(written by Islander)
After today there will be 10 days left to complete this series before I stop at the end of January (unless I panic and post a segment on a weekend). I’m guessing some of you are wondering when I’m going to include more of the 2025 songs you played most often, because I’m confident there’s no way we’ve hit everyone’s favorites so far — there’s just way too many good candidates out there. But I also suspect that this list is already serving as a reminder of that very fact.
My own mind has reached the boggled stage where I know I’m going to have to leave off a great many songs that really got their hooks in me (and you) last year. I also know I’m incapable of ranking the remaining candidates in any way that will make the decisions easier, even with 10 more installments to come after this one.
Well, I’ll leave those agonies for another day and focus instead on today’s trio of addictives tracks.
RIVERS OF NIHIL
Rivers of Nihil’s latest album was self-titled, usually a sign of a band either re-inventing themselves or “returning to basics” when the album arrives this long into their career. Based on comments from the band, it seems they intended to accomplish both things. Founding guitarist Brody Uttley has said, “I feel like these songs are the perfect blend of all our albums, with all the fat cut away.”
Andy Synn considered how the new album compared to its predecessors in his review, and while he offered some constructive criticism he also concluded that the album is “fantastic” and “nothing less than the beginning of a whole new era for the band” (he included it in his 2025 “Critical Top 10” list too).
My own small accolade for the album now comes in selecting “House of Light” for this infectious song list (and please hold your fire, ’cause I know other folks will have different choices from the record). As I’ve written before about this tracK:
True to its name, there is an immediate and mesmerizing splendor to this song, with extravagant voices raised high and the sax seductively wailing away. But the music is ever-changing. The band also unchain their ferocity, with obliterating drums, cutting riffage, and barbaric growls, and they make the music dreamy, dauntingly dramatic, and instrumentally head-spinning too.
So many voices! So many changing facets and moods! Really quite breathtaking. And the video is beautifully made and gripping to watch.
https://riversofnihil.bandcamp.com/album/rivers-of-nihil
https://www.facebook.com/riversofnihil
FIMBUL WINTER
The turn from the song above to this next one is pretty radical, possibly the kind that leads to listener whiplash — and to sore-neck syndrome for other reasons as well.
DGR wrote up Fimbul Winter’s debut EP What Once Was here in a December series of reviews in which he attempted to catch up with writing about favored albums from last year. Like me, he was drawn into the album by the previous resumes of its current members, which included shared time spent in bands like Just Before Dawn, Netherbird, and (for three of the four of them) Amon Amarth. His detailed comments are worth reading if you want a good explanation of why the album made such a positive impact on him, and me, and many others.
Once again, we have here a record whose every song could be seriously considered for this list. I picked the leadoff single “Mounds of Stones“. Once again, I’ll just crib from what I wrote about it soon after it debuted:
It opens with a slow and doleful guitar harmony but quickly picks up steam, fueled by roiling tremolo’d riffing that gives that dismal melody a more distressing cast. Then it picks up more steam, savagely jolting and brazenly blaring, augmented by scalding vocals.The riffing whirls and convulses, in contrast to the steadiness of the beats, and when it comes in bursts, the drums spur into bracing gallops.
The overarching mood of the song is despondent and even desperate. Even when the song generates a throbbing pulse and expands to panoramic and near-symphonic breadth, the ensuing guitar solo sounds forlorn — though it also screams.
The song is paired with a disturbing but fascinating video. As the band explained: “‘Mounds of Stones‘ tells the story of a figure shaped by suffering, who turns his pain into vengeance. He isn’t remembered by name, only by the blood and bones left behind.”
https://share.amuse.io/track/fimbul-winter-mounds-of-stones
https://www.facebook.com/fimbulwinterswe
https://www.instagram.com/fimbulwinterswe/
GRAVETAKER
Maybe this next song is front-of-mind for me because I listened to this Finnish band’s debut demo that includes it (Sheer Lunacy) during the last week of 2025, although that album was first released last April. But man, not just this next song but the whole album really got its big claws in me, and I think I would have still been thinking about it these days even if I’d pounced on it last spring.
I reviewed it here in last year’s waning days, lured into it by a song (“Black Sepulchres”) that I thought was one of the most attention-grabbing album openers I could remember from 2025. I found that the following songs were also elaborate and hair-raising, as the band veered from exultant episodes of storming violence to blaring fanfares of hellish glory, convulsions of shrieking guitar insanity, and murky sinkholes of hopelessness.
I also ventured the opinion (which the band might have thought strange) that the songs also betrayed traces of classical influence, manifesting a kind of multi-faceted orchestral power and grandeur, and also sometimes sounded like a “Big Band” from the inter-war “swing era”. Well, that’s how I heard it, especially in the song I’m now adding to this list — “Threshold“.
The tone of the riffing is gripping, layered in a way that makes it sound both ruinously abrasive and piercing, a dense hornet swarm of sound that also seems to scream. Moreover, the riffs move around, manifesting as delirious madness above a steadily thrumming bass and hammering or clattering drums but also gloriously blaring like horns, even when the music staggers.
To be sure, the song’s pace does significantly slow, and the music then becomes considerably more monstrously grim and oppressive before it begins to howl, convulsively shriek, and blare again — accented this time with a weirdly warping guitar melody.
It’s such a mad spectacle (like every other song on the album), and the fanatically unhinged vocals make it sound even more spectacularly mad. Indeed, I have a hard time thinking of any vocals last year that were more wildly deranged than those of Gravetaker.
https://urealis.bandcamp.com/album/gravetaker-sheer-lunacy
https://shop.ironbonehead.de