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Year End Lists

50-31 | 30-11 | 10-1 | EP/Live/Compilation

10. Hail the Sun – Divine Inner Tension

28[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 WakeCulture 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…

50-31 | 30-11 | 10-1 | EP/Live/Compilation

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] // [

50-31 | 30-11 | 10-1 | EP/Live/Compilation

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

8
[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

20[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

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

logo

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.

50-31 | 30-11 | 10-1 | EP/Live/Compilation

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]

They say not to judge a book by its cover, but from the instant I saw the album cover for Bleed the Dream, I knew exactly what I was in for. The depiction of blood on a music box is a perfect metaphor for this EP. Aggressive music expresses an abrasively gorgeous duality; there is beauty in the breakdown. Bleed the Dream is a brutally raw and urgent collection of songs recalling early-2000s metalcore that is

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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

50-31 | 30-11 | 10-1 | EP/Live/Compilation

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

50-31 | 30-11 | 10-1 | EP/Live/Compilation

10. Dvne – Etemen Ænka

a3088714416_10
[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

EMBARG
[Official site] // [

50-31 | 30-11 | 10-1 | EP/Live/Compilation

10. Gates (USA-NJ) – Here and Now

10 Gates NJ
[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

Here and Now sees Gates return with their first new music since 2016. Frankly, it’s like they never left, with the EP’s six songs residing firmly in the band’s sweet spot, ensconced in the lush middle of the triangle of post-rock, emo, and indie rock. It’s all good, although the staunchly post-rockian (that’s a word) intro “Out Of Nothing” and the melodious anthem “We Are” stand above the rest. If Here and Now doesn’t quite reach the quality level of the group’s two full-lengths, that’s quite OK. Hearing something new from these New Jersey boys is always a treat, especially given the long drought between releases. –Sunnyvale

9. Rebecca Black – Rebecca Black Was Here

9 Rebecca Black
[Facebook] // [Spotify]

Hello and welcome to 2021’s most satisfying “redemption arc” — in quotation marks because I don’t think any teen star with approximately zero creative control over her past output requires any ‘redemption’ whatsoever. Nonetheless, Rebecca Black Was Here managed to divert some of the attention Rebecca Black still gets from the 2011 single “Friday” to some genuinely good music. The new 20-minute project fully and successfully embraces PC music aesthetics, featuring metallic production and hooks for days. Black’s vocal performance suits the stylistic choices brilliantly, detailing unremarkable but well-written tales of maturity, love, and drama. The

50-31 | 30-11 | 10-1 | EP/Live/Compilation

30. JPEGMAFIA – LP! (offline) (online)

Untitled3414
[Official site] // [Spotify]

Leave it to JPEGMAFIA to create hip-hop that’s equal parts abrasive, experimental, and just plain bold. I guess it comes as no surprise when looking at his list of influences, which includes artists as stylistically disparate as Kanye West, Bjork, MF DOOM, and even Hanson. However, LP! might just be the best record of his career thus far: the balance between accessibility and risk-taking is at its strongest here, leading to a record that never stays in one place — musically or emotionally — for too long. “Hazardous Duty Pay!” and “Tired, Nervous & Broke!” bring out the aggro side of JPEG perfectly and manage to be two of the biggest bangers he’s ever put out, but it’s impressive that he’s able to juxtapose these songs so well with more tender, melancholic moments. You’ve got the gospel-inspired “What Kinda Rappin’ is This?”, the low-key vibes of “Thot’s Prayer!”, and even a goddamn Animals as Leaders sample on “End Credits!”. Moreover, LP! can be seen as JPEG’s “fuck you” to the hip-hop industry, which is even more apparent on the ‘(Offline)’ version, which he considers “the true LP!“. LP! largely acts as a commentary on exploitation and favoritism, as well as JPEG’s disillusion with an industry that “never had my best interest at heart.” Really, it’s no wonder that he wanted to go all-out with LP!, and thankfully, he did. –Brendan Schroer

29. Failure

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50. Lord Huron – Long Lost

50 Lord Huron
[Official site] // [Spotify]

Although Lord Huron have been of note in indie folk circles for a while, the group’s fourth LP Long Lost really sees them come into their own. While still treading indie folk/Americana waters, here the band have moved into a much more lush sonic direction (think Honey Harper with a tinge of Ruston Kelly), while also leaning into classic country influences. While the country aspects of this record can feel like pastiche, they work, especially as it’s pretty clear that Lord Huron mastermind Ben Schneider is self-aware enough to understand he’s not Waylon Jennings. For listeners who, like most of my music-loving friends and I, are enthralled by forlorn old songs drenched in bourbon and steel guitar, this album is a godsend. Before the sunset haze of a lengthy ambient drone closer brings us home, Long Lost leaves us with the repeated mantra, “What does it mean if it all means nothing?” — a line that ultimately isn’t just a reflection on familiar tropes of long lost love and hard-drinking wandering songsmiths. More than anything, it’s a reminder that simple words can capture elusive and quite deep concepts. Now that’s a true country music tradition! –Sunnyvale

49. Porter Robinson – Nurture

49 Porter Robinson
[Official site] // [Spotify]

Have no fear, ladies and gentlemen:

50-31 | 30-11 | 10-1 | EP/Live/Compilation

10. The Ocean – Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic

The Ocean-Phanerozoic2
[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

The modern era of The Ocean Collective — a settled aggregate as opposed to the revolving door era of the early 2000s — forced audiences across the metal world to pay attention with Pelagial. Unlike the prior -centric series, it was a record that combined the band’s growing emphasis on atmosphere with their crushing post-metal soundscapes, threatening sludge background, and emerging vocal talent in Loic Rossetti. No longer did an identity crisis plague the group; their newfound individuality, birthed from the novel ambient and progressive leanings, had been solidified in perhaps the crew’s best flowing and paced output in a titanic discography. Striving to succeed such a laudable effort with yet another concept release dual threat seemed like a second chance, correcting the criticism of years past. Armed to the teeth with members that had now begun to cooperate at a high level, the run began with the promising Phanerozoic I: Palaeozoic, which was designed with consistency in mind — a goal that the record, what with its stunning sonic environments populated by massive riffs and evocative moods, certainly excelled at reaching. Per the band’s own admissions, cliché as it may be from a marketing perspective, a treasure trove of surprises awaited in the anticipated second part. Eyes were predictably rolled in anticipation, yet what emerged precisely as advertised: a product that aimed to…

50-31 | 30-11 | 10-1 | EP/Live/Compilation

10. Amenra – Mass VI Live

Amenra - Mass VI Live
[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

You’d be hard-pressed to pick Mass VI Live out of a lineup of Amenra’s studio records were you not already well acquainted with their 2017 release of the same name. The live rendition of the Belgian post-metal legends’ most recent opus is sublime, sporting better production values than most bands’ core albums whilst still packing in all the immediacy, wonder and passion you’d expect from an ‘in the moment’ performance, even with the notable absence of a live audience. “Children of the Eye” still hits like a freight train, “Diaken” bristles with all of the same gorgeous little details and “A Solitary Reign” is “A Solitary Reign” which, as you’ll know if you’ve heard the original, is all that it needed to be. It may have only made it onto this list at the whim of two particularly determined users, yet it deserves to be recognised amongst the most impressive releases of 2020, whether live or otherwise, because Mass VI Live is an event. Come and witness it. –Asleep

(tie) 8. DVNE – Omega Severer

Dvne - Omega Severer
[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

Three years after the fantastic Asheran, these UK proggers added a string to their bow by further smashing together metal genres. On top of their sludge/stoner recipe, some death, thrash, and even blackened elements spice up a formula that

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