Mining Metallic is a month-to-month column from Heavy ipromiseyoumedia contributing writers Langdon Hickman and Colin Dempsey. The main focus is on noteworthy new music rising from the non-mainstream metallic scene, highlighting releases from small and impartial labels — and even releases from unsigned acts.
The irony of this column is that almost all metallic that pursuits us is certain to stay underground to the final music-listening public. Even massive metallic labels launch data which can be as prone to chart (or break containment, which is the popular time period nowadays) as I’m prone to develop a 3rd foot. Sure, metallic is unquestionably massive, however few acts that push the envelope are prone to be a type of “massive” bands. Living proof, you’d must scan fairly far down the Obtain Competition 2026 lineup to discover a band that’s making cool and weird music. A grievance this isn’t, however to say the next: there have been many metallic albums this yr that got here from bigger labels and had been thus ineligible for Mining Metallic, and so they had been fairly good. They deserve some love and a focus too (however not an excessive amount of).
These albums embrace the goth metallic heavyweight champ of the yr, Messa’s The Spin, the newest from Century Media’s finest acquisition over the previous few years, Imperial Triumphant’s Goldstar, the most effective comeback document of 2025, Coroner’s Dissonance Principle, Vaxis – Act III: The Father of Make Imagine, which is the eleventh album from Coheed and Cambria (generally generally known as the most effective band to ever seem in Rockband), and the newest entry in Behemoth’s run as extreme-metal stalwarts: The Shit Ov God (“It’s not a silly title,” insists frontman Nergal). Moreover, Profound Lore had an iron claw-like grip over loss of life metallic this yr. They launched Historic Loss of life’s super debut, Pissgrave’s ultimate document, two of 2025’s best death-doom albums from Innumerable Kinds and Evoken, and the sophomore launch from the Tolkein-indebted black metallic act Considered one of 9.
Every of the albums talked about have the gusto to be data of the yr, possessing the intangible shifting high quality that supersedes efficiency and aesthetics and grips at our fleshy kinds. They’re particular and direct expressions of why we love metallic. Nonetheless, they don’t seem to be our favourite albums from this yr. They’re honorably talked about to raise the eight albums we’ve gathered beneath, all of which come from impartial or smaller labels. As all the time, metallic thrives when away from the daylight and, like fungi, can develop in nutrient-rich soil, ultimately sprouting with its personal sores and blemishes that deepen its style. What we’ve assembled beneath collects the eccentricities and roughness that makes metallic, effectively, metallic.
— Colin Dempsey
