Josh Rioux’s Top Albums of 2025

Since they dropped their first full-length with 20 Buck back at the start of the plague years, Voidceremony have been part of an epochal cohort of progged-out death metal bands mapping the outer planes of what the genre can be in the ‘20s. 2023’s Threads of Unknowing was a high-water mark of that movement for me. Its flashiest feature was the legendary Phil Tougas’ skyscraping lead guitar, wheeling like Daedalus above the rest of the band’s fractalline labyrinth. With Tougas now vanished back through whatever portal he came from, Voidceremony are all labyrinth again; new members Jayson McGehee (guitars) and Dylan Marks (drums) weave into main man Garret Johnson’s and bassist Damon Good’s thorny braid like mycelia, presenting the new iteration of the band as a more organic, interwoven whole. 

Although initially less immediate than that previous record, Abditum proves itself a masterpiece of wild, knotty compositions. “Seventh Ephemeral Aura” is a highlight, with a guitar lead that flares out of the swirling mass like pockets of lightning bursting open under torsive forces, but on the whole, the songs here feel like limbs of a singular entity, twisting and rooting itself into the earth in a sort of metastatic frenzy. My only note, if I have one, is more of a wish, a prayer before the great beast itself: when you’ve got a bassist like Damon Good, please turn him the fuck up. Zero in on his contribution on “Gnosis of Ambivalence,” then go back and listen to Threads of Unknowing and all of StarGazer; the man is a sorcerer. Voidceremony remain an embarrassment of talents, and Abditum is yet another testament.

Consisting of a single 32-minute song conceived as a guided meditation through the process of death, UK progressive metal collective Dawnwalker’s latest earns that potentially alienating move with a mesmerizing structure of ebb and flow, where every new movement of the piece registers as an emotional gate, compressing and dilating the intensity before leading back to the central pulse of the whole, rendering the album’s progress a peristalsis-like experience that lulls you as it draws you along. In theory, this sort of project–album as mandated indivisible experience–demands a lot from the listener, trained as most of us are on musical units of three-to-four highly structured minutes, but it’s hard to stress how seamless the experience of this album is, and how tenderly it holds you when you give it your full attention. The passage of time here feels like a breath. 

The Between is full of light and warmth in a way that doesn’t undermine the fundamental doomyness at its heart; its final passage, thematically a slippage into the ultimate unknown, has the radiance of a sunset at the edge of the world. Having listened to it a dozen times or more now, I’m mostly left with a sense of awe at the humanity behind our traditional rituals of death; we, the still-living, not a one of us sure of anything, trusting in these old, old ways to guide our dying and embrace our witness. That circular, twinned journey from swaddled and sung to in birth to swaddled and sung back into eternity is both terrifying and deeply, deeply loving. In seeking to speak to that awesome truth, The Between reminds me of how true-hearted metal can be, and how generous.

ByoNoiseGenerator are a Russian five-piece who make music they call “jazzgrind”, which doesn’t only mean they’re throwing mankind’s skronkiest instrument on top of a genre not exactly short on skronk (although they do that too, do they fucking ever). There’s legit jazz on this record; not just the presence of jazzy instruments, or jazzoid interstitials dropped between conventional grinds, but jazz as process, there in the dazzling communicative exchange between players you can feel listening to each other, who just happen to be making grindcore with a saxophone on hand. On Subnormal Dives, jazz is the mind through which the grind-body is executed into being. 

This approach leads Subnormal Dives to all kinds of places that feel both spontaneous and purposefully explored. The parts that grind in the traditional sense do so beautifully–the production gives the drums, vocals, and particularly the bass enough buoyancy to surge to the top while the guitars churn like cement beneath, making for an articulate, rounded sound, which would be more than enough for most bands in this zone to stand out. But no track on this record stays in that shape for long before wheeling out into some other arc of exploration; check out the way “4-Ho-Dmtnzambikult” hands itself off between doomy grinds and skittering, grooving excursions led in sequence first by sax, then guitar, then slap-bass, and you’ll get a feel for the openness with which ByoNoiseGenerator are approaching composition. 

Grind is one of the few subgenres of metal that can still feel genuinely extreme in the traditional sense, with its radical compression, speed, and brevity, but that doesn’t mean it can’t feel anonymous when the only way bands work with it is to crank a single level. On Subnormal Dives, ByoNoiseGenerator use grind like a dimension door, deconstructing the conventions and building wildly different structures out of them. We’re lucky to have them back.

For me, the best death metal feels like a location, a literal spatial world made accessible through music. There’s something about Ego Dissolution, Ancient Death’s incredible debut, that feels like open, dimensional space, and particularly movement through that space. The drums rumble and roll like the shifting rubble of a desolate land, the ominous bass booms like distant weather, the guitars judder like harsh winds or peal across the sky in starry streaks, the vocals howl and hunt like unseen denizens of the surrounding peaks… and the riffs. Oh, the riffs. Riffs that describe the falling of empires and the rise of new ones. Riffs that cut holes in space for solos to lance through like newborn gods (“Breaking the Barriers of Hope”, my goodness). The spatial quality of the songs provides a lot of room to breathe; Ancient Death aren’t afraid to jam out, then slow down and make some time to vibe in their alien atmosphere, then rip one star-sailing solo after another.  

There’s an inquisitiveness to this record, a patience that takes a lot of confidence to give full rein to, which is why such a relatively short album feels so complete, and so endlessly explorable. The siren-like clean vocals that appear here and there call you deeper into the unknown lands, the lapping waves like alien tides on interstitial track “Discarnate” (Unlike some, I’m a real believer in the power of a good interstitial) are touches that reveal a band trusting their listeners to be willing to sit and savour the details. Maybe more than any record this year, Ego Dissolution was pure pleasure for me, a death metal record with an explorer’s heart and a poet’s soul that’s one of the best debuts in years. 

Changelings is perfect. The Polish power trio’s second record is an exemplar of agile, technical prog-thrash, the compositions intricate without being cluttered or wanky, everything lean and coiled as desert muscle. There are as many tight riffs to stinkface-headnod to here as there are progged-out warpholes to fall into–headnod stretching, pupils dilating–with every track finding different positions in space from which to leap between those valences. ”Born of Stitch and Flesh” is an obvious highlight on a record with zero dips, its swaggering lion king of an opening riff essentially a sun the rest of the track slingshots around to launch itself into series of accelerant jams and twisty passages that manage to feel both surprising and inevitable. Vocalist/lyricist Piotr Drobina’s dry raven’s rasp, somewhere on the Tim Baker-to-Chuck Schuldiner spectrum, suits the material perfectly, a taut sonic cable that takes up the exact right amount of space, but Changelings is ultimately guitarist Michał Kępca’s show; his single-axe athletics craft an almost weblike presence on this record, weaving wild, spiralling structures between and around the boiling rhythms his bandmates provide. Like with Ancient Death, Changelings falls into the pure pleasure zone for me. This is joy metal, a raised-fist fuck-yeah salute to the cosmos itself.

Sometime back when we were still waist-deep in the plague years, I encountered Wharflurch’s Psychedelic Realms ov Hell, which I consider a true modern classic. Trippy but knuckle-dragging, progressive-minded but death-rolling in filth, its heady storytelling about space mushrooms asteroiding into earth and infecting our ancestors with fucked-up apocalyptic consciousness set to planetarium laser-show death metal rung me like a tuning fork in the midst of our (ongoing, no end in sight) public Babel moment. The man behind the Flurch, prolific Floridian swamp wizard Myk Colby (Liminal Erosion, Isthmus of Styx, Antagonizer, Hot Graves), is responsible for no fewer than three releases in 2025 alone, including side quest-gone-full band project Plasmodulated’s debut full-length, An Ocean ov Putrid, Stinky, Vile, Disgusting Hell. 

Plasmodulated’s origins as yucky, up-tuned counterprogramming to death metal’s downtuned main feed made for a vibrant EP, but three years and the addition of sidefolk Jonathan Griffin (drums, vocals), Carlos Salas (bass), and Josh Goldner (guitars, vocals) has leveled the project up to something truly feverish, a hook-riddled groove machine that moves like hot, infected blood through a rabid body. There’s a wild, bright energy to An Ocean… that feeds off the tweaked tempo and sharpened guitars the record traffics in, all pinch-harmonics and Voivodian acidity, and gives the whole thing a feel that’s totally singular among the American death metal I heard this year. Goldner in particular deserves a shout-out, handling compositions on three of the 10 tracks and bringing a high-voltage guitar presence to the band for Colby to play off. Look to the two-part “Entering the Gastral Realm” suite that forms the record’s centerpiece for a microcosm of everything happening here; an opening pinch-groove that stings like lemon juice in a knife wound, feral riffage, doomy hypercolour ambience, gutpummelling rhythms weaving passage through the diptych like swamp-bound cordyceps. 

An Ocean ov Putrid, Stinky, Vile, Disgusting Hell wasn’t even Myk Colby’s only death metal release this year, but it feels like a return to the wellspring of sorcery he tapped with Wharflurch, and I couldn’t be more stoked for wherever things go from here.

Smiqra is the latest manifestation of ludicrously talented Chinese metal auteur JL (Liu Zhenyang), the man behind Vitriolic Sage and the mighty Όπλίτής (Hoplites), two projects of blistering blackened death metal/deathened black metal that, between them, represent no fewer than eight releases in the last five years–a wild output considering the intensity and depth of the work (See my number 1 pick for more of this kind of shit). But where those other projects read as dead serious–furious, even–Rgyaģdźé! is a swing towards the playful and experimental, a record that manages to goof around while maintaining a batshit savagery and, beyond that, a true sense of the Weird. As signalled by song titles that seem to occupy about five different valences (lower-case emo-ass statements, jokes, dates, Chinese characters, phonetic spellings, Polish maybe?) there’s something extra-dimensional to this record, a feeling that amidst the frantic energy, the flaming deathgrind grooves and angular, chopping movements of the tracks, there are doors in the ceiling opening into extra spaces outside the normal range of detection, extensions to the record’s reality that explain and map the proceedings into sense, if only we had the organs to go along with it. 

That sense of deadly serious play feels critical to whatever dark work Rgyaģdźé! is here to do, a chaos energy that reminds me, at least spiritually, of nothing more than prime Mr. Bungle. “Vdzärnga” and “po-ti-ni-ja!” both have moments buried in them that feel like holes in the songs themselves, where vocals from a different album poke through to harmonize, following an alien logic that scans as a logic nevertheless. In the back half of the record, demon saxophones break through the dimensional rift (“Peer review by oxen”), signalling all manner of nonsense–chiptune intros, breakbeat breakdowns, tracks that sound like ByoNoiseGenerator being executed by chimps with Uzis, a robotic voice repeating “music is for oxen” like it’s giving you some sort of aural mind tattoo, some freaky jazz, and a handful of the best grind tracks released in 2025. Rgyaģdźé! is a black box of an album, one you can only witness by inserting your head fully within, knowing it will be removed in the process of granting you understanding.  

The Spiritual Sound fits a pattern we’ve seen a few times over in recent years. A gifted crew decide to expand on the boundaries of where black metal can go, sometimes by cranking the beauty knob all the way past 10 and back around to it again (Deafheaven), or else by breaking it into shards and then building structures out of those shards that bear little resemblance to anything that happened in Norway in the 90s (Liturgy), and people outside the extreme metal world notice black metal exists, and Pitchfork reviews happen, and my black metal friends get all cranky for a while. It’s like a periodic celestial event that comes along, yanking the usual orbit of the genre for a bit, a phenomenon that seems to only happen in this particular space. Almost in spite of itself, black metal has a constant, low-boiling crossover potential that acts as an ironic, unpredictable counterweight to the persistent atavism of its mainstream. And I get the resentment; that particular flavour of attention from the wider, hipster-haunted music world for projects most distant from the presumptive heart of the genre, and the subsequent space that attention forces open for its own use within the community itself, can feel backhanded at best. 

So here we are again, this time with Agriculture, a crew of the type of bright young gender-diverse folks that haunt MAGA sleepytimes the nation over, who show up to the genre with a duffle bag full of Dylan, Alan Watts, queer political history, the Old Testament, and Van Halen, and drop the black metal event of the decade. But before you tell me this isn’t really even black metal, whether because it’s not entirely made up of tremolo riffing over blastbeats (my straw man), or because it has a bunch of indie shit on it that surely betrays the heart of its true loyalties (yours), I’ll get out in front and say it’s black metal because those sounds we all understand to be the native soil of black metal are not just present across the album, but are at the spiritual root of everything on it, the way the blood that ran through you in the womb is at the root of everything you are now.  

For every post-everything excursion like “Flea”, you have black-as-oil events like “The Weight” or “Micah (5:15am),” where black metal bonafides are earned and then sacrificed in exchange for the ability to push further, deeper, darker. “Bodhidharma” is probably my song of the year, if I gotta pick one. An epic with a wrecking ball riff, verses that find holes deeper and quieter than the lungs of the earth, and a solo that could burn Valhalla to dust, “Bodhidharma” goes everywhere, an appropriate achievement for a song about a guy who gained enlightenment by staring at a wall for nine years. You can read longer-form exegeses of this record elsewhere by sharper listeners than I; I’ll just say that The Spiritual Sound is one of those moments where the hype is simply appropriate, a record where every move feels both unexpected and perfect, every turn a new thing that feels like it’s always been. It’s the real deal.

I wrote a long piece about this record in November, so I’ll try not to walk back over my own tracks here. The counterintuitive pairing of the abrasive Oklahoma sludge uncles and the pastoral Texan fingerpicker was something I felt deep in my bones would work–Chat Pile, despite the noise, are a spiritually warm band, with a deep compassion behind the aggrieved eye they place on the world, while Pedigo’s tender art has a lot of shadow around the edges (and on the covers), something that was explicit in his more abstract early work. It was clear Chat Pile could go tender, and Pedigo could go dark. 

But what makes In the Earth Again a masterpiece is the way their alchemy resulted in an album that feels closer to ritual than the wounded commentaries Chat Pile has provided in the past. It’s as though Pedigo’s energy unlocked an intuition that what we needed at this moment in history was something less like a mosh pit and more like a grieving ceremony, something to bury ourselves to while the world ends, a response to the times that hits as both deeply honest and incredibly moving. There are glimpses of the other Chat Pile here, but most of this record is made up of quietly crackling, shadowy soundscapes and aching ballads, the sound of grief acknowledged, rest invited, a group of musicians aware that the stillness implied by a literal return to the earth isn’t a defeat but a gathering of power for a coming rebirth. 

The most protean composer of extreme metal operating today, Garry Brents has, in 2025 alone, dropped four full-length albums, three EPs, a split and a demo across four different projects, delivers flowers seven days a week, and I think won at least one Magic: The Gathering tournament, although that IG story expired. Brents is no stranger to press in the part of the internet where I read and write, but even so, it can be tough to resist starting every piece about his work with something like “Can you believe this fuckin guy?” The reason for the coverage stands; it’s not that he produces as much as he does, it’s that what he produces is, without exception, fucking exceptional.

Sallow Moth was on mothballs over the last couple of years as Brents did one of his trademark creative zags, this time into nu metal (producing, as Memorrhage, a couple of my favourite records of his in the process), but was resurrected this year with Mossbane Lantern, the project’s fourth full-length and first for Italian avant-garde metal label I, Voidhanger. Brent’s inspiration during this record’s genesis was so intense (even by his standards) that he’s since issued a pair of frankly brilliant satellite EPs that in a different year could’ve easily topped this list; as it stands, they’re relegated to wingmen here. In a career that’s already at Zappa levels of output, Mossbane Lantern is Brents’ most accomplished single work, a wild, shapeshifting plunge into an abyssal space populated by songs so spatial and layered, so populated by unexpected elements and mutant stimuli that it’s not so much a listening experience as it is a dungeon crawl (not a stretch, given the literal fantasy world of lore Brents draws from for the Sallow Moth narrative). 

The dominant mode here is a kind of urgent, prog-shot death metal that draws from the likes of Cynic and Edge of Sanity, but that’s really just the beginning; passage through these tracks traces a line through moods from the brutal to the impossibly delicate (check the closing movement of opener “Gutscape Navigator”, or the back half of “Aethercave Boots”, where the song essentially pauses to take a jazz elevator to the next level; legend) and seemingly every tone in between, all while Brents’ various vocal incarnations rise from pools and burst through walls to gurgle, bellow, chant, or coo, like archetypal visitations out of a dream quest. Sometimes, rather than a linear procession of moods, they’re literally layered on atop the other, like the subdermal melodies running beneath the cave floor during the first couple minutes of “Psionic Battery,” which then morphs into the kind of ambient, intuitive dreamspace that evokes dream metal legends maudlin of the Well. If there can be said to be a centerpiece to an album this rich, it’s the journey from “Cauldron Brim Neurosilk” to “Runemilk Amulet.” It’s just under 15 minutes of aural ayahuasca so potent the only way to resolve the consequences is to be dumped into a comedown pool of JRPG-eque synth beats courtesy of dungeon ambient artist Chipped Topaz (“Parasite Orb”). 

If that all sounds like a lot, I guess it is, but it’s also easy to listen to, because Brents is a genius and Sallow Moth kicks ass. This is the metal album of the year, a contender for metal album of the decade, and apparently, the next one is already in the can. He didn’t even miss a day of work. 

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