PLAYLIST: The Sludgelord's Weekly Hitlist #46, November 7th, 2025 to November 13, 2025

 

⚔️ Total streams: 285 ↑ 34% vs. last week
🩸  Total Artists streamed: 13 ↑ 86%
⚔️ Total Albums streamed: 14 ↑ 100%
🩸  New Tracks streamed: 84 ↑ 40%
 
⚔️ Top Artist: Scorching Tomb (52 streams)

 

🩸  Top Album: Scorching Tomb – “Ossuary” (52 streams)

 

⚔️ Top Track: Scorching Tomb – “Stalagmite Impalement” (8 streams)

⚔️🩸 Top 30 tracks of the week

ESSENTIAL METAL ALBUM(S): WK45 Monday 3 November, 2025 to Sunday 9 November, 2025

 
Week 45 is here, and THE SLUDGELORD’s weekly selection of Essential Albums brings you seven crushing releases from the underground. Each record offers its own unique vision of heaviness—ready to shake foundations and melt speakers.
 
Kicking things off was an easy pick for my Album of the Week: The Acacia Strain return with arguably their best and heaviest record to date. Since the release of 2019’s “It Comes in Waves”, The Acacia Strain have absolutely crushed me—and this album is no different.
 
Psychonaut strike the perfect balance between sprawling, kaleidoscopic psychedelia and monolithic doom, while Old Year emerge as one of the doom genre’s most exciting discoveries, offering a dissonant and bleak template of riffs reminiscent of genre heavyweights Primitive Man. Soulfly continue their sonic onslaught with a succinct yet lethal injection of groove-ridden noise and a rather surprising blackened edge
 
Meanwhile, Drofnosura literally blew my mind with their new album. Arguably more restrained compared to my other picks and yet they deliver something with immense weight and ferocity, interspersed with grunge soaked vocals, making this one an auditory synesthesia. Bonginator bring chaos and I shit you know, they play a wild mix of death metal fused with 80s action flicks, horror vibes, and retro video game aesthetics. Finally, Scorching Tomb unleash a blistering blend of old-school death metal injected with hardcore intensity—a true throwback with teeth.
 
This is THE SLUDGELORD’s Essential Albums of the Week, WK45. Plug in and black out. The ‘Lord has spoken.

⚔️ 🩸 Album of the week:
 
#310 
 
⚔️ Artist: The Acacia Strain
🩸  Title: “You Are Safe From God Here”
⚔️ Release date: October 24th, 2025

🩸 Genre/tags:  metalcore, deathcore, post metal, sludge, doom 

🩸 Essential Release (s)
 
#307 
 
⚔️ Artist: Psychonaut
🩸  Title: “World Maker”
⚔️ Release date: October 24th, 2025 

 🩸 Genre/tags: post metal, psychedelic, progressive metal 

#308 
 
⚔️ Artist: Old Year
🩸  Title: “No Dissent”
⚔️ Release date: October 24th, 2025

🩸 Genre/tags: doom, sludge, death doom 

#309 
 
⚔️ Artist: Soulfly
🩸  Title: “Chama” 
⚔️ Release date: October 24th, 2025 

🩸 Genre/tags: thrash metal, death metal, groove metal 

#311 

⚔️ Artist: Drofnosura
🩸  Title: “Ritual of Split Tongues”
⚔️ Release date: October 24th, 2025

🩸 Genre/tags: psychedelic, atmospheric, black metal, sludge, doom

#312 
 
⚔️ Artist: Bonginator
🩸  Title: “Retrodeath”
⚔️ Release date: October 24th, 2025

🩸 Genre/tags: death metal, synth death 

#313 
 
⚔️ Artist: Scorching Tomb
🩸  Title: “Ossuary”
⚔️ Release date: October 24th, 2025

 

🩸 Genre/tags: death metal, osdm, hardcore 

6 NEW BANDS: THE SLUDGELORD's "666 Pack Review" (January 2019)

By: Nikos Mixas

We made it to another year and January 2019’s edition of THE SLUDGELORD’s “666 Pack Review” is here to celebrate all that is sludgy, heavy and brand fucking new!  There are some huge releases coming out this year, so will this carry over to THE SLUDGELORD’s “666 Pack Review”?  We shall see…  If you’re new to this, each and every month we handpick 6 review submissions and critique them by only using 6 words, then we rate them on a scale from 1 to 666!  Check out our cold as fuck rating scale below: 

1 – If I had a choice to listen to this, or jump into a frozen lake, I’d take the frozen lake.

2 – It is said that whiskey will make you forget that it’s cold out, not too sure about that but it’ll sure help me forget about this band…    
3 – This is the equivalent of can of warm chicken soup when it’s freezing outside.  It kind of does the trick, but not really.  
4 – The feeling you get seeing High on Fire and there’s a blizzard happening outside.       
5 – This will get your ticket punched for purgatory, I heard it’s warm, happy and sludgy there.    
666 – THE SLUDGELORD commends you for warming our bitter and cold heart this month!

Caveat:  Even though the “666 Pack Review” is meant to offer humorous critique, there are no safe spaces here and your gripes will only make you sound like a bellyacher.  THE SLUDGELORD is a picky listener…and doesn’t care what you think of his opinions…

1). Weird Tales “Hell Services Cost a Lot” (Warsaw, Poland)    Rating: 5

Polish Sludge Metal Rules.  Who knew?

2). Hair Puller “Old Friend” (Portland, U.S.A.)   Rating: 4

Chuggy, screamy, their name is appropriate.

3). ILS “Pain Don’t Hurt” (Portland, U.S.A.)   Rating: 666!

This band wins the Portland trophy. 

4). Withered Fist “This is My Mountain” (County Tipperary, Ireland)   Rating: 5

Soundgarden with sludgey, doomtastic mountainic groove.

5). Yuxa “Yuxa” (Brighton, United Kingdom)   Rating: 666!

If Godflesh kicked the industrial habit…

6). Drofnosura “Voidfever” (Toronto, Canada)   Rating: 4

Eclectic doom, a taste of YOB

Band info: Weird Tales || Hair Puller || ILS || Drofnosura