BECAUSE WITTY YEAR END LIST TITLES ABOUT RUINING THE HOLIDAYS ARE FOR SUCKERS – THE DGR YEAR ENDSTAVAGANZA PART FIVE: 10-1

 

(We’ve arrived at the final installment of DGR‘s Top 50 list for 2024, which has been unfolding day by day since Monday of this week. Now it’s time for the Top 10.)

Well this is it folks: the big kahuna, the final ten, the end of all ends, the great sandwich in the sky, the pothole to end all potholes, the grandest exercise in feet dragging you have ever seen, the golden egg, the sponsored award, the singularity of all fifty albums that we’ve been talking about over the course of the week, the grand conjuration, the comically oversized rabbit, the final ten…again.

I wish I had prepard a slightly bigger fanfare than this but it is really hard to explain to your local high school that you would like to borrow their marching band for an hour so you can film them playing as they walk by a camera for each album announcement. What I’m getting at here is this is it. After a week long rollout of the fifty albums I’ve enjoyed jamming the hell out of over the course of the year, we’ve accomplished reaching the end.

It’s been a hell of a thrill ride getting up to this point after all the mountains we’ve climbed, epic journeys we have undertaken, the critic-proofing we’ve had to participate in, the general explanations and explorations of gore, the occasional horror show, yet it never occurs to you just how much these things take out of you until you watch Part One of your list run on the website while you’re in the midst of writing up your final few albums for the last part. Needless to say, this fucker is probably coming in hot, so if these final summations (proclamations, conflagrations) of the albums that made my year-end list read like I was in the midst of being eaten alive, it’s probably because they’re a little more panicked than usual.

Even though we state it over and over, I usually feel the need to make one final go at it whenever I reach the actual top ten of the list: This is a personal top ten. This is not representative of a wider view of the quality of heavy metal or any sort of objectively based ‘well clearly, this is the top showpiece of this year’. This is reflective of my tastes and the circumstances through which an album might find its way on here.

There’s any number of reasons why your favorite group might be on here, and if they are, just remember that we as a website purposefully don’t run a sitewide top ten because a list built by committee would probably read like the same general beige melange that gets issued out every year. The hope, by keeping things specific to each writer, is that we share a wide variety of albums for people to check out and maybe if our tastes align enough you’ll find two or three likable things here.

And hey, if I do manage to land something that the wider heavy metal world seems to agree is one of the top releases of the year, well then congratulations to the wider heavy metal world for catching up with me. It took you long enough.

So let’s rev up our engines one last time and head down the highway to nowhere for our final ten. Hopefully they’ll have paved enough of it by now that we won’t go sailing off into the abyss when we reach the end.

 

10 – Darkened – Defilers Of The Light

Suddenly, another reason why I might’ve been hammering together a year-end review collective reveals itself as we arrive at the number ten spot of the DGR year-end extravaganza – patent pending. The multinational death metal group Darkened have had some steam behind them for a little while now, much of it credit to the members who make up the band whose past resumes include both foundational and structural groups to the current death metal scene.

At one point they even counted a former Bolt Thrower drummer in the mix. So needless to say, many a death metal fan who find themselves fans of the consistent ‘thump in the chest’ style of drum beat upon which many a swede-death song is built tend to look forward to releases by Darkened and I am no different.

I also may draw my own private amusement from the continued dedication to their artistic direction of ‘many skeletons’ being the cover art every time. Much like you can figure out – for the most part – which era a Morbid Angel album came from based upon the first letter of the album name, I expect that in the near future I’ll be able to tell which number Darkened album I’m listening to by how many skeletons feature on its artwork. Privately, I’m hoping for a lengthy enough career that one day I’ll open a disc and have a femur fall out of it.

Darkened‘s newest album Defilers Of The Light was a release that quickly became a go-to for me after first hearing it. Generally speaking, when it comes to my year-end sink-fucker of a list, this particular region is grabbed by the discs that you could go call the ‘defaults’. I’ll touch on it again later as I have a few more of these, but the basic play is that an album like Defilers Of The Light is perfect to throw on when I’m feeling indecisive. It shoots so straight and true that it would put most practiced snipers to shame. Quality-wise, it hovers at a consistent eight-out-of-ten all the way through, and although any level of familiarity with death metal will mean you can see the small man behind the curtain when it comes to Defilers Of The Light, you honestly won’t give anything close to a flying fuck. Perhaps an aerial shit or a lofty bitch-fest but a flying fuck? No sir.

Defilers Of The Light led off this particular feature so the quest to a much deeper dive isn’t too far off. Whether it was the addition of a different drummer or whether Darkened were feeling spicy, they modernized their sound a bit on Defilers Of The Light, leaning heavier into the blastbeat and gallop section than they had before. They get a little Amon Amarth-esque at moments, a little more Demonical at other times, and as grind-guitar heavy as Volturyon at others. It’s not a completely different ballpark for them but whereas albums before were akin to someone kicking your head in with a well-timed stomp, this one is a little more overwhelmingly violent.

Defilers Of The Light is also more melodic than previously approached, so there’s a little bit of cooking-sear on the red meat than Darkened had been serving up before this time around. They largely come from big melodies layered over the group’s originally hefty core, which translates to their well-honed axe-handle approach still being fully intact yet now used as another weapon in an ever-growing collective.

Defilers Of The Light was a dark horse for me when it came to year-end arranging. As I stacked my Jenga blocks of albums that I enjoyed, I found myself moving this one constantly higher just to reflect the fact that I was listening to it so constantly. This one and the disc following on my year-end pile were likely two of the more common albums to find coming out of my speakers after their respective releases.

I know that Darkened are classically minded when they need to be and are calculated and surgical experts when it comes to grabbing someone and throwing them back to the time of dinosaurs but their consistent hybridization of different eras of a specific branch of the much larger death metal Yggdrasil on Defilers Of The Light just worked so goddamned well on me.

 

9 -Darkness Everywhere – To Conquer Eternal Damnation

To Conquer Eternal Damnation is the first full-length from multi-instrumentalist Ben Murray‘s new project Darkness Everywhere. You might recognize the name from this very site, as I got the chance to review To Conquer Eternal Damnation way back in July.

The group are just the latest in his melodeath aspirations and probably the closest he has gotten by far. Light This City – where Ben occupies the drum throne – have trended in that direction over the course of their last few albums and leaned in that direction moreso than the group were given credit for on their earlier releases. Needless to say, in a time of throwback resurrections and a genre that has multiple different eras to choose from, you could do worse than continually aim for the king and try to make your own version of Slaughter Of The Soul.

It is also one hell of a way to make sure you’re shooting an arrow directly at my heart and pretty much guaranteeing you’re going to become one of my go-to default listens from the moment of release. Trust me, since To Conquer Eternal Damnation saw release in early-May, I have listened to this album capital-A ‘a lot’. It helps too that To Conquer Eternal Damnation cuts through the bullshit pretty quickly and respects my time, wrapping things up in just a hair over twenty-seven minutes. Where one might see a grindcore grand-opus in terms of run time, others will spy a pleasantly quick jab right to the chest.

This isn’t meant to be glib either. One of the quickest ways to becoming a default go-to is keeping your songs moving quick, having a couple of strong hooks, and getting out before people notice just how much of the room you’ve destroyed. I often find myself drawn to albums like this or ones that are a guitar-riff avalanche that stubbornly stick to one quick tempo. They become my musical junk food; well aware that I’m not going to be artistically challenged but instead appreciative of how well they might execute on an incredibly well worn blueprint.

With only an EP to their name and now this full length, Darkness Everywhere are already masters of the style in a way that should leave people jealous. Every song is surgically fast and all of them built around at least one razor-wire-laden guitar riff that will get stuck in your brain one way or another. Darkness Everywhere rarely retreat into the comforts of the mid-tempo galloping guitar riff, hence why so many of the songs on To Conquer Eternal Damnation don’t even clear the three-minute mark. They know what they want to say with each song and do so pretty quickly. Like I mentioned, it is music well within the DGR wheelhouse in that way, and thus Darkness Everywhere were a quick adrenaline rush before I would descend into otherwise headier matters. Sometimes, you just need something that’ll cause you to headbang without seeking deeper knowledge of the wider universe.

To Conquer Eternal Damnation has a killer number of gems within its collective when it’s not too busy speeding through your living room so quick that it leaves flaming tire marks on your floor. Looking back on it, even with the above cited review, I found myself shouting out over half the tracklisting as killer songs to listen to. When you have a two-sentence blast of songs listed saying that “Retaliation”, “Cosmic Misfortune”, “Starving Eyes”, and “The Final Descent” all have some serious bite to them, then you might as well just recommend people dive into the whole album.

“The Tragedy Of Infinite Loss” and “In Blood They Will Drown” later on in the album even get a callout, mostly due to the near-literal axe-wielding that takes place for the closing pair of songs. Hell, I’d be remiss without giving a callout to “The Architect Of Misery” as well, as it sets an early impression for how the rest of To Conquer Eternal Damnation is going to go in the first place, constructed out of a hefty one-two snare drum and guitar-riff combo and a vicious vocal front that makes sharp seem like it would be a preferable experience instead. None of this is the most cross-legged deep in meditation worthy stuff out there when it comes to heavy metal, but Darkness Everywhere are stunningly good at putting the melodeath playbook into actual practice and running wild with it.

2024 brought us an absolute array of awesome music and a good chunk of it was groups executing excellently upon alreay well-known genres. Darkness Everywhere were a project formed with an objective from moment one and To Conquer Eternal Damnation accomplishes a lot of it from the get-go. Its great food for melodeath fans and one that other people shouldn’t let fly under their radar. It’s got undeniable hooks, strong melodies, and punchy drum performances, all in concert with a decent scarred-throat vocal approach to make sure that any number of songs from here can get stuck in your head time and time again.

Also it’s probably like they may not be so much stuck, as constantly looping. To Conquer Eternal Damnation is a fantastic release for that.

 

8 – Hippotraktor – Stasis

We’ll be traveling in a different direction when it comes to our next release, far from the worlds of classic and melodic death metal and into the worlds of prog and post-metal, with just a taste for hefty chug and some fantastic drum work.

Hippotraktor‘s Stasis is an album I think a lot more people owe it to themselves to listen to, as it achieves the rare act of being stronger and improving upon an already immensely strong predecessor before it. Hippotraktor‘s take on metal is more mathematically calculated than many of the other groups on this list, with much of their sound wrapped around stuttering guitar and massive, painterly passages that are as much soundscape as they are actual movements within a song. Like mentioned before, Hippotraktor had already started at near pole-position with their prior release Meridian but they are operating on a different level when it comes to Stasis.

In a nice change of pace for my dear readers here and those of you who have fought as ardently through the wall of text before you, I did not in fact review this disc. I came damned close though, a light kiss on the cheek if you will. In that same stead I’m glad someone else was able to tackle it because it freed me up to just enjoy Hippotraktor‘s latest and boy howdy did I.

Stasis is an album that creates a hypnotic effect. I wasn’t initially expecting Hippotraktor to get heavier than they had been on Meridian. It seemed like the band had already found a good compromise between their varying influences and would so exercise upon their combination of groove, interchanging vocal lines, and deft drumming for a few releases… all of which I would have expected to be of pretty good quality. Yet Stasis still managed to catch me on the back foot multiple times. Hippotraktor haven’t completely changed sound into a grindcore band or anything like that, yet throughout Stasis they get so much more bang for the buck when it comes to the hefty chug and screaming segments that pepper their way throughout the whole album.

These intricate and interwoven songs all seem to draw you in, so that when Hippotraktor get almost painterly with their more ambient segments across Stasis you’re more than happy to join them for the ride. The fun part about all of this is that even though there is some of the heaviest stuff that Hippotraktor have broken out to date within Stasis, the clean-sung segments are equally as strong and seemingly acquire just as much focus. It’s why I found myself continually falling into Hippotraktor‘s orbit with this one. They’re doing the dance of polar opposites and weaving them together into some absolutely gorgeous pieces of music.

In many ways, I want you all to travel with Stasis instead of just seeking a fish-hook’s worth of tracks to check out. Throw on your sun hat, drive up and down the coast, sit in traffic, drive off a cliff and deploy parachutes for a sick-ass base jump. This is an album that is worth taking in as a whole, so that you can hear the subtle ebb and flow that works its way throughout the album. It’s not the constant throughline or arc, more like a winding path of sand, ever fragile yet somehow managing to maintain shape while twisting and looping through the air. It’s occasionally magical, occasionally dramatic, occasionally heavy.

When people post these sort of mathematically chugging guitar riffs and seek to paint themselves as progressive metal while sounding like a typewriter, they should be seeking to emulate the playground that Hippotraktor are kicking around in instead. If we all stand on the shoulders of giants and there’s nothing new under the sun, I certainly wouldn’t mind if a newer generation of artists saw fit to mimic releases like Stasis for a while.

 

7 – Cognizance – Phantazein

While I tend to shout from the rooftops like a crazed fool about groups that I think are severely underrated, there are others that I think tend to catch a raw one moreso than others and Cognizance are one of those bands. Granted, I know I live in my own tiny little bubble but I feel like every Cognizance release that has hit thus far is such a good refinement of the overall tech-death sound you’d think they’d be sending ripples through the collective scene. They’re one of those bands that have mastered their style, taking the surgically deft brand of tech-death with winding guitar riffs that require a laser-focused sort of ultra-precision and tied it all around a mad sense of grooving guitar and vocals that seem to require you be locked in place in order to deliver them at such a rapid-fire tempo.

Each album has been an improvement over the others and while they haven’t quite topped the high of “Strychnine Shift” as a song, each album after Malignant Dominion has had a better and better batting average in terms of songs that’ll make you feel like you went rounds with a Taekwondo artist on speed. Even as the albums have gotten longer, Cognizance have even refined upon the sound so that each succesive release still winds itself up at a few minutes over the half hour mark. Cognizance are one of my constant go-to’s for the “guitar riff landslide” style of album that I’ve been referring to over and over again ad nauseum across this wet garbage bag of a year-end list.

Phantazein is just the latest example that; somehow, Cognizance still have it and are doing it better than ever.

Generally, I try to treat these entries as a sort of reappraisal of an album now that I’ve had the time since its release to digest it, and in the case of Phantazein that means I’ve had basically the whole year. However, creature of habit that I am, my opnion remains largely unchanged from the time of the album’s review wherein I was already pretty effusive with praise. My tastes for Phantazein since have only deepened.

The drawing and art collage that makes up Phantazein‘s cover art doesn’t betray the wild circus of music within. You’d never guess the ceaseless nature of how Cognizance just plow through song after song looking at that thing. It is very fun to splash that fucker across the website though, so I take every opportunity possible to at least mention it once in a blue moon. Not to say it’s one of the more commonly run cover arts on this website but I do enjoy reminding people that we are a very serious and grim website whenever any discussion of Phantazein comes up.

I did call out song after song in the aforementioned review of Cognizance‘s latest so I can at least reiterate here the songs on this disc are absolutely killer. They’re intricate even in ways surprising to tech-death aficionados and they have a sharpened rhythm to them that calls to mind the bulldozer groove of Sensory Amusia‘s Breed Death from a few years back.

“Ceremonial Vigour” starts Phantazein off so goddamned strong it feels near-criminal since it’s such a show stopper that you have a different wall to climb than the usual ones bands will erect to get into a disc. Instead of a huge journey, you have one of the stronger songs on the disc right up front and now your biggest obstacle becomes ‘do I continue on or loop this one around again’. It’s messed up and it rules.

“Chiseled In Stone” and “Futureless Horizon” are also great songs laying within the first half of Phantazein, and the back half has its fair share of paired surprises as well. You could even argue for the back four of “Shock Heuristics”, “Broadcast Of The Gods”, “In Verses Unspoken”, and “Shadowgraph” as being their own little mini movement of explosive songs to close out Phantazein. I love that a few of them even do the surgical over/out approach of just cutting the whole song off. No fade-out, nothing.

Phantazein was one of my highlights of the year. As someone who is still fully entranced by anyone willing to dangle shiny keys in front of me over a series of increasing in speed and technicality blastbeats, I was fully absorbed into Phantazein every time I listened to it. Cognizance are locked in on this album and it shows. It is easily one of the more difficult not to headbang along to releases of the year.

 

6 – Hideous Divinity – Unextinct

I continually find myself at odds with my inability to describe why I enjoy Hideous Divinity‘s bulldozer brutal death metal as much as I do. You’d think I’d be better at it by now considering I’ve reviewed many of their releases and have included them in this whole year-end festivity every time they’ve had something since the days of Cobra Verde. Yet ten years removed, with a new album in hand, and here I am once again (I’m toooorn into pieces) tripping over my own two feet in trying to summarize the rolling storm that is every single Hideous Divinity release and then describing the sort of gradient we’re traveling on when I compare them to earlier works.

Hideous Divinity‘s newest album Unextinct came out in late March and has held on to me with a steel-handed fury that is difficult to describe. It is the group’s fifth album and arrives three years after their Alien movie series inspired ep LV-426 and five years after the sort of unspoken darker sibling to their Adveniens release, Simulacrum. Hideous Divinity have had no qualms about looking to film as one of their major sources of inspiration over the course of their career yet you could say that they found a sort of comfort zone in a realm of science-fiction and body horror. This is an influence that while inspiring an aesthetic and general approach isn’t quite as overt as some of our more death metal inspired cohorts over the years, and even then I still wasn’t quite sure what to expect with Unextinct.

Except to be basically pummeled to death because that’s the experience I sign up for every time with Hideous Divinity and it’s no different here on Unextinct. I delved into a large part of that aspect in my review of the album a few weeks before it saw release.

The pacing on Unextinct is wild to say the last. There’s multiple seven to eight minute songs within its run time and in total it asks for fifty-one minutes of sheer ass kicking out of you. The way the album is broken up, the first few songs are an incredibly dense block – from the band that is the most purest in terms of dense death metal out of that wave of Italian hyper-fast blasting machines – and then songs afterward will have a short build-up interlude before launching into an equally dense follower song.

Unextinct is like a block of seven-to-eight minute songs followed by seven-to-eight minute movements. I would seriously argue that “Mysterium Tremendum” requires opener “Der Verlorene Sohn” before it in order to get the full experience of that apocalyptic run of sound. Much like album highlight “More Than Many, Never One” doesn’t work as well without “Hair, Dirt, Mud” preceeding it. If you’re going to make these gigantic and monstrous songs the way Hideous Divinity do, we should honestly just crush them together and get well into the double digits. Let’s really start scaring people.

If you’ll forgive a massive quote block from my review, I covered this as well with the opening numbers and I think it is well worth repeating just to cover the sheer scale of the mountain you’ll be climbing with Unextinct.

Hideous Divinity intertwine a lot of the music together and you’d be forgiven at first for assuming that the opening blast of songs was all one big, suffocating number. “Dust Settles On Humanity” could flatten someone on its own for the minute or so of music within it and Hideous Divinity use it as an opener for what has been one of the lead-off singles for the album, “The Numinous One”. That near-eight-minute run time is not a joke; it’s a gigantic song and one of a few of that size in the overall Unextinct sphere of influence. “Atto quarto, the Horror Paradox” sails well into the eight-plus-minute range and the band are playing for every second of it.

Unextinct is a massive effort of an album and one that is well worth the destination trip into it. It’s like a ship being battered by never-ending waves at times and its movements are very cinematic in scope. It also easily ranks up there as one of their best releases thus far.

 

5 – Benighted – Ekbom

Benighted‘s Ekbom may be one of my most pleasant surprises this year. I had known I was probably going to like the group’s then-upcoming release but you’re operating on a scale of just how much when you talk of my unabashed fandom of the French deathgrinders. They had kept busy over the pandemic by unleashing a string of singles but those felt a little safe for the Benighted crew. Solid as a rock – and for all their horror movie inspiration that other bands would eventually transform into whole albums – but they were songs that perfectly lined up with what they had been doing on 2020’s Obscene Repressed just prior to it.

Ekbom then, was an album that needed to be special. Benighted could have easily skated on doing another album in the vein of Carnivore Sublime but it felt like they had a pretty good tryptch of releases with what they had at present. Otherwise, Benighted would be facing the law of diminishing returns and would’ve slowly backslid into the shadows, so even though it went understated at the time, Ekbom did have some weight resting on its shoulders.

Luckily, Ekbom turned out to be quite the beast regardless, blurring the lines between death and grind even further than they already had – even surprising the hell out of me when it came to how quickly I came around on this release. It’s got some of the most shameless grooves the band have written to date, enough that I would feel ashamed if I had any capacity to do so when the back part of “Morgue” actually lands, and it also has Benighted at their most relentless. They become towering in stature on a few songs but only because the pyroclastic flow the band have unleashed is now collapsing towards you and they’re hovering above it, fully aware that it is their fault.

Much like Darkness Everywhere earlier on in this final edition of my year-end neck-snapping, Benighted waste little of the listener’s time either. There’s one short introductory song but that’s it for set dressing. After that, you have a rocket strapped to you and you’re being launched into whatever hard object has enough mass to stop you. Ekbom runs for twelve songs and thirty-six-and-a-half-minutes and multiple of those songs just barely skirt to the two-and-a-half minute mark. The story of Ekbom quickly becomes a tale of song after song cannoned at the listener from a multi-row fusillade.

There’s plenty of songs to rock you one upside the dome as well: “Scars” and “Morgue” serve for a solid one-two punch right in the opening of Ekbom and things pick up again with “Le vice des entrailles” soon after. At first I had felt that perhaps Ekbom was probably a little frontloaded but then as I worked my way into the back-half, it just became clear that the album was stacked as a whole.

The guest appearance by Archspire‘s Oliver Rae Aleron during “Nothing Left To Fear” – which Benighted wrote suitably fast in order to match their guest – is a lot of fun, and the other guest appearance during “Fame Of The Grotestque” from Blockhead‘s vocalist Xev is also pretty good. The song itself is also appreciably short. It gets in, rips people apart, and leaves the gore pile for other people to discover. It’s definitely part of a much grindier back-half of Ekbom but part of the fun of listening to this release is listening to it slowly mutate into a different creature from whence it started.

The nicest thing about Ekbom is that it only falls close to self-parody one time during “A Reason For Treason”, and even then I still remain unsure if it’s because it’s got some absolute marauders in terms of music in the songs immediately surrounding it.

Ekbom doesn’t fall off otherwise and I love it for that. Benighted unleashing one of the better albums of the year was a lot of fun for me. For all their tales of murder, dead bodies, rot, perversion, and various other things meant to disgust and frighten, Benighted have not forgotten the core of making a really fucking good song. Turns out you can get away with some seriously dumb shit when you have a groove as glorious as the one I keep bringing up from “Morgue” – and only partially because I want to astroturf my way into seeing them do it live.

Ekbom was an easy top five for me when it came to 2024 and I highly suggest you check it out if you’re looking for leg-breaking by cinderblock dropped from space style heaviness.

 

4 – Vitriol – Suffer And Become

Oregon’s Vitriol have a brand of death metal that was designed to be overwhelming from moment one. Existing in a form of fiery, nuclear rage from the start has meant that Vitriol‘s brand of heavy is colored by such an ire within its subject matter than you’re stunned the music is managing to hold itself together, much less the band.

Us heavy metal dorks are big fans of describing music as being weaponized, as if these talented musicians are being put to work on us dissident listeners with the effect being somewhere pleasurable enough that the extreme-sports pyrotechnics taking place within heavy metal’s bounds impress time and time again. Vitriol have actually figurd out how to weaponize their music and use it as an instrument of extreme anger.

Theirs is a branch of death metal that relies heavily on just how overwhelmingly intense it is. Their prior album To Bathe From The Throat Of Cowardice was a release that doesn’t so much blow your hair back as it blows your head off – assuming your brain isn’t rattled out of your ears by the up-in-the-stratosphere level of over the top that the drum mixing got. Vitriol‘s newest album Suffer And Become was part of a wild vanguard of releases that hit in January that I knew was going to spend the year just continually kicking my legs out from under me and lo-and-behold I was correct, for this is a disc that while the band may have finally achieved fully immolating themselves, managed to light my listening senses on fire as well while also making what felt like a natural progression from their previous album five years ago.

Suffer And Become intelligently expanded upon the group’s forever burnt-to-a-cinder take on death metal for their followup album. Rather than just going bigger, Vitriol dug deep and found as many ways as possible to reach that grander scale as well – resulting in an album that is stealthily a little bit more approachable than its older sibling but equally as terrifying. Vitriol remained at the same level of intensity yet also found new ways to inflict pain, which is a hell of a maneuver given that it had seemed like every weapon of war had already been deployed with the group’s first bombing run.

Hell, Vitriol even managed to find ways to do stuff that seemed like it might hurt themselves over and over, as I continually find myself flashing back to the closing guitar work on “Shame And It’s Afterbirth”, which seemed like such a relentless wall of guitar soloing and sweeping that the look of pain that vocalist/guitarist Kyle Rasmussen is usually wearing when playing might actually be real this time.

Don’t let me belay you too much though, there’s a full review of this dense motherfucker waiting for you from all the way back in January if you prefer more than my justifications here.

There’s an oppressive atmosphere to Suffer And Become that stuck with me for the entire year. While I tremendously loved the cleaned up drumming production – it’s nice not being shot to death via snare drum, fun as that was – Vitriol still sounded big during their time on this disc. They used everything and the kitchen sink available to them: There’s very quiet orchestral lines weaving their way through multiple songs, there’s stealthily melodic guitar leads, the group’s trademark vocal assault at this point could potentially include various stage hands for all I know, and there are riffs that alternate between Hate Eternal levels of skullfuckery and tech-death. It’s hard not to be drawn to the ominous atmosphere that covers “Nursing From The Mother Wound” or how teeth-baringly mean a song like “Weaponized Loss” is. Suffer And Become contorts Vitriol‘s formula enough that the body breaks and the spine sticks out of the back of the neck like a pike.

Vitriol shot themselves into the forefront of the current metalsphere by sheer vitrue of ‘holy shit’. Their EP and album prior to Suffer And Become both laid the foundation for the disc to follow and once that initial conflagration was out of the way, the burning of the bodies left behind has to take place. In some ways, you could view Suffer And Become as that. It’s a more mature and mournful take on the group’s ‘burn the world to the ground’ sound and it was also one of the albums that hung itself around my neck all year.

 

3 – Job For A Cowboy – Moon Healer

You all have no idea how much joy I’ve been deriving from the fact that I knew early on I was probably going to have Job For A Cowboy‘s new album Moon Healer somewhere in my top 10 for the year-end list from the moment I first listened to it.

Having long, long, long ago fought and given up the battle against the band for their history as one of deathcore’s initial vanguard right as the genre was exploding and for annoying my guitar-solo-loving, euro-metal worshipping self, I’ve enjoyed Job For A Cowboy‘s career as a band since the group put out Ruination. Despite their name at the time being a relic of the days of naming yourself dumb shit for laughs, the group were legitimately evolving into something impressive, each of their releases moving them closer to a progressive and technical death metal hybrid. I think they finally managed to win me over with the Gloom EP and I’ve been a fan ever since.

To put this in perspective of course, I hadn’t joined No Clean Singing for most of that particular battle so any archive that exists is of me being bought in on Demonocracy and its incredible follower Sun Eater.

Sun Eater was the final album of Job For A Cowboy at the time. It was a release I used to joke was driven by the fact that they sat down and said ‘Holy fuck we have a bassist’. Which could partially be true because you don’t recruit someone who has the chops to hang around with Cephalic Carnage‘s brand of madness and not use them.

Sun Eater was transformitive for Job For A Cowboy and may be one of the finest examples of a disc being ahead of the curve vs its own fan base. A lot of people enjoyed the complete and total transformation into a technical death metal band, complete with a heavy focus on psychedelia, and the release was even a thematic concept album as well. Up to this point I would’ve argued that songs like “Son Of Nihility” and “Encircled By Mirrors” were some of the best Job For A Cowboy had in their arsenal. I thought at the time the group would be truly ascendant, and instead what happened would fall closer to a near-decade of dormancy.

So yes, like many I was very excited when it was announced that the group had gotten back together and would be releasing an album titled Moon Healer. I was even more excited upon the release of the first few singles only to realize that this wasn’t a throwback to earlier eras of the group. The band were getting back together and effectively picking up right where they left off, and not only that, they were willing to get even weirder in the decade since.

Moon Healer is a fucking amazing disc. It’s like the group had stepped off the stage, waited for everyone to catch up to them, and then stepped back on stage and declared they were going to be even more angular than before. Good, too. I wanted them to get weird and challenge people. I wanted them to be bizarre enough and confident enough in it to justify the excellent fashion choices of a Hideous Divinity shirt + fanny pack and shorts combo – not that I don’t appreciate a good Organ Dealer shirt as well – as your official band photo.

Moon Healer picks up the baton from Sun Eater nearly a decade later and sprints off as if there had never been a wait between albums. It is a confident and daring album that hones its older sibling into an even sharper blade while delving even further into the LSD nightmare that is its cover art. This is a release filled with such sharp groove, such winding songwriting, such impressive performances on all fronts – especially on drums with Navene Koperweis helping to record the album and putting on a fucking class of his own – that you couldn’t help but be bowled over by it at first. Moon Healer is an album of complicated layers and interwoven songs and yet they make it seem like it’s the easiest thing in the world for them. The result is a wild near-forty minutes that is one of those albums I would love to see done all the way through live.

Andy tackled this one all the way back in February so thankfully instead I’ve had the ability to just yell at people about how good this album is for the better part of the year.

The singles and music videos leading up to Moon Healer were particularly promising. I was amused greatly by Job For A Cowboy unleashing the pairing of “The Agony Seeping Storm” and “The Forever Rot” ahead of the album only to later discover on the full tracklisting that those were the ones that closed the album. Those two songs are intricate and heavy as hell, churning over themselves and roiling like an angry sea. Job For A Cowboy make use of these massive, wandering guitar parts that allow plenty of breathing room for the bass guitar to fight its way to the front – if you love a good bass guitar effectively working like a lead guitar this is a disc that will have you covered – and those two songs are chock full of them.

If the disc was full of nothing but that then I would’ve been a genuinely happy camper and for the most part that is what happens here. Every song is at that level of quality or better, but the ones that really took me by surprise was a run of three songs near the center of the disc. The run of “Grinding Wheels Of Ophanim” into “The Sun Gave Me Ashes So I Sought Out The Moon” and then into “Into The Crystalline Crypts” is one of the best musical moments of the year. Bar None: Those are three fantastic songs that elevated Moon Healer beyond being just a really goddamned good album and into something amazing that I spent the rest of the year listening to.

Moon Healer is an album that appealed to my musical sensibilties like few others did in 2024. Knowing that it would rocket to the top like that was something set in stone pretty early on, and as the rest of the year filled out it has found itself in an absolutely incredible collective of releases surrounding it. To return after a near-decade of dormancy like this and bring out an album as strong as Moon Healer is a wild goddamned act and one that Job For A Cowboy deserve an insane amount of commendation for.

 

2 – Ulcerate – Cutting The Throat Of God

There have been a lot of words dedicated to describing Ulcerate‘s brand of death metal over the years. We’ve piled on various forms of incineration comparing them to a constant conflagration; we’ve covered the grounds of suffocating and overwhelming, dissonance and discordant; and have enough takes on the idea of gargantua that we could easily fill a book. But rarely did I ever consider I would reach a time when I’d be willing to apply ‘dark and mournful’ to the mix as well, yet with Ulcerate‘s newest album Cutting The Throat Of God that might just be the case.

Ulcerate are a band where the phrase ‘only a group like Ulcerate could…’ gets dropped constantly. This is a band that somehow managed to sound proven by the time of their second release and everything since then has either added to it or increased in quality. They’ve become a force unto themselves within the world of heavy metal. People know Ulcerate more now as a mood than as a musical group. You put Ulcerate on and for a good batch of years there, you did so because you would’ve been okay with watching the world suffocate and burn.

Now, with the their 2024 album Cutting The Throat Of God we can add to the list of things ‘only Ulcerate could…’ because in this case, only Ulcerate could have an album like this release from June feel like it has fast-forwarded through multiple months to drop us right in the dead of the fall/winter changeover. It is an album that lifts us from sunlight and casts us into utter shadow, leaving us wounded and devastated by the time things draw to a close.

I’m rather proud of the review I did for this one and only partially because I did the entire thing via gmail on my cellphone while lightly drunk in a hotel room. I’ve been swimming in the waters of Ulcerate‘s polluted lake for some time now and have managed to crank out a review for most of their releases, and following the change in attitude and style on both the band’s and my own part is fun to watch. Ulcerate tend to rank pretty high with me in general but that still doesn’t deny the fact that I was pretty much in awe of Cutting The Throat of God the first time I heard it.

It was one of the few – you could maybe argue one of a particular five – where I started wrting down thoughts immediately upon finishing it. Usually I like to let things percolate for a while when it comes to intial drafts and things for an album but no so with Cutting The Throat Of God. This is a release that managed to pry its way into my brain about halfway into song three and then it just roared around within the rest of the empty crevasse until it ended. I could tell this was going to be a big disc this year from that first couple of trips through. Ideas began pouring out of me immediately.

Ulcerate albums are the the type that leave you in some sort of wreckage by the time you’re done. They’ve dealt in a suffocating intensity for some time and have rarely been approachable unless you were deeply prepared for it. Cutting The Throat Of God is a different beast because it more or less aims to devastate you. There’s a mournful spectre haunting the outskirts of the death metal dynamo that Ulcerate is normally, and it often takes the form of a melodic line deeply buried within the song. Though it’s rare, because Ulcerate are also of the school of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ some of those melodic lines can help elevate a song way past ‘pretty good’ and right into ‘goddamned great’ territory. Thus, you would figure correctly, Ulcerate use them a lot here but treat them as one more arrow in an increasingly large quiver.

You have to remember that Cutting The Throat Of God is still only seven songs when all is said and done, but each one of those songs is a recorded cataclysm all its own. It continues to amaze me that for a three-piece, Ulcerate manage to sound absolutely gigantic when they’re not using the fun trick of sounding like they were being recorded from the next town over.

“To See Death Just Once” is an absolutely amazing song that transcends just being part of the Ulcerate collective. It is a song more people should experience, even if you’ve long sworn off the big, crashing guitars and drowned vocals of this band. You can’t help but be won over by that song. The bookends of “To Flow Through Ashen Hearts” and “Cutting The Throat Of God” are also really good, and the fact that one then easily turns around and feeds back into the other means Ulcerate have a dangerous collective of spiraling loops within this album – all of which are so emotionally traumitized that you could easily understand why someone might find this level of extremity in music both amazing and comforting.

Cutting The Throat Of God came damned close to taking the top spot this year. I’d argue the difference between them and the one that actually took it is a curled ball hair and that’s about it when it concerns how much I was ‘enjoying’ an album. Cutting The Throat Of God is an almost transcendent album and one that is easily worth recommending to other people. You owe it to yourself to dive in with this one; there’s so much to dissect, so much to watch being dissected, and so many things to hear crushed or immolated afterward that you can’t help but be proud that metal still manages to produce an album on the level of what Ulcerate managed to unleash upon us this year.

 

1 – Schammasch – The Maldoror Chants: Old Ocean

Schammasch‘s The Maldoror Chants: Old Ocean fascinates me in ways that are difficult to describe. It is hypnotic, and I was easily pulled into its orbit upon hearing its first few singles.

Schammasch have been ambitious over the course of their career, with The Maldoror Chants: Old Ocean being part of a collective of works in which Schammasch have drawn inspiration from the book Les chants de Maldororë. It is the second in a series for the band with the first being their Hermaphrodite release back in 2017. While it may have taken seven years to get there, the return on The Maldoror Chants: Old Ocean was well worth the wait.

Schammasch have been using this subset of projects to be more experimental with their sound and thus far both have been absolutely full of surprises. I can imagine they were initially aiming to treat this experiment as a series of EPs that they could then expand upon for full-length albums, yet I can also appreciate the idea that the scope of Schammasch‘s ambitions quickly grew out of control in regards to The Maldoror Chants: Old Ocean and thus it became an album-length release. It’s the only way I can fully explain the sudden pendulum swinging in regards to Schammasch‘s song times, most of which reach well over ten minutes with ease.

A large part of Schammasch‘s draw has been the purposeful sprititual mystique that has enveloped and surrounded the band over the years. Musically, they are highly experimental and have long since sailed past the good ship black metal for realms much more eldritch and mysterious. Each one of their releases has been a crazed exercise in not knowing what to expect as the group wholly give themselves over to their art and what comes over to the other side is just the musical third of it. It’s the synthesis between the conceptual, musical, and visual of each album that makes Schammasch truly work, and on The Maldoror Chants: Old Ocean the group have stepped up to becoming an even more captivating organism than before.

In a lot of ways I was primed to absolutely adore this new album because I also loved the EP in this series before this — Hermaphrodite — even though that record is effectively fifteen-minutes of build up for one actual ‘song’ and an extended closing number. If anyone wonders where something like “Katabasis” might’ve come from on their album Hearts Of No Light, it’s because they laid the groundwork for it on the EP just prior.

I know that recency bias tends to color a lot of people’s opinions when it comes to year-end list writing, and while it will have been a scant few days under two months since this release was officially out by the time this list runs, I’m still confident giving it my top album of the year award because as fucked up as it sounds, The Maldoror Chants: Old Ocean has dominated those two months and become basically all I listen to at times. There’s six songs here for over fifty-minutes worth of music and it is a journey I am excited to take every single time.

I am overjoyed to hear the ambient bits of opener “Crystal Waves” come fading in whenever the album starts over, and I love the way all of the songs – much like the preceding Maldoror Chants EP – are designed to run into one another. Yes, they’re still separate tracks but truthfully this is a fifty-one minute experience. This is a magnetic album that controls me in ways hard to describe and it is one of those I am slowly becoming familiar enough with that even the negative spaces start to appear full to me. Each song on The Maldoror Chants: Old Ocean builds to some sort of cinematic and rumbling climax, and for the most part Schammasch aren’t drifting within the waters on the way there. Everything serves a grander purpose here, even an introductory song like “A Somber Mystery” – which is basically the song that rolls out the red carpet for the incredible pairing of “Your Waters Are Bitter” and “They Have Found Their Master”.

Thankfully, someone else stepped up to review this one so I could go full slack-jawed yokel in love with the pretty thing when it came to this album.

Schammasch combine so many different styles into the eventual potion that becomes The Maldoror Chants: Old Ocean yet all of it sounds organic. Shammasch move deliberately here, and while songs are easily into the ten-minute mark for most of this release, they evolve so naturally that it truly feels like you’re witnessing something more than just music. It’s astonishing that they’re as good at it is as they are here, but it’s clear that Schammasch used the five-year gap between this album and their previous release to maximum effect. It is one that I am perfectly happy awarding the top honors this year because I want people to listen to it. This is one of those releases where I am willing to engage in a bit of zealotry. You should absolutely listen to this album.

As is the case with so many of the releases in my year-end list, this is one of the strongest recommendations I can give you. I have thought that The Maldoror Chants: Old Ocean was astonishing since the moment it crossed my ears for the first time. I couldn’t believe at nearly every twist and turn that Schammasch were somehow making this mad concept work, uniting so many different genres and elements, using contrast as a painter’s brush, and effortlessly letting it all flow out into a maelstrom of musical waters to combine into one album, yet that is what happened over and over again on The Maldoror Chants: Old Ocean .

Do not miss this album. It is worth the journey.

 

Fin

Ta Da! Top hat donned and cane acquired, torn suit placed upon my lilting figure and that’s it. We’re done. Fifty albums done, dusted, immolated, and the slate wiped clean and ready for next year.

I always feel strange by the time I reach the end of the whole year-end collision or whatever I finally settle upon calling this ash pile because my brain is so fried I don’t really have room for ‘final thoughts’. I’d love to pontificate about next year but truthfully – much like 2023 – I honestly don’t fully know what’s coming. I’m very excited to see what new craziness comes out of the Stargate: Heavy Metal over the course of the next year because its not like many of our favorites won’t be lacking for inspiration, but also because there’s always someone willing to take a fucking wild swing to make their art happen within the world of metal and we just get to enjoy the ride.

Which groups evolve, which groups will spring to life, who ascends, who plays it safe, that’s all part of the fun of being a music fan and observer at the same time. It’s a fucking strange form of cultural anthropology and one I imagine wouldn’t pass peer review in a Kindergarden class but one I am more than happy to engage in time and time again. I may disappear for a bit but I still have two or three releases I would like to touch base with at some point, so who knows what neuron will spark and burn itself out to keep me moving over the next handful of weeks. Just remember to keep our friends and loved ones close and I’ll be seeing you all soon to disappoint your kvlt sensibilities once again.