(written by Islander)
For many years as part of our annual LISTMANIA orgy we’ve shared Stereogum’s YE list of the best metal releases. For all of those years (until now) it was assembled by the writers of Stereogum’s monthly Black Market column. In last year’s list it was announced (to my dismay) that the Black Market column would be ending, to be replaced by a column called Breaking the Oath written by Brad Sanders, who had been responsible for Bandcamp Daily’s metal column.
Sure enough, Breaking the Oath’s initial appearance at Stereogum occurred last January and has appeared monthly ever since. If you try to catch up on those columns now, you’ll need to pay Stereogum a subscription fee. Simply registering with an e-mail and password isn’t enough, as I discovered to my chagrin.
However, Brad Sanders has continued Stereogum’s tradition of publishing a list of the year’s best metal, and it’s not pay-walled. Interestingly, he has also continued to write the monthly metal column at Bandcamp Daily, another platform whose YE lists we’ve been sharing for some years, and will do again in our next post today. It shouldn’t shock anyone that today’s list and that one overlap… significantly.
Sanders begins his YE column at Stereogum with heartfelt remembrances of figures from the metal world who passed away this past year, sort of like the Academy Awards’ “In Memoriam” feature. And then he counts down a Top 10 list of albums, with summaries and explanations of the choices.
I think it’s fair to say that the list isn’t as eclectic or obscure as the lists that the Black Market dudes used to assemble. For a relatively short list, it checks off a lot of genre boxes (grind, thrash, multiple variants of death metal and doom, black metal, and intersections of metal and rock), and it’s a mix of major-label and more-underground releases. It happens to include two albums that were on our Andy Synn’s list of the year’s “Great” albums last week, and one other appeared on his list of the “Good.” This means, of course, that none of the others made either list, extensive as those lists were. Make of that what you will.
And with that, here’s the Stereogum list. To read the blurbs about the choices, and the introductory memorial, go HERE.
10. Trauma Bond – Summer Ends. Some Are Long Gone. (Self-Released)
9. Testament – Para Bellum (Nuclear Blast)
8. Hedonist – Scapulimancy (Southern Lord)
7. Christian Mistress – Children Of The Earth (Cruz del Sur)
6. Ancient Death – Ego Dissolution (Profound Lore)
5. Rwake – The Return Of Magik (Relapse)
4. Lamp Of Murmuur – The Dreaming Prince In Ecstasy (Wolves Of Hades)
3. Yellow Eyes – Confusion Gate (Gilead)
2. Deafheaven – Lonely People With Power (Roadrunner)
1. Messa – The Spin (Metal Blade)