The 50 Best Metal Albums Of 2015

If we're just talking about the music -- and isn't that, like, the thing we're talking about here? -- then 2015 was a great year for metal. That should come as no surprise. The genre (to the the extent we can call this vast, ever-expanding universe a "genre") has enjoyed a prolonged period of outstanding health and continued revitalization over the last decade or so. We're now seeing four or five generations of metal bands delivering career-best work -- and perhaps more impressively, being recognized for that work.

In September, Iron Maiden released The Book Of Souls -- a double LP that arrived 35 years after the band's first album -- and it came in at #4 on the Billboard Hot 200, with first-week sales of 74,000, marking the band's best domestic debut ever. In 2015! Less than a month later, Deafheaven dropped their third LP, New Bermuda, which debuted at #8 on Billboard's Independent Albums chart. An American black metal band! It didn't stop there, though: Ghost's Meliora debuted at #8 on the Hot 200; Five Finger Death Punch's Got Your Six debuted at #2; Disturbed had their fifth straight #1 debut. They tied a record set by Metallica! The Wall Street Journal did a story about it! And that demographic-spanning prosperity is represented in the list below, which includes bands like Satan (formed in 1979), Blind Guardian (formed in 1984), Paradise Lost (formed in 1988), Nile (formed in 1993), High On Fire (formed in 1998), Baroness (formed in 2003), Krallice (formed in 2008), and Myrkur (formed in 2014). That alone indicates an unusually high level of artistic vibrancy, not to mention audience engagement. In 2015, metal wasn't slavishly reverent of its elders, and it didn't overly fetishize novelty or newness. It welcomed all comers from all corners, and listeners were rewarded with music of limitless scope.

Beyond the music, though, 2015 was a pretty crummy year for metal. In a world where social media has come to supplant traditional media, where hot takes have come to supplant hard news, metal has been dealt a whole lotta black eyes over the past 12 months. That is, in part, because metal was allegedly doling out some actual black eyes. But mostly, more than ever before, metal found its very character scrutinized by a hyper-aware, politically divided public -- a public largely informed by metrics-focused media outlets eager to weigh in on the issues of the day. This was a carryover from late 2014, when popular blogs like Metal Injection and Metalsucks ran essays with titles like "The Problem With Heavy Metal Is Metalheads: Stop Calling Everyone A Faggot" and "Why Is It Okay To Be Racist And Misogynistic About Babymetal?" And in 2015, the takes arrived on an almost daily basis, via articles like "Racism And Sexism In Heavy Metal Highlighted In New Study" and "Why Is The Convicted Murderer Of A Gay Man Being Celebrated At A Major Metal Festival?"

This past July, renowned metal journalist (and occasional Stereogum contributor) Adrien Begrand wrote a piece for Pop Matters titled "Some Talk, No Action," putting the entire metal community on blast for failing to effectively flush out certain musicians whose art and/or actions seemed to suggest some form of bigotry or separatist ideology. Begrand called out by name such bands as Cobalt, Inquisition, Lord Mantis, and Bölzer, but he extended the indictment to include countless participants -- primarily the media and fans who support (or fail to condemn) any artists who support (or fail to condemn) intolerant worldviews. Wrote Begrand:

When it comes to addressing issues of racism within heavy metal, a lot of lip service is paid but nowhere near enough action is taken, as nobody wants to upset the apple cart within the cozy little hive mind ... Racism in heavy metal, like homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny, must be addressed mercilessly, no matter what excuse given by the artist, no matter how "nice" or "cool" the artist is.

There's certainly some truth to that, although it bears mentioning that every band named by Begrand has openly refuted any allegations of intolerance. And that's where things get tricky.

To illustrate, let's talk about one band not mentioned in Begrand's essay: the New Jersey-based death metal group Disma. In 2011, Disma released their debut album, Towards The Megalith, which received enthusiastic praise pretty much across the board -- including at NPR, Pitchfork, and here at Stereogum. At the very end of 2011, though, somebody dug up a nauseating 2004 interview with Disma frontman Craig Pillard, in which he discussed his then-active noise project Sturmfuhrer, and in the process, unreservedly spewed the type of shockingly reprehensible hate speech most people probably thought had died when Beecher offed Schillinger in the Oz finale. Disma's lyrics are notably apolitical, but when that interview was unearthed, it derailed the band. Almost immediately, they were forced to drop off the 2012 Chaos In Tejas lineup, even though Disma's then-guitarist Daryl Kahan issued a statement attempting to clarify his band's message, mission, and intentions:

Disma has absolutely nothing to do with politics, nor does the band support or condone racist beliefs or Nazi ideology of any kind. Craig may have a questionable past, but he has put that behind him and is solely focused on what the band is doing now.

Kahan's quote comes from December 2011; Sturmfuhrer's last album was released in 2006. But the controversy continues to follow Pillard and Disma. In fact, it no longer follows them. Today -- even though they haven't released an album since that 2011 debut -- it precedes them. In 2015, it just about swallowed them. In February, Pillard offered a statement via his own Facebook, saying:

Disma in no way, shape, or form, has any significance to the ideas of project Sturmfuhrer. On my part alone, the solo projekt known as Sturmfuhrer was a musical and social experiment in the extreme; its purpose was not meant for your pleasure, but for your pain. If I have offended anyone, then it has fulfilled its intended purpose. I do not belong to, or associate with any ideological group in any capacity. To penalize the collective band known as Disma, would be hypocritical and absurd.

Once again, the attempts to distance Disma from Pillard's past proved futile. In summer 2015, Kahan quit the band. A month or so later, Disma were dropped from the lineup of the three-day California Death Fest, without explanation or announcement. In October 2015, the people behind California Death Fest (who are also the people behind the country's biggest metal festival, Maryland Death Fest) chose to remove Disma from the lineup of their inaugural Netherlands Death Fest, to be held in February 2016. According to Death Fest organizers, 10 other bands who were scheduled to play NDF (none of whom were identified) reportedly threatened to bail if they were forced to share a bill with Disma. Per a statement from those organizers:

This is the first time in 14 years of putting on festivals that we've been put in such an awkward situation, and in the end, just like a member of Disma who recently quit the band, we've decided to distance ourselves from the drama surrounding the band lately ... We acknowledge that Disma are nothing more than a death metal band [but] all things considered, there would've been far too many negatives than positives for us to deal with by leaving them on the bill.

I'm using the example of Disma here partly because the controversy surrounding the band took on a new life in 2015, but also because Disma didn't release an album in 2015, and thus, had no music eligible for this list. They provide a helpful object lesson without actually impacting our discussion of 2015's best metal albums. Also: None of us here really rides hard enough for Disma to be conflicted about them, so we can talk about them as a theoretical subject rather than an especially sensitive, tangible one. But let's not kid ourselves: One of these days, it's gonna be a band we love, and we're gonna have to take a real hard look at some shit we've largely circumnavigated so far. We're gonna have to deal with this. We're gonna have to ask ourselves some tough questions.

Well, we're here now, and this isn't going away, so let's start asking.

What sort of music or musicians should we avoid or excommunicate? What sort of behavior would be egregious enough to warrant a penalty? Violent crimes? Nonviolent crimes? Alleged crimes? Immature epithets? Repugnant political or social views? Toxic social media presence? Who defines repugnant? How do we measure toxicity? What is the appropriate response to a band that publicly refutes allegations of intolerance, especially when there's no concrete evidence suggesting said refutation is insincere? Where is the line drawn between art and artist? What if the artists' personal lives are altogether unknown to us, but their art openly glorifies objectionable behavior or beliefs? Is it even possible to define such terms when discussing genres like black and death metal, in which lyrical themes such as anti-religion, gore, war, violence, suicide, necrophilia, and hatred are commonplace?

I don't have answers to any of those questions, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. As a journalist who covers this stuff, I've found it increasingly difficult to determine my own responsibility to Stereogum's readers, the metal community, the world at large, and myself. Should we refuse to cover any artist whose work and/or personal life includes intolerant/abusive/hateful themes or statements? Or is that tantamount to censorship? Should we openly cover every metal band whose artistic output we deem notable, irrespective of that band's affiliations or actions? Or is that an irresponsible misuse of the substantial forum we've been granted -- an abuse of the trust placed in us by Stereogum's readers?

I don't know. Honestly. I think it often comes down to some impossible attempt to know the unknowable: What do these people feel in their hearts? What have they done in their darkest hours? Have they repented? Can they be forgiven? Should they? And by whom? Who among us has that authority? The authority not only to judge, but to offer absolution?

I spent most of 2015 thinking about this stuff, although it was put into a new perspective when I saw this recent interview with Metallica's James Hetfield, in which he said something that really connected with me:

You wouldn't really like me if you knew my story, if you knew what horrible things I've done. I'm coming to grips with that, 'cause I have groups of people that I'm able to share all my horrible stuff with -- shameful, extremely shameful, dark stuff. Some of it is things I've taken from my parents and carried it a little further. Other ones, I've been able to drop some of that. Other ones I've picked up on my own and then created ... Shame's a big thing for me.

Lemme ask you something: What do you suppose it is that James Hetfield did? What sort of "horrible things"?

Do you suppose it's worse than what Craig Pillard did? Not as bad? Let's assume it's exactly as bad. Let's pretend that by "shameful, extremely shameful, dark stuff," Hetfield means that he said a whole bunch of adolescent, abhorrently racist trash, like, a decade ago. (To be clear, I'm not accusing Hetfield of any such behavior; this is entirely hypothetical.) Would that be grounds to forcibly remove Metallica from our lives? Would you remove them from yours?

Me? I don't know. I don't want to know.

I don't want to know James Hetfield's story. I don't care that he's done some unnamed, nebulous "horrible things" -- haven't we all? -- and I don't want to know the details of the horrible things he's done. I want to love James Hetfield without reservation. I want to love Metallica's music without some nagging, lingering negative associations. That music is a part of me, and it has been for nearly three decades. If I knew the truth about the "shameful, extremely shameful, dark stuff" in Hetfield's closet, would I have to dump Metallica from my own life the way Death Fest dumped Disma from its lineup? And where exactly would that leave me? Would I be a nobler person? Or would I be a hypocrite? Would I somehow feel absolved of the horrible things I've done? Or would I merely feel more alone with those things?

The last thing any of us here wants to do is give additional exposure to artists who peddle or preach hatred or intolerance. The other last thing we want to do is act as some Orwellian thought police slowly sanitizing metal by doling out oxygen only to those artists whose views reflect our own, whose actions meet our personal standards of acceptability. It's easy enough to treat Burzum's Varg Vikernes as a pariah: The guy is an enthusiastic, unrepentant bigot and a convicted murderer. (It helps, too, that he hasn't released a decent album since 2011.) I often wonder, though, how the world would react to "Angel Of Death" or "Unsuccessfully Coping With The Natural Beauty Of Infidelity" if those songs were released today. This is dark music! It's not supposed to be safe! It can be safe, but nobody ever got into this shit because it was safe; we got into it because it was scary and transgressive and primal. Who are we to make it safe?

Then again, who are we to promote art or artists fostering unsafe environments?

I'm not winding up for some big, poignant conclusion here, sadly. I'm leaving this as an ellipsis. Because, while 2015 was fraught with these questions, they weren't specific to 2015, and they won't end when we ring in 2016. If anything, next year, they're going to be more prominent, more pronounced, more divisive, more troublesome. This was a great year for metal, and I hope next year is even better. But this was a bad year for metal, too, and I expect next year will be even worse.

Let's leave that ellipsis dangling for now -- along with all its attendant ambivalence -- as we put a definitive and exuberant period on the year that was. This list was voted on, argued over, and created by the five guys who put together Stereogum's monthly metal column, the Black Market -- i.e., me, Doug Moore, Ian Chainey, Aaron Lariviere, and Wyatt Marshall -- which is why it doesn't mirror Stereogum's list of the year's 50 best albums. The five of us go pretty deep on this stuff on a daily basis, and our feelings and opinions often differ, sometimes radically so. This list represents the year as we saw it, from five fairly disparate vantages. And yet, looking it over today, I can't help thinking it's the best year-end list we've ever compiled. That's not because we're so great or anything; it's because the music was undeniably great -- maybe the best year for metal since I started writing about this stuff. And the worst, too! But honestly, mostly? It was just the best. --Michael Nelson

50 Délétère - Les Heures De La Peste (Sepulchral Productions)

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Between bands like Forteresse, Monarque, Chasse Galerie, Ephemer, and more, I've been a big fan of what Quebec has been doing in black metal for a number of years. One of the bands I'm most excited about from this part of the world is Délétère, a duo with a couple of incredible demos of majestic but hard-hitting black metal behind them. Listening to Délétère's debut LP Les Heures De La Peste is a good way to find out why. The record is a tear through what makes Délétère excellent -- it's intensely melodic yet decidedly muscular and gruff, with a subterranean low-end. Sinister stuff, and a couple well-timed mid-tempo breaks with choral vocals provide nice detours from the album's headlong tilt. --Wyatt

49 Maruta - Remain Dystopian (Relapse Records)

When Maruta briefly broke up in 2011, they had just completed a classic grindcore-band career arc. Over their six-year run, they released two demos and two LPs in quick succession before dissolving. Most grindcore bands scarcely get past the demos-and-split-7?s phase, so by the standards of the style, these guys had plenty of time to say their piece. But Maruta are no standard grindcore band, and they've got more than enough ideas to pack their upcoming third LP to the gills. This stuff gets the "grind" tag largely by virtue of the breakneck pace at which they crank out their clipped tunes. Content-wise, though, Maruta have a lot more in common with death metal's most deranged wing than with grindcore's primitive power-chord fixation -- most Maruta riffs are absurd sequences of tortured pick squeals and squawking chords that would make any guitarist's fret hand ache. Remain Dystopian requires plenty of work to process, but it's also incredibly satisfying if you manage to keep pace. --Doug

48 Violet Cold - Desperate Dreams (Violet Cold)

Offering an example of yet another new subgenre that would make Quorthon turn in his grave, Desperate Dreams is self-described "euphoric black metal." While that might elicit (to put it mildly) contempt from purists, Violet Cold's take on the genre is worth listening to. And, though you may be loath to admit it, it's awesome. Here, sugary-sweet keyboards pulled straight from an Owl City song overlay top-notch atmospheric black metal built for soaring into the sunset. The lively drums and desperate vocals work in and out of full-on blasts and memorable refrains remarkably well, inducing heads to nod and pulling heartstrings. Everything about this is all the more impressive, and unlikely, given that Violet Cold isn't even a metal band. This one-man experimental project from Azerbaijan (!) has, in the last two years, released 28 singles and EPs that fall under genres as diverse as witchhouse, minimal techno, neoclassical, indie electro, ambient, sludge, grind, jazz, and more -- seriously, almost everything. The wizard behind Violet Cold -- whose only expressed interest on Facebook is "Space" -- is one Emin Guliyev. Blast off. --Wyatt

47 Undergang - Døden Læger Alle Sår (Dark Descent)

Somewhere someone labeled these guys "old school death" and completely missed the point. Undergang play next-level death metal, so far beyond what mortal ears can effectively understand that it wraps back around again and starts to sound stupid, in a good way. I'm not kidding when I call this idiotically brilliant. It's everything that ever made Obituary great mixed with everything that still makes Autopsy horribly good. But riff after riff, this is better than anything made in the olden days. Doug pointed out that Undergang actually sounds a lot like Coffins; while he's right, Coffins lack the nuance necessary to write something as special as "Kogt I Blod." It's the sequencing of riffs, the push and pull that keeps us tumbling forward, and more than anything, it's the details that make this thing shine. Listen to the little tinkling cymbal fill in between the pseudo-breakdown riff at 4:18 -- that shit slays me. Anyone who doesn't listen to death metal all day every day (even nights and weekends) might not recognize what makes this different, but for those of us that do, this is fucking mastery of form.--Aaron

46 Hate Eternal - Infernus (Season of Mist)

Hate Eternal frontman Erik Rutan may bear the strongest death metal pedigree of any living human. He's probably best known these days as the driving force behind Florida's well-regarded Mana Studios, where he's engineered albums by such extreme metal mainstays as Cannibal Corpse, Goatwhore, Vital Remains, and Tombs. But for death metal dorks, Rutan is best known for his work as the frontman of Hate Eternal, whose five albums have established a gold standard of intensity by which countless younger bands have measured themselves. Incredibly, their upcoming sixth LP Infernus may their fastest album to date, thanks to a jawdropping performance by new skinsman Chason Westmoreland. His blinding speed will no doubt please HE's many technique-oriented fans, but it's the songwriting here -- which is their strongest since I, Monarch -- that should really get people excited. Hate Eternal may be standard-bearers for the mindblowing physicality of 'modern' death metal, but their successes have all relied on catchy, traditionalist structures. Infernus has no shortage of crazy blasting and shredding, but all the brutal noise serves to drive home the somber melodic sensibility that has colored Hate Eternal's sound since the beginning. --Doug

45 Macabre Omen - Gods Of War (Vàn Records)

OK, so if you're reading this, you hopefully have some familiarity with Bathory. (If not, there's no time like now.) Bathory were a lot of things to a lot of people, but in their middle phase, where Quorthon was churning out classic after classic like Blood Fire Death, Hammerheart, and Twilight Of The Gods, the defining characteristics were mythic power and ragged fury. Macabre Omen channel that combination better than any band in recent memory. Macabre Omen actually belong to a long-running scene of their own: along with fellow Greek legends Rotting Christ and Varathron (both incredible), Macabre Omen are one of the original Hellenic black metal bands, having formed in 1994. They only sporadically release music, but what little exists is brilliant. Hellenic black metal stands in melodic opposition to the more caustic sounds of their Scandinavian counterparts; classic heavy metal trades blows with gothic melancholy, and black metal subsumes both into something unique to Greece. Gods Of War channels everything I've just mentioned -- Bathory, Hellenic black metal, and a sense of triumph -- into one of the best albums of the year. Play it loud. --Aaron

44 Amorphis - Under The Red Cloud (Nuclear Blast)

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Amorphis is near and dear to my heart. They were the gateway band that grabbed me and led to my initial deep dive into metal. It was thrilling and foreign. Finnish metal! A palette that evoked the cold exotic climate perfectly in my mind, accented with Middle Eastern vibes. Heady stuff for a teenager. Around the turn of the millennium, with Am Universum, really, Amorphis lost some edge, but it didn't last. Original lead singer Pasi Kokinen, who had taken over all vocal duties from guitarist Tomi Koivusaari and backed away from growling, was eventually replaced by the able Tomi Joutsen. Joutsen delivers both growls and clean vocals, and Amorphis has now released six original albums with him at the helm. Some of that old edge is back on the excellent new album Under The Red Cloud. Twenty-five years into their career, Amorphis still hits with vigor, delivering exciting and uplifting melodic death metal with panache. --Wyatt

43 Vhol - Deeper Than Sky (Profound Lore)

This band is a full-on supergroup, staffed by names that routinely crush the annual best-of circuit: Mike Scheidt (Yob) on vocals, John Cobbett (Hammers Of Misfortune, Ludicra) on guitar, Sigrid Sheie (Hammers Of Misfortune, Amber Asylum) on bass, and Aesop Dekker (Ludicra, Agalloch) on drums. Like all supergroups, Vhol is doomed to register as less than the sum of its parts. But given that Vhol's parts are insanely stacked, that fate still leaves a lot of headroom for excellence. On Deeper Than Sky, Vhol have shuffled around their constituent influences -- '80s thrash and hardcore, '90s black metal, and '70s progressive rock -- in a way that takes more advantage of that upside than their debut did. Deeper Than Sky emphasizes Cobbett's thrash riffing far more than did its predecessor, which is welcome. All of Cobbett's projects have featured his powerful pedal-tone work on occasion, and he's a total fucking monster at the style, with a commanding delivery and a brushed-steel tone that reminds me of James Hetfield's salad days. Hearing him lock in with Dekker and Sheie on those masterful thrash riffs delivers serious joy on this riotous record.--Doug

42 Onirik - Casket Dream Veneration (Iron Bonehead)

Music is like business in that luck is a huge factor. It feels like everyone fakes it until they hit the lottery of making it. This random success is so widespread, it's hard not to grow comfortable with the idea that no one really knows what they're doing. Then, in bounds a legitimately skilled person like a soul-crushing unicorn, a rare beast reminding all that the previous baselines of acceptability have been ego-protecting lies. Onirik is that, an expertly-crafted project sweeping a year's worth of black metal good-enoughs and right-place-right-times under the rug. Cosmic horror guitars exhale progressions of paranoia, rhythms click together like clockwork, and ethereal chants echo throughout the catacombs. At first blast, it's Vindsval, but the half-life of that comparison is one listen. Onirik's regionalism hews closer to under-appreciated countrymen Bosque, in the chants at least. Yet, it's not like this brand new territory, like Casket Dream Veneration doesn't venerate the classics. Those faint moments of familiarity are by design. Onirik main man Gonius Rex checks his black metal boxes. Elsewhere on Casket Dream Veneration, there's mad laughter, wild-eyed ritual recitation, and brief moments of mutated beauty burning through the neuroses. That's black metal. It's also legit good. --Ian

41 Paradise Lost - The Plague Within (Century Media)

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Time has been kind to Paradise Lost, then as now. Their first album, 1990's Lost Paradise, birthed an entire genre unto itself (death/doom), and then they moved right along, restless and ever improving. With a trio of untouchable classics that intermingled metal and gothic rock in various formulations -- 1991's Gothic, 1993's Icon, and 1995's Draconian Times -- prime-era Paradise Lost is the stuff of gods. And just like that, in the wake of several near-perfect metal albums, they gave it all up; 1998's One Second effectively abandoned metal for goth-inflected rock indebted to Sisters Of Mercy and Depeche Mode, and so it went for several albums. It was still good, but metalheads were understandably depressed. So it was a ridiculous treat when Paradise Lost randomly rediscovered their metal roots and came back as strong as ever on 2005's self-titled album, which was followed by a string of modern classics. Here we are in 2015, staring down the barrel of something majestic, miserable, and magical in the form of the heaviest pure doom Paradise Lost has written in decades. I could rave about the album as a whole: about Adrien Erlandsson of At The Gates fame and his phenomenal drum tone; about the positive influence of having both Gregor Mackintosh and Nick Holmes playing legit death metal in Vallenfyre and Bloodbath respectively; or the fact that one of metal's best bands is once again one of our best metal bands. Or you could just listen to this thing for yourself. --Aaron

40 False - Untitled (Gilead Media)

Minneapolis's False put out a really promising couple of EPs back in 2012, making their debut on a split with the excellent and filthy Louisiana black metal band Barghest. The endorsement of Barghest reflected well on False, and the two proved to be kindred spirits, churning out grimy American black metal. And while those early EPs were great, False's Untitled is stellar. The fully-fleshed False is a gritty, relentless gale, an avalanche of thick black metal that effortlessly incorporates layer upon layer of million-mile-an-hour acrobatic guitars and drums. Frontwoman Rachel's snarls are both rabid and controlled. And while nearly every song is around ten-minutes in length or more, the black and roll pedal-to-the-metal style keeps Untitled constantly pushing forward. Untitled is full of big gorgeous orchestral melodies, but, covered in soot and decay, this album feels of and for the city, black metal for a dark, grim and filthy future.--Wyatt

39 Dødheimsgard - A Umbra Omega (Peaceville)

You may not have heard of Dødheimsgard, but if you're a fan of Norwegian black metal of any stripe, you've listened to bands with whom they've share members. This long-running act's Metal Archives page is a mere click or two away from seemingly every legendary black metal band the country has produced. But as impressive as this extensive pedigree is, it's hardly the most interesting thing about Dødheimsgard's intermittent career, which has roughly tracked the genre's last 20 years of evolution. After two straight-ahead LPs in the mid-'90s, DHG took a hard left turn with 1999's 666 International, which was one of the best examples of the Norwegian BM scene's then-transgressive interest in industrial music. Then they disappeared for eight years before releasing Supervillain Outcast, a poppier (and underrated!) spin on the 666 International sound. And then they fell silent for ANOTHER eight years, to the point that I figured that the band had fallen apart. But they hadn't, and A Umbra Omega is somehow the weirdest and most ambitious album in Dødheimsgard's catalog. Trying to name every mood shift and texture that unfolds over these 68 minutes would be a fool's errand; suffice to say that it couches prog rock, ambient electronics, folk, and jazz in some absolutely blistering black metal. --Doug

38 Death Karma - The History Of Death & Burial Rituals Part 1 (Iron Bonehead)

Prague's Death Karma are a duo whose two members -- multi-instrumentalist Infernal Vlad and drummer Tom Coroner -- also play in the trio Cult Of Fire. Cult Of Fire's first album, Triumvirát, was released in 2012, and Death Karma made their debut a year later with the A Life Not Worth Living EP, and over the last few years, both bands have been responsible for some of the most exciting, insane black metal in the world. Cult Of Fire's 2013 LP, ?????? ?? ????? ???????? ("Ascetic Meditation Of Death"), found both musical and thematic influence on the Indian subcontinent, paying homage to the Hindu goddess Kali and incorporating sitar and drone into its melodic black-metal buzz. It was one of 2013's best metal albums. Now, Infernal Vlad has shifted his attention back to Death Karma, and as far as I'm concerned, that band's debut LP, The History Of Death & Burial Rituals Part 1, is the best album of his career. The History of Death & Burial Rituals Part 1 is proggy, symphonic, melodic black metal with a high concept (literally: a history of death and burial rituals), but more importantly, the thing fucking rips. --Michael

37 Baroness - Purple (Abraxan Hymns)

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It's impossible to extricate Purple from its preceding storyline: the bus crash, the injuries, the rehabilitation and recovery process. It's impossible not because the context is more compelling than the album, but because the context is woven deeply into the album's fabric; the first words sung on lead single "Chlorine & Wine" by Baroness frontman John Baizley are, "When I call on my nursemaid / 'Come sit by my side'..." There's a danger, though, that the "survivor" narrative might overshadow the music. It's a little bit like when one-armed pitcher Jim Abbott threw a no-hitter for the Yankees in 1993: By focusing on the adversity that led to the accomplishment, the accomplishment itself somehow feels diluted. That should not have been the case for Abbott, and it should not be the case for Baroness, either. Even if Baroness' bus had never plummeted off a cliff -- hell, even if the band had spent the last three years running a goddamn petting zoo -- this album would be a ridiculous, glorious triumph. Forget about the lyrics; every single sound in this thing will produce a dopamine flood in your skull. --Michael

36 Putridity - Ignominous Atonement (Willowtip)

The kind of technical/brutal death metal that Putridity plays gets me tied up in knots sometimes. In some senses, it's extremely cerebral stuff. It requires a huge amount of physical dexterity and mental precision to execute; Putridity's albums are basically just long through-composed sequences of blasts, chugs, and vocal gurgles, all delivered crisply at insane speeds. Ignominious Atonement is also, bizarrely, a concept album inspired by Eraserhead. And yet, even though this music is extremely high-tech and even high-concept, the final effect is incredibly primal and direct. Like, absurdly so. For all its complexity, Ignominious Atonement is total goddamn gorilla music. Listening to Putridity doesn't make you want to sit in your study leafing through Derrida; it makes you want to punch people's faces inside out. Is it smart? Is it dumb? Is it "avant-dumb," as I've heard brutal death metal called on occasion? Who cares! It fucking rules, and that's what counts. --Doug

35 Vanum - Realm Of Sacrifice (Profound Lore)

Vanum comes from Kyle Morgan and Michael Rekevics, two figures who have been leading forces in US black metal for some time. Morgan is best known as the singer and guitarist for Ash Borer, the prominent atmospheric black metal band from California, and he runs the small influential label Psychic Violence; Rekevics drums in Fell Voices, a kindred spirit to Ash Borer, and plays in the equally awesome bands Vorde, Vilkacis, and the sorely missed Ruin Lust. Given that history, we'd expect a lot from Vanum, and the duo delivers. Realm Of Sacrifice is raw and pained, and as with many Rekevics projects, you get the feeling that playing this music must be both emotionally and physically exhausting. Of the bands mentioned above, I feel that Vanum has most in common with Vilkacis, who similarly craft melody-forward and memorable songs that feel as if they were etched in stone to be played and marveled at by future generations. --Wyatt

34 Vatnett Viskar - Settler (Century Media)

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Vattnet Viskar have a branding problem. The band's name suggests a Nordic black metal outfit, but they're really four New Hampshire guys playing clean, hard-edged, riff-based post-metal. The seemingly cheery cover of the band's second LP, Settler, comes off like a troll job, but the story behind that image is dark as fuck. They're always compared to Deafheaven -- and they're often incorrectly categorized as "blackgaze" -- but aside from a shared propensity for dramatic, knee-buckling hooks and 747-sized guitars, the two groups have little in common. Where Deafheaven build their songs over 10-minute expanses, Vattnet Viskar keep things tight and economical: Settler doesn't ask you to wait for a payoff; it just spills out rewards like a busted slot machine. The album was produced by Sanford Parker (Yob, Leviathan), and it has a distinctly modern, bigger-than-the-night-sky sound, but in many ways, it feels like a throwback: specifically, a throwback to the best '80s thrash -- Megadeth, Kreator, Testament, Voivod -- where technical virtuosity was paired with ambitious, commercially viable songcraft. Settler is a truly heavy album, but it's an album of pure pleasure. Throw it on, go for a walk -- the thing will be over before your legs are tired, and you'll be hitting play again before you turn around and head for home. Hell, you'll extend the walk just so you can hear it again. And you'll feel exhilarated, unstoppable, and fucking alive the whole time.--Michael

33 Vastum - Hole Below (20 Buck Spin)

A friend once posited a grand theory about death metal that has resonated with me over the years, regardless of its accuracy. He theorized that death metal is the musical manifestation of a rejection of sex -- physical repulsion writ large. The lack of danceable rhythms, the theory goes, evinces a fear of the body. Lyrics about gruesome death, rotting bodies, and so forth exist in binary opposition to the notion of reproduction, like a juvenile rebuttal of the ongoing cycle of life. Meanwhile, the foulest death metal lyrics -- the caveman misogyny of Chris Barnes-era Cannibal Corpse, for example -- are supposed to be the clearest instance of the theory at work. It's a reductive way to frame a genre, but it's an interesting lens for analysis, if nothing else. Vastum, in a sense, play it both ways. Their songs fixate on sexual revulsion, but they're not hiding the ball: Every song is shamelessly, brazenly sexual, delving into themes of eroticism, violation, disgust, and abuse, rather than some abstract rejection of the above. Vastum's third album, appropriately titled Hole Below, waves its themes like a burning flag, while the music continues to push forward, evolving further from their formative old school death metal roots towards something more oblique and haunting. --Aaron

32 Howls Of Ebb - The Marrow Veil (I, Voidhanger)

Using the word "experimental" as a modifier for a familiar genre tag usually means one of two things: (1) the band in question plays some slightly weird variation of an existing genre (think: Blut Aus Nord as "experimental black metal") or (2) said band is so fucking weird you can't really describe it, so you may as well just listen and let the weirdness wash over you. Howls of Ebb definitely fall into the second camp. Let's take a trip; you can click along at home. We'll start with a base of '70s kraut/prog/noise: one part freeform krautrock (like, say, Xhol's classic live album, Hau-RUK); add some adventurous noise from the likes of experimental visionaries This Heat; and a dash of Univers Zero's stark existential hell. To keep things moist, modern, and metallic, liberally borrow the same ritualistic, mystic-metal throb as Oranssi Pazuzu. We're missing death metal, so lift a whiff of Demilich's squealing squelch for seasoning. Oh! Black metal: add the crumpled velvet trappings of Mortuary Drape and stir the pot with the basement-dwelling horror of Cultes Des Ghoules. There we have it: a bubbling pile of disparate shit left to bake under an alien sun, and spread across a three-song, 35-minute record. --Aaron

31 Lychgate - An Antidote For The Glass Pill (Blood Music)

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When London's Lychgate released their self-titled debut LP in 2013, their big publicity hook was the involvement of guitarist/vocalist Greg Chandler. Chandler's better known as one of two consistent members of Esoteric, a long-running and prolific doom metal band that helped to establish the lugubrious "funeral doom" subgenre during the mid-'90s. With any luck, An Antidote For The Glass Pill should fully deliver Lychgate from Esoteric's shadow. This is a highly unusual album, even by the standards of a genre as fundamentally freaky as black metal. Multi-instrumentalist James "Vortigern" Young handles its most outré aesthetic touch -- a prominent pipe organ that shares center stage with the guitars for much of the album. But this isn't the cartoonishly spooky pipe organ you'd find on a campy King Diamond record -- Lychgate use it in a completely different context. They've chosen a technical, aggressive approach to black metal with a major penchant for dissonance as their starting point instead. Amidst such gnarled harmonies and intense performances, the organ takes on an unearthly howling quality that's kind of terrifying to listen to. --Doug

30 High On Fire - Luminiferous (Entertainment One)

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Whether or not you've seen Mad Max: Fury Road, you've probably heard of the Doof Wagon: a rolling rock concert that accompanies one of the flick's bloodthirsty scavenger tribes, featuring a huge stack of amps and a guy who looks like Voldo from Soul Calibur riffing out on a flamethrower/guitar hybrid. The Doof Wagon's in-film music sounds like an '80s hard-rock guitarist jamming with Chinese thunder drummers, but it really should've sounded exactly like High On Fire, who are the bog standard for highway-friendly heavy metal in 2015. More than almost any other band, High On Fire epitomize a strain of thought that wishes metal had never moved past Motörhead, Slayer, Frank Frazetta imagery, or 200 beats per minute; the thrills they provide are both as predictable and as viscerally satisfying as an action flick's. If you've heard any of this band's past three or four records, you've got a pretty good idea of what to expect from Luminiferous. But given High On Fire's Platonic perfection of this form, it'd be nuts for them to change now. After all, metal needs institutions, and it doesn't produce many of them these days. --Doug

29 Judicator - At The Expense Of Humanity (Masters of Metal Productions)

Judicator, which originally paired American vocalist John Yelland and multi-instrumentalist Tony Cordisco, made a nice little niche for themselves on their last two albums. Those were power metal history lessons, equally notable for the duo's shredability and their deep dives into dusty tomes for lyrical themes. Now a full band following the addition of Jordan Elcess (drums) and Tyler Sherrill (keyboards), Judicator has narrowed its focus: At the Expense of Humanity is a concept album concerning the passing of Yelland's cancer-stricken brother. Naturally, it's heavy stuff; not exactly a topic that lends itself easily to ripping power metal. However, Judicator approaches this material openly. Yelland's narrator traverses each stage of grief without distancing himself from root emotions. That said, a dirge this is not. Judicator offsets the concept's raw nerves with grandly composed, Euro-tinged, guest-solos-galore power metal. The catchiness reels you in, the humanity makes this truly resonate. And, if you've been a witness to cancer's inexhaustible hunger to consume every part of a person, At the Expense of Humanity really hits home. It's a reminder of existence's terrifying tenuousness, but also why we endure and forge memories. --Ian

28 Misþyrming - Söngvar Elds Og Óreiðu (Terratur Possessions)

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Black metal is the stuff of the frigid north, all ice and tundra and forests, but Iceland's Misþyrming draw more from the palette of subterranean hellfire. I'm talking lava. That's what the cover art looks like to me, and Iceland is no stranger to volcanic eruptions, so in that respect, Misþyrming's debut is well-sourced. And Söngvar Elds Og Óreiðu is awesome, even if we'll never be able to pronounce it ("Eyjafjallajokul"?). The album is a tour-de-force of muscular, dark, massively evil-sounding black metal. For those who prefer death metal to black metal because of the former's propensity for low-end heaviness, there's enough depth here to keep you happy. That doesn't detract from the albums intensely melodic bent -- in its own way, Söngvar Elds Og Óreiðu is gorgeous. --Wyatt

27 Psudoku - Planetarisk Psudoku (Nerve Altar)

Most genre mutation exercises and convoluted what-ifs lose steam after a few plays. If only the compositions were as inspired as the scenarios. But then, there's Steinar. The Norwegian grindcore manipulator hit last year's list with his duo Brutal Blues. This year he's back with his mostly solo endeavor Psudoku, following up 2011's aptly titled Space Grind with an even nuttier sculpture of barely recognizable shapes. "It was recorded next year in a parallel universe," Psudoku's Bandcamp states with a wink, "where grind didn't develop from hardcore punk and thrash metal but from '70s prog from the future, maaaaan." And Planetarisk Sudoku is exactly that. Turbo-quick tonal shifts, brake-screeching tempo changes, Rubik's Cube structures, rabbit-hole tangents: its prog lineage is clear. Yet, the grind is there in equal measure. When Planetarisk Sodoku blasts, it takes off. The two halves form a wholly evolved album, far more considered and labored over than any ear gag could hope to be. Tens of listens in, it's a lot more fun, too. --Ian

26 Drowning The Light - From The Abyss (self-released)

Drowning The Light fit in comfortably amongst the grimmest of the grim in black metal, but the reclusive yet prolific band is one of, if not the founder of the mournful, anthemic and gorgeous black metal sound that comes out of Australia (think Woods Of Desolation). A lot of older Drowning The Light material -- and there is a ton of it, given all the splits and demos Azgorh and a rotating cast of characters have put out over the years -- is buried behind a wall of lo-fi hiss and fuzz, giving it a murky and mysterious from-the-depths quality. From The Abyss ironically steps out from behind that wall to shine a little light on rich harmonies in all their glory while revealing little more of the force behind the mystery. It's a master class in this kind of metal --Wyatt

25 KEN Mode - Success (Season Of Mist)

The title of KEN Mode's Success feels at least a little sarcastic. Even to the extent a discordant, abrasive noise/hardcore/metal band can achieve "success," it's of a tenuous sort. But in many ways, KEN Mode are the model of that success: The band's two constant members -- brothers Jesse and Shane Matthewson (vocals/guitar and drums, respectively) -- were working as accountants until 2011, at which point they decided to quit their day jobs and make music their full-time gig. Success! That means near-endless touring, playing small venues with similarly loud, unwashed bands, broken up only by the occasional chance to record a new album, followed by more touring. Success! But as accountants, KEN Mode know how to work with lean margins, and as Muay Thai practitioners, they've developed almost superhuman discipline, and they've survived by living frugally and producing maximal yields from scant resources. As such, KEN Mode were ideal candidates to work with Steve Albini. Success is the Matthewson brothers' first collaboration with the minimalist engineer. As you might expect, it's a paint-peeling, concussion-inducing assault, introducing tiny elements of pop into the band's backdraft-surge sound. The title's sarcasm matches Albini's worldview, of course, but so too does the title's idealism. The defeated-looking dude on the album's cover looks like he makes pretty good money as, say, an accountant. He also looks like he'd be a whole lot happier in a van, playing in a punk band. Success is what you make it, right? --Michael

24 Grift - Syner (Nordvis Produktion)

Black metal is typically associated with speed, but some of the best in the genre comes when things are slowed down a bit. Grift's "Svaltorna" is a prime example -- what starts as a ponderous mid-tempo groove turns into a sorrowful foundation for howls of loneliness and grief. (We really do operate in a funny milieu when what I just wrote actually qualifies as praise.) The bleak vibe and catchy song is the work of one Erik Gärdefors, and Syner is his debut full-length, an immersive and cinematic album that's a highlight of the year. It will sit well with fans of Agalloch, cold weather, and introspection, and, for those who require it, Grift delivers full speed, lightly folk-inflected black metal that stands with the best of them. --Wyatt

23 Blind Guardian - Beyond The Red Mirror (Nuclear Blast)

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For the uninitiated, Blind Guardian are the reigning gods of power metal, conquering worlds and nerd-hearts across 30 years and 10 albums. Despite my usual predilections for much uglier music, I'm a massive fan -- and so are a lot of people, apparently, as Blind Guardian regularly headline European festivals, and even hosted their own multi-day "Blind Guardian Fest" (immortalized on DVD forevermore). Beyond The Red Mirror harks back to the proggish theatre of A Night At The Opera (their 2002 album intentionally named after the Queen album of the same name, because why not) -- the guitars shred hard and fast, the production is ridiculous, and singer Hansi Kursch sounds like he's singing with an army of 1000 -- which is to say, this is classic Blind Guardian. --Aaron

22 Chrch - Unanswered Hymns (Transylvanian Tapes)

Chrch, or Church depending on when you found this thing, has that sludgy, slowly-stalking doom down. Now, as any recommendation algorithm or aggregator will show you, a lot of other bands do too. But Unanswered Hymns, the Sacramento quintet's debut LP, is aimed at your gut. "Dawning"'s trudge transitions into a planetary caravan traveling towards a blurred-by-barbiturates crescendo. "Stargazer" starts by mediating to reverb's ghosts before crunching tributes to towering amp stacks. "Offering" sacrifices Eva's voice, Chris and Shann's guitars, Ben's bass, and Matt's drums. From a purely technical standpoint, Unanswered Hymns won't surprise. It's sludgy doom. But Chrch feels bigger, greater, more in ways that can't be defined or measured, like describing vertigo or the vestiges of a dream. And the impact grows with each listen as landmarks become more familiar. There's a million impersonal ways to find music these days, but it's still the stuff with the emotional wallop that's ultimately remembered. More than form, this for the feels. --Ian

21 Myrkur - M (Relapse)

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Amalie Bruun took a pretty big risk enlisting Ulver's Kristoffer "Garm" Rygg as producer for Myrkur's full-length debut, M. The upside? A mutually beneficial artistic collaboration resulting in (at least) a great album. The secondary upside? An alliance that would eliminate any suspicions of dilettantism. The downside? A narrative that would shift focus away from Bruun's achievements and transfer majority ownership of the music to Garm. To Bruun's credit, she steered into the skid. Garm's influence can be felt throughout M; the sheer magnitude of sound on display here reflects his decades exploring the possibilities of not only black metal but post-rock and modern classical. As a result, M sounds better suited to caverns and cathedrals than clubs. Perhaps it's better, though, to ask not what Garm did for Myrkur, but what Myrkur did for Garm. By hiring the man to helm a black metal project, he was encouraged to return to his roots, to the one thing he did better than anyone else. Bruun's voice is better suited to the choral stuff than Garm's ever was, and here, she juxtaposes those soft textures over ripping guitars like freshly fallen snow over jagged rock formations. You don't even recognize the inherent risks when they pay these sorts of dividends. You only wonder, why aren't more bands doing this? Well, for one thing: They can't. Also: They wouldn't even dare to try. --Michael

20 Jute Gyte - Ship Of Theseus (Jeshimoth)

Jute Gyte -- a one-man band better known as Adam Kalmbach -- first appeared on Stereogum in February of 2014. The album we covered in that month's Black Market column, Vast Chains, ended up in our Best Metal Albums Of 2014 feature. June 2015's Ship Of Theseus is Kalmbach's third full-length album since Vast Chains. (It's preceded by 2014's Ressentiment and this year's electronic Dialectics.) That's just how Jute Gyte rolls, though. Aside from the breakneck pace at which he produces music, Kalmbach is lately best known for his use of microtones in the eerie, cerebral black metal he produces. For the most part, these in-between intervals produces a queasy alienating effect, which makes sense for a guy who writes lyrics mostly about revulsion and meaninglessness. But on Ship of Theseus those same tactics produce a different result -- there's melancholy melody in there, or at least some alien parody of it. You can hear a good example of this effect in opener "Lugubrious Games (Sans Frontières)," which drifts and stomps like a My Dying Bride tune heard through a black hole, until climaxing in a terrifying vocal call-and-response sequence. This incredibly fecund project is one of underground metal's most rewarding hidden treasures. --Doug

19 Kauan - Sorni Nai (Blood Music)

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Kauan blend elements of folk and metal better than perhaps any other band today, clouding doom in a lush and weary atmosphere. I've found Kauan have always suited feelings of displacement. The sparse snare and woodblock echo in still silence, and simple little piano melodies feel as if they'll be picked up and blown away on a cold wind, but not before searing into your soul. It's a sound not pinned to any point in time, and soft keyboards and big chugging riffs can alter the cold pastoral vibe, though never forcibly. Kauan are Russian, but they sing in Finnish and now are based out of Ukraine, and the band captures a sad sense of loss -- not maudlin but nostalgic. Sorni Nai is a conept album, and it's actually one continuous song cut up into seven tracks for ease of listening. The album chronicles the Dyatlov Pass incident, a bizarre and horrifying event in which nine Russian hikers mysteriously died on February 2, 1959 in the Ural Mountains. You can certainly enjoy Sorni Nai without that context, but with it, you might imagine a bit of the doomed journey. For those who may have first heard Kauan on their 2014 offering, Pirut, you'll see a slightly different side of the band here, one that draws upon Kauan's more melancholic side. It's interesting that on an album about getting lost in the woods, Kauan's found a way forward that so expertly channels the band's collective work. --Wyatt

18 Mg?a - Exercises In Futility (No Solace / Northern Heritage)

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It's tough to pin down exactly what makes Mg?a so special. They play fairly straightforward, riff-based black metal, with all the expected trappings -- spare instrumental tones, tremolo-picked suspensions, mournful arpeggios, reverby snarling, blah blah. Lots of bands ply this particular trade, but Mg?a do it better than nearly all of them. It's frustrating to chalk up such a surfeit of personality and emotional resonance to intangible clichés like "songcraft" and "attitude," but whatever it is, Mg?a have it in spades. Their last LP, 2012's With Hearts Towards None, was a minor masterpiece of orthodox black metal, driven by drummer Maciej Kowalski's baroque rhythms and elevated skyward by mastermind Miko?aj ?entara's gift for wringing the most grandiose emotion possible out of every harmony and transition. Both it and its predecessor Groza are structured as album-length suites broken up into numbered movements, and both got a lot of mileage out of cleverly revisiting motifs throughout their runtimes. Exercises In Futility, their upcoming third LP, shares this approach. This is fierce, epic, triumphant-sounding shit -- almost painfully so at times. But despite its straining emotional tenor, Exercises In Futility retains the icy core of negativity that characterizes all of the best black metal. --Doug

17 Obsequiae - Aria Of Vernal Tombs (20 Buck Spin)

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Obsequiae are one of the best, and perhaps least recognized, bands of this young century.What's most striking about Obsequiae isn't so much the diversity of influences (which are easy to trace), or even the cumulative effect (which is nothing short of brilliant). No, it's the way the sound metastasizes in your head after even a cursory listen. It's like the buried transmission in Videodrome; once it's in there, it's in for good, pulling strings behind the scenes, demanding repeat listens. Nothing else scratches the itch. Obsequiae take a medieval approach to heavy metal, relying exclusively on melodic riffing in the Dorian mode. The guitars are in constant union, harmonized and swirling, a tone poem of woodsmoke and wind. There's a faint whiff of metallicized folk, reminiscent of early In Flames or Dark Tranquility, but this isn't death metal. Meanwhile, you'll hear shades of all manner of outré black metal forms: Hellenic black metal melodicism (à la prime-era Rotting Christ), the Misty Mountain grandeur of Summoning, or maybe the pagan crush of early Empyrium. The closest overall analogue might be Agalloch, whose fans should find a lot to love here, yet this is clearly something else altogether. --Aaron

16 Beaten To Death - Unplugged (Mas-Kina Recordings)

Beaten To Death shares drummer Christian "AntiChristian" Svendsen with stonefaced Norwegian black metal stalwarts Tsjuder. To give you an idea of how different Beaten To Death's presentation is from Tsjuder's, consider that they credit Svendsen as "Christian Bartender." Then consider the thoroughly sarcastic song titles on Unplugged, their outstanding third album. (Which isn't actually an unplugged album.) Opener "Papyrus Containing The Spell To Summon The Breath Of Life Enshrined In The Collected Scrolls Of Sheryl Crow" bags on death metal legends Nile for their predilection for long song titles. "Don't You Fucking Dare To Call Us Heavy Metal" (they are clearly heavy metal) shares space with "Death To False Grindcore." You should Google "Robert Sylvester Kelly" if you don't recognize the name. The last song is called "Troll," for crying out loud. But despite the outward silliness, Unplugged is as intense and inventive as anything on the grindcore landscape these days. Against a familiar backdrop of blastbeats, belching vocals, and rock-salt bass, guitarists Tommy Hjelm and Martin Rygge twang away with clattering single-coil guitars that might sound more at home in a hard-charging '90s indie rock band than in any extreme metal mutation. And at times, the material they're playing sounds in keeping with that bizarre tone -- they're fond of chiming, layered arpeggios that would be positively beautiful if it weren't for all the guttural mayhem belting out of their bandmates. --Doug

15 Murg - Varg & Björn (Nordvis)

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After 20-plus years of innovation, '90s second-wave Scandinavian black metal still serves as the gold standard for the genre. And for good reason -- when the bands of that era carved out a sound of buzzing bleakness accented with rasps, croaks and minor melodic flourishes, they had a formula with lasting power that could be readily built upon but never clearly bettered. In 2015, Murg is one of the best examples of a young band nailing the classic sound with fresh vigor. Varg & Björn succeeds in attaining the kind of depth of character present in Scandinavian forerunners like Gorgoroth and Immortal as well as the catchiness and sense for big, hook-y melodies perfected by Taake. It's awesome, and it comes from a Swedish duo that's arrived out of nowhere, or, according to press materials, from a rural mining area filled with abandoned mines slowly being reclaimed by ravenous nature. --Wyatt

14 Acid King - Middle Of Nowhere, Center Of Everywhere (Svart Records)

Acid King frontwoman Lori S. knows how to bend a guitar string until she finds that feel-good frequency. Bassist Mark Lamb and drummer Joey Osbourne know how to ride a stoner-doom groove. Put them together and you get Middle Of Nowhere, Center Of Everywhere, a 53-minute celebration of a band at the height of its powers. Lori's playing soars when she's not engaged in tug-of-war with her amp, delivering a riff begging for your hummed accompaniment. The rhythm section is the secret weapon, ably supporting each other while supplying their own lead-worthy points of interest. But the true highlight is that Acid King is unhurried. They believe in their skills, knowing they don't need to augment stoner doom's natural slowness with showy proggy braincandy. When Lori responds to her riffs with a from-the-third-eye bluesy howl and then partners with it like a duet on "Silent Pictures," it's straight-up American doom at its purest. Finland's Svart Records must've thought so, too. Maybe it's time for us to win these San Franciscans back.--Ian

13 Satan - Atom By Atom (Listenable)

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Satan technically fall under the NWOBHM banner, meaning they formed in the late '70s, they play some variant of traditional heavy metal, and they're rather British. This describes thousands of bands, ranging from Iron Maiden to Angel Witch, from early Def Leppard to Tygers of Pan Tang...and then there was Satan, out at the edge of the scene with a sound of their own, operating on another level in terms of songwriting. Their first album, released in 1983 and playfully/awkwardly titled Court In The Act, is probably one of the best, least-known NWOBHM albums of all time, and it established their bizarrely legal-themed heavy metal. Its guitars were surprisingly technical, but fairly clean and not especially heavy; near-shreddy melodic passages flowed over rolling, rollicking drums and the sometimes-soaring, always-manly vocals of Brian Ross. The music is hard to describe because Satan sound so little like their contemporaries. They released another album in the later '80s, then changed their name and eventually vanished. After decades in dormancy, the band randomly resurfaced in 2013 to release what has quickly become one of my favorite trad metal albums of all time, Life Sentence. Two years later, I'm loving their second comeback album, Atom by Atom, which picks up where the last one left off -- squirrelly leads chasing carnivalesque melodies in circles, while Brian Ross shouts through uniquely Satan-like choruses. --Aaron

12 Slugdge - Dim & Slimeridden Kingdoms (self-released)

Consider: A band with a concept revolving around interstellar slugs just put out one of the best albums of the year. Again. In the grand metal tradition of harnessing imagination and a boundless reserve of badass riffs to transform a ridiculous conceit into something affecting, Kev Pearson and Matt Moss have, once more, turned in eight gloriously grinding tracks far better than they need to be. So, yes, Dim & Slimeridden Kingdoms's trail of slime is similar to last year's sophomore outing, Gastronomicon. Modern Carcass-ian madness is further whipped into a frenzy by black metal accents, death metal descents, and baited-hook solos. But, Slugdge go deeper here, producing a set that's isn't as immediately catchy, though more able to withstand the erosion of multiple replays -- in part because of the smoother structures, which are somehow more progressive, in the Edge of Sanity sense, and more digestible. "Flying Snails"' centerpiece polyrhythmic thump shrugs off the spotlight other acts would shine on it and, instead, fits snugly within the surrounding sections. Same goes for "Pellet In The Head"'s Ihsahn-isms or "Unchained Malady"'s nod to Enslaved. These aren't just parts, but components of songs. Of course, thinking solely of single-element surface pleasures, it sure doesn't hurt when you've discovered a guitar tone as filthy as Kev Pearson's. It adds up to 55 more minutes of infectious metal with an insatiable appetite for playlists. The unconverted, those who can't get over the name and gimmick, will be confounded. Again. Whatever. Praise Mollusca. --Ian

11 Sivyj Yar - Burial Shrouds (Avantgarde Music)

Like its two jaw-dropping predecessors, Sivyj Yar's third album, Burial Shrouds, takes inspiration from the Russian countryside and rural life. Vladimir, the man behind Sivyj Yar, has crafted a unique brand of deeply moving, melancholic atmospheric black metal. That said, there's often a sense of playfulness to his songs. Folk elements arrive in lush swells of mournful strings, which are both complemented and partly offset by the lively, organic-sounding bass. Vladimir enthusiastically kills it on drums -- album closer "The Snow Shall Fall A Long While" is a prime example -- and often opts for bright guitar tones. Still, it's forceful and soaring stuff, and Vladimir's howls carry a sense of urgency. Agalloch fans might experience a sense of déjà entendu when they hear the first few bars of the title track. But unlike much nature-reverent atmospheric black metal, Burial Shrouds is rooted in a different experience, one forlorn and weary but resolute, with calloused weathered hands from centuries of agrarian life. --Wyatt

10 Deafheaven - New Bermuda (Anti-)

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I wrote a review of New Bermuda back in September and, like ... look, if I'd croaked immediately after hitting publish on that review, I think I might've been okay with that. When that thing was done, I was spent. Man, there's a point halfway through that article where I wrote, "Once I'm done with this review, I'll be happy to never again write about Deafheaven in any capacity." And I meant it! Not because I'm sick of Deafheaven or want to quit covering them or anything, but because I feel like I've said it all. I still kinda feel that way. And yet, here we are. So rather than weigh down the album with another dozen or so adjectives, anecdotes, and metaphors, I'll keep this simple and real: There aren't many albums in the world that I love as much as this one. I treasure this thing. Just knowing that I have it with me all the time, on my phone and in my life, leaves me with this unreasonable feeling of solace and satisfaction. When I saw Deafheaven play these songs live last month, they were further elevated in my estimation -- no small feat, considering they were all already like ~100 emoji~ or whatever. I was fully prepared for Deafheaven to follow up Sunbather with something slightly lesser; instead, they gave me so much more. I'm not saying everyone should love New Bermuda as much as I do, I just don't get it when people tell me they don't. I accept it, though. I'm not here to argue, not anymore. I'm not even here to talk, because I've got nothing else to say. From here on out, I just want to listen. --Michael

09 Nile - What Should Not Be Unearthed (Nuclear Blast)

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Nile are a sneakily important band from a death metal history perspective. You don't hear them mentioned alongside the genre's forefathers very often -- they came along too late, though founder Karl Sanders was part of Morbid Angel's entourage in the late '80s and early '90s -- but as Aaron pointed out in his Black Market writeup of this album, their early classics helped death metal retain its creative momentum during the dark years around the turn of the millennium. But after 2005's triumphant Annihilation Of The Wicked, Nile seemed to lose their mojo. Three mediocre-to-decent albums over the past decade gave the impression that they were chasing their tails, relying ever more heavily on aimless shredding and production values as desiccated as the mummified corpses that populate their lyrics. And really, it would hardly be surprising to find that a band whose schtick amounts to "extremely fast death metal with lyrics about the ancient histories of Egypt and the Gulf states" would run out of ideas after four albums or so. But in what appears to be deliberate act of fan service, Sanders and company have put together their catchiest, hugest-sounding album since Annihilation. It's not markedly different from what they've been doing for their entire career -- it's just fucking awesome, thanks to the band's renewed interest in appealing tones and songcraft. Speaking of which: I can't believe I'm saying this about a song that came out in 2015, but "In The Name Of Amun" might be Nile's best song ever. Ever! In a 22-year career! That lurch at the end is just unreal in its viciousness, and co-frontman Dallas Toler-Wade's unhinged rant about unleashing bronze-age genocide on a rebellious community is actually pretty unsettling when you consider that such things happened all the time during those days. But then, maybe things haven't changed that much since -- they certainly haven't for Nile. --Doug

08 Krallice - Ygg huur (Gilead Media / Avantgarde Music)

When Krallice first appeared in 2008, they were the subjects of a lot of silly allegations and criticisms, many of which stemmed from the context of that moment -- black metal, and especially American black metal, abruptly achieved a higher degree of cultural visibility than it'd had since the Scandinavian criminal melodramas of the '90s right around then. Perhaps the silliest of these allegations was that Krallice were "tourists," non-metal musicians who'd cynically appropriated metal ideas and consequently violated its norms. In reality, Krallice's members are all next-level riff nerds with deep roots in metal and far-ranging knowledge of its more obscure and extreme reaches. Ygg huur effectively exposes those roots for all to see. After devoting four albums to a concerted exploration of black metal's structural boundaries, Krallice let loose with all the other kinds of riffs they like to play here -- which turns out to be everything but the kitchen sink, though dissonant death metal and thrash muscle aside the black metal buzzing most frequently. In doing so, they abandon their former template almost completely -- aside from Mick Barr's uniquely miserable shriek, this could be a different band from the one that produced the excellent Years Past Matter in 2012. (Notably, the longform 10+-minute compositions Krallice have traditionally written are gone entirely; the longest songs on this album are less than seven minutes, and the whole thing clocks in under 40.) Some older fans will surely be disappointed by the knotty, unpredictable turn Krallice have taken, but...well, they're boring, and this album is a monster. Ygg huur marks the beginning of a remarkable second act for a band that already had nothing to prove, and there's reason to suspect that the story will continue very soon. --Doug

07 Fluisteraars - Luwte (Eisenwald Tonschmiede)

Fluisteraars catapulted to the front ranks of ambitious black metal when the Dutch trio put out Dromers in 2014. Following two demos, Dromers announced itself as a fully-fledged masterpiece, a gorgeous album that navigated subterranean darkness but roared back from the depths ablaze. And comprised of three tracks that clocked in around 11 minutes on average, Dromers introduced a fresh and exciting approach to long-winded black metal. You could call Fluisteraars' style atmospheric, and while that would describe the sense of scale and scope at play on Luwte, this year's even-better follow-up to Dromers, to some that might overlook the intricacy of the compositions. Instead, Luwte has an impressionistic edge, and feeling seems as important as anything else. The jangly, chiming guitars are played on strings attached to the soul, navigating through moments of rage, curiosity and triumph. The drumming, near-frantic at times, denotes urgency, and elsewhere booms with confidence and swagger. While there are more than a few moments of wide-screen beauty on Luwte, there's just as much enraged blasting and weary wandering. Luwte is a journey, deserving of a front-to-back listen. But if we are to focus on one song for presentation here, let's go with "Angstvrees," when the band reaches a pinnacle of transcendent beauty unlikely to be forgotten soon by anyone who hears it. --Wyatt

06 Tribulation - The Children Of The Night (Century Media)

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Not a week goes by without someone in the Stereogum comments lamenting the dearth and deficiency of guitars in modern music, and all I can think, every time, is: There are so many goddamn guitars, and so many people doing such amazing things with the instrument. And if you want evidence of that, start right here. Tribulation are a Swedish band, and The Children Of The Night is their third studio full-length. I already wrote a lot about the band's backstory and their evolution, and you can find that here. In that same space, I said that The Children Of The Night was an early frontrunner for my Album Of The Year. I wrote those words in February -- a few weeks after getting my hands on an advance of the record -- and here we are in December, and nothing else has fully dislodged it. The Children Of The Night is an actual masterpiece; the type of thing that will stick around for the next few decades. And even though it's 100% genuine-article capital-M Metal, it doesn't follow any rules or bow to any masters. Tribulation came into this world as a death metal band, but that distinction seems woefully lacking at this point: There's more Iron Maiden here than Cannibal Corpse; more Deep Purple than Morbid Angel. There are generous influences from numerous non-metal genres -- namely classic rock, progressive rock, psychedelic rock, occult rock, hard rock, and gothic rock -- but it would be impossible to mistake this for anything other than The Real Thing. --Michael

05 Sarpanitum - Blessed Be My Brothers (Willowtip Records)

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It seems fairly incredible to me that we have two albums in our top 10 that consist of insanely fast, absurdly catchy death metal with lyrics about the bloody goings-on of pre-modern history, but that's the wacky world we inhabit here at the Stereogum metal cavern. Unlike their likeminded fellows in Nile, Sarpanitum aren't a particularly heralded band -- this is just their second album, coming a full eight years after their debut Despoilment Of Origin. But you would never, ever guess that by listening to Blessed Be My Brothers, which commands the listener to rage with all the fanatical gravitas of a Crusader general. Like Obsequiae, this band makes frequent use of bright, archaic-sounding melodies designed to evoke the music of medieval Europe. But instead of embedding this sensibility in a framework of stately black metal, Sarpanitum supercharge it into a ridiculous technicolor blastfest, bedecked in layers of stratospheric guitar leads and borderline-choral keyboards, and jacketed in a speaker-destroying redline production. On paper, this approach has all the makings of a garish disaster. But Blessed Be My Brothers is actually compulsively listenable and even addictive -- it was pretty much the only thing I spun in the gym for about two months earlier this year. And for good reason! The combination of chest-swelling, genuinely emotional melody and punshing physicality that drives this surprise hit could bring out the warrior in just about anyone. --Doug

04 Elder - Lore (Armageddon Shop)

Elder has a future in soundtracks. After hearing Lore, the US stoner/doom trio's third album, that's a low risk bet. Proggy with a punky bite, Elder constructs cinematic vistas rich enough to conjure close-eyed visuals. Also: five songs, 59 minutes. Unlike other bands with a penchant for extended forays, Elder's excursions have a purpose; less an excuse to impress other musicians, as the great Chris Sessions would say, and more an intricately drawn map guiding attentive listeners. Nick DiSalvo (vocals, guitars, keyboards), Jack Donovan (bass), and Matt Couto (drums) have done this together long enough to really know each other, anticipating when they need to lead or support. That ever-flowing dynamic gives these long songs movement. Lore's title track, this year's high water mark for the genre, is a 16-minute epic that doesn't denigrate that long-abused descriptor. 16 minutes? It has to drag somewhere, right? And yet, "Lore"'s sections roll along with a steady sense of direction. As the band itself notes, it's almost kosmische in spirit. But, to pull back from the how, this is all about the way Elder makes you feel. Lore enlivens experiences. This is a band made for the drudgery of day jobs, long commutes, and unending instances of ennui. Lore restores the balance. It's a much-needed infusion of whoa. It's also the best movie you'll hear this year. --Ian

03 Horrendous - Anareta (Dark Descent)

Horrendous are nominally modern-day practitioners of old-school death metal -- most evident in their retro instrumental tones and production touches -- but they've expanded the parameters and possibilities of that subgenre, so that their output today feels less like a throwback and more like a long-overdue course correction. And Horrendous aren't living in the past: On Anareta, they've taken the very best elements of their influences and cut away all the fat, delivering intricately structured songs that showcase technical prowess and odd time signatures, but openly prioritize hooks above all else. For all its studiously atavistic elements, Anareta might be the catchiest metal album of 2015. The melodic/anthemic elements are present in every song on Anareta -- even the album's most off-kilter track, "Acolytes," eventually leads into a euphoric closing section. Throughout Anareta, Horrendous are fearlessly reaching skyward, peeling off guitar leads that climb like clock towers or church steeples. There's nary a dud to be found on this album -- not a single song here that I couldn't genuinely call "my favorite," assuming superlatives weren't limited to a single entity. On that note: When listening to Anareta, I find myself applying qualified praise to Horrendous, only to strip away those qualifications one by one. I want to say, "They're the low-key best metal band in America" ... but metal is the genre I listen to most, so why am I diminishing them based on their genre? So then I want to say, "They're the low-key best band in America" ... but America is still home to many of the best bands in the world, right? So then I want to say, "They're the low-key best band in the world." But why "low-key"? Isn't that just hedging on my part? Which leaves me wanting to say, "They're the best band in the world." Period. Now, you know, I'm not gonna say that. I can't say that. But goddamn if I don't feel it. --Michael

02 Leviathan - Scar Sighted (Profound Lore)

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There's a lot of context to contend with when you listen to Leviathan. This project is as important -- legendary, even -- as they come in the world of American black metal, with roots that go back to the late '90s, an outstanding discography of influential LPs and short-format releases, and ties to a host of other notable acts that includes SunnO))) and Twilight. There's also the uglier non-musical context of sole contributor Jef "Wrest" Whitehead's 2011 domestic assault charges -- most of which were ultimately dropped, though he was ultimately convicted of one count of aggravated domestic battery -- and the drama that ensued, which included Leviathan's only disappointing album to date, the jury-baiting True Traitor, True Whore. Michael wrote a great piece back in January that delved into this stuff in more detail, and I'd encourage you to read it if you don't know the story already.

But I also think that all this context, both positive and negative, can get in the way of experiencing Scar Sighted for what it is, as a thing-in-itself. And here's what Scar Sighted is: an unbelievable, almost alien creative accomplishment. One-man bands are relatively commonplace in metal these days, but it's mind-boggling to think that the incredible range of hallucinatory vocal and instrumental sounds on this record all came from the same guy (though producer Billy Anderson deserves a great deal of credit for the richness and power that each instrument benefits from). And it's even crazier to think that one man conceived all of these bizarre ideas and integrated them so seamlessly into epic, thunderous, deeply emotive songs. Scar Sighted is an immensely complex and outré recording in terms of its components, but it's also a unified whole that never feels showy or self-conscious -- a unique and beautifully frightening voice crying out in the hinterlands between extreme metal and dark ambient music. Wrest's substantial menace looms throughout Scar Sighted, but melancholy and regret lurk in the gloom too, seeping in only after pulverizing riffs clear out any defenses.

It's hard to imagine Wrest ever matching this incredible album, but it was also hard to imagine him equalling Massive Conspiracy Against All Life, his previous masterpiece. He's done so here -- and in some ways, even surpassed it. "He's experienced as much pain and suffering as anyone I've encountered...and he still has hell to look forward to," intones a sample from Se7en on Scar Sighted's title track. Perhaps so; perhaps Wrest is truly a lost soul. Only he knows for sure. But judging by the commanding blastbeat that ensues, he's also more than ready for whatever comes next.--Doug

01 Panopticon - Autumn Eternal (Bindrune Recordings)

More than any other metal subgenre, black metal lends itself to exploration and experimentation. Where styles like power metal and death metal are largely hidebound by rigid conventions, black metal blends naturally with a record store's worth of disparate sounds: free jazz, folk, ambient, shoegaze, post-rock, punk, dream-pop, slow-core, classical, new age, noise, prog, emo... And for the better part of the last decade, for good or ill, American bands have been at the forefront of black metal's expansion.

Austin Lunn has been adding new ingredients to the old recipe since kicking off Panopticon in 2008. At his most iconoclastic, he was mixing generous helpings of bluegrass into his epic black metal, giving his chosen genre an infusion of Appalachian flavors reflective of the American South in which he grew up and resided. This was totally unexpected, but by no means irreverent: Black metal has always found inspiration in the traditional sounds of the region in which it's been written, but because the genre's roots are Scandinavian, so too are its most common base elements: Bathory embraced viking lore; Burzum invoked the Norwegian countryside. By adding banjo to the mix, Lunn wasn't rejecting black metal's codes and practices; he was embracing them.

Last year, though, Lunn relocated from Kentucky to Minnesota so that he could open a craft brewery with his brother-in-law. (As it happens, that brewery is called Hammerheart, its moniker borrowed from the classic Bathory album.) It's no coincidence that Minnesota's NFL franchise is nicknamed the Vikings: The state was primarily settled by Scandinavian immigrants, and the great majority of its existing population is of Nordic or German descent. So when Lunn started writing Panopticon's sixth album, Autumn Eternal, he drew less from his Southern past, and more from his adopted Midwestern home. It just so happens that the place in which he landed has many of the same traditions as those found in the place where black metal was born.

In that respect, Autumn Eternal is perhaps the most recognizably "black metal" album of Panopticon's career -- competing for that mantle only with the band's 2008 debut, which found the artist at a nascent stage, before he recognized the genre's broader possibilities. But Autumn Eternal is also an unmistakably American album: raised in the place that gave us Bob Dylan, Prince, and the Replacements; finding inspiration in the Minnesota wilderness, in the folk music that first came to this country from Europe, and evolved here into something more inclusive and more beautiful still. Autumn Eternal takes a melting-pot approach to sound, and incorporates lots of contemporary American bands into its slow-simmering stew. The album's acoustic opener, "Tamarack's Gold Returns," could have come off Sun Kil Moon's Ghosts Of The Great Highway. The dizzying guitar-drum interplay on "Pale Ghosts" recalls some of the heavier songs on Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness. On Autumn Eternal's behemoth centerpiece, "Sleep To The Sounds Of Waves Crashing," Lunn shifts from furious, arrhythmic, unnaturally warped guitars into a lovely and serene string-quartet section, and the whole hallucinatory affair reminds me of nothing so much as USBM royalty Leviathan -- whose own 2015 album sits right alongside Autumn Eternal on this list, and whose mastermind, Jef Whitehead, is perhaps the only American black metal auteur today who belongs in Lunn's class. Like Whitehead, Lunn isn't exactly attempting to hybridize black metal with other genres; he's finding unexpected tones and textures that work within black metal's parameters, and then, crafting ambitious compositions that reveal entirely new facets of the genre.

That's just pedantic shit, though, academic shit. And while Lunn's work is worthy of a thesis, Autumn Eternal isn't heady or dispassionate. This is a cathartic, visceral album. Lunn is dealing in bold, bracing melodies and sweeping sonic vistas. He's balancing windswept fury with lush pastoral grandeur, his guitars bending like branches or driving like rain. He's writing captivating, satisfying songs with structure, purpose, momentum, and arc. He's harnessed black metal's essential power and deployed it in the service of a singular vision and voice. Autumn Eternal is a triumphal statement from one of this country's great artists. Listening to it, you can hear the entirety of black metal's history; you can also hear limitless possibilities for the genre's future. Or you can just turn it on, turn it up, and be blown away. --Michael