7. Wiegedood - "There's Always Blood At The End Of The Road"

By a country mile the heaviest and most intense album on this list. After three records of introspective black metal, Wiegedood have got angry, really really angry. “There’s Always Blood at the End of the Road” is a tirade of incessant rage. It is the sound of violent indignation, a protest album that is boiled over into pure pulsating aggression. Both minimalistic and nihilistic, it uses repetitive driving riffs circling around in a never-ending cacophony of white noise. 

It is a fascinating and ultimately intoxicating piece of work. Everything is taken to the extreme. There is no let-up and there is no light. Instead, it is a tsunami of impenetrable and infinite noise. Whilst it shares a lineage with many albums on this list, it is unlike anything else I’ve heard this year. Its level of wrath and ire is quite simply indescribable. As humans, we are drawn to the disturbing and to the imperfect and I just kept finding myself returning again and again to this record. Coarse and Corrosive it still managed to utterly entrance me. An intrinsically difficult album for an intrinsically difficult year.