The Best Industrial / Cyber / Electronic Metal Album - Metal Storm Awards 2024

An Axis Of Perdition - Apertures

It can’t be a coincidence that An Axis Of Perdition makes its triumphant return the same year a certain horror video game does. This Silent Hill-themed industrial black metal machine is back with full force, looking back on its catalogue, learning from it, and updating its style for the current era. Apertures alternates between ominous dark ambient/drone passages and intense industrial black metal for an experience most visceral. An Axis Of Perdition has put its greatest efforts into enhancing its menacing music through a production that is pristine and detailed. Every dissonant riff, blood-curdling shriek, bouncy bass, pulsing beat, and sound effect has so much weight in it that the listener is instantly pulled into a black hole that stretches and twists the mind and body.

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Fange - Perdition

It's been a very long while since Fange were primarily a sludge band, and now there have been more albums of theirs that were considered (and nominated) for the industrial category than ones that weren't. Even within the overarching industrial umbrella, the band always finds a specific sound to go for, and this time around the post-metal element of the preceding Privation transitions into something more reminiscent of the electro-industrial of Health, giving the album a sense of gravitas especially in its choruses.

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Isor - Schwärze

Isor maintain their impressive streak of nominations in this category with another intriguing fusion of industrial, ambient, and black metal. At its most industrial, Schwärze is cold, mechanical, and bleak, as relentless rhythms stomp away beneath suffocating distortion, but there are many flavours to Schwärze, all the way from frozen, menacing black metal through to unexpectedly playful percussion and electronics. An uncompromisingly lo-fi production and bleak dark ambience complete the picture and shape the atmosphere of a record that is as dark as its name implies.

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Keygen Church - Nel Nome Del Codice

The cult of code proliferates its neon gospel (thankfully in characters that are readable this time): Nel Nome Del Codice opens with a choir of human voices, but the red-and-black gates of the artificial afterlife will gen keys only for souls made of 1s and 0s. See Master Boot Record below as reference for the fully synthetic cyber metal concept, but Keygen Church elevates that concept to a new plane, expanding its palette of keys to piano and church organ in addition to the heavily distorted databanks from which it routinely drops its beats. This is a strange mix of the medieval and the futuristic, prophesying a new purpose for metal and for mankind.

Master Boot Record - Hardwarez

Master Boot Record are really putting the "hard" in "hardware(z)" here: after an unusually long gap between records (only two years and change, mind), this Italian man-machine is krafting new werk at supercomputer speed, cutting up code like HAL when Dave pours jungle juice into his USB ports. For those who want a less ecclesiastical take on techno-style metal than Keygen Church, Mr. Victor Love is jamming high octane into the disk drive, with blistering synthesized solos and programmed slams that'll chip tunes right off your skull.

Mesarthim - Anthropic Bias / Departure

Mesarthim first arrived on the scene with Isolate, now an album nearing its ten-year anniversary, and one that had a specific take on the "black metal in space" concept. That concept was one that Mesarthim have kept building on ever since, with wackier and wackier takes on the spacier side of electronica in the context of electronic cosmic black metal. Anthropic Bias / Departure joins together two nearly 20-minute-long tracks, the first released as a single in 2022, and the second last year, and both of them feel equally ethereal and playful.

Prisoner (USA) - Putrid / Obsolete

It's taken Prisoner (USA) a while to get around to record number two, but while this album is indeed putrid, the band make evident that they are in no way obsolete. Putrid / Obsolete has all the harshness and mechanical coldness of noisy industrial metal, but additional nastiness works its way into the album by way of death metal and crusty punk. Fierce roars and growls heighten the malevolence of the album's slower, stomping industrial riffs, and Prisoner inject additional aggression between these songs and passages in the form of brief D-beat and blast beat onslaughts, as if the core of the album's sound wasn't bleak and misanthropic enough.

Shum - Pulzáló Dobok Tisztitják Meg Az Eget

Picture Thy Catafalque with the raw, lo-fi industrial black metal of Sublunary Tragedies/Microcosmos melded with the refined, unique songwriting, alien sound bank, and cool but weird atmospheres of Tűnő Idő Tárlat/Róka Hasa Rádió. That's Shum, or at least Shum on whatever-hundredth album this is: very much the same idea as the other Hungarian one-person avant-garde metal outfit in terms of its unorthodox structures and heavy interpolation of electronics into already bizarre offshoots of conventional metal genres, but pushing the velocity and abrasion to more violent extremes a la Anaal Nathrakh. A black industrial bomb filled with strange synths and little grey voices, Pulzáló Dobok Tisztitják Meg Az Eget is crushing, alienating, and always gripping.

The Body - The Crying Out Of Things

The Body is many things: Sludge, doom, black, death, industrial, noise, and everything dark. They have also collaborated with so many bands that they might need a separate page in our database called “The Body & Friends”. But there is always one constant: the weird, sickening, caustic, and maddening sound. Sometimes it sticks, sometimes it doesn’t. We’ll let you decide. But no matter the outcome The Body always gets a reaction, and the harsh electronics of The Crying Out Of Things will certainly do the trick. This oddball duo will kick your teeth in with the impending doom of their beats and cut your face with the scraping sound of metal coming from the ultra-distorted riffs, but you might ask for more due to how hypnotic the dark groove is. The Crying Out Of Things is some of The Body's most intense work to date and its brilliant sense of layering hides gorgeous things under the cloak of despair.

Uniform - American Standard

Uniform take a note from the Godspeed You! Black Emperor book. Sure, Uniform's credentials as a metal band are questionable at best, mostly coming through collaborations with The Body and Boris. But here, the band start the album with a colossal 20-minute-long title track, one that takes a GY!BE-ish approach to displaying its expansive anguish. The rest of the tracks also feel like meatier versions of the industrial rock/noise rock sound that Uniform have tackled thus far, partly due to the addition of a new member in the shape of a bass player, making this album the most band-focused of Uniform's albums.

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