(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’. Continue reading »

(We have now arrived at the third installment of DGR’s 2025 year-end list, counting down from No. 30 to No. 21, with the next two segments coming in the next two days ahead. That’s right, we’ve found no reason to spare Christmas Eve or Christmas Day from the continuing conflagration.)

Watching this list shrink down is invigorating at times. It is overwhelming at first and it has been that way every time, but much like things are with actual procrastination, actually knuckling down and pushing the car forward can do a lot for morale. The finish line slowly crawls its way into sight and to such a point that it no longer seems like a hallucination but an actual tangible thing.

Of course I say this as if I don’t enjoy this exercise every year as well, rolling backwards through the year and with the rose-tinted glasses on and blinders big enough to block an IMAX screen so that I can focus only on the music and not other bullshit. Then, as is always the case when you write these things, you’ll come across an album and be kicking yourself thinking you should’ve positioned it higher, things should be re-ordered, you reassure yourself again that the rankings really don’t matter and that a game of Whose Line Is It Anyway has more actual structure.

Yet here you are, trying to once again re-stack and rewrite things, like trying to have a bareknuckle boxing match in a train that has derailed and is sailing over a cliff. You have bigger problems at stake vis-a-vis said train now plummetting Earthward, but still, the fight is important as well. My high school English teacher would want to kill me for having never figured out how to prioritize this crap. Continue reading »

(We have reached the second installment of DGR’s 2025 year-end list, counting down from No. 40 to No. 31, with the next three segments coming in the next three days ahead.)

Right as I finished typing the last sentence of the previous entry for this feature it occurred to me that I had not gone onto my usual musings for how this list functions and where the true rankings actually lie. I’ll do so here, otherwise I’ll feel guilty for people actually thinking that I somehow have a nuanced enough opinion that I can actually rank this many albums against one another.

Truthfully, I can at best do a top fifteen and maybe a top twenty. The rest of these inclusions are as fluid and fungible as can get. I’ve joked before and I’ll do so again and again as my memory gets worse due to age but you could almost view this as a top fifteen albums and then thirty-five other really, really, really good releases worth listening to.

If you want to feel better about yourself, you could almost look at this as a fifty-way tie for first place. It’ll help assuage some of those aforementioned guilty feelings on my end at least. This also serves as an explainer for how the opening salvos from this list every year manage to sound as eclectic and wide-reaching as they are. Not as eclectic as a lot of people around here, but if you’d gone from album to album on the last edition you’d have gotten hit with metal bouncing all over the place, from death, to grind, to black metal, to moody-as-can-get sad boy rock, to melodramatic doom, and further down the line. This chunk of the list won’t be too different in that regard. Continue reading »