The Best Death Metal Album - Metal Storm Awards 2025

1914 - Viribus Unitis

War is real for 1914 the way it is for few other bands that sing about it. “Viribus unitis” – “with forces united” – refers not only to the world-spanning conflict of a century past, which they continue to narrate on their third album, but to Ukraine’s continued defense against the Russian invasion and the role that 1914 play in literally drumming up support. This is an album born of war and inseparable from it, and its plodding, doomy marches and furious, blackened charges do not have to imagine carnage from the past to be connected with their subjects.

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Ancient Death - Ego Dissolution

This ain't old-school death. This is Ancient Death. Centered on a space-themed lyrical concept, the Massachusetts four-piece Ancient Death play an incredibly entertaining mix of styles on their very promising debut album Ego Dissolution. Their approach is a marriage of elegant, progressive influences and groovy, technical musicianship. The guitar work flows seamlessly between moody melodies and catchy riffs, while individual solos present intricate compositions that occasionally dip their toes into frantic chaos. Pummeling drums and rumbling growls create a heaviness that's juxtaposed with the bright female vocals of the bassist. Like the ebb and flow of the ocean’s tide, the music naturally evolves through cycles of intensity and atmosphere. Balancing aggressive energy, exquisite melody, and groovy rhythm, Ego Dissolution offers everything one could ask for in a progressive death metal album.

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Baest - Colossal

Colossal marks a very successful evolution for Baest, blending their core death metal sound with classic ‘80s heavy metal and hard rock, resulting in a rich, melodic, and anthemic album. Catchy grooves, strong musicianship, and killer riffs prove that buzzsaws can also be fun at parties. A band needs to have a certain level of self-confidence to call their album ‘Colossal’, but the album fulfills the expectations stemming from its title. Accessible to both hard rock fans and extreme metal lovers, this is an absolute joy to listen to.

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Defacement - Doomed

Fans of The Angelic Process will appreciate the ghostly vibrations that appear in quasi-instrumental bumper tracks and the odd shoegazing breaks that occasionally peek through, but despite those periodic lighter palettes, Doomed is not especially given to periods of introspective inactivity: the launch from "Mournful" into "Portrait" immediately resets the album's character from subdued eeriness to explosive eeriness.  This is on the whole a work of discomfiting death metal, characterized by jarring guitar lines that fall into rapid discord over furious maelstroms of percussion while feral screams smear into the background in cold pockets of reverb.  Doomed] has a really hyperactive underlayer and a disconcerting melodic layer, with impressively intricate and technical drum work that contrasts with the tone-focused guitar work.  Devotees of Ulcerate, Suffering Hour, and Deathspell Omega will come to find that having one's face brutally removed can be a pleasurable experience.

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Dormant Ordeal - Tooth And Nail

Already established as a gem of the notorious Polish death metal scene, Dormant Ordeal marked their 20-year anniversary by releasing a record that launched them to the zenith of the genre in 2025. Despite losing their sole founding member (drummer Radek Kowal), the two surviving members (who have appeared on every album from the band) carried on, recruiting the ever-busy Chason Westmoreland as a session musician and creating a masterclass in blackened death metal. Perhaps less technical and dissonant than its predecessors, Tooth And Nail is nonetheless absolutely savage, assaulting listeners with jackhammer blasts and riffs, yet amongst the chaos, there is also a surprising amount of melodic levity and progressive expanse in the record's longest tracks, turning a visceral experience into a truly well-rounded one.

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Jade - Mysteries Of A Flowery Dream

If the phrase "atmospheric death metal" puts you in mind of something like Fallujah, you're at square one, but Jade is more tactile than that, far more than their delicate aesthetics would suggest.  For Jade, prioritizing mood doesn't entail any loss of presence: though layers of sustained guitars and buried vocals and a palpable wash of reverb make Mysteries Of A Flowery Dream feel obscure and distant, the album maintains immediacy in burning riffs and a dedication to remaining, above all else, recognizably death metal.  Its pacing, riffing styles, and melodic approaches index black metal, doom, and post-metal, and it makes unusual use of clean vocals and deep riff arrangements with concentrated stretches of hot guitar leads, but somehow Jade makes all of this sound like a new and exciting form of death metal rather than a detour into something else.  Even with complex, longer-form writing, Jade remains dark and aggressive, perfecting a difficult balance between atmosphere and brute force.

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Patristic - Catechesis

Spawned as a side-project of Hideous Divinity's Enrico Schettino, Patristic seem to seek the hideosity in divinity as well on their debut album Catechesis. Its theological subject matter is rendered through savage dissonant blackened death metal, primed and ready to punish with abrasive blasts and punishing riffs. However, amidst the fury gradually emerges glimpses of salvation, increasingly blending in melodic and atmospheric touches amongst the cacophonic chaos as if being offered deliverance. In spite of this, Catechesis is a savage and ruinous offering, moulded by malevolence.

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SpiritWorld - Helldorado

High noon, your doom: aimed at you, it's another band of Cowboys From Hell!  Now, there are some real hot guitar licks and wailing dive bombs on Helldorado, so the obvious Pantera callback isn't too out of place, but SpiritWorld have been putting work into cornering the death-western market ever since, well, Deathwestern, and they're not about to just live in someone else's shadow: this band rides alone.  "Abilene Grime" opens Helldorado in dusty rockabilly, lulling you into a false sense of beans and cornbread before gradually transforming into a dirty hardcore punk track; then at last it shows its true colors, throwing off the acoustics and dragging you downward into a death/thrash hell.  These brigands don't ride at a gallop, they're at a forced dash or a menacing beatdown and never in between, rattling off western references with hoarse shouts and furious riffing.  Helldorado also dabbles more in country-like styles than before, which suits the cowboy aesthetic a little more than straight hardcore ("Prayer Lips" even has whispered vocals and a sensual saxophone, which is maybe not country, but not death metal, anyway); there's some real adventure opening up for SpiritWorld here.  But mostly, of course, they're out to scorch everything that walks or crawls with a blistering hardcore/death/thrash assault that'll cut you down before you reach ten paces.

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Teitanblood - From The Visceral Abyss

You could spend this entire month searching through the Metal Storm Awards nominees, hoping to find that one supremely heavy album, that one that just explodes out of your speakers with all hell's fury behind it, that one band that sounds like evil perfected.  Well, this is that album.  After some years of tinkering at an already expert level, Teitanblood have aced their production: From The Visceral Abyss is pure fury and energy and menace, like Anaal Nathrakh but with the murky, voluminous feeling of cavernous death, but with the chilling and apocalyptic melodies of the fiercest black metal, but with the blood-and-guts rawness of Swedeath, but with the implacable hardness of death industrial.  This is Teitanblood's masterpiece: an album so brutal and evil that it is noteworthy for how brutal and evil it is in a genre predicated entirely on being brutal and evil.

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Veilburner - Longing For Triumph, Reeking Of Tragedy

Veilburner’s eighth output delivers yet another puzzling, dissonant, and bizarre slab of experimental death metal. No idea lingers for too long, no moment is wasted; it’s relentlessly creative death metal from beginning to end. And in spite of that, Longing For Triumph, Reeking Of Tragedy remains surprisingly accessible and fun without compromising any of its creativity. It’s another album in a long line of successful reimagining of death metal in a way that only Veilburner can accomplish.

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