The Best Metal on Bandcamp, October 2025

There’s always been a self-referential quality to Yellow Eyes, the adventurous New York black metal band led by brothers Will and Sam Skarstad. Their albums exist in a singular, even insular world that’s entirely the band’s own, constructed through the rural isolation of their creative process and the field recordings that stalk the edges of the songs like ghosts. On Confusion Gate, Yellow Eyes’s first full-on black metal album in six years, they journey even deeper into the mirror. The record is pitched as a kind of shadow companion to 2023’s Master’s Murmur, an album that found the Skarstads deconstructing their signature sound, making strange, roughly Yellow Eyes-shaped songs that flirted with neo-folk, noise, and ambient music. Oblique allusions to Master’s Murmur pop up throughout Confusion Gate, both as musical quotations and repurposed lyrics, though it’s unlikely that you’ll catch any of them on your first (or fifth) listen. In that way, at least, the album is typical Yellow Eyes—only through deep, repeated listening does it fully give up its rewards. Yet it also feels that the band is uncovering new ground, allowing its interest in non-metal sounds to be synthesized more fully with the haunted melodies and clanging dissonance that have defined the band’s riffs at least since 2015’s Sick with Bloom. Yellow Eyes have never sounded much like they were interested in broader trends within black metal, and Confusion Gate bears out the wisdom of their methodology. By taking their own history as their primary influence, they’ve built one of the richest sonic universes in metal.

Coroner
Dissonance Theory

For the full story on the return of Swiss thrash greats Coroner, you can read my recent interview with guitarist Tommy Vetterli; the short version is that, after a 32-year break from releasing new music, Coroner are back with a vengeance. Dissonance Theory feels like the long-overdue follow-up to 1993’s Grin that it is, doubling down on that album’s tectonic grooves and rhythmic complexity. Vetterli is every bit the masterful guitarist he was on more explicitly technical albums like No More Color and Punishment for Decadence, but he’s become a much sharper writer of hooks. The songs on Dissonance Theory are undoubtedly the catchiest of Coroner’s career, but they’re still recognizably Coroner—thrashy, technical, and idiosyncratic.

Wolvennest
Procession

After paring down their trademark longform psych-doom explorations for 2023’s short-and-sweet The Dark Path to the Light, Belgium’s Wolvennest are once again working at epic scale. Procession is a 75-minute parade of hypnotic, occult-tinged doom metal, grand-marshaled by powerhouse vocalist and theremin player Shazzula. Paramount to Wolvennest’s power is their mastery of atmosphere, and Procession frequently feels like an arcane ritual from a 1970s Italian horror movie. (The Goblin-like synth parts help, as does the operatic guest vocal spot by Hekte Zaren on “Tarantism.”) The album’s focus on atmospherics never overshadows its writing, which is consistently taut and focused, even on the longest songs. It seems the band learned a valuable lesson in making a pointedly tighter album last time out, and they’ve brought that discipline to Procession. It’s the closest Wolvennest have come yet to perfecting their formula.

Terzij de Horde
Our Breath Is Not Ours Alone

Terzij de Horde is a stridently political hardcore punk band, cloaked in black metal’s chain mail. Blast beats and tremolo-picked riffs abound on Our Breath Is Not Ours Alone, but the sweat-soaked urgency and relative structural simplicity of the songs—not to mention the scabrous bark that vocalist Joost Vervoort uses to deliver them—mark the album as an outlier in modern black metal. Lyrically, Terzij de Horde tend to blend myth and metaphor with more direct political sloganeering, and on Our Breath Is Not Ours Alone, their major concerns are with collective action and recognizing that our fates as humans are entwined. It’s a message echoed in the music, which teems with vitality and shared energy, and seems to demand being heard live.

Evoken
Mendacium

New Jersey’s Evoken have been at this for a long time. Their 1994 demo, Shades of Night Descending, was an early American entry into what had until then been a largely European movement to slow death metal to a crawl and infuse it with aching, mournful melodies. The subsequent three decades have found the band putting together perhaps the best funeral doom discography ever, highlighted by modern classics like Quietus, Atra Mors, and their most recent album, 2018’s Hypnagogia. Mendacium follows the often quite pretty Hypnagogia with a return to an uglier Evoken circa the ’90s. The logo on the cover is a hint—Mendacium marks the first appearance of the original Evoken wordmark since Shades of Night Descending. John Paradiso’s guitar tone follows in kind, giving a nastier, grittier edge to the proceedings than Evoken have had in years. Mendacium is also a concept album, set in a 14th-century Benedictine monastery and following a dying monk through his cosmic final reckoning. The story only enhances the album’s crushing aura of doom. Drummer Vince Verkay has often said that Evoken makes music that’s miserable, not sad. On Mendacium, you’ll feel the misery.

Morke
To Carry On

The glint of steel; dew clinging gently to a green meadow; dust on weathered stone. Close your eyes while listening to Morke’s To Carry On and you can see these things, the music vividly conjuring the medieval past even as it urges you ever onward into the future. The one-person project of Minnesota’s Eric Wing underwent a significant reinvention since its last full-length, transitioning from gloomy atmospheric black metal to sun-dappled melodic black metal—“castle metal,” as the medieval-aesthetic strain of this stuff is sometimes called. It was a smart move by Wing, whose melodic sensibility is a natural match for this brighter sound. Obsequiae’s Tanner Anderson, widely regarded as the godfather of this style, plays on three songs.

Barren Path
Grieving

Twelve songs, 14 minutes. That’s all it takes for the debut album by Barren Path to leave you unconscious and bleeding. This band is essentially a Gridlink reboot; everyone returns except vocalist Jon Chang, who has been replaced by ex-Maruta frontman Mitchell Luna. That should give you a pretty good idea of the kind of grindcore you’re getting. Grieving is fast and punishing, but it’s also fiendishly technical at times, and not averse to the odd burst of Gothenburgian melody. Smuggling this much detail into songs this short requires steady-handed precision and meticulousness, and nearly 20 years after Gridlink’s debut, there’s still no one better than guitarist Takafumi Matsubara at elevating grindcore to fine art.

Umulamahri
Learning the Secrets of Acid

Baring Teeth’s Andrew Hawkins and Pyrrhon’s Doug Moore team up in Umulamahri, a new band that’s named for a Formulas Fatal to the Flesh deep cut and more than worthy of the comparison. Both Hawkins and Moore are veterans of death metal’s oddball underbelly, and they’re fully unleashed to get weird on Learning the Secrets of Acid. These songs pinball between juddering, brutal death metal intensity and throbbing, minimalist industrial pulse; they’re dense with layers of avant-death dissonance one minute and floating in a cold, Lustmordian void the next. Moore spends most of the album hanging out in the most guttural parts of his register, which lends an appropriately inhuman quality to the already alien music. Learning the Secrets of Acid is deliberately unsettling and frustrating. Knowing Hawkins and Moore’s pedigree, I assume that means they had a blast making it.