Why did I make this three months late? ADHD, that’s why.
Anyway, I’m not going to mope about how bad 2025 was (beyond the description, at least), I think everyone has said or heard something about that. What I want to do is share some things that I really liked from last year, whether they were released last year or not, to celebrate what made 2025 bearable at the very least.
Best Book (Series): BEASTARS by Paru Itagaki
In 2023, I got into the Beastars anime thanks to - of all things - the Eurovision Song Contest, or more specifically, Måneskin’s win in Rotterdam 2021. From that win and the resulting fame they attained, they met Paru Itagaki, the creator of Beastars, and as a result an official collab music video for their song TIMEZONE was released, which used puppet-animated excerpts from the manga. Given that Beastars was on Netflix which I have, I figured I’d give it a go and liked it, then promptly forgot about it until last year, when I decided to give the manga a go having saw it in the local book shops. I did find the art of the manga that I saw in the music video more expressive than in the anime which uses 3D animation for the characters and feels a bit more rigid as a result, so I figured it was worth a shot.
And holy shit, the manga is great. Without spoiling the story, it starts a bit rough at first in terms of the art, but as it goes on, the art becomes absolutely phenomenal. For that reason, I found myself more gripped to the plot of the story reading it in comparison to the anime, where it felt a bit passive - in fairness though, that could be my ADHD. Upon returning to the world of Beastars, I felt it was really well thought out, with a lot of care and attention to the messy relationships between herbivores and carnivores, as well as the different characters, particularly with the relationships that gray wolf Legoshi and red deer Louis forge during the course of the story.
If there is one criticism to be had with Beastars, it’d probably be the pacing, with how fast the story progression felt. It feels like there’s not much time before you’re onto the next chapter - I would have loved for a bit slower pace. But still, I thoroughly enjoyed this manga, and for my first collected series, I don’t know where else to go. It definitely feels like I’ve peaked.
And, I have to say it: part of that feeling is also because this manga made me fall in love with Legoshi. Normally, my tastes in characters are very out there - to put it into perspective, one of my crushes is a cartoon battery - and I tend not to go for furry flavours of the month at their peaks. But Legoshi gripped me like no other furry-bait character to the point where I am still fixated on him even now. It did cause some issues emotionally while reading however, given I didn’t wanna see Legoshi getting hurt despite the fact he’s fictional though… blame the ADHD.
Best Music Album: Inertia by Pendulum
2025 saw the return of Australian drum ‘n’ bass band Pendulum, with an album that’s mostly tracks from their past EPs to the point that people on Rate Your Music think it could be a compilation by such site’s standards. In hindsight, it was not the greatest rollout, but even considering that, it nonetheless still became my favourite album of 2025, even displacing their last album Immersion as my favourite album from them specifically.
Metal becomes a bigger influence on the album, with collaborations with Matt Tuck of Welsh metal band Bullet for My Valentine (Halo), as well as UK-based nu metal duo WARGASM (Cannibal). Vocalist Rob Swire himself also leans into the metal, with metalcore vocals on Save the Cat and screeching the lyrics at the end of Archangel. Rawness and melody are two things I’ve come to strongly like - before my metalhead arc, I’ve been a fan of the hyperpop phase that the music industry had with artists like 100 gecs, as well as the bubblegum bass scene that preceded it which combined experimental sound design with the poppiest pop you can ever pop - and metal is now a part of my music taste, which Pendulum fits very well in for a band that was rooted in dance music. Adding to the rawness, industrial rock is another influence on the album, with Silent Spinner being the most obvious industrially influenced track with its Nine Inch Nails-esque guitars and atmosphere, though Come Alive also leans into an industrial rock sound despite sounding more mainstream, and is up there in the list of Pendulum’s best songs in my opinion.
There’s even rawness in the emotional sense too, Guiding Lights was a massive personal gut-punch, and the heavier rock sound lends itself well to the final track Cartagena, which accompanies the rock with a wailing synth that initially sounds out of place but contributes to the raw emotional energy of the track. It’s such a perfect closer to an amazing album.
Drum and bass is still part of Pendulum’s core sound, though. From the starter that is Driver, which continues from the end of Immersion’s Encoder with sounds of walking out of the water, before smacking you in the face with the DnB drop that sets the stage for the heavier sound, to the end of the album with Cartagena (which I’ll talk about later). You do get some breathers with some admittedly useless ambient interludes, but Louder Than Words, which is a great liquid DnB track and a collab with the duo Hybrid Minds, also acts as a breather from the constant barrage of heavier DnB and metal.
I have not appreciated an album this hard since CHVRCHES’ Screen Violence, which also saw that band get rawer, rockier and dealing more with their emotions. And despite the fact it’s basically an album-themed re-release of their earlier EPs, it still hooked me enough. What made Inertia even more special was being able to see them live at a concert for the very first time. Rob was shaky with controlling his vocals, but his phenomenal voice still shone through despite the shakiness, and it only solidified my love for Inertia.
Given that Pendulum shows no signs of stopping, though they are chilling from releasing new music themselves - this year, Rob put the Pendulum name to an Alesso track that he sung on - I’m definitely looking forward to what they’ve got next.
Best Artist: Spiritbox
I initially wasn’t going to have this section but my metalhead friend mentioned Spiritbox, and I have to give them a section since they were definitely my best artist discovery of 2025. After showing a bunch of peeps in a VRChat session “Save the Cat” from Inertia, someone in the group decided to show me The Void by Canadian metal band Spiritbox. And I was immediately hooked. Later on, I’d do an album dive into their music for RYM, and hoh man I loved it - they were consistently great, definitely up there with Voyager in my group of favourite metal bands now. (more on them later)
Spiritbox’s sound embodies the sort of music that I really like to a tee, combining rawness with melody, while being poppy and electronic enough (no, not Poppy) to hook into my pop-loving tastes. Courtney LaPlante is also a great vocalist, who can do both regular and metal vocals great and is a great fit for the band. My favourite release from them is “The Fear of Fear”, with Jaded and The Void being my picks from that EP. That one I feel is peak Spiritbox.
Best Song: Seen Better Days by Voyager
Content warning: Mentions of cancer, death, mental health
Progressive metal band Voyager has had the worst luck after basically being the best performers at Eurovision in Liverpool 2023 and having what I would argue is the best Eurovision song of all time (which is ironic because they represented Australia). They were on such a high after Eurovision, but unfortunately when they were set to tour Europe, lead singer Danny Estrin had a health emergency and had to return to Australia, which ultimately resulted in the cancellation of the 2023 and ‘24 tours. It would turn out that Danny would be diagnosed with terminal cancer. Seen Better Days is the result of the turmoil.
Now, Voyager have been my favourite metal band since I saw them on TV watching Eurovision. I would even argue that had it not been for them, I would not have asked my friend who’s a much bigger metalhead than I am to get me into extreme metal. Seeing the news about his terminal cancer made my heart sink, but nonetheless I knew that whatever Voyager were going to do post-Eurovision was going to be a banger. And this song is absolutely their best, even better than Promise.
The lyrics are bittersweet; they have this air of optimism but also don’t beat around the bush about the absolutely heavy gravity of Danny’s situation, and the delivery from Danny matches the emotion really well. When I played this to that metalhead friend, he too noticed Danny’s emotion in the vocal, especially at the end where he’s repeating the line “Hold me now, see me through the haze, so hold me now ‘cause I’ve seen better days”.
The production is also Voyager at their best. It combines the modern synth-influenced sound Voyager’s well known for, with their classic prog sound, and it works so well, and doesn’t suffer from the mixing problems that their first post-Eurovision album Fearless in Love had. I particularly love the reverberated scream from one of his fellow bandmates during the middle of the song, which feels like one hell of an emotional release, and at the very end, on the final two bars of the final lines Danny sings, the synths are silenced, leaving the listener with just the raw guitars and drums to bring the gravity home again.
This song also resonated with me on a personal level. Last year I’ve had to deal with multiple deaths of people close to me, amongst other personal issues, as well as the uncomfortable change of the world going full-on pedophile fascist to the point where I’ve felt like I’m being metaphorically suffocated. While this song is a gut-wrenching listen at times and not something I can just listen to on a whim, it’s still hopeful enough that when I need it, it gets me to carry on. For that reason, I am so grateful for Voyager and so glad that I had got into them one way or another.
This is definitely a change of pace for me, and I want to do more of these posts, where I talk about things I’ve watched, read, discovered, etc. and other things I’ve found interesting. I could rant about tech bullshit enough to provide content for the entire year, but I really don’t want to be a one-trick pony. I rant about Linux enough on Bluesky and fedi, ffs.
Oh, and given that I’ve mentioned Eurovision twice positively here: Fuck the EBU.