Best Metal Albums of 2025

In releasing their first album in more than 30 years, Coroner had a clear advantage over many reanimated bands: The Swiss thrash trio already sounded so futuristic during their initial late-Eighties-through-mid-Nineties run that there was little risk of coming off as a relic. Still, it’s striking how seamlessly Dissonance Theory slots into a 21st-century metal climate strongly informed by Meshuggah’s cyborg-esque technicality. Blazing through uptempo ragers like “Renewal” or digging into discordant groovefests such as “Transparent Eye” — tracks that instantly recall 1991’s Mental Vortex and 1993’s Grin, respectively — bassist-vocalist Ron Royce, guitarist Tommy T. Baron, and new drummer Diego Rapacchietti recapture the icy ferocity and eerie atmospherics that have made Coroner perennial cult favorites. —Hank Shteamer

The latest album from the endlessly inventive metal band Deafheaven perfectly sums up their magic-trick mix of raw aggression, painterly lyrics, and earworm melodies. Lonely People With Power is an ambitious and oddly gorgeous suite, vacillating between aching isolation and introspective rage. It’s a culmination of a decade and a half of innovation — a mixing and merging of melody and metal, pain and poetry. Some moments explore conventionally masculine rage, but there’s also a membrane of beauty that holds the whole album together. —Brenna Ehrlich

Runemagick, the lachrymose brainchild of vocalist-guitarist Nicklas Rudolfsson, carved out a desolate corner of the underground back in 1990. Since then, they’ve held firm against every trend, beavering away in the name of darkness, death, and doom. Their stately 14th album, Cycle of the Dying Sun (Dawn of Ashen Realms), is a dusty love letter to the old ways — specifically, the late Nineties, when death-doom hybrids like My Dying Bride and Mourning Beloveth were locked in a global struggle with Runemagick to out-miserable one another. Here, Rudolfsson plays around with tempo and makes some interesting stylistic choices (gotta love a “shamanic trance voice”) but ultimately, the new album sounds old in the best possible way: weighty, human, and heavy as a curse. —Kim Kelly

The Nepali American self-described “immigrindcore” quartet Chepang have been grinding away in the D.I.Y. world for the past decade, wowing devotees with their unique approach to the noisy genre — complete with Nepali pop samples. This year, they inked a deal with Relapse, and their fourth album, Jhyappa, saw the band tear through nine tunes in under 20 minutes. In a callback to their first EP, Lathi Charge, Jhyappa trims away any fat to serve up urgent grindcore with a heavy metallic backbone. Nepali lyrics delivered by dual vocalists Bhotey Gore and Mountain God veer between the personal (the frantic, oddly motivational “Ek Hajar Jhut”) and political (the seething, two-stepping “Drivya Shakti”), culminating in a moment of unexpected Zen on outro “Bindhai.” —K.K.

A time-tested rule in metal is that an attention-grabbing act doesn’t mean squat without the songs to back it up. On their second LP, Castle Rat — a self-described “medieval fantasy heavy metal band,” led by guitarist-vocalist Riley Pinkerton, a.k.a. the Rat Queen, who takes the stage looking like both a pro wrestler and a warrior princess — showed that they’ve clearly been taking notes. While their performances court camp, their music has serious depth, pairing chugging High on Fire–via-Sabbath doom with witchy moodiness and an almost artisanal craftsmanship. “It’s important for us to give people a world to step into outside of their own,” Pinkerton recently told New Noise; accordingly, The Bestiary was as expertly transporting as any other metal LP released this year. —H.S.

Rwake has never done things the “right” way. If they had, the doom metallers might have softened their monolithic sound, moved to a scene-y city, or committed to a punishing tour schedule that could have boosted their name recognition and pulled in some extra dough; instead, Little Rock, Arkansas’ heaviest export chose to grow on their own terms. Their sixth LP, The Return of Magick, was released after a 13-year pause, and it is an absolute stunner. The band tempers its trademark tectonic sludge with progressive flourishes, technical ecstasies, trippy interludes (“In After Reverse” is a brain melter), and nifty fretwork from Austin Sublett and John Judkins’ dual power guitars. —K.K.

Cults, demons, and the seven deadly sins made this album one of the year’s darkest — and most fun. Whitechapel vocal gymnast Phil Bozeman shrieked and growled his way over 10 tracks that recounted a hellish portal and the cult leader who wants to reopen its gaping maw. Produced by one of the group’s three(!) guitarists, Zach Householder, Hymns in Dissonance was balls-to-the-wall metal, both in sound and lyrics. Who doesn’t feel like sowing chaos while blaring songs titled “Prisoner 666,” “Diabolic Slumber,” and “Bedlam”? It’s an intense listen, but Whitechapel’s attention to every devilish detail made it one of the year’s best executed. —Joseph Hudak

When Deadguy released their second LP after a three-decade gap this summer, they weren’t just following up any old record. Fixation on a Co-Worker, the metalcore outfit’s 1995 debut, was long enshrined as an underground classic — an unhinged tantrum of metallic hardcore that touched a nerve in any listener who’d ever felt themself losing their grip on sanity while stuck in a soul-crushing office job. Cueing up Near-Death Travel Services opener “Kill Fee,” it was almost concerning how malcontented the band still sounded, writhing and lurching through its signature nails-on-chalkboard riffs as vocalist Tim Singer howled about coping with a world “full of narrow lanes and rigged games.” The rest of the record followed suit with one relentless noise-core expulsion after another, somehow clearing Fixation‘s impossibly high bar. —H.S.

Blut Aus Nord have always shunned predictability to their advantage. Now, two albums into the decidedly noisy Disharmonium trilogy, frontman Vindsval decided to change tack entirely and release a gorgeous melodic black metal album, Ethereal Horizons, instead. The LP harkens back to the icy grandiosity of the band’s Memoria Vetusta trilogy but adds a dash of modern dissonance and clouds of synth-lined prog-rock to its dreamy mid-tempo meandering. Could the album’s bright, cosmic bent, particularly on radiant closer “The End Becomes Grace,” signal the coming of yet another new era? Time will tell. —K.K.

When Lzzy Hale and Co. teamed up with Eric Church producer Jay Joyce for 2015’s Into the Wild Life, fans feared they were going country. Instead, they made one of their hardest rocking albums yet. The same is true for Everest, a ferocious, multi-layered record helmed by Chris Stapleton’s go-to producer, Dave Cobb. Everest is as grand as the eponymous peak and is an overall lush listening experience (put on headphones for the orchestral “Darkness Always Wins”), punctuated by guitarist Joe Hottinger’s technically ornate solos and Hale’s raspy but ever-soulful howl. On the title track, she takes stock of the journey ahead and the hard roads she and the band have traveled thus far: “All my life, I’ve had to fight/and don’t know why, I just keep going,” Hale sings. After six albums, Halestorm keep scaling rock’s mountain. —J.H.

The doom-metal trio Primitive Man has always fed off its hatred for mankind’s monsters, especially fascists. In 2025, we needed them more than ever — and they delivered. Observance, the death/sludge trio’s fourth full-length, sees them paint a grim portrait of a depressed man, haunted by the horrors of the world outside, consumed by the pain of living. From the album’s first blackened, bleeding moment on “Seer,” Primitive Man lean heavily into the doom-y side of their sound, dragging each note through rotten muck and smothering any shard of light beneath layers of distortion. The band’s languid, shuddering tempos only amplify the horror on tracks like “Transactional,” a gutted paean to alienation. Here, Primitive Man capture the zeitgeist of 2025 — its inhumanities, its hatefulness, its despair — and Observance refuses to let us look away. —K.K.

A decade and a half ago, Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy suffered a lapse of reason and quit the beloved prog-metal outfit he co-founded in 1985. Now, with the stickman back in the fold, the quintet sounds complete again on Parasomnia, their 16th album of athletic prog-metal, built around guitarist John Petrucci’s finger-breaking fretwork, Jordan Rudess’ coils of synths, and Portnoy’s jaw-dropping command of about 16,346 drums and cymbals. On “A Broken Man,” written by frontman James La Brie, they shift gears between un-headbangable time signatures like 5/8 and 5/4, and on “Midnight Messiah,” penned by Portnoy, Petrucci conducts a hurricane of notes during the solo break, but it can’t break the band. On that last song, La Brie sings, “The dream will never end” — not a bad thing. —Kory Grow

Ghost notched some serious career milestones this year, topping the Billboard 200 and selling out their first headlining show at Madison Square Garden. But even more impressive was what the Swedish pop-metal sensations accomplished on their sixth studio LP. Since the band’s 2010 debut, Opus Eponymous, Ghost auteur Tobias Forge has always matched an elaborate backstory and lavish theatrical trappings with serious songwriting chops. Still, Skeletá marked a real leveling-up: Every track here felt worthy of the band’s newfound arena scale, from rock-operatic anthem “Satanized” to tearjerking power ballad “Excelsis” and, maybe best of all, sinister strutter, “Missilia Amori,” which could almost be a lost Hysteria cut. For the first time, the emotional content of the songs — swagger and pathos, chilly blasphemy and cheeky fun — felt as impactful as the band’s famously over-the-top stage show. —H.S.

Two minutes into “My Garden,” the first song on The Spiritual Sound, Agriculture offer up a Zen koan worth considering: “Death is the ultimate fucker.” The guitars squeal and cymbals crash tempestuously. And then they abruptly lighten things up with a chorus that sounds almost like Sonic Youth. The group packed each of the 10 tracks on their second album with abrupt musical U-turns, making it one of the most exciting and avant-garde metal albums in ages. Some of the textures include tremulous black-metal thrumming (“Flea”), extreme noise-guitar terror (“The Weight”), and the one-two punch of “Bodhidharma,” a lumbering, grungy meditation, and “Hallelujah,” a Dinosaur Jr.-like folk-rock song using the same chords. Death may be the ultimate fucker, but Agriculture are penultimate. —K.G.

The best thing about Private Music, the band’s 10th LP, is how it upholds Deftones’ core aesthetic — a juxtaposition of grinding alt-metal riffage, and deep, sensuous yearning that recalls their turn-of-the-millennium landmark White Pony — while somehow sounding fresh. Highlights such as the jagged, unnerving “Cut Hands,” woozy power ballad “I Think About You All the Time” and the anthemic “Ecdysis” felt like instant Deftones canon, each a reminder of this band’s unusual staying power. At a moment where a whole new generation of vanguard heavy acts is proudly displaying the influence of their back catalog — including recent tourmates Fleshwater and English punks Higher Power — Private Music showed that they’re still writing riveting new chapters. —H.S.