The Best Black Metal Album - Metal Storm Awards 2024

Dreamless Veil - Every Limb Of The Flood

The track record of the trio behind Dreamless Veil speaks for itself, with past and present stints in the likes of Inter Arma, Artificial Brain, Psycroptic, and Revocation but a few of the achievements of its founding members. Every Limb Of The Flood exhibits the proficiency of its members, but it doesn't live in the shadows of their more illustrious projects; their take here on black/death metal is one that is fully capable of reaching the heights of those other bands, based on the quality of this debut. The album is dissonant and fierce, but not relentless, frequently allowing its riffs to breathe and shine, and subtly weaving melody in and out of tracks that can otherwise be dingy, contorted, or even vicious. While it leans predominantly towards black metal, the occasional surges of death metal further expand what is already an almost kaleidoscopic spectrum of sounds encompassing a wide range of the blackened end of the musical spectrum.

Full review

Infestus - Entzweiung

Many black metal bands insist on spicing up their music with too many fancy ingredients. Too much reliance on extreme dissonance, symphonic elements, or genre-jumping. What happened to the emphasis on memorable, solid songwriting? One-man band Infestus is here to answer that question for you. With Entzweiung, Infestus incorporates some atmospheric elements such as piano, acoustic guitars, and even strings, but the main focus is and always has been the meticulous songwriting that is firmly rooted in traditional black metal while still casting an eye toward impeccable production and professional performances. After 20 years of existence, it's about time Infestus gets the recognition it deserves. Because a lot of what many bands are doing founder Andras is doing better on his own.

Full review

Kanonenfieber - Die Urkatastrophe

2021's Menschenmühle was a ruthless and potent indictment of what results when society becomes arrogantly gripped by "cannon fever". As is so often the case, however, time has only made things worse, and so Kanonenfieber must return to the blood-drenched wastelands of Europe to once again condemn war, the primal catastrophe, and the Great War, the specific precipitant - and result - of so much that is wrong in our world. Punctuated by the sounds of guns loading, whistles blowing, and propaganda blaring, Die Urkatastrophe is tightly produced and highly melodic, even symphonic in its grand layering; Noise spits his lyrics with venom amidst towering blazes of hook-filled riffs, and the roar of Kanonenfieber at top speed is fearfully overpowering. It is a magnificent album, to be sure, but one dedicated to reminding us that in war, "Everyone loses - their lives, their souls, their humanity".

Full review

Panzerfaust - The Suns Of Perdition - Chapter IV: To Shadow Zion

Six years ago, Panzerfaust embarked on a journey of intimidating scale: a four-part album series, each as brutal and ugly as the last, driven by a reimagining of conventional black metal as something protracted, relentlessly dark in a way that could be matched by voluminous heaviness. The Suns Of Perdition culminates in its fourth chapter, To Shadow Zion, and somehow Panzerfaust stood stalwart to the last: this final segment is somewhat more direct and vicious than its immediate predecessors, hearkening back to the dissonant yet otherwise more conventional black metal of the first chapter, but it doesn't abandon the longer-form travails through post-metal territory of its immediate predecessor(s). The assault of sound summoned by Panzerfaust is simply apocalyptic; with this album, they leave complete one of the most intimidating ventures in modern black metal.

Full review

Paysage d'Hiver - Die Berge

Die Berge. The mountains. Austere; resolute; frigid. Inhospitable. Massive. A dark, frozen hell of disorienting blizzards, sickening precipices, and murderous crags. This is the landscape that Paysage d'Hiver was born to convey through sound. Paysage d'Hiver's career is one constant droning storm, an eternal duel of white noise and black riffs as stark as the jagged peaks captured in monochrome vigil on the face of Die Berge; the scale of the album alone well befits its inspiration, but the compositions, too, reflect the best of the ambient black metal techniques that Wintherr has discovered and sharpened over two and a half decades. The multitudinous layers distort into a vicious, frozen oblivion where blasts and shrieks and riffs coalesce into one looming, terrifying whole. This is the sound of dead sky, of endless nights, of a silenced world. This is the sound of cracked trees, of howling winds, of pale moonlight. This is the sound of winter.

Full review

Sacrificial Vein - Black Terror Genesis

Dissonant black metal was, at one point, at the avant-garde of metal. But full decades have passed since then, and now it's a sound that has became quite commonplace in metal. Pushing it back towards the avant-garde is something that only the brave do. Sacrificial Vein show some of that bravery. A lot of Black Terror Genesis does follow the canon disso-black modus operandi, and it does "harrowing" and "overwhelming", but there's something more to it, because the "terror" part in its title is really built on through the elements they weave into the canon sound, whether some dreamlike Emptiness-like interludes or some Dodecahedron-like intricacies in the songwriting, but most of all through the deranged vocals, both in terms of how the vocal performance ranges from screams to whispers to laughter and also how the layering of the vocals works to enhance that terrifying aspect of the album's atmosphere.

Full review

Selbst - Despondency Chord Progressions

A star of South American black metal, Selbst's take on the genre remains irresistible on third album Despondency Chord Progressions. In defiance of the album's name, the album's chord progressions and melodies are sometimes quite beautiful in their evolution, despite the dissonance that bandleader and multi-instrumentalist N regularly weaves into the record's fabric. Nevertheless, one can feel plenty of sorrow in this work, and occasionally a more sinister darkness alongside too. More than many albums, Despondency Chord Progressions is a testament to beauty in dissonance and to melancholia in anger.

Full review

Seth - La France Des Maudits

Three years after La Morsure Du Christ, French black metallers Seth return with their new album, La France Des Maudits, and it largely sounds in the same vein as its predecessor. Lyrically influenced by the French Revolution and musically filled with ferocious riffs, it is a dark, haunting, and furious black metal album, glazed with symphonic elements and acoustic and lush passages, demonstrating a theatricality that is totally captivating.

Full review

Spectral Wound - Songs Of Blood And Mire

If you thought black metal was at risk of losing its trve identity, then you can think again. Over 3 decades have passed since the 2nd wave first erupted in the cold majestic lands of Scandinavia, but there's another corner of the globe that's equally cold and majestic, where the genre is still well and truly thriving. That place is Canada. Here we find ourselves stricken once more by one of the most promising traditional black metal bands around right now, Spectral Wound. 2024 saw Spectral Wound strike us with another outstanding effort in Songs Of Blood And Mire, an album that not only lived up to the promise of matching the high standards set by the impressive previous two efforts, but even surpassed their quality. From the deeply sinister performances, dark enchanting melodies, hypnotizing rhythms, blasphemous themes, and immaculate production, Songs Of Blood And Mire is the absolute pinnacle of what traditional black metal can truly offer.

Full review

Verwoed - The Mother

It's quite ironic that the Netherlands' Verwoed fulfilled all the potential they had set for themselves when they released De Val, and said fulfilment with The Mother ended up being the band's swansong. But it is such a high note to end on, with the amalgamation of various branches of black metal, like the more dissonant or the more crusty, and even more so the psychedelic this time around, complete with some slight gothic touches, all converging on a dark and ritualistic mid-paced black metal skeleton. It's a concoction whose pace might feel monotonous in the wrong hands, but whose variety in taking cues makes it feel properly engaging.

Full review