TOP 75 ALBUMS OF 2023: Part III (#40-#21)
Getting warmer!
For reference, you can find Part I (#75-#61) here and Part II (#60-#41) of the list here. Now let’s leave this right on the edge of the top 20. Go!
40.
Spider Kitten
A Pound For The Peacebringer
(APF Records)
Even if you’re only vaguely aware of Spider Kitten, by now you are probably aware they are the quintessencial unpredictable band. Each of their records usually veers into a completely different direction, be it doom, sludge, grunge, psych rock, post rock, alt country or a healthy mix of several of those. Somehow, they have been able to maintain a real identity through all of these genre crossings, and as soon as you put on this new album, if you have been a fan for a while, you will know it’s them. They’ve always exhibited a great knack for storytelling, which is the main element of ‘A Pound For The Peacebringer’. Tying the tale together are two folkier songs and two longer, heavier, sludge-grunge (that’s rather satisfying to say out loud, isn’t it?) sort of numbers, which as usual don’t make much sense or sound particularly exciting when described in writing, but when you listen to the whole thing, it’ll feel just like having watched one of those vintage movies you like to put on every now and again and never get tired of.
39.
False Fed
Let Them Eat Fake
(Neurot Recordings)
As I mentioned when I featured them as Band Of The Week, the line-up alone for False Fed will dictate whether you’re interested: Discharge frontman Jeff Janiak, Amebix guitarist Stig C. Miller, plus Nausea, Ministry and Amebix drummer Roy Mayorga and bassist JP Parsons all get together to vent out their (and ours) frustrations with the state of the world in the form of raw and yet fabulously nuanced dark post-punk. And if you’re not interested, you might be reading the wrong publication.
38.
Mirakler
How I Became The Devil
(Reptilian Records)
It’s not like noise rock ever stopped being exciting, but there’s so many bands taking some of its basic characteristics and running away with them to do something new, heavy and amazing that it’s hard not to look at it as one of the genres to highlight the most when looking at the next few years of heavy music. Enter Pittsburgh’s Mirakler with their debut album, and a music personality defined as though they are veterans at this. I mean, they kinda are, as this isn’t their first noise rodeo, but it’s still good to see a cool new band appear that you don’t have to file under “has potential” for later. Nah, Mirakler are for now - nasty and sharp, incorporating elements of sludge and grunge and even some electronics just for the chaos of it, they bring the filth to the knife fight, offering an unnerving, menacing but ultimately fantastic ride, full of jagged riffs and sneering aggression.
37.
Agriculture
Agriculture
(The Flenser)
They call their subgenre “ecstatic black metal”, they have those band photos that you’ve all seen, and they say they are “inspired by the glory of the ocean”. So yeah, of course the edgier lords among you lot already hate them in the fear that another Deafheaven-like mega-success might be brewing within Agriculture. And you know what? I hope there is. We need more outside-the-box stuff to challenge preconceptions and annoy wannabe gatekeepers. They’re well on their way for it, as they certainly have the amazing songs and that supremely enveloping melancholic atmosphere that will make everyone without any taste limitations swoon uncontrollably. Note that I just mentioned Deafheaven because Agriculture also seem to joyfully undermine some of the basic clichés of black metal with particular gusto, not because they sound in any way similar, other than the fact that yes, both play (or played, since Deafheaven have long moved away from most of that) a certain kind of “alternative” take on black metal. Agriculture are doing their own thing, and they will surely be a sight to watch during this year’s live circuit - including at Roadburn!
36.
Tunic
Wrong Dream
(Artoffact Records)
I just mentioned how exciting and open noise rock feels right now up there in the Mirakler blurb, and here’s another one of the biggest examples right now, Tunic. I loved their previous album ‘Quitter’ so much that I even invited frontman David Schellenberg to be a guest on an episode of the TDM podcast (here), so my hopes for this new one were high. Fortunately, Tunic know how to deliver on expectations while still doing something completely different from what those expectations might have entailed. On ‘Wrong Dream’, songs are generally shorter, punchier, rawer even, with a touch on unpredictability that will keep you constantly on edge.
35.
Yatsu
It Can’t Happen Here
(Roman Numeral / The Ghost Is Clear)
One of the good surprises of the last few weeks of the year, Yatsu are the perfect grind band to discover if you’ve grown a bit tired and weary of the genre. Sounding instantly fresh and exciting, adding some touches of noise (guitarist Lane Oliver is a part of Diminishing, who have already been mentioned on this list) and powerviolence to the mix, while not shying away from the grim reality check and protest aspects that have always been an integral part of it, it’s just a kickass record from start to end. If you want what I’ve just said but in fancy magazine reviewspeak, the band has kindly just posted my review of the album on Decibel magazine on their socials, so have at it.
34.
Gnaw Their Tongues
The Cessation Of Suffering
(Consouling Sounds)
Isn’t it nice to just talk about Gnaw Their Tongues without having to lump it with all the other records Maurice De Jong has done this year, like I used to do on previous lists? I don’t regret that format and I may return to it, but it’s people like him who have made me think it’d be good to at least try the one position - one record format too, as it values each individual work so much more. Not only that, but it’s nice to talk about Gnaw Their Tongues tout court, as the project has been, uncharacteristically for Maurice’s habitual frenetic productivity rhythm, dormant for a few years, the last full-length ‘I Speak the Truth, Yet with Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ already dating from 2020. It was already clear by then - if nothing else, because Maurice said it himself in interviews - that this entity, still his most known and in a way his “main” musical vehicle among the many others, was reducing the pace of its output for a more pondered, thoughtful approach, and this is actually noticeable in the many layers of depth ‘The Cessation Of Suffering’ offers. While it has been stated many times by me and many other writers that the Dutch musician’s constant outpouring of material doesn’t really affect its quality (I still stand by that), it’s also nice to see what some extra waiting time will do to his music. Of course, there’s still some of the jangly, torture dungeon horror sounds collage aspect to it, but most of these songs are actually songs, more obviously constructed and with varying degrees of perceivable structure. It’s also a much more nuanced work than before, with melancholy and even some calmness infiltrating what used to be a permanent barrage of abject horror, thus giving the horror itself a much bigger weight when it does creep in. All in all, while some of the earlier stuff will always remain close to our hearts (and guts, and various other innards), this is arguably Gnaw Their Tongues’ best work to date and an essential listen if you want to draw a relevant, wide picture of what extreme music is - and should be - in 2024.
33.
ALOS
Embrace The Darkness
(Dio Drone / Archaeological Records / Occulto Magazine)
Between having Stefania aka Alos as Band Of The Week and featuring this record on The Devil’s Month all in the past couple of months, I’m sure all its merits are still in your memory, or at least a click away now if you missed them. A healing ritual performed on the slopes of a volcano, an experimental noise performance like no other, and a truly multi-media experience that goes far beyond being just a record. A special piece like few others this year.
32.
Protomartyr
Formal Growth In The Desert
(Domino)
Protomartyr have never really been a happy band by any stretch of the imagination - moments of euphoria, yes, several smiles raised by Joe Casey’s endless lyrical brilliance and ability to turn the mundane and even the downright abject into sublime, scuzzy poetry, for sure, but pain and grief and cynicism have always been at the heart of this, one of the most uniquely-sounding bands to appear this century. However, few of their records ever scraped the bottom of the suffering barrel with so much poignancey as this one, their sixth already, precisely because it allows itself to look for hope, to desperately feel like the light shining through can be healing, and not just yet another unpleasant thing that’ll hurt your eyes if you look into it. In general terms, that’s what ‘Formal Growth In The Desert’ is about, forcing yourself to happiness after a devastating loss, which translates to some of their most affecting, shoegazey songs so far, like ‘We Know The Rats’, and some of their most ambitious yet brokenhearted ones at the same time, such as ‘Rain Garden’. All in all, another genius effort from a band that does no wrong.
31.
Thantifaxath
Hive Mind Narcosis
(Dark Descent Records)
I believe the revolutionary effects of a band like Portal will be slowly more and more noticeable throughout the next few years in the most forward-thinking extreme music, as everyone starts to catch up with just how far ahead that band has been from everyone else ever since they first sucked us into their vortex of creepy strangeness. Even for an already established entity, famous for their opaque experimental approach such as Thantifaxath, the late stages of their evolution mean that they too are entering Portal territory, as they do on ‘Hive Mind Narcosis’. The sort of unpredictable, oblique extreme music that’ll cause you to suffer a fatal injury if you try to headbang to it at any kind of accompanying pace, supremely dissonant with very little to hold on to as a listener. When you think you’ve figured out some part of a song, they’ll just throw something that disorients you all over again, even with repeated listens, where the confusion just seems to run deeper and deeper, like a void that you can’t escape being drawn to. A vexovoid, perhaps? Okay, jokes aside, that’s enough comparisons, as this isn’t the second coming of Portal either - despite the parallels, Thantifaxath do have their own brand of dark weirdness and they continue to develop it with extraordinary results each time, with ‘Hive Mind Narcosis’ being the most fascinating example of that yet.
30.
The National
Laugh Track
(4AD)
Yeah, a The National record, but not that one you might have been thinking. ‘First Two Pages Of Frankenstein’, their proper 2023 album that came out last April, is a damn fine record in its own right, and honestly it would probably have made the list if they hadn’t decided to throw this surprise album at us five months later, made of material recorded alongside ‘…Frankenstein’. It’s not really a b-sides album or anything, even though saving it for a surprise “here’s another record by the way!” kind of release might suggest some throwawayable nature of this material, whereas in fact this is by far the superior piece of the two. I’ve read a few reviews where it’s mentioned that it’s an album that sounds “happier” than typically bummed out The National stuff, but I honestly don’t hear it. It’s even sufficiently morose and… colourfully sad, to put it that way, to invoke their absolute masterpiece (2013’s ‘Trouble Will Find Me’, and if you disagree, which you probably will, I suggest you go listen to that album again right now), but with a refreshing looseness and spontaneity that probably causes some to indeed interpret it as “happiness”. Whatever it is you feel about it though, with songs like ‘Space Invader’ or ‘Smoke Detector’ wrapping themselves around you like a subtle cloud of grey smoke, you’ll surely feel something. That’s the whole point, isn’t it.
29.
Lankum
False Lankum
(Rough Trade Records)
You will probably have seen this album top a few yearly lists, and while I happen to still have a few others in front of it, it’s undeniable that Lankum deserve all the praise they are currently getting. A dark and dreary drone-folk band becoming a global phenomenon in just a couple of years wasn’t necessarily in my 2020s scratch card, but it’s wonderful to see it happen. ‘False Lankum’ is the exact opposite of its title, the record where they get closer to the core of the genre mix that is at the basis of their sound. Sombre and deadly serious, but also hopeful and curiously, unexpectedly beautiful in places, every note of this remarkable album screams “big band” at you, in the best possible sense. They’ll even be one of the main bands on this year’s Roadburn Festival bill, and if you’re interested, you can listen here to the story of how me and Walter first heard about Lankum when they were still a vastly unknown little folk band from Ireland that wanted to play the festival. How times change, and how the power of music propels those changes.
28.
Gauze Trail
A Moment Worth A Life
(Static Ritual Recordings)
I picked them as Band Of The Week based on just one (1) song, and goddamn if I wasn’t right that they’d turn out to be something awesome. Not necessarily in the way that I predicted, but that’s even cooler. As I said when I picked them for November’s The Devil’s Month feature, “much harsher than I imagined, first of all, as some of these songs, including crushing opener ‘To Be’, sound like the noisiest Acid Bath moments coupled with one of those blackgrind bands that seem to be out to get you (hey the beginning of ‘Corridors Of Psychological Warfare’ is straight up lo-fi black metal, didn’t really see that coming!), to the point that there are even some Crisis circa ‘The Hollowing’ vibes to this, and that’s not a comparison I throw around lightly.” Yeah, I just compared a band to Crisis, so you know how serious I am about them.
27.
Deep Cross
Royal Water
(Somatic)
“Restlessly adding industrial, noise, doom and electronics to an essentially post-punk template to create a truly haunting, dystopian yet strangely welcoming landscape. It’s a solid leap from their denser, more metallic 2017 self-titled debut, and from what we’ve heard of their songwriting process, never expect the same record to be done twice by this talented duo. With songs like the ferocious and at the same time dreamy opener ‘For Janus’ effortlessly imprinting themselves in your brain with the efficiency of a facehugger growing from within, these guys are on to something really special. Keep watching this space.”, was what I said almost a year ago about Deep Cross’ splendid album, and if anything, the thing has gotten even better as the months have passed. If you want something that defies categorization while offering real depth and emotion, look no further. Can’t wait to hear their next steps!
26.
The Night Terrors
HYPNOTICA - Original Works For Theremin And Electronic Music Synthesizer
(Disdain Records)
Even if you don’t know that Miles Brown and Sarah Lim are the absolute masters of the respective instruments, theremin and synth, that are used to build this fascinating, totally off-the-beaten-path album, you have to admit that title is in itself review enough. If you’re not curious in this day and age to check out hypnotic original works for theremin and synth, something’s a little dead inside you. Of course, that is just the beginning of ‘Hypnotica’s brilliance - check out their recent Band Of The Week feature to know everything about it.
25.
Els Focs Negres
‘Martiris Carnívors: Himnes Per A Un Nou Apocalipsi’
(Firecum Records / Raging Planet Records)
“Feverishly ecclesiastic Catalonian-sung Portuguese-based blackened heavy metal” might have been the craziest subtitle I wrote in any 2023 post when these guys were Band Of The Week a while back, and it still somehow fails to completely capture the over-the-top brilliance that emanates from this totally bokers second album by Els Focs Negres. Featuring the legendary Belathauzer from Filii Nigrantium Infernalium on vocals, which should be reason enough to stop reading me and go listen to the damn thing immediately, this just might be the best kept secret of the year for all you metalheads out there who are into stuff like Malokarpatan, Master’s Hammer or similar others.
24.
Loma Prieta
Last
(Deathwish Inc.)
Time enough has passed since ‘Last’ was released (I signaled it on The Devil’s Month at the time) so that I can make the bold claim that it is Loma Prieta’s best album yet. Considering we’re talking about the band that has kind reinvented screamo (and more) for this century with a sequence of five essentially perfect albums between 2008 and 2015, it might sound like an exaggeration, but the truth is that they’ve never sounded so mature, so dynamic, so goddamn profound in the way they deliver their kind of hardcore intensity that manages to be even higher than before, even with all the new things that are going on in the songs. Or, for the even shorter version of anything that can be written about this record, just listen to the song ‘Dose’, one of the year’s very best.
23.
An Autumn For Crippled Children
Closure
(Prosthetic Records)
Desperately yet quietly melancholic, subtly yet abrasively harsh, ‘Closure’ is, more than an extreme album, an album of extremes. Arguably the best thing this stubbornly anonymous bunch has done in a remarkable fifteen year trajectory, it stands, like an old monument, like the most well-balanced and affecting example of the much-maligned crossover between shoegaze and black metal. This is how it should be done, kids. If it indeed turns out to be AAFCC’s last album, it really was going out with a bang. Or, to put it a little more poetically, like I did on The Devil’s Month column where they were featured at the time, “As the feedback dries out at the end of quietly euphoric closer ‘Here Comes Sorrow’, you actually feel something in your gut, a sense of unspecified loss - when was the last time a bunch of sounds made you feel like that?”
22.
Krieg
Ruiner
(Profound Lore Records)
It was about fucking time, right? Not only did the release of ‘Ruiner’ finally give me the excuse for having Neill as a guest on the podcast, but it also closed a long period of almost a full decade without a full-length album. And let’s face it, we need Krieg. Not only have they acquired a certain kind of “forefather” status in the always fertile and important USBM scene, but there are precious few bands currently active who understand so naturally and with such clarity of spirit what it means to write music that is, unmistakably and unarguably, black metal, in savagery and unhinged intensity, but that also contains depth, thought and meaning behind it without ever compromising the genre’s traditional core musical values. Nothing against the bands that do compromise all those traditional values, mind you - the more subversion and the more “genre blasphemy” the better. Fuck the rules. But as with everything, balance is necessary, and having Krieg with us making new and awesome music means we still have a firm and solid grip on what good things the old times had to offer, while remaining steadfastily in the present as well. So, welcome back. Make it less than nine years until the next one, ‘kay Neill?
21.
Samiam
Stowaway
(Pure Noise Records)
With so much shit passing for “punk” in the last few decades making it big, I don’t really get why Samiam were never wildly successful like they’ve always deserved to be, but maybe that’s just how it is. How many hugely successful bands can you name that have, like C.M. Saunders says on this rather brilliant review of ‘Stowaway’, “everything else: songs, an identity, a following, talent.” The “else” that’s missing there is momentum, and yeah, the fact that we had to wait twelve years for a follow up to ‘Trips’ kinda says it all. But whatever, I’d rather have a kickass Samiam album per decade than any other band’s seven shit records. And yes, ‘Stowaway’ is naturally kickass like all their other intermittent but intensely brilliant full-lengths, featuring everything you ever loved in them. Melody, catchy yet deep and lasting songwriting, gigantic choruses, their habitual turn of phrase and quirky morose darkness in the lyrics, Jason’s unique vocals, the riffs, the power chords, everything’s in there. For the sake of justice, and because these guys really deserve it, we can hope that some weird alignment of the stars will make this the album that gets the attention it deserves. Probably it isn’t, but hey, if you know, you know. Enjoy it.