Thoughteater is one of the boldest raw black metal albums of the past two or three years.

It may be a repeatable album top to bottom, but it’s very much a beautiful painting, coming to life in all of its true, dynamic from.

This has a swagger and a groove. All the best bits from their previous works have been crystallised into a quintessential Year of the Cobra album.

Over the six tracks the band never goes wrong and K L P S has put a real marker down in the Swedish post-metal sound.

You can forget that it’s playing. You won’t forget its impact on your troubled soul.

6 has proven to be another crown to the throne for Krokofant. Not only is it a great album, but a way to see where they will go next.

Here We Go Crazy is coated in a wonderful veneer that shines up close to the punk/pop perfection of Copper Blue.

This excellent EP is the band’s first new material since 2018’s Future Ruins, and these four songs will delight fans new and old.

A fantastic history lesson when it comes to Swedish death metal and these songs still stand up, with the rawness adding a definite charm.

The journey itself is intense, but beyond its outer limits. Cathedrale’s Poison is the ultimate trip with massive repeatable listens, but putting you on the edge of your seat.

A career-defining dark neoclassical record, reckoning with womanhood, that breaches beyond its confines.

Kosmodome have a long way to go by proving themselves they can take it up a notch and see which direction and which path to walk towards. Let’s see where the next chapter will lead them to.

Essentially Rattle is all rhythm and chant and yet it is totally unlike that shaking hoodoo mania thing, completely different to all the spooky drones and incense types.

There are more ideas to come, and hopefully, the real game has just begun for Bedsore to see what kind of brainstorming momentum they’ll have in the years to come during the roaring ‘20s.

Everyday might have a simple title, but there is nothing mundane or simplistic in Kuroda’s music. Again.

As always with Hecker it’s emotional but rich and complex, allowing for multiple possibilities.

Turn up Black Noise to the full and let the outright sonic darkness reign supreme, the way the music of Bong-Ra always has done.

It all could have turned into incredible musical chaos, but instead, the band on a whole are able to keep in sensible and musically tight, bringing that fresh air to some old (and not so old) musical concepts. Nostalgia with a twist.

This might be the album we need for 2025.

The UK’s finest purveyors of sludged up post-metal return with another extraordinary album which manages to step up from a previous point of perfection.

One of the Spirits Burning: A Musical Memoir is an unusual book, it is part musical autobiography, part guide book, part instruction manual!