‘Nija’ was one of 2020’s sleeper hits, an album that slowly but with precise intent wormed its way into our collective consciousness. Technically their difficult fourth album, this is their attempt to follow up the record that brought them such prominence. I suspect you can guess by the heady heights that it has attained, that they have completely succeeded in not just following up what they did before but completely and utterly surpassing it. 

This is an album that manages to be simultaneously nasty but also sumptuously beautiful. It is really heavy and really brutal, but it does so with an astounding level of songwriting. It uses jagged unrefined noise, but it cultivates it into the most astonishing shapes. Every track is immaculately sculptured and the attention to detail is utterly astonishing. Yes, it’s heavy and harsh but it is also immaculately polished. The future is theirs for the taking.

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For 57 years Sparks have been the most important band you have never heard of. They have released an astonishing 25 albums and they have silently and with little fanfare shaped the entire history of modern music. Like shadowy Svengalis, they have skilfully manipulated the flow of pop and are constantly foreshadowed where it’s heading next.

“The Girl is Crying in her Latte” is a career retrospective populated entirely by new compositions. They would never do anything as conventional as regurgitate past glories so they have produced an album that returns to previous styles but with completely new songs. Primary songwriter Ron Mellor long ago realised that pop is at its best when it is simplistic and repetitive. Therefore, all the way through this album he finds a refrain and a theme and lets it loop over and over.

There is a playful maturity to the album. It is daft but it is also intellectually curious in its daftness. Each song feels distinctly unique but also never outstays its welcome. Brilliantly brash and quintessentially obtuse this is a pop album that reminds us that pop never needs to be banal. 

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I adore Metal with a sense of grandiosity. I want my music to be big and epic but also to be grounded enough to have an overarching sense of humanity. This is a stunning record that is large in scope and ambition but does not over-dazzle. It is full of spacious hooks and cascading waves of sound but it is self-aware enough to know when enough is enough. It doesn’t over faze and holds itself in check when it needs to. 

It understands that great songs are sculptured out of a combination of passion and precession. It is bombastic enough to be engaging but also nuanced enough to leave you wanting for more. Just an astonishingly sonically literate album that is a complete joy to listen to. 

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Divine post-rock from Leeds. In a review that I wrote last week, I commented that a great instrumental is one that makes you completely forget there are no vocals. One where the instrumentation is so intricately structured that having something as untamely as words would disrupt its magic. 

This is one of those albums. It is an enchanting psychedelic trip that illustrates how transcendental music can be. It envelopes you in breathtakingly wondrous sound and bewitches you with some of the most beautiful musical passages I have ever heard. Stunning and hypnotic, this is just astounding.

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Sumptuous technical death metal from the city of Angels, Los Angeles. I say sumptuous because the one thing that this album does is sound glorious. Some forms of death metal give the audio impression of rusty jagged edges. This is very different. This is a smooth clean record with sparkling surfaces that you could eat your tea off.

It is gloriously produced, and every single note comes across as precision engineered. There is heaviness but it doesn’t weigh the record down. This is an album brimming with fantastical ambition and it takes flight in a cacophony of Technicolor wonder. It also immaculately balances the harsh with the coarse. Gritty passages instantaneously give way to utter beauty. It just is a divine joy to listen to. 

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One of melodic Death Metal’s most consistently invent and initiative acts. They are storytellers using melodic death metal’s inherent juxtaposition of gruff vocals and melodic guitars to paint evocative pictures This is another concept album and this time they evocatively churn up a nightmarish vision of a rural Sweden plagued by famine and mystical suspicion. 

It nominally tells the tale of the Torsåker witch trials but that is the jump-off point to bring a world of hunger, scepticism, and rural horror to life. It is a dark and effecting story, and they use an astounding mix of gnarled riffs and acoustic beauty to tell it. 

They resist getting too epic and bombastic and instead create an insular and claustrophobic suite of music that is full of creeping resentment and uncertainty. It is beautiful but also, in keeping with the subject matter, it is an unsettling listen. Overall, it is an astounding example of just what is possible with metal. 

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Enslaved are audio storytellers. They have carved themselves out a unique position as the masters of well-structured progressive death metal. Whereas their peers have continued down the nasty insular path, playing with the theatrics of the satanic pantomime, Enslaved have used Black Metal in a much more refined and authentic way. 

This is an aural landscape of sonic cathedrals and deep oscillating valleys. This is not background music; this is a widescreen cinematic all-encompassing experience that understands that great tunes feed the soul. It is a wondrous musical journey that feels both uplifting and edifying. I often think that they have evolved as far as they can and then they go produce another stunning record like this. 

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To replace a larger-than-life frontman and then go on and produce the album of your career is an anomaly, to do it twice is unheard of. Kvelertak play rock and roll and are probably the true heir to Motorhead's crown. They cultivate adrenaline-fueled good-time boogie woogie and are not ashamed to produce uncomplicated soul-quenching music. 

What is amazing about this is album is how laid back and relaxed it is in its delivery. There is no pent-up aggression or repressed anger to be found, instead, this is a joyful and life-affirming set of songs that revels in the sheer pleasure of being alive. It just brims with boisterous good humour and overwhelming happiness. There is no desire to rebel or challenge here, this is an album that just wants to have unrepentant fun.

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This is an extraordinary leap forward for one of the most exciting modern British metal bands. I use the term modern loosely as what Green Lung is doing is as throwback as it comes. They are unashamedly reappropriating occult rock and bringing it firmly into the 21st century. There is a jaunty accessibility to this album that draws the listener in before they strike you over the head with a fistful of paganism.

They have got the songwriting spot on and this is a faultless collection of immaculately sculpted and relentlessly catchy tunes. They have always had a level of euphoric reverence but “This Heathen Lane” season experimenting a lot more and looking to push that sound even further. ‘The Forest Church’ is probably the best individual track I’ve heard all year and ‘Song of the Stones’ feels so inventive and creative. Just a wonderful wonderful retro-modern album that is highly reverent of the past but has eyes also clapped firmly on the future.

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For many years Explosions in the Sky have been at best classed as an American Mogwai and at worst classed as a poor person’s Mogwai. They have made some stunning records over the years but they have always been shackled by that unshakeable tag of “This does this sound an awful lot like Mogwai”. 

However “the End” sees them finally break out of that shadow and create an album that sounds, frankly, like nobody else but them. This is post-rock taken to the nth degree. There is urgency here you don’t usually encounter within this rather lethargic genre. Everything sounds like it is being done a hundred miles an hour and with precision intent.

It is just such a masterly album and they skilfully build the most majestic sparkling towers of pulsating sound. It’s a wondrous swirling maelstrom of twinkling time signatures and hurtling guitars. I just found myself lost in its majestic nature, drunk in its assured ambition. There is now a danger that Mogwai could start to be referred to as a poor person’s Explosions In The Sky.

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 As usual there has been a fair splattering of Doom on this list and we now reach the final entry from that particularly productive genre. This is doom at its most contemplative and its most introspectively beautiful. This is an emotionally mature record that is sparing with its heaviness, utilising it only when narratively and musically relevant.

It is sumptuous in its decadent wonderfulness but there is still a sparsity to it that gives it a dry and arid feel. Nothing is overdone. It’s emotionally wrought but it doesn’t over-egg the pudding and there are plenty of points where it feels slight and unassuming. This is just from start to finish a masterclass in how you produce high-quality quality evocative and intelligent metal.

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It is not often that I find myself saying that this sounds like nothing else, but I am lost for comparisons when it comes to this record. I have listened to it again and again and again just to try and get my head around how different it sounds to anything else masquerading within the metal world.

Muse making a Mastodon album is the nearest I’ve got and even that ludicrous notion undersells the utter individuality of this record. It’s big and epic but it steadfastly refuses to go down that syrupy singalong route. Instead, it pilfers from all over the shop building up a distinctive-sounding patchwork of infinite reference points. 

It is just astonishingly accomplished but also marvelously Metta. The band is highly aware of just how all over the shop it is and they happily lean into that chaos. Polished and accessible it still manages to be challenging and utterly bewildering. Certainly, the most single-minded metal album I have heard in utter years

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Prog time. Best of the Prog releases this year and probably the best Prog album released in absolutely years. Avkst hail from Norway and are ludicrously young. They are embracing a musical form created long before they were born. This is a concept album (aren’t they all) about a bleak soul isolating themselves with their thoughts in a cabin far far from civilization. To achieve the right frame of mind they decamped to a ramshackle building deep in the forests of west Norway and created.

This is a fantastic record. Instrumentally dense and highly intelligent. It is (as you would expect from the narrative) a deeply thoughtful album that slowly and with great intent reveals itself. It captures wonderfully that feeling of complete isolation and self-dependence. Astonishingly accomplished for a band so youthful. 

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2021’s “Serpent & Spirit” was an extraordinarily self-assured slice of modern metal that demonstrated that it understood the failings of the genre but also knew how to bring out its high points. The follow-up “A feast on sorrow“ is inconceivably even better. 

This is a raw and breathtakingly honest thesis on loss. Singer, bassist and principal songwriter Joe Nally skilfully uses the power of metal to demonstrate the devastating effect of dementia. It is a highly textured record, with every note and each riff having a distinct job to do. 

The layers of searing noise combine to create a whole that is emotive and highly effective. Not only does it sound divine but it is so intrinsically plotted that you keep finding new things in it every time you go back to it. An astounding record that manages to redefine what is possible with metal.

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This is the album that Baroness have always threatened to make. Their previous five releases (all named after colours) have been great but this, but this is such a leap forward in ability, vision, and sculptured songwriting. 

This is stoner prog, combining the laid-back vibes of sludge metal with the intricate ambition of prog. Or to use another analogy, this is prog for people who don’t like long songs. It certainly is their most focused effort yet, there is very little fat or wasted opportunities on the record.

Overall, it is a divine record that is just a joy to listen to. Every track is immaculately conceived, with colossal choruses and wonderful dual guitar work. It’s quite hard to describe why it is so brilliant, but it is. Probably because for the first time they are not trying to challenge or educate the listener, instead they have gone out of their way to make a proper and edifying rock record, and boy have they succeeded.

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Finnish retrobates Grave Pleasures have been playing around with their mental-infused version of postpunk for over a decade. They produced two previous albums that recalled the spirit of Joy division and music that soundtracked the desolate wasteland of the early 80s. They were good albums, but the feeling was always the best was yet to come. Well, the yet has become the now, “Plague Boys” is probably the best album Joy division never made. A lost Goth classic that has been unearthed as opposed to made.

It is so good because it remembers what bands like Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees and early Cure did so well and that was to write era-defining catchy songs. It doesn’t try to be clever or even particularly reverential, it just provides nine exquisite packages of haunting melodies. Goth and post-punk was never about being difficult or challenging, if anything it embraced commerciality and was more than happy to find its dancing shoes. 

Every track on here is a Bonafide dancefloor filler. It is a whole night of 80s indie disco concentrated into a single 43-minute album. It is chocker full of anthems that are not just danceable but also nuclear-powered earworms. Just absolutely astonishing.

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Their previous record was an extraordinarily frank confessional about living with mental illness. The subject matter hasn’t changed much but what is a huge development is in the sound that they employ to vividly invoke the everyday struggles of experiencing severe depression. It’s still black metal but a much more expansive and euphoric version of the genre. 

The claustrophobia of their previous records has been dispensed with and instead, we have a musically open and almost transcendental style going on. It seems strange to describe black metal as luscious and succulent but that is exactly what it is doing here. There is so much resonation and evocative emotion in the music. 

The scale and ambition of their musical palette just brings Serena Cherry’s heart-felt testimonies to life. It oozes with passion but also with deep-seated pain. Rather than being used as a fantastical vehicle, the inherent power of black metal has been harnessed as a way of articulating the day-to-day hardships of life, and whilst not an easy listen it is a thoroughly absorbing and endearing one.

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As utterly inconceivable as it might seem Creeper have followed two stunningly original attempts at world-building with an even more ambitious and preposterous fully formed narrative ecosystem. 

With “Sex, death & the infinite void” you could hear the spectre of Jim Steinman lurking in the background. This time around they have invited him in (metaphorically as the man is no longer with us) and put his bombastic style of larger-than-life rock opera front and centre. 

This is the vampire and leather album that Meatloaf should have made. It is high high concept and ludicrously extroverted. But it is also bloody (pun intended) brilliant. This is rock music at its most pop. Big, extravagant, and full of decadent grandeur. Every track has bridges as wide as glaciers and choruses that you can situate entire air forces on. 

This is an album that not only crosses the line into pomposity but does the fandango on it. It embraces rock ‘n’ roll’s obsession with creatures of the night and throws in every cliché that it can find in the dressing-up box. It is also immensely enjoyable. Because the songs are so well written, you never tire of its shameless self-absorption. Yes, it’s retro cheese that borrows from countless well-worn highways but it is high-quality cheese that very much knows its way around a tune. Just just wonderful.

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ROCKFLESH’s album of the year. Paradise Lost have covered many many musical bases in their four-decade-long history. For a while in the late 90s, they went full-on electronic and released the underloved Host. Ignored over here it was a massive hit over the continent but frankly will never top any list of the best Paradise Lost albums (that’s “Draconian Times” if you’re asking).

Fast forwarding 24 years Paradise Lost have firmly returned to their metallic roots making monumentally heavy music that once again steadfastly adheres to the doom template of their earlier works. However, founding members Nick Holmes and Gregor MackIntosh have always stood by the much-maligned “Host”. Realising that they probably couldn’t revisit its electronic splendour under the moniker of Paradise Lost they decided to form a side project named after it specifically to reconnect with the music within it.

The first thing to say about the album is it is the best Depeche Mode album since Violator, even though it is not made by Depeche Mode. It is a wonderful recalibration of the new wave synth sound that flooded the market in the mid-80s. There is an irreverent joyfulness to the album. It is dark and foreboding is also simultaneously playful and self-aware.

The simple fact is it is chock full of incredible songs that stay in the memory. It has yo-yoed from the summit of the list ever since it was released back in February. New releases have on numerous occasions unseated its position only for me to realise that I love this album more than them. It’s just such a brilliant collection of well-made and well-polished dark pop songs. Just stunning stunning. 

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