Two records broken in the space of a fortnight. A TikTok-fuelled comeback that made Deftones bigger than they've ever been. A masked collective from London selling 47,000 vinyl copies in seven days. And a farewell concert in Birmingham that felt less like a funeral and more like a coronation for everything that came next.
2025 was not a quiet year for metal on vinyl. Rock and metal accounted for over half of all UK vinyl album sales in 2024, and last year that momentum only accelerated. The vinyl-buying metal audience is loyal, variant-obsessed, and willing to pay a premium for the right pressing. Labels noticed. What followed was a year of coloured vinyl runs, indie-exclusive editions, and first-week numbers that would have seemed absurd five years ago.
Here are the new albums that made it happen.
Ghost set the record, then watched it fall
Ghost, the Swedish theatrical rock band led by Tobias Forge under his latest guise as Papa V Perpetua, released Skeletá on 25 April 2025 through Loma Vista Recordings. It was their sixth studio album and, by several measures, the biggest week metal vinyl has ever had.
Skeletá sold 44,000 vinyl copies in the US in its first seven days. That was the highest first-week vinyl total for a hard rock album since modern chart tracking began in 1991, helped in part by more than fifteen vinyl variants across standard black, coloured exclusives, and retailer-specific editions. The album hit number two on the UK Official Albums Chart (kept off the top by the Stereophonics) and topped the Billboard 200 in the US with 86,000 units, making Ghost the first hard rock act to reach that summit since AC/DC's Power Up in 2020.
The Skeletour world tour kicked off at Manchester's AO Arena on 15 April, ten days before the album landed. Ghost controversially banned mobile phones from the venues, which caused chaos at the Birmingham date but fed into the band's growing mystique. Metal Hammer named Skeletá their album of the year, and the readers' poll agreed.
Sleep Token broke it two weeks later
Then Sleep Token happened. The anonymous London-based collective, fronted by the vocalist known only as Vessel, released Even In Arcadia on 9 May through RCA Records. Their fourth album debuted at number one on the UK Official Albums Chart and shifted 47,000 vinyl copies in the US in its opening week, surpassing the record Ghost had set just a fortnight earlier.
That number made Even In Arcadia the highest-selling hard rock vinyl release of the modern tracking era. It finished the year at number 23 on the overall UK vinyl chart, comfortably the highest-placed metal album on the list. Multiple coloured pressings sold out within hours of going live, including a metallic gold indie-exclusive 2LP that now commands hefty prices on the secondary market.
Sleep Token's appeal to vinyl collectors makes a certain kind of sense. The band's aesthetic is built on mystery, ritual, and physical objects that feel like artefacts rather than products. Their audience buys records the way football fans buy kits: not because they need them, but because owning them is part of belonging.
Two vinyl records broken in the space of a fortnight. Metal didn't just show up on the vinyl chart in 2025. It kicked the door in.
Deftones came back bigger than they'd ever been
If Ghost and Sleep Token dominated the spring, Deftones owned the summer. Private Music, their tenth studio album and first since 2020's Ohms, arrived on 22 August through Reprise Records. The five-year gap was the longest in the band's career, and the anticipation had been building in an unexpected place: TikTok.
Somewhere during the silence between albums, Deftones became the godfathers of "baddiecore", a term coined by younger fans who discovered the Sacramento band through streaming playlists and short-form video. Chino Moreno's blend of whispered vulnerability and full-throated fury turned out to be tailor-made for a generation raised on emotional extremes in fifteen-second clips. By the time Private Music arrived, Deftones were, by their own admission, bigger than at any point in their nearly three-decade existence.
The album earned a Metacritic score of 90 and a full five stars from NME. It was nominated for Best Rock Album at the 68th Grammy Awards. Produced by Nick Raskulinecz, who had steered Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan, Private Music is a lean eleven tracks that balance crushing riffs ("Cut Hands", "cXz") with the atmospheric drift that has defined their later work. Fred Sablan, who replaced Sergio Vega as touring bassist in 2022, co-wrote and played on the record, making it his first full studio appearance with the band.
For vinyl collectors, Private Music arrived in multiple pressings including a green variant that matched the album's cover art. It's one of those records that people buy on vinyl because it was designed to be listened to in a single sitting, front to back, without skipping.
Spiritbox proved the hype was real
Spiritbox had spent four years building anticipation since their debut Eternal Blue, and Tsunami Sea (released 7 March through Rise Records) proved the wait was worth it. The Canadian metalcore band, led by vocalist Courtney LaPlante, folded electronica and pop into their sound with more confidence than before, creating something that felt like a genre recalibration rather than a genre exercise. They picked up a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance and played a packed Alexandra Palace in London in February, weeks before the album landed.
Babymetal went global with Metal Forth
Most bands wouldn't hand over the majority of their album to collaborators. Babymetal are not most bands. Metal Forth, their fifth full-length, featured guest spots from Poppy, Slaughter to Prevail, Bloodywood, Spiritbox, Electric Callboy, and Tom Morello across seven of its ten tracks. The Japanese pop-metal trio became the first Japanese band to break the US Top 10, proving that their particular collision of J-pop melodies and crushing metal riffs is no longer a novelty. It's a movement.
Lorna Shore raised the bar for extreme metal
Where Spiritbox and Babymetal pushed metal's boundaries outward, Lorna Shore went deeper. I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me, released on 12 September through Century Media, is a 66-minute symphonic deathcore record that makes no concessions to accessibility. Vocalist Will Ramos's range is almost absurdly wide, and producer Josh Schroeder wove orchestral arrangements into the heaviest material the band has ever committed to tape. It placed eleventh in Metal Hammer's readers' poll, and for a deathcore band, that kind of broad recognition used to be unthinkable.
The rest of the class
A year this stacked inevitably leaves excellent albums fighting for attention. Halestorm's Everest, their sixth record, showcased Lzzy Hale at her most powerful. Dream Theater returned with Parasomnia, their first album with Mike Portnoy back behind the kit. Testament's Para Bellum (October, Nuclear Blast) was a thrash return that reminded everyone the Bay Area veterans aren't done. Sabaton released Legends. Killswitch Engage weighed in with This Consequence. Machine Head put out Unatoned. Lacuna Coil delivered Sleepless Empire. Architects released The Sky, The Earth & All Between.
Smaller names punched upward too. Castle Rat's The Bestiary turned doom metal into high fantasy and became one of the year's word-of-mouth favourites. Creeper's Sanguivore II confirmed them as the UK's best rock songwriters for a fourth consecutive album. And Bloodywood's Nu Delhi brought Indian bhangra-infused nu metal to a wider audience than ever.
The farewell that changed everything
On 5 July 2025, Black Sabbath played their "Back to the Beginning" farewell concert at Villa Park in their hometown of Birmingham. It was the first time the original lineup of Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward had played together since 2005. The support bill read like a who's who of everything the genre had produced since Sabbath invented it in 1970: Metallica, Slayer, Pantera, Gojira, Alice in Chains, Guns N' Roses, Lamb of God, Halestorm, Anthrax, and Mastodon. Osbourne, who could no longer walk due to advanced Parkinson's disease, performed seated on a throne.
Seventeen days later, Ozzy Osbourne died at the age of 76. The concert turned out to be not just a farewell but a final statement about the health of what he and his bandmates had started. Five decades of heavy music, represented on a single stage, still selling out.
2026: what's already landed and what's coming
The early months of 2026 have been quieter on the metal front, though the vinyl chart hasn't forgotten the genre. Feeder released Comfort in Sound - Live, which entered the Official Vinyl Albums Chart at twelve in March. Gorillaz's The Mountain topped the vinyl chart in its first week, blending trip-hop and heavy instrumentation in a way that sat comfortably alongside harder material.
The bigger story is what's coming. Record Store Day 2026 falls on 18 April, and the releases list already includes limited pressings aimed squarely at the metal and rock audience. Iron Maiden, Metallica, and several other heavyweights have 2026 releases rumoured or confirmed. If 2025 proved that metal fans buy vinyl in numbers that rival pop, 2026 is set to test how high those numbers can go.
For collectors
If you're buying any of these records, compare prices before committing. Metal vinyl pressings often carry a £3 to £8 premium over standard editions depending on the variant, and pricing varies significantly between UK retailers, especially in the first few weeks after release. The limited coloured runs from Ghost and Sleep Token have already started climbing on the resale market, but standard black pressings of all the albums mentioned here remain widely available and sound just as good.
Chart data: Official Charts Company, Metal Hammer, Billboard. Vinyl sales figures from Official Charts Company and Luminate tracking data, 2025.