Luke Jackson's Top Albums of 2023

Was it just us, or did Grime Stone Records jump the shark this year? Increasingly becoming a boutique label for soundtracks to Commodore 64 games about jousting [Editor’s Note: There’s a market for that!], listeners were forced to look elsewhere for a dose of black metal with renaissance fair sprinkles.

Enter Idaho’s Weald & Woe, who deploy a heaving, hooky interpretation of black metal with a layer of medieval fantasy that nails the actually very tough balancing act of doing service to both, with their ‘medieval’ instrumentation and melodies primarily used to weave a lightness into the otherwise dense brickwork of Weald & Woe’s musical castle. Not to cause a panic, but For The Good of The Realm is the first of several albums in this list that will be described as FUN, in each instance the intention being a compliment.

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For those who worship at the altar of the brothers Skarstad, experimentation and heaviness have been an equal part of the sermon for some time, with stylistic shifts typically flowering off into other named projects. Here though is something else, a mainline Yellow Eyes album (another is promised next year) that partially sheds the genre trappings of black metal, and instead invites the listener to lose themselves in a stone sculpted, wicker adorned village of their creation.

Cardinal sin coming up, but with Master’s Murmur Yellow Eyes have created such an interesting sense of place that once familiar with its pacing and structure: try listening to it out of sequence; the album not only survives but thrives through this kind of reinterpretation, new avenues and alleyways opening up each time. It feels like Master’s Murmur has so much substance to give, and many more stories to tell than we’ve yet extracted in our scant time with it.

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Mmm, forbidden fruit. Everybody reading this list (and certainly everybody writing it) has a period of a couple of weeks in the summer when all they listen to is Blind Guardian, it’s okay! It’s good! Power metal is such an unusual proposition – complex but cheesy, celebrated but maligned; and an individual’s relationship with the subgenre is often just as multilayered.

As a musical language however, power metal is plainly ripe for experimentation and cross pollination, so when Moonlight Sorcery released this perfectly pitched power/black mashup in the mid year, we all threw ourselves at its feet before we even properly considered what it was, and had an incredible amount of fun doing it.

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Youth is often venerated for the wrong reasons, but sometimes creators and bands earlier in their careers enter the room with such zeal and such armfuls of ideas and things to simply try, that you can only smile and be swept along by the energy.

So it was with the self titled full length by Agriculture, who begin with a brew of black metal and stir in contemporary social themes, structures and arrangements culled from classical music, playing the same song twice in succession in a different style! And flaming swords; somehow making all this cohere, and somehow making it feel like it’s over in minutes. They are also the nicest gang in black metal. Everyone fell in love with Agriculture a little bit in 2023, and were right to do so.

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As an awful music nerd, one of the rarer, more interesting phenomena of the music world to witness is when an act with basically zero obvious commercial potential just breaks out, thus it was for Mandy, Indiana in 2023.

If you’ve put off listening to their scraping, imploding, industrial decrees because of their seeming ubiquity, get past it, this is some of the most intimidating music released all year, in a scathing, oblique way that other types of music, including metal, rarely achieve.

As a former Manchester resident, it is also cathartic to see success for an act that sounds fuck all like the traditional idea of that city, which is so obsessed and in love with the romance of its own musical legacy that it often threatens to choke on it.

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There was a real sense this year that some of the most celebrated acts in the underground had been to a meeting, a bit like the Ents, and decided unilaterally that 2023 was going to be twenty percent more prog than usual – (look no farther than the rest of this list for evidence) and it felt like Tomb Mold were at the absolute forefront of this movement.

If you’ve spent years reveling in the complexity of Tomb Mold’s riffs and beats, it was probably not that much of a surprise to hear them extending that complexity into new territories – arrangement and sound. This is still inarguably Tomb Mold, as soon as Max Klebanoff’s gargle pierces through the opening verse of “The Perfect Memory (Phantasm Of Aura)” that is apparent, but it is Tomb Mold expanded; they have always had one eye to the stars, and now in addition to the alien crust and filth they captured on Planetary Clairvoyance, they’ve captured those other elements of the cosmos – space and light.

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Every time the author has seen Spirit Possession play, something has gone wrong – sound and equipment failures, venue management stuff, it feels now almost an integral part of watching the band. What is utterly fantastic about the band’s music, black metal and punk which feels roughly hewn and nailed together, all crunchy surfaces and dreadful sculpture, is that it can withstand all of this and still knock a crowd to the floor.

Of The Sign… is a terrifying step up from Spirit Possession’s debut, it’s the sound of a band confidently realizing ideas they had when they first started to write and rehearse, and its snarling arrogance suggests that they too are fully aware of this.

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Ulthar released two albums simultaneously in 2023, Basic Ulthar (Anthronomicon) and Advanced Ulthar (Helionomicon), and the reason (beyond the author’s immutable basic-ness) Anthronomicon stands here is that it contains the pure distilled essence of talented musicians doing two things: being talented and having fun, this album is a blast.

We get a sense of the band looking at one another smiling, struggling to believe they are physically capable of spawning the rhythms and melodies poured forth over the entirety of this album. There is such skill in translating immense complexity into something that can not only be understood but enjoyed by people who are not experts, and on Anthronomicon Ulthar spend 40 minutes doing so unrelentingly.

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It seemed as though huge underground acts were announcing, releasing, touring and shadow dropping new music constantly in 2023 in a way that left even less time than usual to spend charting an independent path, scouring for satisfying chunks in the gutters of metal’s fringes. Thank you then, dark forces, for Venusberg Cardinal’s Atlas Of Dungeons. The premise is simple; recorded by members of Departure Chandelier, around the same time as their classic Antichrist Rise To Power, but thematically and musically distinct from that work. Atlas Of Dungeons is fuzzy, punked out black metal that not only sounds the part, but contains songs that ‘explore medieval and ancient tortures’ – which is so incredibly metal that it essentially u-turns and becomes brilliantly fun. Murky, scuzzy production is difficult to do right (look how the Whole Internet has seemingly denounced Këkht Aräkh overnight) but Venusberg Cardinal make it work by keeping the music simple, and letting the mid paced melodies rise up from beneath the static.

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For the average KRALLICE listener there has been a point in time that the sentiment around a new release from the band shifted from ‘this is incredible’ to ‘well done’. Never lacking in technical force or musicianship, several of the band’s recent releases have nevertheless failed to hit the same emotional highs as in canonized classics like Years Past Matter.

Porous Resonance Abyss changes this, with its clarity of concept (four part space opera!), of musical impetus, and of form. It would be disingenuous to say this is the first time KRALLICE have incorporated synth parts into their work, but never before have they served such a key melodic purpose, bringing a joyous new voice that first skims across and then plunges into the deep well of musical dark matter that the band is known for. In the relentless hunt for the new and inspiring, sometimes the biggest surprise leaps not out in front of you but from over your shoulder, and this year KRALLICE gave us an album that could only have come from an act with their maturity and confidence.

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