Top 40 Albums of The Year 2025, Part 3
Albums #20-11: caroline, SNOOZE, Dimscûa and more
You know the drill now - entries #20 through #11 of the AOTY 2025 list are below. And if you missed the preceding entries:
20. caroline - caroline 2
A few outlets have tagged caroline with the post-rock label. I’m not sure if they’d embrace that themselves, but in the traditional sense of taking a daring, experimental, deconstructed approach to building rock songs, it feels apposite. Alongside the usual guitars, bass, and drums, there are several string instruments, a clarinet, and a trombone. Opener Total Euphoria messes with your head with bouncing, off-kilter guitars and a big wall of distorted noise; there’s a club beat in the background of the tender When I Get Home. It’s all relentlessly intricate and clever, just short of the point of infuriation.
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19. After Nations - Surface | Essence
Do you like your guitars low-tuned, squidgy and polyrhythmic? Do you like all-out cymbal crashes alongside mind-bending chromaticism and rapid-picked octave chords, drenched in reverb? Do you think the best music skips vocals entirely, in favour of layering riff after riff after riff? I think you might like After Nations. Surface | Essence pulls no punches in its in-your-face approach to djent. It’s a great deal of fun.
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18. you, infinite - you, infinite
I’ve talked before about the ongoing psychodrama of This Will Destroy You confusingly operating as two distinct bands. In case that wasn’t complicated enough, erstwhile TWDY guitarist Jeremy Galindo has reunited with founding member Raymond Brown, who left the band 15 years ago for a career in medicine, to form a new band as a spiritual successor to their original debut album. The only thing that really matters is that Galindo can still convey a wealth of emotion through the simplest melodies and a clean guitar tone, in a way that few others can. you, infinite is a lovely listen - delicate, powerful, calming, inspirational.
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17. Arm’s Length - There’s A Whole World Out There
Somewhere along the way, my generation of middle-class emo kids must have overcome what seemed like insurmountable economic and employment barriers to establish themselves as middle-class in their own right, at a scale large enough to make emo nostalgist festivals (like the appallingly named When We Were Young Festival) and cruises a valid financial prospect for the music industry. Okay, it’s probably a top-slicing effect, or disposable cash that won’t ever make it to deposit status. Nice for those legacy 2000s bands though, with a fanbase that never really moved on from that era. You really should move on from that era, though, because Arm’s Length are great. Big fist-in-the-air pop-punk/emo with a tinge of hardcore, a flash of banjo, and a glut of huge choruses. Nostalgia is overrated, kids.
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16. SEIMS - V
You know what more fiddly math-rock bands should add to their sonic palette? Literal fiddles. Though branding SEIMS as a math-rock band does them a disservice. V is a joyously rich and experimental record, straddling math-, post-, neo-prog and fusion labels with songs that never adhere to a single formula. Credit goes to band leader Simeon Bartholomew for the rich creativity here, at times openly challenging the listener with jarring melodies and (in particular) vocals, but always resolving to something that’s either beautiful or clever, and often both.
Read my full album review on Distorted Sound
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15. An Abstract Illusion - The Sleeping City
I have a confession to make: Having largely avoided death metal and its related subgenres for most of my life, I finally got into it in a big way in 2025. Be prepared for a few more entries in the remaining Top 15.
An Abstract Illusion may be a death metal band, but The Sleeping City draws its sonic inspiration from 1980s cinematic soundtracks. This is nothing new - hell, heavy bands doing synthwave music are ten a penny now. Yet The Sleeping City manages to feel fresh, avoiding the copy-paste tropes of the genre by going to the source material. At times it sounds like The Cure; at others, like early-90s video game soundtracks, themselves inspired by 1970s prog. It’s heavy and technical throughout, layering on the growls and breakdowns alongside those trademark arpeggiated synths.
Read my full album review on Distorted Sound
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14. Kardashev - Alunea
The likes of Deafheaven and Alcest have made black metal and shoegaze familiar bedfellows in the world of blackgaze. Few bands have attempted the same (unholy) marriage between shoegaze and death metal, which is where Kardashev stand out. Shrieks get traded for growls, the technicality bumped up a couple of notches, and it’s a different kind of atmospheric. Most importantly, the songs themselves are excellent; vocalist Mark Garrett at his best gives off shades of Einar Solberg from Leprous, which is one hell of a compliment.
“What kind of music are you listening to right now, Chris?”
“Oh, just some deathgaze.”
“…”
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13. Dimscûa - Dust Eater
Now here’s a story: Dimscûa had something like five monthly listeners for their album Dust Eater on its release, the product of a group of longtime friends in their 30s who loved post-metal and decided to throw something together themselves. A plug from Damnation Festival organiser Gavin McInally landed them a much larger audience, leading to a first-ever gig in front of a tent of 3,000 people at ArcTanGent Festival, a record deal with Big Scary Monsters, and a UK tour planned for 2026 supporting We Lost The Sea and Overhead, The Albatross. Talk about whiplash.
Putting aside how much this feeds my delusions of grandeur of someday hitting it big with my own music (I remain too lazy and unskilled to record anything) - you don’t get to this stage without having created something quite special. And Dust Eater is special; an uncompromising and raw post-metal album that stands head and shoulders above a fair few veterans of the scene.
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12. Maud the Moth - The Distaff
If there’s a theme to this year’s list, particularly in contrast to 2024, it’s that I’ve begun to embrace both death metal and weird, doom-laden experimental music that recreates distorted guitars in the aggregate. On the latter side, one of my favourite discoveries this year was Maud the Moth, a project driven by Amaya López-Carromero of healthyliving. The Distaff drives meandering, dark melodies with the power of her voice, matched by intense piano work, found sounds, heavy percussion and other sonic abrasions. Plus there’s a Dune reference, which is always welcome. It may not be in the Top 10, but this is easily one of my most recommended albums of the year.
Read my full album review on Distorted Sound
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11. Snooze - I KNOW HOW YOU WILL DIE
There’s nothing more insufferable than that music fan who claims to have known a band that achieves some popularity before they got big. So let’s skirt past the fact that I already had the last two Snooze albums on vinyl. Those previous albums set the template for the band’s mathcore sound, like The Dillinger Escape Plan on uppers and with Beach Boys vocal harmonies. I KNOW HOW YOU WILL DIE is a big step up creatively, going for orchestral arrangements, acoustic guitar ditties and a capella breakdowns in its opening two songs, and it only gets more unhinged from there. You probably couldn’t come up with a sound more tailored for my specific tastes than this.
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