Editor's note: just like 2025 and 2024 before it, we are eschewing a "classic", big ol' list of albums we liked from 2026 so far. Lists are fun but they make no sense ("this album is number 12 and this album is number 9" are words uttered by the insane). Instead, we will be using the next few weeks to highlight our favorite trends, releases, shows, cover art, experiences, and more from the first half of this (musically) excellent year.
It should be common knowledge by now (for the blog’s readership at least) that I have left narratives in the rear view mirror. As I’ve said before, I think that’s just the virtue of the passage of time: you can only see your carefully constructed structures fade away so many times before you give up building them in the first place. But that doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to add any structure to our analysis of music; far from it. Instead, all we have to do is try to focus on smaller scopes. When we try to understand years as arbitrary units of time, and the cycles of releases that come with things like finances, listener fatigue, marketing schedules, and the such, then we find that we understand more, not less, of why some things are happening.
But there are phenomena that defy that sort of reading as well. They don’t sit quite well in either of the buckets. They’re not grand narratives on one side nor totally random occurrences on the other and that forces us to deploy and oft-memed perspective: nuance. Here’s an example for you: in 2026, there were many, many excellent releases in the field of technical/progressive thrash metal. We’ve spoken about on the blog before how even using the term causes people to scratch their heads because the sub-genre flowered briefly at the end of the 90’s and then faded away. To be sure, not all bands are gone; Voivod has been making music ever since then after all. But also to be sure, there hasn’t been a “wave” of technical thrash metal so much as droplets here or there, excellent albums but not really anything constituting a “revival”.
But here we are in 2026 and let me just rattle off the list of bands: Wildhunt, Bekor Qilish, Cryptic Shift, Microwaves, Inscribed. I missed a few, I’m sure; those are just the ones I really liked (and that don’t use AI in their music, cough). That’s more than just an album here or there. It doesn’t quite make sense to pass this off as “release cycles”; most of these bands have not released an album in a few good years. It’s also not a micro-scene (local to a specific city) or even a scene located on a certain style of technical thrash. Cryptic Shift is ultra-technical and intricate while Wildhunt hits on the more sweeping, progressive, heavy metal vibes of the style. But they all congregate around fast riffs made complex by composition, instrument choice, or just sheer scope.
On the other hand, I bet you that next year, and the year after that even, won’t have ten more technical thrash metal albums or at least not any as good as most of these. So if you jump the gun and start talking about a “renaissance” or a “revival”, you’re going to look pretty silly very soon (trust me, I’ve been there). So what are we to do? We can’t just shrug and say “oh this is all coincidence” and we also don’t want to say “the stars have ordained that technical thrash metal must return!” So let me offer you a nuanced middle ground - technical thrash metal has always been around as a style of metal. After all, we named Voivod above but there have been other bands working in the style all across these last three decades or so since it began.
Think of technical thrash metal as a potentiality or a color in a palette, if you’d prefer something less abstract. There was always the possibility of someone, anyone, reaching out for that color and making the potential real (woof). And so, whenever someone does that, it’s not really a surprise and it’s not random; it’s one of the ways in which metal can be made. But nor is there a grand narrative at play, some aligning of cursed stars which makes the genre suddenly popular. Rather, artists reach for a certain color and it’s not a surprise that some of them reach for the same one. Sometimes, the conditions of a current point in time can nudge the hand and make more of them want to paint a certain type of picture and, when that happens, they all reach into the same tool box.
This also explains why all of the albums I'm going to link to in this post don't sound the same. It's not about a certain sound being adhered to but rather a sort of style influencing or inspiring a larger group of bands. Some of the bands are melodic; others rely on soul-crushing dissonance and intricacy. But they all have that edge to them, that combination of thrash's speed, progressive metal's flamboyant technicality, and bits of pieces from jazz, heavy metal, death metal, and more. There is something in the air, as if all of the bands are emanating from a common source upon which they bifurcate and fractal into different, yet similar, vectors.
And there is the only positive statement I am willing to risk committing to: there is something in the air which calls forth the mode of technical thrash metal. I leave it to the reader to try and think about some answers for what that is as I am sure there is more than one. But I would like you to consider my favorite explanation: as things become more plastic, more sloppified, less human, more fake and polished but actually ugly (yes because of AI but more because of the social trends which gave birth to AI like, you know, fascism) the more we yearn for authenticity. We would like to replace the vapid joy of smoothness for the raw pleasure of friction. We want less marketing and more truth, less appeal and more passion, less consumption and more feasting. And what is more authentic, gritty, frictionful (that’s a word, shut up), and uncompromising than a genre known for taking something already very fast and making it also very complex?