Here are the albums I listened to the most this year.

Do we have any albums in common? And what were some of your most-listened-to albums this year (regardless of release date)?

Some bangers in here! A very cool list my friend. Dopethrone is definitely an album that I come back to often year after year, 2025 being no exception. The same can probably be said for both Master of Reality and Annihilation of the Wicked. Classic & comforting staples really.

Otherwise this year I've been obsessing over the new Phantom Spell, Heather & Hearth quite a bit. I really love the oldschool heavy prog and power metal vibe of the album and I find the composition and performance absolutely brilliant. An all bangers no fillers type of deal. It's rapidly becoming one of my favourite album of that genre and a big thanks to AndyMetalFreak for that discovery.

Also, I've been returning to one of my early Melodeath love quite a bit this year with Kalmah's They Will Return. Its one of my all time favourite of this genre where I can just loop it non-stop. Its a very nostalgic release for me and I love the raw energy. In my opinion this is their best release in career, period.

Those are the ones striking me most at the moment.

Written by Guib on 23.12.2025 at 16:14

Some bangers in here! A very cool list my friend. Dopethrone is definitely an album that I come back to often year after year, 2025 being no exception. The same can probably be said for both Master of Reality and Annihilation of the Wicked. Classic & comforting staples really.

....
Phantom Spell, Heather & Hearth
....
Kalmah's They Will Return.
....

Those are the ones striking me most at the moment.

Thanks for sharing! Nice that we have those classics in common. I need to listen to that Phantom Spell album, and the Kalmah album. Thanks for the recommendations!

Great list! I haven't managed to keep track on all the albums I've listened to this year and I could really do with setting a word doc, or something similar up myself for next next year so I can keep track easier. As far as I know my most listened to album released this year is the latest Havukruunu. The band's I've likely listened to the most though are Blackbraid, Spectral Wound, Panzerfaust and My Dying Bride. So black and death doom mostly.

Written by AndyMetalFreak on 23.12.2025 at 17:18

Great list! I haven't managed to keep track on all the albums I've listened to this year and I could really do with setting a word doc, or something similar up myself for next next year so I can keep track easier. As far as I know my most listened to album released this year is the latest Havukruunu. The band's I've likely listened to the most though are Blackbraid, Spectral Wound, Panzerfaust and My Dying Bride. So black and death doom mostly.

Yeah, I could definitely recommend keeping track of your listens. Although, with the amount of new albums you digest in a year, it may be a daunting task.

Only 10 albums in this list are from this year, and, in fact, this year I've fallen behind on listening to new releases. First I was occupied with my master thesis. Right now, I'm busy with a new personal project: I'm systematically making my way through an Excel table of about 2000 songs, rating them in a tiered style (bad, average, good, excellent, perfect), associate them with a numbered score, and use the average of song ratings as the album rating. It gives me a good reason to revisit old favorites, and, by the end of this project, I hope to have a new top 200 favorite albums list for myself. That's my goal for sometime next year!

Written by F3ynman on 23.12.2025 at 20:44

I'm systematically making my way through an Excel table of about 2000 songs, rating them in a tiered style (bad, average, good, excellent, perfect), associate them with a numbered score, and use the average of song ratings as the album rating.

That sounds like a fun project. I have started working on that approach in a very similar fashion about 20 years ago. I ended up with a list of about 3,000 songs, in a very vague ranking. The peak of that iceberg is published in my Top 300 Songs of All-Time List.
The entire list indeed turned out to become very helpful for eventually ranking my favourite albums, resulting in a respective published list.
After that work was accomplished I though soon turned away from that long list of songs because I became too obsessed with keeping it up to date. I even had a playlist of the entire list on an mp3 player. And I ran into the problem of only playing that playlist all the time, often on shuffle. The upside was to have exclusively songs be played that you love to hear -- I decided to keep those songs out of the playlist that I rated average or lower. But the downside was that I completely lost connection to the albums the songs originally come from. At some point I realised that it makes absolutely no sense to only go for the highlight songs of an album, more so if they are even shuffled together with songs from other albums, different bands and subgenres.
That is why I abandoned that long list of mine some 5 or 6 years ago, together with its playlist. I only listen to entire albums since then, with a few exceptions in situations when I dont have time to go through the album in total.

Written by Redel on 23.12.2025 at 21:23

Written by F3ynman on 23.12.2025 at 20:44

I'm systematically making my way through an Excel table of about 2000 songs, rating them in a tiered style (bad, average, good, excellent, perfect), associate them with a numbered score, and use the average of song ratings as the album rating.

That sounds like a fun project. I have started working on that approach in a very similar fashion about 20 years ago. I ended up with a list of about 3,000 songs, in a very vague ranking. The peak of that iceberg is published in my Top 300 Songs of All-Time List.
The entire list indeed turned out to become very helpful for eventually ranking my favourite albums, resulting in a respective published list.
After that work was accomplished I though soon turned away from that long list of songs because I became too obsessed with keeping it up to date. I even had a playlist of the entire list on an mp3 player. And I ran into the problem of only playing that playlist all the time, often on shuffle. The upside was to have exclusively songs be played that you love to hear -- I decided to keep those songs out of the playlist that I rated average or lower. But the downside was that I completely lost connection to the albums the songs originally come from. At some point I realised that it makes absolutely no sense to only go for the highlight songs of an album, more so if they are even shuffled together with songs from other albums, different bands and subgenres.
That is why I abandoned that long list of mine some 5 or 6 years ago, together with its playlist. I only listen to entire albums since then, with a few exceptions in situations when I dont have time to go through the album in total.

For this project, I'm listening to entire albums, so the songs aren't shuffled. I'm going in alphabetical order according to the band name.

In general, I listen to whole albums. Once in a while, when I can't decide what to listen to, I listen to a shuffled playlist of individual songs.

By the way, also for this project, I decided to rank some of my favorite non metal albums (it's mostly Arctic Monkeys and Muse, as I dont really listen to non metal genres except for stoner rock) and also recent albums of the 2020s. I've been kind of wary of including new releases in my "all-time favorites" list, but I'm trying to "objectively" rank these songs based on my personal taste, so I think there shouldn't be any recency bias to the method. Also to avoid bias, I'm going to only put together the ranked list once I've rated all the 2000 songs in my table. It should be interesting to see where those non metal and new releases land in the end!

Would you say that you would rank all of these albums highly? (at least an 8) or are there other reasons why they made the list

Written by Dinruth on 03.01.2026 at 16:38

Would you say that you would rank all of these albums highly? (at least an 8) or are there other reasons why they made the list

Yes, I think I rated all of these at least an 8. As you can see by the number of listens I wrote next to the album name, these are 50 albums that I listened to at least 4 times. I only listen to albums I enjoy that many times. Life is so short; why waste time listening to albums you dislike?

By the way, I'm working on an updated top 100 (or top 200, we'll see) list of personal favorites. The last update I gave was in 2022. I hope to have this new one finished sometime in summer or late spring this year. You'll see there many of these albums that I've listed here, among others.

Written by F3ynman on 03.01.2026 at 17:29

Yes, I think I rated all of these at least an 8. As you can see by the number of listens I wrote next to the album name, these are 50 albums that I listened to at least 4 times. I only listen to albums I enjoy that many times. Life is so short; why waste time listening to albums you dislike?

well it has happened to me that, for example, there’s an album that a friend recommended to me or that everyone on MS loved and I listened to it and was like “I don’t get it” but then I feel like “Maybe I didn’t pay enough attention (which happens more often than I like) or I didn’t understand it at the first or second listening”

Btw god to see some love for Acherontas

Written by Dinruth on 04.01.2026 at 07:55

well it has happened to me that, for example, there’s an album that a friend recommended to me or that everyone on MS loved and I listened to it and was like “I don’t get it” but then I feel like “Maybe I didn’t pay enough attention (which happens more often than I like) or I didn’t understand it at the first or second listening”

Ah yeah, I know what you mean. In those cases, I often learn to like an album or, if it really can't grow on me, I don't listen to it that many times in quick succession. I might come back to an album after a year or more, and sometimes it suddenly might click.

Quote:

Btw god to see some love for Acherontas

Nice to see another fan! I usually listen to Vamachara, and this time I checked out their newest album as well. I once listened to some of their earliest albums, but I would need to revisit them sometime... and also probably check out the rest of their discography at some point.