly berserk and bleeding raw in their howls, screams, and strangled snarls, but they also seem rooted in aspects of the band’s homeland.
And while the songs are as wild as famished, uncaged beasts, they’re tremendously punchy too, hard-grooved as well as frantic and vicious, and the band accent them in various ways that prevent the EP from sounding too “same-y” — check out “Sa re Ga” for a prime example of what I’m trying to convey, and wait for the closer “Ghatak Natak” if you feel like getting brutishly beaten to a pulp.
https://lckr.bandcamp.com/album/gamo-grind-jiudo-chetana
https://gamogrind.bandcamp.com/album/jiudo-chetana
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61574681076401
https://www.instagram.com/gamo_grind_
GRAVETAKER (Finland)
Gravetaker’s debut album Sheer Lunacy was released last April by Urealis-tuotanto on CD. I missed it then, but checked it out when I received the news that Iron Bonehead Productions was releasing the album on vinyl this past week. IBP identified Gravetaker’s inspirations as Soulside Journey-era Darkthrone and Katharsis, among other things, and described the songwriting approach as “schizophrenic”. Just listen to the album’s opening song to understand what that means.
“Black Sepulchres” begins in a way that’s something like the polar opposite of what the album’s title promises. That classically inclined and beautifully performed acoustic guitar instrumental is elegant and mesmerizing. But the song does indeed prove to be exhilaratingly schizophrenic, because Gravetaker abruptly obliterate the spell they were making with an eye-popping outburst of blazing and blaring fretwork delirium, earthquake-level drumming, and gritty, ravenous howls.
The guitars swarm and scream; the drums and bass thunder; the vocals are frighteningly rabid; and the music contorts in ways that sound imperial but also like the ominous writhing of great serpents and the quivering frenzies of feeding maggots. The song also channels tremendous menace and wrenching agony before once again exploding in glorious, heart-punching madness.
The sound is dense and abrasive, heavy and hammering, muddy in some respects, but also sharp and piercing in others, an intersection that well-suits the band’s schizoid songwriting. Honestly, with just a few days left in the year, “Black Sepulchres” is one of the most attention-grabbing album openers I can remember from 2025. I kind of held my breath, wondering whether Gravetaker could keep this up as the rest of the album followed on. Happily, I can tell you they do.
The remaining songs are also elaborate and hair-raising, as the band veer from exultant episodes of storming violence to blaring fanfares of hellish glory, convulsions of shrieking guitar insanity, and murky sinkholes of hopelessness. To do this, they shift tempos and rhythmic patterns frequently and they bring together a great multitude of guitar and keyboard tones, some of which sound like horns or calliope’s and others like gnawing beasts or whipping power lines severed from their tethers and frantically sparking. The vocals, though not ever-present, are always malignantly maniacal.
I should add that the songs continue betraying traces of classical influence, manifesting a kind of multi-faceted orchestral power and grandeur, and sometimes sounding like a “Big Band” from the inter-war “swing era” – though I hasten to add that, with the exception of another beautiful acoustic guitar overture in “Aberrations” and the spooky and kind of psychedelic opening of “Revelation” (albeit accented with attention-grabbing drumwork), Gravetaker deploy their elaborate ingredients in ways that earn the album’s title. And it’s not just “sheer lunacy”, it’s unearthly lunacy that the band have given us.
In short, this is another timely reminder that even in the last week of a year great discoveries can be made. Here, I’ve unexpectedly found one of my favorites albums of 2025.
https://shop.ironbonehead.de
https://urealis.bandcamp.com/album/gravetaker-sheer-lunacy
https://www.facebook.com/ironboneheadproductions