10 Albums I Enjoyed In 2024
Obligatory End of Year (Mostly) Metal Album List
First Published: 2025-02-05| Last Updated: 2024-12-14
Status: in progress| Audience: middle aged metal dads| Confidence: aficionado
This is not a “best of” list or a “Album of the Year” list or anything else that might make you think I consider myself or my musical tastes important enough that anyone should use them to evaluate the worth of anything. It’s just a list of 10 (mostly) metal albums I listened to a lot over the year, and enjoyed, arranged alphabetically by band name.
Immerse
Acathexis
An all-star ensemble (at least in the tiny world of niche black metal bands) - Déhà from Silver Knife along with Jacob of Mare Cognitum and Dany of los Males del munda combine to create a truly stunning example of intercontinental ballistic black metal. Variously recorded in their home studios in Buenos Aires, Portland, and Brussels, this is four tracks of perfect tightrope walking between atmo-black and DSBM.
Ad Nauseam (EP)
Allocer
I don’t always listen to DSBM and atmospheric black metal. Sometimes I listen to blackened death metal. And no blackened death album grabbed me this year quite like Allocer’s Ad Nauseam.
Bellum II
Aquilus
In 2011 I became completely obsessed with the album Griseus by the unknown to me (and I think most people) australian band that existed seemingly only on MySpace. However, the fusion of symphonic art music and heavy metal on that album was a feat that made people sit up and take notice - and one that was not even approached by any band in the next decade. It quite literally set the standard for symphonic metal. then in 2021 we got a follow up, or half of one anyway. Now the second half of Bellum has been released, and the man behind the albums, Horace Rosenqvist, has topped his own genre-defining output again. This is light years beyond what Dani Filth could ever hope to produce (but that was also true in 2011). Citing Chopin and Rachmaninoff as his main inspirations, Rosenqvist continues to stand in a league of his own.
Êra
Asarhaddon
Consciously modeling themselves on a stable of the best in Cascadian metal (WitTR, Falls of Rauros, UADA, and Downfall of Gaia), this Thuringian-Saxon duo have been developing their sound for a decade now, and have recently signed to Vendetta Records to release this - the best atmospheric black metal album in a while. Along with Burial Oath (below) this has been the soundtrack to a very wet, dreary autumn here at the black metal cheese cult compound.
The Cycles of Suffering
Burial Oath
I hope for an album like every year. Something that grabs me so completely that I just can’t stop listening to it. Late in the year, I finally got my wish with this 30 minute shiny dagger of Dissection worship. In addition to the obvious UADA influence due to sharing a drummer, there is big Der Weg Einer Freiheit and Asarhaddon energy.
Coma
Gaerea
Gaerea is one of those bands that internet losers that don’t understand how genres work love to hate. Step 1 - divide everything that builds atmosphere into two piles based on whether or not it meets the criteria of RAW KVLT BLACK METAL. If it does, call it DSBM. If it doesn’t, call it Atmospheric Black Metal , shorten it to atmo-black, and then declare it to be butt-rock black metal (when we all know that Black n Roll like Darkthrone, Satyricon, and Kvelertak is the real black metal butt rock). Gaerea is the band in that second pile that redditors love to hate. Ignore them and listen to this amazing album of poignant struggle and blackened pathos that goes beyond the juvenile catharsis of so much modern metal.
Demiurgic Forces
H V N W R D
A side project of Bill Mess (otherwise known as 鬼, Unreqvited and The Ember, The Ash, among others), HVNWRD is exactly what I like in DSBM: hypnotic crushing atmosphere and just enough punctuated shrieking to be unsettling. There is more black metal and less ambient shoegaze here than in Unreqvited, but the bursts of fury and shrieking that drew me into that project remain.
Apex Predator
Hässlig
I have to include one Spanish band per year in these lists, by royal decree. Fortunately Hässlig came along and threw down this soundtrack to driving fast to a fist fight. In general, Spanish bands do not care about labels and genres, and just go do stuff. Sometimes it’s bad, and sometimes it’s filthy disgusting blackened punk to smash the faces of fascists to. ¡Muerte a las fachas!
Muuntautuja
Oranssi Pazuzu
Will hipster-metal darlings Oranssi Pazuzu win over the TRVE KVLT purists with this album? Probably not. There is too much Nine Inch Nails and Boredoms in here and not enough Sigh and Blut aus Nord like some of their previous albums. However, there is a ton of suffocating texture, creepy clouds of feedback and really weird unsettling synth tones. Each album of theirs is the answer to an unasked question, and the question this time was “What would it sound like if Mayhem and Kraftwerk were one band instead of two?”
Songs of Blood and Mire
Spectral Wound
Spectral Wound were on so many end of year lists in 2021 with their album A Diabolic Thirst. I wonder how many of those lists Songs of Blood and Mire will end up on this year. To me, this is an improvement over their last outing - more mature maybe - but definitely more hair-raisingly furious. Maybe there is more Bathory style nasty grooves and a touch less Windir scandi-epic to this album. There is definite Dissection worship going on (apparently a theme for me this year), and some touches of black and roll in there for spice.
Umbilical
Thou
“They’ve called us anarchists, criminals, foreign meddlers, lunatics, dispossessed, relativists, utilitarians, egoists, passion maximizers, ascetics, negators of everything. Clearly, the “Thou” experiment is never going to appeal to audiences who demand that art rigorously enforce a coherent and righteous worldview.
And yet, are we not ourselves constrained by our own rigid morality? In those quiet moments of deep contemplation, when the bargains and concessions are thoroughly examined, when we yield before the Judging Eye–what is the summation of our choices? If the unspoiled self beyond the immensity of time were given voice, what pronouncements would be made? What would such an internal audit yield? What undeniable character would be revealed?
This record is for the radicals, the crackpots, the exiles who have escaped the wasteland of capitulation. This record is for the militants and zealots refusing to surrender to comforts, to practicalities, to thirty pieces of silver. And this record is most especially for the weaklings and malingerers, burdened by capricious indulgence, hunched by the deep wounds of compromise, shuffling in limp approximation, desperately reaching back towards integrity and conviction.” - Thou