Welcome to the obligatory year-end retrospective that you probably don’t really need at this point. Let’s just cut the bullshit and get straight to the point: Here are my 10 favorite grindcore/powerviolence releases I enjoyed this past 365 days. I speak on this matter with the utmost authority as the world’s leading expert of finding grindcore bands on YouTube and sucking at fantasy football. If you disagree with this list feel free to comment on it, perhaps share it or tag some of your other friends who will also comment about how bad it is, which will only help us appease the algorithm gods.
Also, I wanna mention the absolutely insane lineup of reissues we had this year, most notably from Nasum, Gridlink and Mellow Harsher. I didn’t include them here because it felt counterintuitive to include remastered/remixed old material but be sure to check them out if you haven’t already. Alright, now to the ragebait
10. Stimulant, Sub-Normal, Nerve Altar
Normally when a band takes five years off between releases, it can be a bad sign. Jobs, kids, houses, these are all things that can get in the way of cool grindage, but not the case for this for this Brooklyn-based duo who dropped an absolutely psychedelic kaleidoscope bomb of skronk and mayhem-fueled powerviolence on our asses as if the last half decade were merely a footnote. One of the most creative and darkly colorful punk releases of the year, a brutal collage of amplifier abuse and pill worship.
9. Sulfuric Cautery, Consummate Extirpation, Blast Addict
Sulfuric Cautery had a busy year, releasing two full-lengths, a split and a reissue of a ton of old material. Consummate Extirpation features longer, more fleshed-out material than anything they’ve done previously without sacrificing any of their insane brutality. The result is their most realized album yet, one that thoroughly eviscerates the listener by taking them on a steady stream of decapitations and dismemberments. Fun for the whole family.
8. Endless Swarm, The Body Hammer, Self-released
Fastcore can be a hard genre to pull off, either deviating from the script too liberally or just endlessly trudging through very boring and monotonous territory. These scottish lads are guilty of neither as The Body Hammer is packed to the brim with enough twists, turns and surprising moments to keep the listener constantly and delightfully perplexed. Also, the drummer uses gravity blasts. I mean, how fucking bonkers is that?!
7. Fed Ash, Rotting Exuberance, Self-released
Perhaps the darkest and most bleak album to emerge from the sewage of this past year, Rotting Exuberance cuts straight to the marrow. This right here is the perfect melancholic soundtrack for a world cannibalizing itself through violence and agony. Shimmering moments of dark disharmony plaster themselves over the listener and envelope them in a cocoon of pure malaise. God, I think I just exhausted every SAT word I know trying to describe this album.
6. Meth Leppard, Gatekeepers, Self-released
With any Meth Leppard album you pretty much know what you’re getting: silly/uncompromising brutality with a couple of heart-stopping mosh parts thrown in that will be stuck in your head for a few weeks. Gatekeepers does not greatly deviate from this formula but to be quite honest, who fucking cares? This band is already so high-level to begin with and few can combine such tongue-in-cheek lyricism with animalistic savagery and precision. Just relax and enjoy the absolutely ferocious breakdown at the end of ‘Algorithim & Blues’ and take another swig from your Obscene Extreme souvenir cup. It’s how the Good Lord intended.
5. Barren Path, Grieving, Willowtip
Having Bryan Fajardo and Takafumi Matsubara in the same band is essentially a cheat code for grindcore excellence, but it works god dammit! Rising from the ashes of the legendary Gridlink, Barren Path form their own….path when it comes to grindcore excellence. No album this year felt tighter and more symphonic than Grieving and few packed the majesty that these twelve song dish out so rampantly.
4. Psudoku, Psudoktrination, Self-released
To call Psudoku’s music ‘grindcore’ feels like a bit of an understatement. Sure, the intensity is there but in the bands nearly decade-and-a-half of existence they have simply crafted their own outer-space alien language which at times brushes it’s elbows with grindcore but more often than not feels like inter-dimensional transmissions from the future. Psudokutrination is yet another further development in this inter-stellar journey, one that at times sheds it’s intensity for more fathomable moments but at no point feels like anything of this planet. Shine one, spaceman, shine on.
3. Shitbrains, Split with Exhorbinant Prices Must Diminish, Wisegrind
Good lord do I love what this band is doing. No release in 2025 quiet managed the absolute relentless assault that these eight minutes of pure chaos have to offer. Absurd, Yacopsae-inspired stop/starts mixed with the heaviest moments of Mellow Harsher. Even the most ADHD-addled TikTok brain could not even begin to fathom the insane twists and turns of the songs at hand. This is a release by grindcore junkies for grindcore junkies. Handle with caution.
2. Type: Armor Unit, Revolutions In Saecula, Self-released
Coming seemingly out of nowhere, Type:Armor Unit are the science-fiction grindcore project I didn’t know I needed. Imagine Rotten Sound in a fight with a fax machine while Star Trek plays in the background and you might get a slight idea of what this band projects. But let’s not forget some of the absolutely breathtaking and catchy moments that emerge from the madness, most notably ‘Cutlass and Needle’ which featured melodies and riffs that would not escape my head for months.
1. Chepang, Jhyappa, Relapse
No record quite captured the “vibe” of 2025 quite like Jhyappa. The fearless Brooklyn-by-way-of-Nepal outfit manifested all the anger and psychedelic fury of the past twelve months in a record bombards as much as it blasts. Chepang albums are never the same thing twice, and on this particular release the band embraces bouncy grooves intermittent within all of the furious hail-storms of blast beats. The results are nothing short of breathe-taking as Chepang has now firmly entrenched itself now in the pantheon of grindcore Gods.
