Summer in its awful, relentless, pestilential warmth continues to its apex. Trees are overgrown. Grass is wilting under the oppressive sun. Fires sprouting on a weekly basis. I hate it. I need to cool. Give me the frost. GIVE ME BLACK METAL.
Those of you who are also burning up in all this god damned sweltering heat can rest assured that the last few months brought us a premium selection of choice black metal cuts to cool our overheated hearts and add a little ice to the soul. Give them a listen below and let us know about your favorites in the comments.
That’s all I’ve got. It’s too fucking hot in here. Stay frosty, if you can.
-Jonathan Adams
Winter’s Crown
Krallice - Inorganic Rites
New York’s prolific and definitively “most interesting” experimental black metal maestros Krallice have been on a unique tear over the past several years. Digging deep into their bag of tricks, the group have carved a niche in the spaces of progressive and experimental black metal that is truly unrivaled by any of their peers. For every album filled with intense guitar wankery like Demonic Wealth, there’s an ambient space case of a record like Porous Resonance Abyss. For every Psychagogue, a Mass Cathexis 2 counterpoint. This band has been extremely difficult to pin down stylistically since the release of Go Be Forgotten in 2017, and it unfortunately appears that these most recent dreamlike sessions may have come to an end with the closing of Colin Marston’s current iteration of Menegroth Studio, with uncertainty as to where and when it will be reconstructed. So in more ways than one 2024’s Inorganic Rites feels a lot like the closing of a chapter for this era of Krallice, and quite frankly I cannot imagine a more fitting curtain call. This record is sublime.
If, within all of the tonal and aesthetic acrobatics Krallice has thrown at you over the past few years, you crave a record that combines all of the elements that have made this iteration of Krallice so fascinating into one coherent unit, Inorganic Rites will please your ears in every conceivable manner. In a way, Inorganic Rites feels like a compendium of the band’s collective recent history, blending raucous and intense black metal passages with synth-heavy atmospherics and unpredictable tone and subgenre switches that feel on the surface like they shouldn’t work. But much to the contrary, outside of Porous Resonance Abyss, Inorganic Rites is Krallice’s most aesthetically and tonally cohesive record of the past several years. With all that is going on sonically in this record, that’s honestly quite the feat. “Flatlines Encircled Residue” is one of the best examples of the band’s streamlined approach to their disparate sounds on the album, with the music bubbling, flooding, pooling, and falling in a cavalcade of textures and movements that never feel incoherent despite their diversity. It’s honestly an extremely impressive work of musical magic, and I have to commend Krallice for taking an entire half-decade’s worth of work and distilling it into something that feels palatable, coherent, and constantly engaging. There isn’t a dud of a track on the record, and it may be among my favorite releases the band have thus far unleashed.
If at any point you found yourself blown away by a Krallice album over the past 4-5 years, Inorganic Rites is an essential listen. Not only will you find the things you enjoy most about whichever record suited your fancy, but the best possible version of that sound. Krallice have been working tirelessly to push the envelope when it comes to the development of their sound, and Inorganic Rites, much like Go Be Forgotten, feels like a logical closing statement and a creative apex for this chapter. Here’s hoping Colin Marston can lock down his next studio space soon, because I cannot wait to see what the next few years will bring for one of the most unique and unpredictable black metal bands on the planet. A stirring, very high recommendation.
-JA
Best of the Rest
Wormwitch - Self-titled
Wormwitch are not the most experimental of black metal bands, yet still their sound is a bit hard to pin down. Their debut, Strike Mortal Soil, while not an entirely sonically straightforward record, held fast to most of the principal tenets of blistering black metal with some definitive heavy metal elements and riffage. Their sophomore record, however, felt like a massive sea change in sound and execution. Heaven That Dwell Within took a much folkier approach, leaning closer to the stylings of bands like Tribulation and a more straightforward Obsequiae than anything else. Then came Wolf Hex, which found the band leaning more heavily into more intense and dark black metal territory, stripping away some of the subgenre trappings for a leaner, meaner sound without losing some of their folkier elements. This distillation down into even more straightforward core elements with each passing record leads us to their self-titled fourth LP, which may be the most balanced and ferocious of the bunch.
Kicking off with their most aggressive opening track yet, “Fugitive Serpent” is an absolute barnburner of a track that shows the band at their most intense and insane, digging into almost Icelandic levels of ferocity ala Misthyrming or Sinmara. It’s a premium jolt of energy that gets the record started in the right way, offering listeners immediate engagement. Things get no less intense or blistering from there, with follow-up track “Envenomed” displaying just as much ravenous hunger for violence as its predecessor (though with perhaps a touch more melody). At this juncture it may start to feel like Wormwitch are just leaning into the nasty for a whole record, but on the above note of balance, there is a solid amount of diversity in the album’s following tracks. “The Helm and the Bow” contains a full on heavy metal mid-section that will make fans of Eternal Champion and Visigoth smile, while “Inner War” leans heavily into the band’s folk-adjacent forays, providing listeners with some gorgeous acoustic guitar passages to calm the swelling black metal storm. This dance of juxtaposition and balance plays out until the album’s lecherous and brutal final track, sending the album out on a violent and merciless high note.
Where Wormwitch’s fourth studio album falls in their discography is a question I have not been able to fully answer yet, but make no mistake that Wormwitch is a truly mesmerizing, focused, and punishing black metal affair that gave me intense levels of satisfaction throughout. Wormwitch possess an uncanny ability to blend and incorporate various sounds without ever creating an experience that feels disjointed or slow. This is a record with violent intent, and it executes its mission brilliantly. It’s this emphasis in intensity that makes the record’s softer, more nuanced moments all the more impactful and compelling. It’s the complete package, and comes to you highly recommended.
-JA
Malconfort - Humanism
Blame the heat, blame the crushing weight of multiple end-of-times omens, blame climate change, blame…whatever, but black metal became WEIRD this summer. Experimental releases abound, all attacking our sanity via auditory assault. But few came swinging out of left field like Malconfort.
The U.K.-based pseudonymous trio features a name inspired by Deathspell Omega and members of Sea Mosquito and Amaltheia. Unsurprisingly, their sound is deeply unsettling, taking the jagged edges of free-form jazz and mummifying them with atmospheric black metal. Like a restless spirit returned from the grave, Humanism bristles with agitation and aggression, flickering across uneven rhythms, howling vocals, and brooding melodies.
Melancholic guitars wrapped in a chilling atmosphere swirl through the haze, never lingering long enough to become fully known or understood. But their icy bite contains all the power of traditional black metal songwriting, deliberately juxtaposing themselves against glimpses of warm jazz. Malconfort’s dueling vocalists, known only as Nuun and Kopczak, heighten the unnerving sensation of Humanism by alternating between mad laughter, frighteningly calm muttering, and haunting screams.
The chaos feels tightly controlled and deliberately executed in a grandiose design we can never truly understand.
-Bridget Hughes
Amun - Spectra And Obsession
To be clear, this album did not release this month - it was released in 2023. Also to be clear, Amun are sadly no longer in operation. However, I did come across this album last month and it is so fucking good that I had to write it up as soon as I could. Spectra And Obsession, at its core, is a progressive black metal album that proves why that sub-genre deserves its own label, distinct from avantgarde black metal or experimental black metal. Put simply, Spectra And Obsession is wild, absolutely boundless in its choice of sounds or influences. It’s a black metal with tracks longer than thirty minutes (and multiple ones that are longer than 20) that has EDM influences alongside caustic black metal riffs, cheesy meloblack synths, and killer death metal riffs. Oh and saxophones, violas, violins, dulcimers, and a harp.
By the way, yes, I did say EDM - check out “The Father’s Foundation” which opens this absolutely impossible to define release. It has glitches all across it, always adding something more than just gimmick, a certain heaviness and unbridled energy that’s hard to resist. It also has those synths I mentioned above, which slowly burgeon as the track picks up in pace only to shatter on a somber, frosted passage that reminds one of Empyrium. That is, until the vocoder vocals kick in. It’s just one of those releases which, somehow, manages to tie all of these disparate influences together into something magnificent.
I am probably going to be spending months, if not years, fully diving into and deciphering this one. It truly feels like something special, so ambitious as to almost collapse but narrowly avoiding that fate and soaring into greatness. For that, I had to include it here, regardless of timing or scope.
-Eden Kupermintz