6 Great new albums that are unconventionally heavy

In my last column, I suggested that the coming months would bring with them a flood of new metal that might prove overwhelming. And if you look at our Most Anticipated Albums of Fall 2024 list that just went up this week, you’ll see just what I mean by that. (Tribulation, Oranssi Pazuzu, Blood Incantation, Undeath and Chat Pile in just two months’ time?! Can you do that?!) So before we dive headfirst into a season of riffs, I’m doing something a little different this month. Instead of offering hails to the best death metal or black metal or sludge or doom or what have you, I’m offering my praise to six albums that each offer different takes on heavy music. Most of them aren’t really metal at all; three of them are noise or industrial, one is essentially a very weird rock album with metal vocals, and the two that sound most like metal don’t take a conventional path in getting to the riffs. There will be time to don the battle vest once again, but for now, here are six awesome, unconventionally heavy albums you need to hear.

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Uboa – Impossible Light

One of the standout artists on the increasingly great roster of The Flenser, Australian noise artist Xandra Metcalfe, a.k.a. Uboa, makes some of the heaviest music that rarely if ever features a guitar riff. Her follow-up to 2019’s The Origin of My Depression remains thunderously heavy, white-knuckle intense and ominously dark, interspersing hostile assaults of pure noise with electro-industrial darkwave dirges that creep with the synth-laden buzz of more recent Chelsea Wolfe and quiver with the austere incantations of Lingua Ignota. There’s also great beauty on this album: “Pattern Screamers” and “Phthalates” tap into more haunting ethereal wave atmosphere, harboring a grace that moments like the broken-glass tornado of “Weaponized Dysphoria” would make seem all the more unlikely. Impossible Light is beautiful and fearsome, and even occasionally just cool as fuck—a nightmare in dark shades and a black leather jacket.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)

Klein – Marked

Marked, the new album by London producer Klein, is categorized as “metal” on Apple Music. That’s not what it is—not in the blown-out noise-trap of “Blow the Whistle,” not in the hazy disoriented sound layers of “(breaking news)”, and definitely not in the Badalamenti waiting room jazz of “more than like.” But then again, this isn’t particularly friendly music to pop ears, and a significant chunk of the album is splattered with cacophonous guitar noise—in passing, sure, I could perhaps view this as metal in the same way that Sunn O))) is, particularly in the aggressive, distorted assault of “enemy of the state.” But Klein, whose body of work comprises ambient and glitch, cuts a figure here that’s much closer to the classic anything-goes industrial of Throbbing Gristle through a series of tracks that’s alternately hostile and quietly unsettling, sometimes assaulting with noise and elsewhere simply off-kilter and uncomfortable (that some of the abstract noise rock pieces here sound out of tune only goes to show how committed to dissonance Klein is). Is it metal? In aesthetic, perhaps not, but in attitude, this album goes ridiculously hard.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

Endon – Fall of Spring

Japan’s Endon have always been connected to metal if not necessarily faithful practitioners, having collaborated with veteran stoner/drone/anything-and-everything trio Boris. But their latest is a colossally heavy work of industrial noise, a soul-scorching emotional purge that guitar riffs just aren’t sufficient to capture. Their latest arrives after the death of member Etsuo Nagura, brother of Taichi Nagura, and the grief they channel is unmistakable; one song is titled “Time Does Not Heal,” for instance. But it’s a powerful and haunting piece of work, akin to Pharmakon at her most slow-burn terrifying on moments like “Hit Me,” devastating even when the noise is dialed back.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)

Tenue – Arcos, bóvedas, pórticos

The melancholy melody of trumpet that opens the latest album from Galicia, Spain crustpunk group Tenue gives some indication that they’re not simply playing from the same script of crust and screamo bands before them. Arcos, bóvedas, pórticos is at once blisteringly intense and gorgeously graceful, incorporating atmospheric post-rock interludes, maximalist arrangements with horns, multi-layered vocals, soaring melodies, sections of bossa nova rhythms, and an unrelenting fury throughout. It’s not necessarily a surprise to hear such an ambitious record within the screamo sphere yet again this year, after having already heard such great releases from Infant Island and Frail Body. In its most intense moments, it’s an album of blazing riffs and unstoppable power, but the whole of the journey just makes it that much more interesting.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

Uniform – American Standard

The first full minute of “American Standard,” the side-long, 20-minute opener of Uniform’s new album of the same name, comprises just vocalist Michael Berdan barking his way through weird bodily horrors (“There’s meat on my arms!“). Additional elements begin to build underneath, but it takes a few minutes before this harrowing ritual actually turns into what we might call “music,” and for about the first third of the song, Uniform embarks on a hypnotic, psychedelic repetition—one that’s eventually joined by the oddly graceful twinkle of vibraphone. This is not the Uniform that I remember, and I don’t say that with disappointment. Don’t get me wrong—Shame was one of my favorite albums of 2020. But the New York industrial rock group have pushed themselves into more experimental terrain, dense and beautiful, terrifying and richly layered. Of this lot of records this month, Uniform’s is the most “conventional” in terms of it actually sounding like metal, or at least about 40 percent of it, anyway. But this finds the group embarking on a new path, transcending the familiar and embracing their boldest impulses.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)

Mamaleek – Vida Blue

Mamaleek is a fascinating band. For those who have never heard them before, it’s hard to describe the anonymous collective in a way that makes any logical sense. But if you have heard them before, you understand completely. The band’s latest is no different, a set of songs that sounds something like a post-rock operetta bellowed by ghouls. Vida Blue is as inscrutable as heavy, abrasive music gets, ornate and even beautiful at times, featuring some of the most dazzling horn arrangements I’ve heard in heavy music of late. And for that matter, musically, Vida Blue is often quite beautiful, defined less by power or force than its clashing of elements, and moments like the lumbering strut of “Ancient Souls, No Longer Sorrowful,” which sounds more like noise-rock Tom Waits than any of the band’s Bay Area metal contemporaries. The album arrives a year after the death of Eric Alan Livingston, a member of the group since 2019 and a contributor to their strange carnival of sound for a few years before that. That loss adds a sadness to this record that might have otherwise been lost in the group’s disorienting hall of mirrors, but they honor his memory the best way they can—by mangling metal into their own unrecognizable image.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)

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