Five Metal Albums You Need To Hear

It's summer — time for headbangin'!

Phantom

Every fourth Tuesday of a given month, I review five new albums in this newsletter. Sometimes I focus on a single genre, and other times I grab whatever’s sounding good to me at the moment. This week, at least in part because the weather’s warming up, we’re all about the metal. Each of the records below represents a different facet of the genre that’s kept my head banging since I was 11 years old, but each is brilliant in its own way. Let’s open up this fuckin’ pit!

Ancient Death are a quartet from Massachusetts. They came together in 2019 and released a four-track EP, Sacred Vessel, in 2022; Ego Dissolution is their first full-length album. The EP was good, if relatively formulaic — their early style was doomy, intermittently psychedelic death metal, recalling Immolation during the slow parts and middle-period Death (Leprosy, Spiritual Healing) during the fast parts. They’ve really leveled up, though. Singer/guitarist Jerry Witunsky’s vocals have improved significantly. His growls now sound like those of Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt, where before he sounded like a teenager in a garage band. But bassist Jasmine Alexander’s vocals are a thrilling new element, heard on “Breathe — Transcend (Into the Glowing Streams of Forever)” and “Echoing Chambers Within the Dismal Mind”. They’re so beautiful, as clear and cold as dipping your bare foot into a mountain stream, you’ll wish they were present throughout the album instead of only popping up a few times. They’ve become better songwriters, too. The older songs sounded like collections of parts, but the new music has depth and flow, and lead guitarist Ray Brouwer’s solos (sometimes more than one per song) are gorgeous. This is both one of the best debut albums, and one of the best death metal albums, of the year. Do not miss it.

Benediction are UK death metal veterans, active since 1989. Their first vocalist was Mark “Barney” Greenway, but he left after their first album, 1990’s Subconscious Terror, to join Napalm Death. His replacement, Dave Ingram, stuck around till 1998, at which point he was replaced by Dave Hunt (aka V.I.T.R.I.O.L. of Anaal Nathrakh), but when Hunt left in 2019, Ingram returned, performing on 2020’s Scriptures and now the new Ravage Of Empires. (Rhythm sections have come and gone, too; founding guitarists Darren Brookes and Peter Rew have employed four bassists and five drummers, counting the current guys.) This is pummeling, knuckle-walking death metal, built from time-tested materials: thundering drums and pavement-saw guitars, chugging riffs and bearishly roared vocals about societal decay. This is not subtle or virtuosic stuff; even guitar solos are too self-indulgent for these guys. Recommended to fans of Bolt Thrower, Dismember, Misery Index and other leg-breaking acts.

Phantom, a thrash/power metal act from Guadalajara, Mexico, understand the appeal of a good mascot. Both their full-length albums — 2023’s Handed To Execution and the new Tyrants Of Wrath — and their 2024 Transylvanian Nightmare EP feature a skull-faced character in a hood and cape on their covers. Sometimes he’s stalking straight at you, the listener; sometimes he’s gripping a candelabra and staring into a crystal ball, as a hand thrusts out of a grave; and sometimes he’s slaughtering a half dozen barbarian dudes with a gigantic battle-ax. But he’s always there. Phantom’s music is traditional but not retro — they view head-down riffs, galloping Iron Maiden-style bass lines, and blasting drums as a musical way of life, not a costume. Vocalist and guitarist J.C. Necrohex has a guttural bark and a high-pitched shriek reminiscent of Slayer’s Tom Araya (except on “Nimbus”, when he sings in a Gothy baritone), and his bandmates keep it old-school, but occasionally they throw in some surprising touches, like Raír Tavizón’s throbbing postpunk bass on the furious “Dance of the Spiders”. At their fastest and loosest, like on the title track, they’re an unholy combination of Show No Mercy-era Slayer and Damaged-era Black Flag. If you’re a fan of mid-2000s Latin thrash acts like Fueled By Fire and Merciless Death, or fellow Mexican trad metallers Voltax, or even veteran German outfits like Destruction and Kreator, Tyrants Of Wrath will have you throwing the horns with adolescent glee.

Ritual Ascension’s Profanation Of The Adamic Covenant begins with the striking of several temple bells, after which a downtuned doom/death riff comes in that may remind you of Disembowelment or Ævangelist. This is very serious music; you can tell by the track titles — “Womb Exegesis”, “Cursed Adamic Tongues”, “Consummation Rites”, “Pillars of Antecedence”, “Kolob (At the Throne of Elohim)” — and by the way the instruments drop out so you can hear vocalist DH croak the phrase “the cunt of god” with perfect clarity. This is the kind of record you have to surrender yourself to. You have to suspend disbelief and say, OK, I am not just listening to three dudes from Minneapolis playing guitars, bass, and drums and roaring about demons and whatnot; I am being inducted into a dark and mysterious cult, and this is the ritual I must survive if I am to come out on the other side permanently changed, my third eye open and my soul cleansed of all mercy. The record is produced to sound like you’re standing in a high-ceilinged cave listening to the riffs bounce back and forth off the stone floor, walls and ceiling, but it’s much more than just a blurry roar. The guitars and bass are meticulously dropped into place, and other subtle sounds laid around them, like tiles in a mosaic. Despite the fact that they and the vocals seem to share certain low frequencies, every element is audible, nothing swamping anything else, and the drums have a punishing heaviness. This is extraordinarily well-crafted music; even when it’s not “enjoyable” it’s admirable, like a Richard Serra sculpture.

Venator are a quintet from Linz, Austria. They dress badly and have unattractive mustaches. They don’t look like larger-than-life metal warriors; they look like the anonymous dudes pounding beers in the crowd at a show. But the music on their second album, Psychodrome, absolutely rips — they’ve earned their spot onstage. Their songs have the gallop of early ’80s metal, the unglamorous pre-thrash stuff, when it was still the next step after bluesy hard rock. (There are some Judas Priest songs where the guitar solos are practically Southern rock.) Vocalist Hans Heumer has a commanding yowl, not unlike Scorpions’ Klaus Meine, that he can push to a scream when the moment demands it. The guitarists, Anton Holzner and Leon Ehrengruber, deliver big fist-pumping riffs and their solos have real sting, and Stefan Glasner’s bass and Jakob Steidl’s drums pound it all home. The lyrics have an ESL quality that never stopped Accept (or Scorpions); it’s not about what you’re saying, but how you say it, and this is an album with tracks called “Steal the Night”, “Race to Glory”, “Children of the Beast” and “Dynamite”, so you should know what to expect going in. There’s a brief interlude in the middle of the album’s longest track, “The Final Call”, that seems to want to borrow postpunk/goth tones for dramatic effect, and it doesn’t really work. Fortunately, they transition out of that into a screaming guitar solo that washes it away. As a pure evocation of an era when metal bands had a shot at real commercial success, the only thing this album is missing is a token ballad, and we’re better off for it. (“Fear the Light” is the song that probably would have been sent to radio; its hook is just slightly glossier than the rest.) This is music built for fast highway driving; roll the windows down and crank it up.

That’s it for today. See you on Friday, when we’ll be talking about Anthony Braxton.