List

Being a rotating list of my current favorite things.

Best Albums of 2024

2024 sucked massive balls. But hey, at least the music was good! Right? RIGHT?

5. Linkin Park, FROM ZERO

I haven’t bought a Linkin Park album since I was in college, but I rushed to grab this one the day of its release.

I first got into them because of the balanced roundtable of riffs, Mike Shinoda’s rapping, Joe Hahn’s turntable, and Chester Bennington’s melodic flourishes. The band lost me along the way because Chester got so much focus, becoming the de facto “star,” relegating the band’s other elements to the background. I got bored. What happened to him was tragic, but some people’s responses to the band’s new material only prove that what irritated me was absolutely real: “It’s not LP without Chester,” “Chester WAS LP,” “Make a new band,” “What is this, Mike Shinoda and friends?”

Yes. Yes, it is Mike Shinoda and friends, because that’s how it started and what it should be. Emily Armstrong’s vocals and stage presence are the perfect way to move the band forward without its turning into a bizarre posthumous Chester tribute. FROM ZERO ranges from electronic sways with melodic crooning (“Overflow”) to soaring anthems (“Heavy Is the Crown”), and between “Casualty” (the most Helmet-like they’ve ever sounded), “Two-Faced,” and “IGYEIH,” it’s surprisingly heavy and yes, quite metal. Eat your tears, haters.

4. Swamp Coffin, DROWNING GLORY

I’m not a musician and I don’t know much about production, so sometimes I have to make do with metaphor. In the case of Swamp Coffin, I must harken back to childhood days past.

At my first day camp, there was a shoe-sucking monstrosity called “Peanut Butter Land”—thus named due to its foul combination of water, dirt, sand, and horse poop, giving rise to the ideal mixture for epic mud battles. Only the brave attended. And in my native state of Tennessee, miles beneath the earth in an oft-visited cave, there was a place we called “the mud room.” It was a bucket-like cavern carved from rock that somehow retained enough dirt to form an awesome soup whenever it rained. It was a separate trek from the main path, one made only by cavers ready to get down and dirty. Both muddy excursions ended in a desperate battle to get back to burly civilization, soggy but fulfilled, as if crawling back to life after defeating a titanic adversary.

That’s what this album sounds like.

It sounds like a struggle. The listening experience is especially poignant when you read about the deaths and suicide attempts that led up to the album’s creation. The riffs are chunky and glorious—just angry, nihilistic sludge pulling at your feet in an attempt to keep you underground. But you keep fighting, because your goal is to emerge, even covered in earth and exhausted. Every step an accomplishment. Every riff a roar of survival. That’s DROWNING GLORY.

3. Judas Priest, INVINCIBLE SHIELD

50 (!) years after their debut, Judas Priest have produced a record that is pure joy to listen to. I have to give my buddies at the Metalheads Podcast the credit for this sentence: There is nothing about this album I don’t like. All my pretentious word stylings go out the window when I listen to it. I didn’t even know Priest until several years ago when I suddenly thirsted for 80s metal, and my brother in law gloriously provided. They catapulted to being one of my favorite metal bands of all time.

And yet… time. Time passes. Glenn Tipton has Parkinson’s, yet he still plays and writes on albums. Rob Halford can’t hit quite the same high notes, but his voice refuses to age otherwise. Say what you want about KK Downing’s absence, but guitarist Richie Faulkner has breathed new life into the band. Scott Travis drums like someone half his age. And Ian Hill just keeps jamming along, as bassists do.

INVINCIBLE SHIELD sounds like none of that time has passed at all. From updated anthems like the internet-anxiety-themed “Panic Attack” to the heartfelt closer “Giants in the Sky” that pays tribute to Halford’s many dead heroes (and contemporaries), this record never lets up and delivers banger after banger (“Gates of Hell” being my personal fave). Honestly, if a band of old men can release an album this good years after their heyday, no other legacy act has any excuse for getting lazy.

2. Zeal and Ardor, GREIF

Zeal and Ardor may have begun as Manuel Gagneux’s daring attempt to combine black metal and gospel, but by album number four, the project has emerged as a fully-formed beast from Gagneux’s godly Zeus-head, tribal and crunchy and completely beyond its initial metal/soul/metal/soul dichotomy. And it’s an entirely original beast—one that sounds like you’re laying cement in your backyard while every now and then checking in with your neighbors who are conduct a sing-along voodoo chant.

Instead of going back and forth between soul and metal, the genres happen simultaneously, whether it’s the shredding screams that punctuate the otherwise soft “are you the only one now?” or the gutteral spat-like accompaniment to the jiving melody of “Sugarcoat.” It’s rough, melodic, gorgeous, and unexpected in a way that some have used to eject the band from metal spaces entirely.

Metal or not (or somewhere in between), this is some of the most fascinating music to come out in a long, long time. From bonfire interludes that harken to old Africa to plain old Kravitz-esque rockers like “Thrill,” GREIF (a reference to the bird of myth, not to be confused with a misspelling of “grief”) is an eclectic adventure through terrains not normally explored by any band, metal or no.

1. GAEREA, COMA

As soon as the first track of COMA, “The Poet’s Ballet,” ended upon my initial listen, I knew this would be my album of the year.

Anticipation was high. GAEREA had perfected their emotional black metal formula with 2022’s MIRAGE, stretching songs to their limit and playing with stamina, like they were swimming laps that got longer and more complex with every round. COMA, instead of stretching those laps further, dives deep into the abyss, into textures and sounds that sometimes calm your head like the silence of going underwater and sometimes shake your inner ears with sonic waves.

The most fascinating element here is the addition of choral harmonies—sometimes by themselves, sometimes interspersed with the black metal screams. A few metal bros have disparaged the addition of “clean singing.” Oh, boo hoo. Cry yourself to sleep because a great band has discovered texture and nuance. The choral elements take creative leaps. The clipped song runtimes have more to say. The guitarist-turned-vocalist (anonymous, as they all are) has stepped up to the plate and obliterated it, Shohei Hitani-style. Look, it’s so good I made a sports metaphor!

COMA is multicultural, multi-genre, full of emotion, and still powered by rage. The songs boast lyrics out of dystopian myth: a caged man breaks free even knowing it will be his last day on earth (“A World Ablaze”), someone bereft of all their memories must muster the energy to exist without context (“Unknown”), a being changes shape so often it doesn’t even remember what it’s supposed to be (“Shapeshifter”). Guitar melodies punctuate the poetic scenarios like diacritical marks on Japanese hiragana characters. It’s both beautiful and guttural. The most satisfying a record can possibly be. GAEREA doubled their streaming popularity in 2024, and I can’t think of any act more deserving.