What is considered “heavy” in 2025? When you’ve got TURNSTILE’s Brendan Yates out here being interviewed by NEVER ENOUGH super stan Sir Elton John, Militarie Gun pivoting even harder toward “co-worker hardcore” and content fodder for a cyberbullying podcaster’s influencer takeover of the scene, and some of the more exciting newer bands who you figured would soon become big deals ceasing to exist for reasons of *checks notes* gooning, you kind of get why there’s been a greater desire to gatekeep the term at the end of 2025 to keep the adjacencies out of the conversation when talking about the year’s best (we won’t need to worry about the metal corners — they always make their feelings known about what they don’t allow perfectly clear at all times.)

These pages aren’t yet ready to banish some of those artists from the conversation just yet, though this might end up being their graduation years if their stylistic evolutions continue on course toward alternative pop-rock. We’re really starting to see the reactionary effects of a scene hardening its exteriors which began last year becoming the majority rule nevertheless. There’s still plenty of room in the pit for some thinking person’s emo rock, impassioned melodic post-hardcore and punk, and those bands teetering the fine line between shoegaze, hardcore, and metal in the same chord, too. These are the Best Hardcore & Metal Scene Albums of 2025.

Agriculture – The Spiritual Sound [The Flenser]

Leading up to the release of their debut full-length, The Spiritual Sound, self-professed ecstatic black metalmakers Agriculture sounded like they were escaping that label by previewing the whole of the body with a series of expectantly intriguing yet nuanced listens that shifted away from the heavier material of their 2023 breakthrough debut album and the coupling of EPs bookended at both ends. The art of the red herring is a good reminder as to why you shouldn’t assume something of an album based off its promo cycle, as there’s audibly an energy spike in the very, very ecstatic black metal divine occurring throughout while embracing an inner calm after achieving the highest level of consciousness from the onslaught. This is no longer the thing of black metal as derived from beautiful white noise and violent static with joy and Zen applied to the formula, but rather one transformed by the deconstruction of the self where Agriculture define their sound as their own spiritual identity.

Algernon Cadwallader – Trying Not to Have a Thought [Saddle Creek]

What’s even harder on the heart than all of the actual relational fuck ups, personal anxieties, confusion, and existential worry of your youth? Try all of that, now calcified around it alongside the weight of death, personal grief, capitalism, and political doom resting firmly over your shoulders on your fully adulted self, back pains and all. The woes sound effortlessly nimble within the Algernon Cadwallader’s worn hands, nonetheless, on their first post-reunion effort, Trying Not to Have a Thought. Though the band acknowledges the frays that come from gaining a deprecating, hyper self-aware life wisdom, a painfully wistful peer into the rear view, and a bleaker historical perspective on a world view to bat , they’re enjoying it through a long division in navigating the big questions and the occasional exponential value thrown in for life tax purposes added complexity. When it all seems a little too heavy on the head — a blown out post-hardcore-addled anthem screamed from a megaphone pointed at the sky — sounds like just another easy day of devastation.

Anxious – Bambi [Run for Cover Records]

Bambi is an album that may have not even happened had Anxious vocalist Grady Allen not opted to put some space between himself and the musician life after going hard on the dream following the Connecticut emo punks’ breakthrough 2022 debut, Little Green House. Instead, he and band come out of the other end of that exploratory sabbatical by defying sophomore slump territory and decidedly make an instant scene classic, fully alive on its arrival. Collaboration worked wonders for the quintet just as well. Where Allen was once the de facto frontman of the band, guitarist Dante Melucci’s songwriting prowess steps forward equally so, adding dueling verse and chorus structures as well as a sweetness of harmony into their sound that broadens their alternative appeal. Overcoming the growing pains with big swings, Anxious have mastered the art of adulting.

ASKYSOBLACK – Touch Heaven [New Morality Zine]

You don’t really get the complete sense that Touch Heaven wants to feed itself heavily into the rest of the grunge-gaze current. ASKYSOBLACK are looking past those atmospheres on their debut full-length and expanding it as far out as they can. That’s not to say since forming at the turn of this decade, the Philly four-piece haven’t been mining and refining their sound surrounding sonic influences from heavier forms of ’90s alt-rock and post-hardcore. With the arrival of their debut LP, what hits hardest are the melodic skydives they’re taking. With that, they’re turning the emotive depths up by the tenfold, emphasizing a yearning for catharsis from the daily malaise over than being mere wrecking balls through walls of reverb and static feedback. There’s a clarity heard through their Heaven that sounds like a widescreen breakthrough along the likes of Basement, Jimmy Eat World, or the post-Far project Gratitude wielding an alternative gloss, limitless in escaping from those big, heavy feelings weighting you down.

Combust – Belly of the Beast [Triple B Records]

Combust’s arrival with their debut album, Belly of the Beast, is right on time in its serving up the energy to throw it down. Them being a natural fit for the harder edges being demanded of bands right now is a thing of being a product of their environment: coming up from the New York hardcore scene, the quintet come loosely fashioned by its ’90s tough guy aesthetic where the only thing you need to make a broad-shouldered impact is being brutally real, no validation sought regardless of how many enemies you make the process. For Combust, that tough guy is vocalist Andrew Vacante who shouts in a violent hip-hop-styled cadence across the album’s 12 guest-heavy tracks featuring members of Mindforce, Terror, and rapper Rome Street. They riff, they stomp, and they cut motherfuckers up with the occasional two-step breakdown that keeps the art of violence fun for everyone.

Deafheaven – Lonely People With Power [Roadrunner Records]

Clocking in at 62 minutes and 8 seconds in length, the latest from the Bay Area experimental black metal band can be regarded in today’s feeble-minded attention-deficit listening culture as a “demanding” listen, yet it’s most striking that it’s one of the most cohesively-designed productions in the rock spectrum that melds the band’s towering post-metal juiced to the max (“Magnolia”, “Revelator”) with gauzier reprieves experimented with on 2021’s Infinite Granite (“The Garden Route”, “Heathen”) and even new moves in their form of heavy that tempt more mainstream appeal (“Body Behavior”.) Complete with intro, intermission, and closing chapters featuring Jae Matthews from Boy Harsher and Paul Banks of Interpol in spoken word and shimmering production from Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Paramore, Jimmy Eat World,) Lonely People with Power is Deafheaven’s black metal magnum opus.

Deftones – Private Music [Reprise Records / Warner Records]

Deftones’ 10th studio album is a masterful display of the sheer sonic velocity in which the metal-gazing hydra-heads have the power to conduct riveting damage and seismic shifts throughout the atmosphere, even over 25 years after they broke new ground in the scene with White Pony. What’s apparent on Private Music on on standout tracks like “my mind is a mountain”, “infinite source”, and “milk of the madonna” is how they’re more directly anchoring a bold “pop” outline (by Deftones standards, that is…) into their gravitational weight in the heels of their recently-minted Gen-Z alt-rock hero status. Tapping into deeper grooves within their craters and cracked wide heavens of their atmospheric ballads like “ecdysis” and “i think about you all the time”, they band is conquering the art of satiating the highest tiers of the arenas that they comfortably command now on sold out headlining tours. Overdue, but well deserved.

Destiny Bond – The Love [Convulse Records]

Destiny Bond’s kind of hardcore punk needn’t be pretty or stylish to get the point across. Their attitude does most of the heavy lifting just fine. If there were any misconceptions, the Denver hardcore punk band’s second album, The Love, isn’t looking to play nice with anyone who may have taken their invitation to coexist without incident for granted. That includes themselves when the head gets out of line. Vocalist Chloe Madonna is a Hell’s angel of retribution throughout as the face of fury screaming ire into anything and anyone threatening to come in the way of their survival. Riffs move fast and shred faster because they have no time for fucking around, and the drums punctuate the final warning to anyone about to step to. It drops 10 ticking time bombs into whatever is standing in between Destiny Bond’s way from achieving their own definition of immortality.

Drain – …Is Your Friend [Epitaph Records]

DRAIN is your friend and don’t you dare take that for granted. Three albums into their career since breaking out during pandemic times with their 2020 debut, California Cursed, followed by their post-lockdown heatseeker, Living Proof, the Santa Cruz hardcore trio are still young, virile, and fully amped, ready to turn the pit into a party where all of the rage is more than welcome and darkness is to be destroyed on their hardest hitting of impact yet, …IS YOUR FRIEND. On their end, life realities are hitting harder on the health side of things these days (drummer and founding member Tim Flegal revealed his battle with cancer during the album’s rollout,) yet their relentless desire to smash hardcore skate punk and thrash through barriers, and have the sound coming out of the other end of the crater left behind is sounding golden. Whether you call it maturation, another growth spurt, or a refinement in form after putting in plenty of reps on the road, Flegal alongside vocalist Sammy Ciaramitaro and guitarist Cody Chavez are locked in here fully together.

End It – Wrong Side of Heaven [Flatspot Records]

End It know an opportunity to seize when they see it, and do so on their own terms with their debut full-length, Wrong Side of Heaven. 15 songs clocking in under a half hour, they take what they already did damn well on a handful of previous EPs, tidy up the sound quality with an assist from producer Brian McTernnan at his iconic Salad Days studio (which has also been a transitional setting for early Turnstile releases as well as those for luminaries like Bane) and blast through with clarity. The line that separates the Baltimore band from every outstanding harder-edged hardcore band these days from those who are merely solid is a big personality bursting from their sound. Akil’s loud mouth delivers bad omens, calls out the 1% for their complacency, humbles the posers, and bodies the haters. He’s such a natural at the art of smack talk and socio-political pipebombs that when he goes into balladeering mode on their melodic hardcover cover of Maximum Penalty’s “Could You Love Me?”, you have to double check to see if you’re on the same record. They’re on the right side of everything nonetheless.

 Fleshwater –  2000: In Search Of The Endless Sky [Closed Casket Activities]

We’re not dealing with the same fleshwater of just one year ago, never mind five years ago when they were merely known as the mysterious side-project of Massachusetts metalcore boundary breakers Vein.fm alongside experimental shoegaze songwriter MIRSY. For starters, this past spring saw them opening for Deftones in front of sold out arenas behind the strength of their continued success of their 2022 debut album, We’re Not Here to Be Loved. With all the momentum behind them in 2025, their sophomore follow-up, 2000: In Search Of The Endless Sky, hears them shooting for the stratosphere. The band could have easily continued on course to blowing up the scale of their heavenly heavy-gaze model, but instead, they’re making new direction strides that do more to collide their gravity into a melodic hardcore meeting ground. Star dustings of trip-hop and sparse art-rock arrangements within their cosmos bridge the gap between all corners of their scene influences equally. Their universe is indeed endless…

Glitterer – erer [Purple Circle Records]

Big introspective energy has always been the driving source connection between Ned Russin’s brain within Glitterer’s electrical currents. With erer, hearing he and his recent four-piece formation of guitarist Colin Gorman, keyboardist Nicole Dao, and drummer Robin Zeijlon’s latest philosophical flair-ups billowing out from smoldering, grungy riffs as burnt neon synth-pop beams through them in even more violent hues than those articulated in sound, shout, and harrowing vigil on last year’s Rationale plays out like a deep talk catch-up with one of your most mindful of oldest friends — the kind of person who’s always been up for the challenge of self-correcting old habits, working through the nagging anxieties, and is in the healthiest headspace out of anyone you know. Like that friend, Glitterer just get better at figuring it out as the years go by. Like that friend, Glitterer probably is also very into Fugazi’s Instrument (see: “Victory Lap”.)

Gumm – Beneath the Wheel [Convulse Records]

Fiddlehead, Have Heart and How Much Art frontman Patrick Flynn called Gumm leader Drew Waldo “a really frustrated person,” and that’s a compliment. Our first look at Gumm was in the art of celebrating the inward looking outside into this dumpster fire of a world, with the Chattanooga hardcore band’s 2023 debut album, Slogan Machine. The view hasn’t gotten any prettier in the years since, and that definitely is leaving a mar on the band’s sophomore follow-up, Beneath The Wheel. Here, they’re channeling all that frustrated energy into accentuating the self-preservation positives that come from working through these very intense emotions. Digging bigger into the melodicism behind vocalist Waldo’s grated screams while beefing up the ’90s post-hardcore-styled riffs, his feelings of being an outsider may be coming from one human alone, but when he shouts, “I don’t fit in anywhere!” on “New From The Pain”, the listen’s purpose is clear: a communal anthem meant to be screamed by the many looking for one another in the dark.

JIVEBOMB – ETHEREAL [Flatspot Records]

We have arrived at a transitional point within the hardcore scene where one half of it is doing its damnedest to push the genre beyond conventional limits, and then there’s this whole other side reigniting a new found interest in generating a fully engulfed artillery in its energy. JIVEBOMB’s ascent aims to hit both right in the middle of it all with their debut full-length, ETHEREAL. What a contradiction in title it seems to be on its surface, but all too fitting of a sensation once you live through it. Being mowed over by the Baltimore band in just under 20 minutes, they’ve cracked a difficult-to-decode style that mediates both directional limbs in their 10-track tear-up. What is melodious is cranked extra fast while its riffs — bone-crunching yet clean in their detail as bass lines and distortions of found sounds wave alongside hypnotic throughout the cerebrum — bounce then stick to every corner of the pit. At its core is vocalist Kat Madeira and her emotive signature of a tough-as-nails grow to expel what’s unwanted within the mind and body, serrating through the heaviest energy and immolating like a phoenix attempt.

La Dispute – No One Was Driving The Car [Epitaph Records]

Until this year, La Dispute hadn’t released a new album properly since 2019’s Panorama. They’re without a doubt one of the most consistent bands from the scene of the last two decades, but as goes with everything in time, you always worry that your favs might eventually reach a stagnation point. Don’t hold your breath that they’ve reached that point in their careers just yet with their fifth studio effort, No One Was Driving the Car, as the Grand Rapids experimental post-hardcore crew do so with justifiable intentionality, but a demanding one, too. The concept behind it is again a grim reflection of reality’s devolution — a looming apocalypse and the role technology is playing destroying us — with Jordan Dreyer, shaved head-ily bursting at the neurons in sing-talking role playing across its hour-long length. No fatigue on their end, though. If anything, they’re aging well into a new form — something creaking into unsettling noise rock à la Shellac and the Jesus Lizard where the lack of studio gloss brings rawer edges to the forefront.

Militarie Gun – God Save The Gun [Loma Vista Recordings]

Life under the gun isn’t just a witty debut album title that will catapult your band from being DIY hardcore scene darlings to getting big enough to get that Taco Bell bag while playing Coachella. A self-fulfilling prophecy to shoulder with from there on out it has become that for Militarie Gun, who find themselves thousands of miles away on their sophomore effort putting full faith behind frontman Ian Shelton exploiting his loss of edge and the subsequent personal strife for the sake of achieving bigger, sweeter-sounding, and smarter hardcore-informed alt-rock anthems. The result is the band’s strongest jams to date which can kick you in the face one moment and convince you to wave your hands while drowning the next. Beyond the rock-solid reinforced melodic hardcore and punk-pop, Shelton and company deviate from the same ol’ through fired up distortion-accented surf guitars, beaming synthesizers, heavy emo acoustic ballads, and loveless crashouts. It’s what rock music sounds like when the higher power of self-belief has you going for broke.

Pelican – Flickering Resonance [Run for Cover Records]

When you hit play on Flickering Resonance, it’s as if you’re initially under the impression that you’ve stepping into your vehicle for a late night drive only to realize it has turned into a space launch headed straight toward cosmic terrain with the veteran post-metal band as your flight soundtrack. Six years removed since their last effort, the Chicago quartet’s seventh studio effort hears them returning — albeit, far from Earth — fully reinvigorated with their technically proficient execution of instrumental doom and prog metal, post-rock, and post-hard that has an uncanny way of peering at our tiny little blue dot of existence from the edges of the atmosphere, and making you ponder the gravitas of it all. The heaviest of its melodious, big riffed metal matter may pulverize you into space dust, but when you find yourself amongst Pelican’s flickering galaxy, it’s a beautiful thing to behold.

Restraining Order – Future Fortune [Blue Grape Records]

Seeing a band like Restraining Order breakthrough with two outstanding LP’s for the independent hardcore label, Triple B Records, tour the world over, and now finding themselves deservedly as part of the bigger, burgeoning Blue Grape label roster alongside bands like Spiritual Cramp and White Reaper is a well deserved fete for a band who has risen above the oft-overlooked Western Massachusetts DIY hardcore and punk scene in a short span of time. The hard knocks mindset which the five-piece continue to hit home on their third album, Future Fortune, is a good indication as to how that positive grind energy has worked in their favor in spite of *motions to everything*. And they’re keeping on in moving forward by doing what they know to do best at without needing to fix, at that. Over a fast, gruff, and loud anthem bastardization of classic hardcore with a polished razor-backed punk edge, they’re delivering the message on how to out-smart the streets of the world at their own game.

Scowl – Are We All Angels [Dead Oceans]

The chorus on Are We All Angels’ opening track begrudgingly relents, “I don’t want to be special,” after all, yet it holds space as a reverse psychology of sorts that fuels the internal tension and sweet release from it, in turn allowing Scowl to exist in both worlds, under their own rules and needing not answer to anyone — even their own uneasy feelings. Recognizing their own polarization on the come-up at this point in the hardcore scene punctuates all of their strengths on the surface, something which they already began been testing the waters of more concentratedly with their 2023 extended play, Psychic Dance Routine. Pogo-bombing across a dozen tracks that bubble and explode with a joyous energy from embracing the audacity to be an outsider, it gives the Santa Cruz five-piece their own permission to fully colorize Kat Moss’ internal monologues with stylistic volatility.

The Starting Line – Eternal Youth [Lineage Recordings]

23 years ago, the Starting Line told us that we could have the best of them. They lied. As one of the smarter bands from the third wave of pop-punk-indebted emo, it appears that they saved reaching that point for a couple of decades later, as they’re just reaching their creative peak on their very aptly-titled post-reunion effort, Eternal Youth. It’s without a doubt the year’s biggest scene surprise, going harder and smarter than ever before, especially when held up to the rest of their peers who are merely living off nostalgia tour paychecks. You can hear exactly just how well the Pennsylvania punks’ elder emo status has worn down on them. Frontman Kenny Vasoli is in a comfortable pocket with his age-stained shouting anthems within the throes of braided, heavyweight class melodic hardcore riffs that fuck hard in influence from next gen local hero peers Title Fight. Getting modern scene sonic perfectionist Will Yip behind the boards in the studio with them only did their reinvigorated rock ways a favor. It’s an album that almost didn’t happen at all. Instead, the Starting Line are having a proper glow up.

Speedway – A Life’s Refrain [Revelation Records]

Hailing from Stockholm, Speedway handle combustible elements from American youth crew, the Revolution Summer, and the natural lineage of Refused’s metal-injected post-hardcore socio-political fire with ease when fueling up their tank. Throw in production from Title Fight’s Ben and Ned Russin (the latter whom guests on “Day By Day”) as well as pristine heavy mastering artillery from Arthur Rizk, and you’ve got a dream team behind your debut full-length that gets every move right, living up to their name by racing through a dozen shouting anthems with deeply emotive passion yet a hyper-focused state of mind, all cylinders firing hard behind them. Though they may encounter walls of motif — a future impassed on “Permission to Dream” featuring Ekulu’s Chris Wilson, smoldering sacred ground on “Walls of Ire”, and an ascendent hairpin turn inside-out on “Solitaire” — every one of them is smashed through until they see visions of dreams only imagined.

Superheaven – Superheaven [Blue Grape Music]

Originators in what we now know as heavy-gaze, Superheaven laid the blueprint of a sound steeped in sludgy metal, ’90s alternative rock, shoegaze, and melodic hardcore influences that would become replicated but rarely pulled off as naturally by way-too-many newer artists within the scene in the wake of their hiatus-like inactivity following the release of their 2015 sophomore effort, Ours Is Chrome. Their third and self-titled return hears them not only back in full force, but applying a new-found wisdom in the art of wielding big riffs through the doom and gloom that is modern life flailing into the cosmic abyss. There’s a welcome malaise in how they’re channeling surging electrical currents and careening feedback, too, done in a way that fits the vibe of these times where everyone’s just shrugging their shoulders at the way humanity is more or less providing an open arms invitation to a societal apocalypse. Even in the face of this bleak reality, Superheaven can elicit an exhilarating high from our collective collapse.

 TURNSTILE – NEVER ENOUGH [Roadrunner Records]

Since shifting the hardcore scene culture on 2022’s GLOW ON,  the word “adjacent” has become a curse word when describing any band trying to make a similar crossover to copy cat effect. Where does that leave TURNSTILE in 2025? NEVER ENOUGH answers that resoundingly by owning up to their departure as a hardcore band properly in style (but not necessarily spirit) and instead, has the audacity of becoming this year’s best alternative rock album, period. As a bigger, bolder extension of GLOW ON‘s non-hardcore sonic eccentricities, NEVER ENOUGH goes all in with their outsider elements of embracing meditative electronic breakbeats and ambient energy currents attached to nearly every climax. The Baltimore DIY expats are now simply one of the biggest bands on the planet who just so happened to come up from the hardcore ranks, now in a category all their own.