{"id":164449,"date":"2025-11-05T15:39:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T15:39:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/164449\/"},"modified":"2025-11-05T15:39:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T15:39:09","slug":"the-best-metal-on-bandcamp-october-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/164449\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best Metal on Bandcamp, October 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

BEST METAL<\/a><\/p>\n

The Best Metal on Bandcamp, October 2025<\/p>\n

By <\/p>\n

Brad Sanders<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00b7
\n November 05, 2025<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This month\u2019s Best Metal on Bandcamp includes boundary-pushing black metal, a long-awaited thrash comeback, a thick slab of doomy psychedelia, and much more.<\/p>\n

Yellow Eyes
<\/b>Confusion Gate<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

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There\u2019s always been a self-referential quality to Yellow Eyes<\/a>, the adventurous New York black metal band led by brothers Will and Sam Skarstad. Their albums exist in a singular, even insular world that\u2019s entirely the band\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s Master\u2019s Murmur<\/a>, 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\u2019s Murmur pop up throughout Confusion Gate, both as musical quotations and repurposed lyrics, though it\u2019s unlikely that you\u2019ll catch any of them on your first (or fifth) listen. In that way, at least, the album is typical Yellow Eyes\u2014only 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\u2019s riffs at least since 2015\u2019s Sick with Bloom<\/a>. 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\u2019ve built one of the richest sonic universes in metal.<\/p>\n

Coroner
<\/b>Dissonance Theory<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

For the full story on the return of Swiss thrash greats Coroner<\/a>, you can read my recent interview<\/a> 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\u2019s Grin that it is, doubling down on that album\u2019s tectonic grooves and rhythmic complexity. Vetterli is every bit the masterful guitarist he was on more explicitly technical albums like No More Color <\/a>and Punishment for Decadence<\/a>, but he\u2019s become a much sharper writer of hooks. The songs on Dissonance Theory are undoubtedly the catchiest of Coroner\u2019s career, but they\u2019re still recognizably Coroner\u2014thrashy, technical, and idiosyncratic.<\/p>\n

Wolvennest
<\/b>Procession<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

After paring down their trademark longform psych-doom explorations for 2023\u2019s short-and-sweet The Dark Path to the Light<\/a>, Belgium\u2019s Wolvennest<\/a> 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\u2019s power is their mastery of atmosphere, and Procession frequently feels like an arcane ritual from a 1970s Italian horror movie. (The Goblin<\/a>-like synth parts help, as does the operatic guest vocal spot by Hekte Zaren<\/a> on \u201cTarantism.\u201d) The album\u2019s 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\u2019ve brought that discipline to Procession. It\u2019s the closest Wolvennest have come yet to perfecting their formula.<\/p>\n

Terzij de Horde
<\/b>Our Breath Is Not Ours Alone<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Terzij de Horde<\/a> is a stridently political hardcore punk band, cloaked in black metal\u2019s 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\u2014not to mention the scabrous bark that vocalist Joost Vervoort uses to deliver them\u2014mark 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\u2019s a message echoed in the music, which teems with vitality and shared energy, and seems to demand being heard live.<\/p>\n

Evoken
<\/b>Mendacium<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

New Jersey\u2019s Evoken<\/a> have been at this for a long time. Their 1994 demo, Shades of Night Descending<\/a>, 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<\/a>, Atra Mors,<\/a> and their most recent album, 2018\u2019s Hypnagogia.<\/a> Mendacium follows the often quite pretty Hypnagogia with a return to an uglier Evoken circa the \u201990s. The logo on the cover is a hint\u2014Mendacium marks the first appearance of the original Evoken wordmark since Shades of Night Descending. John Paradiso\u2019s 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\u2019s crushing aura of doom. Drummer Vince Verkay has often said that Evoken makes music that\u2019s miserable, not sad. On Mendacium, you\u2019ll feel the misery.<\/p>\n

Morke
<\/b>To Carry On<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The glint of steel; dew clinging gently to a green meadow; dust on weathered stone. Close your eyes while listening to Morke<\/a>\u2019s 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\u2019s Eric Wing underwent a significant reinvention since its last full-length, transitioning from gloomy atmospheric black metal to sun-dappled melodic black metal\u2014\u201ccastle metal,\u201d 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<\/a>\u2019s Tanner Anderson, widely regarded as the godfather of this style, plays on three songs.<\/p>\n

Barren Path
<\/b>Grieving<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Twelve songs, 14 minutes. That\u2019s all it takes for the debut album by Barren Path to leave you unconscious and bleeding. This band is essentially a Gridlink<\/a> reboot; everyone returns except vocalist Jon Chang, who has been replaced by ex-Maruta<\/a> frontman Mitchell Luna. That should give you a pretty good idea of the kind of grindcore you\u2019re getting. Grieving is fast and punishing, but it\u2019s 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\u2019s debut, there\u2019s still no one better than guitarist Takafumi Matsubara at elevating grindcore to fine art.<\/p>\n

Umulamahri
<\/b>Learning the Secrets of Acid<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Baring Teeth<\/a>\u2019s Andrew Hawkins and Pyrrhon<\/a>\u2019s Doug Moore team up in Umulamahri, a new band that\u2019s named for a Formulas Fatal to the Flesh <\/a>deep cut and more than worthy of the comparison. Both Hawkins and Moore are veterans of death metal\u2019s oddball underbelly, and they\u2019re 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\u2019re 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\u2019s pedigree, I assume that means they had a blast making it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BEST METAL The Best Metal on Bandcamp, October 2025 By Brad Sanders \u00b7 November 05, 2025 This month\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":164450,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[264],"tags":[18,117,19,17,337],"class_list":{"0":"post-164449","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-music"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115497845806323866","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164449\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}