Julia’s Top 20 Metal Albums of 2021
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A QUICK FAQ BEFORE THE ETERNAL WORM DEVOURS MEXICALI
Q: Who are you? A: I’m Julia.
Q: Why should I trust you? A: One, I listen to more metal than Satan. Two, no one is paying me to convince you Poppy is good.
Q: Why twenty? A: That’s as many albums as I loved this year.
Q: In what order? A: Alphabetical.
JULIA’S TOP 20 METAL ALBUMS OF 2021
Aenigmatum — Deconsecrate — 20 Buck Spin
(Bassy, cinematic death.)
Aenigmatum is the latest band to offer 20 Buck Spin a now label-trademark slice of cinematic death metal. Doomed landscapes, proggy takeoffs, a bass as starry as it is portentous — for all its crescendoing beauty, Deconsecrate opens brutally and closes the same. Here is a masterstroke of complete storytelling.
Antichrist Siege Machine — Purifying Blade — Profound Lore Records
(Do I have to tell you this is war metal?)
War metal is the most delightfully mask-off heavy subgenre: nowhere else will you find a band called ‘Antichrist Siege Machine’. Purifying Blade, their latest and longest offering, is 29 minutes of pure Christophobia. Any band can take glamour shots holding assault rifles; what makes Antichrist Siege Machine a standout act is their ability to control their tank-tread relentlessness, to not bowl over the listener, but recruit us for their cause.
Archspire — Bleed the Future — Season of Mist
(The best tech-death around.)
Not only are Archspire the most technically proficient band in a genre populated exclusively by hardware sorcerers, they are also its best songwriters. Known for claiming inspirations as varied as Mozart and Tech N9ne, Bleed the Future demonstrates Archspire can do whatever the hell they want, by ever, ever so slightly paring back the technicality in favor of nose-breaking slams and chugs. The future is dead, and Archspire have claimed the crown off its corpse.
The Body — I’ve Seen All I Need To See — Thrill Jockey
(Blown out, sludgy noise.)
The Body have collaborated with everyone from the Assembly of Light Choir to The Haxan Cloak, modeled albums after Taylor Swift and The Weeknd. I’ve Seen All I Need To See, indeed, abandons innovation in favor of obsessively refined monomania. Sheer amplifier volume turns the guitar (presumably) into the sound of a landslide, crushing the shrieking vocals underneath. At top volume, it’s hard to even breathe through this album. The closest thing to safe haven amidst the rubble is a reading of Douglas Dunn’s The Kaleidoscope: ‘grief wrongs us so’. In trimming their sound to its core, The Body touch upon a sorrow so singular as to be universal.
Cannibal Corpse — Violence Unimagined — Metal Blade
(No introduction required.)
Cannibal Corpse is the rare best-selling act that refuses to languish on its laurels. To this effect, they’ve recruited longtime honorary sixth bandmember Erik Rutan as composer and lead guitarist. The interplay between Rutan’s insistent melody and Cannibal Corpse’s ever-rumbling low end makes Violence Unimagined a special entry in Cannibal Corpse’s canon. If Corpsegrinder’s delivery remains unchanged, it’s because there is nothing left for him to improve. Jovial, massive, and with an instantly recognizable rhythm, his name evokes the violent glee of a death metal Santa Claus, serving freshly rotten meat and potatoes for anthropophages worldwide.
Cerebral Rot — Excretion of Mortality — 20 Buck Spin
(Grossout death.)
Excretion of Mortality does in fact sound like it was recorded in Lucifer’s toilet, a churn of mucous vocals, acrid guitars and plosive, over-loud drums. This is the band so dedicated to out-stinking themselves they’ve gone and coined the neologism ‘disgustulent’ for the album’s closer. If death metal is an athletic effort to outdo your predecessors, then Cerebral Rot takes this year’s gold in Grotesquerie.
Drawn and Quartered — Congregation Pestilence — Krucyator Productions
(Old school death goodness, said the 25 year old.)
Drawn and Quartered is the kind of death metal that makes me say ‘they don’t make them like this anymore’ — whereupon I discover they’ve been playing for longer than I’ve been alive. Congregation Pestilence, their eighth (!!) full-length, is an unambiguous triumph as only mega-veterans can achieve. Here are no pretensions, no melodic allowances, no aspirations other than expert breakage of the listener’s neck. Turn it up and let death metal’s most enduring secret brutalize you.
Dungeon Serpent — World of Sorrows — Nameless Grave Records
(Majestically crumbling melodeath.)
A stock scene in gentleman-scholar action cinema: our hero’s tomb-raiding triggers an ancient trap, prompting the whole mausoleum to collapse around their ears. The escape scene that follows is so frantic, one hardly has the time to consider the immemorial architecture lost in a few minutes of shaky cam. In World of Sorrows, Dungeon Serpent captures both adrenaline and majesty, the instantaneous-yet-meditative of an ancient column crumbling into the sea. The title track alone covers a breadth of emotion one might think reserved for orchestral pieces, all while avoiding the temptations of symphonic arrangement, and without vocals, to boot. World of Sorrows is the sound of human history.
Enforced — Kill Grid — Century Media Records
(“Pure crossover death”.)
Enforced harkens to the punk-inflected birth days of thrashing death metal, when horror stories and protest were one and the same. Distrust anyone who comes out of “Beneath Me” and “Malignance” without acute headbanging aches. “Blood Ribbon”’s breakdown dances around an instant-pit-generator riff, flourishes emerging only to be reabsorbed by the primeval pull. Though modern metalheads won’t be surprised when the title track collapses into ambient noise, Kill Grid is much more than a page ripped from the contemporary crossover playbook. Enforced hails past and present in search of a future where thrash has won at last.
Eyehategod — A History of Nomadic Behavior — Century Media Records
(Stripped-down, bluesy sludge.)
Three years ago, Eyehaetegod’s legendary self-destruction cost frontman Mike IX Williams a liver. A History of Nomadic Behavior is his all-American hangover. Jimmy Bower, equally endurant original guitarist, leans on the bluesier side, leaving space for the newly precise vocals. Even the feedback is clearer, occasionally playing the role of a warped saxophone. Sludge metal’s pioneers close out their latest record by infusing Narcan lucidity on a refrain that hasn’t aged a second since their ’90s oeuvre: kill your boss, every day.
Gatecreeper — An Unexpected Reality — Closed Casket Activities
(Lightning-fast grind, then deathly slow doom.)
An Unexpected Reality: dropped within a day of its announcement, shifting away from Gatecreeper’s characteristic deathened hardcore, this surprise release is a response to a year-plus of soured expectations. Six minutes of blast beats pave the way for “Emptiness”, the mammoth dirge comprising the entirety of the B-side. Nearly doubling the front ‘half’ at eleven minutes, “Emptiness” is a death-doom masterclass. Vocalist Chase Mason, at his mightiest on this EP, has stated that Gatecreeper looks to return to ‘stadium death metal’ on upcoming material. One can only expect that this foray portends an injection of fresh blood for one of death metal’s fastest climbers.
Gold Spire — Gold Spire — N/A
(Death metal is jazz is death metal.)
There’s a saxophone on this album. Get back here, I’m not done talking. Death metal has found inspiration in jazz for decades, from progressive fusions to cruel atonality. Gold Spire aren’t the first or last band to draw the logical conclusion, but, with this eponymous debut, they’re already one of the best. Gold Spire is beautiful as a flower blooming on a corpse; when the sax rolls in, smooth and doomy all at once, it’s like the camera dollying out to reveal an endless vista of floral, reeking death. This is one for immersive solo listening.
Inoculation — Celestial Putridity — Maggot Stomp
(Primitech-death.)
Since its foundation, Maggot Stomp has earned cult status as premium purveyors of ‘caveman shit’ death metal. Inoculation pushes the label’s boundaries with a marriage of old school primitivity and new school technicality, single-guitar setup challenging both conventions at once. Celestial Putridity is a vivisection for a ‘cosmic death metal’ rote with psychedelia and Timeghoul worship, all pummeling, blast beats, and the admiration of a band whose members play with delighted awe for each other’s skill.
Oxygen Destroyer — Sinister Monstrosities Spawned By the Unfathomable Ignorance of Humankind — Redefining Darkness Records
(Atomic-breath-deathly black/thrash.)
Oxygen Destroyer’s mouthful of a sophomore album is, like the kaiju it pays tribute to, dedicated to wrecking every motherfucking thing around it. Except for the film samples, there’s not one second on this album where either the string section or the drums (or, most often, both) are not being played at smashing velocity. What a fitting album for our second year of global contagion: Sinister Monstrosities Spawned etc etc should not be played within six feet of another human being, for fear of mutually assured limb-ripping.
Portal — Avow — Profound Lore Records
(Sleep paralysis hallucination metal.)
Portal are a rapture: an ahuman mythos revealed to the band in chthonic fits, proselytized via experimental death metal. Like being trapped on the cover’s oubliette, opener “Catafalque” is so oppressive, so totalizing, that ten minutes become an eternity of night terrors. “Offune” is half the length and twice the nightmare, a mass of guitars like watching the insects under your skin grow. In every way the opposite of 2017’s electroshock ION, Avow and its noise companion Hagbulbia are another step into a spiral of madness that Portal has no choice but to explore.
Spectral Wound — A Diabolic Thirst — Profound Lore Records
(Classic, clear-production meloblack.)
“Imperial Saison Noire”, the opener to Spectral Wound’s second album, meets the ‘old-school’ challenge with glee: yes, you can still compose the bulk of a song around a single riff, provided it’s this good. Like their predecessors, the quintet plays fast, angry and fat-free; like their modern counterparts, their sound is pristine, a towering misery whose individual bricks remain recognizable. Even the album cover puts a hedonistic spin on classic monochrome. A Diabolic Thirst is not just another entry into Profound Lore Records’ storied black metal halls, but a must-listen unto itself.
Steel Bearing Hand — Slay In Hell — Carbonized Records
(Thrashing fantasy violence.)
I struggled for hours to find something pithy to say about Slay in Hell that couldn’t be delivered by its cover art. Steel Bearing Hand plays death/thrash like bards for an undead army, with their eyes on victory and their cloak brooches made of human bone. At times displaying the élan of power metal, Slay in Hell evokes the genreless ’80s, not for any one feature of its distinctly 21st century sound, but for its effortless fusion of everything that’s fun about metal.
Succumb — XXI — The Flenser
(Mystical disso-death.)
Gnosticism, Taoism, ancient Greece and modern pagans: XXI is a comprehensive portrait of human spirituality. Succumb reads from this scripture in mad prophetess vocals, stumbling from verse to verse over a cacophony of dissonant death metal. The band caresses dissolutions into total noise before veering hard for a classic breakdown, a pinch harmonic; like primordial representations of divinity, it would be comforting, were it not agonizing to behold. By the time closer “8 Trigrams” offers a pinch of humanity in the form of war drums, all that’s left to do is pay service to disso-death’s next masters.
Wode — Burn in Many Mirrors — 20 Buck Spin
(Blackened everything.)
After 50 years of metal, ‘genre-bending’ has become a genre unto itself. Wode smash into this new millennium sound at unpretentious breakneck. “Lunar Madness” opens Burn in Many Mirrors like a funeral racecar; “Sulphuric Glow” hurtles from melodic-black to Azagthoth paroxysms with the martial determinacy of Dvorak. The string section finally unleashes its prog sensibilities on “Streams of Rapture”, a three-part, nine-minute closer springboarding off synths reminiscent of the John Carpenter soundtracks that inspired extreme metal’s infancy. On their third LP, Wode consolidate the blackened-everything movement by positioning themselves as its spearhead.
200 Stab Wounds — Slave to the Scalpel — Maggot Stomp
(Death metal, no adjectives.)
The beauty of death metal: you needn’t reinvent the wheel, as proven by 200 Stab Wounds’ stone-age verve. Simplicity is their vehicle for naked creativity, from duosyllabic song names (what the sewer fuck is a “Skin Milk”?) to the slaughterhouse mix. And, despite their straightforwardness, it’s hard to box them into sub-subgenres and ‘For Fans Of’ descriptors, the way one might do to more cerebral bands. Are they slam? Sometimes. Old-school? Mostly. What they are is undemanding and headbanging, and still developing: the fact that Slave to the Scalpel will not be their best record should not be a turn-off, but an invitation to get in on the fun now.
