(Long post warning)

I’ve briefly discussed a few of the albums that follow at earlier points in the year, but now is the time to gather up those releases as well as the music that has appeared since, and pull it all together into one grand summary.

Alas, this year I barely had time for music exploration: I was heavily engaged in completing the first major draft of the biography I’m writing, so that I could get it out to my beta-readers. I couldn’t dive deeply into the music pile until September. As a result, my “long list” is even shorter than it usually is, and I’m later than usual because I’ve had to spend a lot of time catching up. My personal Rule For Reviewing is not to comment on an album until I’ve listened at least half-a-dozen times, and a couple of the albums I wanted to include (or at least consider) were released pretty late in the year.

Genre-wise: metal and post-metal (quite a bit of that, actually—I am fond of the heavy stuff), rock, prog, industrial, ambient, post-punk, and some other things that don’t really fall under any specific genre but are probably closer to prog if you have to put them somewhere.

So…yeah, what follows is what stuck with me in 2025. I’ve whittled a potential list of about 25 albums down to 15, and I’ve gone with that number (instead of, say, 10) because I liked a lot of what I heard. Still, there were a handful I couldn’t quite squeeze in, but hey, you can’t include everything (however, I’ve seen a couple of lists on Substack that apparently did try to include everything. Come on, 100-Albums-of-The-Year guy—nobody has that kind of time!).

I will split this into two parts, posted separately: Part 1: the bottom ten albums plus a look ahead, and Part 2: the Top 5, with their longer summaries.

What’s Coming in 2026 (that I’m interested in)?

A few things.

A new Ulver album, Neverland, which technically will be released this year (December 31) but I don’t imagine it will show up on too many 2025 lists. Two singles are available now, suggesting that once again these guys are going off in a new, rather interesting direction.

Puscifer: Normal Isn’t, to be released on Feb. 6^th. I am looking forward to this one, on the strength of a couple of singles that have been out for a while now, and which have reinforced my preference for Puscifer over Tool.

Yeah, I said it.

The singles are available in all the usual places.

Karnivool: In Verses, also to be released on Feb. 6^th.  This is highly anticipated by the prog community, and I like one of their singles, don’t like another, and am meh about the third. The album promises to be strongly melodic prog-metal, but I’m on the fence.

Shearwater: The New World. Latest update on the album is that it’s pretty much done, a few things left to take care of, but Jonathan Meiburg is currently in Antarctica (!) researching his next book (which is also welcome news just going by how great his last one was). Projected release for the album is “mid-year.”

Quiet Sun: not sure of the title yet. Fifty years after the release of the criminally overlooked classic prog/fusion album Mainstream, the guys (that is, Phil Manzanera, Bill MacCormick, Dave Jarrett, and Charles Hayward) got back together to make a follow-up. The album apparently will consist of demos and outtakes from 1970-71 and 74-75, and new material. It is slated for early summer of 2026 (all this info courtesy of Bill MacCormick).

Something else I can’t talk about, but I surely am looking forward to it.

So far that is all I can think of, but I’m sure I’ll remember something else as soon as I hit “publish.”

Now: Albums 15 to 6.

I had a terrible time ranking this list. I’d try, and then the next day decide that I liked a particular album or two better than I thought I did, so I’d shuffle things around. After doing this for a couple of weeks I realized that yes, it really was a strong year for music, and everything here has given me a lot of enjoyment, and I gave up trying to sort them out. Which is not to say that I think that these ten releases are of equivalent quality or hit me to the same degree, but any attempt to impose some kind of numerical order is arbitrary and driven by my mood on any given day. So: alphabetical it is.

Amorphis: Borderland   (Progressive folk-metal from Finland)

This album was a bit of a grower—because it focuses more on the prog and less on the metal this time around, it didn’t grab my attention right away. As well, I find it a bit too long and samey, and my interest flags at times. Overall though, it is nice, melodic, decently heavy, with a well-balanced mix of growl and clean vocals (Tomi Joutsen is one of my favourite metal vocalists). At the end of the day however it is not particularly memorable—once it’s over, it’s over. I described it earlier as metal for people who think they don’t like metal; the best word I can think of for this album, in the context of their discography, is safe.

Key tracks: “Bones,” “Despair”

 

Amplifier: Gargantuan  (space/psychedelic prog from UK)

This is the sprawling, ambitious, and spacey follow-up to 2023’s Hologram, which I loved and made No. 1 (tied with Riverside’s ID.Entity). Gargantuan however is much looser than Hologram, longer and messier and a bit more experimental. I like the album, but I also find it a bit wearing: the first three tracks are space-prog powerhouses but after that the songs are hit-and-miss, veering between epic lush prog and borderline disorganization (a lot of that is down to Matt Brobin’s everything-all-at-once style of drumming).

The band may be undergoing a bit of a resurgence: months ago (or was it last year? I can’t keep track any more) they streamed their first (self-titled) album live, and I have seen that album subsequently pop up in the lists of online reviewers (not as a 2025 release of course, but as a hey-look-what-I-found! kind of thing). At any rate, if they are being re-discovered, more power to them.

Key tracks: “Invader,” “Black Hole,” “Cross Dissolve”

 

Author and Punisher: Nocturnal Birding  (industrial noise/drone metal from the US)

Former mechanical engineer Tristan Shone builds his own massive “drone machines” and “dub machines” and hauls them around the world on tour to play this stuff, which is monstrously dark and brutal industrial drone metal. He’s been a solo act for most of his career, but for this album has a guitarist and various guests.

Based on ecological themes and incorporating birdsongs and tribal rhythms, Nocturnal Birding is brief (about 35 minutes), intense, relentless, and far more interesting than Krüller, his previous effort. It pummels you right out of the gate and never lets up. I’m glad to see him back on track—although the album, being a rather extreme example of the genre, is not for everyone. He will be on tour across North America and Europe this coming spring in case anyone wants to experience the ear-bleed live.

Key tracks: “Titanis,” “Thrush”

 

Gadi Caplan: Play It Again  (indie art-prog/jazz/fusion from US/Israel)

Israeli guitarist Gadi Caplan gets nowhere near the attention he deserves, due a large part to his low-key presence and a mere handful of releases that defy easy classification. His playing is beautiful: understated, fluid, evocative and enormously skilled, and his songwriting top-notch. The pieces on Play It Again range from folky pop to jazz fusion to indie art-rock songs, but the core of the album is something else again—an astonishing, sweeping suite of three songs right in the middle, a remarkable fusion of prog/oriental/trance, featuring Caplan’s supple guitar and outstanding musicianship from everyone else involved (that bass-and-drum duo is from another planet!!). This is a rather different album than anything else here, and is well worth the time.

Key tracks: “Evoke/Passage/Memory”

 

Rhys Fulber: Memory Impulse Autonomy  (EBM/industrial/electronica from Canada)

Fulber has been a fixture in the industrial/techno world for decades, from Front Line Assembly and Delerium (with Bill Leeb) in the 1980s, through Noise Unit and Synaesthesia (again with Leeb) in the ‘90s, through to production and programming work with other artists such as Fear Factory, Paradise Lost, and Machine Head. Here and there a solo album would appear.

MIA is his eighth (and first for his new label Artoffact Records), and was made as an exercise in nostalgia, looking back to his youth and his early days of making music (with the primitive technology available at the time), but still modern for all that. It is less straight-up industrial and more song-based (bringing in several guest vocalists) than his last album (2021’s Brutal Nature), but there is no shortage of chugging EBM techno among the more sedate, somewhat ambient offerings.

Key tracks: “The Abyss,” “Exclavier”

 

Gaupa: Fyr   (stoner/psych metal from Sweden)

There are a couple of EPs in this list, and this is one of them. Fyr is the first offering from Gaupa after the departure of founding member and guitarist Daniel Nygren, which left them as a foursome. Dense stoner metal riffage and powerhouse singing from vocalist Emma Näslund pummels relentlessly in “Lion’s Thorn,”; the rest of the EP isn’t quite as imposing as that first track but the last one gets close in its prog-metal sensibilities. Heavy and tasty and it doesn’t wear out its welcome.

Key track: “Lion’s Thorn”

 

Gösta Berlings Saga: Forever Now  (instrumental fusion/prog/experimental from Sweden)

Named after a famous Swedish novel, this instrumental progressive/jazz collective has existed for a quarter century, known for their complex blending of melodic progressive and experimental rock with jazz and electronics. Forever Now is their seventh studio album, and it demonstrates their sound and approach as well as anything. They tend to stay strongly melodic but can occasionally wander off into improv and experimentation; your tolerance for that may vary. There are certainly hints of the earlier more fringy days of prog in this release—for example bits of some Canterbury-scene outfits—but they aren’t derivative and manage to avoid pretty much all of the current prog/prog-metal musical clichés that litter that particular landscape. (No, I’m not a fan of that, how can you tell?)

Key tracks: “Full Release,” “Fragment II,” “Ceremonial”

 

Salt of the Chief Cornerstone: Blood Salt and Tears (instrumental post-metal from Canada)

Salt are a guitar-and-drum duo (Brandon Blanchette on guitars and synths; Iven Kakoz on drums) who’ve been playing together for almost two decades, and they create intensely heavy and face melting post-metal, with emphasis on the “metal.” Out of all the entries this year, these guys are up there with Author and Punisher for sheer intensity.

This is their first album since 2014’s Intelligent Design, which was one of the best things I’d heard that year. But it had been so long (and they’d disappeared so thoroughly) that I thought they were finished. Needless to say, I was really stoked when they re-appeared after 11 years with news of a new album.

Blood Salt and Tears follows the formula of Intelligent Design: intense melodic guitar riffage and truly insane drumming, but this offering is tighter and leaner, and incorporates some new ideas—or at least, some instruments you wouldn’t expect to hear in such powerhouse metal (bagpipes and banjo, anyone?), but they work. The ten tracks are named after colours: Blue, Orange, and so on, maybe evoking the stained-glass window of the cover design. At any rate, while I don’t think it is quite as strong as Intelligent Design, it is well worth the listen if you are into headbanging.

Key tracks: “White,” “Silver”

 

Sisters of… Marie/Michel (instrumental doom/psych metal from the US)

Rather like Salt, Sisters of… are a post-metal duo from Missouri, who occasionally pop up with some new, intense, and tasty heaviness, in the form of EPs, singles, and (so far) one full-length album. This year they have given us a brief, two-track EP that (at the moment) is only available on streaming services.

The Sisters of… guys play a variety of instruments between them (drums, guitar, bass, synths), and incorporate a lot of drone and heavy chugging guitars, which gives their music a dark, doomy, contemplative feel, and Marie/Michel is a perfect example of their approach. The tracks were released separately, and that is how they are found on Youtube, but seriously: go to Spotify and play them as an EP—they are written to flow seamlessly together and should be experienced that way.

Key track: the entire EP

 

The Thumpmonks: Just Under the Skin (ambient electronica from the US)

The Thumpmonks (not to be confused with Thumpermonkey, an entirely different outfit) are a couple of guys—Brian Gocher and Max Hsu—who mostly compose scores for games, ads and movie trailers (though not the movies themselves). Their longest-running gig has been providing the OSTs for Polish game creator Mateusz Skutnik’s video games (the Submachine series and Slice of Sea for example). That background music is often as minimalist as possible, so I was surprised at how rich and substantial this album is.

Spooky, moody, and drenched with atmosphere, completely electronic but often with an analogue feel, these tracks buzz with anxiety, brooding and evocative—the soundtrack roots are obvious and it’s clear that whoever these guys are, they know what they are doing. It does get a bit samey by about two-thirds through, but it is excellent background music. If anything, they remind me at times of Necro Deathmort (who are also noted for their atmospheric ambience). Available on streaming services and a digital download only on Bandcamp.

Key tracks: “Just Under the Skin,” “Night Machine”

 

 

Odds and Ends. Here are some words on:

Mariusz Duda: Pianos Under Unsun

This little EP was a bonus with fan-club purchases of the latest Lunatic Soul album, and was also made available at the live LS promotional meetings that Duda conducted across Poland in November. It may eventually appear on his Bandcamp page as an MD release.

It consists of brief, heavily reverbed solo piano pieces (with a few other effects here and there), ranging from mere fragments of ideas to complete musical thoughts, the aim simply to create atmosphere. It feels like more a glimpse into his creative process than a full-fledged EP, with no real musical connection to TWUU besides the fact that the titles form an acrostic. As they would.

Key track: “Reflection”

 

Arka’n Asrafokor: Zã Keli

This album actually came out in 2019, and I’m gonna talk about it because not only is it an excellent album, but is also representative of African metal, a corner of metal that gets little notice. Indeed, African anything is very rare among the heavily-European-music-based listeners I find myself a part of, and they are missing out on a lot of great stuff.

But anyway. These guys are from Togo, West Africa, and this is their first album, a fascinating amalgam of black metal-meets-traditional African folk, with its tribal rhythms, choral vocals, and odd guitar tunings blended with straightforward metal song structure—it’s safe to say that it doesn’t sound much like the vast majority of the genre.

Their second album is not as interesting because it is more straightforwardly standard black metal, and comes across as less adventurous as a result.

Key tracks: “Warrior Song,” “Awala,” “Return of the Ancient Sword”