The Best Djent / Math Metal Album - Metal Storm Awards 2024

All Tomorrows - At The Shadow Of The Andes

Chile's All Tomorrows broke a 9-year album-less streak with At The Shadow Of The Andes, a release that represents modern progressive metal in many of its various iterations. A djent current runs through the album, from the chunky polyrhythms to the faint technical metalcore hints, but the band's third album also draws features from extreme prog. The final product is dense, fierce, and complex, but also groovy, atmospheric, and subtly melodic, marrying the weight of Humanity's Last Breath with the expansiveness of Hypno5e.

Artificial Language - Distant Glow

Artificial Language return from a five-year creative hiatus with Distant Glow, building upon the success of their highly praised djent-infused progressive metal albums The Observer and Now We Sleep. Some critics may argue that, after such a long wait, a 21-minute EP feels too short, but the reason for its release at this precise moment is actually quite obvious. The band sounds more spontaneous, inventive, and energetic than ever before, delivering five tracks that, despite their technical complexity and jazz-inspired guitar work, never feel overly cerebral—even when treading the line between progressive and math metal. It is beyond question that the newfound creativity of these six Californians demanded to be unleashed as soon as possible, both to captivate longtime fans and win over new ones. Distant Glow simply sounds too fresh, too bold, and too intense to have spent even one more day collecting dust on a studio hard drive.

Better Lovers - Highly Irresponsible

Do you miss Every Time I Die? What about The Dillinger Escape Plan? You're in luck! Three-fifths of Every Time I Die are joined by The Dillinger Escape Plan's Greg Puciato and by Fit For An Autopsy's William Putney. As a result of all the intermixing of experiences from previous bands, Highly Irresponsible blends mathcore, alternative metal, southerncore, and just a dash of grunge to create something that's already starting to sound more coherent than just throwing stuff from the members' previous bands together, however good whatever stuff is being thrown is.

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Ever Forthright - Techinflux

For a long while, Ever Forthright seemed destined to be confined to history as a cult band from the early stages of djent with just their self-titled debut to show for it, but the group has resurrected over a decade on to restake their claim with Techinflux. The jazzy elements from the colossally complex and dense debut are carried over, but this album features a strong balance between retaining impressive technicality while being more approachable and inherently memorable, featuring songs both resurrected from the early days of Ever Forthright and fresh, newly written ones. Intervals alumni Mike Semesky and Jacob Umansky make strong impacts on the album as session musicians, and in collaboration with the group's core line-up, they've crafted something worthy of the band's legacy.

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Hippotraktor - Stasis

An already djenty take on prog/post-metal on Hippotraktor's debut turned even djentier second time around. Stasis retains the post-metal dynamics and structures expected from a band on the Pelagic Records roster, but the heaviness in the band's sound is more dominated by thick palm-muted grooves and dizzying polyrhythmic syncopation. As impressive as Hippotraktor's crunch is on Stasis, it is the combination of these heavy outbursts with the dynamic atmospheres - and intelligent builds within and transitions between the extremes - that makes this album such a compelling release.

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Intervals - Memory Palace

What if you stopped looking at them as math problems and started looking at them as math opportunities? Intervals are all about making complexity sing - that's how they can sound serene and pummeling at the same time, tying together light electronics and thudding bass with limber and expressive guitar solos that dance across the whole Mohs scale. This whole style - the bright, melodic, and guitar-centered instrumental prog variant that we now like to throw under the "djent" umbrella for its unorthodox rhythms, contrasting riffing styles, and, well, djenty textures - owes a lot of its existence to the advancements of Intervals, and Memory Palace finds them still on top, continuing to excel in groove and feeling. Intervals: keeping djent happy for all of us.

Night Verses - Every Sound Has A Color In The Valley Of Night: Part 2

Part 1 was such a smashing success that Night Verses expanded the release to find some more sounds that have colors in the valley of night. Some of those sounds are even vocals – yes, Night Verses do break their instru-djental streak for a couple of tunes, but only because they’ve found some perfect compliments to their calm, complex prog style. Anthony Green of Saosin and others and Brandon Boyd of Incubus fame (and no, actually, not that Incubus this time) lend their talents here, and to great effect. But then the band are back to letting their strings do the talking; this half of the valley features a little more tonal variety than the preceding half, indulging in some chilled-out mathy runs and relaxing electro-atmospheres alongside the screeching, slamming djent, resulting in a short yet impactful half-album that sees Night Verses more comfortable than ever at writing purely instrumental compositions even as they reacquaint themselves with the benefits of voices.

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Ou - II: Frailty

Clearly, Ou recorded a perfectly nice, normal, average djenty prog album - a little bit of metalcore crunch here, some soft, soothing vocals there, bit o' clean noodling on top - and then they took every track, every song, and put the whole album in a box and just shook it. They put that album through a blender and they dropped that blender out of a plane and then they crashed that plane into a volcano. Lynn Wu's voice pops up everywhere you're not expecting it, like a thousand randomly firing pixels of soft, bright color, like a TTS voice having a seizure, and the rest of the band is always bent over backwards in some utterly bizarre game of stitching battering breakdowns to loopy math rock tangents in ways that sound accidental. Ou's music sounds too complex and too tight to be improvised, and yet it's so chaotic it's hard to imagine it being “written”. The involvement of Devin Townsend as a guest vocalist and producer on this album goes some way toward explaining/foreshadowing its unflagging eclecticism, but this is the kind of thing that has to be heard to be believed.

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Vola - Friend Of A Phantom

Vola's melodically inclined and stylistically adventurous version of djent has long distinguished them from the bulk of their peers, but after undergoing radical evolution from each of their first three albums to the next, Friend Of A Phantom affords them an opportunity to consolidate their success to date. That being said, the album does feature a degree of intensity on several songs that exceeds anything from their past couple of records, and is also notable for featuring the best song that Anders Fridén of In Flames has appeared on in a good many years. Alongside that heaviness is yet more delectable synth hooks and soundscaping, genre dalliances with trap, and many more features that make this record such a well-rounded and well-polished one.

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Weston Super Maim - See You Tomorrow Baby

They may self-deprecatingly describe themselves as 'if Meshuggah couldn't count', but the international duo Weston Super Maim are remarkable in their cacophonic complexity. Guest appearances from members of Frontierer and Blindfolded And Led To The Woods are very logical, as it is the chaotic sledgehammer math metal popularized by the likes of Frontierer and Car Bomb that See You Tomorrow Baby most closely resembles. However, beyond the abrasive assaults of intense low-end riffs, there are occasional surprise detours in more melodic directions that bring some accessibility to the record's overwhelming madness.

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