What sticks with Doug Moore about his time at Menegroth, The Thousand Caves, Colin Marston’s old studio located in Woodhaven, Queens, New York, is the laughter. “Recording an extreme metal album can be a tense, exhausting process, but Colin is such a steadying presence that we rarely felt stressed while working there,” Moore, the vocalist/multi-instrumentalist and former head honcho of this column, writes. “He’s a hilarious person and a keen observer of music culture who’s quick to remind clients of the subjective nature of the art in question. This approach resulted in a lot more levity and even joy during the recordings I participated in than the usual struggle-session vibe of getting a metal album on tape. When things went wrong, we found reasons to laugh together; we did the same when things went smoothly. I also have many amusing memories of consuming vast quantities of grub from Mr. Wonton, Colin’s preferred local Chinese spot, while laughing at YouTube nonsense at the end of tracking days.”

Pyrrhon’s Exhaust and Scarcity’s The Promise Of Rain, albums on which Moore sings, were the results of those sessions. They’re also some of the final recordings proudly inscribed with Menegroth’s imprimatur. After 18 years and well over 300 bands and artists that either convened at the Thousand Caves or sent their music over to be mixed and/or mastered, Menegroth shuttered last May. It closed the chapter on an incredibly fertile period for underground metal.

“Take a look at his catalog,” Imperial Triumphant’s Zachary Ezrin writes, drawing attention to Marston’s resume, one packed with landmark recordings, notably from bands that call New York home. “All the avant-death bands, black metal, and forward-thinking metal projects have all been influenced to some degree by Menegroth and Colin. I think the 2010s particularly were an era when a lot of bands in NYC were pushing the boundaries.”

Krallice’s Years Past Matter, Gorguts’s Colored Sands, and Artificial Brain’s Labyrinth Constellation are just some of the all-timer albums midwifed within Menegroth. “Everyone knows at least a few albums that were recorded there, whether they realize it or not,” Hades Summoner of Defeated Sanity and Slaughterwar notes. Indeed, one could easily argue that modern experimental metal took root within Menegroth, and those roots run deep, much like the roots of the trees depicted on Karlynn Holland’s mural that graced one of the walls. In Tolkienian fashion, the albums recorded during Menegroth’s new millennium run carved a thousand nooks and crannies in metal’s edifice, leaving their mark while providing refuge to likeminded headbangers.

“The impact Menegroth has had on the underground metal scene cannot be overstated,” Afterbirth’s Cody Drasser explains. “Bands from all over the world have sought out the studio, and for good reason. The proof is not only in the pudding (the hundreds of albums recorded there), but Colin has proven to be a dedicated and caring individual as well. He is someone who is truly dedicated to their craft and goes above and beyond in capturing the essence of each band that walked through the studio’s doors. Menegroth was a marvel of the underground scene, and I hope to see Colin resurface again when the timing is right. The world is already a lesser place with the studio’s absence.”

In conversation with many metal musicians, one can tell how much Menegroth meant to them. “I spent so much time in this studio,” Ezrin remembers. “It shaped me as a recording musician. I have memories of being there last month; I have memories of being there as a teenager. I’ve always looked up to Colin.”

And that’s just it: a studio is just a studio. Marston, the beating heart within the Thousand Caves, is what made the place unique. His guiding hand turned ideas into realities. In turn, each album recorded at Menegroth captures a point in time, encasing it in amber. Menegroth made albums, but it also made memories. So, this isn’t a story about how a studio and its proprietor helped usher in a generational-defining new age of metal. Those ticks have been thoroughly tocked elsewhere. Instead, it’s what you didn’t get to hear that still made these albums what they are.

“I found the space for Menegroth through Craigslist and shared the rent for years with Kevin Hufnagel and Jeff Eber from Dysrhythmia,” Colin Marston said in a recent interview with Tape Op. “The studio had previously been called Bayside Sound and was more in the rock/pop world. I rearranged the layout so that although the control room didn’t have a window, we had three iso booths with a line of sight to the drummer in the live room. That’s the perfect setup for me.”

Naturally, many musicians were also interested in that setup, be it those perfections or Menegroth’s peculiarities.

“The studio had a lot of quirks to it, which contributed to the uniqueness of the sounds Colin was able to achieve there,” Andrew Hawkins from Baring Teeth writes. “He’d often place a mic way down the hallway, for example, which I know he used on a lot of his albums. He was open to any idea that would make the recording better.”

Doug Moore also alluded to the innovative mic placement. “Another subtle but unforgettable quirk of the Menegroth experience was ‘the Menegroth echo.’ There was a small network of hallways extending from Menegroth’s live room, and Colin would set up a condenser mic at the far end of these halls during tracking sessions. This mic picked up the idiosyncratic, alien reverb you can hear on vocal tracks recorded there in particular.”

For Moore, though, one of Menegroth’s most unique traits was where the studio was situated. “Aside from its proprietor, Menegroth’s most unusual quality was the sense of isolation it provided. New York City generally has a way of forcing its presence on your senses whenever you’re within its limits, but the windowless interior of Menegroth really felt like its own little pocket dimension. Once you closed its big submarine-hatch front door, you were in The Music Zone rather than Queens. It was a remarkably good place to do focused work despite being situated in one of the most distracting places on Earth.”

Conversely, for Withered’s Mike Thompson, The Thousand Cave’s mouth opening towards The City That Never Sleeps made the sessions for Grief Relic unforgettable, especially when an ice storm snowed the band in for a week. “The vibe was fantastic. Many friends/acquaintances from the local scene would stop by, either due to concurrent sessions Colin had planned or just to visit with us (Lev!). So that was very enjoyable. We also got to go on a field trip to the city to catch an improv set by Mick Barr, which was fantastic. So, for southern boys, we got a nice dose of ‘the city’ overall and a solid peek into how the scene was rolling in those days.”

But even if you didn’t make it to Menegroth, Marston made sure the experience was invaluable. “We weren’t physically there, unfortunately,” D-Kazar writes about the sessions for Wormed’s Omegon, “but Colin always went above and beyond during the entire remote mixing process, from going really in-depth on explanations of amp settings and mic placements to deftly applying sometimes non-specific and vibe-based mix notes. Always knowledgeable, always willing to try cool things. It was a really smooth experience, and the sonic result was amazing.”

Of course, amazing sonic results have become Marston’s calling card. “Colin was very adamant from the start about getting a good drum sound, especially the snare,” D-Kazar recalls. “He wasn’t with us for the recording sessions, but he monitored the drum recording tests and gave us input on additional room and ambient mics that he likes to incorporate into the mix. And after recording, he was very into trying to achieve the perfect guitar tone by blending different amps and getting the right balance between clarity and brutality. After some back and forth with us (demanding clients, ha), he got the perfect sound for the whole album, including the ethereal clean tones in some sections which were his idea!”

“I think that integrity of sound is the best medium for a specific artist’s distinctiveness,” Marston said to Steel For Brains in 2015. “I try to capture playing in the most flattering way I can with my equipment and ears, always being respectful to what something actually sounds like and how someone actually plays. And specifically, in terms of distinctiveness, nothing is more distinct than the unique way that every musician plays. Often, I feel that there is an unspoken rule that an undoctored, unedited, full performance of music, imperfections and all, has less value than one that’s been taken apart, assembled from pieces, corrected, and flattened. I don’t believe in standards for musicianship or production — anything can be good or bad depending on who’s hearing it and what mood they’re in. I do believe in standards for the basics of recording engineering and audio editing, and those seem to be in short supply these days — but that’s only when I view recording as a technical craft (which it simultaneously is and isn’t), and I can blame a lot of it on the insane pace of personal computing.”

Marston’s standards and attention to detail made an impression on Andrew Hawkins. “His recordings have a very ‘musical’ quality — he doesn’t push everything into the red like you hear on a good chunk of metal albums. Before him, there weren’t very many engineers/producers that did that for extreme metal.”

Moore also highlighted that musical quality. “Aside from the compositional adventurousness of many Menegroth alums, I think the Menegroth signature is the dark but transparent quality of Colin’s mixes. So many metal albums from recent decades feel like getting hit in the face with a plastic wiffle bat, but Colin always pushed back aggressively against the impulse to go louder and brighter than the next guy. You might have to hit the volume knob a little harder as a listener with his work than with many of his peers, but the clarity and organic depth of the sounds he captured at Menegroth were more than worth it – you can always hear how the actual band sounded while playing their songs, rather than a bunch of DAW plugin contrivances and artificial edits.”

“Most modern recordings are so sharpened and evened-out using isolation, EQ, triggers, and compression that they lack depth and weight,” Marston told Moore in a 2014 Stereogum Q&A, in which Marston also identified his “left ear” as his most prized piece of studio gear. “Ninety-nine percent of extreme metal records end up sounding tinny and thin to me in an attempt (I think) to sound clear and defined or, worse yet, perfected. I’ve never quantized drums before and hope I never do. Often, I’m directed to do much more editing than I would if it were my project, which is totally fine since my job is fundamentally to help the musicians make the record they want to make. Because of the tendency towards super cleaned-up recordings in metal, I often find myself only enjoying lo-fi demo recordings or almost experimentally horribly mixed records, such as Cremation or Malicious Onslaught. At least those recordings have a vibe or an attitude in spite of their obvious shittiness.”

“I think one of my strengths is meticulousness,” Marston further explained to Bandcamp Daily in 2018. “I like to take my time with miking and setting up a recording session. Also when I mix and master, I try to always make sure any processing I do actually improves the sound. I’m quite wary of making changes that seem better or more exciting but don’t actually improve things in the long run. I am deeply offended by the idea of music or recordings being a competition, so I’m never seduced by notions of being the ‘loudest,’ or ‘hugest.’ I respect musical content more than any recording quality, so I recognize that it’s more important for a musician to record a satisfactory performance than an unsatisfactory one, even if the sound seems perfect. Perfection doesn’t exist and, therefore, is a dangerous thing to strive for. I encourage musicians to only concern themselves with being well-prepared, doing their best, and striving to be good.”

That drive to strive is a key to Marston and Menegroth’s success. One could say there’s nothing artificial about how Marston approaches recording. There’s a humanity present. Thus, his compassionate sense of careful consideration has bolstered the confidence of the artists he’s engaged with creatively.

“Working with Colin at his Menegroth Studio was an incredible, memorable experience,” Cody Drasser writes about the sessions for Afterbirth’s Four Dimensional Flesh and In But Not Of. “Colin is not only technically knowledgeable but is a supportive and encouraging person. During the recording process for both of our albums, Colin was able to expertly guide us through to our best performances as well as putting us at ease and making the entire session comfortable and productive. The times Afterbirth spent there with him are some of my most cherished memories of my adult life. An unforgettable opportunity that I am still ecstatic about.”

Drasser is not alone in his admiration. Zachary Ezrin says, “He facilitated Imperial Triumphant’s growth and development in many sonic capacities. He has incredible ears and knows what we’re looking for often before we even do.” Andrew Hawkins had a similar experience on Baring Teeth’s Atrophy and The Path Narrows, saying, “Colin was huge in making those records what they are. He had a true producer’s role in the sessions and helped us achieve the sounds/effects we had in our heads. He also made a lot of contributions and recommendations that really improved the final product.” And Hades Summoner speaks of the utopia of producer/artist relationships: “Listening to what we want and need and then working with us through the very end, until everyone in the room is 100 percent happy.”

But there’s something else in these interactions, too. “I think Colin shares a lot of the same values as I do when it comes to extreme metal,” Mike Thompson notes, “especially in regards to more progressive (the adjective, not the subgenre) or unorthodox stylings of black, death, etc. metal. He has a firm grasp on what qualities make classic records classic. And Menegroth is indeed a cave (as any studio should be, in my opinion), which made it conducive to the moods and existential drifting one hopes to experience when focusing on creating substantial expressions of self.”

And sometimes what it takes to make those expressions of self congeal is just being there, leaning on your 10,000 hours, and knowing your stuff. “For Pyrrhon in particular, Colin brought a combination of openmindedness and deep knowledge of various musical idioms to the table that few engineers possess,” Moore writes. “Our music is highly interdisciplinary and often combines ingredients that rarely appear together, which can make it hard to communicate what we hope to achieve during recording sessions. But Colin was never remotely daunted by the prospect of making all these disparate pieces work in tandem, and since he has at least mastered all of our recordings, he has a complete understanding of our spirit and aesthetic vision. We could always trust him to understand what we were going for, which gave us the confidence to become the extremely weird band we are today.”

Of course, Menegroth is no longer there today, a casualty of New York City’s forever-precarious tenant purgatory, as Marston told Tape Op. “Eventually, I could afford the whole space for myself, finally worked my way out of debt… and then the landlord sold the building and kicked me out. There’s a 200-year-old bar [Neir’s Tavern] in the building that was in Goodfellas and was saved by the city as a landmark, but who’s going to stand up for an experimental metal studio?”

The underground metal scene stood up. “Colin Marston and Menegroth studios have been an integral part of the NYC metal underground and the history of Imperial Triumphant,” Ezrin said in a statement upon the announcement of a special edition shirt. “It’s sad to see him lose his studio due to circumstances out of his control, but we would like to try our best to make the transition a little easier. One hundred percent of profits from this shirt will go towards helping Colin move and hopefully finding a new studio space soon! Plus, I’ve always wanted to have a Menegroth studios tee shirt, so I’m definitely buying one myself.”

“Many of my fond memories of the studio can be found in the small print on the shirt,” Marston said to Tape Op. “With a metal record, it’s more of a mountain to surmount. You just slog through it, and if you’re meticulous enough and record things properly, it’ll turn out clear and heavy and all the things we want in a metal recording. But it’s SO fucking hard! Extreme metal music is the most difficult music to work on, by far. What you’re asked to do is so insane; it’s music that’s built to not work.”

And yet, what Marston and Menegroth helped to build has worked, leaving behind a legacy that has been an undeniable step in metal’s eternal evolution. “Colin’s impact on the extreme metal world is immeasurable,” Wormed’s D-Kazar writes. “I was forever jealous of every band I liked that managed to go record at Menegroth, and it’s a shame we didn’t get to actually record there. It was a stamp of quality whenever you read the name in an album’s credits, and not all the albums sounded alike, but they all sounded incredible. Colin will do incredible work again wherever he lands and will turn his next spot into a place of pilgrimage for anyone who’s into weird, dissonant, underground metal.”

So, while that next spot is still TBA, the albums recorded there are still with us. In a sense, that’s the eternalism of music in action, that the ephemerality of the present is immediately turned into the indelibility of the past. The lives of not only Colin Marston but Cody Drasser, Doug Moore, Zachary Ezrin, Andrew Hawkins, Mike Thompson, Hades Summoner, and D-Kazar will live on through their music, their memories laying the foundation for listeners to erect their own memories upon them. Because, for music obsessives, albums are the markers by which we measure our existence. And no matter if another Menegroth rises or not, one thing is true: The memories created within The Thousand Caves will last forever. –Ian Chainey

FOUL EMANATIONS FROM THE VOID

10. Unreqvited – “The Starforger”

Location: Ottawa, Canada
Subgenre: blackgaze

Unreqvited has played richly atmospheric, synthy, and gorgeous atmospheric black metal for nearly a decade. (Like Abriction, also featured in this column, Unreqvited did a split with Damián Antón Ojeda’s Sadness — bands that have done splits with Ojeda’s projects, whether Sadness or Trhä, are in a club that’s worth keeping an eye on.) It’s polished, epic stuff, and it fits right in the wondrous, sky-gazing lane of atmospheric black metal. In an interview with HM Magazine, sole member William Melsness, who goes by “Ghost,” cites the departed Youtube channel “Lightfox177” as an inspiration for starting the project, and if you remember that channel and the exposure it brought to bands in the lane, it’ll all make a whole lot of sense. 

On “The Starforger,” the lead single from Unreqvited’s forthcoming album A Pathway To The Moon, the project is taking a different, slower, and more stately route. It’s gorgeous, and as the track and album title imply, it soundtracks an ascent into endless awe, with new wonders ever approaching and receding into darkness as they pass by. You’ll hear solid doses of Mesarthim and Alcest, a few touchpoints that recall Summoning, and clean vocals that bring to mind the best of Heretoir. All together, it pulls the heartstrings from start to finish, an affecting, deeply felt song that takes something out of you and will linger for some time.
[From A Pathway To The Moon, out 2/7 via Prophecy Productions.] –Wyatt Marshall

9. Submerged – “Infested With Barnacles”

Location: San Diego, CA
Subgenre: brutal death metal

While the metal world descends into a feeding frenzy as metal publications chum the waters with early bird year-end lists, we here at the Black Market are fulfilling our traditional November duties by sneaking old albums in under the wire to make it seem like we weren’t utterly awful at our jobs. And that’s why Submerged’s Tortured At The Depths, one of the best brutal death metal albums of the year, is finally getting some inches within the column despite being released in [flips so many calendar pages, I get a wrist injury] April.

Submerged, which was a trio on Tortured At The Depths, the band’s debut full-length, was one of two new-student-in-class BDM introductions from San Diego, California, this year. The other comes from the related Regurgitated Entrails, a much more ignorant purveyor of pummel that wears a song title like “Squelching Schizophrenic Derangement” proudly. However, unlike its chunky sibling, Submerged is a speed demon. Also, maybe a sea demon? As evidenced by the opener, “Infested With Barnacles,” and the Jon Zig artwork of a diver getting torn asunder by some monkfish-ass-looking tentacle beasts, Tortured At The Depths sports a (mostly) nautical theme. “For their crushed dreams and goals,” singer Erick Rincon growls on the abovementioned “Barnacles,” “Their aspirations one surface away/ They boiled and consumed our brethren.” So, it’s kind of like full steam ahead Brodequin if it had “Under the Sea” on the brain and desired to live out the revenge fantasy of all lobsters. Watch your ass, Jacob Knowles.

Submerged isn’t just a blur of blasts, though. At their best, guitarist Sam Little and drummer Andy Vincent find a fine balance between the redlined rippage and the kind of beefy Suffocation riffs that spontaneously incite mosh pits, often using the expectation of one to subvert tired BDM songwriting tropes. (Vincent has since left the band, thus why Submerged “was” a trio.) Check out the song that follows “Barnacles,” “Submerged In Sewage Water.” At 1:25, Submerged feints like it’s going to pull back and transform into chug mode before, sike, it launches ahead with the bloodthirstiness of a starving shark. The chugs do materialize soon enough, but in a way where you’re never sure of Submerged’s next move, such as when Vincent starts playing double-time double bass under Little’s grooves. It’s a neat little trick that keeps Submerged’s songs from stasis. Like the tides, it’s always rolling in and rolling out.

Tortured At The Depths was produced by Dan Osborn, the former owner of New Standard Elite, the label that has given the more exotic varietals of BDM a home since 2011. Osborn was succeeded by Ryan Baker in late 2023, so this album stands both as a transition and a nice little monument to everything Osborn built. There was some trepidation that NSE would lose its character post-sale, that maybe its characteristic drum-and-fife calling card would start introing dogshit. That hasn’t been the case. While things started slowly, 2024 has been another successful year for the label, adding knockouts from Despondency, Regurgitated Entrails, Indecent Excision, Theurgy, Emasculator, Vulnus, and an absolute mind-melter from Dysthymia that’s fresh out of the oven. Still, Submerged is the one I kept coming back to this year, scratching an itch in my brain that desires turbo chaos. Tortured At The Depths is that, and I’m happy that it finally surfaced in these pages. Took us long enough. [From Tortured At The Depths, out now via New Standard Elite.] –Ian Chainey

8. Effluence – “Ravenous Putrid Fleshfeast”

Location: California, USA
Subgenre: brutal death metal

Effluvia from Effluence’s exploded-melon death metal has soaked the Black Market since late 2020. The mostly solo project of Matt Stephens was first referenced in passing as a marker denoting the end of music, the end-all-be-all termination point of this column’s infatuation with a certain kind of demented death metal depravity. Soon, as all outré things eventually do that cross our path and subsequently annoy regular Stereogum readers, Effluence graduated to being a frequent blurb guest star. And while the band is still niche in terms of listenership, its potential influence on extreme metal continues to ripple outward. For now, it’s like a tsunami in the open ocean: small and hard to perceive. But once it reaches the shore, its effect will be felt. Or something. I don’t know. I tried to be a real writer there for a second.

Anyway, from the supremely gooey debut, 2020’s Subneural Entropic Dysgenesis, on, Effluence has been the band that best exhibits the prime traits of the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Encenathrakh set. Like the landmark Columbus, Ohio, all-star sicko squad, Effluence favors improvisational brutality. But Stephens’ freeness runs a little deeper than that. “EFFLUENCE combines improvisation as a compositional modality with a modern approach to dissonant harmony and multidirectional rhythm while merging the aesthetics of extreme heavy music with ‘new music’ textures to evoke a dense and surreal experience of sound-energy that defies categorization,” says Effluence’s Bandcamp bio. Yes, that. But it’s also like getting your head chopped off by a flying Ornette Coleman record during your shift in a silverware factory.

So, since I’m a grade-A death metal idiot and too stupid to remember key phrases like “multidirectional rhythm,” I’ve taken to calling bands in the extended Effluence universe “extremely hard bop,” a descriptor I’m sure Stephens now regrets using as a Bandcamp tag. Still, I’ll stand by it because, really, does any band in the first wave like the genre pinned upon them? For our purposes, then, that being finding a catchy term that bucks the trend of boring-ass genre names, it’s a decent catch-all for these kinds of jazz-adjacent, freewheeling noise assaults, particularly those finding a home on Putrefactive Recordings, the new depot for intelligent degeneracy. And the family munching on brains within Putrefactive’s halls continues to grow unabated, now comprising Stephens’s other outfits, like Gorenette Coleman (really). Extremely hard bop: there is a lot of it.

As one would expect, 2024 has been a typically busy year for extremely hard bop. Besides the four releases blasted out by the primary entity, three of which we will get to in a second, a host of other projects have gotten on the board, too, such as Tantric Bile (an even more experimental jazz grinder) and Neural Indent (a harsher blaster that proudly features zero guitars, and, whew doggies, that’s a spicy meatball of an album cover). Stephens has also reached beyond metal, demonstrating diverse interests and endlessly dexterous abilities on three albums from Yetzirah, a jazz project covering selections from Alice Coltrane while also dedicating an album to Phạm Phi Nhung.

Needless to say, the pace at which Stephens works is astounding. That unceasing deluge could undermine the impact of an artist’s material. It does for others: Lord knows I’m not picking through 800 Nadja releases to find the good stuff. But everything Stephens releases feels like an entry point into an entirely different discography. Effluence’s 2022 album Sarmat, a 26-minute single song with guest vocals from Paul Acuña, hews much closer to something like the Art Ensemble of Chicago. (For that reason, I wore an Effluence shirt to a Sun Ra Arkestra show, which reads like a Seth Putnam song title in an alternate universe where he wrote for the Penguin Guide To Jazz.) Likewise, Tantric Bile’s Baka, which was released that same year, eschewed grind for exotica to craft an ode to the cult tropicalploitation movie Tanya’s Island, a flick music nerds will note features a pre-Prince Vanity from Vanity 6. When you’re going to get weird, you might as well get WEIRD.

That said, even when Effluence stays closer to the death metal home base, the results often vary from release to release. Convulsing Thoughts and Stillborn Eucharist Psychosis, the two releases that follow Necrobiology, the album we’re ostensibly talking about today as soon as I can quell my terminal blogger brain ADHD, are proper descents into chaos, hurtling to hell aboard the Event Horizon. Necrobiology, though, is probably the most immediate and coherent of Stephens’s Effluence statements, the one album that comes the closest to a well-adjusted person’s idea of death metal.

Sort of. Yeah, sort of. I realize I’m so far gone that very few things sound truly beyond comprehension to me anymore, so the idea that something like “Ravenous Putrid Fleshfeast,” Necrobiology’s extended closer that is to extremely hard bop what Last Days Of Humanity’s “A Divine Proclamation Of Finishing The Present Existence” is to goregrind, can even be in the same universe as, say, Blood Incantation or whatever y’all like is…laughable. It’s laughable. Yuk it up. But that doesn’t mean Effluence isn’t equally as engrossing. You just have to work a little harder to be charmed by it, like a sailor taking a shy siren on a second date.

Here we go: “Ravenous Putrid Fleshfeast.” Lol. From the jump, you can tell this Effluence cut is closer to the Disgorge (Mex) school of BDM, particularly that band’s definitive statement, Necrholocaust. (The fact I’ve mentioned Necrholocaust twice this year in Stereogum amuses me to no end.) And then, as Effluence does, the track gets strange, using brief breakdowns to unleash improvised squalls of woodwinds, John Frusciante in a blender guitar squiggles, and clattering free-time percussion fills. At 2:44, “Ravenous Putrid Fleshfeast” trips into the Twilight Zone, becoming a noise-ambient track worthy of Namanax. Then, the switch is flipped to full modern avant-garde mode: Krzysztof Penderecki if he were into Dave Douglas and, uh, blast beats. It’s the entire Effluence experience in four minutes — head exploding, loling, WTFery. Hell yeah, for me. Your hell yeahs may vary. [From Necrobiology, out now on Putrefactive Recordings.] –Ian Chainey

7. August Moon – “Exitus”

Location: Helsinki, Finland
Subgenre: melodic death metal

“Exitus” sounds like some lost ’90s Finnish melodic death metal gem, and it turns out that’s essentially what it is. A few teenagers formed August Moon in Finland in 1993, put together a couple of demos, and disbanded soon after. Now, 30 years later, they got the band back together to record their first LP, and they brought the sound and aura from their first round with them. It was a great era then, and in “Exitus” you’ll hear bits that will recall some of the other leading acts of the time — in the lead-in to the outro in particular, there’s some Amorphis in those riffs, boinging bass, and laser beam synths. But this isn’t just a nostalgia play, as “Exitus” truly rips. It’s razor sharp and interesting at every turn, never lulling into anything predictable — each passage of riffage is memorable, and they bridge moments when drama unfolds in epic fashion. Guitar leads are ever so stylish, crafting melodic narratives that are grand and mournful and surprising. August Moon may have taken longer than most to get here, but it was worth the wait. [From Something Eldritch And Macabre, out 12/13 via Personal Records.] –Wyatt Marshall

6. Morgue Breath – “Mortificación Fungaempiémico”

Location: Los Angeles, CA
Subgenre: grindcore

In backyards, bars’ backrooms, and back alley warehouses, the Southern California grind scene is thriving. It’s the DIY spirit incarnate, a tight-knit crew of ask-a-punks that, over the past few years, have fostered a fruitful scene, ripening bands that have traveled far beyond the confines of Downtown Los Angeles. Their albums, often adorned with artistic splatter from the likes of Goatfuker Comix and other maestros of meat murals, have seeded grind distros around the globe with a new kind of City of Angeles sleaze. The bands themselves have also gone international, undertaking Euro and Asia tours that have given other grinders a gander at what you can often catch over a weekend in the greater LA area. And grind legends from far-flung locales have returned the favor, stopping by to play one of the scene’s underground hubs, a nondescript building abutting Skid Row. This year alone, Yacøpsæ, Fuck on the Beach, Pulmonary Fibrosis, Contaminated, and Controlled Existence have dropped in as headliners, giving many up-and-comers an all-important “opened for” entry for their bios. So, times are good. It’s the halcyon days, an era-for-the-ages period that only really registers as important when it has passed.

In that sense, Morgue Breath is absolutely living in the present. Its three members are right at the heart of SoCal’s grind renaissance: Guitarist/vocalist Ivo Naranjo, who founded the band, is in Malpractice Insurance and Radiation Vomit; bassist/vocalist Emi Tamura is half of Shitbrains; and drummer Isaac Horne runs the label Blast Addict, a name that doubles as a keen descriptor of his role in bands like Sulfuric Cautery, Raw Addict, Sissy Spacek, Lurid Panacea, and other turbo-ping purveyors. Needless to say, all of these projects go hard. To that end, if you need a visual to explain the audio, a recent Blast Addict shirt design features a post-show snap of Horne’s snare covered in Horne’s blood.

As one might expect, then, Morgue Breath’s second full-length, Plaga Sin Rostro, sounds like LA right now. Its deathly grind brings together the city’s speedier and seedier extreme metal epochs, from Terrorizer to Vulva Essers and everything in between. Naranjo’s low growl and hurricane-of-knives riffs, Tamura’s high scream and fuzz-monsoon bass, and Horne’s high-speed blasts and prodding punk beats coagulate to form a timeless assault, the epitome of the orthodox grind experience, the kind of Maxell Cassette blown-away-guy battering that earns respectful nods from people wearing Insect Warfare hats. It rips.

“Mortificación Fungaempiémico” is a fine tasting pour, a 69-second aural onslaught showcasing what Morgue Breath brings to the autopsy table. The opening is all forward momentum, an unceasing barrage of barreling blasts that could be a runaway bulldozer’s mating call. The trio nails that prime grind trait, that cohesive contradiction, of keeping things tight and loose; it’s tightly coiled so it can land a powerful punch, but its loose wildness always catches you off guard. And that’s what you get when “Mortificación Fungaempiémico” spills into its middle section, a chunky, punky beatdown complete with whammy-bar dying-horse screams. Both sections are a release of kinetic energy, a push and a shove, a shake and a quake. Combined, it’s pure exhilaration, and it’s what has been ringing in the ears of LA residents this year and hopefully many more. [From Plaga Sin Rostro, out now via Blast Addict and Behind the Mountain.] –Ian Chainey

5. Haunted Horses – “Grey Eminence”

Location: Seattle, WA
Subgenre: industrial / noise rock

“Grey Eminence,” lurches and heaves, propelled forward by a big, wonked-out bass that sounds at regular intervals like a bio lab alarm routed through a maniac’s distortion pedal board. Vocals — misery incarnate, weird and crazed — moan and groan and proclaim a woeful tale over the brooding march. This grim, grinding work comes courtesy of the Seattle trio Haunting Horses, who straddle industrial, punkish, noise rock-y, and goth-y sounds, firing up songs that are, first and foremost, dread-laden. Thick gloom hangs around, and you feel as if the band has a practice space in some kind of long-abandoned, bad-vibes manufacturing facility. But it’s captivating, gut-droppingly heavy, and masterful in conveying its menacing vision that will pull you under before you know it. [From Dweller, out 1/10 via Three One G.] –Wyatt Marshall

4. Guck – “IDGAG”

Location: Los Angeles, CA
Subgenre: noise rock

OK. So, there was the time a skateboarder dropped into the middle of a mosh pit and did a kickflip. For a lot of bands, that would be the concert highlight of their careers, the kind of ‘can you believe it’ anecdote worth dining out on for eternity. For Los Angeles’ Guck, a band that already has a reputation for taking over the stages like a devastating tornado, it was another day at the office. Proof in concept: At the noise rock quintet’s next show, a stage monitor spontaneously burst into flames.

“I gotta say the monitor on fire thing has to take the cake for me,” April, Guck’s lead singer, writes in an email. “Never have I ever seen flames come out of a stage monitor,” Kyle, the drummer, adds. “The flames were the best,” Chappy, the guitarist, concurs before chipping in some more Guck concert lore. “There was a backyard show in Santa Ana where the cops came during our set and shone a light on us for about 15 minutes, and we just never stopped playing, and they left, haha. Also, one time, Johnny Knoxville walked across the street from us as we loaded in.”

Unpredictable concert chaos seems to follow Guck around because Guck’s music is precisely that. At first blush, “IDGAG,” the band’s debut single, is one of Guck’s slower burns: Sam’s burbling synth, Andrew’s pulsating bass, and Kyle’s fluid drumming lay the foundation for Chappy’s ringing guitar stabs and April’s hypnotic ruminations. Think a more aggressively no-wave Bush Tetras if reinterpreted by Arab on Radar, maybe.

So, yeah, for the first 30 seconds, you feel like you’re on steady ground. “Imagine you walk right through a wall,” April intones in a voice that is both pacifying and packed with portent. And then, once you step through that wall, “IDGAG” explodes. Kyle is all over his kit, kicking up a tempest with ultra-active fills. Sam’s synths and Andrew’s bass dance around each other, a twisted tango of chest-rattling tones. Chappy’s guitar suffuses the sonic space and tightens the song like sewing thread. April’s vocals rise in intensity, nailing the immediacy of an alarm going off in the middle of the night. “IDGAG” builds and builds until, shwwwwwwwmpf, like a vacuum sucking everything out into space, all that remains are the synths and drums that started the track. It’s a hell of an abrupt finale, encapsulating the unexpectedness of getting t-boned while reversing out of a driveway. It’s also like Guck is releasing you from its spell. For three-and-a-half minutes, you’re just inside of that song. It subsumes you. It entrances you. It’s exhilarating. It feels like something, and it means something, too.

“It’s dancy and has probably one of my favorite synth patches on the record, and I hope people feel like I’m screaming for them in chorus because I am,” April says about “IDGAG.” “It’s so easy for these government establishments and corporations to do the right thing and make sure we as people have a chance at surviving, but they refuse. Imagine hating on poor people, and they’re literally just at a Guck show doing kickflips in the pit.”

For Chappy, “IDGAG” presented an opportunity for some artistic freedom. “This song let me play guitar in ways I haven’t before. I used the pitch shifter pedal as part of the guitar for the chorus and I unlocked a part of my brain when the rest of the band had locked in their parts. A big part of this song that I am proud of is the transitions. They came as happy accidents and planned out alike and I think it has the feeling of falling down and getting up together.”

The reason that those transitions are so well-hewn is that Guck has been in the trenches playing shows, gathering feedback from the live experience before pressing the record button.

“These songs shapeshifted so much before we were satisfied with them,” Kyle writes. “If we had recorded them in earlier incarnations, we would have been doing ourselves a disservice because we definitely would have messed something up live and decided we liked the mistake better, then be bummed that the song had already been set in stone.” “I can’t picture a world really where we could have done this another way,” Chappy adds. “I love this approach, and it allows us to tweak songs in real-time and make them perfect before deciding which version is the best. All of my bands have done this in the past so it feels natural to me.”

Guck was born from the ashes of Prized Pig, Andrew, Kyle, and Sam’s previous project. Guck’s formation came about the same way as its compositional process: happy accidents and planned-out moves. After Prized Pig’s potential was exhausted, the three remaining members knew they wanted to keep things rolling. Enter Chappy.

“I had known Sam and Andrew for years because of playing shows together in Nashville, and when I moved out here, I didn’t have a band yet,” Chappy recalls. “By happenstance, I ran into Andrew at Non Plus Ultra the day I bought an amp to have in LA and mentioned I needed a practice space. He told me him and Sam and Kyle had one I could join, and when Sam gave me my keys, he pitched all jamming together and it began.”

Soon enough, April joined the fold. “Guck is musically an extension of what Andrew, Kyle, and Sam were doing with their band Prized Pig. Prized Pig did one of their first shows and it absolutely blew me away. I tried to book them, but they had to drop because their singer needed to. I remember telling Sam I would be happy to fill in for Prized Pig on vocals just because LA really needed a band like them. Sam and I chatted about a year later and he had just started a new band where instead of guitar he would play synth and they had Chappy on guitar. Sam sent me ‘TAZ,’ which was the first song I heard and was all I needed to be swayed.”

Once everyone was in the same room, things clicked immediately. “When the five of us jammed altogether for the first time it felt like we were channeling something,” Kyle remembers. “I don’t get that feeling often.” “The very first time we played for me, too,” Chappy adds. “For the first few months, we didn’t even try to write songs; we just played for hours and recorded it. A lot of our songs come from those jams, which is a very different way of working in music for me personally, and I love it. Everyone truly has an equal part and excels at what they do. The second click moment came when April showed up. We still have a recording of that first practice and it amazes me that it was so natural.”

There was a bit of serendipity in the mix, too. “I already knew the other guys were cool but then I met Chappy for the first time, which was rad,” April writes. “Him and I are in on the same southern lore of having an appreciation for an iconic band from my hometown, Sohns. That was already a deep-cut green flag for me. Then, to top it off, I found out Chappy and my fiancé are long-lost brothers from the math rock scene. A lot of things about us being together just feel truly meant to be. It really feels like all of us have always wanted a band like this.”

And then came the name. “I think it’s just like, you gotta pick a name, they didn’t want to call it Panda Express per my request, so ‘guck’ is just a typo your phone spells when you try to type ‘fuck’,” April explains. Kyle elaborates: “Somehow, that typo really yielded something that feels representative of the music, like slimy and kind of gross and stinky, but also looks like it might taste good, so we stuck with it. Panda Express would also fit that description, though.” No word yet on a possible Panda Express endorsement.

The fact that Guck’s name is derived from a text typo is fitting. The band’s music is five unique points of interest cohering into a whole, a single organism of independent consciousnesses, not unlike a group chat. “I think a big part of what’s happening with the band’s sounds is that every member has their own sound or creative take,” April notes. “It could be an anxious avoidance thing and that we’re bad at communicating or it could be we just respect each other and don’t really step on each other’s toes creatively so in the music you are really experiencing everyone’s raw expression unfiltered.”

Unfiltered is also an excellent way to describe April’s lyrics. They’re universal but also very Los Angeles, tapping into this underlying id, ego, and superego of the area. They feel very “now,” both in sound and how the music and message rebound off of fans. So, was that style a conscious decision?

“I think originally, no, it wasn’t,” April replies. “I think we just wanted to have a band that was fun. When I was improvising lyrics, the ones the band really liked were the ones where I’m recycling old head takes and canned statements from men I’ve collected so they can hear how silly they sound. Honestly, I really didn’t set out to be a political band, but as I lyricize my experiences, it came off that way anyway, and then I decided to embrace any other similar thoughts.”

“One thing I love about being in Guck is that we didn’t set out to define a sound or an ideal,” Kyle writes. “Those things just sprang up out of our jams and started becoming refined after our first shows. I don’t think it will ever stop becoming refined.”

And Guck sure isn’t stopping. Its dance card is packed with upcoming gigs, and there’s a full-length on the horizon. When asked about what’s ahead, you can see the Guck dynamic in action, each unique answer building upon the other: “Albums,” April answers; “Shows,” Kyle responds; “Tours,” Chappy chips in; “Righteous acts of terror,” Andrew adds. And if you want to do a kickflip while engaging in righteous acts of terror, you now know the right band to soundtrack it. [From IDGAG, out now via the band.] –Ian Chainey

3. Solliloque – “Calcinació I Bromera”

Location: Barcelona, Spain
Subgenre: black metal

Solliloque, the one-person project of a “V.” from Barcelona, plays a stripped-down, poignant black metal. As one-person projects are wont to do, Solliloque is prolific — three releases of varying lengths this year now, and we should have written about at least one of the earlier two. When you listen to “Calcinació i bromera,” the lead-in song to the new album, you’ll notice a sort of regal rigidity to it, as if it were bound to some sort of ordained pageantry. Listen to the rest of the album, with its medieval-ish tones and scales and methodical marches, and you’ll be certain of it. Each song on the album carries the same time signature and similar tempos, and it follows a set of rules imposed on the creative process in a sort of artistic experiment or ethos. ”An impossible fight against boundaries, attempting to touch transcendence by committing to routine, to intranscendence. An everyday story,” V. says in the album liner. And in exploring possibilities within the imposed range, patterns emerge, melodies and themes intertwining and redoubling in kaleidoscopic fashion. It’s mesmerizing, elegance through simplicity, and an abstract, surreal venture that brings you into its world and alters your mind. [From I l’enyoran​ç​a d’una brisa extinta​.​.​., out 1/10 via the band.] –Wyatt Marshall

2. Defeated Sanity – “Temporal Disintegration”

Location: Berlin, Germany
Subgenre: brutal death metal

Chronicles Of Lunacy, Defeated Sanity’s seventh full-length, was almost titled something else. “A concept album about mental disorders and such things,” drummer Lille Gruber told No Clean Singing when asked about what to expect on one of the most anticipated death metal albums of the year. “We almost called it the self-titled….”

Self-titled would’ve made sense. Chronicles Of Lunacy is something like a restatement of purpose for the international quartet. On its previous album, 2020’s The Sanguinary Impetus, Defeated Sanity pushed the technical aspect of its music as far as it could go. While it was named by some, ahem, reputable sources as the best brutal death metal album of the last 10 years, it was also nearly impenetrable, sounding like how the tangle of wires in a server room run by the most idiosyncratic sysadmin must look. Mind you, it wasn’t alienating; Defeated Sanity still knows its way around a hook even when in full Lawnmower Man mode. But it was alien, a disarmingly jagged landscape of antagonistically abrasive everything.

Chronicles Of Lunacy self-consciously pulls back from the edge, returning Defeated Sanity to the blast, widdle, and slam days of Psalms Of The Moribund. “Condemned To Vascular Famine,” for instance, exhibits a smoothness to the song flow that the band hasn’t intentionally utilized in a long time. Granted, it’s hard to say there’s a newfound clarity to the material, mainly because Defeated Sanity has always had a clear vision even at its knottiest — not to mention using such a term as “clarity” to denote music that sounds like a polar bear eating a seal misses the point. That said, Chronicles Of Lunacy might now be the most accessible record with which to onboard new fans to the band’s distinct brand of brutal bugfuckery. With a sterling production from Colin Marston, one of the best of the producer’s career, this is the album that could very well break Defeated Sanity into a wider audience. It’d be well-deserved.

Then again, worry not, degenerates: Defeated Sanity is still for you and probably only for you. I have a hard time imagining anyone who doesn’t have BDM pumping through their veins getting down with “Temporal Disintegration,” a colossus of cacophonous carnage and chameleonic kill riffs. The centerpiece is the slams because of course they are, but everything between is equally outrageous. Defeated Sanity is really feeling itself on this one, rooting around its bag of tricks for the good stuff. This is some Juan Soto in the box confidence, the sound of a band that knows it’s the best. And who can blame them? It’s hard to stay grounded when your mailing address is on Mt. Olympus.

So, on “Temporal Disintegration,” you get Josh Welshman’s pliable-like-taffy growls. You get Vaughn Stoffey’s killer squelch cannon juds and Rubik’s Cube widdles. (Also, is there a sneaky quote of Suffocation in there?) You get Jacob Schmidt pulling double duty as a uniting force with demonic Tetris bass lines and wild, wobbly bowel emptiers. And you get Lille Gruber reaffirming his place as one of the best drummers in death metal. Defeated Sanity gives you it all because this is a for-the-diehards song on a diehards album. But as previously stated, it’s a hell of a potential intro, too, as easy as Defeated Sanity is ever going to get. That duality is Defeated Sanity in the year of our blargh, 2024: You get it all. And, to that end, Chronicles of Lunacy is worthy of being called Defeated Sanity if the band wanted to. [From Chronicles Of Lunacy, out now via Season of Mist.] –Ian Chainey

1. Abriction – “Trail Of Time”

Location: New York, USA
Subgenre: post-metal / atmospheric black metal

Abriction’s Banshee, from February, is one of the best and most refreshing albums in the metal sphere this year. A double album of a surreal mix of Sadness-esque post-blackgaze, goth, pop, punk, screamo, and more, Banshee is captivating, endearing, and ultimately unlike anything else on offer. Abriction is the work of Meredith Salvotri, and listening to her music, along with the aforementioned Sadness and other prolific, excellent Bandcamp-centric acts like Victoria Carmilla Hazemaze, has been like watching a new metal lexicon taking shape over the past several years, one that pulls in influences across porous genre barriers. So Far Away In Time… continues the earnest and youthful charge that courses throughout Abriction’s catalog, channeling it into three beautiful and pulse-racing songs. “Trail Of Time,” the closer, is a favorite, a memorable rush of angular punk-ish riffs, shouted, multi-layered vocals, and blooping electronic flourishes. It’s all cast in a nostalgic haze, reaching back to summer days and nights gone by, capturing a feeling and energy long past but never forgotten. [From So Far Away In Time​.​.​., out now via the band.] –Wyatt Marshall

HYMNS OF BLASPHEMOUS IRREVERENCE

We did it. Peer pressure works. h/t Dave Fonseca