Ranking the Albums I Listened to in 2022 (25-1)

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25) Ritual Hymns, Worm Shepherd (Bandcamp)

I wasn’t sure quite what to expect out of Worm Shepherd, but the album cover and title had me intrigued and, honestly, the opening of the title track really had me intrigued and primed for some epic metal. However, Ritual Hymns quickly establishes itself as a very heavy death metal album, which isn’t a bad thing by any means, but it’s less interesting than the epic, moody, atmospheric metal that the title track hinted at. If you’re into death metal then there are some decent tracks here but it’s very heavy and punishing and I lost most of my interest as the album dragged on.

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24) Days of the Lost, The Halo Effect (Bandcamp)

The Halo Effect are made up of ex-members of In Flames, which is not a band I’m really familiar with, but you can feel their collective experience here on their debut album Days of the Lost. There’s a level of polish and confidence on display here, with an epic, melodic death metal sound that reminded me a lot of Dethklok. It’s very well-made and makes for a good listen, with no tracks really standing out as poor, but on the other hand the whole package lacked that extra bit of “special something” which pushes it from good to great. I could very well end up liking this album a lot more in future if it grows on me with repeat listens, but at this juncture Days of the Lost feels like a good starting point in need of a bit more distinct flavour.

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23) Rashomon, Ibaraki

Going into Rashomon I had absolutely no idea what to expect. All I knew was that this album had a really badass cover and it was a metal album, that’s it. Turns out that Ibaraki are basically a rebranded version of Trivium where Matt Heafy leans into his Japanese heritage. Despite the Japanese influences, Rashomon still basically sounds like a North American heavy metal album, which is fine but I was hoping for something a bit more interesting. Highlights for me would be “Ibaraki-Doji”, “Jigoku Dayu” and “Ronin”.

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22) Dawn of an Eyeless Realm, Xenotheory (Bandcamp)

I’m a simple man, you put a xenomorph on your album and I’m going to check that shit out. Dawn of an Eyeless Realm is only really going to appeal to you if you’re looking for some extremely heavy death metal with a few samples from Alien and, for some reason, The Fellowship of the Ring thrown in, but I really dug it. I may be being a bit generous putting this album so high up the list considering that none of the tracks stick out to me individually, but as an album I could just put on to vibe for ~40 minutes this is a great listen.

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21) Zeit, Rammstein

One of my friends was really into Rammstein in high school so naturally I got into a lot of their stuff as well. That said, I haven’t really kept up with their music since then so I’m around 15 years behind on their music, so I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to get out of Zeit. For better or worse, Zeit is very much the Rammstein I was familiar with, the exact same industrial metal sound and Till Lindemann’s velvet vocals. There’s some stuff here that holds up amongst the best of Rammstein, my favourites would be “Giftig” and “Angst”. Zeit is happy to remind me though that a lot of Rammstein’s songs are cool because they’re in German and I can’t understand them, but if they were translated and sung by someone else they’d be extremely silly. This is best demonstrated by “OK” (abbreviation of a German term for “Without a Condom”) which is about getting fucked, and “Dicke Titten”… which is literally “Fat Tits” and is about a loser whose only wish is for a wife with big tits. All-in-all, it’s Rammstein and it’s solid although the fact that they sound basically the same as they did 15 years ago makes me somewhat concerned that they haven’t evolved at all.

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20) Requiem, Korn

Korn have really turned their fortunes around in the last half decade. Even in their hey-day they didn’t get a lot of respect, but the one-two punch of The Serenity of Suffering and The Nothing have established Korn has one of the best mainstream rock/metal bands in the industry. In particular, The Nothing silenced a lot of critics as it came off of the very public suicide of lead singer Jonathan Davis’ ex-wife, causing a lot of people to re-evaluate that, yeah, maybe there’s a reason why Korn have always been so depressed. Requiem is an appropriate follow-up to The Nothing, it feels like Korn are grappling with the emotions that come after a period of suffering. This makes Requiem, weirdly, one of the most hopeful albums Korn has ever released. Several tracks, such as “Let the Dark Do the Rest”, look forward to a better time while going through a period of depression rather than just wallowing in sorrow (“On and on, this lucid darkness is filling up my soul / And how can I be all alone here? / Constant ridicule / And I just wanna go / And I just want to see what the future holds / Had a hell of a time, I’m suffering in / God my life was a mess / And I will never forget it haunting it / Let the dark do the rest“). However, the closer “Worst Is on Its Way” puts a bit of a damper on that hopefulness, as Jonathan Davis remembers that a period of peace is eventually going to be shattered with more suffering (which is pretty familiar to someone who struggles with cycles of depression).

Requiem has much of Korn’s sound, but most of their signatures, such as their heavy guitars and scatting are almost entirely absent. In fact, when they do show up on “Worst Is on Its Way” it made me realize that I had really missed these elements throughout the album. Tracks like “Lost in the Grandeur”, “Disconnect” and “My Confession” are certainly not bad, they just don’t stand out and they lack the bite that Korn had in The Serenity of Suffering and The Nothing, aiming more for a commercial-friendly rock sound that loses a lot of what makes Korn unique. It also doesn’t help that Requiem is barely over 30 minutes long, it comes and goes very quickly. All that said, Requiem is still a solid album, it just pales in comparison to Korn’s best work. It’s got the same sort of issue that Iron Maiden’s Senjutsu had for me last year: it’s not the first, or second, or third, or fourth, or fifth Korn album I’m going to want to listen to, but I expect that in the future I’ll give it a listen every year or two and enjoy it every time.

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19) Atlas Ruinica, The Wise Man’s Fear (Bandcamp… they did not post any of the songs from this new album there though, much to my annoyance)

The Wise Man’s Fear have put out some of my favourite metalcore of the last decade and with the conclusion of their Codex Trilogy in 2020 I was looking forward to see where they would take their musical talents next. The answer to that was Atlas Ruinica, a new fantasy metalcore journey which would be released as a series of singles over the course of the year. It was an interesting distribution method for the modern era, but in practice this has been really annoying because they only released them to streaming sites and didn’t release a compilation version of the album. This means you have to track everything down individually, which is more effort than it really should be just to listen to new music from one of my favourite bands.

Anyway, all that out of the way, Atlas Ruinica is… basically just more The Wise Man’s Fear. That probably shouldn’t be too surprising, but after The Valley of Kings ended, I was hoping that their follow-up would be just a bit more different and interesting. Instead, we get more of the same, but lesser because it doesn’t have the same sort of weight and scale as the Codex Trilogy did. It’s still The Wise Man’s Fear, meaning that you’re still getting some solid metalcore/deathcore with a fantasy sheen, but I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed.

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18) Skin & Sorrow, Frayle (Bandcamp)

Frayle are one of those bands that seem custom-built for me, being a witch-themed doom metal outfit. Going in I was definitely hoping for good things and Frayle left me very intrigued to explore more of their work in future. Unlike most doom metal bands I’m used to, Frayle is a female-fronted band and that lends an entirely different experience to their music. Gwyn Strang’s vocals are haunting and ethereal, reminding me a lot of Maria Brink’s “witchy” vocals on the last couple In This Moment albums. Musically, this is definitely doom metal, although Frayle aren’t afraid to get heavy and more energetic at times than most doom metal bands I’m used to listening to do. This is especially clear on “Treacle & Revenge” and “Sacrifant”, which are probably my two favourite tracks on the album too. That said, the title track is a good example of how Frayle will take a more standard doom metal sound and lend it a haunting energy through their vocals.

On the more negative side of things, the mixing on the album leaves the vocals lost at times and really difficult to understand, although this is probably an intentional, artistic choice so your mileage may vary on that. Some of the tracks can also feel a bit “samey”, but all-in-all I really liked Skin & Sorrow and will be undoubtedly checking out more of Frayle in future.

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17) Hell Is Where The Heart Is Pt. I: Love, Pt. II: Longing & Pt. III: Clarity, OCEANS (Bandcamp)

OCEANS were probably my favourite new band of 2020 and, despite not making the top 5 of that year, I am confident that I listened to The Sun and the Cold more than any other album that year. Suffice to say that I’ve been eagerly awaiting a follow-up to see where the band would go… and, I have to admit, I goofed last year. Early in 2021 they released a handful of singles and I assumed these were ramping up for a full album, so I didn’t include them in the 2021 album rankings. However, by my own rules, I could have, because they ended up releasing them all in one collected EP, We Are Nøt Okay, before moving on to their next project. I feel particularly bad about this because that EP was great, the natural follow-up I’d been dreaming about and it would have easily cracked the top 10 on my 2021 ranking.

Anyway, that brings us to their 2022 project, Hell Is Where The Heart Is, which has been split into three different parts released over the course of the entire year (and which I have chosen to include here as one entry for simplicity’s sake). Each part represents a different stage in heartbreak and the songs and sound correlate to these themes. Hell Is Where The Heart Is is a whole other beast for OCEANS compared to what they have given us before, as they clearly are trying to experiment with their sound, for better or worse.

Pt. I: Love is, appropriately, very raw, heavy, emotional and, at times, straight-up vicious. The highlight here is definitely “Sulfur”, which sees OCEANS sounding very much like Iowa-era Slipknot (to the point where I had to look up if it was a cover; I know Slipknot has a song with the same name on one of their albums I don’t really like/am not very familiar with). OCEANS are brutal on this track, the energy they put out here is infectious.

Pt. II: Longing is a slower burn in comparison, more mournful and contemplative, although no less emotional. The highlight for me would be “Living=Dying”, which sounds uncannily like OCEANS meets early-era Korn and provides a shot in the arm at the end of the EP. Viewed on its own, Longing is a bit of an unremarkable release, but viewed as part of a whole it works well as the middle point between Love and Clarity.

Pt. III: Clarity is easily the strongest of the three EPs and gives this collection a really solid (if depressing) ending. “If There’s a God She Has Abandoned Us” starts out as a sombre piano track but builds up and gets heavier as it goes along. Easily my favourite track on the album alongside “Sulfur”. “I Sing Alone” and the title track don’t disappoint either, both being delightfully-heavy tracks which close out this collection on a strong note.

That said, easily my least-favourite parts of these releases are the spoken word interludes, which are so angsty that they wouldn’t be out of place on a 13 year old’s Tumblr page. They’re fine as mood-setters, but I’ve gotten in the habit of skipping them entirely whenever I listen to the EP because they just make me cringe.

It took a while to see the whole picture, but Hell Is Where The Heart Is is an interesting evolution for OCEANS. While I’m glad the band’s trying something different, I’m not sure if the results are better than what we’re familiar with from them yet. Hell Is Where The Heart Is is messier than previous OCEANS albums/EPs and the staggered releases has made experiencing each part feel lesser than if we had gotten to experience them all together (in particular this made Love feel slight and Longing feel a bit mediocre and disappointing). Now that we’ve gotten all three I feel much better about them as a whole but it has affected how I view them as a whole.

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16) Heavy Pendulum, Cave In (Bandcamp)

Another year, another band I checked out simply because they had a cool album cover. Apparently Cave In have been making music since 1998 and this is their seventh studio album, but I don’t recall ever coming across them before now. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s a level of maturity and professional craft on display in Heavy Pendulum, as Cave In show off solid hard rock/metal track after track. “Blood Spiller” is probably my favourite of the bunch, but there really isn’t a weak song on the entire album. Musically, this reminds me a lot of Mastodon’s output during the mid-2010s, it’s uncanny just how similar the two sound. It can start to feel like it’s dragging a bit towards the end, but Heavy Pendulum is a solid album nevertheless and if you like Mastodon then I think you can’t go wrong giving Cave In a look.

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15) Eulogy, Wolves at the Gate

Eulogy is fairly typical by metalcore standards, but it’s well-written enough that it manages to stand out. I think the biggest asset is how Wolves at the Gate balance the heaviness with the lighter moments, drawing out stronger emotional resonance in the process than if they went hard one way or the other. It also gives Wolves at the Gate a sound that feels more approachable and “commercial”, kind of like Bad Omens. Eulogy is, perhaps paradoxically, not nearly depressing or aggressive enough to be something I’ll listen to over and over again, but I’d be a fool to deny the quality of tracks like “Peace That Stars the War”, “Euglogies”, “Weight of Glory” and “Silent Anthem”.

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14) Darker Still, Parkway Drive

Parkway Drive combine heavy metal reminiscent of Iron Maiden together with nu metal reminiscent of Linkin Park and Slipknot to produce Darker Still, a polished and surprisingly radio-friendly album which had me headbanging on plenty of occasions through its runtime. Parkway Drive’s lyrics can skew towards typical nu metal angst, but their songwriting often eschews standard song structures and typically will leave tracks getting heavier and catchier, rather than running out of steam as they go. The tracks here are also distinct from one another, often willing to play with genre for a diverse track roster. That said, your mileage will likely vary as a result, and I found myself less than enthused with tracks that leaned more into half-baked country and rap styles like on the title track, “If a God Can Bleed” and “From the Heart of the Darkness”. Still, there are lots of quality tracks here, my favourites being “The Greatest Fear”, “Imperial Heretic”, “Land of the Lost” and “Glitch”, all of which I’d definitely recommend checking out!

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13) Lotus, Within Destruction (Bandcamp)

My God, that is a beautiful cover art. Apparently I’m on a cyberpunk kick this year as I’m finding myself drawn to this sort of aesthetic more and more lately. The actual music of Lotus is a near-even blend of electronica and death metal (sometimes leaning closer to nu metal or deathcore at times), with very heavy and energetic music which will leave you in a constant state of head-banging. The tracks here are infectious and aggressive, with particular highlights for me being the title track, “Toxic”, “Dehumanized” and “Neo-Yakuza”. Within Destruction have put together a rather unlikely blend which works well and which is well worth a listen!

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12) The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead!, Megadeth

Megadeth are yet another band that I was familiar with, but hadn’t heard a full album from until this year. If you’re familiar with the band you’ll know what to expect: energetic, old-school thrash metal with emphasis on guitar solos and Dave Mustaine’s unmistakable vocals giving the band its distinct flair. The best way that I can describe The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead! is that it’s a lot of fun. The songs in the first half remind me of Iron Maiden in their hey-day, focused on death and violence but not in a way that feels transgressive. Megadeth just sound like they’re enjoying themselves, showing off badass guitar work and they even have a rap interlude from Ice-T on “Night Stalkers”, easily one of the highlights of the album. I really enjoyed the first half of the album and would have definitely ranked this much higher if not for the back half. The songs here aren’t bad per se, but tracks like “Killing Time”, “Soldier On!” and “Célebutante” just feel like filler compared to the energy and fun of the first half. I can see these tracks resonating with others more than myself, and if they do then those people are going to love this album, but the back half left me a bit deflated.

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11) The Monumental Mass: A Cinematic Metal Event, Powerwolf

Powerwolf are one of those metal bands that feel like they’re putting out new product for their fans to consume every year, be it singles, compilations, re-releases, special edition releases, live albums or, y’know, a new album every once in a while. As a result, I wasn’t all that excited for The Monumental Mass since it hasn’t been that long since the last time we got a live album out of them and the live albums they did put out were kind of annoying because there would be a lot of downtime between each song where they would be talking to the audience in German. I get that that’s part of the live experience, but when it’s happening for every song it starts to get annoying to me. Luckily, The Monumental Mass is easily my favourite Powerwolf live release and some of that would probably come down to this being a balls-to-the-wall COVID livestream concert. I haven’t watched the video of the concert yet but I’m sure it’s amazing because Powerwolf are putting on their A-game here and intend for this to indeed be an “event”. The setlist is packed with seventeen solid tracks (plus interludes) which sound pretty close to their studio counterparts. Some people might be disappointed by the similarity, but for me it just shows off how good Attila Dorn’s vocals are and how talented Powerwolf are. You’ll probably have your favourites, but for me “Demons Are a Girl’s Best Friend”, “Beast of Gévaudan” and “Where the Wild Wolves Have Gone” got the most excitement out of me. Really, the only tracks that left me feeling a bit deflated were “We Drink Your Blood” and “Armata Strigoi”, but they are very much outliers. Some people might also be disappointed that the album skews towards their newer material and there are curious excisions (particularly “Kiss of the Cobra King”), but these have appeared on previous live albums so I’m not too bothered that they went with something different. All-in-all, this is a great live album and a fantastic way to introduce someone to Powerwolf.

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10) Necromantic, Draconian Reign (Bandcamp)

After the moody lead-in to “Awakening”, Draconian Reign assault you with some truly heavy death metal. It’s a great way to open things and primes you for the rest of the EP to come. Every track stands out in its own way and while it isn’t particularly unique or transformative, it is very enjoyable. It’s a pretty short package, coming in at just over 20 minutes, but if you’re into death metal then this is well worth a listen and gets a hearty recommendation from me.

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9) The Path of Destruction, Overthrone (they have a Bandcamp, but this album isn’t on there for whatever reason)

The Path of Destruction has all the hallmarks that you’d expect from a metalcore band (shouted vocals, aggressive, energetic music, the occasional melodic section to balance out the heaviness, angst). Overthrone aren’t doing anything unique, but they still manage to succeed because the music they’ve crafted is really solid. They’re really at their best when balancing the heavy and the lighter sections in a song, best demonstrated by emotional and sincere tracks like “Watch the World Burn” and “A Better Man”. They also tease a heavier side with “Suffer”, which goes full-on deathcore, but it’s only a two minute track so feels more like a teaser than a proper exploration. Still, The Path of Destruction is good enough that it’s quickly become one of my most-listened to albums of the year. I’m curious to see where Overthrone goes next, although I hope they can carve a more distinct sound for themselves in future.

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8) Venator, Mechina (Bandcamp)

I decided to check out Mechina on a whim because of the cool cover for Venator and I am so glad that I did. Musically, they’re very similar to Words of Farewell (particularly their 2016 album, A Quiet World), with a sound that I’d describe as epic, energetic, industrial/electronic metal. Musically they aren’t too far from melodic death metal, but the big thing that differentiates them from other death metal bands is that the vocals are mostly clean and soaring, more akin to glam or power metal. Taken all together, Venator is a really interesting album, feeling like a sci-fi epic and more than once I found myself thinking that it could be a great backing soundtrack for an anime series. There are several great tracks on here, including “Suffer”, “Praise Hydrus” and the title track, which had me headbanging along with a smile on my face. Definitely give Venator a glance, I’ve linked Mechina’s bandcamp above and would heartily give them a recommendation. I know I’ll be checking out more of their stuff in the future.

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7) Silverline, Anberlin

Anberlin are one of my favourite bands of all time, which shouldn’t be surprising if you saw my list of best albums from the 2010s. It’s been eight years since their last album, so there has been no release this year that I’ve been more excited for than Silverline. The EP doesn’t disappoint, giving us five rock-solid tracks of Anberlin’s signature alt-rock flavour. A particular highlight is “Two Graves”, which kicks the EP off with a bang. This song is heavy by Anberlin’s standards, announcing that the band is back together and haven’t missed a beat since we last heard them. My favourite track though is “Body Language”, a piece which is just oozing with sex appeal and is going to find itself a place on a very particular playlist of mine… Anyway, Silverline is a solid return for Anberlin, whose only real problem is that it leaves me wanting more. Given that we haven’t heard any new music from Anberlin in eight years, that’s just me being dangerously greedy, but I hope that the band finds plenty of inspiration on this new chapter they find themselves in!

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6) Immutable, Meshuggah

Meshuggah are one of those bands that all the big metalheads love, so I figured it was past time for me to check them out. Gotta say, the hype is real with Meshuggah, because Immutable was really solid, energetic, wall-to-wall heavy metal that had me headbanging on several occasions. Highlights for me include “Broken Cog”, “Phantoms” and the extended instrumental track “They Move Below”, but it’s hard to go wrong with any track on Immutable (other than the disappointingly limp closer, “Past Tense”). Definitely a band I’ll be checking out more of in the future.

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5) STRATA, REMINA (Bandcamp)

I’ve really gotten back into Draconian this year (and grown much more of an appreciation for Under a Godless Veil), which made me really come to appreciate how much I love Heike Langhans’ voice; it’s so good that she single-handedly elevated Draconian from “decent” to one of my favourite bands since she joined them in 2012. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that I was saddened earlier this year when the news that she was leaving the band came out. However, the one silver lining was that she was going to be using this opportunity to pursue her own passion projects with her partner Mike Lamb and be able to spend more time with her family as a result. I’m happy that she’s getting to live her dream as an artist and that this creativity is bearing fruit with a number of projects, including this year’s STRATA. Billed as a cosmic metal album, STRATA doesn’t stray too far from Langhans and Lambs’ roots, being very atmospheric doom metal, although the lack of any harsh vocals gives it a different sort of feel. The resulting music encapsulates what I love best about doom metal, it’s beautiful melancholy captured in song. Despite only having seven tracks, this is a surprisingly lengthy album, with each track typically starting chill and sombre and then reaching a heavier, emotional climax towards the end, and it all works simply because Langhans’ voice is incredible. It’s one of those albums that’s best as a complete work, but if you need a single song to sample REMINA, I’d recommend “Icarus Signal”.

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4) Deceivers, Arch Enemy

I was so impressed by Alissa White-Gluz’s vocals on last year’s Powerwolf bonus album, Missa Cantorem, that I knew I had to give Arch Enemy a look. I have to say that Deceivers left me impressed. As expected, Alissa’s vocals are great, both harsh and clean, to the point where you’d swear that Arch Enemy had multiple vocalists. The songwriting here is also really solid, there isn’t a weak track on the entire album. Arch Enemy’s music is melodic, high tempo and epic, best described as being somewhere between power metal and death metal. Just a great album from start to finish, definitely recommend checking this out!

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3) Voyeurist, Underoath

I wanted to like Underoath’s Erase Me a lot more than I did back in 2018. The turn from evangelical metalcore darlings to losing their faith was a compelling story so it was unfortunate that the album didn’t resonate with me. With Voyeurist, it’s clear that the last four years have been a struggle for the band, and much of that is from dealing with the fallout of their crisis of faith, along with the band’s struggles with mental health and addiction. This clearly has provided the band with fertile ground not often tread by an act of this calibre and it makes Voyeurist a decidedly raw and compelling listen. You can feel their pain and anger towards evangelicals in tracks like “Damn Excuses” (“You never gave me anything I wanted but I’m stuck in the cycle with you / Fuck your revelation and fuck your weak conviction / I am finally exposing the truth“), “(No Oasis)” (“In the dark and overused / Left alone with the abused / I’ll never know if I matter to you / Hey, I was talking down to you / You objectify the truth / Every thing you thought you were is all wrapped up inside a lie / The kind that makes you blind / Falling over every line you believed so hard you hollowed out / Hollowed out your mind“) and “We’re All Gonna Die” (“Hey, we’re all gonna die, what difference does it make? / Don’t pray for me and my friends / I think you’re fucking fake“).

Emotion is one thing though, but thankfully Underoath back that up with some really strong songwriting throughout the entire album. “Hallelujah” is fantastic, the kind of song you’d want to shout along to live, “Take a Breath” makes you want to headbang, “Numb” is nice and heavy and “Pneumonia” is a really interesting and moody closer. Really, Voyeurist just keeps getting better as it goes, which is part of the reason why it’s one of my most replayed albums of the year.

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2) Impera, Ghost

So I listened to Impera because I’d heard that it was really good, but I was not ready for what I was walking into. Ghost are straight-up a modern glam metal outfit in 2022! That is very much not what I look for in my aggressive/depressing taste in metal, but Impera is so well-written that it won me over. There are so many great tracks here: “Kaisarion” is a really energetic and catchy rock track, “Call Me Little Sunshine” is like a chill Andrew WK song, and “Watcher in the Sky” feels like the sort of 80s anthem you’d expect to hear Kiss or Styx signing in front of a crowded arena. By far the most impressive track though is “Twenties”, which I shit you not feels like a Disney villain song. It has the most swagger that I’ve ever heard in a metal track. Just listening to it makes me picture the choreography I’d use for it in a stage musical, it’s legitimately one of the coolest songs I’ve heard in years. Being glam metal also means that, unlike the majority of the music I listen to, it’s super accessible to a wide audience. It’s really no wonder that this album is getting as much accolades as it is, it’s truly fantastic and I would implore you not to pass it up.

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1) The Death of Peace of Mind, Bad Omens

Finding God Before God Finds Me was one of my favourite albums of the last couple years, enough for me to consider Bad Omens one of my favourite new bands. Their radio-friendly metalcore style was surprisingly compelling, so naturally I was excited to see what Bad Omens would bring us next. The Death of Peace of Mind is an unexpected turn from the band, downplaying the metalcore (which was already downplayed on Finding God Before God Finds Me compared to their debut album) and leaning heavily into electronic and pop influences. While this change in style leaves me torn and alienated, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that Bad Omens put full effort into this album and still deliver some absolute bangers. “CONCRETE JUNGLE” and “THE DEATH OF PEACE OF MIND” alternate between electronic music and heavy metalcore on a dime, making the most out of both styles and developing a sound that’s as compelling as nearly anything from their previous albums. Perhaps the most exciting tracks are “What do you want from me?” and “ARTIFICIAL SUICIDE”, which take traditional electronic sounds (feeling almost cyberpunk-esque at times) and then mix them like a metal track, creating a really energetic beat which is infectious.

The Death of Peace of Mind scares me. It’s a good album overall, but it also represents a fundamental change for a band I loved. If they continue on this electronic/pop journey and ditch their metal influences altogether then I’m afraid that I won’t still be on board with Bad Omens, which would be sad. That also makes it hard to judge this album fairly, but there’s too many great songs on here for me to be too harsh.

Ranking the Albums I Listened to in 2022 (55-26)

Welcome back to my annual music countdown… and this year, I really overdid it. Back when I started I’d have to write up entries for like fifteen albums and it was nice and easy. That number has ballooned every year, to the point where I’ve written entries for more than fifty new albums released in 2022! As a result, I’m not belabouring every review – if I have lots to say about an album I’ll say what I want, but if I don’t have a lot to say then don’t expect more than a few sentences. I’ve been literally working on this article for the entire year and honestly if fifty albums in a year holds true (or even continues trending upward) then I might just start restricting this year-end list to the twenty-five best; we’ll see how things shake out next year.

In any case, there are so many entries this year that I’ve split this into two parts. Naturally, we’ll start with the lower half and then I’ll post the rest tomorrow. With all that out of the way, let’s look into my 2022 in music!

55) Faith is Gone, Arsenic

Faith is Gone starts on a bad note when “Intro” declares that Arsenic don’t give a shit about what’s mainstream or popular, they just play what they want. I literally rolled my eyes – people who feel the need to brand themselves as rebels usually are covering for the fact that someone one time said that their music sucks, so they pass it off as “they don’t understand us, man!” Then Faith is Gone begins in earnest and, my God, I was not ready for this. Imagine an 80s punk/metal fusion, like the Ramones crossed with Black Album-era Metallica, and then add a thick Quebecois accent to the mix. Round out the package with high-school-garage-band-quality production and songwriting and you might have a good idea what Arsenic are like. Nearly every song sounds identical and most are so slight that they feel incomplete – seriously, this album has 9 full tracks (that’s not even including the intro) and it’s barely over the 28 minute mark. That said, there is one glowing highlight, “Jack the Ripper”, which is a pretty fun track about the eponymous serial killer. It’s a legitimately good song and it closes out Faith is Gone on a pinnacle, since I can guarantee you it’s the only track on this album that I’m ever going to listen to again.

54) Season of the Wolf, With A Heavy Heart (Bandcamp)

I listen to quite a lot of metalcore so I hope it means something when I say that Season of the Wolf is one of the most baffling metalcore albums I’ve ever listened to. The production is clean and professional, but the music itself feels really amateur, like a bunch of kids throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Nearly every song will have multiple instances of the music going from light to heavy (or vice versa), incongruent and sudden shifts in chords before almost immediately switching back, stopping the track entirely for a random sample… all these things I’m describing are some of my favourite parts of a song when done well, but here they feel completely wrong and it’s such a weird thing to realize. It really hammers home how much craftsmanship we take for granted in the music we love. Even when With A Heavy Heart are finding some degree of cohesion in a track, it’s not enough for me to find their music any better than mediocre. I don’t really mean (or want) to shit on With A Heavy Heart, as far as I’m aware they don’t really deserve it, but Season of the Wolf did not work for me at all.

53) Oecumenical Rites for the Antichrist, Law of Contagion (Bandcamp)

Oecumental Rites for the Antichrist is blackened death metal… I’m not sure what else there is to say really. Incomprehensible, growled vocals? Never-ending blast beats? Every song sounds the exact same? Poor production quality? You guessed it. At least I enjoy this kind of music on a baseline level, so I don’t think this album is bad per se; I could throw it on just to get through a foul mood. But that said, it doesn’t stand out to me in the slightest and there isn’t a single song on here that I’m ever going to listen to again, let alone want to.

52) REPENTANCE, Bajoxtierra (Bandcamp)

This is one of those albums that I checked out purely because of the cool artwork. Bajoxtierra are a self-described alt metal band, although I’d say they’re not too far off from metalcore with the interplay between soft and aggressive music (complete with dueling clean and screamed vocals). Normally that’s the kind of thing I like in a metalcore band, but Bajoxtierra feel very mediocre to me. I think the issue is that the quiet sections of their songs just go on for too long and sap all the energy out by the time the faster, more aggressive parts start. There feels like there’s some potential here, but REPENTANCE is very unrefined.

51) Over Opiated in a Forest of Whispering Speakers, Seven Nines & Tens (Bandcamp)

Having started taking edibles over a year ago I’ve gotten more interested in stoner media, so just hearing the title of this album got me interested in checking out Seven Nines & Tens. The album has a grunge-metal sound, like Alice in Chains meets Lateralus-era Tool. The music combines with the vocals to create a palpably dreamy, “far out” atmosphere. It’s really cool at first, but after getting through a couple tracks of the same drawn out sound it starts to drag and blend together, to the point where halfway through I was just wanting it to end. I dunno, maybe I wasn’t high enough to appreciate it, but Over Opiated in a Forest of Whispering Speakers was very dull for me.

50) Babylon, Next Time Mr. Fox (Bandcamp)

Surprise, surprise, I legitimately only checked out this album because the band has the word “fox” in their name, because as we all know foxes are the best. Unfortunately Babylon didn’t really leave me with much of a lasting impression. It’s a pretty slight package, with 6 tracks barely hitting the 20 minute mark (and of those 6, only 4 are full-length tracks). For most of the EP, Next Time Mr. Fox put out some very heavy metal/deathcore. The one big exception is “Under the Moon”, which is a dreamy acoustic track which doesn’t really jive well surrounded by all the heavy metalcore tracks surrounding it. Of all the tracks I think “Bestias” resonated the most to me, it was very aggressive and I found myself headbanging along with it at the start. However, most of Babylon is just painfully mediocre – not bad but just not interesting or something I can see myself ever revisiting. Sorry, Mr. Fox, but I don’t think that there’s going to be a next time.

49) The Great Dying, Once Was Never (Bandcamp)

The Great Dying is, for the most part, fairly typical deathcore. However, I can’t say that I’m a big fan of the vocals on the album, at a certain point enthusiastic, incomprehensible grunts and screams just sound like caveman music. That’s not to say that there aren’t some tracks where this works, I did quite enjoy “The Heartless” and “H.O.M.E.”, but most of this just didn’t catch my interest. Add in the very short playtime at barely over 30 minutes and The Great Dying just didn’t do it for me.

48) AfterLife, Five Finger Death Punch

My thoughts on Five Finger Death Punch are well documented at this point, although I will admit that their last album, F8, was one that I had some positive things to say about. I was curious if AfterLife would continue that turn around, but… well, I can’t even say I’m disappointed. I was momentarily excited when “Welcome to the Circus” started, but then the second the singing kicked in my excitement instantly deflated because it became clear that this was going to be the same old story: really solid musicianship, but abysmal songwriting full of impotent macho posturing. To be fair, the songwriting isn’t as bad as it was on some of their previous albums, but it’s still FFDP and at this point I’ve accepted that I’m just never going to like this band’s songs. If you like FFDP then this will probably be a moot point – like I said, if you can get past the lyrics, the band are undeniably talented musicians. Unfortunately, I just can’t stand the songs they write and clearly never will.

47) Striving Toward Oblivion, Vorga (Bandcamp)

Ahh, black metal. If you’re familiar with these annual countdowns, you’ll know that I check out new bands in this genre all the time, but so many of them fail to make any sort of impression. This genre seems to have a way of making every song bleed together into a loud, congealed soup. Some, like Wolves in the Throne Room and Firelink manage to stand out, but then there’s stuff like Vorga, whose album Striving Toward Oblivion immediately failed to get my interest and every song sounded like the one that came before it. Is it actually bad? No. Will I ever listen to it again? No. There isn’t really much else I have to say other than that.

46) Towards the Dying Lands, Horizon Ignited

Towards the Dying Lands is basically power metal, but with death metal vocals. If you can imagine that, then you’ve got a good idea what Horizon Ignited sound like here and there isn’t a whole lot else I can say about it. I found the album a bit meh, not actively bad but not doing anything that interested me.

45) Exile, Demon Hunter

Demon Hunter used to be one of those bands you could rely on to put out good music on every new album, but they’ve been in something of a tailspin for a while now. Coming off of an uninspired double album and an unnecessary acoustic album, fans of the band have been clamoring for a return to their metalcore roots, but every new release has felt watered down since at least 2012 (even if a couple of those albums have been pretty good anyway). That brings us to Exile, an album I’ve been dreading since it was announced because of the language that was being used to promote it: “Exile is the first-ever concept album by the 20-year metal veterans. Set in the aftermath of civilized society’s collapse, the 12 songs examine modern life through the lens of a nonconformist, contemplating a life untethered. […] Exile is an immersive interrogation of cultural norms and a call to true rebellion.” This was punctuated by the lead single, “Freedom is Dead”… so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that I had some really bad “Don’t tread on me vibes” from the start. It’d be one thing if this was just a fantasy story that Demon Hunter were exploring, but they’re a Christian band and this sort of story setup is rife in evangelical circles, not to mention the anti-mask/vaccine crowd most of us are exhausted of, so suffice to say that there was a good chance that this wasn’t “just a fantasy”.

For a moment there, Exile looked like it might buck my fears. “Defense Mechanism” opens with a roar. It’s pure thrash, a very heavy song, easily the highlight of the album and the sort of track we haven’t gotten out of Demon Hunter in decades. However, the album comes back down to earth pretty much immediately from there. Exile is an album of two selves – on the one hand, it’s musically the most varied Demon Hunter release in a very long time, featuring a handful of heavy, thrash-inspired tracks but still skewing mainly towards lighter ballads and rock tunes. In this regard, it’s better than their last couple lacklustre releases. However, Exile‘s Achilles heel, as I feared, comes down to the songwriting. I can’t take such a self-serious album about non-conformity and fighting for freedom seriously when I know the context it’s coming from. “Master” gets this across early, with lyrics that boil down to “Elites are telling you what to believe and dividing us, but I’m too cool for that, I make my own way! Freedom!” That sort of message is pretty consistent across the album and I just couldn’t take it seriously. In fact, it’s kind of insulting with the inclusion of “Revolutions”, which downplays the importance of efforts to change society, saying that these efforts are cyclical and kind of pointless as a result. If you can get over the lyrics then you’ll probably like Exile more than I did, but it’s not the only issue here. Ryan Clark’s vocals are also noticeably strained throughout the album, especially on all of the heavier tracks. In fact, he sounds downright terrible at several moments on the album, such as the end of “Freedom is Dead”, which might explain why Demon Hunter have been pivoting away from their signature sound for so long. Exile‘s a step in the right direction compared to War and Peace, but even with my obvious biases set aside, it’s still easily in the bottom half of the band’s discography.

44) Quietus, And Hell Followed With (Bandcamp)

Another band I checked out because of a cool album cover, And Hell Followed With are a fairly typical deathcore/death metal band and Quietus gives you about what you’d expect: growled/shouted/screamed vocals, endless blast beats and heavy music galore. It’s just that most of it doesn’t stand out. I was getting excited when I got back-to-back, legitimately good tracks “Infinite Sequential Visions of a Sphere of Hate” and “Sacrificial Human Destiny” came on and hoped that the rest of the album would get more interesting, but unfortunately And Hell Followed With are content to just coast by with a death metal sound that doesn’t stand out. I’d recommend checking out the two tracks noted above and maybe “The Well”, but otherwise Quietus isn’t particularly interesting.

43) Of My Vice, Through the Walls (Bandcamp)

Of My Vice reminds me that nu metal is kind of a stupid umbrella term. I listen to a fair bit of nu metal, but when “The Apparition” started I was instantly reminded that, oh yeah, people think that Slipknot and Linkin Park are part of the same genre. This can be a bit of a tonal whiplash for me because most of the nu metal I listen to has barely any rap in it so I often forget that it’s considered a signature of nu metal bands. Of My Vice lean more in the direction of Linkin Park, with a lot of rap-rock mixed with harsh, metalcore-like vocals. It’s very much a rap-rock album in the first two-thirds, although it does get heavier and I would say goes full-on metalcore by the final track. I wasn’t crazy about Of My Vice, but I did enjoy “The Quandary”, “The Puppeteer” and “The Juxtaposition” (if only because those tracks leaned more into genres of metal that I traditionally find more enjoyable).

42) Dominion, Skillet

I’ve aired my grievances about Skillet in the past. Growing up in an evangelical household, I always found them to be overrated considering the amount of fame they had. As they get further and further away from the breakout album, Comatose, I feel my skepticism become more and more justified. Dominion may be one of their better albums in the past decade, but it is still very much not my thing. It’s decent radio rock written for teenagers by a bunch of rockstars who are nearly 50 years old now, and that insincerity has always really turned me off of Skillet’s music. “Refuge” is the only track that felt like it had any sort of sincerity to it, feeling like a “youth group anthem” and is probably my favourite track on the album. I’m clearly far from the target demographic of this album so take my opinion here with a massive grain of salt, but I’m sure there’s some evangelical kid out there who’s going to hear this and love it (if not, might I recommend Oecumenical Rites for the Antichrist?).

41) Divisive, Disturbed

Like Exile, I’ve been dreading Divisive since it was announced. Disturbed were one of my favourite bands when I was in high school but they have not been the same since their extended hiatus. It got so bad that when 2018’s Evolution came out I was so sick of them that I declared that I’d evolved beyond Disturbed. That was all bad enough, but Disturbed’s politics have been frustrating me for years – it was one thing when the band complained about the media and elites during the 2000s and early 2010s, but when they continue “both sides”-ing through 2016 and the 2020s it feels like they’re either disingenuous or out of touch. Which brings us to Divisive, which promised to be their answer to the divide in society, which they wanted to heal through the power of music… bleh. Suffice to say that I was expecting this album to be one of the worst of the year, but colour me pleasantly surprised that Disturbed managed to exceed my expectations… by being disappointing once again.

Let me explain.

For better or worse, Divisive ditches the experimentation that was present on Immortalized and Evolution and goes back to the heavier fundamentals of their first couple albums. This album sounds more like Disturbed’s nu metal roots than they have in decades. For all their bluster about this being a political album, Divisive only really makes a statement on “Bad Man” and “Divisive”, and I am using “statement” here very broadly. Like Evolution, these tracks are extremely simplistic, wishy-washy and non-committal, to the point where literally anyone could look at these songs and think that Disturbed are supporting their side. Suffice to say, this makes for very limp, uncompelling content. Most of the album from there is just typical Disturbed – “Hey You” is your big, pump-up anthem, “Unstoppable” and “Won’t Back Down” are your macho tracks, etc. Unfortunately, because this is just Disturbed being Disturbed, they’re treading over very well-trodden ground, so you can’t help but look at “Unstoppable” and see it as a weak rehash of their far-better executed “Indestructible”. Similarly, “Hey You” is supposed to be the big single to get people excited, but it’s going to be filler at best if it was played live. The only track with any sort of staying power is “Don’t Tell Me”, which makes the most of David Draiman and guest Ann Wilson’s soaring vocals to put out an emotional song dealing with the pain of divorce. None of the other tracks on the album feel anywhere near as inspired and it’s far and away the best track on the album (hell, it’s the best track Disturbed have put out since 2015).

I’m probably making it sound like Divisive isn’t that great and that’s because it isn’t. It’s kind of mediocre, like Disturbed are just going through the motions and falling back on what worked for them in the past once again… and that’s honestly still better than what I expected of them at this point in their career. So… good job, I guess?

40) Drif, Heilung (Bandcamp)

Heilung are one of the weirder bands that I’ve gotten into in the last couple years, putting out experimental, neolithic, ritualistic folk music which is somehow super metal despite having basically no elements you’d traditionally associate with metal music. Drif is, in many ways, more of the same, but feels like Heilung’s least-interesting album in some crucial aspects. First of all, the entire album is much more chill and low tempo than other Heilung albums, feeling more like what you’d expect of a “traditional” soundscape rather than a series of songs which could run the gamut from atmospheric, to energetic, to experimental gibberish. Heilung albums tend to have at a lot of tracks which are more about the experience: ten minute spoken word rituals, growled rants, repetitive chants, etc – tracks that you’ll listen to once in a blue moon, but more often than not will just get skipped over to get to the good music. Drif, unfortunately, has the weakest tracklist of any Heilung album in my opinion. The only substantial tracks are the first three, “Asja”, “Anoana” and “Tenet”, with the rest being either extended interludes or suffer from noticeably less interesting songwriting. Overall it just makes for an album which is decent and worth a listen, but if you’re familiar with Heilung you can’t help but feel that it’s a missed opportunity. If you’re intrigued by Heilung I would personally recommend seeking out Lifa and watch their live performance if you get the chance – it’s easily their best curated selection of songs and really shows off the band at their best.

39) Tales of Magic, Planeswalker (Bandcamp)

Back in December of 2021, one of my friends finally managed to get me into Magic: The Gathering, and I’ve never forgiven him for it (and, for that matter, neither has my wallet). I don’t really understand the lore that much, but I’ve at least got enough of a knowledge that when I saw a band called “Planeswalker” I realized it was probably MTG-related and decided to check them out. What Planeswalker give us here is some decent power metal, with soaring vocals that are operatic in more ways than one. Many of the songs are full-on narratives, with the band’s dual vocalists often having entire conversations with each other in-character. That said, the MTG-gimmick is the only thing about Tales of Magic which makes it stand out at all – fantasy metal isn’t all that uncommon anyway and there’s nothing special here to make Planeswalker stand out. I guess that’s the issue with basing your music on a card game, there’s no existing sound-scape for you to riff off of unlike, say, all the bands based on video games or movies. Tales of Magic is fine but I lost interest very quickly, if only because I don’t gravitate towards power metal.

38) Inglorious Darkness, Crematory

Crematory are one of those bands with a long career, stretching over thirty years, but I have never checked them out until now. On Inglorious Darkness they bring a distinctly-German flavour of metal, mixing death, power and industrial metal together into their own synthesis. The songwriting is a bit meh and I’m not really a fan of Gerhard Stass’ vocals, but the music is so well-done that I have a hard time holding this against Crematory. I’d recommend checking out the title track and “The Sound of My Life” and see if Inglorious Darkness clicks for you.

37) Blood 1983, In This Moment

Of all the musical projects announced this year, Blood 1983 was probably the biggest surprise for me. Celebrating the tenth anniversary of In This Moment’s landmark album Blood, this EP reimagines some of the biggest tracks from that album in 80s synth-pop style. It’s an intriguing concept to say the least and I appreciate that In This Moment aren’t just looking to make a quick and easy buck off their fans, they’re trying to deliver a transformative, creative venture here.

…unfortunately, the execution on Blood 1983 doesn’t really work. The synth sound on “Adrenalize 1983” really nails the tone this EP’s going for, but the vocals and songwriting don’t really work for the synth pop sound they’re going for; the chorus in particular just sounds like a cacophony. “Blood 1983” really cements the issue here – these songs were written as empowering, high-energy metal tracks, not chill 80s pop tunes, and really don’t work when you try to shove them into that mold. The two tracks that work better are “Burn 1983” and “Whore 1983”. “Burn” is a slower-paced track so it’s better suited to the dreamy soundscape that it’s given here, while “Whore” has been completely reimagined as slowed down, melancholic and reflective track. It’s a really interesting way to transform that track and in-line with the original message, providing a new perspective on it and is easily the highlight of the collection.

Blood 1983 is a real mixed bag. I feel like it’s mostly a failed experiment and hope that it isn’t indicative of In This Moment’s future ventures. Still, as a celebration of the band’s successes, I can’t be too harsh on it and there’s enough good stuff here that fans of the band should definitely give it a listen.

36) The Great Heathen Army, Amon Amarth

Viking metal! I’ve been listening to scattered tracks from Amon Amarth for close to fifteen years now, but I’ve never sat down and listened to a full album from them. The Great Heathen Army is about what I expected from them, providing their brand of power metal/death metal fusion which sounds the exact same as the music they’ve been putting out since 2008. The title track and “Oden Owns You All” got me headbanging, but most of this album is just kind of mediocre and uninspired. It’s far from bad and I can see myself happily putting this on again in future, but it’s clearly a case of one of those metal band that’s long in the tooth churning out yet another album that sounds the same as their last ten.

35) Omens, Lamb of God

Ahh, another major metal band that I’ve never actually listened to until now. I’ve always had some interest in checking them out, if only because my dad saw one of Lamb of God’s shirts in a store one time and got all mistakenly happy because he thought it was a Christian shirt. Omens is relentlessly heavy and aggressive from start to finish, feeling like a mixture of groove metal and death metal. I’ll be honest though, I don’t have a ton to say about it. It’s fine, but it wasn’t really resonating with me. I’d say check out “To the Grave” if you want to get a sample of the album, but otherwise I don’t have a lot of thoughts about it.

34) Color Decay, The Devil Wears Prada

The Devil Wears Prada are another one of those bands that I’ve known about for years but didn’t check out til now… and it kind of feels like I did so about 10 years too late. Color Decay is full of polished, commercial/radio-friendly metalcore and all the angst one would expect to go along with that. Tracks like “Broken” and “Trapped” feel like they’d really resonate with teens, but I’m in my 30s now so it doesn’t really appeal all that much to me. I can appreciate the quality of this album but it just makes me feel old and jaded. That said, I want to give a special shout-out to “Cancer” – that track has a tragic reality to it that gut-punched me. It’s a great way to close out the album and definitely my favourite track of the lot.

33) Key to a Vanishing Future, Falls of Rauros (Bandcamp)

Falls of Rauros make their second appearance on the annual countdown and unfortunately I can’t say that they made much more of an impression on me. It’s still black metal and all that entails (including mediocre-at-best production) although the band’s atmospheric elements help give it a bit more flavour than Vorga at least. Still not enough to make this an album I’m going to remember or want to come back to, but if you’re really into black metal then I’m sure you’re going to love this.

32) Seventh Rum of a Seventh Rum, Alestorm (Bandcamp)

2020’s Curse of the Crystal Coconut single-handedly shook my trust in Alestorm’s ability to thread the line between epic and silly pirate metal, so naturally I approached Seventh Rum of a Seventh Rum with a lot of trepidation. I’d say that Seventh Rum is a slight improvement over the last album, managing to give us some good, fun pirate metal tracks (such as “Magellan’s Expedition” and “Under Blackened Banners”). The album also has two really big surprise successes. The first is “Return to Tortuga”, which chilled my blood at first because “Tortuga” was one of my least favourite tracks on Curse of the Crystal Coconut, so I figured it would be more of the same. Imagine my surprise when it turned out that this was a subversion, because “Return to Tortuga” is essentially the “serious” version of the previous track, even bringing back guest vocalist Captain Yarrface and calling back to that song’s lyrics. It might be my favourite track on the album and shows that Alestorm don’t have to be stupid, they just choose to be… which, honestly, I kind of have to respect. The other big surprise is “Wooden Leg (Part III)”, which had me wondering where the hell Alestorm were going to go given the rather definitive ending in “Part II” on the last album. Turns out that the answer is “not really anywhere”, with “Part III” acting as a final denouement, but it’s the legitimately sombre tone that is the real shocker here and cements the “Wooden Leg” trilogy as an unexpected career highlight for Alestorm.

Unfortunately, Seventh Rum of a Seventh Rum is brought down by some real stinkers. Most odious would be “Canonball”, the obligatory “Fucked With an Anchor” rip-off which had a chorus that literally made me go wide-eyed when I first heard it. “P.A.R.T.Y.” and “Come to Brazil” also suffer for being the five-hundredth juvenile pirate party metal tracks Alestorm have put out and don’t bring anything new to that concept. I also can’t help but be kind of disappointed at how “meh” the title track is, given that the album’s referencing my favourite Iron Maiden album and song.

All-in-all, Seventh Rum of a Seventh Rum keeps a bit more gas in the Alestorm engine and I appreciate that it’s taking a step back towards a more “serious” take on the concept of pirate metal. However, having listened to their first couple albums again recently, it’s shocking just how much the band has turned themselves into a joke. Then again, they joked about scraping the barrel four albums ago and with every new album it feels less like a joke and more like a threat.

31) The End, So Far, Slipknot

Last time we saw Slipknot they were putting out possibly my favourite album of 2019. We Are Not Your Kind saw Slipknot striking a remarkable balance between pleasing fans and charting a path of musical evolution and experimentation for the band. In a lot of ways, The End, So Far seems to be taking a similar course, making even bigger evolutions to Slipknot’s sound while also feeling very similar to Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses), often considered the band’s foray into more mainstream appeal. I spend a lot of time complaining on these countdowns when bands make the same songs over and over and I always give some credit when they branch out to do something different… but man, different does not always mean good, because I just cannot get on board with The End, So Far.

“Adderall” is an interesting opening which sets the tone for what you’re going to be getting – a chill track that I can’t really put my finger on genre-wise. Pop? Jazz? I honestly don’t know, but you end up waiting more than five minutes before you get any sort of metal. Tracks like “The Dying Song (Time to Sing)”, “The Chapeltown Rag”, “Hivemind” and “Medicine for the Dead” should satisfy Slipknot fans, but I feel like they’re still B-tier Slipknot tracks at best. This might be because the whole thing feels sanitized to me in the same sort of way that Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) does. When Slipknot shave off their darker aspects they lose a lot of their energy and bite.

The End, So Far is a mixed bag for me. I’m still deciding if that’s because it’s so different than what Slipknot usually gives me, or if it’s because the songs here really aren’t that great. When I take a step back and think about these songs though, I ask myself “How would people react if these tracks were played live?” For most of them, I think it would be a really muted response compared to Slipknot’s classic tracks. Hell, for a lot of these songs, I can’t even imagine them played live to begin with, they’d feel so out of place. With that in mind, I’m leaning towards The End, So Far being a mediocre release, but it’s one that is going to take some time before I can solidify my feelings on it.

30) Empyrean, Fallujah (Bandcamp)

Empyrean is an atmospheric death metal album which skews towards fast tempos, high energy, heavy sound and screamed and illegible vocals. While tracks can feel a bit same-y at times, when Fallujah let their atmospheric elements loose it can make for some truly epic death metal, particularly on the last two tracks, “Celestial Resonance” and “Artifacts”, which round out the album on a very high note. I’d definitely recommend checking out those two tracks and “Embrace Oblivion” to see if Fallujah are something you’d be interested in.

29) The War to End All Wars, Sabaton (Bandcamp)

Sabaton are one of those bands where you know exactly what you’re going to get out of one of their albums, considering that their sound hasn’t really changed at all since 2008’s The Art of War. Luckily for them, they also put out consistently solid music, so this familiarity hasn’t hurt them too much. The War to End All Wars pushes that familiarity to its limits, because not only is it the same sort of Sabaton that we’re used to, it’s also their second World War I album in three years (plus the three “Echoes of the Great War” EPs that the band will be putting out over the next year, which are basically just over-glorified singles with a bunch of re-released songs; by my own rules I won’t be covering them here, but they’re only adding to the WWI fatigue Sabaton are putting themselves into). The band is clearly passionate about WWI, choosing to put this album out because they had so many stories they still wanted to tell after The Great War, but it can’t help but feel like more of the same. That said, there are some legitimately great tracks on here. “The Unkillable Soldier” is probably the best, “classic” Sabaton track here, nailing that mixture of energetic power metal and the band’s enthusiasm for its heroic subject. “Versailles” is also interesting in how it outwardly has a celebratory tone to mirror the feelings of the Allies at the end of the war, but weaves in a dark, ironic layer because we all know that this victory is going to be fleeting at best. The clear highlight has to be “Christmas Truce” though, the first truly unique Sabaton track in several album cycles, which is like if you took Trans Siberian Orchestra’s “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24” and mashed it with a traditional Sabaton track. It’s epic, tragic and sombre all at once, and will easily be finding a place on my metal Christmas playlists going forward.

All-in-all, The War to End All Wars is fine enough on its own but it feels like a companion piece and is easily among Sabaton’s least-essential albums. Honestly though, the best way to listen to it would probably be to mash together The Great War, The War to End All Wars, and any other WWI tracks and EPs the band has put out, rearrange the tracks in chronological order and listen to them as one big, epic tale of the beginning and end of the First World War.

28) Return to the Void, Shape of Despair (Bandcamp)

Given the name of the album and the band, it should not be surprising that Return to the Void is a funeral doom album. While doom metal has probably become my favourite metal subgenre of the past few years, the funeral doom sub-subgenre is something I’ve only just begun to dabble in, so I was curious to see how Return to the Void would be. It’s about what I expected of this style of music – slow, mournful music with more emphasis on being depressing and atmospheric than on being heavy or energetic, growled vocals and dirge-like backing vocals. Return to the Void doesn’t really do much to deviate from its contemporaries, and being in such a niche genre it is definitely not going to resonate with most people. I found it pretty enjoyable though, especially “Reflection In Slow Time”, the only track to start off properly heavy before transitioning to a very sad duet between the main vocalist death growling while a female vocalist plays off him. It’s easily the best song on the album and if you’re interested in checking out funeral doom it’s a great entry point.

27) Agonist, As The World Dies (Bandcamp)

I always get leery when a band’s website or Bandcamp page really goes hard into hyping them up: it always says something along the lines of “One of the hottest new bands in the metal scene right now!” and will inevitably describe their music as the second coming of Christ. I get that this is how promotion and marketing works in the indie music scene, but so often I’ll see this, then listen to the music and think “It’s a bit shit, actually”. Luckily for As The World Dies, they manage to live up to the lofty hype they hold themselves up to, providing plenty of talented, interesting, and thought-out death metal across Agonist‘s ten tracks. I was enjoying myself throughout Agonist, but it finds itself on the wrong side of that borderline of “this is good” and “I would actually listen to this on a regular basis”. I definitely think that there is an audience who are going to love Agonist and I’m certain I’ll give this more listens in the future, but at this point in time I’m not in love with the album either.

26) Neither Moth nor Rust, Hanging Garden (Bandcamp)

Between Agalloch, Swallow the Sun and Draconian, doom metal may just be my favourite metal sub-genre these days so I’m always on the look-out for interesting new music in the genre. Neither Moss nor Rust by Hanging Garden is pretty low-key by doom metal standards, with mostly-clean vocals (including a second, vastly under-utilized female vocalist) and music that is more moody than heavy. While the EP kind of left me wanting, I did enjoy a couple tracks. “The Last Dance” and “On the Shore of Eternity” are easily the two heaviest songs on the EP and feel like they’re drawing directly from Swallow the Sun’s sound. Weirdly enough, I think my favourite track was “Field of Reeds”, this weird bonus remix which breaks from the rest of the album by being a chill, apocalyptic EDM song. I was shocked how much I liked it, let alone how much better it was than the rest of the album. All-in-all, Neither Moth nor Rust didn’t really inspire me to check out Hanging Garden’s other work but it’s got enough interesting tracks that I’d say it’s worth a listen.

And that’s it for today, be sure to tune back in tomorrow for the second half of this list!