2025 was one hell of a year for metal releases, and it was absolute hell trying to narrow it down to my top ten. Here they are. Crucify me if I’m wrong. I will enjoy it.
10) Sodom, The Arsonist (SPV / Steamhammer)
Release:6/27/2025
Sodom treats speed as a moral imperative, and yet there’s a strange emotional intelligence baked into this record’s blunt-force riffing. It’s not nuance, exactly, but the acknowledgment that nihilism can be strangely comforting when it’s executed with the earnest professionalism of men who have been angry for forty years and somehow still think it’s productive.
Key Track: “The Spirits That I Called”
09) Patriarkh, Prophet Ilja (Napalm Records)
Release: 1/3/2025
This plays like a black metal concept album written by a theologian who got lost in an Eastern Orthodox gift shop and started hallucinating holiness into the blast beats. The record isn’t just religious—it’s aggressively symbolic, taking decades of inherited mysticism and whipping it into something both feral and academically earnest.
Key Track: “Wierszlin VII-Patriarkh”
08) Belenos, Egor (Northern Silence Productions)
Release:6/6/2025
Belenos has always felt like black metal’s answer to reading incomprehensible Breton folklore at 3 a.m., and Egor doubles down by turning that impulse into a windswept fever dream. This is music that assumes you already know five centuries of regional myth and are emotionally prepared to contemplate a coastline as a metaphor for existential dread. It’s raw but erudite, pagan but strangely clinical, like a historical reenactor who knows exactly how ridiculous he looks and is determined to be taken seriously anyway.
Key Track: “Heg Vras An Didermen”
07) Scour, Gold (Housecore Records)
Release: 2/21/2025
On Gold, Scour once again proves that extreme metal supergroups operate on the same principle as action-movie ensembles: you’re not here for subtlety, you’re here to see what happens when every loud personality tries to be louder than the others. The result is a kind of minimalist brutality—black-metal as performed by a demolition crew—that somehow feels both highly efficient and irrationally angry. It’s the sonic equivalent of a luxury car that only drives in straight lines because turning would compromise the aesthetic.
Key Track: “Gold”
06) Panopticon, Laurentian Blue (Bindrune Recordings – co-released with Nordvis)
Release: 8/15/2025
Laurentian Blue is the rare metal album that feels like a long, unbroken thought: sprawling, emotional, and academically obsessed with place in a way that verges on geographical monogamy. Austin Lunn treats landscapes like relationships—messy, complicated, and occasionally transcendent—and the record operates like a conversation between banjo strings, blast beats, and whatever part of your psyche feels guilty for never appreciating nature enough. Panopticon doesn’t just write songs; he writes dissertations disguised as emotional crises.
Key Track: “Ely In The Dark”
