The Best Avantgarde / Experimental Metal Album - Metal Storm Awards 2025

Am I In Trouble? - Spectrum

Dear Steve Wiener: if you are wondering whether you are in trouble (and we have reason to believe that you are wondering this), don't worry.  You're doing a great job, and we're proud of you.  Spectrum claims lineal descent from the unorthodox experiments that black metal embarked on in the 2000s, and if you're looking to be outfitted in a nice reminiscence of Dødheimsgard, Arcturus, or even some early blackgaze, then you'll be satisfied.  Am I In Trouble? sits in a funny spot between being nostalgic for an older sound and being nostalgic for an older sound that's about being cutting-edge: in a weird way, it's familiar, but then the fun thing about all those bands is that they represent a virtually infinite variety.  Look at that cover art and track list.  How many colors other than black do you see?  There's a lot of room to breathe even when you're following in someone's footsteps.  This is a fun send-up of the clean choruses, jarring grooves, and meticulous compositions that overtook black metal two decades ago and hopefully the first stage in a new challenger's evolution.

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Arrows - Yearning Arrows; Cloven Suns

Arrows is another project of Jünger Tumilon, formerly known as The Helvetic Underground Committee, and Yearning Arrows; Cloven Suns is their debut. It features ingredients of black, death, and doom metal, along with both harsh and clean vocals, quasi-symphonic passages, gothic and melancholic undertones, and epic, soaring melodies. The fluidity in the songwriting is remarkable, with abrasive and pummeling sections seamlessly transitioning into melancholic and reflective ones. With all its imperfections, this debut is a breath of fresh, creative, and human air.

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Creatvre - Toujours Humain

Creatvre, who definitely renamed themselves to avoid having to have the country tag specification from their original Creature (FRA), mark that name change by having their first album after it being one whose sounds are as mechanical as its cover art suggests. The one-man project has always lingered in black metal-adjacent waters, progressive and experimental as they were, so to hear a sound so strange and nebulous, one with remnants of roots in black metal but that manages to make its industrial leanings sound warm and its symphonic leanings sound grandiose, does feel like a proper reinvention.

Fleshvessel - Obstinacy: Sisyphean Dreams Unfolded

Fleshvessel are back, and they’re weirder than ever. Come join them on a death metal opera that takes as much inspiration from Tangerine Dream, Diamanda Galás, progressive rock, jazz, and Latin American music as from Timeghoul and Morbid Angel. It’s a vast odyssey that seamlessly blends atmosphere and eclecticism with sick riffs, demented vocals, and the usual heaviness of a death metal record. Each track is detailed and layered with many different ideas, and you’ll see yourself coming back to try and decipher the puzzle that is Obstinacy: Sisyphean Dreams Unfolded.

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Imperial Triumphant - Goldstar

Imperial Triumphant have helpfully provided an assessment of their new album right there on the front: this is deserving of at least one gold star, probably two or three.  And this isn't just a lucky strike: it's a talent for discordant chaos that Imperial Triumphant have been honing for years.  The virtuosic trio takes a lot of inspiration from jazz kool, letting their tempos and time signatures swing and fall where they will: the song structures have more humps than a camel, and any space gets filled with sour bass, singing guitar leads, and pall-mall percussion.  Goldstar is on the more accessible side for once, dealing in shorter track lengths than usual and putting some more extreme metal up front, but if you think any notion of orthodoxy could eclipse this band's natural tendency toward being mavericks, you'd be wrong: nothing about Goldstar is any less than weird, warped, and unhinged, and even if you can get your mind around the ideas of the songs, you'll still have it blown by the incredible amount of notation they can fit into any given moment.  At last, here's a cigarette brand that isn't bad for your health.

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Kostnatění - Přílišnost (Excess)

What crazy person listened to Úpal and thought, "yeah, it's pretty good, but what it really needs is Slipknot"?  Přílišnost still has the sour notes, the microtonal riffing, and the bizarre intersection of Slavic and Middle Eastern traditions that made Úpal so utterly ineffable, but now there's breakbeat added to the blastbeats and a little bit of nu metal stomp in the mix.  Look, all the Jute Gyte/Muyubyosha/Demilich comparisons in the world aren't going to help you triangulate exactly what Kostnatění sounds like (would it help if we said it was like a Sigh album being slowly crushed under a hydraulic press?), so really the only thing you can do is just listen to Přílišnost.  That's the only way to know.  And even then, you won't.  But you've got half an hour.  Or eternity.  Whichever.

Lychgate - Precipice

Initially starting out as more of a black metal project whose selling point was its lineup ties to Esoteric, Lychgate have slowly upped the ante when it comes to the prog and avant-garde side of their sound. Precipice, the band's first release in five years, is the first where the extreme metal side is so nebulous in its melds of black, death, and doom that the band ends up having more in common with fellow nominees than anything black metal, albeit with a less zany and nauseating but still intricate instrumental side, and the focus on being atmospheric in both its very busy-sounding harsher moments and in the mellower "lounge from hell" moments pays off.

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Now I've Done It - An Ill Guest

A crazier Diablo Swing Orchestra, a more restrained Unexpect, a western take on Sigh, or perhaps Faith No More after a major mental breakdown. It’s not important to which avant-garde legends one might want to compare Now I've Done It to. What is important, however, is that their debut album, An Ill Guest, is the most playful and delightfully devilish entry in this category. But just because the exhilarating tone of the music doesn’t take itself too seriously, it does not mean the musicians themselves don’t care for their compositions. Now I've Done It is a duo of multi-instrumentalists who have the songwriting chops of several bands combined. The devil is real and he is tap-dancing his way into your soul.

Uulliata Digir - Uulliata Digir

You’ve probably never heard anything quite like this before. Uulliata Digir‘s debut delivers avant-garde metal with strong dark jazz undertones, a trumpet, and some truly demented female vocals that won’t leave your mind for the foreseeable future. Both the catchier, more straightforward tunes and the somber, atmospheric tracks burst into chaotic and abrasive sections, like if Imperial Triumphant worked with Miles Davis. It’s a memorable, bite-sized experience that you won’t regret checking out.

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Vauruvã - Mar Da Deriva

We've gotta remember the annual dose of Caio Lemos.  Of all his projects, Vauruvã is the one most clearly identifiable with an orthodox metal subgenre, that being black metal, but that doesn't mean much when it's reconstituted in such a unique way; there's no corpse paint or permafrost here, rather a heady heat wave of layered guitars.  Vauruvã takes to the shrieks, the blastbeats, and the tremolo-picked riffs with warm, clean tones and acoustic instrumentation in the background, usually with enough independently moving melodies to sound like a couple of albums played simultaneously.  This is about the most humid black metal will ever sound, and with Lemos's signature riffing style and the incorporation of Brazilian folk elements, it's also one of the most singular approaches to the genre out there.

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