(Around our generally putrid, poisonous, and devastatingly dark halls Christmas isn’t a special day, certainly not a day we honor by going silent. Like on every other holiday, and all the days in between, we commemorate it noisily. And to do that today we present the fourth installment of DGR’s five-part year-end list countdown)

I think that if we have timed this out correctly and things work out properly this entry is going to be that one that runs on Christmas Day, in which case “haha, holy shit”. Talk about a hell of a tour to have to walk through when you’re having your family gatherings – or if you’re a lounger like me, enjoying some now day-old leftovers or whatever chinese food you could score.

While I pored over this year-end list again and again to make sure that only the finest releases made the cut I found that I had created – save one moment of reserved beauty – quite the dense block of both suffocating death metal, blindingly violent black metal, excessive on all fronts metal, and outright depressing metal. This is the segment I’ve often joked is the one that could be most folks’ critical list because there’s a lot of names on here you may have crossed paths with on other sites. For some reason, this always lands about my top twenty with my final ten being some obscura gathering of death and grind bands for people to roll their eyes to and give me a good “how dare he” with some of the nominations. I know for sure I’ve got one on this segment that’ll likely get my car spraypainted.

If, however, this entry does wind up running on the holidays – and likely one of the only posts – then enjoy your time with your family if you’ve got em and appreciate them, if not, tell them to pound sand and hit the play button here. The music will always be here, either way. 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 »