The Best Sludge Metal Album - Metal Storm Awards 2024

Autolith - Artificial Heaven

Four years after leaving many hungry for more with Clandestine Cuts sensation Caustic Light, Autolith have graduated to full-album status in some style on Artificial Heaven. The band's crusty sludge is twisted, punishing, and uncompromising, at times almost suffocating, but their past experimentations with post-metal have also been carried over, resulting in moments that offer space to breathe and allow light to shine through before the bleakness and malice drag you back into the mire. The range of tonalities across the album adds unexpected touches of accessibility to songs, even as Autolith indulge in blasts, dissonance, and pained screams.

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High On Fire - Cometh The Storm

For their first album since becoming Grammy winners, High On Fire were in the unusual position of entering the writing and recording process with a change of personnel; however, Coady Willis from Big Business slots in seamlessly behind the drumkit in place of Des Kensel. Things are slightly different this time around, however, as Cometh The Storm sees Matt Pike and co take their foot off the gas just slightly, reducing the number of thrashy cuts in favour of lots more burly, mid-tempo sludge fire. What it may lack in pace, however, it makes up for in sheer fury, as the instrumental tone is fierce, and Pike's vocals are absolutely monstruous. High On Fire are seasoned veterans seemingly incapable of disappointing, and cometh the hour, Cometh The Storm and another great entry into their mighty discography.

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Horndal - Head Hammer Man

Horndal are back with another wrathful yet groovy sludge album chronicling a chapter from the history of their eponymous hometown. Gruff, irascible vocals contrast with slick synths and catchy guitar riffs that find the common ground between Thin Lizzy and Mastodon; Horndal play it fast and loose with tempo, rhythm, mood, and style, allowing their pace to fluctuate according to each batch of melodies they've devised and the tone they want to adopt, be that rollicking and raucous, hushed and intense, or just plain destructive. The biographical tale is not exactly a happy one, but Horndal have hit such a great stride of songwriting with such a powerful sound that it's hard not to find some joy in the listening. It's a real head hammer, man.

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Inter Arma - New Heaven

When your band already has a reputation for being tough to categorize and you premiere your new record in full at Roadburn, it makes even more sense for that record to be your boldest and most experimental to date. It's an album that could've been in a bunch of other categories, and to properly describe all the ways this album dives into extreme metal niches, art rock soundscapes, folky balladry, and gothic darkness, we'd have to dissect it track by track. For an eight-track album, New Heaven packs a lot of nuance and color, throws a lot of curveballs, and manages to feel like it weighs a ton.

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Lord Dying - Clandestine Transcendence

Sludge metal has often prided itself on how dirty and crushing it could sound, but certain acts have pushed towards lighter and more progressive directions as well. Lord Dying keep pushing that envelope. Having planted the seeds of genre-wise expansion as far back as Poisoned Altars, and now with half the lineup updated, Clandestine Transcendence finds Lord Dying injecting their sound with the most variety they've ever had, especially on the vocal front, partly due to the addition of new singer Alyssa Mocere. For such a corpulent album, there's plenty on it that is immediately rewarding; it's ambitious in the sound it tackles, it's versatile in how well it handles them, and it has some goddamn dirty grooves to show for.

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Mastiff - Deprecipice

More than most sludge bands, Mastiff make the genre's hardcore roots scream through to the forefront of their music. At just over a half-hour in length, Deprecipice launches out the gates with unrestrained fury and romps forth unrelentingly until the end, throwing blast beats, OSDM flirtations, industrial churn, and bruising breakdowns alongside the hardcore fire and crushing sludge trudges. It's an album driven by pain and grief, and the contents are as mirthless and wounded as might be expected for this subject matter, but beyond the overarching aggression, there are ample hooks to elevate the album beyond being empty rage.

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Meth. - Shame

Taking from Katla.'s school of putting a period in your band name for no goddamn reason, Meth. are a punk band turned sludge on Shame. Attempting to evoke this very overlooked negative emotion by basing a lot of the songs on nonfictional accounts of people's experiences with addiction and mental illness, Shame keeps some of the punkier elements of the band's previous works but puts in more noise rock and sludge to create a downtrodden listening experience, and the mathcore elements feels so metallic this time around that it sounds much closer to something like a dash of dissonant death metal.

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Shadow And Claw - Whereabouts Unknown

Shadow And Claw's debut makes an explosive start with "Throne Of Blood" and makes a great case for itself in pure heaviness - this is an album that is recognizably sludgy, with the voluminous doom progressions and punishing hardcore exertions you'd expect - but there's something more to it than that. Whereabouts Unknown actually has a pretty profound sense of place, in spite of its name; the Cascadian black metal scene is one of the more renowned metal pockets in the USA, and Shadow And Claw respect that lineage with folk-, indie-, and Americana-influenced compositions rich with atmosphere and feeling, sometimes acoustic or accompanied by sounds of nature. They're even a little bit grungy for good measure, and you'll hear a warping drone underneath from time to time for an even rainier and more mountainous sound. For such a new band, Shadow And Claw already have a strong sound - one you could easily get lost in.

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Thou - Umbilical

Thou have made such a name for themselves as journeyman artists, collaborating on interesting experiments and releasing cover after cover, that for a time we'd forgotten the sound of their natural voice. But Thou had to come from somewhere in the first place, and Umbilical is here to tie us back to the point of origin: we're getting back to that bread-and-butter sludge, the fuzz-soaked hardcore screams and churning doom-punk riffs with a low end so dark that light can't escape. And to make sure we don't mistake them for someone else's backing band, Thou have made it extra vicious, even to the point of infusing their old classic sound with some of the newer influences they've espoused in recent years; perhaps they can experiment within the main enterprise after all.

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Urzah - The Scorching Gaze

At times resembling the progressive post-metal stable of bands attached to Pelagic Records, The Scorching Gaze also has a fiery sludge core, one that can be as tasty as classic Mastodon or High On Fire, but also at other times more sophisticated and technical. The regular surprises, from math flourishes and hardcore belligerence to subtle tranquillity and engrossing atmospheric soundscapes, add so much to that hooky sludge core and elevate what is already a solid foundation into something truly remarkable for a debut album. Urzah combine strong influences together, yet craft something very recognizably their own, and often glorious.

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