I get a lot of emails in my inbox every single day. Comes with the territory. Part blessing, part curse, part archaeological dig through mountains of sonic rubble. Some days I strike gold. Some days I strike brass. And some days I strike something so catastrophically awful that I consider faking my own death, fleeing the country, and starting a new life as a goat farmer in rural Albania.

But that’s the game. You sift through the junk, the noise, the “please listen to my 78-minute concept album about a sentient onion,” because every once in a while you find that one spark — the thing that makes all the sifting and swearing and caffeine abuse worth it.

Today, that spark was Archon by Archon.

And not only did it spark — it fucking detonated.

Archon isn’t just good.

It isn’t just great.

It isn’t even “contender for album of the year” good.

No.

Archon is the single best Atmospheric Black Metal release of 2025.

Bar fucking none.

Everybody else can pack up their gear, cancel their studio time, and go home. The mountain has been claimed.

Let me be clear: I’ve been writing since I was twelve years old. Forty-one years of bleeding ink, breaking keyboards, and crafting words into weapons. I’ve written about everything from schlock horror movies to international occult magick, and I’d like to think I’m pretty damn good at describing the indescribable.

But this?

This album?

This towering, frost-encrusted monolith of atmospheric devastation?

There are no words in our current language that fully do it justice.

This isn’t simply an album — it’s a fucking event.

Five tracks.

Thirty minutes.And not a single second wasted.

Every part of Archon breathes, shifts, devours, expands. It doesn’t merely play — it manifests, materialises around you like a blizzard taking physical form, wrapping itself around your chest and squeezing until your ribs groan in protest.

Atmospheric Black Metal is a tricky bastard. It’s a subgenre filled with countless bands who think “long song + tremolo + reverb = masterpiece.” Most of it evaporates the moment you stop listening — pleasant, cold, forgettable.

Archon is the opposite.

Archon is inevitable.

Each track feels alive — not metaphorically, not poetically — alive in the way a wolf is alive: hungry, dangerous, built for the hunt. The sound isn’t layered; it’s stacked, towering, glacier-thick walls of guitars holding up skies of swirling ambience while permafrost winds howl underneath. You don’t listen to it as much as you enter it, step by step into a whiteout where the horizon dissolves and time becomes irrelevant.

And then there’s Claustrophobia, the centrepiece of the storm.

I do not say this lightly:

Archon has written not just one of the greatest pieces of music this year — they have written one of the greatest pieces of music ever recorded.

I mean that.

I stand by that.

I’ll die on that fucking hill.

Claustrophobia is a universe collapsing in slow motion. It’s the sound of snow-capped mountains grinding their teeth, of winter swallowing whole civilizations, of isolation so vast and suffocating that it loops back around into transcendence. The song moves with a terrible, beautiful weight — deliberate, crushing, merciless, but always controlled.

The guitars shimmer like ice cracking on a frozen lake. The drums slam like distant avalanches. The vocals drift through the mix like the last breath of someone lost in a blizzard miles from home. The whole thing feels ancient and apocalyptic, like something carved into stone long before humans crawled upright.

It is, without hyperbole, a masterpiece within a masterpiece.

But the miracle of Archon is that every track pulls its own weight. There are no weak links, no filler passages, no half-baked detours. Each song is its own storm cell — one howls, one suffocates, one crawls under your skin like frostbite, one rises into the air like smoke from a sacrificial pyre. The album moves between these states with the confidence of an artist who knows exactly what they’re doing and exactly how to destroy you emotionally in the shortest possible time.

The production deserves special praise. It’s cold without being thin, vast without being muddy, immersive without drowning in its own atmosphere. The balance is immaculate. You feel every cymbal, every low-end rumble, every guitar surge, every shadowed ghost of a vocal line drifting in from the edge of the world.

Archon is not an album you simply hear.

It’s an album that consumes.It engulfs you.It blinds you.

It breaks you open and leaves you wandering through frost-covered ruins, staring at the sky, wondering how the hell anyone captured winter so perfectly in sound.

You can buy Archon by Archon over on their Bandcamp page and there is absolutely no fucking reason you shouldn’t.

CHOICE CUT: Claustrophobia

BLACK METAL ARCHIVES VERDICT: A monumental achievement in Atmospheric Black Metal. Archon is cold, vast, feral, and utterly flawless — a masterpiece that will be talked about, worshipped, and imitated for years. If 2025 has a king, it’s this album.