LISTMANIA 2024: ROLLING STONE’S LIST OF “THE 20 BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 2024”

 LISTMANIA 2024  4 Responses »
Dec 212024
 

(written by Islander)

We’re again including Rolling Stone‘s list of the year’s best metal albums because it has become a tradition, a largely comical tradition at this point which dates back to the halcyon days of 2013 when a commenter somehow just skipped past all our introductory text, looked at Rolling Stone‘s list, and chastised us for not naming Gorguts as AOTY instead of Deafheaven.

Of course, Rolling Stone hands-down qualifies as the kind of “big platform” site or zine that we pull from as part of our LISTMANIA orgy, as a way of getting a glimpse into what the top-side world perceives as great metal.

This year, Rolling Stone compiled a Top 20 list (the number seems to vary from year to year). As it often has in the past, it displays a lot of scatter, for want of a better term. There’s albums on the list (quite a few of them) you wouldn’t be surprised to see on one of the lists assembled by our own writers, and there’s others that will make you cringe, just like the ranking will. Continue reading »

THANK GOD IT’S ONLY THREE PARTS THIS YEAR: NEILL JAMESON’S BEST OF THE BEST 2024

 LISTMANIA 2024  2 Responses »
Dec 202024
 


photo by Alyssa Lorenzon

(Below is the third installment of Neill Jameson‘s year-end list for NCS, and we thank him again for sharing it with us and you.)

I could have spread this out a little more this year by posting a whole bunch of ambient I’ve been enjoying from various Youtube channels or maybe going into some of the great reissues that 2024 included, like the first three Blood records so nicely done through Nuclear War Now!. I could have even written about the “Schizophrenia” rerecording the Cavalera brothers released (which I did enjoy quite a bit). But, as I get older, I’m striving to figure out how to say more with less, to be more impactful. 

That made my head hurt just typing it. I’ve been having to lead a lot of corporate training and that kind of phrasing just sticks with you like some obscure STD you probably got sitting on a toilet at work, ironically enough. Everything connects, it’s fucking spiritual. 

So, what have I been up to recently? Glad you asked. I’ve undertaken a new project, Fuck Music, which is initially just going to be a Substack where I write about, you guessed it, music. What a fucking shocking reveal. I’ve considered podcasting but it’s a lot easier on the ears to just read my inane shit without listening to me trail off, searching for ghosts. Plus I’m shit with followthrough, so let’s just see if I stick with this one, ok?

So, this is the end. [Editor’s note: It actually isn’t… tune in again next Monday.] These are the truly special releases in a year that was shockingly packed full of them. I said before I had a really difficult time figuring out a top ten elsewhere and, especially from my second list, any of the releases I wrote about could have ended up here. For a year that felt like an unenthusiastic handjob, given with no love, it was a truly stellar year for music. Here’s my favorites: Continue reading »

BECAUSE WITTY YEAR END LIST TITLES ABOUT RUINING THE HOLIDAYS ARE FOR SUCKERS – THE DGR YEAR ENDSTAVAGANZA PART FIVE: 10-1

 LISTMANIA 2024  9 Responses »
Dec 202024
 

 

(We’ve arrived at the final installment of DGR‘s Top 50 list for 2024, which has been unfolding day by day since Monday of this week. Now it’s time for the Top 10.)

Well this is it folks: the big kahuna, the final ten, the end of all ends, the great sandwich in the sky, the pothole to end all potholes, the grandest exercise in feet dragging you have ever seen, the golden egg, the sponsored award, the singularity of all fifty albums that we’ve been talking about over the course of the week, the grand conjuration, the comically oversized rabbit, the final ten…again.

I wish I had prepard a slightly bigger fanfare than this but it is really hard to explain to your local high school that you would like to borrow their marching band for an hour so you can film them playing as they walk by a camera for each album announcement. What I’m getting at here is this is it. After a week long rollout of the fifty albums I’ve enjoyed jamming the hell out of over the course of the year, we’ve accomplished reaching the end.

It’s been a hell of a thrill ride getting up to this point after all the mountains we’ve climbed, epic journeys we have undertaken, the critic-proofing we’ve had to participate in, the general explanations and explorations of gore, the occasional horror show, yet it never occurs to you just how much these things take out of you until you watch Part One of your list run on the website while you’re in the midst of writing up your final few albums for the last part. Needless to say, this fucker is probably coming in hot, so if these final summations (proclamations, conflagrations) of the albums that made my year-end list read like I was in the midst of being eaten alive, it’s probably because they’re a little more panicked than usual. Continue reading »

JESUS CHRIST WILL HE JUST GO AWAY? NEILL JAMESON’S 2024 LISTS PT II

 LISTMANIA 2024  1 Response »
Dec 192024
 


photo by Hillarie Jason

(Here’s the second installment of year-end lists compiled for NCS by Neill Jameson (Krieg), with a couple more yet to come.)

Remember how I said things weren’t in any kind of order, until the end, in our last get together? I wasn’t entirely truthful. That list was really more the warm-up because this year I had incredible difficulty putting together a top ten list for my yearly what-have-you with Invisible Oranges, where I had to solidify it just so I could walk away without constantly wanting to move things around. We’ll start seeing those records I left out of the top in here.

I realize there’s several releases that I’m including in these lists that just came out within the last few weeks, which seems to happen every year. Does that mean I had enough time to truly sit with them? I’d like to think so, but it doesn’t seem likely. So I went back to years prior to see if I still felt strongly about late year releases I’d written about before, with a nearly perfect success rate, which was all scientifically calculated. So, in short, fuck off – they’re worth shedding light on.

I doubt anyone truly cares but that seemed like a good internal conversation. Continue reading »

BECAUSE WITTY YEAR-END LIST TITLES ABOUT RUINING THE HOLIDAYS ARE FOR SUCKERS — THE DGR YEAR ENDSTAVAGANZA PART FOUR: 20-11

 LISTMANIA 2024  8 Responses »
Dec 192024
 

(We’ve made it to the fourth installment of DGR‘s Top 50 year-end list, with another block of 10 releases being ranked, and one more section slated for arrival tomorrow.)

You ever do something constantly even though you’ve known for a while that it is taking a lot out of you and driving other people insane? I have habits that I can’t break and sometimes think that long ago we evolved past yearly ‘tradition’ and into something in the warehouse of yearly ‘ritual’ instead.

This YE list series is my closing act in a way, the final signing off, tying of the bow and boot out rifling out the door of my writing for 2024. The final summation in many ways of everything up to this point even though it’s the one time I allow my writing to really veer off the officious sounding mark and into casual territory, as if we’re sitting across the table from one another, and I – in my incredulously drunk state – have achieved inebriated Buddha status and am ready to guide along my vision of the eight-fold path of heavy metal and wild-eyed lunacy.

The realer reason of course is that it helps break up the daily routine and gives me reason to sit cross-legged in front of the computer and just type endlessly, laughing about how I’ve never learned how to type properly and am of the school of ‘whatever finger is closest, thumb is for space bar and I use my pinky if I’m feeling fancy’ yet am still somehow in the one-hundred words per minute range. It’s stupid, but it helps break up the end of the year when I feel like I’m just running in endless loops. Continue reading »

JESUS CHRIST WILL HE JUST GO AWAY? NEILL JAMESON’S 2024 LISTS PT I

 LISTMANIA 2024  No Responses »
Dec 182024
 


photo by Hillarie Jason

(One of the perennial highlights of our year-end LISTMANIA series are the articles Neill Jameson has contributed, and we’re very happy that he’s doing so again this year. This one is the first of three four installments we’ll be publishing. To be clear, Neill wrote the title of this feature himself.)

What a fucking ridiculous year. Between wars, threats of wars, the election, that fucking girl who’s famous for a joke about dick spittings and whatever new allegations your favorite band has against them it’s just been an exhausting twelve months. What better way to cap that off than by reading a bunch of assholes telling you what you should have listened to this year instead of whatever meandering bullshit you actually did. Unless it was Krieg’s split with Withdrawal, you obviously have exquisite taste. 

After all, it’s the most wonderful time of the year, right?

Last year I skipped the genre format for my lists and just threw everything together, with the obviously subjective “best” saved for last. I did this mostly out of laziness but I think we’ve built a new tradition, like picking out who not to send Christmas cards to this year because they did something to publicly shame the family, like supporting RFK. 

Sure the comments section will be measured and forgiving after that one.

So this’ll be a few parts, depending on how much I can write while tucked away in my office hiding from my employees. Here’s part one: Continue reading »

BECAUSE WITTY YEAR END LIST TITLES ABOUT RUINING THE HOLIDAYS ARE FOR SUCKERS – THE DGR YEAR ENDSTAVAGANZA PART THREE: 30 – 21

 LISTMANIA 2024  No Responses »
Dec 182024
 

(This is the third installment of DGR‘s year-end Top 50 list, counting down the third group of 10, with the next two groups slated for the next two days ahead.)

I’ve been doing these lists long enough that I’ve developed a genuine fear that I might be repeating myself. I console myself with the fact that no one else seems to have noticed so far since every one of these has been a fantastic exercise in breaking out the thesaurus and learning new words every day – or reminding myself that I used to not be so dumb. I have yet to work “lugubrious” into one of these but you better believe I’m going to damned well take a swing at it at some point.

But it’s the fear of repeating myself that drives me to such inanity, because I am worried that it might seem like I’m wasting your time. I don’t want these to be the ‘if you’ve read one, you’ve read them all’ of the year-end lists. I even gut-checked myself by archiving them all together at one point just to make sure that each stood as its own artistic statement – or at the very least the authorial equivalent of changing the food for the dog every once in a while.

But like I said (twice already), repetition is a big fear of mine. Well, that and accidentally putting releases from last year in here or playing my hand early and putting something that comes out next January on here. Luckily I haven’t been at risk of doing that last one yet, as I don’t think I have any promos from that timeframe in hand nor would I likely acknowledge them. At this point I feel like I’ve taken a round off of the reaper just by making it to next week. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2024: A YEAR-END LIST FROM SEB PAINCHAUD (TUMBLEWEED DEALER)

 LISTMANIA 2024  10 Responses »
Dec 172024
 

(Montréal -based Seb Painchaud‘s unusually varied year-end lists have always been a popular highlight of our YE LISTMANIA series, and the one below for 2024 won’t be an exception. But unlike other years, when we’ve voiced a futile hope that his band Tumbleweed Dealer would come out with a new album in the New Year, this time they really will do it!)

Another year, another list! And what a god damn year it was. Wasn’t sure it’d make it to the end at times. But here we are.

I`ve greatly modified my listening habits, trying to be less obsessive compulsive about NEEDING to listen to every new release out there. Sometimes it’s okay to throw on a Slayer record you’ve heard a thousand times when you’re stuck in traffic.

I still managed to discover some gems amongst the revisiting of classics this year, and here they are: Continue reading »

BECAUSE WITTY YEAR-END LIST TITLES ABOUT RUINING THE HOLIDAYS ARE FOR SUCKERS — THE DGR YEAR ENDSTAVAGANZA PART TWO: 40-31

 LISTMANIA 2024  3 Responses »
Dec 172024
 

(Here we have the second installment of DGR‘s year-end Top 50 list, counting down the second group of 10, with the next three groups slated for the next three days ahead.)

While we have not achieved critical mass yet in terms of writing for the year-end list, we’re definitely making progress down the line. This is still an area of the list where I often tell people that rankings – useless as they may be since this could be best viewed as ’50 albums DGR liked’ – don’t really start to crystalize in any sense until you start reaching the mid-30’s. So you’re reading the last vestiges of the albums I felt must be spoken about just so I can feel good about saying something about them and also starting to see the ones that I really sunk my teeth into.

They’re not a perfect representation by any means and I guarantee that come January 1st I’ll likely be kicking myself for leaving something off – especially with a late December drop of Frontierer‘s new EP looking like a contender to really fuck things up for me – but at least there’s some confidence in the ten collected before you today.

Tomorrow’s genre-spread will likely be just as silly but you’ll definitely start to see some old favorites popping up there since, much like one of the groups that appears in this collection, I too am a hallmark of consistency. I’m just not nearly as attractive. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2024: WIL CIFER’S TOP 20 YEAR-END LIST

 LISTMANIA 2024  5 Responses »
Dec 162024
 

(This is Wil Cifer‘s presentation of his Top 20 list for 2024.)

The world did not end in 2024, but unless inter-dimensional beings intervene, humanity might find ourselves reaping the consequences of our actions in the year to come. This is the tone of music I was drawn to this year. My taste in sonic darkness showed a dark shift in sounds that held at least a sardonic slant, more often than not a celebration of misanthropy.

I care less about how fast a band play or how low they tune, and more about what an album has to say. As a teenager, I didn’t mind lyrics composed of pseudo-occult garbage. Live and learn, after all, occult means hidden, and subtly goes a long way. If they were serious about the Left-Hand Path the music would make you feel it. I want to hear the inner darkness and ugliness you have inside come out in your music, not a pantomime of what darkness looks like in movies.

Granted with death metal, a little “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is fine if it’s just empty calories, but I expect more from black metal in this regard. Continue reading »

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