BECAUSE WITTY YEAR-END LIST TITLES ABOUT RUINING THE HOLIDAYS ARE FOR SUCKERS — THE DGR YEAR ENDSTAVAGANZA PART FOUR: 20-11

(We’ve made it to the fourth installment of DGR‘s Top 50 year-end list, with another block of 10 releases being ranked, and one more section slated for arrival tomorrow.)

You ever do something constantly even though you’ve known for a while that it is taking a lot out of you and driving other people insane? I have habits that I can’t break and sometimes think that long ago we evolved past yearly ‘tradition’ and into something in the warehouse of yearly ‘ritual’ instead.

This YE list series is my closing act in a way, the final signing off, tying of the bow and boot out rifling out the door of my writing for 2024. The final summation in many ways of everything up to this point even though it’s the one time I allow my writing to really veer off the officious sounding mark and into casual territory, as if we’re sitting across the table from one another, and I – in my incredulously drunk state – have achieved inebriated Buddha status and am ready to guide along my vision of the eight-fold path of heavy metal and wild-eyed lunacy.

The realer reason of course is that it helps break up the daily routine and gives me reason to sit cross-legged in front of the computer and just type endlessly, laughing about how I’ve never learned how to type properly and am of the school of ‘whatever finger is closest, thumb is for space bar and I use my pinky if I’m feeling fancy’ yet am still somehow in the one-hundred words per minute range. It’s stupid, but it helps break up the end of the year when I feel like I’m just running in endless loops.

You’re probably aware of the days as you get deeper into adulthood when you’re an effectively functioning cog of the machine, day by day doing the exact same thing until the point where every day feels exactly the same, but you’re considered responsible because of it. Travel to job, keep the vehicle fueled, pay bills, clean up the house, the beginning becomes the end, the end becomes the beginning, the beginning is the end and it keeps coming around again. That sort of endless monotony broken by the act of creation lest I once again slam my fist into the chair to begin again, 1950s black and white spiral accompanying the descent back into regular madness over and over again. I sometimes get mad that I don’t even have the courtesy of a combination of a bunch of Finnish actors and game developers performing a thinly-veiled short film of the story for me in advance.

This actually just being an exercise in something that I was thinking about a lot lately while looking backwards, not just in the past year, as one inevitably winds up thinking further, and I got sort of lost in the idea of doing a paragraph along the lines of something we used to see back when blogging was new and people were attempting to make a living off it. Well not really, I’m not sure anyone ever accomplished a full living at a single spot, but at the very least the amount of time you spent turning tricks at the Costco on Franklin Blvd went down tremendously as a result, which was nice for a while. You’d get these giant rambling paragraphs filled with backlinks, hyperlinks, and all sorts of interstitial madness before it eventually metamorphised into the modern-day SEO sludge or life story opening up the regular article in an attempt to defeat Google’s summarizing feature. Thank you for indulging me in the act of naval-gazing anyway, I appreciate it more than you’ll ever know.

Plus now, I don’t have to make an attempt at describing what pathways in the grey-matter short-circuited and blew fuses when coming up with this particular entry of the ol’ year end smorgasbord. There’s enough words here already and when I stop now it will be blissfully quiet for a brief moment. Let’s enjoy that for a half second before hitting these first few entries.

 

20 – The Infernal Sea – Hellfenlic

Someone in The Infernal Sea space must’ve read my – positive – take on their previous album Negotium Crucis and not liked what they saw, because in the time since the band have unleashed an album that is somehow heavier and even more black metal than that release turned out to be, in the form of 2024’s Hellfenlic. That’s what I get for praising an otherwise out-of-place guitar solo in a song, I guess.

The tale of The Infernal Sea‘s career has been one of infernal and relentless black metal from the start though, and even though I was particularly late to the bus – so unkvlt – when I picked up on them during The Great Mortality, each release has been succesively darker and more abrasive. I already thought The Great Mortality was a snarling monster of a disc and we’re now discussing one two albums later. Can you even half imagine the monstrous delights held within the eight songs present here?

Hellfenlic saw release in late January and I knew was going to be battling it out for the year-end parade from the first few listens. Even though I claim that I lack the vocabulary to fully describe what drives The Infernal Sea‘s acidic sound, they’ve definitely morphed into a band whose music is as if they’re taking previous black metal generations and pushing them through a disturbed and twisted mirror.

The Infernal Sea are experts in taking something that is already like having razor-wire run across your arm and making it a haunting experience. Early on there’s experiments with distorted singing, brickwalled bass, and the burying of the whole band such that early on in Hellfenlic the tortured screams of vocalist Dean become the only recognizeable thing. Ever the optimists, The Infernal Sea also sought out a twisted enough concept with which to bind the album together, stating on their Bandcamp that Hellfenlic “focuses on the horrific murder and persecution of so-called Witches perpetrated by the Puritan Church in The Infernal Sea’s native East Anglia. Twisted tales are told through the eyes of the famously barbaric and influential Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins.”

Fun stuff

The Infernal Sea found themselves snapped up in the jaws of an early Best of British article this year, so thankfully I could spend the better part of the year digesting some of the toothier songs contained within the run time instead. With eight songs present I don’t want to spend too much time trying to break out specific numbers because it’s just going to devolve into me with tinfoil hat on screaming about how you should just be listening to the whole damned thing at least once.

Yet if you want to have a solid first impression, both the “Witch” themed songs are killer, with “Witchfinder” being abrasive as hell, and much as I joked about the wild guitar solos from an album previously, you owe it to yourselves to check out the loud-countoff and punk-driven atmosphere of “Black Witchery” – which you could almost view as sounding like Witchery being fed through a meat grinder to be mixed into a bowl with Motörhead bass, d-beat drumming (including a mean made for live clap-along segment), Horned Almighty, and the band’s own snarling take on black metal as a whole. Laid late in the album, that one is a hell of a kick to the jaw right after the somewhat drifting “Bastard Of The East” and before the slower misery of “Frozen Fen”.

You owe it to yourself to give a spin to The Infernal Sea‘s latest. If you’re unfamiliar with the band Hellfenlic is a great first impression to an already impressive discography. It would be a fun experience, I imagine, to hear the band as they are now and then listen backwards and see the routes they’ve walked along to arrive at this point now. This is one that you should not let fly under your radar – and then go check out the rest of their discography as well.

 

19 – Convulsing – Perdurance

Many of the albums I include in my year-end extravaganza are here because I have a good time with them and I think other people will too. However, there are always two or three that I include because I think they will challenge people, that they advance heavy metal, or are in some way actual attempts at ‘art’ in our massively stupid corner of the music world. They’re not albums that I expect people will have a good time with but they will have ‘a time’ with them of some form, whether it be the aforementioned challenge, an absolute drag on the spirit, or something so intense that you can be overwhelmed with it. That’s the headspace I’m in when I nominate an album like Convulsing‘s Perdurance into this end of year dumpster fire.

The strangely angular, increasingly dissonant, and deceptively groovy release continues a trend of Convulsing dealing in music that is partially suffocating and so contorted into unrecognizability you can’t help but be in awe. Previous album Grievous was already a mournful monster all its own; Perdurance is the soundtrack of something bent and contorted out of shape attempting to be human and trying to construct itself a pathway to getting there step by step, without the basic building blocks or understanding of what that is.

Looking back on it, I am becoming increasingly aware of just how many of this year’s nominees I reviewed back in May, Perdurance included. The album itself came out in March, but maybe its reflective of just how much I was dragging back to being a basic human that I only managed to get my shit together in regards to it two months after its release.

Some songs on Perdurance hit aggressively hard. “Gossamer Pill” and “Shattered Temples” came out swinging much heavier than I had expected based on previous experience with Convulsing, and opener “Pentarch” is abrasive enough to wash away a lot of people who might be giving this disc a first-shot listen. It might seem across Perdurance that project mainman Brendan Sloan might fully give over into dissonance worship in much the same way the modern death metal scene has a whole, but he instead just stacks it into the many other elements he’s using to construct his final biomorph of an album.

Perdurance has a lot of stretched limbs and otherworldly eyes being added to its overall soup and while the cover art may seem deceptively simple, it’s the fact that it is so disarming that makes much of Perdurance‘s first few passes seem like taking a cattle-prod to the side. Perdurance is heavy in a lot of regards, and even among the more frightening-by-design segments there is groove to be locked into. It’s how I grappled with Perdurance for my first couple of rounds with the album.

I knew what I was in for, given I have previous experience with Convulsing as a whole, so you might argue that I actually enjoy such a thing. You wouldn’t be too far off either; I do have it sitting here, comfortably in the higher reaches of these shenanigans and in the good company of a grouping of other massively killer albums. Just don’t go in expecting the sort of sugar-high that generally appeals to me music-wise. Perdurance is an ugly and frail album, but it is one that I think people need to hear at least once.

 

18 – Eternal Storm – A Giant Bound To Fall

The continued evolution of Eternal Storm is partially why I think I keep adding them to my year-end lists. Starting out as a relatively humble – and granted, very skilled – melodeath band, they’ve continually evolved on each release and have become a much larger and more ambitious project than before, straddling the line between progressive death, melodeath, and the off-kilter forest-loving black metal project. It’s a lot of elements to try and cram into one particular release but the group’s newest album A Giant Bound To Fall manages to do just that.

Even then, it is an album that still manages to surprise because Eternal Storm already had a pretty high mountain to climb in trying to make something comparable to 2019’s Come The Tide, yet have built an album that not only refines on it but is also more ambitious as well. Released in mid-February, A Giant Bound To Fall covers a tremendous amount of ground and has the run time to show for it. Often, when I add an album like this to my year-end playlist I’ll couple it with the explanation that ‘this release is a journey, prepare for it’. A Giant Bound To Fall is a majestic piece of work in that aspect, and while the band themselves may be humble, they sure did pull out all of the stops when it came to building the album that lies before us now.

Andy tackled this one a day before the album’s official release, if you want words from someone who didn’t spend twenty minutes on the last paragraph because there were two birds outside and was amused by watching his cats try to get to them.

A Giant Bound To Fall is an enormous album. If you want to go by grade-school videogame buying dollars to time spent ratio, A Giant Bound To Fall is well-placed in the RPG category. This is a disc where you get your money’s worth with multiple songs in the nine-plus minute range and the rest hanging out around six and a half minutes. There’s two four-something minute tracks within its bounds but it also opens with a thirteen-minute epic in “An Abyss Of Unreality”. Point being, I was serious when I said A Giant Bound To Fall is a journey of a release and many of the songs flow into one another to form one giant, interwoven concept piece.

I wasn’t prepared for the first changeover from song one into “A Dim Illusion”. All of a sudden I heard Sven from Aborted screaming along to a song that, for once, didn’t sound like the song had transformed into an Aborted track because Sven was on it. “A Dim Illusion” is a prog-death epic on its own filled with sweeping lines and mysterious paths, but there are some absolutely gorgeous blastbeat segments with a trident-horned vocal attack at work. Eternal Storm have multiple songs in this vein across the album. I guess you can’t evoke imagery of giants without your disc in turn becoming a massive work in its own right.

Eternal Storm deserve commendation, because for as immense as the disc itself is, nothing feels like it was added for the sheer sake of having a ‘big’ release. Everything that happens within its bounds – get it? – does so organically. There are multiple times across the disc where the band slow down and move into clean guitar playing and singing for a bit – “The Sleepers” opens with such a move before layering into a gorgeous guitar chug – and instead of them feeling like interstitials because the group couldn’t figure out where to fire the roofing nailer to stitch together the next part, they’re expertly woven together.

When you have so much breadth being travelled in the way that A Giant Bound To Fall does, you would think that by the end of the album some of these moves could get tiresome, yet Eternal Storm keep adding different things just to make it work and that’s not even counting the high number of guest appearances that make this giant ambulatory.

Which is why I continue to view Eternal Storm‘s career thus far as evolutionary. The band’s music that appears here is so different from where they started but they’ve truly created an expansive progressive death metal epic. Don’t let this one pass you by.

 

17 – Dödsrit – Nocturnal Will

I knew I fucked up from the moment I hit play on Dödsrit‘s new album Nocturnal Will for the first time. Driven by a combination of our premiere of “Celestial Will” and the review of the album from March, I found myself letting out an exasperated “shiiiiiiit” within the first few minutes of opening song “Irjala”, because I knew… just knew from the moment the guitar lead opened that song up… that I was going to have to make room for Nocturnal Will in my year-end list.

It’s not often you get a band to basically roll into the restaurant that occupies your internal headspace and place a reservation for nine months later quite like Sweden’s Dödsrit did, but alas, maybe that could go a long way to explaining how they basically rocketed up into the top reaches of this feature with nary an impression otherwise. Granted, Dödsrit have done well with me previously but I always feel like I’ve gotten to the albums too late to have anything to say, or more often checked them out based off someone else’s year-end list and then spent the next month kicking myself for not including it within my own pile o’ recommended album releases. Maybe Nocturnal Will was finally the dam bursting, because goddamn, even far removed from the album’s March 22nd release date, Dödsrit are still making a hell of an impression with their new album.

Nocturnal Will is a wild album too, effectively consisting of four full-band songs and five minutes of instrumental spead across two tracks to make up a total of six songs and forty-three minutes of music. The pacing on this disc is weird but it’s an epic journey to take in on one full run. It helps too that Dödsrit are playing with almost no boundaries on their music either. Nocturnal Will is the band seemingly going ‘big’ every chance they can get, so when you look at the song lengths and think to yourself that multiple ten-minute songs means you have a release of a band dragging its feet you’d be wrong.

These are long-form tracks, so comparisons to an actual epic journey aren’t too far off. They still have a very thick vein of black metal running through their sound yet it seems like Dödsrit were more than happy to construct around it with any element that pleased them on Nocturnal Will. Anything added is done so that Nocturnal Will is a glorious sounding release, so if it feels there’s a lot of leads that could’ve come out of the early eras of melodeath while it was still finding its sound and figured an Iron Maiden twin-guitar lead was a good way to go, that’s because it is actually there.

While this summary may be shorter than the usual word-vomit wall that I’ve been hammering out for every other entry, I still highly recommend you dig into Dödsrit‘s newest album. The six-song tracklisting lends itself well to constant spins and their combination of everything under the sun for purpose of an epic journey through an abrasive mountainside is just stunning. I went on some real hard kicks with this album where it would be in constant rotation for big blocks at a time and then total silence, until all of a sudden the mood would strike again like fury from the heavens and I’d throw myself back into the storm once more. I’m sure you’ll be reading, or probably already have been, about this album a lot at the tail end of the year.

 

16 – Darkend – Viaticum

I appreciate Italy’s black metal group Darkend and what they’ve tried to do with every one of their releases so far. They so clearly want to put on a show that the desire carries over into each one of their albums. There is being bought into your music, and there is being fully bought in on everything you do, and Darkend are of the class of the latter. Each of their five releases thus far has been an attempt to create something different from the creature before it, and for the most part Darkend have succeeded pretty well at that aspect. Their newest album – released in the most black metal of months, June – Viaticum is the latest mutation to add to their collection.

With five lengthy songs and one of their longest-written closing out the album, Viaticum is an adventure in exploring catacombs and haunting crypts. There’s only two songs that you could even treat as a single that could stand alone outside of Viaticum; otherwise this is an album that practically cries out for you to listen to it front to back as Darkend break out their old boy-scouts badge – an organization that I’m sure exists where they’re from based on absolutely zero research – and tie everything together into a series of increasingly stunning knots.

If you wish to provide me with head pats the next time we cross paths, yes, I did in fact write a little somethin’-something’ about this disc. Even then I was having a hard time breaking out song by song though, because it felt like a disservice to Darkend as a band. The compromise being that there’s only five songs on Viaticum and each of them is an event to behold, the whole release adding itself perfectly to the collective of other bewitching tales that Darkend have created over the years. The highlights, really, are the two ‘Multitude’ songs that both open and close this release and could easily be an EP of their own just stacked atop one another, but if you need a third song I do have a soft spot for just how raw the group got on Viaticum‘s second song “An Incautious Exhumation of What Lies Beneath Forgotten Ground”.

Otherwise, really, Viaticum is well worth your time as an entire spin. Darkend’s albums are all shows on their own, and enough so that I don’t feel too bad about not having had the chance to see the ‘live ritual’ yet. As long as they keep the mark of quality as high as they have with releases like The Canticle Of Shadows, Spiritual Resonance, and now Viaticum, they’ll probably continue to rank pretty high with me when it comes time for the year-end whiskey pour to be shotgunned so I can sleep through the end of the world.

 

15 – Aborted – Vault Of Horrors

Long ago I gave up on the idea of trying to pontificate where Aborted would try to head in the future and instead just decided I was going to take everything they did at face value. They’re not the deepest or most introspective band in the world; the formula for an Aborted song is pretty fucking straightforward in the grand scheme of things and they’re as reliable as death and taxes.

They also stick to a pretty rigid schedule, and as a result have been insanely prolific over the years from a smattering of singles and EPs between albums to their collective of full-length discs – which now numbers twelve with the release of their 2024 album Vault Of Horrors. Of course even that was led off by the single “Infinite Terror” in 2022 but there’s one thing pretty guaranteed for Aborted, and has been for the better part of a decade-plus now: every two to three years, there will be an Aborted full-length.

Quality is a big factor when it comes to discussing Aborted discs, and the band have had their fair share of decent to good but not spectacular material in recent years. Successive band lineup changes could only carry Aborted for so long and it was starting to reach a critical mass about the time of Maniacult where both the parts of the band and the songs themselves were feeling interchangeable. For a few albums there, Aborted were in a perpetual state of seven-out-of-ten.

You’d have the occasional killer single, and the guest appearances on every disc for the most part were pretty fucking fun, but Aborted had become a much more extreme take on the Amon Amarth approach. It’s more fuel for the fire, more logs for the shuffle pile. You throw a shuffled playlist of everything Aborted had done up to each point and you’d still have a pretty good time and never have to change it, but there was no particular call to dive back into the complete run of a particular album upon hearing a song – much in the way hearing something off of Global Flatline or Necrotic Manifesto tends to send me back to those releases, no questions asked.

In some ways, I don’t think Aborted know or care how to fully extricate themselves from that current situation, hence why I take every Aborted disc at face value now. I’m either going to like it or I don’t. In the case of Vault Of Horrors, I like the album a lot.

Vault Of Horrors is an album whose initial impression is one of gimmickry, given that every single song is a successive parade of guest appearances across the entire album. Aborted are effectively three skits, a prank phone call, and one hidden track of them smoking weed and getting busted by the police from being a late ’90s era rap album given the number of guest appearances on Vault Of Horrors. Our own Andy Synn took a similar view of this release and instead decided to view the album based on the effectiveness of each appearance and whether the band made good usage of the particular guest Power Ranger joining their original five in each song. You can read that here.

The approach is intriguing, indubitably, and wouldn’t have worked if the music behind it wasn’t there to back it up, but overall Vault Of Horrors has the atmosphere of being a giant modern deathgrind party. In that way, I enjoyed Vault Of Horrors quite a bit because, for all of its obsession with gore, horror movies, and lyrics I can’t quote to anyone at work, it is a disc that is just relentlessly fun. Every song here has the potential for an explosive mosh pit and Aborted have found much life in their current guitar-duo, giving them plenty of reason to chop, grind, and saw through a wall of riff work with blissful abandon.

Vault Of Horrors ranks so high then based off of the initial approach I wound up taking to the album as a whole. It plays out that I tend to gather which songs from a particular Aborted album I would throw in a ‘top Aborted tracks’ shuffle playlist, and as the number goes higher so to is my enjoyment of the disc. This sounds stupidly obvious – something that could be shouted from the heights of a soggy cardboard box and still be heard in Tibet – but with Aborted it’s also weirdly accurate since their albums are not ones with distinct throughlines. The distinct throughline of an Aborted album is the Aborted sound and that’s it, so really what it feels like you’re grading on is just how well the band used it to any particular effect.

With Vault Of Horrors then, I found that there was a really solid batch of songs that I could flay from the overall tracklisting and add to my own particular gore-pile. Some so strong, in fact, that they would then elevate the songs surrounding it. Like a moth to flame, I found myself drawn to material like “Condemned To Rot”, “Death Cult”, “Hellbound”, “Insect Politics”, “The Golgothan” and, surprisingly enough, closer “Malevolent Haze”. That collective did so well with me that even the songs that didn’t quite appeal to my particular sensibilities would start to land. I don’t think “Dreadbringer” does too much that wasn’t done with Ben Duerr’s previous appearance with Aborted, and “Naturom Demonto”, much as the name is fun, falls into core-Aborted territory with a visage that is a little blurred.

Yet overall, Vault Of Horrors fought an absolute fucker of a battle, having seen release in mid-March yet somehow hanging on to the point where the fingers broke and bone was sticking out of the knuckles. It was among a handful of the class of 2024’s default DGR listening releases by the time the year started drawing to a close, and my placing of it so high up here on this charlatan’s attempt at a year-end list will hopefully reflect that.

 

14 – Fleshgod Apocalypse – Opera

I’ve been watching the career trajectory of Fleshgod Apocalypse with increasing interest as the years have gone by. It is difficult for a band whose existence is owed largely to an initial launch of utter-bombast to continue in that form; you get the opportunity to stun people once or twice but then after that you become a known factor, and by that point you’ve either faded away, immolated yourself, or figured out how to turn the monster you’ve created into some sort of career.

I never would’ve thought that back in the age of the Oracles release and the following Mafia EP that Fleshgod would be a candidate to make it to six albums, yet somehow their career arc has done just that. Not without a degree of difficulty of course; the group’s lineup has changed consistently and current vocalist/bassist Francesco Paoli has now cycled around to having held nearly every position – save for orchestration/keyboard – within the band itself.

Fleshgod Apocalypse have proven themselves to be tenacious at least, even as it seems like each album nowadays becomes an increasingly manic search for new directions to travel in and horizons to explore. Opera, the newest album, is probably the most manic one of those yet. I initially clocked Veleno as being an exploratory bunch of singles, yet even with an overarching concept and characters to be played; Opera is equally all over the place musically for Fleshgod Apocalypse yet it may be one of their bigger spectacles to date.

I mused in much greater detail on all of this in my review of the album but I figured I’d provide a quick overview here as well to hopefully explain why Opera then continued to woo me over the course of the year.

Fleshgod Apocalypse have developed a pattern for me. They’re a band that – surprisingly enough – like The Black Dahlia Murder, have a very recognizable ‘core’ songwriting style. While not nearly as prolific as the aforementioned band, they’ve got some similarities in how there is a truck-sized block of their music that has become a bread-and-butter song for the band. Usually how much I enjoy an album is then based off of how many of ‘those’ types of songs appear within the disc’s runtime. Fleshgod Apocalypse, at least, seem to have recognized this as being a potential problem, and so the last two releases have run off in wildly different directions like a sugar-high toddler for two albums. Opera at least uses its position as something of a thematic concept album to alleviate this, so that although the songs themselves differ from each other a lot, there’s still something to ground the whole affair so that it just doesn’t immediately float off into the sky.

That being said, the one pattern that did hang on for Opera is the positioning of the one gigantic ass-kicker of the album. Usually around song three or four of the band’s releases is one grandiose piece that they’re likely forever cursed to break out live, but it is also the one that can wind up carrying an album on its shoulders for me. In this case it is “Bloodclock”, which has spent an inordiante amount of time wedged into my brain and has since joined the ranks of songs like “The Violation”, “Sugar”, “The Fool”, and “Elegy” for me.

Yes, they’re all ridiculously high-speed songs built around big orchestral lines and momentous movements but they’ve often carried whole albums for me in the face of some of the band’s more ‘faceless’ material. Opera doesn’t have too much of that though, because the desire to be distinct makes the disc play out like a mad circus as well, so when they’re not invoking the spirit of Trail of Tears on “Matricide 8.21”, dancing with a cloying spirit of power metal briefly during the chorus of “I Can Never Die”, using a big dumbass breakdown as the main driving force of “Pendulum”, or giving into the lunatic fray with “Morphine Waltz”, you know at the very least Fleshgod are putting in some serious effort to make Opera stand on its own. The thing that held Opera back for me a bit was how the album just tends to tail off post-“Matricide”. It closes on some epic-sounding and large numbers – plus the obligatory title song instrumental – but they just don’t stick quite as much as the initial adrenaline rush of the first… 80%?… of the album.

Opera isn’t the most heavy thing within Fleshgod Apocalypse‘s arsenal by far, but the new weaponization of vocalist Veronica Bordacchini as a main element within the band’s music works out for them here. Painting the album from the viewpoint of two characters also lyrically helps elevate Fleshgod‘s brand of bombastic symphonic death metal here. While they’re still musically a little more scattershot than what I would prefer, said experiments with their sound do still seem to be working in the band’s favor thus far. Opera is a fun spectacle all on its own.

 

13 – Exocrine – Legend

I am not so callous an individual to act as if Exocrine‘s take on the technical death metal space doesn’t still work on me to great effect. I’ve been following these French tech-death velocity-worshippers for some time now and they continue to remain one of the more underrated acts in a vibrant scene out that way. There must be somebody else who feels that way at least, as this year saw Season Of Mist throwing their support behind them as well, unleashing their new album Legend upon the world in late January. In an exceedingly rare act, I even managed to get a review of their latest out a little while before release – must’ve been driven by a mania from being within a new year or something along those lines.

Exocrine have made previous appearances on my year-end lists prior to this, both ascendent and somewhat descendent but always as one of the more constantly listened-to albums throughout the year, starting with Molten Giant and carrying the way up to now. They even took the top spot with me in the year of Maelstrom‘s release and were scurrying around the top ten or so with The Hybrid Suns following, so to say I was excited for Legend would be to put things politely.

In any other year, I think Legend would’ve also scored much higher than the spot where it now sits, but 2024 proved itself to be surprisingly stacked when I actually found the time to sit down and think about it. I still adored the album, though I do have my qualms with how it is mixed, so I figured getting within the top twenty among a murderer’s row of gnarly albums was a good compromise.

Legend doesn’t see Exocrine steering too far from their chosen formula either. Whereas The Hybrid Suns did a lot of firetruck-throwing to insist that ‘goddamnit, this is not Maelstrom‘ and left craters that found it closer to Molten Giant before it, Legend does a more commonly expected act by splitting the difference between the two. Understandable in some sense, as it seemed like they were gaining some wider reach so Legend grabbing into the bag of Exocrine tricks and breaking all of them out could be considered the safer thing to do. So while it is a less risky album, Legend does allow them time to refine on what Exocrine had been trying with previous albums, which is interesting. If you thought that songs on those discs sounded embryonic, Legend has Exocrine making spiritual successors in a lot of ways and you can imagine them taking second passes on a lot of those ideas to turn Legend into its own beast instead.

I did find myself being yanked past the event horizon and drawn into the influence of quite a few of the early songs on Legend as well. The ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ approach that is the Exocrine way of doing things is played up to hilarious effect on the three-fer of “Presage”, “Legend”, and “Life”, with “Presage” being the obvious table-setter before the titular “Legend” just picks the thing up and throws it onto the neighbor’s roof. “The Altar Of War” is just wall-to-wall brutality by comparison, but Legend is an album where you’re dealing in a fine gradient in that regard because so much of it – much like Werewolves tend to do on their releases – seems like it was written in an attempt to make drummer Theo Gendron pass out from exhaustion behind the kit.

Exocrine change parts at the drop of a hat and are more like an avalanche than one particular musical style. Exocrine write songs that climb and tumble over each other ala the zombies in the adaptation in name only World War Z movie. They get progressive, they get tech, they go straightforward death metal, and the two guys from Empyreal Vault didn’t quite get the deathcore out of their system either as there are some bludgeoningly dumb breakdowns in the mix as well – granted, insanely fast ones, but caveman chugging guitar can be seen from space.

I don’t quite know what I would expect from Exocrine in the future as this is their sixth album and it remains as batshit insane as the five preceeding it. I’d love for the band to quit squashing so much of their sound down, but maybe that’s the only way they can figure how to pack more and more into each song. They lob nuclear weapons as if firing from a machine-gun as a musical style. It’s so absurdly ridiculous that you can’t help but be in awe for the first couple of songs each time. When I refer to tech-death as being a style that loans itself to a lot of guitar pyrotechnics, Exocrine are one of my more common examples. They and groups like Archspire are the musical equivalent of the X-Games being the big ramp all of the time.

Legend is a head-spinning album and stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the previous three, helping to construct such an insanely dense discography that you can’t help but be pleasantly overwhelmed when you let their collected works just run you over.

 

12 – Wormed – Omegon

While we’re in the realm of tech-death it’s about time we sit down and discuss the long-awaited brain-tenderizer that is the newest album from Spain’s Wormed. Omegon, Wormed‘s newest album, is the group’s latest full-length after an eight-year gap in albums – last one being the much vaunted Krighsu – and five years since the group’s EP Metaportal.

Wormed‘s sound is one that doesn’t really need too much fixing and Omegon doesn’t care much to do so either. The band’s approach to death metal with a science fiction bent consists of hybridizing technical death metal, slam, brutal, and progressive into such a blended frenzy that even those with expertise in the group’s sound have a hard time hanging out. Coupled with the human vacuum noisemaker that is vocalist Phlegeton, Wormed‘s sound is one that is absolutely ferocious. It’s one that the band landed on with 2010’s Planisphaerium and they haven’t felt much need to shift from it since.

The constant tempo and time changes, verging on free-jazz and crashing headlong into the cold, sterile nature of their approach to death metal, has created something akin to the noise recorded of stars. A constant, haunting pulse placed into overdrive and hammered out with such precision that you can see how rubes like me are easily mind-blown almost every time a new Wormed release comes out. Omegon is no different in that regard – but there are a few other instances for which Omegon also managed to win me over.

I delved way, way, way deeper than I could ever hope to here during my July review of the album but I found myself coming to a lot of the same conclusions now that I did back then. I think Omegon is a killer release.

One of the outstanding things that actually took me by surprise was the drumming on Omegon – which seems like a crazed thing to say when you’re discussing Wormed. Their albums are built entirely around drum-kit insanity a lot of the time but previously those performances have been cold and unerringly precise. They’re stunning to listen to simply because you have to imagine the person behind the kit being both monster and machine in order to keep up with the grey-machine madness that Wormed are unleashing for them to play along too. Even when Wormed are basically a mudslide of blastbeats behind the kit, they’re still played with such ferocity that they come off like large explosions each time, as if someone thought it would be a good idea to try and play guitar over a carpet bombing. Wormed could do whole songs about a science fiction war and tell me that the drumming previously was supposed to evoke that and I’d be in full belief.

Omegon makes a lot of use of that, but surprisingly the drumming sounds a little bit more free than it has been in years past. There’s some actual near-jazz drum fills to help break up quite a few of the songs, and elsewhere the aforementioned fills become the signal for said neck-snapping tempo changes that’ve often colored Wormed‘s music. It’s as if the machine has been unleashed this time and Omegon is the music written to surround that event. You still have the unerring and surgically precise brutality that is required in order for Wormed to achieve full dissonance, yet the times when the group let that kit get unlocked as its own beast are truly surprising and are almost nectar-of-the-gods-like whenever they hit. Half the reason my first few spins through Omegon were so much fun was because I just wanted to see what wild-ass hair-on-fire turn the band were going to take next. Any of the listens that happened after that were because I found myself genuinely enjoying the release as a whole.

To put the best foot forward with Omegon is hard, partially because I want it to wash over listeners in one go. Every time I watch someone dive into Wormed for the first time without being prepared is hilarious. You’re either bowled over or trying to headbang along only to get lost constantly. Either way, your neck is going to kill you tomorrow. Still, if the ghost of ‘highlight songs’ must be summoned I would happily point you in the way of opener “Automaton Virtulague” as well as the surprise pairing of “Pleoverse Omninertia” and “Malignant Nexus”. Those three alone could easily leave you stunned, though I will happily make an argument for the titular “Omegon” as well, because Wormed stay true to the album title song actually meaning something and really stretch themselves into a seven-minute contortion that remains elusively difficult to describe.

Wormed are clinically expansive on Omegon and it works in their favor this time. They’ve spent previous albums constructing galaxies’ worth of destroyed space and empty vacuum and now seek to fill it. Omegon is a gigantic fucker of an album in response to that and is one that is still blowing my hair back upon every listen.

 

11 – Gaerea – Coma

Well fuck, ya’ll. It wasn’t that long ago I was reviewing this goddamned thing. Is it feasible that I could just type ‘my thoughts remain unchanged… band good’ and call it a day on this entry without feeling like I’m ripping the dear reader off?

Nope

Easily one of the latest entries on my year-end list – though not in comparison to Opeth many, many words ago – Coma is an album that intrigues me as much as it provides me enjoyment. It represents a shift in sound for the band as they spread further and further into the sonic realm of heavy metal, reaching past just the emotionally heavy black metal that the group had dealt in earlier and into something wherein catharsis is just as much a concept as it is a driving force in their music.

The Gaerea that appears on Coma is a different beast than the one that appeared on Mirage just a few years ago. The time since was one of change for the band so it’s not that surprising that the group’s fourth release is one that is different from its forebears. Elements of post-metal, punk, straight-shooting death metal, and pretty much every other extreme genre find themselves wielded like weapons on Coma so long as they can be used to further Gaerea‘s musical goals. Gone are the many long songs in favor of hewing closer to Mirage‘s shorter tracks, and in many places feeling like a gathering of singles serving as explorations and meditations on Gaerea‘s overall concept. Some of them can feel pretty shrewd and safe, yet even on those songs Gaerea make music that is jaw-dropping to listen to.

On Coma, Gaerea are filtering their sound through other approaches. Less so any one specific songwriting style as much as the group have become a filter. You take a specific genre, feed it through the Gaerea filter, and out pops a song that sounds as gorgeous as it is lush, with plenty of whispered passages and panicked vocal attacks to get the cathartic sense of desperation across. In fact, part of my constant draw to Coma since its release has been the fact that Gaerea took all of these different approaches to their sound and for the most part, they worked. There’re a few times where Gaerea play it safe – this is an album whose last two are beautiful on their own but in the grand run of the album fade into the background – but I found myself fascinated at the turns Gaerea were willing to take, and in my mind a more spread-out approach to the band’s sound could be just as reflective of the change within the group as it is an exploration of the overall lunatic passion that has driven their music.

So you see? Band good. Album pretty good.

While it isn’t quite the awe-inspriing, world changer that their previous releases have been for me, I am still enjoying the Gaerea formula very much. I appreciate their dedication to the visual aspect just as much as their musical one and they’ve become so intertwined that you know one wouldn’t work without the other. Fortunately, both of them are working pretty well right now and as a result – just like in my review – Coma ranks pretty high with me.