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 #7: ‘The Sky, The Earth & All Between‘ by Architects.

All right, strap in! There’s no holding back no more. Today’s album, my #7 of this year, marks a special moment: from here on out, we will go past the albums I enjoyed the most throughout 2025, almost to the fullest, I would say. This will be the territory of releases of which I barely have anything negative to say. I’ve been spinning these on repeat throughout the year and they house some of my favourite songs of the year. Kicking off with Architects’ somewhat polarising 11th album.

The crowd’s reception of ‘The Sky, The Earth & All Between’ seems to be similar to that for Sleep Token’s ‘Even In Arcadia’ and Thornhill’s ‘BODIES’. Fans following those groups for a long time already kind of turned against the direction the band had taken on their specific albums. In Architects’ case, a shift in creativity seemed a bit inevitable. Given their career spans over 20 years, it seems impossible to happily keep on doing the same thing over and over again. Previous albums ‘the classic symptoms of a broken spirit’ (2022) and ‘For Those That Wish To Exist’ (2021) showed Architects is able to release radio friendly metalcore and that sound peaks at this latest. Courtesy to notorious producer and former Bring Me The Horizon-keyboardist Jordan Fish, who’s probably the personification of the saying “you either love it or hate it”.

Fish became known to some as the instigator for BMTH’s direction towards a more pop leaning metal sound which created a massive split in fans. The old school Bring Me-followers absolutely despised everything the band released from ‘Sempiternal’ (2013) onwards while at the same time, that album meant an immense influx of brand new fans. By working together with acts such as Babymetal, Poppy, Halsey, and (strangely enough) Dutch pop singer S10, Fish has been able to perfect his skill of incorporating popular music structures into the realm of heavier, more technical music. On Architects’ 11th, it’s clear the producer really slapped his distinctive mark on it: basically the entire album lives and breathes Jordan Fish. Not only through ways of the more mainstream leaning ‘Chandelier’ or ‘Broken Mirror’, but also by ways of bigger hits on the album like ‘Curse’, ‘Whiplash’, and ‘Blackhole’, which are designed in a very typical Fish-manner. The impressive feature of all these songs lies in the fact that no matter how heavy they may sound, they are still safe enough to be played on the radio. And that’s probably the crux as to why certain old-school fans don’t like it as much.

I myself should admit that I’m a bit of a sucker for this stuff. Many songs on this album have been on repeat all year and honestly, the fact that they are more approachable than others doesn’t really bother me. I get a lot of joy from these tunes and if they sound more catchy than Architects’ older discography, then who am I to spout some snobby opinion over it. ‘Elegy’, ‘Whiplash’, and ‘Blackhole’ form probably my favourite album kick-off I’ve heard all year and while the middle part of this album blends together into a metalcore void, outstanding songs like ‘Brain Dead’ (featuring hot act House of Protection), ‘Curse’, and ‘Seeing Red’ give this album an absolute solid edge I can’t ignore. Yep, ‘The Sky, The Earth & All Between’ is amongst my favourite albums of the year and I have no shame in admitting so.