The 30 Best Metal Albums of 2024

I wouldn’t exactly call it a milestone, but this is the 14th end-of-year metal list I’ve compiled for Treble. My first was in 2011, and remarkably—as is sometimes the case for a lifers-only genre like metal—one of those same bands appears on this list as well. But a lot has changed since then, primarily that the scope of the year’s best metal list has expanded threefold, and we’re on year two of it being a top 30. It almost became a top 33. But then again, having that much great metal in a single year is a good problem to have, I suppose.

I did a deep dive recently on each of those lists and found that, despite the fact that six bands* have appeared at least four times, each year’s been pretty different. Hell, even my definition of metal has been pretty fluid over the years, and while I’ve included some bands without hesitation in the past, some of them this year didn’t quite strike me as metal enough (like Big|Brave and Gouge Away, who released two of my favorite albums this year that are fascinating forays into more melodic and understated terrain). My own personal definition of what constitutes a great metal album has certainly changed a bit in the past decade and a half, but the journey in figuring that out has been the fun part. I almost certainly listen to more metal now than I ever have, and there’s a lot more to listen to than in years past, so it’s a challenge to simply try and keep up, but it’s a challenge well worth taking. All I know is that these 30 albums absolutely rip, so here goes: the 30 best metal albums of 2024.

(*OK, since you asked: Baroness, Big|Brave, Deafheaven Full of Hell, Pallbearer and Thou)

Note: When you buy something through our affiliate links, Treble receives a commission. All albums we cover are chosen by our editors and contributors.

30. Full of Hell & Andrew Nolan – Scraping the Divine

It feels fitting that we begin here, with a band that’s tied for the most appearances on my year-end metal list (the other one’s near the top) and who are on their fourth album in just two years, following two other collaborative releases and the urgent, excellent Coagulated Bliss from earlier this year. (Let’s call that one an Honorable Mention.) But Full of Hell’s new LP with Andrew Nolan struck a chord with me that the immediacy of their other most recent album simply couldn’t; this is noise as much as metal, industrial above all, apocalyptic and calamitous. Scraping the Divine isn’t about riffs, it’s about sound—of rust scraped from the hull, of shattered concrete and broken glass, of a sandpaper wind blowing over the skin. It’s not anti-melodic but more about the sensory whole, where blank space is nearly as deafening. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

29. Iress – Sleep Now, In Reverse

When I first heard Iress’ uniquely dreamy doomgaze sound live around seven or eight years ago (our bands shared a stage, full disclosure) it struck me as elegant and powerful, and it remains so now on Sleep Now, In Reverse, their strongest album to date. The Los Angeles group maintains a seemingly impossible balance between soaring heights and roaring lows, their sound anchored by an undeniable sense of power and muscle while their melodic sensibility aims for weightlessness. They’ve been compared to the likes of Emma Ruth Rundle and King Woman, artists whose music is more metal-adjacent than strictly for-the-riffs. And it’s fitting, but Iress have established a sonic identity all their own, one where a moment of delicate beauty can hit just as hard as a double-bass pummel. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

28. Resin Tomb – Cerebral Purgatory

Brisbane, Australia’s Resin Tomb’s debut album Cerebral Purgatory rips. At a baseline, that’s what every great metal album should do, though toward the top of this list, it’s as much about what they do in addition to merely heaping on the riffs and aggression. But look, I mean it, Cerebral Purgatory unequivocally, unabashedly, rips. This thing is an unstoppable force, a runaway vehicle coming straight toward you at an unreasonable speed, plowing through everything in its path. If only that were the extent of its merits, it’d still belong here, but the group’s songwriting prowess is dialed in and sharpened from the get-go, employing a level of technicality and melodicism that’s at its most thrilling on moments like the Krallice-meets-Sonic Youth standout “Purge Fluid.” All death metal should be this intense, but not all death metal bands can do it with such intricate detail and effortless swagger. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

27. Necrot – Lifeless Birth

Death metal—just death metal, no hyphens, no hybrids—is like the metal equivalent of a gin and tonic: fine enough when hastily put together but immensely satisfying with the right amount of care. Oakland trio Necrot’s latest album Lifeless Birth uses only the top-shelf stuff, ostensibly simple in its ingredients but more complex and luxurious in its finished product. The group’s never been the sort to overdo it on the histrionics, but here they expand their approach considerably, whether embracing a more pronounced melodicism on “Superior,” complete with a soaring guitar solo, or delivering one of their deepest grooves on “Drill the Skull,” which climaxes with some glorious harmonized leads. It’s one of the greatest single moments in the band’s catalog thus far. Still, for as much as Necrot have upgraded their sound, they remain grounded and even relatable in their lyrical statements; they announced the album with standout track “Cut the Cord,” a screed against being in thrall to technology, and just a day before writing this, I’ve deleted my Twitter (or X, I guess, barf), making Lifeless Birth at least in part one of the most prescient records you’ll find here. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)

26. Hulder – Verses in Oath

I’m the sort of black metal fan that tends to appreciate the weirdest and most unconventional forms of the genre (and shout out to my dude Colin Dempsey for his recent feature on the different flavors of black metal that the year’s had to offer). But sometimes it’s hard to beat a record with an old-school streak and production quality that does justice to its more ornate flourishes. Hulder’s Verses in Oath isn’t necessarily purely ‘90s revivalism, though it often conjures the spirit of classic albums from the likes of Immortal and Ulver (particularly through its passages of monastic chanting—that and “Hulder” and “Ulver” kinda rhyme… anyway). It’s not a radical reinterpretation of black metal, but rather one where everything absolutely works. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)

25. Undeath – More Insane

The title of Undeath’s third album More Insane is a slight misnomer. It boasts more of their best assets—more riffs, more hooks, more energy, and best of all, more great songwriting (mostly about horror, naturally). See, for instance, the infectious riffs of “Brandish the Blade,” wherein the group hews much closer to melodeath while retaining their razor’s edge approach with ferocious thrills. But this isn’t so much an increase in bonkers, off-the-wall speed, intensity and dissonance so much as a strengthening of an already good thing—death metal at its absolute best. You can hear the Rochester, New York group stretch themselves to new heights in standout moments like “Sutured for War,” with its ornate and elaborate guitar work. But mostly, this is just a set of great death metal songs—and I’m always happy to accept more of that.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)

24. Tzompantli – Beating the Drums of Ancestral Force

Words like “hypnotic” are typically reserved for bands that embrace the repetition of black metal rather than the death-doom sound that Pomona, California’s Tzompantli navigate. Yet theirs is one that’s steeped in indigenous history and ritual, employing traditional Mesoamerican instruments and ceremonial invocations. There’s an undeniably powerful spiritual element to their sound, which—just to be clear—is absolutely crushing. It’s the seamless intertwining of the ritual and folk elements with the band’s muscular riffage that makes Beating the Drums of Ancestral Force both unique and awesome, an incredible statement from a band with a singular vision. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)

23. Couch Slut – You Could Do It Tonight

You Could Do It Tonight features what Couch Slut have referred to as their first-ever “love song,” “Ode to Jimbo,” which was written about a favorite dive bar. It’s also, despite the expression of affection, just as brutal and terrifying as anything the group’s ever written. Which doesn’t mean that it isn’t the band’s most lighthearted album to some degree, from the jokey interlude at the halfway point to the near-hedonistic use of riffs throughout. But it also features harrowing standouts like “The Donkey,” a narrative that’s introduced as a story about getting fired from a haunted waterpark and delves into gut-wrenching moments about sex with dolls and grotesque self-mutilation. That they follow that up with the absolute bulldozer of a sludge-metal ripper in “Energy Crystals for Healing” speaks to the band’s ability to find balance in their brutality. It’s another key piece of evidence that 2024 is one of the best years for noise rock we’ve had in some time.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

22. Krallice – Inorganic Rites

It feels like something of a minor miracle that Krallice, more than 15 years after their debut album, continue releasing such high quality progressive metal records as frequently as they do. (Fifteen as of this writing, plus a handful of EPs.) Inorganic Rites continues the synth-driven blackened prog that’s been at the center of their approach on recent albums such as 2022’s Crystalline Exhaustion, and they continue to burrow deeper into this masterful and cavernous ice-coated underworld. But it’s often what happens outside their signature surge and gallop that makes the album as breathtaking as it is, such as the slow, oozing synthesizers and ominous atmosphere of “Flatlines Encircled Residue,” or the mesmerizing swirls of keyboards and booming drums of “Universe Ancestral Talisman,” which arrive like a glorious sci-fi film score. This is far from the first time Krallice has appeared on my year-end metal list (though honestly they probably should have appeared more often than they did), and the notion that there’s a non-zero chance they’ll be here again in a year or two is one worth celebrating. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

21. Judas Priest – Invincible Shield

The big comeback story in music this year was The Cure returning with their best album in over two decades (and arguably longer) and first of any kind in 16 years (which maybe makes the previous statement sound less impressive, but still…). But Judas Priest’s record is nothing to scoff at, their latest album arriving a full 50 years(!) after their debut. That’s a rare feat regardless of what it sounds like, but the thing is Invincible Shield is so, so good. I’m astonished that the band—whose frontman Rob Halford still sounds amazing as a vocalist—is still putting out music of this high caliber, but then again 2018’s Firepower was likewise fantastic (though I’ll admit the record is hit or miss in the decade or so before that). But here, the group locks in with a force and fury that feels unstoppable, invoking the heaviness of Painkiller, the anthemic power of Defenders of the Faith and the pop appeal of Turbo, as previously pointed out in our review by Langdon Hickman. Judas Priest have still got it 

Listen/Buy: Spotify | Amazon (vinyl)

20. Gigan – Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus

Utterly bonkers cosmic metal is, more often than not, always going to hit the sweet spot for me. There are more than a few albums on this list with absurd feats of musicianship combined with sci-fi imagery, and that’s a hybrid I’ll invariably get behind—the more intense the better. Chicago’s Gigan are better at this than most, balancing an intricate and technical approach to death metal with a pronounced psychedelic streak, all of which goes unreasonably hard on their latest Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus. (All their titles are ridiculous; see also: “Emerging Sects of Dagonic Acolytes”, “The Strange Harvest of the Baganoids”.) Much like Oranssi Pazuzu, the group crafts malevolent dirges of alien menace, but they have a uniquely aggressive sensibility that sets them apart—less the feeling of invaders crossing the threshold than aiming their venom straight at your face.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)

19. Uniform – American Standard

Uniform present a challenge to the listener within the first minute or so of American Standard. The first thing you hear is Michael Berdan’s layered call-and-response screams about the horrors of his own body, like some kind of Cronenbergian drill sergeant, and it’s several minutes still before you hear any actual music—and once you do, it just keeps on going, the epic industrial-metal monolith extending well past the 20-minute mark in an act of transcendent discomfort. American Standard is at times both Uniform’s least accessible record and their best, an art-metal statement that employs body-horror imagery and harrowing psychological torment through four tracks that stand as some of the group’s most intense and breathtaking material, from the immense title track to the industrial metal pummel of “This Is Not a Prayer” and the soaring black metal majesty of “Permanent Embrace.” Uniform aren’t here to provide immediate satisfaction, but the reward is that much greater because of that.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)

18. Vuur & Zidje – Boezem

Metal and post-punk belong together—it’s been proven time and again (see: Vaura, Tribulation, Grave Pleasures), and the Netherlands’ Vuur & Zijde, whose name aptly translates to “fire and silk,” pull this off better than any other band who released an album in 2024 with Boezem. They’re arguably more post-punk than metal, at their most stunningly sinister bringing to mind classic 4AD releases from the likes of early Cocteau Twins and Xmal Deutschland, but when a blast beat passage breaks through, it’s seamless, elegant, driven by a gorgeous darkness as much as a beastly force of malevolence. While it’s perhaps not a 50/50 split, the group are proficient in both arenas, equally fetching in corpse paint or fishnets, velvet or ash. Either way, it’s made to soundtrack a night of debauchery and decadence. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)

17. Glassing – From the Other Side of the Mirror

It’s always impressive to hear Austin trio Glassing continue to find new territory to explore in the space between atmospheric post-metal, melodic post-hardcore and scorching black metal and screamo. Where post-metal in general can sometimes be a somewhat rote collection of tropes, Glassing stretch the distance between their extremes ever farther on From the Other Side of the Mirror, giving the prettier moments even more sleekness and light, and the heavier moments even weightier punch. But Glassing’s real trick is not so much to highlight those extremes but make them feel seamless, as if the gentle miasma of dream pop and seething bile of black metal are all part of the same continuum.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)

16. Fórn – Repercussions of the Self

Boston’s Fórn were already a very good doom metal band prior to the release of this year’s Repercussions of the Self, but the addition of vocalist Lane Shi Otayonii (of heavy shoegazers Elizabeth Colour Wheel) has brought out added dimension to the group’s crushing approach. Otayonii’s vocal presence helps to open the group’s sound up beyond the guttural lows they’ve already mastered into a more gauzy post-metal realm, elements of shoegaze, psychedelia and darkwave threaded into their sludgy sonic palette, and with a sharpened sense of melody. Moments like the mystical “Pact of Forgetting,” the intricate “Soul Shadow” and the titanic “Dreams of the Blood” show just how far this band has come.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

15. Meth. – Shame

Few heavy bands have undergone as dramatic a transformation in such a concentrated period of time as Chicago’s Meth. Once a more mathematically inclined metalcore band, the group have since embraced a much more punishing noise rock sound on Shame that’s unquestionably heavier than most other records I’ve heard this year. From the repetitive pummel of opener “Doubt,” the group are relentless in their pursuit of harrowing cacophony, and the album’s themes are just as intense—I spoke to vocalist Seb Alvarez earlier this year about how these songs were informed by addiction, strained familial relationships and a reaction to religious fundamentalism, and the combination feels at times like a literal trip through hell. It’s incredible, but definitely not for the faint of heart.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)

14. Infant Island – Obsidian Wreath

Screamo’s had a good year, not simply because old-schoolers like Orchid and Pageninetynine are back onstage (which they are—and it’s awesome), but because the current crop of bands taking the reins are making some remarkable music. Virginia’s Infant Island is one such band, their new album Obsidian Wreath rarely moving at anything less than a furious pace but always focused on crafting a stunning whole. Obsidian Wreath frequently gallops into an explosive black metal sprint, and occasionally unearths a dark low-end groove, but at their best Infant Island capture a heroic sense of ambition that yields results as breathtaking as the crushing shoegaze of “Kindling” or the gorgeous deluge of “With Shadow.” It was one of the first essential heavy releases of the year, and after 11 months it remains one of the best.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)

13. Prisoner – Putrid/Obsolete

I had a good feeling about Prisoner the first time I saw them live, mostly because their guitar player was wearing a Depeche Mode shirt. Then they subsequently played an absolutely blistering set of industrial-tinged crust and black metal, the likes of which instantly made them soar toward the top of my list of the best bands in Richmond. And for that matter, one of the best newer metal bands in America. Their new album Putrid/Obsolete is menacing and pitch black, transitioning between two-minute surges of bile-throated crust and epic dirges from the edge of dystopia. But it’s in the album’s powerful second half, in the industrial-metal apocalypse of “Pathogenesis” or the gothic climax of “Nanodeath” where Prisoner showcase how awe-inspiring and fear-inducing that creation truly is. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

12. Uboa – Impossible Light

Uboa’s sometimes subtle and sometimes blood-curdling death-industrial sound doesn’t always scan as metal under the strictest of terms, but I’ve never let that get in the way of populating this annual list with albums that are as much metal in feeling as in actual quantifiable characteristics. Impossible Light often creeps up slowly, its thrumming dirges pitch black and coursing with unnameable terrors. It’s also often hypnotic and immediate in a way that the noisier end of industrial rarely is. But then again, sometimes it erupts into moments of thunderous bombast, on standouts like “Endocrine Disruptor” and “Gordian Worm.” Most of all, Impossible Light is paradoxically beautiful, an awe-inspiring vision rising from the depths of hell. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)

11. Bedsore – Dreaming the Strife for Love

Bedsore released one of the best metal debuts of 2020, the progressive death metal cyclone of Hypnagogic Hallucinations, which comprised more death than prog, but maintained a compelling balance of the two regardless. Their follow-up removes those guardrails and allows their prog flags to fly proudly, and Dreaming the Strife for Love is all the greater as a result. The thick, syrupy organ that coats each of these songs suggests a kind of Opethification of their sound, but with most of their intense, abrasive sensibility still intact. But I can’t stress this enough: This album is beautiful, not merely for the enhanced ambience and addition of instruments like harpsichord and saxophone (so much saxophone!), but the fact that their songwriting has advanced by leaps and bounds. This year’s crop of great metal has yielded no shortage of great records that emphasize the epic, the ambitious and the cosmically nerdy, and Bedsore’s latest is one of the very best. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

10. The Body & Dis Fig – Orchards of a Futile Heaven

The Body have released a lot of great collaborative albums with a lot of other great artists (Big|Brave, Uniform, Thou), but the duo’s full-length set with Felicia Chen, a.k.a. Dis Fig, is one of the greatest pairings in the band’s already rich catalog. Chip King’s abrasive screech, while still present, mostly takes a backseat to Chen’s expressive, melodic vocal style, as the three musicians craft an awe-inspiring landscape of dense, dreamy, yet still crushing industrial metal. At its most immediate, Orchards of a Futile Heaven recalls the likes of British shoegazers Curve at their most intense, like on the stunning title track, whereas elsewhere the group take their signature noise-metal sound to more subtly haunting places, the presence of Chen’s vocals drawing out a sense of grace that’s not always so readily apparent in their darkest, heaviest material. The Body, overachievers that they are, did release another great album this year, but Orchards isn’t just the best they delivered in 2024, but one of their strongest albums to date.

Listen/Buy:

9. Lord Spikeheart – The Adept

In 2020, I included the self-titled debut and sole full-length album from Kenyan/Ugandan cybergrind group Duma in my list of the best metal albums of the year. Nothing sounded like it then, and pretty much nothing else has since—until the release of Lord Spikeheart’s debut, The Adept. The vocalist of that now-defunct group has delivered a head-spinning and incendiary set of experimental, electronic-industrial noise that incorporates everything from rap to heavy metal and what feels like a dangerous level of distortion. It’s doubtful you’ve heard any other record this year that goes this hard, and I’m pretty sure I haven’t either, though obviously I’ve listened to a lot of loud, intense music. Your mileage may vary on whether it meets the standard definition of a metal record, but The Adept is metal as fuck.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)

8. Ulcerate – Cutting the Throat of God

In our recent feature on Ulcerate, the New Zealand group clarified that their definition of death metal is that it’s the “metal of death,” meaning that it very explicitly connects to loss, grieving and decay. Their latest, Cutting the Throat of God, very specifically explores the psychological toll that death plays on all of us, and it’s a profoundly emotional experience because of it. Which it might not have been if the band had opted for a more dissonant and abstract palette, but the melodic approach they take on only enhances the emotional experience, delivering something both harsh and beautiful, deeply affecting and utterly draining in the best possible way.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)

7. Inter Arma – New Heaven

New Heaven, Inter Arma’s fifth album (not counting their 2020 covers LP Garbers Days Revisited), is a concise album by the Richmond group’s standards but in no way indicates any kind of scaling back. Inter Arma’s consistently eclectic approach grows tighter, more focused in its power, but no less ambitious, its eight songs comprising everything from the venomous dissonance of its title track to the cosmic psychedelia of “Violet Seizures” to the gothic balladry of “Forest Service Road Blues.” Though it’s mostly absent the sprawling epics of albums past, such as “The Long Road Home” or “The Paradise Constellations,” its more immediate nature lends provides a dose of urgent, cathartic power that sets it apart as a uniquely strong entry in a consistently excellent catalog.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)

6. Oranssi Pazuzu – Muuntautuja

Oranssi Pazuzu have never released anything close to a straightforward metal album in their career, but the longer they continue as a band, the farther they get from that elusive point. Their latest album Muuntautuja, which translates to “Shape-shifter,” was inspired by the likes of Portishead, Nine Inch Nails and Death Grips, and its incorporation of industrial and electronic sounds into the band’s alien-menace psychedelia yields new heights of aural terror. They’re a band with an established aesthetic, but it grows darker and more uneasy with each release, their latest being perhaps the most vicious set of space-metal they’ve ever released. And that’s a milestone worth celebrating.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)

5. Frail Body – Artificial Bouquet

If you had stopped the clock in April, this would have been number one. Hell, as it stands, I’m second-guessing myself about whether five is too low, but that’s just the kind of year it’s been—one-upsmanship right on up to the finish line. The sophomore album by Frail Body, Artificial Bouquet is a master class in anthemic songwriting within the sonic palette of extreme music, expanding their beautiful and visceral screamo core with black metal and post-metal elements and always reaching for ever more devastating heights. A sub-two-minute blast of energy like “Berth” showcases a level of intensity that few other bands can match, but it’s in the gorgeously arranged, slow rise of “Devotion” where Frail Body reveal that it’s often in the quieter and subtler moments where their strengths really shine through. What an incredible record.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)

4. Sumac – The Healer

Sumac make some of the heaviest music on earth while somehow transcending genre altogether. The trio of Aaron Turner, Brian Cook and Aaron Yacyshyn have a combined resume that includes several hall-of-fame bands, but when their forces are combined, they create something that’s more wild and free, rooted in free improvisation and almost spiritual in nature. The Healer is one of their most stunning creations to date, epic and unwieldy, gnarled and nasty and beautiful all at once. In its most accessible moments, such as the warm organ glow of “Yellow Dawn,” there’s a soulfulness and avant garde jazz-like groove that you scarcely find in most other heavy music; at their most complex, like the sprawling closer “The Stone’s Turn,” the group find their way through the wilderness into some of their most thunderous moments of ecstasy. Unlocking all of The Healer‘s secrets doesn’t happen in a first listen, but the thrill is in finding your way through its labyrinth.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)

3. Blood Incantation – Absolute Elsewhere

Wow, they really went and did that, didn’t they? Blood Incantation have been building up to something ambitious and incredible over the past decade, stretching their sci-fi death metal chops farther with each full-length release while filling in the gaps with EPs that explore their more experimental, electronic-addled side. Absolute Elsewhere brings it all together in two side-long epics that showcase the limits of what death metal can do and be, and beyond. It’s not enough that the band built out their progressive metal compositions with a mesmerizing balance of hooks, atmosphere, riffs and melody, but the group actually enlisted members of Tangerine Dream—yes, that Tangerine Dream!—to flesh out the electronic elements on these two monolithic pieces. Absolute Elsewhere truly feels like the kind of epic quest most metal albums only hint at, and by the time they reach the soaring climax of “The Message,” they achieve a level of prog-metal heroism that nobody can touch.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Turntable Lab (vinyl)

2. Thou – Umbilical

When Thou last released a non-collaborative, non-video-game-soundtrack album, 2018’s Magus, they did so after exploring various other aspects of their sound in closer detail, separating out their ethereal, drone/noise and grunge elements before focusing in on a more far-reaching sludge/doom metal album. Umbilical, instead, burns off the fringe elements and distills their sound down to its basest and most visceral. It’s also their most accessible and, if you ask me on the right day, maybe even their best. Umbilical is raw and nasty, a sludgy and dark record that wraps self-critical introspection in shrieking feedback and churning riffs, carving out deliciously vile grooves and, especially on tracks like the first single “I Feel Nothing When You Cry,” a much-welcome ass kicking. Thou have never trafficked much in escapism, and I suppose this is no different, but god damn is this fun.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)

1. Chat Pile – Cool World

It took me about one listen to Cool World to determine that it was my favorite metal album of the year. Chat Pile are perhaps technically a noise rock group, and they’ve been called just about everything from sludge metal to grunge (RateYourMusic hilariously includes “funk rock” as one of its influences). But once that opening riff to “I Am Dog Now” hits, you know you’re in the presence of a real motherfucker of an album. The Oklahoma City group got off to a strong start with 2022’s God’s Country, and they’ve since raised the bar with its follow-up, an album that continues the band’s close examination of horrors both internal and external, existential and topical, refining their sonic palette while exploring its possibilities in the process. Sure, maybe there’s a little funk rock in the pummel-‘n’-groove of “Frownland,” and there’s an eerily gothic quality to “Shame,” and a hook-laden drive to the powerful “Masc.” It’s the sound of tearing your soul inside out made catchy, a crushing and emotionally exhausting experience that’s accessible, even pleasurable, in spite of itself. If “heavy” is defined by what leaves the greatest impact, then no other record this year comes close.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Turntable Lab (vinyl)

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