LISTMANIA 2025: ROLLING STONE’S LIST OF “THE 15 BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 2025”

(written by Islander)

The first two parts of our year-end LISTMANIA festivities are nearing conclusion — our sharing of lists from sites and zines with much bigger audiences than our own (but often, audiences who aren’t as devoted to metal as ours) and lists compiled by our own writers and old friends. In this post we’re again including Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the year’s best metal albums because it has become a tradition, a largely comical tradition at this point which dates back to the halcyon days of 2013 when a commenter somehow just skipped past all our introductory text, looked at Rolling Stone‘s list, and chastised us for not naming Gorguts as AOTY instead of Deafheaven.

Of course, Rolling Stone hands-down qualifies as the kind of “big platform” site or zine that we pull from in this part of our LISTMANIA orgy, as a way of getting a glimpse into what the top-side world perceives as great metal.

This year, Rolling Stone compiled a Top 15 list (the number seems to vary from year to year). Ususally their list displays a lot of “scatter”, for want of a better term. Often, it includes albums you wouldn’t be surprised to see on one of the lists assembled by our own writers, and often it includes others that makes us cringe. By our lights, the rankings themselves are often eye-rolling.

Speaking only for myself, I found this year’s Rolling Stone list to be a pleasant surprise, in the sense that I think it includes a greater percentage than usual of albums that have appeared on the lists of our own writers and invited guests. On the other hand, Halestorm? Castle Rat? Among the 15 best metal albums of the year? On the third hand, it’s also hard to fathom (at least for me) their top 5 rankings.

This year, the albums on the list were presented by five writers — Hank Shteamer, Brenna Ehrlich, Kim Kelly, Joseph Hudak, and Kory Grow. Presumably, the albums each one wrote about were the ones they chose, but we have no insights into how the choices were integrated or ranked. In some sense, however, the list reflects some kind of decision-making process among a collective, and perhaps with some kind of editorial hand on the scales. The result is the kind of “spread” that we often see on very large platforms like this one whose audience tastes are much more diffuse than that of little rabbit holes like us.

Anyway, check out the Rolling Stone list below, and go here to see the writers’ explanations for the picks.

15. Coroner, ‘Dissonance Theory’

14. Deafheaven, ‘Lonely People With Power’

13. Runemagick, ‘Cycle of the Dying Sun (Dawn of Ashen Realms)’

12. Chepang, ‘Jhyappa’

11. Castle Rat, ‘The Bestiary’

10. Rwake, ‘The Return of Magick’

9. Whitechapel, ‘Hymns in Dissonance’

8. Deadguy, ‘Near-Death Travel Services’

7. Blut Aus Nord, ‘Ethereal Horizons’

6. Halestorm, ‘Everest’

5. Primitive Man, ‘Observance’

4. Dream Theater, ‘Parasomnia’

3. Ghost, ‘Skeletá’

2. Agriculture, ‘The Spiritual Sound’

1. Deftones, ‘Private Music’