2025 was a year where we had a substantial number of decent post-metal releases. However, only a handful of albums really stayed with me for the rest of the year, so this list was easier to make than the previous one. Anyway, let’s get into it!
5. Beneath the Steel Sky – Cleave
Despite its almost shy and atmospheric approach, no other album this year gave me a stronger Cult of Luna vibe than this one. It works as a great introduction to the style itself, highlighting everything melancholic and oppressive about our never-ending urban spaces. It’s an oddly relaxing experience that offers a careful balance between old and new Post-Metal.
4. Trudger – Void Quest
Someone is going to tell me: this is Sludge Catto. Well, I didn’t want this brutal and hostile mix of Post, Prog, and Sludge to go down the drain without at least a minimum of recognition before flushing. Void Quest is raw, clean, creative, and—most of all—an album that keeps you on your toes, constantly guessing how it’s going to hit you next. It’s the nicest abrasive beatdown of this top.
3. Primitive Man – Observance
This could’ve gone in the Doom top as well, but the truth is that Observance is just too sonically horrifying and conceptually ambiguous to stay there. It might not top some of the band’s classics, but it shows a group comfortable in places where most of us would rather look away. That commitment to the darker side of existence is what kept me coming back, trying to understand what the fudge had just demolished me for an hour or more.
2. Ba’al – The Fine Line Between Heaven and Here
This is an album that divided reviewers quite a bit, but I’m firmly in the positive camp. This is what the new Harakiri for the Sky should have been: a long, risky dive into emotional catharsis that delivers Post-Metal with proper technical prowess without losing its poetic touch. If anything, I think we might all be underrating it—but only time will tell. For now, enjoy some of the sharpest songwriting 2025 has to offer, and don’t forget your tissues.
1. Deafheaven – Lonely People With Power
In no other category this year was the number one spot so obvious. It’s not that Deafheaven were ever dead, but nothing since New Bermuda had really interested me—until Lonely People With Power came along and reminded us that this is still the band that created an entire school of thought within the underground. Relentless, unapologetic, and cathartic, I could use many adjectives to describe this epic work, but deep down it’s a phenomenal display of what extreme Metal music can offer to its broken people: a mirror of flaws and vulnerability that represents this beautiful but corrupted world.
Metal Eclipse Reviews 