The 10 Best Metal Albums Of 2024
Let’s rip off the Band-Aid: This is the final Black Market. After 11-plus years and 140 columns, we’re finally packing it in. “Welcome to the Black Market, a new space at Stereogum dedicated to talking about and listening to heavy music,” Michael Nelson wrote in the first Black Market published on February 27, 2013. Well, we talked about it, and we listened to it, although that last part has been under considerable debate over the past seven years. But, similar to how a record will eventually need to stop spinning, the Black Market has exhausted its wax, and we’re no stuck groove. This is it, then, real-deal dunzo, because in metal, no one ever reforms for festival-backed nostalgia bucks and legacy-tarnishing diminishing returns. Nope. Never happens. Not even once.
So, if you’d indulge us as we gaze into our navels with the tenacity of a tick trapped in a bellybutton lint ball, I’d like to utilize this space to take a little stroll down memory lane one last time. Sure, this particular acreage of the year-end intro is customarily dedicated to metal glossary terms or board games or Aaron telling you that you’ll be eternally disappointed. (I also didn’t want to do this. Talking about myself gives me hives and my hives hives. I wanted to embed the finale of The Incredible Hulk TV show and never return.) However, we’re doing this recap for a good reason. Strike up the band because the boys are, in fact, back in town. Joining me today are Doug Moore and Wyatt Marshall for a final press conference reflecting on a decade of whatever this was. But wait, there’s more: the one, the only Michael Nelson is back on blurb duty. But wait, there isn’t more: Aaron Lariviere is still trapped in a high-security writers jail, and the phone has been hogged by George R. R. Martin asking tech support how long someone can pretend a computer doesn’t work. Alas. Still, this is like a family reunion for ex-Invisible Oranges editors. Or my intervention. Really could go either way at this point.
Anyway, leading this exit interview is the person who will be taking over monthly metal coverage at Stereogum, Brad Sanders. Brad was my first and only choice for carrying on the unruly metal legacy on this website. Worry not, metaller: You’re going to be safe within the warm embrace of his battle vest. Plus, Brad has two things going for him that the recent leadership of this column (hi, it’s me) did not: One, he can write, and two, he has an actual interest in covering relevant metal.
OK. I’m going to duck out and hand things over to Brad. I’ll see you again for the last time in the blurbs for our 10 best metal albums of the year. Behold. Enter Sanders.
I’m Brad Sanders, a writer and radio host who has been bloviating professionally about metal since 2011. You may have seen my byline in the pages of Decibel, heard my interviews on Bandcamp Radio, or read my work right here on Stereogum. I was honored when Ian asked me to take the torch from the Black Market, and I hope you’ll all stick around for my new column, Breaking The Oath, when it debuts in the New Year. My sensibility, as a metalhead and a writer, is a little different from the Black Market you’ve come to know and love. But I’m a voracious, lifelong metal listener, and I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about this music that became the center of my life more than two decades ago. I look forward to sharing that passion with you every month. In January, the circle is meeting again. Who will be the first to fall in trance?
The first edition of the Black Market ran way back in February 2013, almost two years after Brandon Stosuy retired his “Haunting The Chapel” column on Stereogum. What was the foundational idea for the new column, and how did you assemble the initial team of Michael Nelson, Doug Moore, Wyatt Marshall, and Aaron Lariviere?
Doug Moore: As I recall it, the column was Michael’s invention, whole cloth. He knew there was an appetite for in-depth metal coverage at omnibus independent music blogs like Stereogum, where he’d just become a managing editor. He also knew the three of us contributors from his stint running Invisible Oranges, and inferred from our prior work together that we’d be interested in writing for a broader audience than just underground metal die-hards. I applaud him getting other writers involved at all because it would have been much easier for him to run the column solo rather than corralling a bunch of freaks every month.
Wyatt Marshall: I’m assuming this one is for Mike, who was really a mentor to me, and I know a lot of others who made their way up through Invisible Oranges. Mike was the one who was always giving me cool assignments and encouraging me to pitch features and take on pieces that might have seemed a bit daunting. So when he asked me to write alongside him, Aaron, and Doug for a new metal column after he had taken the managing editor role at Stereogum, I was humbled and probably a bit nervous. Thank you, Mike. What a treat it’s been to share the music that captivates us — from the glorious to the goo. The only piece that was missing was Ian, and we remedied that not long after.
Of the 15 picks in that first column, from VHÖL to Woe to Nails to Anciients, what’s stuck with you the most 11 years later?
Doug: It’s clear that we were onto something from the beginning because three of the bands I wrote about in that column — Wormed, Inter Arma, and KEN mode — are among my favorite active bands today. The fourth band I wrote about, Vuyvr, might be in that company, too, if they’d continued to release music. On top of that, among the acts that the other fellows covered, I remain a fan of Aosoth, and am now in a band with Chris from Woe. I also still love that photo of Abbath vogue-ing in front of the farmhouse. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.
Wyatt: I think it’s got to be the Ash Borer track I wrote about, “Oblivion’s Spring.” Listening to that now evokes what was such a vibrant, new era of US black metal that was in full force in the early 2010s. Ash Borer and affiliated bands like Fell Voices were introducing this crazy long-winded, experimental, raw atmospheric black metal then. It had a really mysterious, unsettling, rabid, but alluring force buried in it. It had a really DIY quality to it, too. Who were these bands playing 20-minute plus songs of just insane riffing, Sisyphean blasting, and harrowing shrieks that seemed to channel some primal darkness? Now, it feels like everyone goes long, but when Ash Borer were doing it, it was indecipherable, disorienting, and fascinating. Massive and earthshaking, another wave of boundary-pushing black metal from the northwest. Listening to it, I feel like I can still smell the back room of Tommy’s Tavern.
The membership of the Black Market brain trust has shifted a few times over the years. Ian, how did you come to join the crew? And everyone else (except the immortal Wyatt, who never left), what made you decide to step away?
Ian Chainey: Wyatt is truly immortal, the laconic Blade among us techno-raving word vampires.
As far as I remember, I joined the column because Nelson liked some of my writing at Invisible Oranges, which is funny because, if you didn’t know better, it seemed like I had a clean, clear, and concise style. Nope, those virtues were accidental, simply a byproduct of the intense time crunch of running a busy website. The joke is on you, Mike. Turns out my authentic “voice” is a rambling suicide note that occasionally has music criticism in it.
Anyway, I was pretty burned out editing IO. By the end of my tenure, which I believe is immortalized in Wikipedia as “short” and nothing more, Wyatt and I were running articles solely to make each other, and crucially no one else, laugh, such as the “Metal Law” series. When you’re writing for an audience of two, it’s time to leave the hall. So, I quit writing for good. Then, like an omnipotent Greek god meddling with the lives of moronic mortals, Nelson swooped in. Come in and blurb, he said. That’s all you’ve got to do, he said. Initially, I wanted to write under a pen name so my day job career wouldn’t suffer any more collateral damage. The gang talked me out of it, and now I have bylines under bands named Anal Stabwound and songs about getting tug jobs from aliens. I guess the joke is on me.
Doug: When I signed on as the temporary leader of the column, I had already concluded that I was not going to pursue my music criticism “career” much further for a number of reasons. I’d started writing about metal on the internet in 2005, and by the time I took the reins, I was already pretty burned out on coming up with ways to say “the riffs are sick.” I also began touring more as a musician around that time, and the resultant personal relationships with bands I wanted to cover put me in an awkward position as a critic. And as my stint progressed, I became uncomfortable with the way that nominally independent press outlets were being subsumed into artist/label PR machinery as the decline of magazine publishing squeezed writers and editors. My run was kind of a “one last job” scenario as a result, and in retrospect, I’m proud that I held on for as long as I did.
Wyatt: I was going to roll out whenever Ian headed out. Ride or die.
What column are you proudest of?
Doug: After revisiting many of the column intros I wrote back in the day, I found that the most entertaining reread was one I almost didn’t publish: the throwaway July 2017 entry about using YouTube to slow down or speed up classic metal records. As one might expect, my silliest writing about metal was also my best.
Wyatt: I very rarely took up the lead on writing the intro, but if I’m looking at the few column intros I wrote, I think the feature on Fiadh Productions takes it by a hair — the label, run by Bariann Tuite, has become such a refreshing presence and force in underground metal, and has put out such amazing music from a wide variety of bands. It’s the kind of thing that is really worth shining a light on.
I also really enjoyed putting together the intro on Fluisteraars and Turia and the Dutch black metal scene, a movement we’d been watching and championing for several years. Not a regular column, but another good entry was the 2018 year-end list, when we listed the split De Oord from Fluisteraars and Turia as the number one album of the year. It’s a two-track EP that totals over half an hour in length, and it’s thematically based on the intersection of two rivers in the Netherlands. To a casual reader looking for some metal recommendations, it’s about as obscure as it could get. I think prior to that, we had rules — things like entries on the best album list must be actual full-length albums, with no EPs, no splits, and so on, and we just threw it out the window. I think that one probably caused some head-scratching at first glance, but I think we ended up convincing a lot of people it was maybe the best thing that came out that year. From time to time, we point to that as precedent to essentially do whatever we want.
But who am I kidding? The best intro could be any of the dozens from Ian, Doug, or Mike. Ian set the bar on insane, esoteric essays that, whenever they’re published, are among the best music writing anywhere. Truly one of a kind. Who else writes 3,000 words of data driven analysis of the “trifecta” and throws in multiple charts? He invented a freaking board game for our year-end column one year, not to mention Tic Tac Dio. I crack up reading this one that promises to disappoint anyone looking for their favorite album on our 2023 year-end list.
Ian: There are the columns that took months to report out, like trying to track down the fake band in the movie The Gate, that are lodged firmly in my brain because I had to expend so much energy to make them happen. The one on the Velvet Unicorn was an off-and-on odyssey that burned up at least two years of my life. Very sweaty. However, the one column I think epitomizes my time at the helm is when I interviewed baseball catcher Tom Murphy about being the only player in the major leagues who had metal playing over the PA as they walked to the plate. Murphy mentioned his minor league team instituted “Tommy Tuesdays,” granting him unfettered access to the playlist during batting practice. Thus, as one does, I scoured Baseball-Reference to test if his OPS increased when games were played those days. (It did.) Of course, nobody cared; it was a classic DOA column. But it is one of those “lol, how are they letting me write about this stuff?” experiences that we’ve ended up accruing a lot of under this masthead.
Other than that, I’m proud of how the rare Wyatt intros came together. I wish we did more of those. They’re some of the best things we ran.
Are there any columns you’ve written over the years that you wish you could have back? Let’s say excluding coverage of artists who you later discovered were shitheads.
Doug: I can’t remember which column it was, but the entire premise of the one I wrote about MIDI “covers” of classic death metal songs was a major miss. Those tracks were definitely just Guitar Pro transcriptions that someone had bounced and posted on YouTube. I am a dumbass.
Ian: Besides never getting anything into Longform.org, which has brought great shame to my ancestors, there was one intro I wrote about Amorphis’ “Black Winter Day” that attempted to unpack from various angles why that central melody is so earworm-y. Nearly every interview bailed on me in the 11th hour, so I had to eat a bunch of shit trying to get it across the finish line. I remember looking at my impending deadline like a hungry werewolf, watching the first rays of the morning sun creep over the horizon. Seriously, there’s nothing more disheartening to a writer than seeing the wrong side of a sunrise. Anyway, Amorphisgate is my white whale. Every year, I reopen the draft and peck away at it before getting depressed and trunking it again. I humbly request that, when I die, someone pins it to my chest and rolls my body into a furnace. Kafka wasn’t brave enough to take that step. I am.
Really, the columns I’m most regretful of are the ones we never published. No one wanted to go on record about Lords Of The Crimson Alliance. I couldn’t find a dev to help me realize Metal GeoGuessr. The First Annual Heavy Metal Magic: The Gathering Tournament kept getting delayed. There’s still a pile of research papers on my desk detailing what makes a good workout song. I’ll probably think of these missed opportunities on my pre-furnace deathbed rather than what I published, which mainly was interviewing metal bands about fishing or whatever.
The Black Market, especially in recent years, has highlighted what I’ll admiringly call “weird shit.” Less Mastodon and Lamb Of God, more borderline unlistenable brutal tech-sludge with 12 listeners on Bandcamp. How did that identity emerge? Was it conscious?
Doug: It was conscious in the sense that we knew many readers would expect us to cover the big names in the genre, and we chose to ignore those expectations. I can’t speak for the other guys, but for me, part of the appeal of producing a metal column at a place like Stereogum was the opportunity to put profoundly unusual music — which is what I organically prefer when it comes to metal — in front of readers who might have landed on the site for reasons that didn’t have to do with metal at all. How many chances do you get to expose fans of Chvrches or Kendrick Lamar to a band like Putridity? To me, that’s a lot more fun than reinforcing the metal culture consensus, and it’s hopefully what readers will remember about the column, to the extent that they remember anything.
Wyatt: I think a lot of it is just where our tastes as listeners naturally go. But I think that’s a testament to just the thriving communities and scenes that make up the metal underground. There are entire sounds buried beneath the mainstream that are massively rich worlds unto themselves. It might take a little bit more digging to get there, but that’s the motivation to share it. It’s why we put this thing together for as long as we did.
That said, I think we know some acts don’t need the exposure. So we might choose instead to highlight the high caliber underground that is every bit, and often much more, exciting, challenging, and visionary. I go back to featuring the Fluisteraars/Turia split EP as the number one album on our year-end list one year. We truly believed it, and I think we’d rather shine a light on something the casual metalhead might not have heard of before.
Ian: This answer has the potential to get long and in the weeds like an unchecked Burmese python infestation in the Florida Everglades. Short answer: (1) we’re freaks, and (2) yes. As for the longer answer…
Me and Doug’s tastes have always skewed avant and outré. For the most part, in the early days, we successfully suppressed the desire to write about, like, Mulk in the column because we didn’t think anyone would have the stomach for it. I know I joke a lot, but I do think Stereogum does a really good job covering niche music, both in these genre columns and across the site at large. But…yeah…. Even though we could drop the odd Wormed track into the column because the column was like stumbling upon an elephant graveyard if you accidentally clicked on it, the thought of blurbing Animals Killing People felt like a bridge too far. After all, we were metal ambassadors trying to convince people they should spend time with this stupid music style that dominated and maybe even enriched our lives.
So, it was hard to justify dedicating inches to what we’ve affectionately dubbed “goo” just because we were some of the few souls on the planet blessed/cursed with the same musical illness. Then, after campaigning his ass off for it, Doug ran a premiere for Wormed on main, and it was like, Welp, I guess we’re doing this. It was like crossing a rubicon of sewage, and I agree with Doug that it became fun to expose as many normal readers as possible to the depths of what metal has to offer. Once the seal was broken, I think I followed Wormed up with a premiere of Internal Suffering, and the only comment was something like, “These guys have the worst taste in music.” Oh, just wait.
As for why the weird shit kept getting weirder (and perhaps shittier), I think the factors are threefold. First, as someone who had the scales torched off their eyes by the flamethrower that was the Aquarius Records email list, I’ve always chased the dragon of being baffled by music. But what baffles yesterday is normal today and boring tomorrow. That creep of the ordinary, the regular-degular disease afflicting all music nerds, is further exacerbated by the behind-the-scenes consequences of music blogging, specifically that, due to the deluge of announcements and promos, external repetition keeps redistricting “normal” and resetting the baseline. Like, this isn’t a flex, but it is something I need to talk to my therapist about: My normal is now so far away from a normal person’s normal by dint of me treading water in this mud pit for 20-plus years. I kept moving left of center to find something fresh, and then, as soon as I knew it, I was on a train to Gooville with Encenathrakh as my conductor.
Second, my general approach to music coverage is that big players like Mastodon and Lamb Of God have such massive audiences that writing about them is a waste of time. No band with a respectable Iron Maiden Number gets much out of appearing in The Black Market. However, a brutal tech-sludge with 12 listeners? First, I mean, where is it? Don’t hold out on me, Brad. But seriously, those bands receive a massive bump from getting blurbed. Oftentimes, we’re the first big publication to even sniff at that stuff. While my absolutely inept prognostication powers have become a meme, Wyatt has broken a ton of little-known bands to a broader audience. Choosing to champion the small up-and-comers makes a difference and strengthens the scene, and I have no qualms about focusing my coverage that way.
Finally, because an archaic sense of ethics burdens me like Yoda perched on the back of Luke, I need to cover things I genuinely enjoy. I can’t fake the funk. The reason we stopped covering Blood Incantation is because I don’t like Blood Incantation — no offense to Blood Incantation. Besides my penchant for being unbearably snarky and drive-bying bands within other write-ups like the dedicated world-class hater that I am, I think the last time we even ran something remotely negative in the blurb section was when I delicately panned an Enslaved album that we shouldn’t have been covering in the first place. The List-Making Industrial Complex demands a generally positive outlook for a variety of reasons that are too boring and inside-baseball to enumerate in this long-ass answer everyone already tapped out on 500 words ago. If you’re a freak, you can hear me prattle on about the philosophy of metal list-making on innumerable podcasts that I’m tellingly never invited back to again. So, to keep this short before the band plays me off, when I became responsible for half of the music selections for the Black Market, I had to pick what I liked, and I like weird shit.
The Black Market is over. Michael Jordan has retired a second time; Scottie Pippen is a Rocket; Phil Jackson is off to LA. Elton Brand has just been drafted. (Alas, I’m Elton Brand.) What are your fondest memories of this crazy thing you kept going for over a decade?
Doug: Elton, can you fix the Sixers, please? My fondest memories of The Black Market entirely consist of talking with the other guys who worked on the column, about music or otherwise, outside the bounds of the feature itself — the real treasure was indeed the friends we made along the way. I also had a lot of fun mixing it up in the very active comment sections below the column back in the old times. That’s a part of the internet we grew up with that I miss these days.
Wyatt: It’s crazy to think that this column has been part of my life for so long — nearly a third of it, longer than many things you consider foundational to your identity. Lots of fond memories have come from our team Slack, which is an oddball Pandora’s box brain dump, sort of a hybrid support group and local dive bar (we’ll definitely keep it going). It’s where I feel like I became friends with Ian and Aaron — Doug I see semi-regularly in real life. I’ve learned so much about music from these guys. But I think the fondest memories are just the general feeling of spotlighting music that wasn’t getting coverage on blogs or websites of Stereogum’s size and nature. That and the delight of seeing the column go up, opening it, and being wormholed away into a whole new metal or metal-adjacent world through the wizardry of an Ian column.
Ian: As a lifelong defender of basketball players who can’t jump, Elton Brand was good, and as long as you don’t trick Baron Davis into blurbing for you or give Tobias Harris and Ben Simmons max extensions, you’re going to be fine.
I think my fondest memory will be hanging with my buds. All of us are close friends, amazingly, despite Aaron liking Nevermore, and while the acrid stench of flop sweat permeated many of my emails when it came time to get down to business, it’s simply a joy talking shop and sharing a life with everyone. Making and keeping adult friends is hard, so I’m happy we had this thing that acted like glue as we all hurtled toward oblivion in other aspects of our lives.
As for specifics, you know, there are these moments of absurdity that surface in the chaotic, roiling soup of my mind that make me laugh. Most of them are one-liners — Conjureth’s name sounding like a magician trying to explain to their blind date what they do for work, that kind of stuff. Others are blurbs like Aaron’s Into Coffin write-up. And there were a bunch of truly outlandish moments that never made the column, like the time I made Kirk Windstein’s wife predict how every NFL team would perform in the playoffs based on how much she liked their uniforms. What made this column truly fun, though, was that the other guys weren’t just writing about metal every month but really pushing what writing about metal could be. I’ll miss that. I mostly made bad jokes. I won’t miss that.
So, yeah, I don’t know what legacy The Black Market will have. That’s obviously not for me to decide. But what I’ll always hold with me is being around these super-talented writers who are also great people, and in this sick, sad world, that fills up my heart. The Black Market was Michael Nelson, Aaron Lariviere, Doug Moore, Wyatt Marshall, and this idiot: –Ian Chainey
Damián Antón Ojeda had a bit of a roller-coaster in 2024. Throughout the spring and summer months, he wrote exuberant love song after exuberant love song, all shared, one after another, in pink-cloud bursts on his Patreon, all of these songs hyper-fixated on this new girl he’d been seeing, all of them dedicated to her. In August, Damián “officially” released 14 of those songs across four new Sadness recordings, the titles of which should give you some idea of the intensity of his focus. On 8/19, he delivered the most beautiful girl in the world. On 8/23, it was your perfect hands and my repeated words. On 8/24, he gave us i want to make something as beautiful as you. And on 8/30, simply: i love you, which closed with two distinct songs, each titled “I love you.”
And then, on 8/31, just one day after the cessation of this love-drunk deluge, Damián left this note on his Patreon:
i give up.
im never making music again.
It all feels a bit like The Sorrows Of Young Werther, except Damián here is both Werther and Goethe at once: both the titular lovesick protagonist as well as the brilliant author of this poor kid’s broken heart and his ending. As for us, the audience? We’re over here, just, like, drowning in the whole flood of feelings. Real feelings, raining down on us in real time. This sort of incredibly vivid and direct emotional intensity can’t help but lend itself to some complicated parasocial feelings between artist and fan — and frankly, as a dues-paying member of this particular little cult, it’s hard to step back and play critic. What I can do, though, is tell you what I hear. Which is this:
Sadness’ 2024 output represents, by far, the most melodic, most joyous, most explosive music ever released by Damián Anton Ojeda. It is galaxies removed from Sadness’ early DSBM roots. It is a further evolution and elevation of a catalog that truly has no meaningful equivalent in the history of recorded music. It is the sound of a great artist — an actual genius if you’ll allow me to say that — operating at his highest-yet level, a bold and weird and exhilarating new apex. And it is very clearly, very nakedly, very precariously, the self-portrait of a young artist caught hopelessly in the throes of young love. Very precariously.
Did that love suddenly implode? Did the sudden implosion of that love bring about the end of Sadness? The end of Damián Anton Ojeda’s career as a musician? Not necessarily. He’s got a deep vault, the contents of which will slowly but surely be unearthed. He’s played a handful of live shows over the past couple of months, too, which is a new thing for him, not to mention an incredibly ambitious effort, given the complexity of the work being performed. But all of that stuff…that’s all music of the past. If someday, somehow, a future-Damián were to return to Sadness in earnest — to a post-love Sadness, in a post-love world — I wouldn’t expect it to much resemble any of the Sadnesses he’s given us before. I wouldn’t know what to expect, honestly. I have no idea.
But we’re not here to trip out on the future. We’re here to mark the close of another year, the conclusion of this journey we’ve all taken together. We’re here to huddle close and celebrate the end. It may be winter now, all cold and empty and dark, but when it was spring, when it was summer, it was so bright, so sweet, so loud. –Michael Nelson
My favorite thing about underground extreme metal is the absurdly niche specificity of the stuff. In the absence of viable commercial prospects, the only reward for making it is the thrill of pioneering unique artistic pinnacles until the clock runs out and you need to get a real job. This mechanical emphasis on love of the game yields an endless supply of glorious freakshow bands, in the same way that the hellish pressure around deep-sea hydrothermal vents has given rise to bizarre creatures — yeti crabs, giant tube worms — that would never evolve elsewhere.
Speaking of: Wormed are one of the most comically over-engineered entries in the extreme metal bestiary, playing a wildly intense type of brutal death metal involving Meshuggah-like rhythmic convulsions, astrophysics-themed lyrics, and gruesomely arthropodal vocals that might well come from an abyssal monstrosity. This profile sounds like a fucking train wreck on paper, but Wormed’s greatness is self-evident; they are one of the most celebrated and popular brutal death metal bands ever. I have seen thousands of people absolutely lose their shit to their music live. They’re not for everyone, but they’re really for some.
Omegon marks Wormed’s fourth LP in a long career that goes all the way back to the late ‘90s. They have replaced most of their lineup over that period, sometimes more than once; only bassist Guillermoth and vocalist Phlegeton have survived their evolution. Their songwriting members have turned over repeatedly, but remarkably, the band’s core premise and extraordinarily high standard of quality have persisted. In fact, Omegon is their finest work to date for my money. Call it brutal carcinization: just as Nature has made many attempts to evolve a crab, Metal has made many attempts to evolve a Wormed. For all the regenerating members and glacial growth, this profoundly odd band remains a true joy of life on our dumb planet for fellow extremophile mutants. –Doug Moore
From play, Sin Querencia broods and plots, ranging and prowling territory like a cornered animal, building to strike — and when it does, it unleashes clinical, pummeling fire. Immortal Bird are crushingly heavy, and the Chicago three-piece, which has been around as long as this column, has a unique capacity for conveying deep-seated, painful emotion. On Sin Querencia, they scream and fight and rage against the absurd injustices and indignities of modern life, the Gordian knots of cruelties inflicted by hypocrites. Vocalist Rae Amity delivers one of the most powerful vocal performances of the year, snarling spite, while Nate Madden’s endlessly varied atonal lead guitars and body-jolting grooves of chunky riffs lurch and draw you into an ugly, dystopian sludge. Matt Korajczyk, on drums, powers this war machine with pistons firing at an insane rate and a popping snare racing at an insane BPM. As it relentlessly churns and twists, it feels effortlessly technical, but there’s also a punk attitude and leanings — that shouted passage on “Ocean Endless” wears its heart on its sleeve. Thinking about Sin Querencia, one overwhelming feeling is that it is an incredibly violent listen. But it comes from hurt and pours out as catharsis, and it ultimately wonders how we got to such a loveless, brutal place. –Wyatt Marshall
You know it’s really the end of the Black Market when we’re sticking Effluence in the big list. While we’ve always trafficked in music that could give you tetanus just by listening, few things we cover are as unhinged as sole proprietor and small blarghness owner Matt Stephens’ flagship goo slinger, the brutal death metal band that’s so experimental, so out-there, it’s currently waiting for its order at Milliways, the restaurant at the end of the universe. Even for us, the noted weird shit enthusiasts, this is the bottom of the septic tank, swirling around with Trichomoniasis, Last Days Of Humanity, and the like. If you’re new here, well, uh…maybe cross your eyes and imagine this is Crypt Sermon or something because you’re probably not going to like it. But when has that ever stopped us?
It certainly didn’t stop us a couple of weeks ago when I took you through a sightseeing tour of Necrobiology, Effluence’s fourth(?) full-length. Released during a hectic year for Stephens’ primo splatterer, and innumerable other outfits under the employ of Putrefactive Recordings, Necrobiology is, tldr, bananas. Your honor, I submit the following quotes that I projectile upchucked and were found swimming around in the resulting blurb’s sputum as justification for invoking the crazy-denoting Cavendish:
“… it’s also like getting your head chopped off by a flying Ornette Coleman record during your shift in a silverware factory.”
“You just have to work a little harder to be charmed by it, like a sailor taking a shy siren on a second date.”
“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.”
Wow, reading that back is almost like watching me consign myself to dying alone in real time. Fifteen cats just spontaneously appeared next to me. Anyway, there you go: Every Effluence blurb I write is less an appraisal of the music and more me cannonballing into a kiddie pool filled to the brim with the remnants of my melted mind. Because, yeah, listening to Effluence is like someone poured whatever they were drinking in Street Trash straight into my trepanation hole.
So, offered redemption, here’s my second attempt at a Necrobiology blurb: lol. Just lol. Dude! LOL! Look, I’ve been tracking the edge of heavy metal extremity for over 20 years like a deranged, degenerate David Attenborough. I’ve become inured to so many things a human should not normalize through overexposure. Hyper-ping turbo goregrind shouldn’t ever start to sound like pop music to a sentient, hearing-enabled living being. And yet, Effluence gets up to some gore-drenched hijinks that make even me, the seen-it, done-it, jaded slopaholic binge barfer gutter gremlin, laugh out loud. There’s such pleasure in the cenobite sense in listening to what Matt Stephens has to show you, transforming music into something that sounds like falling under a runaway commercial lawnmower while it chews up a rock garden.
Just listen to…alright, maybe “listen” is the wrong word for Effluence. Just endure “Insectile Nibbling,” a song that’s like an a cappella group made up of sleep paralysis demons trying to mash up Demilich and Buckethead. Just ride out “Enrooted Cerebrum,” which is like Disgorge feeding a still-wiggling Disharmonic Orchestra into a snowplow. Just withstand “Amorphous Horrid Scumhole,” which was also my nickname for much of my time writing here, and is like Malignancy kidnapping Anthony Braxton and forcing him to conduct a seance to bring Henry Cowell back to life.
Say what you will about Necrobiology’s components — the “never hire the Acme movers again” dropped keyboards, “disgruntled pig squeal” woodwinds, “Elvin Jones slapping ants off his drumkit” rhythms, “bear trapped in a trash compactor” growls, and “jet engine trying to disturb the sleep of god” riffs. But, jeez, do those components ever click together like a Lego set of some Lovecraftian elder cosmos chomper that human minds can’t comprehend. In other words, Effluence is an experience rarely heard or felt before. It’s almost 2025. There aren’t a lot of new adventures anymore. Listening to Effluence is one of them. Enjoy it. –Ian Chainey
At first, Morvigor played a kind of melodic, catchy, and slightly quirky death metal that, by their second album, had evolved to incorporate high-production black metal and even hardcore. A seven-year break followed, and the Morvigor that emerged on De Spiegel was a different beast — the band has called it a metamorphosis. Seemingly taking cues from the likes of compatriots Fluisteraars, Turia, Laster, and others, the two-track, twenty-minute De Spiegel is a new Dutch school of atmospheric black metal masterpiece. The low-end points to some of Morvigor’s death metal origins and gives the album a rumbling, neck-jolting force, and when it takes full effect, it hits like a debris-rich tornado. Something that really stands out, even amidst the stunning tumult, are the vocals, shouted and bellowed, that are joined by stentorian choirs that echo across canyons. When the EP opener “Midden in de wereld” comes to its cataclysmic conclusion, you wonder what could follow. Building from ash, the title track leaves the world behind, breaking through troubled skies to an entirely different plane, finding sad, searing melodies and the chorus of the year on its doomed, sky-bound journey. –Wyatt Marshall
Metal can be beautifully complex and sophisticated. It can match any other style of music in terms of compositional depth and nuance; it can address challenging subject matter with profound empathy and seriousness; it can involve delicate dynamics and erudite chordal gestures. Or, it can be Concrete Winds.
Concrete Winds know that things are simple sometimes. They offer exactly one thing musically: a firehose of hydrofluoric acid, aimed at your face. You may think that sounds unpleasant, and you would be correct. This Finnish duo is one of the most aggressive metal bands I’ve ever heard, merging the trebly clatter of culty-cult black metal with the hellacious density of the highest-proof grindcore around to achieve unprecedented nastiness. It’s hard to describe their music without reaching for words associated with industrial chemicals — caustic, corrosive, virulent, astringent. Their self-titled third album consists solely of ever-escalating chaos and pandemonium, performed with cruel conviction by the band, while you repeatedly say “this must be the craziest part on the album — no, it’s gotta be this part — no, wait!” And so forth.
Amidst all the wanton destruction, there is an elegance to Concrete Winds. Below all the layers of outrageous extremity, this album is clearly cut from the same cloth as Slayer’s Reign In Blood — an older model of the craziest shit you’ve ever heard, all the crazier for its cold-blooded efficiency and knifelike balance. Unadulterated chaos it may be, but nary a note is wasted, and not a drop of blood is spilled in vain. Simple, right? –Doug Moore
Damian Master’s Colloquial Sound Recordings has been a gem-filled mine for this column for as long as it’s run, with Master’s own projects, including A Pregnant Light, Aksumite, and others, often making, or topping, the monthly list. It’s an underground institution that’s always stood on its own — fiercely independent, unmoved by trends, and with a vision of how a metal label should look and sound unlike any other. Alongside Master’s own bests, Obliti Devoravit is in the label’s elite tier. The one-person project of Tim Lenger, Obliti Devoravit plays caustic, snarling, and rabid black metal that is also deeply, devastatingly emotional, doling out agony and poetry in equal measure. Lenger is a bass player first, and a disturbing low-end often drives Obliti Devoravit tracks, permeating angst while Lenger’s grating screams and harmonizing guitars dance above. After six EPs and splits, Under My Michigan Sky is where Obliti Devoravit offers its full, magnificent, overwhelming vision. An album written in remembrance of a lost loved one, Under My Michigan Sky is beautiful and terrible, contorted by anguish and exploding in rage and violent renewal. Across five tracks, it absolutely blasts with fury and sorrow, looms menacingly in mid-tempo, lurches with the throes of suffering, and finds brief moments of pure, wondrous joy. The gloom is thick, with low clouds hanging heavy. It’s an incredible album that ranges through stages of grief — an open wound, a phantom limb, a quiet, faded-sunlit room full of memories. –Wyatt Marshall
At the beginning of “Inner Oceans,” one of the standout songs on Convulsing’s third album, Perdurance, you can hear someone breathing. Yes, dad jokesmiths the world over, you’re right: it is literally a breather. The previous two songs are so suffused with sonic tumult and emotional upheaval, these big walls of big feelings, that a listener could use a palate cleanser, an ear reset. Of course, since this is Convulsing, something else is going on there because, with this Australian one-person project, something else is always going on there.
Consider: “Flayed,” the preceding song, a real skull crusher answering “what if Meshuggah but Edge Of Sanity,” ends with breathing, the kind of sharp inhales, the desperate gasps, following a bad dream. “Hurt/ Me/ Again,” Brendan Sloan, Convulsing’s sole member, screams during “Flayed”‘s pre-breathing finale. When paired with the album title — “perdurance,” of enduring forever — the nightmare makes sense. Gasp, gasp, gasp.
So, “Inner Oceans”‘s longer, steadying breath suggests a return to reality, of breaking free from “Flayed”‘s night terror. Maybe. You can have a thousand different reads here. Maybe it’s not somnological at all. Maybe it’s the sound of someone’s anger giving way to ennui, taming fear and channeling that energy towards the necessary pragmatism needed to acclimate to reality. Maybe. Lot of maybes. Here’s a definite: Sloan’s first lines on “Inner Oceans” hit hard. “Stranded in this vessel/ Far away from hope/ Drifting amid a restless calm/ Persistent ache of body’s memory.” Well, shit. Been there. I’ve felt that.
Brendan Sloan has centered his music around “I’ve felt that” for years. Perdurance, though, is the clearest encapsulation of the Convulsing MO. As Sloan said in a roundtable in May, “… I’m opening [Perdurance] by describing the prevailing sensations of my last five years in ‘Pentarch,’ mocking my own self-punishment behaviors in ‘Flayed,’ on to further explorations of mental health crises, asserting my antifascism, and closing it with overtures about noticing the birds chirping, humanity’s interconnectedness, and being completely in love with my partner, and I’m unafraid to do so.” The album, then, is less an exegesis about the human experience than the human experience in all of its messy “I’ve felt that” glory. That Convulsing are so open about that glory’s duality, the subdued triumphs and deafening downfalls, is perhaps the most extreme thing metal can do at this point in its many-tree-rings lifecycle.
Besides the “I’ve felt that”ness of Perdurance, what else comes through is how absurdly detailed Sloan’s music is. I mean, I just burned two paragraphs on a section of breathing that makes up five seconds of the album’s 55-minute runtime. That said, the deep dive feels justified. You could probably take any five seconds on this album and do a graduate-level philosophical analysis. That reads far stuffier than I intend it to. Thankfully, the “I’ve felt this” side is a moderating factor in that regard. Convulsing never sounds up its own ass. It’s not academic, in other words. No, it sounds lived-in. It sounds like it has inhaled and exhaled. It exists. There’s something so relatable about hearing another human just quietly existing, that at the heart of Perdurance, this death metal (and maybe more) album, beats a real, human heart.
So, yeah, I don’t know. I can give you the line about how Perdurance has offered me succor during one of the worst years of my life, and boy, do I have a lot of years to choose from. But taking a myopic glance at Convulsing from my “well, shit” perspective denies the project its universality. Unlike a lot of death metal albums that fixate on finality, living up to the memento mori of the genre’s name, Perdurance is just about existing. It’s the breather between the beginning and the end, where all the life-defining messy stuff happens. Because, again, at its heart, Perdurance has a genuine heart. And it’s life-affirming to hear it beat in unison with your own. –Ian Chainey
Coming up is the old You Could Do It Tonight home for noise rockers. There’s a really fucked up story about this place.
That last sentence might as well be Couch Slut’s mantra. The NSFW New York noise rock quintet is like a swap meet for misery, a clearinghouse for catastrophes that would make most people go catatonic. You Could Do It Tonight, the band’s fourth album, contains the kind of stories that start by looking over one’s shoulder to make sure none of the characters have stepped into the same small town bar. They’re also the kind of stories that end family dinners on a foul note. There’s the haunted water park, the Weaversville Home for Boys, a cock stuffed inside a tiny wire cage. Each tale is so finely detailed, both in a narrative and sonic sense, that they become all the more unnerving.
To that particular point, when You Could Do It Tonight goes dark, it goes dark, like buried under a cave-in in an unlit mine dark. “The man has sawed his arm to the bone,” singer Megan Osztrosits yells with not an ounce of incredulity wasted on the churning and gut-churning “The Donkey,” “and he is bleeding all over the place.”…yeahhhhhhhh. But Couch Slut are also interested in macabre incongruity, a “can’t stop laughing during a funeral” sense of the absurd. “I remember the eyes/ All tied up like Christmas gifts,” Osztrosits unleashes on “Laughing And Crying.” As soon as Christmas is mentioned, drummer Theo Nobel starts playing reindeer bells. In less capable hands, that whiplash would be a mess, like getting your neck adjusted by a chiropractor with tennis elbow. But Couch Slut’s escalating intensity is one hell of a uniting force.
That intensity has become Couch Slut’s calling card, something that naturally extends to the live stage. “From the first note, I’m blacking out and going somewhere else,” Osztrosits told Arielle Gordon in a great profile that ran in Stereogum earlier this year. Unsurprisingly, Osztrosits’ legend has grown as a performer, particularly her custom of wearing, in the parlance of professional wrestling, a crimson mask that’s veiled across her face following, as Gordon puts it, a round of “bashing herself in the skull with her microphone.”
It’s difficult to think of a better way to describe Couch Slut’s music than bashing oneself in the skull with a microphone. This is some primal, aggressive stuff — losing yourself in the moment and hearing about it later from worried friends. Nobel and bassist Kevin Hall lay into these devastating lurches with the walk cycle of a hideous monster. Guitarists Amy Mills and Dylan DiLella (also of Pyhrron, the band whose singer wrote a bunch of blurbs you read a couple minutes ago; Doug also has two guest spots on this record to go full disclosure) trade off on the harrowing job description duties of grinding out sickening jud crunches that sounds like someone fell into industrial gears and screeching out hair-raising howls that put the horror in horripilation. And then there’s that trademark, soul-incinerating Osztrosits scream that, no matter how many times you hear it, never fails to make you feel the phantom sting from the first time they lashed you.
Still, that intensity belies how many clever things Couch Slut are piecing together underneath the maelstrom. That attention to craft is what makes You Could Do It Tonight so compelling. In a sense, the stories and music are entwined like an expertly executed radio play, each playing off the other. I’m still finding new details in the mix tens of listens deep, like finding new bruises on your body after a blackout night on the town. And there’s just so much there, so many clever little micro adornments that make the macro sound even more intense. Your first listen of You Could Do It Tonight is like looking at a stone gargoyle, and your 10th listen is standing back and admiring the whole cathedral. In that same sense, something is awe-inspiring about what Couch Slut, the architect, has built, constructing this titanic twisted tower that is so imposing that it’s strangely beautiful in its resplendent ugliness. Put more simply, this is the audacity of capturing some real shit on a real record. As a result, it has been ringing in my ears all year. So, I gotta agree with the President of the B-side: Crank it up. –Ian Chainey
The anonymous trio that comprise Sleepwalker are scattered around the globe, and listening to the diversity of their collective works, you might think across planets. Sleepwalker began playing what could be described as a kind of noisy, disorienting experimental black metal, and they have always veered into the free-jazzy unknown. The band can be ruinously heavy, but often not in the traditional sense. They use the tried and true metal instrumentation to create low-end, tectonic rumbling, and then they’ll have guitars riffing and noodling at dizzying intervals in the midst or on top of the mix. Then throw in, maybe, a vibraphone or melodica or French horn or didgeridoo. Top it off with buried screams or spoken words, field recordings, and a bunch of other instruments you’ve likely never heard of, and it’s some kind of cross-dimensional jam session. Album and track names are often indecipherable, pulling from non-Latin alphabet languages and referencing some sort of arcane or extraterrestrial lexicon, or perhaps they’re longitude and latitude coordinates. On the surface, it’s challenging and disorienting, but give it a listen, and it’s disarmingly absorbing. It also exerts a gravitational pull that will have you listening again and again.
Delirium Pathomutageno Adductum is Sleepwalker’s furthest venture from that black metal base, and it’s a remarkable, deeply affecting work. Recorded over three years, these four tracks — each five minutes and 40 seconds in length (who knows?) — take the Sleepwalker palette and throw in hair-in-the-wind trad metal vocals, extra doses of psychedelic weirdness, and brooding, elegiac orchestral ambiance. Albums with this much experimentation aren’t supposed to be this catchy, but there are captivating melodic hooks and narratives of an epic scale. The band has always been collaborative and worked with various guests and advisors, and for Delirium Pathomutageno Adductum, they tapped members of Spiral Architect, Habbina Habbina, convulsing, P.M.S./Wench, Traveler, and Chthe’ilist to contribute. How all these voices and minds come together to create this strange treasure is remarkable, a collective faith taking a surreal form. Together, they make the soundtrack to the long, slow, sad death of a star, its violent end, and the residual colorful, tangible impacts it leaves across space and time. –Wyatt Marshall
