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10. Foxing – Foxing

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

Foxing is exhausted, but don’t take my word for it! Their latest album’s cover depicts an over-saturated, digitized, and hollowed out close-up of the Greek bronze sculpture Boxer at Rest, originating from a period of antiquity marked by a shying away from the heroic regalia accentuated in prior generations. The actual statue survived with minimal oxidation only because it was promptly buried — an apt parallel to how this band, the emo revival’s most restless explorers, lay defeated even if their reputation seems well-preserved. Name me a more decorated, adventurous act from their scene and I’ll call you a liar, not that it seems to matter to them: here at LP #5, reinventing the wheel for the fourth time overall and the first time as their own producers and crowd-funders, a medal is chump change compared to a moment’s reprieve.

Not to bury the lede in there, but yes, Foxing have yet again willed their arc in unforeseen directions. With each release, they course-correct from a criticism of the one prior while accumulating touchstones — once a sound enters their DNA, it doesn’t escape so easily. Exhibit 4.1: observe how the tight pop songcraft of predecessor Draw Down The Moon evaporates in favor of Foxing‘s sprawling, nocturnal cynicism while the band’s comfort with electronics doesn’t just remain, but expands until it bursts — guitars and synths shriek, space age…

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10 (tie). Crowning/Oaktails – Split

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

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

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

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…

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30. Fit for an Autopsy – The Nothing That Is

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

…

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50. Aaron West and The Roaring Twenties – In Lieu of Flowers

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

This could be Soupy’s best offering yet from any of his projects. –Slothcore Sam

“Dead Leaves” absolutely destroyed me. Campbell has continued to grow this thing into an absolute juggernaut. –MaySun91

49. Better Lovers – Highly Irresponsible

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

The word ‘supergroup’ tends to draw some worried glances when brought up in music discussions. It seems like, for every A Perfect Circle or Audioslave, there’s just as many where the individual talent of the group’s members never really adds up when brought together. How lucky we are, in that case, that Better Lovers, formed from former Every Time I Die members, vocalist Greg Puciato of Dillinger Escape Plan, and ultra-prolific guitarist and producer Will Putney, escapes the jaws of mediocrity to deliver one of the year’s finest metalcore efforts. Granted, the band had already proven themselves in 2023 with their debut EP, but holy crap does Highly Irresponsible ever live up to those grand expectations. Jagged riffs meet howled vocals that have somehow managed to match and even exceed the best of Puciato’s work with Dillinger. Whether it be the groovy, full-speed ahead riffs of “A White Horse Covered in Blood” or the shocking amounts of genuine emotion present in “At All Times”, there’s something here for all metalcore fans, and it promises…

Greetings, party people! Once again, it’s time for you to have your say: voting is now open for the Top 50 LPs (and 10 EPs, Live Albums, and Compilations) of 2024 community feature!

This will be the first second year we’re going to try to pull this off without the forums, and based on the… delightful feedback from last year about Google forms, we’re hoping this will be a smoother experience. Still no underscores, at least!

Ballots will be open until January 2nd, 11:59PM ET (-ish). For all intensive porpoises, please consider submitting your ballot earlier than that.

Ballot Rules

If you would like to submit an LP ballot, please review the guidelines before submitting your ballot officially (it’s not a race!):

• Your ballot must have exactly 10 LPs on it (and, if opting-in to the EP, Live Album, and Compilation ballot, exactly 3 in this category)
• You are allotted 100 points to divvy up across your 10 LPs (30 points for the EP/Live Album/Compilation ballot)
  • Suggestion 1: just give 10 albums 10 points each and call it a day
  • Suggestion 2: give more points to your S-tier albums and then fewer points to your A-tier albums
• The maximum number of points that can be assigned to any one LP is 30 (21 for EPs/Live Albums/Compilations)
• The minimum number of points that can be assigned to any one LP and EP/Live Album/Compilation is 1
  • These are whole-number votes, so please

…

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10. Hail the Sun – Divine Inner Tension

[Official site] // [Spotify]

I’m going to say something that shouldn’t actually be controversial, but will inevitably cause a bunch of people to lose their shit: Divine Inner Tension is Hail the Sun’s best work.

[long awkward silence]

“Ye speaketh blasphemy, ye corpulent mammalian sea creature!”

Yes, I do. Shamelessly.

I’ve said this before, but it took a lot to bring me to listen to this album. I refused to listen to the singles. I refused to have anything to do with the rotten cadaver of the genre Hail the Sun had been pigeonholed into. “It all sounds the same anyway!” was the chant I told my friends about the singles that kept dropping. “They’ve peaked! They’re on the decline!” is what I kept saying to myself to justify my refusal to give Divine Inner Tension a chance.

It didn’t matter that I have a deep-seated respect and admiration for Donovan Melero as a musician and seemingly good dude. It didn’t matter that of all the “swancore” bands out there, Hail the Sun had actually put out the most consistent music. It didn’t matter that — while they hadn’t quite achieved the highs of Wake — Culture Scars, Mental Knife and New Age Filth were all very good records. All that would come of a new album in the age of aging guitar-wankery…

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10. Magdalena Bay – mini mix Vol. 3

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

Short and sweet collection of almost-banging tunes that take their time to show how smooth these earworms are. The production is gorgeous, and Tenenbaum’s vocal delivery finely walks the playful-quirky line. Really excited about their future. –dedex

9. Joliette – Luz de Bengala

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

If you are still sleeping on Joliette, Luz de Bengala is a short and sweet cacophony to disturb your slumber: the Mexican post-hardcore mainstays are firing on all cylinders here, conjuring up an expected, spellbinding amalgam of downtrodden riffs, chiming, post-rocky builds, and zesty screams en español. Coming off a couple standalone singles in the years prior, this EP marks the band’s first multi-track project with bassist Gastón Prado on lead vocals, and that lineup change isn’t elemental so much as it is tonal: where once Joliette doubled down on grisly, violent imagery or infernal despair, their latest incarnation ultimately espouses hope without sacrificing their knack for tense, tightly-wound arrangements. Fans of Birds In Row, Ostraca, a theoretically skramz-ier At The Drive-In, or basically anything on the quartet’s latest home, Zegema Beach Records: don’t overlook these guys any longer. –ashcrash9

8. Dream Dolphin – Gaia: Selected Ambient & Downtempo Works (1996-2023)

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

In…

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30. Sleep Token – Take Me Back to Eden

[Official site] // [Spotify]

One of the most fascinating factoids of Sleep Token’s extensive and intricate lore is that the band themselves were concocted in a lab to piss off music snobs and elitists. Everything from the soaring clean vocals that are polished to a blinding sheen to the admittedly kind of obnoxious RnB samplings do everything they possibly can to make the conventional fan of prog or metal roll their eyes out of their skull, and frankly, I get it. But that test for elitist purity — known as the No Trve Metalhead fallacy — is a race to the bottom. I was there in the last.fm trenches in 2010 when everyone called Wolves in the Throne Room “Shirts In the Dorm Room” due to their perceived accessibility. Take Me Back to Back to Eden has plenty to criticize and is far from the majesty of Opeth’s Ghost Reveries or the creativity of Between the Buried and Me’s Colors, but in time, it may reveal itself to be the nexus in the same way those works were for an entirely new generation of metal fans and acts. It’s one hell of a time, but only if you’ll uncross your arms and allow yourself to have fun. –Odal

29. TesseracT – War of Being

[Bandcamp] // [

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50. Urne – A Feast On Sorrow

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

“Like Mastodon but not like Mastodon” is one of my favorite genres. –Egarran

Has some old-school Sepultura/Slayer/Coroner tones — with an upgraded sound, of course. Worth the listen. –Astaroth666

49. Chepang – Swatta

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

Let’s make one thing really clear: Swatta is absolutely not for the faint of heart; but if you’re the type of person that seeks thrills, do yourself a favor and listen to this record. It’s hard for me to describe this album without resorting to a bunch of oxymoronic platitudes like “chaotically precise” or “brilliantly raw,” but the fact of the matter is that I don’t think any band brought more unrestrained ferocity to the table than Chepang did in 2023. Swatta is not just a triumph for grind, it’s a triumph in heavy music — and it’s the kind of album that follows the mantra of shooting on sight and taking no prisoners. Don’t be lulled by the disarmingly-satisfying-to-say names, either: Swatta will systematically break every bone in your body before torching you to a cinder. Oh, and you’re going to enjoy every fucking second. –Manatea

48. Panopticon – The Rime of Memory

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

An entirely new level for Panopticon. This is the album…

Greetings, friends!

It’s that time once again for you to have your say: voting is now open for the Top 50 LPs of 2023 community feature!

As in years past, we will also be including EPs/Live Albums/Compilations in a separate category.

This will be the first year we’re going to try to pull this off without the forums, so thank you for your patience in learning to love Google forms (where you no longer have to follow that complicated underscore system!).

Ballots will be open for approximately two weeks (a projected cut-off date of Thursday, December 28th around 11:59PM ET).

LP Ballot Rules

If you would like to submit an LP ballot, please review the guidelines before submitting your ballot officially (it’s not a race!):

• Your ballot must have exactly 10 LPs on it (please note that the ballot asks for the album name first and not the artist!)
• You are allotted 100 points to divvy up across your 10 LPs
  • Some users liked 10 albums equally, so they’ll assign 10 points to 10 LPs
  • Some users choose to assign more points to their favorite LPs on the year
  • The maximum number of points that can be assigned to any one LP is 30
  • The minimum number of points that can be assigned to any one LP is 1
  • These are whole-number votes, so do not worry about fractions or irrational numbers
• Where an album is ranked (e.g., Position 1 vs.

…

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10. He Is Legend – Endless Hallway

[Label site] // [Spotify]

“It’s not unheard of, but certainly rare when a band 25 years old and eight albums deep into their career create a record that could be in contention as their best, but if there was any group who could it, it would be He Is Legend. And guess what? That’s exactly what they’ve done with Endless Hallway. Tonally, it suggests one of their most divisive efforts since Suck Out the Poison — it’s dark, heavy, sludgy, and one of their most narrative driven releases — but it has all of the finesse of their post-reunion material. Speaking of heavy, Endless Hallway may be their most brutal outing to date, oscillating between near djent riffcapades and slower, churning swamp metal throwdowns — there is no shortage of headbanging moments strewn throughout the record. However, this uptick in viciousness does little to deter Schuylar Croom from crafting some of the most memorable hooks of his career. As always, the frontman has a very distinct sense of melody, writing passages that make use of odd harmonies but are still impossibly catchy. Endless Hallway is somehow He is Legend at their peak, and I can’t see any fan of the band being disappointed with this one.” —Brandon Scott / TheSpirit

It’s hard to write about this album without letting Brandon’s words really describe it. The day Brandon left was a tough one –one that is sure…

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10. Gospel – MVDM: Magick Volumes Of Dark Madder

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

If The Loser proved Gospel wanted to go proggier, MVDM proves they really are a prog band that just couldn’t do without infusing some mid-’90s screamo into their Yes worship. Having gone through the perilous (but succeeded) step of coming back, nothing holds the band back from showing what nerds they are — look at that goofy-ass title — a good reminder that prog was never cool. So crafting a sprawling tune whose shtick is to build tension through retrofuturistic synth and keyboards was ultimately Gospel’s ipseity — it just took them 15 years to figure out how to properly forge that version of themselves. Maybe that’s why they never showed signs of existence during that period: Gospel could only be MVDM. –Erwann S. / dedex

9. Foreign Hands – Bleed the Dream

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

…

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30. Ashenspire – Hostile Architecture

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

The overall takeaway from multiple 2020 releases was this overbearing sense of isolation. Across the globe, seclusion was imposed to alleviate a growing pandemic, and its sudden necessity caused a mass dissolution of social connections and relationships. Perhaps, as a response, 2021’s cycle had a bevy of familiar faces delivering solid, safe records, offering comfort that had previously been dismantled. Toss that all out the window — it is 2022, two years removed from when life shut down and power systems demonstrated their profound weaknesses when addressing it. Ashenspire’s purpose on Hostile Architecture is to survey the damage; their scathing social critique takes aim at calculated oppression, malignant government bodies, and the widening divide between the haves and have-nots, firing with such precision that it’s impossible to not envision burgeoning crowds stocked to the brim with pitchforks and torches aplenty. It came out of left field, but the Scots’ sophomore release was certainly something that the new decade’s omnipresent uncertainty was craving.

Given the subject matter at hand, Hostile Architecture is appropriately claustrophobic, erecting shadowy soundscapes that echo about crumbling cities, ringing in the alleyways and reverberating in shelters as frustration bubbles to a boiling point. The band’s grab-bag of influences and contributing elements that they use to portray this hauntingly real dystopia possesses incredible depth. Dissodeath and black metal forge a mesmerizing foundation, while touches of post-punk…

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50. CMAT – If My Wife New I’d Be Dead

[Official site] // [Spotify]

CMAT resides in the soft, pillowy safety of a thought bubble, in the sunset hues of daydream and if-only. Hers is a particular longing, and who can blame her, for the tropes born of country denizens Dolly Parton and Glen Campbell — she wants the tall boots with spurs, the rodeos, and the heartbreak that birthed all those lovelorn Foghorn Leghorn country classics. She wants a slice of the adulation reserved only for pop megastars the ilk of Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey. She wants not to be tangled up in the humdrum of abject normality.

If My Wife New I’d Be Dead plays out like a self-exposing fantasy, a simulation as far removed from reality as possible. It’s full of biting humour aimed very much inward — album standout “No More Virgos” frames her failing relationships as being astrologically determined, denying any possibility of her own shortcomings and pithy demands. On “Every Bottle (Is My Boyfriend)”, a bittersweet romp on the subject of over-imbibing in the face of the absence of romance, she geo-locates herself as being very far away from Nashville indeed with a reference to the Gaelic Athletic Association: “Honky tonk girl of the G.A.A., with about the same glamour and half the game.” But ultimately, CMAT’s reality is right in front of us. There’s no character work…

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10. Dvne – Etemen Ænka

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

While progressive sludge metal might be a rather sparsely-inhabited sub-sub-genre, Dvne have assuredly claimed their kingship over its fertile lands with Etemen Ænka. Standing tall as an epic journey built upon the stones of crushing virtuosity and wizard-level songwriting festooned in ribbons of grandiose, this Edinburgh quintet have procured an especially astute amalgamation of poise and power with their sophomore LP.

Compared to their 2017 debut longplayer Asheran, the whole affair is noticeably tighter as it follows the story of a civilization’s journey through the centuries. The ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ production job helps these matters by offering a wide breadth for the myriad layers to breathe, and moreover, work in harmonious fashion to maximize the emotive gestures and unbelievably devastating heavy sections (think Cult of Luna’s Salvation here). There are parts, like the epic peak of “Sì-XIV”, that hit so fantastically hard you’d swear you can feel the tectonic plates below the soil shift to the movement of the riffs. It’s all very dynamic, with every player sounding loose and totally electrified as they tap into the very tactile power of the music they’re conjuring. Truly cohesive and utterly gripping through its entire runtime, this is prog for the peasantry and sludge for the sommeliers. –Evok

9. Arab Strap – As Days Get Dark

[Official site] // [