(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 »

(This is Part I of a five-part year-end list from NCS writer DGR. We’ll have all the remaining Parts coming out day-by-day until hitting the next weekend.)

I’d like to think that every year I manage to keep some sort of schedule when it comes to writing out the end of year events for this website. Usually it’s Andy’s comprehensive autopsy of the year, followed by my bullshit, and then everyone else gets a shot in between. If I manage to time it just right this usually runs just before the holidays and lands just in time so that you could really ruin a Christmas gathering or two with your musical taste were you so determined. I failed in every regard on that front this year.

Life handed me a few raw ones that I am still dealing with and I’m not even sure I’ve completely cleaned off the heaping plate of horseshit I was served so generously last year. That and of course the overall world events so omnipresent that even if you’ve managed to live in a sort of blissful ignorance, the cavalcade of bullshit just seems to be wearing on everybody. Everybody is fucking tired, everyone feels like shit, and my few moments of joy seem to consist of being surrounded by the gaggle of chucklefucks that attend concerts and festivals that I get to talk to.

Every year for at least the past half a decade at this point has opened with me opining about some sort of pessimistic crap, but to be honest, if you ever see me run one of these lists with a semblance of “man, things were just swell this time around!”, you should probably get a wellness check performed on my behalf. At the very least you shouldn’t trust whatever I put for the top ten that year. Or any year, really. The sheer ego of stacking fifty plus albums and expecting people to read it should be disqualifying enough. Continue reading »