Arson Cafe: Albums of the Year 2025

When we take stock of the events of any given year, we discover that our judgements are shaped not by what has occurred, but by the way in which we have been compelled to interpret it. The process of reflection is never a transparent window into the past, but rather a re-construction of reason out of the debris of experience, as an attempt to distinguish the essential from the ephemeral. There is, of course, a perennial temptation to value according to familiar hierarchies, to relegate what cannot be comprehended easily to already known categories. Yet, the real task of art critique is the confrontation of the uncomfortable, in resistance of the easy consolations of convention. While doing so, resulting verdicts are rarely uniformly agreeable, but always uncompromisingly authentic. Inside everyone's little mental pond of twilight, suddenly a music list makes sense.

To paraphrase F.H. Bradley’ take on metaphysics, music reviewing is the finding of bad reasons for what sounds we like upon instinct. The mind has a capacity for creation as it has for criticism. Both thrive even amid disorder, and both are often intense expressions of lucidity and courage to tackle the vicissitudes of the human condition with a strong distaste for facile interpretations. Musicians, listeners and writers alike remain ever engaged to this broader enterprise of insistence to be forcefully heard, each from their own end. It has been found to be obsessively useful to arrange the year’s more remarkable utterances into a numbered sequence. Numbers confer to authority, and impose discipline upon memory, a brain itch that desperately needs to be satisfied in all of our minds.

Presented is an archive of extreme metal records that stood out to me due to severity of intention, range of view, and above all, repeatability. They were selected among ~1400 checked releases, from which I have a considerably larger pool of suggestions, apart from the top picks. Way easier was to determine the worst album of 2025, the new Behemoth. As I might have mentioned before, beneath the apparent layer of hostility always lies coherence that rewards attention, as these works are not a product of pointless anger, but highly ordered responses to otherwise intolerable conditions. The rusted radio tower has buckled under its own feedback, still screaming in frequencies long after it has hit the ground. Under the shelter of distortion, the voice - raw, stripped of all civility - is the last honest instrument. Another drop in the blackened continuum, another statement of refusal to pretiffy the end times. The list that follows does not pretend to universal validity… No, in fact, it does. See you in court.

Top 10 metal albums of 2025

10. Martröð - Draumsýnir Eldsins

It's like a fever dream to finally see a full length album from this project. Well aware of the debut EP, Transmutation of Wounds (2016), and the inconceivable all-star line up it contained, it seems that just Alex Poole (Krieg / Chaos Moon) and H.V. Lyngdal (Wormlust) are enough to create a fiery gem of Icelandic dissonant riffwork, and layered, psychotropic atmosphere. The opener "Sköpunin" and especially its epic cello ending, is a clear highlight. Since several bands from the bleak North have been on hibernation lately, a like-minded work of this caliber was kinda necessary for us at this point in time.

Gateway to veiled knowledge

9. Scarab - Burn After Listening

More often than I would like to admit, I’m late to the party, in case I even show up. I came across several metallic hardcore / metalcore bands the last few years that impressed me (and would have made it to my lists), with the first Scarab EPs being on top. A short but raw, punchy, 13-minute blast of a debut full-length album from them arrived right on time, with a title that proposes impermanence and a tempo that advances rapidly, leaving little residue upon impact. Ultra heavy grooves, dry lyrics and an unbreakable FU attitude - what else should there be?

I am the bullet with perfect aim

8. Caustic Wound - Grinding Mechanism of Torment

Efficiency both in duration and effect governs the second Caustic Wound (side hustle by members of Mortiferum) album after an amazing debut in 2020. As any foundational deathgrind record presents itself, each component is reduced to its most abrasive function, assembled with the logic of machinery rather than composition. Pressure is constantly applied until resistance fails, and the tracks are surprisingly memorable for their kind. It concludes perfectly with the maniacal "Spider Nest" and then a lecture on doom / death metal with the seven-minute long "Into Cold Dead Universe", which eventually falls into a cyclone of noise.

A life turned into ballistic shield

7. Sanguisugabogg - Hideous Aftermath

The band's absence of introspection is in itself a way of thinking, and this album finally clicked with me compared to the previous ones. Apart from the straightforward, chunky tracks, there's a bunch of amazing musicians featured all over the place, and they do offer their own characteristic flare to their respective moments, adding a lot of variety to the record. Slight experimentation can be found on the industrial-paced "Repulsive Demise", yet my favorites were the opening and closing pieces, "Rotted Entanglement" and "Paid In Flesh".

Flesh spasms unceasing

6. Whitechapel - Hymns in Dissonance

Vintage Whitechapel from the golden era, coupled with the maturity that comes with age and the technical expansion they have acquired after a series of more exploratory albums from 2014 to 2021. I apologize if you're gritting your teeth looking at such an entry this high in the list, but it's pure bliss to my ears listening to this band at this form. Muscular and with a massive sound, tapping on filthy lyricism and Bozeman's vocals at the most demonic they've ever been, Hymns in Dissonance's explosive character deserves everything it strives for.

The universe beckons to sleep

5. Blood Monolith - The Calling of Fire

A chaotic collage where organic and mechanical contours blur into one another. The imagery feels like an X-ray of a fractured psyche: familiar shapes — hints of faces, architectural forms, mechanical elements — jut and merge in a landscape that resists singular explanation. Behind this phantasmagorical cover stands a firmly direct, overly efficient, and well balanced death metal album that somehow got better every time I listened to it this year. Band members are a bunch of sweethearts too, if you look at their other projects...

Resolute we stand in the eyes of avarice

4. Darvaza - We Are Him

The band has not lost focus since releasing the very first EPs, continued with the same temperament on the debut full-length album Ascending Into Perdition (2022), and its engagement with black metal's adversarial roots deepens on the newest work, We Are Him. The album channels classicist formulas with disciplined songcraft, balancing raw force with parts of expansive atmosphere, while vocalist Wraath's expressive delivery truly makes a difference. The first half of the record aims for more immediate impact than the sprawling latter half, yet it's all beautifully composed, and the repetition of form basically asserts the band's presence.

Slaying heaven

3. Putridity - Morbid Ataraxia

The paradox at the heart of Morbid Ataraxia is the implication of calm achieved through excess, and the emotional neutrality that emerges not from absence of intensity, but from its complete saturation. Putridity's grotesque return is simply a logical outcome of Putrid Ciccio's sustained inquiry pushed beyond customary limits, the same limits he has broken before with brutal death metal masterpieces like Ignominious Atonement in 2015. Precision is achieved even with these inhuman patterns and spasmodic riff bursts that snap forward with exaggerated savagery. Another inevitable genre highlight.

The symbols of life are pierced and defiled

2. Teitanblood - From the Visceral Abyss

The soundscape of this band is so fascinating, that every time I listen to a new album, I am overwhelmed as if I've never heard of them before. Even at its buildup moments, Teitanblood's pronouncements are stripped of mediation and are presented as immediate consequence. Their logic is always biological, concerned with impulse, pressure and release, all under the veil of crushing black / death / war metal alchemy. From the Visceral Abyss establishes itself with the indifference of a natural phenomenon, and articulates the band's worldview possibly in the clearest way they've ever done. Not as good as Death (2014), but still way ahead of the pack.

In the vernacular tongue of the deep

1. Volahn - Popol Vuh

It's been more than a decade since Volahn's Aq’Ab’Al (2014), their last masterpiece of pre-Columbian black metal cosmology. Released on the days of Mexico and Guatemala’s independence celebrations, and drawing inspiration from foundational textual archives of the Kʼich'eʼ people way before the Mayans, latest record Popol Vuh is a sonic colossus nothing short of revelatory. Epic in the grandest and most ancient sense, combining indigenous instrumentation with relentless dissonant guitar lines and vocal howls of a different dimension, the record took me by storm even while knowing well what the project is capable of, and what has already been achieved. Crepúsculo Negro rightfully wins it this year.

Thousands of membranous wings

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Tuesday, December 23, 2025

Albums of the Year 2025

Top 10 metal albums of 2025

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