Chalk it up to the “at least we’ll get some great music out of this” logical fallacy if you want, but it seems like the past decade has seen an explosion in a specific lane of metal music that’s both actively political (you know, the good kind of political, not the kind that a lot of black metal music was largely associated with 30 years ago) and fairly accessible to non-metal listeners. Basically, now that crossover bands like Deafheaven have made things a little less gatekeep-y in the metal community, artists are free to spread their wings beyond the confines of metal-specific subgenres to experiment with the endless possibilities found elsewhere in the genre spectrum, heavy or otherwise.
I wanted to compile a short list of some of the most inspiring examples from 2024 beyond Chat Pile and Thou, who both made our general “Best Albums” list this past year. From the influence of shoegaze to post-rock to synth-punk to baroque-pop, these albums each pushed metal forward in interesting ways while borrowing enough from subgenres like sludge metal, death metal, and/or atmospheric black metal to remain firmly grounded in the metal discourse. Make sure your speakers are at a reasonable volume and explore these picks below.
Abriction, Banshee
Abriction is to The Depreciation Guild what Deafheaven is to The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. Maybe I’m dating myself with that reference, but the gist is that Meredith Salvatori (who was barely in grade school when both bands I’m referencing hit their creative peaks) makes digitized blackgaze as a baseline for the 80-minute Banshee, upon which everything from meltdown metal vocals and classic shoegaze arrangements to screamo shrieks and electronic soundbeds—not to mention dubstep wub-wubs and straight up Enya-channeling laments—are employed to keep the release interesting.
Aseethe, The Cost
Aseethe tread the middle ground between their swamp-creature sludge-metal brethren Thou (before they went punk this year) and the atmospheric slabs of avant-garde metal created by Sumac. Given the split lead vocal duties, The Cost further subverts any particular metal subgenre with doom-metal growls constantly being offset by higher-pitched wailing somehow even more dramatic than the song title “Last Time I Do Anything for a Fucking Friend Ever.”
AVOWD, Vol. 2
It’s hard to overstate the excitement of an album (or even, in this case, EP) with a high replay value being titled “Vol. 1”—as if to promise the deliverance of more of the same thrill later down the line. Chicago’s dissonant black metal duo AVOWD did just that with their sequel to March 2023’s debut EP 13 months later, albeit with a more fully formed terror and a less balanced division of track lengths (colossal opener “Perpetual Utopian Ruin” clocks in at over 16 minutes). A debut album would be great, but I’d even settle for a “Vol. 3.”
Balwezo Westijiz, Tower of Famine
I wish I had more context to provide for this record, but evidently it’s only the second full-length from Balwezo Westijiz, the project formed by the prolific Swedish artist Swartadauþuz in 2011 as a dark-ambient side gig among a rolodex of black metal projects he’d either formed or would go on to form over the course of the decade. Yet Tower of Famine is about as black metal as anything could be, harnessing the aesthetic of his previous BW release to fill the softer stretches with unsettling synth notes to match the even more unsettling guitar tones that define the louder ones.
Clarion Void, Failure in Repetition
Whereas Thou have spent nearly 20 years evolving their sound from droning doom metal to quick-paced sludge rock, Colorado’s Clarion Void manage to perfect both ends of this spectrum on their debut album. The dirgey middle section of Failure in Repetition brings to mind their contemporaries in Thou’s disciples Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean (particularly on a song perhaps coincidentally titled “The Bottom”), while the opening moments prove how equally adept they are at higher-end thrash a la Oozing Wound. Clearly the work of musicians who view repetition as failure.
Full of Hell & Andrew Nolan, Scraping the Divine
To say nothing of Full of Hell’s accomplishments on their own, the grindcore architects have helped at least half a dozen of their peers across black metal and harsh noise create some of their best work. Beyond the release of their first non-collaborative album in three years, 2024 also saw the release of their first team-up with post-industrial producer Andrew Nolan on Scraping the Divine, a project that covers a much broader range of territory than the tight aesthetic universes FoH tend to hone. The opening track feels inspired by The Locust before the next couple tracks push things into the ominous atmospheric-metal grooves of Blut Aus Nord, eventually introducing guest vocalists like Endon’s Taichi Nagura and Jesu’s Justin Broadrick to further expand Divine’s scope.
Genital Shame, Chronic Illness Wish
It’s about time we got a strain of black metal that feels more indebted to Drag Race contestants than to Mayhem. Well, Chronic Illness Wish does find inspiration in the tinny sounds of the genre’s second wave, though Genital Shame’s Erin Dawson’s TWBM (trans woman black metal) MO is clearly spelled out on her debut album of proggy sound diaries chronicling the complications of becoming someone specific.
Glassing, From the Other Side of the Mirror
From the Other Side of the Mirror is Glassing’s fourth album and the first of their releases that sees them more than just flirting with sludge and black metal. Without breaking from their roots in bold post-rock and the vein of haunting post-hardcore defined by their mentors in Holy Fawn, the new record feels less fine-tuned than those genres tend to be in favor of a rabid energy defined by elements of screamo and all things blackened heard in the music of fellow Austinites Portrayal of Guilt.
Julie Christmas, “Ridiculous and Full of Blood”
I think Julie Christmas was technically eligible for our “Best Return Albums” list, given that this marks her first solo record since 2010, though the former Battle of Mice vocalist has become well known in her second musical chapter as a frequent Cult of Luna collaborator. That band’s influence can be heard all over Ridiculous and Full of Blood in Johannes Persson’s contributions, though there’s an anachronistic ’90s feel to much of the proceedings between the occasional Tom Morello riff and Björk-like vocal acrobatics from the album’s namesake, who, like Robert Smith, doesn’t sound like she’s aged a day since when she first landed on the scene.
meth., Shame
Few things compare to the experience of seeing meth.’s ritualistic live set in person, and with each successive studio album the Chicago collective comes closer to capturing this energy on record. Their second album Shame is a useful field guide for the blur of nightmarish incantational sound blasting forth from the stage, with clean production helping to isolate some of the band’s influences, which range from dissonant death metal to mid-aughts sasscore.
Persher, Sleep Well
Persher create an industrial-metal take on minimalist synth-punk that could nearly pass as Matt & Kim dragged through the seven circles of hell—or an alternate-future version of Oh Sees wherein John Dwyer entered his metal phase immediately after writing “I Need Seed.” In reality, Sleep Well is the second album from UK techno artists Pariah and Blawan that could very conceivably be an homage to Gilla Band for helping to spread the word about “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?” a decade ago.
Scarcity, The Promise of Rain
After debuting their half-dissonant-black-metal-half-totalism equation on 2022’s Aveilut, the Brooklyn group reworked the formula on The Promise of Rain to allow more space for experimentation within metal and abstract sound design that subtly ratchets up the sense of dread already embedded in their sound. There’s even a leitmotif on this record that sounds a whole lot like the car alarm in your neighborhood that goes off at the most inopportune moments, which certainly adds to the record’s mounting sense of anxiety.
Slim0, Forgiveness
I was already sold on Forgiveness when the pre-album single “Trenches” dropped, which sees the Danish trio do their best Ragana impression after the song opens with Fleet Foxes–like baroque-pop vocal harmonies. But from the opening track’s clear reverence for riot grrl to the Dirty Projectors–esque art-pop experimentation and the many lo-fi and drone-lite interludes that tie everything together, Slim0’s debut constantly bucks any easy categorization. And while I do hope there’s a full album of “Trenches”-like minimalist doom in the future, I’d take a record of just about any other direction they explore here just as gladly.
Sunrise Patriot Motion, My Father Took Me Hunting in the Snow
It’s been too long since we’ve gotten any non-dungeon-synth music from Yellow Eyes, but at least Sunrise Patriot Motion scratches a certain itch that Master’s Murmur may have only inflamed. Across their EP My Father Took Me Hunting in the Snow, YE co-founders Will and Sam Skarstad repurpose that band’s familiar guitar tones and dark-woods atmospherics for a sound that’s more steeped in gothic post-punk, albeit with black metal undertones. Not to mention a bit of that dungeon synth magic, as well.
Wretched Blessing, Wretched Blessing
Wretched Blessing is the new project of Immortal Bird vocalist Rae Amitay and Yautja bassist Kayhan Vaziri, and their self-titled debut EP perfectly balances the death metal of that former band with the sludge metal of the latter. If that doesn’t sell you on these 16 minutes of raw metallic punk, I’ll let a slowed-down Steve Buscemi in Spy Kids 2 do the talking.
