The initial motiviation for taking a look at back at 2010 recently was part personal retropsect, part aversion to the relentless best-of lists we are pounded with at the end of the year. The sense of finality they encourage not only limits our horizons, but discourages deeper dives into recent history. Tens years is not a long time, but it’s long enough to get a better sense of an album’s lasting impact. But the argument could be made that rather than retreading old ground and fannying about with lofty notions of endurance over time, efforts would be better spent shining a brighter light on recent gems. This is especially true after the shocking year music scenes across the world have had to endure.
I have a great deal of sympathy with this point. For that reason I’ve put together this list of top quality releases I have come across since I started Hate Meditations in 2017. I’ve included links to the full write-ups from the ‘I Like the Beats and I Like the Yelling’ review page, and links to the indivudal artist’s Bandcamp pages as ever.
But first a couple of cents on end of the year best of lists in general. Hate Meditations – however clunkily – attempts to treat recorded music as cultural artefacts, not commodites. It’s true that artists live and work in the real (or rather the capitalist) world. Money is a function of that reality. There’s no escaping it. But there’s a difference between acknowledging that reality, and contending that all works are worthy of a baseline level of respect as a result. Criticism should not be a charity, nor a mouthpiece for major record labels with financial clout.
But modernity demands her tributes. The end of the year is no longer defined by ancient festivals to mark the passage of time. Instead it’s a monument to humanity as a consumptive animal. Many large publications throw out lists two months before the year has ended. Invariably made up of acts whose record labels shouted the loudest, whose PR campaign gained the most traction, or simply by older, well known artists phoning in another formulaic set of songs and riding on reputation alone; nothing more than shopping lists for the incurious and acquisitive.
Amidst the noise and band wagon jumping, it’s harder for truly underground offerings to gain traction, to raise their head above ground. So here’s a small (and far from comprehensive) monument to culture worthy of your time, garnered from the music we’ve been enjoying in recent years.
And as ever, thanks to this small band of fellow travellers :
Hate Meditations is dedicated to the global community of underground metal
Ancient Gate: Empire Beyond Dusk
Combines early symphonic black metal with Greek sense of melody, sorrowful yet hopeful epic
AthanaTheos: Prophetic Era (or how Yahveh became the one)
Grand and complex death metal in the tradition of The Chasm or early Septic Flesh
A tour of the more ambitious pillars of old school death metal
Musical journeys, made up of various moods and colours guiding us through landscapes of epic scope
Bovary: Mes Racines dans le Désert
Sparse and sentimental black metal with defiant undertones
Cardiac Arrest: The Day That Death Prevailed
Places the best of old school death metal under the microscope
Condemner: Burning the Decadent
Hard hitting old school death metal that leans heavily on traditional speed metal for its cues, early Slayer through the blender of Sarcofago and Incantation
A cohesive melting pot of styles, neoclassical doom metal informed by baroque and folk music as much as thrash or black metal
Conjureth: The Levitation Manifest
Dark romanticism in micro firm. Operates somewhere between the chromatic chaos of Deicide’s ‘Legion’ and Northern European output of the early 1990s
Cryptic Shift: Visitations From Enceladus
Like watching an incredibly complex jigsaw puzzle gradually assemble before your eyes. Insanely frantic, yet patient, logical, and intuitive progressive death metal
Atmospheric death metal, leaning toward the technical
Surpassing old school death metal worship
Dragkhar: At the Crossroads of Infinity
Death metal founded in traditional heavy metal, informed by a pronounced sense of melody
Melodic death/doom with a massive attention span
The original spirit of metal reaches its full potential in Funereal Presence
Goatcraft: Mephistophelian Exordium
Dense and heavy compositions unfold through a dazzling array of classical piano techniques, at once musically sophisticated, achieves oppressive, suffocating atmospheres of gothic horror common to metal styles
Channels the spirit of early Burzum
A mesmerising blast of hypnotic, repetitive black metal that squeezes every ounce of tension and drama from simple shifts in riff patterns or tempo
A graceful funeral march of mournful death metal supplemented by a Gothenburg bounce
Upbeat yet mournful black metal, invoking both joy and pathos
Insurgency: Militant Death Cult
Old school blackened thrash, absolute bedlam
Into Oblivion: Winds of Serpentine Ascending
Music of epic scope and ambition, patiently stitches together motifs built from highly traditional death metal phrasing and conventional melodic flourishes ripped straight from the playbook of the romantic era in music
Khand: The Sage of Witherthorn
Technically competent and emotionally developed dungeon synth that transcends genre
The Kryptik: Behold Fortress Inferno
Rich, carefully balanced sweeping narratives of cold, melodic black metal
Viking era Bathory reimagined through the lens of Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats
Some of the most mature and enduring extreme metal of the 21st Century
Megalith Lavitation: Acid Doom
A wholesome slab of murky doom metal
Oath of Cruelty: Summary Execution at Dawn
Old school black/death worship that easily stands out in a crowded field
Atmospheric black metal with unique mastery of diverse inflences
OND: Brutal Skeleton Fist Fight
Subversive and humourous thrash at its finest
Symphonic metal with pronounced progressive and Septic Flesh influences
Polemecisit: Zarathustrian Impressions
Frenetic black metal that articulates a finely crafted balance of intellect and will, of Apollo and Dionysus
Death metal emanating from Autopsy’s worst fever dreams; absurdity competes with orthodoxy at every turn
Fluid and intuitive thrash metal packed with surprises
Black metal in its rawest form, emerges from the very primordial soup of metallic noise
Slimelord: The Death Delta Sirens
Death/doom with an unorthodox relationship to rhythm and structure
Sombre Heritage: Alpha Ursae Minoris
Balances the riff based and atmospheric approaches to black metal, refreshes styles many swore off twenty years ago
Sometime the Wolf.: From Here and Earth
Epic progressive goth metal in the tradition of Fields of the Nephilim
Sorcier Des Glaces: Un Monde de Glace et de Sang
The beacon of Canadian black metal offers up yet another complex and mature work of pure sonic immersion
Applies a degree of entropy to the funeral doom framework, leaves one floating in a brume of abyssal ambience
Offers a rich, intuitive, and ultimately more rewarding interpretation of early Darkthrone than the vast majority of their contemporaries
Suhnopfer: Hic Regnant Borbonii Manes
Swedish style blackened death metal, chaotic, unconventionally structured music, with many layers to unpack
Riff based black metal that plays on melodrama and tension
Sentimental yet stirring black, life affirming, powerful, and ultimately celebrates the world beyond the individual perspective
Temple of Abraxas: Temples Forlorn
Masterpiece of modern black with unique atmospheres that refuse to be verbally bottled
Bass guitar driven grindcore cum free-jazz that collides against idiosyncratic melodies and harmonies, with a unique approach to concept and theme
Transcendence: Towards Obscurities Beyond
Blends Necrophobic with Necromantia, and in the process transcends works of sincere homage into quality and original death metal
Tristwood: Black Crowned Majesty
Industiral blackened grindcore with a unique augmentation of the artificial qualities inherent in each genre
Ultra Silvam: The Spearwound Salvation
An intense melting pot of riff based black metal fusion
Vengeful Spectre: Vengeful Spectre
Intense symphonic black metal with an impressive technical prowess
Ambient black metal that calls into question the conventional wisdom of the genre to date
Hate Meditations 
Vargrav – Reign in Supreme Darkness should have been on here; flawless list otherwise
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Great end of year list! Glad to see Mefitis in. That album is a masterpiece.
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