Alan’s Favourite Music of 2025

10: Omnium Gatherum – May The Bridges We Burn Light the Way

Another reliably great release from Omnium Gatherum with the usual uplifting melodies, neoclassical noodling (‘The Last Hero’, ‘Barricades’), and expansive soundscapes that set them apart from the pack. Good clean heavy metal fun for all ages. Slightly disappointed that ‘Streets of Rage’ isn’t a Sega Mega Drive reference, but you can’t win ‘em all.

Listen to: My Pain, The Last Hero

9: The Night Flight Orchestra – Give Us the Moon

I wrongly assumed that The Night Flight Orchestra had died with David Andersson – Soilwork were around before him – but I’ve enjoyed Give Us the Moon more than their other recent releases.

NFO have perfected their style of throwback album–oriented rock: endless glowing night skies of major chords, synths and soaring vocals, more double entendres than a Carry On movie but cheesy rather than sleazy. If you take a Soilwork album, crank the AOR factor to 11 (and the metal factor to almost imperceptible levels, but there’s a little bit of Iron Maiden inspiration sprinkled in there), you’re in for a good time.

Listen to: Melbourne, May I?, Miraculous

8: Ghost – Skeletá

Ghost have become one of the biggest rock bands in the world, selling out arenas across the globe. It’s a delightful, albeit bizarre outcome for a group that started as a stoner metal band helmed by an anonymous Satanic pope. Can they tour everywhere in the USA? Really?

Ghost’s transformation from spooky comedy metal to stadium rock goliath, hinted at in 2022’s Impera, is complete on Skeletá, an album that has far more in common with Journey and Boston than Black Sabbath. Opening track ‘Peacefield’ is basically Journey’s ‘Separate Ways’, while ‘Missilia Amori’ sounds like a pastiche of 80s glam metal, and not necessarily in a good way.

Skeletá sounds a little weak by Ghost standards: ‘Guiding Lights’ and ‘Excelsis’ are among the worst tracks they’ve ever recorded. And yet, at other times it’s among the best music Ghost has ever recorded: the aforementioned ‘Peacefield’, the Scooby Doo groove of ‘Satanized’, a bit of old school Ghost with ‘Marks of the Evil One’ and the epic cowbell climax of ‘Umbra’ with its stadium-filling chorus.

Skeletá is probably the second worst Ghost album², but it’s still my most played album of 2025. Even their weaker albums are difficult not to love.

Listen to: Peacefield, Lachryma, Satanized, Umbra

7: The Midnight – Syndicate

Apple Music Replay breaks down my listening habits month by month – it’s Spotify Wrapped without the investments in weapons manufacturing. It’s a cool way to reflect on the year: I can see the depths of my marathon training when I listened to a lot of Hilltop Hoods, the months of more intense office work when I focused to electronic and synthwave, and that month when I became obsessed with Philip Bailey and Phil Collins’ pop classic ‘Easy Lover’³.

Synthwave is great background music – see also ‘Lofi Girl’ – and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. It has a rhythm that doesn’t distract, it’s subtly motivational. But the Midnight’s latest album Syndicate is not background music: it’s way too exciting for that. The early highlight is ‘Runaways’ featuring Bonnie McKee, a pop songwriting powerhouse behind some of Katy Perry’s hits and Taio Cruz’ ‘Dynamite’. I know how utterly repellant that might sound⁴, but when you take lyrics about Californian nostalgia and layer it over melancholic minor chord synthesisers, it’s a world removed from bubblegum pop.

Syndicate is a diverse if somewhat meandering album (1 hour 25 minutes!) that traces a lot of routes through synthwave pop. It’s a great introduction to the genre, the perfect soundtrack for a (very) long night drive.

Listen to: Runaways, Friction

6: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – Phantom Island

Calling King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard ‘astonishingly prolific’ doesn’t do them justice. Following the thrash metal masterpiece that was 2023’s Petrodragonic Apocalypse – which you can now hear me rave about at length in podcast form– they’ve recently returned to their roots in blues music.

I wasn’t a fan of last year’s Flight b741, but the beauty of the Gizzverse is that if you don’t like one album, something completely different will arrive 6 months later. Phantom Island has some of the blues stylings of b741 but also a full orchestral accompaniment. It’s dynamic and exciting, but surprisingly introspective and sad, an album about being away from your family and friends due to a constant touring schedule.

Speaking of constant touring: we saw King Gizz at the Sydney Opera House earlier this year with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, playing Phantom Island in its entirety plus a selection of hits. There was no 3-hour improvisational jamming (doesn’t work with the orchestra) but there was the perfect rendition of ‘Dragon’ that moved me to tears. Elsewhere in the same tour they were playing epic rave sets and rock sets on alternate nights. Even if you don’t think the Gizz are the best band in the world — that’s OK, nobody’s perfect — no one else has the imagination to come up with all this crazy shit, or the talent to pull it off.

Listen to: Phantom Island, Deadstick, Grow Wings and Fly

5: Moron Police – Pachinko

Comfortably the weirdest of my favourite albums this year, before Pachinko I’d never heard of Moron Police (although from the name alone, they sound aligned to my values). According to the band, “it’s a concept album about a guy who turns into a sentient Pachinko machine in Tokyo” and a tribute to their drummer Thore Omland Pettersen who was tragically killed in a car incident in 2022. Filling in for Thore is Billy Rymer of The Dillinger Escape Plan.

Pachinko, in spite of the circumstances, is a relentlessly positive and beautiful pop-prog album that’s best enjoyed from start to finish. It introduces a leitmotif early in the album that returns and reiterates over again in surprising new forms. So while there’s only one properly beefy prog track in ‘Pachinko, Pt.1’ at 11:44, it’s one big uplifting odyssey.

You have to tolerate a little silliness with Pachinko⁵ – if the lyric “The Devil turned me into a penny dispenser in Tokyo” is too much, this may not be for you – but you should, because this album is delightful.

Listen to: Waiting Around For You, King Among Kittens, The Apathy of Kings

4: The Halo Effect – March of the Unheard

Perhaps the Halo Effect’s sophomore effort should have been called March of the Previously-Heard since it’s so similar to Days of the Lost, and indeed, early In Flames. The opening riff of ‘Detonate’ could easily be mistaken for ‘Pinball Map’ to the untrained ear. The intro to ‘Our Channel to the Darkness’, acoustic noodling before dive-bombing into the duelling guitar riffs, should have its own TV Tropes page by now.

Having said that, Days of the Lost was my favourite album of 2022, so if you’re going to iterate on something, that’s a great choice. This is musical comfort food for me: it goes down smoother than hot coffee, and I’m just as unlikely to get sick of it. But The Halo Effect should be capable of more than reheating last night’s tasty metal leftovers – especially considering vocalist Mikael Stanne’s other metal supergroup, Cemetery Skyline.

March of the Unheard gets my blood pumping when I need to push through another running interval session. It has the awesome melodies and goofy Scandinavian existential crisis lyrics I know and love. It’s still better than a great deal of that chugga-chugga one-chord crap that passes for metal these days. You want to hear a real breakdown? Get a load of the last 90 seconds of ‘Detonate’! It goes so hard, it makes me want to grow my hair out again!

The opening one-two punch of ‘Conspire to Deceive’ followed by ‘Detonate’ is so good that it bumps up my overall sentiments on March of the Unheard. Without them, it wouldn’t be as good as Days of the Lost; with them, it’s a close tie. More great work from The Halo Effect, but let’s push the envelope next time! Someone should ship a few Be’Lakor albums to Sweden…

Listen to: Detonate, What We Become

3: John Butler: PRISM

The great conceit of professional criticism is the score we slap at the end of a review, the pretence of objectivity and fair comparison. 95% of my review scores were based on gut feel, and the remaining 5% were likely the product of having a shitty month or a busy life.

Why do I like PRISM so much? I could tell you it’s John Butler’s wise songwriting, the lyrics that speak to universal truths of the middle-aged human experience without cliche or sugar coating. I could say it’s the intermingled guitar godliness and drum rhythms creating an ecosystem of sound.

Yet – it’s the gut. This album speaks to me like nothing else in 2025, a warm summer breeze of songs that arrived in the Australian winter. It’s just really fucking good.

Listen to: Going Solo, King of California

2: Coheed and Cambria – Vaxis III: The Father of Make Believe

Coheed and Cambria have been around for a long time. Although it feels like it was just yesterday I was listening to The Second Stage Turbine Blade for the first time, last year we watched them headline the Monolith Festival in Sydney and play through Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through The Eyes of Madness⁶ in its entirety to mark its 20th anniversary. Everyone knew the words (but did anyone know what they meant?). Trying to fully understand the ‘Amory Wars’ saga through the music alone is impossible, and even if you were to read through the comic books and novellas to flesh out the sci-fi story, some of those stories have never been released.

To me, that’s not really what Coheed and Cambria’s music is about. The lyrics devoid of musical context are incoherent, but in that context, the words have a powerful emotional resonance. You get the gist of what Claudio Sanchez is trying to convey: IV always read to me like a breakup album.

This is a long way of saying that I have absolutely no idea what the literal interpretation of Vaxis III: The Father of Make Believe is, but it seems to be about time catching up with Claudio and the band in a (real) world they don’t recognise, finding comfort in creating music together:

“The familiar feels so foreign, as I search these spots for a trail I forgot

Once so young, now feeling my age, as my time comes to a

close”

“We’ll all sing together, from the first verse to the last word, our voices will unify in

harmony, sing together, tethered forever”

After Vaxis II, an album full of auto-tuned Imagine Dragons-grade crap that almost swore me off the band completely, The Father of Make Believe is mercifully full of great rock songs. As one would expect from a Coheed album there’s a mix of anthemic stuff (‘Someone Who Can’, ‘One Last Miracle’), epic prog rock (‘The Continuum’), and high-octane riff machines that have been lodged in my head for weeks (‘Searching for Tomorrow’). In line with the other Vaxis albums, it’s also lighter than their other work: straight-up prog rock without the metallic topcoat from the Good Apollo and Afterman albums. Light Coheed are as good as heavy Coheed to me, as long as they lay off the autotune, drum machines and synths. (Man, Vaxis II really was terrible.)

Who are the ‘Father of Make Believe’ and ‘Blind Side Sonny’? Why are there callbacks to the Afterman albums? Who cares! This is the best Coheed album in a decade; it’s a delight to hear them at the top of their game again. Later in 2025, the expanded ‘New Entities’ edition of Vaxis III added some great, heavier bonus tracks that are worth a listen, but they don’t fit into the flow of the original release, which makes them feel a little disposable.

Listen to: Searching for Tomorrow, One Last Miracle

1: Disarmonia Mundi – The Dormant Stranger

The first Disarmonia Mundi album since 2015’s Cold Inferno, The Dormant Stranger is less an album title and more a summary of the band’s whereabouts for the past decade. The Italian melodic death metal duo returned out of nowhere last year with ‘Oathbreaker’, which was both a spectacular return to form and a huge disappointment. The song was great – galloping riffs, Gothenburg guitar noodling, soaring choruses with a weird Italian inflection – but the mix was atrocious, a muddy compressed mess with no definition. I had hoped the full album would fare better, but it’s the same across the board, and it’s just as bad as Cold Inferno.

And yet! If you run The Dormant Stranger through a generic ‘Rock’ 10-band equaliser that boosts the bass and treble at the expense of the mid-range, it sounds dramatically better: snappy at the top, booming at the bottom, much more alive. Can I earnestly recommend an album that I will only listen to through an equaliser? Can that be my album of the year?…

…Yes.

Disarmonia Mundi take a genre that has been done to death (see March of the Unheard) and somehow wring a few new ideas out of it. We’ve heard songs like these before – on other Disarmonia Mundi albums! – but these compositions are just different enough to feel fresh and engaging while retaining that classic “did this just come out of a 2005 time capsule?” melodeath sound. Bjorn ‘Speed’ Strid from Soilwork and The Night Flight Orchestra makes a welcome return on guest vocals: his work on ‘Shadows Of A World Painted Red’ and ‘Warhound’ is the perfect compliment to Claudio Ravinale’s harsh vocals and Ettore Rigotti’s cleans.

While I wish Ettore would hand over the production duties to someone else, there’s no denying the sheer songwriting power of The Dormant Stranger. Crank up the volume, tune in that equaliser, and let it rip.

Listen to: Shadows Of A World Painted Red, Oathbreaker, Warhound

Opal’s Lick of the Year

Greetings hoomans! This year Alan adopted me into the family and I am loving life. I’m not a big music lover – I’m a ‘lounge on the grass and enjoy the birdsong’ kind of girl.

I have been told that if I had the ears to appreciate music, not just the rustling of a bag of treats or the jangling of a bunch of keys (WALKIES!) , that my musical lick of the year would be ‘Detonate’ by The Halo Effect. Dad says “it’s melodic metal perfection from the first note, but the breakdown from 2:45 through the solo is pure magic”. So there you have it. Give me the sound of a lawnmower any day! Now that’s exciting!

Disappointment of the Year

Spiritbox – Tsunami Sea. My hopes were astronomical when they released ‘Perfect Soul’ as the first single, a snappy sequel to ‘Jaded’, but the full album is monumentally dull. I am not even sure I listened through the whole thing. Pretty much the opposite of Eternal Blue and The Fear of Fear. Now I am the one who is jaded.

Honourable Mentions

An Abstract Illusion – The Sleeping City, Blackbraid – Blackbraid III, Boy & Bear – Tripping Over Time, coldrain – OPTIMIZE – EP, dEMOTIONAL – New Horizons, Dream Theater – Parasomnia (it’s fine), Haunt – Ignite, Hilltop Hoods – Fall from the Light, Malevolence – Where Only The Truth Is Spoken, Mega Drive – Machine, Mors Principium Est – Darkness Invisible, The Smith Street Band – Once I Was Wild

1. Really should have been called ‘42.195K25’. ↩
2. I’m not a big fan of Infestissumam. ↩
3. Seriously! It’s an all-timer!

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4. Mainly thinking of ‘Dynamite’ here, the Katy Perry stuff is undeniably catchy. ↩
5. At times, Pachinko reminds me of one of two albums my wife made me turn off while driving – Amazingous by Cheeto’s Magazine. The other album was St. Anger, of course. I stand by Cheeto’s Magazine as a fun time, but we’d both had enough St. Anger for one lifetime. To this day Apple Music thinks I’m a St. Anger megafan and loves to throw in a musical jumpscare like ‘Sweet Amber’ or ‘Invisible Kid’ now and again. ↩
6. Yes, that’s the full name, and although I didn’t have to look it up, I had forgotten the “Volume One” bit. Great album name if you’re a music writer paid by the word. ↩