The Best Heavy Metal of 2023 So Far
With the year now more than halfway over, it seemed like the right time to get a pulse of what everyone’s digging. Specifically, we asked our writers to give us ten albums released from January 1st through June 30th, so there’s some overlap with our Best of Q1 2023 feature.
Below, you’ll find an alphabetical list of the albums that came up across multiple writers’ lists, as well as some personal favorites from our crew. One interesting tidbit that the alphabetical list doesn’t indicate: Lamp of Murmuur maintained a firm #1 spot by showing up on six separate lists.
Keep scrolling and check out some of the best 2023 has to offer so far.
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Austere – Corrosion of Hearts
[…] Nobody can quite replicate Austere, primarily concerning how accurately they portray depression, which is impressive considering how black metal and shoegaze fusions have proliferated over the past decade.
–Jon Rosenthal
[Taken from our premiere of “A Ravenous Oblivion”]
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Blindfolded And Led To The Woods – Rejecting Obliteration
If you’re looking for relentless grind that doesn’t rely on the same old tropes and rather goes in a bold new direction with tons of varied influence, as varied a Aldous Huxley’s writing, even, we’ve got you. Or rather, Blindfolded and Led to the Woods have you covered with this new release. There is way more nuance here than I can do just to in a short blurb, but the TLDR version is definitely don’t sleep on this one; it’s weird and it’s heavy.
–Addison Herron-Wheeler
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Body Of Light – Bitter Reflection
Body Of Light make music to accompany the best dancing you’ll ever do, precipitated by the worst week of your life. And if the dances incited by their previous album Time To Kill were part of a dizzy getting ready montage; those brought on to the sound of Bitter Reflection come at the end of that same night, stumbling home alone with temples throbbing, spinning into the drinks cabinet and coming away with a glass of something old and brandy-ish.
Post punk gives way to New Romanticism, sadness gives way to screaming satisfaction, and stillness gives way to movement as this irresistible album breaks your heart over and over again. Anyone with any sense can see that makes for the heaviest of listens.
–Luke Jackson
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Cattle Decapitation – Terrasite
Terrasite is a brutal and uncompromising display of technical deathgrind. The band have been steadily pushing the boundaries of the genre for over 25 years, and this album is no exception. Songs like “The Anthropocene Extinction” and “From the Womb to the Tomb” are classic slices of death metal and standouts on the album. This one is worth checking out.
–Addison Herron-Wheeler
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Creeping Death – Boundless Domain
Percussive, explosive, impactful, whatever adjective you prefer – Creeping Death’s death metal folds in hardcore in a quest to deliver the most energetic metal possible, and it fucking hits. Tight, rhythmically locked-in riffs reign, as do growl-along choruses.
–Ted Nubel
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Dødheimsgard – Black Medium Current
The older I get, the more I need to escape this languid dimensional plane. Every time I close my eyes, I reach as far as I can for nothing but the distance. For many years Dødheimsgard has been alluding to an unfathomable world far away from here. Today is the day they take us there, and Black Medium Current feels like the utopian grotesquery of my dreams.
–Ben Smasher
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Drain – Living Proof
The band’s sophomore album, this record packs a lot of punches. It’s heavy as hell and really catchy, and still just weird enough to make them stand out from the rest, but fun and brutal enough to make this a record you’ll want to spin over and over. Their well-established West Coast sound is even more apparent here. The band are definitely sticking with their staple themes, and they’re perfecting them as they go.
–Addison Herron-Wheeler
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Enforced – War Remains
After three full-length albums and countless amounts of live shows, the band have honed their craft while strengthening their bond and musical chemistry between members. […]
War Remains is a valid continuation from Kill Grid. However, the 10 menacing tracks have been amped up with even more aggression—if that’s humanly possible.
–Kelley Simms
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Frozen Soul – Glacial Domination
Everyone needs to be ecstatic about this new release from Frozen Soul. Those already in love with the band’s sound will get more of the same—furious guitars and riffing, old-school death with a hardcore flavor, and memorable hooks. Those who passed on the band previously, thinking they were a bit too simple or straightforward, should take a second listen because they really hone their craft on this one.
–Addison Herron-Wheeler
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Gel – Only Constant
Though Gel’s career may have spiritually peaked after a performance at a Sonic Drive-In, musically speaking Only Constant is a monstrous offering that promises even more chaos to come. The band creates bizarre, wondrous soundscapes and then blitzes through them with a menacing hardcore assault. It’s a brutalizing whirlwind at high speeds, and when it slows down we’re treated to some excellent weirdness.
–Ted Nubel
[Read Tom Campagna’s interview with Gel here.]
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Katatonia – Sky Void of Stars
Thirteen albums over three decades, and Katatonia still has crushing insight into the foundations of suffering. Though they’ve long since moved on from death/doom to a dark spread of gothic and progressive metal, that fundamental connection to our heartstrings remains secure.
–Ted Nubel
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Khanate – To Be Cruel
Khanate surprised the metal world […] with the release of their first full-length record in 14 years, To Be Cruel. Calling something this abrasive “an instant classic” would be silly, but for musical masochists and appreciators of envelope-pushing, it’s an immersive, caustic, and ultimately cathartic journey through pain.
[Taken from our interview with James Plotkin]
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Krallice – Porous Resonance Abyss
Krallice, masters of surprise releases, entered 2023 with a synthesizer-led odyssey through some weird, weird spaces. Is it what we expected? No, but expectations and Krallice generally don’t make sense together anyway.
–Ted Nubel
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Kruelty – Untopia
It’s hard to disagree with the thick, meaty diet of d-beats and grisly hardcore-mashed-up-with-death-metal riffs that Kruelty provides. Plus, you really can’t top the drum tones here, especially that snare. As any drummer can attest, an unmuted snare drum is a loud, disagreeable motherfucker, and it’s rendered in full furious fidelity here.
–Ted Nubel
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Lamp of Murmuur – Saturnian Bloodstorm
Having spent four years cultivating a devoted underground following, generated a mountain of speculation and counterspeculation, and finally debuted their live incarnation in 2022, Lamp of Murmuur are here to show us their assertive side. Saturnian Bloodstorm is a whirlwind of heavy metal and confidence that cannot wait for you to hear it.
–Luke Jackson
[Read Luke’s interview with M. here]
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Majesties – Vast Reaches Unclaimed
By design, Majesties’ debut album Vast Reaches Unclaimed has a sound firmly rooted in the past. Featuring members of Inexorum, Obsequiae, and Antiverse, the music holds some similarities to those projects, but it mainly takes you back to early 1990s Sweden with furious melodicism via the riffs and ripping brutality on the vocal side. Fans with an appreciation of the Gothenburg scene in Sweden, especially before it was a fixed monolith in heavy metal history, should recognize this primordial and beautiful style of music in its nascent state: one that can still be heard in various forms over 30 years later.
–Tom Campagna
[Read Tom’s interview with Majesties here.]
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Nothingness – Supraliminal
In January, Minneapolis’ Nothingness returned with a veritable Swiss-Army knife of a sophomore album that crunches, chugs, shreds, pummels, pulverizes, vaporizes–you get the idea. Supraliminal shows the band to be a finely tuned instrument of destruction, doling out death with sickening ease. 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?). Supraliminal is one of the best releases of 2023 (thus far) and absolutely deserves your attention.
–Alex Chan
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Spirit Possession – Of the Sign…
Remember in 2023 when we all remembered that the secret ingredient of good black metal is not, in fact, saxophones, but rather a strong foundation in heavy metal songwriting? Spirit Possession do, and on their second album for Profound Lore, Of the Sign…, heavy metal furls itself around the band’s cavernous blackened instincts.
–Luke Jackson
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Thantifaxath – Hive Mind Narcosis
What a great year for weird black metal, right? Though, even that broad umbrella is only at times applicable to the chameleon-like Canadian entity — but rest assured that these riffs don’t care what genre you try and ascribe them to as they slice through your skull.
–Ted Nubel
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Unearth – The Wretched, The Ruinous
In which the Bostonian metalcore institution proves you can use the “ain’t broke” methodology and still make essential music 25 years into your existence. Everything continually going to shit has inspired the hell outta this band. Trevor Phipps is especially vicious this time around. His vocal chords have some serious gristle on them now, giving his feral bark a lived-in leathery sound, and they’re all the better for it. He attacks these songs with the unbridled rage that mirrors the anger felt worldwide for the last few years.
And thanks to returning producer Will Putney, The Wretched; The Ruinous is also the Unearth’s best-sounding record since Terry Date’s work on 2006’s III: In the Eyes of Fire. Which is good, because they’re still playing and writing like they’ve got something to prove, as if the “everlasting shadows” of the title track isn’t a dying world but instead self-doubt meant to be beat back. Indeed, “Mother Betrayal”’s confident riffing and the triumphant leadwork on “Invictus” confirm that they’re far from running out of ideas within a genre they helped popularize—instead, they’ve spent a quarter-century sharpening and refining their sound. The result: this is the best record Unearth has ever made.
–Steve Lampiris
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Victory Over The Sun – Dance You Monster to My Soft Song!
Though I can’t even begin to parse everything going on here from a technical perspective, Victory over the Sun’s new album is easy to dive into. There’s a strong sense of an overarching narrative tying everything together as the band threads a cohesive journey through a huge spectrum of sounds. Expect everything from jazzy prog-rock-style passages and abstract post-rock to maximalist black metal.
–Ted Nubel
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VNV Nation – Electric Sun
VNV Nation are not metal and Electric Sun is far and away the brightest sounding album on this list, yet the euphoria it brings and the joy I find in it is far more important than a bunch of guitars clamouring for space over, (usually), a fella screaming. Sometimes losing yourself to the beat is the best medicine against the world slowly going mad.
–Cheryl Carter
