Alex Chan's Top Albums of 2023

Zchmach’s second demo is a potent little firecracker that quickly became one of my most frequently played releases of the year. Now, this is partially due to the fact that Karyta Dzieda Platona is only 13 minutes long (which I suppose is the length of the average grindcore album), but also because it just freakin’ rips, man. Here’s what I had to say a few months ago when I featured it on Cheap Thrills:

“While much of the demo is fairly fast and furious, the more atmospheric and textured moments truly steal the show. On standouts like “Rybcy Railway Station” and “Weeping Willow Root,” the keys gently drape over the other instruments like a gossamer curtain, granting them an eerie, ghostly elegance.”

With the amount of growth demonstrated between their first two releases, I eagerly await Zhmach’s next move–we can only hope that a full-length will grace our ears in the near future.

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South Korean shoegaze wunderkind Parranoul made waves in 2021 with his second album, wistfully titled To See the Next Part of the Dream. It was rough around the edges in the way that one would expect from a bedroom shoegaze project, but also undeniably earnest and catchy.

After the Magic is paradoxically more polished and even noisier than its predecessor, with opener “Polaris” acting as a Trojan horse that lures listeners in with jangly dream pop just before it blossoms into gloriously glitchy shoegaze crunch. The album is full of such sneaky bombast, building up to cathartic explosions of strings and pianos and horns and bells and synths and at least a score of guitar tracks–the sonic equivalent of a sugar rush. Listen to this one straight through, and you’ll be buzzing for hours. 

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Vastum prove once again that they are the reigning monarchs of mid-paced death metal, delivering yet another sickening slab of psychosexual blasphemy. Abdul-Rauf and Butler trade barks and growls in guttural call-and-response, their sermons rife with gruesome imagery that will haunt the pious and chaste alike. Steadily pummeling percussion and bass shake the cathedral foundations like the approach of some shambling horror, and the guitars prove equally adept at hammering out concussive palm-muted chugs or trepanning helpless listeners with drill-like tremolo riffs. Vastum is one of the most consistent death metal bands in the business, and <em>Inward to Gethsemane</em> is a ghastly, gory triumph that still gets my blood pumping every time I hear it.

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On their third full length, Chepang unleash a bewildering 29-track salvo of grindcore, friendship, and noise–in that order. SWATTA is a multifaceted work in the most literal sense; mapped out onto two LPs, each of the album’s sides reveals a different vision of extreme music that shows Chepang’s familiar brand of grinding madness gradually evolving into a many-headed maximalist beast. 

The middle sections feature a veritable murderer’s row of guest musicians who contribute everything from saxophone to synthesizers. Just think: thanks to Chepang, you can hear Dirk Verbeuren, Mick Barr, and Takafumi Matsubara on the same track. Then we have the bizarre and potentially controversial final movement, created by feeding the rest of the album into a machine learning model set to “grindcore.” It’s exactly the level of wackiness that I expect from Chepang, but also a sign that the band is down to try just about anything to push themselves and their craft to the absolute limit. 

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After sporadically releasing a handful of new tracks in the early 2010s, Fabricant have finally sporulated with Drudge to the Thicket, a twisted tech-death monstrosity unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. The band may only be a three-piece, but they create an impressive racket that features roars and rasps torn from a ravenous ghoul’s throat, dextrous yet punchy slap-bass with a satisfying lower midrange growl, dizzying tangles of riffs that spread like gnarled cypress roots in all directions, and a drum performance so varied and precise that it must have been produced by some kind of multi-limbed arthropodal lifeform. 

This is the sort of technical death metal album that earns its requisite “Are you hearing this shit?” moments through inventive songwriting, not just showmanship. Take “Song of Stillness,” for example, which introduces a raucously entertaining groove only to deconstruct and stitch it back together using a series of unhinged, warbling guitar leads, or the way that “Adrift in the Sleepless Swamp” seemingly pays homage to the creeping dissonance of 70’s King Crimson with its moody, atmospheric bridge. Packed with such compositional and timbral delights, Drudge to the Thicket is a dense but deeply rewarding listen that was undoubtedly worth the wait.

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Leaning further into their heavy metal and progressive rock influences, Slovakian misfits Malokarpatan return to weave fantastical tales from a bygone era, stories of occult rituals and alchemical experiments against the backdrop of Renaissance Europe. 

Vertumnus Caesar sports a more polished sound than its forebears, but this only makes the album’s highlights ring out even clearer in these reverberant castle halls. Every track is a journey–take “Kočár Postupuje Temnomodrými Dálavami Na Juhozápad”, or “The Carriage Moves Southwest Through the Dark-Blue Distances.” The urgent bounce of the opening riffs mimic a horse’s gallop while the spooky synth-laden choruses foreshadow the darkness to come. 

Treacherous mountain paths are signaled by thrashy power chords and brief bursts of blast beats, and after a night’s respite beneath a star-strewn sky, the party rides onward at dawn with the sun at their backs and the fires of the Inquisition awaiting them at their destination. For a devilishly good time, look no further than Vertumnus Caesar‘s combination of 80s metal theatrics, black metal esotericism, and prog whimsy.

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I sang Supraliminal‘s praises back in July during our mid-year roundup, and–wouldn’t you know it–the album still kicks ass. What kept it in my top 10 this whole time? Let’s check in with a slightly younger (but just as handsome) version of myself: 

“Some tracks, like “Horrendous Incantation” and “The Anvil” are built around huge grooves sure to churn any pit into a frothing feeding frenzy. “Temple of Broken Swords” stomps toward the listener with palpable menace as blackened storm clouds swirl overhead. There are even some quirky prog moments on the short-but-sweet “Inviolate Viscera” with its serpentine riffing and delightfully impish bridge (how many times have you heard a vibraslap on a death metal album?).”

July-Alex was right: Supraliminal rules, and you should be listening to it right now.

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On Scaring the Hoes, two alt-rap titans join forces to create a cacophonous car crash of a collab album. Production wizard and hip-hop provocateur JPEGMAFIA has patched together a chaotic and crass collage of samples and beats that perfectly suit his and Danny Brown’s absurd bars: breakbeats dice early 00’s pop choruses to pieces; marching bands collide with rumbling sub-bass and brash braggadocio; a Japanese infomercial is drowned out by a wall of sleazy guitar distortion, and even the juxtaposition of a squealing trumpet and the sound of two hands clapping feels like implied innuendo. I won’t say that Scaring the Hoes is necessarily the most accessible album in either artist’s discography, but it hits with a recklessness and a fury that demand the listener’s attention. 

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Having followed Krallice since their 2008 debut, I’m not sure what I find more confounding: the almost relentless consistency with which they release music or the ways in which they continue to reinvent themselves every few years. Porous Resonance Abyss is Krallice’s 12th full length album and the third from the band’s current configuration, in which former axemen Colin Marston and Mick Barr have switched to synth and bass, respectively, and former bassist Nick McMaster has assumed guitar duties. 

It is easily my favorite Krallice album since 2017’s Go Be Forgotten, perfectly blending the grand, ethereal synths of the last few LPs with the alien melodicism that made me fall in love with the band 15 years ago. The result is a kosmiche black metal odyssey that capitalizes on all of Krallice’s strengths and solidifies their as one of the most dynamic bands out there–in this galaxy or the next.

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I fell down the Rhinocervs rabbit hole in the mid 2010s, right after a rather embarrassing period during which I routinely typed phrases like “worship Black Twilight” into IRC channels with only the barest hint of irony. All things considered, it was a pretty natural transition to make: here was another, even more shadowy collective whose members not only had a dozen different concurrent projects, but also a slew of untitled demos that could only be referred to by their catalog numbers. How could I resist?

So here we are, a full decade after the last Rhinocervs release and 13 years since the preceding Odz Manouk full-length. I don’t think anyone had “two new Odz Manouk albums” on their black metal bingo card, yet here we are in 2023 with a pair of new releases from the enigmatic Yagan. I’ve gone back and forth over the last six months trying to decide which one I prefer, so let’s just get this out of the way: You should listen to both of them. 

With that said, I’m going to focus on my favorite of the two, Bosoragazan, which ever so slightly slightly edges out the more concise but still fearsome Tzurr. Many of the things that I appreciate about the former are present on the latter as well, but I suppose that Bosoragazan took the lead simply because of how many moments legitimately gave me goosebumps the first time I heard the album: Yagan’s ragged lamentations “To Feast On Celestial Bodies” and “Arevordik,” the ghostly, tremulous strings on “Morratsk,” the spasmodic waltz of “The Last Bastion of the Serpent’s Tongue.” At once hypnotic and feral, Odz Manouk’s music channels that rare sort of darkness that feeds on light itself, capable of swallowing up a candle’s flame without leaving even a wisp of smoke behind. 

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