Not to be confused with the Colorado based doom/stoner band of the same name, this Polish trio arrived on the metal scene in 2025, bringing huge sounding trad metal riffs. Their shamelessly old school heart should make them appeal instantly to lovers of a “classic” style, but it’s also quite pleasing that some of the band’s material shows off a love for an unexpectedly dirty edge.
Credited with bringing back the “fun” and the “sexy” within a retro sound, Pink Stiletto’s 2024 EP ‘New Wava’ presented four mechanical sounding bangers that drew influence from a world of synth pop and new wave and occasionally added basslines that sounded more like they belonged on a synth-goth record. The managerie of sound created something so lovingly indebted to the past, it became instantly loveable, despite sharing a rather cold edge.
In terms of blending metal subgenres, Kill The Silence’s current single ‘The Final Word’ makes a bold statement. The track’s very heavy intro fuses the sheer force of groove metal with the complexity of prog, resulting in something that appears to pull in different directions, yet sounds incredibly tight.
Asylum Road closed their 2025 with a very uncompromising single, ‘Mask of Oblivion’. The track’s mix of metalcore and hardcore with a pinch of death metal darkness left nothing to chance in terms of overall heaviness.
Since the release of their first full length release ‘Floating Above Everything Else’ in 2023, Keeley Moss and her eponymously named band have felt like a massively important part of the indie underground. That record’s heavy nods to a shoegaze and dreampop past ensured listeners who spent the 1990s as wide-eyed twenty somethings found an immediate connection with the KEELEY sound, while the lyrical content – heavily influenced by the narrative surrounding the murder of young traveller Inga Maria Hauser – gave some great tunes a cerebral edge. 2024’s ‘Beautiful Mysterious’ repeated the formula, but certainly didn’t sound like a band treading water. If anything, the album sounded a little more confident; richer, even, and it was clear there was certainly more of a story to be told regarding the Hauser case.