Dark Juan’s Top Ten Records of 2025
Dark Juan’s Top Ten Records of 2025
by Dark Juan
It’s that time of the year again, friends! Once more I will run through the records that I have loved, in a year that has had some amazing professional highs and some shocking lows. Although I have achieved promotions at work, the dizzying heights of competence have proven rather more difficult to navigate than I thought they would, and adults have proven to be massively more complex to manage than young people. Young people generally do what they are told. Adults are not like that. They are capricious wankers who inconveniently have not yet learned to not answer Dark Juan back and want things like holidays and time off and to not do millions of hours of overtime.
Selfish bastards, the lot of them.
I haven’t had a day off or a holiday since April. However, I like the money too much to stop doing what I am doing although I must admit that managing a fucking Aldi or something seems preferable, a lot of the time. But then someone praises me for something done well, and I am suddenly preening like a fucking peacock with a particularly impressive tail. Form an orderly queue, ladies.
Part of the issue with my promotion at my actual work is that it has massively impacted the quantity of the music work that I do. It turns out that if you’re paid well, you’re expected to do work. Unless you’re a politician or in a position of authority in a local council. This was something of a surprise to me, as it turns out that working 48-hour duty periods left you with a lot more spare time to indulge yourself. And Dark Juan is all about indulgence. However, in a probably futile effort to maintain the limited standing in the UK Metal scene that I have previously enjoyed, I have shoved writing about records in the spare seconds I have between existential crises, so here, good people, is the list of music that has impressed me most during this year of 2025, in ascending order of importance in my head. It is, as is tradition at this time of year for Dark Juan and his complicated relationship with rules and boundaries, not quite a top ten.
10. Blu Mamuth – Ka Ora!
Experimental (emphasis on the mental) Industrial music from Italy. I believe it was Hemingway who described Italy as “A paradise inhabited by Devils”. I should state, for the record, that I have not found this to be the case and that everyone I have ever met when wandering around Italy have been lovely. However, Hemingway’s description has some merit when it comes to the music of Blu Mamuth. Jesus fucking Christ. The only way to describe this music is Luciferian. It is incredibly powerful and dehumanising industrial that has more to do with torture as it does entertainment. It will come as no surprise that Dark Juan absolutely loved “Ka Ora!” and awarded it top marks. It did not matter that my ears were bleeding and that I had lost the power of syllabification by the time I had picked myself up off the floor and reattached my limbs.
https://www.facebook.com/BluMamuth
9. Lifer – Lifer
Ah, Wales. How I miss you. When I was in Doomcrow we were stalwarts of the South Wales Metal scene, with a drummer that was in demand by about 45 other bands, who we all knew from playing Crowley’s in Swansea. However, just up the road from Swansea, heading towards Carmarthen, we had Llanelli, home of one of the finest beers I have ever enjoyed, being Felinfoel’s Double Dragon. It was also home to Lifer, the Welsh Groove Metal band who should be absolutely fucking huge yet appear to not be on the radar of discerning fans of extremity. Fronted by the most estimable Scriv, a man who is both charming and fearsome at the same time, and still not forgiven for the hangover he caused Dark Juan the last time he stayed at my gaff while playing in Yorkshire, he fronts a band that can command both power and melody at the same time, creating danceable yet still vicious music and doing all this with a sense of friendliness and bonhomie which has an edge of sharpened steel. Let’s just put it this way, Scriv is a lad I’d rather have on my side, and the music of Lifer reflects this.
https://www.facebook.com/lifermetal
8. Pound Land/ Headless Kross – Split LP
If you regularly read my shit, you’ll know that I am a rabid fan of the kitchen sink flinging Punkery and Industrial clattering of Manchester’s Pound Land, a band so closely aligned with my own politics and working-class chip on my shoulder that I have just turfed them out of the spare bedroom and told them to get a fucking job. Yes, I am quite the fan of Pound Land and their sneering, snotty attitude and their absolute distaste for a good 97% of the population of the UK. Combine this fuck you, extremely northern English attitude with the kind of Sludge and Doom only seen in Dante’s seventh circle of Hell, courtesy of Glaswegians Headless Kross on a split album on which each band takes on one of the other’s tunes in their own style, the result is a fucking musical chimera that is absolutely unholy and also completely bloody lethal. Seriously, if Satan heard this album he’d vacate Hell and hand it to Pound Land and Headless Kross to look after and piss off to fucking Antigua or something and become some kind of mad, red-skinned gigolo. I should say that this was an exclusive offered to Dark Juan by the consummate gentleman that is Steve Strode of Cruel Nature Records, for which I am eternally grateful.
https://cruelnaturerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/headless-kross-pound-land
7. John 3:16 – The Beast
Philippe Gerber is also a gentleman without compare. He is the man behind the Experimental Industrial Drone/ Darkwave project that is John 3:16 and he was kind enough to furnish me with a copy of “The Beast”, which is a much more introspective, cinematic work than previous John 3:16 albums yet although it lacks the horrific maschinenklang of previous recordings, is by no means less powerful or affecting. It truly was a record that took Dark Juan to some dark places in his soul, and it took a full week before I was able to rid myself of the shadow of “The Beast” and I was able to even contemplate writing about any more music. Yes, my friends, “The Beast” is that powerful. There’s not much that a) shuts Dark Juan up and b) stops him dead in his tracks. John 3:16 managed to do both.
https://www.facebook.com/john316experience
6. Igorrr – Amen
The first of two French/ Breton entries on this list (which probably gives away the other one if you know my absolute adoration of that band), Igorrr (which, for ultimate style points was named after mainman Gautier Serre’s childhood hamster) totally annihilated Dark Juan with “Amen”. At times spasmodic, jerky and uncontrolled, but then also regimented, callous and cold in turns, Igorrr turned Metal into something entirely new and undiscovered, twisting it into forms hitherto unimagined and turning it into something approximating the nightmares of plague victims and the people on the wrong end of concentrated artillery barrages. And they even had the bare-faced audacity to involve a fucking recorder on one of their songs. Igorrr are a band for whom genres do not apply. They are just as happy turning electronics into sparking, ozone-reeking piles of ruined machinery as they are lacerating their fingers to the bone on guitars. And that, my friends, is what true extremity looks like. They can take anything and turn it into visceral horrors that not even Lovecraft could imagine. Vive la France!
https://www.facebook.com/IgorrrBarrroque
5. Cwfen – Cwfen
Glaswegian Doomgaze? Yes, please. Cwfen’s music operates in liminal spaces, where careful lingers undecided at the door (to quote God, being Andrew Eldritch) and sits in your memories at the exact point where raging at things that have happened in the past turn into mild regret. This is an uncomfortable place to be in, and their grief-stricken, slow and ponderous music threatens the kind of violence that gets you put away for decades while laying your heartstrings bare, thrumming and trembling in a kind of thrilling, almost pleasurable pain. This self-titled album is the first long player from the band, and it is that absolute rarest of things, the unicorn that is a perfect debut album. Not a note is wasted. Not an emotion has been experienced that is not wrung fucking dry. Not a word is used that doesn’t drip meaning. Suffice to say, Dark Juan loved this album even more than he would love to be dropped with half-a-dozen magnums of champagne into a room full of nymphomaniac Gemma Arterton clones with no exit.
https://www.facebook.com/Cwfenband
4. Fange – Purulences
Breton Industrialists Fange have gripped Dark Juan’s imagination and squeezed it dry ever since he first heard “Privation” a few years ago. Of course, Dark Juan immediately availed himself of the whole Fange back catalogue and has subsumed himself in their unique Industrial Metal ever since. To say I am a fan of Fange is like saying that Scousers and people from Newcastle like football a little bit. I am rabid in my enthusiasm for this band, to the point where I have actually been ejected from a conversation about music because I espoused the glory of the Breton bruisers too much. I will bore anyone who even thinks about talking to me about Fange to death, such is the all-consuming regard I hold them in. Plus, they are Bretons and Brittany holds a special place in my heart. But yes, this band are to me the very ZENITH of the French Extreme Music scene, which is a lot more diverse and interesting than you might give this fairly conservative country credit for. I mean, on a random night out, we discovered a scuzzy LA Punk band playing a bar in a village in the arse end of nowhere… But I digress. If you like your Industrial Metal on the rusted, matt-black and diesel-belching side as opposed to polished and streamlined, then Fange is the band for you. There’s nothing clean about them. Their music is like five vehicles welded together, with bellowing engines and spitting high-calibre explosives all over the shop in saturation patterns designed to mow down anything that has less that four inches of armour.
https://www.facebook.com/fangesludge
3. Ironrat – Beneath It All
Sludgy, Doomy, Grungy goodness from the hallowed valleys of West Yorkshire, and boasting the dreadlocked giant that is Martin Wiseman on vocals and guitar as well as Gordon Wilkinson on drums, a man with a CV so extensive that the only band he appears to have NOT played drums for is Elton John’s backing band, Ironrat released an absolute monster of an album back in February, and it has been on constant rotation in Crow Cottage ever since. Everything about this record is perfect – from the furiously committed tubthumping of Gordon to the fabulous guitar work and riff mastery of Wiseman and the impressively named Wayne Hustler and the fearsome bottom end of Stuart Hillman’s bass, all the ingredients are there for the best time you’ll ever have with your clothes on. Not to mention that they are one of the tastiest live propositions you’ll ever see as well, evidenced by the fact they managed to pull a support slot with Hippie Death Cult, another band I hold in massively high regard. However, Ironrat have squeezed Dark Juan’s endorphin production dry for nearly a whole year, which probably accounts for why I am a bit cross these days and my enthusiasm for their music shows absolutely no sign of abating yet.
https://www.facebook.com/ironrattheband
2. The Machinist – Contempt For Life
Another band who offered me an exclusive listen to their work long before it was even released to the rest of the press pack, my love of The Machinist’s music is not to be denied. “Contempt For Life” took the most complicated and expansive track from their debut album “I Am Void”, ‘Schwarszchild Radius’, and took that as the STARTING point for the aural horrors they unleashed on “Contempt For Life”. Staggeringly complex, utterly visceral and absolutely compelling Technical Death Metal fused with Industrial and Black Metal, The Machinist contravenes the Geneva Convention because they aren’t fucking interested in taking prisoners in their shockingly terrifying dystopian futurescape, where humans are expendable, replaceable pieces of meat machinery in a nightmarish world where munitions production is the only goal. Yet, they aren’t just about brutality. There are moments of Progressive music as well as explorations of the inner self on “Contempt For Life” and The Machinist remain one of the few bands who have ever challenged the intensity, madness and heaviness of The Berzerker, in Dark Juan’s august opinion. A slight downside to the band’s triumph was the loss of vocalist Scott Walton, who was forced to leave the band for medical reasons, but still remains a part of The Machinist family, and is also a bloody splendid chap to boot.
https://www.facebook.com/TheMachinistUK
1. Cold In Berlin – Wounds
This, my friends, is the big tamale, the record of the year, the music that turned Dark Juan into a dribbling mess, convulsing on the floor in paroxysms of what passes for joy in my poorly torture hypothalamus. Everything about this record is perfect, from the amalgamation of Doom, Krautrock and Gothic splendour to Maya’s Siouxsie-on-steroids vocals, to the sheer power of the lyrics. “Wounds” is that rarest of things, an utterly perfect album. Every song on here is an absolute standout and the album as a whole is sheer, untrammelled pleasure. Cold In Berlin are able to combine luxurious sensuousness with brutality, the musical equivalent of Gibson-esque razorgirls in a rain soaked, dystopian future city where garish neon shines brightly against blackened, water-slick concrete and furtive pickpockets slink in and out of shadowy cellars filled with opium dens and illegal gambling houses. In short, it is a perfect representation of the state of Dark Juan’s imagination and “Wounds” resonated with me like no album in the past decade. It is a tremendously worthy album of the year, and I hope that 2025 is the year that Cold in Berlin go absolutely stratospheric. They are THAT good.
https://www.facebook.com/coldinberlinband
And now we break the rules of Ever-Metal.com again…
There were four EPs released this year that were worthy of note in this list. Dark Juan has a rule that they don’t get a mention in the main list because they are not albums, but this is not to say that they are not amazing pieces of work. I just like being deliberately obtuse, as demonstrated by the fact that not even Ever-Metal.com Mum Beth interferes with what I choose to do any more, because she has understood it is fucking futile. This is amusing because at work I demand tremendously high standards from my team and am a stickler for rules. But that’s because the buck stops with me and I will be the one speaking to the authorities if anything goes wrong. Anyway…
Runereader – Pathfinder
Runereader is a one-man Black Metal/ Folk/ Industrial/ Dance/ Classical project of which I have been aware of since its inception, as well as being one of the few people who actually know who the shadowy creator of this most obscure music is. “Pathfinder” is the third release from Runereader and represented a change from the use of Cash Converters-obtained cheap equipment and Fisher Price instrumentation into something larger and, more expansive and rather darker than previous releases, where the Black Metal takes more of a forward role in the music rather than the use of it to create foreboding backgrounds. It is a marvellous EP and brings something new to Black Metal, a genre which has generally remained quite moribund until people meld it with Industrial or Death Metal. This is amply displayed by my next selection.
https://www.facebook.com/runereadermusic
Dusk – Repoka
Hailing from Costa Rica, Dark Juan was an avid convert to Dusk’s misanthropic take on Black Metal fused with Industrial murder on their debut album. “Repoka” gives us three tracks of slaughterhouse soundtrack Industrial Black Metal with no quarter offered or taken and finished up with one of the most demented covers of Slayer’s ‘Raining Blood’ I have ever heard, changed from a Thrash classic into a soulless, insane killing machine possessed of whirring blades and an absolute disgust for humanity. Curiously absorbing for such a short EP, it provides a snapshot into the world of suffering and industrialised cruelty that Dusk inhabits. It is a short, sharp shock to the system and leaves you breathless and desperate for more.
https://www.facebook.com/DUSKVT
pMad -Trust Devoured
Paul Dillon (the man behind Irish Post-Punk/ Goffsters Mad) is another fine gentleman purveying excellent underground music and on “Trust Devoured”, he takes an innovative approach to recording by turning it into a version of the Victorian parlour game, Exquisite Corpse, where other artists (in this case UK/US artist Lunar Paths and Aussies Killtoys) add their own distinctiveness to the already unique sound of pMad. The result is a compelling work on which you remain on tenterhooks as you have no idea at all where the music is going and just what new things the collaborators are going to bring to pMad’s already distinctive sound. The result is a superb, disquieting EP that sets you on edge and doesn’t let you relax until after the final note fades away.
https://www.facebook.com/pMadtheband
Basement Torture Killings – The Gallery Of Monsters (Part I)
Ten out of ten to BTK for their masterful marketing and leaving Dark Juan gasping for more of their distinctive UK Snuffgrind. This EP is the first of a four-part series that will be put together for a full album after the release schedule’s conclusion. Each song is a description of a particular type of murder (for Basement Torture Killings are not a band, they are EDUCATORS) including scaphism (covering some poor bastard in milk and honey as well as force feeding it to them, tying them to a floating vessel and as the concoction putrefies, allowing the local wildlife to chow down on the said victim) and piquerism, which is a sadistic method of murder and also a paraphilia as there is normally a sexual interest in the penetration of the skin with knives and needles. Which makes the stepmom porn that people appear to be quite keen on actually seem to be quite tame and well-adjusted.
Eww. Minging. The stepmom porn, not the piquerism.
Anyway, BTK bring the good stuff here, with slabs of raging, hyperspeed Grind which can flay faces at a thousand yards, with Beryl’s vocals either stripping the skin or being sepulchral grunts that should, if we were following the laws of physics, not emanate from such a small lady. They are never anything but terrifyingly bent on their work and frighteningly committed to their music.
https://www.facebook.com/Basementtorturekillings
And that is it for another year. May I take this moment to wish you all a blessed Yule and remind you that Christmas is a celebration from an imported Middle Eastern death cult that we should be having fuck all to do with, that stole it from the pagans anyway.
Nothing like a positive note to end on, eh? Seriously, enjoy the fuck out of whatever celebration you choose. I’ll see you in 2026, probably.
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
