LISTMANIA 2024: BANDCAMP DAILY’S “THE BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 2024”

(written by Islander)

Reading year-end lists that someone other than you made tend to provoke mixed feelings of validation, perplexity (which sometimes verges into anger), and discovery. The opportunity for discovery is the main reason we here at NCS devote so much space to our annual LISTMANIA extravaganza, even though we know those other feelings will also be in the mix of reactions. The list we’re re-publishing from Bandcamp Daily will probably be no different in any of these respects.

Bandcamp, of course, has become a vital platform for the digital release of music of all stripes (and physical merchandise as well) since its founding in 2007. Bandcamp used to release an annual compilation of performance statistics, but I haven’t found a similar report since the one they released for 2017. However, the main Bandcamp page today reports that “Fans have paid artists $1.42 billion using Bandcamp, and $194 million in the last year.”

Those are staggering totals, and some part of those enormous sums has been the result of Bandcamp’s laudable decision to continue the monthly tradition of “Bandcamp Fridays” that they began during the height of the pandemic. The last of those for 2024 occurred last week. We won’t know for a while whether it will be continued in 2025. It better be, or else!

In the summer of 2016, the company launched Bandcamp Daily, an online music publication about artists on the platform. Bandcamp Daily regularly publishes articles of relevance to metalheads, though metal is of course only one of hundreds of music genres represented on Bandcamp.

Recently Bandcamp Daily once again published its list of the year’s Best Metal Albums, again under the byline of Brad Sanders, who has been writing the monthly metal column for Bandcamp. (It remains to be seen whether he’ll continue doing that, since in January he will take over the monthly metal column at Stereogum.)

The 2024 list again includes 12 un-ranked selections presented alphabetically by band name, accompanied by mini-reviews — and you can read those and listen to the music streams HERE.

Speaking for myself, I again enjoyed this list. It mostly doesn’t pander to the big names or the big labels. It includes some West Coast bands I like a lot. Despite how much listening I’ve done this year, it also includes a handful I haven’t heard, and three bands I haven’t even heard of, so even for me it feeds the appetite for discovery. And it’s going to add fuel to the fire of what seems to be one of the most common arguments I’ve seen pop up across the interhole this year-end — is Blood Incantation‘s really that good?

Feel free to discourse below about that subject, if you haven’t discoursed about it enuf already, or about any other reactions to the list. Here it is:

Blood Incantation – Absolute Elsewhere

Julie Christmas – Ridiculous and Full of Blood

Dödsrit – Nocturnal Will

Genital Shame – Chronic Illness Wish

Grendel’s Sÿster – Katabasis into the Abaton

Intranced – Muerte y Metal

Lowen – Do Not Go to War with the Demons of Mazandara

Necrot – Lifeless Birth

Oxygen Destroyer – Guardian of the Universe

Tzompantli – Beating the Drums of Ancestral Force

Undeath – More Insane

Unto Others – Never, Neverland