The Best Extreme Progressive Metal Album - Metal Storm Awards 2024

Amiensus - Reclamation: Part 2

Amiensus treated us to an impressive double-album edition in 2024, the first half being Reclamation: Part 1, which was a great conceptual progressive black metal album in itself. However, later in the year we were introduced to Reclamation: Part 2, which took the series to a whole new level. Through top-quality performances and impeccable songwriting, this album offers some of the finest musicianship heard in black metal in 2024. The song structures are dense, multi-layered, and often unpredictable, but crafted brilliantly throughout such that never once is there a dull moment. Sometimes the structures are complex and progressive, other times brimming with melody. From beautiful soft acoustic passages to epic symphonic orchestrations, with various vocal styles from clean to harsh, this is a melodic/progressive album (and 2-part series) unlike anything else released in last year.

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Anciients - Beyond The Reach Of The Sun

For those who don’t like the recent directions of Opeth or Mastodon, Anciients seem to offer refuge, with the unpredictable death metal bursts and classic prog-influenced clean passages of the former and the jangly, psychedelic sludge/stoner of the latter. But, similarities acknowledged, Anciients are no mere copycats: the calm, distant vocal melodies and ever-wandering guitar harmonies that dominate the album usher in an atmosphere of the otherworldly, taking familiar elements of progressive metal and making them once again fresh. Beyond The Reach Of The Sun takes you from gritty, groovy earth to thumping, ethereal cosmos, welcoming Anciients back to the realm of the living.

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Bedsore - Dreaming The Strife For Love

Bedsore's debut, Hypnagogic Hallucinations, marked them as a new progressive death metal band to watch, and after only one more album they've already progressed almost entirely out of death metal. Dreaming The Strife For Love still makes plenty of room for extremity - the harsh vocals are intact and there are some full-throttle blasts to be found - but it's the progressive part that occupies most of their attention, shifting away from the Death influence and toward classic Opeth. Bedsore's ugly, discordant spin on progressive rock takes it through a torture chamber of Voivodian and Morbus Chronian sounds and lands it in a strange realm of sickly melody, like a death metal version of a diseased Yes (this is a compliment).

Blighted Eye - Agony's Bespoke

Containing past and present members of bands such as Aethereus and Pantheïst, Blighted Eye storm out of the gates with an epic debut album that incorporates elements of melodic, technical, and blackened death within a progressive metal framework that is overloaded with irresistible riffs and solos. Agony's Bespoke flows freely between outstanding ideas across songs that are lengthy but always entertaining and exhilarating, with a sound reminiscent of a more melodic and sprawling Hath.

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Blood Incantation - Absolute Elsewhere

Blood Incantation were already the talk of the town for a few years thanks to their well-received duo of death metal albums, serving as the poster child for the 2010s OSDM revival. But their interests extended beyond bonky riffs, as evidenced by some latent progressive tendencies and eventually their 2022 EP Timewave Zero, a fully ambient release that took them to the foothills of kosmische musik. Even so, Absolute Elsewhere was a surprise that no one saw coming: in two tales of three parts each, Absolute Elsewhere takes extreme metal on a guided tour of space ambient. This album blends cosmic electronics learned from Tangerine Dream, acoustic and otherwise milder meanderings inspired by classic prog, and an approach to metal that at this point is more Nocturnus than Obituary, resulting in a masterpiece that, as it has often been observed, sounds like nothing so much as the death metal equivalent of Pink Floyd. This is one album that from the day of its release was clearly destined to become a classic.

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Convulsing - Perdurance

Somehow dissonant death metal always seems to lean closer to the tech death side rather than the prog death side of the more intricate versions of death metal. That's not the case with Convulsing's Perdurance. It isn't exactly a blend of two sounds, but it's clear that a huge chunk of it is a continuation of the dissonant and blackened death metal that Convulsing did prior.
The songwriting itself feels less overwhelming this time around, even with all its uncommon time signatures and explosions of dissonance. It never feels like the emphasis is on pulling the rug from the listener's feet, but rather lulling them.

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Hail Spirit Noir - Fossil Gardens

Here meet the progressive nature of Enslaved, the exploratory nature of Dødheimsgard, and the psychedelia of Oranssi Pazuzu. And yet Hail Spirit Noir have never been about sounding like other bands, and Fossil Gardens is no exception. Sure, the biggest thing about it is the return of the black metal aspect in the sound, but it's not a return to an earlier sound. Somehow the psychedelia changed shape from something more playful towards something that feels spacious, mostly from how the synths are used. It's cleaner in production, a lot more focused on creating an atmosphere, and with its avant-garde side a lot less focused on tackiness.

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Iotunn - Kinship

Perhaps appropriately for a category labeled extreme progressive metal, this genre was full of surprises in 2024: surprising debuts, surprising returns, surprising twists. Iotunn was part of this wave, but not for any dramatic development in the band or shift in sound – purely for the incredible quality of Kinship as an album. After the already enthusiastic reception that met Access All Worlds, it should mean a lot how blown away we were by Kinship. Its rich sense of melody keeps it accessible even through consistently lengthy and constantly evolving compositions, as sweet and morish as the poppiest melodeath and as sophisticated in instrumentation and emotion as the best prog. Kinship has a Nordic-feeling blend of melodeath, prog, power, and even a bit of folk, guided by the beautiful, silvery voice of Jon Aldara. Iotunn not only lived up to the promise of their debut; they surpassed it.

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Orgone - Pleroma

On Pleroma, next to Orgone’s familiar technical death metal there are passages of chamber music and jazz, classical instruments, complex rhythms, ethereal sections, and even different languages heard that make for a unique result. The album travels through intense blastbeats, punishing riffs, and guttural vocals, to melancholic melodies, beautiful string sections, and mesmerizing female vocals, creating a rollercoaster of sounds and feelings that never fail to captivate, while the lyrical themes explore philosophical and existential concepts. It took ten years since The Joyless Parson, but it was more than worth the wait.

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Æthĕrĭa Conscĭentĭa - The Blossoming

'Progressive sci-fi saxophone black metal' has now worked a charm twice for Æthĕrĭa Conscĭentĭa; Corrupted Pillars Of Vanity was already remarkable in its own right, but the French band's sophomore release levels up in style. The saxophone and guitars work exquisitely in tandem to craft memorable riffs and motifs, bleeding melody into the intense blackened framework of the record. However, Æthĕrĭa Conscĭentĭa offer more than just black metal, with plenty of psychedelia tinging the record's sci-fi narrative on top of evident progressive rock influences.

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