2025 THROUGH DGR’S EYES: A YEAR END EXTRAVAGANCE WITH PLENTY OF EQUALS: 10-1

(We have arrived at the fifth and final installment of DGR’s year-end list, which completes the countdown from 10 to 1)

The final ten is always the segment I expect will draw the most opinions because it is something so highly personal. After a near-week of exploring the vast reaches of heavy metal we get down to the last ten albums, wherein there’s usually a surprise or two, with a few unexpected turns, and at least one twist of the knife for somebody out there who was waiting to see if their favorite release would make the cut. It probably did not, to tell you the truth.

The final ten here and whatever ramblings that leak out of my brain by the end of this is a snapshot of releases from multiple categories: the straightforward “ones I listened to the most”, the ones I feel are truly important, the ones that – yes, I am a fan of the band – I was overly stoked to hear because it felt good to hear quality from a long-running group, and those I will truly wave the flag for that I feel some of our more tasteful and critique-obsessed fandom are missing out on.

What is usually amusing is that I am in stark contrast to the bigger world of heavy metal writer-dom and I can also understand why. I’m still a mainstream baby at times and I do believe that just because a band is a big name does not disqualify them from putting out an awesome release, they just have to work harder to prove that the music is not just product to move shirts – though to be fair, in the age of professional clothing and accessories salesmen I can’t fault many bands for becoming that because, hey, it’s a livin’.

If you’ve been following whatever godawful thing I wind up naming my year-end lists each year, you’ll probably recognize more than a few of the names here. I’ll own up to being a creature of habit in that way, but my hope is that I do still land a few surprises here. I’ll try and muse more about how things shake out after we’ve barelled through the final ten since this may be the last thing I slap my name on this year.

 

10 – Lik – Necro

What a great time to be alive and to have Sweden’s Lik land one with me the way that Necro did. Long-time fans of this death-obssessed forever support squad of the Swedish metal scene already know that the band have a murderer’s row of records in ten years already, but I’ve been a believer that Lik are one of those bands that steadily improves on every disc. I can never quite pin down what they’re sharpening on their specific musical blade, but while I thought Mass Funeral Evocation was a strong album, I thought Carnage was even more enjoyable, yet when Misanthropic Breed hit in 2020 that one quickly usurped the throne as my new favorite from the team. And, in a shock of all shocks and five years later, Necro has now overtaken the lead when it comes to quality Lik albums in my mind.

It could be that it is a combination of my tastes changing and the band’s sound changing at about an equal rate, and we have steadily been steadily converging up to this point. The result is that while Necro could be described as the most approachable Lik album yet, it is the one that burns the hottest for me when it comes to flaming guitar riffs and whirlpool-spinning circle-pit segments. You can catch a lot of flack playing to the cheap-seats over the years but when you scorch all pretense away by the opening of your first song and then leap fully into it, you can’t help but embrace just how much fun an album is going to be.

Lik’s Necro plays it exceedingly stupid for its forty minutes. It is one of those most pretense-free albums that may have come out this year, pulling from enough stock staples so that, much like Blood Red Throne’s Nonagon, it could serve as a sort of codex death metal for a regional scene. Many a band have found success in both the old school death metal and Swede-death revivalism of the last decade and Lik have been one of the longest runners in that regard. Necro, like many of its other discs, is chainsaw riffs and morbid obsessions a-plenty.

A newer taste for punk-rock drumming and a little bit of thrash can have the guys stumbling into Martyrdöd territory in the same way one might stumble into their neighbor’s house after a nightlong bender, but when you’ve long since reached the saturation point of there being nothing new under the sun, sometimes it can be as good to see someone else execute well on a codified formula.

As mentioned earlier, Necro may simply be the convergence point for Lik and my tastes, which is why their fourth album has ranked so high up with me. Every one of their releases has been sharper and sharper, as Lik have metamorphosed into battle-cat formula. They’re sleek nowadays but could just as easily cut you to ribbons. My review of Necro found the album to be filled with infectious songs, and that is a statement I will still stand by now.

 

9 – Synaptic – Enter The Void

The start of every year in heavy metal is weird. We all like to think we’ve got some idea of what’s coming and how things will shape out but every year throws us a different curveball. I can’t even risk describing it as being a situation of “oh this year will be an early flood of releases”, “this wil be more standard…”, “oh, this will be a fits and starts sort of thing…” Every single time I think I have an idea of what’s coming so I can comfort myself before facing the uncertainty of another year, some different event happens, and thus, heavy metal’s start catches you slipping on ice every time.

The only reliable thing out of any of it is that January is a great month for discovery once you’ve shaken off the rust off of year-end festivities. Sometimes you’ll find bands that you’d never have thought to check out before, or something will catch your eye and have just the right amount of “this is made for me” in the description that you’re doomed for an almost year-long fling. Enter The Void by Germany’s Synaptic was one such discovery.

Even though I dragged my feet in reviewing it, I could tell based off of the early impressions of the band as a combination of tech-death, thrash, and melodeath that Synaptic were the sort of band made just for me, and thus Enter The Void was going to be one of those albums that fought a monster of an endurance match to stick with me through the whole year.

Much as I can love an album for world-wrecking grooves or insane histrionics or maudlin atmospherics, I also hold albums near and dear to my heart that are basically like standing under a waterfall of guitar riffs. Enter The Void is one of those albums, an awesomely indulgent thirty-four minutes that across eight songs somehow manages to contain three instrumentals. Of the five actual “full band” songs, music can range anywhere from two minutes to over nine and none of the longer tracks could be attributed to any sense of slowing down.

Synaptic found themselves filling a Bloodshot Dawn sized hole in my listening habits, and my reasons for loving Enter The Void could be entirely self-serving in that regard. Yet songs like “The Lost Continent”, the instrumental bookended – yes before and after – of “Architects Of The Night”, the two-part madness of “City Of Glass” and “Malfunctional Minds” are all good-times-shredfests wherein every instrument gets so much spotlight they likely have color damage on their finish from it.

The wildly varied, man-on-fire-running-down-the-streeth pacing keeps Enter The Void an interesting and dynamic listen throughout and was a pleasant early-year surprise. If you didn’t catch it the first time Synaptic graced our page, I am presenting you with a golden opportunity to check them out now.

 

8 – Whitechapel – Hymns In Dissonance

Remeber a few bands ago in this year-end featurette when I went on a long screed about how some of my listening habits were tailor-made for deathcore and I basically grew up in it? Yes, a little bit of that was to help buttress the experience of one band, Whitechapel, when they appeared in my year-end list. No reason to catch anyone by surprise now, especially when so many people have taken to acknowledging that Hymns In Dissonance could be one of the best releases in their catalog.

Whitechapel are a band I am both intentionally and accidentally familiar with, having borne witness to well over double-digits of live shows with them – basically since they starting hitting the road – as they would pop up at nearly every show I was attending at the time. I could honestly say that I’ve only gone to a show because Whitechapel were the main draw for me about half the time. The rest of the time they’ve just been there as part of the bill, as if an added bonus. They’ve just been ever-present in my life somehow, and so I, through a sort of cultural osmosis, have attained enjoyment of them.

I like nearly everything they’ve done, have featured them multiple times across my year-end song and dance, and have taken many a critical look at albums they’ve released. An album like Hymns In Dissonance is like returning home in that sense, because it is Whitechapel going back to doing what they do best after years of seeming to wander – to varying degrees of excellence, they’ve done well with their previous two – which is to punch holes in the sky through sheer force.

It is probably both a smart and somewhat cynical career turn for them, and they’ve watched bands who are generations removed from them do what they were known for doing and finding massive success. Whitechapel’s decades of work in the deathcore scene have sent shockwaves of inspiration across many bands, and no doubt to this day Phil Bozeman remains one of the best and mst dynamic vocalists in that style. His singing voice could have him stepping up to front many a more popular radio-worthy metal band, but his range from high-to-low could put the fear in anyone competing in the deathcore vocal olympics category.

Hymns In Dissonance feels like an album from a band declaring themselves to be king again, and to be honest, it feels good just having a brutally heavy Whitechapel again. Yes, it is dressed in a lot of black metal tropes and an entry-level understanding of Satan as evil, but in a genre known for being joyfully stupid I don’t think I would ever expect an entry-level doctorate’s thesis when it comes to tales of cults, demons, and murder. I want rock-punchingly dumb breakdowns, I want growls so low they could shake building foundations, and I want high-screams that cut through the air like a knife. Hymns In Dissonance has all that in spades and the songs are differentiated enough that it devolves into one big-ass, mosh-pit party.

I am bummed that their tour of this one, doing the album all the way through, just barely kisses California because I would love to see it, even after seeing them basically do half already in previous shows. Hymns In Dissonance was a goddamned joy to have, and thats why I’ve positioned it here.

Also, considering how many of my top ten albums Andy did the review for, I should’ve just asked him to write this grouping for me.

 

7 – Themata – Riven

Guitar big. Guitar very, very, very big. Bass guitar also big. Rhythm section as a whole is big. Frontman? Terrifying. Finnish group Themata sound fucking gigantic on their EP Riven and their machinistic sense of groove is undeniable.

Touched on the outskirts by sludge’s low and slow bluesy tunings and murderously heavy downbeaten riff-obsession and you have a recipe for something that sticks with you just based on how large it sounded. I love that. I love a metal band that sounds like a giant lumbering creature even if it’s just four dudes whose names could fucking ruin a game of Wheel Of Fortune if you didn’t know what you were doing.

The musicianship on Themata is clinical and stark, it’s a multi-session class on ass kicking, and as a listener the musical pummeling doesn’t come so much from an overwhelming or overbearing sense of musical pyrotechnics but rather the atmospherics in play and the constant and ever-mechanical plunge downwards. The feeling is nearly primal. You are compelled to nod your head along by forces otherworldly; you sense the main groove of each song as if it were an extension of yourself, and the next thing you know, here you are nodding along. Themata’s recipe is one of the brawniest out there, as if people have been lost in a desert searching for weightlifting music and found Riven as their oasis.

Themata graced our site as part of a short but sweet EP roundup in the middle of October and they have stuck with me since. Granted, I am a tremendous sucker for album art like what is present here, but the band’s apocalyptic sense of rhythm and thunderous stomp ensured they were likely to stick with me, even though my experience with them was so late in the year. Given how fickle these year-end events are, sometimes the late-in-the-year acknowledgements are admissions that we have been listening to a release a ton since we came across it. Riven is the sort of release that has been getting that treatment.

Themata and their five songs have been dominating a big block of my listening time, whether it be the tremendous footfalls of “Colossus”, the spine-contortions of “Loathe”, the overall moodiness that infects the whole EP, or that final field of cinders that is “Of Ire”. Five songs and twenty-one minutes and the band have somehow managed to punch a collection of incredibly good candidates for year-end status straight through a wall and into the next city over.

While we’re currently in a subsection of massive bruises on my year-end list, give Riven a spin and join me in the club of people hoping Themata keep this going. Who knows just how punishing a followup release could be now that the conceptual-statement of the band has been knocked out.

 

6 – Changeling – Changeling

Look, if somebody asks you to review Changeling’s self-titled debut album and you do not have a vocabulary fit to write up entries for a peer-reviewed science journal you should flee. You flee for fear of looking like a fool. You flee for fear of being unable to describe it in time to meet a deadline. You flee from the sheer weight of just how much music there is and how inventive Changeling is as a tech-death album, and you flee for hills you didn’t even know your state had. You flee and then pawn that review off on your editor.

Changeling – the band, the album, the shirt – is the brainchild of virtouso musician Tom “Fountainhead” Geldschläger and the group of cohorts he recruited to make the self-titled album happen — an all-star lineup of tech-death and other assorted crewmen. Not only that, but in a quest to be more than just a marquee series of names and a fantastic multi-genre style of album, Changeling has created an hour’s worth of music so incredibly dense, intricate, and varied that it goes beyond mere words being needed to describe what is happening and starts to look like attempts to mathematically solve fractal patterns.

Every listen to Changeling is like the start of a brand new adventure because this is an album that has been out since the end of April and I still find myself coming across new things to enjoy, new unexpected instruments, and new segments within songs that set my few working brain cells ablaze. Changeling at times feels like a gauntlet being thrown down. It is as if Tom looked at the current arms race of tech-death, decided he wasn’t going to beat Archspire on velocity but could utterly destroy everyone else in terms of grandiose aspiration and indulgence, and declared “now watch this, nerds”.

By vitrue of being a fan of Dark Fortress and Alkaloid – and by extension Noneuclid – I was thrilled to hear Morean take up the vocal slot on this one, and grabbing Mike Heller – for a second or third time on this year-end list! – was inspired. Bringing the insane talents of Aaron McSporran – who also popped up on a 2023 Cosmitorium I quite enjoy – in for bass guitar is much like using a sledgehammer to crack an egg, but hey, if the goal is the joy of pure excess why not hit a home run so hard it breaks a window three cities over? That’s not accounting for the recruitment of a choir, guest vocal singers for operatic stretches, and the many guest soloists and strange instruments.

Remember when I said Changeling was a packed album? That wasn’t a joke. You wind up discovering things over and over again as if you’ve suffered from short-term memory loss, yet it’s always just some element among incredibly intricate songwriting and extensive song length. Our editor does not often write reviews of this style of music but I would refer people to the writeup that was done for this one that I linked to earlier, because it provides an insanely-molecular view of everything featured within Changeling.

In the meantime, I find my brain reduced to overly-excited goo when I declare just how much I’ve been enjoying this disc. I am like a toddler trying to tell their parent about their biggest fascination of the last four minutes and all of its deep lore before my brain gets distracted by something else. I think Changeling is a great album and I am very excited for the havoc this project could wreak on the genre in the future.

 

5 – Distaste – Agoniepositur

Disaste wormed their way into my heart ages ago and sealed their position as one of my favorite grind bands with 2019’s Deibel – which you can find here. I’ve anxiously looked forward to each of their releases since then and have yet to be disappointed. Distaste have discovered a way to blend grind, death metal, a bit of blackened influence, a love of portmanteu, and a shitload of attitude, into a meal that goes over exceedingly well at my table.

I’ve been the one banging the drum for them the loudest at this site and that’s not about to change with their 2025 release Agoniepositur. I reviewed their newest album in November and was very excited not only by the quick turnaround time but also the band’s continued bent toward writing music that sounds as if the band themselves have been lit on fire. Distaste are blisteringly fast and angry enough sounding – credit to vocalist/guitarist Armin Schweiger, who could probably yell North Atlantic shipping schedules at me and sound as if it was an affront to humankind – that the first listen of any release is likely to blow your hair back.

Agoniepositur arrived fairly soon – for Distaste standards – after their album Der Etraeger Und Das Fleisch and hit the ground running from where that release ended. The lead riffs that sound like guitar strings being peeled upwards and out of the guitar are still in place, poor Yannick has to blastbeat for minutes at a time with zero stop, bassist Murz gets the joy of hanging on to whatever Lukas is rumbling through, and the whole affair is tightly-wound grindcore chaos.

Since its October release Agoniepositur has been a mainstay of constant repeats in this household. I wouldn’t dare to shoot down just how strong the opening run of “Furunkelmann”, “Apex Oppressor”, “Last”, “Rosstaeuscherei”, and ” Kaligula 2.0″ is, and considering that we’re dealing in a grindcore record, that’s just the first seven and a half minutes. You still have “Der Thronraeuber” later on to remind you that things will never be calm; “Wind von Asphalt” has fifty-six seconds of madness for you; and the titular “Agoniepositur” is a great closer to the whole affair.

At times it just sounds like Distaste have grabbed the listeners by their shoulders and are using them as a human shield as they go sprinting through a battlefield. The multi-pronged vocal attack and near-unending assault on the instrumental front is meant to be overwhelming and uncompromising. It’s an explosion of absolute energy as Distaste are tearing through song after song here. While they’re a little more of a known factor than before, given just how much this one sounds like the darker and moodier twin of an already bleak take on the world in their previous album, that still doesn’t mean Agoniepositur isn’t murderous in its intent.

I will re-iterate and repeat myself ’til I’m blue in my extremities but you owe it to yourself to give this one a listen.

 

4 – Symbiotic Growth – Beyond The Sleepless Aether

You may notice rather quickly some similarities between Canada’s Symbiotic Growth and their new album Beyond The Sleepless Aether and another artist included on this list. I won’t spoil it but if you’ve got keen ears and longer memory than I do, this opening sentence will come back to you, and you too can be the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV screen meme.

That aside, Symbiotic Growth proved to be a revelation for me early on in the year anyway. I can’t act as if I was one to immediately discover the album, but I did stumble upon it during one of my many rabbit hole tumbles early on in the year and boy was I overjoyed as soon as the song “Of Painted Skies And Dancing Lights” started to kick in to high gear. Beyond The Sleepless Aether is a concept album following a man journeying through all of his alternate realities and, well, their bandcamp page goes much deeper into the overall subject – as does my completely on time review, which did not run while I was on the other side of the country away from my computer at all – and you can find full description of the Symbiotic Growth team’s ambitions and inspirations there.

For me however, Beyond The Sleepless Aether proved itself to be a special album and one that I just knew I was going to place pretty high on my year-end list. Partially because I want to spread the word about this thing to as many people as possible because it is one of those albums that makes you want to evangelize for it, and the other part is to show that like many releases on here, it has conquered my listening habits with ruthless efficiency.

In my review I dove deeper into how Symbiotic Growth operate on their new album. Beyond The Sleepeless Aether’s aforementioned concept loans itself well to seven intricate and tightly-written songs, offering up:

This affords Symbiotic Growth quite a bit of artistic room to move around in and the three-piece take advantage of it, crafting seven tales that weave in and out of each other with both soaring and crashing dramaticism well in play. Symbiotic Growth use the lengthy run times of their compositions to reach far and wide musically, resulting in an ambitious album that has honestly been very hard to remove from the space it took over in the brain after the first few listens. When an album like this more often than not leaves you entranced enough that you don’t notice the passage of time until a movie sample opens up the next song, then you know you’ve come across something great.

Does that mean you can’t break it down into a handful of songs? I’d sincerely recommend not doing so, but if you want a good preview of what Symbiotic Growth are doing on Beyond The Sleepless Aether I would check out “Arid Trials And Barren Sands” for some of the album’s more heavy moments and “Lost In Fractured Reveries” for some of its more progressive reaches. That’s not discounting the aforementioned opener “Of Painted Skies And Dancing Lights” either, which is is as strong a thesis statement as any album could ask for.

When you have a release like Beyond The Sleepless Aether, whose genre tags alone could be longer than this blurb on the year-end finalities yet somehow manages to hold a listener in rapt attention the whole time, then you have a great album. Beyond The Sleepless Aether is a stunner of a 2025 release and it is one you need in your life.

 

3 – Dormant Ordeal – Tooth And Nail

Dormant Ordeal absolutely wrecked my listening habits for 2022 when they dropped their album The Grand Scheme Of Things at the tail end of 2021. The Grand Scheme Of Things was an album that absolutely consumed me and my listening time, so much so that it rocketed to my #1 of 2021 and completely ruined my ability to listen to anything in the beginning of the following year for a while, because I could always go back and listen to The Grand Scheme Of Things again – and hey, you can do that too!

By the grace of the moon then, at least Dormant Ordeal were nice enough to release their new album Tooth And Nail in April this time so it could annihilate my listening habits in the proper year this time. Tooth And Nail arrives with a newly slimmed-down Dormant Ordeal – currently a two piece consisting of two gentlemen by the name of Maciej with differing last names so I can only assume one has a moustache to be the evil alternate universe version of the other one – and four years after their previous album. Tooth And Nail comprises nine songs for forty-seven minutes of complete destruction and fury incarnate, and holy shit, did Dormant Ordeal get close to completely devastating my listening time once again with this album – if for nothing else than the fact that they recruited drummer Chaison Westmoreland to give the drum performance of a lifetime during the course of this disc.

I love Dormant Ordeal when they’re at their most ferocious and it seems that on Tooth And Nail, save for one song – the explorative and explosive “Solvent” – that is the mode that Dormant Ordeal exist in. “Orphans”, “Horse Eater”, and “Dust Crown” are one giant oxygen-fueled firebomb after another. The music just does not stop as some of the meanest guitar tone out there rips and tears its way across the album while vocalist Maciej punctuates each movement with a sharp yell. “Against The Dying Of The Light” and “Everything That Isn’t Silence Is Trivial” run a little longer than you might expect of a Dormant Ordeal song, but they don’t coast during either of those,

Dormant Ordeal manage to throw more stuff than just the kitchen sink at you within those songs as well. The whole album is people piling up on an exit door trying to escape and we’ve reached well past stampede point and now we’re just stacking bodies on top of bodies. Dormant Ordeal are blowing over houses with Tooth And Nail; they descend upon the listener with manic intent and use forty-seven minutes to burn the ground so hot that its chemical propeties change to nice and shiny glass form. Tooth And Nail is an absolute crusher of an album and one of my favorites of the year. I cannot re-iterate enough just how much this one does not let up. You need to hear it.

Hell yeah I wrote at length about this bad boy, you can read that thing here since I’m too busy gushing about it to figure out how to work this properly into the main album writeup on this list.

 

2 – An Abstract Illusion – The Sleeping City

Sweden’s An Abstract Illusion must have been incredibly pent-up after the release of 2022’s Woe because three years to their new album The Sleeping City is a pretty quick turnaround time in comparison to the six that lay in between the former album and the disc that preceeded it. Woe was a special album for a multitude of reasons, arriving as a sophomore followup to an incredible debut and as one incredibly intricate and woven together suite of music.

Woe is an incredible listen, and yes, there was a feeling to it that given precedent beforehand it was likely going to be some serious time before we heard from An Abstract Illusion again in some fashion, and thus we were to enjoy the multitude-genre combination that was the band in the same way a person appreciates shelter after getting lost in a blizzard. Hence, why The Sleeping City is such a pleasant surprise, because by Abstract Illusion turnaround standards we’ve barely blinked and they’re here with a new album.

It takes a focused and smart band to write music the way An Abstract Illusion do, and thankfully An Abstract Illusion are a focused and smart band and the most focused and smart thing they do here is they don’t try to replicate Woe. An Abstract Illusion have a wonderful sound that is a combination of many extreme metal genres and a lot of progressive metal influence as well and that is what remains, but The Sleeping City is very much its own thing: Seven songs that are all adventures on their own for an hour’s worth of music, and what a journey The Sleeping City is.

The Sleeping City seems to float on ethereal atmospherics this time around; the synth and keyboard lines are very prominent but An Abstract Illusion are skilled at blending them into their song form. Andy noticed this too while coursing his way through the album. Whether you’re drifting through the clouds during the opening of “Blackmurmur” or enjoying the sprawling intensity of “Emmet”, An Abstract Illusion are still traversing an incredible amount of musical ground. The Sleeping City is a joy to listen to in that sense, because your listening journey often wanders as much as the band’s musical one. With each song neatly tying itself off at times, you get a chance to reset before An Abstract Illusion set out on their next tale to be told.

There aren’t many bands that can sound like this, and for the moment An Abstract Illusion seem to be the ones that really have this style locked down. The Sleeping City was borne unto the world in mid-October but is an album of such quality that I couldn’t help but place it so high on my list. There was severe risk of it seriously taking the top spot again because even though it is a distinct creature from its two older siblings, I still found myself enjoying it just as much. The degree of difficulty to not be drawn into how magnetic and majestic some of these songs are is so high that I immediately gave up.

I’ve enjoyed every opportunity to let The Sleeping City absorb and wash over me. If somehow you missed An Abstract Illusion’s third absolutely massive work, I highly recommend listening to it. It’s easily one of my favorites of the year.

 

1 – In Mourning – The Immortal

I am a huge In Mourning fan. I have been listening to In Mourning for a long time now and have enjoyed just about everything they have on offer. That includes the early demos, their first full-length, and everything since. I think In Mourning are one of the more severely underrated metal bands out there and one of the few groups that seem to have a stranglehold grip, on the concept of melancholy and melodeath in musical form. They’ve created a fantastic collective of music playing with a multipronged vocal attack and a ton of post-metal and doom influence as well and I was incredibly excited to see that they would be releasing a new album entitled The Immortal this year.

I expected to be won over by The Immortal, I was assured of myself that it would claim a spot on my year-end list, but I did not expect that they would once again stun me much in the same way they did with The Weight Of Oceans so many years ago or The Bleeding Veil more recently. Yet they’ve managed to do so, as my review of the album can show you. The Immortal is a release that quickly rocketed its way to the top and has become my all-encompassing listen more often than not. Few albums this year have gotten the “left on at work on repeat” treatment quite like The Immortal did. Many conquered, dominated, smashed, heard the lamentations of my women when it came to listening time, but The Immortal has been a true standout for me since its release at the end of August. (the end of…)

I was so excited to hear In Mourning have some get-up-and-go again on The Immortal. In Mourning were already leaning toward the quicker tempos again with some of the epic blastbeat-to-high-heaven moments of The Bleeding Veil but the proper gallop and guitar chug was something that In Mourning haven’t broken out in such concentration since the days of 2010’s Monolith. Now, I don’t know if it was the addition of “known for their incredible speed” Ahab drummer Cornelius Althammer to the In Mourning lineup, but the guys sound alive and confident on The Immortal, combining their historical musical epochs into one grand work that is nine songs and forty-seven minutes long.

There’s an absolutely gorgeous quiet and pensive ballad in “Moonless Sky”, but elsewhere you have humongously heavy moments like “Staghorn” or “North Star” and its city-sized groove. “Song Of The Cranes” has a prog-rock spirit that has been summoned into existence, whereas “The Sojourner” and its whole opening segment turned me into a young twenty-something again coming across Monolith for the first time. The post-rock influence that has long been folded into In Mourning’s sound is still all over The Immortal as well, so as much as the album is a tour through their wider career expertly combined into one release, it still sounds like the band is current-day and not just doing a throwback release.

The Immortal has been a source of way more neck-aches in the back-half of my year than I should be willing to admit. With In Mourning operating on a level like this you can’t help but want to proselytize for them and that is what I’m doing here. The Immortal is one of my favorite albums of the year and I am more than happy to give it the top spot. The whole top twenty or so of this year’s list has shown 2025 to be a musical juggernaut, but the multi-faceted, multi-vocal attack, and multi-genre combination of In Mourning is so hard for me to deny. Listen to The Immortal.

 

But wait! whats all this then?

You may have noticed in my opening entry to the year end whatever-I-wind-up-calling-this that I linked to a few albums unprompted as a sort of apology and make-good for having them rest on the bubble for so long. I had more after that and I thought that making a small section for them would be a nice bookend to this overall event, so here’s some more albums – unordered – that I would recommend if you haven’t gotten the chance.

Heaven Shall Burn – Heimat – I am a big Heaven Shall Burn fan though I have long come to terms with the idea that I won’t get a shot at seeing them live due to them never really touring the states. Thus, I must subsist on their albums and I had a lot of fun with Heimat. Wasn’t mindblowing for them – and really do you fault them? Heaven Shall Burn have carved a path for so many as a metalcore vanguard – but it still demonstrated that Heaven Shall Burn can kick somebody’s teeth in from clear across the room.

Omnium Gatherum – May The Bridges We Burn Light The Way – Finland’s Omnium Gatherum are a keyboard-happy melodeath band that had very much settled into a groove by the time of their newest album. It’s still a hell of a lot of fun as the band continue charting their path of ’80s action heroes by way of melodeath. There are songs here that are absolute gems even if they’re not really breaking new ground. Omnium Gatherum still have a tremendous amount of charm to them and I was stoked to have a release from them this year.

Newbreed – Outlaw – Prog-rock from Poland for a bit of a breather, heavily inspired by a surprising amount of the ’90s grunge scene and stacked with groove hefty enough to move mountains and a little death metal flavoring. Hard to pin down, fascinating the whole way.

Deadguy – Near-Death Travel Services – Everybody and their mother will likely be yelling at you about Deadguy and their return, and rightfully so. Both on a cultural and quality front was I happy to see these dudes back after so long away. You can still hear how foundational and vital Deadguy are on this release.

The Haunted – Songs Of Last Resort – I adore The Haunted when they’re scrappy and have something to prove. Less so when they’re mid-tempo and just rumbling along. I want Marco Aro to yell at me more. Let’s keep The Haunted scrappy.

Terror Corpse – Systems Of Apocalypse and Ash Eclipses Flesh – This is a wild one to me because this is basically two different bands with two different styles of releases. One is a sloppy and gnarly deathgrind record and the other is a gross and virulently evil death metal record. Apparently the grind half of this band is splitting off to be its own project? Hell if I know. I enjoyed both. You should too.

Fin’

With that, we draw my year-end festivities to a close. What may be coming in the future, I don’t have the slightest clue. I still somehow have three albums from this year I want to write about so I can keep the machine rolling as opposed to doing the usual “try to kick the rust off in January” routine. But who knows? Maybe I can will an Anaal Nathrakh album into existence now that they’re playing live again. I know it’s Mick’s songwriting baby but when you have a live lineup that includes Antichrist Imperium and Voices guys you do have quite the creative base to draw from. Plus, electronica fans can be so fickle, and while it amuses me greatly the success found in performing as Kordhell, I do miss having Dave Hunt yell at me about the ills of the world over a song whose dynamics look like a cliff wall. There were few bands quite tailor-made for DGR than Anaal Nathrakh.

Perhaps we’ll see something from SepticFlesh again. It has been a bit, and it’s an every-other album for them so maybe this one will have a lot of bite to it. The Amphibians EP had some promise.

I am weirdly curious to see what the next Gojira has on offer given the many statements from the Duplantier crew. When your drummer is saying it is going to be “more metal” and your lead vocalist is hedging more on the “we’re experimenting and working slowly” – who could think of what may actually happen? I know I got my many albums of enjoyment out of them already and I still had a great time seeing them live at Aftershock this year. They had so much fucking pyro, it was incredible. I was eight rows back and I’m sure my eyebrows got singed.

And for a second, let’s be real. I’ve been looking at everyone else’s list while working on mine and it is shocking just how many of us have opened with some permutation of how this year (the non-musical parts) has been fucking garbage. I thought it was just me being a pessimistic internet jackass.

People are important, pets are important. Many of us have found families because our real ones aren’t worth the time of day. Whomever you have, keep them close as we head into this new year. I know many struggle during the time and the loneliness can be difficult. I hope you’re finding some solace here – doesn’t have to be this article, but we’re more than happy to provide people with a quiet corner of the internet to get away from it all.

I hope you are all enjoying your holiday and/or year end events. I’m pretty sure half of my neighbors Christmas decorations now belong to me because they were blown into my yard thanks to the wind storm happening outside. Possession is nine-tenths of the law or something, but only Possessed has Seven Churches.

I’ll see you all in a week or two when my mind clears up after all of this. Enjoy list season.