Aborym - With No Human Intervention

Country: Italy | Genre: Industrial Black Metal | Label: Code666 Records

Don't let the purists tell you that this landmark album is a culture clash. 'With No Human Intervention' harnesses the brooding raw futurism of Thorns and augments it with psychedelic deviance, cryptic structures and dark post-techno electronica, peerlessly. Abundantly riffy, massive in delivery and consistently prickly whether executed via human or machine, the album is a turbulent tour through vibrant new solar systems via harsh abyssal voids. Attila Csihar is the chillingly supreme narrator that reminds you that your pathetic existence is but a transient glitch in a chaotic and doomed cosmos. (Mike)

Blut aus Nord - The Work Which Transforms God

Country: France | Genre: Industrial Black Metal | Label: Appease Me/Candlelight Records

Twisted and nightmarish, The Work Which Transforms God breaks down the barriers of meaning and lays bare the churning chaos that lies hidden just beneath the surface of how we experience reality. Peel away the fragile veils which mercifully cloak our sight from truth and a void is revealed. God is the absence of meaning, truth only an endless spiral of referents eternally pointed towards each other. The Work... with its twisted guitars, cold, mechanical drum machine and the insanely howling vocals amidst sheets of screeching noise and throbbing ambience captures the essence of post-modernity like no other metal album I know of. This is the soundtrack of modern man, finding an endless mirrored image where they hoped to see God or Truth, the image of themselves gazing back from the abyss of meaning, which is itself just another corridor in the eternal labyrinth of text comprising all human thought. (Alex)

Buried at Sea - Migration

Country: USA | Genre: Extreme Doom | Label: Original Sound Recordings

Released by a small label and more or less out of print since, Migration is the greatest extreme doom album many fans of the genre have never had the (mis)fortune to hear.  The three long, untitled dirges of post-Towers, post-Dopethrone droning sludge doom that comprise Migration, did not reinvent the style, but they did contain an aural denisty only hinted at by other similar bands.  The guitars roar like jet engines straining during slow-motion take offs, the drums are chest-crushing doom hammers and the bass is bowel-loosening and headache inducing: those elements coalesce into sonic walls that grow to near deafing before crumbling suddenly into creeping atmospheric doom.  When that relative quietude erupts into lumbering, staggering grooves that sound like Eyehategod played at 16 RPM, the ferocity is undeniable.  Buried At Sea's heaviness is on par with almost anything ever seen in the realm of heavy metal: it's just too bad more people haven't had the chance to experience this shrieking doom beast, because it belongs in the Extreme Doom canon. (Tim)

Fanisk - Noontide

Country: USA | Genre: Symphonic Black Metal | Label: Firehand Forge/Unholy Records

At once glorious and unsettling, Noontide is in my estimation the best symphonic black metal album released to date. Foregoing the frivolity and pomposity that plagues many practitioners of this sub-style, Fanisk present on their sophomore album a picture of fascism triumphant, severe, proud and tyrannical. One can disagree with their philosophy, but it does wonders for the atmosphere, which is oppressive and militaristic, maintained without missing a beat for over an hour. This is stupendously well-composed music, showing a clear understanding of both classical music and black metal, fusing the two music styles without ever compromising either of them. (Alex)

Gorgasm - Masticate To Dominate

Country: USA | Genre: Brutal Death Metal | Label: Unique Leader Records

To think I gave this a wide birth to begin with! The preceding mini-album Bleeding Profusely had the talents of Dave Culross behind the kit - how could the band continue, let alone improve, when no longer having the man who powered Despise the Sun? More to the point, how could I be so short sighted? With Masticate to Dominate, Gorgasm not only kicked the shit out of their previous work but did so to that of the competition too! The album showed an increased savagery and focus, not losing their quasi-neo-classical excursions but sharpening the tendency for relative relief from the incessant shifts in Blasts and brutal riffing. For once in a genre all too often pre-occupied with the technicality and the brutality, the band's deployment of their traits are done so in the tightest of song arrangements. It aint all high falutin' musicality, oh no and the violence of the lyrics and samples keeps the aesthetic grounded, and the Gore in Gorgasm. This is a beast of an album, entirely immune to the criticisms of the genre to which is adheres. (Ewan)

Hate Forest - Battlefields

Country: Ukraine | Genre: Black Metal | Label: Supernal Music

Most of Hate Forest's discography is of a post-Transilvanian Hunger ambient black metal kind, including Purity which was released almost simultaneously with Battlefields. Battlefields on the other hand sets itself apart from both previous Hate Forest albums as well as most black metal as such by subtly fusing the droning, ancient black metal sound with neo-folk and martial industrial. Thunderous percussion and melancholy Ukrainian folk riffs with the utterly disturbing twists Hate Forest are known for characterise this short but sweet testament to Ukraine's troubled past. I could do without the old women laments that serve as interludes, but the powerful black metal portion of this album more than makes up for it. (Alex)

Intestine Baalism - Banquet in the Darkness

Country: Japan | Genre: Death Metal | Label: Blackend Records

Playing a variation of Swedish death metal with occasional black metal-esque vocals and tremolo-ed riffing, Intestine Baalism demonstrate a delicate juxtaposition between melodic audacity and a punishing death metal aesthetic. The seamless blend of death metal styles in a melodic death context is perfected on Banquet in the Darkness, the Japanese group's second record. While earlier work and the subsequent Ultimate Instinct are noteworthy for various reasons, it was Banquet in the Darkness where the band not only found their feet, but streamlined an almost flawless combination of stark, old school flavoured death metal with overt melodic tones. Such guttural vocal work combined with simple yet reticent compositional depth marks Banquet in the Darkness as a unique and unforgettable record. And how can anything be written about this band without mention of the album's title track, arguably the greatest melodic death metal song ever written?. An unwavering force in the death metal underground, Intestine Baalism sits atop a very much deserved cult status – Banquet in the Darkness propagates this to no end. (Berkay)

Pavor - Furioso

Country: Germany | Genre: Technical Death Metal | Label: Self Released

Technical death metal: is there any point in giving finger exercises, noodling, wankery and, when you get right down to it, a bunch of techniques their own sub-genre? After all, music is not about the worship of technique to the exclusion of all else but the communication of an essence that is eternal in nature with the help of various musical techniques. Enter Pavor, and specifically, Furioso! Considering thousands of years of human musical history and its various forms, Pavor create fine but not groundbreaking musical structures. What do they offer? You want complexity and direction in song writing, you got it. A heavy sense of atmosphere and real feeling? Check. Outstanding musicianship on all counts that doesn't forget its true goal is to contribute to good songs? Of course. That's the point of this monster. Oh, and the bass in relation to the rest of the band should be understood thus: it's like your insane friend who pulls off a bank heist when the rest of you are home watching a movie. What more do you want? (Hamano)

Rompeprop - Hellcock's Pornflakes

Country: Netherlands | Genre: Pornogrind | Label: Bizarre Leprous

When the glorious, gelatinous jet of Pornogrind called Rompeprop first spurted heavily all over onto the scene, similarly themed goregrooving outfits had long since flopped. Cock and Ball Torture had failed to deliver the correct bulging brown-paper wrapped package of gorified bawdiness on the unspeakably bland Egoleech release, Mucupurulent got stuck into a greyish mid-paced swamp of samey riffage, and Gut disappered somewhere, probably to cook up the cringeworthy claptrap heard on the infamous Cumback cackfest! Rompeprop's first release, the irresistable little aural-slophole known as Menstrual Stomphulk, acted as the fluffer for Hellcock's Pornflakes. A decadent cavalcade of balls-out pornogroove, instant arse-wiggle rhythms, utterly ri-thick-ulous bottom end, and a hot slurry of hilarious vox, pitchshifted to perfection! Thematically, Hellcock's Pornflakes is certainly concerned with the sillier side of sick and sordid; what with tracks about suckable confectionary made out of vaginal mucilage (Pussy Juice Chupa Chup) and being buried alive in a casket that has a cold (Coffin' Coffin)! When they popped up in the genre, Rompeprop definitely gave it a steel toecapped brothel-creeper up the arse! (Baz)

Sigrblot - Blodsband (Blood Religion Manifest)

Country: Sweden | Genre: Black Metal | Label: Nordiska Förlaget

Sigrblot package folk-inflected black metal in an uptempo, power chord-heavy RAC framework. The folk elements are at once tasteful & subtle and more than simply ornate, from the textural juxtaposition (as opposed to contrast to the metal) of lush acoustics to the occasional polka scales. The main point of attention is of course the provocative lyrics, which carry frightening philosophical gravity and eloquence, condemning Western imperialism & multiculturalism (or at least the artistic homogeneity and materialism associated with these concepts), and--I'm just shittin' you, these guys are basically just xenophobic fucks. "Racialism" (instead of the less nice sounding "racism") is a funny word that crypto-NS metal bands like Sigrblot are beginning to adopt in description of their ideologies in a bid for maturity, but it's not hard to read between the lines and see what they really represent when they use silly phrases like "the Nordic essence" and "... point of no return for the white race."

STILL, bone-headed tribalism aside, Blodsband is very pleasant surprise from a country where most big black metal bands nowadays are either norsecore or Dissection clones, and it redeems itself philosophically with music that transcends the futility of its ideals. (Travis)

Skyforger - Perkonkalve (Thunderforge)

Country: Latvia | Genre: Pagan Metal | Label: Folter Records

Starting out as gnarly pagan black metal, Skyforger slowly transitioned into a more heavy metal based pagan band, with Thunderforge for all intents and purposes completing the transformation. Crushingly heavy riffs and stomping drums careen from the speakers, like a horde of Latvian warriors descending upon the wretched adherents of Christ. Make no mistake about it, even though the tremolo riffs have largely made way for heavy hooks and classical metal fretboard fireworks, this is still unabashedly extreme metal with a blackened heathen heart. (Alex)

The Lord Weird Slough Feg - Traveller/Hammers of Misfortune - The August Engine

Country: USA | Genre: Heavy Metal | Label: Dragonheart/Cruz del Sur

The Lord Weird Slough Feg and Hammers of Misfortune are two separate bands once unified by the team of John Cobbett and Mike Scalzi.  The fact these two guitarists were in both bands resulted in a surprising amount of carryover from one band to the other - hence the decision to include both albums as only a single entry on this list.  Both albums featured Cobbett and Scalzi sizzling through flying riffs and NWOBHM-style harmonies and traded solos, but Traveller, a science fiction-based concept album, was the truer example of the style as The August Engine had the duo take a slightly more subdued approach that played up the folk and the doom.  These two albums are arguably the pinnacle of both catalogs and marked the last album before a distinct stylistic shift in both bands with Slough Feg opting for a stripped down approach on Atavism and Hammers of Misfortune shifting towards a proto-metal sound on The Locust Years. (King)