Top 10 Metal Albums of 2019 So Far
The year of our lord 2019 AD is now 58.36% over, so it’s time to think about all the great music that has come out since January. Initially, it often feels a bit of a struggle to think of 10 albums that have penetrated through the fog of everyday life to etch themselves into my fragile psyche in a mere matter of months. However, looking back it always becomes clear how spoilt for choice we are in the world of modern metal, and what an abundance of quality releases we are treated to every year. What I’ve tried to do here is take into account albums that made an immediate impression on me, as well as albums that required a bit more of a long term relationship. I’ve also tried to incorporate a variety of sub-genres to do justice to the diversity of modern metal music.
It seems people still struggle to understand lists like this so I should make it clear that this list is exclusively for albums I have heard and I like. If an album’s not on here I’ve either not heard it (very likely) or I don’t like it (less likely but possible.) You will never know which.
Anyway, please enjoy this list of albums which I have heard and I like. Hopefully you like them too.
10. Inter Arma — Sulphur English
Pummeling and hypnotic in equal measure, Inter Arma’s fourth album is a wonderful combination of many things; doomy guitar riffs that give Yob a run for their money, vocals that run the gamut of death metal growls to black metal wretches to meditative cleans, plus a progressive edge that’s never too cerebral or soulless. To pull off a 9-song, sixty-seven minute album, you’re going to need to pace yourself, and Inter Arma do this very well. At roughly the midpoint of the record, the song ‘Stillness’ brings in acoustic melodies and clean vocal harmonies, gradually building to an atmospheric climax. It really sounds like a band putting everything they have into an album, and applying it with magisterial vision. Also John Darnielle from the Mountain Goats is a fan, which means they must be good.
FAVOURITE TRACKS: ‘A Waxen Sea’, ‘Stillness’
PERFECT FOR: A 10km run in the rain
9. Full Of Hell — Weeping Choir
In the world of sick, unrelenting grindcore, Full Of Hell are well and truly a household name. Fans will know largely what to expect going into a Full of Hell record, but that doesn’t mean the results are any less impressive every time. The mind boggles to think how a band of only four can fit so much brutality, so much bile, such blistering speed into a single sound file. Living legend producer Kurt Ballou might hold the answer, but pathetic humans like us must never be enlightened. On lead singles ‘Burning Myrrh’ and ‘Silmaril’ in particular, the mix is so saturated that it sounds like each 2 minute track is literally bursting at the seams, frying the very apparatus it depends on. Vocal-wise, as ever, bilious growls and piercing shrieks fight for prominence like rabid animals. Like any Full Of Hell Project, Weeping Choir has acrimony and anxiety deep in its heart, but overall it’s less one note than 2017’s Trumpeting Ecstasy. The 7th track ‘Armory of Obsidian Glass’ is the jewel in the crown here. Much longer, slower, melded with ghoulish groans and desolated choral vocals worthy of the album’s title, it proves that Full Of Hell are still really quite a profound band.
FAVOURITE TRACKS: Army of Obsidian Glass, Angels Gather Here
PERFECT FOR: Breaking things
8. Saor — Forgotten Paths
It’s probably not too reductive a comparison to call Saor Scotland’s answer to Panopticon. A one man ‘Caledonian black metal’ project Spearheaded by Andy Marshall, Saor delivers a strain of black metal deeply wedded to the folk traditions of a nation. Averaging ten minutes apiece, each track is a sweeping tapestry of pipes, tin whistles, dulcimers maybe? harps, piano, and Marshall’s roaring vocals. The standout track, ‘Bròn’ features a beautiful vocal melody from guest musician Sophie Rogers, plus Neige of Alcest apparently provides a contribution on the stellar title track. If I had one criticism, it’s a paradoxical one in that some tracks feel slightly overlong, yet by the time the instrumental finale ‘Exile’ comes to a close I find myself wanting more songs. That said, Marshall is clearly shooting for epic vision and by and large he achieves it. The most blissful blastbeat/bagpipe combo you’ll hear all year.
FAVOURITE TRACKS: Bròn, Forgotten Paths
PERFECT FOR: Writing history essays
7. Misþyrming — Algleymi
A strong online buzz brought my attention to the latest project from Icelandic black metal band Misþyrming. Ranking in the top 5 of Rate Your Music’s favourite metal albums of the year, I suspect that part of its appeal is that it works both for black metal diehards and generalists like me. From first listen it offers an extremely enjoyable combination of black metal austerity and hard rock triumphalism. The seamless transition between the first two tracks is to die for, and throughout the tracklist the band uses the dynamics of the album format very nicely indeed. ‘Ísland, Steingelda Krummaskuð’ is a straight up heavy metal banger and testament to the fact that black metal doesn’t have to be alienating. To my ears the vocals lean less on high pitched wretches and more on feverish growls reminiscent of Behemoth’s Nergal. (If you’re looking for more of the former, might I recommend the album Strävan by Swedish black metal band Murg.)
It’s a good thing this is a quality band because it’s so much effort type the letter þ every time I write about them. Evoking a battle cry across the nordic wilderness without saying so directly or through any kind of gimmick, Algleymi is a very solid release, and shows these four Icelanders known only by their initials to be great ambassadors for the country’s flourishing black metal scene.
FAVOURITE TRACKS: ‘Með Svipur á Lofti’, ‘Ísland, Steingelda Krummaskuð’
PERFECT FOR: A night out on the town (Reykjavik)
6. Rammstein — Untitled
That peculiar strain of 90s/00s industrial alt metal that still manages to sell out stadiums has always been something I’ve been happy to take or leave, but when Rammstein returned with their first studio album in a decade I felt it was a good opportunity to reassess that position (after I’d listened to the Full Of Hell and Carly Rae Jepsen albums that came out on the same day.) Berlin’s favourite sons deliver an untitled/eponymous record that really has no business being so enjoyable. The album’s first half is a truly infectious combination of catchy techno melodies, pounding guitar riffs, Till Lindemann’s authoritarian rasp and a lyrical efficiency that allows even someone like me, with merely a GCSE in German to my name, to appreciate that this is a band that really knows how to write a good rock song. Of course, some of the album’s promotion also shows that they haven’t forgotten how to push certain societal buttons either. Make of it all what you will, but the opening track ‘DEUTSCHLAND’ through to ‘SEX’ is as formidable a five song run as you’re going to hear all year. My main criticism would be that the album’s latter half is much more forgettable, and also the caps lock thing is just as annoying and unnecessary when Rammstein do it as anyone else. Overall though, this is an album that feels weirdly at home in 2019 but still beautifully reminiscent of a time when this type of metal was the zeitgeist.
FAVOURITE TRACKS: DEUTSCHLAND, RADIO, ZEIG DICH
PERFECT FOR: Getting you back into Duolingo
5. Ithaca — The Language of Injury
In the vein of Vein’s Errorzone in 2018 or Code Orange’s Forever the year before, London’s Ithaca are the current kings and queens of dizzying, glitchy hardcore. An urgent, uncompromising push back against an aggressively shit world, The Language of Injury is one of the finest screams into the void I’ve heard in a good while. That’s not to say the album is a crude exercise in futility, indeed its misanthropy is sophisticated and extremely pertinent. Lyrically it’s an extremely hard hitting reflection of the toxicity of human relationships. Listening to the wonderful interplay between intricate guitar riffs, beatdown drums, electronic shrieks and desperate vocals it’s amazing to think this is the band’s first full length release. They do so much with the thirty one minute run time — I especially love the complimentary guitar lines on ‘Gilt’, not to mention the track’s wonderful outro showcasing Djamila Azzouz’s stunning vocal range. Beautiful touches on the album abound, such as on the claustrophobic ‘Impulse Crush,’ where the mic placement really forces the listener and Azzouz into opposite corners of an ever shrinking room. A fabulous album that never lets you get too comfortable and doesn’t outstay its welcome.
FAVOURITE TRACKS: Impulse Crush, Gilt
PERFECT FOR: The gym
4. Baroness — Gold & Grey
Apparently the last of Baroness’s decade-spanning colours series, their first with guitarist Gina Gleason, their second since the near fatal bus crash that marks a considerable trauma in the band’s collective psyche, Gold & Grey sounds like the sum total of everything that has come before, and leaves everyone guessing where John Dyer Baizley and co are going next. As the album’s title and beautiful cover design might reflect, Baroness dredge nuggets of gold out of murky depths, creating something both dark and dazzling. Even though it’s less instantly catchy than its predecessor, 2015's Purple, and contains certain production choices that may perplex some listeners, I think it’s definitely the band’s most advanced songwriting and composition to date. Songs like ‘Seasons’ are wonderfully unpredictable, which is balanced by the consistent strain of emotional earnestness in Baizley’s lyrics and vocal style. Ballads like ‘I’d Do Anything’ prove Gleason to be an ideal fit for the band vocally as well as instrumentally, and while there are maybe a couple too many interlude tracks, Gold & Grey is an album worthy of a band who’s garnered a reputation for doing things their own way, alchemists outgrowing their own formula.
FAVOURITE TRACKS: Tourniquet, Broken Halo
PERFECT FOR: Guitar pedal fanatics
3. Spirit Adrift — Divided by Darkness
The third album from Phoenix Heavy Metal band Spirit Adrift ranks way up on this list simply because of how much fun it is. Divided by Darkness is intrepid, fantastical, psychedelic, and endlessly enjoyable. It’s also a surprisingly accessible listen considering Chase Mason of local death metal giants Gatecreeper contributes to the lineup here. It’s immediately clear what to expect from this band: clean vocals reminiscent of the 70s revivalism of a band like Elder, but with a much more concise adherence to great song structures. The lyrics conjure up trials, tribulations and ultimate triumph through immersive and consistent musical world-building. Backed up by wonderfully catchy harmonising guitar leads, synths and Wurlitzers, this really is one for metal fans young and old, which is heartwarming. I wrote this summary even before I saw the incredible VHS style video for ‘Angel & Abyss’ (see below) and now I’m even more in love. A veritable trek through the metal cosmos, Spirit Adrift make a confident entrance with ‘We Will Not Die,’ finish with an equally triumphant instrumental anthem ‘The Way of Return,’ and hardly put a foot wrong in between.
FAVOURITE TRACKS: ‘We Will Not Die’, ‘Tortured by Time’
PERFECT FOR: Metalheads and their dads
2. Totaled — Lament
I’m trying to think if Profound Lore have ever put out a record I haven’t loved. If they have this most definitely isn’t it. Blackened hardcore band Totaled was a band whose name I hadn’t heard before, but just one listen to this absolute animal of an album made a deep impression on me. Totaled dive into the acrid depths of several musical genres, pull out their bare bones and spawn something for us to relish in all its mutant glory. ‘As Below’ bursts in unannounced with a guitar tone so raw you can hear the pick screech and scrape along the strings, at which point I knew this was probably the most visceral metal album I’d heard all year. Lament is no mindless cacophony though; the band members are well attuned to the melodic and rhythmic foundations it sits on, and the production delivers this with an unmatched explosiveness. Just listen to the chord progression and bassline on the first half of ‘Hypnosis’ as a measure of the band’s sophistication. The rest of the track is an absolute masterclass too: D-beat>Blast beat>slow breakdown>vocal sample>guitar solo>outro>done. The less said about the fadeout ending the better, but this is how it’s done. Whenever a track from Lament comes on on shuffle my ears prick up and my piss begins to boil. Some albums just hit different. In this case it hits like a tonne of bricks and then throws another tonne on top for good measure. 8 tracks, 36 minutes, what more could you want?
FAVOURITE TRACKS: As Below, Eclipsed, Hypnosis
PERFECT FOR: Boiling piss
- Seer — Vol. 6
Some albums you feel like you were just destined to meet. Living in Vancouver last year this doom/sludge outfit seemed to be on everybody’s lips in the local metal scene. It’s perhaps the most obscure album on this list, but that is befitting of an album which I see as an absolute revelation, and one which it is my humble duty to bestow. Vol. 6 sounds like stumbling across some fire-lit esoteric ritual on a wooded mountainside. Seer’s previous ‘volumes’ maintain this strong sense of landscape, and they take great care to keep one foot in the evocative scenery of the Pacific Northwest and one in the realm of fantasy. This is what both anchors and elevates the band’s sound. This record exists in a universe somewhere in between Tolkien and Robert Eggers’ The VVitch. Far from being some MMORPG wizard fetishism, Vol. 6 is as much as anything a very strong genre piece. Take the track ‘Frost Tulpa’ for example. Its title and lyrics refer to a spiritual entity brought to life by Himalayan buddhist mysticism, but it’s incredible how unpretentious the band makes this song. That Gibson SG guitar tone hallowed in the annals of doom metal history extolls thunderous riffs, the vocals boom and wail before transitioning into pure black metal shrieks until it all evaporates and singer Bronson Lee Norton lets out four monolithic groans like the throat singing of a lost culture. It’s one of the most profound metal moments I can think of in recent years. Grandiosity aside, Seer tick every box. The instrumentals, the production, the song structures are simply fantastic. The two singles, ‘Seven Stars, Seven Stones’ and ‘Iron Worth Striking’ are pure bangers. It’s the record I’ve come back to the most times this year by far, and it’s filled me with a deep joy every time.
I can’t help but feel like this album has put some kind of spell on me, but I’d like to think I am of sound mind in giving it such a glowing review, and I hope others reading this are similarly enchanted.
Please please get in touch to let me know what you think.
FAVOURITE TRACKS: All except maybe the instrumental outro
PERFECT FOR: A hike, the woods, the mountains, escaping.
