We're officially past the halfway point of 2025! With the sun blazing overhead and the fields of Europe packed seemingly every week with a new metal festival, we're rapidly marching through the year now. And that means, of course, more new music!
Much as we do every month, this month we've pulled together a collection of rising stars from across the metal spectrum, covering everything from metalcore and alternative metal to industrial and folk. You can read all about those bands below, and stick on our massive playlist if you want to hear their latest releases. See you again next month!
Amira Elfeky
Last year, Amira Elfeky had friends excitedly sending her messages to say that one of her songs was being played before a Bring Me The Horizon gig in her native Los Angeles. Fast-forward to now, and she’s actually going on tour with them.
“I can’t believe it!” she enthuses. “When Oli [Sykes] reached out, asking if I wanted to open, I was screaming and running in circles.”
Being invited out on tour with Bring Me The Horizon isn’t the only big thing the alt metal innovator has accomplished. Earlier this year, she provided guest vocals for Architects on Judgement Day, a highlight of their latest album, The Sky, The Earth & All Between.
“I was starstruck,” she admits. “They’re such an influential band and they were so kind, letting me bring my own style to the song.”
Amira’s music blends the sultrier elements of Deftones with vocals Amy Lee would be proud of, and she’s won an army of fans after releasing several singles and two EPs: 2024’s Skin To Skin, and new release Surrender. The single Will You Love Me When I’m Dead has racked up a whopping 7.8 million Spotify plays, and while it might seem like she’s blown up overnight, Amira has been working at this for a long time.
She recalls going online to find fellow music-lovers to form a band, then spending the next “four or five years” honing everything.
“I was too scared to put anything out. I wanted it to be perfect,” she confesses. “It was this transcendent feeling to record and to sing and to be able to pen my thoughts to paper. I’ve always been emotional, intuitive and empathic, and I knew this had to work out. There could be no plan B.”
Her debut London show sold out – after being upgraded twice – and she played Download Festival in June. With a rising curve like this, who knows where she’ll be a year from now? Jen Thomas
Amira Elfeky's new EP Atlantic is out now via Atlantic.
Sounds Like: A melancholic take on nu metal with a gothic twist
For Fans Of: Deftones, Sleep Token, Cassyette
Listen To: Will You Love Me When I’m Dead
Sylvaine
Sylvaine is a master of emotion and atmosphere. In 2022, the Norwegian artist, real name Kathrine Shepard, released Nova, an excellent record that veered violently between swirling, moonlit melodies and blasts of blackgaze and anguished shrieks.
She followed it up last year with Eg Er Framand, an EP of haunting Nordic folk songs that put her hypnotic vocal upfront, heavily inspired by spiritualism and nature.
“I’m fascinated by duality in sound,” she explains. “I try to find balance between them and figure out how far can I push the limits.”
Much of Eg Er Framand’s six tracks were recorded in Sylvaine’s local church in Oslo. “It’s pretty luminous; it’s the opposite of those creepy darker, heavier churches,” she says. “I wanted it to have the life that was captured in each moment. Sometimes you can hear the church creak in the background.”
She reworked the lyrics of some of the songs to fit themes of loneliness and longing; heavy feelings she’s grappled with for years. “I was always more on the shy, introverted side,” she says. “That ‘lone wolf’ thing has followed me since then. I feel like I’m walking on this path by myself.”
Sylvaine undertook her first UK solo tour in May and June, including a date at Scarborough’s sold-out extreme metal gathering Fortress Festival.
“I have a hard time categorising myself,” Sylvaine says. “I have one foot in the scene and one foot elsewhere. I have never called Sylvaine a metal project… but it does feel like home.” Dannii Leivers
Eg Er Framand is out now via Season Of Mist.
Sounds Like: Walking through a moonlit mist in an enchanted garden, with the odd jumpscare
For Fans Of: Alcest, Myrkur, Lindy-Fay Hella
Listen To: Dagsens Auga Sloknar Ut
Uncured
Who really knew who they were when they were 16? We might have thought we’d got the world sussed out back then, but we reckon nobody reading this can look back at what they were like as a precocious teen without cringing. That’s certainly how the Cox brothers feel.
“We started out playing this very technical, progressive metal,” Uncured vocalist and guitarist Rex Cox recalls. “As you can imagine, there’s a pretty low ceiling on that.”
Inspired by the likes of Dream Theater, Opeth and Nevermore, Rex and his brother Zak formed Uncured while in their teens. The youthful duo may have quickly excelled at their instruments, but they found that Uncured’s songs lacked the visceral edge they needed to make sure they landed when played live.
“There isn’t much to get you hyped up, watching four guys looking at their instruments and playing something super-technical,” Rex says. “We needed music that was going to hit right then and there.”
Although they’d released two albums, when the pandemic hit in 2020 it offered a chance for a total reboot. Widdly guitars were out, and chunky breakdowns and nu metal-inspired rap flows were in, the fruits of their efforts on full display on new album Warpath.
“When we were young, we just didn’t know how to write that stuff,” Zak shrugs. “There was this idea that if a song was longer and more complicated, then it was better. We started wondering, ‘How do you write a hit?’”
Uncured might not be too far from a hit, as it happens. Since their rebrand, they’ve enjoyed a massive increase in monthly listeners on Spotify – they currently have 37,000 – and they receive a much more rabid reception at shows.
“Metal is having a real moment right now,” Rex smiles. “Metalcore is on the rise, nu metal is having a resurgence… We always loved that music. It’s a great time to be a metal band right now, and we just want to be part of that." Stephen Hill
Warpath is out now via Conclave Studios. Uncured play Louder Than Life in September.
Sounds Like: Modern metal with huge grooves, loads of bounce, and choruses that cling tighter to your brain than a boa constrictor
For Fans Of: Bad Wolves, I Prevail, King 810
Listen To: Detonate
Harpy
“Understand what makes people tick really gets me off,” says Harpy. “In another life, I may have been a therapist.”
Luckily for us, she’s used that fascination for the human psyche to create sexy, scary industrial rock music. After growing up with pop radio, Harpy discovered gateway rock bands Paramore, Evanescence and System Of Down. A number of different musical projects followed, but nothing really stuck until she immersed herself in London’s kink and fetish club scene.
“It was this totally different world,” she says. “Seeing so many people being unashamedly themselves just blew my mind.”
Using that charged freedom to create music as Harpy, over the past couple of years she’s released a string of pulsating singles that pull from techno, pop and metal – with her love of horror films also bleeding into the mix.
“I don’t want to pigeonhole myself into one specific genre, but it’s all heavy and fun,” she says happily.
The brooding Not My God Anymore is about reclaiming power in the aftermath of a toxic relationship, while Born To Destroy (co-written with Wargasm’s Milkie Way) flips the script on blokes being celebrated for sleeping around.
“It doesn’t matter how abstract the song seems, they all come from things I’ve experienced in my life,” she explains, before elaborating that each of her dark anthems offer “emancipation”.
“I hope it’s helping people embrace who they are and how they want to express themselves, without giving a fuck what anyone else thinks.”
After touring with Cassyette and Wargasm, Harpy recently played her first headline show in London, bringing euphoric goth bangers, a theatrical flair and a whole lot of latex to the Camden Assembly, before making her debut at Download Festival. Next up is her first full-length album.
“I just try to make art that people want to step into and lose themselves in,” Harpy explains. “ It’s all about offering a release." Ali Shutler
Harpy plays Manchester's Infest Festival in August.
Sounds Like: The soundtrack to a bloody great zombie horror
For Fans Of: Deftones, Nine Inch Nails, Witch Fever
Listen To: Not My God Anymore
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