It’s time to reflect on the year in music! This month, we’ll be highlighting Jam of Today’s favourite albums of 2025. Working our way up to the #1 album, which will be revealed on the 31st of December, we’ll go one by one past this year’s favourites. Today, our #14: ‘BODIES‘ by Thornhill.

In a year flooded with grungy nu-metal acts, it’s hard to stay on top of all that’s good. Fact is, there’s just so many talented bands breaking through at the moment that you start to wonder which ones to listen to first. Naturally, you tend to take a liking to the ones you know already or have taken a liking to before, therefore others need a little nudge in the right direction. Such was the case for Thornhill, whose album ‘BODIES’ I slowly started to appreciate more and more this year, with their show in Utrecht in October being the icing on the cake.

While looking up reviews of this album online, I stumble upon lots of opinions varying in views, from very positive to extremely negative. Interestingly enough, I notice the positive reviews are often given by professional writers with the ‘regular fans’ seemingly being on the pessimistic side regarding the sound Thornhill has embraced on ‘BODIES’. Never did I think an album like this would cause so much polarisation. For me personally, this album is the first Thornhill album I listened to so I suppose I never got familiar with their more prog leaning debut album ‘The Dark Pool’ or the apparently also somewhat controversial follow-up ‘Heroine’. Understandably, people are slowly getting a bit tired of bands trying to sound like Deftones all the time but it’s still worth mentioning that the majority of these albums are really good, ‘BODIES’ included, and if anything: this album is quite a bit more interesting than most of the ones out there.

For starters, the production on ‘BODIES’ is pretty slick, credits to Ocean Grove drummer Sam Bassal taking on this job. Funnily enough, this also seems to be a reason for split opinions in the community. I see quite a lot of people out there disliking this solid production, which makes me wonder what is actually good enough for some of these fans. Anyway, Thornhill’s third touches upon way more than those alt. metal adjacent subgenres I’ve mentioned about a billion times here now. Singer Jacob Charlton has a bit of that Sleep Token-esque R&B twang to his vocals, which has proven itself to be a weirdly soothing combination with the djent on this record. A shame it comes a bit too much to the forefront on the love ballad ‘CRUSH’ which is my number 1 contender to be cut from this record. More positively, songs like ‘Silver Swarm’ and ‘Only Ever You’ strongly remind me of Loathe, a sublime act also able to mix the aforementioned sounds perfectly.

Furthermore worth mentioning are the 4 singles hailing off of ‘BODIES’, being’ Obsession’, ‘nerv’, ‘Silver Swarm’ and ‘TONGUES’, arguably the strongest songs on this album balancing between sexy nu-metal and rough around the edges-grunge. Again, due to Sam Bassal’s awesome job, all songs blend in perfectly and make for a very pleasant listening experience. After battling through the cheesy ‘CRUSH’, we welcome a much stronger ending by ways of ‘under the knife’ and ‘For Now’, the latter beinga staple emo-like ender which, unsurprisingly, I’m a bit of a sucker for. Ultimately, I end up liking ‘BODIES’ as an album having quite a bit more to offer than many of its genre peers do. One that’s quite a bit more charismatic, too, which came clearly to the forefront when I saw them perform their music live earlier this year.So, if you’re not fully convinced by ‘BODIES’ (which, apparently, goes for quite some people out there), take a chance and go see the Australian band live if you have the chance. You won’t regret it.