The Best Ambient / Drone / Noise Album - Metal Storm Awards 2024

Cursed Cemetery - Magma Transmigration

Two of the busiest names in metal globally, let alone Romania, have somehow managed to synchronize their schedules (and with a third member, no less) to release what is now two albums together as part of Cursed Cemetery. As Fulmineos's longest-running active project, however, it is one worth making time for, both on the part of drummer Daniel Neagoe and that of listeners; the trio once more delves into the darkness of drone doom metal, as Magma Transmigration leans to and fro between extremes of funeral doom, blackened aggression, and driving heavy rock, all with a ritualistic core of doomy drone and dark ambience that is truly captivating. At different times, the music can be transcendent, ceremonial, or outright suffocating, but never dull.

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Darkspace - Dark Space -II

A decade has passed since Darkspace's last offering to the cosmos, Dark Space III I. But the perspective of time is heavily distorted in space. This trio returns and easily demonstrates who are the biggest stars in the world of cosmic black metal. The intriguing use of negative numbers serves as a big tipoff regarding the musical changes found in their latest work. Dark Space -II is much slower and more mechanical, pensive, and mood-dependent than any other release by this band. Prepare for the trip beforehand and let Darkspace's immersive cosmic funeral march slowly tear your atoms apart.

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Harvestman - Triptych: Part One

Triptych: Part One offers a meditative journey for those who wish to escape into a distant, forgotten time. Harvestman, the one-man project of Neurosis member Steve Von Till, unites folk instrumentation, rumbling drone, and poetic narration to create excellently hypnotic experiences, all centered around the mystical aura of megalithic sites like Stonehenge. Sit back, relax, and imagine yourself resting beneath these mighty stones. Let the droning ambience transport you to another realm, where ancient transmissions eternally resonate between the stars.

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Insect Ark - Raw Blood Singing

Seasoned Metal Stormers will attest to Dana Schechter's success, as Insect Ark's previous opus, The Vanishing, was also nominated in the Drone category back in 2020. Now she is back with a vengeance and new weapons to boot. The first noticeable change is the addition of Dana's smooth, smoky vocals that add intrigue and mystic to her music. The second one is the recruitment of Tim Wyskida (from drone legends Khanate) behind the drum kit, contributing much suspense to this already intense style of music. Together, this duo has put together one hell of a soundtrack to the end of times that defies conventional genre classification. Raw Blood Singing is dark, groovy, and even seductive. Its maddening, addictive atmosphere will surely stick to the listener like tar.

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John Haughm - 46​°​59'15​.​9"N // 120​°​32'15​.​4"W: The Devil​’​s Coil

John Haughm is apparently hellbent on ensuring that nobody can actually refer to his albums by name, which is all the more maddening because his ambient works are so worth talking about. Haughm’s solo albums are all very bound to a specific sense of time and place, and not just aesthetically – this album’s opener, itself bearing a wordy moniker not worth retyping, entails 19 minutes of reedy, harmonious respiration constructed entirely with instruments (some musical, some medical) appropriate to the theme’s late-19th-century setting. A sense of age creeps around the edges of this album, sometimes bitter and eerie, sometimes rustic and wistful; instruments like harmonica and banjo evoke a sense of old Americana, while spectral Mellotron creates a distinctive retro-future feeling. The sound of the album can be as cryptic as its title, but whether ominous or ethereal, it is an elegant sound.

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La Torture Des Ténèbres - V

As the band name suggests, the music of La Torture Des Ténèbres is not for the faint of heart, plunging listeners into crazed, horrifying depths of aural chaos. Enter the dissonant void and allow the torture of darkness to take control, if you dare. Submerged within the deafening sound, the wretched screams of despair and the razor-sharp distortion tear a gaping hole in your soul, leaving behind the melancholic sensation of cold emptiness.

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Pharmakon - Maggot Mass

All three genre names in this category have their own core genre that is completely separate from metal, even with a bridge formed because of their intrusion into metal's slower and denser textures. Noise, however, is the one whose harshness acts as a negative, common with metal in how unappealing it is to the average listener. It explains why a name like Pharmakon can have such a huge crossover appeal towards people already attuned to harshness in music. Maggot Mass, foregoing the Morbid Angel-esque naming pattern of consecutive albums starting with consecutive letters, feels like it takes more from the other two genres in this category, being more mood-focused, with an anguish that is less immediate and extreme, a sonic palette to match the concept of humanity's severance from the natural world.

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Smote - A Grand Stream

Smote are making their second appearance in this category in two years, having first come to our attention with 2023's Genog. As if to take that momentum for all it's worth, A Grand Stream makes the biggest impression it can, upping the run time by 70% and aiming to swallow the listener with an even vaster, darker, heavier sound. Smote take extensive inspiration from the traditional music and natural surroundings of their native England, and while you won't exactly hear Morris dancers in music of this magnitude and pace, the group's frequent incorporation of acoustic instrumentation leaves A Grand Stream with a folky personality - compare Lankum's drone-based reinterpretations of Irish folk songs. But of course there is a certain darkness to Smote, sometimes psychedelic and mystical, sometimes downright chilling, and if you've ever wanted to hear the tonic drone of bagpipes applied to actual drone music, "Chantry" is your chance.

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Thaw - Fading Backwards

Within the vast noise of Fading Backwards are tangents recognizable as distinctly articulated subclasses of music - black metal, post-metal, electronics, etc. - allowing Thaw to craft unusually dynamic and active compositions for a sound that ultimately serves the cause of enveloping atmosphere. You can hear the black metal try to outrun it, the post-metal try to muscle through, the electronics try to dance around it, the sludge try to... what does sludge do? Vomit? In the end, all are slowly devoured, overwhelmed by the noise, smeared into drone, made slow and cacophonous. Even the vocals are captive, screened by distortion or processed into machinery a la Cynic. Thaw have great facility with the numerous styles they touch on, but in the end, they're here for the noise, and now so are you.

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Uboa - Impossible Light

Not the first and not the last time noise has been used to convey anguish. And Uboa is all anguish. The exploration of trauma through noisy darkwave, not too dissimilar to Lingua Ignota, but more centered around a nonconforming identity, continues straight from where it left off in 2019's The Origin Of My Depression. Impossible Light focuses a lot on the dark ambient side of the spectrum; creating a terrifying and immersive listening experience seems to be the main goal. Add to that several interplays of glitchy noise, sometimes as part of a more patiently building post-industrial synthy soundscape, sometimes as explosions of throat-grabbing immediacy. But all the great vocal layering, engaging album flow, intriguing synthy soundscapes, and the rest on the technical side still don't do as much of the heavy lifting as the emotional side, with all the technical aspects in service of creating something terrifying and, eventually, cathartic.

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