2025 wasn’t an awesome year for a lot of reasons. Fortunately, it was a great year for music. Actually, every year is a great year for music: so many amazing bands and artists are popping up everywhere, and while only a tiny handful of them are able to actually make a living off their art (just like artists in all media, in this dystopian future we live in), this doesn’t prevent the fact that music is just as good and as vibrant as ever.
With that in mind, I thought I’d present my top 5 albums of 2025, along with a few honorable mentions. I’m well aware that these albums skew towards the metal side of things. That just happens to be what I like, and I make no apologies for it. Sorry.
Honorable Mentions: Mourning You, Bonnie Trash; CONFLICT DLC, HEALTH, Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII, Pink Floyd; Talking Machine, The Wytches; Year of the Cobra, Year of the Cobra
Te Rā, Alien Weaponry
Alien Weaponry is a sort of Pacific Islander Sepultura, mixing brutal thrash and groove metal riffs with imagery drawn from the band members’ Maori heritage. In fact, over half of the songs on Te Rā are either in the Maori language or blend Maori and English lyrics, and they hit hard. The percussive nature of Polynesian languages that make them so suitable for haka and war chants also makes them perfect for thrash. The standout track for me is “Mau Moko”, which mixes Meshuggah-like polyrhythm breakdowns with lyrics about the traditional Maori practice of facial tattoos called “moko”– we are the people who wear moko, the English translation of the chorus goes. Absolutely killer riffage mixed with indigenous identity and trauma, as well as mythology that goes well beyond the typical Nordic mythos that most metal, for better or for worse, sticks close to.
Rivers of Nihil, Rivers of Nihil
It’s not a huge innovation for a band to make use of the clean vocalist/distorted vocalist dichotomy, but I don’t know many bands who do it more effectively than Pennsylvania-based progressive death metal band Rivers of Nihil. After their recent lineup change, they shifted clean vocalist/bassist Adam Biggs to the lead singer position, and it brings out so much more emotional resonance in their music. This, combined with an increased use of electronics, pushes Rivers of Nihil more into prog rock territory than some of their previous work, which was much more on the tech-death side of the aisle. They’re still able to be crushingly heavy at times, but on tracks like “Water and Time”, they can achieve a beauty that’s almost transcendent.
METAL FORTH, BABYMETAL
No group in the last fifteen years has been able to expand metal’s frontiers with such unbridled joy as kawaii metal pioneers BABYMETAL, and METAL FORTH is just another boundary-shattering, genre-defying whirlwind. This time, producer Kobametal brought in a different collaborator for nearly every track, pushing BABYMETAL’s transgressive sound even further with the help of six amazing guest artists and also Spiritbox. Every track has a completely different flavor, from Electric Callboy’s sleazy EDM-meets-metalcore beats on “RATATATA”, the Bollywood grooves and nü-metal breakdowns on “Kon! Kon!” (featuring Bloodywood), and the kabuki-and-Tom Morello mashup of “METALI!!” Besides, I can’t think of any artist who’s better at making metal fun quite like BABYMETAL. Their tongues are firmly in cheek on METAL FORTH, and yet it doesn’t sacrifice a bit of the massive riffs and infectious J-pop hooks that made BABYMETAL superstars.
Labyrinthine, Faetooth
I’m extremely fond of doom metal bands with female vocalists. Bands like Alunah, Year of the Cobra, Suldusk, Sylvaine, Windhand, and Blackwater Holylight feature prominently in my discography. A band that cropped up recently that fits this category perfectly is Faetooth, an all-female doom band based out of LA. Their music manages to be both hauntingly ethereal and crushingly heavy all in the space of a single song. And Faetooth also manages to bring in folk and black metal touches to their sludgy core. Definitely a rising band to follow if you’re into the slower, gnarlier side of the extreme metal universe.
Age of Aquarius, Perturbator
The amount of range that synthwave maestro James Kent is able to cover in one album is astonishing. After taking a detour into ambient metal with Final Light in 2022, his main project, Perturbator, has returned to chilly electronic beats redolent of the cyberpunk future that never was. Each track on this album feels like neon lights reflected in a nighttime puddle. What’s more, Age of Aquarius can transition from one wildly divergent mood to another within the space of just a single track, like going from the Vangelis-inspired ambient synth textures and swirling saxophone of “Hangover Square” into the throbbing techno breakbeats of “The Art of War”. Kent also works with an impressive variety of collaborators, from industrial metal composer Author and Punisher to French blackgaze trailblazers Alcest. The standout track is probably “Lady Moon”, with eerie vocals by frequent collaborator Greta Link.
There’s plenty of great artists to check out these days, and if you have similar tastes to mine, you might consider giving these artists a try! And if you like them, please support them through buying merch or physical media, or going to their shows. Streaming services pay artists the barest fraction of a pittance, and so many great musicians and bands depend on merch and live shows to keep existing. Let’s hope 2026 has just as many awesome tunes!
~ Ian (rocking out in Santa Cruz)