The albums listed below are not my favorites. I’ve been publishing the list of records that have truly captured my heart for many years now on RateYourMusic — but that’s another story. The list I decided to post here is a selection that, at times, overlaps with my personal favorites and, at others, diverges from them. More than anything, it is a record of albums that I believe defined the year we are living through, in relation to the musical territories I follow, using criteria that I consider meaningful.
In any case, revisiting old lists of your favorite albums is always a strange process. I’ve been making lists like these for over twenty years, and almost every time I find myself nearly stunned when I look back at them. The biggest surprise is this: albums that have remained in my memory as among the very best of the year —and I would have sworn they were in my Top 5, damn it!— I eventually find sitting around positions 15, 20, 30, or even lower. Albums with quality and real weight, records that have taken root inside me. Conversely, others that had swept me away when they were released have, over time (and not because of any lack of inherent value), been pushed somewhat to the margins.
So, for this particular piece, I ended up with the list below. Quite a few albums I consider favorites —or even musically or emotionally superior to those included here— are missing. Still, this is a summary I’ll be able to return to in the future and remember, with some degree of clarity —and perhaps a little affection— what 2025 was like.
The list (one album per musical field, alphabetically)
Anna von Hausswolff – Iconoclasts
Country: Sweden
Field: Modern organ-drone avant-pop
**Sixth full-length album
An album that uses the church organ not as “atmosphere” but as architecture: massive walls of sound, tension, and catharsis. It marries sacred awe with a deeply human vulnerability, forcefully bringing the voice back to the foreground in a way that reaches the edge of the disturbing. A physical experience which, through its extended low frequencies and lament-like passages, perfectly encapsulates everything Anna von Hausswolff has been striving for (and pioneering) for years now.
Blackbraid – Blackbraid III
Country: USA
Field: Indian naturalistic black metal
**Third full-length album
Atmospheric black metal narrative becomes cultural presence, not decoration. The third album by Blackbraid (the personal project of Sgah’gahsowáh) is their most mature, cohesive, and weighty statement to date. It continues the path of indigenous black metal, but with greater confidence, depth, and narrative coherence. The core of the album is the worldview of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Nature is not presented romantically; it is force, law, and spiritual framework. Forests, mountains, animals, and elements function as carriers of memory and identity.
Blood Orange – Essex Honey
Country: USA
Field: Sophisticated art-pop / R&B collage
**Fifth full-length album
Pop orchestration like a private orchestra: a dense cast of collaborators and a sound that moves from R&B to art-pop without visible seams. An album of mourning and return to one’s homeland, deeply shaped by the death of Devonté Hynes’ mother, yet never slipping into melodrama. This is a musical construction of memory, grief processing, and identity, where music functions as both therapeutic and archival medium, shifting style even within the same tracks (from gentle R&B or indie pop into dance-driven passages or classical sections with strings and breaks).
Blut Aus Nord – Ethereal Horizons
Country: France
Field: Cosmic / avant-black metal
**Sixteenth full-length album
On Ethereal Horizons, black metal becomes cosmic geometry: psychedelic loops, a Lovecraftian sensibility, and production that feels like a vast void. A peak album that “launches” the genre beyond its boundaries without losing the poison it is meant to carry. Blut Aus Nord have for many years been one of the most dominant chapters of atmospheric black metal, and here they embark on cosmic journeys akin to those of Hallucinogen. At the same time, an annual visit to their Facebook page inevitably reveals the true best extreme albums of the year. When you are a proper listener, you know exactly where to steer your band as a musician…
Candelabro – Deseo, Carne y Voluntad
Country: Chile
Field: Christian Latin art rock
**Second full-length album
On their second album, Candelabro explore spirituality and Chilean identity through an intensely emotional narrative. The lamb and the star on the cover are mirrored in the strongly Christian symbolism that permeates this genuinely ambitious release, where lush moments with brass, synths, and jazz rhythms gradually alternate with near-slowcore emptying-out passages. This sound represents a strikingly fresh expression of rock, a form that has gained several worthy representatives over the past three to four years.
Cardiacs – LSD
Country: United Kingdom
Field: Prog rock maximalism
**Sixth full-length album (26 years after the previous one)
LSD is the posthumous album by Cardiacs, completed and released after the death of Tim Smith. It is not archival in the sense of leftovers. It is cohesive, finished, and unmistakably Cardiacs. It functions as the final chapter of a singular artistic universe. Prog-punk / art rock / pop deconstruction, the way only Cardiacs know how to do it. Rapid and abrupt changes in rhythm, tonality, and mood define the album from beginning to end — and somehow (truly!) all of this works within the chaos.
Cave Sermon – Fragile Wings
Country: Australia
Field: Dissonant post-metal
**Third full-length album
Obsidian riffing and a formidable ritualistic gait that is not diluted by its progressive metal elements. This is an album of both weight and fragility: slow, oppressive, with redemptive climaxes. Chaos does not unfold infinitely, but is compressed and flows thickly over the listener’s psyche. Screams and clean vocals are used sparingly, while a creeping cloudiness covers everything in what is one of the finest post-metal albums ever released. It should also be noted that this is self-released and, for now, unavailable in physical form.
Coroner – Dissonance Theory
Country: Switzerland
Field: Groovy prog-thrash comeback
**Sixth full-length album (32 years after the previous one)
A historic return that functions as a technical thrash manifesto: sharp riffs, progressive structures, cold precision. The narrative surrounding the album (after decades of absence) automatically makes it significant, but the essence is that it sounds alive and relevant. This year it managed to unite all metal listeners, both traditional and more modern-minded ones. For that reason, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to describe it as the most important metal album of the year, even if it slightly falls short compared to the feeling of their classic masterpieces.
Deafheaven – Lonely People with Power
Country: USA
Field: Blackgaze 2.0
**Sixth full-length album
A return to the dark light of blackgaze, with intensity that is not retro but renewed and more dramatic. An album that reconnects aggression with emotion without losing its melodic glow. After the somewhat unfairly received departure from the extreme on their previous album, Deafheaven deliver to all their fans the non-black-metal record they (knew they) wanted. This is a musical territory in which they remain the undisputed masters.
Ethel Cain – Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You
Country: USA
Field: Americana slowcore
**Second full-length album
The suffocatingly claustrophobic Perverts, released by Ethel Cain earlier this year, does not take a place among her full-length albums. It functions more like a side release. Willoughby Tucker is a prequel narrative, like an American Gothic novel in slowcore/Americana form: slow, dreamlike, and dangerously familiar. The power lies in the direction: small details that build a world, not “songs” as individual units. Slow tempos and extended structures. A tragic love story before the fall… the second part of an active trilogy.
Geese – Getting Killed
Country: USA
Field: Art rock, no-wave indie
**Fourth full-length album
A darker, more aggressive, and more deconstructed turn compared to their past was enough to place Getting Killed at the top of many 2025 lists. Their music, after all, is as well-crafted as it is inherently ideal for opening doors to diverse audiences, without demanding countless listens. We are living in a time when post-punk/noise rock has become the new unconventional mainstream of rock music (not implying that Geese belong there — it simply opens doors). Cameron Winter’s voice often cracks and disappears into the sound, contributing to the album’s nervous, suffocating, and paranoid profile. Hats off to them for pulling it off without relying on fun or stylized cool anger.
Havukruunu – Tavastland
Country: Finland
Field: Pagan black metal epic
**Fourth full-length album
Havukruunu’s four-album run is unmatched in contemporary black extreme music. The Finns do not reinvent the sword and anvil, nor do they draw first blood, but they play pagan epic black metal with primal tools, without ornamentation. Unlike others feasting at the medieval table, they possess ample technique, both in execution and in compositional structure. Above all, they breathe genuine soul into their music. This is not black metal of nihilism. It is black metal of identity, memory, and land. Another story of resistance to Christianization, in the old Bathory tradition.
Heinali & Andriana,Yaroslava Saienko – Гільдеґарда
Country: Ukraine
Field: Medieval psalm drone
**First full-length album (their collaboration)
Here, the medieval becomes contemporary without a museum-like atmosphere: voice/monophony set against a modular electronic body. Hildegard (Гільдеґарда) is a work standing at the crossroads of the past and the technological present, a re-approach / reinterpretation of 12th-century musical compositions using modern techniques and traditional vocal forms. It is composer Heinali and singer Saienko’s take on how these ancient elements of Hildegard von Bingen’s psalms (12th-century abbess) can emerge today and connect with contemporary Ukrainian reality.
Helloween – Giants & Monsters
Country: Germany
Field: Euro-power veteran metal
**Seventeenth full-length album
Big choruses, twin guitars, speed moments and a stadium feel: power metal in its purest form, upbeat and dynamic. The album works as a modern confirmation of the European power metal canon, without pretending to be anything else. This is the second album with the Pumpkin United lineup, where the three great singers deliver a major-key masterclass that satisfies old fans and brings in new ones. Plenty of small hits, along with more grandiose moments in the footsteps of their well-known epics.
Imperial Triumphant – Goldstar
Country: USA
Field: Avant-garde metal dystopia
**Sixth full-length album
Imperial Triumphant continue their journey in avant-garde / dissonant black metal, with the metropolis as monster remaining the stable core. If their previous albums felt like architectural manifestos, Goldstar works more as a glittering symbol of decay: gold on the surface, rotten inside. Dissonance intertwines with an unholy and free-form version of jazz. The extreme vocals are alien and stripped of emotion, while the guitars strike like lightning and the rhythm section shifts as if pulled from the gates of hell. Imperial Triumphant keep pushing extreme sound to its limits, this time in a way that is somewhat more accessible for us ordinary humans.
Lars Fredrik Frøislie – Gamle Mester
Country: Norway
Field: Symphonic prog revival / ’70s keyboard romanticism
**Second full-length album
Prog that honors the classic ’70s school, with a flood of vintage keyboards and the feeling of old-master art. Wobbler are pioneers in following the teachings of the elders, as very few do it as beautifully and authentically as they do. Frøislie, a cornerstone of Wobbler, with two solo albums now, seems to honor the heavy, ancient oak, which in Norway represents wisdom, endurance, and the flow of time. Out of nowhere, he can now be defined as the underground’s leading representative of the golden expression of rock music—’70s prog, of course. His albums feel as if they were born old, dusty, and smelling of damp wood.
LAUSSE THE CAT – The Mocking Stars
Country: United Kingdom
Field: Abstract hip hop nocturnal storytelling
**First full-length album
A British album that (literally) opens by mocking middle-class Europeans who save money to go on holiday to… Crete! This is a deeply narrative, literary, and introspective record, moving between abstract rap, spoken word, and psychedelic storytelling that reaches the edges of poetry. The lyrics are dense, suggestive, often fragmented. They do not explain stories; they leave them half-lit by an uneven self-mockery. Ambient textures, simple loops, and dirty production elevate the atmospheric result. The cat Lausse prowls the urban landscape, a detached and defeated anti-hero fighting mice and the stars that mock him.
Maruja – Pain to Power
Country: United Kingdom
Field: Art post-punk catharsis
**First full-length album
With three significant releases already under their belt, Maruja were considered a big name even before their first official full-length came out. Their mix of fashionable British post-punk with plenty of rage and even more saxophone makes their music striking from the first listen. My initial question with them was whether they could survive the mold of a structured and set (even by their jam-heavy standards) full-length album. In the end, they not only managed it, but excelled—without being forced to change anything of the anger, poetry, and social critique that define them.
Maud The Moth – The Distaff
Country: Spain
Field: Avant-classical doomwave
**Fourth full-length album
A deeply theatrical album, where the voice functions as a protagonist rather than an instrument. It marries contemporary classical writing, doom heaviness, and intense emotional charge, all escaping through Maud The Moth’s piano. With her fourth album, she moves from dark folk / art song into avant-garde chamber / ritual music in its most consciously feminist and conceptual form. The distaff, a symbol of invisible domestic labor, is raised as the banner of an entire album-experience. The Distaff is very hard to absorb at any hour of the day, at any moment of the month.
McKinley Dixon – Magic, Alive!
Country: USA
Field: Jazz rap / literary hip-hop
**Fifth full-length album
Jazz rap with genuine euphoria: rich brass, a breathing organic rhythm, and lyrics that work like short stories. McKinley Dixon uses childhood as the arc, the act of magic as the arrow, and hits the bullseye. He explores loss and the ways of resurrecting a loved one through three of his friends, delivered in a voice that is both simple, almost childlike, and deeply literary.
Mclusky – The World Is Still Here and So Are We
Country: USA
Field: Noise rock with some post-hardcore sarcasm
**Fourth full-length album (after 20 years)
A return after 20 years with a knife between the teeth: short, sharp tracks, noise, and poison humor. At the album’s core lies a ruthless commentary on modern life: power, capitalism, social hypocrisy, cultural fatigue. Their immediacy defines them, with a sound rough and slappy like a slap in the face. Angry but not impulsive, bitter but not sad—more “we know all this and we are still furious.” Well, a whole lifetime later, you bet on middle-aged clarity instead of youthful rage, don’t you?
Messa – The Spin
Country: Italy
Field: Neo-doom with art-rock elasticity
**Fourth full-length album
Doom that does not stay trapped in weight: it slides into more modern forms, with groove, dramaturgy, and a ritual feel. The album sounds as if it revolves around a dark center, with tracks opening like black, beautiful flowers, leaving room for melody and tension. The gothic-leaning compositions clearly show they have found the perfect balance to stick in your mind, while also containing the quality of careful, selective construction. The ouroboros serpent seals their move into a different category in the audience’s consciousness. They did this slowly, with each album adding its own stone—and they deserve it.
Mountain Realm – Rustborn
Country: Sweden
Field: Dungeon synth
**Fourth full-length album
After three releases last year (including the collaboration with Tales Under The Oak on one of the best dungeon synth albums of all time), Simon Heath releases two more albums this year, one of them being Rustborn. It is now considered certain that, in a genre full of junk that we have learned to love for its cult status, Mountain Realm stand as a reference point of quality. Everything here is as it should be: decayed kingdoms, warriors born after the fall, not at the peak, rusted weapons, lost glory—but duty that remains…
Natalia Lafourcade – Cancionera
Country: Mexico
Field: Mexican folk bolero manifesto
**Eleventh full-length album
A work that places tradition in the living present: recorded with a strong live feeling and emphasis on performance. Natalia Lafourcade herself presents it as a musical/visual manifesto on the duality of the artist and the miracle of music. Recorded live with analog equipment and 18 musicians, it revolves around her alter ego, Cancionera—the personification of the song itself. After years of excavating traditional Mexican music, Lafourcade delivers her major work here.
The Necks – Disquiet
Country: Australia
Field: Long-form minimalist jazz improv
**Nineteenth full-length album
Essentially, we are talking about a triple album with hours of music. And yet, it is not a trick. It is a study in patience, transformation, and micro-changes. A work that goes against the “attention economy” and demands full immersion. Its improvisational mindset organically shapes a deep hypnosis, like a stroll among foliage and spiritual presences. A lesson in how repetition becomes psychology.
Paradise Lost – Ascension
Country: United Kingdom
Field: Gothic death-doom lineage
**Seventeenth full-length album
The classic dark melodies of Paradise Lost, delivered with doom weight and gothic grandeur, as a reminder of their original DNA. The band keeps melodic instinct at the forefront without softening the heavy shadow, achieving at maximum level everything they want to be in their later period—a period that began with The Plague Within in 2015 and the return of the death-doom element. Loss, faith, gloom, uplift…
Phantom Spell – Heather & Hearth
Country: Spain
Field: Pastoral prog-heavy
**Second full-length album
As anti-trend as it gets, the project of Kyle McNeill of Seven Sisters (who also released a very strong album this year) consciously moves in epic / prog heavy metal territory with folk and ’70s hard rock roots. Epic feeling, many melodies, ’80s keyboards… One could say it sits somewhere between the steel of the Up The Hammers Festival and the Protomen (whose highly anticipated Act III I count as 2026, by the way). Heather & Hearth feels like it came out of the British countryside, smelling of heather and lit fireplaces.
Rosalía – Lux
Country: Spain
Field: Art pop classical crossover
Fourth full-length album
Ambitious, multilingual, and structured like a classical work (in movements), with orchestral grandeur and pop ghosts passing through it. A work that blurs the borders between pop and classical music, centered thematically on femininity, transcendence, and rebirth. Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra. The title Lux—Latin for “light”—also functions as the album’s central thematic motif: an exploration of light on a spiritual, creative, and existential level. The songs are inspired by the lives and work of many women, saints, and mystics.
Shallowater – God’s Gonna Give You a Million Dollars
Country: USA
Field: Dirtgaze
**Second full-length album
A slowcore body with shoegaze dust and a West Texas landscape: quiet, but with guitars that scrape and awaken guilty thoughts inside you. It entered very high as a modern reference point for the genre, with emphasis on cohesion and atmosphere. Thematically, this alternative country could deal with nothing other than deeply personal scars, even the death of the creator’s grandmother…
Širom – In the Wind of Night, Hard-Fallen Incantations Whisper
Country: Slovenia
Field: Avant-folk tales
**Fifth full-length album
A trio with dozens of instruments, but with real musical logic: drone, folk, post-rock textures, and improvisational energy. Kaleidoscopic, demanding, emotionally heavy, like a ritual that changes form. The title works like a spell: night, wind, whisper, incantations that have already fallen. Everything points to something ancient, broken but active. There are no songs with beginning–middle–end. There are currents, repetitions, micro-shifts, shaped by Širom’s handmade instruments. Once again (after 2022), they make the difference on these experimental folk paths that carry you into poetic worlds.
Species – Changelings
Country: Poland
Field: Technical sci-fi thrash
**Second full-length album
Technical thrash with imagination: changes, strange passages, and a sense of sci-fi horror built on solid, asymmetrical, labyrinthine riffing. Coroner are the veterans who made the comeback, yet this year’s Coroner have more modern elements than the younger Species! Here, they draw influence directly from forgotten bands of the past, such as Mekong Delta and Watchtower. This is a huge wealth of cerebral thrash, framed by fitting themes of social and psychological mutation, paranoia, pursuit, conformity, and the loss of individual will.
Wings Of Steel – Winds of Time
Country: USA
Field: Melodic heavy / US power revival
**Second full-length album
Purebred heavy metal with ’80s blood: high-pitched vocals, twin guitars, and sword-in-the-air choruses. More reflective than heroic, Winds of Time is driven by mid-tempo dominance and an emotional depth even greater than what we heard on their excellent debut. Wings Of Steel currently appear to be the most in-form new heavy metal band. They proclaim their love for Judas Priest, Dio, Iron Maiden, and early Queensrÿche in the best possible way. If their two albums had been released in the late ’80s, they might now be considered near-classics.
Yazz Ahmed – A Paradise In The Hold
Country: United Kingdom
Field: Spiritual Arabic jazz
**Fourth full-length album
A jazz work of nostalgia and identity: dual heritage, traditional stories and rhythms, and contemporary orchestration. British-Bahraini Yazz Ahmed places memory and origin at the center, without a superficial folkloric approach. She is not afraid to play with nu and electronic elements. The music works as a bridge between a colonial past, the modern experience of migration, and personal/collective memory. Her trumpet functions like a human voice—at times mournful, at times bright, at times almost ritualistic. This instrument is what tells the whole story.
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