Islander

LISTMANIA 2025: AN INVITATION FOR READERS’ LISTS OF THE YEAR’S BEST METAL

 LISTMANIA 2025  47 Responses »
Dec 012025
 

(written by Islander)

As of today we are entering the final month of 2025, and that begins the final countdown to the end of the year. In the world of metal, this month we’ll also start seeing more and more lists of the year’s best releases.

Back in 2009, when this site was just a few days old, I wrote a post about year-end lists and why people bother with them. The best reason still seems to be this: Reading someone else’s list of the albums they thought were best is a good way to discover music you missed and might like.

We don’t do an “official” NCS year-end list of best albums. However, we publish the picks of each of our regular staff writers as well as a group of invited guests, in addition to lists that we re-post from a few print zines and “big platform” online sites.

Every year we also invite our readers to share their lists and we’re doing that again right here, right now.

If you’ve been pondering what you’ve heard this year and have made your own list of the albums, EPs, or splits released in 2025 that you think are the best of what you’ve heard, we invite you to share it with everyone in the Comments section to this post. And if you haven’t made a list yet but want to, there’s still plenty of time (read below). Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2025: POPMATTERS’ LIST OF “THE 20 BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 2025”

 LISTMANIA 2025  3 Responses »
Dec 012025
 

(written by Islander)

We’ve all now breached the wall into December and the year-end lists will start rolling like an avalanche. For example, later today we’ll post our annual invitation to readers to share their YE lists with all of us. But for now we’ve got another installment in a different segment of the NCS YE extravaganza.

As part of our annual LISTMANIA orgy we re-publish lists of the year’s best metal that appear on web sites which appeal to vastly larger numbers of readers than we do — not because we believe those readers or the writers have better taste in metal than our community does, but more from a morbid curiosity about what the great unpoisoned masses are being told is best for them. It’s like opening a window that affords an insight into the way the rest of the world outside our own disease-ridden nooks and crannies perceives the music that is our daily sustenance.

One of those sites is PopMatters. It has been in existence since 1999. In its own words, the site “is an international magazine of cultural criticism and analysis” with a scope that includes “most cultural products and expressions in areas such as music, television, films, books, video games, sports, theatre, the visual arts, travel, and the Internet”. PopMatters, which has been independently owned and operated since its inception, claims that it is “the largest site that bridges academic and popular writing in the world”. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: UMBRÍO, MOON WISDOM, ULTIMA NECAT

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Nov 302025
 


Valerius de Saedeleer (Belgian, 1867–1941) – “A Winter Landscape”, 1931

(written by Islander)

That painting up there popped into one of my news feeds today. I saw it on my phone this morning as I was sitting outside having a cup of joe and a few smokes before daybreak, with the outside temperature at 37°F. With about 17 hours to go at this point before December begins, that all seemed like fitting synchronicity.

Where I live in the Pacific Northwest we’re well into what everyone here calls The Big Dark. No snow (that rarely happens), but the days are short and usually beset by wet gloom even when the sun is (allegedly) above the horizon. Perfect days for chilly and gloomy music, but also good days for music that lights fires. What I’ve picked for this column today manifests in both those ways.

Of course, December brings more than The Big Dark in the earth’s northern latitudes. It will also bring a rising tide of year-end lists. Tomorrow we’ll be re-posting one from another site much larger than ours, and also asking our visitors to share their own. And then one week from tomorrow we’ll begin rolling out the lists of our own writers, beginning with Andy Synn’s usual weeklong takeover. (Actually, it will probably begin this coming Friday, if Andy does what he usually does and shares his list of the year’s best EPs in advance of his main list week.) Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: PONTE DEL DIAVOLO, NEL BUIO, BIND TORTURE KILL, NÍLIM, EQUILIBRIUM, MARISSA NADLER

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Nov 292025
 

(written by Islander)

As on most Saturdays, today I’ll be looking back at the recent past, recommending some selections of underground metal that caught my ears and eyes during the last week or two, but first I want to look ahead — specifically, to something I’ll be asking you to do on Monday.

On Monday I’ll post the annual NCS appeal to our visitors to share their lists of the year’s best metal. Every year this post proves to be a highlight because so many people fill up the Comments with their favorite releases, which makes those Comments a great gathering place for things other people might have otherwise missed. We keep that post linked in the upper right corner of every page on our site for the 12 months that follow (just look there now to see the 2024 lists).

Bear in mind that you don’t have to have your lists completed and ready to go on Monday. Hell, you could add a 2024 list even today. But it’s time to at least begin thinking about it. And now, on to this week’s roundup of new songs and videos…. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VIN DE MIA TRIX — “EXIT GLACIER”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Nov 282025
 

(written by Islander)

We last considered the music of the Ukrainian progressive doom band Vin de Mia Trix in 2017, the occasion being the release that year of their second album Palimpsests. They now have a third one on the way, eight years and a Russian invasion after the last one.

The title of the new album, This Landscape Is Alive, reflects its themes, described as “a poetic and philosophical exploration of the troubled coexistence of the human and the landscape.” What we have for you today is the premiere of the new record’s opening song, “Exit Glacier“. Continue reading »

DISTASTE: “AGONIEPOSITUR”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Nov 282025
 

(We present DGR’s review of Agoniepositur, the latest album by the Austrian deathgrind band Distaste, released on October 24 by F.D.A. Records.)

It comes as a surprise to see something from Austrian grind band Distaste so soon after the release of their 2023 album Der Ertraeger Und Das Fleisch, but it seems to be the band’s modus operandi to quickly burst into and out of existence like someone lobbing flash grenades from the window of a passing race car.

Sliding in just under the wire for 2025 is an impressive act too, given that the crew comprising Distaste do keep busy with a small handful of other projects, but perhaps the summoning call to the blastbeat has proven too strong, bringing them home from the wilds to once again unleash a sub-thirty-minute hammering of music that exists entirely in the redline and rarely moves from it. Dynamics, to put it politely, can get fucked. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MIND PRISONER — “LESS FAITH”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Nov 272025
 

(written by Islander)

Mind Prisoner came together in Portland, Oregon, but their members are now continentally separated between Oregon and South Carolina. Following a handful of demos and an EP, the band released their debut album The Color of Ruin almost exactly one year ago. Our Andy Synn wrote here that it “made one hell of an impression” on him after finally hearing it, using “an array of Black Metal, Post-Black Metal, and Blackened Doom influences” to create experiences that were “dark and desolate,” “bleak yet beautiful,” “bitter” and “biting,” “terrifying” and “tormented.” He closed by suggesting “that Mind Prisoner haven’t even reached the peak of their powers yet, and we should all make sure to watch them very closely in the future!”

We’ve followed that advice, and what the future has now brought us is a new Mind Prisoner album named Less Faith that’s due for release tomorrow — November 28th. It displays a stylistic shift from their first full-length, accurately summarized by their label as “post-black metal with elements of doom, post-punk, and gothic rock,” but as you’ll discover for yourselves through our full streaming premiere of the new record, many of the adjectives that Andy used in describing the first album still apply. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: DEAD AND DRIPPING

 Interviews  No Responses »
Nov 272025
 

(New Jersey-based Dead and Dripping has created macabre musical intersections of sounds that are ghastly, putrid, bludgeoning, and malicious, but also machine-precise, head-spinning, and dazzling – in a very demented way. Their new album will be released tomorrow by Transcending Obscurity Records, and that provided the impetus for Zoltar to reach out for the following interview with D&D’s mainman Evan Daniele.)

There are fucked up death metal bands. And there are REALLY fucked up death metal bands. Dead And Dripping defo deserves to be on the latter top list. Initially ‘just’ a solo project by Sentient Horror’s Evan Daniele who’s never hidden his love of death metal the brutal way, one could have easily expected the result to be on the same basic-and-brOOtal wave-length as, say, Putrid Pile or Insidious Decrepancy, just to cite two early 00s prime examples of one-man-brutality.

But as soon as his debut – first digitally, then on CD format through France’s Percussive Spectre – Profane Verses Of Murderous Rhetoric dropped, we realized that as in Matrix, instead of choosing between the blue or the red pill, Daniele went for both and thus, opened a doorway to some psychedelic, twisted, and, well, truly fucked up parallel universe. And if you thought his first three albums sounded like Demilich or Timeghoul heavily tripping on acid through a brutal death metal vortex, wait until you hear the new one, Nefarious Scintillations.

Turn on, tune in, drop out, and get blasted. Continue reading »

ROTTEN SOUND: “MASS EXTINCTION”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Nov 272025
 

(Rotten Sound’s new EP Mass Extinction comes out December 12th on Season of Mist, and in a rare attempt to get ahead of the game, DGR sent in the following review.)

Rotten Sound’s cycle of album and then EP continues unabated for the third time running with the upcoming release of their eight-song auditory assault known as Mass Extinction.

In classic Rotten Sound fashion, they waste absolutely no time in getting going and also have little care for making a song that even bothers clearing the two-minute mark. Sub-ten minutes of fiery grind are on offer here, split off from the grander chaos of the group’s 2023 Apocalypse sessions and made whole as part of a package that songwriting-wise is a little more scattershot, but manages to hit just as hard as the album that preceded it.

It goes without saying that Rotten Sound have continued to be one of the more straight-shooting pillars of the grind scene over the years and any excuse to sit down with one of their bona-fide blastbeat batterings is a good one. Apocalypse stuck pretty close to the tried-and-true for the Rotten Sound crew and it will come as no surprise, then, that Mass Extinction continues that march into oblivion, just with a slight bit more taste for the two-step now that it is a little more free to stretch its wings than Apocalypse’s unrelenting assault would’ve allowed. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): OMEGAVORTEX — “DIABOLIC MESSIAH OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Nov 262025
 

(written by Islander)

We might think of the varying genres of extreme metal as a branching warren of subterranean caverns, all of them connected but some very far away from others. Some are oppressive in their pressures, others cold enough to freeze breath, some occupied by near-mindless creatures frenzied in their hunger, some haunted by wailing ghosts or giants that woozily lumber about. In some of them, strains of ecstatic and/or mesmerizing melody thread their way through stalactites rhythmically crashing down.

But in some of those underground spaces sheer chaos reigns. That is where you’ll find Omegavortex, in a spiked cavity where skin-searing white phosphorus burns and hurricanes of grit and blades ruthlessly storm, where demons scream in throes of violence and nightmares come to life.

Since 2017 Omegavortex have carved their underground abyss with a few short releases and their 2020 debut album, the aptly named Black Abomination Spawn, but they will soon expand the reach of their terrible domain with a second album, Diabolic Messiah of the New World Order, now set for release on December 5th by Third Eye Temple. We have a full stream of the album for you today — and some thoughts about the gloriously ravishing and ruinous assaults it encompasses. Continue reading »

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