50-31 | 30-11 | 10-1 | EP/Live/Compilation
10 (tie). Crowning/Oaktails – Split
All four tracks here are total skramz rippers, from the Jekyll-and-Hyde fury-and-calm in Oaktails’ “Dazzling Dress” to the nihilistic sneer railing against materialistic greed and hubris in Crowning’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it “Luxor Surrealism”. Intertwining Chicago’s Crowning and Tokyo’s Oaktails throughout the tracklist, rather than compartmentalizing them in Side A/Side B fashion like in previous splits, was a sage idea — while Crowning’s mathy “Jung Money, Freud Problems” is my favorite here, Oaktails’ violence is more immediate in its fury.
10 (tie). Tiny Yawn – Paddle Ship
[YouTube Channel] // [Spotify]
Oooh, this one’s pretty — like a ray of sunshine on the coldest winter afternoon. –gravityswitch
The drums on this alone are worth the price of admission. –Bilbodabag
9. Locktender – Sage: I
By choice, Locktender’s discography has thus far been wholly devoted to the evolution of art between disciplines. The Cleveland-based quartet’s three prior LPs all lifted their names from the works of a different storied figure — for anyone interested in catching up, albums indebted to productions by Franz Kafka, Auguste Rodin, and Caspar David Friedrich await — and Sage: I, the band’s first sizable release in six years, in turn pays homage to three paintings by surrealist Kay Sage, each track sharing its title with an abstract, architectural print of her concoction. The band aligns their vision to those of each illustration: sludgy, lumbering heavyweight “Tomorrow Is Never” evokes scaffolding abandoned in the smoky heavens, “For The Wind to Tear” segues between opener and closer like an accidental skyward snapshot, and the brutalist façade of “No Passing” stretches to grimy, post-metal infinity. It earned my replay value twofold as a crash course and a cool clamor — turns out Sage spent most of her rocky, largely overshadowed career in the tiny Connecticut town I currently call home! — but those less interested in the titular artist should still find the music itself a rousing, concise summation of Locktender’s raison d’être: belting out stark, atmospheric hardcore while paying the act of inspiration forward. –ashcrash9
8. Red Velvet – Cosmic
Outside of maybe Dreamcatcher, it’s difficult to think of a K-pop girl group that delivers with the sheer consistency that Red Velvet has brought with each release. Not for nothing have they been SM Entertainment’s premier girl group artist. After 2023’s comfortable, yet still very enjoyable Chill Kill, the five-piece proved that neither they nor their producers had been resting on their laurels. Cosmic sees the artist return to their “Red” side (AKA their more poppy, upbeat songs as opposed to the slower more R&B-influenced songs that make up their “Velvet” half), with sparkling, starstruck results. The title track’s bassline will immediately worm its way into your head, “Sunflower” and “Bubble” leverage sparkling synths to the best of effects, and closer “Night Drive” is the perfect song for anyone riding through the city late at night. But, as is so often the case with K-pop and especially Red Velvet, it’s the girls’ voices that are the star of the show, rising above the electronic beats to beautifully harmonize and bounce off one another. –AnimalForce1
7. No Cure – I Hope I Die Here
For a genre that seems stuck (yet thriving!) in an endless cycle of regurgitation, hardcore sure loves to keep its margins for permittance quite thin. Veer too far out of bounds, and, well, you’re simply not hardcore anymore — see ya later, poser! This headstrong commitment to purity doesn’t exactly foster innovation, but where creative growth wilts, ingenuity flourishes like mold to fromage bleu. Think smart, play dumb, as they always say. Few modern bands have managed to exploit this loophole to sizeable success, but the ones who have (dare I say, Knocked Loose and Turnstile?) have been leaving footprints for others to follow in their path, and they are well among us. No Cure is one of those few up-and-coming groups that have managed to bite off a chunk of notoriety by delivering a sound that is both fresh and viscerally gripping without ever breaking the rules of what it means to be a hardcore band. They have studied the craft of taking a sound rooted in decades of tradition and pumping it so full of helium that it POPS. Evil death metal leads and tectonic C Standard riffage are held accountable only by their ability to ignite a room full of spin kicks and windmills, just as the odd guttural squeal and grind riff are vigilantly reined in by gang chants, primitive tom grooves, and an overarching commitment to unity in the face of oppression. Take nineteen minutes of metallic hardcore bliss, where each riff is meticulously designed to maximize the impact of the next, then top it off with a plethora of guest features from some of Alabama’s finest, and you have nothing short of a spectacle on your hands. I Hope I Die Here is nearly suffocating at the edges of its EP format, begging to lash out. –artificialbox
6. Frontierer – The Skull Burned Wearing Hell…
I was due for a good dosage of absolute carnage and these guys bring it best. Only complaint is that it’s just 4 songs! After 3 years, I hoped they would have a little more up their sleeves. I guess that’s still possible, too. –butt.
All I know is next album is gonna go bonkers if it’s more stuff like this; “Wearing” Hell is so damn good. –SteakByrnes
5. Night Verses – Every Sound Has a Color…
This one feels like cheating: current music industry conditions made it more profitable for Night Verses to release Every Sound Has a Color in the Valley of Night in two halves, with Pt. I dropping in the fall of 2023 and Pt. II following up this past spring. That was the idea, at least — as it so happens, the album’s two chunks aren’t defined by any particular dichotomy, instead optimally consumed as the larger whole they should have been under more fortuitous circumstances. Pt. II wasn’t really a second addition so much as a second edition: the March 2024 compilation listed here was essentially the full album, updated on streaming services to combine the prior year’s batch of cuts with seven new tracks.
Lest the rollout give you a headache, rest assured the full fourteen-track experience is worth the wait, boasting what might just be modern progressive metal’s finest marriage of technical complexity, stellar production, and melodic accessibility. All three members are irreplaceable facets of the band’s identity: guitarist Nick DePirro’s nimble finger work and intergalactic effects pedals combine for a singularly futuristic tone, bassist Reilly Herrera drives some of the grooviest bass lines in the genre, and drummer Aric Improta is nothing short of a virtuoso, redefining the role of the man behind the kit. Pt. II is admittedly short on other surprises — guest vocalists Brandon Boyd and Anthony Green steal the show on laid-back, late-album excursions “Glitching Prisms” and “Slow Dose”, respectively — but tight chemistry, space battle-ass engineering, and dynamic contrast remain Night Verses’ signature traits, and the trio offers them in spades across the now-combined halves of Every Sound. –ashcrash9
4. Maruja – Connla’s Well
Creatives of every generation face a similar challenge; the young want to improve on the formulas of the old, fretting themselves sick worrying that they’ll never match the heights of the old masters. These anxieties are rarely soothed by their elders, who selfishly turn to nostalgia in their final years, coping endlessly over outgrowing youthful fascination. “Music is dead,” says the jaded elder, “a medium once occupied by thoughtful masters has become irrevocably cheapened by the passage of time and the spurious desires of the youth.” Bullshit! One need only look at the monumental hype Maruja’s last EP, Connla’s Well, inspires to realize that we are not yet in the end times, but instead only in another turn of the cycle. Music nerds are a captive audience to time, permanently cursed to watch the charts, breathlessly waiting for the next musical classic to appear. Maruja appear pregnant with this classic. Building on the sound of modern British rock bands like Black Country New Road and Black Midi, Maruja’s tasteful dependence on jazz transcends their well-tread post-rock stylings into a titanic force. If I can find any complaint about songs like “Invisible Man” or “Resisting Resistance”, it’s that it seems a shame such thoughtful and powerful music is constrained to the limited vision of an EP. For a band posturing as the next Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Slint, Maruja have done almost everything necessary to earn the hype besides releasing a modern classic debut LP. Come on fellas, give it to us. –FowlKrietzsche
3. TWICE – With YOU-th
I don’t think any group makes the argument for K-pop supremacy more convincingly than TWICE. (Almost) a decade into their careers and very few have come close to challenging their undisputed status as THE k-pop girl group, and far less have come for their equivalent continental title. A relentless release and promotion schedule alongside massive support from their parent company (take notes, SM, and everyone else) continues to spoil Onces well past their senior status, as 2024 became TWICE’s most prolific run since their incredible 2017-18 schedule, seeing two mini-albums, a full Japanese album, a subunit mini-album and two solo releases in the space of twelve months.
The group have never struggled for consistency, unlike a sizable portion of their contemporaries, but even by their own high standards, With YOU-th (the pick of this year’s bunch) seems like a monumental achievement. Most interesting here is the side-steps into more garage-influenced sounds on “Rush” and “Bloom”, which, if you still needed convincing of TWICE’s versatility and viability in the ever changing landscape of k-pop, should serve to silence any doubts about their ability to compete with the Newjeanses and tripleSes of the world. On a personal level, though, the clear highlight amongst a very strong sextet of tracks is the achingly heartfelt synthpop title track “I Got You”, which doesn’t particularly do anything new for the group but presents like a warm hand on the back from an old friend reminiscing about how far you’ve come, and what a journey it’s been. Really, this could have been a perfect disbandment song, but luckily for all of us it isn’t — and the equally brilliant Strategy mini-album that landed a couple months back shows there are no signs of stopping for the girls. As they approach ten years together, the stars are the limit — we’re long-past sky at this point. –Sinternet
2. Counterparts – Heaven Let Them Die
Let me paint you a picture: it’s a couple days after one of the most nerve-wracking days/nights in my recent memory, and likely the same for many people across the U.S. Things are feeling, for lack of a better term, completely and utterly hopeless. But, I need to drag myself on and keep going, so I wake up early to get to my job, substitute teaching, Starbucks red cup in hand. I have some time during my lunch break, so I throw on Apple Music, planning to wrap up my discog run of Counterparts, finishing A Eulogy for Those Still Here, only to find out that those sneaky bastards surprise-dropped a 6-track EP that day. Cursing them with a half-smile, I finish Eulogy, and turn on opening track “A Martyr Left Alive”, ready for something equivalent-ish to what I just listened to on the prior album. Then, my ears are met with squealing guitar feedback and the most furious riffs Counterparts have ever put down. Then Brendan Murphy starts screaming, and it sounds not like Counterparts, but like END. And in that moment, I knew two things: one, this EP dropping the day it did felt like unbelievable fate, and two, if we were truly about to enter a dark era, then Counterparts would be our heralds.
Heaven Let Them Die is the angriest, heaviest slab of music Counterparts have ever released, eschewing their melodic side to instead pummel their loyal listeners with chugging riffs amplified by Will Putney’s signature fuzzy production, which calls back to the crushing soundscapes of END’s debut album (which is a pattern you’ll notice consistently across all 17 minutes). Murphy’s lyrics have graduated from pensive and despondent to utterly fucking furious, as he roars of war and abandonment. The album is nowhere near as dynamic as Eulogy, but it didn’t really need to be. What it needed to be was punchy and memorable and pissed the ever-loving fuck off. To quote my sound-off from this EP’s release: if you think you’re as angry at the world as humanly possible, then you’re wrong. Counterparts are angrier. –AnimalForce1
1. Greyhaven – Stereo Grief
Whether cranked from a makeshift basement venue or a late night television stage, 2024 was a remarkable year for heavy music, and a certain Louisville-based metal outfit with a penchant for deep-fried dissonance dominated that resurgence. Despite their many traits in common, that breakout band in question is not Greyhaven (gg, Knocked Loose), but I’d argue it should be: the not-quite-metalcore, a-bit-wilder-than-post-hardcore quartet has been on a roll lately, and their latest EP, Stereo Grief, is a hasty, cutthroat barrage of hooks and uppercuts on par with just about any of the full-length riff-fests you’ve heard within the last year. Five standard-length tracks isn’t a lot to work with — newcomers can consider it a sample platter, while us already-converted souls will liken it to a bonus helping of angsty dessert. If you enjoy blowing out your speakers with a dash of Southern twang and a vocalist who effortlessly flip-flops between virile cleans and sizzling screams, then voilà and bon appétit! –ashcrash9
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we back this long-overdue Kpop revolution, we LOVE that Tiny Yawn inclusion gj userbase
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