I have thrown around the terms “progressive” “intricate” and “expansive” a lot during this countdown. But sometimes there is an innate beauty to stark simplicity. Rock n’ roll is built on primal minimalism. It is not meant to be an ornate and meticulously manicured art form. It is an organic, cranial, and fundamental force, that has its roots in brutish austerity. 

Midnight strip out all the finery and fineness and take Metal back to core components. This is single-minded driving rock n’ roll. Crude and unsophisticated, it relies entirely on driving riffs and a pounding rhythm section. Motorhead were the lords and masters of rudimental and raucous rock n’ roll and you can hear their influence all the way through “Let There be Witchery”. It is a bewitchingly simple album that succeeds because it has so little to it. It is not trying to be anything but a hedonistic explosion of pulsating chords, but it is beautiful in its one-dimensional nature. 

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More larger-than-life widescreen Black Metal. It’s coarse and dynamically caustic, but it has such an expansive and experimental feel to it. It revels in its malignant magnificence, but it wants to be more. It takes the confines of Black Metal’s tight and taut envelope and wallops massive holes in both sides. 

The atmospheric and the ethereal nature are everything here. They take communal garden black metal and douse it in ghostly instrumentation. Everything is slowed down and laced with eerie menace. It’s progressive but in a dark otherworldly way, as opposed to a cold clinical technicality. 

It proudly wears its melodramatic ways on its sleeves. This is black metal prepared to show its emotional fragility. Dark and pensive but also laced with passion and pathos. Big, brash, and wonderfully emotionally literate. 

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So, I know this geezer in a band and that band has done an album. And coz I know him and see him at gigs and out and about and all, I felt duty-bound to listen to it and see where it got to in my mammoth listening session. 

I may have even promised that it could make the hallowed hundred, well I put the emphasis on could. Bottom reaches mind you, but still the hundred. But that’s at least five hundred places than Papa Roach.

Then it turns out to be good. Actually, not just good but Jesus H Christ on a bike good. And now I’m slightly hamstrung and actually rather embraced because this is the guy I know’s band, and bloody Norah if it was a name band that has made this record, I would be tossing superlatives around like confetti. But it's a guy I know’s band, and I am sure he is way too modest to realise he has crafted a bloody corker of an album that deserves a massive audience.

It's goth but with added black metal but with the sense of irony cunningly restored and you can whistle it. It's heavy and ethereal but with a strong sense of anthemic and bombastic. It’s liquorice flavor bubble gum. There is a dark bitter undertone, but it is encased in wonderfully lush sugary goodness.

At the end of the day, it is a band I see gigging their guts out all over the shop and they have gone and produced an album that's way better than the mega acts we all pay hundreds of pounds to see live could ever conjure up. You see my quandary, it’s an album by a guy I know and he has quite simply created a masterpiece.

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For a band that spectacularly imploded nearly 20 years ago, Suede are having a fantastically productive afterlife. This is album number four since their resurrection in 2010 and they continue to quite spectacularly hold their own. They have no interest in being elder statesmen, churning out identikit record after identikit record. They seem driven by the same creative thirst that led them to produce the astonishing trilogy of their self-titled debut, “Dog Man Star” and “Coming Up”. 

2016’s “Night Thoughts” and 2018’s “The Blue Hour” saw them fully embrace their art school pretentious sensibilities, disappearing down the same progressive rabbit hole that they did with the exquisite “Dog Man Star”. Suede never stood still during the first incarnation and they not planning on doing so now. 

“Autofiction” sees them take a massive left turn into glam punk. There is a distinct whiff of familiar territory as this does feel like the same creative hunting ground that they stalked when writing their first album. They have shelved the intricate pretension and instead gone back to writing short sharp rock songs that exquisitely walk the fine line between commerciality and coarseness. 

If they were a bunch of 16-year-olds doing this, we would have already lifted them up on our shoulders and marched through the town proclaiming that they are the new messiahs. But instead, it’s a seasoned and weather-worn bunch of 50+ year old men and there are running rings around all-comers. 

Suede have chosen to ignore the memo that says veteran bands should have nothing further to say and instead they have channelled into that same burning desire that made them such an amazing proposition all those years ago. Conclusive proof that they have no intention to go gently into that good night. 

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The biggest difference between hardcore punk and metal is the level of emotional literacy.  The former is populated by self-aware (and in many cases self-loathing) individuals that are symbiotically connected with their inner feelings. They have seen the content of their own souls and they understand the anatomy of their own traumas. 

Whilst it would be crass to describe all metalheads as knuckle-dragging oafs with little connection with their subconscious, metal is not known for its exploration of the inner self. For decades it has avoided talking about feelings and embracing cognizance and self-enlightenment, and chosen to distract itself with casual sexism, dragons and beer.

Generation Z is making a conscious decision to change all that. They have embraced metal’s acidic and corrosive tones but have wedded them to the emotional intelligence of hard-core. Ithaca are leading the charge of bands that are subverting metal’s aversion to bearing its sole and are using it as a blatant tool to publicly talk about their personal experience of mental health and their battles with adverse childhood experiences.

“They Fear Us” is a brutally honest and emotionally raw treaty on growing up in today’s world. They have chosen to wear their personal pain as a badge of honor and to use, what was once an emotionally repressed musical form, as a therapeutic aid. 

This is a wonderfully open and brutally honest album. Its heart is not just on its sleeve, it’s tattooed to its arm. It is tender and tragic but also crushing and corrosive. A benchmark in self-therapy. 

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I adore bands that stoically exist in the left field. Crippled Black Phoenix have a fierce reputation and a strident fanbase, but they have no intention of ever leaving the confines of the cult persona. You see they make the music they want to and say the things that they want to do and are not trying to fit into any particular style or trend. They have a singular vision and that is to be true to the ethos of their band.

This means that they exist firmly outside of even metal’s mainstream, carving their own singular furrow. There is something liberating about deciding to ignore commercial pressures and instead concentrating solely on making the music that they want to. This sense of freedom and self-determination has paid off in droves as Crippled Black Phoenix have been on a rather spectacular run of form of late. 

2018’s “Great Escape” was the greatest album Pink Floyd never made and 2020’s haunting and evocative “Ellengæst” topped that year’s list. With “Banefyre” they have very much continued the trend, even with a distinct shift in musical form. They sound angrier and more focused than before. Where their previous release was a dark treaty of the soul, this is a much more direct record. They have moved through trauma and loss and reached a point where they want to do something about it.

The beauty of Crippled Black Phoenix has always been the dense instrumentation, and “Banefyre” is no exception. It is a stunningly layered album, full of subtle touches and soaring guitars. Rather than lead to tedium, its length (its 97 minutes long) means that you get to wallow in its ever-changing forms. A wonderful exercise in politically charged modern prog. 

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Last year, Borknager frontman Lars Are Nedland created the most wonderful and multi-faceted modern prog opus under the moniker of White Void. A good friend of mine, and fellow prog concessioner, described it as the album Twelve Night should have made and that would have catapulted them to stadium status. 

Forever a sonic pioneer, Lars has made the decision to subvert everything that White Void stood for and to create its mirror universe evil twin. “Antithesis” is everything “Anti” wasn’t. It is insular, introverted, and inward-facing. It is harsh, acidic black metal full of nihilistic rage and deconstructed sequences. It starts with a very similar soundscape to its sister record, but it warps and distorts its context, divorcing the tracks from melodic and linear structures. 

It’s such a unique and ambitious concept. Introverting an album. Twisting every component so that it concentrates on the constricted monochrome depravity as opposed to its expansive euphoric beauty. This is Black Metal laid bare, a dark journey into harsh tones and malevolent intent. A stunning juxtaposition that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. 

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This is a slow-burning record that unfurls itself at a glacial pace. Everything is stripped back and downplayed. It is a masterclass in majestic miserabilism. Patrick Walker has an innate ability to bring to life the sound of a breaking heart. This is a stark and sorrowful collection of torch songs stripped back to their bare minimum. It is consummate songwriting with every unnecessary diversion removed, so all you are left with is the raw pain of rejection.

But there are also swathes of beauty to be found in the maudlin. This is an utterly gorgeous set of songs. They may soundtrack loss and grief, but they do so in an exquisitely elegant way. This is an album that shows that less is very much more and that there is a hypnotic beauty in stark minimalism.

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Conjurer are quite simply undefinable. They still reside within the staple of heavy music, but what they actually trying to do with it is simply quite extraordinary. They seem intent on turning left where other bands would veer right and they unashamedly ignore metal’s well-worn clichés. As I said, this is still unashamedly heavy metal but with an added frisson and level of creativity that is completely alien to the genre.

I suspect most people reading this have been, like me, listening to metal for most of their adult lives. We know how it goes, we know the formula, we know the score. We can identify a death growl from a menacing goblin-like black metal shriek. We understand the fundamental differences between the slow reverberations of Doom and the bombastic exhibitionism of power metal. 

Conjurer take all those cultural cornerstones and shoves them in the bin. They are not interested in fitting into a particular genre or style. Instead, they are carving out something highly unique within the general confines of heavy. “Páthos” is extraordinary, and I don’t think I’m even halfway there to fully comprehending its brilliance yet. It uses shading and textures in a quite revolutionary way. We are used to a very clear distinction between heavy and not heavy. They blur the lines in a way that I, quite simply, haven’t seen before. 

It’s heavy but it’s also beautifully contoured. In many cases, in our genre heaviness is there because simply that’s what we do. Here it plays an important and crucial part in the musical DNA and ”Páthos” elegantly swoops between tempos and temperament. I could throw around more superlatives, but this album just has to be heard, so go and listen.

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In his wonderful history of pop (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah), Bob Stanley theorised that metal and country were the only two genres to have had an elongated shelf life. Every other musical movement that there has been, he suggests, exists purely to be overtaken by what comes after it. He states that country and metal have survived because, rather than be overtaken by the next big thing lumbering up at their side, they have taken the young upstart genre and absorbed them.

Metal is just a great big thief, or to be precise a vulture. It has unashamedly picked the best bits off the carcasses of other less fortunate genres for most of its 50-odd years of existence. All of its great leaps forward have happened because it has assimilated the traits of another style of music (Glam metal – Glam, Thrash – Punk, Nu-Metal – Hip Hop, and so it goes). 

Saor are purveyors of folk metal but in a very cerebral, dark, and insular way. “Origins” is a brooding and atmospheric record, that manages to effectively combine metal and rootsy folks’ respective finest qualities. It feels earthy and grounded. It creeps through the undergrowth as opposed to simply jumping out at you and slapping you around the face with its riffs. 

Its sound is tribal and organic like it has been shaped from the earth beneath our feet. It has an otherworldly and distinctly spiritual quality, and on numerous occasions, it diligently hides in the shadows patiently building its momentum. 

Bleak but simultaneously beautiful, it is a highly intelligent album that swirls with portent and emotional imagery. This is folk at its rawest and most primal and as such it elegantly matches the creeping metal.

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Cult of Luna are another band that just seems to be incapable of making bad or even run-of-the-mill records.  They have a distinctive sound and feel, yet they manage to subtly change from album to album. You can draw a musical line back from this album to 2019 “A Dawn to Fear” and then on to 2013 is quite incredible “Vertikal” but it is not a linear affair. The journey between the three is a twisty and in many places contorting affair. 

You see Cult of Luna may be a highly edifying experience, but they are not an easy one. They create music that you need to work with. At first glance, “The Long Road North” may feel like discombobulating noise. However, when you start to unwrap its layers, it reveals itself to be an intricate ecosystem of interconnecting sonic convulsions. That is a very convoluted way of saying that there is a hell of a lot going on.

It’s metal, but it’s highly complex and precision-engineered metal. Every note and every sound plays an essential role in the overarching architecture of the record. Nothing is misplaced and nothing is left to chance. Instead, we get meticulously scripted and orchestrated intersections of sound. It’s heavy and it’s also melodic but actually, neither of them are the important component here. This is about the very act of creation, the sheer thrill and anticipation of seeing what you can build.

“The Long Road North” is an intense but ultimately rewarding journey through vivid, alternating rhythm. There is so much to take in that you only really start to become at ease with this record on the third or fourth listen. And this is how music should be, this is not a dip in and sing-along on your drive home type the record. This is a frustrating but also deeply satisfying album that you will find yourself obsessing over for months to come. As I said, exactly how music should be.

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You know when you come to the end of a record, and you find yourself trying to process what the heck you have just listened to, but you know that you need to go straight back in again? Well, that’s exactly how I felt my first three rounds with “Leather Terror”. Of all the records on this list, this is the one that has risen furthest through the medium of repeat listens. My initial inclination was this was a lightweight poppy affair that wore its 80’s obsession on its oversized T-shirt.

But then I started to notice the anarchistic flourishes and the dashes of pure darkness. If this is a pop album, then it is one that is both highly self-aware and also gloriously perverted. This is pop with the sugar replaced by mind-altering substances. It plays with pop, and it knows what good pop is, but it also has the ability to completely subvert it. It presents itself as though butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth, but while you are distracted by its delicious catchiness, it is busy ransacking your drawers and defecating on your carpet. 

And that I think is my overall impression. A glorious subversion of what we think synth-drenched pop should be. It gives the allure of being lightweight and imbecilic when actually it has a PhD in psychology from Oxford. It seduces you with wanton lust and then hits you with a flurry of barbed-wire kisses. It is a clever, cunning and emotionally mature record that masquerades as something much flimsier and disposable. A mass of ever-shifting contradictions, what though does stay constant is the fact that it is an utter work of genius.

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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.

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Some bands emerge fully formed and give us their best work on the first time of asking. Others take a couple of albums in which to find themselves before they hit their peak. Then there are bands like Rolo Tomassi, whose evolution has happened at a slow gradual pace over a number of albums. Like a fine wine or a good steak, they have aged impeccably well, and 14 years into their recording career there only just coming into their own. 

Don’t get me wrong, previous albums have been grand. But there is such a noticeable leap in quality, confidence and ability between what they were doing before and “When Miss Becomes Memory”. It is a thoroughly self-assured record, that is comfortable in his own skin and possesses seminal self-awareness. They have toned down the youthful vigour and unbridled optimism and instead, we get a record that is emotionally mature and extremely comfortable with its own being. 

This is an exquisitely constructed album. It confidently intersects between shrill disharmony and delicate beauty. The transmogrification between the two is faultless, they blend and intertwine in a way that adds virtue to both styles. It knows exactly when to rear forward and when to restrain its abundance. 

It’s heavy but it is also fragile and slight. It is honest and open. There is no posturing or pretending. This is quite simply an authentic and candid dissection of the monotony of being an adult. Rolo Tomassi have grown up and the world has changed and “Where Myth Becomes Memory” effectively chronicles that transition. Utterly utterly brilliant.

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2020’s “Forever Blue” was the soundtrack of my lockdown. A sumptuous and slow-burning record, it was a reflective masterpiece. Its beauty was in its restrained nature. It was cautiously emotive, revealing itself in sparse spurts as opposed to extravagant flourishes. It wasn’t just me that it spoke to, and its unexpected success thrust its creator firmly into the spotlight.

There is always a weight to following up on an album that captures the imagination as much as “Forever Blue” did. Rather than recycle, Alex Williams decided to up the ante in terms of emotion and passion. “As the Moon Rests” is much more strident and muscular than its predecessor. Before Alex vehemently deconstructed metal, using its nature but ditching its heaviness. Here there is much more of a crunch and a primal rallying cry to be found. It’s still fragile and beautiful but there is more voom. 

It is a much more confident and self-assured record. “Forever Blue” was wonderful but it was the sound of an artist finding her feet and her voice. “As The Moon Rests” is a buoyant and assertive next step. It is steeped full of self-knowledge and security. Most of all it is the sound of a unique and authentic voice blossoming in the knowledge of what they can achieve.

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An utterly, utterly unique record that I have lived with for many months but still feel I am nowhere near being able to unravel. I still have no idea what it actually is. What I do know is that I am utterly spellbound by it. It is an emotive, atmospheric, and ultimately heart-breaking concept album, narrated as opposed to sung. 

What is extraordinary is how they take a musical form that is known for being detached, macho and emotionless (Death Metal) and completely transform it into the most extraordinary heart-wrenching lament. It is rich with pathos and passion and thick with soul-searching honesty. This is metal reinvented as an articulate purveyor of fragile nihilistic pain. It strips away all the bravado and masculine bullshit. What we are left with is a raw emotional state that pulls the heartstrings like frankly nothing I have heard before. 

It stretches musical boundaries in a self-assured manner. This is not about sticking to one genre’s particular template, this is about using the music to tell a story and channel the contents of the artist’s soul. Its use of texture is simply stunning. It baths you in waves of distorted melody that get under the skin and into the tear ducts. An astonishing record that is truly unique and proves once and for all that metal can wear its heart and its soul on its sleeve. 

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Marillion have matured remarkably well. Considered by many as a one-hit wonder responsible in the 80s for thousands of babies being christened Kayleigh, they are actually an incredibly politically-literate act with still so much to say. This is album number 19 and the highest-charting affair since 1987’s “Clutching At Straws”. It is very much a case of, if you stand still long enough everything goes round the circle and you come back into fashion. 

Marillion have remained resiliently Marillion. They invented crowdfunding twenty-one years ago (true) and since then, the fact that they ask their fans to pay for the album before they go into the studio, means that they have been able to resolutely remove themselves from having to follow or conform to any fads or fashions. They make music for themselves and for their dedicated following and it just so happens that this has once again connected with the wider mainstream.

“An Hour Before It's Dark” is a sprawling masterpiece. It is not as angry or riddled with indignation as their previous album, but it still manages to cast a quizzical eye over modern life. Its themes of loss, redemption, and community intertwine across the album, with musical and lyrical refrains repeating on numerous occasions. It’s a wonderfully clever but also honest album. It never overdoes the orchestration and instead, it is fragile and haunting and also sparing and slight. There is still the majestic opulence that is prog’s hallmark, but it is never overbearing. 

“An Hour Before It's Dark” is very much an example of an album being more than the sum of its constituent parts. The songs are great but when glued together they create a stirring, emotive and cohesive whole that holds the listener from beginning to end. This is the sound of a band incredibly secure in their being, but still heavily invested in expanding their sound and style. Just plain wonderful. 

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And so our first non-metal metal number one in over a decade of me doing this list. This album is special in that it sounds profoundly unique. Its The Fall collaborating with Tony Bennett doing a set of show tunes covers. It's the Divine Comedy busking with Bob Dylan at an underground jazz club. It's the Polyphonic Spree channelling their inner Pink Floyd on a really really really bad day for every single member. Shit, I don't know what it is apart from it being brilliant.

This is an album that confounds everything. It is but it's not. It's there but it isn't. It's black but it's white. In its short duration, it traverses every pinnacle of musical ability but still stays resonantly undefinable. There is a distinctly Jazz like distortion of time signatures and use of polyrhythmic structures, but it is also too jaunty and "Broadway" to be jazz.

 The tracks bled into each creating a continuous 35 minutes of rolling music. The tone and texture continually shifts, switching from dark and doomy to light and breezy within the same song. There is a fundamental playfulness to the whole approach as if the band had the entire history of music at their disposal to create just over half an hour of product. 

There is a distinct irreverence to everything that has come before. Like “Hellfire” is a hard stop year zero, building a new musical reality from the bones of what came before. There is no respect or adherence to the old ways, instead, there is a frantic creative desire to build new structures on the ruins of what came before.

Absolutely key to the brilliance of the album is the vocal delivery, which is shared by all three core members. We are used to difficult music being topped with difficult and challenging vocal styles. Here Gordie Groop croons like a nihilistic lounge singer in some dystopian post-apocalyptic nightclub. The quality, range, and sumptuous nature of the vocals feel simultaneously disarming and completely necessary.

In all, this album is not just superb, it’s ground-breaking. It draws a line under all that came before and reimagines and reconstructs music for the post-Spotify generation. It is distinctly new but builds on the old. It is familiar but also completely alien. It is extraordinary and by a country mile my album of the year.

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