Colin Williams' Top Albums of 2022

Way back in early February, when the senseless war in Ukraine was but a twinkle in Putin’s eye, Krvvla released one of the year’s bleakest albums, seeming to anticipate the dark cloud that would soon envelop Eastern Europe. X is concise for a full-length, but not a second of it serves anything other than conjuring some of the most wrathful black metal of the young decade, as Ted Nubel covered. X sees the Belarusian four-piece add vocals for the first time. Emerging from their instrumental chrysalis, Krvvla has given voice to the particularly potent strain of nihilism infecting that part of the world.

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Petrale holds the title of my favorite Metal Archives “Lyrical themes” section: “Manifestations of the devil in a rural Mediterranean Catholic area.” Vrh certainly sounds like a manifestation of the devil, with its squalls of guitar and skin-crawling vocal delivery. This black metal solo project has a timeless evil to it, evoking both time-honored genre tropes and avant-garde twists while seeming to sneer at both.

Then comes Petrale’s cover of Croatian funk artist Dino Dvornik’s “Jače Manijače.” Like a humorous intermission in a passion play, this goofy moment works almost like reverse psychology, rendering the writhing black metal on either side even more sinister. Who ever said the Devil doesn’t have a sense of humor?

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What I’ve jokingly called “settler colonialismcore” in black metal has seen a lot of growth in recent years, but the year’s best in the category to my ears came from Canada’s Vital Spirit. Like the sunny cover art, the short song lengths and catchy riffs belie a reckoning with the darker side of Canada’s colonial history. Vital Spirit succeeds in having it both ways, maintaining a depth and sorrow while unleashing bangers like “The Long Walk.” It’s an emotive record with balanced mixing, cohesive structure and a powerful narrative at its core—this is the musical equivalent of a Cormac McCarthy novel with the added benefit of being enjoyable to revisit (don’t @ me).

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I got to talk to Inanna about their latest release, Void of Unending Depths, earlier this year. While doubling down on my earlier assessment that this is 2022’s best death metal release, I’ll add that it’s one of the best metal records overall for its sophistication and, if you’ll pardon me, depth. “Cabo de Hornos” in particular, is an aural voyage through the Tierra del Fuego that reaches some hair-raising peaks of riffage. Inanna are blazing their own trail in the far reaches of melodic death metal. The Chileans have been around for more than a decade, and their experience and confidence in assembling such a sheer volume of ideas into something that manages to be graceful is a musical feat.

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From the opening roar, Hegemone’s Voyance is an oppressively grand record, an edifice of sheer basalt faces cloaked in poisonous vapors. Ted Nubel described it well as “simply immense,” and among 2022’s post-whatever releases, this one surely had the highest walls of sound. Though it’s still recognizably in the same post-doom vein as other Cult of Neurosis (are we still allowed to say that?) acts, Voyance also ventures further than 2018’s We Disappear. There are moments of clarity, like on “Abeyance,” and even flirtations with overt rock riffage, like on “Solace,” but Hegemone always manages to add another layer or reach another level beyond expectations.

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Much has been said about Wormrot this year, including by this writer, so I’ll keep it brief: holy shit. No grindcore record has any business being this long and still laying down such a consistent beatdown, yet multiple bands (see Narakah and Cloud Rat above) pulled that very feat off in 2022. That said, Wormrot did it best for my money. They basically sum up the genre’s entire history at hyperspeed in one album, and it not only works; it rules.

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