I struggle with beginnings, almost more than endings. 2025 was an interesting year for me, but also one of the busiest years of my life, between traveling out of state four times, two weddings, a music festival, and so much more. I wanted to push myself to write more, but looking back I only completed three pieces the entire year. Beginnings can feel overwhelming if I am already afraid I don’t have the kind of momentum I need to get my feet on the ground. Yet in spite of everything, there is a spark I feel kindling itself, a love for this kind of heavy, weird, outsider music that I long to return to. So I am, as always, going to start over and try to do better. Maybe I won’t succeed, but this year will always end and another will take its place, and there you will find me, trying again.
These are the albums that accompanied me on planes, trains, and automobiles, in the comfort of my home and the quiet discomfort of afar, throughout my year.
Honorable Mentions
Chat Pile & Hayden Pedigo – Into the Earth Again
Uboa – All the Dead Melt Down as Rain
Terzij de Horde – Our Breath is Not Ours Alone
The Winner’s Circle
9. Qrixkuor – The Womb of the World
Imagine what the phrase “symphonic blackened death metal” sounds like in your head. Wrong. You can’t really prepare yourself for a work of this kind of mad genius.
8. Fauna – Ochre & Ash
Fauna have a unique way of stirring the heart and tapping into the human condition, and their voice has been sorely missed. Ochre & Ash is a poignant and timely reminder that we, as humans, are more alike than we are not.
7. Agriculture – The Spiritual Sound
I LOVE THE SPIRITUAL SOUND OF ECSTATIC BLACK METAL BY THE BAND AGRICULTURE.
6. Asunojokei – Think of You
Unarguably the most cohesive, compelling, and emotive album from a band that doesn’t stop getting better. A perfect amalgam of j-rock, screamo, black metal, and sun-dappled post-rock.
5. Imperial Triumphant – Goldstar
Goldstar sees NYC’s Imperial Triumphant hard shift back towards putting the ‘jazz’ front and center in their kitschy, psychedelic style of jazz/black metal fusion. Think Weather Report if they had blast beats.
4. Arkhaaik – Uihtis
Every year I tend to make note of the album I listened to the most, even if it did not end up taking the number one spot, and Uihtis handily claims that honor this year. An absolute unknown entity to me, their high-minded conceptual work (lyrics in actual reconstructed Proto-Indo-European) married with undoubtedly the heaviest riffs I have heard all year make this one that I have been putting on repeat for months on end.
3. The Nausea & Echthros – Dream Disintegration
I have to throw you a little bit of a curveball on my lists, but damned if this was one I didn’t even see coming in this high up. Dream Disintegration is one of the most visceral and inventive power electronics albums I have heard in all my life, marrying noise-table style harsh soundscapes with manipulated string quartet instruments in a fusion of beauty and destruction. Hail Aught/Void.
2. Yellow Eyes – Confusion Gate
I continually struggle to think of anyone making black metal as dense, intricate, intense, and memorable as Yellow Eyes. They have been a band dear to me for over a decade now, and I have yet to be bored by anything they do. Confusion Gate is a new crowning achievement.
1. Deafheaven – Lonely People With Power
As if anything else would take this spot. Ever the masters of the oblique step, Deafheaven here summarize and cohere the last few years of their output into something that shows off all their facets at once, and shows why they are simply one of my favorite bands going right now.
Until we meet again, cheers, and be good to each other,
– Vincent