Dark Buddha Rising-Mathreyata

Dark Buddha Rising, who paired up with Oranssi Pazuzu last year for the mind-warping Syntheosis under the name Waste of Space Orchestra, return to their own solo ventures, just as their fellow psychedelic black metal collaborators did earlier this year, in injecting a little bit of magic mushroom hallucinosis into black metal through spacy, freakish synth work.

While not quite as psychedelically wild as Oranssi Pazuzu’s transforming of more traditional black metal Mestarin Kynsi,Mathreyata follows a similar pattern of progression through heavy, dizzying atmospheres that build to fulfilling climaxes with a more ambient, droning, and meditative form of blackened post-metal that the band of course give a little dose of LSD to.

And the results are intriguing at the very least. I would highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys atmospheric black metal at its most meditative or Sunn O))) for the enveloping atmospheres their music can create.

8/10

My Top 70 Metal Albums of 2020

2020 was a pretty fucked year, but we got some good shit in spite of the world trying to kill itself and the music industry. A lot of people speculated a huge slowdown in production and release pushbacks since artists wouldn’t be able to tour, yet while artists’ being stuck at home and unable to tour their studio material has been not just a downer but a huge financial stressor on smaller blossoming artists especially, the continuation of creative output has shown just how inspiration-driven, rather than market-driven, the music world is. Music has become less and less of a cash cow for artists as the years go on, but this abrupt halt of all touring was probably one of the biggest blows artists have had to deal with, and it really has done a number on the music industry as a whole. There’s not much money to be made here right now, but goddamn it if that hasn’t held back anyone inspired to offer their musical voice to our aching world, and I’m thankful as hell for it. So here’s to the best metal music of the year, and all the (not piece-of-shit) artists out there weathering the COVID storm and adapting to the suddenly altered climate.

It tends to go without saying, but I’ll just clarify that I construct this list based on what I reviewed this year, which is primarily metal music, yes, but it also sometimes gets into music that is more metal-adjacent. It might not be bonafide metal music, but it does somehow find itself in the broad metal sphere culturally or even stylistically. So when I include albums in this kind of list like Lingua Ignota’s Caligula or Uboa’s The Origin of My Depression, while those albums aren’t exactly metal per se and rather noisy industrial neoclassical post-modern neo-Marxist darkwave (lol), that’s why. When I include Me and That Man even though it’s a gothic acoustic country/folk project, it’s because it’s spearheaded by the frontman of Behemoth. And of course, my opinion, blah blah blah. These always end up being massive and take tons of time, so enough formalities, you know what it is.

70.Vile Creature-Glory! Glory! Apathy Took Helm

The Ontario duo come through with a massive record that seems too thick and sludgy to be just two people. And yet it is, and the band make quite the expressive statement with the style with just the two of them on their third album here, mainly by injecting much more than the usual emotive performance and vulnerability into the mix.

69.Thrown into Exile-II: Illusion of Control

On their sophomore LP, the L.A. band take a step back from the Trivium comparisons that characterized their first album and focus on making vibrant, energetic metalcore with conviction, however familiar and potentially dated it might be.

68.Eternal Champion-Ravening Iron

With one infectious melody after another, Eternal Champion really do evoke their namesake on this infectious batch of the most old-school, power-metal-adjacent 80’s heavy metal, refurbished just enough to make it fitting for the modern era.

67.Blood from the Soul-DSM-5

Another shared brainchild of the prolific Jacob Bannon, along with former Napalm Death guitarist Shane Embury, Blood from the Soul has shifted to become a rather familiarly hardcore project that feels very in line with the Converge frontman’s main project.DSM-5captures that raw, vibrant energy that the style requires, and runs elegantly with it.

66.Havok-V

I’ll grant that I was kind of expecting a little bit more from Havok after my loving of their 2017 thrash revival album, Conformicide, which was quite possibly the thrash album of that decade. Although it didn’t really emerge much from behind the shadow of its predecessor,Vis still another fiery, opinionated outing of Megadeth-inspired thrash that further establishes Havok as one of this new decade’s foremost names in thrash.

65.Inter Arma-Garbers Days Revisited

Undoubtedly the best cover album I heard all year, the Richmond band’s boisterous tributes from the likes of Venom and Ministry to Tom Petty and Prince (and Metallica with the album’s title) showcase their southern rock roots while still letting their sludgy sonic identity shine through it. It’s one of the most mindfully approached cover albums I’ve heard, and one that I’m not at all surprised to hear Inter Arma excelling at.

64.Sumac-May You Be Held

While it’s not as out-there and sludgily expressive as 2018’s post-metal masterpiece, Love in Shadow, this year’s more traditionally ambient May You Be Held still comes with a good deal of ambitious song structuring that allows the band’s eccentricity to come through.

63.Sodom-Genesis XIX

With another solid thrash metal offering on this list, the German thrash metal pioneers seem the pull from a bottomless well of enthusiasm as energy for the genre as they blast and riff their way through their 16th album, and you can feel the love the band still have for the style and you can’t help but join them.

62.Voidsphere-To Sense | To Perceive

I was prepared for the worst when the super lo-fi black metal tremolo picking kicked in, but Voidsphere’s fourth LP kept the dark celestial acid trip exciting and the sonic spiral into the unknown unceasing to make for an album that throws you to the void and really captures that “void metal” moniker in wholy engulfing atmospheric black metal fashion.

61.Sinira-The Everlorn

With some of the most consistently engaging Swedish melodeath of the year, this debut full-length from the Texan band was one of the most promising and already accomplished debuts I heard all year, and I hope that Sinira can keep the vitally soulful melodies and performative energy going on their future endeavors because The Everlorn is a real treat already.

60.Völur-Death Cult

Though it does get off to a bit of a slow start with the more standard doom metal of the first two of the album’s four tracks, Völur’s Death Cult eventually does make good on its promise of freakish folk metal that makes you feel like you’ve wandered off into the woods and run into a cult that wants to rope you up and hang you over a fire to slow roast your legs.

59.Thou&Emma Ruth Rundle-May Our Chambers Be Full

After a pair of ill-conceived and resultingly lackluster cover albums, Thou come through with a win with their latest offering original material, which their collaboration with Emma Ruth Rundle certainly bolstered significantly. Her haunting vocals add a unique element of hypnotism to the band’s brash atmospheric blackened sludge that really makes the album the success that it is.

58.Suicide Silence -Become the Hunter

Probably one of the most significant turnarounds I’ve covered since starting this blog: I wasn’t as harsh on it as most critics (and fans especially), but the band’s widely panned self-titled album still ended up on my first list of worst albums of the year back in 2017. And here in 2020 they’re on my best-of list with their follow-up. It’s no surprise really; the self-titled album was really just a weird misguided blip on the deathcore icons’ timeline, and with Become the Hunter, Suicide Silence (who clearly heard fans’ message loud and clear) drop the tee-hee and resume their mantle of tasty, groovy deathcore with the best album they’ve made since losing Mitch Lucker.

57.Aseitas-False Peace

With their second album, False Peace, Aseitas establish at the very least a respectably ambitious and experimental ethos that produces both fascinating results in the present and exciting prospects for the band’s future of warping death metal, industrial metal, and metalcore into twisted forms.

56.Psychotic Waltz-The God-Shaped Void

One of the year’s most impressive comebacks comes from the San Diego prog metal pioneers of Psychotic Waltz, whose fifth album finally materialized a decade after their 2010 reunion. And it makes sense, given that context, that the band’s comeback album sounds so fluid and well-balanced. They’ve been rebuilding that chemistry for a decade now, and have had plenty of time to groom this long-awaited release, which serves as a prime guiding example of both a return from the grave and of classic progressive metal.

55.Obsidian Kingdom-Meat Machine

Perhaps the most overtly eccentric and attention-grabbing album on this list, like a dude in a rainbow tuxedo at a death metal show, Obsidian Kingdom first and foremost put on a dazzling show that keeps you engaged and interested, experimenting freely with modern progressive and sludge metal elements, but also showcasing an aptitude with the styles they contort that gives them the capability to do so intentionally rather than amateurishly.

54.Hatebreed-Weight of the False Self

Jamey Jasta and company came through with one of the most energizing and motivational hardcore/metalcore albums of the year. After the raging political commentary of 2016’s The Concrete Confessional,Weight of the False Self directs Hatebreed’s hardcore energy toward individual encouragement and betterment, and it’s a lyrical approach that I think fits them well and directs them to make some of their most slamming and effective hardcore music. Its songs have all already received a good few plays in my workout playlist.

53.ACxDC-Satan Is King

And speaking of vibrant hardcore, ACxDC come through with a quick, but wickedly biting offering of thoroughly aggitated and fired-up powerviolence that seems perfectly tailored to the broad social unrest of the year, channeling it more than capturing it. It’s a sharp, vicious album that feels fit to represent a lot of people’s feelings about the prominence of governmental failures in responding to the economic distress of the pandemic, the rise of fascism, and police brutality.

52.Regarde Les Hommes Tomber-Ascension

The French five-piece’s third album was one of few vibrant post-black-metal records I heard this year in the vein of Numenorean, and Ascension certainly struck for me a similarly emotive chord that kept me coming back to it all year long despite my listening to so much other music.

51.Afterbirth-Four Dimensional Flesh

One of my favorite brutal technical death metal extravaganzas of the year, Four Dimensional Flesh is a treat in both departments without sacrificing one for the other, and it’s a fucking blast the whole way through.

50.Scour-Black

It really says a lot for an EP to make it here, but Scour (despite indeed being a supergroup) have really outdone themselves with their high-octane, grindcore-informed black metal on their third, and best, EP so far, Black. The band of seasoned players packs more into 16 minutes than most bands in their proximity do in 3-4 times that length.

49.Moloken-Unveilance of Dark Matter

Moloken go mad and experimental on their sludgy and tormented atmospheric fourth full-length, Unveilance of Dark Matter, affirming their status’s one of the style’s foremost innovators alongside the likes of Amenra and The Atlas Moth.

48.Lorna Shore-Immortal

On their third LP, Lorna Shore showed that deathcore at its most gratuitous and sickening is a force to be reckoned with, with nastily inhuman vocals and ripping instrumental shows of physicality.

47.Avatar-Hunter Gatherer

The melodeath showmen silence their doubters with a gloriously anthemic and theatrical performance on Hunter Gatherer that never blinks or flinches in embarrassment, and it has no reason to. The album is more conceptually cohesive and intriguing than a lot of the prog I heard this year, and more life-affirmatinf and inspirational than pretty much all the power metal I heard too. This one was a big, definitive win for Avatar.

46.Spirit Adrift-Enlightened in Eternity

Just a year after the beloved Divided by Darkness, Spirit Adrift go even more retro on Enlightened in Eternity, bringing (albeit less than last time) a vital melodic beauty with them that few other acts in their vicinity are doing to the degree they are.

45.The Black Dahlia Murder-Verminous

I had a bit of a change of heart on The Black Dahlia Murder this year, and a big part of that was the undeniable death metal power of the band’s ninth album, Verminous, whose slick melodies and punishing brutality work exquisitely together without one dulling the other. I’ve been harsh on the band’s work in the past, but the infectious brutality of Verminous has really made me rethink my views on them, and by repeated returns to the album throughout the year have been the sufficient indication that I might have had it all wrong about them.

44.Alestorm-Curse of the Crystal Coconut

How this band are able to keep going is beyond me, but I’m here to applaud it, not argue with it. The Scottish pirate metal masters came through with a strong return-to-form album back in 2017, with No Grave but the Sea recalibrating the band to their unique brand of folk metal that they established on Captain Morgan’s Revenge after going off into the stylistic weeds on Sunset on the Golden Age in 2014. But that Curse of the Crystal Coconut embodies that carefree pirate life attitude that makes Alestorm so fun, venturing again into weird stylistic seas, this time with more success than last.

43.Xibalba-Años en Infierno

As fiery as their album’s title implies, Xibalba bring a simple, but welcome, hardcore flavor to slow-beating death metal that frames the genre’s naturally crushing attributes in a flattering light.

42.Tombs-Under Sullen Skies

After a less-enticing appetizer EP earlier in the year, Tombs unleashed their full power and mastery of the arts of death, doom, and black metal on Under Sullen Skies, a record whose consistently solid compositions kept me hooked into it and rather impressed after the taster the band offered earlier in the year.

41.Autonoesis-Autonoesis

Riding a melodic steed into the fray of progressive black metal and thrash metal out of fucking nowhere, this was hands down one of the best independent debut albums of the year that I feel very lucky to have caught wind of before year’s end. I’m eager as hell to see what’s next, if there is indeed something next, for Autonoesis.

40.Dark Buddha Rising-Mathreyata

Coming hot off their collaboration with Oranssi Pazuzu last year, the Finnish psychedelists clearly sharpened their approach to their spacey, atmospheric sludge drones through their collaboration with one of the best acts to train alongside. Mathreyata is significantly more layered and engaging than past Dark Buddha Rising albums, and I have loved basking in the band’s progress since it came out.

39.Sylosis-Cycle of Suffering

Maybe a little too metalcore-influenced and melodic to be considered a straight-up thrash album, but if we let thrash be a diverse field, this was my thrash album of the year. And it’s just a simple recipe of delicious riffs, soaring melodies, and performances with conviction that carry Cycle of Suffering over the line.

38.Carach Angren-Frankensteina Strataemontanus

And speaking of big performances, the theatrical Dutchmen’s sixth album is as conceptual and immersive as ever for them as they take freakish artistic liberties with the 18th century science experiments that were supposed to have inspired Frankenstein (the novel). The symphonic elements are bigger than ever and the band are committed to the act, which makes for an intensely captivating show.

37.Executioner’s Mask-Despair Anthems

A goth melancholic waltz equal parts White Light from the Mouth of Infinity-era Swans and Type O Negative, Despair Anthems is a bleak, meditative set of entrancing songs that certainly felt all too fitting during much of this year.

36.Red-Declaration

Completing basically back-to-back bouncebacks with the release of Declaration, Red redeem themselves after the release of what I think is their worst album (Gone), which followed immediately after a very welcome return to form on Of Beauty and Rage. And like their previous return to form, the band drop the contrived overproduction from Gone and bring back the bombastic, cathartic orchestral elements that have given their brand of inspirational alternative metal its muscle, serving as a reminder of what made this style so resonant in its mid-2000’s peak.

35.Code Orange-Underneath

Probably one of the most big-hyped follow-ups of the year, I saw a lot of reviewers and publishers calling this thing perfection almost reflexively immediately after it was released, but for me, I don’t think it quite reached the lofty bar the band set in 2017 with Forever. But even though I wasn’t as floored by it as so much of the music writing world was, what Code Orange do on Underneath to push metallic hardcore deeper into the more glitchy industrial territory they helped open up is a thrill and much more exciting than the vast majority of the metalcore and hardcore out there.

34.Pharmacist-Medical Renditions of Grinding Decomposition

Well we didn’t get any Pissgrave or old school Carcass this year, so Pharmacist came through to fill the void with some of the most surprisingly accomplished and compositionally astute goregrind albums I’ve heard in a long time. The band are able to make the absolutely nasty into something weirdly inviting through their keen sense of groove.

33.The Acacia Strain-Slow Decay

The Acacia Strain are another band who I warmed up to this year after being kind of overly critical of them in the past, and their roaring back into form with Slow Decay definitely helped that along. The band found again in this album the hardcore mojo that they’ve used to set themselves apart from the rest of the deathcore crop.

32.Ulver-Flowers of Evil

I was surprised at Ulver’s continuation of the new wave synth rock worship that they engaged in on 2017’s The Assassination of Julius Caesar, but not at all surprised, given how well the band fared on their previous foray into the style on that 2017 album, at how smoothly and effortlessly the group once again embodied the style’s best characteristics.

31.Ghostemane-ANTI-ICON

I don’t know if the verdict is out on this album among critics, but something tells me Ghostemane probably isn’t the darling of most people writing for Pitchfork or Rolling Stone. And while I get the sense that its shouty, tormented, edgy industrial metal take on rapcore didn’t make ANTI-ICON a high-minded enough of album to place in most publications’ year-end lists, I couldn’t help returning to it repeatedly this year and loving its raw honesty and addictive expressive realness.

30.Tortuga-Deities

This was one of the most happenstance of my Bandcamp findings this year, but I was so thankful to have heard this debut. After dealing with a lot of uncreative or just tired stoner doom Sabbath-worship, Tortuga’s progressive brand of stoner metal that they showcase on their debut here is full of life, dynamic, and creativity and is refreshingly far removed from the Master of RealityandVol. 4.

29.Cryptic Shift-Visitations from Enceladus

I’m definitely riding alongside quite a hype train with this debut album here, which was quite lavishly adorned with praise and exultations within the Bandcamp world. Deservedly so, Visitations from Enceladus is quite the bold debut into the technical death and thrash metal void that Vektor have left behind. And it’s far from being a meandering wanktest; the band go super-big-brained on the sprawling progressive compositions, especially the 26-minute centerpiece of the album, “Moonbelt Immolator”. It’s an adventure of an album for anyone eager for that techy sci-fi thrash; the hype on this one is legit.

28.Caustic Wound-Death Posture

Out of all the grindcore I went through on my big grindcore binge earlier in the year, Caustic Wound’s thick, quick, nasty, no-nonsense Death Posture was the album I kept coming back to the most for its totally engulfing storm of deathly musical shrapnel. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but the way it’s sure spinning the shit out of the wheel is something you don’t see that often.

27.Myrkur-Folksange

And on a very different note, the Danish singer’s return to her folky roots on Folksange is without a drop of metal in it, only here on this list because Myrkur is what people would consider a “metal band”, but god do I love this album a lot. Amelie Brunn’s long-standing love for and experience with Scandinavian folk music shines magnificently on this album and its ethereal beauty really transports you to some quiet pre-industrial Scandinavian village in the snow-topped mountains and makes you feel like you could stay there.

26.Aversions Crown-Hell Will Come for Us All

Aversions Crown bring a good dose of passionate melody to the high-octane techdeath they play and they integrate it in a rather constructive manner on Hell Will Come for Us All that only bolsters and takes nothing away from the grandiosity of their sound.

25.Terminal Nation-Holocene Extinction

The doomer energy is strong with this one, and for good reason; I can’t blame Terminal Nation for their bleak outlook. But alongside the band’s apocalyptic prophecies on Holocene Extinction is a well-balanced cocktail of doom, grind, and death metal generating plenty of justified ire and directing it at the deserving institutions.

24.Within the Ruins-Black Heart

At the intersection between techdeath and deathcore, Within the Ruins provide a desperately needed creativity and instrumental freshness to the style that makes Black Heart such a fun and exciting listen.

23.Neptunian Maximalism-Éons

At 123 minutes in length, this thing is a monster of an album. Yet it speaks to the album’s effectiveness that its two-hour length really doesn’t feel like much of a factor while listening to it. Time doesn’t really seem to mean anything in the throes of the massive whirlpool of chaotic percussion, disconcerting jazz arrangements, and monolithic metallic drones that pull you in and envelope you in completely. It sure is a time commitment in the real world, but in the alternate dimension the album constructs, time doesn’t matter, and you’re too busy being sucked through the sonic vortex to care about it.

22.Thy Catafalque-Naiv

Thy Catafalque is a well-loved and well-respected band for their consistent ambition and avant-garde approach to metal music. And maybe it’s because pushing boundaries and crafting odd, unique progressive metal experiences is the norm for them that Naiv seemed to fly under the radar as an early-year release. Regardless, it’s an album whose brilliant experiments in progressive metal and jazz fusion deserve to be appreciated and applauded.

21.Spirit Possesion-Spirit Possesion

One of the year’s freshest and most invigorating black metal albums was this eponymous debut from the Oregonian duo. Sticking to the gritty and rebellious attitude that metal built its roots in and which black metal developed its own corpse-painted spin on, the band reject modernity and embrace tradition, and the fiery performances of all the tasty licks and riffs they sprinkle over the album really makes it hard to argue with their choice in doing so.

20.Inexorum-Moonlit Navigation

Inexorum really put the “melodic” in melodic death metal on the beautifully soulful melodies of Moonlit Navigation, whose harmonious, Khemmis-esque guitar leads give the Viking battle cries behind them a deeper sense of purpose than just surviving and beating whatever challenges lie ahead.

19.Emmure-Hindsight

Now here’s an album that I don’t think any of the critics are getting wet for. Frankie Palmeri and Emmure were always kind of the pariah of the metalcore world, and Frankie’s hunger for controversy, however tasteless, outshining the band’s generic try-hard tough guy metalcore music made them a pretty easy target to pick on. But after the Palmeri reset in 2017 with a new band and the mission statement of Look at Yourself, Emmure are starting to hit back, and the strength they’ve trained up is simple. Bangers. That’s it. Hindsight is a sharp, punchy, and to-the-point, no fat to trim, nothing but agile, dirty-fighting djenty metalcore. With only a few songs cracking even the two-and-half-minute mark, the band pack only the densest, most hard-hitting shit into the tight boxes they have, handing the baton to the next song before the first gets even a little fatigued and loses even a little bit of pace.

18.Countless Skies-Glow

With big prog metal ambitions and a real drive to shoot for the stars, Countless Skies hit their celestial target on the absolutely gorgeous progressive melodeath of Glow, whose operatic glory and symphonic majesty would make Devin Townsend smile in awe. Feel free to judge this one by its beautifully painted cover, because it really is beautiful.

17.AbysmalDawn-Phylogenesis

I was relieved that this band had not hung up their capes after the six-year wait for this album, and once again, Abysmal Dawn’s compositional focus produces some of the most crisp and infectious death metal songs of the year. Phylogenesis is a representative of modern death metal in its most photogenic, highlighting the benefits of the genre’s technical evolution.

16.Expander-Neuropunk Boostergang

I suppose this is my thrash album of the year. Having listened to the band’s previous and rough experiments with thrash in preparation for their debut on Profound Lore, I wasn’t really expecting much, but the band did really get their grip on the experimental steering wheel with this album. Crystalizing their sound on their sophomore LP, Neuropunk Boostergang is a fascinating and eye-catching blackened disfigurement of the genre in the best way possible. The harrowing sounds give the futuristic apocalyptic outlook of the album its fear factor, and this is a kind of technical, experimental, blackened form of thrash that I certainly don’t hear anyone else doing.

15.Carnation-Where Death Lies

Another breathtaking sophomore effort, Carnation follow up the bulgingly muscular old-school death metal of 2018’s Chapel of Abhorrence with another punishing offering of the same ass-kicking on Where Death Lies. It’s another of the year’s many monuments to the natural power of the unadultered death metal delivery. Thick, ground-shaking distortion. Fast double-bass. Mean fucking low-tuned grooves. Fierce growls. Carnation don’t need much else to pound your skull into the ground.

14.Undeath-Lesions of a Different Kind

And an even more deathly debut album, Undeath come out of nowhere with the stupidest, nastiest death metal riffs of the year. Even more old-school, even more down-tuned, even deeper gurgly death growls than Carnation, Lesions of a Different Kind is an indulgent exercise in Morbid Angel worship that I can’t help but keep coming back for repeated helpings of. The nasty, stupid caveman riffs, the delectable bass lines, I can’t keep myself away from it.

13.Gazpacho-Fireworker

The Norwegian prog-rockers go big on the layered and choir-bolstered arrangements of Fireworker, which transforms their ordinarily tempered and unassuming prog rock into a cinematic statement piece of instrumental grandeur, and god what a fun time it is. It’s great to hear them take this leap and put more instrumental weight on the bar to see how much more they can lift by playing with all these new elements, and I do hope this isn’t the last of it.

12.End-Splinters from an Ever-Changing Face

This meeting of brilliant minds, to me, was the metalcore album of the year, and the various contributors’ pedigrees show through the smart arrangements, tight performances, and raw energy in every nook and cranny of the album. Splinters from an Ever-Changing Face is less industrially supplement than Code Orange’s or Vein’s recent work, and less openly angsty than Nails or Knocked Loose, but in its raw and violent form, it’s a great showcase of the natural mosh-inducing aggression of metallic hardcore.

11.Haunt-Mind Freeze

In seeking to emulate the glory of the glory days of heavy metal in the 1990’s, the Fresno-based traditionalists have also matched the prolific output of their heroes in their early years. After putting out an album last year and the year before, Mind Freeze was the first of two albums the band put out this year, and what a tribute to the genre’s melodic forefathers. Advantaged by hindsight and informed by the styles of melodies of today that the band show to fit well with the older style, Haunt would undoubtedly hold their ground in the landscape it time-travels to, and Mind Freeze is my favorite 80’s metal album of 2020.

10.Neaera-Neaera

The German quintet’s inspired comeback after their brief disbandment produced the most committed, unflinching offering of melodic death metal the year had to offer, made all the more impactful by the band’s invested performances and metalcore-influenced punch. It’s an album deserving of its eponymous status that the band certainly should feel proud of, proving whatever they needed to prove to come back after their break-up.

9.Pyrrhon-Abcess Time

No album I have ever heard captures quite so vividly the real-life nightmare world of the late-stage capitalist state through such productively experimental means as Pyrrhon here on Abscess Time. Stringing together these off-kilter rhythms, disorienting progressions of dissonant chords, and migraine-tormented screams about the horrors of alienated labor with thematically relevant film samples that help give the album a cinematic sort of immersiveness, Abscess Time is a freakish monster so hideous it’s impossible to look away, because all its ugliness is already a part of you.

8.Humavoid-Lidless

The album that scratched my Meshuggah-loving itch the best this year, Lidless is a blast of a prog metal album and a hell of a mission statement from the up-and-coming Finnish band. Stirring smoothly the proggy grandiosity of Devin Townsend, the synth-play of Dream Theater, and the hypertense jazz piano that Imperial Triumphant are known for into their Meshuggah-inspired sense of groove, Humavoid have made something entirely their own in spite of the identifiable sources of the ingredients, and it’s a whirlwind of an experience in a very positive manner.

7.Gaerea-Limbo

The mass that Gaerea sit us through on Limbo is hardly like any boring-ass religious ritual you’ve ever had to actually sit through. Though the experience the masked Portuguese liturgists create on their second full-length is a pretty religious one, holding back nothing as they bleed out an utterly transfixing and petrifying opus of expressively raw and emotional shaking blackened death metal and post-metal. It’s an album that doesn’t hold back and it’s heavy more than just in its distorted guitars and titanic growls; I highly recommend it and can vouch for the hype it got.

6.Mamaleek-Come and See

The anonymous San Francisco-based duo really outdid themselves on this one; Come and See was by far the weirdest and most artistically experimental album (to succeed to such a degree) that I heard all year. Twisting dizzying swells of jazz and blues instrumentation into hypnotizing, yet unsettling figures of noise and metal. Even though I don’t think I would ruin it by doing so, it’s one of those albums that I feel like I couldn’t possibly describe well enough to do it justice. It’s a one-of-kind album for which “interesting” is a gross understatement. And I highly suggest you join me in figuring out what the hell this thing is if you haven’t already.

5.Greg Puciato-Child Soldier: Creator of God

But speaking of albums I don’t want to spoil by going over every detail about them, Greg Puciato’s debut solo album, Child Soldier: Creator of God, is the solo album every artist dreaming of a solo career dreams of making. Puciato admitted the album came about through his accumulating of songs that felt unfit for any of his other projects, and it’s an album that seems to be born out of a lot of the same wide-variety ambitions that makes so many other solo albums like it fall flat on their faces. For every style from sludge metal to shoegaze to synthwave on here, Puciato shows a deep familiarity with it that makes the songs here feel so genuine. I have been absolutely in love with this album and only falling deeper with it. It is absolutely beautiful and stunningly impressive in what it’s able to accomplish. I can’t say enough good things about this album; Greg Puciato has quite possibly outdone himself with this one here.

4.Ulcerate-Stare into Death and Be Still

Somehow simultaneously atmospheric, emotionally gripping, and crushingly heavy, the sixth album from the forward-thinking New Zealanders is their most accomplished. The way the band strip away the artificial layers to pull the fast-pumping heart of death metal to the surface of the music and present it in a very human light is something else, something that I hear much more of in the black metal world, yet Ulcerate have made death metal atmospheric and meditative, strengthening rather than sacrificing the core heaviness of death metal. Those the band’s supposed pretentiousness has already pushed away might even see more clearly in the band’s reaching of an aspired sound on this album what they have been going for all this time and might be reeled back in by the crushing emotional heaviness and the crushing death metal heaviness in the gorgeous, somber, yet fire-throwing guitar work and the stoic humanism of the monstrous death growls. Ulcerate really landed on something here, striking the gold they’ve been steady tracing their way too, and while it definitely has its barriers to entry, I can’t recommend this album enough.

3.Deadspace-A Portrait of Sacrificial Scars

This album sadly is the Australian band’s last, which they announced their disbandment with the release of back in March. And while it’s a farewell as bittersweet as any, if it’s a high note the band wanted to end on, so can’t blame them for stepping away now because they certainly did so here. The band revitalized their sound in a big, and ultra-drepressive, way with the ample output of last year, and A Portrait of Sacrificial Scars is the indeed grand culmination of their work toward this more full-bodied, and terrifyingly existential form of DSBM. Adding tastefully the haunting singing of backing choirs to their arsenal of depressive black metal weaponry, Deadspace go out in as much of a blaze of glory as a band in their field can, with pure emotional realness and a despondent sound so black, heavy, dense, and crushing it starts to swallow the light from the soul into the black hole of despair the supernova of a band has collapsed into. And like any big celestial event, this album is a fucking thing to behold and be swept in awe into. I don’t think there will be another album like it for a long time. Thank you Deadspace, not just for your final work, but for all of it. I’ll miss you a lot.

2.Imperial Triumphant -Alphaville

This fucking album! Launching into a second similarly styled avant-garde album about the ugly corporate underbelly of their home city, the New Yorkers double down on the harrowing integration of nightmarish jazz instrumentation from 2018’s Vile Luxury, proving with Alphaville that their enigmatic genius was no fluke. And now the band are even more fluent in this unworldly language they’ve created, capturing the hell of the urban sprawl in horror trip hallucinations set to death metal that scares you off the ledge of the skyline and cockeyed jazzy piano lines that smile creepily as you fall through a bottomless pit of skyscraper lights sprinting past you. It is a hell of an album in a very literal sense of the phrase!

1.Oranssi Pazuzu-Mestarin Kynsi

At last, my favorite album of the year, one I could not stop playing over and over again like a drug, and very much like a drug-induced experience, is Oranssi Pazuzu’s psychedelic black metal magnum opus, Mestarin Kynsi. Like Ulcerate this year, Oranssi Pazuzu found on this album an optimized sonic formula that they had been tweaking meticulously toward perfection since the beginning of their career, and what a crystallizing point Mestarin Kynsi is! I wrote a lot about it already this year, and I feel like I am probably just going to repeat myself if I go on about its intense cerebral experience and how layered and evolved the band’s psychedelic black metal sound has become; this album is an experience unlike any other that at this point I just want to slather more praise onto. This album is a huge achievement for Oranssi Pazuzu and psychedelic black metal, which is realized to its fullest form yet (as far as what I’ve heard goes) on Mestarin Kynsi; if the prospect of psychedelic black metal ever sounded ludicrous or if previous products of that genre or other albums slapped with that label didn’t sound convincingly deserving of being called psychedelic, Mestarin Kynsi changes that. The band’s brilliant sense of dynamic and atmospheric build is on full display here as the effects-drenched walls of guitar sound and other-worldly swells of synthesizer psychedelia they employ create this colorful, hypnotic wormhole that swallows you whole and spits you out, after a time too unimportant to comprehend during such an experience, wide-eyed and sweating on the ground, stunned and speechless. Without a doubt my favorite album of the year.

My 25 Favorite Metal Songs of 2020

There are always a lot of songs worth appreciating at the end of the year, way more than 25, and I have done like 90-song lists before, which is nuts. But I’m trying to not go utterly insane this year; it’s been insane enough on its own. I’m keeping this one kind of on the short side so that I can put more energy not the top albums I want to highlight. As with each list, the weird, picky compulsive side of me has a weird selection process that basically tries to exclude stand-alone singles that could be featured more fully as part of an album in the future, like Gojira’s “Another World”. It’s not perfect, but it feels weird to include songs like that here when they could make a future list as part of an album too. So here they are, my 25 favorite metal songs of the year:

25.An Autumn for Crippled Children - “Silver”

One of the most ethereal and human moments on an ambient black metal album this year, “Silver” in all its fuzzily produced glory captures the genre at its most vulnerable in a rather succinct package and I can only love and respect it.

24.Sylosis - “Arms Like a Noose”

Another standout among many, “Arms Like a Noose” finds the UK act bringing a metalcore influence to modern melodic thrash, and a retro-flavored breakdown that, in better times, would undoubtedly make the pit explode into a frenzy and the rest of the crowd headbang in full unified swing.

23.Carach Angren - “Frankensteina Strataemontanous”

Meshing a marching palm-muted chugging rhythm with unhinged, anxiety-inducing piano chords, the title track to the ever-theatrical Dutchmen’s sixth album is an much of a bop as a menacing symphonic black metal track can be.

22.The Acacia Strain - “Crippling Poison”

With a sick, stomp-dancing riff at its core, this song is a furious deathcore chugger that captures the hardcore ethos that makes The Acacia Strain such a powerful force in deathcore when they’re at their best the way they were on this past album.

21.Trivium - “The Defiant”

This one seemed to be the under-the-radar hit for the band this year, in a few of the same ways “Caustic Are the Ties That Bind” was on In Waves. Indeed the two sound kind of like sister songs in their emotive guitar-powered melodies (the harmonious solo here seemingly taking a bit of a cue from Khemmis) and anthemic catharsis. It ends on a pretty bright and hopeful note, that I was a little cold on at first, but have really come to appreciate now. It’s a bold, beautiful track that captures Trivium at their best.

20.Suicide Silence - “Two Steps”

After the embarrassment of their self-titled album in 2017, Suicide Silence came back hard with the lead single to this year’s redemptive Become the Hunter, which reinvested in the band’s knack for combining tasty grooves and scary breakdowns that made them such a force to be feared in the deathcore world.

19.Undeath - “Entranced by the Pendulum”

It was hard to pick a favorite from the uniformly filthy and delicious Lesions of a Different Kind, but I really liked the vocal hooks, the drum accents, and variety of riffs (especially the low-string-bending at the bridge) of “Entranced by the Pendulum”, which made a consistent standout as I came back to the album over and over again after it came out.

18.Alestorm - “Tortuga”

The way the true Scottish pirate metal outfit expanded their sound to involve trap, electronic music elements, and a rap feature on this absolute party of a song give me hope that there is plenty of treasure left in Alestorm’s chest and that the band will defy all the expectations of those who thought they would run out of ways to make music about the pirate’s life.

17.Lamb of God - “Resurrection Man”

Lamb of God’s self-titled effort this year was a pretty low-risk affair, but “Resurrection Man” was stark exception in the middle of the track list, its more scowling first half exploring a variety of unusual guitar styles for the band to build the tension that breaks into a more quick-paced headbang-fest and an absolutely slamming breakdown that makes it hands down the highlight of the album.

16.Carnation - “Iron Discipline”

The Belgians kicked off their practically illegally heavy sophomore release with an energetic, infectious, growl-along banger that certainly captures their emphatic no-bullshit approach to death metal at its most diplomatic, offering a chance to join in the vicious death metal attack before it blasts every in front of it to death.

15.Humavoid - “Aluminum Rain”

Stirring together off-kilter rhythms, jazzy piano chords, a tasty central Meshuggah-esque eight-string groove into a wicked, and a groovy synth-driven bridge into a dizzying prog banger maybe even too mad scientist for Devin Townsend, “Aluminum Rain” stands out as a bolstering highlight in the Finnish outfit’s breakout LP among several tracks of ambitious modern progressive metal.

14.Nearea - “Carriers”

Another solid cut on an album of gems, I found myself coming back to “Carriers” the most out of any track on Nearea’s self-titled album this year for how it kind of just has it all in terms of what made the band’s comeback album this year so exciting. Combining melodic death metal at its most furious with metalcore at its punchiest, it is a sharp, deadly ripper of a track.

13.Avatar - “A Secret Door”

The highlight anthem from the band’s most recent theatrical musical release, Avatar go big and high-soaring on “A Secret Door”, with a pretty palpable power metal influence that absolutely blows the house down.

12.Khemmis - “Down in a Hole”

The thriving Denver doom optimists released a little compilation EP this year whose lead single was a glorious and synthless cover of Dio’s iconic inspirational synth metal anthem, “Rainbow in the Dark”. But the band put out three cover versions this year, and that was not the cover that blew me away the most. Khemmis took part in a multi-artist tribute to Alice in Chains’ grunge cornerstone, Dirt, and they got to cover the albums depressive acoustic ballad, “Down in a Hole”. While Code Orange were getting props for going acoustic for their live cover of the song earlier this year and doing a pretty good job, Khemmis kept the amps on and the results were stunning. The band make the song come to them and the grungy depression that Alice in Chain poured into the writing of the song pairs so unbelievably with Khemmis’ solemn, but hopeful doom metal; it’s an utterly goosebumps-inducing cover, and I can’t urge everyone enough to check it out.

11.Oranssi Pazuzu - “Oikeamielisten sali”

After its lengthy, but warped string intro’s serving as a breather from all the psychedelic mayhem preceding it, “Oikeamielisten sali” plunges Oranssi Pazuzu’s psychedelic black metal magnum opus into a spinning, spiraling world of flashing lights and disorienting sounds that feel like an unreal, but vivid nightmare’s plunge into a tunnel to hell.

10.End - “Pariah”

The pit-karate-inducing highlight of what I think has to be the metallic hardcore album of the year, End show just why their no-bells-and-whistles approach to the sound is so potent on the fiery and crushing “Pariah”, whose concluding breakdown brings the already chaotic and technically impressive track to a deservedly violent climax.

9.Ulcerate - “Inversion”

Similarly to how the self-titled Nearea album was hard to choose from, picking a favorite off Stare into Death and Be Still was a wonderfully difficult task because the band hit the mark with each song in kind of the same way. The guitar playing across the album is incredibly creative and emotional for such thick, titanium-clad death metal, and the band indeed surrenders not a shred of what makes the genre so great to listen to in its more simplistic forms, which I think the particularly heart-wrenching guitar work on “Inversion” demonstrates the most. It’s a good taster for anyone who might be skeptical that death metal can manage to resonate with your innermost melancholic ponderings on death while still firing on all cylinders.

8.August Burns Red - “Three Fountains”

The grand, gorgeous, and heartfelt metalcore closer to the band’s ninth full-length builds up through already-emotional guitar melodies to a glorious sing-along climax that rounds the album off on such an inspiring note.

7.Emmure - “(F)inally (U)nderstanding (N)othing”

Frankie Palmeri and company went hard this year, and I think the opening track from Hindsight best captures the band’s singular directive of making concussion-inducing, furious bangers from front to back and making everything as aggressive and punchy as possible. There’s no one to push around here at home, but that central riff, that verse beat, and that groovy bridge rhythm all make me go fucking stupid wherever I am. Absolute unit of a song.

6.Oranssi Pazuzu - “Ilmestys”

The slow-building and spooky intro track to Oranssi Pazuzu’s masterpiece, “Ilmestys” captures the band’s impeccable form and creative evolution in its subtle, understated opening passage that ultimately opens up like a blooming kaleidoscopic flower into the colorful climax that sees the track out. It’s a stunning, hypnotizing track that manages to encapsulate everything that the Finnish visionaries have been working toward with their psychedelic black metal sound in one seven-minute bite. Crazy to think that that’s just the first song on the album too.

5.Red - “The War We Made”

2000’s alternative metal often gets a bit of a bad rep and is treated like it’s not welcome here anymore in the metal world, at least among the critic class. Well I’m not in that class so I get to enjoy the open-hearted catharsis of alternative metal anthems like “The War We Made”. And it really is one of the band’s best songs and a great example of the genre in general. I dare anyone to honestly stand in front of those strings, those power chords, and that soaring vocal delivery and not feel something resonating in the core of what makes them human. It’s a beautiful song in such simple ways that don’t really beckon much contemporary critical dissection, but that simple openness has been the style’s biggest strength, which Red show wholeheartedly on this song.

4.Code Orange - “Underneath”

The album it came from may have found the Pittsburgh metalcore visionaries in a bit of a phase of growing pains as they try to enhance the industrial aspect of their metallic hardcore sound, but the closing title track of Underneath showed none of it, finishing the album off on a confident, swaggering, and effectively heavy note that packs the hardcore punch they’ve built their reputation on into an infectious alt metal structure without losing any potency. They may not have nabbed album of the year again or even the metalcore album of the year this year, but Code Orange definitely come away with the year’s best standalone metalcore song.

3.Imperial Triumphant - “Atomic Age”

Capturing perhaps the best on the album the deliriously foreboding forest of towers of the big apple, “Atomic Age” spirals down and around through experimentally jazz-infused and nightmarish angular guitar leads in the back of terrifying screams and growls that only add to the psychosis. It feels like being dropped from the top of the Empire State Building over and over and over again and scrambling for safety as the windows of the countless stories rush by.

2.Oranssi Pazuzu - “Uusi teknokratia”

Not that any song on Mestarin Kynsi is particularly lacking for its length or anything, they’re all incredible acid trips of dizzying black metal, but the album’s longest and most dynamic song has to be the most freakish, deceptively welcoming, and other-worldly of the bunch. This song really does take you to another world and entangle your senses there.

1.Deadspace - “A Portrait of Sacrificial Scars” (parts 1 and 2)

Deadspace hit an incredible new high with their sole full-length this year, and the title track in its two phases perhaps best captures the shivering, transfixing power of their more unshackled depressive sound. Everything about it, the drawn-out screams and bellows; the somber clean guitar passages; the depressive distorted chords; the heavenly choir, all sounds like the chilling but undeniably compelling farewell of a long-suffering soul finally seeing the glimpse of peace and release in its welcoming of an afterlife. It’s a song that confronts the heavy concept that DSBM deals with in the kind of candid and forthright manner that makes it so compelling when done well. The song’s abstract lyrics deal with the general sorrow that has surrounded the band’s music and the way the band as a whole has made use of their scars for their art. Deadspace announced their disbandment with the release of this album back in March, and the lyrics portray this act as one of bowing out through suicide (as a band, by disbanding, not literal suicide) to represent the finality of what they have sung about so much throughout their career. While not pairing with a literal death, this album, and this song serve as part of the departing act the way Blackstar served as David Bowie’s farewell and the way Purple Mountains served as David Berman’s suicide note. A Portrait of Sacrificial Scars and its title track is Deadspace’s suicide note as an art project, and one that comes fittingly after a gradual refinement of their sound that mirrored the depressed mind’s spiral from melancholic sorrow to malignant despair, ending their career on a chillingly glorious high note. Being that I’m giving an incredibly dark, DSBM song my top spot, I’d just like to clarify that I’m not suicidal in any way right now, nor advocating it. My top song in 2018 was Andrew W.K.’s “Music Is Worth Living For”, and all the music this year, despite its crushing atmosphere on all of us, and as dark as much of that music is, still is. It’s just, 2020, you know.