Straight away, we get the other end of doom. If the previous entry from Conan was nasty and primitive, this is its evolved, redefined, tempered ancestor. This is housebroken Doom with all its airs and graces. It is a beautifully restrained album that is exquisitely contoured. Sars’s vocals are evocative and bewitching. They sit alongside Alberto’s guitar work, which is stunning in its depth and structure. A hauntingly ethereal album which highlights the beauty in the darkness. If you like dreamy goth metal this one worth checking out.

Lush melodic death metal that goes heavy on the melody. It is full of infectiously catchy hooks and passages and is quite sumptuous in its accessibility. The thing to note here is how beautifully the tracks are constructed. Everything is precision-engineered to sound epic and enticing.

Multi-layered progressive metalcore from Illinois. This is righteously complex stuff. Layers among layers of pulsating guitar melded into each other. Its beauty is the amount of stuff going on. The technical metalcore that the album is swathed in can usually feel rather cold and clinical, however there is an additional warmth and humanity to be found that is provided by the cinematic melody. Overall it feels both epic and expansive but also grounded and confessional. The machine like perfection offset by a bursts of fragility and vulnerability.

When your clean vocalist is a classically trained cellist, you ain't going to let that go to waste. Soren Mourne’s cello features heavily across the sophomore effort and is all the better for it. It helps sculpt an ethereal aesthetic that is rich with Gothic darkness. This is a sumptuous and dark album that slowly unfurls. It is heavy and brittle in parts, but it uses the mournful cello well, regularly juxtaposing with the brutality. In all, this is doom that retains its weight with a combination of monolithic density and haunting instrumentation.

On release this was TOP 10 and I believed (as I still actually do) this is by far the best thing that Architects have released since 2016’s game-changing “All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us”. So before the negatives, let’s do the positives as it is a really good album that further expands and commercialises their sound. This is an album aimed at the thousands that have discovered them through arenas and festival headlines. It is clean, crisp and full of killer hooks and anthemic choruses. And that is also the reason it has steadily fallen down the list on repeat listens. It is good but it lacks the emotional weight that “All Our Gods” had. This is a band with sadly less to say and complain about. Whilst it is a very good record and still the 71 best I’ve heard this year (out of over 800) it lacks the pain and suffering that always defined them. 

A highly personal album that uses the claustrophobic, insular nature of sludge to explore grief. It is extraordinary how the nihilistic, impenetrable nature of extreme metal is twisted and subverted to articulate the feeling of losing someone who has defined your life. It is a bleak record that uses noises in a cathartic manner. There is no hope here, just despair and longing regret, and it is dynamically atmospheric in the way that it all builds. Raw and traumatic, it is an astonishingly dark and inward looking experience.

A gloriously dense album that revels in its inaccessibility. It flirts with many genres but commits to none of them. Instead, it rummages around trying on styles like a Generation Z in a thrift shop. It seems content in continually confounding expectations and enjoys its own unsigned right turns and tempo changes. It is the sound of a band that know who they are even if they don’t plan on revealing that to the listeners. Baffling, Bonkers but frequently brilliant.

A second collaboration between Bell Witch and Aerial Ruin. As with the first this is an atmospheric cauldron of distorted noise and melancholic pondering. It is bleak, sparse and at times coarse and jagged, but within it all is a morose beauty. There are points where you feel in the eye of the storm, within a calm centre of a tempestuous whole. It uses that discombobulation highly effectively, switching from dense and claustrophobic to breezy and brash in a heartbeat. A layered and textured record that looks to stretch the mindset of the listener. 

Frankly, I have lost count which number return to form this is for Alice Cooper. He has got into a cycle of making a plethora of pretty dire records and then suddenly coming back with a bit of all right. This bit of alright heralds the return of almost the original Alice Cooper band and is credited as their first album together since 1973 “Muscle of Love”. I say almost as guitarist Glen Buxton died in 1997, but fittingly enough, he is here in spectral form as unearthed studio recordings of his guitar playing have been spliced into three of the tracks. This is gloriously over-the-top prime-time Alice. It ignores the genre hopping he has indulged in over the years and goes back to the psychedelic ham horror he made his name with. It is fun, flirtatious and fantastically camp.  

Between the Buried and Me are a jazz outfit that just so happen to make heavy metal albums. The freeform non-linear jazz style comes first in their creation process and the heaviness follows. Their albums are easily identifiable, quite simply by sounding like nobody else. At first, it can feel like a directionless mess with each subsequent passage bearing no resemblance or conceivable connection to the last. But there is a beauty in the chaos. Each listen reveals further that there is indeed a linear connection that bonds it all together, it's subtle and buried, but it is there, driving the album forward. Astonishing in stream of consciousness narrative format, this is an album that both astounds with its non-conventional ambition but also proves alluring as you get sucked further into spiralling madness. 

Third album from the mathcore auteurs, and they continue to produce deeply confounding music that rejects the use of conventional structures. “Fleshwork” succeeds in being even more baffling and impenetrable than its predecessors. They throw a level of minimalism into the party, but rather than diluting the brutality it actually heightens it, by giving the brutal passages space to breathe and prosper. As ever, it is hard to describe this as music, but it still manages to be an enticing listen because of its audacity to challenge all perceptions and previous constraints. Marvellous for its non-linear attempt to redefine existing concepts.

A luscious classic rock album that is full of well-crafted rock songs. It does what it does exceedingly well. Lzzy Hale is a dynamic and hypnotic frontperson who drips confidence and charisma. There is a whiff of staged managed and manufactured here, but that is strongly offset by the power of the tunes. It is big, brash and brilliantly accessible. It has its sights set firmly on world domination and has no qualms how it gets there. It is also my 10 year old son’s album of the year, so there you go.

Katatonia have been producing deeply profound, emotive, and perceptive albums for nearly 35 years. They started off as self-declared Paradise Lost fanboys, however, the modern incarnation of the band has crafted a singular and unique atmospheric and melancholic sound that is very much their own. “Nightmares as Extensions of the Waking State” doesn’t particularly change or alter their style. As ever, it is a deep, mournful treatise on emotional despair and the burden of existence. The point is that as a band they do is incredibly well. It is rich, textured and exquisitely rendered. Every track drips with pathos and restrained passion. It is an immersive, heartbreaking experience and proves that, in the right hands, Metal can be tender and forlorn.   

One of the most original bands out there. The bastard offspring of Metallica and Johnny Cash, this is bluegrass metal in all its glory. Album number nine is a darker, rawer affair. Recorded live in the studio in just (fittingly) 13 days it feels less contrived and produced than previous efforts. It still brings the boogie big time and is eminently danceable, but the catchy melodies have more of a crunch to them this time around. A driving, vital record that does deviate from the Volbeat sound but does give it a degree of urgency.

Fantastically well-constructed progressive metal that is full of heavy pulsating riffs and lush melodic passages. It has a real dynamic groove to it all and heaviness feels infectious rather than brittle. Overall, it is an intriguing and highly enjoyable record that keeps your attention by subtly shifting in style on each track. Captivatingly catchy.

Another incredibly personal album that is fueled by personal loss and grief. Rather than wallow in righteous anger, this is an introspective and slow-burning record that reveals its treasure in a lingering and reserved fashion. It mixes post rock with prog, building between quiet ponderous sections and then bursts fourth in an infinite light. It is that constant switch between light and dark that gives the album such a rich texture. The Contrast is managed incredibly well and it feels complementary rather than jarring.

This album is a melting pot of different styles and aesthetics. It throws everything and the kitchen sink to create something that is blisteringly fast but also breathtakingly beautiful. It is a roller coaster of different approaches interwound to create a sound that exists beyond the realms of description. They self-identify as cybergrind. However it is more than just electronic noise. This is a frankly an undefinable supermarket sweep through the entire history of alternative music. There is a dependence on computer game plink plong, but is ably offset by jarring heaviness. A distinctly odd but also curiously creative album. 

Well there you go, two sequels in a row. The first part was released last December and thereby missed being in 2024 list by the very nature of being a festive month release and arriving after I had closed up shop. It would have indeed charted as it is a highly atmospheric blackened death album, intense but simultaneously moody and ethereal. Maleficium is actually even better and sees them world build with furious precision.

The subject matter is witchcraft and persecution and by using superfast metal allied with malignant doomy refrains, they create an album that sonically matches its lyrical content. It is a highly competent clash of old school sensibility and modern ambient metal, that swill together to create a record that is immersive and highly enticing.

One of this year’s word-of-mouth hits. Having spoken to the band at Damnation (Video Interview), you realise just how bonkers the story is. Four mates with a shared love of post metal decide to make a record purely for the cathartic process of exercising a number of their own demons. No label, no track record, no plan beyond making music to soothe their souls. They uploaded it to a number of streaming services and that should be that. But its wasn’t. It somehow ended up on the radio of the Damnation and Arctangent promoters Gav and James who host a weekly podcast together. They espoused the beauty of this twisted but also resolutely hopeful album and suddenly a band that frankly wasn’t a band found themselves with a top streaming album and slots at both the benefactors festivals. The fuzz is justified as this is a brilliantly haunting and thought-provoking album. It balances vulnerability and coarse heaviness with the confidence of a band who have been doing this all their lives. The focus ebbs and flows, and the contracts between light and dark are magnificently evocative. A stirring album that superbly encapsulates the human condition.

Now there is two sides to this story: Either this fourth Creeper is not as good as the previous three records (especially the vampire rock masterpiece that it is nominally a sequel of), or its relatively late arrival means that I haven’t had enough time to digest all its Gothic rockabilly goodness. Either way, this is not following the first “Sanguivore” and the ridiculously good “Sex, Death and the Infinite Void” into my top three.

It still manages to have big bold numbers and a desire to meld Meatloaf with the Sisters of Mercy (Patrica Hodge of the latter and archetype fairy gothmother turns up again to do voice-overs), but it all feels rather familiar. It's good, but there is a sense of treading water rather than terraforming new worlds to inhabit.