The return of Machine Head. Their first album in four years and their first since their long-standing line-up of Flynn, MacEachern, Demmel and McClain dissolved in the fall of 2018. Though to be honest, for many moons now though Machine Head has been Rob Flynn’s passion project. So he regrouped, brought in new personnel (in the shape of Matt Allston and Vogg from Decapitated) and got back to being the primal force that they are.

“Of kingdom and Crown” is a sprawling concept album inspired by the many hours that Rob spent watching “Attack on Titan” with his sons. It is by a country mile the most ambitious thing the band has ever attempted and in the main, they manage to pull it off. It still sounds like Machine Head but a much denser, more complex and technically proficient Machine Head. Once again, they have successfully altered their sound without losing what makes them, them. 

Yes, it could have been done with a little bit of editing (it’s probably about 10 minutes too long) but it is certainly the most diverse and textured album that they have ever made. Whilst it still does not hold a candle to the utterly extraordinary “the Blackening” this is still the most vital and exciting that Machine Head have sounded since then. 

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Soilwork’s Björn Strid and David Andersson formed the ludicrously AOR Night Flight Orchestra as an antidote to the butch posturing of their melodic death metal day job. The two bands were always meant to live in parallel universes, allowing them to have their musical cake and eat it. However, like some Marvel-like collusion of multi-versed franchises, “Övergivenheten” sees the schmaltzy cheese of their side project come tumbling into their day job. 

This is by a country mile the most accessible thing Soilwork have put their name to and sees them major heavily on the melodic in melodic death metal. It is a bright, positive and highly optimistic record that is reminiscent of that bit in Wizard of Oz where the colour kicks in. 

The life-affirming and upbeat nature of “Övergivenheten” is however made bittersweet by the fact that David Andersson’s alcoholism claimed his life a mere month after the album was released. A stupendously confident and self-assured record that leaves a wonderful testimony to the brilliance of Andersson’s guitar work.

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Those curveballs keep on coming. I know this will have me run out of town, but I have never bought into the cult of Pearl Jam. “Ten” was OK, but was a bit commercial for my tastes at the time, and subsequent albums have seemed whiny and self-absorbed. 

So, imagine my surprise then to find myself utterly transfixed by an Eddie Vedder solo album. It’s ace. Utterly ace. It’s like Springsteen but with added swagger. It feels rootsy and grounded, but also has that twinkle of stardust. It doesn’t feel like most career gap solo efforts which, in the main, stink of self-absorption and a general candour of “will this do?” Instead, “Earthling” has the ear of a record lovingly and painstakingly created. 

The songs are well crafted and beautifully rendered and Mr. Vedder himself refrains from any level of self-indulgence. Instead, he feels restrained and sparing. Which leads to the album feeling granular and connected (pun intended) to the earth. Very much an unexpected joy.

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I adore Avantasia. The madcap brainchild of anglophile teutonic rock legend Tobias Sammet. This is a supergroup with an emphasis on the super. A star-studded revolving line-up of vocalists punctuates a wonderfully lavish backing of sumptuous power metal. “A Paranormal Evening with the Moonflower Society” is the second instalment of the “Moonglow” saga. Once again Tobias has enlisted a veritable Who’s Who of talent. Michael Kiske (Helloween), Geoff Tate (formerly of Queensryche), Eric Martin (Mr. Big) and Bob Catley (Magnum) are all back by popular demand. However, this season’s big-money signing is Floor Jansen from Nightwish who is wonderfully operatic and OTT on ‘Misplaced among the Angels’. 

There is a slight level of familiarity fatigue creeping in (evident by the fact that their previous three releases were all top five in those years’ respective lists (and the “Mystery of Time” was my album of the year in 2013)). However this is still a bombastically bonkers record, that revels in its absurdity and its opulence. Luscious, energetic, and euphoric. This is music to help you forget the fact that the world is a pretty crap place at present. 

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Shape of Despair are funeral doom purveyors from Finland with a distinctly cult following. They are highly revered by connoisseurs of this particular subgenre, but unknown by anybody outside of its gravitational pull. Their work ethic is almost as lethargic as the music, as in 24 years of existence this is only their sixth album. However, some things are worth waiting for as “Return to the Void” is a somber melancholic masterpiece. 

Slow, grinding, and desolate, it is the sound of all the joy draining from the world. Dank and dirgy, but in the darkness, there are splints of light and fleeting glimpses of beauty. That juxtaposition is what makes this such a fascinating and entrancing piece of work. Buried in the glacially slow distorted refrains are some utterly enchanting pieces of music. A wonderfully challenging but in the end incredibly fulfilling album. 

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It’s doom o’clock on the list as here come Liverpool’s finest exponent of harsh thumbing doom. Conan have a formula and for five albums they have stuck rigidly to it. They may not have moved on particularly within their sound, but when they do this so well, does it really matter? 

“Evidence of Immortality” is an embarrassment of dark, luscious riches. The riffs are heavy and pulsating but also beautifully rendered. There is something divinely wonderful about the stark minimalism of this album. Everything is stripped back to its bare minimum and there is a primal beauty to its stark austerity. 

There has been numerous examples on this list of people playing with the concept of doom. Sexy doom, melodic doom, doom n’roll. Well this is just old skool communal garden doom, and it’s rather rather special.

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A fascinating, intriguing and consciously misleading record that revels in what it isn’t as much as it is. There are great streaks of electro here but it is much more than that. It flirts with Industrial, and, at times, it reminds me of the Nine Inch Nails that produced “Broke” and “Fixed” but it does not dwell in those pastures. There are also points where it is dirty, distorted pop. 

On a number of tracks Jake Duzsik sounds like Jason Donovan, if it was him that had been corrupted by Michael Hutchens and not Kylie. It’s dark and uncomfortable but also simultaneously alluring. For anyone who thought that Synth-based rock was clean and sanitised, this is the antidote. A dirty, perverted and deconstructed record that manipulates the mainstream into its image.

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Atmospheric, cinematic Death Metal from Sweden. “Woe” may pertain to having separate songs but actually this is a singular sixty-minute piece of work that may be the scariest and most depressing mediation track ever. It swirls in melancholic misery, full of creeping malevolence. 

If Metal usually flirts with darkness and evil, then “Woe” has got itself hitched to the bleak fraternity and produced a brood of twelve kids. This is not cartoon villainy though, this is a very real feeling of dissolution and despair. Sumptuous in its instrumentation, it uses Death Metal’s usually gregarious traits to paint a vivid picture of despondency and dejection. A heart-breaking but simultaneously stunningly creative record. It may be dark and oppressive, but the lush musicality gives it an expansive feeling that contemplates the bleakness. 

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By a country mile Kreator have been the outright winners in Thrash’s unlikely renaissance. Fifteen or so years ago they were getting by on nostalgia for their bit part in developing teutonic thrash. They were dabbling in numerous sounds in order to sustain themselves and to an outside eye, they looked creatively bankrupt. 

In 2022, they are a festival headlining and arena bothering monolith. They have achieved this by hunkering down on the relentless thrash sound that they initially made their name with. They haven’t compromised and instead tastes and trends have shifted to the point where Kreator’s uncompromising approach is now back in en-vogue. 

"Hate Über Alles" is pure unadulterated high-octane metal. Big, Bold, and buoyant. Highly produced but still heavy and driving, it hits that perfect spot for humungous anthemic sing-alongs. Every track is epic and engaging. Metal very much as mother used to make it. I know I like my challenging and my leftfield proponents, but this is straightforward balls to the well, route 101 metal, and it is glorious.

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In a first for this list, this is our second slice of metal tinged with Japanese culture and mythology. Matt Heffy’s Ibaraki may be the newcomers in this particular hybrid sandbox, but Sigh has been doing this brand of culture splicing for nearly thirty years. This is another album of utter musical insanity that blends instruments and musical forms from the east and west. 

It feels audacious and courageous but also confident and instinctive like these alien art forms belong together. It also manages to avoid feeling worthy and self-managed. This is still very much metal and has metal’s swagger and self-assurance. It has just broadened and expanded the spectrum of vessels that you can create metal with. 

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This is Black Metal reimagined as euphoric white noise. Live they have dispensed with stage lighting and instead perform with the houselights firmly on. This intensifies the experience of watching them create their raging cauldron of noise. There is nowhere to hide and instead all aspects of the creative process are on show.

“Mirage” has the same feeling of ‘nothing being left in the tank’. Every drop of passion and carnal carving is wrung out of each track. They are emotional turmoils of pure kinetic energy, pulsating with power and furor. It is like being in the centre of a tempestuous storm, with waves of hurtling sound crashing around you. A cataclysmic record that is full of unbridled elation and exhilaration. 

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Yes, there is very little Power Metal of note this year, but what we have is of the finest pedigree and quality. Blind Guardian are veritable masters at creating bombastic fantasy-driven metal. They describe themselves as wandering minstrels and their particular take on our ever-shifting genre has been described as “Hobbit Metal”. 

This is their first proper band endeavor in seven years and sees them return to their distinctive sound (2019’s “Legacy of the Dark” Lands involved them going full-scale symphonic and jettisoning the metal entirely from power metal). 

“The God Machine” is an astoundingly ambitious piece of work. It is the heaviest and most traditional metal that they have been in a long time. But there is much more to be found here than vocal histrionics and soaring guitars. This is a proper world-building record, with layer upon layer of interlocking instrumentation and intricate storytelling. It is a majestic palace of an album, a labyrinth of elaborate creativity and sumptuous design. The scope is breathtaking but so too is the song writing. A dazzling endeavour that reaches to the stars with every flourish. 

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This is this generation’s “black album”. The moment that an underground hero breaks out into the mainstream and becomes an all-consuming juggernaut. It will be the release that will see Parkway Drive replace Metallica as the alpha male of all metal bands. In decades to come people will speak about this being the album that introduced them to the joy and ecstasy of this genre. It will top lists and it will be spoken of in hushed reverence. 

It is vibrant, bold, and anthemic. Every track is a technicolor juggernaut, highly polished and packed to the gills with vim and vigour. Every song is designed to be screamed along to arenas by a frenzied evangelic fanbase. This is commercial metal at its most accessible and its most expansive. 

At this point you’re probably asking yourself if I think this album is so important and will have such an impact on our world, why have I deemed there to be another 27 albums this year better than it? 

The simple point is as good as I think it is (and it is very good indeed) and as much as I can see its ground-breaking dominance and brilliance, it is, to my tastes, a little too slick and overproduced. I love its opulence and I love its wide-screen spectacle. But I like my perfection packaged with a little grit and imperfection and this is just too impeccable. 

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This is the record Queen would have made if they had developed a social conscience in the late seventies, decided not to play ‘Sun City’, and instead had gone off and recorded a damning socially astute protest album calling for an imminent revolution. 

When Muse were asked by their record company to produce the greatest hits record, they baulked at the idea and instead created this. “Will Of The People” is a breakneck journey through every nook and cranny of their 28-year career. Over the course of its 10 tracks, it manages to touch on every single one of their various musical tent poles. 

I usually have a problem with cloistered multi-millionaire getting all uppity on record about the state of the world (Mr Roger Waters I’m looking at you), however, the inane level of outrage at societal ills on this album manages to come across as powerful indignation as opposed to crass bandwagon jumping. For all their millions and for all their high convoluted ideas, Muse actually sound like they have an idea of what life is actually like for those without their money and that they have got something coherent to say about it. 

Musically, “Will of the People” is a Day-Glo explosion of camp Disco and over-the-top rock histrionics. It leaves the whole concept of subtlety at the door and instead goes as big and as bold as possible. But it is its level of political discourse that stops it from being cheesy or superfluous. For all its elaborate flourishes it is actually a very grounded and spectacularly angry album.

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Talking about subtlety, or more importantly not talking about subtlety, here comes the current King of multi-dimensional, multifaceted, and multilevel metal. Devin Townsend is fiendishly talented and doesn’t he know it. A child prodigy that has become a Renaissance man for highly convoluted progressive metal. Devin sees our music in four dimensions and has an innate God-given power to create textured and twisted pieces of music that bypass the need to be grounded in any one particular genre. 

Whilst his music has always had a level of diversity to it, “Lightwork” does see him make a conscious decoupling from the rampant progressive metal of previous releases. It ventures into territories that I can only be described as hyper-pop and sees the synths dialled up and the guitars put to one side.

The point with Devin is that whatever he sets his hand to, it is going to end up being intricate and interesting. I’m not even sure that the stuff on here is my usual cup of tea and I am adamant that I wouldn’t be reviewing this if it didn’t have his name adorning the cover. But the point is he has taken a style and genre that I will usually walk away from and made it enticing and indoctrinating. And that’s probably the best endorsement that a musician can ask for.

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Zeal & Ardor are, when all is said and done, a one-trick pony. They have one concept, and they are milking it. That is meshing the intensity of black metal with the organic primordialness of vocal-driven delta Blues. They are three albums in, and it really should have run out of steam by now and become boring and repetitive. However, and it is a massive massive however, somehow they are still managing to find endless seams of creativity to mine from this one simple idea. 

This self-titled release doesn’t seem to retread any of their previous territories even though it still sticks very close to the core principles of the central concept. It still effectively explores how dynamic and evocative black metal sounds when you let the vocals rather than the guitars lead it. It is one of those albums that sounds like nothing else because frankly there is nobody else doing metal in this sort of way.

It has a rootsy earthiness to it that seems to strip away all our music’s pretensions. What we end up with is something that feels pure and unrefined. By reverting back to the nucleus of what created rock music in the first place, they have managed to create something that seems unburdened and unbridled. Whatever it is, it is simply stunning. 

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And welcome to the annual entry that comes from an elder statesman that we had all written off. Everyone loves The Pixies but let’s admit it, nobody expected them to still actually be capable of making not just a decent record but a career highlight. They seemed to have fallen into a nostalgic groove of playing previous albums in their entirety or simply just trading on their vast back catalogue. People of my age still flock to see The Pixies because they are The Pixies and they did what they did in the late 80s. To be honest nobody is interested in a new Pixies album.

But The Pixies have always been about bucking the trend and doing what is least expected of them. So here they come with an album that is more than capable of holding its own against the four magnificent records that they made over 30 years ago. “Doggerel” does what The Pixies did best which is to sound like a Pixies album but also sound nothing like the previous records. 

This is not a nostalgic retread of a previous path, this is firmly a Pixies album made in the 21st century. It acknowledges the passing years and gleefully, and magpie-like steals from the many acts that are tried to emulate them over the years.

It’s a happy and positive record that revels in the joy of being alive. Distorted pop that manages to be simultaneously smooth but also in possession of unseen jagged edges. This is The Pixies doing off-kilter indie and they do it wonderfully. It’s full of singalong anthems but with just the right dosage of acidity and coarseness. 

Maybe if they had produced this record when they first returned in the early noughties, they would still be capable of headlining Reading and Leeds festival. But frankly, that doesn’t actually matter. All that’s important is that The Pixies have once again proven that he should never ever write them off.

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Metal has always had a symbiotic relationship with classical music. You can go right back to its beginnings and Deep Purple’s dabbling with “Concerto for Group and Orchestra” and the vibrant use of strings by Led Zeppelin on ‘Kashmir’. 

All through metal’s history, when a band wants to show that they are mature and sensitive they don’t think twice about bringing in an orchestra (yes Metallica I’m looking at you). We even have a whole genre based on the use of symphonic elements. However, all of that history and portent doesn’t stop what Lorna shore are doing from being simply and utterly incredible. 

“Pain Remains” sees deathcore and classical music welded together in an incendiary union. Metal usually uses symphonic elements to soften its tone. Here its addition does the complete opposite. Deathcore is already a riotous and corrosive genre, but the orchestral amendments take everything to another level. It becomes a hurtling juggernaut of bad intent. Heavy and barbaric but also epic and anthemic. Extreme metal has never sounded so widescreen and expansive. 

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It’s fascinating how nostalgia keeps pace with us as we grow old. I've never had much truck with the eighties revival (which seems to have been going on for at least double the amount of time that the eighties actually lasted). I lived through the procession of shoulder pads, gross social inadequacies, Thatcherism, yuppies, and keytars. I had no interest in reliving vicariously through millennials who weren't there.

But this. This is a passionate love letter to the bleeps, bloops and pings that soundtracked the decade. It is a stunningly Faithfull re-enactment of how we thought computerised music sounded like. Crafted with utter love and devotion this is the eighties remastered and re-graded and it sounds utterly sumptuous.

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Consisting of former and severing members of cult British black metal institutions Akercocke, Voices, and Werewolves; Antichrist Imperium was created to exhume the unfinished demos that the former band left in the studio when they disintegrated in 2005. They frame it as a modern retelling of Akercocke’s satanic bile.

This, as the title suggests, is album number three and it happily continues to mine the generous creative well which was Akercocke’s mature and progressive take on occult metal. Our Scandinavian cousins do all this devil-worshipping business with a dash of piazza and a pantomime-like nod and wink. However, this is a very “kitchen sink” British working-class take on satanism that revels in the grim and realism. It is coarse and gritty and full of harsh tones and textures. 

But for all is wonton nihilism it is still a stunningly well-constructed record, breathtaking in its creativity, reach and ambition. Disturbing and discombobulating but also exquisitely detailed, this is an album that keeps giving on each listen. 

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