13 UNDERRATED BLACK METAL ALBUMS (OF THE 21ST CENTURY)
Hey Satan, you rock!
Turns out it was a lot of fun to put together that list of underrated doom metal albums the other day. You guys also reacted really well, and several of you actually wrote in asking for similar lists of other genres. I had been thinking of something a little more outside the norm, but since the most requested genre for another exercise like this was indeed black metal, I will for once cave in to the desires of the majority. I maintain all my previous considerations about what constitutes a “black metal” album - we might disagree on the genre association of some of these and that’s fine - and also what “underrated” really is in this context, and how we also might perceive stuff differently. If you want all the boring disclaimers, just go to the doom metal albums article and read them all, it’s all the same.
One last little detail - because I feel that the ‘90s (and to some extent the ‘80s, even if the genre was pretty much embryonic then) have been completely combed over looking for that “lost classic” that’ll give you maximum kvlt points, I think there’s little black metal left from that decade that could be a surprising recommendation or even classified as underrated at all. So I thought it would be much more fun to focus on this side of the 21st century, given all the usual “black metal is dead” opinions and all. It most certainly is not, and we’ve had some great examples to prove it, which would even be enough to put together two or three lists more like this.
Anyway, hope you find something cool that you didn’t know with this selection. Let me know!
AMERICAN
Coping With Loss
(Sentient Ruin Laboratories)
2014
That pained howl that erupts after the first few quiet introductory notes of ‘Ritual Suicide’ really sets the tone for the torrent of hateful, vicious dread that follows. Nothing much was ever known about AMERICAN other than the fact that they’re a duo (“Jimmy” and “Mike”) from Virginia, and you don’t really need any more info. The absolutely harrowing degree of vitriol that bleeds from each of these tracks speaks for itself, leading us to believe that no, that coping with loss hasn’t gone very well at all. As barrages of noise are thrown into the cutthroat riffs and agonising vocals just to fuck you up a little more, you’ll often wonder if you can make it to the end without a little pause for sanity. Don’t be fooled by its length though - while technically a 40-minute album, you’re pretty much done in 22 minutes (which will nevertheless feel like hours due to the ear-bleeding intensity), and then you’ll just have to suffer through almost eighteen minutes of creepy noise/ambient as closer ‘Coping With Loss And The Insurmountable Guilt Of Existing’ does its best to make you feel what its title suggests. If you survive this, check out their other album, 2017’s ‘Violate And Control’. I dare you.
An Autumn For Crippled Children
Closure
(Prosthetic Records)
2023
I admit that I like the weird vibe that it transmits, but I’m pretty sure that strange band name has been a factor in AAFCC not having reached the popularity heights of some other bands who have fused shoegaze and/or dream pop with black metal, considering this anonymous bunch has done it with much more elegance and pink fury than most of them - and yes, I’m including Deafheaven in this opinion, as well as some lesser also-rans (to me) in that department like Alcest or Lantlôs. Maybe the anonymity, in this case, also didn’t help, as this is the kind of music that the audience sometimes is drawn to if there is a pretty face to attribute all those feelings to. That this was their last release under the old name (they are now know only as An Autumn) is a sort of admission of that fact, I suppose. In any case, what it means is that their long and fertile career (this was their tenth full-length, plus there were a bunch of EPs too) is sitting there just below the surface, waiting to be discovered by the public at large. Several of those records could have featured here (there’s never been any lack of inspiration for great songs over the course of thirteen years), but the apparently previously decided finality of ‘Closure’ lends it a sort of poignant weight that is felt in the music itself - the “gazey” parts are lush and gorgeous, while the black metal portion of it is rough, yes, but delivered with a welcoming velvet glove. It’s Satan all the same, but with hooves covered by fluffy slippers, to put it like that. Which works for me.
Anaphylactic Shock
Two Thousand Years
(Hypertension Records)
2008
I’ve seen this classified as sludge or doom, and though the late great Michiel Eikenaar does scream “we are the children of doom” right at the beginning of ‘Granite’, for me this is black metal and nothing else. Riffy, meaty, groovy black metal, sure, but black metal all the same - the vibe, the razor-sharp malice, the devil-may-care nihilist abandon of the lyrics, everything screams BM about it. Besides, the big man himself once told me he considered it black metal, so there. Regardless of genre nitpickings, however, you need it. Sadly a project that only lasted for this record - Michiel still lived long enough to build an unfuckwithable discography with the mandatory Nihill and Dodecahedron, at least -, Anaphylactic Shock really is a testament to how exciting alternative extreme music felt at one point during that first decade of this century. Vital, inspired, brutal, cynical and oozing personality, culminating in the absolute black hymn for our generation that is ‘Abandon All Hope’. And yeah, as it turns out, ‘The Future Flowed Bleak And Ugly’ indeed. R.I.P. Michiel.
Armagedda
Ond Spiritism: Djæfvvlens Skalder Anno Serpenti MMIV
(Agonia Records)
2004
Very celebrated in certain circles, Armagedda is living proof that even without mixing black metal with anything else, there is still a lot of room to do something with the old workhorse that sounds and feels new and amazing. Armagedda haven’t invented anything, they just play black metal their own way, and the results are staggering, even over twenty years later. At the time announced as their last album, even if they later reunited and released the equally brilliant ‘Svindeldjup Ättestup’ in 2020, that extra gravitas given by its finality hasn’t waned. ‘Ond Spiritism’ feels like the last everything - the last breath you will take in this putrid world, the last tired gasp of an existence surrendered to corruption, disease and rot. This poisonous atmosphere is achieved by songwriting talent alone, there’s no production gimmicks, no over the top histrionics, no loss of control. It’s like the duo (A. Petterson and Graav), within their slow to mid-tempo crawls, are but mere emotionless witnesses to the victory of evil. And with that calculated, cold approach, with perverse irony, they’ve built one of the most emotional and atmospheric black metal albums of the last decades.
Barren Canyon
World Of Wounds
(Avantgarde Music)
2018
Part of the reason why it’s so great to see Spectral Wound become more and more well-known and recognised by their awesome talent is that some of that attention might eventually trickle down to the absolute wonder that was that whole Canadian scene some ten to fifteen years back. Barren Canyon has always been one of my favourites, due to the ponderous, utterly beautiful atmospheric parts that enveloped the icy, longing black metal sections. “Windswept black metal” might feel like a silly term, but when you put this record on it suddenly makes every sense in the world. You are immediately transported to the top of a cold mountain while the winds lash around you. Very rooted in nature, sort of like the introspective cousin of Wolves In The Throne Room, this is music to put on and get totally lost in. Featuring Mike “Maikan” Kirkenbrannsår, who was also in Spectral Wound for a little while back in the day and was a crucial figure of this circle of bands, as owner of Media Tree Recordings (sadly on an indefinite hiatus right now) and driving force in other brilliant projects like Æsahættr, Circle Of Salt or my absolute favourite (see below) Ensorcelor.
Ensorcelor
Crucifuge
(Media Tree Recordings)
2011
Yeah, if I have to pick one black metal record of the 21st century, I think this would be it. Put it this way - I have only ever sown one patch onto the back of a jacket in my adult life, and it was an Ensorcelor one. There is an atmosphere of inevitable dread to it, a palpable, uneasy feeling of something evil consuming you, that few to none other records are capable of. Again, similarly to what I said about Armagedda, this is achieved with no gimmicks whatsoever. Only two very long songs, slowly developing to the point that you can also add “doom” to the genre tags and no one will argue, but always with an unstoppable, harsh purpose to it. There’s no meandering, no fucking about, every single note of this is meant to drag your sorry soul deeper and deeper into the middle of a hellish woods and leaving it there to never be found again. During ‘By Mycomancy Insumed’, there is a bit around the nine minute mark where the muffled blastbeats and the seemingly slowed-down (yet still pretty fast) tremolo picking kick in, and you’ve known they were coming for a while, but for those few seconds it seems like the entire song slows down in anticipation… the rush during those moments is so great that you too will feel like tearing the fabric of time and space in two with a shriek. A uniquely special album that you’ll never get tired of, once it sinks its mighty hooks in you.
Inverno Eterno
Póstumo
(Bubonic Productions)
2008
Inverno Eterno means “Eternal Winter” in Portuguese, which already gives you a relatively accurate idea of what their music sounds like. Single-mindedly fixated with death and suffering, ‘Póstumo’ is a record that could easily fit into that rather awkward category of “depressive/suicidal” black metal, which I particularly dislike (the categorisation, not the music itself, mind you), but hey. What matters here is the way these songs absolutely cut through you. Though very sensitive, not only lyrically but musically as well, with frequent calm interludes punctuating the harshness of the actual black metal, it never veers into sweetness or tenderness. Everything is cold and unfeeling, all hope long taken over by acute grief, from the riffs to the atmospheres, including the uniquely dramatic vocals, which could be an acquired taste for some, but perfectly fit with the grim picture the band paints from start to finish here. The balance between actual drama and melodrama, between tragedy and overblown parody, is hard to maintain in stuff like this, but Inverno Eterno get it just right and never come across as too much. Listening to this in one sitting is like slowly pressing a cold blade against your throat for 40 minutes, and weirdly enjoying it.
IXXI
Assorted Armament
(Sigilla Malae)
2020
I still remember when my mate at LOUD! magazine (also called José, in fact) got in my car to go to some gig in town, and immediately told me “dude, you have to listen to this”, holding a promo CD he had just gotten in the mail (ah, the days of physical promos). He had listened to it already and he loaded it into my car’s CD player with that shit-eating grin you get when you know you’re about to blow someone away with a new band you’ve just discovered. And he was absolutely right, of course. After the creepy intro ends, there’s that unforgettable sample (“Earth, man. What a shithole.”) and the gnarliest, grooviest, most fucking black’n’roll riff you will ever hear kicks in, the result is inevitable. We immediately started headbanging in the car, Wayne’s World style, and I can tell you that even today, almost twenty years later, the effect it’ll have on me, or anyone with functioning ears and metal in their veins, is just about the same. And it’s not just that ‘Armageddon Nobility’ riff, the whole album is full of kickass moments like that. It’s black metal but with the same mastery of punch-your-face dynamics and blunt riff impact as prime Entombed or ‘Slaughter…’-era At The Gates. When you discover that IXXI’s (it’s pronounced nine-eleven) lineup for ‘Assorted Armament’ included the sadly missed Jonas Lars Bergqvist (aka Nattda, aka B, he of Livelover, Ondskapt and more), not to mention a few more Ondskapt dudes, it does make sense, but this record is still an anomaly for how unbelievably awesome it turned out. Don’t bother with the rest of the band’s discography, none of the other three albums (and their varying lineups) even come close to this one. But who cares, because this, this is the one that 99% other bands would kill to have.
L’Acéphale
Mord Und Totschlag
(self-released)
2004
Though the band itself was one of the very first obvious picks I scribbled down for this list, it is however very hard to pick a specific L’Acéphale release, as they are all fantastic and very different from each other. I could be 100% meticulous about my promise of delivering you “albums” on this list, and any of their “proper” albums like ‘Malefeasance’, ‘Stahlhartes Gehäuse’ or the self-titled would totally justify their place here, but I’d rather be honest than meticulous, so in the end I picked ‘Mord Und Totschlag’ which is technically a demo. Though it feels much more cohesive and flowing as a collection of songs than ‘Malefeasance’, for instance, which is in fact a collection of songs written before, during and after this demo. So whatever. The version of the song ‘Book Of Lies’ on this is a top-10 all time moment for black metal, so I could not bear to leave it out. The palpable hatred, the skin-crawling rawness, the ridiculous levels of intensity of the vocals, everything is right up there in the red, and for once backed by intelligent, philosophical lyrics that will send you on a worthy literary journey if you do go down that rabbit hole. They’re able to pull off both the short rager and epics of terrifying proportions like the ten minutes of ‘Terror Is Our Tenderness’ or the twenty of ‘Against A Sea Of Weeping Sleep’, which reference noise, dark ambient and neofolk along the way without ever losing sight of the ultimate goal which is to peel your fucking skin off through sheer sonic horror alone. Unlike a few of the other choices in this list - and as it doesn’t happen often with “underrated” albums -, the whole of L’Acéphale’s work deserves to be discovered, whether you take my advice and start here or just take off by yourself and ravish their Bandcamp however you see fit. Main man Brian “Set Sothis Nox La” Booty, also in Hail and of the equally massively underrated black/crust gem that is Order Of The Volture, is one of the most talented and most unsung musicians in black metal and totally deserves this shout out. Can we have a new album now please, Brian?
Maȟpíya Lúta
Wóohitike
(self-released)
2022
I had noticed an increase in the number of Native American black metal bands coming to my attention, but it wasn’t until I watched a very enlightening discussion panel with the guys from Mutilated Tyrant at Inferno Festival (R.I.P. Jan-Martin) that I really understood how deep and vast that whole scene is. Ultimately, almost all of these bands would more or less classify for a list of “underrated” stuff, perhaps apart from Blackbraid which seem to be pretty well known these days, though they’re in my opinion of the least interesting of the ones I know. Mutilated Tyrant themselves would be a good pick, if only they’d just finally put out a full-length album already, but Maȟpíya Lúta (named after Red Cloud, a famous leader of the Oglala Lakota people, the person on the cover artwork) are an equally worthy representative. Any of their two releases so far would work, so I picked the debut, which is a remarkably expressive and emotional album despite its rawness and lo-fi savagery. These guys (or this guy or girl, or whoever - the lineup is unknown) really nail the difficult balance between sounding like their subject matter, with some riffs and some of the interludes really setting that mood in, and still maintaining things going in terms of harshness and speed. It’s so intense that sometimes it feels like you’re listening to a grind album. Though everything, titles and lyrics, is in the Lakota language, the music is so good that it warrants a little investigation, but even at face value, it never feels too impenetrable and you can actually figure out some things by feeling alone.
Norn
BÖRN: Vltima Permonvm Conea
(Vánagandr)
2015
When I wrote a little bit about Norðanpaunk, I mentioned the importance of those first few years of Eistnaflug, and one of the musical discoveries from that time that I will forever hold close to my heart is Norn. My first contact with them was absolutely unforgettable (seeing their infamous t-shirt “I’m so happy I could eat a baby”), and when I saw them live and heard their music, it totally held up to the out-of-control, deranged kind of image they projected back then. I am happy to report that these are some of the nicest, kindest people you will ever meet in black metal, but their music and approach really is unhinged, and that’s the greatest thing about this album - it feels dangerous, that ever-elusive vibe that every black metal band tries to distill. From the constantly on-the-edge vocals, to the weird interludes, all based on the razor-sharp black metal riffage and unstable song structures. You never know if a song is going to go on a Viking-like fist-in-the-air chant tangent, or just accelerate all the way to the end like a “normal” BM number, or slow down for some manic shrieking, or lead into a creepily quiet spoken part, or what. The most ridiculous thing about Norn, however, is that despite all this tremendous potential to be one of the most quirkily unique voices in black metal, they’ve yet to put out a follow-up to this album in ten years. The closest they got was with a live album last year, which was called, erm, ‘Live In Leipzig’. I shit you not. I think you’ll agree that these people are necessary, so go pester them to put out more stuff right now.
Stormkeep
Tales Of Othertime
(Ván Records)
2021
I know, I know, some of you are now shouting at me “this is not underrated” and yes, this did get a lot of praise in certain circles, but frankly, it needs more. It needs to be held up as an example of how to do black metal right in the 2020s, of how to press all of the right buttons of our generation, the nostalgia (how many of you just went for it at first because it totally looked like a Kristian Wåhlin cover?), the tradition, while still doing something with personality and with their own stamp on it. Everything about ‘Tales Of Othertime’ will immediately rub you right if you’ve ever been into black metal in the ‘90s, the speed, the melody, the synths, the super expressive vocals, the whole Emperor-ness of it all without really sounding exactly like them. I know it’s a description that will put off some of the more necro-serious among you, but this album just a whirlwind of excitement and enthusiasm from beginning to end. I get it that you want to feel cold and dead while listening to your kvltest, rawest kind of black metal, but Stormkeep make you feel cold and alive while listening to them, and to be honest, if anything will make me relive what I felt when I first heard ‘In The Nightside Eclipse’ or ‘Pure Holocaust’ or the Emperor/Enslaved split, which this totally does, I don’t really care about anything else. Nor should you.
Ysyry Mollvün
Ysyry Mollvün
(Avantgarde Music)
2022
It’s not just from North America that some great indigenous black metal has been showing up in the past few years. Ysyry Mollvün are a duo hailing from Argentina, and this, their debut album, portrays the story of K’aux, a sort of anti-hero character in the mythology of the Selk’nam people, a tribe from southern part of the country (“mollvün” actually means “blood” in their language). The black metal parts have similar characteristics to a lot of other bands in most indigenous black metal scenes, though it’s written and performed with an impressive level of elegance and finesse, while still maintaining a raw and violent approach. Those parts intertwine with acoustic guitars and native instruments like the charango, sikus, flutes and percussions, and these arrangements are so well made that ‘Ysyry Mollvün’ becomes one of the most immersive and eloquent records of this kind that I have ever heard. It’s been three years almost to the day since it’s release and it still hasn’t left my regular rotation - can’t wait for its follow up.
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