Firstly, I want to say thanks to all of you who’ve read along through the year as I’ve been able to work through my emotional well-being via reviewing records as well as helping some friends and members of the DIY community to tell their stories through this outlet. Additionally, I offer my most sincere gratitude to the collection of photographers whose work has allowed me to bring a visual identity to this project. This World Scares Me has evolved throughout 2025 into something that I wouldn’t have imagined. With more tape releases, feature articles, and my first foray into promoting gigs on the horizon for 2026, I figured the most appropriate way for me to wrap up the year was the traditional year end best albums list.
So…
Here’s the obligatory spiel about how unproductive the idea of ranking art is and how futile the exercise of making these year end lists could seem. In 2025, I’m considering it less of a critical offering and more like a journal entry. It doesn’t mean anything other than to serve as my recommendation to give these albums your attention and let yourself form a bond with them. Thanks for reading.
-Kevin.
10. Matt Berninger - Get Sunk (Book Records)
Favorite Track: “Frozen Oranges”
I’m a mark and I’m more than willing to admit it. There’s something embedded deep in my DNA that connects me to the brand of aloof, slightly pretentious, hyper-literate melancholy that the National have practiced over the last twenty or so years. While the band have reached a level of success very few from the indie rock set ever see, their output remains remarkably consistent. That’s why it could feel a little terrifying to hear that their frontman, Matt Berninger, had been very publicly talking about writer’s block and a new solo record. Fortunately Get Sunk delivers far more than expected. The album lacks a bit of the ambition and grandiosity that Berninger’s main band have become known for but the more stripped down instrumentation lends to the strength of these straight forward classic pop songs that were mostly co-penned by the record’s producer Sean O’Brien.
Think of Get Sunk like Morrissey’s Bona Drag; it doesn’t have quite all of the intricate ambition of The Smiths but it’s a near perfect collection of memorable tunes that possess many of the qualities fans are craving. Lead single “Bonnet of Pins” is clearly the album’s high point, a raging uptempo number packed with earworm guitar licks and perhaps a top five entry into Berninger’s book of signature lyrical hooks (“she finishes off my drink”) that proves he didn’t hold anything back for his day job. The easy listening lightness of “No Love” expertly contradicts its somber subject matter. For fans of the National looking for a continuation of their sound I’d point to “Breaking Into Acting,” a beautiful duet with Meg Duffy of Hand Habits that could have easily fit into the track list for I Am Easy To Find. Is Get Sunk a perfect album? No, it falls victim to being heavily front loaded as the back five tracks are nowhere near as memorable as the A-side. As it stands, this is perhaps the best work that Berninger has delivered since The National’s streak of perfect albums came to an end around 2017 and makes an excellent entry point for new fans of Berninger’s projects by being a simpler and equally powerful deviation of his classic material.
9. Mares of Thrace - The Loss (Artofact)
Favorite Track: “The Fifth Stage: Depression”
Prior to this summer, when I thought about Alberta, Canada images of pristine mountains and a bitter professional hockey rivalry came to mind. Now, the first thing I will forever think of in relation to that province is the raw, primal, epic metal of Mares of Thrace. While the group have been around in some variation for over a decade, it wasn’t until their US tour with Conan in the late summer that they landed on my radar.
The Loss is one of those very specific types of post-everything metal records that appeals directly to almost every part of my musical sensibilities. While the bulk of these songs are rooted in savage, sludgey doom metal riffing (see the back half of opener “Anticipatory Grief” and “The Third Stage: Anger”) the band boldly wallow in the misery of downtrodden melodic guitars and anguished wailing screams and occasionally dabble in pairing grinding blast beats with dissonant guitars. The total result is a harrowing metallic assault that is befitting of its deeply emotional subject matter and shows a remarkable level of subtlety that could appeal to a wide range of metal fans. While elements of Mares of Thrace can be compared to the epic nature of bands like Sumac, the quieter moments and clear influence of noise-rock calls to mind fellow underappreciated Canadian band KEN Mode. While these comparisons are meant to highlight the highly artistic quality of Mares of Thrace’s metal it isn’t entirely fitting to compare this duo to anyone. Their sound is largely unmatched in today’s musical landscape and that works so well in their favor. The Loss stands all on its own.
8. Sage Christie - Little Deaths (Self-released)
Favorite Track: “Apparition”
This record came out of seemingly nowhere in November and became my go-to listen whenever I needed a break from the constant barrage of longform heavy music and Nine Inch Nails obsession that have been dominating my autumn. Little Deaths is a completely bittersweet exploration in loss, fleeting love, confusion, and loneliness told with the utmost sincerity. It’s so autobiographical that it feels like you shouldn’t be hearing it; like a journal entry that you read before realizing that it wasn’t meant for you.
The delicate folk of Asheville, NC’s Sage Christie is mostly channeled through subdued deliveries of ambitious melodies and acoustic guitars but the additional instrumentation bolsters the album’s most memorable moments. (See the rapturous fiddles on “As Short As You Want” and banjo on “Maybe I’m Learning”) The most intriguing thing about Little Deaths is that Christie’s folk doesn’t draw from the modern indie movement nearly as heavily as traditional Appalachian music and its European roots. This reverence to tradition makes the beauty of tracks like “Apparition” feel all the more timeless. Little Deaths is precisely the kind of hidden gem that I seek out each year; a fearless and earnest record that couldn’t be made within the bigger music industry system. It both takes chances with deliberately acerbic compositions that push the genre’s boundaries and maintains a tight grasp on the American folk lexicon.
7. Fading Signal - Only An Echo (Indecision)
Favorite Track: “Misery Lane”
It’s been an incredible few years watching North Carolina’s Fading Signal rise from perennial local show openers to being one of the state’s leading forces in hardcore. Their performance at 919 Day back in September cements it; this is a band that captures what hardcore means in 2025 for a whole community of people. Because hardcore has largely been carried by demos and EPs in the streaming era it makes Only An Echo feel that much more ambitious. This is an album written with the intention of being an album.
While Only An Echo is clearly most indebted to the Bridge Nine roster and the melodic posi-core that preceded it; the album touches on metallic elements and occasionally dips its toes into the hyper-speed punk of Strike Anywhere or Rise Against to offset the clear reverence for American Nightmare. Lyrically the band also comes across more thoughtful and literate than the average hardcore band. It also helps that the members that solidified their lineup and contributed to writing this LP are incredibly versatile players who spend their spare time playing in a litany of other acts with varying musical identities.That’s where Fading Signal finds a space to stand tall over the shoulders of their peers. They’re unconcerned with being of their moment and as such they have created something that will last long after they’re gone.
6. Deafheaven - Lonely People With Power (Roadrunner)
Favorite Track: “Amethyst”
In the spring I gave an extremely wordy review for this record that chronicled my emotional attachments to Deafheaven and the briefest possible overview of the band’s career leading to Lonely People With Power. If you want to dig back through the archives to read that I’d suggest you do so. Since this record has received the most exhaustive write up of all the records on this list, I’m going to go straight into the most pertinent details. Lonely People With Power is Deafheaven’s greatest work.
There will be many who never move past the brilliance of 2012’s Sunbather and this record might be relegated to living in the shadow of its forebear but Lonely People With Power is more complete and clearly more intentional. This record has been widely regarded as a return to form after the band largely turned down the Mayhem and cranked the Mogwai on Infinite Granite. While that is an accurate assessment, it doesn’t go far enough in stating how much this album succeeds at delivering a perfectly crafted mixture of post-rock and black metal with touches of ambience and industrial noise. Sprawling across a little over an hour, this record is a journey that plays equally well in carefree uplifting summer settings as it does in the frigid darkness of winter. It’s a journey I’m willing to take periodically for the rest of my life.
5. AFI - Silver Bleeds the Black Sun (Run For Cover)
Favorite Track: “VOIDWARD, I BEND BACK”
I didn’t have AFI anywhere near my radar as a band that would impress in 2025 on the level that they did. There’s no way to dance around this assessment; Silver Bleeds the Black Sun is an expertly crafted album of masterfully done post-punk songs. It seems like AFI were always meant to end up here. All the way back in the devil-locked GIlman days the band wore their love of goth progenitors like Bauhaus and the Cure on their sleeves and little by little over the next twenty years the harder edges wore away until we were left with the soaring guitar echos of “Holy Visions.” The track will lodge itself into your head and instantly bury itself amongst the nostalgic classics of early 80’s new wave.
Produced painstakingly by the band’s guitarist Jade Puget, Silver Bleeds the Black Sun is so authentic in its tribute to the dark English pop that inspires it that it could genuinely have been produced forty years ago. The huge driving bass tones and pounding drums of “Behind the Clock” and “Blasphemy & Excess” could have easily been a Flood production. (If you don’t know, look him up.) Frontman Davey Havok’s voice is also the best it’s ever been here; not quite hitting the soaring wails of The Art of Drowning but layered with much more nuance and reserved patience. Forget about the term “comeback,” how many bands get to say they delivered a career defining record this late into their run?
4. Skinhead - It’s a Beautiful Day, What a Beautiful Day (Closed Casket Activities)
Favorite Track: “Separate Checks”
Honestly, I almost kept moving ahead with my life and never listened to this record. I wanted to write it off as another entry into the bottom tier of bands playing alt-pop that try to claim their hardcore roots as an identity. Goddamn am I glad I decided to try it. Skinhead isn’t quite like anything I’ve heard before or since. They’re obviously rooted in hardcore and the working class 70’s boot-punk of their namesake culture, but more than that they’ve managed to infuse a level of poetic sincerity into their music that I don’t believe hardcore has ever seen before. Imagine if Allen Ginsberg had been writing about beating up Neo-Nazis at a Blood for Blood gig or forcibly walking a promoter to the ATM after a show.
The twinkling guitars of “Kill Yourself” and it’s relentless catchiness is a total juxtaposition to the scathing bite of its words. There’s a relentless punk rock pulse to the drums that makes this album feel like it is always moving at double time regardless of the actual beat-per-minute count. When they band layoff the stage-dive energy to deliver something quieter, such as the spoken-word passage of “Ancient History,” it feels well earned and equally emotional to the lament of a lost friend on “Chuck” or an ode to a beloved family pet on “That’s A Promise (The Song About A Dog).” It’s A Beautiful Day, What A Beautiful Day went from being a pleasant surprise, to a repeat listen, to my go-to record whenever I needed a twenty-minute soundtrack for just about anything throughout the course of this year and I don’t see it leaving my regular rotation in 2026.
3. Serrate - Even the Wind Sounds Dead (Bitter Melody/Zegama Beach)
Favorite Tracks: “Kill For The Ones You Love”
While 2025 may have been a personal best year for my mental health, my relationships with family and friends, and my involvement with music and art; it was also 20fucking25 for me just like everyone else. I watched each day as my smartphone delivered a non-stop assault of bad news; a crashing economy, a war against knowledge, genocide, war, disaster, famine quietly underlying every fun adventure or memorable gig. The weight of living in a world that stops and starts at the word of You-Know-Who and every absurdly frustrating and confusing action taken by this regime was always present, even on the best days.
I get the distinct feeling from Even the Wind Sounds Dead that Serrate was keenly feeling this as well. Their grinding and seething brand of emotional hardcore conveys the struggle of keeping your head above water and pressing on with equal amounts of anger and despair. I’ve reckoned with my reluctance to embrace the term “screamo” throughout the year but if we’re reclaiming that label then put the crown on Serrate’s heads as a shining example of the genre’s new wave. Their particular brand of violently aggressive screamo is born from the late 90’s bands that exemplified the term when it was still firmly a part of the hardcore punk underground. (Think less Chiodos and more Orchid.) This record is most succinctly summed up as a barrage of blasting drums covered in dissonant guitars and a blood-curdling, painfully earnest shrieking vocal delivery. What sets this Asheville based act apart from their peers is that no moment of this record seems performative or contrived. It’s painfully clear that Serrate means, and feels, every second of this record.
2. Haunted Horses - Dweller (Three One G)
Favorite Track: “Grey Eminence”
What does it feel like to be at the bottom of a well? To be facing total darkness and wrestling with some form of monster that may or may not be a reality? Seattle based band Haunted Horses seeks to bring that feeling to your record player with Dweller. It’s a pitch black horrific experience. Listening to it feels like inserting yourself as a character in a Lovecraft story.
There just isn’t a perfect way to describe Haunted Horses’ sound on this LP. The most immediate thing is that the drums sound possibly bigger than on any record I’ve ever heard before and that the bass guitar tone makes you feel like your chest is collapsing. These elements combine to give a feeling similar to the early Industrial works while being crafted with traditional instrumentation. The other most prominent note to give would be that vocalist Colin Dawson scares the fuck out of me. Between the mental health as Eldritch horror metaphors contained in the lyrics and the dark drawl he presents it through, he comes off as a truly unhinged and unpredictable performer; something along the lines of David Yow doing Bauhaus. Once you add in the eerie electronics and ambiance that rounds out Dweller you’ve basically written the soundtrack for a mental breakdown. This record set in early for me this year, when the days were short and the nights were darkest, and like the abyssal monster evoked on many tracks it didn’t ever remove its claws from me.
1. Catharsis - Hope against Hope (CrimethInc.)
Favorite Track: “We Live”
Given the aforementioned bleakness that underlies every moment spent living in the end stages of capitalism and “democracy,” the quiet moments of 2025 felt mostly hopeless. What power do I have to make any meaningful changes when those before me have seemingly failed? While I never really gave myself over to having true faith in “the system” I had (through the virtue of my privileges) always managed to keep getting by and thus had allowed myself to at least make peace with the proverbial “system.” 2025 was the year that broke that illusion. Not only am I unable to make a change but I am no longer able to keep living at peace with a broken and unfixable world.
Through the crushing heaviness of Hope against Hope’s tracklist, the band have offered up a landmark of hardcore that owes as much to the epic melodic crust of their peers in bands like Tragedy as it does to the classic European death metal. The most ferocious of their offerings is on “Power” which is destined to live on as Catharsis’s signature song but the true gravitas of the record comes in the two-track sequence on “Embers” where the band led with shredding guitars that give way to an ever building back half that burns out and gives way to the inspiring anthemic beginning of “We Live,” which delivers the albums most uplifting moments.
Hope against Hope is the record that has brought me around to my current mindset, and while I don’t project that my interpretation of this record is in line with the intentions of Catharsis I would imagine that at least some of the spirit of their work is aligned with my beliefs. I’m convinced now that there is no system that works as intended. Humanity is by default incapable of living up to our most admirable ideals. However, the continued strive to achieve our highest ideals is part of humanity’s purpose, and without a structural system that can provide and protect us all we are obliged to do so for each other. What this stellar comeback from North Carolina based anarchist-crust masters Catharsis has taught me this year is that despite the pessimist leanings of my previous statements I have no choice but to keep going. The darkness before the dawn does indeed go on and on.