I didn't think too hard about dedicating the second-ever edition of this column to Ragne Wahlquist. The late Heavy Load frontman left an indelible mark on heavy metal, in his native Sweden and beyond, so writing about him after learning he'd died unexpectedly at the age of 69 just made sense. I stand behind that column. It contains the only major interview that Ragne's brother and bandmate, Styrbjörn Wahlquist, has done since Ragne's death. I got a few luminaries of today's Swedish metal underground to talk about what Heavy Load meant to them. A few readers even told me that my column had convinced them to check out Death And Glory and Stronger Than Evil, which was all I could have asked for. By late summer, when I had weighed and decided against a half-dozen other memorial columns, it became clear that the Ragne Wahlquist tribute would be a one-off. Metal legends were dying with such frequency that, if anything, Breaking The Oath needed an obituaries desk.
2025 was a truly brutal year for metal deaths, and the temptation was strong at times to turn this column into a rolling soliloquy about the great records that these musicians left us with. There was exciting new music to cover, though, so I saved everything up for a year-end ode to our fallen heroes. Think of this like the Oscars' annual In Memoriam reel — one that will also have its inevitable omissions, much like when you wondered how the fuck Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper got left on the cutting-room floor back in 2018. (They did include George A. Romero in that montage, so maybe the Academy has a one-per-year rule for deceased independent horror auteurs.) My sincerest wish is that I don't have to write a version of this column next year, or ever again. But the amount of star power that heavy metal sent back out into the universe this year demanded it. Let's pay our respects.
I'll pour out one more aquavit for Ragne Wahlquist, the man who is most responsible for turning Sweden into a nation of metalheads. When Heavy Load started in the late '70s, metal was still in its infancy, and there weren't yet many bands outside of Anglophone countries playing it. The brothers Wahlquist not only introduced heavy metal's thunder and grandeur to Sweden; they also touched on the Viking themes that remain a mainstay for Scandinavian bands to this day. On immortal Death or Glory cuts like "Heavy Metal Angels (In Metal and Leather)," "Might for Right," and "The Guitar Is My Sword," Heavy Load equated the metal spirit with a kind of pugnacious strength. When you listen to Ragne Wahlquist's music, you might find yourself looking for a battle to march into.
We lost two drummers, separated in age by more than three decades, who reimagined metal's beat, and who consistently elevated their bands through their playing. Les Binks only appeared on two Judas Priest albums, Stained Class and Killing Machine, but that was enough to cement him as an eternal fan favorite. His rolling, dexterous intro to "Exciter" was the proto-"Painkiller," less flashy and boisterous than Scott Travis' epochal drum part but with a grace that Travis has seldom equaled. Allen Blickle played in Baroness for their first decade, anchoring the band's gnarliest sludge outings and helping usher them to proggier, prettier pastures. Blickle quit the band not long after a devastating tour bus crash left him with broken vertebrae; after leaving music, he developed the neuroendocrine cancer that eventually killed him. His musical legacy is just three albums – Red Album, Blue Record, and Yellow & Green – a three-for-three streak of modern classics that few musicians can touch.
A long illness also took Bethlehem mastermind Jürgen Bartsch. An iconoclast through and through, Bartsch was the man largely responsible for writing avant-garde classics like Dark Metal and Sardonischer Untergang Im Zeichen Irreligiöser Darbietung (SUIZID). Black metal was always a thrillingly undefined thing in Bartsch's hands, and he had a knack for pushing the envelope of aural extremity, even within the intense crucible of the genre's '90s scene. My go-to answer when people ask me for the scariestmetal album of all time is Bethlehem's Dictius Te Necare. Nisse Karlén, who redefined black metal melodicism in his pioneering work with Sacramentum, died by suicide not long after a run of the biggest tour dates the band ever played. His death was a reminder that the darkness that black metal summons so effectively is often very real for the people who summon it.
One of the most exciting extreme metal bands of the 2000s was Cobalt, the Colorado project led by multi-instrumentalist Erik Wunder. Peaking with 2009's genuinely upsetting Gin, the band had an unmatched talent for injecting a real sense of danger into its thoughtful, thorny compositions. (That danger curdled into edgelordery more than a few times thanks to vocalists Phil McSorley and Charlie Fell, which frankly hurt Cobalt's legacy more than Wunder's.) It had been nearly a decade since we heard new Cobalt music when Wunder passed, but he was keeping active with his bluesy folk-rock project, Man's Gin. On "Nihilism," from last year's The Reprobate, Wunder sang, "We know we all gotta die/ But it's alright/ Ride it out, everything's OK." The albums he never got to make in middle age and beyond are an acutely felt loss.
The Brent Hinds-versus-Mastodon saga reached its sad conclusion when the Atlanta band's estranged guitarist died in a motorcycle crash in August. Hinds was a troubled person, who ruined more than one Mastodon show that I attended with his alcohol and anger issues, but he was rarely anything but brilliant with a guitar in his hands. There were a lot of good reasons for Remission, Leviathan, Blood Mountain, and Crack The Skye to break out of metal's hermetic chamber and touch a wider audience, but chief among them was Hinds's thrillingly unencumbered playing. The musical moment I'll always think of when I think of Brent Hinds is the bluegrass lick that gives way to a breakneck thrash part midway through "Megalodon." Nobody but him would have had the guts to try that in 2004, much less the chops to pull it off.
One of the first major hurdles for prospective metalheads is the genre's preponderance of harsh vocals. If you fail to acquire that taste, you're leaving the vast majority of contemporary metal on the table. The first harsh vocalist I learned to appreciate was the late Tomas Lindberg, whose throat-shredding bark on At The Gates' Slaughter Of The Soul came to me when I was 13 years old and permanently rewired my neural pathways. Lindberg approached death metal the same way he approached grindcore in Lock Up and D-beat in Disfear — with a feverish intensity that reached out of the speakers to grab you by the collar. He was a brilliant vocalist and lyricist, but more importantly, he was one of metal's true good guys. I've never heard an ill word spoken about "Tompa," the force of enthusiasm, piss, and vinegar whose very existence made the underground feel like a more welcoming place.
If you don't care about KISS, that's fine. I don't really care about KISS beyond a few songs. But your favorite metal band cares about KISS, and your favorite metal band's favorite member of KISS is Ace Frehley. When Frehley died in October, my Instagram was absolutely flooded with photos of the Spaceman and litanies of favorite songs, mostly from musicians at least 20 years my senior. Before metal became ubiquitous, KISS was a crucial access point for kids interested in heavy, over-the-top music, and Frehley was the best musician (and least cringy personality) in the band. The costuming, makeup, and stagecraft were every bit as important as the music, and that had a huge impact on metal's visual identity. You don't have to like KISS, but you can hear – and see – Frehley's influence in everything from King Diamond to GWAR to Immortal.
Of course, no one in metal has ever had the impact of John Michael "Ozzy" Osbourne, born in 1948 in Birmingham, England and deceased this past July, just a few weeks after performing at a massive farewell show with Black Sabbath. There's nothing I can say about Ozzy's legacy that hasn't been said ad infinitum since then, so I'll just say this: When my parents try to explain to their friends what I do for a living, they say that I interviewed Ozzy Osbourne. That will be the headline of my professional life to normal people forever, and I only spent 30 minutes on the phone with the guy. He was bigger than this genre, bigger than music itself, and almost universally beloved. Metal began in 1970, when four working-class youths from England's Black Country rained hell on an unsuspecting public with a band, an album, and a song called "Black Sabbath." None of the albums on the following list could have been made without the touch of Ozzy's five-decade-long finger of influence. Hail and farewell to the Prince of Darkness.
London's Trauma Bond have spent the past five years quietly amassing one of the more adventurous discographies in modern grindcore. Multi-instrumentalist Tom Mitchell and vocalist/lyricist Eloise Chong-Gargette like to push and prod at the boundaries of the genre, incorporating sludge metal, industrial noise, and thumping electronics into their razor-edged grind assault. Summer Ends. Some Are Long Gone., the duo's first release to be classified as a full-length, is their most confident and well-balanced work yet, delivering art-grind pensiveness and raw, ripping fury alike. Converge's Kurt Ballou guests on guitar, a telling co-sign that hints at this band's limitless potential.
This year's award for old-guy metal album of the year goes to Para Bellum, the 14th full-length by O.G. Bay Area thrashers Testament. (It faced stiff competition from Coroner's Dissonance Theory and Sodom's The Arsonist, both also excellent.) Testament were already the American thrash band with the best 21st-century track record, releasing solid albums like The Formation Of Damnation and Dark Roots Of Earth and never truly embarrassing themselves. Para Bellum is on another level entirely. It's their best album since the early '90s, a genuine late-career triumph. Eric Peterson brings the extreme metal riffs, Alex Skolnick adds the tasteful, lyrical lead work, and Chuck Billy darts between pseudo-death growls and soulful cleans with ease. There's even an orchestral power ballad, the soaring "Meant To Be," and it's the best damn song on the record. You're going to want two copies of Para Bellum — one for your collection, and one to send to the ex-hesher dad or uncle in your life.
There wasn't an album that more purely embodied the spirit of death metal this year than Scapulimancy, the crushing debut by Victoria, BC's Hedonist. Most of the members of Hedonist are also in punk and hardcore bands, but they don't bring much of that telltale punks-playing-metal laxity to Scapulimancy. It's bludgeoning, brutal, and laser-precise in its revivification of classic death metal sounds, drawing most heavily from the martial intensity of Bolt Thrower and the primordial, evil-thrash stomp of Possessed. Frontwoman AJ gives the most insane-sounding death metal vocal performance of the year, an indecipherable barrage of monosyllabic grunts and piercing war cries. Hedonist played first-of-four on Carcass' package tour of the US this year and completely owned the stage. World domination is next.
Pacific Northwest heroes Christian Mistress returned from an unplanned 10-year recording hiatus with what's perhaps their finest album. Children Of The Earth is full of the taut, riff-driven hard rock and early heavy metal that made Christian Mistress one of the best bands of the 2010s, and the songwriting has been sharpened to the point that nearly every moment on the record works as a hook. The years were kind to frontwoman Christine Davis's distinctive voice, which was already appealingly gravelly a decade ago and now boasts an even finer patina. She commands songs like "Demon's Night" and "Shadow" as only she can, her vocals encircling Tim Diedrich and Jonny Wulf's Lizzyesque guitar parts like smoke rings.
Death metal and prog rock have enjoyed a long and fruitful courtship over the past three decades. The frequent collisions between these two seemingly disparate sounds, from Death to Opeth to Blood Incantation, have helped define extreme metal's evolutionary arc. Massachusetts natives Ancient Death are the latest alchemists to find gold in the unlikely combination of head-bashing riffs and head-scratching time signatures. Their dreamy, Floydian debut album, Ego Dissolution, leans heavily on the foundational texts of '90s prog-death, but it also uncovers some exciting new ground, especially when the band clears out and lets clean vocalist/fretless bassist Jasmine Alexander go to work. Like all progressive death metal worth its salt, Ego Dissolution is at its best when it hits you in the head and the gut at the same time.
The cliché about Rwake's music is that it sounds like a backwoods acid trip, and sure, there are moments when Chris "CT" Terry and Brittany Fugate are screaming about gods and demons while molasses-thick guitars approximate a sludge-metal Deliverance and you think, yeah, I might be too high for this—whether you're high or not. Much has been said about the terror of Rwake; less has been said about the beauty. What makes them a great band, and what makes the long-awaited The Return Of Magik one of the best albums of the year, is the way they can embody both within a single measure. The harrowing and the heartrending find equilibrium in these six songs about interconnectedness and universal consciousness, songs that radiate a generosity that Rwake has rarely been credited with. On The Return Of Magik, the universe shrinks down to the eye of a needle, and all are welcome in.
The capstone for the Lamp Of Murmuur project, at least thus far, is The Dreaming Prince In Ecstasy, which finds mainman M. working on his grandest scale yet while incorporating bits of influence from all his previous albums. It's high-wire stuff, but M. pulls it off convincingly, making the kind of album that erstwhile Lamp skeptics may have been waiting for. Here you'll find deathrock dramatics, post-punk bounce, heavy metal swagger, grand symphonic gestures, and even some of the raw, hissing black metal that Lamp Of Murmuur made on its early demos. Newer wrinkles include an influx of clean vocals and a neofolk song called "A Brute Angel's Sorrow" that sounds a little like Iron Maiden's 2003 track "Journeyman." Maybe that's intentional, and instructive: The Dreaming Prince In Ecstasy is both a journey in itself and the culmination of one. Where M. goes next is entirely up to him.
Yellow Eyes' black metal feels like it was plucked from a shroud of mist hanging over a Siberian beet field, not written on guitar by a couple of guys from New York. (Full disclosure: I've hung out with Will and Sam Skarstad on several occasions, and alas, they are normal dudes, not Rasputin-like mystics — beards notwithstanding.) The Slavic quality of the band's earlier albums was often rooted in their use of field recordings from Russian villages, but on Confusion Gate, it bears a more irreducible aura, an atmosphere that emerges through the way the Skarstads weave snakelike riffs, odd melodic lines, and unintuitive vocal placements into beguiling tapestries of sound. In truth, it's an album that exists not in physical space but in the imagined reality of the Yellow Eyes discography, where it sits in conversation with 2023's industrial-folk experiment Master's Murmur and builds on the oddness of previous black metal obliquities like Immersion Trench Reverie and Rare Field Ceiling. Yellow Eyes are creating a new world, riff by riff.
Deafheaven are a better band today than they were when they made Sunbather. The critical and commercial winds blow fickle, and a lot of the people from outside of metal who made Sunbather so huge probably didn't even hear Lonely People With Power. That's their loss. The band could sometimes sound clumsy in synthesizing delicate beauty and crushing heaviness on Sunbather, but they're now in total control of the dynamics that make their songs tick. There are parts on Lonely People that are heavier than anything the band's done since 2015's New Bermuda, and parts that are prettier than anything outside of their shoegaze album, Infinite Granite. It's not just that Deafheaven have mastered a wider range of textures and moods. It's that they've learned to dial into them more precisely and deploy them with more intention. These are the best, smartest songs Deafheaven have written, and even if they never get the big live-show singalong that "Dream House" gets, real heads will always know.
In a recent New Yorker article about aphantasia, a poorly understood condition which causes people to be unable to "see" mental images, the writer Larissa MacFarquhar presented a related, even less well understood phenomenon: hyperphantasia. People with hyperphantasia can vividly reproduce the sensations of entire days of their life, or "watch" full movies in their heads from memory. I was nodding along to a lot of the article's descriptions of hyperphantastics, but I especially zeroed in on the testimony of one anonymous source who described his life with "auditory hyperphantasia." I'll share it in full:
"I can—and do—listen to entire classical works in my head. The longest continuous one was the entire Verdi requiem, listened to internally on a long-haul flight. The imagery is very detailed. I can summon up a work and identify the instruments playing in an orchestral texture, or the registration being used in a particular organ piece. I can't turn it off though. It's in the background as I write (Schumann, third symphony, last movement). Sometimes a short passage will repeat endlessly, typically when I am stressed. And if I wake at night, it is usually with a short sequence of harmonies repeating themselves."
I must have listened to Messa's The Spin at least 100 times this year — in headphones or on speakers. I've listened to it in my head at least 100 more. I don't know if auditory hyperphantasia is closely associated with a deep love for music, or whether it's easier for hyperphantastics to reconstruct a song in their head when they've heard it dozens of times. I do know that the music that Sara Bianchin, Alberto Piccolo, Marco Zanin, and Rocco Toaldo make as Messa lives deep in my bones. I know I've been awakened by my brain's recreation of Bianchin's showstopping vocal run at the end of "At Races," and I know I've stood in a hot shower unable to lather up because I was "listening" to "Immolation."
Messa aren't the only band I can do this with, but they're one of the most satisfying ones. Their compositions are richly detailed but not mathematically complex, and each of the players in the band is doing something interesting pretty much constantly. Listening to The Spin makes my hair stand on end, but not listening to The Spin can just about get me there, too. I've written about the album in terms of its sound and its story, in a long profile of the band for this column and a blurb for Stereogum's sitewide year-end list. I'm not going to write about that stuff here. I'm going to close my eyes, turn off my speakers, and play The Spin again.
