The Best Metal Albums of 2019 – Pitchfork

Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal

The geologic pace, the sepulchral growls, the humorless countenance: Funeral doom is a subgenre defined by barriers to entry. On The Sadness of Time Passing, Finnish quintet Profetus indeed growl inscrutable curses and grind through themes at a glacial tempo, dutifully nodding to progenitors Thergothon and Evoken. But listen for the way an organ traces every contour or how the slyly harmonizing guitars twinklethey frame this prevailing darkness with a hopeful glow, the way the suns corona reminds us that light still exists during a total eclipse. Grayson Haver Currin

Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal

The Oakland anarcha-feminist metal duos 2019 EP was inspired by a poem from early 20th-century anarchist heroine Voltairine De Cleyre, and its lone two tracks trade off doomed tension and moments of stark beauty. There is a shoegaze influence that melds seamlessly with the songs atmospheric black metal, and the vocals alternate between bright and harsh. There is a fragility in their sound, but that vulnerability is not masked by distortion; rather, it is amplified. The gods are silent, but Ragana still roars. Kim Kelly

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

Sunn O))) spent the bulk of this decade living like a legacy act, indulging in fantasy collaborations, commemorative reissues, and festival-headlining status. But in 2018, Greg Anderson and Stephen OMalley put on the robes, huddled with engineering wizard Steve Albini, and reemerged with their most absorbing music in years. Life Metal, the first and best of two complementary 2019 LPs, is a master class in controlling something bigger than yourselfin this case, walls of sound bent with the superhuman skill of a Richard Serra sculpture. These four pieces are overwhelming and affirming, 70 minutes of cleansing amid a very messy year. Grayson Haver Currin

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal

After three years of inactivity, Teitanblood reemerged with The Baneful Choir, a frenzied and bestial churn laced with chilling ambient interludes and dense walls of articulated fury. Spains blackened death metallers glory in savagery, but they subvert war metals simplistic bone-headery; Teitanblood is ugly and chaotic, yes, but also smart. The album is blessedly well-produced, and tracks like Inhuman Utterings show off the virtuosic command of their instruments. They might have a taste for blood in their mouths, but this is no banal sop to the nuke-obsessed hordes. Kim Kelly

Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal

A major trend of metal in the 2010s has been old-school death metal revival. Taking the gurgling nihilism of the subgenres heyday and bringing it to more dynamic, spiritual places, bands like Horrendous and Blood Incantation have steadily expanded their subgenre. Among those bands, Torontos Tomb Mold began as the most reverential; their pivot toward atmospheric territory began with last years Manor of Infinite Forms, but it fully comes alive on Planetary Clairvoyance. Their voyage through the cosmos is filled with brilliant riffs, inventive song structures, and ambiance that seems to signal the strange visions to come. Sam Sodomsky

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal

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The Best Metal Albums of 2019 - Pitchfork