10. Unto Others - Never, Neverland (Century Media)
Unto Others made an instant impact (then as Idle Hands) with 2019 debut Mana, seamlessly fusing trad metal and goth rock with a thrilling razor’s edge. As with 2021’s Strength, Never Neverland replaced that initial urgency with stadium-filling grandiosity, while refusing to be a nostalgia-baiting throwback.
Gabriel Franco’s plaintive baritone and stellar songwriting prowess were possessed with a rare verve and wit. Here they aimed to further distinguish a sound already distinctive among their peers in 2024, playing with an expanded sonic palette covering everything from riffing madness and pealing solos to wistful romance, pitch-black gallows humour and radio-friendly rock. The sound of a band with huge ambitions and the charisma to deliver.
9. Lowen - Do Not Go To War With The Demons Of Mazandaran (Church Road)
Drawing on the ethereal power of prog metal, apocalyptic dread of doom and a very healthy dose of singer Nina Saeidi’s Iranian heritage in their songcraft, melodies and subject matter, Lowen stepped forth as an emerging force in British metal in 2024.
In truth, Do Not Go To War… continued a sonic journey started on their 2018 debut EP, A Crypt In The Stars, albeit with a laser-focus that highlighted the sheer potency the band could harness, while a sleek production ensured an undeniably cinematic scope that made the album a sonic monument to their burgeoning, towering talent.
Nina’s sublime vocal patterns showcased her as a powerhouse talent, each soaring note tinged with both liberating empowerment and sadness at a culture she is cruelly restricted from.
READ MORE: Meet Lowen, 2024's breakout prog metal sensation.
8. Ihsahn - Ihsahn (Candelight)
Ihsahn had long mastered the art of blending classical instrumentation with the intensity of extreme metal, but never had he achieved it with such unparalleled sophistication.
The Emperor mastermind’s eighth solo album, released as two versions including a standalone classical arrangement of the same songs, was a towering achievement, with tracks like The Promethean Spark and Twice Born epitomising his bold integration of black metal, progressive structures and cinematic textures.
With a deepening reliance on orchestral elements marking a significant evolution for Ihsahn, his compositions were pushed to new heights while At The Heart Of All Things Broken elevated listeners to his new spiritual plane, marking this eponymous release as one of the sharpest fusions of Ihsahn’s finest skills.
READ MORE: How Ihsahn went from black metal icon to prog metal master
7. Heriot - Devoured By The Mouth Of Hell (Century Media)
2024 was the year everything fell into place for Heriot. The Swindon/Birmingham quartet were one of the most talked-about bands in metal long before the release of their debut, Devoured By The Mouth Of Hell, and the album delivered on that early promise.
Taking their dynamic and experimental brand of metalcore, industrial and hardcore to even greater heights, while Harm Sequence and Siege Lord were unfathomably heavy, tracks like Opaline and Visage blew their ambient, shoegazey tendencies – only hinted at in the past – up to full scale.
It was the sound of a band in control, aware of when to temper their heaviness and when to let it run rampant. We’re only beginning to see what Heriot are truly capable of.
READ MORE: How Heriot became the UK's hottest underground metal band.
6. Opeth - The Last Will And Testament (Regining Phoenix)
Five years on from the acclaimed In Cauda Venenum, Opeth took a new and intriguing path on their 14th studio album. The Last Will And Testament was the Swedes’ second bona fide concept record, and one of the most adventurous and subversive things they had recorded to date.
A spiky, sardonic tale of family betrayal and shocking revelations, its eight chapters represented some of the most complex and challenging music in Opeth history. And yes, Mikael Åkerfeldt’s peerless death metal growls returned. But this was no cynical return to the band’s earlier sound. Instead, it amounted to another grand leap forward for prog metal’s most creative crew, and their heaviest record in decades. Prog on.
READ MORE: Opeth spill the tea on The Last Will & Testament.
5. Bruce Dickinson - The Mandrake Project (BMG)
Iron Maiden’s unstoppable frontman took his sweet time to make his seventh solo album, but the wait was more than worth it. The Mandrake Project was a sprawling, prog-tinged, doom-laden heavy metal masterpiece, full of dark, ingenious songs that showcased the unerring strength of Bruce’s voice and the enduring vitality of his long-term partnership with guitarist Roy Z.
A concept piece focusing on notions of power, abuse and identity, its tumultuous battles between science and the occult ensured that the legendary singer’s return looked, sounded and felt like a momentous event. Songs like the doom-driven opener Afterglow Of Ragnarok and closing epic Sonata (Immortal Beloved) were heavier and more immersive than anything in Bruce’s already magnificent solo catalogue. Comeback of the year.
READ MORE: 50 years in, Bruce Dickinson is making some of his most ambitious music ever
4. Knocked Loose - You Won't Go Before You're Supposed To (Pure Noise)
Knocked Loose were already one of the biggest bands operating in a vibrant and overflowing hardcore scene, but You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To turned them into one of the biggest heavy bands on the planet, period.
Following sets at Coachella and shoutouts from pop stars like Billie Eilish and Demi Lovato, the Kentucky quintet well and truly smashed their way into mainstream consciousness – a feat made all the more mind-boggling by the fact their third album was their most uncompromisingly, terrifyingly heavy record yet.
Every track here showed off their multi-faceted brilliance, from the sheer power and panic of Piece By Piece to the surging, tar-thick breakdowns of Sit & Mourn, while the reggaeton switch-up of Suffocate was one of the year’s finest musical moments. A masterpiece.
3. Chelsea Wolfe - She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She (Loma Vista)
Following 2017’s Hiss Spun and 2019’s Birth Of Violence, Chelsea continued her excellent run of releases with She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She. Inspired by the singer’s newfound sobriety and the phases of the moon, her seventh studio album was dense with witchy, emotional energy, exploring her touchstones of goth, folk and otherworldly doom.
Tracks Everything Turns Blue and Tunnel Lights built a sense of drama that was both majestic and nightmarish, while The Liminal, peppered with Depeche Mode and NIN-inspired industrial electronics, felt like a natural evolution. Closing with the darkly hopeful Dusk, and the lyric ‘held anew and whole again’, this was a bewitching journey out of darkness and into the light.
READ MORE: We visited LA's weirdest and most wonderful book store with Chelsea Wolfe
2. Judas Priest - Invincible Shield (Sony)
Judas Priest’s 19th studio campaign was not just a latecareer victory, it was a reaffirmation of their towering legacy. Across 11 marauding tracks, Invincible Shield harnessed the relentless energy that defined 2018’s Firepower and amplified it into a deafening proclamation that silenced any whispers of retirement.
With Rob Halford’s vocal power on full display and the unbridled force of Richie Faulkner and Glenn Tipton’s twin-guitar assault, bangers like Panic Attack and The Serpent And The King proved Priest could still raise the stakes in a genre they helped define. Fans and critics united in hailing Invincible Shield as a fist-pumping testament to heavy metal’s staying power, cementing the album as one of the year’s most essential releases. Judas Priest had, once again, shown the world how it’s done.
READ MORE: Rob Halford talks Judas Priest, Dolly Parton... and kittens.
1. Blood Incantation - Absolute Elsewhere (Century Media)
Reactions to Absolute Elsewhere crash-landing into Hammer’s Album Of The Year beacon will probably be split into two responses: “What the fuck is this?” and “Didn’t see that coming, but yeah, of course.” Both are entirely appropriate. The record felt simultaneously like a piece of alien technology fallen from the heavens and an excavated artefact central to human and heavy metal civilisation.
Blood Incantation made their name as a forward-thinking death metal act with 2016 debut Starspawn and 2019’s landmark, gloriously maximalist The Hidden History Of The Human Race, but Absolute Elsewhere saw them set a course for a place where genre strictures were nonexistent.
Their molten death metal riffing flattened skulls, but it was the foregrounding of their prog, psych, krautrock and ambient sensibilities that really twisted heads from shoulders. While these elements had played a part in the band’s sound since day one and were let of the leash for 2022’s instrumental synthscape, Timewave Zero, every element now felt fully synthesised and folded into a greater whole, as though the band had emerged from a strange, sticky pupa and evolved into an entirely new state of being.
Huge riffs and searing harmonics interwove with woozy bass emanations, craggy, cracked-meteorite roars and, at the album’s close, one of the year’s most breathlessly thrilling black metal climaxes. These moments, however, were laced with Eastern melodies, unexpected bongos, dashes of dappled acoustic prettiness and Mellotron workouts from members of Hällas and Tangerine Dream.
Just as they filtered different sounds, the quartet threaded together multiple philosophies, mythologies, histories and lines of scientific inquiry to form an immersive worldview. This grand vision elevated their metal and imbued it with a galactic scale, speaking to an insatiable hunger for cosmic truth that placed them within a lineage of far-sighted metal mystics that ran from Cynic and Morbid Angel to Nile and to Oranssi Pazuzu.
A yearning soulfulness at the core of the album made the unquantifiable vastness Blood Incantation explored thrilling rather than terrifying. While dazzling in scope and delivery, there was also a sense of togetherness that was capable of satisfying our primal need to feel part of something bigger and meaningful. After all, community and belonging are fundamental to life as a metal fan: the ritual of the moshpit; the camaraderie of a festival crowd; the subtle nod to a stranger on the street whose band shirt you recognise.
With Absolute Elsewhere, this experience was writ large and magnetic – a glowing orb on the landscape drawing everyone towards its radiance. 2024 was Blood Incantation’s year, from proving the signature draw at Roadburn, as metalheads, hipsters and more nearly burst a 3,000-capacity venue for their ambient and death metal sets, to finding themselves trending on X when the album was released.
Coming in at 45 points above the nearest competition, whether its prime placing was a deus ex machina anomaly or preordained, Absolute Elsewhere was a landmark album whose mysteries and repercussions we’ll be picking apart for years to come.
READ MORE: How Blood Incantation made the most essential album of 2024.
