LISTMANIA 2023: A TOP 12 METAL LIST FROM BANDCAMP DAILY

Reading year-end lists that someone other than you made tend to provoke mixed feelings of validation, perplexity (which sometimes verges into anger), and discovery. The opportunity for discovery is the main reason we here at NCS devote so much space to our annual LISTMANIA extravaganza, even though we know those other feelings will also be in the mix of reactions. The list we’re re-publishing from Bandcamp Daily will probably be no different in any of these respects.

Bandcamp, of course, has become a vital platform for the digital release of music of all stripes (and physical merchandise as well) since its founding in 2007. Bandcamp used to release an annual compilation of performance statistics, but I haven’t found a similar report since the one they released for 2017. However, the main Bandcamp page today reports that “Fans have paid artists $1.23 billion using Bandcamp, and $193 million in the last year.”

Those are staggering totals, and some part of those enormous sums has been the result of Bandcamp’s laudable decision to continue the monthly tradition of “Bandcamp Fridays” that they began during the height of the pandemic.

In the summer of 2016, the company launched Bandcamp Daily, an online music publication about artists on the platform. Bandcamp Daily regularly publishes articles of relevance to metalheads, though metal is of course only one of hundreds of music genres represented on Bandcamp.

Recently Bandcamp Daily once again published its list of the year’s Best Metal Albums, again under the byline of Brad Sanders, who writes the monthly metal column for Bandcamp.

The list includes 12 un-ranked selections presented alphabetically by band name, accompanied by mini-reviews — and you can read those and listen to the music streams HERE.

Speaking for myself, I enjoyed this list. It doesn’t pander to the big names or the big labels. It includes albums I haven’t heard this year despite a lot of listening, and so it feeds the appetite for discovery. And it’s going to add fuel to the fury of what seems to be one of the most common arguments I’ve seen pop up across the interhole this year-end — is Tomb Mold really that good?

Feel free to discourse below about that subject, if you haven’t discoursed about it enuf already, or discourse about any other reactions to the list. Here it is:

 

Crypta – Shades of Sorrow

Djunah – Femina Furens

Green Lung – This Heathen Land

Lamp of Murmuur – Saturnian Bloodstorm

Maggot Heart – Hunger

Malleus – The Fires of Heaven

The Mosaic Window – Plight of Acceptance

Sacred Outcry – Towers of Gold

Saturnus – The Storm Within

Thantifaxath – Hive Mind Narcosis

Tomb Mold – The Enduring Spirit

Year of the Knife – No Love Lost