I had the longest professional break this year that I’ve had in six years, the last one being the six months just prior to starting grad school. I was initially expecting just a few months over the summer as is the norm for teachers like myself. But my break was extended due to a scheduling realignment with the program that I created, instruct, and help manage. I took the opportunity to do almost no professional work whatsoever for almost five months. For the three months I was home I played disc golf and pickleball; went biking and hiking; lifted weights and did yoga; and hung out with and visited friends.
It felt liberating in more ways than one. I was relegated to staying inside for most of the academic year because of the pandemic and the resulting necessity of working from home. Over the summer, I had a difficult time staying at home. In fact, it made me feel anxious if I spent too much time at home during the day. I just needed to get outside. But, the time away from work also felt liberating because it gave me perspective. My identity and sense of self-worth have been so tied with my profession that it took an extended break to regain respect for a healthy work-life balance. I realized I was burned out. And I really don’t know if I’ve fully bounced back quite yet. But, like always, music has been there for me during the ups and downs over the last year.
Music has reliably been there for me, but my tastes sure have surprised me. I was perhaps most surprised to see “ambient” as my third most-listened-to genre in my 2021 Wrapped via Spotify. Sure, I sometimes listen to ambient while working — but enough to be my third most-listened-to genre?! Maybe that is also reflective of my need to seek solace and relax after such a crazy couple of years. Besides that surprise, I’ve also listened to a lot more avant-garde music than I have in the past: from the droning krautrock of Hypnodrone Ensemble to the nebulous and fluttering minimal dub-techno of Topdown Dialectic to the electro-acoustic sound textures of yes/and. I think that my explorations into more avant-garde styles have forced me to be more critical of metal bands that rigidly follow genre tropes instead of pushing boundaries.
OK, I know what you’re thinking. I’m absolutely aware that this could be the cynical, cantankerous, and even pretentious ramblings of a 36-year-old metalhead who has been listening to the genre for about 25 years. But if I look at my top 10 lists over just the last two years, I see innovative, forward-thinking releases like Mestarin kynsi, Alphaville, and Sulphur English — releases in which the bands that authored them have unique musical palettes that make lazy labeling a real chore. There were also releases by bands who may reliably fall into one subgenre of metal but who have an instantly recognizable musical identity. Releases that have been in my top 10 lists over the last couple of years like No One Knows What The Dead Think and Pollinator fit into this category.
While there are still great artists and albums that received deserved attention this year in the realms of OSDM, lo-fi second-wave-inspired kvlt black metal, and other styles, it’s the bands pushing boundaries and throwing away the rulebooks that I am most interested in.
I know I’ve mentioned this in my other year-end lists, but I am constantly mining for releases that are pushing boundaries in metal, or, at the very least, are doing an absolutely ace job of writing interesting and memorable songs within a clearly defined subgenre. When I look over my top 10 for this year, those are the two categories I think you will see.
Metal
10. Sea Mosquito – Fire, Magic & Venom
Just like with my complaint about chaotic math metal and mathcore, I similarly have an issue with psychedelic black metal. My complaint is that bands who typically embrace the psychedelic black metal label lay claim to the label as soon as they start adding considerable delays to the guitars and/or vocals. Really? Is that all it takes? No, you’re just a black metal band with heavy delay effects.
However, with Fire, Magic & Venom, Sea Mosquito utilizes droning, hypnotic riffs and beats that gradually and incrementally shift. During just the first few minutes, the listener is subjected to unsettling ambient noises buried in the mix, throat singing, and a repetitive riff that contracts and expands in complexity. This concoction continues to warp and weave through the listener’s cerebral cortex as the song flows perfectly until the very end – more than possibly any other long metal song I’ve ever heard. There is, for example, no ambient transition as the song awkwardly stumbles to the next riff – everything flows seamlessly as layers and intensity are added and removed. Even the saxophone (which was surprising, don’t get me wrong) fits much better into the epic track than saxophone in 99.9% of other metal songs in which it is used.
Since this release is just one 20-minute track, I debated whether to include this in my top 10 or not. However, Fire, Magic & Venom is quite literally the best psychedelic black metal I’ve heard this side of Oranssi Pazuzu in quite some time.
9. Plebeian Grandstand – Rein ne suffit
I feel like there is at least one album every year that I think is brilliant, but at the same is so dense, that I have trouble giving it repeated spins. Rein ne suffit is definitely one of those albums (Imperative Imperceptible Impulse by Ad Nauseam is another one of those albums for me for 2021, but it’s in my “honorable mentions”).
Plebeian Grandstand‘s last album, 2016’s False Highs, True Lows, was a decent example of angular, hardcore-inspired post-black metal. However, I always thought that the guitars on that album were too unfocused as they seemed to aimlessly wander from one dissonant arpeggiation to another. This is still moderately an issue with Rein ne suffit, but Plebeian Grandstand‘s overall sound is much more focused while, at the same time, they have expanded their sound into a dense, at times impenetrable, wall of sound. Sure, there is still some “wandering”, but Rein ne suffit has many more discernible riffs, which, when coupled with the inhuman frenetic drumming, slice and pummel the listener into submission.
But that’s not all! Besides sharpening and strengthening their musical claws, the band has also added a hefty dose of confrontational industrial noise throughout the album. This addition to their already intense sound makes Rein ne suffit one of the most intense, anxious, yet enjoyable albums of the year.
8. Old Nick – Iam Vampire Castle
Arguably, there is no one doing a better job at playing with the tropes of black metal than Old Nick. And, honestly, what a breath of fresh air.
Casting off the self-seriousness of black metal, Old Nick writes incredibly goofy, catchy, and campy black metal tracks that, according to Old Nick himself, are essentially written as they are recorded. Many of the songs bounce and romp with a childish-like wonder and naivete. Truly, the only points of comparison I can muster are the French fairy lords themselves Nuit Noire as well as Finnish goofballs Finntroll. But even then, Old Nick is a different black metal beast altogether.
Most notably the Casio-like synth sounds that sharply punctuate the rhythmic stomp of the verses and glide through the surprisingly deft transitions are often reminiscent of Mr. Bungle‘s general irreverence. All the while, the guitars and drums elect to keep things as simple as possible with straightforwardly played power chords and basic 4/4 rhythms with quarter notes alternating between the bass drum and snare, respectively. In fact, if the vocals and synths were removed, this might just be some really low-effort pop-punk. It might be surprising to some, but that’s the charm of it all.
While most people seemed to prefer his other 2021 full-length A New Generation of Vampiric Conspiracies, Iam Vampire Castle was the first Old Nick album I heard in full as well as the release that really struck a Casio chord (tee hee hee) with me. Perhaps it has to do with Iam Vampire Castle having the better production value, but whatever the case, Old Nick is one of the best and most refreshing finds for me in metal in 2021.
7. Bewitcher – Cursed Be Thy Kingdom
I knoooow I said I prefer my metal to be boundary-pushing, but this album is just too good. Cursed Be Thy Kingdom takes the best elements of sleazy blackened speed and thrash metal like Midnight and injects it with a healthy dose of 80s glam metal swagger. Songs like “Satanic Magick Attack” sound like Mötley Crüe if they just started getting into black metal via bands like Carpathian Forest and Abbath’s I.
However, this is hardly a retread of early 80s metal bands. The riffs are eerily reminiscent of that time, but there are surprises around every corner. Just when you think “Electric Phantoms” is about to throttle you into the chorus, the guitarist instead busts out a bluesy Kill’em All pentatonic riff before finally leading you into the chorus.
I listened to a lot of kvlt thrash and speed metal this year from the likes of Nekromantheon, Oxygen Destroyer, and others, but Cursed Be Thy Kingdom takes the cake. While the style is very reminiscent of their obvious influences, Bewitcher‘s memorable songwriting and finger-lickin’-good riffs make Cursed Be Thy Kingdom one of my favorite releases this year.
6. Lantlôs – Wildhund
Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like it’s been an awfully long time since any Graduation Day Metal™ has graced my annual top 10 list. If there is an album that deserves this bittersweet recognition this year, it is certainly Wildhund, the long-awaited Lantlôs follow-up to 2014’s Melting Sun.
I’m not sure if it was ever revealed why Markus Siegenhort, the main man behind Lantlôs, waited seven years between 2014’s Melting Sun and 2021’s Wildhund to release a new album, but I would say it almost worth the wait. Knowing Siegenhort’s penchant for having radically different sounding albums, from the jazz-inflected post-black metal of .neon (one of my favorite albums of 2010) to the heavy shoegaze of the aforementioned Melting Sun, most fans should have been expecting a radical change. However, I think most fans wanted Melting Sun, Part Deux. Instead, what we got was a more streamlined and, dare I say, poppier version of the sound on Melting Sun. Imagine a happier Deftones as a starting reference point for the music on Wildhund.
With that said, Siegenhort is no Chino! His robotic autotuned vocals were initially a big turn-off for me, but after a while, I couldn’t help but give my cynical soul up to the sickly sweet, ethereal, and wistful sounds that were emanating out of my speakers.
Wildhund may not be quite what Lantlôs fans (including myself) were expecting from the follow-up to Melting Sun, but I have to say that I’m still quite happy with how it turned out: a perfect summer soundtrack.
5. Sugar Wounds – Calico Dreams
There were quite a few high-quality but minor grindcore releases this year (Purgatory by Razoreater and Socioclast’s self-titled both come to mind). No other 2021 grindcore album can lay claim to being as nearly innovative as Calico Dreams. Grindcore purists would probably sneer at the fact that I’m even referring to Calico Dreams as a grindcore album. Matt Myrtle, the man behind the one-man Sugar Wounds project, would be well to take that as a compliment.
I generally despise the seemingly endless desire for people to categorize innovative musical approaches with ever more complicated micro-genre designations, but grindgaze would be a really good start in describing this sound, thanks to the staff over at Invisible Oranges.
Some bands unsuccessfully mish-mash disparate sounds and styles of music, but on Calico Dreams, Sugar Wounds expertly integrates chorus-drenched shoegaze guitar and synth (?!) and melodies reminiscent of Japanese anime music (a.k.a. anisong) into the grindcore format. While one or two tracks, such as “Combat Wombat”, are more straightforward grindcore songs, tracks like “Calico Dreams” spend very little of their running time indulging grindcore tropes and instead focus on the other aforementioned sounds. However, the integration of all of these contrasting sounds most expertly coalesce on the album’s standout track and album closer “Good Night, Midnight”. There is one part with repeating, semi-melodic motif under grinding drums that recall The Inalienable Dreamless-era Discordance Axis contrasted with wildly prancing synths and washed-out guitar tones in another part. The track ultimately culminates in a wistful but pummeling play on the motif in which it sounds like HUM attempting to play the end of “One” by Metallica.
Like Sunbather by Deafheaven, Calico Dreams strikes a perfect balance between beauty and violence. It makes for the most innovative grindcore albums, and one of the most underrated albums overall, of the entire year.
4. Frontierer – Oxidizer
My main issue with chaotic math metal and mathcore is that the complexity is overbearing and often overshadows everything else. Most math metal and mathcore bands just focus on playing as many randomly disconnected dissonant chords or intervals (hello, minor second!) in as many time signatures as possible. On the other hand, bands like The Dillinger Escape Plan were adept at adding memorable aspects, from crooked melodies to actual straight-up pop choruses, to their dizzying technical complexity. What I’m trying to say is that the mathcore bands I tend to enjoy do employ complexity, but they also have an ear for ways to make songs memorable.
Frontierer is definitely one of these bands that writes memorable…math? One needs to look no further than Oxidizer‘s first track “Heirloom” for a potent concoction of mathematic mayhem: an absolutely pummeling triplet-laden breakdown, a drum’n’bass break that comes out of nowhere, and guitars that use pitch-shifting whammy pedals to that sound more like the scratching of a DJ or lazers out of a sci-fi flick than that of guitarists playing strings. And that’s really illustrative of the entire album. It’s a complete assault on the senses that gives you nary a moment of rest.
But, the reason why this album has stuck with me is that each song has something to latch on to rather than just complete unthinking, unmemorable chaos. Whether it’s slowing things down with the jackhammer rhythms of “This Magnetic Drift” or the epic emotional ending of “/Hope”, each track on Oxidizer gives the listener easily recalled variables to calculate in their heads.
3. Kowloon Walled City – Piecework
Since Kowloon Walled City first came on my radar with their 2012 effort Container Ships, I recognized that their strength was combining a potent, plodding, and pruned mix of sludge, post-metal, and noise rock into an expression of existential anxiety where every note hits like a punch against a brick wall. Just as their main influence Harvey Milk did in ripping every note, every howl from the deepest recesses of their angst-ridden souls, so do Kowloon Walled City.
What Kowloon Walled City has done with Piecework is strip down that sound even further. While many heavy bands avoid silence like the plague, Kowloon Walled City utterly embraces negative space so that the sort of desperation in those massive hits is even more profound. Not only do they let the negative space speak for itself, but the guitars are dialed back so there is only the slightest bit of distortion. But when the guitars are most active in songs like “Oxygen Tent” is when they complement the pummeling rhythms of the bass and drums with angular lines reminiscent of one of my all-time favorites, Kansas City’s Shiner. This allows them to avoid the mediocre trap of a lot of sludge and noise rock that just relies on slowly played power chords. Instead, they allow the clashing tones and the aforementioned negative space to set a mood of uneasiness and dread.
Normally, I’m not one for minimalism in heavy music. Any of my former bandmates can you tell you I’m an infamous maximalist when it comes to the heavy music I write and listen to. But if there is an album that could turn me into a minimalist, it’s Piecework.
2. Autarkh – Form in Motion
I have often been confused by Metal Archives’ seemingly arbitrarily dubbing some bands as acceptably metal, while the blacklist hammer comes down hard on other bands. I have perhaps never been more confused in this respect as when Metal Archives decided to blacklist Autarkh and their 2021 debut album Form in Motion. At the same time, when a band gets banned from Metal Archives, it’s usually a sign that a band is doing something innovative or, at the very least, pushing genre boundaries.
The band consists of two former members of Dodecahedron, a Dutch avant-garde black metal band that released two of my favorite albums of the 2010s, 2012’s self-titled and 2017’s kwintessens. Unsurprisingly, considering that those two former members (Michel Nienhuis and David Luiten) were both guitarists in Dodecahedron, the stylings of the guitars sound the most reminiscent to that band. However, Autarkh has elected to scale back the speed, expand its musical palette, and turn up the groove.
First of all, the band has elected to forego a human drummer. Instead, they have two members who focus solely on electronically producing beats and other sounds (Tijnn Verbruggen is credited with beat and sound design while Joris Bonis is credited with sound synthesis and sound design). Michel Nienhuis is also credited with programming. The groove that I mentioned earlier is perfectly complemented by the lurching industrial beats, such as in “Lost to Sight”.
Second, the band has integrated much more groove into their sound. Whereas so much of Dodecahedron‘s work consisted of intricately tremolo-picked guitars notes and chords, Autarkh add a lot of grooves reminiscent of Meshuggah and djent bands.
I think it’s with the above characteristics that the mods at Metal Archives variously and unfairly accused the band of being industrial/nü-metal or being industrial with death metal “flair”. But Autarkh‘s Form in Motion has all of the hallmarks of an extreme metal band casting off easily defined labels and pushing boundaries forward.
- The Armed – ULTRAPOP
The Armed’s last album, 2018’s Only Love, was my top album of that year, and the placing that ULTRAPOP has in my top 10 for 2021 is no different.
The Armed has often strived to be as obscure as possible, often at the media’s expense. However, for the ULTRAPOP album cycle, The Armed has finally revealed many of the faces behind their mysterious collective. Not only that, but they filmed a full-length feature performance at the Free Masons building in Detroit. They also hella bulked up and happily discussed their workout and diet routines. And, oh yea, they basically started a cult. In my opinion, no other band in 2021 has been quite so ingenious in their marketing, having also apparently gotten fans to pay for billboards around the world advertising ULTRAPOP. It all seems part of the art project of this somehow still-unknowable musical collective. Even if you want to suggest that this was all hype (notice I haven’t written anything about the music yet), then I can assure you: ULTRAPOP is an aural experience worthy of all of the hype.
The Armed has stated that they were approaching the music on ULTRAPOP from the presupposition that, essentially, everything these days is pop. Playing off of the steroid-injected pop music approach of hyperpop artists like 100 gecs while simultaneously staying true to their hardcore roots, ULTRAPOP comes off as a hyper-maximalist, ecstatic approach to playing pop-inspired hardcore. But it’s not just hardcore and pop: there are elements of shoegaze, grindcore, and electronic music. Again, as listeners, we should be operating under the assumption that everything is pop.
A track that exemplifies this amorphous amalgamation is “Masanuga Vapors”. While I am often reminded of the uplifting, nearly tropicalia-but-technical sounds of bands like Battles when listening to that track, there is no denying the intensity of the blasting drums and the oversaturated…well, everything. Uplifting? Yes. Relaxing? No.
Demonstrated their expanded pallet is “Bad Selection” which features an electronic drum beat that seems awfully apt for the newest Genghis Tron album Dream Weapon (and it’s no surprise since it’s no secret that Tony Wolski is in both The Armed and Genghis Tron). The song gradually adds a lyrically unsettling but musically soothing chorus gracefully touched with a “hallelujah”. By the end of the song, the listener is launched into an electronically-punctuated blast beat before the tension is released into an exploding, elevated iteration of the chorus once more.
Whereas Thom Yorke of Radiohead once lamented the idea of “everything all of the time”, The Armed are finding transcendence in it with the best release of the year.
Honorable Mentions
Pupil Slicer – Mirrors
Bummer – Dead Horse
Nekromantheon – The Visions of Trismegistros
Anti Ritual – Expel the Leeches
Panopticon – …And Into the Night
Der Weg einer Freiheit – Noktvrn
Ad Nauseam – Imperative Imperceptible Impulse
Groza – The Redemptive End
Sunless – Ylem
Peculate – Your Own Personal Abyss
Wanderer – Liberation from a Brutalist Existence,
Ungfell – Es grauet
Genune – Inert & Unerring
Empyrium – Über den Sternen
Non-Metal
Overall Top 10 Non-Metal (in no order)
Origami Angel – Gami Gang
Small Black – Cheap Dreams
CHAI – WINK
Clearbody – One More Day (2020)
CFCF – memoryland
Brogan Bentley – Diapason Rex
Hard Feelings – HARD FEELINGS
Pom Poko – Cheater
Flight Mode – TX, ’98
Belmont – Reflections (2020)
Electronic
Skee Mask – Pool
Ulla – Limitless Frame
Body Meat – Year of the Orc
Topdown Dialectic – Vol. 3
Hoavi – Invariant
Baltra – Ambition
UNiiQU3 – Heartbeats
DJ Manny – Signals In My Head
xphresh – xephon
Laurence Guy – Your Good Times Are Here and Mutual Excitement is a Wonderful Thing
Indie/Post-Punk
Zoon – Bleached Wavves
Home Front – Think of the Lie
True Body – Heavenly Rhythms for the Uninitiated
OVLOV – Buds
FACS – Void Moments
Floatie – Voyage Out
W.H. Lung – Vanities
Circuit Circuit – Circuit Circuit
Yvette – How The Garden Grows
Experimental/Avant-Garde
Low – HEY
Album – Album
Dear Laika – Pluperfect Mind
Rachika Nayar – fragments
Vanishing Twin – Ookii Gekkou
Buffalo Daughter – We Are The Times
Charlotte Greve – Sediments We Move
Marisa Anderson & William Tyler – Lost Futures
yes/and – yes/and
Maria Arnal i Marcel Bagés – Clamor
John Dwyer – Witch Egg
Daniel Aged – You Are Protected By Silent Love
Ichiko Aoba – Windswept Adan
Yasmin Williams – Urban Driftwood