Tom 2024 Top 10
In the spirit of BAZ—which champions underground, extreme metal—a part of me feels I should only list my favourite metal releases from this year. But if there’s one thing I hate in music writing, it’s putting music into neat genres. So my Top 10 is as it is, some metal, some not, some who knows? Whatever it is, it’s what I’ve loved the most.
Dirty Shades – Stuck In Motion
Via Independent
French Progressive Rock that avoids any of the typical cliches of accomplished musicians that want to show off how well they can play their instruments. Dirty Shades can indeed play—every one of the album’s six tracks are filled with inventive interplay between the guitars, drums and bass, and the songs organically evolve, build and expand (all the while holding onto little melodic motifs). Vocalist Anouk Degrande sings like she’s seen a lifetime of the blues. Can she (and the rest of the band) really be so young?
CNTS – Thoughts & Prayers
Via Ipecac
For their second full-length release LA’s CNTS deliver a delightfully scuzzy, snarling, vulgar blast of Hard Rock—exactly as it should be for a band that will likely make your local record seller do a double take when they ask for the name of the band whose album you want them to order (unless they’re very cool). Rarely has a middle finger in music form been so endearing.
Chat Pile – Cool World
Via The Flenser
Oklahoma’s Chat Pile focus their collective attention on the most awful aspects of human behavior and soundtrack the grim subject matter with Alternative Rock fed through a prism of Industrial Metal, Goth Rock and early Korn (!), creating something uniquely dreary and awful—in the best possible way!
Full of Hell – Coagulated Bliss
Via Closed Casket Activities
The ever-prolific Full of Hell never cease to impress with their inventive mix of Death Metal, Industrial, Grindcore and Noise. On Coagulated Bliss the band incorporate a new aspect into their sound—the demented, zigzagging Alt-Rock noise of early Today Is The Day. Bravo, Full of Hell, bravo.
Malconfort – Humanism
Via Transcending Obscurity Records
The quick and easy tag for Humanism (the debut record by the mysterious and anonymous Malconfort) is Experimental Black Metal. What that description doesn’t tell you is the Jazz, Prog Rock and Trip-Hop elements to be found in these very dark, but also quite funky rhythms. Rest assured, you will get screamed at by a malevolent demon from about two seconds into the record, but there’s so much wild creativity on display that trying to put Malconfort in a neat box would be impossible. Why can’t more bands be this daring and free?
Buńuel – Mansuetude
Via Overdrive Records / SKiN GRAFT Records
Take a great, innovative and powerful set of musicians from Italy and combine them with one of the most singular and captivating vocalists of his generation (that being former Oxbow-frontman Eugene S. Robinson) and what do you get? You get Buńuel, a band that continues to push the boundaries of heavy and sonically overpowering Rock Music you can still groove to.
Veilburner – The Duality of Decapitation and Wisdom
Via Transcending Obscurity Records
Oh the mystical, mythical joy of Veilburner and this wonderful world of Extreme Metal they have constructed. Seven albums in and the masked duo take the conceptual construction of their unique Dissonant Death Metal style onto its next chapter. Fuelled in equal parts by the twisted guitars of Mephisto Deleterio and the ghoulish howls of Chrisom Infernium, the strange world of Veilburner continues to delight.
Couch Slut – You Could Do It Tonight
Via Brutal Panda Records
Darkly comic and traumatic in equal measure (well, probably a fair bit more on the trauma side to be fair), NYC’s Couch Slut is the kind of malevolent Noise Rock you find behind the fridge of an abandoned apartment, snarling and half-deranged from months subsisting on a diet of No Wave and existential horror. Still, there really are laughs to be had here (if you like your humour the pitchest of black).
Trelldom – …By The Shadows…
Via Prophecy Productions
Since the band’s last full-length release in 2007, Norway’s Black Metal group Trelldom took a major turn into the lands of the avant-garde and the results are glorious. Fronted by Kristian Eivind Espedal (AKA Gaahl), …By The Shadows… is sonically closer in tone to Children of God-era Swans, Bauhaus, or even King Crimson (if they worshipped the dark lord) than to the abrasive Black Metal of their roots and I’m here for it.
Prisoner – Putrid | Obsolete
Via Persistent Vision Records
Blending the remorseless, mechanised pounding of Industrial Metal with the frothing, rabid carnage of Crust Punk, Putrid | Obsolete is the sound of the apocalypse on your doorstep. A compelling voyage into a churning, clattering nightmare that stomps you into the dust without mercy.
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