Metal Storm Awards 2025
Metal Storm Awards 2025
28 days later... the voting closes. But don't worry, we'll be up and running and foaming at the mouth again in another 11 months, so start getting excited now. Or, if you're Cillian Murphy, be afraid. And don't stand too close to the Sludge category. You don't know where it's been.
Your generous voting has bestowed some much-deserved love and attention on a cool couple hundred albums, and we've all hopefully come away with a busload of new bands and albums to fill our souls with. That's our only goal, and if you've benefited from that, then this whole orchestration has been a success. But a competition in which everyone is a winner is never quite as interesting as a competition in which only a few can win, and we do need some hard measurement to look back on 10 or 20 years from now to see what the metallic zeitgeist was in 2025/6. Let's start looking at the new royalty.
Amorphis have broken their own record (again) and come away from the 2025 Metal Storm Awards with their eighth win, making them the most highly awarded band in MSA history by an even larger margin. That's especially impressive considering we've never really managed to put them in the right category (this time it's Folk again). And it's not just their eighth win, it's their eighth consecutive win: every single album of theirs since 2007's Silent Waters has won a Metal Storm Award. Bad news for other Folk contenders like Havukruunu, who weren't able to add another notch to their giant-slaying swords, but they and Saor still performed very well in a popular category. We should also take a moment to crown King Coroner: it's an incredible achievement to come back at all after 32 years, let alone with an album as great as Dissonance Theory, and then to crush Testament after they themselves made an astonishing return to form. It's no surprise that Coroner also picked up Biggest Surprise. Maybe we didn't have any stunning upsets this year, but it's hard to resent the results when even the big names are still funneling that kind of inspiration.
Rather than upsets, we actually had some oddly uniform races; Ambient/Drone/Noise, Grindcore, Sludge, Djent/Math, Stoner, and the Debut category had no individual candidates break 100 votes, with an unusually close spread between the highest and lowest scorers. Maybe a dearth of high-profile releases, maybe strong consistency in quality, but you couldn't necessarily predict the winners based on name recognition alone, and that's something we like to see; Stoner even came down to a tie between Howling Giant and Nightstalker that was broken only at the last minute. Naturally, other categories saw The Obvious Winner take the ball and go home: Private Music is getting promoted, Tooth And Nail didn't require either to conquer Death, and if it surprises you to learn that Helloween won Power, you should see what Paradise Lost did to Gothic.
In other news, finally, a full 20 years after the introduction of the Blu-ray format, we changed the name of the "Best DVD" category to "Best Live Concert Video Release". We sprang that one in media res, so there may be some hammering still to do around the edges, but at least now the name of the category reflects a little better the variety of media options that are available for conveying a live performance. The times they have already a-changed, and Metal Storm is changing with them.
Not by a whole lot, though. We're still here to be a home for human-made music and human enjoyers of such, and we'll be back next year with even more to love. We'll see you then, and for now, let's all go discuss the results here.
Metal Storm Staff
Best albums by genre
Other awards
Judas Priest
War Pigs [Black Sabbath cover]
War Pigs [Black Sabbath cover]
Moonspell
Opus Diabolicum
Opus Diabolicum
Igorrr
ADHD
ADHD