Colin Dempsey’s Top Albums of 2025

Sharing mind-bending and obtuse metal is tantamount to recommending a video game that becomes enjoyable after the first 40 hours. We’re not all blessed with patience. Veilburner recognizes this, and despite the fact that they are as heady as an esoteric blackened death metal duo should be, with their eighth record detailing two characters who “suffer like two dragons consuming one another in a serpentine-like fashion until one can no longer consume the other, frozen in the shape of infinity (∞) and numerologically represented by the digit eight (8),” they never let it interrupt catchy songwriting. Resultingly, Longing for Triumph, Reeking of Tragedy is as lean as it possibly can be, cleanly communicating the incomprehensible hell of its lore. It’s for that reason that Veilburner’s depiction of despair is so arresting. They refuse to obscure what’s happening, peeling back undue distortion and muddy performances for a direct, but nonetheless challenging, experience.

 As Josh Rioux’s list made clear, this year death metal remembered that Cynic, Atheist, and Demilich existed and that it could get weird and technical. Not that it hasn’t before, but 2025 had a disproportionate number of strong, colorful death metal albums. Conversely, Eleanor Harper remembered that Bolt Thrower existed and it doesn’t require a master’s degree to predict that adding Bolt Thrower’s pragmatic riffs to raw black metal can only be good. The result is no bullshit, hypnotizing, and groovy. Irrevocably Drubbed, Harper’s second full-length as Lust Hag, provides little in the way of variation–to its own benefit–because it finds plenty to work with within Harper’s ideal blackened death metal (or deathened black metal, depending on where your allegiance lays) framework.

A hurdle in any form of criticism is the battle between selfishness and responsibility. The responsible option is to be hungry for novel releases that challenge or confront you, while the selfish option is favoring that which feeds your sensibilities, confirming that your tastes are indeed good, and that you don’t need to search elsewhere. Under the Eternal Shadow is then a homecooked and comforting dinner made by my grandmother (or, to be correct, Final Dose). The sophomore LP from the UK group is as innovative as butter on toast, but in this case, the toast is blackened crust punk and the butter is dungeon synth-adjacent aesthetics. It speaks straight to the subconscious with elementary musicianship and oh-so-satisfying fuzz, eclipsing any frontal lobe doubts about the lack of ambition. But, that’s also punk music in a nutshell–chatting with the parasympathetic nervous system in a monogamous relationship.

It’d be criminal to ignore Chariot Sun Blazing. There’s good reason to, since it released during the last days of 2024, but that small period post-list season is rife for recounts and reconsiderations, all of which Chariot Sun Blazing deserves, compounded by the significant fact that it was surprise-released over a decade after Skagos’ last album. The band had been quiet enough for long enough that it became a question as to whether they still existed. 

And upon their return, Skagos blew open the concept of Cascadian black metal. It could be because Chariot Sun Blazing has an improvisational air that feels alien to Cascadian black metal’s religious devotion to climax-based songwriting, or perhaps it’s the timbre of the riffs, like that on “In the Burned Out Shell,” that feel neither mighty nor dark and more so quietly appreciative. Imagine an ent that’s too trepidatious to walk, else it snap the twigs on its legs, and that’s Chariot Sun Blazing; patient, weary, and wise. Much of it isn’t even metal. Skagos tap into post-rock’s Spirit of Eden roots and curiously poke around what constitutes a song and how we define beauty.

On their debut demo last year, Demon Sluice (the duo of Garry Brents and Valefor) tapped into the charred-earth approach of bestial USBM, namedropping Von and Profanatica while chiseling a sculpture of a goat out of granite. Their first full-length record, Dancers Beneath the Shores of Fire, maintains that energy while refining the technique. Much is made of the atmosphere in black metal coming from synths and spectacle, but Demon Sluice suggest that atmosphere can be equally built through less opulent means (the riffs, song structures, the ceaseless loudness, etc.), like a castle, imposing due to its architecture rather than its assortment of bats, skeletons, and stained-glass windows.

Look, metal is referential and iterative, but Demon Sluice crossed those steps on their demo. Here, they provide an alternative for what USBM would become, away from post-rock-isms and forests and into a hall of pointed mirrors. They progress a sound that, by definition, was limited and stubborn, by elongating its edges rather than smoothing them out. Yes, Dancers Beneath the Shores of Fire rips as much as old school caveman USBM, but more importantly, it models how to make that rip even more.

Earlier this year, I wrote about how Garry Brents’ workaholism doesn’t interfere with his creative drive and that, fortunately or not, his weirdo music is successful in and of itself because it’s so strange and untouched by anything other than his hands. Now, I’m going a step further: Mossbane Lantern is necessary if we want better art. Not that art is a game. “Better,” here, meaning “art that strikes a more precise nerve,” whether that’s moving, escapist, inspiring, or impressive. Mossbane Lantern is all those qualities and one of the few records (ever, realistically speaking) that exemplifies them by sounding like slam Cynic. Not “in spite of it sounding like slam Cynic,” but because it does, because the mathy techniques emanate from the same source as one that loves fat, dumb, chunky production. It’s the energy behind the videos of classically-trained clarinet players covering Cannibal Corpse left to denature in a tub of LSD. It’s so far from how we expect metal to be, and what we can expect from metal, while holding onto metalness. It could only come from someone who works to finance their music without ever wanting to make their artistry an income source.

The Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy represents the latest stylistic barrier Lamp of Murmuur’s M.’s had to overcome, and it was the most daunting; symphonic, mid-tempo black metal with a maximalist slant towards the genre’s most commercially successful and critically maligned acts. M.’s given no reason to doubt that he was capable, considering he’s gone from raw black metal to peak-era Immortal worship in only three years. But that’s not why Dremaing… sounds so jubilant. M. rewards himself with decadence for persevering through the health issues that colored Saturnian Bloodstorm. As such, Dreaming… breathes with relief and satisfaction. Although still traditionally heavy, it shines brightest when M. enters symphonic trances like “Angelic Vortex” or the second portion of the title track suite. In these spaces, he sounds weightless as he’s no longer burdened by his impingement. It, as oxymoronic as it sounds, is black metal that celebrates life.

To praise Ethereal Horizons is to praise an institution within a subgenre that has, for the past 30 years, pushed and defied said subgenre. While the record’s immediate context isn’t insignificant–that being, it takes a similar palette and paintbrush as Blut Aus Nord’s past three albums to convey cosmic glee instead of cosmic horror–it’s less important than its place as the project’s 16th record since 1995, all of which were composed by the same guy, far-flung from most media engagement and adhering to the individualism and isolationist tendencies that black metal was supposedly founded upon but that decayed as its founders learned they had to live in the world, and, despite all that, it’s fresh.

By now, Blut Aus Nord have covered, or outright invented, most streams of black metal. And, like their other albums, Ethereal Horizons won’t grip anyone not already wise to Blut Aus Nord, even if the pitch is enticing; kosmische blackgaze, psychedelic atmospheric black metal, space rock Below the Lights-era Enslaved at half-speed. All apply, and all are juicy invitations if you have the ears. These pastures are unorthodox and worthwhile, especially given the optimistic encasing, but what matters more is that Ethereal Horizons is a strong stand-alone release from one of the best metal runs of all time.  

Confusion Gate sounds different than previous Yellow Eyes in so much that it’s “Yellow Eyes, but better.” The band’s key traits remain for the most part, now emboldened by more expansive songwriting, both interior and exterior to their woven black metal patchworks. Regarding the latter, the New York group employs medieval instrumentation and flairs to strengthen the record’s character and setting. Meanwhile, they’ve found the cure to their allergy to power chords; more power chords. By fattening their sides and bulking up the skeletons of their songs, Yellow Eyes sound more complete than they have before. 

But that praise is only worthwhile if you’re familiar with Yellow Eyes. Else, it falls on deaf ears. So, I’ll pitch it this way: Confusion Gate confronts aging by getting more rowdy. Maturity is not the undoing of our youthful ridges but sharpening them, honing in on them as one realizes that there’s less time on the clock to grow in your identity than there is time to find a new one. Yellow Eyes retain their core and specifically embellish it instead of reorienting it, all to make peace with their impending expiration date. 

The Convalescence Agonies is weary because recovery is exhausting and not guaranteed. Hell, the record wasn’t guaranteed. It cobbles itself together and scrapes its boots across concrete, grimacing as it finishes each track, reflecting Doug Moore’s laborious recovery from nerve damage in his shoulder. He’s recuperating on tape, relearning how to hold his guitar, let alone play it. There were tidbits of this process on his last album with Pyrrhon, Exhaust, but with Weeping Sores, Moore delves into pain not as a metaphor nor an amorphous lyrical theme mentioned on Metal Archives, but the physical sensation that changes lives. The Convalescence Agonies illustrates how it strips faculties, reducing us to agents acting on aversion.

There’s little in the way of comeuppance or catharsis, no victories or payoff, yet this doesn’t make the album flat or one-dimensional as it can more thoroughly investigate the mindset that accompanies chronic pain. For instance, “Waiting for the Scythe” is anything but subtle, but even more telling is the title track, the first Moore wrote for the project and thus when he was his most unencumbered, in which he describes his then-state: “I am become a landscape of scars/ A patchwork province of fibrous memories/ Hardening beneath the hostile stars.” 

Through decaying death-doom, Moore reveals that pain traumatizes and nostalgizes. It haunts, a ghost of the person you once were. Yes, you may heal, but depending on the severity, you may never be that person again. And remember (if you read my interview with Moore), he didn’t injure himself through a freak accident. It was a miscalculation in exercising, a failing of the human body. The vessels we operate can do that, sometimes. Much as we’d like to believe that every day our right foot will always step in front of our left foot with the same cadence, Moore tells that’s not the case with a grace not frequently found in metal.