Death’s Door’s contributors have been busy in 2025.
Well, personally yes. Jobs and life responsibilities have been a bear this year. But we’re also busy consuming the absolutely titanic amount of quality death metal that’s been hitting us since January. A chaotic calm in the storm of life? You bet.
Here are our latest obsessions from the month that was. Hope you find something to enjoy here! As always…
Death metal. Forever.
-JA
Cream of the Crop
Revocation - New Gods, New Masters
I feel like consistency is underrated in extreme music. In a world that consistently peddles art at the margins, there’s a hunger in certain circles for everything to be novel or bringing something constantly new to the table. Often excellent bands who know their sound and execute it routinely at a high level get drowned out by the new and novel. Which is a damn shame.
Revocation is one of those aforementioned arbiters of uncanny consistency. Across what now stands as a nine album career, the band have never once faltered or dropped the ball when it comes to providing the masses with delectable death metal goodness. One of the few death metal bands that it would be easy to argue has never made a bad album, their latest work is no exception, and another consistently great outing.
If you’ve Revocation before, there’s not a whole lot here that will shock you. And that’s a good thing. The band’s signature expert musicianship, propulsive and clever songwriting, and disgusting vocals are all here at the peak of their powers. Just listen to “Sarcophagi of the Soul” or “Confines of Infinity” (the latter featuring a gruesome performance from Travis Ryan of Cattle Decapitation) for ample evidence of that claim. There’s nothing here that would convince most death metal aficionados that the band have lost a step.
Which, in and of itself, is fairly remarkable. Look, Revocation aren’t Imperial Triumphant. They’re not here to twist your brain into a new knot every time they release a new project. Instead, they’re a collective that knows exactly what they’re good at and execute that vision to perfection. Every. Single. Time. It’s not boring music, or uninspired. Instead, New Gods, New Masters feels like the latest section of a vast, consistent landscape the band have been painting for decades. It fits in perfectly with their previous work, and is just another stroke of consistent goodness from a band that simply cannot fumble the bag.
-JA
Best of the Rest
Amorphis - Borderland
Speaking of consistency…
How is Amorphis still making great music? Can someone explain the cosmic alchemy behind the fact that this band’s creative back has never been broken? Sure, by now their sound is as tried and true and recognizable as it gets in the death metal world, but god dang if it isn’t as delicious a plate of melodies and riffs as it was 30 years ago. The band’s umpteen bajillionth album Borderland is just another notch in their perfectly symmetrical belt. Praise be!
“The Circle” and “Bones” are a fantastic opening one-two punch, establishing quickly that the Amorphis we know and love hasn’t gone anywhere. While I still very much enjoyed 2022’s Halo, Borderland feels like a more complete album to my ears, heralding back to some of the best moments from Queen of Time and Under the Red Cloud. The album flows naturally and beautifully, presenting tapestry after tapestry of intricate melodies and triumphant peaks, culminating in as satisfying an experience as one could hope for.
Borderland is overall a triumph for a band that, along with the above-stated Revocation, has become a model of death metal consistency. If anything, Borderland makes it abundantly clear that the band haven’t lost their ability to write compelling tunes, and the sensibilities that have made them the juggernaut they are today have yet to dim or diminish. Another excellent outing from an incredible band. Long may they reign.
-JA
Mors Principium Est - Darkness Invisible
I’ll come right out of the gate with this: Mors Principium Est is a formative band for me, and probably my favorite melodic death metal band when push comes to shove. Being firmly embedded in the hyper-melodic, hooky and melancholic Finnish strand of melodeath, MPE stands among giants like Insomnium, Omnium Gatherum and Kalmah. Within this spectrum, they are located on the faster, more incisive and most high-octane end. Every album chock-full of blistering riffs and leads, wailing solos, triumphant and hooky melodies and a significant dose of symphonic embellishment, there is just something in their indomitable riff-driven energy that keeps drawing me back in. My fawning fanboyisms notwithstanding, I approached Darkness Invisible with some trepidation. This being the first full-length album of new music released since the less-than harmonious departure of longtime guitarist Andy Gillion, and coming off the heels of a somewhat disappointing and good but not great album (2017s Embers of a dying World and 2020s Seven respectively), I was hopeful but apprehensive about their return to glory days of And Death said Live… and my personal favorite Dawn of the Fifth Era, and hoped the bands change in lineup would inject them with the right type of momentum and change without sacrificing the razor-sharp hooks and splendid melodies that make me love their previous output so dearly.
I’m happy to report that this is largely the case. On Darkness Invisible, MPE ply a notably darker, somewhat more blackened and spooky trade. There is still plenty of the tried and true formula to latch on to, exemplified by “Monuments” which is an aptly titled monument to the classic sound, and the excellent “Venator” which shows Ville Viljanen’s high speed, filthy and raspy delivery is still in prime form. On opener “Of Death” these classic qualities are embellished with a heavy dose of symphonics and an unhinged, scything blackened edge.
What especially delights me is that on this latest album, MPE show their willingness to once more drop down into the caverns of low-tuned, grinding death metal sections, accompanied by Viljanen’s gruesome and under-used lower register growls. These sections, for example on “Summoning the Dark” and “All Life is Evil” inject a level of brutality equal to “Parasited on Paradise”from 2006 album The Unborn. Paired with the dark overtones and dominant use of orchestral embellishments make for a brutal and refreshing spin on the classic formula of bombast perfected by the MPE I know and love.
The album suffers from the same arguable pitfalls that have plagued this band over their entire career: there is little breathing room afforded,the master is quite loud, and tracks can bleed together due to the sheer amount of hooks stacked on top of each other and the lack of sonic variety. It’s clear these guys don’t really do less is more, and that’s completely fine with me. I would have been perfectly happy with another Seven, but with Darkness Invisible Mors Principium Est have both revitalized their classic sound and reinforced it with a fresh direction and a lineup full of threatening, incisive tunes that once again cements their position as my favorite melodic death metal band.
-Boeli Krumperman
Heruvim - Mercator
If you’ll allow me to be silly for a second (it’s my blog, I can do what I want), there are many types of “textures” to death metal. There’s the thick one that feels like running your hand through blood. There’s spidery black metal, scintillating like webs. There’s death metal that feels like sewage. And there’s death metal that’s jagged. That’s usually the type of death metal that’s mixed in with plenty of thrash and technical progressive metal, creating guitar riffs that feel like a bunch of blades going through your stomach. Heruvim play “jagged” death metal, old school in ways, technical in others, wholly unrelenting throughout.
Just tune into “Arammu”, one of my favorite tracks from the release (though I really could have picked any track because it all slaps). That main riff, beyond being immediately stank face inducing, is such a good layup for the rest of the undulating track. It’s backed up by a kind of spacious, atmospheric layout of chords that makes you think of Death. But the main line is never willing to fully relinquish its control and let the track go deeper into progressive death metal. Everything is on the edge, juggling assault, complexity, and groove to an admirable degree.
The rest of the album is just as tense as this track, treading the lines between progressive, technical, and all-out heavy in really interesting ways. “Jagged” really is the only adjective I could come up with to describe the full thing - it just feels like an outcropping of harsh stone, branching out aggressively into many styles of death metal and beyond. If you’re looking for this year’s “thoughtful banger”, this is the one. Come for the stomach churning riffs; stay for the unravelling intricacy of it all.
-Eden Kupermintz