The Best Hardcore / Metalcore / Deathcore Album - Metal Storm Awards 2025

Deadguy - Near-Death Travel Services

Even aside from being a damn great mathcore album, Near-Death Travel Services stands out for being a reunion album exactly three decades removed from Deadguy's classic Fixation On A Coworker. And because of just how much time has passed, the mathcore on this record is more in a formative, primitive vein, as if it were just bursting out of metalcore (hence why you find this album in this category instead of the math one), and despite being three decades older and playing things even closer to straight-forward metalcore here, Deadguy don't sound like they ran out of steam.

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Despised Icon - Shadow Work

The kings are back! Shadow Work is the seventh studio album from Canadian deathcore mainstays Despised Icon. The veterans lean hard into their signature sound, built on razor-sharp riffs, a dual-vocal assault, and monstrous breakdowns, served with a side of skull-crushing force and delicious grooves. At the same time, they flirt with tempo shifts and hardcore shout-along passages, giving the record a slightly broader palette than perhaps expected. Either way, this radiates savage energy throughout. Long live the kings!

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Heaven Shall Burn - Heimat

The German term “Heimat” has a somewhat deeper and more layered meaning than the English translation “home”, as it refers not only to a physical place such as one’s own four walls, but also to a sense of identification with one’s origins and an emotional connection to one’s homeland. Heaven Shall Burn are very aware that this term was appropriated by those in power during the darkest period of German history, turning the idea of belonging into a tool of exclusion toward those who were deemed different, and that it therefore still carries a negatively charged connotation today. Against this backdrop, the album title can be understood as a call not to surrender such weighty words without resistance, but to reclaim them and restore a positive meaning to them. Musically speaking, the band’s now tenth full-length album has likewise become a kind of homecoming, essentially a return to their musical roots. Still fundamentally a hybrid of Gothenburg-style death metal and melodic metalcore, Heimat comes across as more stripped-down and direct than its predecessors Of Truth & Sacrifice and Wanderer, and at the very latest with the Killswitch Engage cover “Numbered Days” (fittingly featuring Jesse Leach as guest vocalist) or the rage-fueled “Those Left Behind”, it becomes clear that while the band have grown more seasoned over nearly three decades together, they have by no means become tamer. The anger rooted in their hardcore influences remains essential to Heaven Shall Burn, and this anger courses through Heimat in every fiber.

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Lorna Shore - I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me

Lorna Shore are entering year six of their 15 minutes of fame and they don't seem to be going anywhere; since scoring Will Ramos and entering a new phase in their symphonic experiments, they've been one of the major global ambassadors of deathcore, even extreme metal generally, and they seem dedicated to making a good showing for themselves.  I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me is perhaps the most potent combination yet of deathcore and symphony, with the orchestral elements better incorporated into the bones of the songs: more exchange between the strident strings and blistering guitar riffs, more mutual support between Ramos's obliterating screams and the swells of elegant melody.  Lorna Shore's raw power is overwhelming, their writing is getting more sophisticated, and right now it seems like they're the band to beat in this sphere.

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Shadow Of Intent - Imperium Delirium

After Elegy pushed the symphonics of their deathcore to a whole new level, Shadow Of Intent decided this time around to give the deathcore part of their sound some extra focus. Imperium Delirium still has the symphonic window dressing, but with chonkier riffs, more frequent breakdowns, and fewer clean vocals, it represents Shadow Of Intent at their most menacing and vicious, and never more so than during the cameo appearance of Cannibal Corpse's Corpsegrinder. As both a recapitulation of the group's various iterations to date and a stride into the more extreme, Imperium Delirium is an exciting next step for one of modern deathcore's leading names.

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Stick To Your Guns - Keep Planting Flowers

In this horrific and abyssal world, "keep planting flowers" is good advice... although so is "stick to your guns".  And so is "listen to Keep Planting Flowers by Stick To Your Guns".  This veteran hardcore posse has expertly refined the two most important tenets of the genre: 1) be angry and 2) be vulnerable.  One half is a bare-knuckled freight train of raw sound, one half is catchy choruses soaked with emotional conviction.  Stick To Your Guns write compactly and succinctly, getting across both necessary feelings in an efficient 25 minutes that are as single-mindedly violent as you need in your stress relief and hooky enough to keep you coming back for round after round. Times are tough right now. Just remember: you're not invisible. Keep planting flowers.

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The Acacia Strain - You Are Safe From God Here

Coming off the back of releasing sibling albums, Failure Will Follow and Step Into The Light, that divided their sound neatly into a slow, lumbering sludge side and a punchier hardcore side, The Acacia Strain now merge their two sides back, revamping the downtempo deathcore into something with more synergy, evidenced by the fact that the slower sludge side now works in very short songs as well, but it works most amazingly when Blackwater Holylight's Allison Faris provides a mellow doom counterpart for the album's only long song.

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Thus Spoke Zarathustra - I'm Done With Self Care, It's Time For Others' Harm

Well, if that ain't the album title of the moment - but buddy, you don't even have to choose between the two.  Blast this sucker at levels prohibited by the Geneva Convention and you'll achieve maximum room-clearing efficiency in only the time that it takes for Zarathustra to speak blegh.  If you wanna stop violently jackknife-kicking in the pit for a second we can talk about how interesting it is that the thrashy breakaways and prominent guitar leads demonstrate a healthy respect for deathcore's origins in early melodic death metal while the album simultaneously goes balls-to-the-wall on the subsequent trends of all-out supraliminal br00taliteee that gave deathcore such hype energy in the later 2000s... but why exactly would you want to stop?  After all, there's a valuable lesson here: if you want to truly change the world, you must first disrespect your surroundings.

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Whitechapel - Hymns In Dissonance

Hymns In Dissonance is an absolute return to form from one of deathcore’s original architects. After a few detours into more melodic soundscapes and clean-vocal experimentation, the Knoxville, Tennessee sextet have shoved all that aside and delivered an album that feels like a satisfying shift back toward their brutal roots. This ninth LP drops you into a grim narrative about a cultist chasing resurrection by way of the seven deadly sins, and the music reinforces that menace with some of the band’s heaviest, most relentless material in years. While the brutality is front and center, eerie atmospherics and occasional melodic touches add enough texture and depth to make the album all the more compelling.

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Your Spirit Dies - My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest

Your Spirit Dies' debut full-length My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest storms out of the gate with jagged riffs, blast beats, and a hard-hitting blend of hardcore bite and metalcore muscle that makes you want to punch a hole or two through the nearest wall. Hailing from South Carolina, the band have distilled decades of influence into a tightly written, relentless, and enjoyable record that wears its scars proudly. A full-on blast from start to finish.

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