10 Underrated Metal Albums to Enjoy This Halloween

It’s the most wonderful time of the year for those of us who love all things dark and evil, but here are ten albums that don’t always get the attention they deserve during spooky season.

‘Underrated’ is a dangerous term to use on an internet where everyone is an authority on everything. I use it simply because I wanted to write about some of the metal I’ve been enjoying this spooky season, but felt like I had nothing to say about the same handful of Ghost, King Diamond and Type O Negative albums. I wanted to bob a little bit deeper for my apples, go at least one layer below the surface of the playlists that do the rounds at this time of year. This is all to say that I listened to most of these records for the first time this year, and I always find that whether it’s metal albums or horror films, discovering new things has increasingly become the most fun thing about Halloween every year. This is truer this year than ever, where many of us our forced to feed our Frankenstein alone. Whether you’re looking for a boundary pushing isolation soundtrack, or to show your party guests (if you’re allowed them) that you’ve got a bit more about you, I hope you enjoy these quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore.

Coven — Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls (1969)

An underrated Halloween listen and an underrated milestone in the history of heavy music. In 1969 the American band Coven unleashed nine tracks of heavily occult rock and roll music and one thirteen-minute recording of the band performing a ‘Satanic Mass.’ This was a period of music history in which occultist figures like Crowley and LaVey were making a deep and unpredictable mark on rock and roll. Bands like Black Sabbath quickly realised the lucrative notoriety that would ensue from even the most superficial dabbling in Satanism, albeit with a sound that was anything but. What we see in Coven’s debut, released a good year before Sabbath’s self-titled is a kind of inversion of that; fairly standard psychy rock instrumentals, but a shocking fervence of occultist lyricism and delivery by eighteen-year-old frontwoman Jinx Dawson. The zeal of her singing and the way she lived out her “classic Christian satanist” values would go on to influence King Diamond himself. A glance at the tracklisting in its historical context raises many eyebrows, with songs like ‘Choke, Thirst, Die,’ ‘Dignitaries of Hell,’ and, remarkably, ‘Black Sabbath.’ Note also that the band’s bassist was named Greg ‘Oz’ Osborne. Beyond mere spooky coincidences, this album provides many genuinely foundational aspects of heavy metal. The aforementioned satanic mass is purportedly the first ever recorded, and the LP’s artwork depicts the band providing the first known usage of the devil horns hand signal in rock music. This album feels like a lost artefact that completely shakes up our assumptions about music history. It is scary enough in the intensity of its themes, but more so in the way it disrupts these traditional linear timelines of heavy metal itself.

Saint Vitus — Die Healing (1995)

Saint Vitus are, nowadays, fairly well respected in the annals of doom metal, but this has not always been the case. Since forming in the late 1970s alongside contemporaries like Pentagram and other bands seeking to put an American spin on the genre’s industrial British heritage, Saint Vitus often seemed to fall between the cracks throughout their decades in the game. 1995’s Die Healing was the first record in ten years to feature the band’s original lineup, but would end up being their last album in any form for a further decade and a half to come. Guitarist Dave Chandler, the only consistent member from the beginning, sees it as their finest work, but laments that “in ’95 no one cared. It was like pissing in the ocean. Literally. No press, no nothing. But apparently during all that lapse in time, the doom metal genre came to light.” Saint Vitus became a classic example of a band releasing some of their best material before calling it quits, only to re-emerge into a world surrounded by bands who revere them as an influence. You can hear this in the quality of Die Healing itself. Songs like ‘Sloth’ have a very modern devotion to the primacy of the slow, gargantuan riff, and yet they have a foot in tradition in terms of the showmanship of the lead vocals. Scott Reagers warbles and howls over cultish songs of zombies, asylums, days of reckoning, taking an unwaveringly dark view of the world we live in and what lurks beyond it. Its time-warp qualities hit the sweet spot between a great modern doom album and a cultish relic from the past, perfect to indulge in at full volume at this time of year.

Nile — Amongst the Catacombs of Nephren-Ka (1998)

Nile are famous for their dense back catalogue of death metal dealing in ancient pharaohs, gods and mummies, which have of course been staples of the horror genre for decades if not centuries. That said, of course, the South Carolina band’s musicianship and songwriting topics are a great deal more sophisticated than the work of Boris Karloff or Christopher Lee. What is striking from their debut full-length here is that we see them balancing their typically rigorous attention to historical detail with the more fantastical tradition of H. P. Lovecraft. Metal music inspired by the infamous teller of Weird Tales is a crowded field, and this stands out perhaps precisely because it doesn’t over-rely on that influence. The record’s title comes from the short story ‘The Outsider,’ whose protagonist has never known the contact of another human, nor ever felt the light of the sun. The album’s final song ‘Beneath Eternal Oceans of Sand’ takes its lyrics almost wholesale from the story’s conclusion, in which the narrator, having realised he is too frightful for human society, exclaims: “Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka.” Yet the album’s Halloweeny goodness doesn’t come exclusively from its Lovecraftian reference points as much as the moments of musical drama that it manages to create. For the most part, what we get is blistering and brutal and blistering late-90s death metal, interspersed with certain atmospheric touches that add so much. There’s the choral chimes on ‘Barra Edinazzu,’ the wailing female voice at the beginning of ‘Serpent Headed Mask,’ the rhythmic chanting of ‘Die Rache Krieg Lied Der Assyriche.’ It all adds such a frightening dimension to the album as a whole. There’s so much historical and literary lore behind this album and yet at the same time it’s a load of fun. It’s a record that really expands outwards way beyond Lovecraft, which is good because it means you can acknowledge that he was a horrible racist little man whilst still enjoying all the spooky goodness of this album.

Lychgate — The Contagion in 9 Steps (2018)

I never felt like this English avant-garde black metal frightfest got the love and attention it deserved when it came out a couple of years ago. Perhaps it was so unsettling that people found it hard to contextualise, but if there’s ever a time for these church organ dirges it is now. The pipes scream and stab away while Greg Chandler’s barked vocals echo around as if off the walls of a cavernous haunted church. While the elements of gothic instrumentation are heavily stylised, they are never generic or predictable. Everything in this record is off kilter and unnerving. Just listen to the vaudevillian rhythms of the opening track ‘Republic,’ or the jazzy piano at the beginning of ‘Hither Comes the Swarm.’ That track also treats us to haunting choral vocals, bell chimes and endless gothic grandeur behind its metal brutality. Organs and stuff are fun, and often cheesy, but it feels like Lychgate unleash something really dark here. A flood of insects blackening the air around the listener. I’m starting to regret pitching these albums as party pieces, because this is an album that makes me tense up, an album that is impossible to relax into. But Halloween is not simply supposed to be fun, it can’t just be an exercise in cake decoration, you need to be properly scared at some point, you need to be uncomfortable. This record provides that in the grandest fashion.

Lingua Ignota — Caligula (2019)

The party continues to get darker I’m afraid. This major label debut from New England based musician Kristin Hayter did receive plenty of critical acclaim upon release, but I never really felt I saw it get the credit it deserves in metal circles, because although it relies more on classical instrumentation, mainly organs (again), it’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever heard. Some of the dissonant organ work on tracks like ‘Butcher of the World,’ evokes the portent of Wendy Carlos’ classical interpolations for A Clockwork Orange. But when the vocals come in it’s like your whole world shattering. The mix is so saturated, so full of pain, anguish, real, genuine misanthropy. It’s scarier than any guitar-based metal music you’ll ever hear. On quieter and more haunting moments we hear Hayter’s qualities as a classically trained pianist and singer. Everything is so well composed, so well arranged for the right outbursts of the right emotions at the right time, you really feel that you’ve been through something listening to this record. You loved it but you’re kind of relieved it’s over, like some of the best horror films, it’s a troubling experience, one you don’t know when or if you will repeat, but you know it’s always there when you’re ready to go through it again.

Sigh — Imaginary Sonicscape (2001)

Tokyo band Sigh have a rich history; once signed to Euronymous’ Deathlike Silence label, they have spent the ensuing decades expanding their horizons outwards into the avant-garde, and this technicolour freakshow of an album is testament to that. Like many of the bands who survived that era, their prodigious musical ability has seen them refuse to sit still, and explore manifold musical landscapes expertly. It leaves them with an amazingly sophisticated metal vocabulary, an incredible skillset to create all kinds of wizardry. Imaginary Sonicscape is a heavy metal cult-horror soundtrack and then some. I will never get tired of the Phantom of the Opera chord progressions of Scarlet Dream, nor the beautiful wobbly synth line over the top. Corpsecry — Angelfall is just great, old fashioned Maiden-style riffing, with Argento-esque keyboards bringing the cinema. We get sci-fi sound effects and samples of frightened cries as we’re encouraged to “Scream for love, Scream for hate Scream for life, Scream for death.” It reminds us that there’s a horror film for every occasion, and a metal album to go with it. This record tries to be everything at once and it succeeds. The smooth jazz and soft rock elements on Sunset Song have a similar bizarre vibe as Nobuhiko Obayashi’s incomparable 1977 horror classic Hausu, compounded by the addition of demonic vocals pleading “Tear me apart! Tear me apart!” The whole thing is metal as we know it with a haunted house chaos running throughout it. It is simply an unbelievably fun album, but a tough one to explain, so much to unpack. This is also true of the psychedelic artwork that adorns its cover, which comes from Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O))). Slightly weirder though is the fact that the proggy third track ‘Nietzschean Conspiracy’ credits Emperor drummer and convicted homophobic murderer Bård Eithun as a songwriter, who was in prison at the time. This album is bamboozling from front to back, but never at the expense of enjoyability. This carries through to the closer, ‘Requiem — Nostalgia,’ with dramatic, cinematic orchestral swells and, naturally, a giggling baby outro. If you listen to one album from this list, make it this one.

Cultes des Ghoules — Henbane (2013)

This is Polish black metal dripping with old timey horror. It starts off with moaning and groaning horror movie samples, before feral blackmetal riffing and absolutely hideous vocals. I love black metal where the singer makes every attempt possible not to sound human. Some of the low throaty growls are reminiscent of Mayhem’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, and it has that classic feel to it, but like that album it uses a much more versatile and terrifying box of tricks than a lot of black metal. There’s a hamminess to the guitar playing too, which gives a it lot of personality, and across the board it maintains a resolutely unpolished quality. Like all great horror it’s all practical effects here. The song ‘Vintage Black Magic’ is the jewel in the crown for me; slower, cleaner guitar passages give the vocals extra space to get under your skin, as Marek ‘Mark of the Devil’ Górecki rasps, shrieks and cackles his way through the nearly twelve minute run-time. The evil laughter comes back with ‘Festival of Devotion,’ and elsewhere in the tracklisting we get incantatory chanting and yet more horror samples. Every single one of Henbane’s five long songs offers an absolute festival of horrors.

Mortuary Drape — Secret Sudaria (1997)

I barely know anything about this Italian Black/death metal band but they’ve been ticking over for several decades of black magic. Secret Sudaria is simply a very tight 1990s extreme metal release which is, as the opening track title suggests, obsessed with necromancy. The album cover is so simple and effective, and fits the sound perfectly, to the point where it really feels like the band recorded these eleven tracks in the haunted crypt depicted. Having a foot in a couple of different musical styles gives the band a way to dabble in the black arts with real command. It’s not raw black metal and it’s not brutal death metal, the band use elements of those two primitive styles for a more sophisticated storytelling. The production is very solid, although the drums are mixed a little high, but this emphasises the great rhythms the band manages to build up. ‘Madness’ has a great thrashy energy to it whilst still managing to be creepy, while songs like ‘Evil Death’ are just great black metal from the deepest catacombs. Beyond the solid quality of the songwriting, there are countless touches that lend it that extra Halloween charm, not least the demented screaming that finishes the album. Elsewhere there’s also the ghostly choral accompaniments on ‘Necromancer,’ or the evil beginning of ‘Abbot,’ where a baby’s cries echo off the crypt walls while the frontman (‘Wildness Perversion’), breathes heavily in the darkness. The track’s hellish conclusion is another highlight on a beautifully evil album.

Paradise Lost — Gothic (1991)

I know that this is generally considered an essential release in the gothic metal genre and therefore probably shouldn’t really be described as underrated, but I still don’t believe people quite treat it as the metal staple that they ought to, especially at this time of year. Melodically this album is absolutely flawless, and it nails the balance between its death metal vocals and the more ornate character of some of its instrumentals. The opening title track is such a wonderful indication of the quality that Yorkshire’s Finest are bringing on this album. The string interludes and female vocal layering are so atmospheric, and so influential. The guitar tone throughout the album is phenomenal too. In an era where that would see so many ‘gothic’ or even symphonic bands pursuing ‘epicness’ with fairly risible results, Paradise Lost achieve it with staggering authenticity. It’s such a confident album, so much so that it is content to be synonymous with the subgenre itself. The spoken word verse of ‘Shattered’ has the camp quality of a Vincent Price or a Christopher Lee but hits with the weight of a Poe poem or classic novel. The synth organ passages on ‘Eternal’ take some of the finest aspects of goth’s golden era in the decade before, while the guitars foreshadow the best of the decade to come. ‘Silent’ sounds like the awakening of a great monster of literature, and forms just one piece of this great library of an album. This record is a vast decrepit mansion, a ravishing feast of dark metal goodness.

Twin Temple — Twin Temple (Bring You Their Signature Sound…. Satanic Doo-Wop) (2018)

Not metal at all but looking at this list someone really needs to lighten the mood. This album is an incongruous reflection of all that is fun about Halloween, all its goofy Americanisms and risquee playfulness. On this self-released LP, the Los Angeles duo Twin Temple deliver exactly what it says on the tin: Satanism via the classic rock and roll sounds of 50’s and 60’s American rock and roll. The reason I’m including it in this list is because a) I think more people need to hear it, and b) it reminds us that metal doesn’t have a monopoly on Satan, who (as we’ve seen) has been omnipresent in all forms of American rock and roll back to its very foundations. As the band themselves say: “Everybody knows that the Devil has all the best tunes, from Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads to the blood-soaked black metal of Norway.” This allows us to enjoy a fun little anachronism like this with both irony and reverence, which are famously everyone’s favourite Halloween party activities. This means nothing if the songs themselves don’t work on their own terms, but the good news is they do! Singer Alexandra James evokes the revivalism of Amy Winehouse atop her husband’s reverby hollow body guitar sound. ‘The Devil (Didn’t Make Me Do It)’ has a Ronettes style shuffle to it while the followup ‘Lucifer, My Love’ is a waltzing plea to the big man himself to take James’ soul (for free.) The song brings the standout moment of the whole album where, in a teasing spoken word address, she reasons that Lucifer is “a much better kisser than Jesus.” The Spanish-inflected tango track ‘Santa Muerte’ is another highlight. Ultimately this is a lusciously sinful party piece that should appeal to any metal fan with a soul, provided you haven’t sold it.

Happy Halloween.