One of the unfortunate side effects of doing album of the year lists in December is that music releasing late in the year invariably ends up getting missed. Our boy Stevo rounded up a handful of December releases that might have otherwise slipped under the radar, and we wanted to follow that up with a few more late-2025 albums that should have been AOTY list contenders. Presented are some choice cuts from last November and December across a variety of extreme metal subgenres that are sure to please sickos from around the metalsphere.

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Sulfuric Cautery – Consummate Extirpation
Blast Addict | December 5, 2025

The goregrind ghouls that make up Sulfuric Cautery had what I’d consider a pretty massive 2025, with two full-length albums, two splits, and a compilation of works between 2019 and 2021. Originally appearing on my radar with 2019’s Chainsaws Clogged With the Underdeveloped Brain Matter of Xenophobes, Sulfuric Cautery stood out to me as more than just another group building off of the Last Days of Humanity formula of pulpy grind so loud, sloppy, and distorted that it closer resembles power electronics acts like Controlled Bleeding or The Gerogerigegege than Carcass or Exhumed, even if that is a good descriptor for their sound. For one, as you may be able to tell from song titles like “Pathetic Hate Speech Dependency” and “Desperately Sucking on the Rotten Breasts of Demagogues,” they’re based as fuck. In addition (and more importantly from a musical quality standpoint), they clearly have both a love for the craft of goregrind and a genuine desire for improvement in a field somewhat-synonymous with arrested development. Just compare the band’s 2010s split material or even 2023’s Suffocating Feats of Dehumanization to Killing Spree, the latter stands as the group’s defining moment thus far – getting their pulpy display of power as close to perfection and self-actualization as possible.

As you may be able to tell (because you’re very smart and pretty and, by the way, have you lost weight?), we are not supposed talking about Killing Spree. After the release of that album in June, Sulfuric Cautery had another album waiting in the wings for December – a marriage of goregrind and brutal death metal that puts the group more in line with acts like Disordered and Viscera Infest (please look up any and all bands listed as comparisons at your own risk, this genre has the worst album covers of all time). Titled Consummate Extirpation and thankfully adorned with a drawing of gore (as opposed to the Ogreish/LiveLeak smorgasbord that’s considered the sub-genre standard), this full length is an expert display in both niches, expertly adding more-formed riffs and slams into their regular formula of congealed gurgle blasts. It’s a testament to the group’s taste and talent, as this marks the current duo’s first excursion into the world of death metal as Sulfuric Cautery (drummer and original lineup member Isaac Horne was in the short lived brutal deathgrind act Lurid Panacea).

Records like Consummate Extirpation can be difficult to talk about at length, as what makes it so special is it’s simplicity. Unlike other favorites from 2025, this album is one that shines through its simplicity – nothing stands between the listener and the immediate viscera they desire. It just happens to be incredibly strong from a songwriting and production standpoint. Ending with a strong cover of influencing act Orchidectomy, this 27 minute LP (which is like a double album compared to the ones preceding it) stakes Sulfuric Cautery as a force to be reckoned with in death metal and grindcore. With the band stating that this release “…forg[es] a new chapter,” for them, I’m excited to what pustulated messes we can expect in 2026 and beyond. I hope it’s a synthpop album! Or, what about a rage EP produced by F1LTHY!?

Special shoutout to recording engineer and mixer Michael Robert Foster, member of brutal death newcomers and “Toilet Ov Hell’s Worst Covers of 2025” recipient Mephitic Corpse. –Sean Ghoulson

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Fleshvessel – Obstinacy: Sisyphean Dreams Unfolded
I, Voidhanger | December 12, 2025

If December’s Obstinacy: Sisyphean Dreams Unfolded is anything to go by, Fleshvessel is an act worth keeping in mind for the avant-garde inclined readers who miss the wacky, tangentially-rooted-in-death-metal works of bands like maudlin of the Well and Disharmonic Orchestra. Similarly to those acts and the various progressive-first bands in the extreme metal orbit, Fleshvessel uses death metal as a spring board to develop unique visions of what this genre can be. Obstinacy uses its various sonic influences to construct four lengthy scribes that thematically tackle humanity’s demise at the hands of its own stubbornness. The first three tracks revolve around the self-destructive nature of human consciousness and our desire for unchecked “progress” (“Am,” for example, is a track dedicated to the trope of artificial intelligence being our downfall, going as far as to whole cloth quote the “Hate” segment from I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream). These themes then culminate in the sixteen-and-a-half epic closer “It Lurched From A Chasm In the Sky,” which seems to paint a scenario of coming apocalypse and/or revelation, presumably at the hand’s of man’s own doing (if the themes of the rest of the record are to be trusted).

Musically, this lofty narrative is built upon a sound somewhere between jazz flavored death metal stylings and layered progressive arrangements. Regularly shifting from visceral, dissonant metal passages to foreboding atmospherics that build tension towards the cataclysmic resolution on “It Lurched…” Bits of non-standard instrumentation (piano, viola, clarinet, flute, etc.) poke through the riff-based composition, while also making up their own small segments of classical-adjacent orchestration.

All this flows naturally and effortlessly, but any metal band with a dedicated flute player is going to run the risk of coming off a bit too theatrical and maybe the tiniest bit cheesy. While I’d be lying if I said there weren’t pieces of tracks that went a bit far for my tastes, the whole of Obstinacy justifies the drama and pizzazz in a way other “zany” metal acts fail too. I even found myself able to look past some of the more silly sounding prog-rock motifs and the frankly goofy vocal moments where death-growls give way to what I can only think to describe as “King Diamond Opera Inflection.”

Even if you think you may be filtered by the bizarre genre mixing and overly-theatrical stylings, I’d recommend everyone reading at least give this Fleshvessel record a chance. It’s flavorful and rich, showcasing a band with a surplus of compositional talent and thought-provoking musical ideas. It’s worth the price of admission to hear a band that makes their I, Voidhanger label-mates sound genre-standard by comparison. –Sean Ghoulson

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Ragana & Drowse – Ash Souvenir
The Flenser | November 14, 2025

While I hadn’t kept up much with either artist involved here, I knew enough about Ragana’s harrowing brand of blackened sludge and Drowse’s shoegazy, droning, folk-ish output to expect a mix of the two to be potentially interesting. “Utterly emotionally devastating” is somewhere on the interesting scale, I suppose.

Colossal opener “In Eternal Woods Pts. 1-3” keeps things calm for almost half of its runtime before flaring up into some of the most straightforward black metal I’ve yet heard from Ragana. As you might expect from black metal, the lyrics praise the beauty of the titular forest; musically, however, this is a panicked, wounded animal dragging itself back into its refuge before bleeding out. The tempo is just slow enough to make the song feel like it’s struggling, while the vocals scream in anguish.

This anguish clashes with Kyle Bates’ (Drowse) soothing vocals, which proceed to take a more prominent role in the next track, providing a serene, yet unyielding cliff against which the waves of Ragana’s rage clash. When the latter comes in halfway through the song, the emotional crescendo reaches a peak as vocal lines intertwine against a droning, mournful, yet not hopeless backdrop.

The final track’s structure – minimalist beginning, big, booming finale – may not be a surprise at this point, but it arguably does the most with the least. The clean vocals are beautiful, and once the distortion sets in, the mood remains far from upbeat, but the slow notes nonetheless suggest a catharsis of sorts, closing out this meditation on loss and being lost with a peculiar sense of warmth, insisting on a need to persist despite the harsh brutality of existence. –Hans

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Demon King – Death Knell
The Artisan Era | November 14, 2025

We’ve gotten a good taste of what Demon King has to offer these past four years with their EPs The Final Tyranny and Vesania, and now they’ve given us their first full-length album in Death Knell. For anyone unacquainted with these Tech Death Thursday alums, they play a style of blackened tech that feels natural coming from former members of Enfold Darkness and Inferi. It’s highly melodic, super fast, and more than a little dorky in an endearing fuck-yeah-wizard-shit sort of way.

Black metal and tech death are both genres driven by pageantry to some extent, more so than most other types of metal in my opinion, and blending elements of them together feels natural. Demon King has struck a particularly sweet spot between the two on Death Knell. The evil sorcerer vibe they’re angling for necessitates a certain amount of bombast in establishing the atmosphere, and their use of big, sinister chords tempers the florid instrumental work such that the more technical moments truly sound like unknowable magic. It is a storm roiling about the mountain’s peak, and within its eye conducting it is Demon King.

Further selling this feeling in a somewhat rare instance for tech death is the vocals; for me, death metal vocals are almost entirely about the texture they add to the music rather than the lyrical content, and this is no exception. In that regard, Matt Brown does a lot that I’d like to hear more of in this genre. He delivers some suitably grimy high and low death metal screams, but the occasional grandiloquent spoken word section throughout and the surprisingly raw howls on the album’s title track are standout moments on an album rife with standout moments. It seems like such a small thing, but that small additional variety in delivery pull a surprising amount of weight.

While it draws from a well of familiar ideas, the execution of said ideas on Death Knell is what makes it what it is. More than just a showcase for virtuosity or moody setpieces, it’s a highly listenable and complete album, and it’s wormed its way into my regular rotations lately. Hail to the king, baby. –Spear