I’m going to start with a couple of honorable mentions. These are primarily albums that just didn’t make it into the top twenty list because other records resonated more with me. Given that I just don’t have that much time this year to write about 35 albums in detail, I had to make cuts. I’ll provide Bandcamp links where I can.

However, there’s a couple of albums I wanted to mention here. For example, playing right now is Beyond the Reach of the Sun by Anciients, a dreamlike prog metal journey that’s a top contender for my next vinyl purchase. It sounds like from a different time, even though songwriting and production are top of the line, and even though it runs for almost an hour, it doesn’t feel like it.

Sticking with the genre, Witch Club Satan impressed me with its mixture of old-school black metal, humor and artistic intent, demonstrating that there is still much to explore artistically. Finally, I’d like to mention Dzikkuh by Arka’n Asrafokor, a phenomenal record that mixes thrash-y riffs with traditional African instruments. It almost made the list, but I’m already cheating to make my limit of twenty entries work, so I thought I’d write a short sentence about it here.

I saw Gnome live at the Lazy Bones festival last year. They’re fun and goofy and I actually bought a red gnome pointed hat at their merch table. With their new album Vestiges of Verumex Visidrome, I was glad to see that they lean heavily into their goofy side while still delivering heavy, butt-kicking riffs. It’s playful, creative and fun and also more than a little bit silly, but that’s exactly what we’re here for. Also, it takes serious courage to write, perform, record and produce a verse riff like that in the albums opener (Old Soul) in an age and genre that often seems to discourage this kind of playfulness.

Some day in spring, KALANDRA made me cry with The State of the World, a beautiful, sad video to an even more beautiful, sad song. I was ready to put a single song on the honorable mentions list, then some day in fall, the album dropped and I quickly discovered liking it quite much. There’s a warmth in here that’s missing from much of my musical diet (which, as you will soon realize, mostly consists of frosted black metal and sounds that remind me of swamps), but it’s still quite dark. In addition, tracks such as Are You Ready? remind me a lot of early Darren Korb stuff, which is always a plus. Bardaginn, on the other hand, smokes most other folk rock and metal bands in a pipe, while I’ll Get There One Day seemingly seems to channel Hans Zimmer’s Dune score. Speaking of it, the whole album feels cinematic, score-like and modern. Since I don’t have any soundtracks on my list this year, it’s going to do the heavy lifting in that category, which it’s more than up to for.

Before I became a metalhead, I was a huge fan of German (pop) punk bands Die Ärzte and Die Toten Hosen. Ever since meeting my lovely partner, whose music taste is heavily influenced by alternative rock and pop music, I’ve been reconnecting with that side of me. I started discovering bands for myself that I wouldn’t have touched as a seventeen year old kid for not being metal enough. Today, I’m not afraid anymore to enjoy artists such as Tocotronic or Tomte, and because of that, while on a Thees Uhlmann concert, I got to know Grillmaster Flash, who was on support duty that fateful night.

Grilli, as he’s called affectionately, is a singer and songwriter from Bremen. He’s got some hilarious songs, especially one about Sottrum, in which he mercilessly roasts heavy metal fans from rural northern Germany. It’s funny because it’s true, it stings a little because Sottrum is just about twenty kilometers away from where I grew up, and it’s a hint that Grilli himself knows a thing or two about metal. And look at that, this year he released a metal album that walks the fine line between parody and sincerity, and he somehow even got two thirds of Die Ärzte involved. FLÆSH MËTAL, as it’s called, is a lovingly mocking love letter to classic heavy metal and overall just loads of fun. Titles such as Ich glaube an den Rasenmähermann (“I believe in the lawnmower man”) or Bremen-Nord Powerchord are revealing the parody of the whole piece, but their hooks are memorable and easy to sing to. Im Weltall Nichts Neues (“Nothing New in Space”), a seven minute epic, even manages to come off as sincere as some of the old legends of metal. I like it a lot, and the fact that it was recorded in a studio even closer to the town I grew up in than Sottrum (as revealed in the Outro) makes it perfect for me.

I might have mentioned this before, but there are factors beyond the actual music that I consider when making these lists. Primarily, I’m looking for themes and concepts, and, in the best case, strong cover artwork to go with that. So when I saw the cover art for Exist’s Hijacking the Zeitgeist, I knew that I was in for something special.

The theme of technology stealing our souls might not be the most unique, but it’s relevant in a world in which tech companies seek not to serve humanity, but to control it. Personally, in a year in which I started to distance myself from services such as Spotify and OneDrive as well as Social Media, it felt like the right soundtrack to accompany these steps with.

Evergrey is at it again with Theories of Emptiness. There are lots of anthems to sing, there is supreme heaviness, there is the obligatory slow song, and there is a lot of sadness. What can I say, I love Evergrey and it pains me a bit that I missed their tour stop in Hamburg in late November. I hope they will be back soon. In the meantime, I’ll listen to the final track before the outro, Our Way Through Silence, because I’m a big softy when I’m not listening to big edgy evil boy music.

Before I deleted my Threads account this year, one of the People I Know From The Internet stated that Dark Tranquillity have never released a bad album in their entire career, and I’m inclined to agree. Dark Tranquillity is one of my favorite bands of all time, period. Even though I kind of dropped out of keeping up with current releases after Fiction and the brilliant, in my eyes and ears even legendary live album Where Death is most Alive, I will never forget how the band got me through bad days at school, breakups, and, well, Guild Wars: Nightfall. They are an inspiration behind what I do, and Mikael Stanne is arguably one of metal’s most charismatic front people.

That being said, a new Dark Tranquillity album always has to measure up against these memories and entrenched feelings. I’m biased both in favor as well as against any new album. And while it’s true that their 2024 album, Endtime Signals, cannot live up to the nostalgia I have for Character, Haven, Damage Done or Projector, it’s a great record nonetheless. There are some elements and songs that seem to remember classic Dark Tranquillity, and I would have probably loved songs such as Shivers and Voids, Not Nothing or The Last Imagination as much as I love Lost to Apathy, My Negation or Monochromatic Stains if they had been released alongside them. The songwriting is strong here, but one of my personal highlights is the ballad that’s called One of Us Is Gone, which was a gut punch right into my own grief-ridden soul. I was able to put some of the feelings I had suppressed over the year into tears with that song, and so I can another thing to the list of things that Dark Tranquillity helped me getting through.

I love a strong concept. Correction: I love even a weak concept. Doesn’t really matter. So if you’d lean over to me and softly whisper „science fiction space black metal“ into my ear, you’d have me in your hands. Because that’s exactly what I want to listen to while reading the Warhammer 40k Tyranid Codex, and Beyond the Palest Star by VORGA is doing that pretty well. The cold aesthetic of black metal and the indifference of space fit together rather naturally, turns out. I had no trouble in picturing the sonic scenes and landscapes that VORGA paint as epic deep space images, and while it’s perhaps not as much my jam as Terminal Redux by space-themed thrash metal legends Vektor, it found a steady place in my rotation this year.

Speaking of a strong concept, one of the most amazing records I got to listen to this year was Weibermacht by Folterkammer, BDSM-from-a-female-perspective-themed black metal with an opera singer on lead vocals, featuring titles such as Das Peitschengedicht (“the whip poem”), Leck Mich! (“lick me”, but also in some contexts it can mean “bite me”) or Anno Domina (lol). And it’s awesome. In an interview on YouTube channel Heavy Metal Philosophy, lead singer Andromeda Anarchia (lovely name) suggests that talking – or rather singing – about female sexuality, expression of sexuality, and female power might be one of the last things to shock with in metal, and I can see that. Male sexuality gets celebrated, female sexuality is a taboo, and it’s great to see black metal band actually crossing a line, and even more so, doing it with lots of humor and compositions that sound almost classical. Plus, the cover art is probably the best cover art of the year. When you see it, you’ll get why. I’m a simple man.

On a more serious note, this year being a year in which my depression got the hold of me for the better part of the year, one thing that I found solace in was Transzendenz Schatten Romantik by Weltenbrandt. Its second track, Apotropaion, quickly became one of my favorite tracks of the year. Going over the whole album, it was pretty easy for myself to get lost in the sadness of the album’s melodies and just let myself go for a while.

One of my favorite tracks of all time is Solitude by Oubliette, so I was bound to check out their new release this year, Eternity Whispers. And while it took me a while and, finally, a purchase of the album on Bandcamp to truly get into it, I eventually grew to love its dense atmosphere. To my ears, it evokes a dark and overgrown forest riddled with patches of swamp puddles, a dangerous, but darkly beautiful otherworld of undisturbed nature and the indifferent cycle of life, decay and rebirth. Musically, aside from the flawless, stellar musicianship, I especially appreciated the short melodic death segments in the middle of Dreams of Nevermore, loaned straight from the genre’s best times. But that’s just a single thing to highlight. This is one of those records that reveal more and more details of their sonic landscape the more you listen to it, and every single one of them is worth taking another listen.

I switched jobs this year and was delighted to find some hardcore, rock and metal people at my new place of work. One of them recommended Gatecreeper to me (among other things) and I decided to check out their recent record, Dark Superstition, while on my way to the Frankfurter Buchmesse.

And as I might be saying more than once on this list, I was not disappointed. While not quite the same thing, they remind me a lot of At the Gates and early 90’s In Flames, especially in the vocal performance, while still being their own thing. The songwriting is superb, melodic and memorable, the distortion and the cymbals sound appropriately nasty, and it’s probably the most pissed-off sounding vocal performance on this whole list. More than any other album on this list, it’s probably a bit harder to get into because of its harsh sound, and I have to admit that I’m not always in the mood for it myself. But when I need it, it’s great and awesome.

In the category of “not quite black metal but with enough stylistic elements taken from the genre that it kinda sorta counts if you squint”, Boezem by Vuur & Zijde sound unlike anything else on this list. Featured reviews on the album’s Bandcamp page describe it as “dripping with Gothic atmosphere” or even “blackened post-punk”, and while I tend to agree, it’s actually quite hard to describe, especially for me, amateur writer person that I am. Anyway, it’s dark and atmospheric. The lyrics are sung in Dutch, which is a wonderful language that lends itself quite perfectly to metal vocals, but they’re sung with a clean, almost ethereal voice, which takes some of the edge out of it. The production feel warm and somewhat even cozy, fitting for a band name that translates to Fire and Silk. I want to pull this album and the heavy atmosphere it conjures over my head like the weighted blanket I sleep under at night and sink into a dark and dreamless slumber.

Thanks to my buddy Rolf, I’m getting to know a load of stoner and doom bands once a year when he kidnaps me from whatever I’m doing to take me to the Lazy Bones festival in Hamburg. This year, I fell in love with Daevar from Cologne and was glad to find out that they had an album that had come out this year. Amber Eyes, as it’s called, is pretty great. To me, it feels swampy and muddy in the best way possible, with ethereal, echoing vocals laying a foggy, dream-like mist over it. Being in my witch era in October (probably due to a recent binge of both The Owl House and Agatha All Along), it was the song Caliban And The Witch that I grew especially fond of, humming its chorus for days after the festival.

Five years after releasing one of my favorite albums of all time, Alcest are back with a new record. However, because Spiritual Instinct had gotten me through the emotional turmoil that was writing my master’s thesis a couple of years back, the hill the new album would have had to climb was steep. I often listen to specific eras of a band’s career and am totally fine with new material not reaching the emotional heights that certain albums make me feel (see: Dark Tranquillity, or In Flames). So when information came out about the new album being a bit more on the bright and uplifting side, I was fine with writing it off as probably not being my thing.

But then the first single dropped, L’Envol. I had to turn it off after the first one or two minutes, for one because I didn’t want to spoil the rest of the song until I got my crusty fingers on the whole album, but mostly because I was crying tears of melancholic joy. The combination of the songwriting, production and the beautiful images in the video were too much for me to handle.

And then the album came out, in all of its joyful sadness. I don’t know, but there’s something that Neige and his crew managed to touch inside of mew with the end-of-summer-soon-the-leaves-are-gonna-fall-and-what-if-this-is-our-last-summer-together atmosphere. We’re all going to fall like leaves, some of us sonner than later, so let’s enhoy our last golden days in the sun together (also, on a scale from “Yes” to “Absolutely”, how perfect is the video for Flamme Jumelle?).

People who know me might have heard me saying that I like big monsters and I can not lie, Kaiju always get me to listen up. So when I stumbled upon Kaiju-themed death metal band Oxygen Destroyer, named after the cruel weapon that defeated Godzilla in the very first movie in 1954, I knew I had to check them out. And I wasn’t disappointed. Guardian of the Universe is roughly half an hour of awesome, neck-breaking death metal that crosses over into thrash metal at just the right moments. Guess I gotta check out the Gamera movies after all.

Being loosely related to the genre of Japanese monster movies itself – giant moths from space may invoke memories of famous Mothra, after all – Lord of the Insect Order by Monolith is a similarly short but effective journey through an insect apocalypse. Musically, tremolo guitars lend themselves well to conjuring up the titular swarm, and there are moments of strange, alien beauty in the whole dark and brutal piece of art that is this album. I would classify it as deathcore but without much of the cliché of other acts, far more interested in building a coherent sonic landscape than in partaking in the guitar/drums/vocal olympics. Plus, any band that dares to sample the 1996 Roland Emmerich cinematic masterpiece Independence Day is a paragon of exquisite taste in my book, so there’s that.

I’m constantly amazed at what is possible in music, and I admire artists who can seamlessly weave elements into their songs that seem unusual at first. And even though Solemn by In Vain took a few spins to fully click with me, I knew that I had to give it a few more plays when I first heard the brass section in the ending of the album’s opener, Shadows Flap Their Black Wings. Then there’s a saxophone solo in Season of Unrest and it, well, slaps, as the kids tend to say today (do they still)?

Not to say that these highlights are the only qualities of Solemn, because they aren’t. There are key changes between parts that a lesser band would struggle with, but they work here. The guitar work is excellent, as is the drumming, and then there are the clean vocals. Boy, over time they really got to me and I can see myself humming those melancholic melodies for years to come.

In the end, it only took a couple of listening sessions for me to know that Solemn would not only make the list, but become a contender for the album of the year.

If I had to describe what black metal means to me, and I want to stress that: to me personally, in a single word, I would answer with “defiance.” Black metal is defiance, resistance and rebellion, and no other black metal record than Bloom & Decay, as much as it’s also about “Cycles of life and death, grief and glory, hope and melancholy” (taken from Dawn Treader’s Bandcamp page), represented that feeling for me this year. That might have to do with the speeches that feature on some of the tracks, but it’s also in the music: black metal, in the form that most resonated with me this year, is a scream of pain against the universe, against the burden of existence, or the cruel and unjust systems that we built. A sign of life, of us being here in this very moment within a cold and unfeeling universe. It’s a primal and ultimately tragic scream into the void, it’s suffering, and yet at the same time, there’s beauty in it, in our futility to create lasting meaning in the ever changing spaces we inhabit. We don’t give up. We don’t go without a scream of anguish. We do not go quietly into the night. Will we be remembered or, to reference the brilliant cover art, will our spines and rib cages become silent, decaying monuments of our pain?

Look, I’ve written about two hundred words now without saying anything that deep or cohesive, but this album made me feel things this year, man.

Mariner by Cult of Luna is one of my favorite albums of all time, and it’s in large parts because of the unbelievable vocals featured artist Julie Christmas lends to all of the five tracks. I know, I’m original and cool and not like the other boys in my scene. But jokes aside, the album was there for me during a difficult time, and I am still in awe of not only the deeply atmospheric compositions, but also the screams, whispers and chants of Julie Christmas.

And even though I don’t follow her actively, I somehow got to hear about the release of a new solo album. And with a title as wonderfully twisted as Ridiculous And Full Of Blood, how could I not be instantly in love with it? Listening to the album revealed a whole world of vocal range and raw, emotional power, something that feels incredibly punk in tone but not in structure, defiant, angry, yet playful and and creative at the same time, supported by a stellar production that sounds way more rough than it actually is. Seriously, this probably one of my favorite albums of the year just for how it sounds, songwriting and performances aside. While listening to it, I repeatedly felt myself compelled to put it on top of this year’s list, and in a weaker year, it would have probably stayed there.

From the first seconds, Where Gods Fear to Speak is a masterpiece in heavy, thick atmospheric songwriting and production wrapping me up like a blanket made from centuries of sorrow and anger. Heavy riffs, perfect drums and Cammie Gilbert-Beverly’s unmatched vocal performance create a world that, once I decide to enter it, I don’t want to leave. They take me on a journey through a dark and beautiful realm, and then, on top of that, they bring out Mikael Stanne for some of the most memorable guest vocals I’ve listened to this year.

Also, I need to talk about the album title. What I got from it while listening to the album is that someone is angry with the gods, and the gods are afraid to speak up against it. I don’t like to throw around that overused word lightly, but that’s a badass title. It picks you up right where you need to be for the sonic journey ahead, and if it wasn’t for the previous entry, this would have won the non-existing album title of the year category (I really need to do cover art and title categories next year).

As with many bands and artists on here, I get to know a lot of them via the black forbidden magic of following cool people on social media. Hiraes is a good example for that. I’ve been following lead singer Britta Görtz on Instagram for a while because I was considering a vocal workshop, and took the opportunity to check out their new album when it arrived early this year.

What I didn’t expect was that this would be everything I want from a melodic death metal album. If you would have given this to my almost sixteen year old self in 2004 instead of In Flames‘ Reroute to Remain, this would have been the thing that would have kicked my ass from the fence between punk and metal I was sitting on into full-on metal territory. I would have written fantasy stories based on tracks from this. The opening trio of Through the Storm, We Owe No One and Undercurrent alone reminded me of why I love this subgenre, its energy, and its underlying melancholy. And with the almost hymnic chorus of Undercurrent, I knew from during my first listening session that I would have to put this in the top ten of this list.

The most interesting part to me is that there is nothing particularly special about this album in terms of composition, arrangement, performance or production. It’s just a well-made record that speaks to me on a personal, emotional level. And that’s enough for me to give Dormant the top spot, even in a year that has amazing, genre-pushing records.

There’s a couple of bands that I listened to as a teen, and then somehow didn’t anymore when I grew older. Thrash/power metal legend and symphonic metal pioneer (at least in Germany) Rage is one of these bands. Me and my classmates got to know them in the early 2000’s because of a song used on the soundtrack of a then-popular German comedy movie that has aged like fine milk. But the song had power, then one friend in particular got into Rage, and by the power of schoolyard exchange of CDs, Rage found their place in my friend group’s pantheon of favorite metal bands. Soundchaser and Unity played themselves into my heart, and me and my friends went to see Rage live together, and to this day, counting festival appearances, Rage is probably the band I’ve seen the most (tied with Dark Tranquillity, perhaps). I still got my Speak of the Dead tour longsleeve with me, although I’m way too fat to wear it today.