The Top 10 Metal Albums of 2020 So Far
The chaotic soundtrack to the first half of an unprecedented year
A little late in posting this mid-year update, but it’s not exactly my fault that the perception of time as a concept has collapsed. The first half of this year was terrible, and NOT in a good way. A year where the void became mainstream. This should have been good news for metal fans — metal is the music of the void after all, but in the depths of lockdown surely even the most seasoned abyss starer would’ve found the whole thing very passe. I completely fell out of the habit of keeping up with new metal, and my hunger for new music generally dried up as I found myself reaching for comfort food in most areas of my life. But I’ve finally assembled a gaggle of albums that helped me feel like myself again. Most of this piece was written in July/August and I know a whole lot of good stuff has come out since then but I’m sure I’ll get to all that at the end of the year.
10. Kaatayra — Só Quem Viu o Relâmpago à Sua Direita Sabe
Kicking off with the left field pick of the year — a one man black metal project out of Brasilia using only acoustic guitars. It is a delicate, unnerving balance of blast beats and entrancing folk passages. The standout moment for me comes midway through the second track ‘Desnaturação de Si-Mesmo’; the flutes, the percussion, and the mournful stacked vocals. It’s perhaps the least metal moment on the album but a high point nonetheless. This is already the second project of the year from musician Caio Lemos, and sees him leaning into the folk sounds of his tropical surroundings tastefully. It is yet another shining example of black metal artists finding wiggle room in the depths of the genre’s foundations to produce something completely different.
9. Poppy — I Disagree
Yes it is a pop album. But it uses metal aesthetics more compellingly than most metal bands. I am not particularly interested in YouTubers launching pop careers, nor am I particularly familiar with who Poppy is beyond this album. Indeed I’m more confused now after hearing it. The fact that I Disagree grabbed my attention from the first listen and held it pretty consistently since its release several years ago in January 2020 says a lot about its quality. The opener ‘Concrete’ forms the perfect overture for this bizarre metal pop opera, lurching between sugary J-Pop style choruses and sickening breakdowns. The remaining tracks tend to lean more heavily on the modern pop angle, but overall this is an album perfectly concocted for incredibly online people whose approach to metal is open-minded and morbidly ironic. The radioactive decay of Nu-metal has finally reached its half-life, and now innovative pop artists like Poppy and Rina Sawayama are able to venture into its exclusion zone to pull out the best bits to give gen Z the pop music it needs and deserves. Now is not the time to go outside.
8. Kvelertak — Splid
Kvelertak rang in the 2010s with a modern classic. Their near-perfect self titled debut essentially represented the shape of metal to come in that decade. Genre-fusion was really the order of the day and, with Kurt Ballou behind the boards, Stavanger’s finest brought black metal in from the cold and chucked it in the mixer with all the best bits of classic hard rock. It was a moment in heavy music that was incredibly formative for me as a fan. It remains a high watermark and first on my list of recommendations to anyone who wants to get into modern metal.
This is all to say Kvelertak are a very special band for me, which does colour my experience of this album. It’s hard to believe that it’s been ten years already, but Kvelertak are insistent that they’re still full of good ideas in 2020. This is impressive given the departure of the inimitable vocalist Erlend Hjelvik which could have proved terminal. Playing to the vocal strengths of the incumbent Ivar Nikolaisen leads the band to lean more noticeably towards their punk influences, which is fitting given the album’s title translates to ‘discord’. Songs like ‘Necrosoft’ display these broiling influences with anthemic power chords, blastbeats and jaunty piano stabs. ‘Fanden Ta Dette Hull!’ is a Kvelertak barn burner if ever I’ve heard one, with Thin Lizzy style dual guitar licks and group vocals that clean up beautifully.
Kvelertak promoted the album with a purchasable virtual concert experience, a pyrotechnic-laden performance in an empty warehouse. Very cool. As I understand, Kvelertak have remained a household name in Norway far above and beyond the acclaim they’ve received abroad, but in any case, longevity is never guaranteed, and being the future only lasts so long. In this most testing of years, Kvelertak have managed to pass with flying colours.
7. Havukruunu — Uinuos Syömein Sota
The best Finnish pagan metal album I’ve heard all year, and the absence of new music from Moonsorrow since 2016 leaves an open goal in this particular field. In its very first minutes this album gives me exactly what I want; bellowed vocal harmonies straight off the longboat, blistering blast beats and searing guitarwork. The grandiose reverb that drenches every track is really reminiscent of the swashbuckling first wave of black metal and makes the whole record a particularly immersive experience. We have horses braying, chains clanging in mountain halls, waves crashing, non-stop ice and fire. Everything is just dripping with cinema; impossibly fast and fluid guitar leads, harmonies and solos. We also acoustic sea-shanty type interludes such as we see on the track ‘Ja viimein on yö’ to give a real sense of narrative to the record. See also the glistening intro to the midway track ‘Kuin öinen meri’ for a breathtaking use of musical dynamics. This album is pure heroism. A great deal of fun but by no means tongue in cheek and not too gimmicky all things considered. If you like your black metal with the trad folk side of things ramped up I’d also recommend Winterfylleth’s very impressive The Reckoning Dawn, which also nearly made this list.
6. Oranssi Pazuzu — Mestarin kynsi
The Finnish takeover continues with one of the most intriguing bands in metal at the moment. While Mestarin kynsi perhaps doesn’t quite have the beguiling novelty of 2016’s Värähtelijä, it’s just as hypnotic at times. The formula here is electronically tinged metal grooves and wretched vocals, boiling over into psychedelic breaks. Jun-His Venhanen’s vocals crackle like the croaks of a mutant animal, and these are the soundtracks of his underground sewer raves. The lead single ‘Uusi teknokratia’ gave us a great indication of what to expect; with decent headphones you can really get a feel for the panorama of the album. Crunchy guitars, synths, and what sounds like flutes spiral ever inwards, vocal shrieks bouncing of the labyrinth’s walls. At the risk of lecturing, I’d say this is a proper album in that it’s probably not going to work for you if you have a few minutes to spare here and there, but will be most rewarding if you listen hard and often. Despite the fact that a lot of these tracks are largely instrumental psych-metal freakout jams, this is not background music. I think Oranssi Pazuzu are a band that wants you to keep coming back to go deeper and deeper into each release. They’ve added so many different ingredients so well thought out and so well executed to make this a perfect ‘multiple listens album.’ A song like ‘Taivaan porti,’ essentially a 8 minute blastbeat packed with pounding synths and otherworldly vocal layering makes me wonder how on earth they would pull all this off in a live setting, but I’m sure they’re ready for when such a thing is possible.
5. Bedsore — Hypnagogic Hallucinations
This year’s death metal race is currently being led by this four-piece from Rome. This debut full-length of theirs is pretty eccentric, but not at all challenging to listen to. As someone who is not particularly into old school death metal revivalism, nor any hyper-modernised offshoots, this record strikes a really enjoyable sweet spot that I think would appeal to any kind of metal fan. The guitars are a little fizzy, but all this heat in the high end gives the riffs the scrape of surgical steel.
The synths and organs that kick off the instrumental opener ‘The Gate, Disclosure’ could be straight out of a giallo film, fading seamlessly into its sequel, ‘The Gate, Closure (Sarcoptes Obitus,’ which is littered with these grimy gang vocals that sound like a horde of goblins. Tracks like this one and ‘Disembowelment of the Souls’ are just great fun, metal’s equivalent of watching an Argento film with your friends; dark and scary with a wild streak of technicolour that stops you ever knowing quite what to expect.
The band gets more grim and hellish on ‘Deathgazer’, and the Lovecraftian ‘At the Mountains of Madness strikes the record’s most sombre tone. ‘Cauliflower Growth’ sums the album up best in that it reads as fairly traditional death metal but then the band will do something small: a particular vocal inflection, a production choice, the introduction of some synth or organ, which just jolts you awake and makes you pay attention. Bedsore is death metal worth paying attention to.
4. Black Curse — Endless Wound
Incredibly punishing, totally rewarding, a record that goes absolutely hard as fuck front to back. Rough around the edges but still eminently listenable, every member of this Denver four-piece delivers a performance that is raw and organic in the extreme. This is exactly what I want from my metal; I want it to sound like human beings making all the noise they can with the tools they have. It’s a profoundly human endeavour, and is the true test of whether a band can be greater than the sum of its parts.. These 7 tracks, spanning 38 minutes, tick every box. Tracks like ‘Crowned in (Floral) Vice’ and ‘Charnel Rift’ are exhausting, gnawing, grinding, giving not one inch of breathing space.
In pursuit of going absolutely hard as fuck front to back, they drift into the danger of becoming slightly one note, so you begin to wonder what they can do to break it up a bit. ‘Enraptured by Decay’ hints at a more pensive note, but becomes a little repetitive and ends with a fade out, granting diversity to the album only by virtue of being a bit of a lull in the track listing. The title track, second from the end, makes much better use of musical space. From its feral beginning it shows off a range of vocal styles, riff structures and tempos. If we think of metal music as giving form to a descent into the void, Black Curse are leading the pack this year, headlong into the abyss whether we’re along for the ride or not.
3. Code Orange — Underneath
Pittsburgh’s hardcore giants released their fourth album just as the world locked down, with no certainty of who or what from our normal lives would survive. They were due to launch Underneath with their first show in months, to 1,500 fans at Pittsburgh’s Roxian theatre until it suddenly became clear that indoor mass gatherings of any kind would be off limits indefinitely. And so, Code Orange played these songs like their lives depended on it in an empty arena, streamed to the masses via Twitch. Surely if there were one single moment to sum up the year in metal, it would be that one, and if we had to point to a band that best defines the language of metal in our current moment it would be this one. And yet it’s even more complicated than that. Underneath bleeds metal’s recent past, and yet is endlessly futuristic in its application. The track ‘Who I Am’ is a great example, with its alternating clean/screamed vocals, electronic tics and industrial synths. It sounds like the early 2000s repurposed, deeply buried memories of our baggiest jeans and most disastrous eye liner experiments, triggered in glorious fashion. The chorus on ‘Sulphur Surrounding’ is beautifully melodramatic. Elsewhere on the album we get more of what we’ve come sophisticated, breakdown-heavy hardcore, with terrifying electronic and industrial touches broiling in the depths of every track.
The title of the album, and its repeated motif “Let’s take a good look at you” sums up what Code Orange are doing here; peeling back the skin of the music we love, having a root around in its tissues and adding its own synthetic sinews, hitting us on the visceral level of body horror. They have become masters of aesthetics, accompanying everything with stunning audio-visual material including a recent full length semi-parody of MTV unplugged featuring an acoustic Alice in Chains Cover.
So on one level this is a stunning work of metal retrofuturism, on another level it’s just a dead good album that rips. I overuse the word cinematic in my reviews but it really is the best word for the scope of Code Orange’s ongoing mission to elevate harcore into a form of high art that stays true to its most primitive instincts. The New Normal.
2. Boris — NO
Despite the pretentiousness of my writing style, I don’t think I have particularly high brow tastes, and during lockdown especially I’ve been more drawn to safety and familiarity than horizon-expanding. Boris was a band that was always tucked away in my mind as a certain type of experimental band that I’d get into eventually if I was in the mood. NO feels like the ideal time for my path to cross with Atsuo, Takeshi and Wata. In the literal sense of the word, NO is generic, in that it belongs to a particular genre, or at least a genus of music, but the application is anything but. This record essentially sees the Japanese band dishing out thrash bangers for forty minutes, and yet you can tell this is a group that has cut its teeth over decades of experimentation. They just know what they’re doing. They know how to make guitars sound overwhelmingly huge. Beyond this they understand how to condense it all into a package that is — get this — both lean and mean. It’s muscular and physical but deceptively light on its feet. It feels like bands like Boris have amassed such a strong command of the mechanisms and the very language of heavy music, and what they’re communicating here is absolutely universal. Listening to the riffs on songs like ‘Kikinoue’ or ‘Lust,’ or the stacked vocals on Non Blood Love or Zerkalo, it’s nothing we haven’t heard before, but it just hits different. Everything feels bathed in some brain frying acid where everything gets better and better the louder you play it.
Look at the riffs on ‘Anti-Gone’ or the melodic passages on ‘Fundamental Error.’ They groan and heave like a snoring monster, but manage to keep up with the blistering pace the band sets for itself. It must be so hard to create something so gargantuan but so agile. This is a band with a profound mastery of noisecraft just having a class time with it. Fair play to them. Turn it up.
1. Sweven — The Eternal Resonance
I’m completely blindsided by this Stockholm band’s debut effort. It’s a patient, wonderfully crafted record, brimming with quality ideas in every chord progression. The vocals are pained screams almost akin to death metal, but the instrumentals are incredibly delicate. We’re well into the second track before we hear a distorted guitar, and every inch of musical space leading up to it is filled with earnest feeling. This is an album where everything has been thought about, but nothing overthought. The production is bare bones, and the record sounds immaculate precisely because of its lack of studio sheen. Nothing is obscured, the guitars get to crunch and ring and harmonise together beautifully. There’s plenty of effects, choruses, reverbs, delays, but nothing beyond the reach of any bedroom guitar player. This is just simply a case of a band thriving solely on the strength of their ideas. Songs like ‘Reduced to an Ember’ cycle through so many phases and movements, each one completely captivating, no weak links, nothing disjointed, it’s like every song has at least four songs worth of quality contained within. This is most true in the guitar playing, constantly in harmony, constantly multiplying the enjoyment factor. The two guitar players, Robert Andersson and Isak Koskinen Rosemarin, have near-telepathic chemistry, and are lovingly embellished by Jesper Nyrelius’ heartfelt drumming. I haven’t heard such a profound sense of melody in a metal record for a very long time. Not necessarily catchy, but infectious. The second half of ‘Solemn Retreat,’ pensive and triumphant, encapsulates the mood of this record. The way Andersson describes the project shows it to be a labour of love, far too long in the making, years and years in “a cycle of anger and frustration” to get to something that he is proud of, something that “means the world to him.” You can hear this in the music itself; sensitive and wracked with doubt, wrought into something exultant. Music that has been through a lot and is ready to emerge with staggering confidence.
The final track, mostly an instrumental besides some beautiful latin group vocals to finish, reads as a kind of victory lap, which is what I want my closing tracks to be. This is an album that has worked so hard and deserves the utmost love and attention. So bloody good, I can’t wait to keep coming back throughout the rest of the year.
