Albums of May 30, 2025

The most interesting releases of the week!

The second album from the Doug-Moore-including death doom band Weeping Sores, The Convalescence Agonies was released on I, Voidhanger Records. The long, sweeping songs forming this record haven’t lost a step from 2019’s False Confession. While the album’s immediate impact can be a bit muted, going through the record is always an enthralling journey.

I do wish that the production was a bit crisper. Some depth is lost when the drums aren’t fully separated from the other instruments and the whole album sounds tinnier than I’d like. Performance-wise, Weeping Sores do sound like a band without that many people. It’s not that they play poorly, they’re just not feeding off of a group energy the way the best death metal bands sometimes can. Songwriting, no notes. This album is deep and worth coming back to for a long time.

Not the best technical death metal album featuring Christian Munzner in the first half of 2025, but still a good listen. Techtalitarian was released on Transcending Obscurity Records. Eschaton do not boldly push metal past the breaking point. They arpeggiate in ways that you have heard before. They just manage to do it competently and in a very pleasing manner. While it won’t change the world, Techtalitarian contains impressive songwriting, flashy playing, and little weakness.

The production on Techtalitarian sounds quite harsh, but it fits the band quite nice. And while the band doesn’t even try to shed the “soulless technical death metal” label, they just sound like so much damn fun that it brings a smile to my face. The vocals especially just fit this sound so well.

It’s Vader. Humanihility, the new EP released on Nuclear Blast, will contain more of same for everyone who loves the band. High octane, standard construction death metal with short run times and excellent riffs. The short form of the release allows Vader to go all out without worrying about silly things like album structure. Humanihility is a good thing for all.

The guitar solos especially throughout Humanihility are laughably good. Even including that, and the satisfying relentlessness of the drums, there’s nothing to say here that hasn’t been said about Vader a thousand times. Great band, still consistent, still worth checking out. Like comfort food that burns your tongue every time.

Premonition opens with a guitar solo that frames this album more as a concerto than a group effort. That quickly dissipates as the other instruments prove themselves worthy of the spotlight as well, but Needless continue to blend modern metal song structures with efforts that seem more at home in an older format. Premonition was released on Inertial Music.

There’s another odd clash in Premonition, where the vocals seem to have all sorts of effects on them and go back and forth between pseudo-punk shouts and death metal growls, and the rest of the instruments stick more or less to a progressive thrash/death sound. In any case, the band makes it work. Their songs sound like fully-fleshed-out arcs, and I’m a bit surprised that this band hasn’t gotten more attention. Fans of Vector will appreciate them, as will prog fans looking for something on the more direct side of the genre.