Our Annual Report keeps rolling with the Best Underground Metal Albums of 2023, courtesy of “Mining Metal” writers Langdon Hickman and Colin Dempsey. As the year winds down, keep it tuned here for more awards, lists, and exclusive features about the best in music, film, and TV of 2023. You can find it all in one place here.
It’s year-end time, which means, as you have likely seen, it’s list season. We come near the end of the lists here at Consequence, which gives us a couple unique vantage points. First, we are able to excise from our own lists things that are already covered on the bigger hard rock and heavy metal albums list. That means if you are looking for more blurbs on Tomb Mold and Godflesh — both written by Colin and me on that main list, by the way — you are out of luck. This is because while the records on the main list are obviously great, hence the strong recommendation, we think it’s both in keeping with the spirit of an underground metal column to showcase albums not otherwise accounted for during end-of-year coverage as well as a way to just maximize bang for your buck as readers, so to speak. After all, the cutoff for the amount of albums any given publication includes is already somewhat arbitrary; you listen to as much music as us types do during a year and your list of albums you wish you could tell people about gets pretty long come December. It’s already a trial to trim it down to something manageable.
I’d be a bit more ruminative, but I expended my year-end fixations on last month’s intro. The passing of time, marked so rigidly by events in our publication calendars and lives, the birthdays and deadlines of adult life, create the strange illusion of demarcation that doesn’t really exist in the flesh of our days. The clock’s hands sweep numb and blind past our casually-strewn numbers, and suddenly I’m 35. This sense, the meaninglessness of numbers, feels at first like a casual nihilism until suddenly it inverts itself; time is, of course, quite real, and quite finite, and so suddenly this passing feels something between a mourning and a celebration (as though one could ever hope to be anything but the other). What’s more, things mutate over time, refuse to stay static, and so these structured mourning celebrations are as much to fix a perspective in time as a moment. The clock ticks and things we once loved we come to revile, memories we once detested and were ashamed of we come to view with peace and insight. It is as much the material fundament of memory that erodes as the noumenal emotional aura that surrounds it, the very reason why the memory — or in this case, records — sticks in our minds.
Having written quite a bit and thus mined this world of memory a hell of a lot, it’s also curious to see what winds up burrowing itself deep into your memory. I go back over our column every year to see if there’s something I loved that I may have forgotten; as years tick on, I see my own writing about an album I’ve totally forgotten that feels like an arrow fired in circuitous loops to arrive back at myself sometime later, a reminder of something of value. Other records, meanwhile, burn themselves into my brain despite seeming perhaps minor at first blush, be it because they become inevitably bound up in the flesh of my life or that they simply reveal in subtlety something of value that takes time to truly unearth. The older I get, the more humbling and strange this process becomes. My mother, in her mid-70s, tells me this feeling only grows in strangeness with age. What a pleasant thought.
– Langdon Hickman
Fleshvessel – Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed
Maudlin of the Well reborn, the dreamlike legendary progressive metal band, here summoned to life once more by an unrelated set of brilliant players and songwriters. The spirit remains, however; where Toby Driver’s unit evolved naturally into Kayo Dot, here it feels as though an alternate evolutionary path was discovered. These songs are underpinned by folk, by piano, by metallophones, by lush acoustic arrangements, which are then accentuated with metal instrumentation. It often feels more like a long-lost progressive rock masterpiece of some obscure European troupe in the ’70s was called back up from the aether and re-recorded by players who cut their teeth on the more abstract and sophisticated wing of progressive extreme metal, dark metal, and the like. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Langdon Hickman
HEALTH – RAT WARS
HEALTH make music for Leon S. Kennedy, Warhammer aficionados, the new drummer in Slipknot, people who wish God Hand got a sequel, and both Kane and Lynch. RAT WARS is a Christmas morning’s worth of pop, noise, and metal delivered via the bite-sized, nuanceless, and fully-torqued way we’ve adapted technology to please us. It’s a reflection of the 21st century’s adoption of content as a necessity rather than a luxury while bemoaning that exact principle. Most importantly, it’s also proof that HEALTH are not just a meme but fully-fledged artists with a specific mission. They disregard the little details for bold impressions. Sure, they only care about what’s surface level, but god, they make that surface shine. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Colin Dempsey
KEN Mode – Void
Noise rock is a funny beast for me. Its brackish waters, where progressive and punk musicianship meet and intermingle, odd times and loose, primal brutality, is at once easy to whip together if you know your stuff but shockingly difficult to imbue with the same devout emotionality of either of its parent genres. KEN Mode meanwhile wind up making most working bands in the field look like chumps; this is a record as emotionally harrowing as it is absolutely sick in its riffs and playing, keeping the riffs weird and proggy without losing groove or swagger in the process. This is a tough balance to strike and even harder to have feel as emotionally hollowed out and drained as it sounds. Sometimes we need music to capture pain. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Langdon Hickman
Kostnatění – Úpal
Recorded in Minneapolis, sung in Czech, and pulling from African folk, Úpal eludes classification unless you know what microtonal black metal is. For those unaware of what that refers to, it essentially means that Úpal occasionally sounds gorgeous and other times sounds like shit. “Shit” is an intentional quality in that D.L. (the sole member of Kostnatění) is interested in how to play ugly music well. “Finding beauty in a storm” is not the MO — creating the storm of ugly that’s inherently beautiful is. It’s not the rough abrasive noise approach found in grindcore but a measured approach to find the logic and artistry in ugliness. Yes, Úpal is black metal, arguably the most confrontational metal subgenre. But beyond that, D.L. confronts sensible tastes on a microscopic level for an album that doesn’t sound like anything else because it contains sounds that may have never been played before. If there were one album this year that distinguished itself through sonics alone, it’s Úpal. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Colin Dempsey
