The Best Alternative Metal Album - Metal Storm Awards 2025

Byzantine - Harbingers

Groove metallers Byzantine celebrated 25 years in 2025, and what better way to mark the occasion than by ending an 8-year gap between releases in style. Harbingers continues the band's exploration of more progressive metal avenues while still retaining their classic NWOAHM groove/thrash metal style: burly, aggressive, but with a soaring chorus often just around the corner. Tony Rohrbough slides seamlessly back into the fold for his latest stint in the band, and the guitarwork by all three axemen is a treat across Harbingers, which offers plenty of biting riffs, scene-stealing solos and tasty guitar leads.

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Confess - Destination Addiction

A lot of the buzz around Confess comes from their tragic story of banishment from their home country of Iran, and that's something that intrinsically tied to their music, but more than just their story, their music speaks for itself. Partly because the drumming comes from George Kollias, which does ground the music into something even tighter, partly because the angsty, rebellious groove thrash sound wouldn't feel out of place on a New Wave Of American Heavy Metal album from the early noughties.

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Deftones - Private Music

It's incredible how much lasting influence a band has, enough that newer bands, including fellow nominees, still emulate the sounds that Deftones have been doing for three decades. Not only still relevant, but incredibly consistent at it, Deftones return to working with Nick Raskulinecz to make Private Music have an organic sound and such a seamless flow that it's often hard to pick up when one song ends and one begins, which only rewards the full listen. Private Music is full of seamless ambient interludes, soaring choruses, bits of nu metal nostalgia, and memorable riffing.

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Fleshwater - 2000: In Search Of The Endless Sky

Everything about Fleshwater screams nostalgia for the dawn of a new millennium. From the artwork and album title to the angsty sounds of grunge, alternative metal, and nu metal that would pick up the attention of any Deftones fan. But there is more to 2000: In Search Of The Endless Sky than meets the eye at first glance. Some of the aggressive hardcore drumming, crushing riffs, and energy-pumping screams from their related band Vein.fm are still present to a certain degree. Fleshwater’s sophomore record also changes gears compared to their debut album by being significantly longer, thus letting the band explore their sound further with interesting riffs, intriguing sonic textures, and the charismatic vocals of Marisa Sharir.

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Haven (GER) - Causes

In an impressive display of self-awareness, Haven (GER) describe themselves as an alternative/post-metal band, and have produced a debut record in Causes that very much fits that bill. However, the forms of each contributing style exhibited here are remarkable bedfellows; Haven (GER) can at one moment unleash the pained shrieks and dense instrumentation of Amenra, and then pivot towards the world of Maynard James Keenan. Not only do the clean vocals exhibit an uncanny resemblance to those of Keenan, but the instrumentation draws from the best elements of Tool and A Perfect Circle. It's a mesh that seems like it shouldn't work, but across the spectrum of Causes, the sounds capture the essence of what makes each influence so appealing without ever sounding incongruent, which is quite the feat.

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Mawiza - Ül

Comparisons to Sepultura/Soulfly are inevitable thanks to the mixture of groove-oriented metal with indigenous music: those thunderous riffs made of harmonics, slides, and slamming chords and roughneck stomps of leathery toms are hard to misplace, and if there's a second major factor, it's Gojira, whose own Joe Duplantier makes an appearance here.  But when Mawiza went out to find their roots bloody roots, they came back with the heart of something more their own: this is an album of metal done Mapuche style.  The texture of the Mapudungun lyrics and Awka's dramatic delivery make Ül a fabulous album for vocals: sometimes you'll hear a croaking style nearly at the drones and overtones of throat singing, elsewhere it's a cleaner bellow reverberating with oratorial power, and in some places it's chants that echo into timeless mists.  Amidst the crunchy groove metal bangers are littered indigenous instrumentation and snippets of melody that make this a very unique-sounding album in spite of its identifiable modern influences.  Bands like Mawiza prove that metal can be a powerful vessel for culture.

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Preyrs - The Wounded Healer

Formerly the solo act of singer Amy Montgomery, Preyrs developed into a full band and was rebranded in time for the release of The Wounded Healer, a genre-mash that defies easy categorization. Montgomery's powerful, smoky voice sounds purpose-built for a slick blues rock band, but The Wounded Healer dabbles with various different takes on rock and metal, ranging from driving alternative and noise rock to darker industrial-tinged alternative metal. While the prevailing focus between tracks can flicker between an emphasis on hooky accessibility to soulful pathos.

Rioghan - Kept

Rioghan has embraced more members, more styles, and with it all more success on album #2.  Kept will first and foremost appeal to Leprous fans who appreciate the quiet pulse of electronics complementing a clean-sounding prog metal groove, but Rioghan take their clear influence and go home with it, turning those sounds into something colder and more alien on the softer end and harsher and djentier on the heavier end.  The vocals of Rioghan herself alternate between heady murmurs and urgent shrieks, joining staccato rhythms, palpable bass, and a strong crunch at the peak of the album's crescendos for a pretty punchy alt-prog sound, retreating then into restrained electronic-led recharges.  Good for those who like a taste of the heavy stuff but don't want to lose any texture.

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The Yagas - Midnight Minuet

The cheap sell here is that The Yagas' vocalist is actress Vera Farmiga, but we don't nominate stuff for the Metal Storm Awards because it's easy to market.  We nominate stuff because it's neat and it's good and we like it.  Thus you can credit our enthusiasm for Midnight Minuet, a stunning debut that blends beautiful gloom and ecstatic horror in a cool, dark place bounded by synths and lit by Farmiga's eerie vocals.  The album weaves together threads of goth rock, darkwave, doom metal, and the moody alternative sounds of decades past into a twilit spectacle: icy electronics, grim but memorable melodies, and a balance between atmosphere and attitude.  Rich with unearthly darkness and knit together with a strong batch of songs, Midnight Minuet is an impressive showing from a band that hopefully has a lot more brooding yet to do.

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Thornhill - Bodies

Most metalheads who partake in the nightclub lifestyle more often than not wish for heavier music to be played at the local mainstream club. Thornhill are more than willing to compromise and deliver one hell of a sexy album. With Bodies, these Aussies take a big page from the book of Deftones and mix it with groovy and progressive metalcore, dark electronica, dreamy shoegaze, and vocals intriguingly reminiscent of Matt Bellamy from Muse. The luscious noir feel in Bodies is strong and addictive. 2000s nostalgia has rarely been this charming and hot!