The Best Grindcore Album - Metal Storm Awards 2025

Barren Path - Grieving

Gridlink is dead, long live grindcore with musical consciousness.  Barren Path merges members from several groups, mostly Gridlink, and while you will not find a 1-to-1 recreation here - Barren Path is distinctly heavier and more vocally diverse - the basic philosophies regarding how many riffs you should be able to fit into a grindcore song persist in this phenomenally energetic massacre with melody.  In a "full-length" debut that feels a little short even for grindcore, there's still plenty of room to walk in the shoes of other genres and incorporate song structures that run a bit more complex than your standard scream'n'mash approach.  Pure aural violence is great, of course, but it's nice to see that at least one band out there knows you can write complete songs within that framework.

Full review

Bent Sea - The Dormant Ruin

The three members of Bent Sea - Dirk Verbeuren, Shane Embury, and Sven du Caluwe - are all known not just for their talent but their productivity, each racking up a huge number of bands and spinoffs, and so it is perhaps no wonder that on The Dormant Ruin, Bent Sea's long-awaited debut album, they like to try out a few different approaches to fast noise.  They take pleasure in revisiting the punk origins of the genre, then buckling down to inject it with the technicality of a brutal death metal crossover; and when it's time to just slam concrete with the barrage of fast-cutting chaos we know as traditional grindcore, it's hard to outdo the extreme energy and practiced techniques of three veterans.  Bent Sea were uncharacteristically slow for a grindcore band, taking a full 14 years to work up to a full-length album (although what's "full-length" for grind anyway?), but now that they've done it, it's an easy sweep to be one of the best of the year.

Full review

Caustic Wound - Grinding Mechanism Of Torment

Only one of these albums has "grind" in its name, which should tell you all you need to know. But if that's not enough, the alumni of this band come from Mortiferum, Fetid, and Magrudergrind, leaving Caustic Wound's sound to have some clear debt towards death metal, especially its doomier version. Low gurgles and OSDM riffs fast and slow are the name of the game, but Grinding Mechanism Of Torment tweaks things a bit with a cleaner, fuller production and a long closing track that lets the band go full-on with the doomier death side.

Full review

Defigurement - Endbryo

The Best Grindcore Album category each year would not feel complete without at least one absolutely madcap and unhinged release, and Defigurement more than fulfil that quota this year with debut album Endbryo. Featuring the incomprehensibly busy Mike Heller on drums (who only had about half a dozen other albums out in 2025), the quartet deliver a style that could be described as experimental deathgrind, but such a label would fall woefully short of encapsulating the breadth and insanity of the ideas presented across the course of the record. On top of the grindcore staples of rapid blasting drumming, frenetic riffs (albeit with an unusually melodic hue) and frenzied vocals, listeners will encounter a spread of sounds including (but not limited to) blackened tremolo riffs, dazzling shredded solos, jazz- and disco-inspired drum rhythms, and melancholic piano/keyboard interludes. Endbryo sounds like nothing else you'll have heard in grindcore this decade, let alone this year; you owe it to yourself to discover whether that's a good or bad thing.

Dephosphorus - Planetoktonos

Dephosphorus return after a 5-year gap with another tasty slab of deathgrind, one that makes good use of the grooviness of death metal as a counter to the punky aggression of grindcore. Planetoktonos is inspired by sci-fi and cosmology, and psychedelic synths, ponderous song intros and background clean vocals lend an otherworldly touch to otherwise gritty extreme metal. The grindcore roots of the band are quite old-school courtesy of the punk-indebted rhythms, but they mesh well with the more modern extreme metal elements, not to mention the extraterrestrial soundscaping.

King Parrot - A Young Person's Guide To King Parrot

Thankfully this album is available for listening outside of the demographic of young persons, wherever the demarcation line between young and old would lie, especially since we're on an Internet forum. So our all-ages guide to King Parrot is this: imagine grindcore that is fully committed to being metal rather than punk by leaning quite close to a thrashier sound. A Young Person's Guide To King Parrot is pretty neat on the production and lyrical front in a way that still exudes raw energy.

Full review

Omegavortex - Diabolic Messiah Of The New World Order

Combining the unholy trinity of metal's most extreme genres in grindcore, black metal and death metal is a surefire way to produce something truly abrasive and belligerent, and Omegavortex sound truly diabolical on Diabolic Messiah Of The New World Order. The full-pelt frenzied grinding aggression that is the core of the album is accentuated by sinister tremolo riffs, headbangable death metal grooves, cacophonic dissonance and shredding solos. With song lengths around the 3-minute mark on average, each hellish onslaught sticks around just long enough to leave you questioning your own insanity before making way for the next sonic assault.

Psudoku - Psudoktrination

Do you like your grindcore to be as annoying as humanly possible?  You don't?  Hey, newsflash: you listen to grindcore, so yeah, you do.  And that means you'll love Psudoku, a band that among all grinding outfits has shown the most dedication to being unlistenably bright, spastic, and sensorily disorienting.  Try yelling "sensorily disorienting" five times fast and you'll roughly approximate this album.  To be a little kinder, Psudoku is a genuinely unique project with an incredibly detailed sound, and the space-themed neon blasts of jackhammered riffing are complex enough that you'll need all of NASA inventing new math to chart out the tablature.  Psudoktrination is actually closer to earth than usual, with a heavier low end and a little more grindcore convention to ease you in if this is your first spacewalk, but pretty soon the only music you'll be able to listen to will be the electric shocks immobilizing your eyeballs.  Suit up, space cadet: it's time to get psudoktrinated.

Full review

Tithe - Communion In Anguish

The idea of attempting to find fertile ground in the space between grindcore's blistering violence and death doom's crawling bleakness isn't the most obvious, and Tithe have been somewhat alone in pursuing this vision, but they continue to demonstrate that there is a clear method to the madness. Communion In Anguish is arguably the most successful combination of these styles yet; the grindcore is a battering ram of ferocity that still has a satisfying hookiness to it, while the doomier passages bring a foreboding atmosphere into the equation that nicely fills the spaces around the blasting outbursts. Communion In Anguish is oppressive and sinister in both its slower and faster moments, bringing the two extremes together to devastating effect.

Trauma Bond - Summer Ends. Some Are Long Gone

Regardless of how literally the name "Trauma Bond" can be taken for a duo bonding over their love of extreme music, Summer Ends. Some Are Long Gone is the third in a tetralogy based on the four seasons. Not hard to guess which one this is based on, but a lot of the sauce on this album comes from the band infusing the short tracks with various influences, from noise rock to chuggy metalcore, and then filling a third of the runtime with a nine-minute-long closer that goes into sludge and drone.

Full review