The Best Grindcore Album - Metal Storm Awards 2024

Apes - Penitence

The centerpiece of the Canadian sextet's second full-length album is a monologue by actor and director Werner Herzog: "We only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel. A cheap novel. […] There is no harmony in the universe." This quote, taken from the documentary Burden of Dreams, aptly encapsulates the album’s misanthropic essence, but not necessarily its musical execution. Despite the sheer sonic brutality that inevitably arises when three guitarists, a driving rhythm section, a fiercely shrieking black metal vocalist, and a hardcore shouter construct a massive soundscape of relentless riffs and filthy grooves, only to repeatedly tear it down again with precisely placed breakdowns, Apes sound neither cacophonous nor chaotic. Instead, Penitence feels meticulously structured and thoughtfully composed, and for an album that blends grindcore with black metal, death metal, noise, and a hint of doom, it is surprisingly dark, atmospheric, and, above all, incredibly catchy.

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Beaten To Death - Sunrise Over Rigor Mortis

As a genre that is largely dedicated to single-minded, no-frills violence, grindcore is nevertheless prone to some fascinatingly unique takes on the genre. Beaten To Death, from the band name to the 20-minute album length, seem very typical on the surface, but just a cursory listen to Sunrise Over Rigor Mortis reveals a whole bunch of oddness lurking behind the blistering, janky deathgrind that makes for its core sound. Madcap discordant solos, unexpected atmospheric and melodic segues, quirky indie rock song openings, and dazzling math rock licks are just a few of the remarkable surprises encountered across an album that makes the fullest use of every second at its disposal.

Brat - Social Grace

2024 was the year of the "Brat summer", a year when the pop field was dominated by... wait, there was another "Brat" roaming about this year?! Brat the band might've made a smaller splash this year, but their brand of "bimbocore" did make a splash nonetheless. Sure, it's the aesthetics that stand out first, but Social Grace delivers a pummeling hardcore beatdown within its 20-minute runtime, with heavy riffage, crushing breakdowns, and riveting snarls.

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Brodequin - Harbinger Of Woe

The fun thing about grindcore is that when people talk about “instruments of torture” you’re never sure whether they’re talking about the bands themselves or the stuff they’re named after. You can look up what a brodequin is if you're really curious, but if you want to know what it feels like, you can also just listen to Harbinger Of Woe. Brodequin may have some silky-smooth riff transitions and a knack for restrained builds that can lull you into a false sense of ambience, but those gurgling utterances, bone-snapping drums, and angry-red chords are downright hateful. The guitars are so distorted that they’re essentially a static, caustic haze burning through your eardrums like acid through flesh. For their first execution in 20 years, Brodequin are sounding as bloodthirsty as ever.

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Hereisaropegoodluck - Nothing To Write Home About

Betraying its title, the debut album from Hereisaropegoodluck offers plenty to write home about. As a grindcore album, there's lots of blasting barrages and vicious sonic maelstroms packed into short songs, but even looking beyond the high-calibre production and ventures into other -core styles, Nothing To Write Home About challenges genre conventions in more unexpected ways. Even shorter songs occasionally find place for an unexpected flirtation with post-rock or semi-melodic dissonant textures, and the longer tracks offer further surprises still. Yet, this is unmistakably a grindcore album, and the ear-shredding shrieks and growls of Brian Cole are matched by relentlessly hyperspeed blast beats and twisted riffs dripping with venom.

Knoll - As Spoken

...And now, for something completely different: funeral grind!

All right, we know. As catchy as the name is, Knoll are not exactly delivering a fusion of grindcore and funeral doom metal. That being said, As Spoken does have one of the most unique and malevolent sounds in grindcore you will hear from 2024. It is really refreshing to see a grindcore act that focuses on a terrifying, dissonant, and dark atmosphere. With erratic drumming, punishing guitar work that borrows from occult death and black metal, and sickening banshee-like shrieks, Knoll manifest unsettling visions of seances and exorcisms. Turn the lights off and let the ritual consume you.

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Nails - Every Bridge Burning

Nails, as in hard as. Not much in this world is more furious, more abrasive, more aggressive than Nails. A few years ago, they’d just finished claiming that you will never be one of us when suddenly they declared also, we will no longer be one of us – but 2024 brought a new lineup, a new life, and consequently a new wave of violence. Every Bridge Burning is just like its predecessors: so unnervingly violent, so ludicrously heavy, that in this sub-18-minute smash-and-grab you’ll lose sight of whether you’re listening to Nails or the hammer that drives them.

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Resin Tomb - Cerebral Purgatory

Brendan Auld and Matthew Budge have already released some thoroughly nasty music with Snorlax, but Resin Tomb is a different kettle of fish entirely, taking an already belligerent genre in deathgrind and putrifying it further with a dollop of sludge. The five-piece's debut, Cerebral Purgatory, is blistering, janky, dissonant, and cacophonic in all the most abrasive ways, but it also grinds, broods, and beats listeners down, exhibiting an appetite for violence that is realized at different tempos and with different riff approaches. Half the album's songs exceeding 4 minutes in length makes these sonic assaults relatively lengthy for grindcore, but the quality and diversity of the riffs ensures that these slabs of brutality do more than just exhaust listeners.

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Slug Gore - They Slime! They Ooze! They Kill!

Representing the south side (the subterranean mutant/insect/megafauna lobby), Slug Gore are here to claim the surface world for the aliens, C.H.U.D.s, and whatever it is that Ultraman fights. They're sliming, oozing, and killing their way through all the posers who don't have the stomach for slugs and/or gore, armed with an ugly, septic guitar tone, pugnacious growls, and an appreciation for both the punkiness of classic grind and the heaviness and complexity of newer, death metal-oriented offshoots. In grindcore as in horror, nobody does the gloopy, grimy, gross stuff quite like the Italians.

Yersin - The Scythe Is Remorseless

Yersin capture the sound of desperation and hopelessness even as they punch through the sound barrier; their riffs are crusted over like the underside of a tall ship after a weekend at the barnacle farm and their breakdowns hit like John L. Sullivan after a bender, but even their self-proclaimed “lust for crust” can’t disguise a penchant for more complex melody. The ultra-distorted guitars sometimes wander from their usual slamming violence, incorporating techniques of black and death metal to become ominous and frantic, and the vocals, too, work on a sliding scale of brutality depending on whether the desired tone is grind or crust or slam or whatever else there might be; there’s a surprising degree of variety in these 25 minutes. At all times, of course, it’s so heavy you’ll hardly be able to breathe.