Top Albums ov 2024 w/ Hans & Iron Goddess of Mercy!
Concepts like “self-control” and “fiscal responsibility?” Laughable. Fiscal isn’t even a real word. No, no—we don’t adhere to such trifles in the Bowl. In fact, Hans and Iron Goddess of Mercy just plopped in with some downright reckless recs to drain our dollars. Indeed, LISTMANIA 2K24 DAY 4 is upon us—prepare the financial funeral pyre!
Hans
Another year, another disappointingly low post count, but luckily, new(ish)comers like Aaron, Sean, and Brock continue to pick up the slack, while Roldy, Stick, and that old man who rambles about emo records every Friday continue to be the foundation of this crumbling abode. Thanks all!
Should you be in the mood for some gnarly techno, this year’s honorable mention serves just that. AnD‘s When Stars Collide comes off a little obtuse and noisy at the beginning but just might lull you in with its big-ass thwomping bass that pulses in rhythms inspired by the titular celestial bodies.
10. Haunted Plasma – I
Svart Records
First time I’m including something I found on another Top 10 list. As such, I haven’t spent as much time with it as some of the other albums, but I’m not adding it out of a desperate lack of picks. I’ve long had a soft spot for krautrock, and after banishing Giant Brain to the honorable mentions last year [Coward ~Roldy], I’m glad that this one’s metal enough by association with Oranssi Pazuzu to warrant inclusion, even if said association is barely reflected in the music. What you get is synth-heavy, trippy krautpop propelled by the genre’s trademark monotonous drum beats and topped off with a great vocal performance by Mat McNerney (Grave Pleasures, Beastmilk, et al), among others. Check out the highly danceable “Spectral Embrace” and how it morphs into a full-fledged movie soundtrack halfway through. Truly grandiose.
9. Deadform – Entrenched In Hell
Tankcrimes/Brainsand
Here’s the mini review that’s been in pending forever because it needed a final sentence that I never came up with: “I don’t remember the last time a release did so much with so little. Playing a mix between some kinda metal and some kinda punk, Deadform aren’t here to wow you with their instrumental prowess or bludgeon you with sheer speed, but I’ll be damned if the vibes aren’t absolutely on point. While the seeminlgy effortless proto-death-thrash-doom blend reminded me of the eternally unsigned Borealis, the frequent focus on slower tempos evokes the doomy fatalism of Thrall. Add to that a dash of the crossover appeal of something like High Command and liberally coat everything in the dystopian aesthetic of Voivod, with atmospheric interludes of drones and clanks evoking a post-industrial hellscape where diesel fumes still waft between the hulking carcasses of factories as marauding biker gangs roam the crumbling highways.” Still don’t have that final sentence. “It’s real good.” There we go.
8. Skulld – The Portal is Open
World Eater Records
It wouldn’t be a year-end list without at least one meat-and-potatoes death metal record, the kind that just feels so immensely satisfying in the way it adds maybe one or two extra ingredients to spice things up but otherwise focuses on the basics. As I watched Gutless and Scumbag clamor for the coveted spot, I suddenly remembered that I’d already had my fill earlier in the year. Skulld serve up some extra chunky stew with hearty riffs and crunchy d-beats, never exactly venturing into nouvelle cuisine but peppering everything with a vocal approach that is a bit outside of the genre’s usual fare. It reminds me a bit of Sigrid Sheie from Hammers of Misfortune and Vhöl, which can never be a bad thing. Do me a favor and don’t pass this up.
7. Dusk Shrine – Celestial Trauma / 6. Annular – Thanatophobia / 5. Rhûn – Conveyance in Death
If you think I’m getting off easy by grouping these three, rest assured that whatever time may have been saved was immediately lost trying to figure out how to format this shit. Let it also not be considered a dig at the quality and individuality of these albums, but rather take it as my being unable to talk about them separately without repeating myself because my vocabulary hasn’t received an expansion in 5 years. All three are one-man projects, all three are a little hard to define beyond the “black metal” tag, and all three brought big autumn vibes (best season, don’t @ me) without plunging into outright sadness. All three have excellent songwriting that holds the middle ground between classic and modern approaches to the genre. Annular gets an extra point for the funniest opening.
4. Chaos Sanctuary – Instrumentatility
Independent
Those in the know might notice that I’m cheating here, but as far as I can tell, nobody is in the know because this thing was unceremoniously flung into the buttcrack of 2023, the abyss between the years, the wasteland from whence no album ever finds its way onto a list. Luminaries of list season have long held that the year should go from December to December, and in their spirit I hold aloft this album with all its pointy bits and whirring blades and beautiful, intricate melodies and say, yes, you may be an anime-themed tech death record, but never again shall you have to hide because of that. A lot of people can look past it, and worse, some are into it, so you should stand! Stand proudly in the light and let them marvel at your sick riffs and weedlies, some of which might remind them of Dessiderium. Thou art magnificent!
3. Boarhammer – II: Chemognosis – A Shortcut to Mushrooms
Naturmacht Productions | Review
Okay, I might not have done a great job distinguishing those other black metal albums from each other, but there’s absolutely no lumping this thing in with anything else. With only minimal concessions made to non-forest-dwellers, Boarhammer’s debut continues to confound through its singular sound and atmosphere. It’s a hallucinogenic trip in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night with nothing but some distant lights from a witch’s cot to guide you along your way and nothing but some distant memories of what black metal sounds like to keep you company. In other words, this shit is weird, and I love it.
2. Khirki – Κυκεώνας
Venerate Industries | Review
Every so often, an album comes along that damn near makes me question everything else I listen to. What’s the point of all this evil metal, all this growling, when it seems like all I really want are some goddamn choruses to bellow along to? To be fair, it helps if everything else about the music is good, too, with tight compositions, creative percussion, and melodies and guitar solos to die for. Khirki’s sophomore record combines all of these into a meteor of a record that tore quite the crater into my listening habits, to the point where I listened to this and the debut almost exclusively for several weeks.
1. Squint – Big Hand
Sunday Drive Records
Khirki set the bar pretty high in terms of hooks, but Squint managed to just clear it, clawing their way into the deep recesses of my brain in no time flat and getting stuck there well and good. 10 pop punk ditties spliced with post-hardcore and ’90s alt rock, and at least 9 of them are surefire hits that I won’t be getting out of my head anytime soon. The mix of styles offers up all the ingredients needed to perfectly underscore the open and heartfelt lyrics about failure and progress, often infusing even the more powerful sections and walls of distortion with a certain melancholy that feels weary but never tired, resulting in an oddly comforting vibe. On top of that, there’s tracks like “Pack Rat” and “Golden State” which, while feeling no less personal, put fun at the forefront, rounding the album out to a beautiful package.
Iron Goddess of Mercy
With all due apologies to Atrae Bilis, Ceremony of Silence, Slimelord, Thou, Alex Henry Foster, Moss Upon the Skull, and Devenial Verdict. Here’s my Top Ten.
10. Chapel of Disease – Echoes of Light
Ván Records
Most Sensible Jam: “A Death Though No Loss”
Some bands have sensibilities. They have melodic sensibilities, songwriting sensibilities, emotional sensibilities. Chapel of Disease might be the metal band of sensibilities par excellence. Much has been made that they aren’t really a death metal band or even a metal band anymore. No, they are a band of sensibilities. They feel and make us feel more keenly, more consciously, more acutely. They imbue us with a sense of the immaculate grandeur and imperceptible tininess of life. “…I am nothing and a thousand worlds small. But I don’t mind… I still want echoes of light!” Plus, these riffs, y’all. These riffs.
9. Cold Cave – Passion Depression
Heartworm Press | Mini | FIF
Grooviest Bummer – “Hourglass”
As much as I’m given over to thinking about Passion Depression as a Side A/Side B affair—particularly as the band released Side A in a steady monthly rip from March to June and then dropped the whole album in the suitably spooky month of October—that belies obvious affinities throughout. “She Reigns Down” and “Siren Song” are both pitch-perfect homages to Sisters of Mercy: pulsive, gothic, and infectious grooves that send you posthaste to the middle of the smoke-choked dancefloor. “Hourglass” and “Everlasting” are uniquely New Order, the former sparser than the latter but both full of new-wave ebullience.
8. Ut Mutem – Wet Nurse
Independent Release
Top Nurse Noise: “Wet Nurse Palace”
It is a delightful irony that Wet Nurse, the latest album from OKC-based noise project Ut Mutem, is so mature. Each track is a composition, looping and recursive, telling a terribly human story that sits on the other side of intelligibility. Founded in musique concrete and moving towards a more narratively dense dark ambient, Wet Nurse stages the grand egoic contradiction between fantasies of plenitude and omnipotence and the constitutive lack and loss that we suffer in order to live. Garbled voices, crepuscular winds, luminous ringing, sharp screams, and endless drippings all coalesce into a vision of newly formed life.
7. Pneuma Hagion – From Beyond
Everlasting Spew | Track Premiere
Heaviest Beatdown: “All Worlds Enslaved”
When I premiered “The Temple Fires” in July, I noted Pneuma Hagion’s “knack for taking everything that made Gateways to Annihilation an instant classic and distilling it to its purest form” while also highlighting the myriad “moshing, stomping riffs… interrupted by pinch harmonics and brief twisted runs.” I simply never stopped listening to From Beyond—its short runtime, storm of Weekend Nachos breakdowns, and R’s bellicose proclamations make for an impossibly addicting album. Every time you hear “Lurking Beyond Time and Space,” “Aeon,” or “All Worlds Enslaved,” you have to listen again immediately while you slobber all over your finest crewneck.
6. Denzel Curry – King of the Mischievous South
Loma Vista
The Most Right Price: “Black Flag Freestyle” featuring That Mexican OT
Did King of the Mischievous South improve on King of the Mischievous South vol. 2? No clue. It did give us “Still in the Paint” which is so hard it outweighs the lesser additions. Ultimately, the new record(s) from Dade County’s Denzel Curry is about the trunk shakers and rump shakers: “Set It,” “Hot One,” “Black Flag Freestyle,” “G’z Up,” Hit the Floor,” and “Hoodlumz.” That’s enough heat for years. That A$AP Rocky and Ferg are on this album makes sense, as Curry delights in echoing the flows of both. Other than “Cole Pimp,” the rest will rattle your fillings.
5. PeelingFlesh – The G Code
Unique Leader
Slam Loud and Bangin’: “Creepin’ Out the Cut” featuring Matti Way
Where were you when the music video for “Still Tippin’” dropped in 2004? Where were you after? In two different fucking worlds, that’s where. Everything changed that November. Now, 20 years later we have the slam culmination of that world thanks to Oklahoma’s PeelingFlesh. The G Code combines perfectly calibrated slam, a deep love for Memphis ’90s tape culture, and the candypaint-drippin, barre-sippin’, woodgrain-grippin’ aesthetic of Screwston, Texas. Replete with guest vocalists, DJ scratching, and crate-dug rap samples, this is absolutely the most fun record of the year. Whether or not you’re ready to it admit is your own failing.
4. Alcest – Les chants de l’aurore
Nuclear Blast | Review Long Essay
Euphoric Achievement: “Komorebi”
The only album released in 2024 about which I wrote an entire review. What else is there to say, really? “Komorebi” is almost certainly the song of the year. “Flamme Jumelle” gave us the video of the year. Les chants… excels in every manner. It is an explosive, exuberant, and enchanting celebration of life, an endless fireworks display, a timeless show of interconnection and camaraderie, a kind of career capstone for a band that has so much more to offer. All I hope is I’m surrounded by friends on February 23rd at the Masquerade, so we can all ascend together.
3. Chat Pile – Cool World
The Flenser
Lifetime Bummer Award: “The New World”
If God’s Country embodied the terrifying anxieties, pressures, symptoms, and claustrophobia of COVID life, then Cool World is the wild-eyed, flailing readjustment to whatever it means to live in a “post”-pandemic world that requires more solemnity and melancholy after all that loss. “Death always leaves one singer to mourn,” Miranda sings to Adam in Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider as she begins to spiral in the first few days of what will be a months-long feverish mania brought on by the 1918 pandemic. There remains for Miranda that “stubborn will to live,” a stubbornness I see all over Cool World.
2. Gladekeeper – Yearntale
Fiadh Productions | Cassette Roundup
Coziest Moment: “Gratitude for Berry and Warmth”
What I wrote in July is all that needs be said. I’ve returned to Yearntale again and again; a serene, bountiful, wondrous oasis that provided such peace and calm in a year that was overly exciting in myriad ways good and bad. From July: “You are a traveler and a survivor. What you know and do not know and are yet to know will not fit suitably into a parlour game. And so the brooks and the creeks everflow around you, safe in your garden, knowing that you are both and neither, that you are spectacularly undetermined. Let us rest.”
1. Replicant – Infinite Mortality
Transcending Obscurity | Track Premiere A Stern Warning
Shit You Can’t Do: “Reciprocal Abandonment”
The malignant reality is that Replicant released the best death metal album of 2024, and it’s not close. As I wrote in March, we are dealing with a “group of plank-browed geniuses whose knuckles drag on the very ground where they scribble out the key to all mythologies in the blood and skin ripped from their hands by the glass-bottle strewn concrete.” The brutal-cum-technical-cum-dissonant death metal on Infinite Mortality has the band approaching dizzying new heights reserved for only the choicest of acts. Gonçalves also turns in the vocal performance of the year, having lost every one of his marbles.
Check out LISTMANIA 2K24 Days I, II, and III!
