BECAUSE WITTY YEAR-END LIST TITLES ABOUT RUINING THE HOLIDAYS ARE FOR SUCKERS — THE DGR YEAR ENDSTAVAGANZA PART ONE: 50-41

(This is the first part of a five-part countdown by DGR of his 2024 year-end list, with each selection accompanied by his very extensive thoughts about the releases. Our plan is to roll out the rest of the installments on successive days until this week ends or falls into a sinkhole under the weight of his words.)

It feels like I blinked and suddenly a whole year had passed. Maybe it’s just the flow of life finally catching back up to me but this year moved in extreme fits and extreme starts and somewhere along the way I lost track of it among the deluge and wreckage that seems to be a daily existence. Among the piles of charred wood and still yet burning cars is another three hundred and sixty-five days of existence slowly signing its final paperwork and preparing itself to move on from the mortal coil.

At the very least, there was some sort of notification that this was coming. It feels like every year I open with some variation of ‘hey, this previous year sucked shit,’ and I’m pretty sure I’ve taken a similar tack to open up a few of the previous year-end posts – if only some sort of dipshit had done an anniversary post whereby he might have easy access to all his previous years’ transgressions upon the internet and the collective heavy metal world at large –  so I’ll dispense with the usual landfill avalanche of thoughts pertaining to world events and the previous days gone by because, shock of all shocks, this year sucked.

Next year is likely going to suck too and the year after that will probably suck even worse. We’ll make the word ‘suck’ mundane through repetition, as if an ever-present shadow haunting our lives, by the time we’re done with this. Eventually, we will all lose all sense of what the word actually means and we will be permanently trapped in some sort of constant suck-vortex powerful enough that we’ll get dragged into court for infringement by Dyson and we’ll be numb to the common sense of suck surrounding us. We’ll have finally ascended into the boring dystopia I’ve bitched about that is coming for years. Just my luck I can’t even get one with decent Blade Runner lighting.

 

I will say that, musically, this was a weird one.

Not necessarily due to the way heavy metal heaves, roils, and changes like a maelstrom with an upset stomach but rather due to life events outside of it and my ability to access music. I found that due to changes in the job position, general relocation, as well as differing interests in regular life off the beaten path resulted in my music-listening ability being cleaved pretty sharply down from what it used to be.

Used to be I could surround myself in it, forever be awash in it, and explore as much as possible within the realm of my awake time – and maybe a little while I’m asleep depending on how comfy the headphones are – but now? Work has made it difficult and more often than not, I’m not concentrated in one place like I used to be, so the old trick of having it going on a speaker resting by where I’m working doesn’t quite have the same effect. Especially when you’re in charge of four other people.

Now, music becomes a communal event whether you want it to be or not. Should my coworkers have some sense of the difference between deathgrind, grindcore, and brutal death? Probably not. Do they? I eagerly await my first supervisor review.

So what did that mean for the year-end pile? Could I conceivably still acheive the dreaded ego exercise of having fifty albums to write about and hogging a whole week to myself for no other purpose than to make sure the ole’ horn-tooter still works? Yes, and actually in spite of all of it, I did so with relative ease.

Usually I start panicking until I reach about thirty-eight albums written down on this list of whether or not I’ll have enough until I start crossing into the window of the late-summer/early-fall releases. This time around I came in with about sixty-five of those things, and with some careful pruning, painful and not so painful cuts, and a handful of last minute Batty-esque brain shortings, was I able to whittle it down until a ballpark-fifty as of the end of November. Which means that by the time this runs, a few albums I’ve had in reserve will have seen release but probably won’t be on there.

Doing the whole ‘lookit me, I’m covering stuff you haven’t heard and claiming it’s one of the better albums this year’ feels a little gauche. I get why, because we all have deadlines, but at the very least I can maintain some semblance of ‘fairness’… right before I kick your favorite group in the junk by not including them.

Which brings us to the yearly disclaimers, legal disclosures, NDAs, stuff to keep in mind, and other flotsam and jetsam that likely won’t hold up in the court of the glorious nation of California. This list is not like Andy‘s list. There’s a reason why I prefer to let Andy‘s incredibly comprehensive exercise in list-making run first as well as a bunch of the bigger magazine/website collectives. This list is highly personal; it pertains to my tastes and my tastes alone.

The hope is that many of you trust me enough to take it on faith that I’m not just posting bullshit to post bullshit but that even when there’s a bunch of stuff you’ll turn your nose up at in one particular entry – or hell, all of them – you’ll still spot one or two that you enjoy. It’s a godawful batting average and I’m well aware, but it isn’t too far off from my athletic performance in actual baseball anyway.

Even then I have made efforts to cull some of the sillier, more commonly listened to releases that I’ve played with this year; otherwise you’d find the electronica rave/youtube guitarist gangbang/breakdown-fest that is The Browning‘s newest album Omni laying in this mix because I do like me a good pop-song hook and breakdown. Is it revolutionary? Nope. Has it become my equivalent of slamming a can of Mt.Dew down my face and playing Warframe for four hours? You betcha.

Really, part of this is just because I enjoy the cover art collages that get run alongside each one, and given my musical tastes, at the very least there’ll be some decent splashes of color to help break the uber-kvlt black and white and classical paintings that tend to dominate when the year-end pile comes around. Also – there’s the part where I am still shamelessly deep within the tech-death and various-core worlds, which I know a lot of metal listeners have long since had their Andy in Toy Story moment with, but let this be a testament to any future partners out there: I am nothing else if not stupidly loyal.

With the mental diarrhea now effectively cleansed for the briefest of seconds let’s do what we all came here to do and hit the go button on this motherfucker. I’ve got a week of your guys’ time to waste and you better believe I’m going to enjoy every second of it.

I mean for fucks sake, when was the last time you guys really took a look at your landscaping? And you’re in here reading this shit?

 

50 – Nails – Every Bridge Burning

This was one spot where I did not expect to have a small bit of internal consternation when it came to placing a release, given how high up in the reaches of the year-end shenanigans that we are. I do consider that the first release that appears – i.e., the one that is in slot 50 – sets the tone for the overall venture, strange as it sounds. Yet, it is the first one that people see if they’re following you chronologically and the first taste of what the upcoming section might look like.

It also makes a weird sort of statement given that releases lower than this this would otherwise be relegated to some sort of quickly tossed off ‘honorable mentions’ section – which I have no intention of doing. If I reference another release that you don’t see popping up in the bounds of my year-end thing, you can assume I also enjoyed that album as well. I’ll try to talk about it somewhat at least.

So in that case, what slot fifty gives the impression of being is a sort of gatekeeper, which is something I do hope to dispel by simply saying that the upper parts of my year-end lists (the larger numbers) tend to move and shift with the tides. Really, they’re on here because I felt a compulsion to say something at least, like the release was owed that much. As if to acknowledge its existence was to vindicate said existence.

Thus, for a long time I debated what to put here, and weirdly enough, the toss-up came up between Kruelty‘s Profane Usurpation and Nails‘ Every Bridge Burning, which are releases that see the former and the latter trending more in their cohorts’ direction than what they realize… and also releases that hit just late enough for me to by super-familiar with them outside of the lame-ass ‘oh yeah, I really enjoy this’.

In a way, I’m pleasantly surprised by Kruelty‘s latest EP as it continues their trend of knuckle-dragging, just outright stupid riff writing, but by kicking the tempo in the ass a little bit the band have gotten a little grindier and with a little more ferocity and it works for them. Likewise, Nails‘ long absence saw them working a lot of crustier death metal into their mix – so much so that the production job on Every Bridge Burning is dirtier by comparison to their previous album’s oppressively sharp turn at the speakers – and it also works for them.

Overall, neither band’s sound shifted fully into artistic revolution or unrecognizable territory but each band did wind up with a new war-worthy weapon in their hands. Its just that yours truly tends to enjoy the relentless blastbeat ass-beating of a grind session more than the crustier thump of a hardcore and death metal hybridization. I reiterate on this point though… that means just barely. You’d be treating yourself well by going for either of the two I’m discussing here. You’d even be spending a similar amount of time, given that the difference between the Profane Usurpation EP and Every Bridge Burning album is a whopping one minute and forty seconds.

Bands that tend to share the same wheelhouse as groups like Afgrund, Nasum, Rotten Sound, Gadget, Teethgrinder, Napalm Death, and the like, tend to find their way into my year-end lists by sheer virtue of the fact that they’ve become a default listen for a needed energy boost. Much of the music these bands put out is heavily blastbeat oriented and driven by such utter ferocity that you could use it to power an internal combustion engine. Nails‘ career up to this point hasn’t really been different in that regard.

In fact, when they were first really starting to gain steam as a project they sent quite a few shockwaves up and down the California coast, so the Nails project is something I’ve been following for some time. That sort of familiarity meant when they gained a lot of recognition in the halcyon days of You Will Never Be One Of Us it was more along the ‘hey, nice to see people joining the party’ rather than them being some sort of auditory revolution.

There’s a lot in the Nails sound that is instantly recognizable if you have a familiarity with grind as a whole, and the band get by just by being wholly bought into their brand of bullshit. They make their sound work because they believe in it, so when you have an album just called Every Bridge Burning after having some pretty intensely exclusionary song titles like “I Don’t Want To Know You”, you can understand that anything that is being stated on that album is something the group are throwing their whole weight behind and the same goes for the music as well.

Nails played a fiery grind and their genre needle doesn’t shift much here. They’ve definitely got a newer strain of death metal revivalism working through some of it, but the sort of no bullshit, no consequences, zero survivors style grind that has been their bread and butter is still the very core of Every Bridge Burning. As it stood, the almost three months it has been out up to the point when I’m writing this blurb has at the very least landed it on the radar where I felt I had to say something about it. It just isn’t an album I went back to as much as I would’ve liked.

My tastes were weirdly effervescent this year and often would shift from one thing to another like someone fucking with a radio dial and being thrilled with the static between channels just as much as the music before. Every Bridge Burning is a solid no-holds-barred style grind disc. There’s some hefty death metal thump to it but songs rarely veer into the two and three minute mark. Yes, there’s been a huge gap of time between releases but you’d never guess it going by the way Every Bridge Burning gives off the impression of picking up the baton from when Nails last set it down.

 

 

49 – Mental Torment – Dead Shot Revival

Mental Torment‘s newest album Dead Shot Revival arrives as the product of a weird fascination. Generally speaking, albums that come out later on in the year have to make a hell of an impression in order to crack into the list party, and often when they do I’ll find myself placing it closer to the higher reaches of the list for an often cited reason – familiarity. The excuse being that I just haven’t had enough time to let an album really grow on me, yet Mental Torment‘s Dead Shot Revival made a real hard fight to dominate my last month or so of listening time.

There were a few albums to do that this year, and even one that paired up well with Mental Torment‘s release, that fought their way into the spotlight like ravenous animals. Which I will openly admit are some very strange descriptors to apply to a doom album, but in order to understand that you’d likely need a quick primer on what Dead Shot Revival is.

This is Mental Torment‘s third album and second one after a near eight-year period of inactivity in regards to released music between 2013 and 2021. They’re a doom band with a heavy taste for funereal dirges, though their equal taste for a big keyboard swell sees the band hitting balls in the same park as a group like Swallow The Sun at times – which may be why Dead Shot Revival has made such an impression on me for the past month or so.

Swallow The Sun go for big, heavy, arena-worthy depressive rock, and a handful of groups step up to fill the soul-crushing dirge and emotive crawl that they would’ve otherwise gone for. Mental Torment do put an interesting spin on it by having a big influence from the abyssal side of death metal, so in between these large, brooding crawls through the mud, the band will drop into a room-rumbling shake that could knock portraits off of walls. That switch happens deftly as well, and is often organic within the song itself, so that it doesn’t feel like parts being stitched together with a sewing machine.

Needless to say, something like Dead Shot Revival is impressive on that front because Mental Torment really do step into the limelight here and manage to put on one hell of a show. With a tale of the tape weighing in at near fifty minutes of music and six songs, you’ll have to leave your ‘psychic of the week’ hat at home this time because you can probably guess just what sort of musical activity Mental Torment are serving up here.

They are one of a few bands in 2024 that in spite of my tendency to pull away from the doom-oriented genres in recent years, still have managed to leave me a little spellbound. Their style of music isn’t too far from recognizable but it is a credit to the band that they have been able to execute upon their chosen blueprint so well that even in the span of a little over a month since Dead Shot Revival‘s release, you’ve got at least one of us here feeling the compulsion to say something.

The band work hard to try and maintain their death metal influences – especially in the hollow cave and heavy grunt recording style – but when the album opens as cold and pensive as a song like “DYM”, it’s hard to deny that the draw is a little irresistable. If it isn’t that, it’s the frigid and melodic guitar leads that sprout up throughout Dead Shot Revival‘s six songs, some of which have some surprisingly bluesy guitar bends to them. It’s not often in a doom album when you could picture one person sitting in a chair and just enjoying every time they make a note bend, but those spring up in between each labored step or drawn-out death metal passage.

A lot of the interest with Mental Torment‘s latest was just to see where they would go next, especially when half of the album is songs over nine minutes long. Dead Shot Revival stood in stark contrast to much of what I’ve listened to this year and the fascination with it remains strong. It made one hell of a first impression during one of my many YouTube rabbit hole tumbles this year but it is also an album I think folks outside my regular listening sphere are likely to be drawn to as well.

 

 

48 – Carnosus – Wormtales

Feels like we’re getting started early with the X Games Skateboarding big-ramp-esque style death metal doesn’t it? In spite of the genre now becoming a much more known factor within the world of heavy metal and congealing into its own particular artform full of recognizable tropes, dances, and plot-twists, there is still the occasional chance that someone will blow your hair back or catch you by surprise by being just slightly more than the latest musicians tumble dried and shuffled into a new group of interchangeable mud.

2024 did pretty well on that front actually, and though there were some known factors executing incredibly well upon careers now notable enough that you could pick them out from a lineup blindfolded, there were still plenty of groups that managed to put a new twist on it to keep things interesting.

The tale behind Carnosus and their release Wormtales is especially impressive on that front, hitting basically on a year and a half turnaround – itself a difficult feat – from an album released in 2023 and managing to come off like the alternate universe mirror image of that release. There’s a certain amount of nastiness that works its way into the grossness that is Wormtales but Carnosus have a lot of fun here and do so with some immensely sharp riff-writing. It’s not barbed wire so much as it is nano-filament cutting its way through skin and bone with little effort, and they have a catlike agility to move between parts and solos with ease. All while espousing absolute grossness for subject matter.

What has been especially interesting with Wormtales isn’t just the part where they’re showy as hell but also that the band’s history sees them coming from both a thrashier and more death metal oriented form, and the weird three-way split crossroads they occupy has a surprising bag of melodeath resting at the center as well. It’s enough to fill a Black Dahlia-shaped hole in one’s listening schedule at times, and then at other moments could see the group’s straightforward shred just bulldozing people on its own.

Having so many amorphous blobs combining into one disgusting creature of its own can make Carnosus a weird sell at first, but Wormtales – and the album before it Visions Of Infinihility – make for interesting listens, and as I researched them more, I found myself just letting the two run one after the other. Carnosus don’t make a massive leap forward artistically between the two but, like mentioned before, the sort of inversion of what part of their sound dominates over the other is part of what makes Wormtales interesting.

Why it finds itself haunting the rafters of this list, then, comes down to a few different burning reasons. One is that for all of the praise I can heap upon Carnosus and how much fun it is listening to the band whip their way through Wormtales like a category five storm, there is definitely a fair share of comfort food happening within the album’s margins. Carnosus love themselves a good genre-trope on this album, and for every interesting turn down an unknown path or around an odd bend, there’s going to be just as many hefty chugs and brees tucked neatly between the folds of this album’s corroded flesh.

Carnosus also have a small booklet’s worth of interesting guitar pyrotechnics going on to offset that madness, but they could definitely just as easily fit into the most scene-core show imaginable as they could a proper death metal set. It just depends on which album that group are likely to pull more from.

“Within Throat, Within Heart” for instance is a solid demonstration of everything the band have going for them, and the more twisted and angular moments within the song actually remind a lot of the tech-death group Asylum out of Texas that I’ve covered a few times before. Both seem to have an abiding love for the slightly unnerving, to keep your head on a swivel just when you think your decades-plus of music experience means that you could headbang along to the song in a dark room with zero experience with Carnosus before.

“Worm Charmer” is a welcome bit of mid-tempo stomp right in the center of the album, arriving after four tracks of accelerator planted through the floor, and the group’s ‘wound’ obsession gives them a solid pair of songs in “Harbinger Of Woundism” and “Wound Of Wisdom”.

As I’ve mentioned, Carnosus do put in a mule’s worth of work to keep things interesting, even when they’re at their most ‘familiar’ to those of us who’ve kicked around these metal gutters for a long time now. Wormtales is an album that forced itself into the year end list due in part to its explosive nature but also how out of left-field this group appeared for me, only to then claim my head and move on with their day. It made for a great late in the year addition to the overall listening pile.

 

 

47 – Fit For An Autopsy – The Nothing That Is

Now it is time for the yearly shooting of myself in the foot with an arrow so accurate that it would make an Olympic competitor jealous.

It goes without saying that as much as I imagine myself a musical tree with branches reaching far and wide, forever exploring and attempting to embrace new things, at heart I still have a strain of dumbass deathcore kid in me and I will always likely be attracted to that style. It’s something I grew up with and I will fully admit that I am not above a fucking mean breakdown or heavy groove just veering to the left of a nu-metal bounce.

What this has meant is that over the course of their career Fit For An Autopsy have been primed for me to enjoy quite a bit, and thankfully they have indulged enough experiments and evolutionary sidesteps that things have been kept intriguing. They’ve fought their way into a limelight position and have a killer discography so far, which is why I’m actually okay having them appear so early with their 2024 release The Nothing That Is – because I feel I’m capable of lauding it just as much for what the album is as much as I can pick at it for what the album clearly is not.

Every band hits a point in their career where there is a recognizable and established groove. A sort of musical niche that they’ve carved out for themselves that has been the core of their sound for so long they could do it reflexively, like a sudden catch or grasp for a ledge. It’s the foundation upon which they often build but a foundation solid enough that you could observe it as a structure unto itself, such that if the band just break out what would otherwise be referred to as the bread and butter, you would see that the core of those songs is what is often expanded into the ‘greater whole’ of material they have.

Needless to say, as groups get later in their career you can see the gears turn a little more because of it, and The Nothing That Is has been the first time I felt like I could see the gears turning in a long time. They’ve often had a surprise or two up their sleeve for each album and usually that’s been enough to carry them by, with each release feeling like a different take on the big, boisterous, and groove-heavy sound they’ve charted for themselves over the years. The Nothing That Is, then, is an album of Fit For An Autopsy playing well within their comfort zone, which means that yes, the music here is enjoyable but it didn’t quite deliver the sudden neck-snapping/head-turn combo I’ve gotten out of each album as I found myself musing “Oh, wow, they’ll be going down that route for a few songs huh?”

It actually hadn’t occurred to me that it’s been two years since the release of Oh What The Future Holds as they’ve been surprisingly active anyway in that span of time, collaborating on a split EP with a few other deathcore luminaries and even breaking out a couple of cover songs they’d had in the hopper for a while. That’s why the seemingly sudden appearance of The Nothing That Is didn’t quite seem as sudden for me as I would’ve thought. Fit For An Autopsy did an excellent job, at the very least, of always remaining somewhere in the headlines so that people were aware they were still a group. It’s probably helped them a ton in their travels as well, given that they’ve recently been embarking on a sizeable headlining trek.

Don’t assume that I’m all knives out on this release though, much as I’m musing about how well within the Fit For An Autopsy ballpark the band are playing here. Because even then, there’s still a pretty goddamn solid four or five song EP shotgun blast worth of songs here, which is what sort of carried The Nothing That Is as a whole album for me. They aren’t quite as staid as my personal reception would suggest, it’s just that when I’m going half and half on a release, even I can recognize that an album is fairly straight-shooting.

Ultimately, what I am curious about when it comes to The Nothing That Is, is the songs that people are drawn to when it comes to the ones they define as being ‘good’, because I imagine there’s a surprising spread among those. The Nothing That Is feels like a handful of different approaches to the overall Fit For An Autopsy sound, some relatively safe for them, with hefty bruises being left in their battle-scarred wake, and some a little more adventurous.

I found myself drawn to a lot of the songs Andy shouted out in his coverage of the album, with tracks like “Lurch”, “Lower Purpose,” and “Weaker Wolves” hitting similarly hard, but by that same token… I still enjoyed songs like “Lust For The Severed Head” and the braindead circle-pit assault happening in “Spoils Of The Horde”. My only real defense is that I like going full lizard-brain at times and those two songs definitely hit that mark.

Which circles back around to the fact that I like The Nothing That Is quite a bit. It’s in my goddamned year-end list, which means that somewhere along the line it spoke to me just a little bit more than the eighteen or nineteen other discs I have sitting in the bullpen waiting to be called up if the stars manage to align just right. It’s just that given the overall Fit For An Autopsy discography I’d probably still more likely be drawn to the four albums prior to it.

The Nothing That Is works out to be a great stack of songs but it’s also surprisingly suitable for the full-discography shuffle wherein you can have a song hit and while it doesn’t quite spark the full-blown uncontrollable body spasm you might want from it, there’s still no temptation to turn it off, because sometimes listening to the machine do its work is just as enjoyable as every second being a revelation via breakdown and burly riff.

 

 

46 – Interloper – A Forgotten Loss

I can’t claim to be hip with the kids or cool or whatever you youngsters use to describe being in touch these days. I effectively punched out of popular music in 2001 and have approached everything with a bemused shrug and a ‘you kids have your fun’ ever since. I can’t dream of being nearly as cool as the people who trawl through the web to find diamonds like our own Andy did when he came to unleash this collective a few months back, so it won’t be shocking for any of you to hear that Interloper are a fairly new discovery for me, but they’re one that’s been filling an interesting niche ever since I came across their second album A Forgotten Loss.

The sound Interloper have going on their second release is one I’m surprised I don’t see more of. Not for lack of looking but this sort of hybridization of prog-rock, metalcore, and expansive melodic death metal has resulted in an album of largely rhythm-riff-driven music. Everything played here is required to be precise because the music Interloper have made is quietly rather intricate – impressive given that this is coming from a two-piece group basically handling all the instrumentation.

There are few bands that I’ve noticed tackling this particular subset of sounds, and each time it has a sort of mesmerizing draw to it. It’s hard to tell if that’s because the riff-work takes on this weirdly hypnotic quality as songs are continually crunched down and ground up, or if, as perceived by someone who played drums in Orchestra in his school days, there’s a strange sort of appeal in hearing what is effectively musical math continually being typed out as if it were a guitar plucked ASMR video.

Interloper seem to weave their songs together into an overall progressively textured sound and, surprisingly enough, the one band that they reminded me of a lot outside of early Allegaeon was the Denver, Colorado based group Mire and their album A New Found Rain.

A Forgotten Loss charts a handful of interesting paths for the band, and while not all of them work for me personally – things get very glossy and radio-worthy metalcore on occasion – there’s more than enough to offset that throughout the album. My personal tastes clashing with what an artist wants to do is no big deal, and on A Forgotten Loss it’s easy enough to work around when just about everything is so expertly tied together that it does feel like someone attempting an evolutionary approach to a genre that has long since been blueprinted, formatted, and almost criminally scientifically analyzed to the point of interchangeability.

That Interloper only make that part of their sound and exist as one of those bands steadying themselves on a few different tightropes is where a lot of my personal listening experience came from; some of the wonder for this disc was how they managed to keep the songs from almost fully falling into cliche-ridden hell more often than I would’ve expected them to. They’re spinning a lot of plates on this disc and it works in their favor.

“The Soul Beneath” makes for an impressive opening number but the focused dark and unrelenting march that makes up the following song – and title track! – “A Forgotten Loss” gives the album a real strong one-two punch for an opening. The quieter synth stings that pop up to highlight the upward swing of each riff are a lot of fun and subtly done enough that you don’t even notice they’re the ones responsible for a pie-shaped bit of the melody in the song, with the rest mostly following the vocal lines.

There’s a little bit of Devin Townsend-esque throughline running through A Forgotten Loss as well, as a few of the songs in their most controlled manias have an air of the circus-like atmosphere the former has often used to great effect. It’s delightfully twisted in between the machine-gunning that most of the guitar work delivers on this album. It’s why pairs of songs like “The Rot” and “Opulence” work so well together, because they tend to invert the other’s tastes during their respective time.

“Rot” opens softly and builds into a monster of a song, “Opulence” starts – as the name would suggest – incredibly rich with a big wall of sound, before settling into the expected brutality that “Rot” built itself up towards. One starts beautiful, the other… obnoxious.

The twists and turns of those songs are the building blocks that A Forgotten Loss is made out of and why it was such an interesting discovery in the latter half of the year. It is a disc that has demanded a lot of my listening time, sucker as I am for pneumatic hammer style guitar work. Every year I add a small handful of riff-avalanche style of albums to my overall collection and Interloper‘s latest is one of those that has easily joined that collective.

 

 

45 – Emasculator – The Disfigured And The Divine

We’ll go from riff-avalanche style albums to a release that sounds more like an actual avalanche this time around.

If you listen to music long enough you’ll find yourself gathering up projects like you’ve been dredging the bottom of the sea for mud. If you’re like I am, you’ll come across a group and immediately find yourself investigating/enjoying all of the various offshoots of said band throughout the years as musicians strike out on their own or explore other creative avenues, as if the original band was the seed from which a musical tree might be sprouting.

Which is a long way of saying that I really, really liked the Massachusetts-based brutal death metal group Abnormality back when they were active and I check fairly constantly just to see what its various constituent parts have been up to ever since that group decided to hang up its hat. And likely, you’ve already figured out by the fact that we’ve been covering Emasculator from its very first release that there is a definite tie to the aforementioned band within the lineup here. I won’t deny that vocalist Mallika Sundaramurthy‘s travels throughout the worlds of brutal death, slam, and tech-death have been one of the many musical threads I’ve been following over the years.

The Disfigured And The Divine is Emasculator‘s latest death metal musical salvo launched upon unsuspecting listeners and the one wherein the international union of musicians are seeking to further expand their sound beyond endless volleys of baneful brutality. Granted, it’s baby steps because the foundation for Emasculator‘s style was basically laid down from moment one on their Depraved Disfigurement demo from 2022. But even so, the two years’ difference between that demo and The Disfigured And The Divine hitting in late October is impressive already – if nothing else because the crew making up the good ship Emasculator have found seven different approaches to utter violence and have managed to keep things interesting the whole time.

Emasculator perform some concerted works across The Disfigured And The Divine to keep things interesting as well, whether amplifying songs by background melodic chant and vocals, or some impressive guitar work, or even the spread across different song run-times. You get three different styles here – a occasionally indulgent, relentlessly grinding, and classically flavored brutal-death hybrid. Credit to the band that they’ve settled on a sound close to having a small group of bulldozers perform an overly complicated waltz atop your skull and that you’ll keep coming back to for more.

I am immensely interested to see where Emasculator travel in the future. The Disfigured And The Divine is a short enough release that it can just constantly keep spinning and you’ll begin to settle into it like a comfortable couch. It is a wall of abject ferocity with an undeniable sense of groove to it, but Emasculator know when it is time to make the punishment come due, and more often than not each snare drum rattling blast is followed by a downward focused musical thrust strong enough to shake buildings.

On The Disfigured And The Divine, Emasculator have clearly figured out their core strengths and are playing to them immensely well, and part of the reason it makes it into the year-end confetti explosion is that I really want to see just how much they expand their scale of destruction from here.

 

 

44 – Obscura Qalma – Veils Of Transcendence

Obscura Qalma‘s Veils of Transcendence is one of a handful of EPs that makes the list this year not only because I think the release itself is pretty good but also because I think that there’s so much potential on display here that I’m down to hear at minimum one more EP/album of the band honing their sound in.

I appreciate that Obscura Qalma make absolutely no attempt to disguise who their influences are or the style of music they want to play. There’s more room to breathe once you’ve dispensed with the bullshit about being the next big revolution in sound. The nice thing with that particular statement is that what Obscura Qalma want to be happens to align pretty goddamned well with my musical tastes at the moment and that happens to be a love for symphonic death metal dorkiness.

Obscura Qalma have been going for a little while up to the release of Veils Of Transcendence with a couple of albums and EPs earlier in their career ahead of this new one. The band are on an album/ep pattern at the moment, and that often reflects a style of experimentation usually within the bounds of the EP that is then later expanded upon in the album. In Obscura Qalma‘s case, it isn’t so much a sense of experimentation that colors their newest release as it is a sense of continuing to forge away at a particular sound. With Veils Of Transcendence the band are getting tantalizingly close to breaking past being another ‘really good one of those style’ and into leaving their own mark on the genre. I took a pretty deep dive into this one as a whole around the time if its release if you want some truly expansive thoughts on the symphonic death dischord by way of the Dusktone release label.

I honestly hadn’t expected Obscura Qalma to hang out as well as they did throughout the course of the year. The bumper crop of orchestral goofballs was pretty fucking solid in 2024 and there were a lot of projects that I seemed to collide with over that time of a similar ilk. Perhaps it was just the short run-time, so what the band were doing here didn’t quite get the chance to overstay its welcome, as many of these projects tend to do once the bombast becomes mundane and the veil is lifted on whether or not the songwriting is there to back it up.

Maybe it is just that Veils Of Transcendence is the promise of something greater, and the idea of potential riches is always more fascinating than the ones we already have sitting in front of us. Maybe it’s just that the song we premiered ages ago on this website – Ophidian’s Enthronement – is still gargantuan and strong in my mind. Either way, Veils Of Transcendence was one of those releases that fought like hell to stay relevant in the DGR mind-space in between the ongoing ten-hour loop of Daft Punk‘s Around The World and the small encyclopedia I have going of heavy metal releases that I’m dragon-hoarding away over the course of the year.

 

 

43 – Carrion Vael – Cannibals Anonymous

I can see it coming from space but every year without fail I always manage to find at least a handful of releases that are the equivalent of lining up a row of noise-maker fireworks and lighting them all at once just to enjoy the cacophony that follows. It’s like a switch that gets flicked in my brain that jumps past the joy of guitar pyrotechnics and into an almost childlike glee at listening to the instruments make all the fun ‘fweeeeeeeeee’ noises for the better part of thirty-five minutes.

You’d think that since I know this is a yearly event I’d stop being shocked by it, but here I am again with yet another high speed tech-death and melodeath hybrid album wherein the lead segment is clearly at the forefront and the band behind it is playing at speeds we would otherwise reserve for someone with their hair on fire running for the closest bucket of water. Carrion Vael‘s Cannibals Anonymous was an album that felt like a throwback to an earlier era of tech-death musical labels and I found myself viewing it through such a lens in my review of the album all the way back in the ass end of May. Yet even then, I still found myself listening to the album a ton.

Yes, admittedly, I am overjoyed that I managed to somehow run a weird tonsil-dong thing on the cover art across the main page of this website without a single one of you pulling a ‘hey, wait a gosh-darned minute here….’ in the comments, but also there’s a certain amount of stars that need to align for an album like this to just work, because really, if you break it down to just its constituent parts you’ll notice that Carrion Vael are of a class of tech-death musicians who just clearly love a speedy-tempo and some Black Dahlia-esque shred work. In fact, I wouldn’t be shocked to hear the band were an influence on the group at some point as they were to so many others, e.g., bands like Alterbeast for a pretty solid decade there.

I remained consistently impressed throughout much of Carrion Vael‘s newest release, even when I could easily notice every single cog of the machine that was turning anyway. This happened to me a few times throughout the year in which I would note that a band was hewing pretty close already to a well-known genre blueprint, and then for the most part didn’t give a flying fuck because by that same token a well-built structure should sometimes just be allowed to be that, a well-built structure.

Just ask some of the folks on the Northern California coastline that got rocked by the recent earthquake. Or don’t, but look at me being relevant to the outside world!

There’s so many tracks on here that are worth diving into that you could just throw darts and consider where they landed your solid starting point. For me, I was heavily infatuated with opener “In The Words Of Grimm” and the song “Augustas Dead”, which I even shouted out multiple times over three paragraphs because I guess at the time of writing that review I really wanted to hammer that one home. “You Die Either Way” also held on quite a bit throughout the year, and yes, the name “Love Zombie” still gives me a little chuckle, given the speed Carrion Vael manage to achieve over the course of that song.

The bigger numbers on this album are just as worth it to dive into, and overall, given how quickly this one whips right past you, it also makes for an easy recommendation because the time investment isn’t as grand as you might think. It just happens to be a tightly packed and interwoven one instead.

 

 

42 – Opeth – The Last Will and Testament

I figured from moment one that Opeth were likely going to be one of the last few late entries into the year-end party. For a lot of people they probably ranked way, way higher than where you see them here, but this is also mostly an acknowledgement of the fact that it feels good to celebrate that Opeth have put out something I truly enjoy from front to back again.

It hadn’t really occurred to me just how long it had been since Opeth broke out the contrasting vocal styles within their music and just how much it can affect their overall sound, but lo-and-behold one solid growl in the opening single and all of a sudden I’m really interested in what Opeth might be doing with their music in the future, and not just looking forward to my exercise of picking out the three or four songs that are the most melancholic – and by extension the ones I probably liked the most – from their prog music exploration/influence-worship and compiling them all into a file that I’ve jokingly called “Damnation 2”. The one truly nice thing about In Cauda Venenum wasn’t so much that it felt like Mikael Akerfeldt was able to finally exercise a lot of the musical inspiration that had been haunting him into one cohesive work, or that it felt like the solid capping of an end of a musical arc, but that it gave me the final three or four songs to Damnation 2 up to a solid eleven-song tracklist.

So where does that leave Opeth‘s newest album The Last Will And Testament? A hesitant return to form with a monkey’s paw-esque wish of combining multiple eras of Opeth music into one truly indulgent album that is meant to be taken as one entire song – and shockingly, not the only one of those in my year-end list here. Much as it is appreciated, the plot details here aren’t actually that revelatory or shocking and are somewhat secondary to the music being presented within. You can probably guess by reading the press-releases ahead of the album what exact twists and turns await you at this gathering of vultures over a man’s imagined riches. I’ve seen far worse on a YouTube binge of mid-aughts Maury episodes and honestly, were this an actual reading of a man’s last will I can’t help but visualize mid-bass-solo someone in the family standing up and yelling “GET TO THE FUCKING POINT ALREADY”. Mayhaps the now dearly-departed should’ve uploaded his will into an early 1900s Google doc so he could have someone comb through the margins and let the poor guy know when he’s repeating himself a little too often or falling into the absurdly flower language trap.

Musically though, the trials and trevails that Opeth put their tormented protagonist through are some of the most lush sounding that Opeth have been in some time. The concept driving the album gives Opeth enough breathing room to be as indulgent in their music as they’ve wanted to be in years. The sort of quiet meditation and synthesizer wanderings that defined some of the group’s mid-aughts era is instead mixed in with both hard-driving music and even some delightfully twisted riff-work that seems to exist for the sheer purpose of being off-kilter and leaving a listener on-edge. Combine that with the feat of genuinely trying to tie together whole passages of music via extended vocal lines and narration and The Last Will And Testament does start to look a lot more exciting than initial passes might’ve suggested.

The songs are treated as paragraphs here so there’s often not much to help make a track distinct from its opening measures, but most develop into original works all their own along about the middle-segment of each song as some new obstacle presents itself narratively – even building up to some pretty climactic and impressive segments midway through the album that show Mikael still has the pipes you came to the band for initially. On top of that, they’ve then roped in heavy metal luminaries and legends from groups like… Jethro Tull and Europe.

Okay, striking that last part, there is a tip of the cap involved that you can have names like that combined with a juggernaut like Opeth and the two seem perfectly fitting, especially within the confines of this album. Turns out, metal fans will tolerate a lot so long as you have the music to reinforce your musical dalliances. The Last Will And Testament engages in that game fully then, of buying leeway with passages that have been some of the heaviest that Opeth have put to record in some time in order to issue out the equally strange and bent guitar work and rhythm segments that’ve come to define Opeth in recent years.

It’s that push-pull dynamic that does restore a sense of some of the old reason Opeth used to stand out so much; the band were excellent at working in soundscapes that contrasted well with one another and somehow were able to blend the however many different meals they had before them all into one solid work each time – which would go a lot way to explain why the song lengths were always way up there for the band. What kept Opeth going in recent years wasn’t the part where they were blending so many different ingredients but that they had their chosen two or three and were stubbornly sticking to them – and honestly, the success rate was getting better each time but felt like we were still an album and a half away of ‘oh, you’ve nailed it finally, great that you’ve made this behemoth contort into its new shape’.

The Last Will And Testament, as free as it may seem, is basically working within the creative bounds of blending two eras of Opeth together and maybe, just maybe, because there were barriers and guardrails in place, Opeth came out greater on the other side. It may not be the full trumpets-blaring king comes home from a victorious march return to form that a lot of people are treating this as, but as a piece of art standing on its own, it is an impressive release.

 

 

41 – The Black Dahlia Murder – Servitude

A lot has been said in regard to the return of The Black Dahlia Murder; few bands in the underground have ever reached such a titanic and ever-present status quite like The Black Dahlia Murder did. Ever the workhorses, the group put out solid to goddamned incredible albums every two to three years with little time to breathe in between. They are a band that somehow managed to have multiple musicians moving into and out of the wings and still retained a basic overall core sound, one that was spectacularly good as a gateway for a lot of people into the more extreme worlds of heavy metal.

They were fronted by someone who was so dedicated to this musical scene that they were constantly giving shoutouts and making appearances with other groups, attempting to be friendly with almost everyone who came their way; existing in a forever ‘On’ state must’ve been exhausting, and their personal record collection could be turned into an extreme metal museum of its own. To put it bluntly, Trevor left behind some gargantuan city-size shoes to fill and one could forgive the rest of The Black Dahlia crew left to take up the flag for wanting to hang it up then and there. However, given all of the lineup changes and absolutely relentless touring schedule the band had kept up for the better part of two decades you could see how the rest of the band – even with this seemingly insurmountable challenge – might also take stock of everything and declare ‘we’re not fucking done yet’.

Thus we have Servitude, The Black Dahlia Murder‘s newest album, which places long-tenured guitarist Brian Eschbach in the vocal role and sees the return of guitarist Ryan Knight to the fold to play alongside fellow Arsis call-up Brandon Ellis. Otherwise the lineup that recorded Nightbringers and Verminous remains here untouched, so you would think that, given that batting record, Servitude would be much higher on my year-end list than the spot it currently inhabits. Servitude is a triumphant album in a lot of ways, injecting a spark of much-needed life into both a band and a fanbase that likely both feel they should be around as part of the heavy metal lexicon for a long time to come. Yet for all of this, Servitude places where it does for a feeling that has somewhat colored Black Dahlia‘s return for me as a whole – which is that it feels very conservatively measured.

This is a strange critique to throw out in regards to an album like Servitude because if you were to just go by sheer tale of the tape when it comes to this album, it checks every single box possible in regards to what makes a Black Dahlia Murder album, but by doing that it creates such a sense of familiarity that the group seem almost – and truthfully are fully justified in feeling so – hesitant to try and rock the boat.

So instead of the confident swagger that often surrounded Black Dahlia Murder releases – and again a lot of this came from a larger than life vocalist who was very good at taking the brunt of being in the limelight –  you get a pretty good batch of Black Dahlia Murder songs that oddly enough at times sound like a throwback all the way to the years of Unhallowed. I’m not sure how much of that is having Brian in the main position or if the songwriting core of Black Dahlia so easily hews down back to those years, but sometimes while listening to Servitude I found myself wondering if I had come across a time-delayed discovery of an alternate universe Unhallowed twin wherein the band were more polished and got a better production.

That shouldn’t be viewed as me accusing this album of being derivative because – must I point it out here? – this is an album that is still among the upper echelons of releases that I listened to throughout the year. I’m even ranking it above two other albums where I can see this band being a clear throughline influence upon them, because hey, sometimes it’s hard to dethrone the actual king. I think Servitude is a pretty goddamned good album that sometimes ascends to absolute greatness, and I also think that sort of feeling is likely to happen with a disc like Servitude because songwriting-wise it is not a release with a solid arrow shot in it, so much as it is the band knocking their way through different eras of their history and cherry-picking their favorites to expand upon.

You could understand the appeal of a band coming back and declaring ‘no, we are responsible for all of these different sounds and let us show you what we mean’. The Black Dahlia Murder‘s discography has multiple historic arcs to it and part of the appeal of Servitude – outside of the absolute guitar-shred crew that the band have in their employ now – is that they make a damned valiant attempt at trying to knock their way through all of it.

Servitude also wastes little time, with the band keeping every song within the three-minute range – save for an instrumental intermission – resulting in one of the shortest releases they have put out so far. It’s punchy in that way, with the whole release whipping past you the first time before you’ve realized what the hell just happened, and it’s only in the multiple listens afterward that the desire to dissect will start to kick in. That’s when I started to notice how it felt more like a gathered collection of singles with The Black Dahlia Murder gleefully ransacking their own history, but only in such a way to ensure that the music that came out the other end still sounded reliably like The Black Dahlia Murder.

Thus, Servitude becomes a solid as the Earth foundation upon which The Black Dahlia Murder could build in the future. It proves that the band still have it in them even when tragedy strikes. They re-forged and honed themselves into a different sort of blade than what you might expect, but the battle-axe that they are could still easily be stamped with The Black Dahlia Murder‘s logo at the hilt. There’s nine solid blastfest songs present on Servitude and they’re ones that give you exactly what you want from this band returning to the stage; its just that now I’m real curious to see what strange pathways open up for them from here.