Berlin, the summer of 2023, in the big room at Hansa Tonstudio where half the records your parents own were made. Four men from Denver are tracking a death metal album with Arthur Rizk at the desk, a member of Tangerine Dream is booked to play synthesiser on it, and nobody involved seems to think this is a strange way to spend a budget. Century Media released Absolute Elsewhere on 4 October 2024. It scored 92 on Metacritic, reached number three on the United Kingdom rock and metal chart, and Metal Hammer put it at the top of its albums of the year.
That is where the decade got to. Now here is how it got there.
The 2020s did not thin the herd
Every previous decade in this genre had a shape: a boom, a glut, a collapse, a recovery. The 2020s refused all four. The abattoir ran at full speed for six straight years and nobody ever shut the line down, and the result is that a genuinely good death metal record now has to fight for attention against forty other genuinely good death metal records released the same month.
Two things caused it. The first is that the touring economy stopped in 2020 and a lot of bands wrote instead. The second is that recording got cheap enough that the gap between a demo and an album became a matter of choice rather than money. Both of those are covered properly in the account of death metal today. What matters here is the output.
2020 to 2022: the underground gets loud
The first half of the decade belonged to bands nobody outside the mail order lists had heard of in 2018. Ulcerate opened it on 24 April 2020 with Stare Into Death and Be Still, their first for Debemur Morti, a record Blabbermouth called dissonant and discombobulating and which finished eighth on Stereogum's metal list that December. It is not an easy way in. It is the correct one, if you can take it.
Then the American underground arrived in a block: Necrot with Mortal, Undeath with Lesions of a Different Kind, Frozen Soul with Crypt of Ice, 200 Stab Wounds with Slave to the Scalpel, four bands with nothing in common except a refusal to sound like the year they were in. Meanwhile the elders were not finished. Cannibal Corpse made Violence Unimagined in 2021 with Erik Rutan playing on it, and Immolation made Acts of God in 2022, their best in twenty years by common consent.
A good death metal record in 2025 has to fight forty other good death metal records released the same month. That is not a complaint.
The other thing 2021 produced was a trophy. Archspire released Bleed the Future on Season of Mist on 29 October, thirty one minutes long, sold three thousand seven hundred copies in its first week, entered the Billboard Heatseekers chart at number seven, and won the 2022 Juno Award for Metal or Hard Music Album of the Year. Technical death metal, on a national award stage, in a tuxedo.
2023 and 2024: everybody delivers at once
The Toronto band who spent three years quietly rebuilding themselves produced the record of 2023. Tomb Mold cut The Enduring Spirit at Boxcar Sound Recording in Hamilton, Ontario between 2020 and 2023, Arthur Rizk mixed and mastered it, 20 Buck Spin issued it digitally on 15 September and physically on 13 October, and it took an 8.6 and a Best New Music from Pitchfork, a Polaris Music Prize longlisting and number 47 on the United Kingdom download chart. Death metal with jazz fusion and dream pop in the seams, and not one moment of it apologetic.
Around it the rest of the year queued up: Obituary with Dying of Everything, Horrendous with Ontological Mysterium, Suffocation with Hymns from the Apocrypha, Cryptopsy with As Gomorrah Burns. Then 2024 answered with Absolute Elsewhere, with Ulcerate's Cutting the Throat of God, with Vitriol, and with 200 Stab Wounds moving up to Metal Blade. Four years earlier most of these bands were selling tapes by post. Some of them still are, and now they do it with a chart position.
2025, the year in full
If you came here for the best death metal albums of 2025 specifically, this is the section, and the honest summary is that it was a deep year rather than a top heavy one. No single record dominated the way Absolute Elsewhere had the year before. What happened instead was that eight or nine albums arrived that would each have led a thinner year.
Cryptopsy put out their ninth, An Insatiable Violence, through Season of Mist on 20 June 2025, twenty one months after the previous one and carrying some of the fastest playing Flo Mounier has ever committed to tape. It went on to a Juno nomination for Metal or Hard Music Album of the Year. Metal Blade released Lik's Necro, Swedish buzzsaw death metal played by people who grew up on it. Relapse had Vacuous and In His Blood. Profound Lore had Ancient Death's Ego Dissolution and Blood Monolith's The Calling of Fire. Century Media had Sanguisugabogg's Hideous Aftermath. Decibel spent its December on Drawn and Quartered's Lord of Two Horns, cavernous death metal from a band who have been doing this since the early nineties without a single fashionable year.
Ever since COVID our focus is clearer, a lot of work gets done faster, and we push each other to get it done.
Flo Mounier of Cryptopsy, announcing An Insatiable Violence, April 2025
The edges got interesting too. Kardashev made Alunea for Metal Blade, which is death metal with shoegaze in it and works far better than that description suggests. Dormant Ordeal came out of Poland on Willowtip with Tooth and Nail. If you want the newer names rather than the established ones, the Best New Death Metal Bands is the list built for that job.
Ten records, in order of how hard they hit you
| Record | Year | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|
| Blood Incantation, Absolute Elsewhere | 2024 | The decade's argument settled in two tracks and forty three minutes |
| Tomb Mold, The Enduring Spirit | 2023 | Underground death metal that stopped asking permission |
| Ulcerate, Cutting the Throat of God | 2024 | An hour of unresolved harmony with a genuine arc |
| Ulcerate, Stare Into Death and Be Still | 2020 | The record that opened the decade and set the difficulty |
| Archspire, Bleed the Future | 2021 | Thirty one minutes, a Juno award, no fat anywhere |
| Immolation, Acts of God | 2022 | Thirty five years in and still the darkest band in New York |
| Cryptopsy, An Insatiable Violence | 2025 | The fastest record of 2025 by a comfortable margin |
| Horrendous, Ontological Mysterium | 2023 | Melody and technique without a single deathcore reflex |
| 200 Stab Wounds, Slave to the Scalpel | 2021 | The purest statement of the new American underground |
| Lik, Necro | 2025 | The Stockholm guitar sound, played correctly, thirty years late |
One warning before you start buying. Two of those records are unsparing on purpose, and if dissonant Death Metal is not something you have made peace with yet, begin at the bottom of the table and climb. Start with the Lik album on a Friday night and the Ulcerate on a Sunday morning when there is nothing else in the room. In that order it makes sense. In the other order most people give up by track three, and there is no shame in it.
