TOP ALBUMS OV 2025 W/ IRON GODDESS OF MERCY, SPEAR, & ROLDERATHIS!
TovH’s Country is a delightfully expected banger of a LISTMANIA 2K25 DAY VII by the metal band IGoM, Spear & Roldy from winter two thousand and twenty five that artfully expresses a vile contempt for the dredges of late-stage crapitalism.
Iron Goddess of Mercy
With all due respect to Clipse, Dead and Dripping, Skaphos, Onsetter, Holy Death, Friarbird, and Jean-Paul Dessy, here is my Top 10 of 2025.
10. Enragement – Extinguish All Existence
Transcending Obscurity Records | Track Premiere
Top Volcanic Experience: “Vesuvius”
Sometimes you premiere a track and, in your preparation, fall in love with the whole damn thing. Transcending Obscurity, per usual, has no shortage of end-of-year talent, but I’d be remiss to omit Extinguish All Existence. Channeling Aborted, Suffocation, Dying Fetus, and a whole assortment of technically proficient, slam-addled brutal death metal, Enragement’s 4th full-length is maybe the most fun record of the year. As I teased in conversations prior to the album’s release, the explosive “Vesuvius” was going to leave everyone as pulverized as pumice. Don’t think too hard about this, y’all. Just slam your face into the magma.
09. Tómarúm – Beyond Obsidian Euphoria
Prosthetic Records | Review
Most Hogged-Out Prog: “Silver, Ashen Tears”
I spent months agonizing over Beyond Obsidian Euphoria, but those months were delightful, exploratory, and eye-opening. My fellow Atlantans created something titanic in size with the depth of an imminent iceberg. The journey is arduous, but the guides are inexhaustible. Returning to Beyond Obsidian Euphoria after all this time, there’s a freshness and familiarity to it, a new appreciation for tracks like “Halcyon Memory” and a renewed sense of wonder at “In Search of the Triumph Beyond…” and “Silver, Ashen Tears.” It is impossible to imagine what follows “Becoming the Stone Icon,” but that is only to the band’s credit.
08. Boldy James – Conversational Pieces, Alphabet Highway, Token of Appreciation
Real Bad Man Records | 1301 | RRC Music | FIF | FIF
Biggest Stick with a Flycatcher: “Cutthroats”
It was the year of Boldy Block, and I’m planting my flag for this trio of albums all released within a few months of each other. Whether on the soul-infused Token of Appreciation, the sparse and haunted Alphabet Highway, or noodle-knocking of Conversational Pieces, James demonstrated all year a dizzying array of moods and moves that lesser rappers could never accomplish. “Cutthroats,” “B.O.B.,” and “Split the Bill” will stay on repeat when the calendar turns to 2026. “Put 180 on the quarter when I cut the blow / When it came to cuttin’ corners I had to cut it close.”
07. Pile – Sunshine and Balance Beams
Sooper Records | FIF
Weirdo Anthem of The Year: “Born at Night”
Watching the inspiring weirdness of Rick Maguire on stage back in October secured Sunshine and Balance Beams a spot on my year-end list. From the blown-out fuzz of “Deep Clay,” through the fragile-god melodrama of “A Loosened Knot,” to the technicolour revelations of “Born at Night,” the whole album is a triumph of pressure and release, a soft, sensuous, and knowing look inward and outward at the ills and thrills of life. “I’m starting to believe it wouldn’t at all have mattered if I’d hit all the right notes.” That’s just it, isn’t it? There are more notes to come.
06. Dormant Ordeal – Tooth and Bone
Willowtip Records
Dylan Thomas’s Favourite Metal Song: “Against the Dying of the Light”
In the grand scheme of things, we had it coming. What we call fate. Tooth and Bone rains and pours, a forever-oncoming of diluvian proportions. Deft instrumentation, intense reflection, songs and ideas crafted to indulge and purge. Early returns on “Halo of Bones,” “Horse Eater,” and “Solvent” bore out, while “Everything That isn’t Silence is Trivial” and “Against the Dying of the Light” gave us something worth grasping and relinquishing all the same. This is tragedy and comedy on the world’s stage, played out in melody and ferocity. “It doesn’t have to be today,” though it will be one day.
05. Wrekmeister Harmonies – Flowers in the Spring
Thrill Jockey Records | FIF
Most Aptly Named Drone Track: “Fuck the Pigs”
Whether you find it soothing or arresting, Flowers in the Spring is affectively rich and richly effective. These are fortuitous frequencies for the overwrought and shaky. These are dilating drones for the increasingly claustrophobic and hunched. Take off your shoes, take up some room, and take it all in. Feel that it’s okay to exist in the minutiae or the grandeur of it all. Movements like “Fuck the Pigs” and “A Shepherd Stares in the Sun” beat back Saïs’s desire to unveil Isis. Our lives are a succession of things that can’t be undone. That’s truth enough, come what may.
04. End It – Wrong Side of Heaven
Flatspot Records
Song to Show the Zionists in Your Life: “Anti-Colonial”
Wrong Side of Heaven is a band playing to all its strengths, particularly the exciting, unique versatility of their vocalist Akil Godsey. It’s not just the cover of Maximum Penalty’s “Could You Love Me?” either. It’s in “Pale Horse,” “Cloutbusting,” “Life Sublime,” and “Anti-Colonial,” too, where the band’s Baltimore bounce wraps itself around Akil’s vocals like a glove. Whether offering up earnest self-introspection, critiquing genocidal campaigns, or championing the pockmarked beauty of hardcore, End It approach everything with raw, refreshing honesty. I don’t want to hear one more word about that other Baltimore band. That’s the wrong side of history.
03. Moving Mountains – Pruning of the Lower Limbs
Wax Bodega | FIF
Choicest Lullaby for Crybabies: “Ghosts”
It was the beautiful sickness of love and adoration that ever made me think Moving Mountains could return after all these years and match what they did before they left us, but ultimately it doesn’t matter because Pruning of the Lower Limbs is an adoring love letter to all the sick and beautiful of this world. I’m aching for the acoustic corniness of “Blue,” for the poppy celebration of “Wedding Clothes,” for the ribcage reverberations of “All Here,” for the soft touch of “Everyone is Happy,” and for the flood of tears of “Ghosts.” It’s just simply who I am.
02. Stomach – Low Demon
Hibernation Release | Review
Soundtrack to Unpleasant Living: “Dredged”
In a year of not doing very much right with putting words on a page, my July review of Low Demon, the second album from Chicago’s Stomach, was one of very few high points. It is distressing, life, such as it is, with its endless pathways to thwarting you. The only habits you form are bad ones. The only streak you can string together is an unbroken streak of broken streaks. You’re doing your goddamned best, and God bless you for it, but Cruelty is now our Godhead, and we are beset by its blessings. Find another way to worship.
01.Home Front – Watch it Die
La Vida Es Un Mus | FIF
The Antidote to It All: “Light Sleeper”
And there is always another way. Yeah, they’re gonna “pick and pull at you,” and, yeah, they’re gonna leave you with “fuck all,” and, yeah, we can’t seem to stop “dancing with anxiety,” but, even then, you might be able to understand “all this anger is just pain.” If you can do that? If you can redefine the world for yourself, or redefine yourself for the world, then you can do anything. One thing you can do, lucky for us, is make the best retro-’80s record since we started making retro-’80s records. ‘Cause that empire-setting sun “never sets on us.”
Spear
Making me choose a top 10 album every year feels like what I imagine having to choose your favorite among your own children would be like, except that would probably be easier since you don’t squirt out a new one every week or two. Fortunately for me, I had a surprising amount of crossover with other writers in the Toilet crew’s lists, which made paring it down a bit easier this year. As always, I aimed to select albums that didn’t get a showing on anyone else’s top 10, and as always, it’s presented in alphabetical order by band.
ADE – Supplicium
Time To Kill | Premiere/Review
ADE is proof that death metal is always elevated by the addition of a bouzouki and some hand drums. I’ve described these guys as “Nile for the Roman empire” before, but there’s some Nevermore-style riffing on here that helps give them their own musical identity despite the similarity to their Egypt-obsessed peers. It moves, it grooves, it’ll send hundreds of thousands of its legions to die conquering the Mediterranean nations.
Blindfolded and Led to the Woods – The Hardest Thing About Being God Is That No One Believes Me
Prosthetic Records | TTT Feature
With each new release, Blindfolded and Led to the Woods find new ways of making music that is equal parts banging and upsetting. The amusing (and frankly perfect) album title hides behind it some of the band’s most intense and disturbing material, a concept album whose final line carries the band’s name. Rarely does lyricism match the ugliness of the music in extreme metal, but this one makes my skin crawl, and for that I have to applaud them.
Brainblast – Colossus Suprema
Vmbrella
Brainblast boldly asked the question, “What if First Fragment had a loud-ass orchestra going along with all the other stuff?” and by god did they deliver on that premise, even getting the talents of Nicholas Wells and Dominic Lapointe on drums and fretless bass (as well as Rich Gray of Annihilator). While they don’t quite hit the pinch harmonics per minute of their Canadian counterparts, they approach similar levels of noodliness and back it up with a shitload of choirs and strings. This is the pure, uncut tech death excess; one hit of this will keep you going for days, and I know you’ll be around for more.
Hypermass – Apparition Day
Seek & Strike
If any of you melodeath riff perverts haven’t heard this yet, you need to do yourselves a favor and put this in your ear buttholes right now. Each of this EP’s 5 songs are incredible earworms despite being on the longer side of songs for this genre, most around 6 minutes. The opening hook of “Neovortex” has bored a hole into my brain at this point, but the whole thing is incredibly catchy. Apparition Day is pure guitar porn, and it’s immaculately paced and fun as all hell.
Noise Trail Immersion – Tutta la Morte in un solo punto
I, Voidhanger | Dissodaddies feature
Me too, giant screaming black ocean baby. Me too.
Revocation – New Gods, New Masters
Metal Blade | Review
In retrospect, I may have been a bit too hung up on a minor gripe with this album in my review. I have only grown to appreciate this new Revocation album more since its release; it doesn’t have the immediate fun factor of Netherheaven, but it’s as angry as the band has been in years and mean and nasty as they’ve ever been. And, of course, the musicianship is immaculate. Thrashy tech death at its finest.
Slaughtersun – Black Marrow
Independent | TTT Feature
Using an electric violin in place of a guitar is not something I’d have ever thought to do in metal, but Slaughtersun shows that not only is it a viable alternative, it’s fucking sick. Novelty aside, it gives the music a unique fuzzy tone that works surprisingly well with the band’s hyper-aggressive death thrash. These guys have The Juice™, and I really hope we hear more from them soon.
Synaptic – Enter the Void
Lifeless Chasm Records | TTT Feature
Now this is some TECH-DEATH-ass tech death right here, super melodic shit chock full of weedlies and relentless in pace. It was also the first new album I listened to this year, and the fact that it’s stuck with me all the way to now should speak volumes about its quality. The interplay between the strings is busy and complex, but the way they build their harmonies and counterpoint melodies make it fairly easy to follow along, or make it sound natural to the ear anyway. It also makes the spots where they slow down and slap you with a fat groove hit that much harder. An instant classic as far as I’m concerned.
Tribal Gaze – Inveighing Brilliance
Nuclear Blast
Talking about a “refinement” of the musical equivalent of getting your head slammed in a car door might seem a little silly, but there’s an art to making music that inflicts brain damage. Tribal Gaze were already cooking on The Nine Choirs, and they took it to the next level on this one. They’ve got stronger hooks, better pacing, more variety from riff to riff, and they keep it fun without it feeling tongue-in-cheek. No-frills death metal records like this are a dime a dozen, so making one that keeps me engaged and coming back for more is quite a feat.
Weald & Woe – Far From the Light of Heaven
Fiadh Productions | Review
No release this year left me spoiling for battle and conquest like Far From the Light of Heaven. For as much as the lyrics speak of the misery of waging war in a distant land, the music itself makes it sound awesome. This is the sound of the enemy’s pitiful assault breaking uselessly upon your walls as your archers rain arrows from the ramparts. These are the songs you play when your rams fall upon the castle gates like thunder, turning them into so much firewood. It’s also probably what played for the crusaders as they died of typhoid on the way to wage a comedically unsuccessful war in the Middle East, so, you know, at least they got to hear some sick jams as their souls sunk into the pits of hell.
Rolderathis
2025 was a tough year for life and a great one for metal music. My BC wishlist continued growing to an insurmountable height (I can hear Spear‘s laughter from above), and I listened to far less new music than I wanted to. If only I had 7 days of BIG, MEATY LISTS to help me catch up. I want to say thank you to our readers, writers, Discordians, and endangered species Commentator disqii for continuing to flush with us despite a distressing (to say the least) present—this crapper would crumble without your support and shidposts.
10. Skaphos – Cult of Uzura
Transcending Obscurity | Track Premiere
Another year, another non-Euclidean horror traveling through the spheres to desecrate my year-end list—such is life in the Girardiverse™. Skaphos does blackened death a little differently than most in the style, with streams of eerie melody rising from the deep, adding color out of space to a genre I often find lacking in personality.
A host of deranged voices reverberates through Cult of Uzura: acolytes drone their deity’s name in the title track, and “Echoes of the Drowned” features a throat-singing intro that lends unearthly ambience to the proceedings. (There’s even a Mercyful Fate falsetto in “Mad Man and the Sea” that I find quite charming.) While it’s not explicitly written with this intent, what begins as a relatively tame record slowly unravels into insanity, with greater variety and more surprises in store the further we sink. However, it’s probably unwise to believe anything I say; I went delightfully mad the second I set eyes on Uzura’s cyclopean visage.
9. Narrenwind – Gorzkie plony
Pagan Records | TTT Feature
Gorzkie plony has a carnival air about it, but imagine Cooger & Dark as opposed to Napalm “step right up”-ery. Guttural (yet highly expressive) vocals bellow like caged beasts from these black ‘n roll tracks, and I’m reminded of the theatrics of the Hellenic metal scene. A tapestry of reverb coats the album, adding an arena rock gloss to songs like “Na próżno” and “Nikt nie wie” without drowning out the details.
Narrenwind’s more aggressive side takes influence from Ruun-era Enslaved (“Kantylena”), speed metal (“Koniugacja”), and guitar-driven folk metal (Khirki and Quasarborn come to mind); it’s an eclectic mix that took me several spins to start appreciating, but I’m glad I didn’t give up on this strange circus. Doing so would’ve made me a fool, and we’ve got enough of those in the genre already.
8. Insidius – Vulgus Illustrata
Black Lion Records
Ahh, Polish death metal: one of the few reasons I’ll volunteer to be slaughtered, ground into mincemeat, and shoved in a sheep intestine. Vulgus Illustrata echoes the abattoir in its cold, mechanistic precision, but veins of melody and an infusion of disparate genres ensure the album never sounds lifeless; “Orgiastic”‘s start/stop intro and hypnotic breakdown recall Nevermore at their most nu metal (laudatory), and “Censure”‘s densely-layered tremolos channel Serpents Lair‘s take on blackened death.
Insidius raised this album in a cage of claustrophobic dissonance—a sound I’m just starting to explore (thanks, Brock)—and in combination with the organic production, I received my coup de grâce. I am nothing but a captive (bolt) audience when Vulgus Illustrata reverberates above the killing floor.
7. Jordsjuk – Naglet til livet
Indie Recordings
Jordsjuk’s black metal is bitter as winter wind and sharp as a rat’s incisors, with nary a ritual nor corpse paint in sight. There is no escapism here: no theater, no magic, just the bleakness of urban decay and the ugly sounds that accompany it. Naglet til livet leaves little room between instrument and audience, favoring dry, nearly caustic production over smothering reverb; the result is an album that makes an immediate impact through its severity.
Opening track “Kollaps” inundates listeners with blastbeats like acid rain, but the band is comfortable spreading their suffering in a variety of tempos. Whether encrusted in d-beats (“Grovt skadeverk”) or waltzing piss-drunk down a dark alley (“Til ettertids plage”), the songs on Naglet til livet never outstay their welcome—and thank goodness, I’d be a pile of raw hamburger in a gutter somewhere if this album topped 40 minutes. I think you’ll like it.
6. Blackwater – Aporia
Independent
I’ve spent much of 2025 in my own aporia, watching truth erode along with the rights of my most vulnerable friends and family. Blackwater’s farewell EP, a rabid mix of blackened deathgrind, hardcore, and post-metal, practically froths at the mouth in anger, providing a perfect soundtrack to our current of national (and moral) degradation. Aporia‘s jagged, bare-bones production coats the borders of each track in razor wire, making for a visceral experience that stays lodged in the body long after the music’s bled out.
Songs like “Constant Paradigm” and the title track recall Dying Fetus at their grooviest while still sounding seconds from collapse; this balancing act is all the more impressive when caustic, blackened vocals (think Full of Hell or Anaal Nathrakh) and morose melodies enter the fray. Aporia clung to me like a leech this entire year—and a little more, as it technically released in the last days of 2024—but unlike vocalist Fabian Lindberg’s dire pronunciation, it didn’t drain my spirit or drag me down; rather, it staved off complacency and kept me pissed off enough to fight another day.
5. Melpomene – A Body Is A Suggestion
Independent | TTT Feature
I love when a band name alone sends me down a Wikipedia spiral. In the case of Melpomene, I found out she’s the Muse of tragedy in Greek mythology; it would’ve been tragic indeed if I’d let this project slip through my feathers. Fortunately, the stellar artwork that drew me in is matched in quality by the instrumental everythingcore beneath the surface—a veritable cascade of genres that will speak its own language to every listener.
Through smoky jazz, subtle electronics, fusion guitar heroics in the vein of CHON and Plini, and the gnarliest rhythm hand this side of Convulsing, A Body Is A Suggestion shines in each of its many facets. This album encourages all who hear it to rip themselves open, contemplate what’s inside, and let it bloom into the world, regardless of the reception.
4. ARHAAIK – Uihtis
Eisenwald | TTT Feature
With a crack of cudgel on cranium, ARKHAAIK sent me back several millennia, to a time when the realms of man and beast were less stratified by religious dogma. This blackened death/doom opus—with Proto-Indo-European lyrics, reconstructed by Zurich-based academic, SzaSza—transports listeners to the Bronze Age to watch the sun rise and set on a day of hunting and ritual slaughter.
From ecstatic battle-cries to cymbals that sound like they were excavated during an archaeological dig (“Geutores Suhnos“), Uihtis employs a unique sonic palette that feels genuinely ancient. The band’s mastery of mood and setting stirs up a sense of yearning in me that will be familiar to history nerds: the incurable itch to traverse time and see the world as it once was; to reach out and touch the mysteries of the distant past.
3. Phantom Spell – Heather & Hearth
Independent
By the time the adorable, warbly synth intro to “The Autumn Citadel” crossed my eardrums, it was too late: I was caught in Phantom Spell’s clutches. Having been raised on a diet of classic and prog rock—with bands like Heart, Kansas, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer in regular rotation—I was particularly susceptible to this project’s retro charms. “Retro prog” might sound like an oxymoron, but Kyle McNeill’s songwriting manages to both pay homage to yesteryear’s pioneers and weave in the rhythmic intensity of heavy metal without once approaching banality.
From tales of high fantasy (“The Autumn Citadel”) to the title track’s ode to pastoral life, Heather & Hearth handles epic-length tracks and shorter, punchier numbers with the same level of care and attention to detail. There’s a warmth imbued throughout the album that speaks to McNeill’s deep love and respect for his musical forebears, resulting in a class act with elements that just about anyone can appreciate.
2. Jordfäst – Blodsdåd Och Hor
Black Lion Records
I’m already a sucker for this sort of folk-tinged black metal; throw in epic tracks split into movements with liberal use of leitmotifs, and it’s over. I didn’t expect much when I saw the monochromatic landscape art, but the instant “Ett altare av skärvor pt1” started, my ambivalence melted away. Blodsdåd Och Hor is suffused with atmosphere of the Viking variety: melodic, mid-paced riffs evoke the steady rhythm of oars, and choral cleans lend the weight of ages.
While melody adds depth of emotion to the album, the most grim and frostbitten among us will find cold comfort in blasting blackthrash segments and Olof’s rasping vocals which, oddly enough, approach skramz/screamo in their hoarse delivery. In moments of unexpected beauty (the emotive leads in “Dit gudarna trälar är pt2”) and impish delight, Jordfäst showcases the elasticity of this (once) insular genre.
1. Chaos Inception – Vengeance Evangel
Lavadome Productions | Review | TTT Feature
Chaos Inception is a fitting name for the band that set my listening habits into an unrecoverable tailspin this year. Since my first listen in February, I’ve pored over the seemingly endless depths of Vengeance Evangel on a daily basis, to the detriment of my quality time with all other albums. Whether noticing a quiet guttural submerged in the background or a particularly inhuman fill from Kévin Paradis, subtle details continue rising to the surface like so many bloated corpses.
The album has taken up permanent residence in my car stereo and the remaining folds of my brain, so much so that I’ve considered utterly debasing myself by creating a Metal-Archives account to upload the lyrics included with my physical copy. Do you remember the scene in Ratatouille where the nasty food critic takes a bite of the eponymous dish and is transported in an instant to a watershed moment deep in his past? This record had the same impact on me, but I was spirited away to the day I first heard Nile‘s Annihilation of the Wicked, my initiation into the absurd revelry that is brutal death metal. There aren’t enough superlatives in the English language to express my adoration for Vengeance Evangel, so I will simply say it’s my favorite death metal album of all time.
Make sure to check out LISTMANIA 2K25 Days I | II | III | IV | V | VI as well!
