TOP 5 EPS OF 2024
Short, but sweet.
Before we close the 2024 chapter for good, here it is, the promised list of EPs. Smaller releases that might have passed you by, mostly by smaller bands too, but containing such multitudes to put many full-length releases to shame. This is usually an even more open category than the proper albums lists, so do share your smaller releases of 2024 that you loved in the chat or comments, we love hearing about it!
05.
The Deathmetal Supersquad
Dead Zeppelin
(Paradísarborgarplötur)
Remember when I raved about DMϟSS (as their logo goes) after seeing them live at Norðanpaunk? Though their live energy - especially in front of their rabid home crowd! - is impossible to fully transmit, this EP of theirs really goes a long way to giving you an idea. Is it originally from 2009? Yes. Do we care? Not really. I’d say pretty much everyone reading this apart from those in the Icelandic punk scene will be new to them, so treat it as such. Melodic, indie punk with traces of all the cool greats - from Hüsker Dü to Samiam, from Rancid to Leatherface, there’s no arguing with this stuff. Hopefully their almost decade-long hiatus is gone and we’ll get some proper activity from them from here on out.
04.
Poison Ruïn
Confrere
(Relapse Records)
More punk! Just moving from Reykjavik to Philadelphia, and nastying it up a bit. But only in the overall grittiness of the sound, as ‘Confrere’, as the band themselves state, is “an ode to the sacred bonds of friendship; a strength which holds true through the endless twisting and straining of space and time.” Aww, right? These six new tracks (+ intro) pretty much continue on the awesome spirit of 2023’s brilliant ‘Härvest’, raw but shockingly beautiful punk that sounds like just about no one else. If anything, their unique take on the genre is even more refined, with a denser atmosphere and, at the same time, a heightened sense of intensity. Can’t wait for the next full-length already.
03.
Spiter
Enter The Gates Of Fucking Hell
(Hells Headbangers Records)
And more punk! And we even get to stay in Philadelphia too! As you can obviously notice from the album cover and the titles even before you subject yourself to a single note of Spiter’s music, their approach is more of the fun+Satan variety, with wonderful squirts of black and thrash metal slobbered all over the immensely rewarding mess of their songs. Which you should know already because I can’t shut up about them, their debut full-length was even the first record I reviewed on my “reviews of new shit” feature SHINY OBJECTS. If you really need a reference point, the fact that there’s people from Devil Master and Shitfucker in this band should be enough. Now go have some unholy fun with the devil and don’t come back until you’re covered in blood and puke and imp’s cum.
02.
LÖBO
Matéria Negra
(self-released)
After years of absence and neverending pleas for them to come back, LÖBO have finally returned and no, they still haven’t done the proper, hour-long black hole of an album that we know they can, but this salivatingly brilliant EP will have to do for now. Three long songs, or rather towering monuments of dark and light, of sadness and strength, of vastness and intimacy. Before I wax poetically for another twenty pages, I’ll just direct you to The Devil’s Month where I went on about this for quite a while. Listen to it and try not to lose your way back home.
01.
Hull Of Light
Gilded Liminal Shrines
When I had Hull Of Light as BAND OF THE WEEK a couple of months ago, absolutely in awe by the unclassifiable, ethereal broken beauty that these people that I already admire in a bunch of other projects had produced under this new guise, I ended that feature saying “why don’t we do a Fenriz, stop talking too much, and just listen to the thing?”, and that’s clearly what is needed now. If you really need more details, you can just click and go to that feature, where we even carved out an interview out of one of these alien-like musicians. But if you want to properly understand why this is the obvious, no-brainer choice for best EP of the year, the answer really is in the Play button down here and nowhere else. Go for it.
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