Friends of I Die: You Die Year End Favourites 2025

As is our custom, we’re starting off our Year End coverage with recommendations from friends from within and around This Thing Of Ours from the past year. All things I Die: You Die, including our Year End list, invariably ends up reflecting the very subjective tastes of just two people, and so we relish chances like this to check in with others we trust, catch up on some stuff we might have missed, and offer our readers perspectives other than our own. The first ten entries on our Top 25 will be out tomorrow!

Mari Kattman, Year of the Kat
Mari continues to be a powerhouse of a producer. With everything she puts out, you can hear her evolution and Year of the Katt delivers an incredibly powerful album. I feel like there’s something for everyone on this record. While it’s soundscapes might be shaped by familiar past productions within similar genres – this record is ALL her, and you know it when you listen to it. There’s raw emotion, there’s strength and power. It’s full of completely relatable material from start to finish. And if I may, I highly recommend seeing her perform live. Her energy and insane vocals on stage, really take it to the next level.

HEALTH, CONFLICT: DLC
I’d like to share a memory tied to my recommendation. We were fortunate to first play with HEALTH back in 2018 at the wonderful TERMINUS Fest in Calgary and became fast friends. Slaves of Fear had just come out, and even though I had heard them for many years prior, (even seeing them open for NIN back in 2008) this was the first album of theirs that really got stuck in my headphones.
Panther and I met up with them in NYC for their sold-out show at Brooklyn Steel on the Rat Wars tour, and coincidently while we were there, the sax solo for our song “Only You” showed up in our inbox.

We listened around my phone to what had been delivered by Benjamin Harrison and were just thrilled to hear our vision realized. What you hear on our record is basically exactly what he sent. So we were just buzzing, saw HEALTH perform a phenomenal show followed by a fun afterparty. It all felt very celebratory & was a wonderful moment in time that I now have tied to another band that I call friends & inspirations.

Now here in 2025, I found myself listening to a LOT of their album CONFLICT: DLC. They seem to have caught a real creative groove and songs like “Ordinary Loss” & “Thought Leader” really hit home for me right now. I was talking to their drummer Beej about it and was stunned to hear that they literally wrote & recorded the whole album within the last year. I had assumed that a lot of this record was just B-sides & outtakes from Rat Wars since it was so soon after its release. Nope. All new stuff. Really looking forward to seeing them again in ’26. Humbling & inspiring to know some of your favorite bands are your friends.

Assemblage 23, Null
It’s been a difficult year for human rights, peace, and basic human decency. I gravitate towards music that helps me process the anger, dread, and confusion that come with doomscrolling the news and social media each day. It’s almost uncanny how precisely Assemblage 23 captured the mood of 2025. The paradox of tolerance has been a hot topic in the scene this year, so a song like “Tolerate,” which says bigotry is not welcome in our spaces, arrived with razor-sharp timing. But what really makes Null so vital is that Tom Shear refuses to leave us in the dark. He balances the record’s fury with moments of genuine hope. “Believe” insists that there’s still good in the world, “Normal” extends a hand through the hard times, and, perhaps best of all, “Waited” reminds us that love is worth waiting for. Thirty-plus years and ten albums in, Assemblage 23 dropped its best album yet.

DJ Rev.John (Das Bunker)

GEORGI, “That Night”
“That Night” is a catchy pop-darkwave (emphasis on pop) earworm that will be stuck in your head for months after first listen. GEORGI has been slow rolling out the tracks for over a year now and we can all hope the album drops soon.

My Chemical Romance, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge Deluxe
For my pick, I chose My Chemical Romance’s remastered Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. Three Cheers was initially released in 2006, at the height of the emo noise war, but with this remix from Rich Costey, the album takes on new life, showcasing the band’s talent. Recounting a story of a man tasked with killing 1,000 evil men to save his wife’s soul, he sets out to rid the world of evil, only to find his actions have made him the final man. This compelling story invites listeners to feel connected and curious about the album’s deeper themes. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge is simply one of the best mid-2000s emo albums ever written.

AFI, Silver Bleeds the Black Sun…
For a band that has flirted with goth-adjacent aesthetics and influences for the better part of their 30+ year career, it certainly took AFI a long time to finally put out a full-fledged goth rock record. They finally did it and pulled no punches, leaning fully in. Washy guitars, chorused bass, drum machines, baritone vocals, the whole works. I never anticipated Davey Havok putting on his best Peter Murphy, but it works surprisingly well. There is a very present live rock band energy throughout the record that balances out with the addition of synths and processed sounds, alongside a palpable influence from the modern wave of post-punk/goth-adjacent bands that is refreshing to hear carried throughout the record by a band this tenured, especially heard on tracks like “Ash Speck” and “Voidward.” Curious to hear where they’ll go from here.

Verses GT, self-titled
Verses GT is a collaboration between Canadian deep house producer Jacques Greene, and US bass / IDM architect Nosaj Thing. Collabs tend to sound like how they read on paper – a melange of two recipes, resulting in a dish that tastes like the ingredients used, and nothing more – but here, this fusion creates a fragile and soothing space that far outweighs the sum of its parts. Ethereal outings like “Left” and “Vision+Television” float next to hazy emotive 2-step workouts like “Found” and “Unknown”, their otherworldly vocals seemingly manifesting out of thin air. I don’t think I’ve heard a more palpably magic record this year.

Door Eater, Try
What an absolute wreck of a year this has been. Door Eater’s June release, Try perfectly encapsulates the visceral frustration that I associate with 2025. Door Eater doesn’t draw directly from industrial music—at least not perceptibly—but combines noise rock, chiptune, and a smattering of other things into an album that shares a musical kinship with bands like genCAB and Health. There’s a lot of glitchy percussion and effects, and structured songwriting that strikes a balance between heavy elements and pop accessibility. The vocals bounce constantly between sing-songy indie melodies tinged with sarcasm and starkly emotional atonal screaming.

Collaborators Lauren Bousfield (Nero’s Day at Disneyland) and Ada Rook each have prior work that approaches Door Eater’s vibe and concept, but I haven’t found anything else they’ve done that hits quite this hard. There’s an almost juvenile expression of rage to this album that I’ve really needed lately, and I’m glad it’s here.