(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.

Continue reading Year in Review: The Music of 2025 (Part 1) →