Number 25:

Band: T R Y S T E

Album: To Rise You Seek The End

Genre: Post Black Metal/Blackgaze

Label: Independent

The album is a place where clean, heavenly tones seduce you into calm just before the music rips your head off. They build enormous, plush soundscapes and glassy, delayed guitar lines that bloom into a devotional warmth. Vocals sit perfectly in the mix as if they were another instrument in a cathedral of sound. Those clean timbres are addictive: shimmering, rounded, and they invite surrender. The album has melancholy and longing in the cleans, visceral rage and dread in the harshness. It’s a record for listeners who enjoy being soothed and then shaken awake. It nails that uneasy marriage that is seductive, punishing, and unforgettable.

Number 24:

Band: Orob

Album: Golden Tears of Love and Sorrow     

Genre: Post Black Metal

Label: L’Ordalie Noire

France is one of the hot beds for modern Metal these days. The album walks a feral line of Post-Black Metal and the expanding horizons of Progressive Metal that it keeps brushing up against like a hand on a forbidden door. It’s harsh, but not primitive, expansive, but never polished to sterility. The interplay creates a kind of emotional chiaroscuro. You feel the darkness, but you can also sense the shapes surviving within it. It’s music that claws upward even as it sinks deeper, and that contradiction is what makes it compelling.

Number 23:

Band: Asira

Album: As Ink In Water

Genre: Progressive/Post Black Metal

Label: Independent

This album is a storm forged from countless currents of Metal, pulling from blackened ferocity, progressive intricacy, and melodic catharsis. Rather than sounding like a disjointed patchwork, the band bends these influences into a fluid, purposeful whole. It’s a journey where every shade of Metal collides and coexists. The result is both cathartic and challenging, an album that reminds us why Metal’s endless diversity is its greatest strength.

Number 22:

Band: Ihlo

Album: Legacy

Genre: Progressive Metal

Label: Kscope

An unbroken thread of melody carries the listener through an emotional spectrum. Their music exists in that space where progressive metal’s precision and compositional complexity merge with raw human feeling, creating something both powerful and deeply personal. The emotional breadth of IHLO’s sound is its defining strength. The songs give space for reflection, but they also demand release. They capture isolation and connection, despair and determination, collapse and rebirth. By the album’s end, you remember most how it felt. The album resonates in the bones, the breath, and the quiet spaces you carry inside.

Number 21:

Band: Rivers of Nihil

Album: Rivers of Nihil

Genre: Progressive Death Metal

Label: Metal Blade

The album registers as a bold and ferocious entry into the realm of Progressive Death Metal that marries unrelenting aggression with a structural intelligence rare in the genre. It is a balancing act between chaos and calculation…a sound that never loses its teeth, even as it brushes against moments of eerie melody and intricate musicianship. In a landscape crowded with brutality for brutality’s sake, this album is a fusion of relentless death metal ferocity, progressive ambition, and melodic sensibility. It’s the sound of a band not afraid to push, twist, and mold their aggression into forward progress. It's evolution with its fists still clenched.

Number 20:

Band: Novembre

Album: Words of Indigo

Genre: Progressive Death/Doom Metal

Label: Peaceville

You might expect a band with this longevity to be stale after all of these years, but you would be dead wrong. There’s a powerful tension between grace and aggression. The instruments hit with a sense of purpose, the guitars snarl and shimmer in equal measure, and the vocals hover between anguish and awe. Beneath the thick layers of sound lies a strange sense of wonder, as if the band is trying to wrestle meaning from the chaos, to find some fragile light buried deep within the noise. It’s the kind of record that just feels alive. The melodies ache, the heaviness hums, and it feels like a meditation on strength through struggle. 35 years later, NOVEMBRE is still killing the game.

Number 19:

Band: Brevine

Album: Lhotse

Genre: Post Metal

Label: These Hands Melt

What keeps the album from sinking into unrelenting bleakness is its remarkable sense of melody and restraint. Just when the walls of noise threaten to overwhelm, the music opens into passages of calm reflection: clean guitar lines shimmering through the haze, bass tones carrying an almost mournful weight, and melodies that feel fragile but determined to endure. This is Post Metal at its most evocative…an album that sounds like standing among ruins, feeling both the weight of what has been lost and the faint hope of what might be rebuilt.

Number 18:

Band: Lucynine

Album: Melena

Genre: Horror Black Metal

Label: Talheim

If you aren’t aware, the genre boundaries for Black Metal are very wide these days. Each song on “Melena” feels like a journey into the unknown, unpredictable and unnerving, yet always purposeful. Dissonant chords stab through moments of haunting calm, blast beats erupt like storms, and subtle progressive flourishes twist the path further, ensuring the listener never feels safe. It’s rare to hear a Black Metal album this frightening that also demonstrates such compositional control. The band proves they are not just conjurers of atmosphere, but master songwriters who can bend structure and complexity to their will without sacrificing raw intensity.

Number 17:

Band: Tomarum

Album: Beyond Obsidian Euphoria

Genre: Progressive Black Metal

Label: Prophecy Productions

The band has a seemingly endless plethora of tools at their disposal on the album. As complex as the album is, and as utterly ambitious as their vision was, it also has a binding cohesion to it. On sheer musicianship alone, it is simply beyond the standard rating system.  It is a rare feat to craft something so technically precise yet emotionally gripping, so brutally intense yet undeniably elegant. This is not just an album for those who crave speed, aggression, and virtuosity—it is an album for those who seek an experience, one that pushes and pulls, devastates and soothes. It’s a masterclass in precision, power, and poise.

Number 16:

Band: Lux Terminus

Album: Cinder

Genre: Progressive/Electronic Metal

Label: Independent

“Cinder” is an ascent—a journey through cascading waves of emotion, carried aloft by impeccable musicianship and a sparkling sense of undying hope. There’s a resilience to this album—a refusal to descend into despair. Even in its most subdued passages, there is always movement, always breath, always a soft promise: that dawn will come, that beauty still lingers, that hope is an eternal flame. For me, it delivers one of the most uplifting and compositionally rich musical experiences of the year.

Number 15:

Band: Lunatic Soul

Album: The World Under Unsun

Genre: Progressive Rock

Label: Inside Out

According to the internet, “The world under unsun” might best be understood as a world that exists in darkness. Not destroyed but deprived of light. The album feels like standing at the edge of existence, staring into the space between what is living and what is lost, and the music drifts like mist across forgotten landscapes, pulling emotion from silence as much as from sound. The emotional weight of the album lies in its reflection. It’s a contemplation set to sound, a journey through metaphysical terrain that lies between the pulse of life and the silence that follows it. It’s progressive rock at its most human…a search for truth carried out in echoes, resonance, and light fading into darkness.

Number 14:

Band: Igorrr

Album: Amen

Genre: Progressive/Electronic Death Metal

Label: Metal Blade Records

This album plays like the grand experiment of a mad scientist who has wired every song with unpredictable current. One moment it’s hammering you with chaotic riffs, the next it’s spiraling into strange atmospheric passages, and then it mutates again into some twisted electronic pulse. Two constants keep the chaos tethered. The first is an oppressive darkness that saturates everything, no matter how far the music strays stylistically. The second is the electronic element, which doesn’t just decorate the songs but electrifies them—like jolts to the nervous system. It’s a true testament to the idea that sometimes the most brilliant results come not from order, but from the carefully orchestrated chaos of a mind unafraid to embrace madness.

Number 13:

Band: Heretoir

Album: Sostalgia

Genre: Post Metal

Label: AOP Records

This album looms, building its monolithic soundscapes with patience, tension, and purpose. It’s a towering testament to the genre, reminds us that heaviness isn’t just about distortion or speed…it’s about atmosphere, intent, and emotional gravity. For those willing to surrender to its slow, deliberate pull, the reward is profound…a visceral, cathartic experience that leaves you feeling drained and full at once. The album proves that post-metal is an emotional process, carved in distortion and silence, weight and restraint.

Number 12:

Band: Neurotech

Album: Exo Escapism

Genre: Progressive/Industrial/Electronic Metal

Label: Independent

In a landscape crowded with genre hybrids that often lean too far into excess or restraint, this is a rare achievement: an album that feels physically heavy without ever surrendering its melodic soul. It’s music made of metal and mist—where industrial-weight electronics and punishing riffs grind against your chest while smooth, celestial vocals float above. The songs are meticulously constructed: verses draw you in with layered synthwork and eerie calm, only to erupt into choruses that balance monolithic riffs with earworm hooks. There’s an understanding here of dynamics, of emotional escalation. You don’t just hear the songs—you’re pulled through them. In short, it doesn’t ask you to choose between power and polish. It gives you both. It’s the sound of machinery dreaming. A storm with a lullaby stitched into its eye.

Number 11:

Band: Violet Cold

Album: Modular Consciousness

Genre: Experimental Black Metal

Label: Independent

This album was a breathtaking fusion where glorious melodies soar above the abyss of Black Metal's unrelenting intensity, creating a soundscape that is celestial. In its ascent, it becomes a statement, and a testament to the power of melody, even in the face of oblivion.

Number 10:

Band: Abigail Williams

Album: A Void Within Existence

Genre: Black Metal

Label: Agonia Records

Black metal has always lived in extremes—fury unleashed through blast beats, scorched earth tremolo picking, and vocals that sound like they were torn from the void. But, the finest albums in the genre do more than burn; they carve. This latest release is no exception. It’s a study in strength through precision, aggression shaped by intent, and rage that carries a refined edge. This record stands out by finding a balance within the chaos. It’s aggressive without being mindless, intricate without being pretentious, and melodic without ever compromising its bleak core. This is black metal with teeth—but also with a mind. A storm, but one that knows exactly where it’s going.

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Number 9:

Band: Creatvre

Album: Toujours Humain

Genre: Progressive/Electronic Metal

Label: I, Voidhanger Records

“Tourjous Humain” is a searing slab of metal, grinding forward like a rusted machine coming alive in a storm, its engine built on distortion, repetition, and complex tasks. What makes this record more than just a wall of sonic abrasion is the strange humanity that breathes through its fractured surfaces. What’s most striking is how personal this mechanical monstrosity feels. For all its concrete and steel, this is an album about survival, and finding rhythm inside the noise, and letting yourself breathe even when the air is poisoned.

Number 8:

Band: Psychonaut

Album: World Maker

Genre: Progressive Metal

Label: Pelagic Records

This album is a testament to the dual nature of Progressive Metal, where weight and wonder coexist in perfect balance. The tone of the record shifts constantly. Melodies move like moods, shadowed and reflective one moment, luminous and soaring the next. It’s an album of contrasts…brutal, mechanical grooves give way to passages of near-celestial beauty. This is music that weighs on the listener yet uplifts them. It’s heavy not just in tone, but in meaning…the kind of heaviness that stays with you long after the final note fades, reminding you that beauty and burden often share the same space.

Number 7:

Band: Abraham

Album: IDSUNGWÜSSÄ

Genre: Post Metal

Label: Pelagic Records

The album crawls from the speakers like a living wound…dark, and filthy.  Listening feels less like experiencing music and more like enduring an ordeal…a descent into a pit where pain and madness blur together. It seems chaotic, but it’s a deliberate architecture of horror that transforms suffering into expression. This is not music for comfort or catharsis. It’s music that drags you through filth to remind you what darkness truly feels like, a portrait of anguish painted in noise and decay.

Number 6:

Band: Novelists

Album: Coda

Genre: Progressive Metal

Label: SharpTone

What unfolds over the course of this record is a compelling balancing act between sonic brutality and melodic triumph, a hardened shell cracked open repeatedly by moments of sweeping beauty and unforgettable hooks. What makes this record so powerful is its commitment to memorable moments. Even amidst weighted beats, harsh vocals, and jagged guitars, it’s the melodies—those carved-out, sky-reaching moments of clarity—that give the album its staying power. And they’re not just good. They’re colossal.

Number 5:

Band: Unreqvited 

Album: A Pathway to the Moon

Genre: Black Metal/Blackgaze

Label: Prophecy Productions

The clean vocals add another layer of artistic and even spiritual sublimity to the album. The way that they co-exist with the aggression of Black Metal is key to the sound. Gazing at the moon as meditation may sound a little “out there,” but some say it can help you find a sense of peace and calm and instill a sense of wonder. It’s only January 5, and I already have a contender for album of the year.

Number 4:

Band: …And Oceans

Album: The Regeneration Itinerary

Genre: Black Metal

Label: Season of Mist

At its core, it is a raging beast of Black Metal fury—relentless tremolo-picked guitars, battering drums, and vocals that sound like they are being torn from the depths of something primal and wounded. But beneath that seething chaos, there is something else—a hidden world of nuance, melody, and experimentation that refuses to let the album settle into predictability. For those who crave Black Metal that is not just an assault on the senses but a journey through the abyss, this album delivers…and then some.

Number 3:

Band: Floating

Album: Hesitating Lights

Genre: Progressive Black Metal

Label: Transcending Obscurity

Built on a death metal foundation that’s both precise and primal, the record refuses to remain in one form for long. Instead, it stretches into progressive terrain, dives into melodic undercurrents, and thrives on one core ingredient: tension…the kind that simmers, builds, and transforms. The listener is never allowed to fully settle. Every moment begs the question: what’s coming next? A thinking person’s apocalypse.

Number 2:

Band: Astronoid

Album: Stargod

Genre: Dream Thrash

Label: 3DOTT

This album stands as a testament to how metal’s ironclad backbone can hold up something far brighter than despair or aggression. It can carry joy. Here, the riffs are still muscular, the drums still hit with thunderous conviction, but instead of summoning darkness, they blaze with sunlight. What’s most remarkable is how it embraces melody, harmony, and a sense of fun that most bands in this genre wouldn’t dare approach. In a genre often defined by gloom and fury, this record is the outlier that proves heaviness doesn’t have to mean hopelessness. It’s a joyful roar, a masterclass in making something heavy feel light on its feet, and it burns like love.

Number 1:

Band: An Abstract Illusion

Album: The Sleeping City

Genre: Progressive Death/Black Metal

Label: Willowtip

The album combines the naked ferocity of black and death metal, the elegance of soaring melody, and the sophistication of progressive metal’s structural complexity, yet presenting it all in a way that feels instantly graspable. It speaks to multiple audiences at once. The black/death metal purist will find plenty of savage bite. The melody-driven listener will latch onto motifs that return and evolve with each track. The progressive devotee will marvel at the hidden architecture beneath the surface. Even with all this depth, the music remains immediately accessible. For me, it’s a quantum leap for Progressive Death Metal, and the best album of 2025.