Welcome back to Part II of our series unveiling our Top 40 Metal Albums of 2023. Make sure you check out the first part of the series counting down 40 through 21. You can also hear tracks from the below albums over at this past week’s Metal Dad Radio Show.
20. Nixil – From the Wound Spilled Forth Fire
I was a huge fan of the 2021 debut album from Baltimore’s Nixil. This blackened collective combines black metal with various progressive and crusty elements to form a wholly unique take on the genre, and their follow up album shows ample progression in style and substance. There’s a sort of mystery and mysticism at play on this record that too many black metal releases are lacking these days. It’s the type of album that those not initiated into the rites of black metal would deem dangerous, and that’s the best compliment you can doll out to an album like this one.
https://nixil.bandcamp.com/album/from-the-wound-spilled-forth-fire
19. Spirit Possession – Of The Sign
One of my most anticipated albums of 2023 was the newest offering from Portland’s Spirit Possession. I have been slightly obsessed with this band since their 2020 debut. Maybe it was the state of the world (or my mind) at the time, but their apocalyptic brand of thrash-infused black metal was exactly what the doctor ordered. Fast forward three years and we are once again gifted an album filled with absolutely devious and diabolical offerings. There are few bands in the world who seem to musically embody what the ’80s Satanic Panic was trying to search out like Spirit Possession and I am absolutely here for it.
https://spiritpossession.bandcamp.com/album/of-the-sign
18. Morne – Engraved With Pain
Another fantastic release from Metal Blade this year came courtesy of Boston sludge/post-metal outfit Morne. Longtime readers may remember their last full-length, 2018’s To the Night Unknown, also showing up on my year-end list. This is a band that has a knack for writing albums that are wholly engaging, and Engraved With Pain is one of their best yet. There’s a certain weight to these songs, as if the heaviness is palpable in more than just churning riffs and thunderous low end, and with each repeated listen there are nuances that release from the tapestry of sounds to present themselves. Fans of the Neurosis/Isis/Cult of Luna vibe will find a lot to love on this record.
https://morneband.bandcamp.com/album/engraved-with-pain
17. Eave – Fervor
I have to fully admit that I find the current wave of shoegaze/depressive/post-black metal to be a bit of a bore. It takes a lot for a band of that ilk to impress my crotchety, old guy sensibilities. However, one band that combines all of those genres that I’ve seemed to connect with is Connecticut’s Eave. Unafraid to bend and even break the rules of each of these sub-genres, Eave delivered an album that throws off the dull paint-by-numbers aesthetics of so many of their peers. The pieces are still there – frost bitten blast beats and tremolo picking, harried vocals, and atmospheric breaks – but Eave is able to create a puzzle that is less reliant on the pieces themselves and more so the vision in creates.
https://eave.bandcamp.com/album/fervor
16. Spirit Adrift – Ghost at the Gallows
My 17-year old co-host of The Metal Dad Radio Show likes to remind me that as Austin’s Spirit Adrift started to drift from their original doom sound to the more trad metal based stylings of their most recent efforts that I wasn’t quick to follow the band on their sonic journey. However, for the second time in as many releases I find myself more and more enamored with this band. Once again Spirit Adrift has delivered a soaring, epic slab of trad metal that places them at the top of this particular mountain. With Maiden-esque riffs and catchy-as-hell choruses all over this thing, Ghost at the Gallows hearkens back to a time when “trad metal” was, for the most part, the only game in town and we were all o.k. with it.
https://spiritadrift.bandcamp.com/album/ghost-at-the-gallows
15. Bolt Gun – The Tower
First off, any band that name drops German jazz noir outfit Bohren und der Club of Gore as an influence will immediately get my attention. Australia’s Bolt Gun also lists acts as varied as Swans and second wave black metal in the description for The Tower on their Bandcamp page, and all three of those things do indeed seem to hold sway over this record. I’m pretty positive this will be the only album to prominently feature saxophone on this list, and it’s not just some novelty trick in an attempt to differentiate from the pack either. Bolt Gun take bending the definition of “atmospheric black metal” very seriously and they’ve succeeded in taking the genre to new and interesting heights on this record. This is an album that deserves every ounce of attention you are willing to give it.
https://boltgun.bandcamp.com/album/the-tower
14. Left Cross – Upon Desecrated Altars
One of my absolute favorite death metal releases of the year came from Richmond horde Left Cross. Any band can pound away on their instruments and deem it heavy, but only the true death metal warriors can make it a memorable trek worth coming back for over and over again. This album has everything you want in a great death metal record – blasting cacophony, riffs and solos that cut through time and space, monstrous vocals, and a ton of moments where you think to yourself ‘this is where the pit opens the fuck up’. Sheer brutality for the ages.
https://leftcross666.bandcamp.com/album/upon-desecrated-altars
13. Will Haven – VII
I’ll argue to the death that the best era of hardcore was the 1990s, however there are still several bands that originated during that time still putting out phenomenal albums. By the end of the ’90s one of my favorite hardcore bands was California’s Will Haven. Their discordant brand of hardcore combined noise rock and the earliest post-metal leanings to create something unique and exciting at a time when the genre was starting to fade into an endless array of chugga-chugga metalcore. Their newest release is honestly one of their best yet. Heavy as a sack of bricks when it needs to be and layered in the dark, almost cinematic, atmospherics that they’ve been perfecting for multiple decades, this is hands down one of the best hardcore releases I’ve put ears on in a long time.
https://willhaven.bandcamp.com/album/vii
12. Cirith Ungol – Dark Parade
You can literally count on one hand the number of metal bands who were putting out records as early as 1981 and 42 years later are still putting out records worth adding to your collection. Out of that small handful of acts you could make the case that the best recorded output is coming from California’s Cirith Ungol. Eternally underrated in their original iteration, Cirith Ungol returned in 2020 to critical acclaim. As amazing as that comeback record was (I personally had it in my top five that year) the case can be made that Dark Parade is the superior record. If you call yourself a fan of trad metal and this album hasn’t been on your radar this year, are you actually a trad metal fan? Probably not.
https://cirithungol.bandcamp.com/album/dark-parade
11. Lucifixion – Trisect Joy of Pierced Hearts
I know very little about the mysterious Lucifixion except that they are from the US, they are signed to the mighty Sentient Ruin label, and they play an absolutely angel-raping brand of black metal. Unholy, animal-like vocals, riffs that weave and pierce through the night sky like the smoke from a burning church, and an overall second wave aesthetic combine to create one of the most visceral and exciting black metal releases of the year. In a year that wound up being a very, very impressive one for black metal in general this as easily one of the most memorable releases the genre produced.
https://lucifixion666.bandcamp.com/album/trisect-joys-of-pierced-hearts
In the last guest episode of 2023, Peter ‘Trendcrusher’ K is joined by Jayson Sherlock from Australian death metal act Revulsed. They discuss the creative process behind the band’s latest album Cerebral Contamination. From the early origins of songs like Nefarious Devourment to wrapping up recording after completing just 10 tracks, Jason gives insight into the long road to Cerebral Contamination.
Jayson also reflects on being a part of bands like Mortification, Horde, Paramecium, and shares his thoughts on Christian metal.
Track list
Revulsed – Nefarious Devourment
Check out Cerebral Contamination
https://everlastingspewrecords.bandcamp.com/album/cerebral-contamination
It was standing room only at the joyous funeral services today commemorating the life and music of The Pogues’ frontman Shane MacGowan . I was recently invited by the music department of UC Riverside to give a distinguished lecture as part of their Florence Bayz lecture/concert series. The talk I gave, on December 6, 2023, drew on two chapters of my ongoing book project, titled Heaviness in Metal Music, which is currently under contract with Oxford University Press. I’m posting the abstract below for anyone who is interested in getting a preview of what I’m working on!
The parts of this talk that were about headbanging are an expanded version of one of my first conference papers, and I’ve got an article version of this chapter in the works that I hope to be able to announce soon.
Abstract
Metal’s roots in the blues are often invoked at the beginning of genre histories, but this invocation often seems to isolate Blackness in a separated past. I argue, however, that heavy metal’s initial and present conditions are shaped by White (mis)understandings of Blackness, with continuing legacies including two central aesthetic practices, heaviness and headbanging.
Existing research shows that Blues scenes in Britain were originally driven by racial authenticity based in artists’ knowledge of and ability to imitate Black American bluesmen. During the 1960s this racial authenticity was replaced with progressionist authenticity, a new rhetoric dictating that British musicians must depart from (Black) tradition to create their own authentic (White) style. This “White Blues” was renamed “Heavy Metal” circa 1975. Subsequently, the metal genre can be described as an aspirational trajectory towards extremity—“loudestness” (Duncan 1984) and heaviness—apparently disconnected from race. In other words, metal’s aesthetic of heaviness evolved from Blues ideologies about Blackness, but with the racial signifiers disconnected from their prior referents.
Like the aesthetic of heaviness, metal’s dance practices also evolved from White Blues understandings of Blackness. There is no evidence that earlier Black American musicians engaged in headbanging, moshing, or throwing the devil horns in the air. However, metal’s dance practices share many values and dynamics observed by scholars of Black American dance (such as Malone 1996): metal audiences participate in the performance, vocally and visibly appreciating the music; metal fans “dance the song,” embodying and expressing the song’s rhythms and changes in energy; headbanging preserves the motional logic of the backbeat pattern from Black American musics (Hudson 2022); and metal dancing involves the entire body with ecstatic intensity, deviating from Anglo-American norms of dispassion and upright comportment.
“Leaving the blues behind” is a master narrative in the history of heavy metal, but as the Black American guitarist Mike Coffey says, “you can’t take the blues out of it.” I conclude by exploring a few moments in which fans and musicians have stepped off the “teleological treadmill” of extremity, adopted healthier less-partisan and less-macho relationships with heaviness, and reconnected metal with its racial past.