2025 TOP 100 ALBUMS (100-81)

A cacophony of both soaring melody and incoherent chaos. This is an album that is fascinating in its level of instability. There is beauty and accessibility to be found within it, but it is not necessarily at right angles with everything else. It feels like a stream of consciousness unloading of the collective members' feelings about trying to be adults in today’s challenging world.

Hailing from Sydney, Australia. We Lost The Sea sculpt beautiful and immersive post-rock that goes heavy on the emotion. Rather than dwell on loss or regret, it is about the euphoric, wonderfulness of life, and it is a life-affirming validation that actually everything is probably going to be okay.

Thrash Uberlords who are more popular now than they ever were in their heyday. It is album number fourteen and by far the heaviest for a long while. Instead of just chucking out yet another collection of thrash tracks, “Para Bellum” sees them to develop their style to take in both black and death metal. It is a well-rendered album that shows that they have indeed been listening and taking notes on where modern metal is.

Sometimes there is nothing better than uncompromised heaviness. Despised Icon may well be labelled deathcore, but this is route 101 undiluted death metal. It is majestic in its fist-pumping raw brutality. Gloriously unfiltered.

Technical thrash from the Netherlands that is crisp and frenetic. Large and dynamic in its sound, it is immaculately produced and constructed. There is an intricate nature at play here that feels clever and cerebral.

With Grave Pleasures going the way of Beast Milk and being put on hiatus, Mat NcNerney is back with his new project. This is a colder, more foreboding and bleak endeavour than his other instalments. It still has that early eighties goth aesthetic but is more early Killing Joke than the pop sensibilities of the Cure. There is an accessibility in its dourness, but in all it is a pessimistic portrayal of the world to come.

Gloriously eclectic, there is not a sub-genre that isn’t portrayed or pilfered from in this album. It hams everything up to the ninth degree and in places is rather ridiculous in its theatrical grandeur. However, it is rescued because the songs are really good and the closing track in particular is a doozer.

Massive over on the continent, this is a competent and rather enjoyable exercise in melodic death metal. Containing lush production values, it manages to eloquently balance the brash with the accessible. This may well be the release that finally gives them the dews that they require in this country.

A veritable cult concern, Cryptopsy are a massive influence on many in the modern metal game. After a length of inactivity, this is their second album of this decade. It is great. Big and boisterous, it is rather muscular in its uncompromising vision. Technical and brutal it is precision-engineered to create as much carnage as possible.

BIG|BRAVE make difficult records, end of story. They cultivate a sound that seems at odds with everything else around it. OST is a soundtrack for images yet to come. A turmoil of tempestuous sound that borders on the abstract. There is nothing as conventional as a structure here; instead, noises float in and out with little cause or effect. Eccentric and improvised it is intriguing in its non-linear entity.

When a band declares that they are returning to their roots, the result is usually a watered-down and sanitised version of the past. Not here, this is a visceral and crushingly chaotic retread of Whitechapel’s early years. They strip back all the progression of previous records and go for the jugular. Potent heaviness personified.

As you would expect from a side project of Greta Van fleet guitarist Jake Kiszka, this sounds like Greta Van Fleet. But here is the rub, I like this a lot more than I have ever liked a Greta Van Fleet album. It feels rawer, more improvised and less produced. It’s still bluesy classic rock but it is looser and less contrived.

More deathcore from another legend of the scene. Simultaneously barbaric but also brave and beautiful. This is Deathcore the vulnerable years. The chest beating male toxicity is put to one side and instead we get an album that explores and questions their own very being.

Gloriously uncompromising Swedish death metal. It revels in its nastiness and brutality. Zero production values and just razor-sharp riffs that pierce into the soul.

Yes this sounds like Tool. In fact, Chevelle have been a Tempu Tool for thirty years. However, whatever it lacks in originality it more than makes up for in creative flair. It is a very good album full of well-crafted, sumptuous tunes. Everything flows incredibly well, and it is intriguing in both its intelligence and its depth and flair.

A great album title that welcomes us to the freeform world of Prog jazz. This is a complex but free-flowing album that feels improvised as opposed to constructed. There are repeated patterns but in the main this is a plane of spontaneity. Inspired flourishes are all over the shop and it feels fresh and uncharacteristic.

Polish blackened metal that unsurprisingly does sound a lot like Behemoth. This is a hard and heavy album that sees a scaling back of the epic and atmospheric and moves back to the blatant brutality of the past. It still has scale and cinematic values but in the main it feels jagged and (forgive the pun) hateful.

The vast majority of the interesting metal in the last decade has hailed from France. This is yet another treatise on loss, inner turmoil, and existential struggle, however for all its navel gazing woe, it is done really well. A maelstrom of up-tempo noise, they create spiralling waves of sound that cocoon the listener. Its beauty is how the instruments entwine to create a result that is far more than the sum of its parts. An inspired descent into the battered human spirit.

Black Metal auteur, Gaahls is an enigmatic figure more than happy to throw off the shackles of the musical form that birthed him. “Braiding The Stories” is his second album with this self-titled unit and he further gleefully deconstructs all the tenants of Black Metal. There is so much in this album; folk, synthwave, goth and post-rock. In fact, the one thing you will struggle to find is communal garden Black Metal. What we are instead presented with is a top-of-his-game storyteller, spinning atmospheric yarns.

Conan play doom. A base-level granite-heavy version of Doom that takes everything back to its core components. There is no nuance or niceties to be found here, this is a primordial sludge of raw ingredients. With Long Player Number Six, they have made no attempt to cultivate or expand their sound. It rumbles as ever with malicious intent and is a gloriously simplistic, muddy mess of low-level tempos. Stunning in its sparse nature, this is rock ‘n’ roll slowed down and de-evolved back to its bare atoms.

Straight away, we get the other end of doom. If the previous entry from Conan was nasty and primitive, this is its evolved, redefined, tempered ancestor. This is housebroken Doom with all its airs and graces. It is a beautifully restrained album that is exquisitely contoured. Sars’s vocals are evocative and bewitching. They sit alongside Alberto’s guitar work, which is stunning in its depth and structure. A hauntingly ethereal album which highlights the beauty in the darkness. If you like dreamy goth metal this one worth checking out.

Frankly, I have lost count which number return to form this is for Alice Cooper. He has got into a cycle of making a plethora of pretty dire records and then suddenly coming back with a bit of all right. This bit of alright heralds the return of almost the original Alice Cooper band and is credited as their first album together since 1973 “Muscle of Love”. I say almost as guitarist Glen Buxton died in 1997, but fittingly enough, he is here in spectral form as unearthed studio recordings of his guitar playing have been spliced into three of the tracks. This is gloriously over-the-top prime-time Alice. It ignores the genre hopping he has indulged in over the years and goes back to the psychedelic ham horror he made his name with. It is fun, flirtatious and fantastically camp.  

One of the most original bands out there. The bastard offspring of Metallica and Johnny Cash, this is bluegrass metal in all its glory. Album number nine is a darker, rawer affair. Recorded live in the studio in just (fittingly) 13 days it feels less contrived and produced than previous efforts. It still brings the boogie big time and is eminently danceable, but the catchy melodies have more of a crunch to them this time around. A driving, vital record that does deviate from the Volbeat sound but does give it a degree of urgency.

Multi-layered progressive metalcore from Illinois. This is righteously complex stuff. Layers among layers of pulsating guitar melded into each other. Its beauty is the amount of stuff going on. The technical metalcore that the album is swathed in can usually feel rather cold and clinical, however there is an additional warmth and humanity to be found that is provided by the cinematic melody. Overall it feels both epic and expansive but also grounded and confessional. The machine like perfection offset by a bursts of fragility and vulnerability.

Lush melodic death metal that goes heavy on the melody. It is full of infectiously catchy hooks and passages and is quite sumptuous in its accessibility. The thing to note here is how beautifully the tracks are constructed. Everything is precision-engineered to sound epic and enticing.

Between the Buried and Me are a jazz outfit that just so happen to make heavy metal albums. The freeform non-linear jazz style comes first in their creation process and the heaviness follows. Their albums are easily identifiable, quite simply by sounding like nobody else. At first, it can feel like a directionless mess with each subsequent passage bearing no resemblance or conceivable connection to the last. But there is a beauty in the chaos. Each listen reveals further that there is indeed a linear connection that bonds it all together, it's subtle and buried, but it is there, driving the album forward. Astonishing in stream of consciousness narrative format, this is an album that both astounds with its non-conventional ambition but also proves alluring as you get sucked further into spiralling madness. 

Katatonia have been producing deeply profound, emotive, and perceptive albums for nearly 35 years. They started off as self-declared Paradise Lost fanboys, however, the modern incarnation of the band has crafted a singular and unique atmospheric and melancholic sound that is very much their own. “Nightmares as Extensions of the Waking State” doesn’t particularly change or alter their style. As ever, it is a deep, mournful treatise on emotional despair and the burden of existence. The point is that as a band they do is incredibly well. It is rich, textured and exquisitely rendered. Every track drips with pathos and restrained passion. It is an immersive, heartbreaking experience and proves that, in the right hands, Metal can be tender and forlorn.   

Fantastically well-constructed progressive metal that is full of heavy pulsating riffs and lush melodic passages. It has a real dynamic groove to it all and heaviness feels infectious rather than brittle. Overall, it is an intriguing and highly enjoyable record that keeps your attention by subtly shifting in style on each track. Captivatingly catchy.

A highly personal album that uses the claustrophobic, insular nature of sludge to explore grief. It is extraordinary how the nihilistic, impenetrable nature of extreme metal is twisted and subverted to articulate the feeling of losing someone who has defined your life. It is a bleak record that uses noises in a cathartic manner. There is no hope here, just despair and longing regret, and it is dynamically atmospheric in the way that it all builds. Raw and traumatic, it is an astonishingly dark and inward looking experience.

On release this was TOP 10 and I believed (as I still actually do) this is by far the best thing that Architects have released since 2016’s game-changing “All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us”. So before the negatives, let’s do the positives as it is a really good album that further expands and commercialises their sound. This is an album aimed at the thousands that have discovered them through arenas and festival headlines. It is clean, crisp and full of killer hooks and anthemic choruses. And that is also the reason it has steadily fallen down the list on repeat listens. It is good but it lacks the emotional weight that “All Our Gods” had. This is a band with sadly less to say and complain about. Whilst it is a very good record and still the 71 best I’ve heard this year (out of over 800) it lacks the pain and suffering that always defined them.