2025 wasn’t a year, it was an open throated scream. Every corner of heavy music came out swinging.
Bands returned hungry, new voices rose out of the underground like fresh tectonic shifts, and long standing icons reminded everyone why metal still owns the emotional bandwidth of the damned and the devoted.
Genres blurred. Rules cracked. Nobody played it safe.
And for Metal Lair, this AOTY list isn’t about trends or algorithms, it’s about the records that hit with force, changed the temperature of a room, or left fingerprints on the inside of your skull long after the last note decayed.
So here it is. Your definitive, defiant, beautifully unhinged Top 10 of 2025 followed by the year’s deeper map of essential releases across every subgenre.
This is your soundtrack to the year we barely survived… and the one that reminded us why we keep going.
Looking for more of Metal Lair’s signature features? Don’t miss our Deep Cuts, Seven Deadly Songs, and our weekly World Metal Weekly.
THE TOP 10 ALBUMS OF 2025 (RANKED)
1. Cryptopsy – An Insatiable Violence.
A devastating reminder that technical death metal can still sound dangerous. Cryptopsy via Season of Mist returned not just sharp, but predatory with riffs coiled like razor wire, drums hitting with inhuman velocity, and songwriting that’s somehow both brain melting and brutally memorable.
This is extreme metal’s final exam, and most bands wouldn’t pass it.
2. Harakiri for the Sky – Scorched Earth
Post-black metal at its most cinematic and emotionally ruinous. Every track feels like a memory set on fire. Towering crescendos, heart sick melodies, and a sense of scale that swallows the horizon.
This record doesn’t ask you to feel something. It demands it.
3. Igorrr – Amen
No artist warped reality harder in 2025 than Igorrr. Breakcore chaos meets baroque opera meets industrial doom meets “what the hell did I just witness?”
Amen is the strangest, boldest album on this list and the one that makes the future feel thrillingly unstable.
4. …And Oceans – The Regeneration Itinerary
A shimmering, high voltage black metal odyssey. Modern, melodic, atmospheric, and electric. This album feels like a neural upgrade.
Synths pulse. Vocals blaze. The whole thing moves with cosmic purpose.
Black metal, but luminous.
5. Allegaeon – The Ossuary Lens
Technical melodic death metal elevated to something philosophical and fully alive. Nothing is wasted, every riff, every tempo shift, every lyric hits with intention.
This is Allegaeon at their most complete: smart, savage, and surprisingly emotional.
6. Blackbraid – Blackbraid III
Atmospheric black metal carved with instinct, myth, and the raw pulse of landscape. Blackbraid continues building one of the most compelling artistic identities in modern metal and III is their most confident statement yet.
Vast, fierce, evocative.
7. Opeth – Last Will and Testament
Opeth in late career brilliance mode. Progressive storytelling woven with shadow, restraint, and a maturity most bands never earn.
This is a band settling into their legacy and still outclassing half the scene.
8. Hooded Menace – Lachrymose Monuments of Obscuration
Funeral gloom with cathedral weight.
A doom record with the patience of a predator, slow moving, suffocating, and beautifully sculpted.
Perfect for anyone who thinks happiness is overrated.
9. Green Carnation – A Dark Poem Pt. I
Melancholic, elegant, atmospheric.
A return to form that feels like time folding back on itself. Green Carnation builds worlds, not songs, and this one is drenched in ache and beauty. A perfect album for winter light.
10. Lorna Shore – I Feel the Everblack Festering Within Me
Symphonic deathcore’s banner bearers deliver another operatic onslaught. Massive, indulgent, dramatic and overwhelming in all the right ways.
A spectacular closer for the Top 10: modern extremity with blockbuster ambition.
THE REST OF 2025: GENRE ESSENTIALS
EXTREME METAL / BLACK / DEATH / CHAOS
• The Great Old Ones – Kadath
• Der Weg einer Freiheit – Innern
• Dawn of Ouroboros – Bioluminescence
• Retromorphosis – Psalmus Mortis
• Changeling – Changeling
• Spiritbox – Tsunami Sea
• Blackbraid – Blackbraid III
• Warbringer – Wrath and Ruin
• The Acacia Strain – You Are Safe from God Here
• Evoken – Mendacium
• Scimitar – Scimitarium I
• Teitanblood – From the Visceral Abyss
• Vacuous – In His Blood
• Barshasketh – Antinomian Asceticism
• Abduction – Existentialismus
• Cénotaphe – Chimères
• Blood Absission – I–I
• Gaahls Wyrd – Braiding the Stories
• The Zenith Passage – Fleshbound Reliquary
• Carach Angren – Cult of Kariba
• Nightfall – Children of Eve
MELODIC DEATH / PROGRESSIVE DEATH / TECHNICAL
• Allegaeon – The Ossuary Lens
• Rivers of Nihil – Self-Titled
• Fallujah – Xenotaph
• Harakiri for the Sky – Scorched Earth
• …And Oceans – The Regeneration Itinerary
• Shadow of Intent – Imperium Delirium
• Havukruunu – Tavastland
• Centuries of Decay – A Monument to Oblivion
PROGRESSIVE / ATMOSPHERIC / ART METAL
• Opeth – Last Will and Testament
• Green Carnation – A Dark Poem Pt. I
• Nite – Cult of the Serpent Sun
• Lacuna Coil – Sleepless Empire
• Helloween – Giants & Monsters
• Dream Theater – Parasomnia
• Katatonia – Nightmares as Extensions of the Waking State
DOOM / SLUDGE / GLOOM / DRONE
• Hooded Menace – Lachrymose Monuments Of Obscuration
• Messa – The Spin
• Mourir – Insolence
• Stoned Jesus – Songs to Sun
• Barren Path – Grieving
INDUSTRIAL / EXPERIMENTAL / AVANT-GARDE
• Igorrr – Amen
• ZERO ABSOLU – La Saignée
• King Parrot – A Young Person’s Guide To
• Ghost Bath – Rose Thorn Necklace
METALCORE / DEATHCORE / MODERN HEAVY
• Lorna Shore – I Feel the Everblack Festering Within Me (Top 10)
• Whitechapel – Hymns in Dissonance
• The Callous Daoboys – I Don’t Want to See You in Heaven
• The Halo Effect – March of the Unheard
• Jinjer – Duél
• Killswitch Engage – This Consequence
• Arch Enemy – Blood Dynasty
• Machine Head – Unatoned
SYMPHONIC / GOTHIC / MELODIC / DARK
• Cradle of Filth – The Screaming of the Valkyries
• Eluveitie – Anv
• Paradise Lost – Ascension
• Lacuna Coil – Sleepless Empire
THRASH / TRADITIONAL / HEAVY METAL
• Testament – Para Bellum
• Warbringer – Wrath and Ruin
• Machine Head – Unatoned
• Bleed From Within – Zenith
EPIC / CONCEPTUAL / NARRATIVE
• The Great Old Ones – Kadath
• Green Carnation – A Dark Poem Pt. I
• Opeth – Last Will and Testament
A year like 2025 doesn’t come around often. It was chaotic, loud, emotionally violent, and creatively fearless, which means it was perfect for metal.
These are the albums that defined it. The ones that sank their teeth in. The ones we’ll still be talking about when 2030 rolls in wearing corpse paint and bad intentions.
Raise a glass. Turn it up. And may the next year be even louder.