20. Rotting Christ - Pro Xristou (Season Of Mist)
Greece’s premier extreme metal exports have undergone one of the most impressive and enjoyable evolutions in the game over the past two decades, and it reached new heights with this year’s magnificent 14th studio album.
Striving further towards the arena-ready sonics the band have flirted with for some time, Pro Xristou managed to produce hooks that stayed embedded in your cranium for days without sacrificing an inch of the metallic might that has driven this band ever forward. Epic stuff.
19. Lucifer - V (Nuclear Blast)
The fifth full-length from these Stockholm-based throwbacks saw them perfect their fusion of doom, occult and 70s shock rock. Led by Johanna Platow Andersson and featuring husband Nicke Andersson Platow of Hellacopters fame, Lucifer V was littered with deliciously creepy, darkly comic sermons about sin, wickedness and forbidden love affairs.
Dialling everything up to 13, the likes of the anthemic At The Mortuary and irresistible power ballad Slow Dance In A Crypt had hooks sharper than Old Scratch’s trident.
18. Dvne - Voidkind (Metal Blade)
Punchier and more direct than Dvne’s hypnotic 2021 breakthrough Etemen Ænka, Voidkind concertedly advanced the Scottish quintet’s post-metallic prog-sludge magick to a more immediate, accessible level, adding meatier hooks and craftier riffs while maintaining the chemical flow of jam-toned interplay.
Dvne’s precociously expert blending of light and shade dynamics reached a rolling boil during this hour-long odyssey, heightening the album’s dramatic intensity and bringing a satisfying sense of emotional completeness to the organic and immersive whole.
17. Bring Me The Horizon - Post Human: Nex Gen (Sony)
After multiple delays, Bring Me The Horizon’s seventh album finally arrived in a blaze of glorious technicolour. A playful, genreagnostic romp through metal, hyper pop, R’n’B and breakcore, and even a Deftones-ian crawl on Limousine, was delivered with head-spinning energy.
Meanwhile, a cheeky nod to pop punk on anthems Lost and Top 10 Statues That Cried Blood ensured BMTH kept a finger on the zeitgeist, while looking resolutely forwards. Post Human: Nex Gen was everything we’ve come to expect from the alt metal innovators.
16. Nightwish - Yesterwynde (Nuclear Blast)
After 2020’s sprawling Human. :II: Nature., Yesterwynde emerged as a rebirth, returning to the band’s heavier roots while blending intricate storytelling and powerful orchestration with bombastic blasts of metal.
From the epic An Ocean Of Strange Islands to the iron-clad The Antikythera Mechanism and immersive Perfume Of The Timeless, each track exuded symphonic grandeur, driven by Floor Jansen’s dynamic operatic prowess, cementing Nightwish as one of metal’s most accomplished exponents and Yesterwynde as one of their most invigorating releases in years.
READ MORE: How death, cancer and a pandemic couldn't stop Nightwish making their most positive album yet
15. Julie Christmas - Ridiculous And Full Of Blood (Red CRK)
To be reductive, Julie Christmas’s second solo album was Björk by way of ArcTanGent Festival. To be accurate, Ridiculous And Full Of Blood was an emotionally wrought, uncanny plunge into post-metal, hardcore, glistening pop and sundry other subgenres.
Tracks such as Supernatural detonated with chorusminded precision, while Julie’s dextrous wails parried Cult Of Luna’s Johannes Persson, guttural as per, through End Of The World. Much like eternal enemies Robert Smith and Morrissey, Julie proved possessed of a voice that never weathers. Magic.
14. Ulcerate - Cutting The Throat Of God (Debemur Morti Productions)
These Kiwis had been twisting death metal into increasingly unforgiving and avant-garde shapes since the early 00s, but no one saw their embrace of melody in the 20s coming.
Here they were more unique and hypnotising than ever, their dissonant death metal now reflecting a dark night of the soul with intimate, tragic atmospheres and raw emotional textures. All the more impressive for being a trio, the horrifying scale of their labyrinthine cacophony cast the listener as a speck of insignificant cosmic dust.
13. Dool - The Shape Of Fluidity (Prophecy)
Rarely had an album title been so apt. The Shape Of Fluidity was not only informed by vocalist Raven van Dorst’s exploration of their intersex identity, it was driven by wave upon wave of sinuous musical forms that defied genre without losing cohesion.
There were hints of progenitor outfit The Devil’s Blood’s slick occult rock, but there were also broad progressive and psychedelic strokes along with crashes of classic and gothic metal. Style, substance and wonderful songs bled together in shadowy perfection.
READ MORE: How Dool are challenging gender-norms with The Shape Of Fluidity
![Dool - Venus in Flames [Official Music Video] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/ybL_zAmMad0/maxresdefault.jpg)
12. Gatecreeper - Dark Superstition (Nuclear Blast)
Arizona ragers Gatecreeper have been steadily but assuredly expanding their modernised Swedish death metal template for a decade now, but with third studio full-length Dark Superstition they scaled nefarious new heights.
Never a band to shy away from drawing on their influences, this was the album where the five-piece let some of their more extracurricular inspirations run wild, resulting in not just their most convincing and diverse offering so far, but one of the essential extreme metal albums of 2024.
From obvious touch points like Bolt Thrower, Dismember and early In Flames to more surprising (but welcome) tips of their grotty cap to Paradise Lost, Black Sabbath, Kyuss and Cradle Of Filth, Gatecreeper and producer Kurt Ballou crafted a record that sounded colossal, modern and invigorating while rooted in underground metal’s murkiest traditions.
From the searing gothic metal of The Black Curtain to the swaying melodeath of Caught In The Treads to the straight-up heavy metal majesty of Tears Fall From The Sky, Dark Superstition is like a bulletproof guide to making modern extreme metal that will still appeal to old-school diehards.
11. Oranssi Pazuzu - Muuntautuja (Nuclear Blast)
Oranssi Pazuzu’s= sixth album was their most nightmarish trip yet. If 2020’s Nuclear Blast debut, Mestarin Kynsi, was a distilled entry point for the Finns’ blackened, reality-warping rites, here they plunged into ever deeper, lightless realms of human consciousness, where only the most exotic of monsters reside.
From the jarring countdown intro through Jupiter-force sonic storms; primordial, instruction-relaying lizard chants and cavernous expanses, Muuntautuja instilled awe and unease in vast and equal measure, boldly venturing where no band had gone before.
