Our 32 Favorite Metal Albums of 2024

The metal world is as vast as ever, and 2024 was full of countless great albums from all across the metal spectrum, by bands from all over the world. We included some of our heavy faves on our list of the 50 best albums of 2024, but there’s so much more metal we want to celebrate so here’s our list of our [X] favorite metal albums of 2024. The metal on this list includes black, death, prog, post-, sludge, doom, noise, grind, and plenty of albums that don’t fit neatly into any individual subgenres. Even narrowing it down to [X] was a nearly-impossible task, given the countless metal albums we loved throughout the year, but these [X] really stood out to us and we hope you find something new to love from this list.

Read on for our picks, in alphabetical order…

Bedsore – Dreaming the Strife for Love (20 Buck Spin)

Like the widely-acclaimed new Blood Incantation album (more on that very soon), Italian band Bedsore’s sophomore album Dreaming the Strife for Love is a 50/50 mix of beastly death metal and full-on, ’70s-style prog. Just look at the analog synth and the double-neck guitar in Bedsore’s new press photo; these folks look more like Yes/Camel/Genesis nerds than metalheads. And that side of Bedsore very much shows up on this album–keyboards, organs, horns, acoustic guitars, tricky time signatures, guitar-god solos, the works–delivered with love and care for their ’70s-era forebears and blended expertly with the band’s knack for death and black metal. The Blood Incantation comparison is hard to shake, but this album also reminds me of The Children of the Night/Down Below-era Tribulation for the way it uses elements of harsh, extreme metal to create what sounds like an evil version of triumphant, melodic arena rock. Both of those bands have cracked a code that appeals to both “metalheads” and “non-metalheads” in a way that feels damn effortless, and Bedsore just might have done the same. [Andrew Sacher]

Blood Incantation – Absolute Elsewhere (Century Media)

Blood Incantation aren’t the only death metal band to flirt with progressive rock these past few years, but on their long-awaited new album Absolute Elsewhere, they might be the only band that answers the question: “What if Pink Floyd made a death metal album?” Outside of the overt Floyd homage on “The Message [Tablet II],” even that description is reductive, but I think it’s an elevator pitch that does Absolute Elsewhere justice. Named after a short-lived mid ’70s prog band that included King Crimson drummer Bill Bruford, Absolute Elsewhere has equal footing in the world of bands like Floyd, Crimson, and Tangerine Dream as it does in the world of bands like Morbid Angel, At the Gates, and Gorguts, and Blood Incantation are masters of both worlds, and masters at blending them together. They find common ground between earthy ’60s psychedelia, ’70s prog rock excursions, ’80s sci-fi synths, and bone-crushing ’90s metal, and the ever-changing album’s transitions are seamless every time. It’s a great metal album, a great prog album, and also transcends being either of those things. It’s just some of the year’s best guitar-based music, period. [A.S.]

Candy – It’s Inside You (Relapse)

We’ve seen a lot of band toy with the confines of hardcore these past few years, but no one’s doing it like Candy’s doing it right now. On their third and most expansive album yet, they give you everything from straight-up hardcore punk to chugging metalcore to synths, breakbeats, and other electronics to the best and catchiest ’90s industrial rock song of 2024, “Love Like Snow.” (Candy bristle at being called “industrial” though. They prefer “hypercore.”) With a little help from their friends (including members of Angel Du$t, Fleshwater, Trash Talk, and Integrity), Candy defy expectations left and right on It’s Inside You. For 31 relentless minutes, they fit square pegs into round holes, turning unsettling moments into satisfying ones and squeezing boundless experimentation into concise bursts of rage. It pushes them further in every direction–weirder, heavier, catchier, etc–and it just never lets up. [A.S.]

Chat Pile – Cool World (The Flenser)

For their second album, Chat Pile have zoomed out. Their 2022 debut LP God’s Country saw them taking a look at the dark underbelly of American society, and Cool World goes global by looking at disasters all around the world and how they affect each other and, ultimately, us. It’s a theme that hit especially hard this year, and Chat Pile match their global dread with a backdrop that’s even bigger, heavier, and harder to pigeonhole than their beloved debut. It ranges from somber, gothy moments to sludgy noise rock to straight-up extreme metal, with lots of other ground covered in between. In a time where it feels like things just keep getting worse, this album makes for a perfectly bleak soundtrack. [A.S.]

Civerous – Maze Envy (20 Buck Spin)

Via Invisible Oranges: Civerous weave through Maze Envy like a stunt driver let loose in an old Dodge Charger, knowing exactly what the strengths and limitations of the death metal engine are, and fully capable of popping a handbrake turn or wheelspin when it’s time to show off. Death-doom as a genre can be impenetrable, unwelcoming music, but Civerous make it gratifying, smashing any obstacles to enjoyment with riffs and pure fun. [Luke Jackson]

Couch Slut – You Could Do It Tonight (Brutal Panda)

Four albums in, NYC’s Couch Slut are as venomous as ever. Recorded with Uniform’s Ben Greenberg and featuring members of fellow NYC bands Imperial Triumphant and Pyrrhon, You Could Do It Tonight is a truly caustic blend of noise rock, post-hardcore, and sludge, topped off with both real-life and exaggerated social commentary that’s more horrific than a slasher flick. It’s an album of armed robbery, assault, self-harm, and a lengthy closing track inspired by an urban legend about an abandoned juvenile detention facility. In an era where NYC’s rock scene has less of an identity than ever, Couch Slut bring the kind of filth that only this city can inspire. The heyday of Unsane, Swans, and Cop Shoot Cop is alive and well on this LP. [A.S.]

Crypt Sermon – The Stygian Rose (Dark Descent)

Via Invisible Oranges: Heavy metal collective Crypt Sermon are more than the sum of their parts as they have continued to add musicians from the outside, like keyboardist Tanner Anderson (of Obsequiae, Majesties, and Hulder’s live band), and officially welcomed back bassist Matt Knox (Horrendous/The Silver) to make them a six piece (something we talked about a few months back). The Stygian Rose is a combination of all of the skills on display here and also a way to possibly distance themselves slightly from the epic doom metal name that they have been associated with since their inception. “Glimmers In The Underworld” is a great showcase for vocalist Brooks Wilson and guitar maestro Steve Jansson, who is joined by Frank Chin on rhythm guitar. Jansson flashes the flourish of ‘80s shredders while maintaining a supreme level of melodicism as he rides the lighting up and down his fretboard. The album closes out with an 11-minute self-titled epic where the band lets it hang out for all to see. Crypt Sermon will have a herculean task to top The Stygian Rose, but that shouldn’t be their aim. There is so much flash, flourish and genuine intrigue that it’s hard to quantify just how powerful of a record it really is. [Tom Campagna]

Defeated Sanity – Chronicles of Lunacy (Season of Mist)

When good old fashioned death metal is no longer enough, a strong dose of the brutal variety is just what you need, and the ever-reliable masters of that craft Defeated Sanity returned towards the end of the year just in time for the holidays with a special delivery in the form of the Colin Marston-produced Chronicles of Lunacy. After various experimentations, it’s a return to form of sorts, but not at all a step backwards. Turn up the volume to drown out the pain, keep an ear out for the Taxi Driver sample, and have a slamming good time.

Frail Body – Artificial Bouquet (Deathwish)

Five years after their great debut LP A Brief Memoriam, Rockford, IL’s Frail Body are back and better than ever. For anyone who ever considered Deafheaven’s Sunbather to be kind of a screamo album (complimentary), there are two albums on this list that you need to make sure you’re not missing out on and Artificial Bouquet is one of them. It makes the line between screamo and black metal seem virtually nonexistent, and it pushes Frail Body further in every direction. It’s their heaviest music to date and also their most beautiful music to date. It’s a towering, sensory-overload experience but it still has the intimacy that you want from a great screamo record. It’s an album that provides drama in every chord change, every earth-shaking drum fill, every blown-out bassline, and every desperate shriek. It’s blackened screamo at its most emotionally overwhelming. [A.S.]

Full of Hell – Coagulated Bliss (Closed Casket Activities)

Full of Hell’s new album follows collaborative LPs with Nothing and The Body, and guitarist Spencer Hazard has said that making those albums helped the band “[learn] how to find what actually services a song” and “recognize that there was value in pop music,” respectively. As a result, Coagulated Bliss, the first proper Full of Hell album since 2021’s Garden of Burning Apparitions, takes more cues from pop music and traditional songcraft than any Full of Hell album before it. Even the bright, colorful artwork suggests something more welcoming than the band’s usual black and white. It’s still Full of Hell though, so this is all relative. Coagulated Bliss is still informed by grindcore, powerviolence, death metal, sludge metal, noise, and other extreme forms of metal and punk, but presented in a way that goes down just a little smoother than usual, like a shot of 100 proof with a little something sweet thrown in. Like the last few Full of Hell albums, it’s a total sensory overload and it’s really in a lane of its own. There are other bands that are this heavy, this genre-agnostic, or this chaotic, but not many who do all of those things at once the way Full of Hell does. [A.S.]

See also: Full of Hell’s collaborative album with Andrew Nolan from this year, Scraping the Divine.

Gatecreeper – Dark Superstition (Nuclear Blast)

It’s getting harder and harder to stand out within the increasingly-crowded sphere of new old-school death metal, and one band that did it with flying colors this year was Gatecreeper. They embraced their love of melodic death metal more than ever, but Dark Superstition isn’t just At The Gates/In Flames worship either. It’s a tasteful, kickass melting pot of the melodeath stuff, the old school death-thrash stuff, some punk/hardcore, and more, and Gatecreeper stir it all together in a way that’s devilishly catchy and just a little bit out of step with everything happening around them. These are the most memorable songs of Gatecreeper’s career, and some of the most euphoric metal songs to drop this year from any band. [A.S.]

Genital Shame – Chronic Illness Wish (The Garrote)

Genital Shame’s 2024 LP Chronic Illness Wish was a late-in-the-year addition to our list of faves (and to our radar at all), thanks mostly to seeing it so high on Machine Music’s epic EOY list where they wrote that it “sounds like an album beyond space and time. While some of the sonic elements should sound vaguely familiar to anyone with an interest in avant-garde black metal, the way those parts come together here sounds absolutely new. And exciting. And scary. But never inhuman, which is the prize of all prizes here, the dear, unfiltered, and immaculately expressed humanity.” It moved us in that way many of the greats do on first listen, and the Pittshburgh-based artist has been in rotation since.

High On Fire – Cometh the Storm (MNRK Heavy)

Riff master Matt Pike is back and sounding even more energized than on his past couple LPs with Cometh the Storm. It’s High On Fire’s first album in six years (also following Matt’s debut solo album), first with a new hop in the band’s step from new drummer Coady Willis (Murder City Devils, Big Business, Melvins), and first since bassist Jeff Matz learned to play the bağlama, which brings a Middle Eastern flair to these songs. Outside of those couple minor adjustments, High On Fire don’t fix what ain’t broke, dishing out a stoner metal sludgefeast that sounds as fiery as any peak in this band’s 25-year-long career. [A.S.]

Hulder – Verses In Oath (20 Buck Spin)

Via Invisible Oranges: As black metal’s rising force, Hulder continues her ascent through the mires and makes a name for herself on her sophomore album Verses In Oath. Following up the surprising wide-ranging coverage for her first album Godslastering: Hymns of a Forlorn Peasantry is a tough one, as it blew the doors off my 2021, but the new record did exactly that too. Fans of Immortal will feel right at home with the wonderful sections of galloped riffs and keyboards to give off the nice icy sheen you expect when listening to black metal.

“Boughs Ablaze” and “Hearken The End” make for a tremendous 1-2 punch to follow an opening instrumental, giving ample atmosphere where it fits best since Hulder never wavers from her attack. Guitars grind up bits of obsidian forest with each successive riff. There is a double dose of the ethereal with “Lamentation” and “An Offering” providing stillness between the slaughter. A massive highlight among the closing tracks has to be “Vessel of Suffering,” a short track by black metal standards, but for what it lacks in length, it makes up for in being a total onslaught on the senses. Verses In Oath is the sound of a one-person black metal tour-de-force. [Tom Campagna]

Immortal Bird – Sin Querencia (20 Buck Spin)

For their third album, Chicago’s Immortal Bird aimed to experiment and push themselves outside of their usual boundaries, and that’s exactly what they did. Sin Querencia has elements of black metal, death metal, post-rock, clean vocals, proggy workouts, sludgy hardcore, and more, and Immortal Bird expertly pull off every second of it. [A.S.]

Infant Island – Obsidian Wreath (Secret Voice)

Virginia’s Infant Island have always been on the black-metally side of screamo, and with their best album yet, Obsidian Wreath, they blur the lines between those two genres more than ever. (If you’ve been reading all the blurbs, yes, this is the second album on this list that fans of Deafheaven’s Sunbather need to know.) Depending on which way you squint, you can hear it in the lineage of hometown screamo heroes like Majority Rule (whose Matt Michel produced this album), pageninetynine, and City of Caterpillar, or you can hear it among the Deafheavens and the Alcests of the world. It feels punk in its brevity and its uncompromising critique of capitalism, the climate crisis, and other societal woes, and it also sounds majestic and beautiful in the way that atmospheric post-metal albums so often do. The word “apocalyptic” gets tossed around a lot when people talk about this kind of music, but there truly were few better soundtracks to our collective downward spiral than Obsidian Wreath this year. [A.S.]

Julie Christmas – Ridiculous and Full of Blood (Red Crk)

Julie Christmas’ output pace has slowed down since her days fronting Made Out of Babies and Battle of Mice in the 2000s, but her quality control has never weakened. Since releasing her 2010 debut solo album The Bad Wife, the Brooklyn native teamed up with Swedish post-metal greats Cult of Luna for the 2016 collaborative album Mariner, and now she released her second solo album and first project since Mariner, Ridiculous and Full of Blood. Cult of Luna’s Johannes Persson is again involved (he’s on guitar and contributes some piercing screams), and her band also features bassist/producer Andrew Schneider (KEN mode, Unsane), guitarist John LaMacchia (Candiria), drummer Chris Enriquez (Spotlights, On the Might of Princes), and keyboardist Tom Tierney. The band delivers sludgy, hard-hitting instrumentals, and Julie tops it off with some of the most haunting, soaring, attention-grabbing wails of her career. She’s been doing this for about 20 years, and as she said in a press release, “Right now I’m stronger and LOUDER than I have ever been… Time doesn’t make you softer, it makes you harder.” That’s very true in Julie Christmas’ case; she bucks against any expectation that she’d soften over time, and she sounds hungrier than ever. Her mix of heavy guitars and powerfully ethereal vocals has been echoed by a handful of prominent artists over the years, and with Ridiculous and Full of Blood, she once again sounds like she’s leading the charge. [A.S.]

Knocked Loose – You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To (Pure Noise)

Knocked Loose aren’t just one of the biggest hardcore bands in the world but one of the most chameleonic. On top of going on increasingly-large headlining tours with diverse tour packages, they’re as likely to be found opening an arena tour for Slipknot and getting the kinds of crowd reactions they’d get at their own shows as they are to turn Coachella into a hardcore show with Billie Eilish rocking out sidestage. Whether it’s Coachella or a hardcore fest, a heavy metal fest, or an emo nostalgia fest, Knocked Loose emerge as a show-stopping band with mass appeal. And they continue to do it all without ever softening up their sound one bit. This year’s You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To is one of the most brutal records of this band’s ten-plus-year career, but it’s also one of their catchiest. And it manages to be “catchy” without having a single part that would count as “clean vocals”–even when radio-friendly guests Poppy and Chris Motionless show up, they’re here to scream their heads off too. It’s an album that finds Knocked Loose walking the walk, making music that’s true to themselves that also happens to fit in so many different contexts. It’s genre-transcending without being genre-defying. It suggests that maybe Knocked Loose keep getting all these Ws because they’re just that good. [A.S.]

Oranssi Pazuzu – Muuntautuja (Nuclear Blast)

Oranssi Pazuzu are pretty adamant in interviews that they don’t necessarily identify as a metal band, and that they find the usual confines of the genre can be limiting. On the Finnish band’s last album, 2020’s Mestarin Kynsi, they sounded like a psychedelic rock band trapped in a black metal band’s body, and for their new album Muuntautuja, they’re breaking out of their shell entirely. They’ve been citing influences like Portishead, My Bloody Valentine, and Death Grips, and you can hear that stuff coming through as they trek through noise, electronics, trip-hop, and hazy wall-of-sound guitars with as much intent as they have during the more overtly black metal moments. Muuntautuja isn’t not a metal album, but it’s not exactly a metal album either. It feels like what might’ve happened if Ulver made Perdition City without abandoning the aggressive elements of the albums before it, but with a point of view that’s entirely unique to Oranssi Pazuzu. [A.S.]

Paysage d’Hiver — Die Berge (Kunsthall Produktionen)

Via Invisible Oranges: Writing about Paysage d’Hiver verges onto memoir and wordplay that, to be frank, downplays the one-man band’s immediate qualities, regardless of said writing’s honesty. By that I mean, there’s nothing that brings me more joy than pontificating on how one sad wanderer in the snowy woods jolts my synapses, as if they’re walking through my brain and striking all the right nerves with a pickaxe, but that takes the focus away from Die Berge‘s solemn atmosphere, faith in the listener’s attention span, ceaseless riffs, and pristinely lo-fi production. These are not unique to Die Berge, but few albums excel at all of them like Die Berge does because they lack its balance. It knows exactly how to not scorch the nervous system with overstimulation while still remaining engaging.

And, after all, this is the wanderer’s journey, not mine, so it’s his memoir that’s worthy of coverage. [Colin Dempsey]

Prisoner – Putrid Obsolete (Persistent Vision)

We could get into the way Richmond band Prisoner’s sophomore album casually toe the line between sludge metal, industrial, crust, D-beat, black metal, and more, but it’d be quicker just to say it sounds like bleak devastation. It’s not everyday that you see an album compared to Godflesh, Napalm Death, and Neurosis all at once that actually scratches the itches that all three of those bands scratch, but Prisoner do exactly that and then some. To quote Glassing’s Dustin Coffman, “While I don’t usually need to wear earplugs for bands, we needed them for these guys. Their music sounds like a tidal wave of stabbing agony.” [A.S.]

Pyrrhon – Exhaust (Willowtip)

Via Invisible Oranges: After boldly proclaiming that “work sucks” in 2020 (i.e. Abscess Time), Pyrrhon returned to shake the coconuts from their ivory towers with an even more daring statement; life is exhausting. There’s a joy in simplifying Pyrrhon’s octopus-with-unclipped-fingernails “death” metal (death being a relative term here) as they continue to be the best band at isolating a specific theme and finding all the crevices within it where humanity lives. Their mission is simple but their methods and coverage are robust. Plus, they play like they’re continuously touching an exposed nerve, as if they are both Mr. Frog and Pim. Simply put, that’s what living feels like when you’re out of gas. [Colin Dempsey]

Ripped To Shreds – Sanshi (Relapse)

With their 2022 Relapse debut Jubian, Andrew Lee turned Ripped To Shreds from a one-man death metal project into a full band, and the album deservedly became a breakthrough. That made the anticipation a little higher for Sanshi, and Ripped To Shreds are meeting the moment by just continuing to kick ass and push forward. The big difference with Sanshi is that this one was written with second guitarist/vocalist Michael Chavez (who joined RTS after Jubian was recorded), and that allowed for Andrew and Mike to bring a dual-vocal approach to this record. “Our delivery on those parts are inspired by Razor or Demolition Hammer, meant to be punky and high energy,” he said in an interview with Invisible Oranges. “Punky and high energy” is also just a great way to describe Sanshi in general; RTS make old school-style death metal that feels punk without really falling into the “hardcore-adjacent death metal” wave, and Sanshi is a great example of that. Sanshi also stands out from other death metal bands in the way that it thematically deals with death. “Christian conceptions of God, Satan, and demons have been beaten to death in death metal, but more importantly, I feel like Christian mythology lacks personality with a very black and white idea of morality, and a mostly unchanging central deity,” Andrew said in that same IO interview. He instead looked to the way death and the afterlife are discussed within traditional Chinese folklore, which opened the album up to stories that are undertold not just in death metal but in Western music in general. Ripped To Shreds aren’t entirely reinventing the form or anything, but they’re making a version of death metal that you’d never mistake for any other band, in more ways than one. [A.S.]

Slimelord – Chytridiomycosis (20 Buck Spin)

One of our favorite death metal albums of the year is the riff-filled, soul-permeating debut full length from Leeds, UK five-piece Slimelord (whose skilled members also make up 3/4 of Cryptic Shift). Out on the always reliable 20 Buck Spin, and mixed & mastered by Horrendous’ Damian Herring, it’s a 47-minute crushing, atmospheric death doom journey full of dark twists and turns that still feel fresh after countless recent listens, despite being so dirty. The amphibian-themed psychedelic and occasionally headbanging album includes chants (moments remind me of Type O Negative) and field recordings that help suck you into the depths of the swamp on a supernatural journey to try and save the world from rapidly spreading “Chytridiomycosis” (a rapidly-spreading infectious disease that affects frogs and other amphibians), or something like that. The colorful cover art comes courtesy of Brad Moore whose work you might recognize from like-minded filth by Gatecreeper, Worm, and Tomb Mold.

Spectral Voice – Sparagmos (Dark Descent)

Not only did Blood Incantation released one of the most widely-acclaimed metal albums of the year, 3/4 of that band released the first Spectral Voice album since their 2017 debut LP Eroded Corridors of Unbeing. Spectral Voice’s death metal leans much more overtly doom than Blood Incantation’s, but both bands are clearly very interested in bending genres and minds. Sparagmos is made up of four lengthy tracks of slow-paced death-doom, covered in a foggy haze and injected with the occasional burst of blastbeat-driven black metal. It’s a total sensory overload that’s as evil and abrasive as it is ethereal and trippy. [A.S.]

Spectral Wound – Songs of Blood and Mire (Profound Lore)

Via Invisible Oranges: On their fourth LP, Spectral Wound bring their own black metal sensibilities that differentiate them from their peers while kneeling before the mighty Dissection for guidance. You can hear it in the ample melodicism on “Fevers and Suffering” among others. On what feels like a proper genre moniker for them, “Aristocratic Suicidal Black Metal,” Spectral Wound lay it all out for everyone to take in their massively melodic sound that doesn’t bury the individual contributions from each member. Jonah Campbell’s vocals shriek, and another note that often gets missed in the genre is the bass work of Samuel Arseneau-Roy, delivering one of the best black metal bass performances I can think of this side of Mortuary Drape.

Spectral Wound feel like a spiritual successor to the heavy riffing and melodiousness of the mid ‘90s, making sure to hit all the musical highs and taking their musicianship to the next level on each successive release. With Songs of Blood and Mire, they are the new bearers of the heavy metal adjacent to black metal, rocking out to Satan while paying homage to the beauty in the darkness smiling back at them. [Tom Campagna]

SUMAC – The Healer (Thrill Jockey)

The Healer is one of the year’s best sludge metal albums and one of the year’s best noise rock albums. Across four songs in 66 minutes, they echo the ten-ton riffs of bandleader Aaron Turner’s former band Isis and the noisy improvisation of a Sonic Youth or Swans live show in equal measure, and they walk that line so effortlessly that The Healer never really falls into one category or another. It’s heavy, it’s clamoring, it’s psychedelic, and it’s a journey that earns its lengthy runtime with multiple cathartic payoffs. [A.S.]

Terminal Nation- Echoes Of The Devil’s Den (20 Buck Spin)

The week this album was released, we were in the midst of witnessing widely-shared footage of police attacking unarmed protesters who stand in firm opposition to our own government funding the Israeli government as the latter terrorizes innocent Palestinians. Our country looks a lot more like an authoritarian, fascist state right now than any of our nation’s leaders will admit, and Terminal Nation is a band of five musicians from Little Rock, Arkansas who have been calling this spade a spade for years. They’re a hardcore-laced death metal band who march in the footsteps of political death metal OGs like Bolt Thrower, Napalm Death, and Carcass, and their sophomore LP Echoes of the Devil’s Den does not mince words when it comes to the state of modern America. “There is no form for the murder of children,” they scream on “No Reform (New Age Slave Patrol),” and if that’s not clear enough for you, try the songs coda: “Fuck every cop that’s ever fucking lived.” On “Empire of Decay,” they lament that we’ve been “born into a hellscape that’s beyond repair.” War profiteering, the climate crisis, the prison industrial complex, and religion-fueled violence are just a few of the other themes that permeate this album, and Terminal Nation deliver all of this with as much brute force as a great death metal album should have. They also get some help from some very talented guests–Killswitch Engage’s Jesse Leach, Integrity’s Dwid Hellion, Nails/Terror’s Todd Jones, Sex Prisoner’s K. Kennedy, and Elysia’s Zak Vargas–and it’s easy to see why established veterans like these would all want a piece of Terminal Nation’s pie. They’re doing something that death metal really needs more of right now, and they’re kicking so much ass in the process. [A.S.]

Thou – Umbilical (Sacred Bones)

Nearly 20 years in and six years since their last proper LP, Thou are as uncompromising as ever. Umbilical has elements of sludge metal, black metal, punk, grunge, noise, and more, but it would be easier just to say it sounds like Thou. They use familiar ingredients to come up with an otherwise-unfamiliar approach, and there’s still nobody doing it like them. They sound as hungry, powerful, and abrasive as ever on Umbilical, an album that meets the moment with poetic dissent and static-y darkness. [A.S.]

Ulcerate – Cutting the Throat of God (Debemur Morti Productions)

Ulcerate simply do not miss. If you’re already on the Ulcerate train, you can probably skip reading about this album and jump straight to listening to it, because Cutting the Throat of God gives you everything you’ve always wanted from an Ulcerate album. For the uninitiated, the New Zealand band are long-running makers of experimental death metal that defies easy categorization and has so much widespread appeal that I’d recommend it even if you don’t really listen to death metal. The hyper-specific world of metal subgenres will have you know that Ulcerate’s death metal is “technical,” “dissonant,” and “atmospheric,” and it’s definitely all of those things, but trying to fit Ulcerate into narrow boxes doesn’t do them any favors. It’s mind-bending, mesmerizing heavy music with a real transportive quality to it, and I think it’d be pretty difficult to listen to this album and not feel moved by it. [A.S.]

Undeath – More Insane (Prosthetic)

Undeath know that you can’t call your album More Insane if the music itself isn’t gonna live up to that promise. The Rochester band’s third LP finds them rising from the old school-style death metal swamps of their first two, and coming out with their best and most musically-varied album yet. It’s still death metal through and through, but it also incorporates elements from all throughout metal history, from the gallop of classic heavy metal to the crisp attack of thrash to a little aughts-era metalcore and a little tech/prog. More Insane has the biggest screamalong hooks and the most air-guitar-worthy riffs of Undeath’s career, and the clearer production from Mark Lewis (Cannibal Corpse, The Black Dahlia Murder) only helps bring the intricacies of Undeath’s songwriting to the forefront. [A.S.]

Vemod – The Deepening (Prophecy Productions)

In atmospheric black metal circles, Vemod’s sophomore LP has been one of the most anticipated albums for years. It comes 12 years after the Norwegian band’s beloved debut, Venter på stormene, and as many agree, it was worth the wait. Like the debut, it’s dark, beautiful, and hauntingly ethereal, and it’s also not just a retread of the debut. It’s still raw, but a little cleaner, less rough around the edges, and bandleader Jan Even Åsli’s songwriting has clearly evolved over the years. He aimed to expand the band’s horizons, while still capturing the spirit that made Venter på stormene so unique, as he discusses in great detail in a recent interview with Invisible Oranges.

and…

HERE’S TWENTY MORE (it was hard to narrow it down!)
200 Stab Wounds
Black Curse
Bongripper
Brodequin
Convulsing
Dreamless Veil
Fulci
Gigan
Inter Arma
Job For A Cowboy
Judas Priest
Leila Abdul-Rauf
Mammoth Grinder EP
Mother of Graves
Nails
Opeth
Porcupine
Tzompantli
Upon Stone
Void Witch

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