Release Day Roundup: 7/18/25

Note: This post originally ran with a write-up of the new Laura Jane Grace album as one of its top picks. However, on the eve of the album’s release, Laura’s wife, Paris Campbell Grace, accused Laura of current and ongoing abuse, so I’ve removed it, especially since the album was a collaboration between the two.

Top Pick

Abigail Williams – A Void Within Existence (progressive? black metal)

The popular narrative around Abigail Williams is that they started as a metalcore band before going legit (but were still somehow posers or something, idk). But I listened to In the Shadow of a Thousand Suns (2008) the other day, and it sounds a lot like what Dimmu Borgir were doing at the time to me. Sure, the Legend EP (2006) has some melodeath riffing and sounds a bit more like The Black Dahlia Murder, but also a lot like Cradle of Filth (who some might call posers, but definitely aren't metalcore), and they made the switch to trve black metal almost instantly after that now largely overlooked debut. ...call it the Darkthrone gambit. A more controversial contention might be that, while Abigail Williams may have gotten much "better" at being a black metal, they've also gotten a lot less interesting. Their last outing A Walk Beyond the Dark (2019) is a very good black metal album, but it also sounds a lot like a lot of very good black metal albums, whereas Legend remains a lot more interesting that whatever Lorna Shore are doing these days—although it also turns out that people don't seem to really like the only Abigail Williams album I've ever gone back to before this, being 2010's In the Absence of Light (I just think the riffs are neat!).

With A Void Within Existence though, Abigail Williams take a stab at being both a very good and very interesting black metal band. Moreover, while this is largely to do with all of the progressive, symphonic and atmospheric flair they've to their songwriting, it's also in no small part due to bringing back some of their more core-ish undertones. Opener "Life, Disconnected" starts off sounding like something Gatecreeper might have come up with, and there are more than a few almost djent-like, downtuned riffs and rhythms that find their way into the mix toward the end. In between the band bring a more progressive edge to the atmospherics they've been honing over their past couple of albums. "Nonexistence" even ends on a Pink Floyd-style solo, with much of its surrounds also bringing to mind mid-period Nachtmystium and Enslaved, or even Chapel of Disease's most recent records. What's really impressive though, is the way they weave all of these seemingly disperate ideas together into a continuous and compelling whole—all of which is to say that, A Void Within Existence is absolutely the best Abigail Williams record to date and maybe the best black metal album of the year so far as well.

Also, PSA: The reason why we don’t do embeds for every album these days is because having too many meant the posts kept crashing on mobile. It’s not some “lazy” way of going through and sampling, tagging and linking literally hundreds of releases every week for your convenience. So, if you’re thinking of sending a cunty email about it, maybe stop and ask yourself: “y tho?”