2024 TOP 100 ALBUMS

Ok, lets get this proverbial party started with a bit of introspective, insular atmospherics. Eye is the solo incarnation of the voice of Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard’s (a regular on this list) Jessica Ball. Her day job is specialising in ethereal doom but separated from her band mates she casts her net much further. You could almost say this is an Indie rather than a metal album as it certainly brings to mind early Lush (before they got swept up in Britpop) and the late lamented Mazy Star. It is a rich, opulent and Gothic record that is more than happy to show off its songwriting credentials. Potentially envisaged purely as an exercise in musical release, it has very much grown legs and purveys the potential to become its own distinct musical universe.

More ethereal and atmospheric metal, this time from the exotic setting of the Faroe Islands. This is a grand and distinctly operatic album full of big flourishes and intricate touches. It builds in momentum, shifting from claustrophobic to impressively widescreen in the space of a single track. It veers more on the side of metal than previous releases, but it still manages to wide build in a distinctly unique way.

It would not be my 100 countdown without some down right nasty old-school death metal. Hailing from Arizona, Gatecreeper are part of a cabal of young American death metal acts that are outright rejecting the technicality that has swept into the genre and returning it to its feral roots. This is a frenzied and frantic celebration of brutal heaviness. It is unrepentant in its gnarled malice and the vocals are spat out like toxic waste hidden in a (vegan) hot dog. Crushingly corrosive.

There is actually a fair bit of non-metal in this year's countdown and quite a lot of it in the upper echelon. This is our first visit to outside of the confines of planet metal but to be honest St. Vincent is by no means a stranger to my countdowns. This is pop with a blackened heart and venomous bite. One of the greatest guitarists of her generation, she has returned the raucous rock to her vernacular after a couple of albums that stayed firmly in electronica. This is a wonderfully expressive record that bounces along with an inbuilt sense of purpose. Whilst previous releases have felt like art statements this seems happy to just be fun.

Unashamed traditional Metal. Hammer welding big songs with gargantuan choruses and galloping guitars. Grand Magus do this chest-beating Viking stuff so well and whilst Sunraven does not see them deviate from that trajectory it still manages to add something from their already impressive cannon. Quite simply, it is all monumentally catchy and adds a spring to your step.

It is not quite clear where Norna fits in metal’s labyrinth of sub-genres. They are probably too noisy and brittle to be post metal but there is a whiff of both intelligence and experimentation that differentiate them from more standard offerings. Whatever it actually is, this is a dense record full of sludgy riffs and circular refrains. That aforementioned streak of intelligence means that it doesn’t get bogged down in its thickness and instead there are obvious flares of real creativeness that keep it interesting.

The Italian’s are the originators and foremost purveyors of Symphonic Death Metal. This is their finest work for years and certainly their first record where the two facets of their persona seem in perfect balance. Everything here feels grand and opulent. The symphonic sections don’t feel like synth-driven samples, It feels like a real orchestra is there, striking beside them. Marvellously melodramatic and fantastically flamboyant.

An absolute oddity from Beijing. This is one of the strangest and intriguing albums on the list, and that’s saying a lot. Modern prog metal with a hand firmly in the electronics draw. It is fascinatingly diverse and you can see the breadth of vision throbbing out. There are parts where it becomes downright impenetrable and others where it is distinctly indescribable. But in the main this is an intriguing record that holds onto its cultural baggage and contrives to do something very different to usual metallic fusions. Very much an album to be nurtured.

For many of us it felt inevitable that the tragic death of Trevor Strnad would spell the end of The Black Dahlia Murder. After all his colourful charisma was very much at the heart of their appeal. However his bandmates took time to grieve and to adjust and made the decision that they should continue.

Brian Eschbach has put down his guitar and moved into the spotlight and Ryan Knight has returned after 6 years in exile. What is so edifying and entertaining about this album is that it sounds and feels definitively like a The Black Dahlia Murder record. It is still fiercely melodic death metal, with the emphasis on a blistering two guitar attack. It is comforting in its familiarity and the overall complexion is that Trevor’s life has been both celebrated and honoured by continuing on as if he was still here.

More Death Metal, this time from Belgium. Aborted have been doing this for nigh on thirty years but really for most of that it has been Sven "Svencho" de Caluwé and an ever-changing cast of bandmates. They have grown a loyal following by playing straightforward horror fixated death metal. “Vault of Horrors” is a sort of concept album, putting to brutal music the plots of various horror movies. It isn’t particularly inventive and doesn’t move the genre along in any way but it is unashamedly enjoyable.

Our first slice of Black Metal. Now I will be using a lot of words like transcendental and atmospheric and progressive to describe the black metal albums coming. Not this, this is extreme face-ripping jagged edge black metal that is harsh as hell. It just accelerates from track one in a billowing cloud of frenzied antagonistic hatred. The guitars are down-tuned and it feels like a veritable love letter to the raw fringes of the fabled Nordic second wave. It is contoured with evil but does so with a level of stripped back simplicity. The sound is not packed and instead the shrill guitars and screamed vocals have space to breathe. A stunningly good example of potent powerful full pelt Black Metal. 

Remember the name. This is the next break-out act. The next band to emerge out of the primordial soup of extreme metal and drag their rotting carcass into the mainstream. The cheer that welcomed their announcement for next year’s bloodstock was louder than for any other band. This is a bruising heavyweight album full of slow incisive riffs that rip through the soul. It realises that metal is at its best when everything is stripped back and just the essential ingredients remain. It is intrusive, aggressive and brims with nihilistic intent. Pure heaviness distilled into an anti-establishmentarian attitude that appeals to the disfranchised masses. This is the sound of the downtrodden and the pissed off and they are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

As you can guess Tarot is a very metal band name. Therefore there are an awful lot of Tarots doing the business. This Tarot are not the legendary Fins and instead a fairly newly incarnated bunch of Australians. However, you would be fooled into thinking this was a lost 70’s classic as its fundamental retro in its feel and style. Their ravishing of the 70’s gimmick box is both reverential and respectful. The album is packed full of chugging guitars and fiercely melodic vocals. Wonderfully old-fashioned and immaculately rendered in its adherence to the old ways.

It is like these two should always be paired together. The fifth Lucifer album segways astonishingly well from the 70’s obsessed guitar aerobics of Tarot. This is an immaculately beautiful album that brims with sensual promise. Johanna Sadonis acts as a seductive siren enticing the listener into her musical harem. Again, it is a wonderfully accurate reproduction of the hedonistic seventies sound. Rich in warmth and vigour. The choruses are riddled with forbidden temptation and feel authentic and elegant. A wonderful escape back to a simpler time.

Our second slice of Indie. This is The Fall repackaged for the modern era. It is angular, non-linear and wears its lo-fi tendencies on its sleeve. At times it feels like Mark E. Smith fronting Da La Soul, but it then metamorphoses in front of your very ears into something else. It knows its musical history but also knows how to distort and deconstruct that. It plays with melody, always remaining just out of reach of what could be viewed as commercial. As soon as it gets too comfortable with harmonious sounds it retreats back to the off-kilter. This is how I want modern indie to sound, independent and deeply personal.

Sinistro produce sexy doom. They may be now missing their sensuality incarnate lead singer Johanna Sadonis but Sinistro still know how to create sexually provocative metal. It brims with sensuality and newcomer Priscila Da Costa’s voice wonderfully entwines with the slow melodious riffs.

Sixth studio album for probably one of the finest live acts currently stomping through the circuit. Imagine if Motorhead made a black metal album. It would sound like this. Minimal, messy and full of vibrant life. A cacophony of violent intent that feels so wonderful alive and alluring. In your face dirty metal at its best.

Liverpool has never really had a metal scene and certainly no stand out metal acts outside of the world-conquering Carcass. There has been splutterings of life but usually it has ended up snuffed out. Ogun showed that there was stirrings of something special in the early noughties, but real life got in the way before they could make any serious headway or at the very least release anything of note. Time was eked out as karaoke rock act for hire Rockzilla but there was still a veritable itch to scratch. The beast was resurrected in 2022 and suddenly, twenty-two years after they first started making waves on Merseyside we have a Bonafide debut album.

It is an absolute dozer. Thrash but perfected for a more refined crowd. Time is the best teacher and time has taught them how to create immaculate riffs reinforced with steel. Every note is here for a reason. All the fat has been trimmed. Instead we have a slim concise album that understands instinctively how good songs work. The choruses are strident enough to feel voluminous but have a swagger and self-belief that makes them infectious. Good things come to those who wait and suddenly we have a stunningly good Liverpudlian metal album.

Nails made a name for themselves last decade as a triad of almighty accelerated noise. They took the term unlistenable and absolutely inhabited it. This is their first record since they returned from their 2016 hiatus. Those who reveal in their nihilistic noise will be pleased to know that nothing has changed. It is still 101 miles an hour hurtle through impenetrable dirge. The guitars scream, the vocals scream the whole thing is like sticking your head into a food processor. But this is extraordinarily enticing because of its sheer brutality. It is brimming with kinetic and vital energy and its sense of almighty purpose just burns out of it. Noise but bloody lovely noise.

This is a posthumous release as the two creative forces behind this band have now sadly died. It is based on the music that Gared O’Donell created in the months leading up to his death from esophageal cancer in 2021. In the intervening years the remaining members of the band have lovingly taken the raw recordings and honed them into a state for release.

But don’t expect “Do You Still Love Me?” to be filled with maudlin self-reflection. Gared always believed in creating difficult but fulfilling music that circumnavigated genres and existed firmly in its own universe. His final creative endeavours stay firmly within those parameters. This is a sophisticated punk album that mixes melody with obsequious noise. Whilst these are the last testaments of a dying man it is still full of life and shows that Gared enjoyed playing with conventions right up until the end.

More Black Metal. This iteration of the genre begins to exhibit some of those features we spoke of before. Whilst “Ethos” is distinctly strident in its heaviness, it brings into play a folky edge that gives the tempo an almost jolly swagger. It’s also effortlessly big in its sound. It avoids Black Metal's usual penchant to be under produced and instead it is very slick in its grandiose production and windscreen presentation. Still nihilistically nasty this is nihilism with both a Hollywood budget and aspirations.

We have had one posthumous release, but this is the final word in final records. By the time this was released, there was nobody left. This is the first MC5 album in 53 years and definitively their last, as the two remaining members alive (Wayne Krammer and Dennis Thompson) both sadly passed away soon after its completion.

For a band with the legacy and historical importance of the MC5, “Heavy Lifting” is actually a fitting swan song. Any notion of it being derivative or safe are swept away when you take into account that MC5 invented garage rock. Without them there is no Stooges and Iggy, no Ramones and therefore no Punk. This album shows simultaneously that everything has changed in 53 years and nothing has changed. It is essentially an eye-spy spotter’s guide to everything musically that they have influenced or been the catalyst for. 

It is an unrepentant rock n’ roll record, that revels in the wonder of soaring guitar, thumping bass and pounding drum. It builds upon their previous two records by showing that they have indeed listened to everything that their year zero has begot. Eclectic, but cohesive enough to feel like a linear whole as opposed to a complication. A fitting full stop to one of the most important bands ever.

Self-described as a spirited manifesto for artistic freedom as well as a grand declaration of war against nostalgic stagnation, this is indeed an oddity of a release. They have already carved a formidable signature into Nordic black metal folklore by being what Gaahl did first before he was conscripted into Gorgoroth. They have never formally dissolved, instead, they have simmered along in the background, reanimated sporadically when Gaahl felt the creative itch.

The point about declaring war on nostalgia is very real here as this is a complete side step away from where the band began. Instead, we get dark avant-garde project that owes as much to free-form jazz as it does to black metal. It is stunningly original and fiercely non-linear. It wanders off into cul-de-sacs of experimental prog that feel drawn from edges of early Genesis, with added bile and bite. Head scratchingly odd but surprisingly intriguing and intoxicating it is one of those records you will be in unpackaging for a long time to come.

Another non-metal entry. “Seldom Seen Kid” and that bloody song will always be an albatross for the arena bothering Mancunian miserabilists. It was a zeitgeist that launched a thousand montages and made Guy Garvey an unlikely household name and national treasure.

They have diligently continued making records (some better than others) but have always struggled with where they go next musically and how far they stray from that anthemic style that become their payday. With “Audio Vertigo” they have put their big boy pants on and tried to do something different.

This is a funk album, it shakes its booty and has a rhythmic afro-beat feel to it. It seems happy to play with convention and dispense with a reliance on communal garden time signatures. Guy seems intent on throwing off his shackles of respectability and his lyrics are more subversive and dryly funny than they have been in years. Rather than a return to form or past glories this is a distinctly left-hand turn into unknown pastures and the sound of band not yet ready to become a nostalgia machine churning out the hit.

This is intrinsically vital noise pop from Norway. It builds from a foundation of black and roll, but does so with a heavy dose of youthful vigour. Its beauty is its raw untapped energy. A feeling of unashamed joy and vigour just burns from the record. It feels more alive and real than probably any other record on this list. An unashamedly hedonistic antidote to everything that is drab and dreary in this world.

Bleak but beautiful highly intelligent doom from Canada. This a tender but desolate emotionally wrought record that is stunning in its procession and its prose. It just works magnificently, and the songs build in crescendos of forlorn glory. It is understated and at times ferociously minimal, but there is so much wonder in its forsaken and austere manner.

A wonderfully expansive album from Belgium. This mixes post rock with doom creating a pleasant and all-consuming noise that is rich in texture and variation. There is a lot going on across its eight tracks and it is consciously cut in two, buffered by the self explanatory titled ‘Interlude’. The first part sounds massive, interspersed with gigantic hocks and colossal vocals. The latter section is much more self-reflective and slight and feels like a descension into a bleak bottomless hole. Still astonishingly intricate it is noticeably more dark and maudlin than the start of the record. Astonishing album.

It is instrumental self-indulgence time. There are just two tracks here (so far so prog) and this is a highly convoluted journey through multiple musical soundscapes. It is a constantly replicating kaleidoscope of sound that soundtracks an unmade post-apocalyptic movie. That idea that this accompanies a cinematic narrative allows them to drastically play with the conventions of song structure. What you end up with is swirling cloud of big riffs, scuzzy bass and endlessly fluctuating pace. Big, inventive and thoroughly immersive.

A hidden Mancunian gem, Winterfylleth are without doubt this country’s premier Black Metal act (Cradle of Filth don’t count, what they are doing stopped being Black Metal years ago). They strip away all the malignant doom and satanic pantomime in order to reinvent Black Metal as a strident storytelling tool connecting us with the soul of Albion and our naturalistic roots. They link back to British folklore and the protection of our natural heritage.

In the past, they have brought in dark maudlin folk but with “The Imperious Horizon” they have taken a more anthemic approach and this is their most wide-screen and cinematic record to date. It sweeps in majestic grandeur and reeks of both confidence and splendour. Yes, the guitars still pulsate and the vocals still screech but this is ultimately highly accessible black metal, opening up its charred gates and letting the songs frizzle with opportunity.

This is a simultaneously complex but also wonderfully accessible album that brims with ideas. It is inventive and sumptuously forward-thinking. It weaves a tapestry of off-kilter sonic ideas that convene together to create a post-rock sound that has both heft and grand melodicnness. It is an album that feels as if oceans of thought went into its creation. Every note is meticulously placed and every shift in tone precision engineered. Gloriously dense but also astonishingly rendered.