TNM Albums of the Year 2025: Round 1

2025 Album of the Year time begins on That's Not Metal, with our first lists from Perran and Elliot celebrating everything from synth-punk to goth-doom, power-goregrind to jazz-death, post-metal to metalcore, legendary rock icons to grimy dungeon crust bands that this year gave us.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Welcome everybody and have your pen and pencil. They're ready
to catch these albums because it is December and that
means it's happened with the id time here on that's
not metal. We have been beavering away trying to bring
the best of what twenty twenty five rock music has
to offer. If you have been with us all year,
you will have heard us review seventy nine albums this
year on the main show, and that does not completely

(00:49):
even cover every album that we've enjoyed that will come
up in these shows as well. On top of that,
I'm sure now it is time to cut the shit
and really crown what we think are the best albums
of five. To everyone who has been here with us
this year, thank you very much for listening. It's obviously
been you know. It was a milestone year for T
and M with our tenth anniversary show, and whether you've

(01:12):
been here since day one or joined us more recently,
it has been a pleasure talking to you all week in,
week out this year about music and hopefully you are
excited as we are to get into these end of
year celebrations. This is our first of two Album of
the Year episodes and then the awards. On top of that,
as you know, we've got a few crew members, you know,
under the banner of T and M who need their
assigned time to shine Today. First up, as usual, myself,

(01:35):
Pernheish and Elliot Paisley here as well, are going to
be bringing you our albums of the year. Next week,
Sam Dignot and Mark Sanderson will be here as well
as next week the unveiling of your Albums of the Year,
which if you haven't got your vote in yet, you
still have a few days to do so end of
the day December the twelfth is when the voting ends
for that, so please please please get it in by then.

(01:56):
But we do want as many votes from you guys
as possible to get the best, most reflective list possible,
So listen to this show and then spend these next
few days getting that down and send it into us.
This year, I think I'm right in saying that it's
more spread out than usual. Compared to twenty four, twenty three,

(02:16):
twenty two, there are less absolutely nailed on obvious that's
gonna win it picks so this year more than any
of them so far. Actually, I would say your vote
really will make the difference in deciding who does come
out on top. On that note, Elliott, what I've just said,
I feel that's kind of true, like even in what

(02:36):
you and I tend to lean more towards, which is
the underground side of the TNM spectrum. Last year we
had the massive blood Incantation event which got everybody you know.
This year, I don't really know what your number one is,
although I might have a guess in mind that I'll
tell you at the NFL was right, I imagine you
could probably only have a vague stab at mine. It
feels like it's anyone's game.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
Really.

Speaker 3 (02:57):
Yeah, it's been a weird year because I think if
you went to me back in January and you gave
me a list of all the bands that I love,
and this is true both of the underground and in
the mainstream, and you said these were releasing alms this year,
and then you show me how few of them made
my Top twenty, I would be I'd be pretty staggered.
How few of them? Did A few have? And on

(03:20):
one hand, it's easy to go maybe that's a sign
of a disappointing or a lesser year. But then when
I actually look at the top twenty I have in
front of me. I don't think it's any worse than
any of the ones I've certainly done for T and M,
which tells me that kind of new, smaller, maybe sort
of out there bands, bands I wouldn't have bet on,
have really stepped up, which which makes it exciting its

(03:41):
own way.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
I was going to ask if you thought it was
a disappointing year, but that's a positive thing to hear. Then.
I don't think, for example, we had any tens this year.
From where I'm setting, I think loads of great albums,
but are major landmark events pretty fleeting? I think, as
per as we've said, for certainly the last few the
mainstream face of metal are just I mean, it's almost
a given that barely needs pointing out at this point

(04:04):
that they aren't really going to make up a lot
of particularly our lists, right Like that hasn't changed, and
the award show that we do in a couple of
weeks is going to be very reflective of the highs
and lows of twenty twenty five. I do have a
couple of like big, big bands, more so than I
think I did last year. In fairness, last year I
had like dick All in that regard. But I've got
a few, you know, arena fillers in this time, but
as usual they are mixed in with the couple thousand

(04:27):
monthly listeners crowd. So I would imagine, you know, maybe
the same for you as well. We will be covering
the length and breadth of the heavy spectrum today.

Speaker 3 (04:35):
Definitely. That's the other thing I was going to say.
So this might be the most varied of the top
twenties I've done, and I have to look back and
trying to, you know, really break down the mass of it.
But looking at it now, I think this year more
than It's not like a single scene has especially stood out.
It's just it feels like there's been great stuff no
matter where you look.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
Honorable mentions. First of all, with us listening to all
of these albums every year, there's always a lot to mention,
either albums that we want to just take this opportunity
to spread this last little bit of love for that
people might not have heard even think quite naked twenties,
or albums that maybe people might be waiting to hear
turn up that haven't quite made it either.

Speaker 3 (05:11):
How many of you got I haven't got too many,
but I'm always terrible at these. Like I my twenty
kind of came to me pretty fast, and it was only,
you know, I had a handful that we're kind of
fleeting around the sort of eighteen to twenty scene that
were kind of coming in and out, and it's always
when I hear someone else start listening, I was like,
fuck that, yeah, that that should The stuff that's in

(05:33):
my top twenty I'm pretty confident about. But the stuff
I put in the honorable mentions that there's a few
things there. So the ones that came to mind for
me sitting down to do this were the Dead Guy
album pretty close but didn't quite make it in. It's
really fucking good. That home Front album. I've listened to
a bunch since the last reviews, but I don't think
i've quite heard it enough times for it to, you know,
substitute some of the ones in the lower ranks. The

(05:54):
Dax Riggs record is great, Sangle two, I really like
the Malthusian record we did a couple months ago, and
two records that certainly I didn't speak about on the show,
Titan Blood. Their album is plittably sick as Hell, and
that Agriculture record is fucking upsetting, So that.

Speaker 1 (06:11):
Oh, I thought that was going to be in yours
for sure.

Speaker 3 (06:14):
That was that was one of them that did sub
in and out. So that would probably be the twenty
one if I could have, because I do I really
really like that record, but sort of last minute switches,
it fell back into the shoutouts Yes.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
Angle War two, Agriculture I thought was going to be
in yours as well. A couple of surprises there. I
will have enough mentions for both of us, I suppose then,
because you know, even these do not comprehensively cover all
of the albums that we've you know, given the thumbs
up to this year. But I would like, I guess,
particularly to shout out also the comeback Dead Guy record
that just seamlessly sounded like Dead Guy. It deal seems
like a really weird event that that happened this year.

(06:49):
Astronoid Conjurer employ to serve. It's not as good as
their last three, and it has now been overshadowed at
the end of the year by all the drama. But
I did get, you know, earlier in the year, my
fair share of this out of the New Cradle of
Filth record straight from the Path, going out on one
of their best records. Whitechapel's return to Blistering Death Courts
honestly one of like two death core albums I legitimately

(07:10):
cared about this year. A lot of people are mentioning
the Comeback Coroner as like metal album of the year,
big contender. I don't feel quite that strongly about it,
but it's very good, so I'm just letting people know, yes,
I have heard it, Yes it gets the thumbs up
scowl I know is a very popular one, and I
did think that album was really strong. Similarly, Turnstyle, I
think you and I Elliott particularly maybe you. There's this

(07:34):
idea that's developed that people think we didn't like the
Turnstyle album. Speaking for myself, I did not enough to
be in my twenty, which I don't know if that's
that much of a shot, considering glow On didn't even
make my twenty at the time. But I do still
like it enough to give it a mention here. The
Model Actress record was really super cool for this kind
of feverish dark electronic music. The New Wode record was

(07:55):
again excellent. If you like distinctive heavy metal inspired black metal,
will a lot of Dynamics Stanger Eagle for Impushed Forest
Troll Music. There's a record that I've just started listening
to really by a band called Steroid called Chain Male
Commandos that is weird and niche, and it's like a
new over British heavy metal record if it was pitch
shifted up to sound like it's inside a tiny eighties

(08:16):
video game, and every single song is about rocking and
giving it your best, even if you're rocking alone. And
it's so beautiful and inspiring to me, Elliot, I think
you've definitely got to hear that. One the smallest band
I'll be mentioning a toll today is this band called
ash Magic with a K at the end, which is
these two Turkish women who put out a really raw,
evil black metal record that deals with a lot of

(08:37):
kind of Eastern mysticism and that kind of thing. And
it's so fucking vile that if you really want like
a horrifying low fi black male experience, but it's got
some ferocious riffs on it. That's a band that really
blew my skirt up. Similarly, another smaller band who really
weren't far outside my twenty are Scimitar, who play this
kind of demented style of heavy black metal crossover that's

(08:58):
just kind of careening out of control. It's like a
more blo usty and solitude sometimes with this like wailing,
supernatural female vocal that's super sick. The death metal album
this year that I think needs more love is Vacuus,
who I got about like three or four death metal
albums in my twenty so this is absolutely top five
death metal albums of this year, way more you know,
inventive and multi dimensioned than most, so I'm really looking

(09:19):
forward to hearing more from them. The Perturbator album was
really great, as always, love this continued kind of goth
noir direction that he's going in. And the last two
that missed my twenty are Warbringer, which is a shame
I can't talk about further because that's one of the
fun stories of this year, was just being reminded of
how sick Warbringer can be. And I do think that
is the best pure thrash metal record of this year.
And Creeper sang before Two, who I'm not used to

(09:43):
talking about this early, you know. And again I think
I've explained in our last review show the reasons why
I might not have this quite as high as the
other Creeper records, but I still have so much love
for it, and some of the most outrageous songs I've
heard this year are on it, So I'm still a
bit gutter to not fit in love to Creepers always.
I'm looking forward to catching live again, you know with
iis Nan Kills next week and a non rock music one.

(10:04):
But for stuff outside of TNM, I will join everyone
else in offering the unoriginal thought that the return Clips
album is really good. Some of the really like goddamn
evil hip hop at times, and we love some evil
hip hop. But my number twenty is a funny one
because it's a kind of quirky one in its own right.
It's an underground metal album that doesn't really sound like
a lot else. It doesn't sound like any particular movement

(10:27):
or thing that's currently going on. And when I think
about some of the bangers that are on you know,
that Creeper record or war Bringer or Scowl Turnstile whatever
just outside, it's the strange, unique vibes of this one
that have kept me coming back. It's Sigein and Helgin Combat,
which is such a strange, esoteric but also really fun package,

(10:49):
which is maybe my main takeaway with this. So it's like,
you describe this to someone and it feels really niche
and like a really deep, underground pull in the things
that it's dealing with and stringing together, but fundamental it
rips and it's really fun, and it's one of those
things where I think it's appeal maybe transcends what it's
actual sort of curated audience is, because this is a

(11:10):
total horns up metal record that deals with Sumerian mythology
and esoteric ancient rights through the sounds of evil eighties
thrash and thrashing death metal of the kind where you
know those are almost one and the same, and that
kind of primordial pool of early extreme metal. And when
you say it sounds like that kind of time where
those borders of extreme metal substyles were less defined. Often

(11:32):
that means really raw and simplistic, but this record is
also complicated and dexterous because these are ingenious students of
the game. The fact that this has so many really
off kilter riffs from like the technical thrash end of
Megadeth and Voivod but meeting the early barbarism of possessed
and like old Creator and eighty Sepultura, how many of

(11:54):
these rifts?

Speaker 3 (11:54):
How have you got?

Speaker 1 (11:55):
These are like Peace Cells era Megadeth rifts but played
by rotten crypt Goul, essentially like what a fun proposition
that is? What if those early death thrash bands had
gotten insanely good at their instruments and obtuse structures, but
also have a really like super dry eighties production so
that nothing is hidden. It's a rejection of some kind
of modern death metals tendency to really murk things up

(12:18):
and instead just have everything that rips right there in
plain sight. If you saw them live with Blood Incantation
this year, it's a proper power trio with a lead
guitarist who has going absolutely mental and this lemmyish bass
player front man wearing massive thrasher high tops and croaking
out these wicked hooks that sound like his throat has
been torn out like an Elucho Fultcue movie, with blood gushing.

Speaker 3 (12:40):
Out of his neck.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
But also every chorus while he's doing it is really decipherable.
The stomping riff around fear not the men. It has
been like lunging about like I'm the people in Candle Masses,
Bewitched video or religious Insanity Denies Slavery, which has that brilliant,
slightly unnatural and ungainly yet directness of language that you
only really get in metal where English is not the

(13:02):
first language, like lyrics that eighties Matt's Cavalleira would write.
And I love it because in this incensed anti organized
religion song, you kill other people because of minor decrees.
It ain't fucking holy. To fall on your knees is
a bar, and it's something that could have, you know,
the iconic eighties metal blade Axe logo on the LP
is also left field enough that they could play Roadburn.

(13:24):
It's for seasoned listeners, not because it's particularly extreme, but
because it's so artisan, like you can't just say old
school death metal and know what it is, because it's
quite delicately balancing a lot of things for a refined pellette.
And one of the things I think is really cool
about that is some of these guys wearing neckcross christos
for years, who are one of those bands really in
the underground doing the old school death metal thing long

(13:47):
before it became popular again, along with bands like Dead
Congregation or Grave miasma or repugnant. These are some of
the guys who were doing that when the audience for
it was much more cult and now you can't move
for death metal bands, but rather than try and reap
some of the rewards of that by doing something more basic,
instead they're just like off and onwards to weirder terrains.
And the majority of death metal albums that are really

(14:09):
great right now are like that. I think they're bands
who aren't following what the zeitgeist is now that that's
that kind of you know, caveman death metal is so
much of the zeitgeist instead of you know, kind of
well death not as popular now, let's just go and
do one that's really our own thing, and the albums
I have in my list will reflect that, and Sigein
are a great introduction to that idea, because you only

(14:31):
make this record if you love death metal and it's
your life, but you're also a bit weird and a
bit involved in your tastes. It rocks Elliott number twenty, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:40):
I should have. I should have put that in the
honorable mentions. As soon as you said it. That was
as I knew that there'd be some that I've got
to say the album one and I'm agree in it.
But there is a kind of synchronicity between my twenty
and yours because both of them are inventive, wild but
super fun extreme metal records. Difference is because I'm a zoomer.

(15:00):
It's fourteen minutes long. Mine is grieving by Barren Path,
which is the most recent side quest of Discordant Saxis,
which if you're a grind fan, they're always a joy,
but they do disappear and reappear fairly quickly, Like I
think the first one post Gridlink was in twenty eighteen.
There was like no one cares what the dead think,

(15:21):
no one knows what the dead think. One album disappeared again.
Twenty thirteen, Gridlink came back. One album disappeared again. Now
all of the members that bad, aside from John Chang,
who's the vocalist, they've formed a new band of their own.
So I guess this one, in theory could stick around
because I think it is. I think it's him basically
going no. I made board games for a living, so
I can't be in a grindcore band. But this thing,

(15:42):
it's twelve songs, just on the fourteen minutes you just
know it's gonna be a good time with that lineup.
And the new vocalist this time is Mitchell from Maruta, who,
if you know anything about grind Clean, that's a very
different vocal study. He doesn't have that sort of shriek
like John Shang is one of the most distressing v
the Sharre has ever had. And Mitch was more in

(16:02):
the rotten sound death metal school of thought. And when
I heard this album exists, I thought, I don't see
how those two things are going to match. This really
dazzling technical kind of cybergrind. How's that going to map
onto the death metal thing? The quite cool thing is
Baron Parth. They've matched him because they've taken all the technicality,
but they've stripped out any of the beautiful melodies that

(16:24):
you'd find in certainly Gridlink, and it's they've gone kind
of gnaws them with it. So it's way meaner, it's
way darker, it's way more menacing. It's again pure it's
more purely metal than anything any of the other discording.
Sexis side project's done before and again for me and
for my tastes, it's just when I've had a spare
fifteen minutes. So often I'll reach for this record because

(16:48):
it just goes and goes and goes in that time.
There's no breaking, there's no variation, there's no variety. It's
just explosively powerful, super exciting grind core. And because their
lads and not weaklings, there's no obligatory sludge metal song
at the end, which everyone seems obligated to do nowadays.
Every single song comes in one hundred seconds or less.

(17:09):
There's no room to breathe, and yet it doesn't get exhausting.
Some of these records, it's just you put it on
in it it might as well be white noise. But
there's so many catchy riffs and fun ideas and brilliant
turns of pace. It's I guess I'll keep it suitably brief.
Whther I was I wann to outstrip the length of
the album itself, but as far as go to alms
this year, especially in the last couple of months, where

(17:31):
if I want something exciting and extreme but still kind
of fun and thilling to listen to, this has been
one of my absolute go tos.

Speaker 1 (17:40):
Yeah, I know you're such a big grid Link guy,
so I wondered if that might turn up somewhere. It's
nice and nice that it's there. Mind them in nineteen
can you smell what God is cooking? It's the Shit
of God from Behemoth. We're in a weird period for
Behemoth where every time I put them in my top
twenty over band who I may be nastier, who have
made bigger strides more recent lee who have a cooler

(18:01):
fan base, I feel some need to defend it for
some reason. But you know, this band, I think they
have been rejected by the folded arm taste makers of
what undergradmittal is now, Like they were already there and
then the Shit of God was just straight away going
to be a meme. That split in their audience has
happened the people who are still with Behemoth. I think
this record was actually very well received amongst like you know,

(18:21):
the core Behemo fan base, more so even maybe than
their last couple and even so, you know, essentially the
way I rank the modern era of Behemoth stuff is
the Satanist and I Loved You at your Darkest are
the classics. Opu's Contrainatoram and this one are pretty similar
by like eight out of tens. The reason I think
this has gone down surprisingly well. Is it's just Behemoth
doing what they do with no fucking pretense, Like if

(18:43):
you like the core sound of Behemoth, you'd like this record.
And it's in more of a punch of a package
where a dialing down of the excess and the pageantry,
eight songs, a bit over thirty five minutes, a really
like old school classic album approach to like we're having
you know those two so a vinyl and that is it,
several albums into this era, going what else can we do?

Speaker 3 (19:04):
You know?

Speaker 1 (19:04):
I don't feel they need to be more grand than
the last time on this one. I feel they need
to be metal. It's a punch in the face of
a Behemoth record, no need for it to really be
too intellectualized. It is just self awarely crude. In a
year when we got a few bodily substance related shops
from extreme metal, Behemoth are you know a massive band
from that world, a full on touring machine with this

(19:27):
big commercial enterprise, who are still just a middle finger
to anyone either in the you know, the conservative outside
world or in their own scene who may not like them.
And luckily, whether they want to go grandiose or whether
they want to go simple. There's some of the best
heavy metal songwriters in the world, and this is a
record particularly designed for pumping your fist and enacting this

(19:50):
very particular togetherness in blasphemy. Actually we are the shit
of God, we are the shadow elite. It's populist manner,
war minded extreme metal, signing you up to the army
of evil where you can find that kind of satanic brotherhood.
It's more brutal than they've been in a minute, where
like I said, sort of song for song, I think
it's really about as good as Oprah contrinataan was. I

(20:11):
think I even had, you know them basically similar points
in my lists in their respective years. But that odd
Joe burracy hard rock mix that that one had is gone. Instead,
it's just got more of their naughty's death metal side
back in there, maybe like those sort of demigod evangelian riffs,
but in the hands now of a band who will
play with a mono math and machine head and play

(20:31):
more to the back of the arena with them and
a front man who is still one of the most
grab you by the cuff of your shirt and spit
every word in your face till they are heard vocalist
in Nettle. The spelling out hook in the title track
is properly stupid, but it's still one of the biggest
tunes of the year because it has the most arena
humper riff that Bohemoth had ever written. That the first

(20:51):
time I heard it, I likened it to a black
metal swerve City and the Captain my captain in to
drown the sun in wine, I am saluting, I'm going
to join the metal brigade. I just can't fucking help myself.
I fucking love the bits when the Greek woman is
going absolutely mental holler in her head off, and in
the dread Vulture at the end, they've got what feels
to me like their current Behemoth callback to one of

(21:15):
my favorite album clovers and set closers of all time
in Chant for Escaton, where they're just loosing the dogs
of War and a horde of birds of prey is
descending like a plague of locusts on their enemies. I
think I loved you at your darkest. It's the last
Behemoth album to enter that upper tier of what they
can do, but I am so consistently enjoying everything they do,

(21:35):
and there's not another band crucially operating at the same
scale in order to be able to do what they
do better. Doesn't really matter how many cringe T shirts
he sells. The conviction in the music is still there,
and Behemoth still a really good band. I'll smell this
shit any day.

Speaker 3 (21:50):
I was wondering if this was going to be in
your Top twenty, which which is strange for Behemoth record,
but only because I don't know. This album seems to
have of the last few maybe been essentially as you say,
like more warmly received that the impression I got was
more divisive. I think I need to go back to
it's been. It's been quite well now. But going from
your populist, back of the arena death metal record to

(22:11):
maybe the strangest album on my list but also a
death metal album, is I don't know if it's a
bound of one guy, it's a it's a project called Effluence,
and the album is called Pianistic Dismemberment.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
I know that's what so as I've been into this is,
so of course this is on your fucking lis.

Speaker 1 (22:29):
This is the most elliot shit I've ever heard.

Speaker 3 (22:32):
You know, I've been into extreme music for at this point,
it's it's over half my life, and it is easy
to eventually start going. I feel like I've heard everything.
There's only so many ways to tune a guitar or
play the drums or arranger song, and you know you
can write better songs in that style, and maybe you
can combine things, but I don't know. Like something that
really throws you off your off your balance is pretty

(22:53):
rare these days. And then every now and then something
comes along and it's so weird and fresh and bizarre
that you kind of fall in love, just in principle,
at least maybe if you're wild like I am, because
this is if you're not, if you're not familiar as
we all should be. This is a brutal death metal

(23:15):
album that has no guitars or drums on It is vocals, drums, piano,
and woodwind. It's fucking mad, this thing. It's it's the
exact middle ground between Mortician and Ornett Coleman. I didn't
know there was a path between those two things. This

(23:36):
is on it and I find that so exciting. But again,
it's the sort of thing where it could be novelty.
You could put this on and go ha ha ha,
what a silly album dismiss it again, and that was
my first sensation, the first and mintal so I was
going like, this is this is daft? What a fun
thing to have found. I'm not sure how they managed
to make something that features no distorted instrumentation at all,

(23:57):
sounds so loud, like coughness and extra. It's as heavy
as virtually anything I've heard this year, and the tools
that you need to make the sensation of heavy are
nowhere to be found. It's one of the most intense records,
and it's kind of record I didn't think it exists
till now, but the only tools at its disposal are
things that you normally use for laid back, cool jazz.

(24:20):
And yet it works. It's and somehow, and you might
laugh at this. I do think the album is catchy,
like you're not kind of tapping your foot humming along
to it, but going back to this record time and
time again, purely because the sensation was so strange. I
was struck by how much of it was sticking in
the memory. And when you're imposing yourself with such a handicap,

(24:41):
I think that's an amazing achievement. But the real magic
is because this guy isn't just some fucking like shit
house who's going like I'm gonna put some piano on
this super fast, strong track. You can tell he's a
capable composer because when there are moments of harmony, they're
like a lifeline in the chaos. It's the sort of
thing that he didn't need to bother with. The combination

(25:03):
is already like noteworthy on its own, but it's all
the better for it, and it actually makes a record that,
like I say, sticks around in the psyche and is
worth your time. It's never gonna be a big name thing,
and I couldn't realistically put it much higher because, like
I say, it's such a bizarre thing to listen to,
and it's not an hour I go, oh, I don't
know what's put on. I put on that effluence um again.
But if you're interested in things that are happening on

(25:24):
like the outer fringes of extreme music, I think this
is a Musclessnenes. It's one for me, one of the
most overlooked albums purely in terms of who's doing new
things with this genre and out in the wilderness is
just this madman and I'm fascinated by it.

Speaker 1 (25:41):
Yeah, proper weirdo shit eighteen. Right back to one of
the very fair things we reviewed in twenty twenty five,
Wardrouner and Biana mentioning sometimes bands that we've reconnected with.
This has been a really nice affirming instance of that
for me this year with Wardruner. I finally saw them
live this year, and all those things that people say
that sound like kind of buzzwords of you know, spiritually

(26:03):
transcending and communally connecting with something. As an audience witnessing this,
you know, one in a million spectacle, there is truth
to it. And this is just the most I've gotten
into and fallen for a Wadruna record since Egracil in
twenty thirteen, which was the album that got me in
on them in the first place. And does this mean
that this record is substantially better than all of the
ones they've made in that time. I don't know if

(26:23):
it does, but I think a band like this in particular,
it can just be about where you are and what
headspace you're in when one of them comes along. And
me and Wardrone are just intersected this year in a
very nice and happy way. Because this is an album
not necessarily one I'm listening to Mega frequently because it
is a demanding listen where I have to, you know,
carve out the right moment to turn everything off and

(26:44):
do so. But when I do, I know I am
going to fall into it. And in our review of
this album, we were speaking about what a fascinating movement
this is of this you know old world specifically Norse here,
but kind of pan European to a degree even global
if you're not fucking weird discriminating about it, sort of
ancient style folk music. To have that be a thing

(27:04):
that's present in like the metal zeitgeist or even just
outside of metal, where somewhere in our modern era of
you know, artificial digital reality, people deep down feel this
yearning to be a part of something and have this
connection to the natural world or to history. That this
kind of music that is meant to evoke something from
before popular music was even a thing has become this

(27:26):
like quite defined strain of popular music. And yet at
the same time, we're in an era where it's so
trendy that you have Viking TikTokers, and in an era
when you know, AI music is rising. I guarantee there's
several projects on Spotify or whatever that are like doing
this kind of thing that are AI generated because it
seems like, you know, make me an ancient Viking folk
song that sounds like these TV shows and video games

(27:48):
I like, and they'll be out there and wardroner. Just
as they preempted that whole movement, are still holding onto
something that is real and is human as part of that.
They don't even have that, you know, the pretend of
these are ancient practices that are handed down by our forefathers,
like the fucking Viking weir Boos would have you think.
They're just very openly this is an interpretation. This is

(28:08):
something of our own that still manages to connect you
with these ideas of you know, of history and the earth,
and through these percussive, heartbeat like builds that feel like
the very ground you're standing on has a deep rumble
through it. These exquisite sounding stringed instruments that sound like
the trees and the foliage are speaking through them, the

(28:31):
layers and layers and layers of different voices, like you
are surrounded by all of the spirits of the people
who have stood on the same patch of ground that
you are currently on for thousands of years. Before you.
It's so beautiful and enveloping in its scope and the
specific kind of talismanic emblem of the bear to this one,

(28:52):
because each one of their albums does have a sort
of a you know, kind of a you know, almost
a through line to it, like that the album cover
with the bear fur and everything around there, you know, sigil.
On this one, the pulse rate of a hibernating bear
is literally embedded within the music of this album as
a recurring rhythmic motif. It's the third thing you hear
when you listen to it. And there's that fifteen minute

(29:12):
centerpiece in the album that sounds like some great, powerful
creature slumbering with this delicate, you know, echoing you know,
liar or loot like instrument, but this booming, deep, you know,
heart hibernating heartbeat somewhere deep in in the back of
the track. There's a huge power latent within this album

(29:35):
but waiting and biding its time, and there's so much
meaning that you can project onto, you know, a record
like this as you're listening to it, but it does
feel like a tremendously passionate cry for holding onto what
is real, what is communal? What is tangible, something that
you can taste and you can touch with your fingertips.
And as one of the only actual, like major label

(29:57):
Columbia Records albums that we talked about, I think that's
a beautiful thing.

Speaker 3 (30:02):
Well, my scene feels fucking stupid after that, because my
eighteen is the VIAGRAA Boys with VIAGRAA Boys. Of all
the post punk bands to gain popularize in the last
ten years, and I'm talking of the strain which might
play Reading Festival or Glassy and that sort of thing,
VIAGRAA Boys are the runaway favorite. They are so far
and away the bet if it's all in Idle Spoon, Fonzaines, DC,

(30:25):
whoever it is, these are the best ones. I really
got into them back in twenty twenty two because in
the space of eighteen months they released two of the best,
like I say, post punk art punk records of recent years,
in Welfare Jazz, which is still my favorite then and
Cave World. And the cool thing about those was within
those eighteen months, Welfare was this, Welfare Jazz was this noisy,

(30:49):
kind of melancholic record, and then Cave War came along
and it's just like all our whacka whacka dance Punk
and then after that took three years to follow that
pair of records up. They've done on this album, and
why it's so cool is they've married those two worlds
without compromising one either, Like it's not taken one attribute
at the expense of the other. This is an album

(31:10):
that managed to be their strangest also their most like.
It's their strangest and most reflective, but it's also their
kind of funkiest and catchiest at the same time. So
even if it isn't my absolute number one, if you're
only gonna listen to one of their records, make it
this one, because it's hard to get across into words
just how fun it is to listen to because it's

(31:32):
all possible within the same few songs like Man Made
of Meat, Dirty Boys, Uno to Perimid of Health, water Boy,
You'd Meet Me. These songs, they're instantly catchy, and they're
the sort of thing where you can imagine standing in
the sun, like I say, in a tent at reading
with a cider, popping up and down with your mates.
But the more you listen to them, the more you
hear these strange details that are woven into the music,

(31:53):
and they become so much more rewarding than their fellow
post punk than the work their fellow post punk bands
are doing. Like you could put these on at any
indie bar in the country and the whole room would
be shuffling. And yet rather than having lyrics about things
like you know, eating chips and watching TV, it's these
oddball stream of consciousness rambles that make for some of

(32:15):
the most inventive hooks of any rock band working today.
It's an album that's equal parts Captain Beefheart and the
Dandy Warholes, which again it's those are two completely desperate
fan bases, and yet they've managed to find something that
marries those two worlds in a way that's exciting and eccentric,

(32:37):
I don't know, just genuinely infectious. Like it's psychedelic, it's wild,
it's untamed, it's a laugh, it's you know, it's hard
to like. There's no grand narrative around it. I just
think this is a superb batch of songs.

Speaker 1 (32:51):
Yeah, via Good Boys seventeen, I've got one of my
big Kahoona's Deftones private music, and I must say, you know,
compared to the release week of this album, when I
wasn't sure if I was actually going to make you know,
this would make my list. It coming in at number
seventeen is pretty fantastic, actually, because what a big year
for Deaftones. They're officially now finally a massive band, like

(33:13):
not just a big one, but a multi generational top
of the tree kind of band. And along with that
is the most like wow, holy shit, collective response to
a Deaftones album in fifteen years. We're seeing some of
the response right now in the audience poll that's coming
in as we speak, and it's to the point where
you know, there are people who have this as their
album of the year who are actually shocked when someone

(33:34):
else doesn't. And it's been a year a little bit
for me of like trying to not second guess some
albums actually where you know this Creeper, Turnstile and at
least one more I have in my list coming up
as well. I've found myself going why do I not
think this is quite as good as their previous material,
whilst also allowing myself to just enjoy the fuck out
of what, in each of those cases I think is

(33:55):
a great record. And I've settled into a really good
place with private music where it was hard to separate
those feelings from the ferrara that was around this album
at the end of the summer.

Speaker 3 (34:05):
But what this is.

Speaker 1 (34:07):
A really graceful, assured, comfortable in a pretty good way,
late career record from a band who are thirty years
in the game and yet bigger than ever. And there
are those things about it, you know, the fact that
Chino supposedly wrote a big chunk of the riffs of this,
so Steph's weirder, more idiosyncratic metal style that you heard
to a good degree in Oms, for example, is less there.

(34:29):
And there are parts of those where you know, in
the guitars and the drums that feel so within the
pocket to the point of almost recycling themselves. And there's
less new stuff than either Gore or Ohms, you know,
like them or not, those records made more strides in
areas of their sound. But even if there's less flash,
this record is so locked in with these big head

(34:50):
nodders all the way through. It's maybe the most that
everyone has sounded on the same page in fifteen years,
and it does make for a wonderful body of work
of a record for a band who you know, this
is one of the most genuinely mainstream heavy music events
this year. They still sound so album focused whether there
are you know, a couple of clear singles on this
but also songs that I haven't really bothered to stick

(35:11):
on outside of the record because they just feel like
they're there to exist as part of the puzzle. Really
strange production job. This has of this almost alien sheen
that still makes deaf Tones sound like extraterrestrials so far
from any other you know, similarly kind of aging rock band.
The parts where the riffs do truly take off almost
blind you with their brilliance, where Ekdesis and Infinite Source

(35:34):
are the effortless fusion of post hardcore and groove metal
that makes them feel like the same nineties skater kids
that they were at the start just now the fifty
year old versions of those guys and Whatchino is doing
on this album is glorious, from the abrasive, yelping hooks
of negative space that bring you into the album to

(35:56):
the final track where he just suddenly turns into a
different guy for a minute. It's still weird and I
think about you all the time, and the chorus of
Infinite Sauce are points when I just melt, and that
luscious riding on a wave of pleasure that you think
about with prime deaf Tones just sinks its magic into you.

(36:17):
Sex that track panicked, jagged, weird clanging tonality that also
then makes them more than just that, and it probably
does have the most you know, new metal e set
of bangers for the set in a While in Milk
of the Madonna, where Chino sounds like he is just
kind of erupt on that chorus, and my Mind is
a Mountain, and even a bit of rap metal in

(36:37):
cut Hands, you know, the most of those type songs
since that other big flare up they had at the
beginning of the early you know, the twenty tens. They
sound so above The landscape does try to reheat their
leftovers and desperately has tried to produce again and again
bands that have the same appeal as deaf Tones, and
instead they just sound as cool and timeless and kind

(36:59):
of un bothered if you like, as depeche Mode and
The Cure and those kind of bands that Deftones would
probably aspire to be considered on the same level if
you ask them. I don't think this is Diamond Eyes
or coin aocan good as the last period of their
career that you know that was like career best Deaf Tones.
But if everyone is gonna go nuts over a Deathtones record,
at least it does rock. And you know, the records

(37:22):
that I have below this or just outside my twenty
thres mentioned, I really like them. So this is excellent stuff.

Speaker 3 (37:28):
Yeah, I mean sticking with a big hit Yeah, sticking
with the big hitters. My seventeen is Ghost Skeleton and
this is the lowest to Ghost album has ever charted
in my Albums of the Year list, and I've been
making these as far back as I've been following music,
So I think every Ghost album I know more or
less where they'd rank. Certainly Meliora, Prequelling, Impira all in

(37:50):
the top three of their respective years. And I think
if I went back to do twenty ten, twenty thirteen,
or least check up on those lists, I think both
of those the alarms they released those years, would end
up in similar positions. And I don't think it's just
luck of the drawer. I you know, a few months later,
I think I said this at the time, but it's
been confirmed a few months later. I do think this
is probably the weakest Ghost record, and just to get

(38:12):
out the way before I start waxing fantastic about it,
it's the only album of their I think has songs
in it I might call filler, And my main one
with the record is sonically it feels kind of stiffer
and less on a bit less ambidextrous than what they
were doing on the last few where they were really
pulling some strange things out of the ether. However, the

(38:33):
bulk of this album is the best arena ready rock
album I've heard this year, of this stripe of the
kind of like eighties stadium metal thing. I don't think
anyone else has come close, because the songs on this
when they're at there, when Ghost are in their pomp,
there's no one like them. And Peacefield, Lachroma, Satanized, cenotaph Marks,

(38:58):
the eve One and Umbra I was gonna say particular,
that's most of the record. These are just glitzy, thrilling
eighties heavy metal songs done to the highest standard, and
you know they do interpulate like pieces of classic rock
that you immediately recognize, like Peacefield has that journey chorus,
like Satanized, that's that Tears for Fears, drum beat like
lachromo organ like this sounds like something off the Ultimate

(39:20):
Sin Cenotaph, sounds like Queen. I feel that's happening more
and more with ghost records, where you're able to see
where they're coming from coming from, but I don't mind, because,
like I say, no one else is doing it to
this standard. And if there is something I like about
this record which hasn't been there on the previous records,
is this feels so much like a a Bias Forge record.
I feel like on the first five records, if you

(39:40):
want to group those together, that's very much a character,
like the Papo Maratus thing here technically still in character,
but I listen to these songs and go, this isn't
this is got stepping away maybe from that like Alice
Cooper kind of thing. It's like they're moving more into
just being a classic metal band, like the kind of

(40:01):
the shock rock antics. Feel that they've sort of taken
a back seat this time around, which maybe makes it
less attention grabbing. But I don't think you necessarily need
all that stuff when you're still writing pop songs of
this standard and for somehow, and it's the Amata trick
of ghost taking things that sound so much like the

(40:22):
past and don't not really doing anything to modern them up,
but still sounding fresh and new and exciting and songs
I want to hear live. Like I say, when this
band are on it, there's no one else doing this
thing to their standard. And even in a quote unquote
like off moment on their worst album, they come packing
some of the standout tracks of the year, and I think, like,

(40:43):
you know, goes becoming a genuine like download headliner, tear
band at this point, even if it's not been you know,
it's not happened for them, yet part of me wishes
it happened on a previous record that I felt more
passionately about. But at the same time, it's it's it's
hard to feel reszen for when they're still putting out
you know, six Arms In. That's further than most of
the bands they're taking from in terms of runs of

(41:05):
records that they've gotten further along now of putting out
super material most of those bands you think think of
eighties metal bands, six Arms In you're kind of looking
at the end of the decade turn of the nineties.
It's like the sort of the dampening years. Ghost are
fucking still on it and they deserve all the credit
in the world for that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (41:24):
Agree, Number sixteen. It's another one, going right back to
the beginning of the year, our first reviews episode and
the sweet sweet world of love crafty and black metal,
the Great Old Ones and kadaf every year, Elliott, I
feel like you and I have a couple of records
that have like a punchy phrase, like a concept like that,
and they just commit so hard to realizing it that

(41:46):
you just have to applaud it. And the Great Old
Ones are the best love crafty and black metal band
in the world, the way that Ahab are the best
nautical funeral doom band, the way that Departure Chandelier are
the best band about Napoleon being the reincarnation of the Antichrist.
I love a corner's niche and not in a surface
level gimmick way to disguise otherwise average music. But you

(42:07):
have so wholly geared every piece of your bands to
realizing this dream in your head of what this thing
sounds like and the specter of some horror so large
and looming in scope that you can barely materialize it
hangs over the Great Old Ones in such a prominent way.
Theirs is a music that has the churning mass of

(42:29):
the sea, but also here of dreams, the dream quest
of unknown Cadaf, the Lovecraft story that this draws from
is all about the you know, getting lost in the
passageways of the mind and this cosmic psychedelia, and the
Great Old Ones managed to embrace that mind altering quality
while also at the root of this straight up rocking
and writing some of the most head banging rifts on

(42:50):
an extreme metal record this year. How on earth do
you do all of that? Like, to tick all of
those boxes seems like an impossible task, but they make
it look easy. And from the word go you see
that this is a post black metal record. That's seven
songs are over an hour long, and you expect it
to be pretty ponderous. But the first thing you hear
is the fucking war cry of Cadaff, and suddenly you're
barreling down the mouth of hell, sucked into this tornado

(43:14):
of dreams and nightmares, and it's so heavy with these sludgy,
mirey riffs, a usage of a post metal kind of
basis sound to just sound like the beasts of below
writhing and aching to be freed and wrapping that in
this the nightmare quality and the dissonant squall of black
metal tremolone leads that are like an you know, alien

(43:35):
wailing of these kind of subterranean beasts. I feel like
I'm Amy Adams in Arrival, sometimes trying to decipher the
language of some being different to ourselves. That's communicating through
these melodies. But also the grooves that they're placed on
are deadly, like there's beatdowns on this thing that make
you want to kill people as much as any hardcore
record this year. When Under the Sign of Cough kicks

(43:56):
off and gets the high hat going, it's so exciting.
Primarily fundamentally, those from Althar has hidden away in it
one of the crunchiest four to four drummer riding a
backbeat metal grooves of the year, and that is the
accessible half of the record at the beginning, before the
back end disappears into fifteen minute instrumentals that feel like

(44:17):
they're probing at the boundaries of space and time. That
this is a kind of post black metal, but it
has nothing to do with black Gates. It's a band
just prodding away at their own definition of what that
kind of thing can mean. They sound less like Outsetts
or Death Heaven than they do. Cult of Lunar gave
birth to a fish person and then throw it out
to sea, where it then morphed and grew into some

(44:39):
unsightly abomination. It's a kind of metal that could only
exist in the modern day, when the roads of evolution
have brought it here. But also the primal nature of
it makes it simultaneously seen ancient and immortal and as
a kind of black metal that is committed to this
particular goal of hugeness, of width and of mass. It's

(45:01):
monstrously unique. It's possibly their best record since their Landmarks
to Kelly Lee record, and they're a very consistent band.
And I got to see him as well this year
in a Victorian theater on the North Yorkshire coastline with
the sea air still wafting into the building. So it
may never sound better than that, but nonetheless killer album,
Great Old Ones in.

Speaker 3 (45:22):
My sixteen in light of that fucking, highly accomplished, lovecrafty
and black metal record feels a bit dark because talking
about pieces of media influencing metal records, I have never
played a millisecond of Elden ring in my life. I
don't know what it is. I don't know anything about it.

(45:42):
I don't know the story My sixteen is entirely based
around it. I don't know what any of the terms mean.
But what I do know is when your band photo
is a massive lad in chain mail with a face
covering helmets stood in the fog next to a crotch rocket,
I will be listening to your band. And that is

(46:02):
the case with fell Omen with their twenty two minute
epic Invaded by a Dark Spirit. This thing is so
naff to an outsider because, like I say, it's seven
songs twenty two minutes. It's a combination of metal punk
and dungeon synth. It doesn't sound like they ever bother

(46:23):
to plug in things correctly or even tune the instruments.
The guitar leads on this thing are so fucking funny,
the way they fall in and out of tune and time,
like guitar harmonies where there's no way. These are the
note choices that were made deliberately, and like I say,
and the lyrics are about a video game that I've
never played and know nothing about, but I get so

(46:47):
swept up in this record. Every time I listen to it.
There's something so charming about a guy operating within such
tight limits, trying to create something of such scope, even
if he can't get it down on ten, he manages
to communicate the fantasy world that's in his mind that
he's taken from his video game, and somehow that's good enough.

(47:08):
This album is. It's in the brilliant spirit and lineage
of one man metal bands. We get these genuine outsiders
who were just doggedly pursuing a strange vision, hampered by
all the limitations that of doing it alone. And but
it comes out the other side with the record that
no group of people would ever make because strictly by

(47:28):
the laws of statistics, no one else is going to
have this exact vision. And as soon as you start
trying to appease another musician, you dilute the thing you're
going for. As soon as you start to make those
concessions or you know, doubt the dream, it's it's not
quite going to be as good. This isn't the work
of an auteur, because if whoever, I don't know his
name now, but it fell home and ever blinked once

(47:49):
this album wouldn't work as it does. It's just a
joy to listen to. And I can't go into like
the incredible details of how the songwriting works and the
structures and the progressing the way they build the world.
It almost feels like a bit of a hypnosis trick, because,
like I said, it's so low budget and so difficult
and so strange and so rudimentary. But somehow he managed

(48:13):
to imbue these songs with such I don't know, optimism
and hope and a scope of its own. And that's
been something that I've found myself drawn to more and
more over the last couple of years, and especially this year.
And it's it's not going to win any Grammys, but
for me and my taste and things that made me smile,

(48:35):
it's right up there.

Speaker 1 (48:36):
I think it should definitely be nominated for Best Promo,
but Pictures definitely that was easily number fifteen. You know
how I get on my high horse every now and
then about how, yes, death metal is fun and fun
death metal is great, but not all death metals should
be fun. Some death metal should be able to maintain
some god forsaken purity of intent. Are suffocating, lightless affront

(48:58):
to the senses. Last year it was Spectral Voice. That's
why one of the best metal records of this year
is Malthusians The Summoning Bell. This record is the pure,
concentrated stench of evil. This is death metal as a
writhing morass of worms and snakes crawling through a till
field of bones. This record is like you have rung

(49:19):
an ancient forbidden bell exhumed from an ancient king's tomb,
and now this evil has been let out into the world,
and you immediately regret it, and you can't undo what
you've done and close it off again. It's out there.
The intro track is the most heavy going thing, Like
Jesus Christ, what am I informed? Before? It scolds you
with a hellish rain of dive bombs, and I fucking

(49:39):
love it. I love how insanely tightly wound yet also
so guttural and deep in your chest cavity that it
seeps into your subconscious. This is the week that this
came out, I felt like I was perceiving the world
in death metal because it's so crawled in and infected
my senses. This is just an unforgiving labyrinth twisted death

(50:01):
metal and I've loved this band for about ten years,
and to see them suddenly make the jump to Relapse
was really surprising and encouraging. And this album is more
refined than all that they've done before, absolutely, and it's
less blurry. It's less like a death metal band have
been sick across the studio, and more precise about what
they place where and why. But for a cleaner record,

(50:21):
it is every bit as powerful and still feels totally
hostile to human life. This is the death metal album
that dunks your head in the cubicle toilet if you're
not hard enough to hang like fifty four minutes of
this kind of sickening weight. It doesn't make it easy,
but it doesn't care about making it easy. It slumps
and sways and falls apart without warning like the weight

(50:43):
of its own putrefied intestines inside. It is getting under itself.
Yet when it blasts, it's not strictly a death doom record.
It's also absolutely merciless and like being hit by a tank.
Johnny King drumming on this is playing like he's possessed
by the necronomicon. There are riffs on this that, in
their own twisted way, are so barbed and hooky. The
title track intro Rift, which glides in on this unholy

(51:05):
wind that gets in my brain but also makes the
hairs prick up on my neck, the way that Slayer
or Immolation or Cannibal corp intros will do between Dens
and Ruins, has one of these sickest base break parts
in death metal. This side of hammer Smashed Face. There's
scrunky gorguts, rifts that feel like your bones are being
cracked into new shapes. There are just these voices throughout it,

(51:26):
like not the death metal groul voice, but just these
other voices that feel like they are whispering incantations in
your ears. It feels like something malevolent in the earth
this record, Like I keep visually coming back to the
intro of Blood on Saintsan's Claw. If people know that
seventies folk horror film where the intro is in a
toiled field uncovering this unearthly, misshapen skull of a devil

(51:48):
and its energy is just emanating out and poisoning the town.
Something horrible dwells within the soil of this record. And
having gone through all of that, there is also a
fifteen minute track that takes everything unforgiving about this album
and channels it into an extreme marathon that's like a
game of chicken, like someone is going to fall down first,

(52:09):
either you or the song. And yes, about ten minutes
or so into it is one of the most invigorating riffs.
That's like it's tapped some last swell of late energy.
It's another instance of, you know, a like minded group
of veteran underground musicians with a serious pedigree between them
committing to furthering the cause of nightmare death metal. It
is the foulest, most venomous death metal record of the year,

(52:33):
bar one, but we'll get to that in a bit.

Speaker 3 (52:35):
Very very good album fifteen For me, you've just spoken
about it is Deathtone's private music. Okay, I'm going to
briefly repeat a couple things I ended up saying about
the Ghost record, but I didn't think so at the time.
This might be the weakest Deathtones record. I'm not sure
to think about sure. I mean, like I said, they're
one of my absolute favorite bands. They're one of the

(52:57):
greatest bands in the history of rock music. So this
album is still fucking superb. The rise of Deathtones from
that always the bridesmaid position to genuinely people going are
they too big for download? They even need download? They
can just do their own shows. Has been an amazing
thing to see because they've been able to do that
without having to be remotely cynical or in fact, they've

(53:18):
not real able to do anything because it happened in
the years between Omes and this record Omes came out
and they were a very popular download subheadline of size band.
By the time this arrives, people are going, is this
going to be the number one album of the week.
They've become as omnipresent and popular as a rock band
as anyone else in the world, like the people I
know who now love Death Tones, who are now towards

(53:41):
to saying, oh, you're gonna get tickets, who even three
years ago that seemed impossible. And it's just it's the
ultimate reward for what's been thirty years of staggering quality
of output. And I include all their records in that
I've said before, I think Saturday Night Risk is probably
my second favorite, because only Weaklings and Helen Lovejoys don't

(54:03):
like Pink cell Phone. But the wonder of this record
for me is as much as you say, and this
is absolutely true. This is one of the most warm
probably the most warmly received Deathtones records since Diamond Dies.
It doesn't feel like how good this record is has
affected them one way or the other, because it's like
whether this album was their best album in fifteen years

(54:26):
or for me it's one of their weakest. They've just
become so inescapable that it was going to work for
them no matter what. Like this doesn't necessarily feel like
Deathtones deliberately seizing the moment, because you can imagine, you know,
bands in their position where they've kind of become popular
out of their own powers or outside of their own powers.
It's like, oh, fuck word, suddenly a small stadium band,

(54:48):
we need to meet the moment and they're just too
cool for that. Like what they did is just they
got together, ripped through some songs. Like even the story
behind this record just seems so understated, just like, yeah,
we got together a few time as you wrote some songs,
got Nick to record them. This is those songs, which
for some bands might sound a bit lazy, but when
your Deathtones, and like I say, one of the best bands,

(55:09):
one of the best lineups of musicians working in rock
music today, that's more than enough. And when the songs
you're coming out with are things like my Mind is
a Mountain, infinite source, one of the songs of the year,
you know, you point to them all like I think
about you all the time, Milk of Them. Madonna is
one of those late career classics which the moment I

(55:30):
heard it, it was again it was like hearing Swerve
City for the first time, or Rocket Skates or probably
the most I've felt like that since I first got
into this band. In fact, they've been touring, you know,
they've been torn off the back of this record and
that's the close of their main set and it looks right,
which is just bizarre. It's just it's the sheer strength
of songwriting. It's it's a remarkable thing. Like I say,

(55:53):
this album, I'd have to think about it. I might
feel differently in a year. Again, as of today, it
might be my least favorite death Tones album, But that
says so much more about them than it says about this,
because I absolutely love this record.

Speaker 1 (56:06):
M My number fourteen. I feel like some of the
things that you were saying about the Fellowmen record I
might be about to say about this it's final dose
under the Eternal Shadow for when We've got both at
number fourteen. Both at fourteen brilliant stuff. Okay, because for
twenty five minutes of knuckle tracking lizard Brain ferocity, I

(56:27):
almost didn't need any other records like that this year.
This just did everything I could want. Because the taste
for the sadistic that this record has has just kept
me coming back to it all year long. This has
got to be one of the records that I've just
put on the most this year because I've gotta hear
these riffs. I've got to hear this crust punk band
infected by the frostbitten spirit of Dark Throne rather than
the other way around.

Speaker 3 (56:47):
Where.

Speaker 1 (56:48):
For as absolutely blood spitting as this record is, it's
also in its whirlwind package one of the most satisfying
genre cross pollinations that I could personally imagine this year.
This record has almost everything I could want in a short,
fast evil record. The guitar tone is savage. It's like
raking barbed wire across your skin and then flossing your

(57:08):
teeth with it for good measure. It is those perfect
Dark Throne type primitive head banger riffs, but they're also
played about two time speed. This habms a little bit
like listening to under a Funeral Moon on forty five
rpm sometimes, and these like simple, wonderfully dumb as fuck
drum beats that are punk incarnate just do no more
complicated than needed. The first riff just hitting the crash symbol,

(57:32):
no no no, at the very beginn of the record,
so incessantly I am throwing the claws to the sky
as the fires of hell rise up around it, and
this blustery Nordic blast beat follows, and then a minute
in the sickest switch into one of those two steps parts,
and the bits when the drummer just drops it all
and goes right fuck it half tempo. When this thing

(57:53):
rides a rift like the end of Weathered Acts. It
is the most primarily satisfying cave man ah thing you
could imagine. It is a chain mail ass beating of
a record. The savage riff and that Oi tom park
that starts Revenge I have played again and again this year.
But it's also a strange genre pick and mix that's

(58:14):
oddly holistic about the kinds of sounds and styles that
they know will sound good together. Because I think for
all of its obnoxiousness. This record is great testament to
how like minded some of these sonically seemingly desperate things are.
Because if you're not in the mood for a full
forty five minutes of DSBM or Nordic folk music or
dungeon synth, don't worry. This twenty five minute crush record

(58:38):
is gonna have you covered. It's gonna have moments where
it sounds like it's dragging itself through piss and blood
into the bathroom in order to kill itself. It's gonna
have moments where the singer, who has mostly been gargling
razors and howling like a wolf, will break out into
this like manic wild Man of the Hills folk baritone.
It's gonna have one interlude track on side A of

(58:58):
wretching and way over harsh industrial noise like it's full
of hell, and then a dungeon synth one on side
B where he's still barking and wrenching over the top
of it, and the overall effect is like a mosh
insider medieval torture chamber. It doesn't go on any longer
than it needs to be, but it's shockingly eclectic. It's
so by and for overall underground music enthusiasts, this sort

(59:21):
of dungeon punk idea of like clattering, cider throwing punk music,
but with the callous black metal crust to it and
this almost archaic atmosphere. And if you're into punk and
black metal and speed metal and noise, all this kind
of collectively basement dwelling sweat dripping down the rotten Wolves music,

(59:41):
we just have the coolest bands, right, like combining those things,
and Final Dose as one of the most aggressive of
them that I've heard, chomping on broken glass and then
grinning at you with blood dripping down between its teeth.
What are the coolest bands I've heard all year? And
you absolutely agree earlier.

Speaker 3 (59:59):
Yeah, I mean you kind of said it, but this
and fell Omen are like two bands from alternate realities
kind of expressed the same sort of thing. It's like
fantastical black metal punk with a sort of dungeon synflair.
And not to slag off Fellomen, you know, I've just
said very nice things about them, but this is the
world where that idea actually works, Like putting it together

(01:00:20):
because I listened to that Fellomen record and you know,
I recognize it's going to be for a very specific
kind of person as a sort of an affinity for
that sort of thing. It's broken, bizarre, kind of odd ball.
I don't blame anyone who listens to that album and goes, well,
this is this is silly Final Dose. You are morally obligated,
I think, by law, to think this album rips because

(01:00:41):
this tiny niche as hell crossband has managed to put
together genuinely one of the best collections of riffs you'll
find all year. Some of the most popular metal bands,
popular in acclaimed metal bands in the world put music
out this shit. I don't think any of them put
together a tapestry of sick riffs that goes toe to
toe this And the best part, they almost all sound

(01:01:03):
exactly the same. There's the tritone dbat rift, there's the
slamming like exactly like you said under a funeral moon riff.
There's the occasional bit of classic bathery riff here, and
there's just rinse and repeat and I never get sick
of it. And I've heard these rifts by other bands
a billion times. I don't know how Final does manage
to make it sound so exciting to pick up a

(01:01:24):
large amount to make the comparison. It's a feeling not
unlike when I first heard Nightmare Logic and I thought, Okay,
I've heard these rifts before, but it sounds so fresh
and exciting and just it communicate. Anyone who likes metal
likes that record, and I kind of feel that way
about this, and in some ways more so because this
is more closely attuned to my personal taste. There's no

(01:01:46):
dungeon synth on Nightmare Logic, much to my chagrin, and
this album, which like rips as hard as anything I've
heard this year, it's sort of dungeon synth. Flair also
has this like LARPer Kiss version energy to it, which
I don't know how those two things w rop up
against each other so brillly, but they do. It's it's
and it somehow makes the music cooler. It's almost like

(01:02:08):
it's it's daring you to make fun of it. This record,
it's just it's like fucking twenty five minutes long. It's
just it's superb.

Speaker 1 (01:02:17):
Yeah, it's gotten them decently well noticed. I think I
saw at some point this year they did a Brazilian tour.
It's like you're a pub band from London. Basically, how
have you got this army of you know, Brazilians waiting
for you there to go and play it there? But
it worked for them because it's just some of the
sickest underground riff music. As you say, this year, back
over to me again number thirteen. Remember when I was

(01:02:39):
speaking about foul death metal, where there is of course
a band who cemented their place this year as maybe
the foulest of all time. I've got quite a lot
in my top ten that isn't just noise, but we
are in my violence section piss Grave, malignant worthlessness, the
COVID years missed piss Grave and the last decade in
death metal. The year you know, after the last pis Grave.

(01:03:01):
Alum particularly saw this explosion in death metal's popularity, and
in a time when death metal is more popular than
ever pretty much and everyone and their mum is in
a death metal band, what we were waiting for was
that challenge to once again be laid down and go
are you up to this though? Because death metal is
like almost a normal genre now, but somewhere that idea

(01:03:23):
of what people think death metal is. If you ask
a random person and it's like the apotheosis in garbled
noise and horrifying sound scary music. The pisk Grave project
of the last ten years has been to elevate what
death metal is still after thirty to forty years as
a genre capable of on the repellent horror bar graph,

(01:03:45):
and even as they have become an almost mythical name,
a byword for extremity in the way that Dying Fetus
or Cannibal Corps are on just name alone, piss Grave
are still so cult and underground because you just can't
get that many people into this, like this record that
sounds like being eaten alive by maggots, or the trap

(01:04:06):
in Saw three that drowns you in liquefied Pigs, where
we went six years without a record, a time in
which we didn't even really know if pisk Grave were
a band, and all of these trips they do here
no one attempted in those six years that arms race
of intensity and fear that characterized the birth of death metal.
Piskgrave are one of the only bands still thinking in

(01:04:27):
those terms and doing tricks like the vocal distortion getting
taken even further. Speaking of guitar tones, can you get
more putrid than this. I've never heard a guitar sound
sounds so much like an electric carving knife than pisk
Grave Records, and where all of the bits of fat
and gristle it's slicing away also somehow find their way

(01:04:48):
into the final mix. Getting in Heretic Blood, christened as
the first pisk Grave song in six years, and just
having immediately be the most violent hellish death metal song
released in those years, was such a thrill. And then
after that dizzying intro, you're slapping you awake, locking in
and throwing its whole body into what is the death

(01:05:09):
metal riff of the year when it kicks so good,
and these rifts that are so barbaric also truly get
you grooving, the low rolling rifts that you'd recognize from
a morbid Angel, but caked in piss that drive the
title track, and dissident Amputator, which is like the sound
of a fucking meat packing plant. I love, actually the

(01:05:31):
classic metal instincts that are in this, you know if
you break through it, the way that heaping pile of
electrified gore opens with this dramatic, quite pompous intro, the
way that death would do on a pull, the plug
or you know you go not too far before that
and it's Slayer the d and I know it's absolutely horrid,
but try and not nod your head to interminent orgy.

(01:05:52):
These fundamentals of good rifts, big grooves being put into
the hands of the rare death a band who are
also going to prey those noise experimental disorientation buttons and
the final challenge of this album, the curtain call on
the Run, being to drag you down for what feels
like an eternity, into the depth and drown you in

(01:06:13):
this ocean of noise and distortion. And I think they're
done piss grave. If you ask any bands or promoters
that have tried to book them or whatever, they are
very hard to pin down to a time and place
kind of band, and what they've done almost feels less
like a band and more some kind of art project
of let's for a decade carve out this piece of

(01:06:34):
death metal history and here close out what we might
term as their trilogy of disgust. I think this is
the last stamp on ten years of making the most
rancid death music of all time, and what a thrill
that is. One last time an affront to what people
think is tasteful and proper still and then sailing out
as a band who in the twenty tens and the

(01:06:56):
twenty twenties still managed to write their name as a
banner band for extreme music and throwing down the gauntlet
for the next band who try and go against the
grain and make sure death metal doesn't ever get too
comfy and lovable, absolutely unwavering legend behavior.

Speaker 3 (01:07:13):
My number thirteen, it's one of my favorite new discoveries
of the year. It's Grab with Cremes, which it's a
band that I'd never heard of until it came time
to do the reviews for it, and I've just I've
fucking loved this record all year. To me, it's almost
the platonic ideal of what black metal should sound like.

(01:07:33):
It's raw enough to feel authentic and real and have
that timeless quality that all the best black met does.
But they managed to sort they strike that balance in
a way that doesn't forego scale and drama, because you know,
I love raw black metal, and I have something of
a diversity to a lot of black mel that's maybe
too clean or too rigidly produced. This being able to

(01:07:54):
spin those two plates. It makes for even if it's
not my favorite Blackmel record of the year, it might
be the most transportative. At the moment I put this on,
I'm suddenly stranded in the Bavarian mountains on a blisteringly
cold night, like being handled a bowl by the grim Reaper.
The way this band managed to weave extra instrumentation, you know,

(01:08:16):
maybe it's since I don't know, but the sound of
bells and dulcamers and strings and the like into the
tapestry of caustic black mel, it's a sight to behold.
It's one of the most impressive, most impressively mixed records
of the year. In a way, it's you know, in
a way it feels kind of hopelessly bleak, and it's
atmospherically something of a dirge. It's not say there's no

(01:08:37):
color and light, but the overall vibe of this record
is grim but also manages to feel dramatic. When this
thing kind of takes its foot off the accelerator, there's
a sense of scopes with you only find on the
best Enslaved records, which is a completely different strand of
black mel that bears no relation to some of the
stuff they more often focus on, and I think in

(01:08:58):
large part it's helped along by one of the best
extreme metal vocal performances of the year, like this his
name is it good? Aren'ts?

Speaker 1 (01:09:06):
Or?

Speaker 3 (01:09:06):
I think it's Grant say it like he has this
super distinctive teutonic croak. But when he really opens up
that diaphragm and starts to bellow it, it's pulling to
mind things like Latter Da Amoebics and Primordial and even
like Paradise Lost and the level of drama those kind
of bands have. And when the when the music slows

(01:09:30):
down and allows that to take place, you suddenly feel
like you're kind of suspended over a crevice. It's just
it's so like I say, transportative and evocative of such
a specific thing. And the real fun of it is
they managed to have those moments that feel dramatic, dramatic
and orchestral, but in a way that doesn't sacrifice song

(01:09:50):
craft and fun because this album has a bit of
rock and roll flare to it. When it bowls along,
it doesn't sound too dissimilar from a middle era satirical album,
just decorated with it bells and whistles, and there's a
brief blast somewhere in the record where it's full disco
beat and it just puts a massive smile on my
face and it's gone again. Like that's not common among
blackmore records, where like stone facedness and repetition is off

(01:10:12):
in the aim of the game, particularly for trying to
capture a certain atmosphere, grather a case of a band
mailes have their cake and eat it too, and I'm
always going to warm to those this record. The band
is just brilliant, so inventive, so distinct, and I've loved
this record all year.

Speaker 1 (01:10:29):
I'm well happy that that turned up in your list.
Number twelve is a band who the more years go by,
the more they might be the best metal core band
of all time, not named Converge Bleeding Through in nine.
Metalcore is an almost dead genre, and that might seem
like a weird thing to say when it's still by
far the commercially dominant style of metal today, But it
is it's shambling corpse that is walking out there that

(01:10:52):
is barely recognizable. Even what people like to call the
true metal core that's far more popular in the hardcore
scene is largely regarded to and almost as redundant. People
just don't want to admit it, and there are a
few bands keeping something alive within it. I thought the
Dying Wish album this year was cool and encouraging and
not artistically bankrupt malevolence if you want to count them
out of you, fresh and interesting. But the only metal

(01:11:16):
core album that got anywhere near my twenty is a
band who have been killing it for twenty five years
and crucially seem almost completely immune to both time and
the state of the genre around them. This is the
Chainsaw band of their generation, the new wave of American
heavy metal band who most seem that they could beat
the crap out of you, even if they are wearing

(01:11:36):
eyeliner as they did it, being as hard and as
mean as they've ever been speaking a long gap seven
years between this and their comeback album, which is longer
than between that and the album they initially broke up
on and the follow up to the successful comeback album, Kills,
which engaged didn't manage it, and maybe it's because Bleeding
Through aren't a band who are always on the touring

(01:11:56):
grind anymore, being sanded into a safer version of themselves
because the band is their meal ticket. Instead, when Bleeding
through Turn Up. It's a version that is still full
of hunger and still looking right in the whites of
your eyes. This record starts with Sarah Man and only
gets harder from there when they are digging themselves up
doing the don't mess with our gang thing on Our
Brander's Chaos.

Speaker 2 (01:12:17):
You believe it.

Speaker 1 (01:12:19):
This is the two thousands metal core sound souped up
sonically so much that it fits in perfectly with what
else is around them on Sharp Turned Records, and the
engine of it is fucking crazy, Like when this thing
hits full pelt, it is like a multi car pile
up with limbs strewn everywhere. How is this a metalcore
record that makes me feel like I have had a
piss grave cover happen to me?

Speaker 3 (01:12:40):
You know?

Speaker 1 (01:12:41):
And the magic trick that they always would do of
the gothic poetry Phantom of the Opera shit wrapped around
the thuggiest beat Belms. Lost in Isolation is the hardest
breakdown of the year, when it just fucking busts through
that wall with lashings of keys and strings and organs
around them that shift from track to track and some

(01:13:02):
incredible lead work on top as well. Dead but so
Alive has one of the only metalcore choruses to actually
make me want to sing along while also feeling like
I've been dragged at full speed from the back of
a horse. And when at the very end Marta starts
hitting the lt me let me in, it's so powerful.
Nine albums in going at this point, Hey, let's basically

(01:13:25):
get Martin to be a co vocalist like twenty years
in now only now deciding to use some of these
elements they have in their arsenal to their full potential.
What's really great about some of this is how they
are still tinkering how they can do certain things better,
rather than just trading on the fumes of being a
band who haven't developed. Since this is Love, This is Murderous,
and the songs where she does take over like a

(01:13:46):
path of our disease. It's not like say, Hannah and Creeper,
where it's such an obvious like oh, she's a star,
but it's creaky and ghoulish and skeletal and befitting of
the atmosphere of the record and the superhero team ups
on this record of not the same guest people who
always get invited to the metaphorical metal band Aid but
some of the people also on Bleeding Through his level

(01:14:07):
of like probably still van touring somewhere out there. I
am resistance. You get basically a goth comeback kid song
with an actual burst of lightning fast hardcore in your
metal record, and it's like fucking huffing a tank of
rocket field. Like that song got me through the first
like three months of twenty twenty five on its own.
If you like metalcore and you weren't listening to this

(01:14:29):
record this year, I don't know what the hell you
were doing or how you even stayed alive, Because, like,
people are really excited about the Lamb of God singles
that are coming out at the moment, which are pretty cool.
If that Lamb of God record next year turns out
to be half as good as this, it will be
a top ten album everywhere, because Bleeding Through are just
perpetually underappreciated. But that I've still got a what you

(01:14:52):
would call a red blooded metal record in my twenty
teenage me is thankful that there's still something like that
worth of dam They are like an Ireland in a
barren ocean. Long may we treasure them?

Speaker 3 (01:15:03):
Yeah, that should have been my honorable mention. Because that
the album is superb. My twelve you had at thirteen,
which means I think technically it means I'm harder than
you because my twelve is maliminent worthlessness by Piscrave. I
maybe I'm imature. I just love everything that Pisgrave represent,
this shadowy entity that emerge every few years to the

(01:15:26):
hollowing of perverts and siccos, and they come out with
this the most hideous, nauseating metal arm of the year,
every year that they come out and then just disappear again.
And knowing this is the last time, I found myself
getting sad in a weird way, like it's not the
sort of music that you're supposed to form an emotional
connection to, but I have an emotional connection to them

(01:15:48):
because they are, like you said, They're like the final
word in depravity. It's almost like if you're increasing the
frequency on something until it just goes into white noise
and then a high buzz and then you can't hear
it anymore. This is the buzz before it ceases to
be music. Because with this album, I genuinely think they've

(01:16:10):
gone of the best all time three hour runs in
the history of death. MeTL Suicide euphoria, posthumous humiliation, malignant worthlessness,
even just the titles, it's just it's the stuff of legends.
And the fact this might be their most listener friendly
is hysterical because it's quite comfortably the nastiest metal album
I've heard all year. This thing is like it's like

(01:16:32):
a hissing cockroach. It's so diseased and threatening. It's like
a flamethrow that's held up to your face and then
when only when it runs out of fuel, they just
throw a fistfull of like maggots into your blisters. It
goes at ten thousand miles an hour. The vocals sound
like a rabid pitbull. The only word I can think
for the guitar tone is venereal. It's so fucking disgusting.

(01:16:56):
But with those tools they've also crafted, like you said,
some of the catchest rifts of the year. In termin Orgy,
I've been tapping my foot to that, humming it to myself.
In Tesco, it's a groove that Behems would be filled
to put on their record Ignominy of putre Faction. The
main roof from that wouldn't sound out of place on
two of the Muselas or the bleeding. It just sounds

(01:17:16):
like it's wrapped in barbed wire and lead rifts. It's
not all just low end, faceless slop like. There's serious
personality in the playing, which only makes piss Grave sound
so much more distinct and interesting than so many their peers.
You just go up ten thousand miles an hour and
don't by the writing songs or do. I do also
like that it also makes them more frightening. It's so

(01:17:39):
much more memorable for it. It's not just an aimless
barrage of sputum. It's it's holding your nose, grabbing your
chin and being sick down your throat and in the
best way possible. Like you said, it's it's sad knowing
that this is the swan song, but what a fucking
way to go out. It's it really is laying down
the marker. Piss Grave an't going to do what some

(01:18:00):
death metal bands, even many classic bands do, where they
just sort of stick around and keep churning out albums
that are approximations of the thing they were doing before.
It's one of the most unfuck withable entities in the
history of death metal, and I honestly I feel privileged
to have been along for the ride.

Speaker 1 (01:18:17):
Yeah, I totally agree. I had an immaculate top ten
that then got all mixed up, and I've got one
too many albums for it. And I was happy for
everything I've spoken about so far to be in the
first ten. I really wanted everything from here and out
to be at the top ten. So this is top
ten in my heart, even if it's mathematically not allowed
to be number eleven. At least right now, I've ended

(01:18:38):
up with Lamp of Murmur, the dreaming Prince in ecstasy.
He's here every time, right Like Lamp of Murma has
been one of my consistent favorite artists of the twenty twenties,
but we've got a new flavor every time. This is
one of our great black metal prodigies with a flair
for the eccentric that keeps each album interesting and managing
to exactly give me the purest feeling of black mam

(01:19:00):
and what I love about it every time, but without
it actually being just pure, straight down the line every time,
and managing to you know, first transcend the raw you know,
band camp black metal scene into something of the more
epic side of the second wave, to now up and
again punching through some new ceiling. It's something that could

(01:19:20):
be a cause play, because last time it was a
mortal and now it's got flavors of Emperor and Old
Man's Child and early Demi bor Gear. But the skill
with which these hallmarks are used is absolutely ingenious, and
this project has turned into something of a perpetual evolution machine,
where every time we think he's done it, it emerges
from its cocoon once again and sheds its skin for

(01:19:41):
something fresh. This album, in particular, feels like I don't
care what corner you're pulling from. It's one of the
straight up most impressive metal albums of the year that
demands respect because it's not only something new and fresh
in the intertwining here of absolute back cave goth death rock,
dark wave type feelings, and epic black metal, and they are,

(01:20:03):
you know, not completely foreign words world to one another,
but they have rarely sounded more cohesive than they sound here.
But it's also just on a compositional level for straight
up metal satisfaction. These are unbelievable, flowing songs upwards of
five seven nine minutes long on the first half of
the record, with rifts upon rifts that are arranged to

(01:20:25):
perfection in forest of hallucinations and hate gait and reincarnation
of a witch. No matter what different direction they go in,
you are just thundering horns up all the way, trumpeting
fanfare at your back, fist fucking pumping, never two chin
stroke keeper, just total invigorating power. And the sounds like
wherever the strings have been sampled from, or what keys

(01:20:48):
effects he's going for? Whatever, This album feels like it's
born of an eternal quest to find the most enchanting
sounds and texts you could put onto what you imagine
is still a relatively cheap one man black metal record
in twenty twenty five. Some of them are out of
this world, and the maximalist scope of the record and
the density of the tracks, it's one of those exquisite

(01:21:10):
black metal records architecturally that feels like the very body
of the album itself is like you are standing within
an opulent concert hall, a haunted opera house full of
these swirling ghosts embodied by all of these different tones
of the record, be it keys or harpsichords or whatever.
And then you get into side B, which is like

(01:21:31):
his goth black metal twenty one to twelve suite, which
for twenty two minutes feels like he is endeavoring to
draw these twin loves that he has of total eighties
gothic rock and nineties black metal together as seamlessly as
he can, like he's just trying to make the world
feel what he feels about these kinds of music. And

(01:21:52):
you know how much those things individually make up my
music taste, You can imagine how much I back the
vision here where part two of it is the liminal
moving down the river sticks threshold between mortal planes of
prime fields with an ethyln only for part three to
have the dark ruler of this world unfurl its jet
black wings and pay it off with the most dripping

(01:22:14):
in dark, regal, majesty black metal riffs of this year.
It's like a mad scientist record, but the record doesn't
actually feel that mad if you don't overanalyze it, because
it's so smooth to have this symphonic black metal record
that also sounds like it's strutting its stuff on the
golf club dance floor with slinky high hat beats. They
are meant to go together here, and my personal softest

(01:22:36):
spot does sit with some of the earliest material, but
compositionally and an ambition. This feels like Lamp of Murmurs
at magnum Opus so far, and to see the growth
that's happened musically in five years. You look back sometimes
and you see how much musical ground Emperor or Celtic
Frost managed to cover in that kind of time frame
back in the day, and it just doesn't seem possible today.

(01:22:57):
And I'm not saying that this is as trailblazing or
as cutting edge as that, but there's not another black
metal album you've heard that is exactly like this one.
That was also true even the last time, when it
mostly sounds like a Moor, it was still true for
her previous records. And this is what that kind of
inspiration today sounds like.

Speaker 3 (01:23:14):
Yeah, more of that later. My eleven is on if
you've heard this? Have you heard of a band called
lip Hoomer?

Speaker 1 (01:23:23):
How do you spell that?

Speaker 3 (01:23:25):
L I p oma?

Speaker 1 (01:23:27):
I don't think I have heard this one now, I'm
just just taking a look. No, I mean that cover
art is promising I've not heard it.

Speaker 3 (01:23:35):
Yeah, well, yeah, there are there are many albums on
my list. I think everyone who listens to this should
go and check out, and I think pretty much everyone
like There are several where if no one else listens
to it or likes them, I won't take it seriously
because I don't suspect melodic gore grind with medieval imagery
and songs about ancient medicine.

Speaker 1 (01:23:56):
Is this the noc here for the second album?

Speaker 3 (01:23:58):
Yes? Sorry if I say they no Cure for the
Sick by Alapoma. Gore grind as a genre, it's not
one that welcomes much in the way of progression. Carcass
released Free Computer Faction in nineteen eighty eight, and they've
basically been going in circles for forty years. Brilliant bands
and albums have emerged in that time. By I can't

(01:24:19):
think of really any occasion where I've listened to a
gorgrinderal and thought, oh, that's new. I think the last
time I heard something and thought that's different was the
first one I heard Last Days of Humanity, and I thought,
nothing's ever going to be faster and more disgusting than that.
And that does seem like the end game, because this
is a genre where if it seemingly only goes in
one direction, can you be faster, Can you be heavier?

(01:24:39):
Can you be dirtier? And if you can't do that,
then you're kind of obsolete. What Lippoem have done now
seems obvious, and they've just exploded the possibilities for the
niche of the niche sub genre, and they've crafted one
of the most inventive, fun and totally one of a

(01:25:00):
kind of extreme metal records I've heard this year. This
isn't just like a batch of twenty second songs that
sounds like a toilet. These are four minute roller coaster
compositions that go from last Dais of Humanity to cradle
of filth at the Gates to ancient medieval folk and
then back again. If your tastes sit anywhere in that

(01:25:22):
ven diagram, it is such unbelievable fun. There are melodic
refrains on the scene that would not sound out of
place on a Helloween record, and this is an album
which also has bits that sound like a lot of
it sounds like devowment, and yet it works. There's a
spoken word sample section on the song called to the
Fire Breathers that reminds me of Blood on Ice. Here
a bathory and dare I say night falling Middle Earth.

(01:25:44):
This is a gor Grind down. We're talking about people
and some of it somehow the strangest part it sounds
like skate punk while still being a gorgrown record. There's
bits and I was going, this sounds like first record Propagandhi,
how is this possible? And I don't think maybe ever
have I heard gorgrind songs that are this dexterous and

(01:26:06):
kind of well written. You know, I love Carcass, but
Rica Putrefaction is kind of slop like that. Some of
those songs are big moments, but a lot of the
songs just blur together. Every single one of these songs
I could pick out from the other, and I don't
know if that's ever happened in this subject undre before
and as a genre which I've always liked mainly for
the pure sixth will have actually listening to it. This

(01:26:29):
might be one of the catchest albums it's ever coughed out.
I've never heard an album in this star that sounds
so bright, so optimistic, just sort of has such a
glint in the eye, and I a bit like that
effluence I was talking earlier. I just never thought that
was possible with the tools that are at their disposal.
If you're curious about this record but you're not quite

(01:26:50):
ready to commit to it, go and listen to that
Cult to the Fibry the song. If you're not interested
in more, We're not Friends.

Speaker 1 (01:26:57):
Yeah, I will check that out. It's mad that you
miss broad a Kin at Damnation, Like Howard you, of
all people, managed to let that slip past you?

Speaker 2 (01:27:04):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:27:05):
My top ten begins with continuing on the goth kick
with some of my picks here. This is the album
that has climbed the most for me throughout the year.
Where I was fairly taken with it when we reviewed
it in the first half of twenty twenty five, but
my love for it had not truly blossomed, and where
you know, other albums maybe did not stay in rotation
so much. I consistently found myself wanting to go back

(01:27:27):
and put this on and let its seductive appeal wash
over me. It's Mesa and the Spin. All my goth
mates love this record. Like when I talked to my
immediate friend group, this is one of the albums that
we all agree on. I think they've made something of
a cult classic here. It's not the you know, most
obvious push for the Masses record this year that's had
a huge song and dance made about it, but the

(01:27:48):
fact that for the audience poll next week, I'm thinking
about the albums that I'm expecting to come up fairly strong,
and it's like Turnstile, Creeper, Deftones, Mesa, like this has
been kind of a dark horse pick for our of
the Year this whole time, and the amount that you've
heard Mesa's name dropped this year. It's great because it's
just all on musical merit, you know. And not to

(01:28:08):
say that those other bands I've just picked their you know,
aren't because they're all great bands obviously, I just mean
that this is a wonderful little story of a band
who exists on a kind of cult level, who aren't
super established outside of the underground, making a record that
totally organically turns a bunch of heads and make people go, wow,
that's incredible. And this is absolutely the classiest record that
I have in my Top twenty this year. This band

(01:28:29):
feel just like too cool for me to hang out
with them. Like the video for at Races has the
singer where in all black leather, riding her motorbike through
like the Balkan countryside, and when I listen to this record,
I feel like I've been invited to a super exclusive
party in some European bar serving refined, fancy cocktails. I
should probably be kicked out of because possibly along with

(01:28:51):
I will say my next uber goth album, pick the
best sounding record of the year, like the weight of Noir.
Atmosphere in this without actually being that heavy a record,
because there's tons of space and air in this record,
which absolutely makes these songs sing is just unbelievable. It's
another wonderful little genre mel that just pays off so

(01:29:13):
seamlessly to itch so many things that I like, taking
this undercurrent of progressive doom and then pumping it full
of eighties post punk and goth rock, putting that dance
floor rhythm into you know, not black metal this time,
but this already sumptuous beauty and grace of Paul Bearer
or Yob. It's such a good idea, I'm shocked that

(01:29:34):
we haven't had more of it. There remind me a
bit of bands like Tribulation or Chapel of Disease, and
that they feel like people who could exist in the
seventies or the nineties or in Messr's case, like the
forties with this like jazzy flourisht they've got going on.
The first time I heard this record, it was songs
like at Races with that post punk groove and fire
on the Roof with this burst of like led Zeppelin

(01:29:55):
or even Alison Chains kind of seventies rock soul to it,
where that is also like underpin by this palsy John
Cartperer synth that really gripped me first. But now it's
the mid portion of this record that I just cannot
get over, with Immolation and the Dress where the singer
just sounds beyond heavenly and that lone jazz piano, and

(01:30:15):
the bit in Immolation when the guitar solo hits her
lead melody and just bursts that emotional dam and then
the brass that comes in on the dress and the
trumpet free jazz guitar lead conversation that unfolds between those
two instruments, and the cosmic bills that goes on. It
just all brings a tear to the eye. And then

(01:30:35):
you've still got Reveal, which is an odd fucking idea
that seems to have taken so many individual weird steps
to get to what it is where they've ripped the
iron Man riff but as an Italian goth band played
it on a Southern slide guitar and then put a
blastbeat under it.

Speaker 3 (01:30:50):
That's a weird.

Speaker 1 (01:30:51):
Move to do all those things, but I'm glad someone's
done it. And you know, in the year when we
bed a real final farewell to Black Sabbath, fifty some
years on, we still have bands able to cook up
new things with those ingredients. This is like a dark,
glassier cherry chocolate of an album. They had Messa socks
at Damnation. A part of me feels like I should
have bought the Messa socks because I do feel like

(01:31:12):
I'm wrapped up in something so luxurious and comforting when
I listened to it. Just outrageously pretty album where they
sound like absolute stars on this record.

Speaker 3 (01:31:21):
Yeah, I think you were saying early about your top
ten just seeming air tight, so then struggling to get
the eleventh th in. I almost have the opposite effect
where I was looking at mine and I was like, final,
doz grab fucking piss grave lip home. I'm so fucking metal.
I'm the coolest guy in the world, and then eventually
I had to recognize where this ranks purely in terms

(01:31:42):
of how much I like it, how much I'm listening
to it, and I go, no, I'm still a pathetic dweeb,
and I'm scared. I want to see the light fall
from your eyes on this, because I can't imagine you
have any interest in this at all. But my number
ten is Geese with getting killed.

Speaker 1 (01:31:56):
I have heard this name come up a lot in
UH music circles that I'm not involved in. I do
not think I could tell you what they sound like
at all.

Speaker 3 (01:32:05):
It already sounds like you're trying to bargain somehow, just.

Speaker 1 (01:32:08):
Don't know what it is.

Speaker 2 (01:32:09):
Really.

Speaker 3 (01:32:10):
Yeah, well, well, this is the thing is, you know,
every couple of years that you know wing of those
people often have great taste and other things, but they're
tasting rock music. The ones they seem to annoint often
they're not great. It's it's every couple of years they'll go,
here's a rock band that has nothing that's appealing or
exciting about rock music in them, and actually they're the
only appealing and exciting rock band in the world. And

(01:32:33):
every now and then those guys do get it. So
right and Geese is them getting it right? When they
were suddenly like the kind of core sillibra among that crowd.
I'll be honest, I kind of started rolling my eyes
because the first thing I heard about them was people going,
this is the best rock alum of the twenty twenties whatever,
and I just thought, laugh, fucking this is gonna be
some you know, bog standard average indies that's just going

(01:32:57):
to be gone again in two years. I didn't anticipate
loving it, but you know what, this is comfortably one
of the best indie rock alums to release this decade.
They have a thing which all bands of this kind
seem to strive for and so few achieved, which is
a sound that feels totally natural and classic, genuinely timeless,

(01:33:19):
but also fresh, contemporary and exciting. It's an amalgam of Pavement, Arcade, fire,
ram Cassi, head Rest, the Fall, Foxgen the New York Dolls,
bit of Alison Chains in there, Kate Bush, Tom Waits
just stuffed from the Great not the Great American Songbook
of like you know, Blue Moon, Kentucky, but like the

(01:33:42):
lineage of North American artists who have you know, to
find the second half of the twenty first century and
the start of the second half of the twenty century
of the first half of the twenty first it makes
it really difficult to capture precisely what the combination of
those things is. But it's also why it feels kind
of inimitable. This sound just has a sensation to it
that I find intoxicating. It's like sunshine on your face

(01:34:03):
or I kiss on your cheek. There's not much you
can do in terms of explaining why it works. You
can only express that it does. Since it has come out,
it's been one of my go to feel something albums
of the year. It's not always upbeat, but there's a
breeziness to this record and an earnestness that even when
it's noisy and abstract I just find myself connecting to.

(01:34:24):
And when they really put the hammer down, it's not heavy,
but it hits like nothing else I've heard this year.
The big breakout song of this record is a or
Paid the Cocaine, which I can only say it sounds
like the song is writing itself. It's so earnest and
pure of heart that you couldn't add or take anything
away from it to enhance it. It just feels like

(01:34:45):
it's unfolding as you listen to it, and it's one
of the most beautiful pieces of music I've heard all year.
But it's also electrifying and fun to listen to it
because this band's chemistry is just off the charts, and
when they they seem to pull things out of the
air that make the am feel explosive and technical, despite
being quite often a mellow record. You know, it's clumsy,

(01:35:05):
but it'sself assured. It's loud, and it's delicate. It's spontaneous,
but it feels masterfully composed. It's complex, but these are
songs that like stick in your head and feel time
as the moment they hit you, you know for the
thing that it is. It feels like a bit of
a classical ready and honestly, rightly so all.

Speaker 1 (01:35:22):
Right manamer nine. This is another of what feel like
the consensus albums this year, the big ones that I
am expecting to hear again and again this December. Death
Heaven Lonely, People with Power. Hasn't it been good to
see Death Heavens surge back this year and I almost
didn't register that they needed or had anything to surch
back from because of course their last album was their

(01:35:43):
most divisive one, inherently so in the style that I
went for. But we've always discussed Death Eavan as a relevant,
creatively interesting band. I've not felt like over the last
ten years Death Heaven have been an absent band from
those kinds of conversations. But suddenly in twenty twenty five,
it's like you couldn't move for death Head again in
a way that you hadn't been able to, you know,
since some beaver. And this album was seemed to soundtrack

(01:36:06):
so much of this year, and at first I was
almost overwhelmed with twelve tracks when their classics have five
to seven. That is a lot of Death Heaven to
take in, and it gives you so much, maybe the
most pointedly we've ever had Death Heaven bangers where they
flirted with that with you know, here's black Brick, a
song that's just all black metal hears from the Kettalans

(01:36:26):
to the coil. But there's almost a Death Eavan song
for every occasion on this thing. And I saw death
Evan again earlier this week doing a headline link show,
and almost all of this album was in the set,
and seeing firsthand how primed this material is to light
a fire in people. I said, I don't have much
like red blooded, populist big metal in my list. Does
it really matter. I've seen Doberman and Magnolia do to

(01:36:48):
crowds what any good metal song should do, fucking hammer
people and make them move. It's ferocious, and we talk
about Death Heavens sometimes as this like long form artsy,
fartsy sort of band where the people who like that
Geese record are into them. You can be both of
those things, you know. When they crunch on this record,
it sounds as good as any heavy band this year
that my iris has only black views part in Doberman.

(01:37:12):
If I can have that as a mosh call, that's
my favorite one of the year. And the middle riff
in Magnolia is maybe the hardest riff of the year,
where instinctively I can do nothing but hammer my arm
like a hydraulic when it comes in. Sometimes you know
Black Gaze, which which Death Heaven if not inventing, they
certainly more widely than ever popularized, can become almost shapeless

(01:37:34):
or edgeless. But this album is a masterclass in firmly
keeping their hands on the songwriting controls, and these are
fine edged, precise blade swings. The riff in Revelator feels
like it is scouring your eyes out, it is so
crackling with otherworldly bright intensity. Incidental too, they're used as

(01:37:56):
their return to the stage for the encore song and
moving from those like murmuring disquieting tones of Jane Matthews
from Boy Harsher then to that fucking noise crashing down
has you cowering. But every area of what they do
feels like it is represented and kind of brought upper
level on this album, where the sort of goth indie

(01:38:17):
bits that they had in ordinary corrupt human love and
even bits of infinite granite are able to dance their
way through stuff like Heathen or the Garden Route in
an intricate ballet, the elegance of amethyst and that steadiness
of lift that's like you're being carried over the clouds
in a hot air balloon. And then Wenona, where now
they can end us set and go Here's dream House first,

(01:38:37):
and then We'renona for a back to back hit of
just some of the loudest, most intense sensations of dazzlement
in metal for someone who in the early days, was
sometimes criticized for just kind of hitting the same button hiss, yeah, yeah,
hearing George twist and put this best. You'll bent onto
his delivery on a song like Body Behavior that ducks

(01:38:58):
and weaves with some of their most light footed indie energy,
but with this wretching gutter poet yanking your arm through it,
and then you start to peel back the surface of
some of the content of this album and the dark,
kind of queasy elements of human behavior that are in it.
I really back Infinite Granite as a part of their
catalog where I'm particularly now. I'm very happy to have

(01:39:18):
seen them on that and caught that chapter of their
history and that version of the band while it was there.
And I really rate Ordinary correct Human Love as well.
But there is an indescribable kind of fire that I
feel from Death Heaven at their very best, and this
is the most I've felt that since New Bermuda. It's
one of the defining bands of the century. And again
everybody thinks this one's great. It's been anointed. I think

(01:39:41):
Sunbather is their canonical masterpiece, and New Bermuda is my
firm second. But I'd have this next and to be
you know, have album six be such a great refresher
for them. Who knows how much further they can go
in the distance.

Speaker 3 (01:39:56):
Well, my number nine. In these divided times of atomization,
everyone going into their own pockets and focusing on their
scene and not communicating with one another. Here's something that
I think we could all be interested in and find
something to enjoy. How does an avant garde? Anonymous rock
band that formed in the late sixties releasing a new

(01:40:16):
I'm in twenty twenty five, which is an eighty minute
three act metal opera performed with the San Francisco conserat
in Music, which has a narrative that weaves together the
life and times of euthanasia advocate and convicted murderer and
acid bath album mar Man, Lest we forget Dr Jack
Gavorkian and the nineteen ninety one Judas Priest trial for

(01:40:38):
subliminal messaging.

Speaker 1 (01:40:40):
What's not to like?

Speaker 3 (01:40:41):
So this is the residence with Doctor Dark. They are
a fascinating band. I could go into I could talk
about them at length hours that they've never done the same
thing twice and they've done some of the strangest and
most entertaining album concepts I've ever heard like. They have
an alum that's themed around fame, train wrecks like the

(01:41:01):
arm they did before. This is a covers album of
songs by a blue singer that doesn't exist. They made
a soundtrack ALM for a Discovery Channel series about predators
that's ten hours long. And maybe my favorite album concept
ever was in the late seventies. They made Now that
they wrote and recorded with the alleged idea that they
would not release it until every single member of the
band forgot it existed on incredible work this whole time.

(01:41:27):
It's done a lot to limit their appeal, perhaps, but
also what's made them so appealing. I think this might
be my favorite record of Theirs. I don't love every album.
I probably haven't heard half of them, but they were
a bounding march to the beat of their own drum
and nothing else. This time around, they just so happened
to have arrived at a confluence of things that I

(01:41:48):
find fascinating, and it lives up to the promise. Like
I said, their alms are theirs I love and alms
I find interesting. But I don't necessarily want to listen to.

Speaker 2 (01:41:57):
This.

Speaker 3 (01:41:57):
The reason why I think it's my favorites because conceptually
it's so fascinating and bizarre, but also it's some of
their best straight up songwriting today. I am gripped by
this thing. It's one of their It has some of
their strangest flights of fancy, but it's ultimately rooted in
brilliant emotional songwriting. The performances on this are as emotional

(01:42:20):
and personal as they've ever been on a residence album.
They're a band who go to you know, they spent
sixty years going to great links to alienate the listener,
like we don't know who's in the band, and hearing
them provides some of the most stirring and just like
tonally rich music that I've heard all this year. After

(01:42:42):
spending half a century trying to stress you out and
put you off balance, It's like a kind hand reaching
out to a beaten dog. You can never fully relax
because they will strike you again, but in the moments
they let you in. It's some of the most potent
and I keep using the word emotional, but I think
it's only because it's the only word that feels appropriate

(01:43:04):
for this record. And one of the reasons this album
is so bizarre in their catalog. I'm just so taken
with this thing. It's kind of like the pitch is
so much of it. Once you kind of have heard that,
you'll know whether it's for you. But I implore you to,
even if that does sound alienating, to give this album
a go, because it's so much more colorful and interesting and,

(01:43:29):
like I say, just exciting to listen to than I
think anything else that they've ever done. And they've made
a career of doing some pretty exciting things. If it
wasn't for another long time avant garde band releasing a
double album later later in the year, this might be
in a bit higher But as it is, I just
think this is one of the most fascinating pieces of
music I've heard in twenty twenty five. When you started

(01:43:50):
that one off saying like eighty minute album from returning
one of the you know, great kind of weirder experiment
my rock bands, I thought you were going to say
the other one and how he now gone, Oh it's
mad that you've got who are those this year? How
what do you mean?

Speaker 2 (01:44:03):
But two of.

Speaker 1 (01:44:04):
These looking unbelievable, Like the albums there you go Number eight,
an album that was one of my most anticipated of
this year, and when putting this together, felt like, yeah,
this is one of the bigger spots of like quite
a breathtaking undertaking and really entranced me Hex Vessel Nocturne.
There's been a story playing out here with not that
many eyes on it, but one of the odder trajectories

(01:44:27):
for any artist in the walls of metal right now
entering some unknown territory. Are kind of psychedelic folk band
that's existed for like fifteen od years already, from a
musician with this varied history in metal and punk and
all sorts, suddenly plugging their guitars into the frigid north
and becoming a folky black metal band, and then that
musician getting tasked with creating an expanded ensemble version of

(01:44:52):
that band for a boutique festival, and then before that
live recording was ever released to the rest of us,
it actually turns up in a completed studio album form,
Like it's such an odd sequence of events, but it's
befitting of an album that is exquisitely odd and individual
and having made in Polar Vale a couple of years ago,
an album that's managed to fit some you know, primal

(01:45:14):
bone within my being. That transported me right back to
the experience of having the spell of atmospheric black metal
fall over me as a teenager hungry for new experiences,
while also not sounding exactly like any of that music.
It's wild to then get what feels like the expanded universe,
even more delicately arranged take on that where it's like

(01:45:35):
we've zoomed out from polar Veil, which feels like it's
being made by a hermit in a frigid little cabin
to take in all of the nighttime realm around it,
swallowing it up. And this is a record that seems
to worship at the very idea of night. The Nocturne
sort of orchestra ensemble that is put together on top
of the standard x Vessel band feels like they have

(01:45:57):
been put together with the express purpose of expressing each
different shade and tone of nighttime, and it is made
to just take you away out of your mundane into
this meditative place of winter and midnight. This record contains
the heaviest, most caustic music of Hex Vessel's career, but

(01:46:17):
it's somehow dainty as well, like like Gossamer, where you
could knock one thing and the whole house of cards
goes down, and it's this progressive, blanketing experience like an
Opeth or an Agaloque record is. And you know, having
listened to and done a lot of stuff on Code
lately since this record came out, I'm reminded of those

(01:46:37):
reference points we were talking about there of like you know,
Genesis or roky ericson whatever, like seventies English folk, the
kind of things that Matt is able to bring into
black metal. But the riffs are frostbitten to the point
where you could like tap it and it would shatter.
It's a uniquely chilling sonic experience this and as someone
who is obsessed with ghost stories as well, it's unbelievably

(01:46:58):
spectral where the melodies and the vocal arrangements, it's so
creeping but also romantically death like. One of my favorite
rifts of the year is in Night's Tender Reckoning, which
is really slow and simple, but it sounds like a
centering kind of acceptance, almost of sinking down into a
subterranean grave, with lyrics about human skeletons unearthed found resting

(01:47:23):
in each other's arms for thousands of years, and this
romantic idea of an eternity after this mortal coil. This
is a death worship record, but not in the way
I sometimes talk about spectral voice or someone as death
worship record. In the unknowable pits of it. This is
an almost blissful, decaying and skeletal yet waltzing into the

(01:47:43):
arms of that mortality kind of sound, and even room
for a couple of moments like Spirit Masked Wolf, which
puffs its chest out a bit and gives Matt some
room to give it a bit more welly in that
voice that we so know from him, in this kind
of shamanic incantation. And then still as a fan of
this kind of whole commune of artists almost that have together,

(01:48:03):
you know, weaved in and out of each other, producing
such wealths of artistically forward thinking music, hearing players from
throughout their careers together like Vi Kottnik from DoD Heims
Guard on Unworld and Uho fam Amanzipuzuzu on Phoebus. There's
a touch of this record that also feels like a
kind of celebration of this whole scene of avant garde,
left leaning underground metal artists and what they've done together.

(01:48:27):
It was such a cool move in hindsight to introduce
you to this particular world with polar Veil, and we
thought that that was it, and that was a weird enough,
interesting enough move to get your head around. And then
having all these further layers to it sitting in their
back pocket and these you know, twin records together with
their mirroring cover arts. It's the kind of thing is
why I will never get enough of black metal and

(01:48:49):
surrounding genres, because it never seems to stop producing unique
experiences like this. And it came out in June for
some reason as the least summary record I've ever heard.
But when the snow is here, like if you try
to stick it on them and the mud wasn't right,
I'm putting the Turnstar record on. Dig it out again.
It's still their time hasn't run out, and this record
feels like it's ancient.

Speaker 3 (01:49:11):
I honestly think like the timing of that record coming
out is one of the reasons it's not in my
top twenty. I think that came out even in October November,
that might have had more of a chance, because that
is a beautiful thing. But my number eight is an
Animal's come up very recently that we haven't spoken about before,
but it's a collaboration record between chap Pile and Hayden
Petago and there are Earth again. This year, we've passed

(01:49:34):
the halfway point of the decade, and it's at a
point now where you can start going who are the
bands that are defining this era of music. I honestly
think Chatpong might be the best metal band of the
twenty twenties. Outside of the two EP's that they released
on the other side of it, everything they've released has

(01:49:55):
been brilliant and or fascinating. This is my fourth time
doing and I'm of the Year list for this show,
and it's the third time chat Pile of landed in
the top ten, and I think this might be their
lowest charsting position, and I primarily put that down to
it being probably the most difficult and strange release to date.

(01:50:15):
Like they're already pretty weird. It's a noise metal band
that channel of the likes of Helmet Corn, The Jesus Lizard,
Big Black, and they've produced some of the most harrowing
and also catchy metal music of recent years. And they've
chosen to collaborate with a finger picking acoustic guitar player,
and for whatever reason, somehow it works brilliantly. Chap Piles

(01:50:39):
are their sort of signature rural industrial sound. It's given
real grandeur by the presidence of Aden Pettigo. Their music.
Typically their music feels like being, you know, trapped in
a hot grain silo, but by having this extra flare
in there, this sort of backwards deliverance feel to it,
he actually brings real beauty to the music and pulled
something out of chat Pile the though I think was

(01:51:01):
always there, but it's easy to miss without him. You know,
their music has always been obsessing, aggravating, aggressive and depressing,
but I don't think they've ever made something that feels
as deeply tragic as this record. There's a feeling of
heartache to this record that I don't think I would
have expected from chat Pile under ordinary circumstances. So much

(01:51:21):
this album is gorgeous, which is not a word I've
used for their albums in the past. The Magic of
the World, Behold a Pale Horse. I've got my own
blunt of smoke. These like whispering folk songs that pull
from Nick Drake and William Tyler, and they're done to
that kind of standard. It's also got some of the
most terrifying material they've ever put to tape. The matat Or,

(01:51:43):
which is like the eight minute song that comes towards
the end of the record, is a fucking nightmare. It's
a squawling anxiety attack of the song, and on a
typical chat Pile album, it would be the heaviest thing
on it. The real strength in this and the thing
that I think is just one of the things that's
so impressive about chapt Pile is their ability to collaborate.
It's not a matter of I would just put some
songs down and then we get Muhr's about to come

(01:52:05):
out and do some sculling noise on the top of it,
and that would be a collaboration record. They really blend
their styles together. Radioactive Dreams, Never Say Die and Demon Time.
These are songs that neither artist could have made without
the help of the other. And that's what makes for
a great collaboration. You know, most of the time when
you get two artists together, especially want too that as

(01:52:25):
different as these, it's a fun curial but not really
more than that. I would love to hear another collaboration
by these two. I think this album is fantastic and
it feels like there's more to explore, which is one
of the things that's so exciting about it. Chap pop
up music so frequently that you're never starved of it,
and it's easy for maybe non canonic records to get
lost in the shuffle. This is as essential as anything

(01:52:49):
else they've done, and if they want to explore this
terrain more, I would welcome it with open arms.

Speaker 1 (01:52:55):
Yeah, I need to go back to that one because
it didn't Obviously it didn't hit the same normal buttons
a chap I'll do, and I didn't spend that much
time with it, but I do need to go and
refresh myself and let it sink in more. Number seven
and this six and five have flip flopped around. It
was very competitive which of these would get in the
top five, and this record has been at the longest
of them. If you were to believe my streaming wrapped

(01:53:18):
this week, this is the album I've apparently listened to
the most this year, but I'm saying it does have
like a six to seven month head start on these
others in terms of where I've settled with it. I
think this is good Ghost Skeleton. It was hard to
decide where to place this one because I also think
this is sixth place out of six when it comes
to Ghost albums, and talking earlier about some of the

(01:53:39):
albums having this kind of push and pull of your
your critical brain almost looking for holes to poke in things,
and then the elemental pull of but I love it.
This is the last album of those I was talking about,
and yet it's here, and until the final stretch going
into this it was in my top five all year,
and I think that dichotic just isn't true for me

(01:54:01):
this year, where it might be with some of these
other bands I mentioned, I think looking at the general
rock end of year slate at the moment this year,
you're seeing that particular thing play out with Ghost where
I don't know if I've spoken to anyone whose new
favorite Ghost album? Is this the way we have had
for arguably everyone previous and for a while this year

(01:54:21):
that might have made me think maybe this album is unpopular,
you know, and maybe this is the inclusion in my
list where me having it so high would would get
a bit of a kicking. But I think by and large,
people just can't resist the pull of pop songwriting, this savvy,
and even if there's almost no new or novelty factor
to Ghost turning up with another set of fun songs

(01:54:43):
where it feels like the great leaps we can have
are less now. Having made that incredible surge with Milliora
into Prequel into Impaira of forcing themselves into being one
of the only genuinely massive bands to break in their era,
this is them over the mountain already, They've done the
concert film. What we do get is ultimately more fantastic

(01:55:05):
feats of songwriting, and I just think, do you love melody?
There are only two or three albums in my list
that I would describe as addictive pop albums. I haven't
had a lot of that so far, have I this album?
I can just go ham on like a kid with
too many sweets and prance around to these pop metal
show tunes. It's such a cheeky, little teh grembling of
an album. It feels like maze to wear a sparkly

(01:55:28):
suit and have the charisma to be brash and absurd
and bawdy like this. We laughed so much at some
of these lyrics. Yeah, also be so sweet and listenable.
It is a little bit more measured than Impira. Maybe
there's not quite a spill Ways or a Dance Macarb
on it, but Lachramer and satanized, ah, if you were

(01:55:49):
to look at their career, the sort of next rung
down singles where if they come on maybe you go,
oh fuck yeah that one and genius pop arrangements. Satanized
with that heavy metal Here's for fears gait that you
mentioned and that impish skipping side to side blatomy heresy
is so deft and delicate as a piece of songwriting,

(01:56:10):
melodies that move from the guitar to the vocals and back.
Lachryma with those guitar riffs are sort of grown like
a night creature lurking under your bed in the middle
of the nighted feed and then the chorus just melts
it all away and you go, this is it. This
is like the blockbuster movie level hard rock where we
don't have to use the same Journey and bon Jovi

(01:56:31):
and Billie Idol songs for everything forever when we need
a kind of bit of air grabbing stature like that,
because we've got these a song that feels as made
for all the needle drops that they get there is
more of the AOAR on this one. I think they
lean more into the Europe and the journey, and maybe
that's part of its kind of particular character that sits
better with some people than others. I think it's delicious.

(01:56:51):
Guiding Lights is maybe my favorite ballad of theirs, yet
in this kind of glitzier era of them, where it
sounds like, you know, in the movie they made the
kind of vague sentiments they were trying to get across
about comfort and solace through music, and they're quite clunky
with them when they're actually trying to put it into
words like that, but they get the feeling of it
in their music so universally, and at the same time

(01:57:13):
it still has that classic euro horror score kind of
flavor in the acoustics that makes it still somehow a band.
I can remember coming through the same scene as in
Solitude and Tribulation. There's the toe tapping vaudeville energy through
something like cenotaph, which that chorus line.

Speaker 2 (01:57:28):
Of wherever I go, You're always there right in next
to me.

Speaker 1 (01:57:35):
It just makes me feel like I can take on
the world and left we forget reviving for one track.
These sleeze arena rock of kiss and Scorpions, and rather
than just calling the song love rockets because that's what
it is, having to translate it to Missilia Amori, to
try and trojan horse it into their like baroque Latin
approach of their aesthetic. It's so silly, and sometimes this

(01:57:56):
album races and just genuinely seems to take flight in
ways I find so gorgeous and buttery in to prefund
this borealis and umbra with those insane John Lord Duweling
organ parts, and also contains the line in the shadow
of the Nazarene, I'll put my love in you, and
the little additions to bridges and final choruses to give
each song their extra push once you've already become accustomed

(01:58:19):
to each hook. When he hits the there there watch,
I feel like I have given God an uppercut. It's
so incendiary. They structure albums so sweepingly with peace phill
drawing open the curtain, but it's also really concise. No
interludes this time ten songs, and I can look down
this track list, and unlike various other albums, I could
look at this here, I can for each one go Yeah,

(01:58:39):
that's what that song brings to the album. That's its role,
and I'm annoyed. I haven't seen them live on this
one yet, but the promo pictures and the look might
be one of the coolest Ghost looks ever, Like, I
want to visit this steampunk vampire opera. Skill Wins Out
and Ghost are basically the most skilled songwriters in this
world right now. It's another album that feels like a

(01:59:01):
delicious meal from a master chef, and the primary ingredient
is rock.

Speaker 3 (01:59:07):
Amazingly, I was going to make a joke about our
seven's being different, but in a way, they kind of
feel like they've sunk up again because seven is Imperial
Triumphant with gold Star, where long last we've been waiting
for the black and jazz fusion death metal black album
and it's arrived, you know, you know, between Viral Luxury

(01:59:27):
and Alphaville, Imperial Triumphant became one of the most fascinating
and it felt like an instant classic extreme metal band
of their generation, the kind of band that comes along,
you know, a couple of times in twenty years and
they do something legitimately bizarre, distinct, kind of wrongheaded, like

(01:59:48):
Portal Gorgut's Dodham's Guard before them, it felt like they
instantly arrived in that bracket. And on their last record,
Spirit of Ecstasy, which they almost went to too far.
It was too imperial triumphant, even for fans of the band,
like even you just look at the guest list and
it's like, what do you mean You've got the guy
from Voivod and Kenny G on your record.

Speaker 1 (02:00:11):
We got Kenny t was on it.

Speaker 3 (02:00:13):
Maddening and you know, maybe you would have been fair
to bet on them going even further if it was possible.
What I love about GoldStar is them going, let's take
that and without sacrificing how wild and untamed it is,
make our most streamlined, direct and viscerally exciting album today.

(02:00:34):
This thing is so bright and front facing. It's not
nearly as shadowy as the other albums they've done, but
I don't think it's any less obtuse, like they've not
to do any of the eccentricities and the wild things
they'll pull from. But it's so aggressive while being grand
that you almost don't notice how strange it is on
first listen. If you're accustomed to imperial triumphant, it's just

(02:00:55):
a barrage in your face. It's too you're too bold
over by the sensation of it to start analyzing the
amount of world it's building for you. Previously, alms have
felt like you're sinking into something where these art deco
villains that stretch all the way down to the pits
of hell. This album, I said in the review, but
it sounds like a migraine on a sunny day in

(02:01:15):
New York. It's like you're stumbling out into the street
with a hangover, and bright light is danced off the
buildings into your eyes, but in a good way. And
in the lineage of extreme bizarro metal, it tends to
lean on long winding songs and long tapestries and bloody,
bloody belt and this just inverts that. It's nine tracks

(02:01:36):
or nine class A tunes. If you look at the
album cover and it's over and under forty minutes, it
even as a jazz grindcore song right there in the
middle of it, over in out forty seven seconds. And
as someone who's an avid fan of Naked City as
going ah a bit of the John's own thing, It's
happened again with a different band. The opening twenty minutes

(02:01:57):
of this record is one of the most possibly the
most brilliant passages of extreme metal you'll you'll find this year,
up there with the passages of songs in the decade
I have Mars Gomaraovy. I can't say any of these
words Lexington, Delirium, Hotel, Sphinx and New York City. I
don't think you can find a more propulsive and violent,

(02:02:18):
also technicolor and almost humorous batch of songs in this
field anywhere else. And that's to say nothing of the
closing run of the title track, rot Modern, Pleasured Home
and Industry of Misery, where they started employing these was
tribal and rigid rhythms that I haven't heard this band

(02:02:38):
do before. It's amazing how powerful this sound, getting Thomas
Hark and Dave Lombardo coming together and then layering percussion
on Pleasured Home. As an fan of extreme music, it's
just it's almost too much to handle. I'm so impressed
and so pleased that this is the album that seems
to have gotten some people over that last hurdle. Well,
like when we reviewed it with sam As, I was

(02:03:00):
going I love this and it was half here as
a joke just to put them through it again, but
they've managed to do that without sacrificing anything that makes
the Imperial Triumphant experience so special. They've, if you could
call it this, it's like they've boiled off any excess
and they've left you with the molten rock. It's this
beautiful gem that's hot to the touch. I never thought

(02:03:21):
they top Alphaville, and I didn't know where this ranked
at the time. This thing gives it a hell of
a run for its money, and I wouldn't be surprised
if this goes on to be seen as like the
Imperial Triumphant record. That is, if they don't top it,
which you know, of course they might.

Speaker 1 (02:03:37):
Yeah, number six one of the best bands of all
time on the thirtieth anniversary of their debut record on
album twelve, throwing themselves this hard into something new. AFI
silver Bleeds the Black Sun. This should be the niche appeal.
AFI album is what I've been loving so much about
the last couple of months since this came out. AFI

(02:03:57):
are a band who carved out there appeal first in
hardcore punk music and then went on to be this
commercial powerhouse, writing these smash singles that even casual rock
fans kind of know, and the kind of people as
a result who have a dalliance with some era of
AFI is so broad. This should be by rights one
of their more divisive ones, because a sizable chunk of

(02:04:20):
those people aren't going to be as specifically into the
thing that they're mining here as others. But instead, it's
so fun that this time we have one of the
AFI albums that everybody seems to love, another of the
more popular albums in our world this year, and it's
an example of committing so hard to the vision that
no matter how many people you think may or may

(02:04:40):
not get it, not second guessing if it's too specific
or niche, or they'll curtail, they'll appeal or whatever, that
it completely pays off and the work becomes undeniable. This
is an AFI, a band who in the lanes they inhabit,
have always have tons of command over shadow at their
most underworld that they we introduced this as our vibe

(02:05:01):
album and when you guys have got a lock in
for this one, because we're not going to make it
easy for you, even if you are a fan who
has loved every album they've done, has been along for
the whole ride. This whole time. It was still something
of a startling revelation just how dramatically they had overhauled
every aspect of themselves in servers of this vision this time,

(02:05:22):
right down to Davy's mustache. This is staggering musicianship, not
in you know, getting your face blasted off, how the
fuck are their fingers playing that kind of newsonus, but
in taste and in knowledge as players of the music
they're making. I keep thinking about Adam on the drums
and now he is a guy who helped form in
California a punk band in the mid nineties to write

(02:05:43):
songs called I Want to Get a mohawk, but Mum
wondn't let me get one? And here he sounds so
fucking tight and in the pocket on the dance beats
that it's like he could be tapped as a studio
player to lay down Motown records, hitting this sexy, hip
swinging goth dance hit Bullseye in Holy, which has a
guitar siloe that I think is incapable of not making

(02:06:03):
me want to get up and dance around my flat.
Jade is a sonic wizard. The production on this record
is unfucking real. There are hooky guitar leads all over
it and Davy throwing out earworms from Margarita my Gene Devaul.
When the sense and the rolling toms come in on
Birds of Prey, I get the feeling of being in
the safest hands that I usually reserve for when I'm

(02:06:26):
listening to the cure Sphere of Truth. I got to
the agloc this year, and around it, I was listening
to a bunch of the kind of similarly textured stuff
like Current ninety three that kind of goes into that.
I wasn't expecting the new album this year to give
me a taste of that to be the AFI one
and Goff neo folk, the kind that I've got elsewhere
on my list in the form of a couple tracks
on the lamp of Murmur record is now an element

(02:06:48):
of AFI thirty years in a band associated with being
spooky punks and Naughty's emo hit makers. The twelve string
slinking guitar of blasphemy and excess with the cat's govern
underneath it is the straight up sickest sound, and the
chorus here is blasphemy in no excess.

Speaker 3 (02:07:06):
Baby.

Speaker 1 (02:07:07):
We're devils and we like it. They are the band
who have tasted this kind of success, who still carry
this streak of the subversive and the salacious, And this
album speaks to this just totally individualist state of mind
that you kind of need to be thirty years in
the game like AFI and still be as creatively relevant
as they are. Getting a lead single from a big
rock band in twenty twenty five and it sounds like

(02:07:29):
an interstellar transmission and not like any song they've done before.
Is such a beautiful thing to still happen, And it
happened with Behind the Clock, which is like evil how
Soon is now emanating from inside a nuclear reactor. And
in the year that started with the loss of David Lynch,
and like we said we were back in January. I
have spent this whole year watching the whole David Lynch catalog.

(02:07:50):
I've finished on Inland Empire, like last week this song
Weaving Together. I am Freddie Madison and Betty ELM's Nicky Grayson,
Susan Blue and Glitter Hell, these characters who I have
spent this year watching their individual crises. This record just
feels in conversation with so much of the lineage of
alternative culture and still adding their own additions to that

(02:08:12):
and their own addendums to it. One of the best
pieces of sequencing this year is the closer on this
which suddenly from this nocturnal dream world that you've inhabited
for the last like thirty minutes and you know the
sounds of this album feeling up your pause, it wakes
up and it basically has a panic attack because Davy
is running around checking everywhere, and there's no one on

(02:08:33):
the streets, no one in the photo. The world has
been emptied out, and there's something to the anxiety of
the modern digitally compartmentalized era about it. This weird, uncanny
sense that there's no community anymore, there's nothing real that
we have and some of the same things that I
get from Lynch films, you know, And it's like waking
up from the end of the dream in this album

(02:08:54):
and finding out the rapture has happened. It's an unsettled album.
This it's perturbed some of that uncanniness and translating it
through this luscious goth rock and it's the record that
made so obvious what you could feel for a while,
which is that afi are more than anything in the
cannon and lineage of great goth bands that goes from

(02:09:14):
Bauhaus to The Cure, to the Sisters of Mercy to
Echo and the Bunny Men to the Cult. This is
them having inherited that crown. And if anyone thinks, oh
that bad, are they? The mismurder a lot. This album
should be on in every goth bar forever. And even
as someone who was not there for the first half
of their career when they made arguably all their biggest classics,

(02:09:35):
there is still so much pleasure in watching it play
out there, Like last fifteen years is a miraculous period.
I know I'm a mark for them, but there's a
reason that is right. There's not any other band of
their scene or era like it. Most of those might
make one particularly strong record every now and then and
they kind of simmer down again. Please come to the UK,
you monsters. Why can we not fucking move for the offspring?

(02:09:57):
But I have not the best one there's ever been.

Speaker 3 (02:10:02):
You've just reminded me. I never got around here in
that record, but that is that's top of the list.

Speaker 2 (02:10:06):
The bits that sound like the kind of current nuety
three got near folks off you'll be like, what the
fuck how is this the band who did fucking black
Sails in the Sunset.

Speaker 3 (02:10:14):
It's mental, Well, I'll do this and you do my
melodic gore grind down that I was talking. Yeah, but
my number six you spoke about earlier, and we spoke
about only a few weeks ago, so I won't spend
too much time because it's already been captured. But Lamp
of Murmur with the Dreaming Prince in Ecstasy, that thing
I was saying earlier about chap Pyle just constantly releasing

(02:10:36):
brilliant music and defining themselves as one of the best
bands of the current decade. Lamp for Murmur in that conversation,
and you know, I love the previous records, but it
was really this one that tips over into that sort
of territory for me, because I think this is their
crowning achievement. The thing that I love about this is
the castle they'd set up so far. It seems like

(02:10:57):
you're expected to make a choice with the next amer
Murmur record, because you know, in the space of a
few years, they've crafted these masterpieces of goth rock black metal,
and then they shed it all off and did the
best immortal album since All Shell Fall, maybe even Sons
of Northern Darkness. And when the band's doing that sort
of thing, you'd think the options would be, well, we
can either go back to the goth thing, or we

(02:11:19):
can keep doing the immortal thing, or do something new.
And they've said you can have all three. They've managed
to marry three options. We no longer have to choose,
and it's here in front of us. This thing just
smacks of magnum opus. It's the sort of thing that
feels like it should have taken a decade to put together,

(02:11:40):
and it's here, fucking two years after the last record.
The talent on display is absolutely maddening. It's I think,
the most ambitious work in the whole catalog, and it
also boasts the best set of songs. It's hard to
know what the best part of this record is. I
had the track list stuff and I was going like,
when does really peak? And there is no real peak

(02:12:02):
because the whole thing is utterly sublime. Side A is
just an incredible run of brilliant black mel just diving
and slaloming from one genius idea to the next. Side
B being dominated by a twenty two minute epic which
is one of the best black metal epics I've heard
in forever and closing on a neo folk ballad that

(02:12:27):
we didn't really speak about as much in the review,
but it might be my favorite song on the record,
and it's something so different and so tremendous for an
album that takes such flights of fancy, like it closes
on its most subtle down to earth moment and it's
just again that song to me was not, let's say

(02:12:48):
the moment, but one of the things on the record.
I thought, this is why this is my favorite. It's
because it's just the level of songwriting Strip Naked is
just in a class above any of their peers. You know,
we said it all a couple weeks ago, and you
said it perfectly earlier, So I'll wrap up quick. But
Lamb foram Murment have quickly become one of the most
rewarding metal bands that you can be a fan of

(02:13:09):
in the world today. And I again cut up the
picture of thing. I feel lucky to be getting these
albums as they come out, and this is their finest hour.
But you know that they might have betted it in
six months knowing this band, so I'm went a bet
against it being their best album for very long. This
thing is just fucking awesome.

Speaker 1 (02:13:29):
Yes, we enter the top five and the real peaks
of twenty twenty five. For us and for me, this
was where I got the last minute panic of trying
to place a late entry and putting it against records
that I've spent months and months listening to, doing the
impossible task of trying to gauge how you might feel
about something in six months time. All that stuff, But
all I can go is how much joy this record

(02:13:51):
gives me, which has made me yoink it up every
time I've heard it home Front, watch It Die Nice.
I think this is the best punk record in so long,
And the genius of it, like a few albums I've
mentioned today, is how it makes them on paper pretty
wild swings and making leaps in drawing things together that
mean you can't just swap this out for any other

(02:14:12):
punk record this year, or say, oh, you know, they're
just doing this thing that this X record years ago did.
But emotionally, this pushes so many buttons of things I'm
already looking for in this kind of music and know
that I love. This record has the sensibility of feeling
classic yet totally new and fresh, and that sounds like
a meaningless oxymoron just to put buzzwords around a record,

(02:14:34):
but that's the balancing act that this pulls off. It's
such an unbelievable idea to concoct a style of punk
rock music that you could only really most accurately describe
as synth oil, and it's brilliant on the immediate level
of just it is so much fun to listen to,
but also what this album does for me and what
I'm seeing I think in kind of how it can

(02:14:55):
unite the tribes of the different people that are into
it is it is a genuine, thoughtful showing appreciation really
for these many sonically disparate but aesthetically spiritually politically like
minded alternative subcultures, in much the same way that Lamp
of Murmur can Go, black metal and goth rock are
to me spiritually seeking the same kind of goal and

(02:15:17):
Final Dose can Go. Black metal and crust punk and
Dungeon synth are all part of the same emotional canvas.
This record is like punk rockers out there. We know
you are spinning some pet Shop Boys and depeche Mode
records on the side. We are in a landscape where
a ban like Nova Testamento can play Sound and fury
Fest and do disco remixes of Scowl songs, and this

(02:15:39):
rallying the troops of New Order and Joy Division and
Fucking Yazoo and The Cure as much as all of
these basement punk rock bands they're going these are the
same basements. We're all in here together. It's a record
that is in love with alternative culture and the kind
of people who make up alternative culture. It's so fucking
call to me that the Facebook banner photo of this band,

(02:16:00):
it's the singer wearing a Motorhead England t shirt leaping
into the air while his mate next to him is
hammering away on one of those electronic synthpads.

Speaker 3 (02:16:08):
And I've had.

Speaker 1 (02:16:09):
This for like two three weeks, but in terms of
finding a new favorite song, every time I put it on,
I found like an evolving obsession. On twice Speed, the
title track is maybe the most lift your head to
the sky and put some pep in your step punk
rock opener since the mensing has opened after the party
with telling lies except when those eighties movies synth arpeggios

(02:16:30):
trickle in. It gives it this whole new color and tonality.
I really love the low fine nature of its new
waveside and the electronic drum kit and those eighties pop
flavors which shimmer with the kind of naive purity of
synth pop when it was an emerging cultural revolution. There's
bass guitar melodies on it that have that lovely comforting
register of prime Peter Hook, and songs like Eulogy with

(02:16:53):
them that are so emotionally bearing as well. I love
the songs where they crank up the mechanized industrial punk
and that sardonic, mocking militarism when that you get in
eighties industrial with the shouts of Leader Leader on New
Madness and you can fucking Big Fish, Little Fish, Cardboard
Box Your Way to beat Ai and Oia in Dancing

(02:17:14):
with Anxiety and Young Offender is so unbelievably tough that
they for two minutes and fourteen seconds that I have
played on literally on a loop, again and again and again,
that song right up for the other. They enter the
untapped and sew me all over territory of an EBM
battle ruined song, and the call and response bit of

(02:17:35):
they hate us.

Speaker 3 (02:17:36):
We hate them pops so hard.

Speaker 1 (02:17:39):
And it's so right in a year that we in
the middle of it decided was Cox Sparrowsummer. We get
to the end of it and as a band knocking
out that kind of timeless communal punk rock music, but
in a totally different, fresh sort of way as well,
where the cider being thrown around you you can taste
even through the electronic sheen of the record, and fuck

(02:18:00):
is all that's left for us is the biggest fucking
expulsion of rough and ready communal arms up together, punk
rock joy. I've heard maybe all decade, you keep giving us,
you keep giving us. I almost hear up every time
I hear that song, and light Sleepers refrain of We're
born alone, we die alone, don't ever think you have

(02:18:21):
to live alone is so fucking beautiful, calling out to
all the misfits with the optimism if we band together,
they can't keep us down. And then always this way
is a piano slide rockabilly song, because what the fuck'
stopping us at this stage. Most records like this might
be a bit top heavy tracks seven through eleven on.
This is one of the most insane, giddy runs of
music anywhere this year. I've bought a ticket to see

(02:18:43):
him in London in February because I just have to
see this. If there is as much life in their
live show as there is in this record, I need
to get together with the other people who fall of
for this record and sing fuck all is all that's
left for us. If this has come out in summer,
I can only imagine how many people it might have
managed to get on side before the year's end. But
if you like any of these things from the past

(02:19:05):
few years, like Turnstile, Military Gun, Scowl, hy veers, punk
and hardcore bands with this similar attitude kind of for
the holistic when it comes to you bringing together celebrating
these many threads of alternative music, this is up with
the best of the best of that field.

Speaker 3 (02:19:20):
Well other than this summer in fact being Gillen some
I agree with everything else the same episode. It counts.
But again, like we're sinking up on the subjects of
dance punk because my number five is model Actress with Pirouette.

Speaker 2 (02:19:35):
Oh cool, yeah, synth the punk like dance punk has
a thing, or even dance rock in general, is one
of the most misleading, like failed promised subgenres there is.

Speaker 3 (02:19:47):
Because so many the bands in this scene. They either
make your dance but they're not punk. Maybe they're punk,
but they don't really make your dance. Most of them
are neither punk, nor do they make your dance all
that much. Model Actress are a band who have finally
delivered on the promise of that title, maybe more than anyone.
This is a vicious, vulnerable, and emotionally an emotionally wrought

(02:20:10):
record that also makes you want to oops upside your head.
And I think the reason the genre so often fails
and where the sound succeeds is Model Actress have found
the common thread between those two genres and what makes
the best stuff in both of them and its tension.
The best punk music and the best dance music both
hinge on an understanding of tension, the build of it,

(02:20:31):
and the power of its release. Whether it's a beatdown
or a gang vocal on a great punk song, or
it's when the beat kicks back in on a brilliant
dance track, it can be one of the most exciting
sensations in music, and I don't think there's many artists
in the world who use it to such brilliant effect
as Model Actress. The songs on this record they rumble

(02:20:51):
with a genuine unease, but they're also fun and kind
of glitzy and discoing in exciting and the way you
strike the balance it's a high wire act and you
feel like you could fall fall off at any time,
but you don't, and it's what makes this so infectiously.
It's like an adrenaline rush of a record. The lyrics

(02:21:14):
are funny, super insightful, and as someone who you know
this record maybe doesn't naturally speak to as much as
it would other people, I think Cole Hayden does an
amazing job of communicating the Minu Shaven experience that I've
never had, like makes it so vivid and personal and understandable. Frankly,

(02:21:34):
the medicine is easier to take when the music is
so infectious. He's become one of the most magnetic frontmen
in all of rock music. If you want to classes band,
it's one of them. But the band match him in
terms of charisma and magnetism. They're a fairly small band
where their music sounds absolutely box office. You put the
song with headphones, it's one of the most sonically impressive

(02:21:56):
albums of the year, and this is a year where
you know, we've got a new nine inch nails material,
and I think this sounds just as good as it,
but with would be a one hundredth for the budget.
That's always been true with this band, Like when we
did the debut and the Amuelete without Alistair from Ash Andspire,
we kind of touched on that bond. This record, they've
gone even further and done something that I think no
one else in their realm has come close to, which

(02:22:18):
is this record is real beauty to it. You know
this of some of their nastier moments, like ring Road
is fucking it sounds like throbbing wristle, it's agony. But
in the moments where this band really open up, that's
when you see why they're special and why their peers
aren't aren't coming close. It's the juxtaposition that's true in
all great music, Like there's a balladeering quality to this

(02:22:39):
record where you listen to songs like Acid Rain and
Departures and Doves And maybe this sounds like a big claim,
but I don't think I've heard a band do something
in that style to that standard since like fucking Radiohead
at their best, when like kid A came out in
two thousand and one. That's the kind of league we're
talking about, and that's not even really you know, that's
not their bread, and that's something they're just trying for

(02:23:01):
the first time. Here. I'm in all with this band.
I can't wait to see what comes next. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:23:07):
One of the coolest moments of the year is that
bit when he goes, I'm such a fucking bit awesome. Yeah, awesome.
Number four. It's another one of those years when he
put up two of them and got two spots. It's
a funny run here. Actually, for me, the seven through
to this is basically all of the slots in my
list that I'm gonna sing and dance to. And the

(02:23:27):
king of scarily catchy, skeletal, hip shaking goth dance rock
music is Matt McNerney Scorpion Milk Slime of the Times.
It's been a kind of funny thing getting this for
me this year, because I don't quite want to believe
that grave pleasures are in the grave now. It was
a little like getting the Bitter with the Sweet getting

(02:23:48):
this album because it came with the suggestion that at
least for the meantime, possibly my favorite band of the
last ten years are put up on the shelf. I'm
not gonna see my album of the in the last
one that they put out Live. The other thing I
hope is that they aren't too disenchanted with what they did.
I get the impression a little bit that he might

(02:24:08):
think they went a little bit too pop on Plague Boys.
And this is almost like a coarse correction. And it
doesn't have to be a case of one of these
things succeeding where the other one failed. I think the
most fulfilling way to think about it is the ongoing
artistic conversation between these bands of Beef Milk passing the
button to Grave Pleasures, who do what they did to
that Beast Milk template, who then pass it on to

(02:24:29):
Scorpion Milk who do something else again, and the Matt
McNerney apocalyptic post punk ouverra. It's not like let Live
have broken up in Old Fever three through three. This
is definitely as good, isn't it? And this puts the
emphasis on the scary side of it. If this was
the next Grave Pleasures record and they swerved in this direction,
that was so much nastier and dripping in poison than

(02:24:52):
what they'd just been doing on Plague Boys, we would
be talking about it as like one of these consistently invigorating,
refreshing artistic trajectories. Anyway, here he's got an all star team,
Nate Newton on the bass as it goes dirtier and
scrungier than it ever did before, the drummers from Viagra
Boys and Killing Joke, and this record makes me instinctively

(02:25:13):
move the way that these previous records in this lineage have,
but while also making me feel like I need a
bath and a blood transfusion at the end of it,
because this is truly embracing the countercultural scumminess of classic
post punk and anarcho punk. It's such a vibe this record,
like if you loved Grave Pleasures on Motherblood, I can't

(02:25:34):
imagine the guitar riffs that open she Wolf of London
and all the fear that money can buy not infecting
your senses in the same way, There's still so many
pop hooks everywhere you look on this, but more than
ever they're rotted on this one. The fact that Matt
shakes up what he's done vocally on these pop punk
as well, so that there are songs you know, these
are those type of songs, but there's a snarling creature

(02:25:57):
lurking in the sidelines opening It's more and bearing its
teeth at you. And they're insistent as well. They're repetitive.
They're mocking in the way that some of the nastiest
of Golden era post punk was the mantras of.

Speaker 3 (02:26:09):
Wall to All paranoia.

Speaker 1 (02:26:11):
And will to live with its little cruel fucking punchline
of the will to die wretched after it, I said
when we reviewed it, these are maybe the closest I
have heard any band approximate the feeling of classic killing
joke ever, and particularly that feeling of industrial wasteland. This
is a warping nightmare world under the heel of these

(02:26:34):
oppressive forces. And they're so catchy, but you're looking over
your shoulder during these songs because you're just a little
gutta rat and the fucking you know, George Orwell's police
or on your tail. And my favorite song that Will
Goud sings this year isn't even a creeper one. It's
the foggy London streets and bodies in the Thames on
this where Matt gets him to sing the line drawing

(02:26:55):
down the Moon, which part of me has to believe
is a Beherit reference. And it's so London like if
some of these records Matt's done have been inflected by
more mainland Europe. This sounds like the United Kingdom melting
into toxic waste, he says, rotting hill Gate at one
point on it and speaking about AFI and some of
the illusions there to the uncanny warping of contemporary reality.

(02:27:19):
And that's the kind of thing that's come up a
lot this year in you know, just art generally. You know,
there's movies I've been trying to express it, like like
Eddington or Bogonia or The Shrouds. That's really what this is.
It's the world turning to indistinct slime around us. That
is the slime of the times. It's all snakes, no ladders,
while silver pigs is chirping, be happy.

Speaker 3 (02:27:38):
It's your duty.

Speaker 1 (02:27:39):
It's another day another abyss drifting through in this desensitized
state of exhaustion as our surroundings feed to us another
genocide over here, another violation of civil rights there, and
expressing it through this perfectly arranged little pocket of pop lightfootedness,
telling you you've got to get through here, get through it.
Before that then crumbles away into the clanging, juttering, distorted

(02:28:04):
rifts of water wall or slime of the times. And
when you look at that, that unsettled, paranoid social decay,
where just everywhere you look, things are degrading and everything
is just a bit shitter than it was five years before.
That gave birth to crass and killing joke and rudimentary
penie and was reflected in all those great records. It's

(02:28:24):
more fit for the twenty twenties than it has been
any time since. It's not a case of hey, remember
how bad thatcher was and then just emptily using the
kind of the aesthetics of something from forty years ago
with no further addition or comment. It's as reflective of
our reality now as it that was then.

Speaker 3 (02:28:39):
My number four, you spoke about it earlier. It's death
heaven with the lonely people with power we are. It
dawned me for the first time this year. But we're
approaching a point where metal has existed for longer in
the twenty first century than it did in the previous,
and it feels it's still just part of our language.
Saying one of the best bands of the twenty first century,
that's nearly most of metal, and when you think about

(02:28:59):
how much which metal music has been produced in that time,
there's way more post two thousand than there was beforehand.
So it's a big claim to put a band in
that bracket now. But I think if we weren't there already,
it's high time that people start talking about Death Heaven
as one of the finest metal bands to merge on
this side of the Divide. Masters on Kajira Lama God

(02:29:22):
was in the throne room Trivium, who whatever kind of
metal you like, Death Heaven should be in that conversation,
And it was this album that clarified it for me,
not because I think it's, you know, their best, but
I think this album more than any other, captures the
experience of this band, why they're special and why they're
so exciting, why they are definitive of that time. Infinite

(02:29:43):
Granite was an album that I feel like I admired
it more than I liked it, although I do like
it more in the wake of this record kind of
seeing like you were saying, like seeing its place in
their catalog. I liked what they were exploring and that
they were taking a record to really explore that sound,
but and I I didn't find myself going back to
it as much as I had the previous four, but

(02:30:04):
taking the lessons they learned on that record and folding
it back into the Death Heaven recipe on their most direct,
outwardly aggressive album today in points, it's maybe the I
think it might be the quintessential Death Heaven experience, Like
it has the ethereal strangeness of Roads to Judah, that
skycracking scale of Sunbatha. It's got some of the nasty

(02:30:28):
streak of New Bermuda, which again with this band, one
of the things I've discovered this year is I think
that's my favorite record of theirs. It manages to match
that with the warmth of ordinary, corrupt human love. And
now we have that shadowy kind of pop sensibility, beauty
of infinite granite, and we have all of those things.
While this albums have managed to find an identity of
its own. Whatever kind of Death Heaven you like, if

(02:30:50):
it was, it's on full display here and done super
high standard. It might be their riffiest album. Like Doberman,
the riff on Magnolia is absurd. Reve later when that
first came in and it's I just got I'd never
thought I'd hear like mos s riffs on a Death
Heaven album quite like that. It might be their most
alien and strangely of the incidental trilogy of interludes, which

(02:31:13):
are so bizarre. It sounds like nothing they've done before,
and nothing a metal band of any popularity has maybe
ever done. And it also has some of their most
beautiful music they've ever released, like the marvelous Orange Tree,
the way Winona takes off in the second half, it
just like it needs to be heard to be believed,
and it might be their catchiest body behavior. Amethyst and

(02:31:36):
the Garden Root like some of the biggest hooks you'll
find on a metal record this year, and not necessarily
in the metal sense every single time, Like sometimes they're
pulling hooks in a way that are a bit more,
you know, like shoegaysy or Indie, but folding that into
the recipe of an extreme metal record in a way
that still feels exciting, It still feels distinct. There are

(02:31:56):
so many Death Heaven copycats going around nowadays, and sometimes
it just takes going back to the source a bit
and going, yeah, this is why this is the band
that I'm kind of going to go down in history.
This is why this band is going to be the
one that have established their legend and over in that
conversation I was talking about earlier, I wouldn't know how
to rank the Death Heaven albums, even you know, having

(02:32:18):
months and months are listening to this and seeing them
twice on this cycle. I think it might be the
bronze medal, like it's I don't know if I ever
see them usurping some Bathe and New but Muda purely
because this albums are not just they're so tremendous, but
they're so closely tied to an exciting time in my life.
But I wasn't sure they never get this close again.
I don't know why better against it. So maybe it's

(02:32:39):
because Infinite Granite wasn't an album that I fell in
love with the way I had the previous ones. But
I am if it didn't, if it didn't require it,
I'm all aboard the Death Heaven training again. This album
is fucking it fantastic.

Speaker 2 (02:32:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:32:53):
Number three, my favorite black metal album of the year
turned out to be one of the very first ones
that I heard, and I'm pleased actually that I've seen
quite a number of people you know, sharing the vision
for it, including yourself, It's Grub and cre Mess. I
had a really nice organic relationship with this album this
year where I do quite a few reviews of the

(02:33:15):
smaller black metal records for Metal Hammer, where if you
open the magazine that got like one hundred odd word
reviews of some small black metal record and I get
a lot of like black metal records fall into my
inbox that way. And I got sent this right at
the tail end of twenty twenty four. I think it
was just like any of those other albums I do.
And I saw that it was the guy who sang
on the first Dark Fortress albums, and so I knew
who he was because I'm a big Dark Fortress fan.

(02:33:37):
But the first album from this project a couple of
years ago had passed me by for whatever reason, and
I was expecting I'll properly like this, but then quickly realized,
hold on, this is actually fantastic, and I've got these
what feel like, like genuinely like some huge artistic statement
records in this lane from you know, Hex Vessel or
Lamp of Murmur in this list, but my favorite black
melt record of this year, I think much the same

(02:33:59):
way those have got their bells and whistles on them.
This cuts to some real root things as to why
you get into black metal, and it's to make the
real world seem otherworldly, and black metal as a form
of almost ancient folk music its ability to connect you
with the land. Like I've been to Bavaria, I've been
to that castle, which is probably the most outrageously picturesque

(02:34:22):
place I've seen with by their eyes. But I can
listen to this record here and this is a enveloping
brother's grim fairy tale of a record, almost, and the
soul and the roots of the place it was made
are in it. It feels like it's probably made from
as you know, like childhood countryside memories or something in
this area. But for me it summons up this nosferrato,

(02:34:43):
you know, Germanic kind of oldie welde and all of
the folklore and the stories that fill it. Speaking earlier
about some of the black metal like almost as ghost
story effect, this record is so chilling. The cover with
the Reaper coming to visit this like sad starving little
boy by himself in the snow. If you have the
vinyl and you look at the back cover, it's the
same picture, is that the figures are both gone and

(02:35:05):
it's just the empty space and the mournful coat of
winter setting in with this record is palpable, and it
feels like a funeral procession through these ancient, mystical woods.
I got a lot of play out of this right
at the start of the year, and then as summer arrived,
I mostly put it on the shelf for a while.
But right now I'm shivering again and this record sounds

(02:35:27):
pretty damn good. And speaking about these immaculately arranged, every
detail of perfect detail black metal records, I'm really glad
you said earlier about that it might be one of
the best mixed records of the year, because I agree.
This is fucking masterful, and it can howl still as well,
like the opening riff, summoning up this like total wind
chill effect with this big, folky ah kind of quiet part.

(02:35:50):
This is maybe the most traditional black metal record in
my list, but tradition in black metal can be such
a beautiful thing, and the tonal character that this has
on biting cold res of the additional be it timpany
or you know, flutes, particularly the hammered dulcimer, as an
instrument of the kind of folk region that it's embodying.
Centering that so much as a melodic player gives this

(02:36:12):
such a distinct, incredible tonal character, the way it dances
in lockstep with the bass guitar melody. On Kirkha Moasta,
My favorite long form black metal composition of the year
is the two part. I think it just translates as
a ghost story or a folk tale or something in
the middle. And the melodies in it are so delicate,

(02:36:33):
while the rifts they're laid on are so powerful and
fist pumping. And this dichotomy of this roaring metal band
with these enchanted old world forest melody lines is absolutely magical.
The first part of that sounds like kind of tiptoeing
over a disturbed grave, before the second just fills me
with warmth, like the sun has come up for one

(02:36:53):
second in this record. And vocally again, I'm really glad
you were picking it out, because there's so much character
from someone who who has been honing this for thirty years,
you know, summoning up these sounds from the bottom of
his throat and cackling like an old spirit that lives
in a tree. There's one riff in it where he
just goes and it's so awesome. I love it so much.

(02:37:15):
It makes me just smile and pump my fist. And
this album had been out for barely a couple of
months before they announce that this was going to be
it and he's going to be retiring. They played like
two or three concerts in Europe for this album and
then letting it be, and with that maybe already in mind,
this was maybe gonna be the last song that you're
gonna make. I can only imagine how meaniful the Last

(02:37:35):
Winter as the last track on this is like a
funeral farewell almost to thirty years making black metal, and
the ending solo on it from his former Dark Fortress
bandmatee Vi Santura from Tryptocon is the best guitar solo
of the year and also makes it a kind of
coda to these other albums I love from twenty five
years ago. And then you are just left with the

(02:37:57):
howling blizzard wind at the end of it. Again, it's
a masterclass in transportative woodland black metal, and these records
that make you feel like burg Tat or Dark medieval
times or pale folklore or first spell make you feel
when you hear them it's a special thing.

Speaker 3 (02:38:18):
Yeah, And speaking of special things, it's the second of
the eighty minute avant Guarde. So my third is a
Cardiacs with their album LSD.

Speaker 1 (02:38:31):
This was the record that I if I was going
to guess at what your number one would be, I've
had in my mind that it might be this.

Speaker 3 (02:38:36):
Well, I should say the top three they've cycled around,
but this is where it's ultimately ended up, and there
was a context surrounding this record, which part of me
wants to get into now because it's an inseparable reason
of why this album is so like life affirming and
why it's one of the been one of the most

(02:38:57):
rewarding records I've heard in years. But I actually think
I'd rather save that for the award show in a
couple of weeks, because I feel like the story's better
told there, so you know, inevitably has to be referred to,
But are try and focus on the music because it's
here on that marror anyway. Cardiacs, they're not one of
the most popular bands in the world, but if you

(02:39:17):
like a good band, any good band with even a
vaguely experimental bent to it. I promise you the members
of that band you love fucking love the Cardiacs. Whether
it's Biffy Cleiro or Napalm Death, the Cardiacs have an influence.
No one sounds quite like them, but nobody ever will,
and yet you can kind of hear their presence in

(02:39:40):
especially in like British experimental music in the last thirty
forty years. They are a permanent part of that. This
albums in the works on and off for about twenty years.
They kept being put on hold, and I don't think
anyone really would have blamed the band if we never
got to hear it. I think more or less in

(02:40:02):
the last five years everyone had given up on ever
hearing it. And yet out of the ashes through like
this is unbelievable determination and willingness to see the vision through.
We finally have it. It's been, it's here, and it's magnificent.
And this is a coaleidoscopic hall of mirrors of a record.

(02:40:23):
Is a distorting, an unhinged amalgam of basically every exciting
style of music to emerge in the last fifty years.
It's I was trying to think of how to explain
it in a way that's remotely succinct, And the best
I can get is it's psychedelic, aggressive punk rock that
marries the worlds of Frank Zappa, Homas, the Buzzcocks and

(02:40:44):
the Beatles, and for eighty minutes you are at its
mercy and it is a wild ride. A spelled all
wrong is These are just some elevated pictures for are
just a handful of songs on the record. Spelled all
Wrong is a lost Smith song that's been a lost
Monty Python film. Down Up sounds like Blondie having a

(02:41:04):
go at writing a nursery rhyme. The Blue and Buff
somehow sounds like a Christmas surf rock song, if such
a thing. Actually the Beach Boys have done that bad example.
But and those are some of the more digestible tracks
on the record. There are songs on this album that
are longer and more labyrinthine and go into all manno
strange places, And again it never quite sound like anyone else.

(02:41:25):
But I think the reason why Cardiacs, as much as
they're a cult band, the reason why people get quite
so enthusiastic about them, is because they just have bangers.
They write some of the catchiest eccentric rock songs you're
likely to find. And on song Would and I, which
is maybe the catchier song I've heard all year, the
moment that first ends in my ears, it was like,

(02:41:47):
that's never leaving anytime I have, you know, basically a
wandering mind that's going to enter it and disrupt whatever
I'm doing. Even if this collection of influencers sounds hell
to you, which I could understand, go and listen to
that song and try it to be swept up in it. Ultimately,
this album is just it's a pleasure to hear one

(02:42:10):
of the most distinct bands in the history of British
music back doing their thing. And there's there's so many
aspects now, the major thing that which is why this
so opinion again is their melodic style is unlike anyone
else I've ever heard. And I can't tell you what
a pleasure is hearing something that sounds so different on
such a fundamental level. It's just exhilarating listening to a

(02:42:32):
band who genuinely don't bend to a rule book of
any kind. They write. They have melodic structures that it's
hard to imagine where it even came from It doesn't
sound like a product of the Beatles, or that all
the things I mentioned earlier, the things which they clearly
take influence from this band, the songs that they write.
It's it's just like that. It's the thing of like

(02:42:53):
a true eccentric where it's not a put on, it's
not an act, it's a genuine, addible creative Let loose
and listening to this album is like it's like visiting
the Willy Wonka chocolate factory. Like maybe you don't want
to drink from the chocolate river every day, but you
should do it once in your life, and I've been
doing it quite a lot the last few months since

(02:43:15):
the Thing's come out again. There's much to this record
that I want to discuss now. I think a huge
reason as to why this album is emotionally connecting with
me so much this year. His context I should speak
at to another time. But even without that, this thing
is just a marvel of experimental avant garde but such

(02:43:37):
fucking fun songwriting. It's excellent.

Speaker 2 (02:43:40):
There you go.

Speaker 1 (02:43:41):
Cardiacts my number two, my top two albums of this year.
We actually we reviewed them back to back in the
same episode. So there's a hint for you on my
number one if you can remember that far back, if
you haven't already worked it out, And it was a
particularly trying reviews month, but at the end of that
episode we had these two absolute monoliths of brilliant music,

(02:44:05):
and they stayed at number one and number two all year,
really their only competition being at first, you know, when
as I was getting to crypts of them each other,
Number two, Wake, the Return of Magic. This was like
a monumental unearthing this album, where getting this fucking tone
of a record, wrapping my mind around it, but knowing

(02:44:26):
before I had managed to really get inside it that
this was quite simply a serious record and it might
be one of the moost unexpected albums of the year.
Because Wake had been dormant basically since twenty eleven, and
to remind you of my relationship with them, I was
not following Wake during their heyday. I had not spent
these fourteen years wishing Awake album into existence, because this

(02:44:47):
is not a band I was thinking about during those
quiet years for them of the twenty tens. I'd only
just really started to get into them in the year
or so prior to this album coming, and I hadn't
gotten through their whole catalog yet when this album arrived,
So the idea of this like long dormant sludge band
who for the first decade of me being into that
music never really came my way suddenly getting their stuff

(02:45:09):
together and putting out the second best album of the year.
It wasn't on my predictions list, and you know, getting
jump started by how good this album is. I did
then spend particularly the first half of this year, really
familiarizing myself with all of the rest of their catalog,
and they were a great band, but this is by
a wide margin, the best album they've ever put out,
in my opinion, and in the world of proggy sludge

(02:45:31):
or post metal, this is the one record that came
out this year that felt like this is a major
work in the way that last year it was inter Armor,
and in the same way, it's post metal that sounds
nothing like what the sort of norm of post metal is,
and in Wake's case, that's only amplified many times over
by them having been in hibernation for so long, because

(02:45:53):
they feel like they have been growing in their own cocoon,
buried beneath a bed of moss and leaves, and some
of these records in this list fall into the very
timely category. Some of them are timeless. This is the
latter for sure, because this record feels like you are
inhaling wood smoke and then getting lost in an area

(02:46:15):
of the Deep South untouched by the modern world. This
is one of the most genuinely psychedelic metal records I've heard,
not by a Rancy Pazuzu, and in a completely different
way to Rancy Perzuzu. It's these gnulled and knotted sludge
doom metal songs that wind in these unexpected ways, and
they are guiding you through them like mystics who have

(02:46:36):
walked these overgrown, knotted paths a thousand times, and they
know the places where they can put their feet where
a novice would just get totally lost. There's such an
incredible sense of assurance and a sort of sage quality
about it, where even when these songs are at their
most volatile, there's a wisdom about it, best evidenced in
Distant Constellations and the Psychedelic Incarceration, which is a whole

(02:46:59):
song that like it's from people whose brains in their
younger years have been spun out by drugs, and they're
warning you with this like strange distorted psa almost introduction
about the dangers of becoming trapped inside your own mind.
But it's not like but out, you know, it's rather
thank you, sense I will consider that as I go
forward on my open minded journey, like this is fucking

(02:47:20):
demonic as well, and it's such a slow burn. But
to be doing that through this epic length, shamanic psychedelic
folk song that feels like you're in a cave surrounded
by animal bones and wicker sculptures that by the end
has become this dizzying mastered on at their best prog metal,

(02:47:41):
the steel and the country pieces of it. The steel
guitar parts achingly beautiful. The outro track on this is
so gorgeous I want to die, And like so many
of the best sludge bands, they feel deeply connected to
its place in the lineage of blues, American folk and
classic rock. It's like an ultra meditative, five long, seven

(02:48:06):
to fourteen minute long songs record. And I can still
tell how much thin Lizzie. These guys are consuming, and
the metal League guitars are raiser sharp, like as able
to slide through you as they are to exude this
supreme churning bowels of the earth melanchol. It's so heavy,
but earthly heavy. The riff in with Star Does Flowers

(02:48:30):
is like a genuine just force of nature, rocking you
back and forth like it sounds like a storm. And
the title track is staggering and might be the most
single invigorating metal song of twenty twenty five.

Speaker 3 (02:48:44):
It has this.

Speaker 1 (02:48:45):
Zealous, feverish conviction and the most I've heard this decade,
the neurosissy thing of this kind of spiritual scarring then
healing of this kind of music. It's so cathartic and
the most effective use of dynamic range on a metal
record this year. Are absolutely towering, towering record, Elliotts, what's

(02:49:12):
your number two hour of the year.

Speaker 3 (02:49:16):
We've lined up again. It's Rake with the Return of Magic.
Yeah on hearing you describing us now, This is now
I've heard dozens of times this year. I was like,
I need to listen to this again, and it's.

Speaker 1 (02:49:27):
This thing's fucking amazing, isn't it.

Speaker 3 (02:49:29):
It's fucking one. I've been awake fan for a long time,
but one of the real joys this year was discovering
just how much of a fan I am. I genuinely
think they're one of the most underrated metal bands, the
undergre's ever seen. Of all the reasons you would just
described like a true one off. I don't think anyone
has ever done their mix of sludge metal, psychedelic rock

(02:49:49):
and Appalachian folk horror. And it helps that they're also
so fucking good at it. And this rival in its
rival with my love of them, might have happened without
this record, you know, going back to them to do
the Nola Special and like going back to the Voice
of Omens and Rest and Hell has a Daughter the
Sun and all of those. It's an incredible catalog, but

(02:50:14):
it certainly held. This year kicked off with I agree
their masterpiece, the Return of Magic. When this song was announced,
like I said, I've been awake fan for a long time,
and I thought, oh cool, they're back, Like, let's give
this new song a listen. Honestly, not expecting a classic,
because we know what has these bands disappear for a while,
they come back and sometimes it could be a bit rusty,

(02:50:35):
sometimes in the best way. But I heard that the
title track for this song and it just it took
my head off. It was like this twelve minute fever
dream where the exact meeting point between classic neurosis, American
black metal, neo folk, and they just wove something seamless

(02:50:55):
and terrifying out of those influences, and I was suddenly
went from going, Oh, that would be a cool album
when it comes along, so I cannot wait to get
my hands at the thing, and the alum itself more
than lived up to that promise you saw. We'd always
be together opens with one of the one of the
most beautiful pieces of music I've heard this year, and
the way that mutates into one of the most devastatingly

(02:51:16):
heavy and ugly piece of music I've heard this year
while still having that beauty and scope to it. Somehow
in that mix. The lead guitars on this record, I'm
a sucker for those and they are something else, and
they know precisely when to drop those twin leads. They
always get the moment exactly right, just when it's getting

(02:51:37):
too oppressive and too nasty, the Thin Lizzie and the
Kream's clear Water Revival influence comes out and tells you
that even if just for a few moments, it's going
to be okay, and it makes them so much more
dynamic than the tag of sludge metal typically allows for.
The riff on with Stardos Flowers is something that should
have been written one hundred times in the last forty
five years. It's such a primearly satisfying metal riff, and

(02:51:59):
that song maybe has the best guitar solo of the
year in a year where Ghost released a record and
they always come out with the best ones. You spoke
about it already, but Distant Constellations and the psychedelic Incarceration
on the best down they've ever put their name to.
That's certainly the best song they've ever done for in
my money, and it's the kind of song that I

(02:52:20):
don't think I've ever heard before, where in this amalgam
of Panoptacon souls at zero ear in Neurosis and like
ninety Swans, and in this forteen minute meditation, it's it's
an unbelievable feat and then when that's punctured by in

(02:52:41):
after reverse, it's it has some of those bruising riffs
you'll find on an arm this year, and this thing
the way it just it rocks and rolls and it
has fits and it always again always at precisely the
right moment. They're understanding of push and pull. It's on
the level of the likes of Mastodon at their best,
and I don't say that lightly. This bound they might
not be for everyone, but they deserve a lot more

(02:53:02):
than they have. They are the sort of band that
any self respecting fan of experimental, out there underground metal,
even if just for this record, they should worship at
the also of them. They've been brilliant for their whole career,
but on this album they've never been more brilliant. This
thing is staggering.

Speaker 1 (02:53:18):
Yeah, I'm so happy that that is one that we've
been able to meet up together on because I think
there's a good kind of cult of people who have
really registered what are like just earth shattering event of
a record this is. But if you haven't heard it,

(02:53:38):
I've got one more trying new.

Speaker 2 (02:53:42):
Gold Star, Bye gold Star, when the world is falling,
just listen to the calling gold Star Imperial Triumphant. Why
the fuck have I listened to this album so many times?
I shouldn't have been going this year? What do I
want to listen to through on? I Know?

Speaker 1 (02:54:02):
Imperio Triumphant thirty eight minutes to spare quick puff of
gold Star.

Speaker 2 (02:54:06):
That'll do me.

Speaker 1 (02:54:07):
They made the most perversely listenable experimental jazz black death
metal album of all type. This band, this decade have
been and I'm sure you don't hear this term too
often with them, they have been a delight.

Speaker 3 (02:54:22):
It's been so.

Speaker 1 (02:54:23):
Weird and fun and surprising having them around making these
mad fucking records. But I picked up a copy of
Vile Luxury just recently, which is the first album that
kicks off this current era and lineup of Imperio Triumphant
that we have been really with where they really find
their sound. And it's a great record, but it's not
effortless for me as gold Star somehow is I think

(02:54:46):
Alphaville is a modern classic. I think Spirit of Ecstasy
it might have been too much for some people. I
think it's delirious, precisely for just being the most blog
eyed mad thing they've made. But the one move I
genuinely didn't expect from Imperio Triumphant is to boil things
down and somehow make whatever their equivalent of a record
like The Hunter is, Like, is this Imperia Triumphant's Wolverine Blues?

(02:55:09):
I don't fucking know. It's never been done before. But
this spectrum of like fringe dissonant extreme metal, from ad
Nauseum to Kraalis, despell Omega, whatever, none of them are
making records that rock like this. And that was just
the most excitement I got out of a record this year,
hearing them make this groovy death metal with this experimental

(02:55:33):
flair they have still completely intact, and all these inspired
touches of like Afro Cuban music and wonky broken guitar
riffs and nineteen twenties jazz breaks only add into that
central groove. It's just brilliant. Literally all the way through
this album, I'm nodding my head, and that doesn't feel
like it should be possible, because they're throwing all these

(02:55:54):
things at it that feel like they should disrupt your
enjoyment of the music. But the trick of centering you rhythmically,
it doesn't feel quite as Lovecraftian as an Alphaville in
terms of overwhelming you. But this next test of their
capability as a band. Can we streamline it like this
while still letting our manic creativity in our particular touch

(02:56:17):
seep all over it. It's paid off. So many people
are into this record, and with this newfound instantaneousness, you
can be more easily brought into oh this is what
you're doing. Like this bright, gleaming, repulsively wealthy and excessive sound.
Gold as the color of pure despotic evil. The package

(02:56:40):
of the album, and even how the vinyl gatefold opens
the last one was inspired by luxury cars. This is
the entire album as a cigarette package, and it's something
that is a luxury item. It's indulgent, and every American
gentleman is going to want to have their gold Stars cigarettes,
but it's something that rots you inside. And Gomora Nouveau
the new face of metropolitan corruption. I of Mars, the

(02:57:03):
hellish ensemble of brass. That is like you are a
tiny plebeian paraded out into a gladiatorial ring with hundreds
of cruel, twisted faces glaring down at you. It feels
like I'm at the end of Bo's Afraid or something.
And then you get to the end of that song,
and that was actually the second most hellish part of

(02:57:25):
the song that opened up with I Love the Impression
of Height. In Imperial Trymphant Albums and al Vertigo, where
they became the first metal band to play on top
of the Chrysler building or something dafted when they were
filming the video for Lexington Delirium, and the leads at
the end of it sound like cascading down the side
of that building. Hotel shinks is jazz cannibal corpse with

(02:57:47):
this wibbling, charging of viscerating death metal riff, and it's
what like a theme song for a hotel, as in
like welcome to this house of horrors and the terrible
things that have happened inside these walls. Gomora Nuveau the
most evil death metal slap bas riff you could possibly imagine.
It has the best drumming on a heavy record this year,
just by virtue of it being an Imperial Triumphant record

(02:58:09):
really and the husky, painful, yowling growl of that Greeder's
good rot modern figure that is the narrator of this record.
There are so many different avenues of things that I
could pull out that this record as to why I
love it that as someone who adores my sugar but

(02:58:30):
barely listens to any sugar derived music, this is one
of the only things in twenty years where the juttering
gears of some great Metropolis engine in pleasure. Doome remind
you why those grooves felt so scary and cool? Why
do you think Thomas keeps working with them? And then
that song also has Dave Lombardo doing a samba carnival breakdown.

(02:58:51):
The African inspired grooves on this are fantastic. Side A
of the record ends with a forty five second improvised
jazz grind song just titled after the city where they're from,
and it is like a contained pressure cooker scream of
urban living, hemmed in like rats wishing people would get
the fuck out of your way, And then you flip

(02:59:12):
the record over and it's like, here's the solution. This
mid century radio advert for this will solve your problems.
Buy this, and particularly I think Kperia Triumphant capture better
than any other band. The maddening, almost dissociative state of
living in a society where we are bombarded by the
evidence of the moral emptiness of our higher ups and

(02:59:34):
know fully well how rotten they are, but seem to
be able to do almost nothing about it. Where so
many points throughout this year, another development has come up
about Jeffrey Epstein having letters written to him by you
know who or Diddy and the extent of his abuse
and alleged trafficking. I don't know if it's been explicitly
said so, but if you want my interpretation, reading a

(02:59:55):
lot of the lyrics to this, I think a lot
of it is about the Epstein stuff or even Diddy.
You know, things that have happened in New York and
are as much a canvas of the city as anything else.
And the genuine cognitive dissonance of knowing how many people
governing the world are criminals and yet we all keep
carrying on as normal, and the feeling of vertigo of
looking down that black hole of unchecked monstrosity and going

(03:00:18):
how the hell do we come back from here? And
in Lexington Delirium, when Thomas Harker does the bit of
narration and he growls that line, the gold that crowns
this tower pays its respect only to the black. It
sounds super fucking cool and evil, but it's true and
industry of misery. At the end. It's an interesting song
because imperial triumphant, who usually embody that evil, this seems

(03:00:39):
to be to me almost like their call to arms
against it. And after all of this shit, it has
that insane moment of bellowing.

Speaker 3 (03:00:47):
Out bring Down the Guillotine.

Speaker 1 (03:00:50):
Before an outro that I can't believe I didn't clock
when reviewed it. How open a homage to the Beatles.
I want you to so heavy? That is which in
your weirdo jazz death not a record good? Sure?

Speaker 3 (03:01:00):
Why not?

Speaker 1 (03:01:01):
And Uh, like you said earlier, I'm with you. I
thought Alphaville was going to comfortably sit as this band's masterpiece.
And I don't know if I can say which I
think is better out of these two records, but that
at the very least this is about at least as good.

Speaker 3 (03:01:16):
Now Is this as good.

Speaker 1 (03:01:17):
As the Fault the Camera album last year? I don't know.
But on top of all of this horrific underbelly of
corruption and abuse of power and wealth inequality that exists
in this record, and the stuff that makes it subversive
and reflective of extreme metal's ability to get into the
darkest parts of our world that we bear not think
about lest it drive us insane. Also this whole lineage

(03:01:41):
of weirdo avant garde extreme metal acts or music acts
like Naked City, Portal, Gorguts, Painkiller. One of them made
a banger in that brilliant and what a banger it is.

Speaker 3 (03:01:55):
Yeah, it's a fucking highly deserved number one. But I
will say I think it's funny that we do that
this way. In the sense that ours are lists, we
expect to have more sync ups, and there have been
many syncops in our picks this year. I think we
might have the two most different number ones we've ever had.
Would be my suspicion because my number one is an

(03:02:17):
Now you recommended to me about three hours ago, but
I'm always one step ahead. Oh, because I've gone for
steroid no way, I know you love this.

Speaker 2 (03:02:27):
I was literally I was gonna say at the end
of this, I was like, holy shit, I've heard this record.

Speaker 3 (03:02:31):
It's so up your street. Oh my god, I've known
for a few months now this is likely to be
my number one, and can I bring this on the show?
I think I'd like to talk about it. Honestly. It's
for the best, both because I wanted to do the
reveal here, but also if we spoke about this a
month that came out, I don't think i'd be able to.
My cheeks were sore from smile to this thing. Like, So,

(03:02:54):
if you're not sure, if you haven't heard of Steroid,
we can forgive that, well, I can't forgive us if
you don't invest after hearing this, because they are an
Australian egg punk band who formed only a few years ago.
Until this year, they only had one EP to their name,
and this is their debut album. If you don't know
what egg punk is, it's a very I didn't know

(03:03:14):
what it was until I discovered this band. It's a
very internet phenomenon where sort of low five punk rock
that draws on new Wave of the late nineteen seventies,
which basically Devo and Steroid asked the natural question what
if Devo had to go at making a new wave
of British heavy metal album and what if they enlisted

(03:03:35):
Daniel Johnston to sing for them?

Speaker 1 (03:03:37):
Be and Mark went fucking insane recently looking at the
band camp tags for this and how often it says
new wave of egg emal.

Speaker 3 (03:03:47):
Is so niche this I didn't even bother trying to
google what the egg connection was get it at all.
But this record is amazing. That question, I've just laid
out this army the answer to it, and it is
one of the most euphoric rock albums I've maybe ever
heard in my life. The first thing that drew me

(03:04:10):
to it. But beyond the arm title of the name
is the album cover, which is this weird like school
book comic book image of a castle in a tank
and this little menace like Dennis the Men's character in
chain Mail, and it's like Neon Green, and I thought, oh, this,
this would be interesting. And as soon as that opening
riff of war Zone in the City comes in, it was.

(03:04:31):
It was absolute love. At first listen. It felt like
someone had gone into my psyche and handed my id
a massive frosty beer. For thirty three minutes, I was
treated to the most joyful and life affirming crash course
of heavy metal cliches. Pretty much all of them are
on this record. In fact, because say all of them on,

(03:04:53):
I mean the absolute banger The main stage one of
my favorite verses of the year, arriving at the airport late,
trashing out our private plane, drive the limo through the fans,
flipping off the other bands. We had too much whiskey
at the bar. We don't know where the hell we are,
but we're rocking hard, and we're rocking loud. Will turn
this place into a mushroom cloud. It's poetry and taking

(03:05:15):
all those cliches which we all know and we all love,
and subverting it. Subverting it's not the word, but like
putting it through the lens of a genre that it's
never been put through before. You know, all the things
we love about heavy metal is like really thick guitars
and big, rich reverbi drums and a powerhouse vocalist. This
does none of that program drums, deliberately tinny eight bit

(03:05:39):
guitar tone, and a singer that has more in common
with Jonathan Richmond than it does Rob Halford. And yet
through sheer power of iron clad bangers, they've come out
on top. These songs are Ramon's level catchy. I've already
said war Zone in the City give me the same
feeling as when I heard Like the thunder and Lightning
for the first time. The Ties Will track is our

(03:06:00):
this World the main stage through the night, rock your
own way, but a rocky row away at the closer
arena show, rocking alone.

Speaker 1 (03:06:10):
I've been singing that for the last like two weeks straight,
and literally I went to an arena show on my
own fucking like yesterday, and I was going on the
way to that, going.

Speaker 3 (03:06:18):
I'll be fucking alone show. You put that on this show,
I nearly a couple there the conversation. The level of
songwriting is off the chain. If you're like, if you're
like one of us and you've ever asked, where did
all the songs about rocking go? We finally know Steroid

(03:06:41):
have them all. I'm I think literally every single song
on this record mentions rocking and the power of it
and how brilliant it is. If that doesn't sell you,
I don't know what to say. Sometimes we come on
it and we talk about records and I, you know,
we'll kind of say, oh, you know, I love this thing.
It might not be for everyone on I think like
some people would like this, this would be good. This
is a very bizarre mix of things eighties heavy metal,

(03:07:05):
seventies new wave, retro, internet culture, and like outsider art.
I can understand why someone might hear that and go
it sounds a bit baffling. I don't know if that's
for me. Sincerely, If you like anything we talk about
on this show that we've ever described as upbeat, if
you just like being happy, but if you just if
you if you like the Dirty Nil or accept or

(03:07:27):
Jimmy Eat World or Cocksparre or Blind Guardian or Judas
Priest or Scorpions please listen to this. And one of
the things that's been so fun about it was looking
back on my previous albums of the year for T
and M how much this stood out because the first
three I felt like there was a rough mold. They
could all kind of be fitting to where its established,

(03:07:50):
or bands in the midst of being established, like doing
their most experimental work today and smashing out of the
park like worm Rot making the most far reaching and
artists brilliant grindcer album. I could imagine Blooding Tentation making
this all time like extreme metal classic that takes their
one of a kind brand of death metal further into

(03:08:11):
the outer limits than anyone has ever done it. And yes,
Avenge Sevenfold producing the most daring and idiosyncratic album and
arena metal band has maybe ever put out this year.
It's different and it's kind of made me rethink that mold,
and it's pure to be. The reason this is here
isn't because it's the grandest musical statement, although it is

(03:08:33):
really bizarre and really distinct. Ultimately, it's give me something
I've never heard before and make music feel like the
most exciting thing in the world, and sometimes you want
something really brainy to do that, and sometimes it can
be beautifully simple, and Chaine Melt Commandos is the example
of that. I love this band and no album has

(03:08:54):
wrought be more happiness this year than Shane Melt Commandos.

Speaker 1 (03:08:58):
They're like right up on their band for this album
contains legitimately one of the most beautiful paragraphs I've ever read,
which is, this is a record about rocking and never
stopping and then rocking some more. You can rock with
friends at a gig or a show. Sometimes you have
to rock alone, but that's okay. Just give it your
best and never miss your chance to rock. This is
I am elated that the most dilated I could be

(03:09:19):
that an album didn't even review has turned up one.
How happy were you earlier when I just threw that out?
Was like, you know, I mentioned you should check out.
I can't believe we've blind up like this.

Speaker 3 (03:09:27):
I honestly, I was trying to hide my small because
I didn't want to give it away eause it gets number
two and I haven't said it then, mate, this thing
is out of this world.

Speaker 1 (03:09:39):
Yeah, And if you are completely torn up by you know,
the state of everything that is reflected in the Imperial
Triumphant album. How do you get through it? It's by
never ever missing your chance to rock. So there you go.
There is a synergy between those two picks, and they
do go hand in hand. Thank you everybody for listening
and joining us on myself and Elliott's albums of the Year.

(03:10:02):
So many incredible records there to synk your teeth into.
I know you've got records that you've loved, and so
I want everybody here to keep voting. You've got until
the twelfth, which is this Friday, to get those votes in.
We've got a good amount of votes so far, as
we always do. But I know there's some thousands of
you out there who listen to the show or are
in the Facebook group. You haven't done it yet, have

(03:10:24):
you come on? Give it in, Give us the best
list we can get if you want to match the
might of what myself and Eliot have offered there. We
will be back next week with more album of the
Year lists, maybe some crossover with these ones. I'm sure
a lot of albums that have not shown up so
far will be there. I think we are not going
to be able to do Monday, but we are going

(03:10:45):
to aim to put it out for Tuesday of next week,
so just over a week we will be back with those.

Speaker 3 (03:10:50):
But there you go.

Speaker 1 (03:10:52):
Thank you everybody see it then