My listening habits were all over the place this year. Not enough standout thrash albums for my tastes (though plenty tried). About the only trends I could spot were a penchant for progressive death metal, bands with the word “cadaver” in their name, throaty female vocalists, and songs about birds. Enjoy.
Thrash metal is what I grew up on, so the genre will always be the one that speaks to me the most. And as much as bands like Metallica and Megadeth forever changed my life, there was something about the crossover thrash of bands like D.R.I., Cryptic Slaughter, and Excel that “hit different” as the kids say. In a year when the genre's new blood largely disappointed, Pest Control did thrash right with a collection of face-rippers to rival their forebears.
I don’t know why CJ insists on releasing his albums so late in the year when everyone’s year end lists are all sorted. Say one thing about The Wildhearts, say they know how to shoot themselves in the feet. After the band’s latest ugly reunion/breakup(/reformation?) cycle, CJ is clearly moving on with confidence. Wildhearts fans should be pleased with CJ’s SPLIT, as it deftly captures his alma mater’s feel-good melodic punk leanings just as well as 2020’s Siege harnessed its seething rage. With output this strong, it’s hard not to mourn the lack of CJ in the Wildhearts moving forward. But as the man himself sings in the biting ‘All The Dough’, “Some things just won’t work out, some things are better off dead.”
While the name had me expecting some grimy basement black metal, Filth is Eternal are actually a full-throated hardcore/post-hardcore band. The filth comes in the form of some truly nasty riffs and a force-of-nature vocal performance by frontwoman Lis Di Angelo. One of the most exciting albums I heard this year, as the songs kick you in the face on first listen and then just keep stomping. Kudos to Decibel’s Top 40 Albums of 2023 for bringing this excellent band to my attention.
One of the coolest moments of Firesideometer’s Scandinavian Adventure™ this fall was the Quicksand/Fireside show in Stockholm, which–in addition to being an awesome performance by both bands–was a veritable who’s who of Swedish rock and metal musicians. You couldn’t scratch your butt without accidentally elbowing Tomas Haake or Denis Lyxzen. When I asked the Voivod-shirted dude next to me if he was in a band, he said, “yeah, I play guitar in a death metal band called Grand Cadaver.”
And the rest was history for me and this ripper of a Swedish death metal album. The band features former members of Katatonia, Dark Tranquility, and Tiamat and is a blistering mix of crusty buzzsaw guitars and blackened thrash riffs that belies the band’s Gothenburg roots. Melody shmelody, Deities of Deathlike Sleep is a ripper from start to finish.
What does Frozen Soul do that a hundred other death metal bands haven’t been doing since the early 90’s? Nothing really. They sound a lot like Bolt Thrower to me. But they sound a lot like Bolt Thrower better than any other band that sounds a lot like Bolt Thrower sounds like Bolt Thrower. Of course, emulating the masters only gets you so far– you have to be able to write the tunes to back up the sound. This is where Frozen Soul stands head and shoulders above their peers. These songs all slay, making Glacial Domination the only straight-up death metal album that held my interest from start to finish this year.
Having spent a lot of time with Oozing Wound’s excellent 2019 album, High Anxiety, I thought I knew what they were all about–dirty, sludgy, crossover thrash! So it took a minute for me to get my head around We Cater to Cowards, which owes as much to The Jesus Lizard and McClusky as it does D.R.I. and Nuclear Assault. Is Oozing Wound a noise rock band that sometimes plays fast or a neurotic thrash band with the distortion cranked up to 11? I’d imagine they’re a band that does whatever the hell they want as long as the end result gets under your skin, which We Cater to Cowards does better than a bad case of scabies.
I’d not heard Cadaver until Spotify suggested the title track, so this ended up being one of the better surprises of 2023 for me. Cadaver is the brainchild of Norweigian extreme metal pioneer Anders Odden, and The Age of the Offended is their second album to feature ex-Soilwork and current Megadeth drummer, Dirk Verbeuren. The music is best described as blackened death metal, but there are elements of punk, crust, and grindcore burbling beneath the surface of this fantastic album.
Based on Atheist frontman Kelly Shaefer’s description of his new project Till The Dirt, I was half-expecting Outside The Spiral to be a Greg Puciato-esque alt-rock new wave diversion, miles away from his work with Atheist. And while this album does feature clean vocals and is relatively melodic, it is still undoubtedly a spazzy, chaotic, extreme metal affair. It also happens to be a ton of fun, with Shaefer delivering some of the best vocal work of his esteemed career. Oh, and it was produced by Scott Burns, so if you weren’t already on board…
Appalooza are a difficult band to describe. I hear a lot of 90’s grunge influence, some QOTSA-inspired desert rock, and a dash of Baroness-esque, American-styled (by way of Brittany, France) alt-metal. They blend this all together in the service of some truly excellent songwriting, along with hands-down the best pronunciation of the word “pelican” you’ll hear all year.
I was a massive fan of Alkaloid’s 2018 epic Liquid Anatomy, and even more enamored with vocalist/guitarist Morean’s subsequent work on Dark Fortress’ Spectres from the Old World. As a vocalist alone, he’s quite unique, delivering cleans, growls and a phrasing style that really stands out. Of course, the rest of the band are no slouches either, with drummer Hannes Grossman (Obscura, Necrophagist) being in a league of his own. So I came into Numen with sky-high expectations, and must admit to being a little underwhelmed at first. My initial impression was that the band was noodling for the sake of noodling and sacrificing songwriting at the Altar of Prog.
I should not have feared, because these compositions–while ridiculously complex–are rarely needlessly so. All of the seemingly out-of-left-field transitions do pay off after repeated listens, and I ultimately came to appreciate Numen’s many eccentricities.
This one hit hard early in the year, and kept on delivering all throughout 2023. Just an epic, heavy rock album. As I wrote in my mid-year review, “While I’ve heard several Spotlights songs before and liked them, attempts to get into their full-lengths left me thinking they were a bit too post-, too droney for my tastes. Alchemy for the Dead swaps out a good deal of those qualities for more melodic and accessible songwriting, though there’s still plenty of moody, atmospheric drone swirling around it all. For fans of Hum, Failure, Torche.”
I’m honestly a little surprised to see this so high on my list. While I was enthusiastic about PURGE when it dropped mid-year, I half expected that excitement to wane as the nostalgia of a PURE-inspired throwback album wore off. Quite the contrary,PURGE actually reignited a love for this band that had fallen a bit on the backburner for me the past few decades. I read a fair amount of weak reviews for this album when it came out, and I still don’t get it. If you don’t like PURGE, then you don’t like GODFLESH, and you’re no goddamned friend of mine.
State of Emergency? For Prong, it’s just another in their seemingly endless state of “being on a roll”. I had my doubts. ‘Breaking Point’ is a little (ok, a lot) on-the-nose lyrically, and the band leans into their chug-metal roots at the expense of the thrashier style I prefer. But there’s no denying Tommy Victor remains a world-class riff-master and knows how to bury a hook deep in your brain. If you can listen to ’Non Existence’ without getting it stuck in your head, you may need a CT scan.
There weren’t a lot of straight up hard rock albums that stuck with me this year. White Reaper was a notable exception, delivering the goods with their heaviest album yet. From our mid-year review: “Asking For A Ride is swimming with feel-good tunes, killer hooks, and a few surprisingly heavy riffs (the title track is damn-near thrashy). And it’s all delivered with a much beefier production that really accents their strengths.”
I remember on my fourth or fifth listen of Sky Void of Stars, thinking “why can’t these guys write a fucking hook anymore?” There were pieces of songs here and there that resonated with me, but so much of the in between parts were just…boring. Here we are nearly a full year later, and I honestly can’t imagine what on earth I was on about. I suppose the true brilliance of late-career Katatonia has been their ability to weave such subtly infectious hooks into their music. But today–listening to stone-cold bangers like ‘Austerity’ ,‘Colossal Shade’, ‘Birds’, and ‘Author’–it’s hard to imagine I ever didn’t love this album. This is top-shelf Katatonia, and my favorite album of the year by a fair margin.
Enslaved - Heimdal
Dethklok - Dethalbum IV
Girish and the Chronicles - Back on Earth
Scar Symmetry - The Singularity (Phase II Xenotaph)
Enforced - War Remains
