I have liked the beats and I have liked the yelling: 2023’s top 40

Apokatastasis: The Consecratory Secretion
Hessian Firm

Leverages elements of symphonic black metal, old school death metal, and riffs bordering on slam (of all things), Frank Mullen-esque staccato vocal hits and all. But a pronounced identity sits above these apparently contradictory elements, ensuring that they mesh and collide in ways both ordered and conflict driven.

Atemporal: Thorn Genesis
I, Voidhanger Records

Angular, illogical, industrialist black metal. Stands apart from aesthetically comparable releases for its ability to craft melodic and narrative logic above the superficially atomised and conflicted nature of these pieces. A holistic, completist approach pregnant with meaning.

Délétère: Songes d’une Nuit Souillée
Sepulchural Productions

Maximalist black metalists return for another episode of winter activism. Winding melodic threads bind together an exercise in disciplined bombast. A dedication to the limitless space of open wilderness expressed through a rigid performative and compositional discipline.

Desecresy: Deserted Realms
Xtreem Music

Eight albums in from this Finnish production line, maintaining a consistently elevated topography of quality throughout. Exposes death metal to conversations with ambient, industrial, and electronica via a distinctive compositional vocabulary.

Hail Conjurer: Ouroboros Lust
Bestial Burst

Live action entropy. Black metal fuzz reduces all to a viscous mulch. The deconstruction of musical norms taking place within the citadel of institutionalised music theory itself. Trapped in a moment where the rot has set in, annihilating the possibility of reversal into solidity, only total decomposition awaits.

Hasard: Malivore
I, Voidhanger

Appearances are skin deep. Hazard mimic many populist calling cards common to lesser artists. Graduates atmosphere and noise from mere ornamentation to compositional weapons in their own right by recruiting them into the formalities of dictatorial flow common to extreme metal.

Herzog: Furnace
Amor Fati

Rich and doom laden black metal unleashes an arcane psychological disposition replete with grim purpose. Understands rigidity and restraint as compositional virtues. Every element is recruited in service of the wider artistic vision, resulting in a nuanced exercise in the typical made atypical.

Midnight Odyssey: Biolume Part 3 – A Fullmoon Madness
I, Voidhanger

One cannot ignore the fact that within this one entity we find both a unique and captivating artistic vision alongside a rare ability to execute it. Midnight Odyssey is unmistakable amongst its peers, and for this reason alone it seems for once the fanfare and “event hype” surrounding this release are at least a little warranted.

Vortize: Desde Bajo Tierra
Selvajaria Records

Irrepressibly bouncy speed metal frontloaded with an outrageous accumulation of ancillary material in the form of harmony, counterpoint, rhythmic accents. Brash, abrasive, relentless, Vortize do everything wrong by the metrics of good taste. 

Fleshvessel: Yearning – Promethean Fates Sealed
I, Voidhanger, cassette version Xenoglossy

Makes a show of allowing their ability, ambition, and zeal to run away with itself, giving rise to a theatrical and over the top display of music for its own sake in a way that would delight prog fans.

Ascendancy: A Manifest of Imperious Destiny
Me Saco Un Ojo/Dark Descent

Takes the primal aggression of blackened thrash and the subtle evolutions of melodic content found in the likes of Greek or Swedish black metal to create a slow burn of playfully dark music. 

Concilium: Sky Bvrial
Sentient Ruin

Surrealist aggression is replaced by understated mourning, but this latter package is still supplemented by a healthy degree of unchecked violence, binding the music together with a profound primitivism.

Cromlech: Ascent of Kings
Hessian Firm

Bombastic, raw, epic, almost comedic in its sincere quest to deliver giant slabs of epic doom metal that seem to emanate from another time and place, far away over the hills.

Cruciamentum: Obsidian Refractions
Profound Lore Records

Uses the same grammar as bargain basement OSDM, but ultimately speaks an entirely different language. Across these pieces a diverse, multifaceted sound world unfolds, capable of expressing senseless aggression alongside surprisingly meditative melodic threads.

Le Morte: Midnight in the Garden of Tragedy
Darkness Shall Rise Productions/Feudal Soil Records

Takes the corpse of Autopsy and smothers it in black lipstick and nail polish. Melodic content, obscene in its simplicity, rented from early Scandinavian death metal, is draped in a dignified gothic flair. 

Shadow Legion
Self-released

Imaginative and technically admirable musicians work up this anomic offering with nuance, complexity, and diversity. The result is more comprehensive piece of sonic cinema than it is atomised or unfocused tangentcore.

Sodality: Benediction, Part I
Norma Evangelium Diaboli

Sees rich yet raw black metal swirl in a miasma of slow tempos, gradualist melodic development, and cyclical rhythmic shapes that lend the music a sense of futile eternal return at the macro level.

Solipnosis: Sintesis Silenciosa
Virupi

A project intent on utterly disorientating metal’s foundations from a constructive, well informed, and ultimately loving place. 

The Evil: Seven Acts to Apocalypse
Osmose Productions

A shining example of how to resurrect the sterility of stoner doom from its current mire, and bring a sense of motion to the otherwise tepid creative cul-de-sacs it currently finds itself in.

Vile Ritual: Caverns of Occultic Hatred
Sentient Ruin

Meshes elements of The Chasm and Incantation with more progressive leanings borrowed from Timeghoul and Demilich, a union officiated by subtle undercurrents of blackened grind with a marked (if warped) melodic character.

Athanatheos: Cross. Deny. Glorify
Lavadome Productions

What death-metal-era-Behemoth could or should have been. Athanatheos present a clean, dramatic, and at times technical vision of spiritually inclined death metal, but here the bolshie fanfare and overworked melodrama are jettisoned for the sake of a highly focused rumination on theological despair and ideological struggle. 

Beithioch: Beowulf
Self-released

This is where I locate barbaric metal within the pantheon. Above the pure animalistic experience of an Ildjarn but below the nuanced melodic flow of a Summoning. Here, there is space for nobility as well as rage, for premeditation as a counterweight to pure action. 

Conjureth: The Parasitic Chambers
Memento Mori

A work of subtle and incremental riff administration using chaos as a means to greater complexity, an illusion that pulls us in, revealing new dimensions of order and systematic unity unavailable to other forms of music. Death metal’s hidden nuances remain a closely guarded secret.  

Deiquisitor: Apotheosis
Extremely Rotten Productions/Night Shroud Records

Both a continuation of and an evolution upon the qualities of truly atmospheric, idiosyncratic death metal that nevertheless trades on a pronounced riff philosophy to achieve these ends.

Letalis: Bestia Occulta
Trauma Records

Absolutely ridiculous speed metal. Each atomised moment may deal in pure adrenaline, power, will, but there is a measured, macro intent, surmounting its shortcomings in terms of pacing and execution through sheer enthusiasm and joy taken in the craft.

Malokarpatan: Vertumnus Caesar
Invictus Productions

The spirit of early Czech black metal clashes with a progressive rock intellect, the heart of new folk revival, and an ample rump of eccentric class. 

Plague Bearer: Summoning Apocalyptic Devastation
Nameless Grave Records

What do you get when you cross the grandiosity of Immolation at the height of their powers with a dash of black metal mysticism, and the raw energy of formative death metal? 

Profanatica: Crux Simplex
Season of Mist

According to everything we know about artistic decline, musicians this age – following two albums released on autopilot and a lukewarm reception – should not be returning with material of the calibre found on ‘Crux Simplex’.

Tombstone: To the Existence of Light
Gutter Prince Cabal

An immersive work of cinematic melodic black metal, explicitly traditional yet no less creative for the fact. Rich with musical content, impressive musicianship, and the requisite compositional discipline to bring this genre to bear at its strongest. 

Yaaroth: The Man in the Wood
I, Voidhanger

A truly idiosyncratic and lamentably rare experiment in genuinely Progressive metal. If this album makes contact with the wrong audience it may not survive in the wild, one can only hope a large enough segment of the “right” listeners are waiting in the wings, ready to receive this work as intended.

Blood Oath: Lost in an Eternal Silence
Caligari Records

Death metal working within its compositional norms to cast new messages, shapes, and ideas into the super ego of the genre, demonstrating an engagement with the form keen to reach for a level of sophistication that is sadly rare within the current landscape. 

Demoncy: Black Star Gnosis
Dark Descent Records

Demoncy’s work carried black metal through its most barren period in the 2000s and early 2010s. Where once this artist was a reliable workhorse of the genre, in today’s landscape, and with much the same formula, they appear as defiant revolutionaries. 

Demoniac: Nube Negra
Edged Circle Productions

Demoniac are immediately identifiable as anomalous within the topography of modern thrash, refusing to buckle to empty gestures of remembrance or impotent party music.

Kostnatění: Úpal
Willowtip Records

Straddles the border between noise rock and technical-cum-dissonant black metal. This jarring stylistic clash serves as midwife to expressions of Turkish and North African folk traditions. 

Marthe: Further in Evil
Southern Lord Recordings

The realisation of how I always felt the legacy of Bathory could or should be built on, but was never able to frame this desire with words. At the lighter end of barbaric metal, Marthe’s concoction of Viking era Bathory worship bleeds seamlessly into loose psychedelia, midwifed by grandiose Candlemass pretentions.

Petrale: Salvation Precipitates
Self-released

Petrale offer a peripheral, conflicted work seeking to reconcile order and disorder, control and chaos, formal logic and Dada, through the jarring tempo shifts, the fits and starts of melodic momentum, the choppy chromaticism and the abrasive ambience of dissonant guitar noise, an emergent meta lucidity slowly arising from this bizarrest brume.

Sammath: Grebbeberg
Hammerheart Records

Whilst Sammath’s approach is undeniably every bit as brutal, chaotic, and combative as war metal, it leaves room for reflection and nuance. Beyond the barrage of blisteringly fast blackened thrash comes soaring tremolo picked riffs hinting at light and colour, and expressive melodic refrains both commenting on, and knitting themselves into, the anomie below.

Sarpa: Mauta Tala
Self-released

A dazzling feat of stylistic engineering sits alongside an iron clad compositional discipline. With patient and repeated listens, the borderline impenetrable meanders into an uneasy viscosity, eventually solidifying into a bizarre logic both awkward yet oddly flowing. One of the very few releases to come out in the last five years that demanding new vocabulary in order to even furnish it with curation.

Sepulcrum: Lamentation of Immolated Souls
Chaos Records/Canometal/Burning Coffin

Support Chilean death metal!

Sühnopfer: Nous sommes d’Hier
Debemur Morti Productions

Sühnopfer tread where the latter day saints of metal turn away. This is metal reconnecting not only with the value of melody, but the challenge it presents to any composer as a means of communication. The opportunities to create a statement distinct from that which preceded it comes only with labour, time, and creative will. To fully engage with this process and master its nuance is an act far more revolutionary than even the most seeded avant-gardist statement that would seek to purify metal of the very thing that makes it unique: context.